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Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0013TX6FI/ A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn #1) by P Djčlí Clark - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HKXS84X/ Artifact Space by Miles Cameron - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092DV697H/ A pair of books by Charles Stross Saturn's Children (Freyaverse) - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0013A1IYI/ Rule 34 (Halting State #2) - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Y3I6XW/ Blackfish City by Sam J Miller - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071DSNY9G/ Knight's Shadow (Greatcoats #2) by Sebastien de Castell - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TV1V7SW/
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May 1, 2022 19:46
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Bhodi posted:Even the "best" people seem beaten down by the system or are deeply flawed in some way. I guess maybe that's kind of police procedurals / crime thrillers in general? I think it might be. I don't read much of that genre either but I read Peter Temple's novel Truth a while ago (because it won a literary award) and he continually describes Melbourne's CBD along the lines of how white suburbanites in the US might imagine Detroit. It was hard to tell whether he was deliberately giving us the view of a jaded veteran cop who's always on the lookout for trouble, or whether the author himself was still carrying the baggage of having grown up a white person in Johannesburg.
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May 1, 2022 21:32
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pradmer posted:
I like the Halting State series. Stross has found a sweet spot in near-future crime novels where he can use some real tech to build plots on, while still adding new tech as extrapolations. The only problems is occasionally having to throw away a manuscript because someone actually did the caper he's writing about. I like the characters and the plots, so I have to recommend the series. Rule 34 doesn't spoil the first one in any major way, so you could take a flier on it while it's on discount.
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May 1, 2022 21:45
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freebooter posted:I think it might be. I don't read much of that genre either but I read Peter Temple's novel Truth a while ago (because it won a literary award) and he continually describes Melbourne's CBD along the lines of how white suburbanites in the US might imagine Detroit. It was hard to tell whether he was deliberately giving us the view of a jaded veteran cop who's always on the lookout for trouble, or whether the author himself was still carrying the baggage of having grown up a white person in Johannesburg. i live in Melbourne's CBD and last week a neighbour put an old chair outside my house rather than take it to the tip, after dark i put it back outside his house. the next day he put it outside another house. brutal stuff
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May 1, 2022 23:52
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branedotorg posted:i live in Melbourne's CBD and last week a neighbour put an old chair outside my house rather than take it to the tip, after dark i put it back outside his house. the next day he put it outside another house. dang, that is some brutal urban warfare op
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May 2, 2022 00:32
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darkgray posted:The Red Sister trilogy by Mark Lawrence was wonderfully read by Helen Duff. Huh I actually tried Red Sister blind because I liked Heather O’Neill so much when she read one of Tana Frenchs books. Didn’t realize there was another edition but I’ll vouch for O’Neill any day
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May 2, 2022 00:55
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Got Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary" and Levar Burton's "Aftermath" next up on my reading pile. Have mixed feelings about both books. Weir's macgyver competence porn main characters + quippy-ness kind of grates on me, while Burton's Aftermath is gonna be a deeply weird post-apocalyptic read, just taking into account what kind of headspace and long seated issues Burton in the 1990's was working out onto paper and print.
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May 2, 2022 04:10
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silvergoose posted:If you're okay with memes occasionally popping up, I really loved Moira Quirk's narration of Gideon the Ninth. A Proper Uppercut posted:Oh yea those are really good audiobooks too. Thank you everyone, I've copied it all down, but this is what we actually started on before I got a chance to check the thread because I remembered them being good and we enjoy a good female protagonist/narrator. It's weird, all the books we've listened to I've already read, but I get a good amount out of listening so that it's still a worthwhile experience.
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May 2, 2022 07:22
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Bhodi posted:However, really feels like it's happening at the meta level because it seems like the author themselves can't conceptualize or write people who are actually empathetic and caring and make a real difference in the world. It's like everyone is written to be inherently mean or selfish or duty-bound and the only thing holding people back from brutishness is laws and the fear of getting caught. That's not a particularly controversial take though. It's like that thing where people point out that maybe violent video-games are not actually an outlet for a fantasy self or a safe space to explore alien thoughts and impulses, but rather an outlet for your true self, unshackled by the mores and consequences we face in our day to day life.
