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Oh, dang. The conclusion to the Alex verus series came out in December. It's called Risen. Also, gotta somewhat disagree with the gemmell post reaction. Almost every book he wrote (again barring the later ones in his life) works as a stand alone. You don't need to read druss before anything else, he explains in every book he's in that he's an old famous adventurer and has a big rear end axe he uses to chop evil. Same with Waylander. You might not understand a cameo or you might wonder what that battle of the wall was, but if it's important to the story, he retold it in the book. At least as I recall, it's been far too long since I read them again. Still recommend Heart of Stone by Ben galley. I'm actually kinda pissed it's a stand alone book cause the world he made for it is pretty neat.
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Feb 19, 2022 18:28
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:Most of the standalone fantasy that's coming to mind for me is more like urban fantasy or magical realism, but for what it's worth: I think of The City and the City as - hm. Science fiction, I suppose, but I just realised I can't back that up at all.
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Feb 19, 2022 18:41
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A long time ago this series about a truck driving on highways in space was mentioned in this thread Starrigger (Skyway Book 1) by John DeChancie - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KFU6QDA/
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Feb 19, 2022 19:46
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Red Mars (Mars Trilogy #1) by Kim Stanley Robinson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QCS914/ The Last Policeman (#1) by Ben H Winters - 2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076Q1GW2/ Book #2 is also still on sale from earlier.
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Feb 19, 2022 19:47
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Very obscure standalone fantasy rec: Living Alone by Stella Benson (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14907) Written in 1919, set in WWI London; a witch meets a lonely spinster and it doesn't go anywhere you'd expect from that. Involves War Work, sarcastic fairies, Harold the Broomstick, the Dog David, a witch dogfight over London, a rather... oddly crowded bomb shelter and an embarrassing posh failson, among quite a lot else. (I could do without Peony's gorblimey accent, but eh, 1919.) Ed: here, have the beginning of the first chapter: quote:There were six women, seven chairs, and a table in an otherwise unfurnished room in an unfashionable part of London. Three of the women were of the kind that has no life apart from committees. They need not be mentioned in detail. The names of two others were Miss Meta Mostyn Ford and Lady Arabel Higgins. Miss Ford was a good woman, as well as a lady. Her hands were beautiful because they paid a manicurist to keep them so, but she was too righteous to powder her nose. She was the sort of person a man would like his best friend to marry. Lady Arabel was older: she was virtuous to the same extent as Achilles was invulnerable. In the beginning, when her soul was being soaked in virtue, the heel of it was fortunately left dry. She had a husband, but no apparent tragedy in her life. These two women were obviously not native to their surroundings. Their eyelashes brought Bond Street—or at least Kensington—to mind; their shoes were mudless; their gloves had not been bought in the sales. Of the sixth woman the less said the better. Runcible Cat fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 20:13
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Runcible Cat posted:Very obscure standalone fantasy rec: Living Alone by Stella Benson (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14907) Yeah okay I'll download that for free, I liked the sample a lot. Cheers.
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Feb 19, 2022 20:22
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Technically speaking there is a prequel to Peter Pan and a sequel to The Count of Monte Cristo. Nobody reads them. There were at least two sequels to Monte Cristo published within Dumas' lifetime, both by other authors. And Monte Cristo is itself arguably not an original work, being a rewrite of Dumas' earlier novel Georges. There are also two sequels to The Three Musketeers, and people definitely read at least part of one of them because it's The Man in the Iron Mask.
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Feb 19, 2022 20:38
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pradmer posted:Red Mars (Mars Trilogy #1) by Kim Stanley Robinson - $1.99 One of my favorite hard scifi series.
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Feb 19, 2022 20:49
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Runcible Cat posted:Very obscure standalone fantasy rec: Living Alone by Stella Benson (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14907) I love this. It’s telling not showing all the way through and wonderful for it.
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Feb 19, 2022 20:52
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Jedit posted:There are also two sequels to The Three Musketeers, and people definitely read at least part of one of them because it's The Man in the Iron Mask. If you’re only saying one of the two sequels then it’s The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, which contains The Man in the Iron Mask and much more.
