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Orconomics is fantastic, and also has a sequel. Though I'm not sure it's entirely great for turning off your brain or being a light read. There's a surprising amount of heart there for a satirical novel. I'll second Cradle as a good series for light dumb fun though, as long as you like muscle wizards dueling and training/powering up. Cicero fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 12:42
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When I think light comic D&D parody fantasy, I think Jig the Goblin.
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Oct 16, 2020 13:54
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:When I think light comic D&D parody fantasy, I think Jig the Goblin. Seconded.
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Oct 16, 2020 15:52
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Anyone read Providence by Max Barry? I thought it was pretty cool.
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Oct 16, 2020 18:03
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The Goblin Corps by Ari Marmell was dumb fun following a band of villains around and it didn't have a sequel last time I checked
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Oct 16, 2020 20:53
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Terry Pratchett's Discworld series - $4.99 each https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TYGGG76/ World of Trouble (Last Policeman #3) by Ben H Winters - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HXYHVNU/
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Oct 17, 2020 19:22
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Cicero posted:Orconomics is fantastic, and also has a sequel. Though I'm not sure it's entirely great for turning off your brain or being a light read. There's a surprising amount of heart there for a satirical novel. Orconomics is a weird book - it's half goofy RPG-parody, half slightly more pointed satire as the world slowly slides towards facism. It's like reading early-Discworld and mid/late-Discworld. I'm not sure if its a particurlarly good idea to try and do both those things at once, but it has a drat good stab at it. There's some genuinely good moments of pathos, like Kaitha's self-harm/drug addiction, or the halfling banker's feelings of uselessness and self-loathing when confronted by the kobold doorman's widow
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Oct 18, 2020 15:31
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pradmer posted:Terry Pratchett's Discworld series - $4.99 each Hey man just wanted to thank you for these posts you've saved me a lot of money hit me up if you want me to buy you something on the forums
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Oct 18, 2020 17:40
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orange sky posted:Hey man just wanted to thank you for these posts you've saved me a lot of money hit me up if you want me to buy you something on the forums Thanks but I do it mostly for my own benefit. Not that much more work to share with everyone. Hope I've increased everyone else's backlogs as much as my own. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NRQOR26/
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Oct 18, 2020 18:05
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pradmer posted:Terry Pratchett's Discworld series - $4.99 each FWIW if you're in australia but buying with a us kindle account ( i may be the only one here?) some are down to 3.57 and some have the brilliant price of 9.20 (reduced from 8.36) on the other hand almost none of the sale links you post are buyable for me so this is a nice change. I'm going to buy pyramids
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Oct 18, 2020 22:27
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pradmer posted:Thanks but I do it mostly for my own benefit. Not that much more work to share with everyone. Hope I've increased everyone else's backlogs as much as my own. yeah just on the flip side of what that guy said, you've cost me a fortune because you post these links to good books and none of them are on special where i am but I just smash that button anyway 
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Oct 18, 2020 22:47
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pradmer posted:Thanks but I do it mostly for my own benefit. Not that much more work to share with everyone. Hope I've increased everyone else's backlogs as much as my own. This is a great book but very depressing and probably a prescient look at how climate change is going to gently caress America.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:23
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It took over 9 years for the SFL Archives to start talking about flying cars, which is 3280 days longer than I expected it would take; flying cars are a huge trope of 1930's - 1980's science fiction. It took over 6 years for the SFL Archives to declare the Bladerunner 1982 movie prescient and start debating all things in it. I'm on "team set lighting" regarding replicant eye glows in the Bladerunner 1982 movie. And also think of the movie as a mashup of the PKD novel & the Alan Nourse novel (the eyeball farmer, the DNA serial tagging and the active bustling seediness of future LA seem pulled more from Nourse's novel vs Dick's desolate irradiated San Francisco & Mercerism). Meanwhile it takes about 3-4 weeks before Stephen Donaldson/Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series gets brought up again, and almost everyone in SFL land loves the generic-ness of David Edding's Belgariad stories and the first Malloreon series book; while slowly starting to turn on their previous high views of Piers Anthony and Jack Chalker. Star Trek: The Next Generation discussion didn't turn out as bad as I expected it would in SFL Vol 12b. The initial casting announcement for TNG was funny, Gene Roddenberry's perv factor was very apparent when it listed Marina Sirtis's previous notable roles. Almost everyone in SFL land got used to the main TNG cast by episode 4 or episode 5, although "where's the chief engineer on 1701-D" questions keep cropping up . Q was seen as a oddball one-off character until he came back, and 1987 SFLer's hate Wesley Crusher enough to dream up multiple ways Wesley Crusher could be written off the show asap. No-one has predicted the "groomed by space Aatrek" series exit ending for Wesley so far though, and I reposted the infamous-in-1987 open letter to Gene Roddenberry/the producers of TNG in the main Star Trek TV-IV thread.
