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Red Crown
Oct 20, 2008

Pretend my finger's a knife.
These were all fantastic suggestions. Having already read the Hexarchate series, Culture series, and A Memory Called Empire, I'm putting in an order for the Scott Westerfeld series and I'll move on from there!

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freebooter
Jul 7, 2009

Nondescript Van posted:

Anyway, decent read, but I count it much closer to typical fantasy than scifi (certainly not hard scifi). Sure it takes place in space, but it could just as easily take place on a large continent and the tech is literally magic supported by ritual.

This never occurred to me when I was reading it, but that's spot on. In fact I think I might have enjoyed it more if it were fantasy. (I did like it well enough, but it left no enduring impression on me and I have no desire to read the rest of the series.)

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

The Lightbringer books are competent verging on "pretty alright actually" fantasy romps. They have problems, but I find I like the high points much more than I dislike the low points.

The first book is fairly weak, I think- it has its moments (the bit where the Freeing ceremony is intercut with the Colour Prince's speech is a nice one), but things don't really come together until the second and third books, which are a lot better. Four, uh, has issues. Mostly structural.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

I read a few of them but gave up on the series when it just didn't get any better. Apparently I bailed before some character revealed she had a tiny vagina for some reason. That alone tells me it was the right decision.

This bit is wild though and we need to talk about it.

At the end of the third book the protagonist gets married. Not to the previously established love interest with multiple books of build-up and a well developed emotional bond with our boy, but to someone who has until this point been a minor side character and antagonist. It's a political marriage, and is presented as part of the protagonist growing up and becoming a mature political operator. And this is all good and fine and a logical progression of his character arc up to this point (Teia Was Robbed).

At the beginning of the next book, it is revealed that the lady (Tisis) suffers from vaginismus. This is a real condition and Weeks treats it, well, adequately? It's not trivialised or presented as a punchline, and it doesn't become the sole defining trait of the character. It's this painful, frustrating, embarrassing thing which demands empathy and communication.

But. Why? What is this PSA about an obscure sexual disorder doing sitting flush against magic Jesus fighting Satanists in the jungle? I got educated, and I guess I'm glad for that? Thank you, Mr Weeks? It feels a lot like he read a "did you know?" article shortly before sitting down to do the first draft of the book and felt compelled to work it in somehow.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

The first book is ok, but be prepared for the main character to CONTINUALLY refer to himself as fat. He has no other traits, he is the fat person. He has trouble doing things, you see, because he is fat.

This I just have to disagree with entirely. Kip has plenty of traits. Mostly your standard young adult fantasy protagonist ones- he's impetuous, loyal, clever, unwilling to suffer slights, etc. He does fixate on his weight, because he has a problem with self-esteem and body image issues in particular. That mostly goes away in books 2 and 3, though?

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer
I gotta disagree with your disagreement. Even when the inevitable assassination attempt happens in the first book, the whole time he's getting potentially killed, he's still thinking "I'M TOO FAT TO HEAVE OVER THE RAIL!". Dude is loving hung up on it. I get it, but he just... never... stops... mentioning it.

He gets better as the books go on, but they just weren't clicking with me, and when I heard about tiny vagina lady being a plot point, I just noped the gently caress out. Weeks has some weird sexual hangups and I really did not wanna go down that road AGAIN after the whole previous trilogy. I just have an extremely low tolerance for sex related things in books, because 98% of the time, it's written horribly. I'll fully admit that's me though.

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087X6Z1GS/

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




pradmer posted:

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087X6Z1GS/

The ultimate Monkey's Paw story.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

SFL archives readthrough update.

SFL Vol 06 had a hostile takeover attempt (that succeeded). The person who had previously submitted 3 entire digests of cherry-picked (100% not faked) content from a non-arpanet connected host named SU-LOTS ended up as the new mailing list moderator. Suspiciously, those SU-LOTS cherry picked submissions -> SFL dried up the instant the hostile mod takeover happened, no mention of the SU-LOTS discussions made the SFL mailing list again, lots of long-time SFL posters stopped appearing in the SFL Digests after the hostile mod takeover.