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Feb 19, 2022 21:13
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General Battuta posted:I love this. It’s telling not showing all the way through and wonderful for it. I know, it's great! It's so far divergent from what fantasy became that it's outsider art - well, to be fair it was probably pretty outsider art even when it was written: the foreword is: quote:This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered too assertive a trespasser. - but in a completely different way. It's simultaneously proto-urban fantasy and absolutely nothing like modern urban fantasy and it's a delight.
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Feb 19, 2022 22:21
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:standalone urban fantasy I have a like/ehh relationship with Adrian Tchaikovskys books but I really enjoyed his Cage of Souls, which fits well into this category (I said it was 'Dying Earth by way of Heart of Darkness' when I first read it)
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Feb 19, 2022 22:23
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roomtone posted:what are the best standalone fantasy novels It's sort of weird that Martha Wells standalone fantasy novels City of Bones and Wheel of the Infinite haven't been given as recommendations by other people in this thread yet, given how strongly Murderbot stuff gets recommended. Both those two standalone stories are just as strong as her Murderbot stuff and take place in wildly different settings and universes.
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Feb 20, 2022 08:04
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The Fifth Season (Broken Earth #1) by NK Jemisin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H25FCSQ/ Dawnshard (Stormlight Archive novella) by Brandon Sanderson - $1.60 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MXXWYT7/
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Feb 20, 2022 18:39
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I just finished reading Between Two Fires and I enjoyed it a lot. Cutting through the metaphor, a story about redemption, forgiveness, and about choosing goodness especially in the face of awful horrors always gets to me. This scene near the end will stick with me for awhile, I think.quote:[...]he saw a devil with wide black wings gripped by two angels, who drove it down and seemed to speak in its ears as they fell; they hit the bend of the Rhône, sending up a great, illuminated plume of water visible from Orange.
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Feb 21, 2022 01:51
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quantumfoam posted:It's sort of weird that Martha Wells standalone fantasy novels City of Bones and Wheel of the Infinite haven't been given as recommendations by other people in this thread yet, given how strongly Murderbot stuff gets recommended. Both those two standalone stories are just as strong as her Murderbot stuff and take place in wildly different settings and universes. fritz posted:* City of Bones (Wells)
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Feb 21, 2022 02:01
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The Stars My Destination had a killer fast pace and a sense of fun and imagination on a level I don't encounter often. Already feeling like I'm starting to forget what happens in it, though.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:14
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FPyat posted:The Stars My Destination had a killer fast pace and a sense of fun and imagination on a level I don't encounter often. Already feeling like I'm starting to forget what happens in it, though.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:30
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RDM posted:I think this has the Citizen Kane problem; it seems kinda cartoonish and the plot seems like a million other sci-fi stories because of how influential it was and how many authors have ripped off parts of it over the last 70 years. Alexander dumas is mad as hell and he’s coming for you
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Feb 21, 2022 04:38
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Stars My Destination was Alfred Besters writing peak. You don't want to read anything Bester wrote after it came out. Strike that, read Alfred Bester's "The Deceivers", book barn thread, I dare you. The Deceivers is possibly the worse scifi book I've ever read, and having recently read 120+ really terrible 1970's-1980s-1990's scifi and fantasy books thanks to my reading list from doing the SFL Archives readthrough, that is saying something.
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Feb 21, 2022 04:56
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RDM posted:I think this has the Citizen Kane problem; it seems kinda cartoonish and the plot seems like a million other sci-fi stories because of how influential it was and how many authors have ripped off parts of it over the last 70 years. This is how I felt when I finally read Blindsight. I was like, oh, I've already read this book.
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Feb 21, 2022 05:40
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quantumfoam posted:Stars My Destination was Alfred Besters writing peak. You don't want to read anything Bester wrote after it came out. I have a copy of The Deceivers and will fully agree that it's unreadable. On the other hand, don't read The Stars My Destination either because the lead character is a rapist.
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Feb 21, 2022 10:50
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quantumfoam posted:Stars My Destination was Alfred Besters writing peak. You don't want to read anything Bester wrote after it came out. Not really true. He wrote quite a few great short stories after Stars. His novels, though...
