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MockingQuantum posted:I was iffy on the second book too but I thought HMS Surprise, The Mauritius Command, and Desolation Island may be my favorite books I've read in the last few years. I recently finished Fortunes of War and Surgeon's Mate and while I don't think either of those two are quite as good, they both have their moments, and Surgeon's Mate was surprisingly funny, even by A&M standards so far. I'm still on my first time through the books, but I will say by the third book I feel like they really fall into a good rhythm, where even if you're not crazy about the setting or the plot right at the start of the book, it'll take you through something you're going to enjoy. Just to add to this for any mostly-SFF readers who are iffy about it: I really struggled with the first and second books, because they really can be very 19th century in their manner of writing, O'Brian doesn't spoonfeed you anything and has a disconcerting way of doing jump cuts between scenes that took a while to get used to, and I can fairly say that 50% of it went completely over my head, especially all the naval stuff. By the third book I thought "OK I'm starting to get why so many people love this series," and by the fifth book (especially the chase through sub-Antarctic seas and the collision with the iceberg) I thought "OK I'm now 100% in love with this series too." I don't mean any of that in the "you have to watch this TV show it gets good in the third season" sense; it's more about adjusting to it as a reader, and I have no doubt that when I eventually go back and re-read the early books I'll find them way easier and love them. HA is right that it's technically science fiction and in my opinion it's spiritually fantasy. It does what I enjoy (what I think most of us enjoy) in fantasy: tells an incredibly long story about friends venturing out into the big, wide, unknown world to have adventures. Larry Parrish posted:His just resigned exasperation about every scam Aubrey falls into is funny. Especially because it's basically the exact same reaction Aubrey has about Marturin being a weirdo. quote:“Stephen, have you forgot breakfast?”
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Jan 24, 2022 23:33
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can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? I'm reading the Damned trilogy by Alan Dean Foster right now and I really like everything with alien culture differences but I'm meh on the humans being the Only Ones Barbaric Enough To Wage War stuff I've read a lot in the category, my favorite sci-fi series of all time is the Culture books, for example, hence trying to find less known stuff. Thanks!!!! E: To try and think of some I've read that others probably haven't, one that comes to mind is John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, which I liked better than his Old Man's War stuff but never see mentioned anywhere. AARD VARKMAN fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 00:08
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Cherryh? Although she's very well known. I hesitate to recommend a web series but "War Queen" on Royal Road is very entertaining as well.
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Jan 25, 2022 00:18
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? I assume that you've already read a fat stack of C.J. Cherryh, because basically all of her SF that isn't the Alliance-Union books is exactly what you're looking for and she is not, I hope, that obscure. Flipping through my journal, there's a lot of stuff that qualifies but most of it is by fairly high-profile authors you've probably already read like Becky Chambers, Timothy Zahn, and Elizabeth Moon. I had not realized before how much of the "small-name" SF I read features zero aliens.
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Jan 25, 2022 00:19
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Yeah I love C.J. Cherryh! I've read lots of her stuff. She ranks up there with Banks and Vernor Vinge for my favorite frequent writers of aliens, although I guess I only read the 2 Vinge books? they were so good he's up there any way. seriously A Deepness In The Sky is so damned good 
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Jan 25, 2022 00:26
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ToxicFrog posted:I assume that you've already read a fat stack of C.J. Cherryh, because basically all of her SF that isn't the Alliance-Union books is exactly what you're looking for and she is not, I hope, that obscure. Any specific recommendations on either Zahn or Elizabeth Moon? I only know of Zahn from Star Wars (which I'm not reading  ) and Elizabeth Moon is a blank spot for me apparently. Becky Chambers I've read and enjoyed
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Jan 25, 2022 00:31
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Aardvark! posted:Any specific recommendations on either Zahn or Elizabeth Moon? I only know of Zahn from Star Wars (which I'm not reading Zahn's "The Icarus Hunt" is a fun sci-fi novel. Totally stand alone, no sequels and not part of a series. Just a good read. I haven't read Moon's "The Deed of Paksenarrion," but I feel like that is what one often sees recommended when her name comes up
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Jan 25, 2022 00:46
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Aardvark! posted:Any specific recommendations on either Zahn or Elizabeth Moon? I only know of Zahn from Star Wars (which I'm not reading For Zahn, off the top of my head, The Green and the Grey is SF about aliens living among us initially disguised as urban fantasy, and the Conquerers trilogy starts off as humans-vs-aliens total war but halfway through it becomes more about diplomacy and coexistence (although since it's Zahn there's still a lot of laserspewpew). Oh, and The Icarus Hunt isn't really about aliens but does feature them. For Elizabeth Moon I was specifically thinking of Remnant Population, which is about an isolated human bonding with the aliens native to the planet she's on. E: The Deed of Paksenarrion is fantasy and not about aliens, so not in scope
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Jan 25, 2022 00:46
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Embassytown by Mieville is all about language and thought as people coexist with an extremely alien species. The Book of Strange New Things is about a pastor going to an alien planet to minister to the aliens there and is mostly about him trying to understand the alien civilization. It’s extremely good. Under the Skin by the same author also fits and is excellent (but more violent/disturbing). I don’t want to spoil anything more about it but really, more people should be reading it.
