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Zurtilik posted:I'm sure if I roll through the thread I'd find this answer somewhere, but oh well, lazy posting keeps the thread alive?! Becky Chambers's wayfarer series (first one is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, the most recent one just came out and is called The Galaxy and the Ground Within) is new. It's not for everyone but if you're asking about Star Trek novels my guess is you will definitely like them (not a quality judgment, they just take place in a Star Trek-style universe).
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Jun 22, 2021 14:50
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Also, Piranesi and the Murderbot series by Martha Wells
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Jun 22, 2021 14:51
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Zurtilik posted:I'm sure if I roll through the thread I'd find this answer somewhere, but oh well, lazy posting keeps the thread alive?! Melissa Scott put out the Water Horse recently if you want epic fantasy in a single volume; I haven't read it but she's amazing so I'm sure it's good. A.M. Tuomala wrote and published Erekos that I shilled a page ago. Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford was WEIRD and short and good, about an inhuman healer who heals people by literally reshaping their bodies with her hands, then burying them in the ground. (flipping through my goodreads and lol I've read a lot of Anita Blake in the last few years. But you want fantasy/sci-fi that's recent, so...) Prosper's Demon by KJ Parker is short about a man facing off with a demon Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather is a novella about a living starship full of nuns The Hierophant's Daughter by M F Sullivan is first of a trilogy about a fascist theocracy ruled by vampires and it's weird Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner is a story about giant mechas fighting in space and it's AWESOME The Bone Ships by RJ Barker is the first of a trilogy about a fantasy world where ships are made out of bones, it's really really good The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams is the first of a trilogy about a fantasy world being invaded by bug monsters and there's weirder stuff in there and a ruined empire Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir is the first of a trilogy about a necromancer's bodyguard who is trying to keep them all from being killed by this haunted house thing kind of Lots of trilogies, you'll notice! They're in vogue.
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Jun 22, 2021 15:11
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StrixNebulosa posted:
I read both of those and enjoyed them. The second contains a lethal concentration of dad jokes however.
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Jun 22, 2021 15:26
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Horizon Burning posted:project hail mary is some kind of reddit-brained 'i loving love science' abomination lmao, some of the worst prose i can remember reading. come on, you're selling this as a hard sci-fi book but your ad copy is written by ernest 'vr 80s lmao' cline? come off it You're very correct, but I'm kinda enjoying it anyway. I just like the concept I guess. Also I'm listening to the audiobook and it's the same narrator who did the Bobiverse books, which also had very similar terrible prose but I also enjoyed despite that. I guess I think he pulls off the stupid internal monologue stuff...okayi-sh?
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Jun 22, 2021 15:28
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Zurtilik posted:I'm sure if I roll through the thread I'd find this answer somewhere, but oh well, lazy posting keeps the thread alive?! If you’re open to YA-ish, may I recommend Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko? It was published in 2020, is pretty different from a lot of fantasy published pre-90’s and it’s sequel is coming out this summer. I’m bad at synopsis but the setup is that a girl is unknowingly raised to be a weapon against what is essentially the Emperor’s son and then is sent to his court. There’s a whole lot of world building that I’m leaving out and that’s just the basic setup of the story, it changes pretty rapidly from there. DreamingofRoses fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 15:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather is a novella about a living starship full of nuns this one is super weird and kind of fascinating The novella part is key; I think it might have worn out its welcome if it was twice the length, but I'm gravitating more and more towards novellas. Some of the ideas I've been reading feel like they don't hold up to long novels.
