LogFAQs > #951414892

JigsawTDC posted...

Stranger in a Strange Land is a great. I still have some major Heinlein books and stories to read, but so far that one has been my favorite of his. I don't think I had ever noticed the word before, but after reading it, I started noticing people using "grok" in various discussion forums.

I will bump it up in my stack! It won't be the next book I read, but I'll get around to it sooner now.

kinda bolsters my point about great story, bad ending. Love the story, hate the ending. "Grok" and "waiting for fulness" is iconic in the same way Orwellian Doublespeak is. I'd been using "Grok" in speech since a decade prior to reading the text it came from just because it infiltrated geek spheres.

it doesn't change the fact that i find the last 5th of SiaSL weak AF. a terribly unsatisfying ending to a great work. like Jester in Asimov's Empire. The last act of Lucifer's Hammer, the end of the second book and the entire third book of Ringworld...

sci fi always disappoints me, even from titans like Clarke, Asimov, Niven...i can get past badly aged tech like "holotapes", but the actual writing always seems to fall apart at the end of a story when its a novel.

like they all wrote incredible short stories, and the short story ending is fine for a short story...but a short story ending on the end of a novel is just ugly.

for some reason, fantasy authors don't always seem to fall into the same predictable rut.

for a great, modern story i highly recommend Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and its related works. I really think our kids and grandkids might View Logen Ninefingers the same way we see Frodo and Bilbo now.

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