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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 Is blindsight or murderbot even space opera?
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Jul 24, 2020 19:53
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Cardiac posted:Is blindsight or murderbot even space opera? I wouldn't say so strictly but I didn't want to limit it to such a nebulous sub category 
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Jul 24, 2020 20:18
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pradmer posted:Cold Iron (Masters & Mages #1) by Miles Cameron - $2.99 This series is great.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:28
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Cardiac posted:Is blindsight or murderbot even space opera? I'd feel comfortable calling Murderbot a space opera, in much the same way that the Vorkosigan books are.
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Jul 24, 2020 20:58
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I really like Neal Asher's Polity books, and I'd put them just under The Culture for space opera.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:31
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How is the Xeelee Sequence? I saw that somewhere recommended for fans of The Culture.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:35
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The only real order in the Culture series are Read Use of Weapons before Surface Detail. Read Consider Phlebas before "Look to Windward". Use of Weapons, Consider Phlebas, and Player of Games are the best starting points. Excession is many readers' favorite, and Look to Windward is probably the best of them. Consider Phlebas is very controversial; it's an outsider's perspective and a lot darker than the rest of the series. It does have some amazing action sequences and would look amazing on the big screen.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:43
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Consider Phlebas almost feels like a deliberate prank on the reader. It's a cynical antihero on a swashbuckling journey, wacky hijinks and poorly thought-out heists, adventure ensues! Then everybody dies utterly miserable, meaningless deaths, because war is loving awful like that. Almost every character struggles through miles and miles of dark tunnels and meets a grisly death - either through incompetence, getting outmanouevred, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only witnesses to Horza's sacrifice are the drone (who after the war withdraws from the world) and Horza's enemy, the SC agent who has herself frozen for ages as a philosophical point, and promptly commits suicide after being defrosted. The Mind is saved, and seemingly lives a long and happy life. But we don't find out the details, because it's not the Mind's story. None of their struggles meant anything in any grand sense, and their trials and tribulations were an insignificant part of an war that is incomprehensibly vast and terrible to its fighters, but that the epilogue describes in unfeeling, historical prose: "Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (± .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) - 91,215,660 (± 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or sequence-position alteration) - 6. A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. Rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space... Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days." The Cult sequence is pretty bad though,its Banks' getting carried away with dumb gross-out humour, and even worse it draaaaaaags for ages. But Phlebas is one of my favourite of his books, just for that ending.
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Jul 24, 2020 22:05
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OK, well I can put some of the others on the list then and see if I get on any better with them than Consider Phlebas. I do like the idea of the series from what I've read about it, so it's worth another shot if this book is somewhat different from the others.
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Jul 24, 2020 23:21
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Neal Asher is good but he seems to have lost his mind in the same way as Dan Simmons. I’m not sure if the Polity novels go that way, but he has some other books (“The Owner”) series I believe. Its full of straw men leftists who can’t beat John Galt, Superman and super Genius who also seduces all the women and tortures and murders all the reds. Read the polity books until they get too crazy would be my recommendation.
Velius fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jul 25, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 23:37
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ed balls balls man posted:This series is great. How's it compare to the Traitor Son series?
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Jul 24, 2020 23:42
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space marine todd posted:How is the Xeelee Sequence? I saw that somewhere recommended for fans of The Culture. I liked it a lot. I was about to write down the titles that I really liked, but then I realized I liked pretty much all of them.
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Jul 25, 2020 01:30
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Major Ryan posted:OK, well I can put some of the others on the list then and see if I get on any better with them than Consider Phlebas. I do like the idea of the series from what I've read about it, so it's worth another shot if this book is somewhat different from the others. I can't answer the question on how Consider Phlebas compares to the rest of the Culture series, but FWIW I skipped it and went straight to Player of Games and absolutely loved it.
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Jul 25, 2020 01:33
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Major Ryan posted:OK, well I can put some of the others on the list then and see if I get on any better with them than Consider Phlebas. I do like the idea of the series from what I've read about it, so it's worth another shot if this book is somewhat different from the others. I liked Consider Phlebas the least, out of all the Culture novels. I read it immediately after Use of Weapons, which might have colored my impressions. It was merely "okay" instead of varying degrees of "Cool" and "Whoaaaaa" that the other Culture novels were.
