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Lampsacus posted:Does anyone know of a sci fi story where an object suddenly appears? For example, a giant pink triangle in the sky. Or an odd enormous sleeping hermit crab on a hill. And it's at least somewhat about people's reaction to the unexplained apparency rather than any answers. got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library A new book of previously untranslated Stanislaw Lem short stories was released recently https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Other-Stories-Stanislaw-Lem-ebook/dp/B08QMRMCNL/ A couple common themes to these stories is either a strange alien lands on Earth that no one can really communicate with or explain in any way, or someone creates a machine intelligence that is completely beyond anything humanity can understand. It’s ridiculously expensive for an ebook though, so it’s probably best if you can find it at a library like I did E. Vandana Singh’s short story collection is also pretty close to Ted Chiang in tone and quality https://www.amazon.com/Ambiguity-Machines-stories-Vandana-Singh/dp/1618731432/ Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 17:43
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StrixNebulosa posted:Huh, saw this on Janny Wurts' twitter: You're in for a treat. The Daughter/Servant/Mistress of the Empire books are absolutely worth reading. They're easily as strong the original Magician. I'd recommend reading Magician:Apprentice, Magician:Master by Feist first, but after that diving into Daughter/Servant/Mistress is very reasonable if you don't want to do Silverthorn and Darkness at Sethanon (they are Feist's next two books). Eventually Feist starts to flag, although people disagree about where. I liked the serpentwar stuff well enough, in particular the coffee house bits were good. Anyways, enjoy!
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Dec 15, 2021 17:50
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StrixNebulosa posted:Huh, saw this on Janny Wurts' twitter: Nobody has mentioned the Licanius trilogy yet so I'll weigh in on that - I've listened to the first two and enjoyed them and fully intend to listen to the third at some point too. They were better than either of the two Sandersons I've read (Elantris and WoK). I tend more to sci fi than fantasy which is why I haven't finished them yet. Fwiw I think my favourite fantasy trilogy of recent times is the Rotherweird series, but they're not secondary world so probably don't make it onto this kind of list.
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Dec 15, 2021 18:30
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:Fwiw I think my favourite fantasy trilogy of recent times is the Rotherweird series, but they're not secondary world so probably don't make it onto this kind of list. What's that about?
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Dec 15, 2021 18:48
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As someone whose not a fan of Sanderson but occasionally likes a dumb fun read I thought 3 was fine but had a ton of wheelspinning before it got to the good stuff. I've never read a Sanderson that didn't feel like it could loose at least a 100 pages though, it's just part of the package.
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Dec 15, 2021 18:59
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Yeah I landed enjoying the first book quite a bit, disliking the second, and enjoying the final pages of the third a lot.
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Dec 15, 2021 19:10
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:Fwiw I think my favourite fantasy trilogy of recent times is the Rotherweird series, but they're not secondary world so probably don't make it onto this kind of list. I almost picked up the first book a month ago when I saw it in a book shop. Seemed interesting, but the synopsis also seemed kinda generic. So it is worth reading?
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Dec 15, 2021 19:26
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library Iraq +100 is very very good. It's a collection of stories all set 100 years after the 2003 invasion by Iraqi authors.
