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RoboCicero posted:I've been inexplicably on a "human mind(s) shatter on the rocks of something fundamentally incomprehensible" kick lately, with some prime examples being like, The Cipher by Kathe Joka, Uzumaki by Junji Ito, House of Leaves, Blindsight, or the Area X trilogy. Stuff like Ship of Fools is good too! Does anyone have any other recommendations along those veins? Just read The Last Astronaut and, while it was decent, it wasn't quite what I was looking for. Definitely not leaning as hard into as others, but maybe Planetfall? Parts of it did remind me of Diamond Dogs.
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Apr 28, 2022 10:22
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Kalman posted:CJ Cherryh’s Voyager In Night. This would be my top pick. Lem has already been mentioned with Solaris, but The Futurological Congress may also be worth a look.
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Apr 28, 2022 14:37
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read rendevous with rama. this is sci fi that i like. it's just a series of cool and mysterious things happening. the characters are interchangable names but that's a good thing here. there's almost no interpersonal drama. it's just a bunch of decent humans exploring a huge mysterious spaceship. when problems come up, the book doesn't waste time on resolving them because the point isn't contrived peril, it's that the problem highlights another cool mystery. i see that there are bad sequels which apparently gently caress up all of this so no more from rama but it's a cool book. it doesn't need any follow up at all.
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Apr 28, 2022 15:05
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I challenge anyone to read a Rama book, and remember a single thing that happened in it 15 minutes later. They're so boring.
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Apr 28, 2022 15:41
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Deptfordx posted:I challenge anyone to read a Rama book, and remember a single thing that happened in it 15 minutes later. They're so boring.
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Apr 28, 2022 15:47
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I enjoyed Rendevous as a teen. Planetary is a comic book series, 29 issues long, that is all about love for stories. It has tributes to various pulp heroes, comic books, fairy tales, scifi etc. A bit in the same vein as Venture Bros. One of my favorite stories is a tribute to Rama. There's a big dumb thing in orbit and the good guys send these gorgeous observational AI's to map it.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:05
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:I love science fiction as a genre, and I've bounced off the Rama series every time I've tried reading it. Same, I read Rendezvous in the last couple of years and I would be very hard pressed to tell you anything about it other than the broadest of strokes. Admittedly I think Clarke may just not be for me, because I wasn't crazy about Childhood's End either, but that one was at least, uh, more memorable.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:06
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weird, i thought it was very clear and interesting. it isn't so much about what happens as much as what they discover and what the purpose of all the things they find could be. i've got a pretty vivid mental image of the place. i suppose you just have to be already interested in exploring an giant ark type spaceship going in, because that is the only thing it has going for it and it does it well.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:18
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roomtone posted:weird, i thought it was very clear and interesting. it isn't so much about what happens as much as what they discover and what the purpose of all the things they find could be. i've got a pretty vivid mental image of the place. That was pretty much my experience as well, and is generally what I'm looking for in a Big Dumb Object story -- I want the main focus to be on exploring the object and trying to figure out what it does and why (and not necessarily succeeding). I'm a lot less interested in stories that use the BDO as the backdrop for the largely unrelated story they actually want to tell, which is why a lot of the thread recommendations in that vein like Blindsight, Planetfall, and Ship of Fools fell flat for me. Rama II delivered on that to some extent as well, but turned up the interpersonal drama and then went completely off the rails in the last 20% or so. IMO the best way to experience the sequel is to play the DOS game based on it, which (a) is a good game in its own right and (b) ends when Rama's main drive ignites and leaves you trapped on board with a few other members of the exploration team en route out of the solar system, completely ignoring the last few chapters of the book. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Apr 28, 2022 |
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Apr 28, 2022 16:34
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ToxicFrog posted:(b) ends when Rama's main drive ignites and leaves you trapped on board with a few other members of the exploration team en route out of the solar system, completely ignoring the last few chapters of the book. This is also what happens in Planetary. I love it.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:41
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It's time to enter the terrifying world of MUDs and MOOs  
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Apr 28, 2022 16:41
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ToxicFrog posted:That was pretty much my experience as well, and is generally what I'm looking for in a Big Dumb Object story -- I want the main focus to be on exploring the object and trying to figure out what it does and why (and not necessarily succeeding). I'm a lot less interested in stories that use the BDO as the backdrop for the largely unrelated story they actually want to tell, which is why a lot of the thread recommendations in that vein like Blindsight, Planetfall, and Ship of Fools fell flat for me. yeah the episode of ross's game dungeon on youtube about the rama game is what made me want to read the book. i tried to get the game running on my pc before but couldn't do it, might try again now just to see it's interpretation of the place. i agree about blindsight, at least. that is a book i went to read after seeing the author's talk on consciousness, which was really interesting, but then the book was just a bunch of depressing assholes rambling and i lost interest before it got going. put down roadside picnic a couple of weeks ago for the same reason; i was interested in the zone, not the cynical worldview of its rear end in a top hat protagonist. i think it's just that if i want to read character based writing, sci-fi is not where i go.