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May 2, 2022 10:48
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Beachcomber posted:Thank you everyone, I've copied it all down, but this is what we actually started on before I got a chance to check the thread because I remembered them being good and we enjoy a good female protagonist/narrator. As it turns out, I basically only listen to books I've already read so it isn't weird to me!
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May 2, 2022 11:09
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Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? And what other fantasy would you recommend if my favorite authors are Le Guin and China Mieville? Bonus points for non-anglo stuff
Slowdive fucked around with this message at 16:18 on May 2, 2022 |
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May 2, 2022 16:16
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Did you read last month's book of the month? Kalpa Imperial.
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May 2, 2022 16:23
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silvergoose posted:Did you read last month's book of the month? Kalpa Imperial. Yep, loved it! Anything similar comes to mind apart from Le Guin?
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May 2, 2022 16:33
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Slowdive posted:Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? Anything by Lem, Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. David Zindell’s Neverness.
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May 2, 2022 19:02
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Slowdive posted:Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? And what other fantasy would you recommend if my favorite authors are Le Guin and China Mieville? Bonus points for non-anglo stuff M. John Harrison might do you, both for fantasy (the Viriconium stories or The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again) and SF (the Kefahuchi Tract books or The Centauri Device).
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May 2, 2022 19:14
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pradmer posted:Artifact Space by Miles Cameron - $1.99 Contemplating skipping an hour of work to get through another week's episode (kinda feels a TV show with an overarching plot yet with monsters-of-the-week).
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May 2, 2022 19:14
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Remulak posted:This is hella fun, somehow both conventional and odd, really episodic the way that the old novels-made-of-recycled-short-stories were. This is almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion but I just recently learned that "novels made out of recycled short stories" were referred to as "fix-ups" and I thought that was a neat bit of trivia.
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May 2, 2022 19:25
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thotsky posted:That's not a particularly controversial take though. It's like that thing where people point out that maybe violent video-games are not actually an outlet for a fantasy self or a safe space to explore alien thoughts and impulses, but rather an outlet for your true self, unshackled by the mores and consequences we face in our day to day life. If real life was populated by monstrous opponents with no inner life and only the most basic of scripts forcing them to fight me, and I was an all powerful killfucker with an arsenal of exactingly fetishized and super satisfying guns, and I could respawn when I died, and also I felt no pain, I guess, sure, I could be a first person shooter protagonist. But I don't know if that's my 'true self' so much as 'a reasonable thing to be under those conditions'.
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May 2, 2022 19:32
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General Battuta posted:If real life was populated by monstrous opponents with no inner life i mean,
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May 2, 2022 20:33
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a harsh but not inaccurate description of online multiplayer
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May 2, 2022 20:47
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Slowdive posted:Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? And what other fantasy would you recommend if my favorite authors are Le Guin and China Mieville? Bonus points for non-anglo stuff Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent reads and do a lot of stuff you won't have seen before (I never read The Children of the Sky, book 3 in the series, does it hold up to the first two?)
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May 3, 2022 00:08
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:
I listened to the first one and while I can't comment on her capacity as a narrator I will say I found her work on Ancillary Justice pretty hard to get through. I don't know if she's usually more characterful or emotive in her usual work, and I get why it makes sense for Justice, but it felt like a really flat delivery across the entire novel. Made it tough to keep my focus and I found I had to go back and re-listen to passages because I had just kind of zoned out. It probably didn't help that outside of the unique perspective of the main character the book doesn't have a whole lot going for it in terms of plot or characterization either, imo. The worldbuilding is fair to good, but felt like once they'd achieved their premise they didn't have many interesting places to go with it.
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May 3, 2022 07:36
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Slowdive posted:Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? And what other fantasy would you recommend if my favorite authors are Le Guin and China Mieville? Bonus points for non-anglo stuff I think I've brought it up in this thread before, but I'd recommend Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. It's a sci-fi novel about a poet recruited to combat a weaponised language that warps the minds of anyone who tries to learn it.