Other SFL Vol 06 events were: a solid 9 weeks of posts about scifi/fantasy music albums/songs/bands, From: addresseses evolving into long!strings!of!text!separated!by!exclamation!points @ illustrating how email morphed through many stages before the internet became the Internet, someone begging for free access codes to the ARPANET because their boss was defunding the on-site ARPANET hookup, full filk-song lyrics, a 5 part plus HitchHikersGuideToGalaxy parody only using computer terms got posted, and December 1982 was pretty much pure Star Wars discussion (aided in no small part by Empire Strikes Back getting re-released in theaters for the 1st time ever).

SFL Vol 07 pretty much started from scratch 2 months after SFL Vol 06 ended.
SFL Vol 07 is really short thanks to a brave new world of trying out TCP for SFL Digest distribution versus relying on dying hardware, and multiple week gaps in SFL Digests. At least one then-current scifi writer self-doxxed themselves asking for other current SFWA writers to speak up/feedback. Dr Robert Forward asked the SFL mailing list for help finding a wizard of CAD to create the illustrations of variable usage robots in Forwards serialized story/upcoming book Rocheworld aka Flight of the Dragonfly.
Sarcasm Mode LEXX ??

theblackw0lf
Apr 15, 2003

"...creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature"
Finished Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett (author of City of Stairs). It's not high art but it is extremely entertaining. Some of the most fun I've had with a fantasy novel in a long time. A lot of this is due to the dialog which is just a joy to read, and is often quite funny. Also I adored the main characters.

The book has practically zero filler, I can't think of a single scene that didn't feel important in some way. And while the very beginning is a little slow, once it hits around page 25 I felt it had a brisk pace that didn't let up till the end. It's a page-turner for sure.

Much also needs to be said about the magic system which is one of the most innovative I've seen. Don't want to say much to spoil the fun of discovering it.

Anyway highly recommend reading it. Now onto the sequel!

theblackw0lf fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jul 22, 2020

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Revelation Space (Inhibitor #1) by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0819W19WD/

snoremac
Jul 27, 2012

I LOVE SEEING DEAD BABIES ON 𝕏, THE EVERYTHING APP. IT'S WORTH IT FOR THE FOLLOWING TAB.
Just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant and am experiencing severe whiplash. What a loving cascade of emotions the last 50 pages are.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




snoremac posted:

Just finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant and am experiencing severe whiplash. What a loving cascade of emotions the last 50 pages are.

That reminds me, time to do a re-read in anticipation of the third book !

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087GJ5WI/

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DHJT92Q/

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


General Battuta posted:

The twist is a twist to the characters in the book. It doesn’t need to be a twist for the reader. They can know the whole time and the story still works well (better, even?)

The genesis of this conversation was the fact that book 2 avoids giving you Cheris's perspective for most of the book, which sure looks like it's meant to be ambiguous to the readers, not just the character, who is actually piloting that body.

And for me it was ambiguous and going back and reading Ninefox Gambit I think that ambiguity was intended.

Ccs
Feb 25, 2011


I recently finished re-reading Monster in anticipation of the new Baru Cormorant book. The parts I remembered were the flashback sections which I still enjoy the most. It's nice seeing the development of Farrier and Cosgrade told from the perspective of a character who isn't as hardened as Baru. Yawa is still my least favorite character to read, I get that her perspectives are necessary for understanding why certain things are happening and it adds to the tension that she has these machinations, but few of them actually go anywhere. Baru slips from her clutches or figures out what her plans were (with the poison) to the extent that I think all the Yawa chapters could be excised without losing much, and anything that does happen to Baru she could later figure out or suspect was Yawa's doing as a way of filling the reader in.

Trim is still an interesting idea, as is the concept that the villains can cut someone out of trim. The book left a lot of dangling threads that I'm looking forward to being picked up.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

I just finished reading Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams and it was a fun ride! Here's my review:

It opens with a lonely swordsman in a magical Middle Eastern-themed fantasy world and then explodes into a much larger scope of a post-singularity world where there are many utopias and pocket universes for humanity to live in, all ruled by benevolent AIs and many many humans.

This is, first and foremost, an idea book. And that's part of what brings it down: while the author attempts character work and does a decent job at it, it's flat compared to how vibrant the ideas are.

The core conflict of the book is between a mysterious villain intent on bringing down all of humanity and our hero, the lonely swordsman: Aristide. He's a fine protagonist, generally wise and wise-cracking, good at violence, etc, and he has a compelling past - he's over a thousand years old, remembers life before the utopias happened, and he uses all of that experience to help figure out what's going on.

