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Everyone posted:I'm a few chapters into Jonathan Maberry's [url=https://www.amazon.com/Kagen-Damned-Novel-Jonathan-Maberry-ebook/dp/B09CNF9Y8M/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CG9731SVOTE9&keywords=kagen+the+damned+by+jonathan+maberry&qid=1652303506&sprefix=kagen+the%2Caps%2C160&sr=8-1Kagen the Damned[/url] I bought it based on you mentioning it - lovecraftian fantasy sounded interesting and different. I'm about 25% of the way in and it's just not great. Plot is confused, the main characters aren't compelling and about 80% of the female characters have been raped or almost raped. The premise begins with a huge empire overthrown in single night by an evil, thought to be defeated enemy, using magic that no one believes existed simultaneously in many cities with no warning despite 10 of thousands of troops invading. I don't know, I get a logistical headache from it.
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May 19, 2022 13:42
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mllaneza posted:There's an easy gateway drug from guy lit to Austen: The Master and Commander series. We're not ever going to top the kind of stories we got while the characters are at sea, but Austen writes Good Stuff about what goes on ashore. Since you mentioned Master and Commander (the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian) I may as well provide a progress update: I'm on book 5 of the RCN series by David Drake now. It has fully accepted itself in being a straight ripoff of the aforementioned series. Hell they even gently caress around on water boats in every book for some reason. There's always a loving island or oceans involved lol
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May 19, 2022 14:38
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Are the Aubrey-Maturin audiobooks (assuming there are some) done well? I just finished 2 months on Last Exit and want something different.
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May 19, 2022 15:01
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bagrada posted:Are the Aubrey-Maturin audiobooks (assuming there are some) done well? I just finished 2 months on Last Exit and want something different. I really like them, though I think there's two or three different sets of audiobooks with different narrators. I listened to Master & Commander and a couple others narrated by Simon Vance and now I can't hear Jack Aubrey in any other voice but his, but it looks like those aren't widely available anymore. No idea how the Patrick Tull versions are. edit: turns out there's like four different recordings of the Aubrey-Maturin books with different narrators, and which ones you can get seems to be at least partially dependent on what region you're in. Consensus seems to be that the Vance versions are the best, but that the Patrick Tull versions are also good too. On US Audible, it looks like you can get the Patrick Tull versions and the Tim Pigott-Smith versions (which weirdly enough have the covers for the Simon Vance versions, it's bizarre). I've been getting the Vance ones through Overdrive at my local library. MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 16:19 on May 19, 2022 |
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May 19, 2022 16:16
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zoux posted:Pushing Ice always seemed to me like a spiritual cousin to one of my most favorite sci-fi books, Heart of the Comet by Brin and Baxter. Very similar vibes, also takes place on a dang comet. Because Catholicism. Seriously. Soldano is by accident or intent correct that the ship is evil, but he's also the highest spiritual figure available to us in the story - mentally sub out "Bishop" for "Pope" and it makes more sense, because the story positions him as doctrinally infallible. If he says it's bad news, and the Argonos needs to get out of there, he's correct in the eyes of whatever higher power exists in this story. Whether he's being manipulative, actually earnestly concerned for the ship, or because game recognize game when it comes to capital-E evil is unclear, and I would be shocked if that wasn't intentional. But also it doesn't make any difference. Veronica is unquestionably the most moral person in the story, but regardless of her moral intent, her beliefs are heretical. It doesn't matter if Soldano was honest and her death really was an accident, she was dead the second she put on the collar. The horror is not the thousands of tortured dead bodies, it's that the universe is playing by Catholic rules, and that may or may not include a loving deity, but it sure as hell includes Satan. It doesn't matter if you grasp what the plan was, or whether humans can understand the aliens. You didn't follow the rules, hosed around with Evil, and got got. It's not your place to know, or the place of anybody in the story except the Bishop, and even that's not certain.
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May 19, 2022 17:13
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bagrada posted:Are the Aubrey-Maturin audiobooks (assuming there are some) done well? I just finished 2 months on Last Exit and want something different. The Patrick Tull versions are incredible. Easily one of my favorite audiobook readings, coming back and re-listening to them is like having a warm blanket, very soothing. I'm fairly certain if you ask this question in the Aubrey-Maturin thread they would be the overwhelming favorite.