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Jan 25, 2022 01:30
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Ancestral Night and Machine by Elizabeth Bear are both real good. Def in the "gay-future-space-utopian-communist" spectrum that Becky Chambers lords over like a benevolent goddess, but a few notches down on the gay slash utopian scale. Machine in particular is I think an homage to the Sector General series and very fun and sad. The protag has chronic? undiagnosable? pain (I'm not sure of the word for folks who suffer long term from stuff that isn't yet diagnosable) which was an interesting thing to see a protagonist deal with. Highly recommend. Both feature a pleathora of aliens, AIs, etc... and most certainly aren't milsci
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Jan 25, 2022 01:32
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore. Wasn't really my cup of tea but it's definitely a more obscure book about a human trying to deal with the cultures of multiple alien species.
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Jan 25, 2022 01:59
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Okay you read Cherryh, now try these: This Alien Shore by CS Friedman. Instead of aliens you get humanity sending out a thousand colony ships and everyone gets mutated and meets back up together with weird new cultures. Great cyberpunk/sci-fi weirdness, I adored this book. A Judgment of Dragons by Phyllis Gotlieb, a brief snippet from my review: quote:A Judgment of Dragons is a set of four novellas that form a single novel. Despite being novellas you shouldn't start anywhere - they reference previous novellas and are meant to be read in chronological order. The Species Imperative trilogy by Julie E Czerneda is her best work, imho. It's about a salmon researcher getting kidnapped by aliens and she has to learn their culture while negotiating with other aliens to solve a huge galactic mystery. It feels very, VERY star trek in a good way, and how optimistic it is. The Jani Killian Chronicles series - five books, some of my very favorites. It starts very thriller sci-fi but evolves into political sci-fi with a side of space opera as - okay, this is gonna get complicated. I forget the precise details, but Earth met aliens, and the aliens held a civil war, and Earth helped out. Jani Killian was one of those diplomat-soldiers, and we open the series with her living on a colony on the run from everyone, as she had to fake her death to escape some horrifying revelations. A spoiler that's revealed by the end of the first book (or sooner, it's been too long) and is on the back of the second book: she was medically altered to be a human-alien hybrid, and that means weird changes for her body. You can absolutely bet there are all kinds of political fallout from this. I really liked how the series really dug into human-alien relations and had to claw its bloody way towards peace. I also loved the look at PTSD, and a dash of romance, and just - ugh now I want to reread them, they're some of my favorite novels of all time. And finally, to close out this post, Banner of Souls by Liz Williams. More fantasy than sci-fi, with tech so futuristic it's like reading a mythic fairy tale at points. I'll quote a review from someone else: quote:In the first chapter, you follow a woman named Dreams-Of-War as she has her ability to empathize re-activated to make her a more zealous bodyguard. Then she gets into something like a space-shuttle with a kappa, who has an actual depression on top of her head, and leaves Mars for earth. The kappa is a lab-tech, and Dreams-Of-War wears armour made out of a ghost. Listen, this is me trying to make it clearer.
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Jan 25, 2022 02:05
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Czernada's Species Imperative was the series I was going to post for aliens.
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Jan 25, 2022 02:16
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Read James Alan Gardner's Expendable scifi series. It is pretty decently written, has a galactic federation full of aliens and alien civilizations whose key conceit/gimmick is that murderers cannot travel to other star systems. Avoiding murder, bastards that exploit loopholes in GalFed law, political intrigues and exploring strange new worlds while trying to not to be killed is a running theme in the stories.
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Jan 25, 2022 02:17
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buffalo all day posted:Embassytown by Mieville is all about language and thought as people coexist with an extremely alien species. e: I'd also throw in The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 02:19
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? No one ever reads Shikasta. Fifth Head of Cerebus by Wolfe is one of my better reads on the topic of "aliens" as well. shirunei fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 02:22
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Ccs posted:So I finished KJ Parker's "A Practical Guide to Conquering the World", which concludes his "Seige" trilogy (though there's not really much of any seiges in this one.) It returns to all of Parker's usual beloved subjects, but since 2015's "Savages" he's been much better about tailoring his interests towards what people actually want to read about instead of going on a 5 page tangent about the construction bows (there is a bit about bow building in this one but its only half a page and the narrator even says "what I find interesting other people don't, so skip this section if" or something to that effect.) I finished this book today. Read most of it on a relatively quiet night on call yesterday. I liked it too. It goes a bit further than the previous two books on post-truth narrative with Parker's "really well read guy owns conventional brain morons" themes that he has previously written, but I (personally) didn't feel it was overdone.
