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picturing a ten foot stack of dogeared webnovels and found footage sci-fi YA while the earthsea books languish on your shelf 
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Jun 18, 2020 22:12
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buffalo all day posted:picturing a ten foot stack of dogeared webnovels and found footage sci-fi YA while the earthsea books languish on your shelf I don't actually own the Earthsea novels yet, I'm gonna get the giant illustrated edition next month and have a feast for my birthday month.
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Jun 18, 2020 22:20
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Clark Nova posted:I assume you've already read every Ted Chiang story? I've read one of his short story collections. I don't really see the similarity.
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Jun 18, 2020 23:06
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Dzhay posted:I'm a massive nerd. As such, I'm a great fan of Greg Egan. Try some of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee books. They're all standalone so just grab whichever seems to have the most interesting concept. My personal faves are Vacuum Diagrams and Exultant.
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Jun 18, 2020 23:59
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Don't forget excrutiating and overly-detailed descriptions of any gem carvings in a 100-mile radius. Those bits rule, they're like dwarf fortress descriptions.
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Jun 19, 2020 07:10
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Ccs posted:I don't like how streaming services are going backwards in time from Martin for their adaptions. Wheel of Time, another LotR, another Ghormenghast. I don't want to see any of that. The Black Company project isn't officially dead yet. There's still hope.
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Jun 19, 2020 08:28
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Streaming services should actually go back way further and adapt William Morris and Lord Dunsany, except that in reality they probably shouldn't because there's no way anyone employed by a streaming service would be able to make those cool instead of lame.
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Jun 19, 2020 10:45
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Fuckin' William Hope Hodgson. Give us some fuckin House on the Borderland, some fuckin Night Land.
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Jun 19, 2020 11:52
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I too want to see that weird pizza cutter power tool thing.
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Jun 19, 2020 11:54
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mllaneza posted:The Black Company project isn't officially dead yet. There's still hope. But that's still older than Martin, his first book was published in 1996, Black Company is from the 80s. Like you'd think with the success of Game of Thrones they'd be going for projects that were directly inspired by it, as opposed to the stuff Martin was kind of deconstructing with his project.
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Jun 19, 2020 14:29
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Option George RR Martin's Sandkings instead of a Game of Thrones knockoff or Black Company misery-porn. Any book series with heavy internal monologing is going to be hard to adapt to TV/streaming services, which is why I think Consider Pheblas was a smart pickup and way more acessable than Player of Games.90s Cringe Rock posted:I too want to see that weird pizza cutter power tool thing. I thought that was in one of the Turok games.
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Jun 19, 2020 17:11
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Ccs posted:But that's still older than Martin, his first book was published in 1996, Black Company is from the 80s. Game of Thrones came out in 1996 but that wasn't Martin's first book, he'd been around since the 70s. (Kind of funny how his main claim to fame used to be some very efficient and cool short stories.)
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Jun 19, 2020 22:01
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Sorry I meant first book in ASoIaF. I've read his earlier stuff, like the one about the band, the one about the 1800's vampires and steamships, and both his big short story collections. Haviland Tuf is fun character, and I always saw Varys as an extension of that character but working with much less power at his disposal.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:08
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Ccs posted:But that's still older than Martin, his first book was published in 1996, I would also accept a series based on Becky Chambers' slices of life in space novels, that's both current and excellent. Anything Jemsin wrote would be gold for an adaption as well. She's on literally urban fantasy now, I think there's a good chance she has an adaption deal signed before the third book is published. You could also get a couple of seasons of an anthology show out of How Long Til Black Future Month, which is an outstanding collection and you should all read it.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:31
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mllaneza posted:I would also accept a series based on Becky Chambers' slices of life in space novels, that's both current and excellent. Anything Jemsin wrote would be gold for an adaption as well. She's on literally urban fantasy now, I think there's a good chance she has an adaption deal signed before the third book is published. You could also get a couple of seasons of an anthology show out of How Long Til Black Future Month, which is an outstanding collection and you should all read it. Black Future Month is a collection? Somehow, none of the ads or recommendations made this clear.
