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Emnity posted:More of a cocksure political type, with inspirint oratory and quite a flirt. The character doesn't necessarily need to be a bard in the traditional sense, just a deep inspiring character. You're going to really love Patrick Rothfuss. Don't let anyone stop you, go and get the name of the wind right now! I think you'll find it to be inspiring in three parts.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:33
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Emnity posted:More of a cocksure political type, with inspirint oratory and quite a flirt. The character doesn't necessarily need to be a bard in the traditional sense, just a deep inspiring character. Dandelion from the Witcher. He's a minor noble who fled home, changed his name and became a minstrel. He's independently quite wealthy thanks to his songs about Geralt (that he only ocasionally changes to embellish his own role) and all the money a few different kings pay him for spying. He's almost 40, looks about 30, thinks he's 20 and acts like he's 10.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:39
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Emnity posted:More of a cocksure political type, with inspirint oratory and quite a flirt. The character doesn't necessarily need to be a bard in the traditional sense, just a deep inspiring character. Mercedes Lackey has a whole series called Bedlam's Bard iirc, never read it though, Lackey never clicked with me when I was young and I never got around to trying her stuff later. You could also go historical/mythological with something like Taliesin, who supposedly was Merlin's teacher. Personally though I have trouble not playing a cowardly and hilarious type whenever I'm a rogue subclass of any type, so I'm not sure how much I could help. What I'd recommend is start to storyboard your character a little bit. Think about his appearance, his preferences for clothing and instrument, the types of songs he likes (inspirational? gory? debauched?), his personal quirks and mannerisms, etc.. Having your character exhibit a verbal orbehavioral tic can go a long way to sinking yourself into a character and making it more fun for those around you as well.. Maybe he sweats a lot, or not at all, or he likes to speak in iambic pentameter or alliteration (read a bunch fo dr seuss helps with this), or he is constantly fixing his hair or pickig his nose or pulling at his lapels, etc. edit: another option could be a skald, a viking bard.. Big, covered in furs, likes to get way drunk and sing epic ballads and get in fistfights and chase dragons and battles.. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 18:44
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uberkeyzer posted:You're going to really love Patrick Rothfuss. Don't let anyone stop you, go and get the name of the wind right now! I think you'll find it to be inspiring in three parts. Seconding this. Rothfuss also can write really good songs, so it's really fun.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:58
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Seconding this. Rothfuss also can write really good songs, so it's really fun.
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Jun 11, 2017 18:59
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uberkeyzer posted:You're going to really love Patrick Rothfuss. Don't let anyone stop you, go and get the name of the wind right now! I think you'll find it to be inspiring in three parts. 
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Jun 11, 2017 19:28
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Finished Aurora, I think it got much weaker in the second half. There are a few moments where he forgets his characters in the midst of the science, and loses his concept of the story and its inherent flow in his desire to talk about environmental science. Roughly the last 150 pages of the book could have been condensed into about fifty. The final chapter in particular dragged on anticlimactically. I also do not think we needed 30 pages describing the deceleration process step by step as much as we just needed to know they stopped. He seemed so caught up in wanting to explain how it could work realistically that they forgot how to make it feel organic to the narrative. Its ironic because there are elements of the story that suffered huge time jumps that needed to be fleshed out. They decide to split up after a hugely violent civil war, and the novel just says "several years passed and in the end they were sad to be leaving." We are having tearful goodbyes with people who were murderous rebels 20 pages ago. He spends more time describing how the ship handles its bacterial diversity on the biomes than explains how a community that tried to kill each other for months eventually repaired themselves. All in all though, I enjoyed it. On to Cyteen.
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Jun 12, 2017 01:58
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Emnity posted:More of a cocksure political type, with inspirint oratory and quite a flirt. The character doesn't necessarily need to be a bard in the traditional sense, just a deep inspiring character. Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan novels. Obviously.
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Jun 12, 2017 02:12
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Emnity posted:More of a cocksure political type, with inspirint oratory and quite a flirt. The character doesn't necessarily need to be a bard in the traditional sense, just a deep inspiring character. Legend of Eli Montpress, maybe. Lies of Locke Lamora for sure, Jalad from the Wheel of Osheim books.
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Jun 12, 2017 06:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Finished Aurora, I think it got much weaker in the second half. This is what I mean when I say Robinson is weak on characters. And it's not what the book is about, per se, but during the schism bits I couldn't help but feel it would be a lot more effective if he'd had a larger cast of more diverse and memorable characters.
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Jun 12, 2017 07:43
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navyjack posted:Legend of Eli Montpress, maybe. Lies of Locke Lamora for sure, Jalad from the Wheel of Osheim books. Cugel in Vance's Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga.
