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Has anyone got a recommended reading list for Cherryh excluding Cyteen? My FLCS owner just inherited a bunch from someone who has gone overseas for good and is selling them off cheap.
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Jul 2, 2022 23:24
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Jedit posted:Has anyone got a recommended reading list for Cherryh excluding Cyteen? My FLCS owner just inherited a bunch from someone who has gone overseas for good and is selling them off cheap. My favourites are Merchanter's Luck and Finity's End. But honestly you can't really go wrong with her.
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Jul 2, 2022 23:25
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The chanur books (pride of chanur is the first stand alone, then there is a very serialised trilogy, then another stand alone), the morgaine books, faded sun trilogy. Serpents reach is good.
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Jul 2, 2022 23:40
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Kesper North posted:I'm starting to like this Graydon Saunders character despite myself, gently caress Thank you.
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Jul 2, 2022 23:54
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Jedit posted:Has anyone got a recommended reading list for Cherryh excluding Cyteen? My FLCS owner just inherited a bunch from someone who has gone overseas for good and is selling them off cheap.
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Jul 2, 2022 23:55
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The paladin is a great standalone, would make a great movie too: classic yarn about a grizzled disgraced samurai training up a young woman to get her revenge in some kind of fantasy china
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Jul 3, 2022 00:02
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My biggest problem with Harrow now is that I saw someone suggest that John is John Key and now I can’t stop seeing it.
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Jul 3, 2022 01:03
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xiw posted:My biggest problem with Harrow now is that I saw someone suggest that John is John Key and now I can’t stop seeing it. without clicking on that spoiler I'm going to assume it's John Galt and honestly who is john galt ayn rand sucks really hard. like a lot. gently caress her.
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Jul 3, 2022 01:06
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StrixNebulosa posted:without clicking on that spoiler I'm going to assume it's John Galt NZ pol and former Prime Minister 2008-2016, genus "twitticus maximus" looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Key
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Jul 3, 2022 01:28
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Lo i love that
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Jul 3, 2022 01:31
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I mean the Eminem lyrics right? It's even the same song, and if you're gonna kill John, naming yourself after one of his notable defeats seem appropriate. EDIT: KILL A CHARACTER BASED ON THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOHN IN A NOVEL SERIES, THIS IS PURELY A HYPOTHETICAL AND NOT A REAL THREAT TOWARDS ANY POLITICIANS ACTIVE OR OTHERWISE It can't be the same guy, Jod's explicitly from the Wairarapa. Most of the big players from the resurrection are. Not 100% clear from Nona but Pyrrha seemed to work at the RNZPC in Porirua (get it? Pyrrha, Porirua) and that's about as far from Featherston as any of them got. See also in the first two books: Trentham, "Mercymorn" (that last one feels like a stretch but I asked Taz and she said it was intentional ok, there are a bunch of refs to places on the WLG train system, if you look, which seem to be diegetic – Jod gave them all names based on where they're from). See also Augustine. Mercymorn is haughty and detached, Augustine is the Wellingtonian who's an rear end in a top hat in a much more urbane and surface-level-approachable way, Phyrra's from coptown. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Jul 3, 2022 |
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Jul 3, 2022 01:48
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:What if we turn Larry into a book? Library of Ruina crossover thread
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Jul 3, 2022 04:31
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Everyone posted:Is there really such a thing as a wrong Sharpe video? Similar vein, you can pick up the whole lot of the TV Movies on iTunes for £15, which is a decent deal for something like 13 films of Sean Bean Sean Beaning.
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Jul 3, 2022 07:25
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Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot #6) by Martha Wells - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088H926KF/ A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan #1) by Arkady Martine - 2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C7BCB88/
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Jul 3, 2022 18:18
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AARD VARKMAN posted:If you like Cradle, or if you like cozier fantasy, I will now recommend the overwhelmingly K/U thread recommended book, Beware of Chicken. Seconding this. Got it yesterday, read it yesterday. Fun book. Nice change of pace when the protag has the option of going through all the usual fantasy bullshit, but instead goes "gently caress THAT" and hauls rear end to the most peaceful place he can find. There's also an attack chicken. What more reason do you need?
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Jul 3, 2022 18:25
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I know a few other folks in here have read and enjoyed it, but just adding that I also really enjoyed Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. It is YA but doesn't suffer from too many YA-isms I didn't think. The main characters do some legitimately nasty stuff and sidestep a lot of the "uwu but what if we just talk about it!" sorts of pitfalls that a lot of recent SFF stuff (YA and not) tends to fall into (which tends to irk me personally, at least). It's a quick breezy read, nothing too complex but it's a fun mecha + revenge story and I'm looking forward to the sequel. I would love to see the author do something more adult-audience oriented at some point because I think they have it in them to do something pretty great considering this was just their debut.
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Jul 3, 2022 21:59
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DurianGray posted:I know a few other folks in here have read and enjoyed it, but just adding that I also really enjoyed Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. It is YA but doesn't suffer from too many YA-isms I didn't think. The main characters do some legitimately nasty stuff and sidestep a lot of the "uwu but what if we just talk about it!" sorts of pitfalls that a lot of recent SFF stuff (YA and not) tends to fall into (which tends to irk me personally, at least). It's a quick breezy read, nothing too complex but it's a fun mecha + revenge story and I'm looking forward to the sequel. I would love to see the author do something more adult-audience oriented at some point because I think they have it in them to do something pretty great considering this was just their debut. According to Wikipedia there's going to be a sequel to Iron Widow dropping in 2023. Maybe they'll turn out to be a bit like Pierce Brown. His Red Rising trilogy was good and it was kind of dark, but it was very much a YA series. His follow-up Iron Gold trilogy is lot more... more. It feels a bit like what you might get if the original Star Wars had been followed by a trilogy written and directed by the creators of Game of Thrones and the new Battlestar Galactica.
