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Apparently if I wanted a black-edged copy I needed to specify in the order. I sent an email to follow up, but if it turns out I wasted $75+, I might also end up asking in the thread if anyone else can help me lay my hands on a copy. I gotta say I'm a bit irritated that it seems so goddamn hard to get a copy in the author's home country, but what do I know?
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Aug 7, 2020 04:46
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cptn_dr posted:Apparently if I wanted a black-edged copy I needed to specify in the order. I sent an email to follow up, but if it turns out I wasted $75+, I might also end up asking in the thread if anyone else can help me lay my hands on a copy. drat, yeah, I should've said. I found the tweet about it, and if you order from Mystgalaxy, specify in the order comments that you want a black-edged copy.
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Aug 7, 2020 04:58
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I've pre-ordered Tyrant. Looking forward to it! GB, did you have some sort of plot summary of Monster? I seem to remember you had one somewhere last time...
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Aug 7, 2020 09:28
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Hey so remember how two goons were up for Best Novel and Best Short Story at the little side awards at WorldCon? It really does sound like the Hugos and CoNZ were a complete clusterfuck from start to finish. Like, GRRM showed his entire rear end, but it's the con organizers who shoved the Vogel awards under the carpet, chose to use the speech GRRM submitted, etc. Congrats on the award, and I'm sorry the actual ceremony was full of spiders.
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Aug 7, 2020 13:58
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I haven't been able to find it in an email to confirm, so for now it's just unsubstantiated rumour, but I was told GRRM was refusing to re-record anything (I was told this after I expressed concern that he made a kind of gross sexual harrassment joke for the opening ceremony).
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Aug 7, 2020 14:02
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I'm just starting Harrow and already it's making me laugh. I fear no puns. Spoilered but it's an early joke that reveals nothing and I probably didn't need to.Harrow the Ninth posted:Another officer said, “My gracious lord, the loyal Saint of Joy…” “Has not yet learned to wait,” said God. “Hold the comms. I answered three of them just this morning.” “But her order countermands—” “A Lyctor’s order is the order of God and should be carried out with the same grace you would have honoured me with,” he said. “Except for right now. Station the last person to graduate Trentham on the stele and tell them to make static noises if she keeps it up.” “Lord?” “Air blown through the teeth, tongue high, hand flaps up and down over the mouth. Sounds suspect, I know, but she’s never caught on when I’ve done it.”
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Aug 7, 2020 18:24
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cptn_dr posted:I haven't been able to find it in an email to confirm, so for now it's just unsubstantiated rumour, but I was told GRRM was refusing to re-record anything (I was told this after I expressed concern that he made a kind of gross sexual harrassment joke for the opening ceremony). GRRM actually addressed that last weekend...as a comment on the File770 post on the Hugos (http://file770.com/2020-hugo-awards/). It's like the 80th comment so it's buried somewhere in there. I won't quote the whole thing cause it's very, very long, but here are the highlights: - He says he was never asked to rerecord pronunciations or change his content. - He did rerecord some stuff because the original recording quality was bad, one thing he was asked to rerecord he didn't because it involved props he didn't have on hand (again, this was for the recording quality). - He only received pronunciation guides for the winners on the slips of paper in the envelopes, which was done live (I think?) - He admits to being terrible with pronouncing names and thought about reaching out to the organizers/nominees but never did. - He explained his choice of material as a bunch of stories he's told countless times and always goes over well, so how could he have predicted it would go over like a lead balloon? - His focus on the deep past of the Hugos was made because, I poo poo you not, he figured this was the first New Zealand Worldcon so lots of attendees would have no clue about the awards and their rich history and he wanted to teach them about it. It's hilariously patronizing. Anyway, he gets roasted by a bunch of people in the comments for not reaching out to get the right pronunciations when he knew it would be an issue, for not seeming to get why people objected to the content of his prepared remarks, and for not understanding that fans in New Zealand have of course heard of the Hugo Awards before. I do buy that the organizers never sent him pronunciation guides, though, because everything I've read about ConZ indicates that behind the scenes it was a clusterfuck, and this wouldn't be the only case of information not being passed on when it should have been--apparently there was a similar issue with the souvenir book they put together, as in many cases the bios for nominees were not passed on and so a bunch of people don't have them in the book.
