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It’s a good book and worth reading. e: I refuse to articulate further
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Mar 7, 2022 16:43
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It's cool. I loved her urban fantasy and like harry august but then I read Touch and it felt samey.
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Mar 7, 2022 16:51
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FPyat posted:That's a Greg Bear book I hadn't heard of. Liked it when it came out. Can't remember poo poo now but I'm sure it's good.
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Mar 7, 2022 17:58
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ToxicFrog posted:
Mmmm, Anne of Green Gables.
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Mar 7, 2022 18:08
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FPyat posted:That's a Greg Bear book I hadn't heard of. It is a loose sequel to Queen of Angels (and his FBI thrillers are an even looser pair of prequels to both.)
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Mar 7, 2022 18:22
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ToxicFrog posted:I don't think I have anything that hasn't already been recommended (although I'll keep thinking) but I wanted to thank you for the mention of Legends & Lattes, I read it yesterday and it was comfy as hell. heck yes, thank the kindle unlimited thread. and gimme that trash romance in my fantasy. pepsicake posted:Anymore recs for this kind of sf? Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
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Mar 7, 2022 18:31
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PlushCow posted:This was mentioned weeks ago, it's a wonderful novel, and it's on sale for $3 on US ebook today The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECE9OD4 yeah this pwned
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Mar 7, 2022 18:48
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Another kickstarter from an author incredibly beloved by this thread (author of Cradle): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/author-will-wight/fantasy-novels-cradle-1-3-by-will-wight
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Mar 7, 2022 20:19
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tokenbrownguy posted:heck yes, thank the kindle unlimited thread. and gimme that trash romance in my fantasy. Definitely check those out then.
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Mar 7, 2022 21:14
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pepsicake posted:Anymore recs for this kind of sf? Parts of the Strugatsky brothers Beetle in the Anthill and all of their last novel Doomed City are amazing at this. You can track the Strugatsky brothers hopefullness declining over time, even as relatively privileged USSR science-citizens life sucked majorly for people living behind the Iron Curtain.
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Mar 7, 2022 21:53
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PlushCow posted:This was mentioned weeks ago, it's a wonderful novel, and it's on sale for $3 on US ebook today The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECE9OD4 I always get this and the 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle confused. Anyway I picked this one up. If I don't like it maybe I'll try the other one.
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Mar 7, 2022 23:17
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Ccs posted:I always get this and the 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle confused. Anyway I picked this one up. If I don't like it maybe I'll try the other one.
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Mar 7, 2022 23:23
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot #1) by Becky Chambers - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08H831J18/ A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E Harrow - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PSFF6PM/ Peace on Earth (From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy #4) by Stanislaw Lem - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008533DBW/ The Dragonriders of Pern: Dragonflight Dragonquest The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000RH0E70/ The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077RG9JFX/
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Mar 7, 2022 23:39
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psalm is epic, read it
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Mar 8, 2022 00:10
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Ccs posted:I always get this and the 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle confused. Anyway I picked this one up. If I don't like it maybe I'll try the other one. Add the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and you've got a real confusing mess.
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Mar 8, 2022 00:21
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I always wanted to write sci-fi, but I got convinced by mutual acquaintances of GB and I that I'm too black, not smart enough, and not 'good' enough to ever be a real writer, especially in Sci-fi. I guess seeing the recent change in things on the sci-fi front has made me feel better about that. After all, if Sanderson can just right four books offhandedly, I can at least write a short story.
Fivemarks fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Mar 8, 2022 |
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Mar 8, 2022 00:52
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On the off chance other posters here are like me, in that they have a bunch of Google play credits from the Google survey app thing, just a PSA that it's worth checking if Kindle sale books are also available on the Google play store. The publishers seem to drop prices across platforms. I've been buying heavily discounted books for free basically, thanks to Google giving me 50 cents every time I go to the supermarket.
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Mar 8, 2022 01:08
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Any books out there that capture the "space archeology" feel of Rendezvous with Rama?
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Mar 8, 2022 01:18
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Annath posted:Any books out there that capture the "space archeology" feel of Rendezvous with Rama? I think Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space is a pretty popular choice. Ship of Fools by Richard Russo is another. You could try the novelization of The Dig which wasn’t awful, in my memory. In the recommendation thread you mentioned generation ships which is why you got recommended Aurora, which imo has basically taken apart and reset the whole “generation ship” subgenre like how GRRM reset epic fantasy back in the early 00s. It would be the first book I’d recommend to anyone too.
