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tildes posted:The whole world of Baru is such a well thought out analogue to imperialism in the real world, and touches like the one above definitely contribute to that. Falcrest is not just a faceless evil empire- instead the underlying history/internal logic and motivations which causes a bunch of not-really-evil people to do awful things is so well laid out. It really feels like you’ve come away with a new understanding of imperialism in the real world after reading about it in this fictional one.
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Aug 19, 2020 05:21
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There's a new K.J. Parker novel out as of yesterday: How to Rule an Empire & Get Away with It. It's sort of a sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City. Sadly, there is almost no way to read anything about it, even the slightest blurb, without spoilers. Then again, if you like K.J. Parker, you already pretty much know what you're getting. Here's what Publisher's Weekly thought. I do happen to like K.J. Parker, a lot, and have wondered why I don't see his stuff promoted often or in many places.
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Aug 19, 2020 06:18
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algebra testes posted:I read this over a holiday last year and it has this slow pace that I found really relaxing. One of my favourites! Also another of the "read the first book not rest" club. Interesting! I think Red Mars is the most immediately compelling of the trilogy, but they're all good, and very much a sum-of-their-parts deal. I read it as a much younger man and originally thought it was a flaw to kill off the three most interesting characters in the first book, but I've subsequently read other opinions which describe it as a clever move to change the tone and pace of the trilogy by removing the alpha male main leads and letting female characters (plus people like Sax) take centre stage in what becomes a book which is less about aggressive revolution and ultimately more about peaceful political compromise and building more utopian societies.. He also released a collection of short stories called The Martians which is pointless cutting room floor stuff, but does contain one very good short story, Michel in Antarctica, which is about the psychologist analysing the group at the very beginning in the training mission in Antarctica. I remember it being boring all the way through except for the final line, which is brilliant, and which only works if you've read the entire Mars trilogy first.
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Aug 19, 2020 07:10
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freebooter posted:He also released a collection of short stories called The Martians which is pointless cutting room floor stuff, but does contain one very good short story, Michel in Antarctica, which is about the psychologist analysing the group at the very beginning in the training mission in Antarctica. I remember it being boring all the way through except for the final line, which is brilliant, and which only works if you've read the entire Mars trilogy first.
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Aug 19, 2020 07:37
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Anyone read anything by Matthew Mather? This popped up on an ad and it seems like a mess, but maybe in a fun way?
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Aug 19, 2020 15:03
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freebooter posted:He also released a collection of short stories called The Martians which is pointless cutting room floor stuff, It's not pointless, all those are good slice-of-(anaerobic)-life stories. I can see why, as anecdotes about Mars, you'd cut them from novels that are already long, but if you're interested in the setting, they're very much worth reading. I particularly enjoyed climbing Mount Olympus. YMMV.
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Aug 19, 2020 15:44
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I remember enjoying the Martians. It was just vignettes of Mars set during all three of the books. I can see why you'd call it cutting room stuff but to me it was more of a welcome return to a story I really liked.
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Aug 19, 2020 23:45
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Could you spoil that? It's been so long. So basically, it just feels like a straight prequel story about something we already got glimpses of in the trilogy, about the assessment program they ran in Antarctica, told from Michel's POV. And it seems pretty pointless and dull because it's about a lot of characters who either die off or prove otherwise minor, or... just doesn't really feel like it adds anything worthwhile to the story. And the ending of it is Michel giving his final evaluations to the higher-ups, including the presidents of the US and Russia, and he doesn't feel confident about the psychological impact of sending this group to Mars indefinitely. And the presidents are conferring back and forth, and agree that they have many other political problems and don't necessarily want to engage in such a high stakes programs right now, it feels like the cons outweigh the pros. And the final line of the story is "So they cancelled the project." I just thought it was a really great hoodwinking on KSR's part, making you think it's just a character study, when in fact it's a demonstration of just how easily all this 1000+ pages of 200 years of future history, all the experiences these characters have, the utopian society they eventually built, could have just so easily not happened. It was definitely more impactful on me since I read it more or less right after finishing the trilogy. mllaneza posted:It's not pointless, all those are good slice-of-(anaerobic)-life stories. I can see why, as anecdotes about Mars, you'd cut them from novels that are already long, but if you're interested in the setting, they're very much worth reading. I particularly enjoyed climbing Mount Olympus. branedotorg posted:I remember enjoying the Martians. Yeah fair enough. I certainly don't think it's something he shouldn't have published, or anything. One other story I really remember the tone and atmosphere of - and I guess it is a slice of life vignette, not a story - was just about a guy going for a hike around his local post-terraforming caldera early in the morning before anyone else in his household is awake, and appreciating the beauty of it. That's it. In fact maybe it's just five months of lockdown talking but I kinda wish I had my copy to hand so I could read that again.
