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Sibling of TB posted:I almost bought earthseed because "hey a full series!" but "A multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner’s powerful saga of survival and destiny in a near-future dystopian America." and I'm not sure if I want to read dystopian future America right now. They're fantastic, but as others have said, they're brutal and the dystopia they present is very close to home. Another thing, "complete series" in this case means two novels.
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Jan 14, 2021 16:19
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This might be a weird request. But are there any good sci fi books that actually incorporate technologies as a major part of the book. Like technologies that are based in science and actually doable in the future.
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Jan 14, 2021 21:00
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Ulio posted:This might be a weird request. But are there any good sci fi books that actually incorporate technologies as a major part of the book. Like technologies that are based in science and actually doable in the future. Ready Player One  (don't read it)
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Jan 14, 2021 23:00
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Ulio posted:This might be a weird request. But are there any good sci fi books that actually incorporate technologies as a major part of the book. Like technologies that are based in science and actually doable in the future. No idea what this means - are you looking for near future SF? Something like The Wind-up Girl or The Water Knife, maybe? Or, Altered Carbon? Can you give an example of what you're talking about?
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Jan 14, 2021 23:09
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Ulio posted:This might be a weird request. But are there any good sci fi books that actually incorporate technologies as a major part of the book. Like technologies that are based in science and actually doable in the future. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series for slow burn near future interplanetary travel drama.
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Jan 14, 2021 23:10
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Ulio posted:This might be a weird request. But are there any good sci fi books that actually incorporate technologies as a major part of the book. Like technologies that are based in science and actually doable in the future. I think maybe you want to look into the sub-genre of hard sci-fi, which emphasises scientific accuracy.
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Jan 14, 2021 23:35
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e: beaten! I would suggest using "hard sci fi" as a search term for recommendations for that kind of work, except that brought me to this list at the top of Google. It includes decidedly non-hard works like Ninefox Gambit and Ancillary Justice and decries traditional lists of white male authors before jumping immediately to Arthur C Clarke and Michael Crichton at top billing. So, uh, exercise some care with searching.
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Jan 14, 2021 23:40
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The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087C3G2T3/ Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NERQRPI/ The Dragon's Path (The Dagger and the Coin #1) by Daniel Abraham - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047Y16LC/
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Jan 14, 2021 23:45
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All the books that have been finalists in Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off are on sale for 99 cents today. I’m currently reading the one that got the highest rank ever from the bloggers, The Sword of Kaigen. I have some thoughts on this book I might have to share soon... https://mlwangbooks.com/spfbo-finalist-super-sale/
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Jan 14, 2021 23:51
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Ccs posted:All the books that have been finalists in Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off are on sale for 99 cents today. I’m currently reading the one that got the highest rank ever from the bloggers, The Sword of Kaigen. I have some thoughts on this book I might have to share soon... I've read a few of those thanks to Kindle unlimited, Paternus was a pretty fun read if you are into mythology. Crimson Queen the first book was really promising but the next two were a bit of a let down, had to struggle to finish the second book but third was a better but not as good as the first book. Probably check out Sword of Kaigen next and grab some of the others that look interesting while they are cheap.
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Jan 15, 2021 00:40
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Thanks for the heads up. The ones I'm a little familiar with are Orconomics, which I've heard many positive things about in this thread, and The Way into Chaos which is by Harry Connolly, the Twenty Palaces series author.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:00
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pradmer posted:The Way into Chaos which is by Harry Connolly, the Twenty Palaces series author. Maybe i'm being too harsh on free kindle unlimited books, it's better than a lot of the competition, but the ending to this one really left a sour taste in my mouth. It, as they say, smacked heavily to the earth in much the same way that spaceships do not - i strongly get the feeling he either expected another book or two to wrap up, or just started writing without an ending in mind. Besides which, along the way, it had a bunch of ideas that could have been neat, but just felt under-baked.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:43
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buffalo all day posted:No idea what this means - are you looking for near future SF? Something like The Wind-up Girl or The Water Knife, maybe? Or, Altered Carbon? Can you give an example of what you're talking about? Don't read Altered Carbon, nothing about its society makes any sense given the technology.