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Jan 25, 2022 02:36
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Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and its sequel is arguably about aliens as well. I mean they might as well be aliens.
Doktor Avalanche fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 02:47
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Brunner's Crucible of Time is a fun one about aliens, with no humans present whateoever.
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Jan 25, 2022 03:14
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? I'm in the midst of A Woman of the Iron People at the moment, and so far it seems to fit the bill, especially on the "obscure but actually good" side of things. It's anthropological SF with a very Ursula K. Le Guin feel, so it's perhaps unsurprising that Le Guin was a fan and spoke highly of it. The pitch is that a slower-than-light ship from Earth arrives at an earthlike world, and finds it inhabited by alien cultures in the early stages of metallurgy, with a life-cycle that forces segregation of the sexes. We alternate perspectives between the titular Woman of the Iron People, a native smith, and an anthropologist from the ship who embeds with the aliens to learn their culture. The characters are well-drawn, the culture is interesting, and the prose is deliberately and pleasantly restrained. The caveat is that I haven't finished this yet, and "books Le Guin likes" are not necessarily free of humans doing terrible things to aliens, but so far it doesn't feel like that kind of story.
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Jan 25, 2022 03:14
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Double-posting because I've just realized nobody has mentioned The Sparrow yet. buffalo all day posted:The Book of Strange New Things is about a pastor going to an alien planet to minister to the aliens there and is mostly about him trying to understand the alien civilization. It’s extremely good. Under the Skin by the same author also fits and is excellent (but more violent/disturbing). I don’t want to spoil anything more about it but really, more people should be reading it. In a similar vein to The Book of Strange New Things, another recommendation, albeit a significantly less cozy one: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. This one is a Jesuit expedition to make first contact with a culture discovered when SETI picks up radio broadcasts of astonishingly beautiful music - but the expedition goes horribly wrong, and the only survivor returns to Earth a broken man. We alternate between the Jesuits' doomed journey and first contact efforts, and the priest's physical, psychological, and spiritual convalescence back on Earth. Beautifully written, vividly realized characters, nicely alien aliens, I would unhesistatingly recommend The Sparrow to anyone except that it also needs some strong content warnings: infanticide, sexual assault, and disfigurement are all present, though none of them happen "on screen".
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Jan 25, 2022 03:29
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On the other hand I thought the ending of the Sparrow was so bad it made me angry I had wasted any time on the rest of it.
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Jan 25, 2022 04:07
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Man these Sten Chronicles mil-scifi books are even worse than I remembered on a re-read. Sten book 1: already recapped it in the mil-scifi thread Sten book 2: Sten solves the middle-east crisis Sten book 3: Day of the Jackal featuring Cagney & Sten book 4: Sten vs World War 2 Japan pt1 Sten book 5: The great escape (1963 movie) + Sten finishes off World War 2 Japan pt2 Sten book 6: Waiting for Sten book 7: Oh Crap. The Eternal Emperor came back from the dead wrong Sten book 8: The Eternal Emperor isn't so Eternal after all vs Sten's plot armor + the secret origins of the Eternal Emperor Having re-read the Sten series, going to focus on something interesting like 2014's NaNoGenMo "the seeker" which seems to be about a n A.I. system learning about humans from wikihow dot com articles
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Jan 25, 2022 05:12
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If someone's never read Cherryh, where would a good place to start be?ShutteredIn posted:On the other hand I thought the ending of the Sparrow was so bad it made me angry I had wasted any time on the rest of it. I definitely didn't feel like it needed that sequel.
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Jan 25, 2022 07:12
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You know, if I wanted to read about a galactic war led by an undying emperor who is actually a modern guy who constantly makes references to ancient memes, I would read the other series.
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Jan 25, 2022 09:08
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big dyke energy posted:If someone's never read Cherryh, where would a good place to start be? I really really liked the “foreigner” series, but then I have always had a soft spot for stories where people try to fix issues through diplomacy and understanding. (And then hire assassins if it didn’t work but eh)
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Jan 25, 2022 09:13
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tokenbrownguy posted:Ancestral Night and Machine by Elizabeth Bear are both real good. Def in the "gay-future-space-utopian-communist" spectrum that Becky Chambers lords over like a benevolent goddess, but a few notches down on the gay slash utopian scale. Long time bear fan here but hated ancestral night. Jacobs Ladder series would be my closest recommendation but it's more transhumans on a long lost generation ship. It's quite visceral. Maybe Tanya Huff Confereration? It's military but pansexual, the military is made up of four races battling on behalf of evolved elder races. Human Sgt provides pastoral care, emotional support and kills poo poo with a bunch of aliens.