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Apr 28, 2022 19:48
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Man I'd love a cosmic space horror book where we have a big weird object in space we send scientists to, and they just randomly all get killed by pushing random buttons that do horrible things to them. Just like, a completely alien ship, no human logic to it at all. No secret alien among the crew. Just like: "Dave drew the short straw so he's gotta flip the lever now" "Goddammit Eugene you cheating gently caress!" *Flips lever* *Incinerated by a laser grid that shoots out of a vent* "Huh... Maybe... Maybe they had alien rats? gently caress, I dunno why this poo poo is in here, I've been lost since Barbara got turned inside out when she thought that big red button thing led to an airlock. Why do they have a button specifically to turn you inside out? What possible use could that be to anyone?" Bonus points if the airlock entrance they went in was an engine vent and not an actual airlock. Half the book probably spent wandering around in the alien version of a v8. All we learn in the book is there's maybe 5 buttons on the ship that don't kill you somehow. Nothing else. It's never sell but I'd read the hell out of a series like that.
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Apr 28, 2022 21:51
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You should read Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds 
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Apr 28, 2022 21:58
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Deptfordx posted:I challenge anyone to read a Rama book, and remember a single thing that happened in it 15 minutes later. They're so boring. I remember them dodging the slosh pattern from a bunch of wave breaks in some random pool of water they had to sail across for reasons. And they sliced a bunch of poo poo open with a laser at the end because they didn't have enough time. There's a similar series that I can't remember the name of at all where the mysterious spaceship is an alternative universe's Ceres that's been turned into a generation ship and it had a dimensional portal to a weird infinite tubular realm in the back. The reason it's memorable is because of the team of Soviet commandos that literally train for a life time to fly in and... Hang out with the Americans, I guess, it didn't make much sense. But I read it like 15 years ago and it stuck with me more than rama did so it did something right.
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Apr 28, 2022 22:10
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That's Eon by Greg Bear iirc
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Apr 28, 2022 22:17
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Agency (Jackpot #2) by William Gibson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072NXSB14/
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Apr 28, 2022 22:21
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Man I'd love a cosmic space horror book where we have a big weird object in space we send scientists to, and they just randomly all get killed by pushing random buttons that do horrible things to them. So basically Cube, but on a spaceship.
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Apr 28, 2022 23:38
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ToxicFrog posted:That was pretty much my experience as well, and is generally what I'm looking for in a Big Dumb Object story -- I want the main focus to be on exploring the object and trying to figure out what it does and why (and not necessarily succeeding). I'm a lot less interested in stories that use the BDO as the backdrop for the largely unrelated story they actually want to tell, which is why a lot of the thread recommendations in that vein like Blindsight, Planetfall, and Ship of Fools fell flat for me. This recently released translation of Stanidlaw Lem’s less-known early short stories has at least three pure BDO stories in it, basically much more focused and distilled takes kinda in the run up to writing Solaris (the rest seem like pre-cursors to Golem XIV about developing general AI). Unfortunately the kindle price is totally ridiculous because it’s only out in hardcover yet: https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Other-Stories-Stanislaw-Lem/dp/0262046083/ StrixNebulosa posted:It's time to enter the terrifying world of MUDs and MOOs 
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Apr 28, 2022 23:40
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Basically, only without the clues for solving the rooms being dangerous. The entire ship is just random weird poo poo. Some good, some bad, some just weird stuff like "hey that wall turned blue" with nothing else happening.
