Alhazred posted:

On Arrakis the conditions are so harsh that the fremen have to recycle their own body fluids. But they still have water enough to brew coffee.

Alhazred posted:

On Arrakis the conditions are so harsh that the fremen have to recycle their own body fluids. But they still have water enough to brew coffee.

branedotorg posted:

Has anyone read the new Anthony Ryan?

It's not bad, it's first person story about a young thief recounting his adventures from old age.

Low fantasy, no magic (yet) and pretty readable but I'm only 1/4 of the way through.

** The pariah ** also now some magic has sort of appeared. It's probably the thing of his I've enjoyed the most, after some very up and down stuff.

Cardiac posted:

Is the thief named Kvothe?

buffalo all day posted:

I finally read Piranesi and wow that was unbelievable. So good and such beautiful writing.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

In the movie they all take turns spitting in the pot. That, as gross as it is, explains a bit.

Alhazred posted:

The fremen spits to show how much they like you...and also when they make coffee.

branedotorg posted:

It's more black tongue thief than name of the wind so far, with a little bit of KJ Parker's scavenger. The protagonist certainly isn't preternaturally talented at music, magic and sex like kvothe

It's not ground breaking but it's enjoyable and I'll preorder the second.

quote:

Deep in the Mash, the path wound tortuously between umber-iron bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow geld streams, and fringed by silver reeds. The trees were smooth-barked, yellow-ochre and burnt-orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy light. At their roots grew tall black grasses and great clumps of multifaceted transparent crystal, like alien fungi.
 Charcoal-grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as they floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long wicked bodies glittered green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining ephemera and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise.
Over everything hung the oppressive stench of rotting metal.

quote:

By mid-morning they had crossed the last of them and entered the marsh.
It began as a few thickets of low trees, strangely shaped but still recognisable as thorn or bullace, through which meandered a river flanked by dense reedbeds a bright unnatural ochre colour. The thickets closed up; the river was soon lost, going to feed iron bogs, then quicksands of suspended magnesium or aluminium alloys, and finally sumps of thick whitish slurry marbled with streaks of mauve or oily cadmium yellow. What paths there were wound between steep-sided pits, along crumbling ridges and promontories of soft discoloured earth. The trees of the interior were of quite unknown kinds, black and burnt-orange, with smooth-barked tapering stems; their tightly woven foliage, rarely more than fifteen feet above the surface of the bog, tinted the light a frail organic pink, which seemed sometimes to be veined like the lobe of a very delicate ear. Moving furtively, as if they had been crippled, or as if they had only just learned how to breath air, frogs and small lizards floundered from sump to sump; they swam with equal difficulty, hurt perhaps by the water, and after some apparently aimless, undirected activity, always struggled to leave it at the same place they had entered. There were insects in the trees, with papery, inutile wings a foot long; they seemed to have too many legs.

Groke posted:

Well you loving HAVE to have coffee or life would be completely unbearable.

freebooter posted:

I read Revelation Space years ago and had mixed feelings about it, went on to read a bunch of Reynolds' other books and really liked them (Pushing Ice, House of Suns, most of his short fiction) and then figured I might as well go back and finish the Revelation Space trilogy. So I just finished Chasm City which it turns out isn't part of that trilogy but takes place in the same universe, and although it has all the same flaws as Revelation Space (expository dialogue, bloated writing, all the characters feeling and talking like autistics or psychopaths) I was more forgiving of them. Really enjoyed it. In fact I've read a string of clunkers across the past few months and this was the first book in a while where reading it felt enjoyable rather than a chore.

I saw somebody describing Dune as "mostly vibes" the other day (as a compliment) and I think that applies to Reynolds as well, particularly the Revelation Space series. He's really, really good at imparting this atmosphere of a big frightening universe with Gothic horror vibes; a place where every human or alien you encounter is probably going to be hostile and nothing good is ever going to happen to you. Which goes hand in hand with my favourite crossover genre of sci-fi plus creepy mystery, exemplified in Chasm City by the "ghost" ship trailing the interstellar convoy which the main character eventually realises isn't a myth after all.

freebooter posted:

(expository dialogue, bloated writing, all the characters feeling and talking like autistics or psychopaths)

packetmantis posted:

freebooter posted:

I didn't mean that these are the same thing, I meant all his characters are either one or the other. I'm sure Mr Reynolds is a very nice man but in his early writing career he didn't seem to understand how people actually talk to each other. Every character is either Machiavelli or Basil Exposition.

freebooter posted:

all the characters feeling and talking like autistics

freebooter posted:

I didn't mean that these are the same thing,

freebooter posted:

he didn't seem to understand how people actually talk to each other. Every character is either Machiavelli or Basil Exposition.

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

I try to stay in my lane and write characters with combat depression

pseudorandom name posted:

What about Ghost in the Shell calling the cyberbrain airplane mode "autistic mode"?

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

I try to stay in my lane and write characters with combat depression

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

I try to stay in my lane and write characters with combat depression

Quorum posted:

Personally my experience of autism is that I would be loving garbage at combat, lmao. Being constantly inundated with a tide of sensations and stimuli, and having to actively exert cognitive resources to tune them out, seems counterproductive for getting in fights! Plus the emotional gut punch of actually hurting someone? No thank you!

Sinatrapod posted:

Yeah, particularly earlier on reading Reynolds was all about the spectacle and the worldbuilding, not for the people. He does get better at it, at least to the point where his characters don't actively detract from the enjoyment as he goes along and there's few people who can match him for Big Weird Space poo poo.

pseudorandom name posted:

What about Ghost in the Shell calling the cyberbrain airplane mode "autistic mode"?

freebooter posted:

I remember reading House of Suns and feeling glad that he'd realised not every character needs to be a completely amoral rear end in a top hat; not every verbal exchange needs to be dripping with hostile contempt. Aside from being unrealistic it just gets boring!

pseudorandom name posted:

What about Ghost in the Shell calling the cyberbrain airplane mode "autistic mode"?

secular woods sex posted:

I feel like there is a subset of people who assume that autism also confers savant status in something. Combat savantism would have gotten the point across better in my opinion.