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Jun 12, 2017 10:13
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Reading Cherryh after Aurora is a big whiplash. Literally the first two pages go "We colonized some planets and discovered ftl travel" and I just imagine KSR screaming
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Jun 12, 2017 16:12
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To be fair to her, cyteen is part of a gigantic pile of novels she wrote that all take place in that same setting. The process of colonizing planets and discovering FTL travel was detailed over like 5 books prior to cyteen so it's not like she handwaved the details
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Jun 12, 2017 18:15
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I must get around to reading Cyteen. Not least to find out WTF the Union thought they were doing on Gehenna.
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Jun 12, 2017 18:51
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andrew smash posted:To be fair to her, cyteen is part of a gigantic pile of novels she wrote that all take place in that same setting. The process of colonizing planets and discovering FTL travel was detailed over like 5 books prior to cyteen so it's not like she handwaved the details I don't mean she hand-waved away the details, I mean that KSR's book was a lengthy treatise on how interplanetary colonization and FTL travel were both impossible and the next book I read has on the first page "So we traveled faster than light and colonized some planets" EDIT: If anything I think she needs to hand wave away more details. About fifty pages in and I am already bored with the minutiae of interstellar parliamentary subterfuge. Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 12, 2017 19:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I don't mean she hand-waved away the details, I mean that KSR's book was a lengthy treatise on how interplanetary colonization and FTL travel were both impossible and the next book I read has on the first page "So we traveled faster than light and colonized some planets" Generally the minutiae have good payoff. I've only read Downbelow Station but there all the little family rivalries and seemingly nebbish bureaucrats paid off in vicious unforgiving consequences once poo poo went down. I admired very much how she served a stale dish of "useless out of touch diplomats" and then gave us their POV to show that they were actually clever, human, and working on a very different agenda than earlier POVs assumed.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:18
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I've said it before but Downbelow reads like a style guide for BSG. The cold hostile expanses of space, the militaries trying to coerce and control a civilian population under environmental strain, even the aesthetics of the battles with their clipped chatter. Only book I've read that really plays up the overwhelming danger of riot in a closed artificial environment. Mobs are scary but mind on a crowded ship or station are worse.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:21
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I'm also finding the opening sections of Cyteen heavy going. Even if there's a payoff it's questionable how long I'll remember the setup.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:24
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Peel posted:I'm also finding the opening sections of Cyteen heavy going. Even if there's a payoff it's questionable how long I'll remember the setup. I have a theory about how the story could be improved but I want to read a little further before I say it
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Jun 12, 2017 20:26
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Runcible Cat posted:Cugel in Vance's Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga. I don't really think I would call Cugel particularly deep or inspiring, more like the literary personification of  On the topic of Vance, I'm reading The Demon Princes and "The Killing Machine" has my new favorite sci-fi parachronism: Gersen outwits Interchange and the villain by counterfeiting 10 billion space-dollars worth of paper money, which people in 3500 AD still haul around in suitcases, apparently.
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Jun 12, 2017 20:36
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At least there's the Institute to blame this on.
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Jun 12, 2017 21:19
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Megazver posted:At least there's the Institute to blame this on. Man, the Institute's ideology is so incredibly dumb. The Dexad's secret true ideology revealed later on isn't much better. I think this is intentional, though. I think a lot of their members are just using them to learn things for their own projects the way Gersen was.
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Jun 12, 2017 22:43
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The Demon Princes is basically just pushing through the first three books so you can have the pleasure of the last two.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:16
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Rand Brittain posted:The Demon Princes is basically just pushing through the first three books so you can have the pleasure of the last two. I'd say the third book is good too. It's amazing how much more interesting the three human Demon Princes are than the alien and the vampire. Part of the problem is that we never meet Malagate or Hekkus as themselves until the end, so they don't get fleshed out properly. We get a lot of exposition about Star Kings in general, but the only thing we learn about Malagate himself beyond vague rumors is that he's not like all the other Star Kings.
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Jun 13, 2017 00:34
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I'm glad to hear that because while the Oikumene and Beyond is a rad setting and Vance does a fantastic job building it, the characters in the first two have been utterly unremarkable. Beauty Dace was a good bad guy but other than that, eh. There's a part (I forget if it's in the second or third) where Gersen does a little introspection and wonders, "I have zero personality or defining characteristics except as a tool of revenge/justice", which I took as Vance slyly acknowledging that Gersen is a rather weak character.
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Jun 13, 2017 02:44
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my bony fealty posted:There's a part (I forget if it's in the second or third) where Gersen does a little introspection and wonders, "I have zero personality or defining characteristics except as a tool of revenge/justice", which I took as Vance slyly acknowledging that Gersen is a rather weak character. He's not even particularly good at it. I was waving my arms at him all through the book while he fumbled through going on a date and screaming "you are putting a target on this woman's head, idiot." The later Demon Princes are definitely better, yeah, although I kind of wonder to what degree Vance consciously realized that they're all basically enacting teenage revenge fantasies.