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May 19, 2022 17:46
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branedotorg posted:I bought it based on you mentioning it - lovecraftian fantasy sounded interesting and different. You'll get to it if you stick with it, but the Silver Empire was kind of like a way more psychotic version of the Empire from Warhammer fantasy. It's not that they didn't believe in magic so much as they thought they'd pretty well witch-hunted it out of existence but they were wrong.
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May 19, 2022 17:47
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uPen posted:The Patrick Tull versions are incredible. Easily one of my favorite audiobook readings, coming back and re-listening to them is like having a warm blanket, very soothing. I'm fairly certain if you ask this question in the Aubrey-Maturin thread they would be the overwhelming favorite. MockingQuantum posted:I really like them, though I think there's two or three different sets of audiobooks with different narrators. I listened to Master & Commander and a couple others narrated by Simon Vance and now I can't hear Jack Aubrey in any other voice but his, but it looks like those aren't widely available anymore. No idea how the Patrick Tull versions are. Thanks both, grabbed the Patrick Tull. When I browsed, it and the audio drama version were my only options so I'm glad Tull is well regarded too. The reviews below were pretty glowing.
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May 19, 2022 18:04
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MockingQuantum posted:I really like them, though I think there's two or three different sets of audiobooks with different narrators. I listened to Master & Commander and a couple others narrated by Simon Vance and now I can't hear Jack Aubrey in any other voice but his, but it looks like those aren't widely available anymore. No idea how the Patrick Tull versions are. I second Patrick Tull, he's amazing.
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May 19, 2022 18:48
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Good to know! It's a series I know I'll re-read/listen to often, so I was a little sad to know that I couldn't get the Vance versions. I'll probably grab the Tull ones on a re-read, whenever I get around to it.
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May 19, 2022 18:53
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women writing opinion pieces on how they don't really like their partners is just the hot thing right now; not sure there is any actual point to that article
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May 19, 2022 18:58
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thotsky posted:women writing opinion pieces on how they don't really like their partners is just the hot thing right now; not sure there is any actual point to that article As a man married to a woman I have to say: okay, yeah, fair enough
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May 19, 2022 19:01
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My favorite Lit vs Genre meme came out a few years ago and I cant find it, unfortunately. It's from a very female centric, feel good show, One Tree Hill, think. It begins with one of the purely good and sweet female protags gushing about how Gravity's Rainbow is her favorite piece of literature, then it jump cuts to someone doing a live reading of the coprophilia scene from Gravity's Rainbow.
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May 19, 2022 22:09
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The Book of Koli (Rampart #1) by MR Carey - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W54MPDZ/
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May 19, 2022 23:37
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I can’t believe I managed to hate-read all the rest of the way through Sea of Tranquility because it loving SUCKED DEAD DOG DICK Jesus loving Christ. She set most of the novel on a moon colony in the Sea of Tranquility and she described the sky as endless black with nothing of note in the sky, when that mare is FACING THE loving EARTH Like she can’t even do the most perfunctory research for her setting, for a science fiction novel. What, does she think that’s below her as a lovely C-tier lit fic author? Like, would she be totally be ok situating the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Paris? And that’s like a niggling complaint next to the fact the plot was barely strung together timey-wimey garbage, the characters had no character, the dialogue was completely flat bullshit exposition, and her literary style reads like a first draft because when going back to certain povs she can’t even maintain 1st vs 3rd person or tense. Also she was trying imitate Cloud Atlas and did such and incredibly lovely job. How did this lazy poo poo not make it through at least another round of editing? Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 03:14 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 03:02
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Stuporstar posted:I can’t believe I managed to hate-read all the rest of the way through Sea of Tranquility because it loving SUCKED DEAD DOG DICK So... it wasn't your bag, eh?