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Dec 15, 2021 19:31
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Lampsacus posted:Does anyone know of a sci fi story where an object suddenly appears? For example, a giant pink triangle in the sky. Or an odd enormous sleeping hermit crab on a hill. And it's at least somewhat about people's reaction to the unexplained apparency rather than any answers. Not quite exactly what you specified, but Hyperpilosity by L. Sprague De Camp and The New Prehistory by Rene Rebetez-Cortes are similar in concept. Both involve humans undergoing an anomalous physical change that is never really explained, and the focus is on people's reactions both on an individual and social level. Oh, and I forgot this earlier in relation to "encyclopedic" sci-fi-- All Tomorrows: https://web.archive.org/web/20061124141617/http://www.nemoramjet.com/alltomorrows.pdf ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 20:53
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Thirding that Divine Cities is a good trilogy. Think a spy novel about the anti-magic British Empire But Indian. That said I dunno it seems a bit too morally squeaky-clean despite being about conducting imperial espionage against exploited subjects, and explicitly trying to discuss why what they are doing is bad. Not sure it passes muster politically against, say, The Maritime Bird Baru Cormorant. Also, people keep writing books about empires where there is an imperial heartland and the colonies and absolutely nothing else exists in the known world. Which IMO absolutely misses half the point of imperialism which is the envy/fear of rival empires and the fact that any day now the Russians are going to find a route through Afghanistan and then the tender heartland of the Raj will be on their dinner plate 
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Dec 15, 2021 21:15
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StrixNebulosa posted:What's that about? Rotherweird is great! Its like a more accessible Gormenghast crossed with classic Adams/Pratchett humor. Small-town British eccentrics being endearingly weird with enough goofy alternate dimension shenanigans and hidden mysteries to make the plot move. Its also a very chill series. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
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Dec 15, 2021 22:11
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Copernic posted:Rotherweird is great! Its like a more accessible Gormenghast crossed with classic Adams/Pratchett humor. Small-town British eccentrics being endearingly weird with enough goofy alternate dimension shenanigans and hidden mysteries to make the plot move. Its also a very chill series. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Oh hey it's 5$ on kindle, I'll give it a gander, thanks! e: wait the whole trilogy is 15$ on kindle on amazon, that's a deal!
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Dec 15, 2021 22:15
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Copernic posted:Rotherweird is great! Its like a more accessible Gormenghast crossed with classic Adams/Pratchett humor. Small-town British eccentrics being endearingly weird with enough goofy alternate dimension shenanigans and hidden mysteries to make the plot move. Its also a very chill series. I recommend it wholeheartedly. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 22:24
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anilEhilated posted:Yeah, they're a lot of fun. They might learn a bit too much onto the "quirky townsfolk" vibe but it's got a fun enough mystery to unravel and some genuine page-turner moments. Nice try, Andrew Caldecott. If you want to astroturf you should try Houston.  E: Better stick to your day job, which is apparently "a Queen's Counsel barrister specializing in media law; he has represented a variety of clients, from the BBC and the Guardian to supermodel Naomi Campbell." Copernic fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Dec 15, 2021 |
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Dec 15, 2021 22:27
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The Trials of Koli (The Rampart #2) by MR Carey - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084215SR3/
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Dec 15, 2021 23:55
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library I've read a bunch of Alastair Reynolds' collections, most recently Beyond the Aquila Rift, and really enjoyed them - I actually think he's better at short fiction than long fiction because he doesn't have space to let his tech exposition (techposition?) lead him down the garden path. For anthologies of multiple authors I also recently re-read Brian Aldiss' A Science Fiction Omnibus for the first time since high school, which I think was probably the first short fiction I ever read apart from stuff assigned to us. There's a bunch of different iterations incorporating newer fiction, but they all have the same core of original stories from the 50s, 60s and 70s, some of which are dated but some of which are still really great.
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Dec 15, 2021 23:58
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Copernic posted:Rotherweird is great! Its like a more accessible Gormenghast crossed with classic Adams/Pratchett humor. Small-town British eccentrics being endearingly weird with enough goofy alternate dimension shenanigans and hidden mysteries to make the plot move. Its also a very chill series. I recommend it wholeheartedly. Exactly this. It has a laid-back rural charm and a quirky, Dickensian, 'cant quite join the modern world' town, which has traditions that feel realistic in a very British way not least because many of them make very little outward sense at all. There's an easy atmosphere about Rotherweird that leads you from the opening fish-out-of-water stuff into a nicely intricate plot.
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Dec 16, 2021 00:12
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library I go into a multi author short story collection expecting to love 20%, dislike 20%
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Dec 16, 2021 00:52
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Anias posted:You're in for a treat. Seconding Feist, I had a lot of fun with those as a teenager, and it’s only rereading as an adult that I can see that they were quite innovative compared with the other stuff coming out at the same time. Also quite horny, he did a book about fairies that was pretty much straight up erotic fiction.