But that's the other problem - despite all of the futuristic trappings, he's kind of boring? He doesn't have an internal struggle except against ennui, and honestly, he's mostly a viewpoint character. The book would have been better if we'd spent less time with him, so to speak. Bitsy - the AI manifesting as a cat- has more personality, and Dhaljit's emotional journey is more compelling, but it's in the name: Bitsy. They're bit pieces to the grand stage that is the ideas and setting.

If the ideas and scope weren't so large, I'd knock it down to three stars as it was a relatively slow read. But - god, this is a future I want to know more about. This is a playground I want to explore. This is the kind of imagination I want from high sci-fi, where everything is plausible and yet fantastical. Pocket universes alone! The depiction of warfare! Biological plagues made fascinating! (Not that they aren't already!)

So, this book sits comfortable at four stars, where it's really really good but not great. Highly recommended if looking at the future appeals to you, but temper your expectations.

(also one note: author, author darling, you flinched at the end and I saw it and I'm disappointed. Write a sequel and don't flinch this time.)


So to that end - the only other book I've read (that I can recall currently) in this genre is the Corporation Wars trilogy by Ken Macleod and it was similarly interesting but not as good, and both books whiffed the character work.

I would really like to read a hard(ish) sci-fi book about the post-singularity with actually good character work. Does anyone know of any?

cptn_dr
Sep 7, 2011

Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies


I tried to preorder Baru 3 the other day, but it was going to cost at least $75 and their system kept calling it Masquerade #1. I really hope I can get my hands on a copy without having to resort to lying to Amazon about where I live so I they let me buy it.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran

quantumfoam posted:

Other SFL Vol 06 events were: a solid 9 weeks of posts about scifi/fantasy music albums/songs/bands

As an unironic lover of filk, this intrigues me. I may have to read SFL Vol 06.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

SFL Vol 07 update final

-Yet another scifi genre writer revealed themselves in the SFL archives. (I've done no lookups into any of the self-doxxed authors that have posted in the SFL archives other than Dr Robert Forward/Dr Robert Forward's edgelord son)

-Return of the Jedi (1983) came out. The shoe-horned in muppets and Ewok's and Lucas being more interested in in cinematography than telling a story are what most of the negative reactions re SFL "Return of the Jedi" posts are about. Very funny reading 37 years later, especially funny given how George Lucas tripled down on those factors for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

-Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe and Jon Brunner got mentioned and discussed multiple times. Added tracking down Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, and Wolfe's Castle of the Otter to my reading list.

-Mack Reynolds obituary notice. Mack Reynolds is still the best hardcore socialist scifi/fantasy writer I've ever come across. China Miéville and Ken Macleod are weak/terrible sellout in comparison. Mack Reynolds walked the hardcore socialist walk back when going to jail for being a socialist or getting black-balled was a real and omnipresent thing.

-An uber Libertarian mil-fiction series all about Texas and Texans kicking names and taking rear end of everyone and everything else in the world got mentioned positively first, then not so positively mentioned.
Daniel Da Cruz is the author, The Ayes of Texas is the series starting book, and the book plot is 100% ripped off from Space Battleship Yamato only Texas-ified

-People who "crack-ping" on the Jeffrey Epstein threads will be delighted that Donald Barr, father of the current US Attorney General, gets mentioned for the first time ever by a weird canadian that liked Donald Barr's writing in Space Relations/A Planet in Arms

-Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series got discussed repeatedly, but I don't give a gently caress about Thomas Covenant at all, and hold to a special theory about the books. It was all a meth-fantasy/it was all a shared meth-fantasy when the secondary main character (Linden Avery) showed up.

-Wargames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/ ended up as the bridge-too-far moment/total user-meltdown topic for a SFL user that had been posting in the SFL mailing since the very beginning (September 1979). The technical inaccuracies in Wargames 1983 made this long-time SFL user snap, and angry post multiple times at length about Wargames 1983. Given that the SFL user's IRL job was/is computer security related, most of the anger/frustration appears to be coming from a unspoken "oh poo poo this movie is going to inspire a never-ending wave of hacking attempts by phone freaks/arpanet people....on all the systems I support/my friends support"

For people not really familiar with the 1970s-80s, malicious phone phreaking and malicious computer hacking were becoming major issues in the 1980s. Prior to the malicious turn, motivation for phone-phreaking in the 1970s-80s was more for the lulz and giving a middle finger to the monolithic omnipresent Bell Telephone Company, and computer systems were isolated mainframes or very open non-networked computer systems.