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Apr 28, 2022 23:43
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Also sounds like the Heechee/Gateway books. I read them as a kid, no idea if they hold up.
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Apr 28, 2022 23:51
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Working my way through "The Dark Forest" and Luo Ji just blowing tons of money and resources on his quest to find his dream girlfriend as a Wallfacer is just hilarious to me Not even an ounce of desire to assist with saving humanity, just pure hedonism. I can respect the guy. He knows what he wants and doesn't give a gently caress.
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Apr 29, 2022 00:40
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Bhodi posted:Also sounds like the Heechee/Gateway books. I read them as a kid, no idea if they hold up. Ooh, I blew through those a few months ago. They're fine. Not even too problematic for a 70's series. Definitely pretty horny though.
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Apr 29, 2022 00:54
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Man I'd love a cosmic space horror book where we have a big weird object in space we send scientists to, and they just randomly all get killed by pushing random buttons that do horrible things to them. That's basically the backdrop to Rogue Moon, in that that's how the object functions, but the exploration of it isn't the heart of the story.
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Apr 29, 2022 05:41
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Bhodi posted:Also sounds like the Heechee/Gateway books. I read them as a kid, no idea if they hold up. Way back when I was a very young kid I played the text based adventure games of these. My most notable memory as like a grade school kid is that I ate a diseased raccoon and died. My second most notable was learning about Chernobyl as a thing that happened recently based upon the year ingame and doing the arithmetic of when it happened.
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Apr 29, 2022 06:17
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I picked up Singularity Sky. Does it get less twee as time goes on or is this just not the book for me?
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Apr 29, 2022 06:46
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Nitrousoxide posted:Working my way through "The Dark Forest" and Luo Ji just blowing tons of money and resources on his quest to find his dream girlfriend as a Wallfacer is just hilarious to me Not even an ounce of desire to assist with saving humanity, just pure hedonism. I can respect the guy. He knows what he wants and doesn't give a gently caress. I loved how his assistant was like "Okay, you have incredibly specific ideas about your dream girlfriend and you want me to find that exact person, which might not exist. I'll probably get it done, but there's some change it wont work out."
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Apr 29, 2022 06:47
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I love when he buys the undersea shipwreck wine and then drinks it even though its turned green and then nearly dies from from the drinking poisonous 500 year old wine. There's not enough dumb guys in fiction doing harebrained poo poo for no reason.
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Apr 29, 2022 09:56
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Man I'd love a cosmic space horror book where we have a big weird object in space we send scientists to, and they just randomly all get killed by pushing random buttons that do horrible things to them. Not strictly sci-fi, but that's an almost exact description of Castle Heterodyne in Girl Genius. The Castle is a broken artificial intelligence and filled with deathtraps, but is also a repository of some of the most advanced scientific knowledge of the age. So mad scientists who become too inconvenient are sent into the Castle to try and repair it, with hilarious* results. * if you are an insane AI with a copious supply of deathtraps.
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Apr 29, 2022 10:20
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No Dignity posted:I love when he buys the undersea shipwreck wine and then drinks it even though its turned green and then nearly dies from from the drinking poisonous 500 year old wine. There's not enough dumb guys in fiction doing harebrained poo poo for no reason. I’m betting he’s driving the Trisolarans batty trying to read importance and meaning into his actions.
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Apr 29, 2022 12:23
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Are there any science fiction books set in the future which uses the Holocene calendar for dating things?
