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HopperUK posted: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. There are definitely several parts where Thomas wakes up after a particularly intense bout of supernatural bullshit that are ambiguously dreams or reality. Especially as the book goes on though I was reading it as reality itself breaking down more than dream stuff.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:39
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Uh, maybe you're taking it too literally. By "dream sequences" I lump together scenes where reality warps a lot, like hallucinations or visions. The way they're often described in fiction makes me lose interest fast. I do understand that there's an element of soul interaction or whatever in this particular case, but it doesn't make me more excited. Few things are as boring as people describing their bizarre nightmares, even if they happen to be "real", I guess. Maybe this is just me rejecting horror as an entire genre.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:45
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thank you all for the recs on more alien books, lots to look at that I haven't read or considered before so I am stoked there also put me down for despising dream sequences in books. there's only one thing that makes me start skimming faster and that's Original Song Lyrics lol. I even groaned whenever the dream sequences started in The Name Of The Rose
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Jan 25, 2022 16:50
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darkgray posted:Uh, maybe you're taking it too literally. By "dream sequences" I lump together scenes where reality warps a lot, like hallucinations or visions. The way they're often described in fiction makes me lose interest fast. I do understand that there's an element of soul interaction or whatever in this particular case, but it doesn't make me more excited. Few things are as boring as people describing their bizarre nightmares, even if they happen to be "real", I guess. Maybe this is just me rejecting horror as an entire genre. Oh gosh yeah, if you don't like that then I can see why you didn't like Between Two Fires, haha. The breakdown of reality and the failure of logic is a big part of what's going on there. Maybe more direct horror is more for you if you want that sort of feeling? Where the horror is like, monsters, or big rats, or horrid slugs or something, rather than the more existential stuff.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:51
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darkgray posted:Uh, maybe you're taking it too literally. By "dream sequences" I lump together scenes where reality warps a lot, like hallucinations or visions. The way they're often described in fiction makes me lose interest fast. I do understand that there's an element of soul interaction or whatever in this particular case, but it doesn't make me more excited. Few things are as boring as people describing their bizarre nightmares, even if they happen to be "real", I guess. Maybe this is just me rejecting horror as an entire genre. Yeah, that's fair. Like, BtF is a very niche work. It's historical fiction set in a particular historical era and even more importantly from a specific historical mindset and viewpoint, the medieval mindset where religious war and Christ and the Devil were as real as grass, if not moreso. Not everybody has to like it! I'm just a huge fan because there's very little else like it (some Umberto Eco; Susannah Clarke but in a different way) and I've read so much fantasy over the years that I hunger for genuinely novel approaches.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:54
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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 gave up on it somewhere between a third and halfway through when it was clear it was never going to hit me the way it did so many other others.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:55
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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 really enjoyed the rest of the author’s work though. The Lesser Dead, Those Across the River, The Suicide Motor Club and The Necromancer’s House were all great reads for me. Why yes, I do like urban fantasy.
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Jan 25, 2022 17:45
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big dyke energy posted:If someone's never read Cherryh, where would a good place to start be? The short answer is that my go-to starting rec is The Pride of Chanur -- alien space truckers find themselves with a human stowaway and concomitant massive political complications. Reasonably fast-paced, stands on its own but has sequels if you want more once you're done. The long answer StrixNebulosa already beat me to.
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Jan 25, 2022 19:50
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darkgray posted:Uh, maybe you're taking it too literally. By "dream sequences" I lump together scenes where reality warps a lot, like hallucinations or visions. The way they're often described in fiction makes me lose interest fast. I do understand that there's an element of soul interaction or whatever in this particular case, but it doesn't make me more excited. Few things are as boring as people describing their bizarre nightmares, even if they happen to be "real", I guess. Maybe this is just me rejecting horror as an entire genre. Don't read Blinding
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Jan 25, 2022 20:07
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Bilirubin posted:Don't read Blinding I mean, I'm really not trying to be a jerk or unkindly intrude into the SFF thread but maybe your issue is with the quality of how such things are written? Like, have you ever read Virginia Woolf? Your stance would seem to rule To the Lighthouse out a priori, and you would be missing one of the most magnificent books ever written. Please help me understand your perspective a little better.
