Great Moments in Author Filibuster History

So, post some of your favorite most hated cases of Author Filibuster.

I especially despise the latter parts of the Red Mars Trilogy. It is a book about the adventure and challenges of colonizing Mars right up until the end of the first book, then becomes what amounts to a collection of political essays calling for the end of capitalism, a few sex scenes that were more gross than anything, and some notes about modern psychology tossed in the blender. Thing is, Kim Stanley Robinson has pretty much made Author Filibuster his job, so yeah, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. A Honey Badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

Geez bitch, like... I get it the first time, you don't have to write ANOTHER giant brick about the exact same thing.

^ Seconding Ayn Rand. I really don't get why she had to write fiction books when she gave jack shit about even plotting/pace/characters and only wanted to write 200 page speech about why you suck. Essays are perfectly legitimate and get to the point you know.

Victor Hugo, especially Les Miserables. I admit actually like him and his random story breaks are good for history, but they do get tedious. Especially when there are so freaking many of them.

There's one early on in The Diamond Age about how some cultures are better than others, which I thought was expressed in a fairly condescending way.

It also does this thing really common in Heinlein novels, where one character plays the ignorant role so another character can "explain" to them. Normal people don't talk like this.

Hodor

Now remember people, if you mention a book I like there will be spankings.

^ What possible Author Filibuster books do you like?

I like Starship Troopers.

@OP: I liked Red Mars' AuthorFilibusters. :{

edited 20th May '10 1:44:46 PM by Quoth

Greatest? Well, Faith of the Fallen is one of my favourite books ever, and it really manages to make me cheer for an ideology that is more or less opposite of my own.

Agreed with the Les Miserables comment above. It's author history lesson, and I'm sorry, but it's not fair to unload that kind of stuff on us when the barricade has fallen, all our beloved Friends of the ABC are dead, Marius is gravely injured, and Valjean has to escape with him into the sewers... pursued by Javert. Not a great time for a history lesson on sewage.

I have a funny relationship with His Dark Materials, infamous for an author tract (which appears to be against religion and esp. Catholicism) at the end of what had been a gripping adventure. I actually really do agree with what Mr. Pullman says - anti-tyranny, pro-thinking for yourself, working day by day to make the world a better place - I'm down with that.

But the more I think about it the less and less I like Xaphania. Of all the characters to deliver this Filibuster - it could have been someone that we knew a bit better, and didn't take her word on - well, on faith.  ^*

I just read a good Good Omens / His Dark Materials Crossover fic which called Xaphania the "Angel of Anti-Climactic Narrative Exposition." From Crowley, no less. Good way of putting it.

Fic can be found here, by the way.

edited 20th May '10 3:49:55 PM by vifetoile

Sex scenes aren't necessarily meant to be titillating. But I haven't read the trilogy in question, so I have even less idea as to how the author would have meant for it to come off.

edited 20th May '10 3:50:02 PM by Aoede

survival of the tight-lipped

Just out of curiosity here, are there any books which support tyranny and making the world a worse place? I'm not even going to get into how insanely meaningless and broken, a "think for yourself" aesop is when you are very clearly pushing a viewpoint.

On-topic, I hated that scene in Cryptonomicon with the sociology professor. Why don't you just put AUTHORIAL VIEWPOINT in big giant letters at the top of the page, Neal?

edited 20th May '10 4:06:09 PM by Myrmidon

Kill all math nerds

^ Was that meant for me?

edit: nevermind, I'm dumb

edited 20th May '10 4:07:05 PM by Kerrah

^^ You bring up an extremely valid point, Myrmidon. I think I just get a bit defensive around HDM because I do love it, and on this very wiki I frequently find a lot of flak for the Author Filibuster at the end.

Ooh, for works that I actually hated with Author Filibuster - I did despise the one at the end of Messenger, which kind of made the forest out into this big metaphor for the human condition. That entire book annoyed me, especially compared to The Giver.

Oh, and Gregory Maguire's Wicked had way too many long philosophical musings on the matter of evil and wickedness. Really, give me the song "Wonderful" any day (though I admit I like the book's ending better.)

edited 20th May '10 4:46:14 PM by vifetoile

I love Jack Ryan's speeches in Executive Orders, particularly the "Ryan Doctrine" chapter, which is entirely about him telling the rest of the world they can go take a flying fuck if they mess with the U.S. ever again.

edited 20th May '10 4:54:47 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

As a rule, if a fictional work explicitly espouses a moral, I'll feel the work is the lesser for it. I sometimes enjoy works that present a group of people and ask me decide who's right and who's wrong (e.g. A Doll's House), but not works that tell me which character to root for and what to stick where if I don't.

edited 20th May '10 4:56:52 PM by feotakahari

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

^ This, very much this.

edited 20th May '10 5:00:04 PM by melloncollie

A Prayer For Owen Meany

Every single scene in which the narrator is an adult is nothing but one long tract on Why America Sucks.

^Oh Gods I hated that book. The American hate was actually tolerable compared to having to deal with the emo protagonist whining about being a virgin forever.

I forgot her name, but basically she is the granddaughter of some of the first hundred people to live on Mars (since people live to be around two hundred plus in the trilogy, you start to get a lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren showing up in the latter books), and she has raunchy sex with everything. I'm talking a sex scene between her and a man old enough to be her great grandfather (described in detail, including such gems as "he pawed her with his little monkey hands"), a scene in which she is "tabled" (basically, they've got these tables in the adult sextion of a hot springs resort, and well, if you lay down on the table its an invitation for everybody in the vicinity to go hogwild on whatever orifice is available), and of course random sex with people she barely knows...in public. All these scenes take up the entire middle of Blue Mars, completely interrupt the somewhat exciting plot up to that point, and are rendered completely irrelevant to the main storyline after said character promptly dies after only being in three chapters of nonstop orgies and meaningless sex. It was like if, in the middle of I Robot, Asimov decided to include five chapters of a dirty pornographic novel.

edited 20th May '10 5:52:15 PM by Bioelectricclam

Fear is our ally. The gasoline will be ours. A Honey Badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.

I kind of liked Owen, but the protagonist needed to die.

Kill all math nerds

I think there are quite a few Author Filibuster moments that are well written and culturally important. Shakespeare had plenty, Joseph Conrad made an entire book out of one...

And better than thy stroke; why swellest thou then?

Yeah, I don't think that an Author Filibuster is necessarily bad. For example, I think that Illuminatus would be far less effective without some of the philosophizing that goes on in it. Same thing with Nineteen Eighty Four. The key is to keep said passages relatively brief, and don't let it overwhelm the other aspects of the book (plot, character, etc.).

no one will notice that I changed this

I'm with the people who nominated His Dark Materials. Loved the first book, found the second fascinating, was so let down by the third.

And the Wicked novel has it's points, too. I read it before I saw the musical, and I ended up liking the musical better.

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I've always thought His Dark Materials sounded like the name of a bad romance novel.

Unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe.

I would say that the teacher flunked my planet. That was actually an arthur tract but dear god that book was stupid.

1984 is more of an arthur tract but it still tells a compelling and sad story of a dictatorships.

edited 22nd May '10 4:03:24 PM by BlackKing