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 posermcbogus wrote:

Kind of how like I feel Pratchett will never get the recognition he really deserves from literary circles, because he wrote stories about fantasy stuff (and good lord was he prolific), and academics seem to still be thumbing their noses at it, despite it actually being fantastically good.

Academics and literary critics are not synonymous. Every university with an English literature department (so basically all of them) has people churning out research about fantasy and sci fi. And graphic novels, nowadays.

 Kroem wrote:
I've been working my way through the 'SF Masterworks' series and there is quite a large variation in quality, some are brilliant but some are a real slog ('City' by Clifford D. Simak being the worst so far).

It's hard to consider some on their merits though, for example I've avoided I Am Legend because of the rubbish Will Smith film but I was attracted to Greybeard because I liked the premise of Children of Men (talking of rip-offs )

Don’t skip I am Legend because of the movie as there is very little relation between the two other than the name. Ok maybe a little but the book is far superior with a very very different finale.

I think what we're talking about is the difference between the "literati" and "everyone else on planet earth." We're talking about an ever shrinking number of increasingly old farts and stuck up fart sniffers who are with each passing year, less and less relevant to society. The people who think that "high art" is it's own class of superior expression as defined in an impossibly narrow band.

Real world academics meanwhile are doing cool gak, like talking about Nietzchian philosophy as presented by Legend of Zelda, or teach their students about Empire by using Twilight as an example (both things I've seen college professors do) because most modern academics were nerds when they were kids. Frankly, a lot of people now were nerds when they were kids in some form or another. The idea of nerd/geek culture as this isolated other that will never get any credit for anything was already dying when I was young.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 Togusa wrote:
Anyways, anyone else excited for Dune 2020?

Will it be a terrible movie, or will be really capture the spirit of the saga?

It all depends on how much the director will let the story of Dune tell itself, versus him telling his own vision/version of it.
Kind of like Lynch's version: it had it's good parts, but David Lynch had to go and be David Lynch with it. It's why I both love and hate season 3 of Twin Peaks: I loved getting more Twin Peaks, but I hated that David Lynch went and David Lynched all over it.

Thing was that Twin Peaks was always David Lynch's. Dune was an adaptation of someone else's work, and the end result was something that basically missed or misinterpreted every important theme from the book. (Although the studio has plenty of blame to share there.)

For the record, I think season 3 is a masterpiece and Lynch's magnum opus. It's not for everyone, but I still think and have conversations about it in ways that I never did with the original series. There's so much depth to it and so much commentary and thoughtfulness. The irony is that these qualities are the very things that his Dune movie was missing.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
LSD wasn't a thing in the 13th century.

Dante Aligheri ripped off Neil Hannon's seminal Il Mio Adorabile Cavallo.

I wasn't being literal.

Dante is wack, yo.

Nor was I.

Neil Hannon is from a band called Divine Comedy and the Italian translates to 'My Lovely Horse'.

My lovely lovely lovely lovely lovely horse!

Sir Terry Pratchett wrote:I, of course, used a time machine to "get the idea" of Unseen University from Hogwarts; I don't know what Paul [Kidby, the illustrator] used in this case. Obviously he must have used something.

On being asked why he "ripped off" J. K. Rowling

SeanDrake wrote:

 Kroem wrote:
I've been working my way through the 'SF Masterworks' series and there is quite a large variation in quality, some are brilliant but some are a real slog ('City' by Clifford D. Simak being the worst so far).

It's hard to consider some on their merits though, for example I've avoided I Am Legend because of the rubbish Will Smith film but I was attracted to Greybeard because I liked the premise of Children of Men (talking of rip-offs )

Don’t skip I am Legend because of the movie as there is very little relation between the two other than the name. Ok maybe a little but the book is far superior with a very very different finale.

Plus it's like, 14, pages and can be banged out in a single leisurely pooh.

That's a lot of red meat.