The Official Geek Thread

[Bando]

I definitely really liked the whole season and thought they did a very good job. The finale last night was in typical HBO fashion (a lot of set up for next season, with all the action taking place in the penultimate episode). I thought the King in the North and Dany & Dragons scenes were really well done in particular.

Boz, I'm pretty sure they're keeping the name of the series as "Game of Thrones". I wouldn't be surprised to see "A Clash of Kings" as an episode title or something, or maybe a title for the season (can you do that?)

[JB5]

The season finale did a great job of setting up the next season and even included a few bits (as I recall) from book 2. I'm thinking of the exchange between Cat and Jaime: "There are no men like me." I thought the King in the North scene was hurt a bit by the absense of the River Lords, but probably too expensive to build a Riverrun set and design Tully costumes. Hopefully, this season did well enough to loosen the purse strings for season 2.

Do I remember correctly that in the book the comet appeared in book 1 during the last scene?

[SFHoya99]

Boz: They are calling it Game of Thrones. I expect the episode title is where Clash may end up, but maybe even not then. Martin has said episode nine is simply called "Blackwater."

More interestingly, D&D had an interview where they were very honest about the Green Fork. They had planned to do it Tyrion POV and follow the Mountain as he mauled people left and right. But...

"DB: There was never much discussion of shooting The Battle of Whispering Wood [Robb vs. Jaime's army]. We did have plans to show Tyrion marching into battle behind The Mountain. We had a whole way we wanted to shoot it following Tyrion’s eye level as The Mountain is just (cutting soldiers down). Ultimately we had to make some really tough decisions. We ran out of time to shoot it properly and we much rather have a great scene with our characters than a crappy version of the battle. We want to have some great battles, we’re working very hard to have great battles in season two. We’d like to have more direwolves too.

DW: There’s so many things we can do so much better than films. But there are a few things like battles and creatures where there’s a brute force financial component to doing those well, and it involves being very creative and selective about how you show those things to make them achievable. We don’t want them to look like a Playstation 2 game, we want it to look at the same level [of quality] as the rest of the show."

D&D interview

There may be some Clash spoilers there.

I'm not sure if that quote makes me more confident or less.

JE III: The exclusion of the comet was somewhat of an inexplicable decision, though I wonder if budget was part of it. It's supposed to be omnipresent in the sky for a good part of the opening of Clash, so I wonder if they just thought it would be an annoying pain.

[Filo]

This thread seems like a good place to ask... Has anyone read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson? Thinking about giving it a try but not sure I will have the energy. Anyone with any thoughts, positive or negative?

[SFHoya99]

Jun 20, 2011 22:26:56 GMT -5 Filo said:

This thread seems like a good place to ask... Has anyone read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson? Thinking about giving it a try but not sure I will have the energy. Anyone with any thoughts, positive or negative?

Read it, really enjoyed it, though the first one is the best one.

EDIT: It's kind of a fantastical, fun-loving historical fiction. Hard to describe it otherwise. Swashbuckling is a good word for it.

[hoopsmccan]

Jun 16, 2011 14:14:15 GMT -5 SFHoya99 said:

Has any movie been rumored more (now that they've made a live-action LOTR) than Ender's Game?

SF - regarding Ender's Game, have you read the whole series? I read the book awhile ago, but didn't both reading the sequel/companion books. Trying to figure out whether I should?

hm

[SFHoya99]

I haven't read every Ender book, but I've read Speaker for the Dead and Xenophobe (?) and they are both very good, but they are extremely different. They are very thinking SciFi, much harder core in the sense of a thinking/philosophical book than the action of Ender's Game. Ender's Game was raw, Speaker for the Dead was smooth.

I thought they were worth it, but it removes the action and inserts more of a "what does it mean to be human" -- which was present in Ender's Game but not dominant.

[hoopsmccan]

Thanks man. Sounds good...they'll go on the list, but probably not pre-A Dance with Dragons.

hm

[rosslynhoya]

Jun 27, 2011 16:07:33 GMT -5 SFHoya99 said:

I haven't read every Ender book, but I've read Speaker for the Dead and Xenophobe (?) and they are both very good, but they are extremely different. They are very thinking SciFi, much harder core in the sense of a thinking/philosophical book than the action of Ender's Game. Ender's Game was raw, Speaker for the Dead was smooth.

I thought they were worth it, but it removes the action and inserts more of a "what does it mean to be human" -- which was present in Ender's Game but not dominant.

The companion novels, i.e., the Bean books from Ender's Shadow onward, are written in the style of the original, set on a near-future Earth and without the philosophical brooding of Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide/Children of the Mind.

I've fairly enjoyed them: good cheap fun.

[whatmaroon]

Some otherwise die-hard Stephenson fans I know didn't care as much for the Baroque Cycle. Personally, I loved it, even the non-swashbuckling parts of book 2, The Confusion, which bored many people.

As Rosslyn mentioned, there are two sequel paths to Ender's Game. The Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind books are set in the far future and occupy a different space, more traditional soft scifi than Ender's Game. They're different, but still good. Speaker is the best, so if that's not to your taste, stop. The Bean books are closer in style to Ender's Game, but can be a little too much... OSCard-ian is how I think of them. I've enjoyed them, but they're not great. There's another, newer book, Ender in Exile, that ties the two sequel paths together (set after the 4th Bean book and before Speaker), but it's not very good and I don't recommend it unless you're an obsessive completionist.