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Jul 25, 2020 03:45
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Iain M Banks culture chat: Definitely prefer Consider Pheblas over Player of Games and Use of Weapons, but that's mostly because the main character in Player of Games rivals Thomas Covenant on the main character unlikeability scale, while I gave less than zero fucks about everything that went down in Use of Weapons. Having said that, Use of Weapons is 4 times more engaging, interesting and readable than any of Iain Banks "normal" non-middle initial M stories. personal top tier space opera rankings 1)Strugatsky Brothers Noon Universe setting (Noon: 22nd Century, Hard to be a God, Beetle in the Anthill, Far Rainbow, etc) 2)Stanislaw Lem: FIASCO, Cyberiad. Ijon Tichy + Pirx the Pilot short stories 3)Vernor Vinge's Peace War/Marooned in Realtime, Fire Upon the Deep, etc 4)Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories 5)Philip K Dick: Clans of Alphane Moon, galactic pothealer, VALIS trilogy, now wait for last year, etc 6)The Frank Herbert Dune books and short stories 7)Larry Niven's Known Space series up til Ringworld got published 8)the first 20 or so Battletech novels 9)EE Smith's Skylark of Space series, Lensmen series Recently visited a regional used bookstore and here's what I ended up getting.. only four of the purchases weren't SF-LOVERS related.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:09
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Oh you are going to love The Sheep Look Up, Brunner is a wizard with weird sci-fi.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:15
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Major Ryan posted:OK, well I can put some of the others on the list then and see if I get on any better with them than Consider Phlebas. I do like the idea of the series from what I've read about it, so it's worth another shot if this book is somewhat different from the others. Honestly I read Feersum Endjinn first (not a Culture book) by Banks, loved it and went looking for more Banks, read Look to Windward next (my favourite) and then read a bunch more completely out of chronological order, wasn't a problem at all.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:16
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Rogue Moon is, well, I don't think you'll regret reading it, but I hestitate to say you'll love it. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, actually. Eando Binder is crazy old-school (pre-Golden Age), but I've never actually read anything by him: all I know is that he wrote a story called I, Robot that some publisher named Asimov's collection after. I think the York stories were a series, so I assume that's a compilation.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:18
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Heh, I've got at least 5 of those books in the same bindings, I recognize the spines. Makes me miss buying physical books, though I really don't have the room for more on my shelves, they're stacked 2-deep already. Lots of good books there , but Inherit the Starts pushes all my buttons in particular, I love a good space archeology tale. The sequels are tempered by knowing that Hogan started believing in what he was writing (in broad strokes - he was a follower of Immanuel Velikovsky), so they get rather loopy.
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Jul 25, 2020 04:58
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Agent of Chaos is far from Spinrad at his best (it was his second novel, I think), but still worth a read.
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Jul 25, 2020 05:08
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Major Ryan posted:OK, well I can put some of the others on the list then and see if I get on any better with them than Consider Phlebas. I do like the idea of the series from what I've read about it, so it's worth another shot if this book is somewhat different from the others. I would also recommend against Feersum Endjinn unless you really love phonetic spelling. I highly recommend Player of Games or Use of Weapons.
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Jul 25, 2020 05:19
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Finally got my hands on Murderbot 5. First page hits me with “my uneaten client stat is high.” So far, so good. 
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Jul 25, 2020 05:56
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Velius posted:Neal Asher is good but he seems to have lost his mind in the same way as Dan Simmons. I’m not sure if the Polity novels go that way, but he has some other books (“The Owner”) series I believe. Its full of straw men leftists who can’t beat John Galt, Superman and super Genius who also seduces all the women and tortures and murders all the reds. Read the polity books until they get too crazy would be my recommendation. Have you read the owner series, cause it sounds more like you are repeating what someone else have said? Asher has hardly lost his mind in the same way as Simmons, and I would rather say that he has lost any faith in humanity overall. Case in point, last series had zero POV belonging to something that could be referred to as baseline humans and instead all POVs where Ai, haimans, war drones and aliens.