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Oct 19, 2020 05:23
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quantumfoam posted:The initial casting announcement for TNG was funny, Gene Roddenberry's perv factor was very apparent when it listed Marina Sirtis's previous notable roles. There's a bit in one of RLM's Best of the Worst videos (may have been this one) where they see Sirtis in a very porn-y role and Mike recollects her talk from a convention where see says how glad she was to be cast in TNG so she never had to do any more of those "terrible, terrible movies" and he said she sounded like a trauma survivor.
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Oct 19, 2020 20:13
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navyjack posted:This is a great book but very depressing and probably a prescient look at how climate change is going to gently caress America. Seconding this recommendation. Kind of surprised this hasn't become a prestige TV series, seems like a natural for it.
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Oct 19, 2020 20:17
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Hobnob posted:There's a bit in one of RLM's Best of the Worst videos (may have been this one) where they see Sirtis in a very porn-y role and Mike recollects her talk from a convention where see says how glad she was to be cast in TNG so she never had to do any more of those "terrible, terrible movies" and he said she sounded like a trauma survivor. Prior to Star Trek TNG, Marina Sirtis was best known for being raped in a Death Wish movie. So, yeah, "trauma survivor" is not an inaccurate description.
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Oct 19, 2020 22:13
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NFHF0Q/ Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZZ25BCX/
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Oct 19, 2020 22:52
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buffalo all day posted:Seconding this recommendation. Kind of surprised this hasn't become a prestige TV series, seems like a natural for it. If you wanted more content, he did a short story in the same universe called "Shooting the apocalypse". I read it in "The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych #1)" , but I think it's been in other collections.
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Oct 20, 2020 00:12
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I just finished the 3-Body-Problem. I thought it was ok. I'm not sure I understand the high praise. The book hit it's peak for me pretty early on with the mystery of the countdown and the three-body game. Once Trisolaris was officially unveiled I thought it became pretty rote sci-fi. The chapters that actually featured Trisolarians took it down another notch, because I thought they were some of the most uninteresting aliens I've ever read-- in fact they were simply just humans that were more technologically advanced. Was the part where they sent the messages about humans being bugs supposed to be comical? It sort of feels like the book was an excuse for the author to write about the three-body-problem and the 11th-dimensional nanocommputer. I'm guessing some people love the book just because of the high concept physics stuff? I do think it's a neat concept and the image of 2D sophon stretched over the entire planet is cool, but I'm not really sure that was the pay off I was expecting to the story. How are the other two books? If I wasn't enthralled by the first are they working tackling or is it just more of the same (cool physics concepts wrapped in mediocre writing and narrative).
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Oct 20, 2020 01:12
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Megasabin posted:I just finished the 3-Body-Problem. I thought it was ok. I'm not sure I understand the high praise. I read Three Body Problem twice and thought it sucked each time. I thought the tone of the translation was kind of comical, which didn't seem to jive with the content of the story. The video game plotline was bizarre, and seemed like neither a good use of the aliens' time nor something that anybody would believably 'play'. The boat antics at the end were kind of neat but didn't really seem to tie in well with the rest of the novel and by then I didn't really care about any of the characters. I don't think the author did a great job writing about the different human factions, either. I enjoyed the second book a bit more, and the third a lot more since it really goes buck wild with the Big Science Ideas and the characters interact with each other a lot more believably. I don't think it ever moves beyond mediocre writing with a mediocre narrative, though it does improve. This might sound like a back-handed compliment but I would compare the third book favorably with Arthur C. Clarke's novels. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Oct 20, 2020 |
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Oct 20, 2020 01:47
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Megasabin posted:I just finished the 3-Body-Problem. I thought it was ok. I'm not sure I understand the high praise. It's been a while since I read the trilogy but the trisolarians are incapable of deception, right? So the whole trilogy becomes about the chinese characters playing the long, long, long game and all the other humans being bumbling oafs (American General's plan being "bomb bomb bomb
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Oct 20, 2020 02:09
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The second book has some great sequences where nerds get unbelievably, utterly owned
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Oct 20, 2020 02:13
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Megasabin posted:I just finished the 3-Body-Problem. I thought it was ok. I'm not sure I understand the high praise. We learn more about the Trisolarians in The Dark Forest, and they're actually somewhat weirder than they initially seem. Remember the bit about the "formation computer," for example, and think about what sort of bodies/minds might make that worthwhile. Though there's also a sense in which they aren't really that different from humans - I do think the "You're bugs!" arrogance is meant to be somewhat comical, especially since we're told that their technological advancement has actually been slower than that of humans. (There's shades here of the John W. Campbell rule of Golden Age sci-fi, where aliens aren't allowed to be really better than humans.) I actually found the parts The Three Body Problem about the Cultural Revolution just as interesting as the high-concept sci-fi stuff. The weakest part, IMO, involves the main male character - he's not really fleshed out properly (he has a wife and child but they mostly disappear from the story, and in general his characterization amounts to "audience viewpoint character trying to figure out what's going on with the disrupted experiments/Three Body game/ETO"). The main character in The Dark Forest is more fleshed out (though he's, presumably deliberately, not very likable), and there's more weird sci-fi ideas. Unfortunately it has a different translator with a clunkier style.
