I think we've only begun to scratch the surface really. Most space horror is just being stuck in a place with a monster. It's just a reskin of fantasy, not that different from being stuck in a labyrinth with a minotaur.

Very little space horror explores just how horrific the sheer difference between us and whats out there can be. Stuff like Blindsight or Annihilation.

Or even just contamination horror. You are literally made out of food. Every single moment of your life a horde of microbial life is trying to eat you alive, parasitise you or highjack your cells to force your body to create copies of itself until your body simply fails.

The only reason you're not a failing mind in a decomposing living body right is that your immune system has learned to fight off most other Earth life from eating you alive.

Any life you encounter out there will be unfamiliar to your immune system.

It's one of the themes of the franchise really humanity and the xenomorph are both monsters.

I love his short stories for adults.

Lots of friendships fail and lots of people have difficulty making friends exactly because they have poor social grace.

There's a difference between being honest and being honest in an antagonising manner. The goal here is to get your point across without people rejecting what you're trying to do.

>That's interesting. I always assumed sex for young women was taboo back then due to the risk of pregnancy out of wedlock, and not necessarily from any concern for the woman's emotional state. But I like your reasoning better.

That was also part of it. Unsurprisingly the whole thing is rather multifaceted.

Your Montgomery example is a good example if what I meant. Innocence is easily lost and often under painful circumstances. Which is also why it's valued and people desire to protect it.

>I don't give books passing marks or cut them slack just because they're old

Weird but okay.

>It's very important to address books by today's standards and criticize them.

So you can feel smug by doing something silly and irrelevant?

>Expecting today's people to react favorably to very problematic plot points

That's not at all the expectation. But it's good to cultivate reading comprehension by means of judging stories in a context where they make sense. You might as well stop reading if your intent is to intentionally fail to understand books so you can misrepresent the stories.

>(we literally have a pedophile here in the story) is absurd

Because that helps prevent ridiculous statements like this one that do nothing but demonstrate your failure to understand the definition of the word and the context of the book causing you to misapply the word.

>Critiquing a book by today's standard is the healthiest thing to do,

Considering how many problems with that way of thinking you managed to demonstrate in a single paragraph, I'd say that's a laughable statement at best.

You're basically advocating intentionally misunderstanding and misrepresenting stories for no clear gain.

>I didn’t say he was a “sleazy abuser,” though. I said the story as a whole was “borderline yikes.”

The only reason you seem to be doing that is that you have zero sense of context though.

Not if they commit crimes to buy more books while hurting their loved ones it's not.

But that would be the difference between actual addiction and people being hyperbolic about their hobby.

I get that but you think of it in in modern terms. A perv who wants children.

Life was hard throughout most of history. When so many people suffer, innocence is a wonderful quality. An innocent is unaware of the suffering. An innocent doesn't suffer. Even just seeing an innocent can soften the harshness of the world for a short while as you see life through their eyes.

To be able to keep someone childlike and innocent was a great gift and achievement. It essentially means you were able to spare them the suffering of the world. And not at all in some creepy pop culture lolita adult acting like a child way.

Sexuality is one of the gateways to losing innocence because while sex and intimacy and love can be wonderful, it's also the gateway to heartbreak. To learning the ways of sexual manipulation. Of romantic betrayal and so on. The turning from boy or girl to man or woman. A loss of illusion and protected innocence and a gaining of greater understanding of the world.

A young woman could be seen as innocent and childlike while at the same time being competent and lustful (but inexperienced). It has nothing to do with modern views on such phrases.

Eric kissing Kilmeny isn't a sleazy abuse. It's just a turning point from one phase of life to another. You're just hung up on how we see those words instead of what they actually mean in the context of the story.

Frankly, even today we can easily write about a 60 year old with a childlike sense of innocence as they take joy in imagining shapes in the clouds. The meaning of the words hasn't changed that much except for people who are dead set on interpreting them one way only without a care for context.

Your description sounds like the problem lies more with you than the story really. You can't apply today's standards to a century old story. All it does is demonstrate your inability to grasp context and learn how views change over time.

You talk about Eric as he's got a skeezy Tinder profile when really Eric's circumstance and family history cause him to be very pragmatic in the selection of a wife.

A character from this time period speaking about innocence and childlikeness has nothing to do with the sexual deviancy you seem to read into it. That's all you, not the story, character or time period. These qualities were admired, not lusted after. Parents still admire those qualities today and it's mostly cultural paranoia that has changed people's view on this kind of phrasing.

Along the same lines, age gapped relationships have been very common throughout history because they brought the most benefit to both parties. And most of the time, marriage was very much an arrangement of convenience or necessity. Couples needed each other and only the desperate would settle for a partner that brought them little advantage.

Which is exactly why Kilmeny doesn't want to marry him without her voice. She feels the inconvenience of her muteness outweighs her usefulness as a spouse and as such doesn't want him to marry her. There's a lot of romance plots where one partner either feels like they're not good enough or vice versa attempts to hide their deficiencies (poverty, debt, criminal history etc.) until the marriage is settled.