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Jun 22, 2021 16:23
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Zurtilik posted:Also, are any of those Star Trek/Star Wars novels actually worth my time? With the recent stuff pretty well covered, I'll talk about the better Star Trek and Star Wars novels. Peter David can be very hit and miss, but when he hits he does a great job. I'd recommend his Q Squared and Imzadi as probably his best Trek work. You could also read Strike Zone which acts as a sort of prequel to Imzadi and Triangle: Imzadi II which is definitely a sequel to it, but neither are as good as Imzadi if you ask me. Which you did, after a fashion. If you like David's work then he's got a ton of Trek novels (and comics for that matter) that you can delve into, including the New Frontiers series about the TNG era USS Excalibur and her crew, many of whom were old characters from the early TNG seasons. I personally have a fondness for the early TOS Pocket Books novels, but I'm well aware that a lot of them don't hold up. Still, the two books by John M. Ford from that era (The Final Reflection and How Much For Just the Planet?) are both excellent while being completely different from one another and still presenting surprisingly nuanced views of Klingons. Diane Duane's Romulan books, particularly the first two (My Enemy My Ally and The Romulan Way), do much the same for the Romulans. Ironically enough, once TNG came around both Ford's and Duane's views were partially adapted by the TNG writers....for the other species! TNG Klingons got the honor obsessed loyalty to one's house that Duane gave the Romulans, while the TNG Romulans got the Machiavellian schemers always two moves ahead portrayal that Ford attributed to the Klingons. Duane also wrote Dark Mirror, an excellent TNG crew vs the Mirrorverse story that has since been rendered non-canonical by the DS9 Mirror Universe episodes. Still, if you want to see Picard deal with the Mirror Universe, that's the book for you. Trek novels, you may notice, tend to get run over by the shows a lot. That's because there was never any attempt to maintain continuity between them the way the Star Wars novels did with the Star Wars Expanded Universe. So the only Trek novels that reference one another are those by the same author. Ford's How Much for Just the Planet references concepts introduced in his The Final Reflection, but aren't mentioned anywhere else. Duane has recurring characters and concepts that go through most of her Trek work but no other author uses them, that sort of thing. One could consider most Trek novels to be fanfic that people got paid to write and not be far wrong. That's because arguably Trek fans invented modern fanfic in the years between the cancellation of TOS and the release of Star Trek the Motion Picture, and thus the writers who managed to get paid for their work mostly got their starts doing fanfic in the first place! Star Wars had a very different history of novels. Lucas was initially pretty reluctant to open up the Star Wars universe to other hands, though he did like money quite a bit so there were a handful of novels that came out in the early '80s (The Crystal Star, The Han Solo Trilogy, the Lando Trilogy) but those aren't particularly well regarded. Star Wars as a book series was really born with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command). Set five years after Return of the Jedi it posits a universe where the New Republic is at war with the remnants of the Empire, and what happens when a particularly talented Imperial Grand Admiral takes command of the Imperial Remnant. It was a big hit, and rightfully so since it was pretty darn good, and Lucas smelled a source of income that didn't require him to do any work, so he took the brakes off and the Star Wars Expanded Universe was born. And from 1991 until the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, the Expanded Universe WAS Star Wars. The only new Star Wars anyone was getting was the EU books, comics, and the occasional video game. And in that time there was an attempt to maintain a cohesive future history of Star Wars. It was always a little haphazard. Zahn's books were written first and so events that were written later but occurred chronologically earlier like, for instance, The Courtship of Princess Leia, were of course unmentioned in Zahn's works. And sometimes certain points in time could get pretty crowded...it turns out a LOT happened right after Death Star II blew up...but the attempt was made to make it so it was possible to start right after Return of the Jedi and follow the history of the New Republic and the New Jedi Order going some 40 years or so. Then Phantom Menace released, and the EU started moving backwards as well as forwards. Discounting the Old Republic era stuff which was disconnected from the rest of the EU by thousands of years, it was eventually possible to read stuff covering a hundred and fifty years, one hundred years before the movies and forty after, and even further into the future than that if you included the comic books. Here's a list of the novels chronologically. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Legends_books Now a lot of that stuff is trash. A lot more is just okay. But the highlights for me of the EU were the Zahn novels, the original three and the Hand of Thrawn duology, as well as the X-Wing novels following the adventures of Wedge Antilles and Rogue Squadron, particularly the later novels in the series written by Aaron Allston. I also have a fondness for the two MedStar novels, covering the efforts of a couple of Jedi medics during the Clone Wars. But there is a lot of EU out there, telling a lot of different stories, and one could take years reading it all and never finish it. And then Disney bought Star Wars and blew all that up. Everything in the old EU got reclassified as "Legends" and Disney started getting new books written that fit into the Disney era continuity, mostly focusing on bridging the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. And honestly, though there are a lot fewer Disney era books, a number of them are pretty decent. I like the Alphabet Squadron books, I like the new Thrawn books (setting up a revised Thrawn for his appearances as a villain on the Rebels cartoon from a few years back), and I really liked Light of the Jedi, the first book of the High Republic era, set two hundred years before the movies when the Republic was at its peak. The High Republic stuff may in fact be a good place to start if you want the Star Wars setting without all the existing characters and storylines. Otherwise, go with the best of the EU books and then maybe dip your toes into the new Disney stuff. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jun 22, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 16:48
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StrixNebulosa posted:I recently finished Erekos by A M Tuomala who uses non-standard pronouns and it was AMAZING and a great look at the intersection of multiple cultures, with attention paid to "what if the gods were real" and language and such. Oh yeah all of this sounds right up my alley, and the ebook was only about $2.50, so I went ahead and picked it up. Also thirding(?) Sisters of the Vast Black as a fun, quick read. It's the perfect length and the worldbuilding with the living ships is really neat. It also was the first book to make me aware of the apparent sub-genre of Nuns In Space.