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Oct 20, 2020 02:22
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I disliked how the female main character was too weak and soft and totally let the aliens own her it came across as sexist and lazy. And I really think the books are like a 6/10, tops.
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Oct 20, 2020 02:39
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Ironically, the translator is a better writer. Read his original stuff instead.
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Oct 20, 2020 03:04
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Ken Liu is a good writer. I'm not sure Joel Martinsen is. His translation of The Dark Forest really hurts it relative to the first and third novels. The prose is flat and makes the novel even more of a slog. I did enjoy Death's End for all the galaxy brain high concept poo poo and ultimately felt it made reading the entire trilogy worth my time.
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Oct 20, 2020 03:30
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mewse posted:It's been a while since I read the trilogy but the trisolarians are incapable of deception, right? So the whole trilogy becomes about the chinese characters playing the long, long, long game and all the other humans being bumbling oafs (American General's plan being "bomb bomb bomb Honestly, the more I think about it the more my closest comparison to Cixin Liu is John C. Wright: they're both in the Heinlein mold of super interesting ideas, cardboard characters, lovely political views underpinning the entire thing (for totally different reasons - Liu's toeing the party line on Uighurs doesn't seem to come in to his work anywhere I've noticed, for instance). And I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me.
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Oct 20, 2020 13:25
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Going to preface by saying I couldn't bring myself to read Death's End but I still can't quite believe that the fantasy waifu with no personality and no agency that got conjured out of thin air in the Dark Forest didn't end up being a trap or trick or anything more complicated than just a victim who got (actually, literally) fridged.
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Oct 20, 2020 14:10
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buffalo all day posted:Going to preface by saying I couldn't bring myself to read Death's End but I still can't quite believe that the fantasy waifu with no personality and no agency that got conjured out of thin air in the Dark Forest didn't end up being a trap or trick or anything more complicated than just a victim who got (actually, literally) fridged. I mean, she left Luo Ji and took their child with her in order to get him to do his drat job. Does that not count as agency?
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Oct 20, 2020 14:16
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Silver2195 posted:I mean, she left Luo Ji and took their child with her in order to get him to do his drat job. Does that not count as agency?
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Oct 20, 2020 17:55
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Yes and no, because they learn to lie, eventually, or at least create an AI that does, but also the Americans are right all along because they are Hard Men Doing Hard Things mostly because of the lazy sexism that permeates the trilogy My impression is that Remembrance of Earth’s Past broke through to many readers who don’t usually read science fiction, so the breadth of ideas on display (especially in the third book) would be impressive from that point of view. Ideas-wise it reminded me of the Xeelee Sequence. I found the tone of the translation of the first book strange, and agree with all the points about thin characterization and sexism. Overall I didn’t really care too much for the trilogy, and I have trouble understanding the almost universal praise for it. I find it hard to fault Liu for his public political views. In interview he spews the party rhetoric basically word for word and seems pretty unhappy in having to do so. To do otherwise would be to risk his livelihood, at the very least.
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Oct 20, 2020 19:57
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the way people talk about three-body problem and such reminds me of the nineties, when anime was just getting big in the west, and nerds were like 'hey, this is from JAPAN so it's just BETTER than american cartoons.'