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Jan 15, 2021 05:55
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pseudorandom name posted:Don't read Altered Carbon, nothing about its society makes any sense given the technology. I mean Altered Carbon itself relies on randomly discovered alien technology that lets humanity do a whole ton of really impossible things. It's hard to call it "near future tech". The society doesn't make sense because Morgan is using it to make a super exaggerated noir setting, highlighting in even more stark contrast the lives of the elite versus the commonfolk that's a pretty standard element of a lot of old school noir. And as science fiction noir, it works great.
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Jan 15, 2021 07:00
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Amortals by Matt Forbeck is a nifty take on Altered Carbon.
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Jan 15, 2021 07:11
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Amortals by Matt Forbeck is a nifty take on Altered Carbon. ...which is apparently free with that new Audible Plus thing. So added to the library. Thanks!
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Jan 15, 2021 07:44
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Ccs posted:All the books that have been finalists in Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off are on sale for 99 cents today. I’m currently reading the one that got the highest rank ever from the bloggers, The Sword of Kaigen. I have some thoughts on this book I might have to share soon... Took a look, the mike shel book (aching god) is the only one I'd read. I don't read much fantasy but I liked it enough pre-order the second one while still reading it.
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Jan 15, 2021 09:13
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pseudorandom name posted:Don't read Altered Carbon, nothing about its society makes any sense given the technology.
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Jan 15, 2021 10:00
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Ccs posted:All the books that have been finalists in Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off are on sale for 99 cents today. I’m currently reading the one that got the highest rank ever from the bloggers, The Sword of Kaigen. I have some thoughts on this book I might have to share soon... Will Wight said good things about Alec Hutson's The Crimson Queen - has anyone read it?
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Jan 15, 2021 10:05
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90s Cringe Rock posted:bits make a little more sense when you find out the author's a raging terf Ugh how can you write a whole series about body-swapping yet miss the point so badly
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Jan 15, 2021 10:43
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Altered Carbon was fun but really hard to shake the discomfort that, despite the human body and gender allegedly becoming meaningless, it's fundamentally about Cool Special Forces Detective Man fighting sexual violence against women and the big baddie is a billionaire who kills prostitutes. Also Kovacs is a super spy and a one of a kind ninja commando, but also like a leftist revolutionary (the department tolerated it bc he's so drat good?), also a detective, and he has his two signature cool guns you guys, and the ladies all want him (not the dudes obv), and he doles out justice to the mean corpos, come on it's juvenile as heck. Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 13:08
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Crashbee posted:Ugh how can you write a whole series about body-swapping yet miss the point so badly Ive seen some of the terrible things he's written recently on twitter/his blog but don't recall how they informed altered carbon (probably read it last about 10 years ago and recall it being a fun detective noir)...
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Jan 15, 2021 15:20
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I'm 10% through Sword of Kaigen so far and I can see why it won SPFBO, the scene and character work is good. I have two major gripes, one which might be addressed later in the novel. The first is that it takes Japanese culture and drops it into a fantasy world, with characters constantly spouting honorifics after every name, and the occasional Japanese word left untranslated for emphasis. This causes it to read like an anime fansubbed by one of those translators who doesn't believe any localization is necessary. You have characters who say "Nii-san" instead of "Brother", or a word which I was fairly sure meant "unbelievable" but that was only because I remembered hearing it in an anime where the subtitles did translate every sentence. That's a stylistic choice which some people may enjoy and others will become very annoyed by, but I expect it to stay consistent over the course of the novel. The other issue is that it depicts a warrior culture in which everyone trains to master ice magic to repel possible invaders. The magic allows them to create ice spears that are almost as strong as steel. The most powerful families can create ice that's stronger than steel! Cool right? Except this is set in a world with post-WWII tech. Ice spears aren't going to be much use against guns and bombs. The twist of the novel could be that they're expending all this effort for nothing. The reason they haven't been invaded could be because they're a resource poor nation, and the fact that their island is inhabited by a bunch of warriors who felt no need to industrialize as the rest of the world was doing so makes them doubly worthless as a colony to some larger empire. However the book is sold as a war story, so I assume that they will be invaded at some point. If they discover they are hopelessly outclassed by modern weaponry, that would be interesting. A kind of "Last Samurai" tale. Then I would enjoy the book. If it turns out their ice spears are inexplicably effective against modern projectiles then I will be disappointed. If it turns out that the rest of the world has invented video games and airplanes but still fight wars using their own relatively useless elemental magic then I will be disgusted.