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Dec 16, 2021 01:41
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Selachian posted:And his Spin. Darwinia too also by him. I think I'm due for another reread of that one too.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:25
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard ebook on amazon should have The Drowned Giant in it. For multi-author, the Infinity Project series (Engineering Infinity, Edge of Infinity, Reach For Infinity and like four more) were pretty killer throughout, a lot of very creative hard sci-fi type stuff. For one-author, Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter is great, lots of extremely weird aliens. Brian Evenson's collections aren't all sci-fi, but drat good in general. "Song For The Unraveling of the World" and "The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell" have the highest proportion of sci-fi stuff.
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Dec 16, 2021 07:44
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StrixNebulosa posted:Huh, saw this on Janny Wurts' twitter: I dunno if I’m fifthing this at this point, but Divine Cities is v good and I’d definitely recommend, and that for me Poppy War’s second book really got to be too much of a bummer and I didn’t finish it. Also the Green Bone saga is good, tho I haven’t finished it yet.
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Dec 16, 2021 08:54
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? Things That Never Happen (out of print) or Settling the world by M. John Harrison
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Dec 16, 2021 09:00
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https://twitter.com/CandlemarkGleam/status/1470418092400463876
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Dec 16, 2021 14:54
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got some chores tonight posted:im curious - does anyone have a good anthology of scifi short stories they like? im trying to find a copy of "the drowned giant" to read and im having trouble finding something i can actually check out of the (e-)library Looking back on it, I don't read many multi-author short story collections. Of the ones I've read in the last few years that are actually worth discussing -- - We're the Weird Aliens was probably my favourite overall, an entire book of short stories on the theme of aliens being fascinated and/or freaked out by all the weird biology/culture/etc humans express - Unidentified Funny Objects are SF comedy collections and they were ok but forgettable - The New Space Opera 2 had no stories in it that I loved but lots that I liked, I described it as "solid" - The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination had a few absolute standouts, including "Laughter at the Academy" which is what got me started reading Seanan McGuire, but also some real stinkers which were also, frustratingly, the longest stories in the book Most of my short story intake tends to be single-author collections from authors I already know I like, like Lem's Cyberiad, Yoon Ha Lee's Conservation of Shadows, or Seth Dickinson's shorts (there's no official collection, but there's about a collection's worth of short stories freely available if you're willing to run around to a dozen different websites finding them all).
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Dec 16, 2021 16:10
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They're all linked on my lovely webzone.
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Dec 16, 2021 16:19
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General Battuta posted:They're all linked on my lovely webzone. Yeah, but they're not all hosted there, so there's still a bunch of running around as you follow the links! Worth the effort, though.
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Dec 16, 2021 16:31
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We should go back to webrings.
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Dec 16, 2021 16:37
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:2nding this. Literally the plot is thing appears in area and people wonder why, then poo poo gets weird. And a whole quid in the uk right now if you don't have Unlimited https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AHJIJF2
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Dec 16, 2021 16:53
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packetmantis posted:We should go back to webrings. We didn’t use web rings even when web rings were in use.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:28
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Just finished Shadow of the Torturer and boy am I glad I read this on Kindle; being able to easily look up the etymology of various obscure old English, Latin, Greek, and French words has been fun. For example! I vaguely recalled that Nessus (the name of the city the first book takes place in) was the dude who killed Hercules (sort of), but I had no idea he was also a ferryman. It’s not important to the plot, but it lends more credence to my suspicion that Nessus was once a generation/world ship. Being able to highlight passages to come back to later has also been super helpful. Baldanders talking in his sleep, the scene with Dorcas’ resurrection, various Severian dreams, etc
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Dec 16, 2021 22:31
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A Carly Rae Jihad posted:Just finished Shadow of the Torturer and boy am I glad I read this on Kindle; being able to easily look up the etymology of various obscure old English, Latin, Greek, and French words has been fun. For example! I vaguely recalled that Nessus (the name of the city the first book takes place in) was the dude who killed Hercules (sort of), but I had no idea he was also a ferryman. It’s not important to the plot, but it lends more credence to my suspicion that Nessus was once a generation/world ship. I genuinely put aside Shadow just because my old Kindle has a crappy slow highlight dictionary function, and I really wanted to catch the meanings of those. I should upgrade just for that reason.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:59
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PupsOfWar posted:man whatever happened to tobias s buckell anyway I no longer recall the details, but around 2008-2009 he got clobbered by a Serious Health Issue of some kind. This put him out of commission for a while, and I think it also put some longer term limitations on how fast he could write.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:22
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https://twitter.com/kit_kerr/status/1471631219611688963?s=21
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Dec 17, 2021 01:20
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Famethrowa posted:I genuinely put aside Shadow just because my old Kindle has a crappy slow highlight dictionary function, and I really wanted to catch the meanings of those. I should upgrade just for that reason.