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May 3, 2022 09:11
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Slowdive posted:Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? Of those three I only haven't read Salvation (loved the other two, though I dislike Hamilton) but am I correct in thinking the linking thread between all three is big, broad-scale stuff across space and time? In that case you will definitely also enjoy Reynolds' Pushing Ice, and maybe Chris Beckett's Dark Eden trilogy, and possibly (though these are Earth-bound) David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. And it doesn't fit into the big scale time/space concept but I found Michael Flynn's Eifelheim to be a really original and interesting take on a first contact alien landing story.
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May 3, 2022 10:23
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Tor are giving away A Psalm For The Wild-Built this week, if you aren't already aware.
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May 3, 2022 14:05
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Sinatrapod posted:I listened to the first one and while I can't comment on her capacity as a narrator I will say I found her work on Ancillary Justice pretty hard to get through. I don't know if she's usually more characterful or emotive in her usual work, and I get why it makes sense for Justice, but it felt like a really flat delivery across the entire novel. Made it tough to keep my focus and I found I had to go back and re-listen to passages because I had just kind of zoned out. It probably didn't help that outside of the unique perspective of the main character the book doesn't have a whole lot going for it in terms of plot or characterization either, imo. The worldbuilding is fair to good, but felt like once they'd achieved their premise they didn't have many interesting places to go with it. Depending on when you listened to it/which version, initially the first book was not narrated by Andoh. She came in on the second two and eventually they re-recorded the first one with Andoh. They had a very weird direction going with the inital narrator where she sounded super robotic (leaning way too into 'the main character is an AI' I guess) whenever she was reading anything that wasn't other character's dialog (so, most of the book). It's really not great. Andoh's narration is really good though! edit: Wow, so, apparently Audible considers the Andoh version of Ancillary Justice a different book. I'd have to buy it again to get the Andoh version (I only have the Celeste Ciulla-narrated version in my library, but they don't even seem to officially offer it on the app anymore from what I can see.) DurianGray fucked around with this message at 15:21 on May 3, 2022 |
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May 3, 2022 15:13
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent reads and do a lot of stuff you won't have seen before (I never read The Children of the Sky, book 3 in the series, does it hold up to the first two?) It does not.
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May 3, 2022 16:04
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Jedit posted:Tor are giving away A Psalm For The Wild-Built this week, if you aren't already aware. Perhaps a bit more info is needed for those of us who don't memorize everything that is published by a thread-favorite author  Tor's monthly ebook club is giving away a bundle of 3-books-in-1: A Psalm For The Wild-Built (Monk and Robot #1) by Becky Chambers Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome (Lock In #0) by John Scalzi An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner
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May 3, 2022 16:20
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DurianGray posted:Depending on when you listened to it/which version, initially the first book was not narrated by Andoh. She came in on the second two and eventually they re-recorded the first one with Andoh. That's exactly what happened! Sorry to poo-poo your good works, Andoh. I still don't think the book is great but that's not their cross to bear. Man, the blowback must have been pretty zesty for them to run it back that hard. Now I kind of want to try it again and see if the narration was poisoning my opinion.
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May 3, 2022 16:21
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I haven't listened to the audiobook, but my feeling on Ancillary Justice is that it was a book with a few really compelling ideas that was just kind of let down by the execution. It wasn't poorly written by any means, it just didn't seem to do a whole lot with the most interesting bits. For all I know the other two books go more interesting places, but I never really had the drive to read them. Which is notable in its own way, as I'm the type of person to compulsively finish book trilogies even if I'm pretty lukewarm on the first or second book.
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May 3, 2022 17:53
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MockingQuantum posted:For all I know the other two books go more interesting places IMO they do not, neither in terms of setting nor conceptually.
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May 3, 2022 18:11
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Bayham Badger posted:IMO they do not, neither in terms of setting nor conceptually. Yeah, I enjoyed the trilogy, but if the first one doesn't do much for you, there's nothing in the sequels that's gonna turn it around suddenly.