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Jun 20, 2020 00:01
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John Lee posted:Black Future Month is a collection? Somehow, none of the ads or recommendations made this clear. It's a collection of her short stories. Should get around reading that - it has been on my shelf for year or so.
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Jun 20, 2020 00:21
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Groke posted:Game of Thrones came out in 1996 but that wasn't Martin's first book, he'd been around since the 70s. (Kind of funny how his main claim to fame used to be some very efficient and cool short stories.) This has been one of the delights of reading the SF-LOVERS digests. Lots of forgotten to time authors and stories keep getting mentioned. Granted more than half of the stories & authors mentioned will have aged badly readability wise in 2020, but it's still very cool snapshots into what mega-fans of fantasy & scifi genres had access to at the time.
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Jun 20, 2020 02:37
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StrixNebulosa posted:Otherland: The prose is solid, good but not great, and I'm digging the future setting - when's the last time you read a sci-fi book set in Africa? I'm going to chip at this. It being insanely long isn't a bad thing because boy do I need distractions right now. I read Otherland about 20 years ago. As I recall, the first book is the best. It's interesting, there's some cool mystery and some cliffhangers. And the next book isn't quite as good, and so on, until you finish book four confused, disappointed, and wondering where it all went wrong and what happened to the last 4000 pages of your life. It's not actively bad, but it squandered most of the promise of book 1, and it took a long time doing it. Ben Nevis fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 03:07
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Illuminae Files update: love to get halfway into a book and realize the authors are blindingly stupid. Writing an AI as if he's a drunk emo teenager is bad writing! Especially when he has made two crucial errors that a properly written supercomputer wouldn't do! Spoilers: Problem one: if AIDAN had told literally anyone that the ship he's about to blow up is entirely infected with zombie plague, no survivors, well there wouldn't have been a rescue attempt. Which leads directly into problem two: I know you're broken at this point but releasing quarantined zombies into the ship pal... I like zombies but this is insanely frustrating, drama for the sake of it. I demand better. My standards may be deteriorating due to web novels but I still have a few and I don't have to read this. I have better on my plate.
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Jun 20, 2020 06:15
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Re-reading the SF-LOVERS digests from the beginning, only I'm taking notes this time. -If you're disappointed that there isn't more black/non-white/female/alt-gender main characters in modern fantasy + science-fiction stories, that has been an ongoing complaint about the scifi + fantasy genres for at least 40 yrs (source: SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 1, late March 1980) -Posts coming from @UCLA-Security in the SF-LOVERS mailing list were highly readable: lots of interesting behind the scenes info about the Star Trek franchise, prophetic generic statements, and detailed summaries of then current sci-fi themed tv series/tv-movies you can now find at wikipedia/imdb. -If you thought Roger Zelazny's original content do-not-steal AMBER series sucked and was derivative....you are correct! AMBER series was apparently a direct ripoff of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. But since PJF ripped off everyone else constantly, no lawsuits happened. -Even back in 1980 Andre Norton had a staggering amount of published fiction out in the world. -You can palpably feel the growth of Star Wars fandom as time goes on. A now forgotten part of the "Empire Strikes Back" marketing was phone banks you could call to listen to special teaser audio clips from the ESB cast, and those phone banks being unavailable keeps cropping up. 40 years later I'm wondering WTF was in those phone-bank ESB audio clips. -Robert Forward was a "hard-scifi author" of his era, and used the SF-LOVERS mailing list as a sounding board/rebuttal forum to hard scifi "that doesn't make sense" questions and statements. -the ongoing jokes, taunts and dares about computer viruses and network tapeworms in the SF-LOVERS mailing list give some compelling backstory to Robert Tappan Morris's 1988 "breaking of the Internet". -Hal Draper's 1961 short story MS Fnd in a Lbry was very prophetic, especially for software developers quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 19:56
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I just stumbled across this quote that I saved several years ago from a story about a super-advanced computer. Warms my heart to read it.The Next Logical Step by Ben Bova (1962) posted:"It's all transistorized and subminiaturized, of course," Ford explained. "That's the only way we could build so much detail into the machine and still have it small enough to fit inside a single building." I know that the genre has come a long way, but reading about atomic-era vacuum tubes and positronic brains is always going to be comfort food for me.