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Apr 29, 2022 13:10
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Less Fat Luke posted:You should read Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds Yes. Take it fantasy and this is also kind of the premise of Paladin's Hope by Ursula Vernon, although they do eventually figure out what the deathtraps are for. roomtone posted:yeah the episode of ross's game dungeon on youtube about the rama game is what made me want to read the book. i tried to get the game running on my pc before but couldn't do it, might try again now just to see it's interpretation of the place. It runs fine in DosBox these days, and it's also included in eXoDOS, so give it a shot. quote:i think it's just that if i want to read character based writing, sci-fi is not where i go. It's not even that I don't want character based writing in my SF (although a lot of SF authors are bad at it¹), but if I pick up a book with an attitude of "hell yeah, 500 pages of people exploring incomprehensible alien architecture!" and the first 480 pages are actually about the protagonist struggling with the psychological burden of the terrible secrets she hides while the alien architecture just kind of squats in the background doing and affecting nothing, I'm going to be disappointed no matter how successful those 480 pages are at what the author set out to do with them. ¹ on reflection, I don't know if SF authors are notably worse at it than other genres, or if it's just that I'm more likely to forgive SF books with bad character writing if the book's big idea is otherwise cool and interesting, and thus read disproportionately more SF books with bad characterization. Jedit posted:Not strictly sci-fi, but that's an almost exact description of Castle Heterodyne in Girl Genius. The Castle is a broken artificial intelligence and filled with deathtraps, but is also a repository of some of the most advanced scientific knowledge of the age. So mad scientists who become too inconvenient are sent into the Castle to try and repair it, with hilarious* results. It has been a very long time since I read GG, but IIRC the Castle is actually, like, twelve different AIs that are all mostly functional but can no longer communicate with each other So the damage control AI goes "the backup generator in sector 12 needs repairs, I'll turn on a bunch of lights guiding these guys to it and tell the security AI to let them in", but the security AI never gets the memo and goes "oh poo poo, intruders in sector 12 near the backup generator, release the ceiling lobsters". If I'm remembering incorrectly, I still think that's a cool idea I want to see in books. 
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Apr 29, 2022 14:16
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I finished Discord of the Gods, which is the final book in the 5-book Ruin of Kings series. I enjoyed it, but i have to say that the series felt weaker at the end than the beginning. The first book feels mysterious and fresh, but a lot of that mystery gets explained by the end of the fifth book and it's not quite as fun. Still probably worth a read as a series, but with the caveat that most things are revealed.
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Apr 29, 2022 14:41
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Captain Monkey posted:I picked up Singularity Sky. Does it get less twee as time goes on or is this just not the book for me? I didn't think much of it when I first read it, but after reading the sequel (Iron Sunrise) i went back and found it a good deal more compelling.
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Apr 29, 2022 15:15
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Captain Monkey posted:I picked up Singularity Sky. Does it get less twee as time goes on or is this just not the book for me? its pretty goofy all the way through from what i remember. lots of really crazy tech. the latter half isnt nearly as outright weird but still pretty out there.
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Apr 29, 2022 15:48
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Captain Monkey posted:I picked up Singularity Sky. Does it get less twee as time goes on or is this just not the book for me? I don’t remember much about it, except for the Mimes and the Worst Cream Pie: Charles Stross posted:A fuzzy white shape moved among the trees in front of him. It had once been a woman. Now it was powder white, except for blood-red lips and bobble nose: layers of white clothing shrouded its putrefying limbs, held together with a delicate lacework of silvery metallic vines that pulsed and contracted as it moved. It swayed from side to side as it approached, bending coquettishly at the hips, as if the base of its spine had been replaced by a universal joint. It clutched a large pie dish in both bony hands. Collapsed eye sockets lined with black photoreceptive film grinned at him as it bowed and extended the bowl, like a mother offering her spoiled son his favorite dessert. Felix gagged. The smell was indescribable.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:01
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i'm not sure twee is a word i would use to describe that book???
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Apr 29, 2022 17:55
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ToxicFrog posted:It has been a very long time since I read GG, but IIRC the Castle is actually, like, twelve different AIs that are all mostly functional but can no longer communicate with each other Close. Castle Heterodyne is a single AI that has been fragmented into a dozen pieces, all of which assume that they are the principal AI. The true central AI also knows that it isn't in control of the subsidiaries any more, so it will be sending its helpers into extreme danger. But as mentioned, this doesn't stop it because 1) the job needs doing and 2) it's a personality clone of Faustus Heterodyne and he would have thought it was hilarious.
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Apr 29, 2022 18:14
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Is there a term for that wry British self-aware writing style that Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett do? I ask because Stross has always struck me as a poor imitator of that style.
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Apr 29, 2022 19:10
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zoux posted:Is there a term for that wry British self-aware writing style that Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett do? I ask because Stross has always struck me as a poor imitator of that style.
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Apr 29, 2022 19:17
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