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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. KSR’s aurora
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Feb 25, 2020 05:40
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It's been mentioned recently in this thread, but Dragon's Egg is a very good first-contact story with genuinely alien aliens.
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Feb 25, 2020 05:41
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Colony Fleet by Susan R. Matthews. This one puts a lot of focus on class issues within a generation ship(s). TheAardvark posted:To turn it around, who other than Bujold has done romance well in SF/F? Any good love stories? Book 4 of The Dark Tower comes to mind. Julie Czerneda. I picked up her first few books and bounced off with a "not for me" due to heavy romance stylings, not at all a quality issue. No particular recommendations, but if you want alien princes falling in love with human woman, check her backlist out. Sarah Zettel. I picked her up about the same time as Czerneda. She's done SF romance, portal fantasies, and standing very well clear of the rest of her stuff, Fool's War. That's a hard SF novel about AIs with a lot of good character development. Its also a good "ideas" book.
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Feb 25, 2020 06:17
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Echoing KSR's Aurora is the best generation ship book I've ever read. Michael Flynn's Eifelheim is the best first contact book I've ever read. (And also just a great historical fiction novel too. A bafflingly unknown and underrated gem.)
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Feb 25, 2020 08:08
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Well the natural answer has to be Children of Time even though Aurora is objectively better.
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Feb 25, 2020 08:32
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Learning the world by Ken Macleod is about both (and is very good).
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Feb 25, 2020 09:26
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/george_12_19/ This isn't book, but I really enjoyed this story from a recent issue of Clarkesworld.
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Feb 25, 2020 09:50
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freebooter posted:Echoing KSR's Aurora is the best generation ship book I've ever read. Read Eifelhiem, loved it. Didn’t read Aurora, probably won’t because I hate books narrated by AI. Hallucinogenic Toreador posted:Learning the world by Ken Macleod is about both (and is very good). The bat one? Loved it! PawParole fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 10:06
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Did anyone read Unto Leviathan?
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Feb 25, 2020 10:07
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PawParole posted:Did anyone read Unto Leviathan?
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Feb 25, 2020 10:32
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gvibes posted:For those who are curious, it's Barker, not Parker. I only checked because I thought it would be pretty unfortunate for there to be both a RJ Parker and a KJ Parker. Thanks, the AutoComplete on my surface makes the strangest changes. RJ Barker is an old goth and writes good but depressing fantasy. Is funny on twitter too.
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Feb 25, 2020 10:35
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PawParole posted:Did anyone read Unto Leviathan? AKA Ship of Fools? Yeah, read that years ago. Good, though don't remember that much about it now.
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Feb 25, 2020 10:38
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Would Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Children of Ruin books count?
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Feb 25, 2020 12:29
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is intriguing, although first contact is almost incidental to the story.
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Feb 25, 2020 12:51
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Novella, Murray Leinster, "First Contact"
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Feb 25, 2020 12:53
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem e: Wikipedia mentions three other books: "[Fiasco] is the fourth in Lem's series of pessimistic first contact scenarios, after Eden, Solaris and The Invincible." ringu0 fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 16:31
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Oh yeah and two of John Wyndham's great classics also count as first contact books, though of the "aien invasion" type: The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos. Also we were talking about Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice a page ago and I just realised it technically counts as both a first contact and generation ship story.
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Feb 25, 2020 23:08
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Revenger by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LXW2IUQ/
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Feb 26, 2020 00:17
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pradmer posted:Revenger by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 Is there some way to trick Amazon when the deals aren't international? It's always such a bummer.
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Feb 26, 2020 01:22
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Black Griffon posted:Is there some way to trick Amazon when the deals aren't international? It's always such a bummer. Temporarily switch your address to something in-country. Switch it back after purchase.
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Feb 26, 2020 01:38
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Doesn't seem to be working.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:19
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I was definitely able to buy UK ebooks in the US after changing my shipping address to 10 Downing Street. Though that was several years ago so maybe they have since plugged the loophole.
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Feb 26, 2020 02:57
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Black Griffon posted:Doesn't seem to be working. It isn't shipping address, there's a different setting to change. Your Account -> Your devices and content -> Change your digital and device settings -> Country/Region Settings You don't need to make up an address, you can set the country and leave the other fields blank.