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Jun 22, 2021 16:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner is a story about giant mechas fighting in space and it's AWESOME I really enjoyed this, its mechas but like, good.
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Jun 22, 2021 19:09
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Zurtilik posted:Also, are any of those Star Trek/Star Wars novels actually worth my time? Just to add my two cents, I'd like to recommend A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson. It's an epistolary memoir of Garak written by the actor who played him, who developed it out of biographical notes he wrote to get himself into the mindset of the character. Sadly it's pretty hard to get ahold of these days; it was a mass-market paperback from the 1990s and it's never received a digital rerelease, so copies are rare and expensive. I'd also like to recommend the Vanguard novels. They're a serialized set of novels set on a Federation space station in the mid-23rd century, and they operate as something of a companion piece to TOS while telling its own story. jng2058 posted:With the recent stuff pretty well covered, I'll talk about the better Star Trek and Star Wars novels. Continuity between Trek novels slowly became more of a thing from the mid-1990s onward. After TNG ended in 1994, the novels were slowly granted more and more latitude to explore areas beyond the confines of the shows, and we started to get more multi-book "events" that crossed between multiple lines. New Frontier itself was launched in 1997 to give the novels their own ship and crew to play with that wasn't beholden to the whims of any televised source material, but the increasing loosening of restrictions on the other lines made NF somewhat redundant, so it ultimately became Peter David's little Trek playground. Anyway, by the beginning of the 2000s TNG, DS9, and VOY were off the air and the Berman era as a whole was drawing to a close, so the novels were freed to build their own continuity. The three series I listed were "relaunched" with mixes of new and old characters, and the novels were far more serialized and events that occurred in one series would have an effect in all the others. The books also began making far more drastic changes to the Trek status quo, chief among them the Destiny trilogy, which had the Borg attempt to destroy drat well near the entire Trek universe, only to be eliminated as a threat forever. To be honest, I'm not that fond of this era of books, since to me it feels like they've just turned Trek into Marvel comics, with a universe-destroying cataclysm every four months or so. Still, there were forays in special miniseries of books to more neglected parts of the Trek universe, such as the Department of Temporal Investigations or into the "lost era" between the end of the TOS movies and the beginning of TNG. The novelverse was able to do its own thing off in the wilderness for almost two decades, but that seems to be coming to an end now as the franchise comes back to life. Trek has traditionally taken a very hard line that the only things that count are the TV shows and the movies, and while the modern shows are more comfortable with addressing things from beta canon (the USS Titan in LDS was originally a fan design done for the novels), I don't think Paramount considers the novels popular enough to warrant their inclusion. There's going to be a trilogy of books released later this year that will depict some sort of "Crisis on Infinite Earths"-style event that will draw the novelverse to a close and reset the universe to something that fits in with the current shows, and that'll be that.
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Jun 22, 2021 20:08
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Marshal Radisic posted:Just to add my two cents, I'd like to recommend A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson. It's an epistolary memoir of Garak written by the actor who played him, who developed it out of biographical notes he wrote to get himself into the mindset of the character. Sadly it's pretty hard to get ahold of these days; it was a mass-market paperback from the 1990s and it's never received a digital rerelease, so copies are rare and expensive. It seems to be available for Kindle?