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Jan 25, 2022 20:22
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I forgot that skipped The Silver Spike by Glen Cook in my read through so I still got one more book in the Black Company series! Yay.
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Jan 25, 2022 21:06
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Bilirubin posted:I mean, I'm really not trying to be a jerk or unkindly intrude into the SFF thread but maybe your issue is with the quality of how such things are written? Like, have you ever read Virginia Woolf? Your stance would seem to rule To the Lighthouse out a priori, and you would be missing one of the most magnificent books ever written. Please help me understand your perspective a little better. It's not really a hard stance or anything. It's just rare that I happen to enjoy reading such scenes, but it's not like they make me drop a book immediately. Maybe it's because I've never personally been haunted by dreams, usually completely forgetting about them within five minutes of getting out of bed, so when a character is describing their dream experience page after page in excruciating detail, there's always a little voice in my head going "Yeah, whatever, it's a loving dream, just get on with it." It'd probably be easier to empathise if I was into dream analysis and such, but to me they're pretty much the brain's garbage collection, and I don't attach meaning to them. Although I do occasionally have nightmares in which I crack or lose a tooth, and it's quite the fright to wake up and have to run my tongue over it to see if it's still in there safe and sound. Perhaps there's something to this genre after all.
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Jan 25, 2022 23:00
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Fart of Presto posted:If you are up for some trashy/pulpy post-apocalyptic reading, PC games seller Fanatical has a bundle just for you (3 tiers): and if you bough the first FORTY books in this bundle, you'll be thrilled to learn there are ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE available to buy now https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/deathlands-sci-fi-novels-bundle-2  I can't imagine these are anything other than beneath-the-barrel trash..?
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Jan 25, 2022 23:16
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The Player of Games (Culture #2) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002WM3HC2/ Dark One #1 by Brandon Sanderson - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FFQTNLC/ Graphic novel, quality unknown.
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Jan 25, 2022 23:47
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NoneMoreNegative posted:and if you bough the first FORTY books in this bundle, you'll be thrilled to learn there are ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE available to buy now Public library had a random rear end assortment of these when I was a kid. Definitely not good. Also definitely not for 8 year olds, although possibly written by a disturbingly horny one. Now that I think about it, might be some of the earliest sex scenes I ever read which might explain a lot.
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Jan 26, 2022 00:04
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90s Cringe Rock posted: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. You mean the Gideon/Harrow aka Locked Tomb books? Really don't care about the mystery of the Undying Emperor's past in the Locked Tomb series, and found myself visibly losing interest anytime the Undying Emperor character was present or talking, so I'm essentially done with that series unless it does a massive swerve and doesn't expand on the undying emperors past & buried secrets. C.M. Kruger posted:Yeah, they're okay at best, not good but readable enough compared to "worse than self-published trash" like the Deathstalker series. Nothing in the Sten books matched Daniel Keys Moran literally writing in Cheetara from the Thundercats so his one of his two self-insert main characters in Emerald Eyes could rail the hell out of her, but the CarnivorousCarebear Mantis team/Phoenix team member in the Sten Chronicles that existed for 4 books or so was sort of amusing in a "Carebears if they existed would be the best murderers in the entire galaxy". The *secret* 50 billion dollar trench knife (which got even sharper around book 3) got mentioned a bunch in the first Sten 5 books then got ignored as Sten became an even more overt Mary-Sue; however the running gag of the Eternal Emperor eternally hating suckups and megarich people and therefore intentionally feeding them rotted garbage at parties he hosted & cooked for (before he came back wrong) was good though. Sten Books 4+5 can definitely be chalked up to lingering resentment over Japan that got amped hard up when Japan's 1980's economic bubble kicked off.