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Jun 20, 2020 20:51
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John Lee posted:Black Future Month is a collection? Somehow, none of the ads or recommendations made this clear. Black Future Month is an anthology of 22 short stories, ranging from contemporary with a twist, to fantasy and science fiction. They're all at least very good, some excellent, and a few are superb. When she wants to creep you out, your skin crawls. When she wants you to raise a fist in resistance, you resist. When she wants to leave you a little maudlin, the room gets a bit dusty. She's already spun one of these into a series of novels, and there are a number of stories I'd like more of. For sheer quality, I'd have to go to LeGuin as the one author who can consistently put out collections better than this. There are some who come close - Yoon Ha Lee has a real talent for short fiction - but Jemsin didn't win all those Hugo by accident. e. Threw that up on Amazon in case anyone else was confused. I'll not that the Kindle edition is $9.99 right now.
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Jun 20, 2020 21:16
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Ben Nevis posted:It's not actively bad, but it squandered most of the promise of book 1, and it took a long time doing it.
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Jun 20, 2020 21:29
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Eh. I think Otherland has a pretty metal ending with the crashing satellite but it's probably not worth drudging through four (five?) books to get there.
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Jun 20, 2020 21:37
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quantumfoam posted:-If you thought Roger Zelazny's original content do-not-steal AMBER series sucked and was derivative....you are correct! AMBER series was apparently a direct ripoff of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. But since PJF ripped off everyone else constantly, no lawsuits happened. That's a pretty harsh mischaracterization of what went on. I'm holding a third printing of Sign of the Unicorn and it's dedication is "For Jadawin and his Demiurge, not to forget Kickaha." Those being the main characters of "The World of Tiers," of course. You don't dedicate your book to the characters of a novel series you're homaging if you're worried they're going to sue you. For that matter, outside the barest of story beats of "dude on Earth encounters people of great power and then discovers he's one of those people afflicted with amnesia", the stories diverge pretty quickly. And it's not like you can sue over general story points anyhow, or else there'd be no end to the lawsuits between "guy with gun shoots a lot of bad guys" authors. Fer gently caress's sake, Paolini's Inheritance Cycle is just Star Wars with Dragons, with the movie for Eragon being even more so, and no one ever sued about that poo poo, and those are multi-billion dollar corporations with lawyers on staff whose job is to sue over poo poo like that. Perhaps most importantly we should remember that "good authors borrow, great authors steal." Whether you think Amber "sucked and was derivative" or not, the books were very popular and most people here know what you're talking about when you mention them, and a good percentage of us have read them. Far fewer have so much as heard of "The World of Tiers", much less seen a copy to read. Taking an existing story and transforming it and improving it such that no one remembers the original is the mark of a great writer. Unless you think Shakespeare adapting the lives of an obscure Danish prince and a thane of Scotland into two of the greatest tragedies in the English language was "derivative". 
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Jun 20, 2020 22:26
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wizzardstaff posted:I just stumbled across this quote that I saved several years ago from a story about a super-advanced computer. Warms my heart to read it. If you haven'f found O'Neil's Venus Equilateral stories yet, get on that poo poo - they're exactly your jam.Vacuum tubes, big-rear end capacitors, transmission dishes that can talk to half the solar system, and engineers solving the plot on tablecloths from the station's only bar & grill. Seriously, about halfway through, the drafting department has worked out how to run a tablecloth through a blueprint machine because the protagonists keep solving world hunger over cocktails and then they drop it off with instructions to "build this". The protagonists actually do solve world hunger. From a communications relay station at the Venus-Sol L4 point. The courtroom fight over their replicator is amazing. They basically win by borrowing the opposing council's heirloom watch and making enough duplicates of it to hand out perfect copies to the jury and everyone in the audience.