Since my post a few pages back, I read K.J. Parker's The Hammer and found it mostly meh. Fine as a library read, but no more.

[SFHoya99]

whatmaroon,

It sounds like our tastes are somewhat in line. I'm really looking for another series -- scifi or fantasy or otherwise -- to dig my teeth into. I go through books like mad, but after I finish my re-reads and ADwD and my guilty pleasure of the next Dresden book in July, I got nothing in terms of fluff reading reading (by this, I mean something non-"Literaturey").

[whatmaroon]

SF,

I got into F/SF because I was getting tired of the general thriller-type books when I wanted some light reading, so maybe try genre expansion? Throwing out random recommendations: Dan Simmons (Hyperion cantos, and other non-SF works), Bernard Cornwell (lots of historical fiction, with series set in different eras), Ken Scholes' Psalms of Isaak (F, 3 books of 5 out), Peter Brett's Warded Man (F, 2 books of 3 out), Tobias Buckell's trilogy starting with Crystal Rain (SF-y), Peter Hamilton's space opera books (Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained or Void trilogy I haven't read), and Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia books starting with The Thief (F, 4 books, fluffy, juvenile but not annoyingly juvey like Eragon and others). Of those, Simmons and Cornwell are the only ones I might recommend to non-genre fans, but you may get mileage out of the others. Of likely even more limited interest, try Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality.

I mostly handle the problem by spending as much time as I can manage reading things other than light fiction.

[SFHoya99]

Thanks, whatmaroon. I read Cornwell's Arthur stories a few years ago and have been meaning to read more of his. Maybe I will start there.

[FormerHoya]

I just finished "The Terror" by Dan Simmons. What a strange book. Not that it wasn't good, and not that I wouldn't recommend it, but it seems like he wrote two separate books, then decided, " Aw, what they hell, how about I stick 'em together and see what happens." Again, I enjoyed it, but thought the last 100 pages were such a strange departure...

Also, for fast stupid fun, you can't beat Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. They're (especially the first few) like a really good action movie, and take just about as long to read.

[rosslynhoya]

I think I've been putting off the Hyperion Cantos for too long, considering how much I enjoyed the fusion of SF with Greek mythology and Shakespeare in Ilium and Olympus respectively.

The chasm in quality between Book 1 and Book 2 of The Warded Man series baffled me. The first, Peter Britt's debut novel, read like the screenplay for a rather pedestrian Hollywood fantasy-action movie; the second is significantly better in terms of plot complexity and character development and may be virtually unfilmable.

Has "World War Z" gotten a shout-out here yet? It's somewhat slow-starting and ridiculously easy to put down, but Max Brooks furnishes an outstanding parody of the pop military history genre, that absolutely bristles with insightful social commentary (I remember the Karl Rove characterization being especially brutal). The Brad Pitt version is allegedly supposed to begin filming in a few weeks.

[hoopsmccan]

Thanks for the Ender input ross and what. Switching gears a bit (and I'm not sure if it's still in "geek" territory), but I read this bit regarding American Gods:

HBO's upcoming American Gods, the anticipated series based on a Neil Gaiman book, will differ slightly from the plot of the novel, Gaiman told MTV. "The plan right now is that the first season would essentially be the first book, with divergences," Gaiman said. "You don't want the people who've read the book to be able to go, 'I know everything that's going to be happening.' Well, no. You know a lot more than anybody who is starting from here, but we will do things that will surprise you, too." In other news, asked if the Gods spin-off Anansi Boys would play a role in the series, Gaiman said no, because Boys is expected to receive a mini-series of its own in the future.

I liked the book (and Gaiman's work generally), but I'm not as excited for this series as I was for other adaptations. We'll see...I haven't read much about it; maybe I'll be more interested as it gets closer.

hm

[thebin]

Nit-picking I know...but aren't dire wolves meant to be very large? As in larger than the largest wolves alive today? These wolves looked much smaller to me than North American gray wolves. I'm sure there are probably just sled dogs they are using for practical purposes....obviously not a big deal. But for the readers....are the dire wolves not meant to be much much bigger or no? I guess they still might be puppies?

[Boz]

Real dire wolves weren't that much bigger than modern wolves.

In the Westeros mythology, they are both much larger and much more intelligent.

In the TV series, they addressed this in one of the production clips and said they just tried to get the best approximation they could with trainable dogs. (are they huskies? I can't remember)

[thebin]

My understanding was they were much heavier but with shorter legs. Actually now that I think about it, the dead mother wolf was enormous. I've just seen indications on IMDB board that maybe in the coming seasons they might have no choice but to CGI them as this season the excuse is they were still pups.

[Boz]

I'm pretty glad they're using real animals as opposed to CGI & am willing to suspend disbelief on the size of the wolves.

I think the only significant CGI used this whole season was the dragons, maybe the panorama scenes at The Wall too. But seeing as how the dragons aren't going away anytime soon, they'll be using more of it for sure.

Anyway, there's good CGI (Lord of the Rings) and bad CGI (Spider Man, The Matrix, Star Wars). If they decide to do that for the wolves, I hope they do it well.