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Aug 20, 2020 00:56
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I finished Baru 3 last night. It was great and I'm going to leave an amazon review next (do amazons .com and .ca collate review numbers or seperate them?) Some thoughts: As mentioned earlier in the thread, Over There is fascinating to me as well. Perpetual lightning continent? Hell yeah. Is Starfall Bay where a meteor struck, or something exploded forever ago? Everyone knows there's a Supercontinent, but do people go there on the reg? Is the Black Tea Ocean just where tea comes from, or is the water actually black? I like in-canon alternate names for scientific theories, like "coin theory" instead of Mendelian genetics. I was hoping for more on-screen adventures with the cancer-whale, he's fun. The lobotomy scenes were incredibly difficult for me. I have some sort of mental block around the concept of digging around inside peoples brains, probably stemming from watching a surprise brain surgery video in a psychology class in college, where I passed out and then threw up right in class, lol. Anyway, I had to read those scenes a sentence at a time and then distract myself for a minute until the creeping grey vision went away. That is NOT a criticism, and really served, for me at least, to drive home how creepy and evil Falcrest is if they do those on the regular to dissident citizens. I'm hype for Baru 4, but good things take time, so I hope Seth doesn't rush for the sake of his fans and mental health.
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Aug 20, 2020 03:24
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By the way when is Seths sci fi book Exordia coming out? The initial press release from 2018 said sometime in 2020.
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Aug 20, 2020 04:21
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Does anyone have short fiction recs? I'm looking for stuff from the last five years, ideally weird and dark. I'm less interested in hard SF and slice of life stuff, but I'll check out just about anything. Huge plus if it's free to read online.
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Aug 20, 2020 04:48
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tiniestacorn posted:Does anyone have short fiction recs? I'm looking for stuff from the last five years, ideally weird and dark. I'm less interested in hard SF and slice of life stuff, but I'll check out just about anything. Huge plus if it's free to read online. N.K. Jemison's How Long 'til Black Future Month ! https://smile.amazon.com/How-Long-Black-Future-Month-ebook/dp/B07FSLQXY8/ There are a lot of stories in here that I'd like to see more of; and one of them has become a novel (that I haven't gotten to yet). The stories are all over the place, but well arranged, so you've got body horror, social commentary, litanies of sacrifice, and the street come real all in the same volume. This is easily the best SF anthology I've ever read, from a single author or a collection of various. One of my favorites is about a restaurant that can make any meal you can imagine or have ever had. Not that they can't perfectly recreate the feast served the night the Magna Carta was signed, which they can, or what the kitchen was serving the night of Dolly Parton's first professional appearance. They can make you the burned mac & cheese you had the night you became a parent. And that's not even the best idea involving food in this volume. Read these stories ! The best anthology I haven't read all of is Joyce Carol Oates The Oxford Book of American Short Stories https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0199744394/ It's a mix of American short stories from Rip Van Winkle to modern fiction. Voices of all kinds speak in this volume, and they're all good. She's no slouch with a short story herself, I think she just wanted a textbook for her classes and put her collection together. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 05:08
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buffalo all day posted:
Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness. Anyone have recommendations that hit the spot? Foundryside doesn't seem to do it for me.
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Aug 20, 2020 06:36
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I get that he wanted to spread his wings but god drat, the Scar was so good, so many ideas packed into it. Then again "October" was pretty great too...
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space marine todd posted:Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness. The only other contemporary "weird" fantasy I can think of is The Vorrh by Brian Catling, though I personally found it to be literary/poetic to the point of tediousness; sort of like the distilled worst excesses of Jeff Vandermeer. Obviously that's not a recc but a lot of people raved about it so YMMV.
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Aug 20, 2020 06:55
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tiniestacorn posted:Does anyone have short fiction recs? I'm looking for stuff from the last five years, ideally weird and dark. I'm less interested in hard SF and slice of life stuff, but I'll check out just about anything. Huge plus if it's free to read online. https://lackingtons.com/2020/05/01/the-capacity-to-serve-by-simon-christiansen/ I wrote this last year. It is definitely weird.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:09
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space marine todd posted:Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness. Gareth Hanrahan's The Gutter Prayer struck me as Bas-Lag lite: fun and readable enough, but the Dickensian hell-world was a shade less hellish, the inventive magic poo poo a shade less inventive and magic.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:27
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SimonChris posted:https://lackingtons.com/2020/05/01/the-capacity-to-serve-by-simon-christiansen/ Lackington's rules, happy to check this out!