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May 3, 2022 18:21
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent reads and do a lot of stuff you won't have seen before (I never read The Children of the Sky, book 3 in the series, does it hold up to the first two?) people usually say it doesn't, but if you liked the tines and wished to see more of them then the answer is yes
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May 3, 2022 18:29
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Children of the Sky is a middle book in a way the other two weren't.
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May 3, 2022 19:27
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MockingQuantum posted:I haven't listened to the audiobook, but my feeling on Ancillary Justice is that it was a book with a few really compelling ideas that was just kind of let down by the execution. It wasn't poorly written by any means, it just didn't seem to do a whole lot with the most interesting bits. For all I know the other two books go more interesting places, but I never really had the drive to read them. Which is notable in its own way, as I'm the type of person to compulsively finish book trilogies even if I'm pretty lukewarm on the first or second book. I really enjoyed Justice and would have been happy with it as a self contained book rather than a trilogy. The sequels were fine but the stories weren't as compelling, and if the Anaander Mianaai stuff could have been wrapped up as an extra hundred pages in the first book that would have made a really good standalone. Speaking of series where the first book is fine but you're not sure whether you want to continue, I listened to The Ninth Rain the other week and enjoyed it but I'm finding it hard to get into fantasy at the moment. Are the sequels good and worthy of my credits, or diminishing returns?
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May 3, 2022 20:00
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Changing Planes by Ursula K Le Guin - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IWTRB4E/ The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Volume Two: Swords Against Wizardry, The Swords of Lankhmar, and Swords and Ice Magic by Fritz Leiber - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L8WP9LR/
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May 3, 2022 23:00
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:I really enjoyed Justice and would have been happy with it as a self contained book rather than a trilogy. The sequels were fine but the stories weren't as compelling, and if the Anaander Mianaai stuff could have been wrapped up as an extra hundred pages in the first book that would have made a really good standalone. Yeah, the second and third books were odd because they took a sharp turn from epic space opera that affects the whole galaxy, to the protag trying to take care of just one planet. We never even got to see much of the conflict between the different Anaander Mianaai clones. I get that that was a purposeful decision by the author to focus more on character and culture instead of space battles. But, it wasn't where I was hoping the story would go.
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May 4, 2022 00:35
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Also when I listened the audiobook, my brain filled in completely different spellings for all the characters' names. So to my mind it's "Ana'ander Miat-n'ai" and seeing the real spelling always looks weird.
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May 4, 2022 00:36
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I posted this in the text adventure thread but since Disch was a famous SF writer, I think it's worth repeating here. https://amnesia-restored.com/ AMNESIA by Thomas Disch has been released in a digitally remastered version, featuring graphical elements and cut content that didn't fit on the original disks. Amnesia Restored posted:Amnesia: Restored offers four modes of gameplay for players to experience: the original Apple IIe, Commodore 64, and IBM PC, and the new web-based, contemporary mode for today’s computing devices. It also restores the portions of Disch’s manuscript omitted by Electronic Arts when it published the game in 1986. Other features include an easily accessible x-street indexer, interactive map of Manhattan, list of commands, address book, and 3D inventory of assets. Originally released in 1986, Amnesia was one of the first attempts to create a proper interactive novel (envisioned as "bookware" by the publisher) by an established SF writer. In addition to a sophisticated plot, it also contains a detailed simulation of Manhattan, with more than 4000 locations. Disch was supposedly disappointed that the SF community ignored the game and didn't treat it like a serious work: https://www.inform-fiction.org/manual/html/s46.html posted:Thomas M. Disch, another novelist of real powers, went through a wild surge of enthusiasm writing ‘Amnesia’ (1986), to be followed by total disillusion when it was not marketed and received as a novel might be. “The notion of trying to superimpose over this structure [i.e., the adventure game] a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience.” (Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, 1990). With the entire manuscript restored, this is effectively a lost Thomas Disch novel that has not been fully published previously.
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May 4, 2022 08:58
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SimonChris posted:I posted this in the text adventure thread There's a text adventure thread?
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May 4, 2022 12:39
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