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Mar 8, 2022 01:31
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Fivemarks posted:I always wanted to write sci-fi, but I got convinced by mutual acquaintances of GB and I that I'm too black, not smart enough, and not 'good' enough to ever be a real writer, especially in Sci-fi. I guess seeing the recent change in things on the sci-fi front has made me feel better about that. After all, if Sanderson can just right four books offhandedly, I can at least write a short story. I'll read your stuff. I'll probably like it.
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Mar 8, 2022 01:36
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Annath posted:Any books out there that capture the "space archeology" feel of Rendezvous with Rama?
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Mar 8, 2022 01:36
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buffalo all day posted:I think Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space is a pretty popular choice. Ship of Fools by Richard Russo is another. You could try the novelization of The Dig which wasn’t awful, in my memory. I read the blurb of Ship of Fools, and it sounds awesome, but alas I don't see any audiobook version. I read a blurb on Aurora, and a lot of reviews mention that it has a very pessimistic view of space exploration. That made me a bit sad, as I personally really want to believe in humanity's future in space.
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Mar 8, 2022 01:38
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Annath posted:I read the blurb of Ship of Fools, and it sounds awesome, but alas I don't see any audiobook version. I can’t tell if Children of Time by Adrien Tchaikovsky would be something you’re looking for or not but you could look it up. Aurora’s perspective is that Earth is amazing and we should do everything we can to save it and preserve it because the universe is really hostile. Honestly I feel like you do re optimism but Aurora was really worth reading if you don’t mind being challenged a bit.
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Mar 8, 2022 01:41
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Fivemarks posted:I always wanted to write sci-fi, but I got convinced by mutual acquaintances of GB and I that I'm too black, not smart enough, and not 'good' enough to ever be a real writer What?????? e: I don't want to be mutual acquaintances with anyone who'd do that General Battuta fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Mar 8, 2022 |
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Mar 8, 2022 02:00
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Fivemarks posted:I always wanted to write sci-fi, but I got convinced by mutual acquaintances of GB and I that I'm too black, not smart enough, and not 'good' enough to ever be a real writer, especially in Sci-fi. I guess seeing the recent change in things on the sci-fi front has made me feel better about that. After all, if Sanderson can just right four books offhandedly, I can at least write a short story. Your friend sucks, if you like writing, keep writing. Here's a good motivation thread I totally have not been reading off an on the past year or so - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3807739 Just remember to write, and finish what you write. You can always edit it later but you can't edit what you don't write.
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Mar 8, 2022 02:17
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Come hang out in thunderdome. Write a little every week. Pick fights. Get people to read your writing. Ignore some of them. Yell at others.
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Mar 8, 2022 02:32
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General Battuta posted:What?????? You know the SV people who did it- I don't think you're *friends*, for instance, with people like that, and I didn't want to imply that.
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Mar 8, 2022 02:38
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Annath posted:I read a blurb on Aurora, and a lot of reviews mention that it has a very pessimistic view of space exploration. That made me a bit sad, as I personally really want to believe in humanity's future in space. Have you read To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers ? If you believe in the dream of space, this is for you. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L2Z4DBK/ I'll also throw in the Lady Astronaut series, I really like these. They're an excuse to file the serial numbers off of a bunch of Space Race-era anecdotes and apocrypha, an the long struggle to get off a planet wrecked by a comet impact. The first novel starts with a comet impact taking out the Eastern Seaboard and setting off uncontrolle climate collapse, so we need a space program, a big one, and we need it now. I almost bounced off these, and I'm really glad I didn't. I was posting another recommendation for the series last year or so, and I wanted to gush over it but I couldn't. In fact just thinking about the book and trying to explain it brought back the anxious, awkward, cramped-in feeling I'd had while I was reading it. I posted what I could. A few hours later I realized that if one were, like the protagonist and PO character, a Jewish woman working as a computer for the space program in the 1950s... one would feel like that all the time. That flipped my opinion from good to great, that's some very skillful writing to get the reader into the character's head. The first two books are the same POV character, and the third changes POV for a locked-room murder mystery on the moon. They're terrific adventures, even the one that is formally a mystery  https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756JH5R1
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Mar 8, 2022 02:43
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Annath posted:Any books out there that capture the "space archeology" feel of Rendezvous with Rama? A good deal of Jack McDevitt's stuff, especially Engines of God. Hogan's Inherit the Stars. Fredrick Pohl's Gateway. H. Beam Piper's short story "Omnilingual" (on project Gutenberg).
