BF2S Forums Let's talk about the Sopranos

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Also this "let me know when it overtakes Harry Potter" stuff. A successful story isn't necessarily a good story. We've been here before on these forums.

How many billion dollars did Avatar gross? All the effort put into fantastic world building. But the story is still boringly safe, with flat characters, and frankly uninteresting (also RIP musical potential; I would have loved to have heard some of the unique sounds that were planned before that was slashed in the name of western appeal). A punch in the gut to the rest of the creative team.

Anyway, regardless of how many pipes dilbert fabricated, Dune definitely falls on the science fiction side of sci-fi vs. fantasy if you want to distinguish between the two. See also, Foundation.

ESP, parapsychology, psychics, reality-bending physics, abound in science fiction stories and sci-fi history. They don't all have to read like a technical manual.

Adams_BJ wrote:

If you had have told me when I signed up to this forum 15 years and 4 months ago I would be witness to an argument about what does and does not constitute scifi on a thread about the sopranos on a BF2 stats forum I would have laughed.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Pretty normal for forums though. Also stuff like:

- If you post a new topic that was posted about several months ago, your thread is closed, and you're warned to use the search function.
- If you use the search function and revive an old topic, the thread is closed, and you're warned about necromancing old threads.

Saw this a lot especially on tech forums.

uziq wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

How in the heck did this thread become "Dune isn't sci-fi," wt actual f.

dilbert is so severely autistic and hence so glommed by the thought of fictional writing about human beings, human relations, human families, or human power dynamics, that he will insist that THE MOST ACCLAIMED SCI-FI BOOK OF ALL TIME is 'not really sci-fi' and 'more a space adventure fantasy thing'.

then he will link to wikipedia articles on soft sci-fi, a category which contains basically half of all the greatest sci-fi tales ever written, and which are explicitly defined as 'sci-fi books with more of a concern on humanity, humanism, human motivations, psychology/sociology, politics, and the future of the human race, etc', and try to redefine them as 'not really sci-fi though' (according, that is, to his own idiosyncratic measure; too bad wells! too bad PKD! too bad heinlein! real sci-fi is only about engineering and spends pages detailing the physics of space travel).

SO, because the sopranos MUST be bad according to his ridiculous and priggish attitude, therefore we must invent arbitrary distinctions between george r.r. martin's fantasy or frank herbert's sci-fi, which clearly continues in the tradition of 'complex anti-heroes' and 'examinations of humanity'.

his ideal book is one where ideas tesselate together on a page like chess pieces. he knows what makes a good book: he has read 20-30 of them in 45 years. so he'll lecture endlessly: every tv critic to ever say the sopranos was, in fact good; every fantasy reader who enjoyed game of thrones; all sci-fi fans, sci-fi magazines, sci-fi awards, and sci-fi wikipedia editors who persist in publishing 'adventure space soap-opera fantasy stuff' that isn't really interested in the serious matter of opto-electronic sighting systems. lol.

full steam ahead on the dilbert monomania rail!

my point that, to even write fiction, one needs to expend a whole lot of effort on fictional stuff that isn't strictly concerned with ideas/concepts, has gone way over his head. to him, writing stuff about character or psychology or human relations is 'bad writing', somehow passé, the stuff of yesteryear and minor talents. my point is that good and convincing fiction writing requires oodles of effort to be spent on dramatic conceits like ... plot, pacing, events/scenarios, complications, resolutions; to describe aptly and convincingly; to write in an appropriate style; to recreate plausible characters with believable motivations which animate said plot. all of this is STRICTLY surplus to books about 'ideas and concepts': those are called philosophy or history books, and belong in the nonfiction section. a book which just personifies an idea into a one-note or puddle-deep character will, in fact, be a very bad example of fiction. (and surely the fact that some of the most highly acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy of all time, like dune, spend so much time and succeed at this 'surplus' drama stuff, whilst some of the most mocked and pilloried novels of all time, like ayn rand's shallow rants, use characters as mouthpieces for ideas, only confirms my basic point.)

WHOOOOOSH! DKB: dilbert knows best.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

How in the heck did this thread become "Dune isn't sci-fi," wt actual f.

dilbert is so severely autistic and hence so glommed by the thought of fictional writing about human beings, human relations, human families, or human power dynamics, that he will insist that THE MOST ACCLAIMED SCI-FI BOOK OF ALL TIME is 'not really sci-fi' and 'more a space adventure fantasy thing'.

then he will link to wikipedia articles on soft sci-fi, a category which contains basically half of all the greatest sci-fi tales ever written, and which are explicitly defined as 'sci-fi books with more of a concern on humanity, humanism, human motivations, psychology/sociology, politics, and the future of the human race, etc', and try to redefine them as 'not really sci-fi though' (according, that is, to his own idiosyncratic measure; too bad wells! too bad PKD! too bad heinlein! real sci-fi is only about engineering and spends pages detailing the physics of space travel).

SO, because the sopranos MUST be bad according to his ridiculous and priggish attitude, therefore we must invent arbitrary distinctions between george r.r. martin's fantasy or frank herbert's sci-fi, which clearly continues in the tradition of 'complex anti-heroes' and 'examinations of humanity'.

his ideal book is one where ideas tesselate together on a page like chess pieces. he knows what makes a good book: he has read 20-30 of them in 45 years. so he'll lecture endlessly: every tv critic to ever say the sopranos was, in fact good; every fantasy reader who enjoyed game of thrones; all sci-fi fans, sci-fi magazines, sci-fi awards, and sci-fi wikipedia editors who persist in publishing 'adventure space soap-opera fantasy stuff' that isn't really interested in the serious matter of opto-electronic sighting systems. lol.

full steam ahead on the dilbert monomania rail!

my point that, to even write fiction, one needs to expend a whole lot of effort on fictional stuff that isn't strictly concerned with ideas/concepts, has gone way over his head. to him, writing stuff about character or psychology or human relations is 'bad writing', somehow passé, the stuff of yesteryear and minor talents. my point is that good and convincing fiction writing requires oodles of effort to be spent on dramatic conceits like ... plot, pacing, events/scenarios, complications, resolutions; to describe aptly and convincingly; to write in an appropriate style; to recreate plausible characters with believable motivations which animate said plot. all of this is STRICTLY surplus to books about 'ideas and concepts': those are called philosophy or history books, and belong in the nonfiction section. a book which just personifies an idea into a one-note or puddle-deep character will, in fact, be a very bad example of fiction. (and surely the fact that some of the most highly acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy of all time, like dune, spend so much time and succeed at this 'surplus' drama stuff, whilst some of the most mocked and pilloried novels of all time, like ayn rand's shallow rants, use characters as mouthpieces for ideas, only confirms my basic point.)

WHOOOOOSH! DKB: dilbert knows best.

What I'm really enjoying here is being psychoanalysed by a literature nerd who misreads what I write, is unable to pick up on facetious comments and has not so much a a metric scintilla of knowledge, training, experience or qualification in psychoanalysis.

As an actual real-life STEM hero myself I am totally confident I am the best person here to issue diagnoses on anyone's personality issues.

I'm sure everyone has been waiting for it, the research has taken some time, I conclude that uziq suffers from narcissistic ego-fragility and its a fairly severe case, possibly the worst I've seen in my career as a psychoanalyst.

Further reading
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. … 0902815451
https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog … nferiority