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I don't want to get into too many details, since I don't want to bias any repsonses, but I'm in the early stages of designing a video game and need some input from the masses.
To put it generally, what books/movies/games/paintings/songs/whatever have influenced you as a person the most?
Thanks!
EDI:You don't need to answer all fo those, just chuck down whatever you think is most applicable to you, and feel free to go into some details.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2010/02/05 16:42:23
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
Sorry, those were a list of options, not questions. a why would also be helpful.
I might explain...later...I need a few responses first.
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
Influenced how? I mean if it's how I live my life, then the bible would be a book that's fairly high up there. If it's media that I'm a big fan of then it's the usual geek suspects.
Primarily your thought process. but really any majour aspect of your life. For me, whenever I take in a piece of information I usually run it throught the 1984 filter.
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
Typically old Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels from the 60s/70s era. If I had to name one series: The Chronicles of Amber. It has everything I typically look for in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel (and I do mean "Sci-Fi/Fantasy" as I prefer novels which span both genres).
What kind of game are you trying to write? RPG, FPS, Mystery/Puzzle...? Side-scroller?
Being a bit poor (cue the violins) and being stuck in the middle of nowhere growing up I lost myself into the world of literature and made my own worlds and those I read about through Legos.
Tolkien, David Eddings, Pratchett in the fantasy vein.
I read Jerry Ahern pulp novlels and Tom Clancy thrillers from the ages of 9 or so and pulp sci fi.
A fan of history i read and watched all I could, especially about WW2 an military history.
Watching A-10s strafing tractors in fields turned me onto aviation and their mission onto cold war history.
I watched and watched a lot of sci fi, for the escapism. I'm still a massive fan of cartoons.
I think perhaps putting this in a theme forum was a bad move. I was hoping to get a wide variety of answers. I'm working on a character who is meant to be representative of the skitophrenic nature of the public sphere. I'm having difficulty writing the character, as the only other character int he game (yes, only two) is mostly auto-biographical and so quite easy to write. Influencing media plays a large roel in both the story and gameplay, so I thought this would be a good way to start.
Its a text adventure...sort of. I won't go into any more details now. Might be some thieving indie devs around trying to snipe ideas.... -_-
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
but you know that 12 angry men was a book first right?
(please don't hit me)
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), by Robert A. Heinlein
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as 'state' and 'society' and 'government' have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame. . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world. . . aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2010/02/06 05:24:47
Damn, I should read more Heinlein. I mean, Starship Troopers was great but...damn...
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
George Orwell is my hero.
Social Experiment: if you're pissed like me, copy and paste this into your sig, and add a number after it.
PISSED 8374982374983749873948234
Check out my band Man In A Shed
Clthomps wrote:I just edited in the second quote, took a second to find it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
dreadlord wrote:
Clthomps wrote:Perhaps one on the best books ever written:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein is a racist hack.
Care to elaborate, or are you just trolling?
Don't listen to me if you're going to accuse me of trolling. I happen to love oldschool sci-fi. Just google "Robert A. Heinlein racism" and judge the results for yourself.
dreadlord wrote:
Don't listen to me if you're going to accuse me of trolling. I happen to love oldschool sci-fi. Just google "Robert A. Heinlein racism" and judge the results for yourself.
There's no criticism in that essay. Moorcock rails against the trap that is passing moral authority up the chain of command, only to use phrases like 'adult choices' as though there can only ever be one right answer in such situations. He wants and order without hierarchy, which is impossible given subjectivity.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
dreadlord wrote:
Don't listen to me if you're going to accuse me of trolling. I happen to love oldschool sci-fi. Just google "Robert A. Heinlein racism" and judge the results for yourself.
There's no criticism in that essay. Moorcock rails against the trap that is passing moral authority up the chain of command, only to use phrases like 'adult choices' as though there can only ever be one right answer in such situations. He wants and order without hierarchy, which is impossible given subjectivity.
Wow nice response, its great to see someone with reading comprehension respond. Nothing irritates me more than people just cut and pasting other peoples opinions instead of forming opinions for themselves.
dreadlord wrote: Don't listen to me if you're going to accuse me of trolling. I happen to love oldschool sci-fi. Just google "Robert A. Heinlein racism" and judge the results for yourself.
There's no criticism in that essay. Moorcock rails against the trap that is passing moral authority up the chain of command, only to use phrases like 'adult choices' as though there can only ever be one right answer in such situations. He wants and order without hierarchy, which is impossible given subjectivity.
Wow nice response, its great to see someone with reading comprehension respond. Nothing irritates me more than people just cut and pasting other peoples opinions instead of forming opinions for themselves.
At the risk of being a cliche:
Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last 'straight' sf serial for Campbell before he began his 'serious' books such as Farnham's Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as 'radical' was easy enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it. Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkein and Heinlein? The clue could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth century -- it is Reaganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Maclean and The Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy -- at its most refined it is William F. Buckley Jr., who, already a long way more sophisticated than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.
I admit that I am a Moorcockian fanboi. I typically agree with his sentiments and I own (personalized) autographed books of his. I am bias to the N'th degree. But considering the general lack of origional thought available in our society, I value the fact that so well written and intellegent a man is my inspiration. More fanboyism... I'm losing my touch as a troll. Oh well.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2010/02/06 04:24:45
I think MM is more deserving of the sobriquet myself - sure his Elric stuff was ok, but the rest - pure hack.
Obviously I would argue this point but frankly it would be pointless. Some of his stuff is better than others. Admittedly he wrote back in the day when Sci-Fi/Fantasy writers were writing novels paycheck to paycheck. He has a very interesting article about how to write a novel in 3 days. What novels of his have you read? I particularly like Jerry Cornelius, Elric, and the Blood series. Although Blood can be very confusing if you aren't familiar with his other works.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2010/02/06 04:38:30
Anyone else find it richly satisfying that we would have people trying to find scant racial stereotypes portrayed in alien species in novel from 1959, yet at the same time don't debate the obvious racial overtones in 40k?