Google Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, both of whom turned legit/as-legit as possible given their history. Poulsen wrote a mostly amusing non-fiction book about another convicted computer hacker titled Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jul 24, 2020

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013
Kevin Mitnick's autobiography was fairly good as I recall. Turns out a lot of hacking is just calling somebody and going "Hi this is Bob from the County Password Inspection Department" or (now) sending them a fake Linkdin email.

Probably should have gone through the compsci program at my college instead of the CNC machining one, then maybe I'd have a job/prospects for the future.

Lemniscate Blue
Apr 21, 2006

Here we go again.
The Ayes of Texas is incredibly stupid in its politics and in its science fiction elements, but it was also a ripping read. Seeing just how crazy it gets is half the fun.

I didn't know it was part of a series, but I don't think I'll bother to seek out the sequels.

Gato
Feb 1, 2012

Ccs posted:

I recently finished re-reading Monster in anticipation of the new Baru Cormorant book. The parts I remembered were the flashback sections which I still enjoy the most. It's nice seeing the development of Farrier and Cosgrade told from the perspective of a character who isn't as hardened as Baru. Yawa is still my least favorite character to read, I get that her perspectives are necessary for understanding why certain things are happening and it adds to the tension that she has these machinations, but few of them actually go anywhere. Baru slips from her clutches or figures out what her plans were (with the poison) to the extent that I think all the Yawa chapters could be excised without losing much, and anything that does happen to Baru she could later figure out or suspect was Yawa's doing as a way of filling the reader in.

Trim is still an interesting idea, as is the concept that the villains can cut someone out of trim. The book left a lot of dangling threads that I'm looking forward to being picked up.

Agreed, I loved reading the Oriati flashback sections, as well as Tau-Indi as a character in general. Simply having a character around who's a charming, sincere optimist did a good job of stopping the book sliding into misery/cynicism fatigue, which felt like a risk at some points. I thought the trim concept was really interesting, a neat way of showing how what we would consider magical thinking could be an effective guiding principle for a person or culture until it's turned back against them.

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993
let's rank sci-fi books/series. there was a request for new space operas and I like seeing what people consider top tier

1) The Culture by Iain M. Banks
2) Zones of Thought by Vernor Vinge
3) Blindsight/sequel by Peter Watts
4) Murderbot sequence my Martha Wells
5) Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold


I think I will have to expand to 10, so many good books/series

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




TheAardvark posted:

let's rank sci-fi books/series. there was a request for new space operas and I like seeing what people consider top tier

I think I will have to expand to 10, so many good books/series

1) The Culture by Iain M. Banks
2) Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold
3) Zones of Thought by Vernor Vinge
4) Wayfarers by Becky Chambers
5) Murderbot sequence by Martha Wells

(haven't read Blindsight yet)

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993
I loved the Vorkosigan Saga a lot, but I feel like all of its strongest points were romance or fantasy novels. Bujold does romance so well it just sweeps me away.

No. No more dancing!
Jun 15, 2006
Let 'er rip, dude!
I don't really feel like I can rank individual books and series together. For series ranking, I'd probably go with:

1) The Culture by Iain M. Banks (expect to see a lot of this)
2) The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein (a surprisingly close second)
3) Murderbot sequence by Martha Wells (a distant third, though I like them quite a bit)
4) The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

There are some other big series like the Hainish Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin and the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis that I've only read 1 or 2 books from, and quite liked. It looks like I should probably pick up Zones of Thought next. What I feel really makes a series good is wanting more books in that series, and the top 3 in my list all hit that mark for me.

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

C.M. Kruger posted:

Kevin Mitnick's autobiography was fairly good as I recall. Turns out a lot of hacking is just calling somebody and going "Hi this is Bob from the County Password Inspection Department" or (now) sending them a fake Linkdin email.