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Feb 21, 2022 13:38
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quantumfoam posted:Stars My Destination was Alfred Besters writing peak. You don't want to read anything Bester wrote after it came out. Got a link to that thread, please? I can't seem to find it.
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Feb 21, 2022 13:57
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buffalo all day posted:Alexander dumas is mad as hell and he’s coming for you Although as I write this, I realize I don't know if The Stars My Destination was really the first book for the trope or if there's some other earlier work I've never heard of.
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Feb 21, 2022 14:01
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RDM posted:"The Count of Monte Cristo but with spaceships" is probably one of the scifi tropes that gets ripped off the most. It's the first one I can think of. Lord knows the book has enough other firsts. Dude basically invented the cyberpunk genre about forty years too early. Jedit posted:I have a copy of The Deceivers and will fully agree that it's unreadable. On the other hand, don't read The Stars My Destination either because the lead character is a rapist. Silver lining, it was written long enough ago that the rape scene 1) is asterisk'd past rather than described explicitly, and 2) is clearly intended by the author to be a bad act that makes the protagonist a bad person. Which puts it ahead of a lot of modern fantasy at least.
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Feb 21, 2022 15:37
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tiniestacorn posted:This is how I felt when I finally read Blindsight. I was like, oh, I've already read this book. I felt that way too, but it was more because I felt I was reading what would have happened had Delany written Rama.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:15
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NoneMoreNegative posted:I have a like/ehh relationship with Adrian Tchaikovskys books but I really enjoyed his Cage of Souls, which fits well into this category (I said it was 'Dying Earth by way of Heart of Darkness' when I first read it) I liked it too, and that's a good description. Edit: Oh and stand alone Fantasy recommendation. The Drawing of the Dark, an early Tim Powers book. The year is 1529, and Brian Duffy, a world-weary Irish mercenary soldier, is hired in Venice by the mysterious Aurelianus to go to Vienna and work as a bouncer at the Zimmerman Inn, former monastery and current brewery of the famous Herzwesten beer....... A fun book with King Arthur themes set during the famous* Siege of Vienna. *Although the 17th Century siege is probably more famous as I think about it. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2022 16:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's the first one I can think of. Lord knows the book has enough other firsts. Dude basically invented the cyberpunk genre about forty years too early. Yeah, if you think Gully Foyle is the hero, you're reading the book wrong. (See also: Walter White, Light Yagami, etc.)
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Feb 21, 2022 16:53
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Deptfordx posted:I liked it too, and that's a good description. Yeah a bunch of Tim Powers is great and standalone. Drawing of the dark is one of the best that aren't the really commonly recommended ones though, good thought!
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Feb 21, 2022 17:08
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Lilith's Brood: The Complete Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia E Butler - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008HALOMI/
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Feb 21, 2022 18:44
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Finally got around to reading The Cyberiad, and at roughly the halfway mark I'm astonished that this exists in English. I genuinely do not know how it is possible to translate a book that seems to have at least one quite clever rhyme or pun per sentence, and sometimes much more. Has there been much written on how The Cyberiad was translated? I'm wondering how much of what I'm reading is Lem's own work, and how much is a translator just going absolutely wild with no regard for the source material. Honestly, I'd love to read a straight-up literal translation of the original, with no effort made to maintain the rhyming schemes or puns, just to see how much was changed - or, more likely, what single-digit percentage of the original was left intact.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:41
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Selachian posted:Not really true. He wrote quite a few great short stories after Stars. His novels, though... Alfred Bester: No disagreement about his novels after Stars my Destination not being worth reading, unless you got paid to do so. As for his published short stories, they range from "eh instantly forgettable" to "wtf did I just read", at least for me. Bester's short story with the "sigma pal" ending (think it's Rollercoaster?) is the most WTF memorable one in a bad way, but that's because it's about time travelers *CONTENT WARNING* from the future taking jaunts into the past to mentally torture, then murder, then physically gently caress people from the present day (because they know their victims are safe to murder/gently caress/torture because of in-the-future newspaper obituaries) *CONTENT WARNING*. Kchama posted:Got a link to that thread, please? I can't seem to find it. There is no thread. There will be no thread.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:44