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Jun 20, 2020 22:35
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jng2058 posted:
The legend of Hamlet wasn't actually particularly obscure before Shakespeare; there seems to have been an Elizabethan play about Hamlet by someone else before Shakespeare. Derivative indeed! (Yes, some scholars think it was just an early draft of Shakespeare's Hamlet, maybe even the First Quarto version, despite the only line quoted from Ur-Hamlet not actually being in First Quarto Hamlet. But it could be a misquotation.)
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Jun 20, 2020 22:50
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jng2058 posted:That's a pretty harsh mischaracterization of what went on. I'm holding a third printing of Sign of the Unicorn and it's dedication is "For Jadawin and his Demiurge, not to forget Kickaha." Those being the main characters of "The World of Tiers," of course. You don't dedicate your book to the characters of a novel series you're homaging if you're worried they're going to sue you. For that matter, outside the barest of story beats of "dude on Earth encounters people of great power and then discovers he's one of those people afflicted with amnesia", the stories diverge pretty quickly. Calm the gently caress down. Or get mad at AQE@MIT-MC and their 03-19-1980 post "Re: Similarities between "World of Tiers" and "Amber" which I quoted. Lots of people in this thread and the previous SF&F mega-thread have commented that Zelazny's Amber series isn't the greatest and was at best written for the paycheck. Other stuff oddball stuff gleaned from SF-LOVERS Digest Vol 01 so far(only 42% through on the re-read while taking notes): -Both Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle made the humble-brag claim at a 1980 MIT lecture called "How to get Rich Quick" that "they, and many other experienced authors. write without editing their work". (DGSHARP@MIT-AI 02-13-1980) Robert Forward chimed in a few days later to "clarify" Niven and Pournelle's statements about "never editing" or revising their work and to make the counter humble-brag of "Poul Anderson and me both agonize over each word at least 6 or 8 times before the final draft is sent into the publishers." -An early collaborative fantasy-scifi world setting called Darkover keeps getting mentioned over and over again in the SF-LOVERS. However, this is one of the things that have aged super badly because Marion Zimmer Bradley was a major contributor to the Darkover series...and keeps getting praised for writing strong female characters in the Darkover stories. Ughh. -During discussion of black main characters, SALawrence@MIT-Multics brought up Richard Lupoff's The Sacred Locomotive Files because of it's sheer weirdness. The story had a white main character but almost everyone else in the book was secretly black and appeared to be white from taking a weird drug that changed their skin color and also made them obese as a side-effect. The book sounds weird enough that I've added it to my "try to find it" list -More retroactively weird Star Wars stuff. Fanzines named BANTHA TRACKS (great user name btw) and ALDERAAN. One on one interviews with David Prouse, the body-actor actively erased from Star Wars by Lucas and Disney. Bootleg SW character themes & SW themed albums before John Williams scores became the default Star Wars sound. e: oh jesus. Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI) just popped up on the SF-LOVERS mailing list for the first time ever. Noticed it was him from the EMACS humblebrag and the omnipresent RMS handle. Just checked, RMS only posted 3 times in the Vol 01 SF-LOVERS Digest. 2nd time was debating about Darth Vader really being Luke's father and 3rd time was to nitpick a core piece of Robert Forward's Dragons Egg. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 00:15
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wizzardstaff posted:I know that the genre has come a long way, but reading about atomic-era vacuum tubes and positronic brains is always going to be comfort food for me. I think my favourite work in that vein is a short story -- I no longer remember where I read it, or who it was by -- featuring a twice-daily atomic-powered earth-moon commuter shuttle flown entirely by computer. The computerization means it only needs a crew of two; one to feed refreshments to the passengers, and one to feed punch cards to the autopilot.