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Jan 26, 2022 01:54
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So, I recently finished up the Broken Earth series, and it was really good but there's one part of it I didn't really understand. This seems to be a good thread to inquire further into what happened to Schaffa exactly. So, as I understand it, Guardians use the corestones to get superpowers but in exchange are always in extreme pain unless they do what the Earth wants them to do, and sometimes the Earth just steals their brains, and they immediately kill each other if they suspect this ("contamination") has happened. This is how it usually works. At the end of book 1, Schaffa gets blown up, and he lets the Earth contaminate him in exchange for not dying, and his entire personality gets overwritten by the Earth and his memory gets wiped, but, then the new Schaffa still doesn't do what the Earth wants (until like the very last chapter anyway) and is still always in extreme pain because of it. What did the contamination DO exactly then?
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Jan 26, 2022 16:30
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The Wall of Storms (Dandelion Dynasty #2) by Ken Liu - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BKR14LK/
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Jan 26, 2022 23:35
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I read Between Two Fires on recommendation from this thread, and it was good, and I understand why it may not be everyone's cup of tea because there is some real disturbing stuff in the novel, but I did enjoy it a lot. After I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August , on recommendation from this thread sometime too I believe, and it was not just good, it was great, I loved it, wow, one of those novels that gets its hooks deep in you and it's all you think about and all you do is read in your free time until it's done. That's one that will stick in my mind for a long time. quote:Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. That's the blurb, but if that seems interesting in the slightest to go check out a sample and read the first chapter, it's only a few paragraphs long, highly recommended.
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Jan 27, 2022 02:26
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Yeah First Fifteen Lives is Great. If you enjoyed it I also highly recommend Ken Grimwood's 1980s thriller Replay which is more or less the same concept.
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Jan 27, 2022 02:40
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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 really enjoyed Madness Season which is a weird book which I think is a lesser known one by C.S. Friedman. It has lots of aliens and its long after a successful invasion of Earth where everyone just  at it as its the status quo so no desperate resistance or anything.
FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 09:58
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Ok, first fifteen lives pwns lol.quote:Then, “At last,” he exclaimed. “Something new to talk about!”
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Jan 27, 2022 11:37
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I finished it. Exceptionally good book, although I've seen that style of narration before. In fact it's kind of standard for what I will tentatively call a novel about an intelligence agent (is that a genre?), because I've seen it before, but those were in forgettable airport novels that didn't do it nearly as well. 8/10, prose is a little up it's own rear end in a top hat sometimes but I acknowledge that it's a popular style nowadays even if it irritates me and I tend to just skim it. And most of the book isn't like that. Only Tom Robbins is allowed to write like this without me knocking a point off.
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Jan 27, 2022 14:20
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I'm reading The Silver Spike by Glen Cook and its really good.
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Jan 27, 2022 18:06
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I gave Black Company another shot thanks to y'all. I don't know wtf was wrong with teenage me because I'm halfway through The White Rose and I loving love these books! Read The Black Company people. It's awesome to see Cook stretching himself, in terms of craft, from book to book. unattended spaghetti fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 22:56
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FuzzySlippers posted:I really enjoyed Madness Season which is a weird book which I think is a lesser known one by C.S. Friedman. It has lots of aliens and its long after a successful invasion of Earth where everyone just that's the vampire hiding in a group mind on conquered earth right?
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Jan 27, 2022 23:20
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The Testaments (Handmaid's Tale #2) by Margaret Atwood - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLPYDQ/ Jade City (Green Bone Saga #1) by Fonda Lee - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XRCBRX8/ Ashes of the Sun (Burningblade & Silvereye #1) by Django Wexler - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZZ25BCX/
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Jan 27, 2022 23:46
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branedotorg posted:that's the vampire hiding in a group mind on conquered earth right? There's a vampire hiding on post-alien-conquest Earth, and there is a group mind later, but the vampire isn't part of the group mind. Fun book though. Doesn't seem to have as high a profile as her other work for some reason.