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Kestral posted:Finally got around to reading The Cyberiad, and at roughly the halfway mark I'm astonished that this exists in English. I genuinely do not know how it is possible to translate a book that seems to have at least one quite clever rhyme or pun per sentence, and sometimes much more. Has there been much written on how The Cyberiad was translated? I'm wondering how much of what I'm reading is Lem's own work, and how much is a translator just going absolutely wild with no regard for the source material. I finally got around to reading this early this year as well, and yeah. There’s so much play with the language, I’m equally amazed by Lem and his translator at the same time That poem in mathematical metaphors was just…
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Feb 22, 2022 00:10
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Kestral posted:Finally got around to reading The Cyberiad, and at roughly the halfway mark I'm astonished that this exists in English. I genuinely do not know how it is possible to translate a book that seems to have at least one quite clever rhyme or pun per sentence, and sometimes much more. Has there been much written on how The Cyberiad was translated? I'm wondering how much of what I'm reading is Lem's own work, and how much is a translator just going absolutely wild with no regard for the source material. The translation alone is a work of art. I found a couple of interviews with the translator, https://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/trying-build-tower-reaches-heaven-interview-translator-michael-kandel/ https://restlessbooks.org/blog/2014/1/27/a-conversation-with-michael-kandel https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/198359/in-the-cyberiad-how-did-the-letter-n-manifest-in-polish And someone wrote about translating a different short story, https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-story-6c2446632bd8
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Feb 22, 2022 00:29
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Continuing my read of 1980s nuclear war potboilers, I finished Long Voyage Back and really enjoyed it. Survivors aboard a trimaran fleeing Chesapeake Bay down into Latin America after the bombs fall. Less sexism/weird dialogue/wooden characterisation than its contemporaries (though still plenty of it) and does a good job of portraying what things would be like in the immediate aftermath in the Global South, for countries that didn't get nuked but still just saw most of the global economy vanish overnight.
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Feb 22, 2022 01:34
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freebooter posted:Continuing my read of 1980s nuclear war potboilers, I finished Long Voyage Back and really enjoyed it. Survivors aboard a trimaran fleeing Chesapeake Bay down into Latin America after the bombs fall. Less sexism/weird dialogue/wooden characterisation than its contemporaries (though still plenty of it) and does a good job of portraying what things would be like in the immediate aftermath in the Global South, for countries that didn't get nuked but still just saw most of the global economy vanish overnight. My favorite in that genre is Down to a Sunless Sea, a deeply silly thriller about a New York-London passenger jet that's in midair when the balloon goes up, leaving them searching for somewhere safe to land.
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Feb 22, 2022 05:02
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Selachian posted:My favorite in that genre is Down to a Sunless Sea, a deeply silly thriller about a New York-London passenger jet that's in midair when the balloon goes up, leaving them searching for somewhere safe to land. I read this last year and it was one of my favourite books of the year! I concur it's deeply silly, but the middle act in the flight cockpit where the pilot and his crew are desperately trying to find safe haven in the handful of flight hours they have left is genuinely good thriller stuff. I actually think the two make very good companion pieces, both from the early 80s and both of the elevator pitch genre "nuclear war with a circumstantial twist." And they're both clear-eyed about the fact that just because being on a plane/boat means you stand a better chance of survival than 99% of North Americans and Europeans, your problems are still only just beginning. edit - if anyone else is interested in the 1980s nuclear war genre (for some reason I started reading it a lot again after Trump became president) the other good one I've read in recent years is Whitley Streiber's Warday, which takes place 10 years after a limited nuclear conflict that only knocks out a few cities but still causes widespread fallout issues and total economic collapse, and is a sort of "fake real account" book that follows a journalist as he travels around a now-balkanised United States interviewing people. Also often deeply silly, but still very good. freebooter fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Feb 22, 2022 |
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Feb 22, 2022 07:06
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freebooter posted:Whitley Streiber One of those names that causes you to instantly hear this playing in your head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViN2bRGrBx8
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Feb 22, 2022 09:59
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UK Kindle alert: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett is 99p today only. Fill your boots (with rats).
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Feb 22, 2022 10:23
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