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Jan 15, 2021 15:53
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Has anyone in here read Miles Cameron? I realized he has a five book mega-chonk series called the Traitor Son Cycle and I might be in the mood for a long big military fantasy adventure. Is it worth it?
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Jan 15, 2021 16:22
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StrixNebulosa posted:Has anyone in here read Miles Cameron? I realized he has a five book mega-chonk series called the Traitor Son Cycle and I might be in the mood for a long big military fantasy adventure. Is it worth it? I read the first three and tapped out partway through the fourth one. Each is reasonably self-contained from what I recall and seemed to have diminishing returns. The first one is reasonably good, the guy is a big historical reenactor so there's a lot of technical stuff about armor and weapons (but also a tortured love that Dare Not Speak Its Name). Worth a shot IMO
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Jan 15, 2021 16:26
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Strategic Tea posted:Altered Carbon was fun but really hard to shake the discomfort that, despite the human body and gender allegedly becoming meaningless, it's fundamentally about Cool Special Forces Detective Man fighting sexual violence against women and the big baddie is a billionaire who kills prostitutes. Eh, because it's noir.  Your typical noir detective is a World War II veteran who was a bad rear end hero in the war but doesn't like to talk about it, uses the skills he learned in the war and contacts he made with old war buddies to make a living as a PI, has a hard and cynical exterior but is secretly outraged when the weak, especially women, are victimized. He's also usually badly handling PTSD through alcoholism though the writers at the time probably weren't putting that aspect in intentionally, though maybe I'm underestimating them. And yes, he's a chick magnet that all the girls want to bone.  Even so, it's a genre that's as much a reaction to the seemingly perfect "white picket fences" world of the 1950s by shining a light on the seedy underbelly, on the corruption and abuse going on behind the scenes as cyberpunk is a reaction to the rise of commercialism and corporate power in the 1980s. Or how novels even now being started that we'll see come out in the next few years will be a reaction to the MAGA insurrection. Could Morgan have done more with his concept? Definitely. Could he have done more with it and still kept it recognizably noir? Probably not. I mean a better writer could have, but Morgan's kind of a hack as the rest of the Kovacs novels show. But if you happen to enjoy noir and want to read a science fiction noir story that does Science Fiction Noir as literally as Firefly did Science Fiction Western, then Altered Carbon fits the bill. If you want something MORE than Science Fiction Noir, then forget it, you're not going to get it here. Not for everyone, by any means, and not all the time, but if you're in the mood for it, then it can scratch a very specific itch. buffalo all day posted:Ive seen some of the terrible things he's written recently on twitter/his blog but don't recall how they informed altered carbon (probably read it last about 10 years ago and recall it being a fun detective noir)... Yeah, I haven't enjoyed anything else he's written. Read Altered Carbon for exactly that....a fun science fiction noir story...and ignore him otherwise.
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Jan 15, 2021 16:31
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buffalo all day posted:I read the first three and tapped out partway through the fourth one. Each is reasonably self-contained from what I recall and seemed to have diminishing returns. The first one is reasonably good, the guy is a big historical reenactor so there's a lot of technical stuff about armor and weapons (but also a tortured love that Dare Not Speak Its Name). Worth a shot IMO Sounds good. I've been struggling with reading lately due to depression and starting something new might help jumpstart reading again. We'll see!
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Jan 15, 2021 16:35
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Ccs posted:I'm 10% through Sword of Kaigen so far and I can see why it won SPFBO, the scene and character work is good. I have two major gripes, one which might be addressed later in the novel. (...) Eh, let's say the actual story will be quite different from what you're expecting. The emphasis is a lot more or personal growth, family relations, regret, etc. It's not really a war story. Whether you'll like it is another question...
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Jan 15, 2021 17:05
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jng2058 posted:Eh, because it's noir. The rub is that Chandler wasn't writing about how much of a stone loving badass Marlowe is while Morgan is definitely writing about how much of a stone cold loving super badass Kovacs is. Morgan isn't writing noir so much as he's using its trappings to dress up his sci fi power fantasy. While they don't check off as many of its genre markers as Morgan's Altered Carbon, Gibson's Neuromancer, Effinger's When Gravity Fails, and even some missions in 2077 do a much better job of capturing the ethos and atmosphere of noir in a cyberpunk setting. The board game Android does too.