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Jun 21, 2020 00:59
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The Clarke Awards shortlist was announced the other day, consisting of: quote:THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT - CHARLIE JANE ANDERS The Light Brigade was great so I have my fingers crossed for that one, but it's also the only one of the six I've read. Anyone read the last two? I love the premise of Cage of Souls, but as much as I enjoyed Children of Time / Ruin, Tchaikovsky's prose is kinda lackluster in those and I might just read more Gene Wolfe instead. The Last Astronaut looks like a Big Dumb Object story, which I find myself quite in the mood for if the execution is good.
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Jun 21, 2020 01:42
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I read The Last Astronaut, it was alright, kind of a horror take on Big Dumb Objects but the horror fizzles out once you find out what’s happening
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Jun 21, 2020 01:51
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quantumfoam posted:Option George RR Martin's Sandkings instead of a Game of Thrones knockoff or Black Company misery-porn. Any book series with heavy internal monologing is going to be hard to adapt to TV/streaming services, which is why I think Consider Pheblas was a smart pickup and way more acessable than Player of Games. There actually was a TV adaptation of Sandkings in the 90's Outer Limits reboot. No idea if it was any good or not.
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Jun 21, 2020 02:53
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quantumfoam posted:-An early collaborative fantasy-scifi world setting called Darkover keeps getting mentioned over and over again in the SF-LOVERS. However, this is one of the things that have aged super badly because Marion Zimmer Bradley was a major contributor to the Darkover series...and keeps getting praised for writing strong female characters in the Darkover stories. Ughh. I was under the impression that Darkover was entirely MZB's baby, although she occasionally brought in collaborators. It certainly wasn't a shared world the way the Thieves' World or Wild Cards books were.
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Jun 21, 2020 03:57
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Selachian posted:I was under the impression that Darkover was entirely MZB's baby, although she occasionally brought in collaborators. It certainly wasn't a shared world the way the Thieves' World or Wild Cards books were. You may be right. Up to where I am at in the SF-LOVERS mailing list(late april 1980), the Darkover series has been mentioned as a collaborative world with MZB having the most stories/having the strongest female characters/writing in it. Still have over 150 mb/20 years of mailing list posts left to dig through, and I tend to outright power-skim for sanity's sake whenever MZB get's mentioned in it anyway. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 04:34
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Hedrigall posted:I read The Last Astronaut, it was alright, kind of a horror take on Big Dumb Objects but the horror fizzles out once you find out what’s happening I liked it but then again I'm a sucker for first contact stories full stop. You aren't kidding that it gets far less scary after the big reveal though. Blindsight remains my #1 all-time in that genre but if you like a good first contact tale that has just enough points of difference to feel unique I'd still give it a rec.
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Jun 21, 2020 05:10
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quantumfoam posted:. Still in print. https://www.booktopia.com.au/sacred-locomotive-flies-richard-a-lupoff/ebook/9781473208629.html
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Jun 21, 2020 10:28
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Has anyone read Ninth House? It was at the top of Goodreads list of fantasy books for 2019 but some of the reviews look pretty mixed. Premise sounds interesting enough though. https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2019
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Jun 21, 2020 16:32
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Ccs posted:Has anyone read Ninth House? It was at the top of Goodreads list of fantasy books for 2019 but some of the reviews look pretty mixed. Premise sounds interesting enough though. I liked it.
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Jun 21, 2020 17:12
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NFHF0Q/
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Jun 21, 2020 18:58
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Kestral posted:The Clarke Awards shortlist was announced the other day, consisting of: I really enjoyed Cage of Souls. I'd say I liked it better than COT/Ruin, COS has a cool dying earth sort of world, interesting characters. (I felt Ruin was a bit of a letdown, really) I also liked Redemption's Blade by him too, gimmick being that the "big bad" is already defeated, and it's about dealing with post war events. The name of the book is regretfully super generic , I will admit.
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Jun 22, 2020 04:23
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