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Aug 7, 2020 18:36
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I ventured in here for recommendations since Rhythm on War is on a slow drip feed, Dawnshards is still being written and Will Wight doesn't look like he'll be releasing Wintersteel until late September (despite having recently finished his third draft), but I only got as far as this exchange:Sibling of TB posted:I have never read a book before where about half way through I decided that I hated all the characters and wanted to see bad stuff happen to them. Any other books like that? wizzardstaff posted:The Blending by Sharon Green. jng2058 posted:Do it! Give in to your hate and it will make you stronger! StrixNebulosa posted:You know there's a sequel series, right? Please hate-read these to us, I own all five and never finished them and I'd like to know what happens. wizzardstaff posted:I've never read the sequel series but it's why I reread the first five so many times. I'd think, "Man, I'm really curious how those sequels went but I should refresh myself on the originals first. It's light reading, it should go fast." And then by the time I'm done I just want to throw the books in a fire. jng2058 posted:I would be entertained by this, yes. Proteus Jones posted:Count me in on being entertained by watching a slow melt-down Let's Read ending with incoherent posts composed while in the grip of a frothing rage. I confess that I actually own all eight Blending universe books and re-read them a lot despite their dumpster fire worthiness because for some inexplicable reason they have a weird appeal. Before finding this thread, I had begun analyzing the books to figure out why the world building concepts are appealing despite the horrible execution and whether the books could be fixed (and how they might be fixed). Since there appears to be demand and I couldn't find a thread from wizzardstaff, I've started a let's read thread here for anyone interested: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3935822
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Aug 7, 2020 19:29
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Leng posted:I confess that I actually own all eight Blending universe books and re-read them a lot despite their dumpster fire worthiness because for some inexplicable reason they have a weird appeal. Before finding this thread, I had begun analyzing the books to figure out why the world building concepts are appealing despite the horrible execution and whether the books could be fixed (and how they might be fixed). Since there appears to be demand and I couldn't find a thread from wizzardstaff, I've started a let's read thread here for anyone interested:
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Aug 7, 2020 19:47
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wizzardstaff posted:Thank you! This has been on the back of my mind for months and I even started writing out posts for the first few chapters, but with the state of the world I just couldn't commit. I am gonna be following this thread with massive interest. Come on over and post what you've drafted!! It's so gloriously bad yet popular enough that a lot of people seem to have read it but apart from the odd review on Goodreads or Amazon, there's no real discussion of it on the internet. We can fix that!
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Aug 8, 2020 00:15
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Just finished up A Fire Upon the Deep and really liked it. Are the other two books any good?
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Aug 8, 2020 00:38
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Oathbringer (Stormlight Archive #3) by Brandon Sanderson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAWAH85/ Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016CQUL4U/
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Aug 8, 2020 00:40
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished up A Fire Upon the Deep and really liked it. Are the other two books any good? I consider A Deepness in the Sky a better one out of two. The third book does not exist.
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Aug 8, 2020 00:54
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ringu0 posted:I consider A Deepness in the Sky a better one out of two. The third book does not exist. Deepness is a hell of a book, and probably my favorite sci-fi book of all time. Children of the Sky is a trifle that doesn’t look like will ever pay off with an ending.
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Aug 8, 2020 01:55
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Finished Harrow and liked it a lot but (same as the first book) it was (1) heavy on the memes + banter and (2) composed of 90% cliffhangers. The narrative is propulsive for sure (I read it all the same day I got it) but drat let the prose breath a little. ending stuff Yeah so at the end of the first book I was sort of assuming that The Emperor blew up Earth (or the sun?) and something something death energy something something becomes god (the line about the "vengeance of the 10 billion" I took to refer to the population of earth being killed and the emperor somehow being culpable). The second book doesn't explicitly confirm anything, but it def implies it: God - nobody likes toddlers juxtaposed with cleansed Awake - How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius? God - All of them. one of the notes from Awake ends with: "in the shadow of my long lost natal sun" Harrow talking to God/John: "What does BOE stand for?' "Blood of Eden." he'd said, slowly. "Who is Eden?" "Someone they left to die," said God wearily "How sharper than the serpent's tooth, et cetera ... Harrow if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it." (BOE thinks they're the inheritors of earth but God quotes King Lear and accuses them of being Earth's ungrateful children who should actually just go gently caress themselves) tl;dr earth was dying, people left to colonize other planets, John Gaius blows up the sun, kills everyone in the sol system, creates necromancy, and then resurrects everybody with the death energy of the dead planets ... that same planet death creates the 9 Resurrection Beasts of which one is missing (5 were defeated and 3 remain - presumably the last one is A.L in the locked tomb) comedy theory: God/John Gaius is a radical eco-terrorist taking his revenge on the remnants of humanity that fled earth to pollute other planets; his original disciples/saints were also weird eco-terrorists in their lives before The End of the World Augustine: "Stop assembling ... this invasion force ... let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity." God: "Augustine, if the man you were - the man you were before you died, before The Resurrection - could hear what you just said, he'd tear your throat out" Also, the planet that Camilla (and I assume Giddeon?) wake up on in the epilogue is noted as being filled with smog and car exhaust - a remnant of the old human diaspora. Gato The Elder fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 07:30
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fashionly snort posted:
Harrow ending conjecture: I'm pretty sure Camilla is talking to Alecto awakened (seeing as how Harrow crawled into an empty tomb) in the epilogue but maybe I'm wrong.