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Jun 13, 2017 04:25
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my bony fealty posted:I'm glad to hear that because while the Oikumene and Beyond is a rad setting and Vance does a fantastic job building it, the characters in the first two have been utterly unremarkable. Beauty Dace was a good bad guy but other than that, eh. I have mixed feelings about the setting. It feels like simultaneously too much and too little has changed in 1500 years. One thing I can't help but notice is that while there's a lot of cultures, even within the Oikumene, with radically different values, there's still an implied core interplanetary culture (which I suppose is the dominant culture of places like Alphanor) that's basically just America circa 1962. To some extent this is necessary to create contrast, but with regards to gender roles in particular, it often comes across as an unintentional failure of imagination. (The Oikumene as portrayed in The Book of Dreams seems to have become more gender-equal, probably because it was published in 1981 while the first few books were published in the 60s.) What's even weirder is how much people seem to have changed biologically in just a millennium and a half; some of the new ethnic groups that have emerged seem to be outright new subspecies (like the descendants of the vegetarian colonists of New Concept, who have become sheep-like). Even some of the cultural developments are a bit much, like an entire inhabited planet (Thamber) passing into legend and the apparently complete replacement of the religions of today's world with new religions. Even cultures like the Darsh and the planet of poisoners that have radically different values from all real-world industrialized societies are pushing it. I think the general idea Vance is going for is that people who live in environments radically unlike Earth will be undergo more rapid cultural and physical changes than we do, but I have trouble buying it. If you can accept the general conceits, though, it's a really interesting setting. It would be neat to read more about stuff like the Dexad's machinations, Gersen's past missions for the IPCC, the cultures of some of the worlds mentioned in passing, and so forth. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jun 13, 2017 |
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Jun 13, 2017 04:35
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Rand Brittain posted:He's not even particularly good at it. I was waving my arms at him all through the book while he fumbled through going on a date and screaming "you are putting a target on this woman's head, idiot." The third book begins with Gersen's girlfriend breaking up with him after calling him out on his messed-up outlook, and the narrator straight up says that he has no good answer to her arguments. In general, Vance doesn't really approve of the kind of protagonists he writes about (the short story "The New Prime" makes the particularly clear).
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Jun 13, 2017 04:43
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I've picked up a few books based on recommendations here lately and am actually halfway through one, but Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem just came out and I'm putting everything else on hold.
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Jun 13, 2017 08:17
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Getting in touch with my inner sperg I've been going on a LitRPG bender with a couple of audiobooks: The Gam3 and Continue Online: Memories. The Gam3 is not a good book. It's not very well written and the author repeats words a lot and it's quite guilty of dumping a bunch of stats "+5 to health" style at you. The plot is the standard LitRPG fare about newbie growing stronger and getting nice loot and such. A complete gamer powerfantasy. The protagonist is a gigantic Mary Sue and most other characters are completely forgettable... But. It's still entertaining. Nick Podehl narrates and does a nice job as usual and it pretty much fails to be both misogynistic and racist! I haven't finished it yet but Continue Online: Memories doesn't read like an average LitRPG book. It's character driven and just seems to be about the protagonist dealing with the loss of his fiancee. It's not amazing and it meanders a lot. It doesn't do the info dump thing these books have a habit of doing. It's more of a traditional science fiction story that happens to involve virtual reality than straight up LitRPG. It's not great, but it's more interesting.
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Jun 13, 2017 14:26
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Two people in space sit at a table and talk about how they outsmarted each other - a novel by CJ Cherryh.