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Jul 25, 2020 06:10
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ulmont posted:I would also recommend against Feersum Endjinn unless you really love phonetic spelling. I highly recommend Player of Games or Use of Weapons. Feersum Endjinn is just Neuromancer with less neon n' chrome and more phonetic spelling. And no Molly. Now if you want to see some really out there phonetic spelling, there's a chapter early in The Bridge that's the phonetic transcript of the thickest fookin' Scottish brogue that ever was. It took me three tries to 'get it', but I burst out laughing when I finally did. It's a true linguistic accomplishment and a treat to read. The Bridge is one of the more enjoyable non-M books, it's got a lot of dreamlike weirdness. Banks is wasted on describing the real world. And let's not forget The Wasp Factory. Imagine, I don't know, if Catcher in the Rye took some bad acid and had some body horror stuff go on. It's one of those first novels where you think "this author has the potential for true greatness" and also "Jesus Christ I hope he's got whatever that was out of his system." Both things are true, read The Wasp Factory.
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Jul 25, 2020 06:11
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The Wasp Factory is actually the only Ian (M or not) Banks book that I’ve finished (or, honestly, made it more than a few pages into).
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Jul 25, 2020 06:19
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This makes me miss the smell of a second-hand bookstore
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Jul 25, 2020 08:43
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I feel like there is some value in reading the Culture novels in order. I don't remember when it happened but I got the impression they assumed you knew more of the universe as it went on. Like what the Culture is, how the Minds are created/work, neural laces, SC. etc you'd get a much better introduction the first time it mattered and in later books you'd just get a little refresh. I don't know how much it would matter though. I didn't enjoy Excession the first time, I struggled to keep all the characters straight or care too much about their motivations, but I recently went back (having read almost all of them) and loved it. Such a great series. I've been rationing them for years and I've only got Hydrogen Sonata left 
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Jul 25, 2020 10:34
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mllaneza posted:The Bridge is one of the more enjoyable non-M books, it's got a lot of dreamlike weirdness. Banks is wasted on describing the real world. And let's not forget The Wasp Factory. Imagine, I don't know, if Catcher in the Rye took some bad acid and had some body horror stuff go on. It's one of those first novels where you think "this author has the potential for true greatness" and also "Jesus Christ I hope he's got whatever that was out of his system." Both things are true, read The Wasp Factory.
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Jul 25, 2020 10:42
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Evil Fluffy posted:How's it compare to the Traitor Son series? It's a bit all over the place but I enjoyed it more. More compact, more ideas.
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Jul 25, 2020 10:58
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Cardiac posted:Have you read the owner series, cause it sounds more like you are repeating what someone else have said? I read the first one, yes. I do think you’re right about losing faith in humanity. Looking over the book there’s a complete absence of ideology attributed to “The Committee” beyond it being a totalitarian world government, to the extent words like “capitalism” and “socialism” never occur in the book. I suspect there was some editing involved to make it less obvious. There is, however, a lot of text about how governments use fear to get people to abridge their own freedoms which is ideologically neutral and reasonable. But then the actual dialogue of the villains is all red scare language about how xxx isn’t benefiting the collective good of society”. Re: cloning extinct species: “How, precisely,” Coran began, “can you justify the expenditure of millions of Euros just to save such a species? Where, exactly, will such an alpha predator fit into the society we’re building?” Re: Nationalized health care: “Even after national health services across the world turned into a lethal joke for the recipients of treatment, the Committee insisted upon amalgamating them to establish a worldwide service, free to every user. However, with status classification being established in parallel, what free treatment you received from All Health depended on how useful you were to society.” Great pain is taken to omit any real world leftist language, in that everything is about “The Committee”, or “society”, or “all health”. But the villains are all about evil government taking over society despite being inefficient and bad. It’s strange, because of course you could say the same about 1984, or various other dystopia where government justifies tyranny by using trappings of socialism, but the Owner series makes it less about the evils of government and more about how government is keeping the few, good people down. It has chapter titles like “The People Rule”, and “I’m killing you for your freedom” which suggest it’s trying to be tongue in cheek, but it’s utterly humorless. It’s just the main character murdering various strawman officials oppressing the world, then moving somewhere else to repeat the process. I’ve read a fair amount of military sci-fi, so I’m used to government straw men, but something about this series just really grossed me out.