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Oct 20, 2020 22:38
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quantumfoam posted:Going to give you a broad spectrum of recommendations. You seem to be the person who recommends Lem the most around here, what's your opinion on the english translations? Most of his work available in portuguese is in old collections infamous for really bad translations, so if the english ones are better i will try to grab them.
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Oct 20, 2020 23:47
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:You seem to be the person who recommends Lem the most around here, what's your opinion on the english translations? Most of his work available in portuguese is in old collections infamous for really bad translations, so if the english ones are better i will try to grab them. I'm at least a top ten Lem recommender, and I think the English translations are very good. You get coherent prose and natural sounding dialogue, plus the poetry in The Cyberiad came through as good verse.
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Oct 21, 2020 00:13
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Yeah most of the modern Lem translations are just fine. If you pick up Solaris, make sure to get the Johnston translation. I think you'd be hard pressed to buy a copy of the Kilmartin/Cox one unless you stumbled on it used, but that's the one to avoid in any case. Edit: Unrelated to the above, but I'm reading Network Effect right now (the novel-length Murderbot) and I'm having a hell of a time getting through it. The asides are a little too long, I'm kind of bored with the chapters in the past, and everything happening on the ship feels like it's dragging, hard. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and this is my second try at reading it. Does it get appreciably better or faster-paced at some point? I feel like mostly it's been Murderbot wandering around this ship trying not to get anybody killed, which isn't too engaging. I just got to the part where Murderbot discovered ART and "reinstalled" him, which feels like a turning point in the book, but also felt pretty inevitable. Any advice on whether I should tough it out or drop it? MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Oct 21, 2020 |
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Oct 21, 2020 00:25
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:You seem to be the person who recommends Lem the most around here, what's your opinion on the english translations? Most of his work available in portuguese is in old collections infamous for really bad translations, so if the english ones are better i will try to grab them. The only terrible English translation of Lem's work I've come across is THE INVESTIGATION. Lem's RETURN FROM THE STARS isn't great/can be skipped, while Lem's ONE HUMAN MINUTE, MICROWORLDS, and A PERFECT VACUUM are mostly essays and reviews of books that don't exist, and therefore can be safely avoided until you are used to Stanislaw Lem's writing style. And if you are diving into Stanislaw Lem's work, I also highly recommend the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady & Boris) Noon Universe stories. NOON: 22ND CENTURY is the best entry into their Noon Universe setting, while their HARD TO BE A GOD or THE INHABITED ISLAND aka PRISONERS OF POWER are good alternate entries to that setting if you can't track down Noon: 22nd century.
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Oct 21, 2020 03:58
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So I just finished the first book in the Nevernight series by Krisioff. It is basically another version of the classic assassin school and revenge story, but with enough twists and storytelling ways to make it different and enjoyable. Nice pace to the storyline as well. I can almost forgive the attempt at making Pratchettian footnotes.
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Oct 21, 2020 04:53
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quantumfoam posted:The only terrible English translation of Lem's work I've come across is THE INVESTIGATION.
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Oct 21, 2020 10:44
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Alhazred posted:I have yet to find a Noon book that doesn't cost a small fortune. Noon: 22nd century remains out of print (and is expensive and keeps getting more expensive), while Hard to be a God & The Inhabited Island got re-published recently/have ebook editions (which is why I mentioned those two books as alternate choice first reads for the Noon Universe setting). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon:_22nd_Century gives barebones details on the short stories in it. The big things in the Noon Universe setting are: -Communism won out vs capitalism around now-ish in the Noon Universe setting -The 22nd century Earth is a peaceful post-scarcity setting thanks to universal progressive education/universal indoctrination efforts -99.9995% of the people living on Earth were injected with what is essentially the Captain America super-serum shortly after birth -Multiple alien species exist in the Noon Universe setting, plus a mysterious Progenitor race seeded early pre-humanity on other planets across the galaxy -FTL travel exists and is common-place enough that random idiots can use it to day-trip to other planets(ESCAPE ATTEMPT) or scout for alien civilizations
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Oct 21, 2020 15:37
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Reddit went and created a list of what they think are the best fantasy books of the past decade. I disagree with this list, and especially the rankings of the books, but it gives a pretty good picture of what general fantasy readers think is good, alongside a few Kindle Unlimited series that are only popular with redditors. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/jfbz4e/the_rfantasy_top_novels_of_the_decade_20102019/
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Oct 21, 2020 16:12
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