If you insist on ignoring context and meaning because you're too busy applying your standards on characters that don't live in your world, you're not going to get much out of your reading.

Videogames, movies and tv shows are hideously expensive to make and just as expensive to market. The marketing budget for blockbuster movies is often as much if not more than the production budget itself.

Pulling the plug on such a production is a big decision. A cancelled book on the other hand isn't such a big deal. It's mostly a contract thing between the writer and the publisher. It's like millions have already been spend.

It's called tunnel vision. I'm a 41 year old life long voracious reader and I've never read a book that featured notable violence against women.

I bet if I tried, I could read nothing but books that feature violence against women, or heinous racism or people who owned dogs though. And then pretend like it's a defining trend for books.

People tend to take note of the things they want to take note of.

The whole world's telling them that fun is something you buy and if something doesn't pay off instantly, it's not worth doing.

That's not really cultivating a reading mindset.

There's lots of reasons to enjoy LotR really. For me, the main reason is the way Tolkien treats the world itself. Most novels try to put your in the character's heads. You experience their thoughts, feelings, motivations... their inner lives.

Tolkien doesn't try to put you in the character's heads so much as their world. He lavishes the landscape with descriptions of landmarks, weather, scents and sounds. He places you right there with the fellowship walking under oppressively dark forest canopies or freezing mountain tops fearing to be hit by a giant's boulder toss.

And virtually no setting can rival Tolkien's world for sheer world building. A place that has a comprehensive set of stories from the creation of the world all the way up to the events that nearly end it. With fully fledged languages and bloodlines that go back ages. A lot of people love Tolkien because you can trace details through centuries or aeons of fictional history.

And sure, it's not like warhammer or the witcher. Those franchises tend to have gimmicks exactly because they needed to reach for something to differentiate themselves from what you call 'generic fantasy'.

I love those franchises on their own just fine. But for me the difference is that something like warhammer is like a carnival ride. Loud, flashy, fast, a need to find some new whiz bang to keep your attention. Tolkien is more like a David Attenborough documentary meets a historical document. It takes you by the hand as you wander this beautiful and harsh world with little need to wow you with flashy effects.

Social Media is based around sheep idolising influencers. These people successfully sell people their bathwater.

Books are no different really. When followers buy into the value of some influencer's vapid opinion, they'll value that opinion no matter what it is. That includes pushing books.

>I know of businesses that have laid off their entire marketing teams and replaced them with ChatGPT.

ChatGTP produces very bland marketing texts. They'll either regret firing their marketing teams or those marketing teams couldn't even market their own worth.

>I've seen several instances of small presses being flooded with AI-generated content by people looking to make a quick buck, to the point of closing down submissions and making life harder for actual writers.

Every technological development has transitional periods like that. Every new web tech has a temporary thread of amateurs using this tool or that to make subpar development products that don't last long.

>There was even a post here not so long ago from a guy who self-published a book of poetry that was admittedly generated by ChatGPI, but he still claimed to be a writer.

Etsy is full of people making "art" out of throwing junk together. People claiming to be artists despite having no art is something that goes back to the dawn of our species.

They're tools. ChatGTP can already write very complex things. But complex is not synonymous with good.

Most of these tools will replace people who had little to offer in the first place and be used by people who have a clear idea of their own added value and how to use tools to their best effect.

I barely even remember the rest of the book. But for the most part it seemed like the kind of book where nothing truly bad will happen.

And then there's a scene where one of the characters is tied up and a huge pig described as having tusks like carrots saunters up. It sniffs the tied up character and out of nowhere decides to take a massive bite out of his side and the book takes its sweet time describing how his screaming goes up in pitch until it just turns to gurgling and he dies.

This book just goes Stephen king for two pages and then goes back to 'normal'.

There is no secret to reading. You either do it because you enjoy it or you don't. Forcing yourself to do it is rarely effective.

I'd suggest just trying different genres until you find something you can actually enjoy reading. Other than that, there really is no trick to it.

It sounds like you like being seen as a reader more than the reading itself. Reading is easiest if you enjoy the act and can't put down a story or can't stop wanting to learn more from your text book.

If you don't have that, there's not much point in reading.

If you're enjoying it, it's not a bad habit. Reading is not a competitive sport.

I didn't say he did. I said that's how the novel reads. The Road is a tediously bland tale of two people slogging through the most generic possible apocalypse while failing to hold a conversation.

It's a dreary playlist of unimaginative atrocities that ends >!on a silly christmas miracle when the boy is picked up by The Last Nice People on Earth when his dad dies.!<

It's easily the most overrated book I've ever read by far.

It reads like someone went on a wikipedia spree to just get all the shock schlock from warzones and sieges to string together into the most flat and generic possible "story".

So yeah, if you don't get your jollies reading about the miserable and cruel things we do to each other, it won't be for you.

Probably taste. There's complex books that I just breeze through and simple books that I just cannot finish.

Finding something to enjoy about a book is key to reading it and digesting it.