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Jan 27, 2022 23:50
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Fifteen Lives is enjoyable because it shows how hubris and procrastination can gently caress over anyone. The Seeker ended up being uh something I guess. It was miles better than 17776 though.
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Jan 27, 2022 23:52
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Well I finished Glen Cooks The Silver Spike. That's the last Black Company book I had to read. Now I have to move onto another author. Joe Ambercrombie , I may go back and reread the first law trilogy , I got his new trilogy's first book though. So I'll read that first. Always feel a bit of melancholy at finishing a authors works knowing there's not anything after.
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Jan 28, 2022 06:03
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So the latest Asher was really good. Less massive space battles with AIs, more xenomonsters. The protagonist starts as a new born clone without any memory and then it quickly goes of the rails. More of a survival story than anything. Standard Asher in many ways and familiarity with the Polity universe is pretty much required.
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Jan 28, 2022 06:06
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I'm really struggling to read Senlin Ascends. I should like it, I feel like I want to like it, but I just can't stand Senlin himself. A little bit too much insufferable naivety that carries on for so long now that it feels like there is a bit of change coming (I'm up to where he's working through the painting heist) that I'm going to be frustrated if he actually gets some common sense and a backbone that isn't built entirely on self-delusion. However I like the story, it's more being in Senlin's head that is the problem, and want to find out more about the tower and what's happening with Marya. I'm just not sure I can keep going with Senlin as he is, and pretty sure I'd be annoyed as hell to have him become competent after already not having any significant change up to this point. Is there a middle ground the author goes down on does Senlin adapt but down another path besides being more righteous and heroic without the cluelessness?
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Jan 28, 2022 06:23
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nessin posted:I'm really struggling to read Senlin Ascends. I should like it, I feel like I want to like it, but I just can't stand Senlin himself. A little bit too much insufferable naivety that carries on for so long now that it feels like there is a bit of change coming (I'm up to where he's working through the painting heist) that I'm going to be frustrated if he actually gets some common sense and a backbone that isn't built entirely on self-delusion. However I like the story, it's more being in Senlin's head that is the problem, and want to find out more about the tower and what's happening with Marya. I'm just not sure I can keep going with Senlin as he is, and pretty sure I'd be annoyed as hell to have him become competent after already not having any significant change up to this point. Is there a middle ground the author goes down on does Senlin adapt but down another path besides being more righteous and heroic without the cluelessness?
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Jan 28, 2022 13:19
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https://twitter.com/maxgladstone/status/1487174167820738565 https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1487174882282594312
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Jan 28, 2022 22:49
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smdh looks like saunders has set up his sock puppets on twitter too 
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Jan 28, 2022 22:51
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Hollismason posted:I'm reading The Silver Spike by Glen Cook and its really good. i love this book so much - Smeds and his crew are like Cook went 'Shed was an awful person but was a lot of fun as a viewpoint character, let's set up someone Even Worse' and they're an absolute ride to hang out with. When I reread the series I go from Silver Spike to the books of the south and just grind to a halt immediately because nobody's as interesting.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:07
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buffalo all day posted:smdh looks like saunders has set up his sock puppets on twitter too He's even writing other entire series and books under a different name and selling them on Amazon to throw us off.
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Jan 28, 2022 23:21
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:He's even writing other entire series and books under a different name and selling them on Amazon to throw us off. 
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Jan 29, 2022 09:41
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Cardiac posted:So the latest Asher was really good. Which Polity book has the best space battle?
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Jan 29, 2022 15:37
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I'm considering picking up The Meg series just to see how deep the rabbit hole of crazy goes. Please convince me otherwise.
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Jan 29, 2022 16:19
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