frandroid

What are you currently reading: A Michael Crichton novel, Pirate Latitudes. I know, I know. The recommendation came through a commenter on the Straight Black Sails group, too, which should have been warning enough. It contains many of the bad sexist/racist tropes you expect from pirate novels, though not many references to slavery or black people in general, I think? One character has a name, but keeps being referred to as "The Jew". This was published in 2010, not 1974... Also, the novel is realist for about 2/3rds of the way, but because Crichton got even lazier in his writing, at that point a pentagram is drawn to calm down a hurricane, and then afterwards our pirate crew meets a kraken. It would have been basic writing to link the two events (i.e. invoke the devil, face a creature from beneath) but that connection isn't even made. Also, most of the killing happens not in valiant sword combat, but when people are drunken/ly asleep, because our pirates are always attacking places with much larger crews/garrisons than pirates on hand. So crafty! The one good thing I got out of this book is an explanation of what breeching a cannon entails. There's a bit of decent naval combat writing but in the end everything is mostly about our good Captain and his smart associates thinking of engineering solutions from a century ahead to resolve their present-day problems.

Speaking of Black Sails, I'm now at Season 4 of my re-watch, along with the Fathoms Deep podcast, and it's A Lot of Podcast. The podcast started after S3 was out, so the main host had watched the show a million times and was able to provide lots of guidance on details and make lots of in-depth connections as they were going through the episodes from S1 thru S3. For S4, they put out the podcast as the episodes were coming out, so there's less in-depth analysis, and more first impressions. One part I'm enjoying is listening to their speculation on what's going to happen in future episodes. One other thing that's interesting is that the podcast got more popular and at that point they were able to get some cast (including Toby Schmitz,

sabotabby !), writers and directors on the show. (They're seriously fangirling over the actors, which is a bit annoying as a listener...) They even got one of the showrunners to come in for an interview. Looking forward to more interviews once they've finished the series so they can comment on everything without spoiling the future.

*** ETA: It turns out that this novel was found in Crichton's papers after his death. So even he had recognized that it wasn't that good, but obviously his estate only saw dollar signs. :P