The great majority of "hacking" is just social engineering, and it's even more common today than it was then. You always attack a defence system at its weakest point, and the weakest point in a modern computer system is the person who is allowed access to it. The recent Twitter hack was done using Twitter's own admin tools, access to which was obtained by manipulating Twitter staff. That doesn't mean you can't brute force access, but as anyone who's ever made three typos in a row knows it's trivial to seal a system against a thousand random guesses.

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

^^Insert relevant xkcd here.

quantumfoam posted:

-Glen Cook and Gene Wolfe and Jon Brunner got mentioned and discussed multiple times. Added tracking down Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, and Wolfe's Castle of the Otter to my reading list.

You'll probably find it easier to turn up a copy of Castle of Days, which contains The Castle of the Otter, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, and some other minor nonfiction. Book of Days is a fun collection and has a few of my favourite stories: "Car Sinister", "Forlesen", "How I Won the Second World War".

quote:

For people not really familiar with the 1970s-80s, malicious phone phreaking and malicious computer hacking were becoming major issues in the 1980s. Prior to the malicious turn, motivation for phone-phreaking in the 1970s-80s was more for the lulz and giving a middle finger to the monolithic omnipresent Bell Telephone Company, and computer systems were isolated mainframes or very open non-networked computer systems.

Google Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, both of whom turned legit/as-legit as possible given their history. Poulsen wrote a mostly amusing non-fiction book about another convicted computer hacker titled Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground.

You've read The Hacker Crackdown, right?

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

The Strugatski Brothers Noon Universe/Noon 22nd Century series is Space Opera writ large, and more people need to read those stories.
The weakest stories in the Noon Universe series is probably Final Circle of Paradise closely followed by 2nd Invasion by Mars. If Noon: 22nd Century doesn't blow you away, you are dead inside and please get the gently caress out of this thread forever.

Much of Stanislaw Lem's work qualifies as space opera too. FIASCO is for sure space opera, same goes for the Cyberiad stories. Lem's Pirx the Pilot short stories are blue collar space opera, most of the Ijon Tichy stories that involve space/spaceflight are amazing. The planet of Robot Bastards aka The Eleventh Voyage is fantastic start to finish.

Robert Reed's The Great Ship short stories did the Culture setting years before Iain Banks got his first Culture book published.
All the Great Ship short stories are great, avoid the novel versions unless you can endure a fusion of "Peter Watts writing Neal Asher's The Skinner series" misery porn for an meta-plot reveal/explanation of the Great Ship's purpose.

Safety Biscuits posted:

You've read The Hacker Crackdown, right?

Yes, and way too many other cyber-criminal/computer hacker/computer culture books. This is why the SFL readthrough is so good despite a lot of dross, the context and point of time discussions give lots of flavor and explanation to what I'd previously read in those cyber-criminal/computer hacker/computer culture books. Katie Hafner's Cyberpunk (1991) and Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996) are genre must-reads.

C.M. Kruger posted:

Kevin Mitnick's autobiography was fairly good as I recall. Turns out a lot of hacking is just calling somebody and going "Hi this is Bob from the County Password Inspection Department" or (now) sending them a fake Linkdin email.

Kevin Mitnick's autobiography was more of a self-serving resume in book form than actual autobiography.
Jonathan Littman biography of Mitnick is more interesting and detailed mainly because Mitnick was in real life constantly hacking Littman's email and constantly calling Littman to give his own side of things while Littman was doing background research on Mitnick for a potential magazine/newspaper article.

John Markoff's "journalism" about Mitnick and Mitnick's constant intrusions into Littman's life turned the potential article about Mitnick into a book about Mitnick (a early example of the Streisand effect/too many social engineering attempts on a alert subject)

quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Jul 24, 2020

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
I've never heard of Mack Reynolds. What works of his should I check out?

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I've never heard of Mack Reynolds. What works of his should I check out?

Socialism, UBI, class struggle, bread and circuses, taking USSR 5 year plans & TASS press releases at face value, and a weird fixation with racial cosplay (ala Iron Sky 1) sums up Mack Reynolds writing quirks.

I'm a stranger here myself is a good Mack Reynolds sampler.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26741


Mercenary was where Mack Reynolds was prescient about many things in current society minus implementation of UBI. I rec'd Mercenary at least three times in the 2nd SFF megathread.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24370

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Cold Iron (Masters & Mages #1) by Miles Cameron - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079L5669Y/

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I've never heard of Mack Reynolds. What works of his should I check out?