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Jan 15, 2021 17:21
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Strategic Tea posted:Also Kovacs is a super spy and a one of a kind ninja commando, but also like a leftist revolutionary (the department tolerated it bc he's so drat good?), also a detective, and he has his two signature cool guns you guys, and the ladies all want him (not the dudes obv), and he doles out justice to the mean corpos, come on it's juvenile as heck. The rest of this is correct, but the whole thing about being a leftist is clearly function of post-Envoy disillusionment after his whole unit eats that info-virus and he gets turfed out. He turns to the revolutionary ideology that he's familiar with from his youth to understand his experiences. There's no sense that he was particularly political prior to being kicked out and having essentially zero options to make money, since nobody wants to hire an ex-Envoy to do anything they are good at in a legal capacity.
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Jan 15, 2021 17:21
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Ccs posted:All the books that have been finalists in Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off are on sale for 99 cents today. I’m currently reading the one that got the highest rank ever from the bloggers, The Sword of Kaigen. I have some thoughts on this book I might have to share soon... That's pretty cool. I've read 4 books and they all ranged between good and great. What I read in order of my preference: - The Lost War - Orconomics - Blood of Heirs - The Sword of Kaigen (still not bad at all)
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Jan 15, 2021 17:42
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The David Brin rants over Ralph Bakshi & the complete original casting announcements for Babylon 5/the Info File for the Babylon 5 pilot episode are up on dedicated posts on the offsite SFL Archives readthrough blog. Tempted to make Daniel Keys Moran's 1992 status update that he posted to the SFL Archives 1992 a dedicated offsite post too, because it is pure hubris on multiple levels, especially the editor thing. Also tempted to do a "The weird stuff in Philip K Dick's Flow my tears & Scanner Darkly were based on true events in PKD's life" post.
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Jan 15, 2021 17:54
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PeterWeller posted:The rub is that Chandler wasn't writing about how much of a stone loving badass Marlowe is while Morgan is definitely writing about how much of a stone cold loving super badass Kovacs is. Mickey Spillane writing Mike Hammer, though...
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Jan 15, 2021 18:00
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ulmont posted:Mickey Spillane writing Mike Hammer, though... Yeah, good point. But I think of the Hammer books as less "noir" and more "hard boiled" or "pulp detective". PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 18:20
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, good point. But think of the Hammer books as less "noir" and more "hard boiled" or "pulp detective".
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Jan 15, 2021 18:38
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PeterWeller posted:The rub is that Chandler wasn't writing about how much of a stone loving badass Marlowe is while Morgan is definitely writing about how much of a stone cold loving super badass Kovacs is. Morgan isn't writing noir so much as he's using its trappings to dress up his sci fi power fantasy. Yeah that is spot on. The books were just too much of a power fantasy for me to really love them. And they always ended in a made for TV shootout scene.
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Jan 15, 2021 18:46
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Altered Carbon has problems, Morgan bei a bizarro-Terf not withstanding, but it was still enjoyable to read. But Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds manages to do the noir mystery thing without the bad gender stuff. I don’t see it mentioned here too often, but I enjoyed it. It’s part of his larger Revelation Space setting, but not in ways that require to you have read them before if I’m remembering right.
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Jan 15, 2021 19:09
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https://twitter.com/scottedelman/status/1350167610214629377
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Jan 15, 2021 21:08
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Velius posted:Altered Carbon has problems, Morgan bei a bizarro-Terf not withstanding, but it was still enjoyable to read. But Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds manages to do the noir mystery thing without the bad gender stuff. I don’t see it mentioned here too often, but I enjoyed it. It’s part of his larger Revelation Space setting, but not in ways that require to you have read them before if I’m remembering right.
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Jan 15, 2021 21:25
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The name looked familiar, and checking my bookshelf, it turns out I've read her massive Wraeththu book. For the life of me I can't remember a single detail from it outside of having hermaphrodites or something.
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Jan 15, 2021 22:14
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