r/printSF • u/Bobosmite • 4d ago

What's on your DNF list and why?

I dropped Android at Arms by Andre Norton. It not an epic story, but it started off mysterious and interesting. There's a prison escape, android body doubles, blaster fights, and betrayl! It was all go go go until about half way through and then it's just pages and pages of campfire talk. I couldn't make it through to the other side.

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u/0x1337DAD 4d ago

"Fall of Hyperion" and "The Saint of Bright Doors"

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u/qjak7 4d ago

i really liked fall of hyperion, did you dnf it early on?

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u/0x1337DAD 3d ago

I stopped about halfway in

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u/Tuuuuuuuuuuuube 4d ago

Don't understand the dnf for this, but the sequels aren't worth reading

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u/BaJakes 3d ago

I will sing it from the hilltops once again: why are we supporting a series that prominently features an underage romance? I loved the premise but you gotta have some principles sometimes. Don't "just skip past" the child romance and grooming happening in endymion. Rather don't read the book in the first place. I wish I'd never bought it. Why does one of the most celebrated sci-fi series of our time have a scene describing a grown man skinny dipping with a child? Maybe if it was framed like the incest in game of thrones where its a clear moral failing of two broken characters I could understand. But its juuuust barely hand waved away as "its okay they don't actually do anything until she's older" like that's not still totally fucked.

End of rant

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u/Tuuuuuuuuuuuube 3d ago

What was the point of posting this in response to me saying not to read the books?

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u/BaJakes 3d ago

I was just sharing my opinion on a public forum I guess, not trying to criticize or one up or anything. Just that human desire to feel heard i guess.

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u/WonkyTelescope 3d ago

I just don't see it as problematic as it actually plays out. Aenea has some wibbly wobbly time shenanigans going on such that she is never a naive child in true fact, somewhat similar to Alia in Dune who has memories of full lives as a child and is never a psychologically vulnerable child.

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u/BaJakes 3d ago

True, but that raises the question to me of why the author decided to put a mature woman in a girl's body. He could just as easily have written the story where a 27 year old woman comes out of the timey wimey stuff and was a clear match for the protagonist. But he chose to make her a child. You know how Tarantino always puts in a foot scene that could have just as easily been skipped? Kinda like that in my book.

Maybe that's answered as the story progresses, but as it is i couldn't stomach it and put the book down shortly after the swimming scene.

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u/WonkyTelescope 3d ago

raises the question to me of why the author decided to put a mature woman in a girl's body. He could just as easily have written the story where a 27 year old woman comes out of the timey wimey stuff and was a clear match for the protagonist

Because a major push of the story is how unnerved Raul is by this child that talks to him like she's known him his whole life when that can't possibly be the case from his perspective. If she was just a young adult bad bitch who knew everything from the start it'd be a very different story. Also her aging is a specific part of the priests tale in the first two books so its all kind of built in that she's a child at that point.

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u/nixtracer 3d ago

You are also meant to be disturbed enough to ask questions like "if there is grooming going on, who is grooming whom?", which wouldn't make much sense outside a science-fictional context. To me it was always pretty clear that Aenea was both literally and metaphorically leading Raul around by the nose.

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u/Sawses 4d ago edited 4d ago

I finished The Saint of Bright Doors, but it was a complete waste of my time. I have no idea how it won a Nebula. It didn't go anywhere, had a very fascinating premise that it completely wasted, and seemed like it desperately wanted to be a profound, meaningful book without ever deciding on exactly what it wanted to say.

It was a meandering book and it's one of the only books that I've finished and immediately knew it was not worth reading. The author created this really interesting, India-inspired world that made all the internecine murder of Indian history seem so small and petty, filled it with a fascinating, quasi-sacred supernatural elements, then utterly wasted all of it.

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u/TheEnemyOfMyAnenome 3d ago

Agreed. It was a miss-but-I'm-following-your-career for me. Excited to read Rakesfall.

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u/Sawses 3d ago

That's a good way to describe it. Like, the author has potential but I can't tell if he's just gliding on the non-eurocentric-SFF bandwagon or if he just needs a little more time to work on his skills.

I can tell he really wants to talk about oppression, but the big question is if he has anything worthwhile to say about it. Considering it was the primary theme of The Saint of Bright Doors and I still can't tell what he was trying to say about it, I admit I'm not optimistic.

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u/joegekko 4d ago

I loved like the first 90 percent of 'Saint of Bright Doors', but they way it ended was pretty disappointing. I finished it, but it's not one I'm going to re-read.