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i would like parker's books a lot more if they had fewer horrific plots and more digressions into The Way Things Used to Work
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Aug 29, 2021 20:10
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splifyphus posted:I just finished the sequel Children of Ruin and I highly reccomend it. If you like the first one you'll love the second, it's a variation on the same theme of alternate evolutionary paths taken by terraforming experiments. Spider biotechnology is loving amazing. Awesome. On the list.
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Aug 29, 2021 20:19
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I recently finished MR Forbes The Forgotten trilogy. It was one of Amazon's 99 cent deals, so I figured, why not? It's a generation ship saga with an interesting twist. Lots of generic sci-fi characters and tropes, but I give it credit for the actual twist. The ship never left Earth.
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Aug 29, 2021 23:38
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wasn't that the plot and hook of a tv series a few years back?
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Aug 30, 2021 05:46
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Every time people talk about Parker I think it's the blonde thief. 
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Aug 30, 2021 05:53
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Horizon Burning posted:wasn't that the plot and hook of a tv series a few years back? Ascenscion. It was a miniseries pilot that never got the Battlestar treatment.
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Aug 30, 2021 06:55
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Horizon Burning posted:wasn't that the plot and hook of a tv series a few years back? Top of my head: recent show I saw on Netflix I am too lazy to look up now, Soviet seventies era children’s movie, Pelevin’s Omon Ra. I’m sure there was more.
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Aug 30, 2021 06:56
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Yeah, it's a fairly obvious twist, must have been invented a number of times.
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Aug 30, 2021 07:08
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packetmantis posted:Every time people talk about Parker I think it's the blonde thief. Nice ref! I always think J. Jonah Jamison yelling "PARKER!" myself. 
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Aug 30, 2021 07:21
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Groke posted:Yeah, it's a fairly obvious twist, must have been invented a number of times. The earliest example I can remember off the top of my head is a Bruce Sterling short story, I think in the same universe as Are You 486?, involving somebody breaking into an underground Chinese facility where there are three separate instances in various states success or failure.
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Aug 30, 2021 07:40
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pseudorandom name posted:The earliest example I can remember off the top of my head is a Bruce Sterling short story, I think in the same universe as Are You 486?, involving somebody breaking into an underground Chinese facility where there are three separate instances in various states success or failure. Taklamakan is a good as hell story. Especially because if you're reading it a random collection, it starts off as just another bullshit Cyberpunk Techno Thriller and then become about someone completely out of their depth dealing with a humanitarian disaster.
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Aug 30, 2021 08:54
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What's J.G. Ballard's best novel?
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Aug 30, 2021 11:40
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FPyat posted:What's J.G. Ballard's best novel? Empire of the Sun.
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Aug 30, 2021 11:52
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Groke posted:Yeah, it's a fairly obvious twist, must have been invented a number of times. It was the first time I've seen it.
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Aug 30, 2021 12:45
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FPyat posted:What's J.G. Ballard's best novel? I really liked High Rise but it's not gonna be for everyone.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:12
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Empire of the Sun for me too.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:44
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Mister Kingdom posted:It was the first time I've seen it. As a concept it's loving difficult to google because you just end up with a poo poo-ton of conspiracy crap about fake moon landings and whatnot. There was "Capricorn One" in the seventies, but in that the astronauts were in on it. There's a load of old stories about hosed-up generation ships where the people don't know they're on a ship, that's somewhat related.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:49
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FPyat posted:What's J.G. Ballard's best novel? I really love The Drowned World, The Crystal World, and Hello America, besides the novels already mentioned. If you like more experimental books, The Atrocity Exhibition is very much for you.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:53
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Partial to Crash since I think about it a lot more but there aren’t really any wrong answers, Empire is amazing but I suspect I missed a lot. Dolan talked about it in a recent Radio War Nerd so I might pick it up again, something about the protofascist in young men that I don’t recall - or didn’t get.
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Aug 30, 2021 14:14
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fez_machine posted:Taklamakan is a good as hell story. Especially because if you're reading it a random collection, it starts off as just another bullshit Cyberpunk Techno Thriller and then become about someone completely out of their depth dealing with a humanitarian disaster. Huh, that was published a lot later than I assumed.