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Jul 25, 2020 14:00
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Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DN8BQMD/ Eon by Greg Bear - $2.09 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J3EU5RC/ Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GV95CWZ/ Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008R2J70M/
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Jul 25, 2020 16:40
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mllaneza posted:Feersum Endjinn is just Neuromancer with less neon n' chrome and more phonetic spelling. And no Molly. This is kind of a "sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn't know because I wouldn't eat that filthy motherfucker" kind of scenario. mllaneza posted:Now if you want to see some really out there phonetic spelling, there's a chapter early in The Bridge that's the phonetic transcript of the thickest fookin' Scottish brogue that ever was. It took me three tries to 'get it', but I burst out laughing when I finally did. It's a true linguistic accomplishment and a treat to read. I got through that; I've read all of the non-M books (and all of the M books except Feersum Endjinn). I think The Crow Road is still my favorite.
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Jul 25, 2020 16:48
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fritz posted:I agree with 'good until "Angry Lead Skies" '. "Whispering Nickel Idols" was fine and I remember pretty much nothing about "Cruel Zinc Melodies", but "Gilded Latten Bones" was a slog and I actively disliked "Wicked Bronze Ambition". I couldn't find book 1 so I re-read book 2 ("Bitter Gold Tears") and holy poo poo the anti-women stuff was so much worse than I remembered. A real shame too because the rest of it held up. Don't think I'll continue, at least not right now.
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Jul 25, 2020 16:50
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space marine todd posted:How is the Xeelee Sequence? I saw that somewhere recommended for fans of The Culture. That's an odd recommendation, because while I like the Xelee books, they're not very similar to the Culture novels at all. Baxter can't write characters beyond "the wry hero," "the sad hero," and "anti-science villain." It's definitely an ideas over style series, but they are pretty cool ideas. Get ready for a lot of deep time. Vacuum Diagrams is probably the place to start, since it's a nice sampling of the whole enterprise.
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Jul 25, 2020 18:12
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Velius posted:I read the first one, yes. I do think you’re right about losing faith in humanity. Looking over the book there’s a complete absence of ideology attributed to “The Committee” beyond it being a totalitarian world government, to the extent words like “capitalism” and “socialism” never occur in the book. I suspect there was some editing involved to make it less obvious. The second book veers into extreme environmentalism, where the next major villain kills of 90% of humanity by pressing a button in order to recover the environment. I never attributed any special form of ideology to the world ruling government, neither left or right, but rather standard oppressive bureaucracy where the purpose is to preserve and extend the current oppressive system than anything ideological. The opposition to Asher seems to be due to him being very much not left. But then again, I see all sci-fi and fantasy as fiction. Also, complaining about having a main protagonist hero that solves everything despite opposition from the system is pretty much applicable to 90% of all sci-Fi/fantasy. Pretty much no one would read a story about a organization full of anonymous people that bring down a system. Neither Banks or Mieville have been close to doing this. Also, I guess it is time to reread the series. It was ok as far as I remember but suffered from bland characters, meandering storyline (by ashers standards) and too comically evil villains.
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Jul 25, 2020 18:23
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted: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. It absolutely won't. It's got nothing to do with time travel, though. It's a sci-fi espionage novel set in a post-nuclear 21st century where all weapons newer than 1900 have been banned by international treaty.
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Jul 25, 2020 21:09
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Cardiac posted:Is blindsight or murderbot even space opera? Blindsight is definitely not a space opera. it also is available online for free to read and/or download. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm that ↑ link posted:Download as PDF, zipped HTML, Brian Gilbert's Mobipocket mix or John Joseph Adams's (with thanks to both), Ellen Herzfeld's e-pub edition (more thanks!), or just read online (below)
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Jul 25, 2020 21:42
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Anyone read the sequel to The Sparrow? I went through it a few months back and it was heavy enough that I wanted to digest it before thinking about moving forward with the next one. I'm still on the fence about continuing although I almost feel obligated to...almost.
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Jul 25, 2020 22:20
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I read it many years ago and while I can hardly remember anything about it I think I enjoyed it.
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Jul 26, 2020 03:57
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shirunei posted:Anyone read the sequel to The Sparrow? I went through it a few months back and it was heavy enough that I wanted to digest it before thinking about moving forward with the next one. I'm still on the fence about continuing although I almost feel obligated to...almost. I have it in my to-read list, I picked up a used copy on my last Abebooks shopping spree. Given the contents of the original book I've been reticent to read it but will in time.
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Jul 26, 2020 08:23
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