What’s wrong with:
a)The Stars Like Dust?
b)The action sequences?
And, wow! You’re one lucky guy if these are the worse things you’ve read.
Ok, vivalostwages I have two problems with your link. In fact one, the one that wrote is is geographically handicapped. Buenos Aires isn’t in the tropics.
And just another minor nitpick 85% of Argentina’s population is white, therefore an hispanic name can belong to someone with fair skin. My father is a great example, he’s surname is as spanish as they come and yet he is blond, why? Danish ancestors. My best friend surname is syrian and he is also blond, his grandfathers are german. Anyway it was an small complaint, great link.
What’s wrong with The Stars like Dust? Are you kidding me?! Four pages into that book, the main “character” (I cringe at dignifying Asimov’s creation by calling it a character) is looking for a secret weapon that destroyed a tyranny back on earth. I groaned and thought, “Oh, please oh please oh please, don’t let this secret weapon be what I think it’s gonna be.”
But yeah. That’s what it was. And it’s not like the pages in between the first four and the last paragraph were remotely entertaining. I only read it because I was trapped on campus. During Spring Break. Without, I presume, a fork. If I’d had a fork, I would’ve entertained myself by poking my belly over and over with a fork instead of reading that horrific book.
The action sequences in Starship Troopers were bland and barely sketched out. Some authors do brilliant action sequences – look at the games in Ender’s Game for an example of hard science fiction with very cool tactical battles. But I couldn’t tell, or care, what was going on in Starship Trooper’s action sequences.
I’ve read some crap in my day, I admit. I’ve read the first nine Xanth books, Stephen King at his most putrid, Anne Rice, Jesus Christ the Vampire, and more. But the two books above took the cake.
Incidentally, I read Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game back-to-back during college, and wrote an essay on them using Dostoyevsky’s Hedgehog/Fox dichotomy as a model. The two books are very interesting in their different approaches to a fairly similar situation (i.e., young boy is caught up in a militaristic future society fighting a war for humanity’s survival against a buglike alien race).
Daniel
Well, The Stars Like Dust might not be the twentieth century’s greatest novel but it wins points foar:
a) great title
b) endearing naivete
c) being Asimov’s first novel
Sure it’s predictable and sophomoric but that’s part of the charm.
And the action sequences in ST are among the clearest most well writen ones I’ve ever read. You know the terrain, the troops’ disposition and tactics being used. You just can’t get any clearer about what’s going on during the battle.
I understand you finding them bad. Even real bad. But the worse ever?
We want oil and it would be bad form to attack Saudi Arabia, our good buddy that turns out more terrorists than we can shake a stick at. That’s what I’m implying, in plain English.
Indeed.
Judging from Rikwriter’s reaction, however, I suspect (though I cannot be sure) that we were believed to make some misplaced 9-11 remark. I cannot speak for ** Equipoise**, but that was obviously not what I was implying.
My reading was also that the bugs didn’t attack BA and, yep, there is a resonance (for me) apropos, maybe, WOMD but certainly the way Bush has tried to sell 9/11 and Saddam as being linked.
But I guess that 's one way war has been justified through history; you demonise an enemy then you associate all kinds of evil nonsense with them. Just a pretty normal, manipulative tactic.
Okay, that’s good to hear. That’s what I thought exactly…the whole deal with the faked attack on Buenos Aires idea being “relevant to the present” made me think you were trying to say that 9-11 was a government plot.
Of course, it’s come out that Hussein HAS supported Al Quaeda, so it’s not really manipulative. One of the masterminds of the 93 WTC bombing has been in Iraq ever since then.
Wow, there sure are a lot of people who seem to “get” the movie despite Rikwriter’s vociferous denials of any sort of subtext. I can understand those who argue that Verhoeven’s satire wasn’t very good (although I disagree), but to deny that it’s there at all is, IMHO, to be totally disingenuous. Especially considering that satire was Verhoeven’s repeatedly stated intent.
FTR, I must be deluded, too, as I always considered the bugs to be the innocent victims in the movie. I got the impression that the humans were just lashing out a conveniently squishy target. However, it has been awhile since I’ve viewed the movie so I’m going to rent it sometime this week and see if I still think this interpretation is valid.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Hodge *
**Wow, there sure are a lot of people who seem to “get” the movie despite Rikwriter’s vociferous denials of any sort of subtext.
**
First off, I never denied there was a subtext, so that’s a straw man. I simply said that the movie was poorly done even if intended as satire. Second your characterization of my posts as "vociferous is highly inaccurate.
**
I can understand those who argue that Verhoeven’s satire wasn’t very good (although I disagree), but to deny that it’s there at all is, IMHO, to be totally disingenuous.
**
What’s even more disingenuous is to falsely claim that I said it wasn’t a satire.
OK, I withdraw my comments. I obviously mis-remembered the thread and, upon re-reading it, I see that although other people denied the movie’s satirical intent, RikWriter was not one of them. I apologize for mischaracterizing his stance.
Vociferous was used mostly in reply to your “nutball” comment but I see that was based on a misunderstanding that was clarified even before I made my post above.
Sigh…never post before coffee.
I didn’t realize The Stars, Like Dust was Asimov’s first novel. THat’s something of an excuse for its putridosity. And it’s a great title, I agree. Damn those deceptive titles that trick me into reading crappy books!
I don’t know how to argue with you about the battle scenes. I hated 'em. By themselves, they wouldn’t have made the book the second-worst book I’ve ever read, but in combination with all the other book’s flaws, it added up.
Daniel
Or perhaps everyone is a blond-haired, blue eyed decendent of Nazi war criminals who fled to Buenos Aries after the war…hmmm…makes you think.
Hey, I just thought it was a popcorn munching no brainer.
Good film, but let’s not read too much into it.
I’d imagine RikWriter is pretty much a closed-minded lost cause but in the interests of fighting ignorance I offer this GD ythread:
40% of Americans Belive that Iraq was responsible for 9-11???
I’m amazed this thread is still alive.
Again, I saw perfectly well what Verhoeven and Newmeier were doing, but what they were doing was so vastly against Heinlein’s plot, philosophy, and his very appreciation for the science of science fiction that the movie was an insult, and bad.
Imagine if Verhoeven had bought the rights to, say, The Sound of Music, but decided that he really didn’t want to make a schmaltzy , typically movie musical about a giverness winning the heart and mind of a crusty Austran captain and his kids in pre-war Austria. "I know, Paul and Ed say together, “We’ll make her a secret agent for the Nazis, and she’'l surreptitiously get the kids into the Hitler Youth through her songs. And to make it relevant we’ll make all the songs rap songs. And the Captain will be black. But we’ll still call it “The Sound of Music”.”
Think fan’s of the musical will be pissed off? Are you gonna say their problem is that they don’t appreciate satire?
One of these days, hopefully, Heinlein’s books will find their Peter Jackson.
This is kind of funny, because THe Sound of Music was ‘based’ on a true story, but the filmmakers went so far astray from reality in bringing their own insulated, sugar-coated artificiality to the screen that the final product resembles its source even LESS than does Verhoeven’s reworking of the elements of ST.
NOT a good example, Cal.