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Feb 26, 2020 06:10
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Oh hey it's working, thanks!
Black Griffon fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 13:12
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I finished both "The Three Body Problem" and the sequel "The Dark Forest" within the last week, however I was really struggling with TDF to stay interested as the plot moved further and further into the future, where Gen X is treated as wise old sages and all the modern humans are naive and annoying Millenial/Zoomer caricatures. Even the ending was a bit of a let down compared to TTBP. What is Death's End like? Is it worth reading?
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Feb 26, 2020 23:25
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Happiness Commando posted:Vita Nostra by the Dyachenkos. It might be a little like The Nevernight Series by Jay Kristoff, which I liked a great deal. It might not be, but someone here recommended it, so I'll give it a try. Ben Nevis posted:I read this last year. I found it to be very interesting and very readable, but I the end left me with some questions. Now I don't quite remember what they were, but I anxiously await a review Vita Nostra was nothing like Nevernight, and it was also way, way better. I really liked how the three year span of the story was treated nonlinearly, where the first year took up most of the book, the second less, and then the third basically only existed for the climax. It was a neat way to resolve what could have gotten repetitive. The ending did indeed leave me with several questions, and was kinda deus ex machina-y in a slightly unsatisfying way, but I was willing to roll with it. I described it to my friend as "a very literary version of Grant Morrison's work, where 'very literary' means there are no pictures, just words". The parts of the novel I had the hardest time suspending my disbelief for were the interactions between the main character and her mother. That, I think, is indicative of both how weird my brain is and also how privileged I am to have a healthy relationship with my mom. I can concede that in the world of possibility, such relationships are possible and almost certainly exists, but it was alien to me to read along with. A+ would read again
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Feb 27, 2020 01:40
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Professor Shark posted:I finished both "The Three Body Problem" and the sequel "The Dark Forest" within the last week, however I was really struggling with TDF to stay interested as the plot moved further and further into the future, where Gen X is treated as wise old sages and all the modern humans are naive and annoying Millenial/Zoomer caricatures. Even the ending was a bit of a let down compared to TTBP. None of the issues with the series' writing are really fixed in the last book so I suspect you'll have similar problems. If anything, the characterization gets thinner, if that's possible.
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Feb 27, 2020 01:40
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eke out posted:None of the issues with the series' writing are really fixed in the last book so I suspect you'll have similar problems. If anything, the characterization gets thinner, if that's possible. Yeah, it's the kind of book you read for the wild ideas; the characters are ultimately two-dimensional, mostly.
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Feb 27, 2020 08:47
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eke out posted:None of the issues with the series' writing are really fixed in the last book so I suspect you'll have similar problems. If anything, the characterization gets thinner, if that's possible. I think the prose improves in Death's End with Ken Liu's return as translator. Martinsen's translation comes across as almost juvenile in places with how simply the prose is rendered. Liu seems to capture a bit more nuance and complexity. But you're right about the characters getting thinner. They're basically just cutouts designed to comment on the bonkers poo poo that goes down. And I think that bonkers poo poo is worth a read despite the sketchily drawn characters.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:11
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PeterWeller posted:But you're right about the characters getting thinner. They're basically just cutouts designed to comment on the bonkers poo poo that goes down. And I think that bonkers poo poo is worth a read despite the sketchily drawn characters. Yeah, I read them anyways because it was interesting, it was just... a lot of sacrifices are made in the name of getting the cool ideas down on paper. I don't even know that he's actually bad at writing characters, it just seems like he didn't care to try any more than the bare minimum. eke out fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Feb 27, 2020 |
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Feb 27, 2020 19:40
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eke out posted:Yeah, I read them anyways because it was interesting, it was just... a lot of sacrifices are made in the name of getting the cool ideas down on paper. I don't even know that he's actually bad at writing characters, it just seems like he didn't care to try any more than the bare minimum. Yeah, I think he can write decent characters. Three Body Problem has decent characters. I think you're right that he just isn't concerned about characters when he's busy describing popping suns like cosmic balloons and dropping the Solar System into two dimensional space.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:51
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Book of the Long Sun is a generation ship story that has a low-key first contact subplot
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Feb 27, 2020 21:25
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I'm making a third attempt to read Blindsight by Peter Watts because I find what I have heard about the subject matter interesting, but I'm again finding it really difficult to get into. - I don't usually read hard sci-fi. There is a lot of detail on the description of the ship and how it works, which is almost entirely meaningless to me so I feel like I'm not actually building a picture of what is happening. Is it expected that readers understand what most of this stuff is? Because to me, it feels like reading technobabble for all that it is adding to the story. I'm asking if this is me being ignorant of engineering and physics getting in the way, and if it is, I probably shouldn't read hard sci fi because those things don't interest me. - I don't like Watts' brutal style of writing, ie describing biological matter as 'meat' all the time, and things like that. I feel like it is affected. The characters all have the same above it all lovely attitude. Actually gently caress it I'll probably just give up on the book.