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Aug 30, 2021 14:59
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I posted earlier in the thread that Neill Blomkamp was on Joe Rogan's podcast and mentioned he was working with Peter Watts on his next movie because he loved Blindsight, but I never finished the podcast. Turns out Neil spoke in more detail about it later in the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s8eQWtdA_E So he is specifically taking Watt's idea of vampires from Blindsight and turning that into a movie. Sounds really good and I love all of Blomkamp's work and Blindsight is my favorite sci-fi novel. I am beyond pumped.
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Aug 30, 2021 15:12
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Top of my head: recent show I saw on Netflix I am too lazy to look up now, Soviet seventies era children’s movie, Pelevin’s Omon Ra. I’m sure there was more. There's a Spanish TV show Orbiter 9, it's on Netflix so that might be it (or it could be Ascension like someone else said). There's also We Have Always Lived On Mars, which is a Tor short story from 2013.
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Aug 30, 2021 18:20
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Narmi posted:There's also We Have Always Lived On Mars, which is a Tor short story from 2013. I hope this is a We Have Always Lived In The Castle reference.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:21
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D-Pad posted:So he is specifically taking Watt's idea of vampires from Blindsight and turning that into a movie. Sounds really good and I love all of Blomkamp's work and Blindsight is my favorite sci-fi novel. I am beyond pumped. I was annoyed that the only thing that he seemed interested in making a movie about was that character in a presumably very different movie/plot than Blindsight. Just make Blindsight!
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Aug 30, 2021 19:44
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The best of the Discworld books, Night Watch, is on sale for $2.99: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B000W912Q0/
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Aug 30, 2021 19:46
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BananaNutkins posted:I was annoyed that the only thing that he seemed interested in making a movie about was that character in a presumably very different movie/plot than Blindsight. Just make Blindsight! As much as I would love this a big part of the magic of Blindsight is the view from the narrator's very unique brain and I see no way to do that on the screen.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:47
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withak posted:I hope this is a We Have Always Lived In The Castle reference. Just a coincidence, it's not really similar. (e: I'm assuming at least.) Narmi fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 21:44
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Paladin of Souls (Chalion #2) by Lois McMaster Bujold - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC138Q/ Red Country (First Law) by Joe Abercrombie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076DEJMO/ Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0013TX6FI/ The Death of Dulgath (Riyria Chronicles #3) by Michael J Sullivan - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014WOCH0A/
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Aug 30, 2021 22:23
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withak posted:I hope this is a We Have Always Lived In The Castle reference. That book owns.
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Aug 30, 2021 22:28
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D-Pad posted:As much as I would love this a big part of the magic of Blindsight is the view from the narrator's very unique brain and I see no way to do that on the screen. Siri Keeton’s job is to explain what’s going on to the people back home, he could narrate the entire thing.
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Aug 30, 2021 22:40
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The real magic of Blindsight was the frequent footnotes in it keeping Peter Watts writing style in check for as long as it did. Remake the old Italian horror-scifi movie Planet of the Vampires with some of Blindsight's content the perfectly camouflaging drones moving in sync to eyeball saccades & the alien bio-matter absorbing and corrupting the quantum stream back home and you'd have a near perfect scifi horror movie. Keep those spacesuits & high-vis planetary exploration suits too.
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Aug 31, 2021 01:34
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quantumfoam posted:The real magic of Blindsight was the frequent footnotes in it keeping Peter Watts writing style in check for as long as it did. But it doesn't have any footnotes! At least not the version I read, where footnotes were purely confined to the 'notes and references' section after the novel proper.
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Aug 31, 2021 02:28
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I think that Blindsight kept Watts on track by having a common genre trope (the first contact/derelict spaceship plot). The tension and the horror are built in, and he still had a little room to some great ideas on the page, but there were rails he was constrained to, and that's a good thing.
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Aug 31, 2021 04:35
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HopperUK posted:I really liked High Rise but it's not gonna be for everyone. i like high rise best too but drowned world is also fun.