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Jun 22, 2021 20:27
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Marshal Radisic posted:Just to add my two cents, I'd like to recommend A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson. It's an epistolary memoir of Garak written by the actor who played him, who developed it out of biographical notes he wrote to get himself into the mindset of the character. Sadly it's pretty hard to get ahold of these days; it was a mass-market paperback from the 1990s and it's never received a digital rerelease, so copies are rare and expensive. I'd also like to recommend the Vanguard novels. They're a serialized set of novels set on a Federation space station in the mid-23rd century, and they operate as something of a companion piece to TOS while telling its own story. That's a good choice, I had forgotten that one. It's an excellent book, albeit one that kind of requires at least a a passing knowledge of who Garak is and what his deal is. Marshal Radisic posted:Continuity between Trek novels slowly became more of a thing from the mid-1990s onward. After TNG ended in 1994, the novels were slowly granted more and more latitude to explore areas beyond the confines of the shows, and we started to get more multi-book "events" that crossed between multiple lines. New Frontier itself was launched in 1997 to give the novels their own ship and crew to play with that wasn't beholden to the whims of any televised source material, but the increasing loosening of restrictions on the other lines made NF somewhat redundant, so it ultimately became Peter David's little Trek playground. Yeah, I'd pretty much checked out of the Trek novel scene by then. I'd heard that it had gotten more continuity, but not having read the books myself, I opted to reserve my commentary for what I did read. I didn't realize they were blowing the whole thing up soon. I wonder if having an actual ending will be more satisfying than the Star Wars EU just stopping when Disney took over?
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Jun 22, 2021 20:33
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jng2058 posted:Star Wars had a very different history of novels. Lucas was initially pretty reluctant to open up the Star Wars universe to other hands, though he did like money quite a bit so there were a handful of novels that came out in the early '80s (The Crystal Star, The Han Solo Trilogy, the Lando Trilogy) but those aren't particularly well regarded. Gonna sneak in a slight disagreement here: I think Brian Daley's Han Solo novels are good pulpy fun. L. Neil Smith's Lando trilogy, on the other hand, is utterly forgettable.
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Jun 22, 2021 20:35
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StrixNebulosa posted:The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams is the first of a trilogy about a fantasy world being invaded by bug monsters and there's weirder stuff in there and a ruined empire This sounds like the kind of thing that I'd love, but I can't find an ebook version. Is there one for sale direct from a publisher or anything?
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Jun 22, 2021 20:52
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a foolish pianist posted:This sounds like the kind of thing that I'd love, but I can't find an ebook version. Is there one for sale direct from a publisher or anything? This is for sure available as an ebook in all the normal places https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/the-ninth-rain-the-winnowing-flame-trilogy-1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01D8ZE2DY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_ER9MXD97F4DTMBJ9EFED
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Jun 22, 2021 21:07
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team overhead smash posted:This is for sure available as an ebook in all the normal places not in the U.S. 
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Jun 22, 2021 21:15
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I hate that I know so much about David Brin's writing career, drat you SFL Archives readthrough; however few people are aware that David Brin also wrote a fantasy novel, that was based on some of the same concepts and RPG gaming sessions that also launched Raymond Feist into a professional writing career. That David Brin fantasy novel is called the Practice Effect. People who actually care about Brin's opinions on fantasy writing may want to compare how well his novel the Practice Effect matches up to his own standards. Aardvark! posted:Any recommendations for a mil-scifi (or any scifi/fantasy book tbh) where the protagonist flies through the ranks/gets promoted a lot and gets more and more responsibilities etc? The Bill the Galactic Hero mil-scifi parody series is the exact opposite of this request, and it owns the stupidity of real life military service hard. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Jun 23, 2021 |
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Jun 22, 2021 22:07
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Aardvark! posted:not in the U.S. Change your default address in Amazon to 9 Downing Street and then you can order it. Switch back after ordering.
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Jun 22, 2021 22:14
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https://twitter.com/sennydreadful/status/1407457450853347330?s=21 Boooo
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Jun 22, 2021 22:56
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Maybe I shouldn't be too curious but, what are David Brin's shittiest political opinions?
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Jun 23, 2021 02:26
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withak posted:Change your default address in Amazon to 9 Downing Street and then you can order it. Switch back after ordering. This is more annoying than it used to be, since the switch now kicks out all of your KU books.
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Jun 23, 2021 03:26
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The sequel to The Goblin Emperor came out today. It’s gotten mostly positive reviews but something about the premise makes me not want to grab it immediately.