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Feb 28, 2020 02:32
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Blindsight is one of my favorite books ever, but also I really enjoy in-depth explanations and explorations of technology and brutal, grody writing style, so it kinda sounds like it might not be for you. But what I truly adore about Blindsight is the sense of slow dread and darkness it builds as they attempt to figure out what they've found. It's my favorite type of Big Dumb Object story too; horror BDO.
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Feb 28, 2020 02:49
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So I finished the second Lady Astronaut novel, and read a couple of Kowal's short stories. The Fated Sky is a considerable improvement over the first book; they have a really rough trip to Mars. And that's the whole novel, one three-year bad trip. I'm giving the series a thumbs up and recommending it to anyone who likes retro space (the Mars missions launches in 1962). Of the shorts, Articulated Restraints is a LA spinoff. It's pretty good. First Flight is a time travel story with a lot of heart and charm. I'll recommend grabbing this if you're in the mood for a little time travel. It's got a pretty clever time travel system; you can't go back before you were born, and the future is always different.
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Feb 28, 2020 05:56
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So, I finished Gideon the Ninth and... I kinda hated it? The ending, mostly. Not because it was badly written, per se, but because I find myself just not caring about what happens next. I do not care about Harrow. I just... Don't. I gave a poo poo about Gideon. Which is why continued through. But I do not care for someone who abused her throughout most of her short life. I also disliked Harrow's "redemption". Like, maybe it is just me, but I cannot see how "love" excuses all of the poo poo Harrow did to Gideon. Even though we know that Harrow did genuinely change, in real life... In real life analogous cases usually end up with "Harrows" completely unchanged, abusing their "Gideons" all the way to "Lyctorhood". They might even be doing it out of "love". A highly shityy, poisonous, abusive "love", but "love" nonetheless. They would probably be remorseful after their "Gideons' " death, like Harrow in epilogue. They would still be villains, unlike Harrow, who is portrayed heroically. Honestly, I would feel better if it was "villain wins" story. Anyway, I am rambling. I do not think I can recommend it. I liked reading most of it, but... Yeah. Cannot, in good conscience, recommend it.
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Feb 28, 2020 09:59
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I honestly didn't feel like the book was idolizing Harrow - you get her side of the story but that makes her feel even more hosed up than anything else. My impression was that the heroic one was Gideon, to the very end. A book doesn't have to have a sympathetic protagonist to be enjoyable.
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Feb 28, 2020 11:43
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anilEhilated posted:I honestly didn't feel like the book was idolizing Harrow - you get her side of the story but that makes her feel even more hosed up than anything else. My impression was that the heroic one was Gideon, to the very end. Which also ties into why I am not that interested in Harrow as a protagonist. She just isnt compelling to me. Even an unsympathetic protagonist has to be compelling.
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Feb 28, 2020 13:07
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large_gourd posted:I'm making a third attempt to read Blindsight by Peter Watts because I find what I have heard about the subject matter interesting, but I'm again finding it really difficult to get into. I didn’t know that vampires counted as hard sci-fi?
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Feb 28, 2020 19:17
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Cardiac posted:I didn’t know that vampires counted as hard sci-fi? Hard sci-fi is a broad term that mostly means heavy on technical details. Most ‘hard’ sci-fi contains some fantastical elements.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:21
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