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Aug 8, 2020 10:57
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BlackIronHeart posted:Harrow ending conjecture: I'm pretty sure Camilla is talking to Alecto awakened (seeing as how Harrow crawled into an empty tomb) in the epilogue but maybe I'm wrong. I'm pretty sure the coffin where Harrow locked herself up is where she had sealed away Gideon's soul so that she wouldn't completely absorb it. That's why she found a copy of Frontline Titties of the Fifth in there when she sealed herself up, and that's why the two-hander was resting there. Gideon was out in the body and had left her things in her room, so to speak. No idea who is in the body right now, though. Maybe just Gideon, but damaged by all the poo poo Harrow had done to her brain to compartmentalize things. It ends with "The Tomb will open in ALECTO THE NINTH", which strongly implies that the Tomb hasn't opened yet which makes me think that A.L. is still locked up for now.
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Aug 8, 2020 11:47
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Had lots of free time recently, and went deep into reading SFL Vol 09 -V the 1980's tv-series making zero sense on multiple levels caused much SFL discussion -Star Trek 3 came out and and also caused much SFL discussion -Lots and lots of discussion-arguments about "time travel for profit" using banks/investing/trade -Someone reposted all the Hitchhikers Guide to the Net parody/homage series and hate filled my soul. -Marion Zimmer Bradley chat cropped up repeatedly along with filk chat and more "old time religion" filk-song series. Hate continued to rise. -The SFL archives version of BravestOfTheLamps is Jeff Duntemann on a never ending quest to determine what SFF stories/what SFF authors are of literary merit -BackStabMod reappeared in the SFL archives as a "normal" poster after less than 2 months of being "off the ARPANET" forever. Still going to call them BackStabMod forever though, just like DolphinFucker will forever be called DolphinFucker paperbacks: When HARLIE Was One: Think "benevolent SHODAN mindfucks its creator and the holding company corporation that owns HARLIE" The two Robert L Forward Rocheworld books: Terrible, sexist and many many #METOO sexual harassment lawsuits in the Matt Lauer/Harvey Weinstein/CBS News leadership way. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Aug 8, 2020 |
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Aug 8, 2020 17:53
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished up A Fire Upon the Deep and really liked it. Are the other two books any good? Deepness in the Sky is really, really excellent. Children of the Sky is a sequel to the half of Fire Upon the Deep that I skip on re-reads.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:15
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Deepness is excellent but full of sexual violence to a maybe offputting degree. Good spiders though.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:19
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ZekeNY posted:Deepness in the Sky is really, really excellent. Children of the Sky is a sequel to the half of Fire Upon the Deep that I skip on re-reads. Have to agree with you and the others here. Fire Upon the Deep's internal politics were not the fun part of that book. Deepness in the Sky was a fantastic story, on the other hand.
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Aug 8, 2020 21:21
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General Battuta posted:Deepness is excellent but full of sexual violence to a maybe offputting degree. Good spiders though. Agree. I could have dealt with a lot less time spent detailing how bad the baddies were on that axis. Was a big fan of some of the ideas around ever-growing complexity of software systems and exploiting long dormant aspects thereof...
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Aug 8, 2020 21:41
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Re GRRM not being asked to rerecord: it was pointed out he was asked nine times and he amended it to "I was ONLY asked NINE times I can't be held responsible for forgetting"
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Aug 8, 2020 23:54
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Brandon Sanderson's kickstarter for Way of Kings leatherbound ($200 for a copy) finished with ~$6.8 million. The next highest KS in the publishing category was 866k. I bring it up here because that seems like a lot of money for a seemingly niche product. Might this success inspire other popular fantasy authors to offer fancy leatherbound books? Or does this already happen and I've just never heard of it before?