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Aug 31, 2021 05:20
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I have a question for some of you sci-fi historians here. In K W Jeter's novel Noir, in the author section there is this An essay on the copyright issues raised in his novel NOIR can be located at http://www.europa.com/~jeter/copyrights.html But it that site doesn't exist anymore and my google skills are not up to finding it anywhere. I am curious to know more of his beliefs because of the weird contradiction here. In novels he does take some weird views on copyright, like in Noir, a suspected digital book pirate gets their brain cored out so it can be installed into a toaster to suffer for life, because just executing book pirates wasn't enough to stop people. Or in Farewell Horizontal the MC is an artist for DRM controlled tattoos, which then get hacked. So from that it looks like he thinks this copyright enforcement is going too crazy, but then in an interview he said "I’m not so sure that Noir is an anti-capitalist novel, so much as it is, like the George Dower novels, simply anti-modernist – again, more of that Madlands nostalgia for a poorly remembered & factually, if not emotionally, inaccurate past. In terms of a particular theme, I’m still a soldier in the fight against the anti-copyright techno-jihadists – which now seems like a fight that my side has pretty much won, except for a few remaining rearguard skirmishes. Some of the anti-copyright crowd have revealed their true colors lately, such as with the so-called Electronic Frontier Foundation coming out in favor of online censorship. In that sense, Noir was prescient in detecting that some people’s definition of freedom is “You’re free to do what we want you to do"
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Aug 31, 2021 09:36
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ianmacdo posted:I have a question for some of you sci-fi historians here. His views may have changed since, but I remember an interview at the time where he came across as being so obsessed with book piracy that "core pirates' brains so they can suffer literal eternal torture for the crime of violating copyright" (or at least execute them) was his personal fantasy.
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Aug 31, 2021 14:23
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I didn't know that about Jeter, but now I'm glad that the only novel of his I ever read ('Farewell Horizontal') I bought used.
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Aug 31, 2021 15:09
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Ripped through The Space Between Worlds in like 2 days. It makes a nice counterpoint to The Gone World: both deal with travelling between timelines/within the multiverse as a job, but where GW is tense and grim, like a sci-fi True Detective, this feels more like an action flick. Basically a girl from the slums gets a chance to travel to other timelines and collect information (financial, demographic, public health, etc.), with the conceit that you can only travel to worlds that A) are very similar to your original, baseline world and B) that the “you” in that world is dead. The slums are on the edge of a Mad Max wasteland where the sun starts to burn you in minutes, but have a strong sense of culture and traditions, while the city is a bright and shiny dome with multiple layers and lots of boring rich folks. You get the sense that you’re in a distant-ish future where climate change fractured civilization, but the main focus stays on the characters, with themes of redemption, rebirth, whether to overcome or embrace your origins, etc. It doesn’t really engage with the sci-fi trappings too much; the universe travel process seems to be “get into an unobtainium chamber and get vibrated into another dimension”, and they hand-wave away how they communicate in real time while in separate universes, but honestly the lack of technobabble was refreshing. Apparently it’s Micaiah Johnson’s first novel, definitely someone to watch for. Started Rosewater, it was kind of off putting at first but it’s starting to grow on me. Alien dome springs up in Nigeria and heals all ailments, sometimes with unexpected consequences. Also there’s mind readers. Another Dirty Dish fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Aug 31, 2021 |
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Aug 31, 2021 16:48
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ianmacdo posted:I have a question for some of you sci-fi historians here. Nice, I am sure he loves libraries.
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Aug 31, 2021 17:04
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ianmacdo posted:I have a question for some of you sci-fi historians here. Here, dig away https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.europa.com/~jeter/copyrights.html The best underrated fantasy/urban fantasy book for me is Monday Begins on Saturday, which is Soviet 5 year-plans for science meshed with Russian folklore and more. There is also Greek Hundred-Handed Ones, personal cloning, ultimate archetypes, time machines, stable time loops, etc in it. Both english translations of MBoS are good, the older english translation captures more of the planned science-Soviet bureaucracy vibe while the newer english translation has more modern phrasing and overall reads more cleanly than the older translation.
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Aug 31, 2021 17:47
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