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May 20, 2022 03:20
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Everyone posted:So... it wasn't your bag, eh? I don’t know whose bag it is cause it’s poo poo scifi that insulting to all scifi and scifi fans, but it’s also poo poo lit fic that’s insultingly bad to anyone who likes lit fic The only people I can imagine liking this are Harry Potter fans who’ve never read another book finally deciding to try another book, and literally any vaguely sff-like book other than Harry Potter will blow them away You know… like Erin Morgenstern fans
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May 20, 2022 03:25
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The last book that caused me to react with your level of vitriol was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.
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May 20, 2022 03:56
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Eyes of the Void, the sequel to Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards of Earth is out. It's okay, but rather middle-bookish.
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May 20, 2022 03:58
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That's pretty much the level of venom I directed at KPS.
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May 20, 2022 04:10
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MartingaleJack posted:The last book that caused me to react with your level of vitriol was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. I usually DNF books I’m not enjoying and try to forget about them, but something about this one kept egging me on to hate read because it’s from an author who is supposed to be more competent than this (Station Eleven was meh but not this bad). I have no one to blame but myself for all that wasted time, but I’m gonna be mad at this book for it anyway For the first half of the book, I could see she was purposely riffing on Cloud Atlas, but all I could think was how much better Cloud Atlas is than this weak poo poo. By the time it got to 2401 and all the characters still sounded exactly the same and the setting still barely futuristic, I shoulda quit right then Also from there all the description and dialogue sounds like this quote:Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies. The first colony on the moon was intended as a prototype, a practice run for establishing a presence in other solar systems in the coming centuries. “Because we’ll have to,” the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, “eventually, whether we want to or not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line.” So every character, even this unnamed Chinese president (never mentioned before, she just asspulls like that after the fact all the time), sounds exactly like the extremely anglo author And this exposition is several chapters after this has already been established (one of the previous characters came from moon Colony Two—and yes everything is so creatively named). But all the characters constantly reiterate poo poo the reader is supposed to know in this as-you-know-bob manner, even if it makes no sense for the character to know it. They’re less characters than expository NPCs who all have access to the exact same dialogue trees. quote:I remembered the news stories when time travel was invented and then immediately made illegal outside of government facilities. I remembered a chapter from a criminology textbook dedicated to the near-annihilating nightmare of the so-called Rose Loop, when history had changed twenty-seven times before the rogue traveller was taken out of commission and his damage undone. I knew that one hundred forty-one of the two hundred and five people serving life sentences on the moon were there because they’d attempted time travel. It didn’t matter if they’d been successful or not; the attempt was enough to send you away for life. So this character is talking to his sister, who he knows works for the Time Institute because she always accidentally lets it slip (everyone is constantly saying poo poo and then going, “but oops that’s supposed to be a secret.” Every single character does this. All the time.) And conveniently forgets he’s in the Time Institute cause hey she has to remind the puddinghead readers she’s writing for, so she just tries to put a lampshade over it by having the character be like, “Durr, I so dumb haha of course I am standing right here in the Time Institute.” She constantly does that too And in the end, after repeated warnings about loving around with the timeline, the main character immediately fucks with the timeline and nothing of consequence happens whatsoever but he gets in trouble for it anyway and ends up in a really stupid coverup plot that strands him in time and he becomes some past character earlier in the story which is not in fact a big reveal because everything that happens is blitheringly obvious and doesn’t actually matter one bit at all and he didn’t really want to go home to the moon anyway because the author could only ever imagine and describe the future as blaaaah and it’s bland and boring and suuuuuucks Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 04:59 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 04:16
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Stuporstar posted:
I take it you didn't like The Night Circus, then?
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May 20, 2022 09:36
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Stuporstar posted:I don’t know whose bag it is cause it’s poo poo scifi that insulting to all scifi and scifi fans, but it’s also poo poo lit fic that’s insultingly bad to anyone who likes lit fic This is what I think of as 'literary arbitrage'. People can be weirdly successful by smuggling stuff across the borders of genre to readers who aren't familiar with the original/superior works that are being imitated.
