As pointed out on FB

[james_davis_nicoll]

Regarding Jemisin's The Fifth Season:

What a waste of time. I very disappointed in this book---no characters, no plot, not even pages! It turns out it doesn't actually exist at this point, and not for another year, so trying to read it now is fruitless. How are these other people rating it at 4 or more? WTF?

Comments

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I have to agree.... now, I think I will create some imaginary books and put them up for reviews..

[bedii.livejournal.com]

Will you be changing your name to Frederic R. Ewing, then?

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I would go with Kilgore Trout, but someone did write Venus on the Half Shell.. sigh. But I do adore imaginary books within books.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

But I do adore imaginary books within books.

There used to be a site called The Invisible Library that listed books that only exist in other books, but it seems to have fractured into a bunch of blogs.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

There was another site that tracked fictional curators and archives, but it was never as cool as I wanted it to be and now I think it's defunct.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

oh *drat* I was going to get all cute n fluffy over that sort of site...

[bedii.livejournal.com]

If you think that I, Libertine wasn't written as a book, then Theodore Sturgeon and Kelly Freas, who illustrated the cover, must have had a hell of a projective hallucination facility.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

even sadder, are real books that dont match up with the reviews and the cover blurbs.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

How lem-esque?

Nah, doesn't have the same ring to it as kafkaesque, and sounds a lot more like some kind of miniature terrasque.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Actually it's Borgesesque, but that's even worse. Borgesy.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Borgesiousy?

[krfsm.livejournal.com]

Borgesuoise?

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

this is starting to sound like a Monty Python exchange..

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Bearing in mind that my Spanish is extremely limited, so I may have misunderstood my sources, the Spanish adjective for Borgesian appears to be Borgiano (there are arguments about why it is not Borgesiano that turn on intricacies I cannot follow).

[eub.livejournal.com]

It's utterly borgeous.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

In Goodreads parlance, "lem" is a verb meaning "to give up on a book." Comes from the Sword and Laser book club, where the group leader once decided to pick a Lem novel but chose one of his most abstruse novels (Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). The co-leader mentioned that she couldn't finish it, and other posters picked up on it and started saying they "lemmed" other books.

[carbonel]

Funny. On the Delphi Trivia forum, "lem" is a verb meaning to copy someone else's answers. (In the trivia game, all correct answers given before time count for points, and it's okay to copy.) I comes from the alleged behavior of lemmings following each other off the cliff, because people are almost as likely to copy a wrong answer as a correct one. (There used to be a "Liar's Points" game, where the one who gave an incorrect answer got points for the number of people who copied her. But that game is long gone.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Heh. That was my first Lem (at the age of eleven? twelve?) and I couldn't make head or tail of it. Bounced off it completely.

Come to think of it, I haven't read any of Lem's work since. I must remedy that.