I figure it’s tome we had another sci-fi club edition. The free-for-all is always a good way to kick off. Talk about whatever sci-fi book, show, or material you’ve had on your mind and need to share.
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Growing up I used to read my dad's books and his collection of E.E. Doc Smith was basically my introduction to sci-fi and I think why I'm heavily biased towards the space opera end of things. I fell in love with these massively expansive ideas about what space is and how technical advances propel us (because it's always basically humans of course) forward into new environments with their planets, systems, species and weird technology. That's the heart of sci-fi for me. So I'm nervously embarking on his work - starting with the Skylark series and then moving onto Lensman. I say nervous because of the times and societal attitudes those books were written in and the fear of poisoning my own nostalgia. Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie in their own halcyon dreams.
I can relate to that. Sometimes you can believe it's just the characters that are written to reflect ideas of the era, then it's not so bad. Harder to do when the author has a long forward where they ramble about their thoughts cough Ellison coughI say nervous because of the times and societal attitudes those books were written in and the fear of poisoning my own nostalgia. Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie in their own halcyon dreams.
The shorthand I've resorted to is that people would have responded to Star Wars the same way if you didn't know that Annekin is Darth Vader going into it. Nobody wants to admit it, but everyone feels betrayed by Danerys and they don't like that they bet on the wrong horse in a tragedy. Sweet holy fuck I'd be doing some soul searching if I'd named my kid Khaleesi instead of Arya.
Which, on some level, I get. I think that Season 8 could've benefited from being a full-length season, which could've delivered some of the characterization which detractors of the series claim was lacking. Do I think more episodes - even perfectly executed ones like people seem to want - would make everyone happy with S8? No, definitely not. But it would've been nice to flesh out motivations a bit more, imo - I would've particularly liked to see Bran's motivations evolve between the Battle of Winterfell and the Battle of King's Landing. C'est la vie. That being said, the betrayal that people felt when Dany made her heel turn isn't shocking to me. I liked it, though. I liked how bad I felt when things didn't go exactly like I expected. Is its legacy a hallmark of great TV or legendary writing? Not in my opinion, but that's fine. It was _really fucking good_ and that's more than enough for me.