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Jan 25, 2022 09:27
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shirunei posted:No one ever reads Shikasta. Doris Lessing's SF series ? That was a thick read, but few works have ever laid bare the essentials of the human condition more clearly.
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Jan 25, 2022 10:42
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quantumfoam posted:Man these Sten Chronicles mil-scifi books are even worse than I remembered on a re-read. Yeah, they're okay at best, not good but readable enough compared to "worse than self-published trash" like the Deathstalker series. One thing I noticed when I read it was it felt like the authors would quite often introduce some technology or device or concept or whatever and then never mention it again in favor of referencing some movie or historic event or whatever. Like even the protagonist's super cool trench knife manages to start getting ignored after a while.
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Jan 25, 2022 11:37
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series is totally focused on alien cultures, each book is named after the alien species and culture it focuses on. They're presented as a problem to solve for the protagonist but Vance is so good at Anthropological Sci-Fi that you get a lot of depth. Robert Reed's Great Ship short stories are focused on aliens and humans who might as well be aliens, although the novels are much more focused on human side of things. Eleanor Arnason's Hwarhath series is divided into two parts. Ring of Swords is a novel about the first complications of human contact. The second is a series of short stories in part about how the aliens post-contact retell and reinterpret human stories and how that effects their society/culture, they're all collected in Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. If you want a cornucopia of leads then the SFE entry on Aliens is a good place to start: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aliens fez_machine fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 11:38
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I started reading The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and was mostly enjoying it until I got to the fourth person where the book decides to just constantly talk about how gross and fat this guy is and he's so fat he can't do anything by himself and so on. The whole thing comes off as extremely weird because of how over the top it is.
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Jan 25, 2022 13:34
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I read that as the narrator being freaked out about being placed in a completely different body but I agree it's laid on pretty thick.
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Jan 25, 2022 13:47
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Hey I'm in the middle of reading that too and that was about my opinion on the section as well. I'm still reading to see where it goes, but right now I feel like there was a fine line to walk and the writing tipped too far in the wrong direction. Like, it's definitely something that would just turn off a lot of readers, whether or not it's justified by the writing later.
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Jan 25, 2022 13:59
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I can see the point in mentioning it because it limits what the main character can do that day but the descriptions about being embarrassed and grossed out come across more like the author hates fat people.
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Jan 25, 2022 14:24
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big dyke energy posted:If someone's never read Cherryh, where would a good place to start be? StrixNebulosa posted:The Cherryh fangirl has logged on
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Jan 25, 2022 15:09
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This thread is making me feel very lonely in not enjoying Between Two Fires at all. Had to drag myself through it over weeks and weeks. Gloomy, repetitive, and I generally hate dream sequences, of which it had plenty. Project Hail Mary was a lot of fun, though. I've only watched the movie version of The Martian prior, so I didn't have high hopes, but it surprised me in a good way. Coming into it without having read any synopsis was probably helpful, since it matched the plot so well. And thanks for the heads-up on The Pariah. I really liked the author's debut work Blood Song, and this was similarly focused and enjoyable, whereas the old series' sequels kind of got lost in too many character PoVs for my liking.
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Jan 25, 2022 15:19
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Aardvark! posted:can anyone recommend some lesser known one-offs or series that feature aliens, preferably not just being murdered by humans? I recall a very much younger me enjoying James Horgan's Giant's Star https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776485.Giants_Star
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Jan 25, 2022 16:16
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ToxicFrog posted:For Elizabeth Moon I was specifically thinking of Remnant Population, which is about an isolated human bonding with the aliens native to the planet she's on. Remnant Population is one of the included books on Audible, for anyone who has a subscription. I haven't got around to it yet myself but it's on the list.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:19
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darkgray posted:This thread is making me feel very lonely in not enjoying Between Two Fires at all. Had to drag myself through it over weeks and weeks. Gloomy, repetitive, and I generally hate dream sequences, of which it had plenty. I'm a huge fan of BtF, to the extent I've been reading all the author's other works too, but I think this is a fair critique. I will say I didn't read the visions as "dream sequences" as such, but as things that were actually happening, it's just that reality wasn't exactly stable and/or human perception was limited. But I can see a reading where it's all just dreams and then yeah the book would feel much less consequential throughout.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:26
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I was gonna say, I remember a lot of explicitly supernatural things happening because demons and angels are around, and not many dream sequences, but maybe I missed an implication somewhere.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:31
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