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2010/02/06 05:26:16
Clthomps wrote:Anyone else find it richly satisfying that we would have people trying to find scant racial stereotypes portrayed in alien species in novel from 1959, yet at the same time don't debate the obvious racial overtones in 40k?
Nice edit. This was my response to what you originally wrote:
Michael Moorcock, described by Vittorio Curtoni as a ‘bizarre beatnik figure’ (25), has been involved in politics for much of his life, having been first attracted, by his own account, by the anarchist movement of the 1950s (Moorcock 1983: 12). At that time he used to attend anarchist meetings in Brylcreemed hair, blazer, tie and flannels, rather than orthodox bohemian wear; contrariwise he would wear beatnik clothes to a church fete (ibid.: 75). He later joined successively Labour, Liberal, and Labour parties, finally reverting to anarchism.
In 1978, at Stuart Christie’s request, he contributed ‘Starship Stormtroopers: Anarchist and Authoritarian Ideas in Science Fiction' to the fourth issue of the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review; this article is one of the major sources on this theme.
In 1983 Moorcock published his political testament, The Retreat from Liberty. He speaks knowledgeably of historical anarchism, referring to Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, Berkman, and Voline (his 1982 novel The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, which is not sf, also mentions Bakunin). Among contemporaries he refers to the British anarchists Stuart Christie, Albert Meltzer, and Nicolas Walter, and to the American Noam Chomsky. With the then marginal state of the anarchist movement, he pinned his hopes for the future on the women's movement.
In The Black Corridor, against the disintegration of British society, a businessman escapes into space; he is, however, progressively shown to be no better than the world he is escaping. A very bitter and pessimistic work, it does however insist on the individual's responsibility for the creation of a decent society, and the necessity for means to correspond to ends.
Breakfast in the Ruins is a sequence of vignettes of Karl Glogauer at dates from 1871 to 1990 - key historical loci, from the Paris Commune to Vietnam, via Auschwitz. He is frequently shown, coldly, as perpetrator as well as victim of atrocities. Chapter 9 features Glogauer with the army of Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist of the 1920s. Makhno himself is shown as miserable but reckless and cruel. The novel is shockingly amoral in presentation, but presumably with the intention of forcing a reappraisal of the reader's moral stance.
The Warlord of the Air is a quasi-Griffithian story of a time-traveller, airships, and a utopian community. Anarchists are prominent, but are not very favourably portrayed - they are the first, for example, to use the atomic bomb. The book slurs over the differences between socialism, communism, and anarchism, but as no more than a potboiler can't be expected to be good propaganda.
The Cornelius Chronicles constitute some of Moorcock's best work, centring on the attempts of Jerry Cornelius, a sort of transcendental hippy James Bond, to relate to the late twentieth century world. Nestor Makhno's army is again encountered. On this occasion it is in wild alliance with an army of Scottish anarchists and their fleet of a hundred airships painted in black anarchist livery and St Andrew's crosses. The opportunist Cornelius, known as a Makhnovist sympathiser, winds up as governor in Kiev. Andrew Hedgecock, writing in Freedom, saw Cornelius as 'a template for Moorcock's ironic attacks on authoritarianism, racism and traditionally defined gender roles'; on this seminal tetralogy the author declines to editorialise, compelling enhanced reader participation - hence the 'narrative is consonant with the central notion that self discipline is a necessary condition for freedom.' Moorcock confirms this:
The whole point of my fiction is to allow readers to decide for themselves their own moral attitudes. The Jerry Cornelius stories, for instance, are pure anarchism in their refusal to "guide" the reader in any direction. I try to set out the material and let them decide what they think. (Killjoy, 2009)
In The Entropy Tango Makhno, following the success of his Ukrainian revolution, gallivants around the globe attempting insurrections in Ottawa, Yucatan, Somalia, Bohemia and Queensland, before finally being electrocuted by the Americans after looting San Francisco.
'The Makhnovist uprising was also successful in the parallel universe of The Nomad of Time series; in The Steel Tsar (1981),Makhno once again appears as a character and engages in political arguments with Stalin. Byzantium Endures (1982) also features Nestor Makhno as one of its characters, though in this series the anarchist uprising was unsuccessful.' (Dan Clore)
Nestor Makhno also appears in The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century. The Opium General and Other Stories includes a long Cornelius story and a few essays. Among the latter are the most accessible republication of 'Starship Stormtroopers', and a review of a book on Makhno, whom Moorcock describes as 'a martyr to a cause that can never be lost but which the world may never properly understand.'
Of The Dancers at the End of Time a poster on anarchysf wrote: 'Theme is an anarchic society where all material needs have been met. There's only a few people but boy are they bored! Could be seen as an attempt to play around with a situationist scenario?'
I think it's important to remember that an author writing about racial or colonial themes isn't necessarily a racist himself. In that article Moorcock doesn't really offer any true critiques - while his criticisms may be valid, he doesn't offer any evidence for them, so unfortunately it's not a very good source to back up your point. His thesis also has little-to-nothing to do with Heinlein-as-racist, but is about Heinlein-as-pro-establishment.
That all said, an author being racist (sexist/homophobic/insert your distasteful quality of choice here) does not and should not preclude them from being able to write great and life-altering works of literature. Orson Scott Card is anti-gay, Lovecraft used to make anti-Semitic comments to his half-Jewish wife, Gulliver's Travels is packed full of racial stereotypes, and Confucius placed women distinctly below men. Does that mean we should disregard them completely as having nothing of worth to say? I don't think so.