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Aug 9, 2020 00:38
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Cicero posted:Brandon Sanderson's kickstarter for Way of Kings leatherbound ($200 for a copy) finished with ~$6.8 million. The next highest KS in the publishing category was 866k. It happens all the time, though the vast majority don't self-publish their special edition books.
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Aug 9, 2020 00:47
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Cicero posted:Brandon Sanderson’s kickstarter for Way of Kings leatherbound ($200 for a copy) finished with ~$6.8 million. The next highest KS in the publishing category was 866k. I’m not sure how frequently they do leatherbound, but Folio Society and Subterranean Press do special editions of popular SFF books and they are gorgeous. I am lucky that I just moved from a tiny flat into an only-just-slightly-larger flat with arguably less storage space or else those books would be a Problem.
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Aug 9, 2020 03:26
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Almost every SubPress book has a leather-bound version in the lettered edition.
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Aug 9, 2020 05:00
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SFL Vol 09 update whatever, 64% completion, 99 bookmarks -A whole lot of SFL people are reverting to "my non-online friend says: CONTROVERSIAL TAKE" posting -Dean Ing gets mentioned for the first time in the SFL archives. Dean Ing was/is a batshit crazy mil-scifi survivalist author obsessed with airplanes, cowboys, technology, the old west, and the sex life of boars. -Terry Pratchett gets mentioned for the first time in the SFL archives as well, regarding huge scale "built world" story recommendations, which definitely applies to Terry Pratchett's STRATA. -a Tekumel RPG/Empire of the Petal Throne RPG novel gets pimped/reviewed/counter-reviewed. -many people ask for Libertarian fiction recommendations, resulting in multiple Libertarian fiction recs, which I won't inflict on this thread other than saying 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999919999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999993999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 of the Libertarian stories mentioned in the replies are exactly as stupid and trite as Shakespearean plays. -William Gibson's Neuromancer came out, and most of the SFL likes it. Personal opinion: Worse thing in Neuromancer is the character archetypes, which Gibson will reuse and reuse until you are sick of them. -Scifi magazine/book cover-art chat devolves-evolves into Queen the Band discussion/Day the Earth Stood Still/cover artist chat, which purged about 80% of the hatred in my soul from the earlier mentioned MZB chat & filk-song lyric posts. -Lauren Weinstein takes some lithium/finally calms the gently caress down about Wargames 1983 enough to promise IMDB style episode summaries of the Outer Limits tv-show -request from the current mailing list mod for SFL subscribers to cut back on outright ads/product reviews/pricing/prices, since the SF-LOVERS mailing list runs ontop of government funded ARPANET networks/nodes and absolutely must not be seen to be selling things. -BackStabMod can't stop posting thinly disguised product reviews about what amazing things BackStabMod has encountered recently in SFF. physical books: A for Andromeda: terrible, dated, poorly written with about everything in it fitting into the first 10 minutes of Species 1. Watch Species 1 instead of reading this book. Gameplayers of Zan: it takes about 100 intensely boring pages for the book to get back to what happened in the first chapter, then slowly gains speed. Ended up liking this book despite my first impression when the book finally got off it's rear end Agents of Chaos: maybe this book was clever and daring when it came out, however in August 2020; Agents of Chaos came off as dated, terrible, predictable,etc, The only reason I will remember anything about Agents of Chaos is because of the main character in it. The main character Boris Johnson, hero of democracy getting punked over and over again as they enacted terrorist plots in the name of democracy. And yes, I absolutely pictured real-life Boris Johnson,current UK Prime Minister, in that main character role.