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Dec 17, 2021 04:02
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/rhjozs/the_official_english_release_of_mo_xiang_tong/quote:The Scum Villain's Self Saving System, Heaven Official's Blessing, and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation are the three gay Chinese fantasy romances that have achieved an extreme level of success, Grandmaster in particular with live action and anime adaptations, merchandise, games, etc.,
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Dec 17, 2021 07:12
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Lex Talionis posted:There's no wrong way to read a book and I myself normally break the flow of reading a book to look up any word I don't know, but I can't help but delurk to say that you're not supposed to know the exact meanings of the words used in Book of the New Sun. Few readers at the time would have even owned a sufficiently unabridged dictionary to look them up. They're supposed to wash over you and give the writing an alien-but-still-familiar vibe that I've never seen done anywhere else in quite the same way. It's an old Jack Vance trick taken to its extreme.
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Dec 17, 2021 08:39
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Lex Talionis posted:There's no wrong way to read a book and I myself normally break the flow of reading a book to look up any word I don't know, but I can't help but delurk to say that you're not supposed to know the exact meanings of the words used in Book of the New Sun. Few readers at the time would have even owned a sufficiently unabridged dictionary to look them up. They're supposed to wash over you and give the writing an alien-but-still-familiar vibe that I've never seen done anywhere else in quite the same way. Sure. They’re also written deliberately and a lot of thought went into the choice of words. So I dunno! Looking stuff up is also (1) fun and (2) forces me to pause and think about what I’ve read. It is helpful imo
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Dec 17, 2021 09:09
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Just finished Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds and really enjoyed it. I read Revelation Space years and years ago and was iffy on it so never returned to the series, but then read heaps of his short stories and other novels and liked them, so I came back. I think it's a mixture both of him getting marginally better at writing characters etc, plus me being more willing to tolerate his bullshit, but basically if you're like me and found lots to admire in Revelation Space but also lots to dislike, do give the rest of the series a crack, I think it's worth it. It would actually be really interesting to see someone go in blind and start with his more recent Prefect series (haven't read it, but I understand it's set on Yellowstone during its heyday several centuries prior) and then move onto the Revelation Space series. Like watching Better Call Saul and then Breaking Bad, when poo poo really hits the fan. Lex Talionis posted:There's no wrong way to read a book and I myself normally break the flow of reading a book to look up any word I don't know, but I can't help but delurk to say that you're not supposed to know the exact meanings of the words used in Book of the New Sun. Few readers at the time would have even owned a sufficiently unabridged dictionary to look them up. They're supposed to wash over you and give the writing an alien-but-still-familiar vibe that I've never seen done anywhere else in quite the same way. I dunno, though, figuring out all that stuff was more enjoyable to me than letting it just be part of the atmosphere. I liked (and remember) those books more as puzzles to be solved rather than as actual stories.
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Dec 17, 2021 09:49
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I basically did that, or rather I read Redemption Space + Ark so long ago I forgot most of the details when I read The Prefect. (I had re-read Chasm City more recently) I actually think it works just fine reading them either way around. Blamestorm fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 17, 2021 10:21
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