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Aug 20, 2020 07:42
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space marine todd posted:Anyone have recommendations that hit the spot? Foundryside doesn't seem to do it for me. You gotta read Sascha Stronach's THE DAWNHOUNDS. He won the Sir Julius Vogel Award this year, and he posts in this thread!
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Aug 20, 2020 07:45
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space marine todd posted:Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness. Michael Cisco is your man for this, Animal Money is Bas Lag weirdness to the ultimate degree. Oh and The Divinity Student and The Golem will scratch that itch. Jeff Vandermeer made his name with The City of Saints and Madmen which should also work. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 09:29
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occamsnailfile posted:So I'm a bit late to this party, but re: end of Harrow the person with Camilla is Gideon the First and Wake's actual kid, while Gideon the Ninth was obviously something else. This comes from the very brief side comment made by Gideon the First while fighting Wake-in-Cytherea, just asking "Why did you bring the ba-" and then later him tilting the whole plan because he thought his kid was there. Also in the description at the end the kid's eyes are mentioned as grey. I assume that means Alecto is up to no good in some other way, while Harrow is chilling in the mental drawer she had built herself for Gideon I'm not sure about this: the grey eyes are not the narrator's but Camilla's, which I think we're meant to interpret as her having absorbed Sextus (so like a reverse-Lyctor) after having learned from Harrow how to find him. I'm pretty sure the epilogue narrator is the physical body of Gideon herself, with Harrow (or "a" Harrow) inside her cuddling a sword and looking at nudie magazines. I may be mistaken about that latter part and you may be right that Harrow actually ended up inside the pocket she had made inside her own body, but I think given that they established earlier that "true" Lyctorhood is actually an exchange of souls rather than one consuming the other (so both continue to exist, each making the other immortal) that we'll find Gideon "survived" the first book and was taken by Camilla/etc and held with the Blood of Eden, ultimately leading to a dual-Lyctor team-up of Harrow-with-Gideon-inside and Gideon-with-Harrow-inside. In the earlier fight you mention, Gideon the First could just as easily have been asking Wake "why did you bring the baby [Gideon the Ninth] to Drearburh?" rather than "why did you bring the baby here" or whatever. e: for clarity on my book 3 prediction thumper57 fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 13:25
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space marine todd posted:Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:43
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So I just finished The Stars My Destination in my ongoing project to catch up on "classic" works that are kinda considered fundamental to the genre. I posted about it briefly in the What Did You Just Finish thread, but I wanted to get a little bit more out of it here. I went into it knowing that the story is widely lauded for being a pioneering work in sci-fi, but I gotta say... about the first half of the book I just kinda soldiered through. It didn't really get "good" to me (by that I mean: a book that I enjoyed reading but didn't feel ~compelled to finish~ in my ample free time on vacation) until about the halfway mark or whenever Gully develops the Fourmyle persona. Up until that point the character was just utterly uninteresting to me, and even less interesting as a protagonist (especially given that, y'know, he's a literal rapist). The dialogue was really grating to me throughout, and the overall back-and-forth conversational style of it just kinda got on my nerves more often than not. I didn't really come around to really liking the book until the closing couple of chapters when Foyle starts achieving his weird apotheosis or whatever is happening to him. The ending was highly enjoyable though, I'll admit that much, especially when Bester started actually giving a more overt message about things like transparency and accountability. I just kinda don't get why this thing is such a big deal in the genre. It was good and all, and I guess (according to wiki) a lot of its trappings were pretty crucial to the formation of the cyberpunk genre, but I don't get why it was so groundbreaking.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:33
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Basically every page in Stars my Destination has a new idea. It has aged poorly due to the rape scene, but at the time, sf heroes were always Competent Man paragon, so it was revolutionary to have a dark gritty protagonist. Past that yeah it's cyberpunk a half century in advance. There's a general problem that most cyberpunk has aged badly because now it just seems like normal default reality, not a dystopia. But at the time pretty much every page of that book was a brand new idea.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:46
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I finished Baru 1 and, uh holy poo poo that ending. I figured something was up but I didn't expect it to be as rough to read as it was. If anything realising what was coming made the book even tenser cause there was this shadow over the whole thing. I usually don't like binging series but I kinda have to read Monster ASAP now.