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May 20, 2022 10:06
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Stuporstar posted:I can’t believe I managed to hate-read all the rest of the way through Sea of Tranquility because it loving SUCKED DEAD DOG DICK Thank you so much for saying this. I really didn't like Station Eleven and thought I had somehow missed something. It ended up on so many best of the year lists and everyone was praising it as this wonderful SF novel like we hadn't seen for decades. It was boring, with no tension and all the things I wanted/expected to happen didn't pay off in any satisfying way. So I was thinking of giving Sea of Tranquility a try and maybe understanding the genius I was missing. Gonna dodge that bullet. Also, the example you gave of the Chinese president's speech also has another kind of poor science research problem. She says she doesn't know how the sun is going to go so it's not like she's "wrong." But scientists in our current time are almost certain that our sun will not supernova. It's too small and will likely just expand and burn out. And even before it gets to burning out it will have already scorched the earth with the intensity of its new size and strength. So why the Chinese president doesn't have access to the best scientists of the day or... an Internet search is another unbelievable bit to throw on the pile.
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May 20, 2022 11:37
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Listen, I'm just glad they gave it the helpful subtitle: "A Novel"
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May 20, 2022 12:33
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I'm most annoyed that the sun is definitely not going to go supernova. It isn't big enough. This is a known and simple fact about our sun. Whatever happens to the earth in the end it definitely will not be 'sucked into a supernova'. Ugh.
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May 20, 2022 12:46
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i like the part where apparently the author never looked at the moon enough to notice it's tidally locked.
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May 20, 2022 13:59
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Being charitable, they probably meant something in the stellar neighborhood like Betelgeuse blowing up. I can understand not being charitable though, given every single other thing mentioned about the book so far
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May 20, 2022 14:43
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Stuporstar posted:I can’t believe I managed to hate-read all the rest of the way through Sea of Tranquility because it loving SUCKED DEAD DOG DICK While I don't have as much for the book as you do, you nailed the flaws. I dropped it about 100 pages in, my usual limit for any book. I actually enjoyed Station Eleven, but her other books bored me to tears. Dropping SoT and The Glass Hotel confirms that I won't be reading anything by ESJM again.
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May 20, 2022 15:54
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There’s absolutely no reason to be charitable when she doesn’t even seem to know the moon’s gravity is about 1/3 the Earth’s and has characters who grew up on the moon travelling to Earth with no disability whatsoever. They don’t even feel awkward having to change their gait, and her main character is so intentionally awkward, you’d think she’d want to highlight that. Hell, she has the main character tell her author self-insert, ”Hi, I’m a time traveller and you’re gonna die from the pandemic in three days.” And she believes him instantly and flies home to the moon. Does she use a virus’ incubation period to ironically kill her anyway and have the timeline right itself? Nah. She just goes into lockdown on the moon and gets to live and continue being the author’s self-insert for her boring pandemic journal. You’d think hearing so much about Covid for months she’d know something about how viruses work, but how many dense heads did all these facts not penetrate? Larry Parrish posted:i like the part where apparently the author never looked at the moon enough to notice it's tidally locked. I’m not sure if she even knows what tidal locking is. Here’s how she describes the view: quote:The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth—it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void—and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn’t light, but that light was extremely un-Earthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there So she googled “how long is a day on the moon” but then… picked the wrong side of the moon? At first I thought maybe Colony Two was on the other side of Colony One in the Sea of Tranquility, but then she writes this: quote:In those days I lived in a bland little apartment in a block of other bland little apartments on the far edge of Colony One, close enough to the Periphery that the dome barely cleared the roof of the apartment complex. Sometimes on dark nights I liked to cross the street to the Periphery, to look through the composite glass at Colony Two glittering in the distance. My life in those days was as bland and limited as my apartment. I tried not to think about my mother too much. I slept through the days. My cat always woke me in the late afternoon. Around sunset I ate a meal that could reasonably be called either dinner or breakfast, put on my uniform, and went to the hotel to stare at people for seven hours. So they’re built right next to each other, but the Earth is nowhere in sight. Also most of her descriptions are about how bland and boring and uninteresting and samey everything is, and all her characters feel this way about everything almost all of the time. When the main character finally gets to Earth, is its natural beauty overwhelming and wonderful to this boring little moon man? Nah… quote:The little white church on the hillside was unchanged since the last time he’d been here—it must have recently been repainted—but the