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Mar 8, 2022 04:03
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Hobnob posted:Fredrick Pohl's Gateway. Gateway is a ripping novel. It's told in large part through the main character's therapy session, dealing with the extremely traumatic mission that made them rich and killed 9 of their best friends. Almost all of the other named characters in the book are lost on this expedition. What kind of expedition ? A prospector on Venus found an intact alien space craft. He hosed around with the controls. It took off and returned to base, an asteroid installation with hundreds more ships. The Gateway Corporation was founded to explore this bounty. It had been cleaned out when the aliens left, we got almost nothing. What we did find made a few people very, very rich. Which is good, because at this point Earth sucks, an the main character comes from a mining family, they're digging shale out of the Black Hills for food. Really lovely vat-grown hydrocarbon-based gloop, but when the climate sucks and traditional agriculture is over, food is food. Main character wins the lottery and trades his winnings for a ticket to Gateway. He's volunteered to get in a alien starship, gently caress with the controls, explore wherever it takes them, an bring scientific data and, ideally, useful alien artifacts back. They don't know how long the trip will be, so they stuff the ship with supplies for one, three, or five people and hit go. You practice strict rationing until the ship flips over at the halfway point to decelerate, and then you know how long you have to stretch your supplies for. All missions set out with a revolver on board - when you pick the person who doesn't get any more food and water you don't want any acrimonious discussions about the pick, the revolver both makes and enforces the selection. I'd image you give each person one round - theirs - to prevent someone from just grabbing the gun and enough ammo for the rest of the crew. Sometimes there's plenty of food when the ship makes turnover, an there are valuable artifacts at the other end. Or a black hole. Or supernova. Or there's a planet with life, but an alien fungus eats the landing party. Life on the station is... tight. The company charges absurd amounts for all but the most basic necessities of life. This is deliberate, intended to push prospectors out on missions before they go broke. Society is very charged, status is based on the number of missions undergone and money made. Given the danger involved, people with enough money to retire should naturally get the gently caress out of there and back to the elite life on Earth. Naturally, the edge cases with an imperfectly formed sense of personal mortality can instead stay on the station, make more money, and live like rock stars while throwing their wealth around (and away). There's some really screwed up people in this book, and how they got that way is a big theme of it. You don't get inside the head of many more people than the protagonist, but he's a perfectly believable, hosed up but functional human being who behaves in ways that make sense given who he is. Gateway is also a multimedia project, an early one. Interspersed with the text of the novel are other documents, presented in different styles and fonts. You get a list of how much it will cost you to pick and eat fruit in the low-gee garden, the procedure and costs for how you take a shower, classified ads from Gateway's version of Craigslist, and on and on. This goes a long way to making Gateway seem real. I'd pay a lot for an illustrated Gateway. There are sequels. You learn more about the ancient aliens and what's going on. None of them recapture the magic of the original, but there's an interesting story being told out through the experiences of a well-meaning but kinda insufferable protagonist. The big plot is, the ancient aliens were warned of a Great Filter event impending, other aliens they called the Assassins who liked to reset the galaxy to a lifeless state. The story has been told better, but this isn't a bad take on it. Oh, and here's Piper's page on Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8301. The short stories are good, most of the novels are classic tales of the Earth Man's Burden; Uller Uprising is a retelling of the Sepoy Mutiny with aliens, and The Cosmic Computer is a clever take on the Story of Stone soup but with a lot of Otherization and coded CSA apologia. There's a future history unfolding that follows humanity from federation, to Empire, to Long Night. The Fuzzy novels are great, and in my opinion redeem the rest, they're where he got to in his development. Piper is problematic, no question about it, he wasn't a product of his times so much as a cause of them. But. You can draw a line from Murder in the Gun Room (a murder mystery featuring as the detective, one Jefferson Davis Rand, no that's not a typo) to Little Fuzzy and its sequels and there's a clear upward trend. If he'd lived longer I can't help but think he'd have come a long way from the viewpoint put into his early works.