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Aug 20, 2020 15:58
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Stanfield posted:I finished Baru 1 and, uh holy poo poo that ending. I figured something was up but I didn't expect it to be as rough to read as it was. If anything realising what was coming made the book even tenser cause there was this shadow over the whole thing. One minor point about that ending: One might think that the whole brain injury thing is some made-up weird fantasy bullshit, but nope, it's a real-world thing.
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Aug 20, 2020 17:01
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I've been reading Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, and I'd like more stuff in that kind of style-- sort of bizarre fantasy, so divorced from reality and fanciful that it tends to sound downright alien and mythical. Alternatively anything set on earth, but so far in the future that it may as well be somewhere else, is a really neat concept to me. What else out there does something similar?
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Aug 20, 2020 19:45
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Viroconium (MJohn Harrison) might be what you want. Cherryh’s Morgaine Cycle might also work. And while the prose isn’t anywhere near as good as either of those (or Vance), Django Wexler’s newest series is sorta in that vein as well.
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Aug 20, 2020 19:47
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*cough* Book of the New Sun *cough*
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Aug 20, 2020 21:49
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Woo-hoo, my black-edged copy of Harrow finally got here and now I have both! Gotta keep an eye on Alecto this time so I'm not scrambling at the last minute.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:09
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Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky is also in this wheelhouse.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:14
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The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BJZT8GJ/ Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RRXXMA/ Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XD75HGV/ The Collapsing Empire (Interdependency #1) by John Scalzi - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F20E7CO/
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Aug 20, 2020 23:34
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I was just gonna ask about The Luminous Dead and The Collapsing Empire. I seem to remember the first one being mentioned when we talked about sci-fi horror, and I thought the second one seemed interesting. Any impressions?
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Aug 21, 2020 01:32
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Black Griffon posted:I was just gonna ask about The Luminous Dead and The Collapsing Empire. I seem to remember the first one being mentioned when we talked about sci-fi horror, and I thought the second one seemed interesting. Any impressions? I really, really loved the Luminous Dead, it's about a sci-fi woman going cave diving with the world's worst(/best) radio handler.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:21
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Black Griffon posted:I was just gonna ask about The Luminous Dead and The Collapsing Empire. I seem to remember the first one being mentioned when we talked about sci-fi horror, and I thought the second one seemed interesting. Any impressions? The Collapsing Empire is somewhat decent "popcorn" lit but the last book's ending is some of the worst trash imaginable.
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Aug 21, 2020 03:08
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Sounds like I'll avoid The Collapsing Empire and go for Luminous Dead then. In other news I finished Bone Silence and Reynolds does not pull punches. It's not the best I've read from him, but the Revenger books are marvelous fun and I enjoyed them a lot. The postscript says he has no plans for additional books in books in the series yet, but the "yet" is still very clearly implied, and I hope to read more from that universe
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Aug 21, 2020 03:13
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Luminous dead has the cave diver where her support person can literally control what she sees and hears, right? I started it but never finished it. Guess I'll change that soon. Iirc the book cover was pretty awesome too.
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Aug 21, 2020 03:19
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MockingQuantum posted:I've been reading Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, and I'd like more stuff in that kind of style-- sort of bizarre fantasy, so divorced from reality and fanciful that it tends to sound downright alien and mythical. Alternatively anything set on earth, but so far in the future that it may as well be somewhere else, is a really neat concept to me. Michael Moorcock has some works in that vein -- in particular, the "Dancers at the End of Time" series (An Alien Heat et al) and the "Second Ether" series (Blood et al). Matthew Hughes is the only writer I've seen who can do a passable imitation of Vance's style without sounding forced and artificial. Try Majestrum or The Gist Hunter and Other Stories. And because it's been a while since I recommended Tanith Lee, she does weird Gothic-mythic fantasy pretty well, particularly in "Tales from the Flat Earth" (Night's Master et al). You could also go way back and check out Lord Dunsany; his short stories are the best but The King of Elfland's Daughter is worth reading too.
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Aug 21, 2020 04:28
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I really enjoyed the Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell miniseries. Is the book as good/better?
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Aug 21, 2020 04:40
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Captain Monkey posted:I really enjoyed the Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell miniseries. Is the book as good/better? Didn't watch the miniseries yet, but I was utterly charmed by the book. Fun, well written, would absolutely recommend.
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Aug 21, 2020 04:45
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Captain Monkey posted:I really enjoyed the Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell miniseries. Is the book as good/better? I liked it better, in large part because the format of the book allowed for much more detail, like interesting footnotes and asides. If you enjoyed the show at all, the book is definitely worth reading, particularly at the current Kindle sale price.
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Aug 21, 2020 04:47
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