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Aug 9, 2020 05:23
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I stopped lurking this thread for a few days so I could read Harrow the Ninth. Some thoughts: Exploding soup made me go "Ha, neat" out loud and then have to explain part of the book to my wife. Matthias Nonius appearing made me go "Ha, he's real" out loud and then have to explain further. I wondered "It's strange that part of this book is written in second person past tense" right before you find out why. Gideon's extremely online and snarky voice is clearly a point of contention, but I love it and was delighted to have her return and keep narrating like she did in Gideon
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Aug 9, 2020 06:08
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My friend recommended Iain M. Banks Culture series to me, so I picked up an ebook copy of the first one. I'm surprised it's regarded as a classic. It seems to be a series of hamfisted vignettes interspersed with scenes where the calm, collected, much-sex-having author insert is held captive for pages and pages of exposition on some grotesque or other. But hey, you know there's hundreds of pages left so he's not going to die so why does it take 20 pages of torture (both of the main character and the reader) before he mercifully escapes? The cannibal scene was just... gross? And really long. And now the author has spent like 5 or 10 pages describing how cool the card game 'damage' is, and how only the coolest most badass people in the galaxy play it, and I'm dropping this. Is reading the rest of it likely to change my mind? Or if I feel this way about the first 1/3rd of the first book should I just not bother? And if anyone wants to recommend an alternative, I'm looking Vim Fuego fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Aug 9, 2020 |
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Aug 9, 2020 09:01
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The Culture books are probably my favorite series of books, and a lot of people like them, but I guess ymmv. I also started with Consider Phlebas and I didn't find it very good, but soldiered on and it paid off. Most people recommend starting with Player of Games, which is a better intro, but I also didn't love it. What I loved was everything as a whole, put together, after reading all the books. Best moments, for me, were in Use of Weapons, Excession, and Hydrogen Sonata. So maybe read Player of Games and see what you think. By the way, the whole notion of "the baddest in the galaxy", of someone who alters the course of history, is basically what Banks dispells in every single book. So the book might not end as you expect it.
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Aug 9, 2020 09:15
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orange sky posted:The Culture books are probably my favorite series of books, and a lot of people like them, but I guess ymmv. The culture series as well as the Discworld series (along with others Cherry?) does not require any specific order in which the books should be read and just emphasise how much publishing nowadays is about doing series. I blame the audience.
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Aug 9, 2020 11:44
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Eh, you should read Look to Windward after Consider Phlebas if you want to have a better understanding of what the events are that spur characters in LtW to do what they're doing, but it's not critical as much as an intentional trilogy thing would be.
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Aug 9, 2020 11:55
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Vim Fuego posted:My friend recommended Iain M. Banks Culture series to me, so I picked up an ebook copy of the first one. I'm surprised it's regarded as a classic. It seems to be a series of hamfisted vignettes interspersed with scenes where the calm, collected, much-sex-having author insert is held captive for pages and pages of exposition on some grotesque or other. But hey, you know there's hundreds of pages left so he's not going to die so why does it take 20 pages of torture (both of the main character and the reader) before he mercifully escapes? The cannibal scene was just... gross? And really long. And now the author has spent like 5 or 10 pages describing how cool the card game 'damage' is, and how only the coolest most badass people in the galaxy play it, and I'm dropping this. Ha, it's me from about a month ago. I picked up Player of Games after being massively turned off by Consider Phlebas and it's much more like the book I was expecting it to be. It's properly drawn me in and feels like a big space opera, not some disgusting scene-a-thon that never seemed to be going anywhere. So maybe try that if you're still interested in Culture? I gave up on Consider Phlebas and I'm not regretting having not gone back at all.
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Aug 9, 2020 12:00
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Re GRRM not being asked to rerecord: it was pointed out he was asked nine times and he amended it to "I was ONLY asked NINE times I can't be held responsible for forgetting" Do you have a link for this? I'm curious.
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Aug 9, 2020 12:11
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Eh, you should read Look to Windward after Consider Phlebas if you want to have a better understanding of what the events are that spur characters in LtW to do what they're doing, but it's not critical as much as an intentional trilogy thing would be. I read Look to Windward first of any of the Culture books (because I was backpacking and it was one of the only English language books I could get my hands on), then read Consider Phlebas, then read Player of Games (which, along with Use of Weapons, is generally considered one of the two best, I think?) I didn't dislike any of them. They're not bad and they filled my time. But I'm nonplussed by the widespread acceptance that they're fantastic writing and classics of the genre. They're just generic space opera.
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Aug 9, 2020 14:26
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freebooter posted:I read Look to Windward first of any of the Culture books (because I was backpacking and it was one of the only English language books I could get my hands on), then read Consider Phlebas, then read Player of Games (which, along with Use of Weapons, is generally considered one of the two best, I think?) I have no opinion on the Culture novels. That said: what are your classics of the genre/books with fantastic writing?
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Aug 9, 2020 14:48
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The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07M77XW56/
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Aug 9, 2020 18:24
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Major Ryan posted:Ha, it's me from about a month ago. Nice, I'll give it a shot. thanks!
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Aug 9, 2020 19:41
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Ok, I guess I’ll be a contrary voice here. I enjoyed Gideon the Ninth well enough but I’m finding Harrow in-loving-sufferable. Please, Tasmin, crawl out from out from within thine own delisqulated(?) rear end and tell a story. I’m trying here, I really am, but I’ve about had it.
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