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Jun 23, 2021 03:57
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FPyat posted:Maybe I shouldn't be too curious but, what are David Brin's shittiest political opinions? I don't know if it's his shittiest political opinion, but the behavior that caused Jo Walton to throw a drink in his face at a convention in 2003 might shed some light on him as a person. https://web.archive.org/web/20120504014805/https://papersky.livejournal.com/35050.html
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Jun 23, 2021 04:43
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Ccs posted:The sequel to The Goblin Emperor came out today. It’s gotten mostly positive reviews but something about the premise makes me not want to grab it immediately. there was a sneak peek (no longer available, unfortunately) that I read and liked. the sad-sack detective-priest was not the highlight of The Goblin Emperor for me, but the sneak peek was interesting enough that i'm going to pick up witness for the dead once i get through my backlog. worth the money but not worth staying up late for is where i'd put it
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Jun 23, 2021 04:47
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DreamingofRoses posted:I continue with my good luck! My library has the set on Hoopla, although they’re numbered wrong in the series. I’m starting today. That could be publication order versus chronological . I'd go chronological, quote:According to Bujold's website, the internal chronology of the World of the Five Gods is: I think that's right.
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Jun 23, 2021 08:07
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I’d go publication, as I think jumping into Curse of Challion and the sequels with no knowledge of what saints and gods and demons and the like are is a better experience.
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Jun 23, 2021 11:25
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team overhead smash posted:I’d go publication, as I think jumping into Curse of Challion and the sequels with no knowledge of what saints and gods and demons and the like are is a better experience. This. Publication order is a MUCH better reading experience.
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Jun 23, 2021 12:03
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fez_machine posted:This. Publication order is a MUCH better reading experience. Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best.
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Jun 23, 2021 13:49
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wizzardstaff posted:Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best. The only exception I'm aware of is Cornwell's Sharpe series and even there it's arguable. And it's the exception that proves the rule because Cornwell wrote out a detailed outline of sharpest entire career before ever starting to write any of the books.
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Jun 23, 2021 13:53
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wizzardstaff posted:Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best. Reading in-fiction chronological order is okay on a re-read because it can give a different texture to the narrative, but if you're not onboard for seeing the author develop as a writer and extend their ideas as it happens, then you're missing a special joy. There's also sci-fi/fantasy fix ups where the novel is presented in chronological order when the original publication order of the stories was very different. (Absolutely kills some series where your start here introduction is some continuity wank rather than the poo poo that originally got people excited. See Elric and Fafhrd/Grey Mouser for examples).
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Jun 23, 2021 13:56
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wizzardstaff posted:Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best. Discworld. Lonesome Dove quartet.
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Jun 23, 2021 13:58
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wizzardstaff posted:Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best.
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Jun 23, 2021 14:02
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freebooter posted:Discworld. Llamadeus posted:Iain M. Banks's Culture series, there are even posts saying to not start with the first published book in the active Banks thread here Both of these are start anywhere that looks interesting series, go back to the first books if you want. Reading in chronological order would suck for both. In any case, it's a universal truth: Reading in publication order (unless the author really sucked early on) > Dipping in however you like > Reading in chronological order
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Jun 23, 2021 14:12
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I thought the Culture's release and chronological order was the same? The Idiran war is a framing device for the entire series
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Jun 23, 2021 14:19
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not sure if i can read Witness for the Dead yet, I need to finish Ender's Contest first
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Jun 23, 2021 14:23
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multijoe posted:I thought the Culture's release and chronological order was the same? The Idiran war is a framing device for the entire series Yeah, but aside from the odd reference the books are completely unconnected, so you can read em however you like. And the Idiran war is mostly explored in the books that are looking back at the war. The one book set in the war isn't even all that much about the war.
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Jun 23, 2021 14:28
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In retrospect I'm glad my boxed set of narnia was chronological, I got to read the cool somewhat creepier book first.
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Jun 23, 2021 14:52
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ulmont posted:This is more annoying than it used to be, since the switch now kicks out all of your KU books. It can also gently caress up your amazon household if you share prime with family members.
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Jun 23, 2021 18:04
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90s Cringe Rock posted:In retrospect I'm glad my boxed set of narnia was chronological, I got to read the cool somewhat creepier book first. Yeah, I grew up with a boxed set in chronological order (those Chris Van Allsburg cover illustrations are seared into my brain) and had to look up what the original publication order even was. I can't imagine reading The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew as the 5th and 6th books  Writing/publishing the prequel for the entire series at the penultimate book is just wild.
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Jun 23, 2021 19:06
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