Time Gladiator.

tildes
Nov 16, 2018

TheAardvark posted:

let's rank sci-fi books/series. there was a request for new space operas and I like seeing what people consider top tier

Trying to do this has made me realize that I don’t really have that many full sci fi series which are obviously top tier for me. These two for sure:

Martha Wells Murderbot
Ann Leckie Ancillary X Series

But tough to choose many more. I liked most of Becky Chamber’s Wayfarer series, but haven’t managed to get myself to finish the most recent one. I liked the Three Body Problem a lot, but am not interested in finishing the series. I’m not sure I’d like Foundation if I read it again as an adult. I like Yoon Ha Lee but it doesn’t really feel on the same level as the two above. So IDK, maybe I need to read more series.

No. No more dancing! posted:

I don't really feel like I can rank individual books and series together. For series ranking, I'd probably go with:

1) The Culture by Iain M. Banks (expect to see a lot of this)
2) The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein (a surprisingly close second)
3) Murderbot sequence by Martha Wells (a distant third, though I like them quite a bit)
4) The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

There are some other big series like the Hainish Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin and the Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis that I've only read 1 or 2 books from, and quite liked. It looks like I should probably pick up Zones of Thought next. What I feel really makes a series good is wanting more books in that series, and the top 3 in my list all hit that mark for me.

I would probably have never bought Steerswoman based on the cover art/extremely self published graphic design vibe, but this convinced me to pick it up!


Also what order should I read the Culture novels in, since so many people seem into them? I’d rather start with best first than “maybe technically best chronologically but not as good”, unless you really need the context from one book first. I keep bouncing off this series :(

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993
Use of Weapons is the standard Culture starting recommendation if you want a good one. I liked Consider Phlebas (the first published/first chronologically) a lot though opinion is divided on it. Excession is great as well and pretty different, told from the perspective of the AIs.

hannibal
Jul 27, 2001

[img-planes]

tildes posted:



Also what order should I read the Culture novels in, since so many people seem into them? I’d rather start with best first than “maybe technically best chronologically but not as good”, unless you really need the context from one book first. I keep bouncing off this series :(

There's really not an order to the Culture novels, just some references between some of them that don't really matter (IMHO).

I would probably start with Player of Games.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer

Jedit posted:

Time Gladiator.



Please spoil the hell out of this for me because there is no way on god's green earth it's going to match up with what's going on in my head right now.

PlushCow
Oct 19, 2005

The cow eats the grass

hannibal posted:

There's really not an order to the Culture novels, just some references between some of them that don't really matter (IMHO).

I would probably start with Player of Games.

Yeah start with Player of Games, then go onto Use of Weapons.

I did start with the first published one, Consider Phlebas, enjoyed it and went on but it is a little different, perspective wise, from the others. Player of Games better represents the series as a whole.

Major Ryan
May 11, 2008

Completely blank
I absolutely hated Consider Phlebas and that confused me because I assumed I’d love the Culture series. Would I stand a chance of liking any of the other books knowing I didn’t like it, or should I just move on - it’s not look my reading list is getting any shorter without adding another multi book series to it.

Basically I thought the book ran like a series of And then... statements where the main character continually got saved in the nick of time, and I found the cult sequence just needlessly harrowing to the point that I felt like I just didn’t need to be reading it any more.

AARD VARKMAN
May 17, 1993
Consider Phlebas is the only book that ever gets talked about as skippable, and it's because it does have a different kind of writing from the rest of the series. It's Chronicles of Riddick while the rest of the books are much more.. subtle, I guess? Some of them have basically no action at all, like Player of Games. It's literally about the best gamer in the universe being sent out to play the ultimate super-complicated version of alien chess in the name of diplomacy.

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Prism Mirror Lens
Oct 9, 2012

~*"The most intelligent and meaning-rich film he could think of was Shaun of the Dead, I don't think either brain is going to absorb anything you post."*~




:chord:
I’ve tried to read Phlebas at least 3 times and I still couldn’t tell you a single thing about it. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on most of the time, couldn’t form a clear image of anything that was happening. But I liked Player of Games and Look to Windward and I love The Wasp Factory. So yeah, try some others. (Though I have to admit I had the same issue with Use of Weapons, even though everyone says that’s one of the best ones..)

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