houses around it were different. He turned his back on the settlement, and his gaze fell on the ocean. The sun was rising, shades of blue and pink rippling over the water. He liked the way it moved, the gentle repetition of waves. He found himself thinking of his mother now, for the first time in a while. She’d spent time on Earth as a child. She’d kept a framed photo of an Earth ocean in the kitchen of his childhood home, a small rectangle of waves on the wall near the stove. He remembered her gazing at it while she stirred soup. And yet for himself, he realized, the ocean carried no weight in his heart, it featured in none of his childhood memories and none of the important moments of his life; it was just a place he’d seen in movies and visited for work, so he couldn’t summon much feeling for it, and after a moment he turned and walked away down the beach, following the coordinates that flashed softly on his device. He walked beyond the last house, then into the forest. It’s merely a milqtoast nice and the main character walks away with a meh, as every character seems to do about everything. Apparently you only feel things if you have nostalgia for them. Jedit posted:I take it you didn't like The Night Circus, then? I had the same problem as a friendly penguin, thinking I musta been missing something while everyone raved about it. Then I tried reading the Starless Sea, and it was so crap and none of the characters had any character (except for what Harry Potter house they identified with), and quit half way through like I shoulda with this book. I’ve mentally shelved both these authors and their undifferentiated voice as bland bookish cat-mom mumblecore. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:08 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 16:06
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Clark Nova posted:Being charitable, they probably meant something in the stellar neighborhood like Betelgeuse blowing up. I can understand not being charitable though, given every single other thing mentioned about the book so far There's nothing in the stellar neighborhood that we know about that could cause a supernova that has an effect on us. We also know, pretty well, what the eventual fate of our own G-class main sequence star will be. Stars have to be a certain mass to become supernovae, and the bottom limit of that is around 10 solar masses. What's baffling about saying our own sun will eventually go supernova is that our sun will absolutely devour the earth and moon as it expands into a red giant some billions of years from now. Our own star will (very likely) eventually destroy our planet, just not through exploding. A much more meh ending, which would seem to fit this book much better anyway.
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May 20, 2022 17:30
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Stuporstar posted:Then I tried reading the Starless Sea, and it was so crap and none of the characters had any character (except for what Harry Potter house they identified with), and quit half way through like I shoulda with this book. Not that she grows in any othert way, obviously. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:05 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 18:03
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Are you guys using a metaphor or does this author literally use extensive HP references in her book
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May 20, 2022 18:14
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There's a scene where a character gives another character a hand-knit Ravenclaw scarf and he asks "how did you know my house would be Ravenclaw?", to her answer along the lines of "duh". Near the end of the book she recalls this and realizes that pigeonholing people into four arbitrary categories is a stupid idea. That's pretty much it. e: They're both nerds an in college so it's not that far-fetched. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:25 on May 20, 2022 |
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May 20, 2022 18:21
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Morgenstern also used "poetry" as an adjective for weather. And the word "agnostipagan." Starless Sea had a lot that would appeal to me, but ultimately just failed.
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May 20, 2022 19:35
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Ben Nevis posted:"agnostipagan." What is this, bothering people with crystal astrology BS that you don't actually think is real
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May 20, 2022 19:41
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A lot of people held up The Night Circus because it was written as a NaNo project that made it to publication, and therefore a success story. While researching query letters recently I found The Night Circus's:quote:Dear (Agent): Books can obviously change a ton between querying and publication, but after that first paragraph, this query loses my attention. It doesn't mention the magician rivalry romance at all and it reads more like this is going to be something with a similar structure as The Islanders by Christopher Priest. And it's not. It's a more conventional story which is more marketable. Just wondering how any agent picked it up.
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May 20, 2022 21:03
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Blood of Dragons (Rain Wilds Chronicles #4) by Robin Hobb - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089LOD6Y/
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May 20, 2022 22:15
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When you're losing a book-off with your boyfriend so hard that you have to write to GQ about it
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May 20, 2022 22:38
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Hanya Yanagihara has also written a Cloud Atlas-like book called To Paradise.
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May 20, 2022 23:31
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