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Jun 13, 2017 16:36
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General Emergency posted:Getting in touch with my inner sperg I've been going on a LitRPG bender with a couple of audiobooks: The Gam3 and Continue Online: Memories. I'm all about recommending the Continue Online books. There's 5 of them I think (4?) and its a complete story now. It does meander a lot. In fact, there's a whole book where the main character plays a different game because he's locked out of the main one. I've finished a new crop of LitRPG books. Recommends: 3 books by Daniel Schinhoffen - Alpha World book 1: Gamer for Life - Ex prison guard, now convicted murderer is offered to participate in a test of long term virtual reality immersion. Last Horizon: Beta and Last Horizon: Live - Long time friends and guild-mates from old MMO games, basically Gen-Xers in their 60s, get together to play the brand new first Full Immersion VR game Last Horizon. Along the way, the main character finds out he has terminal cancer. Fun ensues? These books say a lot about the author. Such as his fetishes and his tastes in women. Lots of sex - mostly off screen in Last Horizon and up in your face in Alpha World. But even though his writing paints him as a rather creepy dude, these books ended up being a rather enjoyable read. When I read Alpha World, I didn't realize it was the same author as the other two until I was done and then everything made sense because his female characters in one were just a remix of the same character traits presented in the female characters in the other. These novels carry the theme of the main characters treating virtual NPCs as people instead of as pieces of code, which gets them ahead of everyone else who treat the NPCs like poo poo. Ascend Online: Hell to Pay - Not a sequel to the first book set in the same series, but running concurrently to it, this story of the criminal underworld path of play in the Ascend Online game starts with a failed heist leading to the main character losing all memory of the heist and branded with a sigil that allows him to go into a berserk fury at cost of his health. Sort of a mixture of Payback, The Hangover and the Sopranos but very fast paced and set to the background of a world ending threat. The first book was pretty enjoyable as well. Weird Russian (translated?) book honorable mention: The Dark Herbalist series: Video Game Plotline Tester and Stay on the Wing by Michael Atamanov - I really liked these two books and give them the recommend with the caveat of them being written by a Russian native author. If its a translation its well done, if not, it seems professionally edited. Story of a poor man with a young, crippled sister who signs up as a game tester for the massive Boundless Realms corporation. His job is to play their VR game with a lesser chosen race and class combination, in this case a Goblin Herbalist, and produce and publish gameplay videos to try to draw customers in the game world out of the cities and away from the tried and true race/class combinations. In exchange, he will be given the ability to withdraw game currency in the form of cash. The only wrinkle is that he had logged into the game years before and his character was infected with vampirism. Now, his goblin herbalist is a vampire in a game where all the vampires have been exterminated and every long time player has quests to kill vampires. If he is found out, he will be spawn camped until he quits playing. Not recommends: Lost Archive: A LitRPG adventure - a Linguistics scholar is pulled into a weird game-like world. This book sucked, nothing interesting happened. The main character has no real agency and the whole thing feels on rails. I mean, it should be on rails by definition, but in this case it just felt like nothing the main character did came with choices to make. Either he can do such and such and progress the plot or he can do nothing? I guess? Eternal: The Awakening - A dude living in a world that might as well be an MMORPG but supposedly isn't wakes up with no memory. He can respawn if he dies. This is apparently special and unique in this world and it ends up he is some incredibly powerful reincarnation/return of a champion of chaos. Another book that pretty much sucked.
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Jun 13, 2017 17:36
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Not gonna lie, the recommended ones sound about as godawful as the one you didn't like.
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Jun 13, 2017 18:27
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I am genuinely curious by what criteria a reader even determines if a Lit RPG is good or not
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Jun 13, 2017 18:47
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Victorkm posted:I'm all about recommending the Continue Online books. There's 5 of them I think (4?) and its a complete story now. It does meander a lot. In fact, there's a whole book where the main character plays a different game because he's locked out of the main one. lol (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jun 13, 2017 19:00
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Victorkm posted:I'm all about recommending the Continue Online books. There's 5 of them I think (4?) and its a complete story now. It does meander a lot. In fact, there's a whole book where the main character plays a different game because he's locked out of the main one. More reviews is good, keep writing them. I might not want to read most of these but I am interested in reading about them. Don't listen to the mean jerks who suggest otherwise.
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Jun 13, 2017 19:03
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Make a new thread for it and humiliate yourselves there please
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Jun 13, 2017 19:05
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holy poo poo I kind of glazed over this plot the last time but seriously read thisVictorkm posted:The Dark Herbalist series: Video Game Plotline Tester and Stay on the Wing by Michael Atamanov - I really liked these two books and give them the recommend with the caveat of them being written by a Russian native author. If its a translation its well done, if not, it seems professionally edited. Story of a poor man with a young, crippled sister who signs up as a game tester for the massive Boundless Realms corporation. His job is to play their VR game with a lesser chosen race and class combination, in this case a Goblin Herbalist, and produce and publish gameplay videos to try to draw customers in the game world out of the cities and away from the tried and true race/class combinations. In exchange, he will be given the ability to withdraw game currency in the form of cash. The only wrinkle is that he had logged into the game years before and his character was infected with vampirism. Now, his goblin herbalist is a vampire in a game where all the vampires have been exterminated and every long time player has quests to kill vampires. If he is found out, he will be spawn camped until he quits playing. Thats the weirdest plot I have ever heard
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Jun 13, 2017 19:21
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I've picked up a few books based on recommendations here lately and am actually halfway through one, but Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem just came out and I'm putting everything else on hold. ...why is it like 7.40 for a physical copy and 5.38 for Kindle edition? Snap buying right now, I loved the first book. Definitely would have paid more, but really happy it's so cheap.
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Jun 13, 2017 19:33
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From what I remember of the Ninefox Gambit ending: Cheris uses the special gun on her shadow, shattering Jedao into lots of little shards. She then floats around eating them, building back his consciousness? Is that more or less right? What I don't remember is if there was any of Cheris left at the end or if Jedao was now completely in control.
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Jun 13, 2017 20:58
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