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Mar 8, 2022 05:40
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mllaneza posted:
I've actually only read the final sequel and I thought the meta-plot was cool: It turns out the Assassins are energy-based lifeforms who have engineered the Universe so that instead of expanding infinitely into nothing, it will collapse and the re-explode into a steady-state universe more amenable to their existence while they're hanging out in a black hole elsewhere. They emerge every so often to wipe out all life so that nobody fucks up the delicate universe engineering they've done. The Assassins let the humans and heechee live when they discover both species have been uploading their consciousness into computers. The Assassins reason that it means the human-heechee civilization is transitioning to also being energy-based and will therefore prefer the Assassin agenda to a universe that stretches out into infinite nothing. Danhenge fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Mar 8, 2022 |
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Mar 8, 2022 05:59
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buffalo all day posted:Gene Wolfe’s the book of the new sun springs immediately to mind hm, shadow and claw i think definitely but i think sword and citadel maybe too epic for this mood? i haven't read citadel yet though. one thing i liked about 'the dying of the light' is that the book's plot was meaningless for the other kavalar. tokenbrownguy posted:Piranesi by Susanna Clarke thanks, looks interesting! quantumfoam posted:Parts of the Strugatsky brothers Beetle in the Anthill and all of their last novel Doomed City are amazing at this. i find the strugatsky's a bit uneven but i picked up the doomed city last week. guess it's going on top of the reading stack. i haven't read beetle though so thank you! weren't they also at odds with the union of soviet writers for much of their career? i think i read that in the 'hard to be a god' intro essay. that might make you a bit pessimistic i'd imagine.
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Mar 8, 2022 06:32
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Doomed City isn't Strugatskis last written novel. It's the last novel published --- they decided that even showing it to the censors would get them a quick trip to Siberia. So, it waited until Glasnost. They even left two spare copes of the manuscript with trusted but not well-known acquaintances in case they got arrested and the original got destroyed. As an upside, you don't have to worry whether the version you got is the one that got censor edits undone. And yeah, it's broody and trippy, and sociological, and, well, I am not even sure it's really sci-fi. Also, inspired by this painting: 
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Mar 8, 2022 06:48
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Was it Gateway that had that guy talking about how some dude struck it rich by finding some alien tech that kept stuff super cold in a bottle or super hot? I think I might have read it but I can't remember.
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Mar 8, 2022 10:18
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Metis of the Hallways posted:Add the Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and you've got a real confusing mess. Just tell people that the three works comprise the loosely connected Public Announcements trilogy.
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Mar 8, 2022 10:26
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Annath posted:Any books out there that capture the "space archeology" feel of Rendezvous with Rama? Ringworld is the other major classic of the Big Dumb Object genre. There's also John Varley's Titan and its sequels, which are actually pretty good despite all the fun everyone has with the Titanide sex chart. Also, how about Solaris for a similar "humans trying to deal with an alien object they can't really understand" feel?
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Mar 8, 2022 16:31
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tokenbrownguy posted:idk about "hopepunk" or w/e but I could use some more chill and humanistic books ala Becky Chambers This was a few pages back, but my god, thank you for that recommendation. That book was a quick read, but, just absolutely adorable. I loved it.
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Mar 8, 2022 18:47
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heck yes. some real gems in the kindle unlimited thread, that's where I saw the rec.
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Mar 8, 2022 19:14
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Fivemarks posted:I always wanted to write sci-fi, but I got convinced by mutual acquaintances of GB and I that I'm too black, not smart enough, and not 'good' enough to ever be a real writer, especially in Sci-fi. I guess seeing the recent change in things on the sci-fi front has made me feel better about that. After all, if Sanderson can just right four books offhandedly, I can at least write a short story. i want to read your books/stories
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Mar 8, 2022 20:17
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OddObserver posted:Doomed City isn't Strugatskis last written novel. It's the last novel published --- they decided that even showing it to the censors would get them a quick trip to Siberia. So, it waited until Glasnost. They even left two spare copes of the manuscript with trusted but not well-known acquaintances in case they got arrested and the original got destroyed. As an upside, you don't have to worry whether the version you got is the one that got censor edits undone. And yeah, it's broody and trippy, and sociological, and, well, I am not even sure it's really sci-fi. I tend to go by published date for authors. Doomed City is either a expose of various putsch attempts that happened in USSR with a thin veneer of scifi elements to disguise the gulag worthy content, or a scifi book with a disguised payload about various putsches that might have gone down in a future not-USSR city. Either way, Doomed City does have scifi elements like involuntary time travel, forcefields, anti-gravity hijinks, "city counselors" who can literally stop time while they do their thing, etc. I have a massive soft spot for russian/USSR client state scifi authors of the Iron Curtain period like the Strugatsky brothers, Stanislaw Lem, Kir Bulychev, etc; so take the following statement with a 50kg boulder of salt. I feel that the constraints russian & russian client state scifi authors worked under resulted in more clever, engaging, and humanitarianism themed style stories than what was getting published in the free world by their scifi author contemporaries like Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl, Poul Anderson, Silverberg, etc. Kir Bulychev's english language short story collections Half a Life and Guslar Wonders are worth reading if you ever stumble across them.
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Mar 8, 2022 21:42
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