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Jul 4, 2022 03:48
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I follow Xiran on twitter and they have been pretty open about how much (little) they made from advances for Iron Widow and the Zachary Ying book. IIRC Iron Widow has paid out already but the advance was split up into five payments. It's weird when I hear about other debuts and they are gigantic for books that sound like unoriginal trash but that's publishing, baby! https://twitter.com/XiranJayZhao/status/1543730848750526466 https://twitter.com/xiranjayzhao/status/1449504614936547332?lang=en
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Jul 4, 2022 04:08
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I'm not a fan of Xiran's writing (then again I have a pretty sharp anti-YA bias) but they post some really awesome and fairly well-researched Chinese history stuff on their Youtube channel which I vigorously recommend to anyone vaguely interested in the subject. They do an excellent job of presenting the five-alarm clown car accident of Imperial China's court life in a fun pop-history way without glossing over too much fun nuance, which is a goddamn heroic job given the state and density of most writing on the subject.
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Jul 4, 2022 07:05
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I'm looking for a sci-fi short story. I may have even encountered it here first. 1. I think it's called something like History of Something Something China, but it's a retrospective from the future. 2. Takes place mostly in China, I think 3. About an AI 4. The woman who develops the AI has, like, purple hair, tattoos, and piercings. She later hires another woman to be her right hand. 5. It's a learning efficiency program. She basically gives it away for free so it can learn things, before licencing it out to do those things, iirc. 6. The program places several children with down syndrome or something with an older lady to look after. As the kids grow, the program helps them enough to function highly. 7. Happy ending. 8. Pretty sure I read it free online. Thanks.
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Jul 4, 2022 08:19
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15k USD seems pretty normal honestly. Especially for a debut. Maybe the equations are different from YA, it's its own whole world that I'm not really part of it, but I've seen adult NYT bestsellers get $2-5k advances. I got a really good deal for TDH (30k) but it came in on the same day as a major publisher offer of $2500/book for the first two with a soft option on the third. It's brutal out there.
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Jul 4, 2022 09:42
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Just finished the new Anthony Ryan book, the martyr It's a sequel to the pariah and if you liked that I think you'll like this one (I think it was split opinion around here). He's finally got over 'anthony ryan syndrome ' where he writes a pretty decent book to start a series then the quality immediately drops off. Low fantasy with some magic, about an ex outlaw who falls in with a saint and involved in mediaeval politics and warfare.
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Jul 4, 2022 12:42
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Just finished the Terra Ignota series and thoroughly enjoyed it. First off, I enjoy how it is a modern science fiction story set in the somewhat near future, yet is not a dystopia of some sort. At the start of the series, the world of Terra Ignota is basically a utopia, if a flawed one. The society it depicts is even kind of plausible, even if it relies on some basically magical technology. The central theme is that instead of geographically limited nation states, the "states" of Terra Ignota are seven Hives - These are governments based on voluntary participation, where, upon reaching adulthood, a person chooses which Hive to belong to, and is then bound by it's laws, taxes, etc. These Hives are free to make their own laws, provided they abide by some universally agreed basic laws (i.e no murder, assault, etc), which are set by a global Senate which each Hive gets representatives to based on population. You can also choose to opt out, being Hiveless, which means you are only bound by these universal basic laws. These Hives are not geographically bound - Hive members are spread out all over the globe, which is enabled by global internet coverage, as well as a system of "Cars" - flying hypersonic cars which connect any two points on the globe to another with a maximum transit time of around two hours. These cars blatantly break the laws of physics, which I guess is fine. The world is a near-post scarcity - The average working week is about twenty hours per week, and although there is substantial wealth inequality, poverty has been eliminated - the poorest people still have their needs met easily. One of the cracks in this extremely liberal utopia is that religion is suppressed, because the world went through a terribly destructive series of wars known as the "Church Wars" in the late 21st century - These are never much elaborated on, but one consequence of these is that one of the aforementioned universal laws, which states that "It is an intolerable crime to take an action likely to cause extensive or uncontrolled loss of human life or suffering of human beings.", is interpreted extremely widely, in that proselytising is forbidden, since a clash of incompatible religions was the cause of the "Church Wars". This is again interpreted so widely that it is impermissible to publicly state which religion you belong to. Religion as such is not forbidden, but you can't talk about it. You can travel (using these magical Cars, this is trivial) to a "reservation" for your religion where public practice of that religion is permitted. The first two books are all about the breakdown of this order into a world war, while the second two books are about the world war this spawns and it's eventual resolution. In particularly I enjoyed quite a bit how the primary conflict of the story, although it is not revealed as such until the fourth book, is between two equally valid and good visions for the future of humanity - One side wants to spread humanity into space, spending a huge percentage of the world's resources on terraforming Mars, while the other wants to focus on making life as good as possible here on Earth. Although these two viewpoints are radically opposed, a good argument is made for both of them, and both sides are entirely reasonable - Though they both commit some heinous acts in support of this view during the war. There are two things that really annoy me about the series though. The first is that the author likes the 18th century a little too much. This is a big plot point in the first couple of books, which is fine, but the series as a whole is presented as a first-hand account of the war through a pseudo-diary by one of the main characters - lots of "thees" and "thous", and "gentle readers", which gets pretty grating at times. The second is JED Mason. The character is very well written, and I enjoyed them as a character, but I found it unbelievable how everyone else reacted to them. I don't really feel like going into depth on what his deal is, but the way half the population of the world was willing to fight a world war to make this person, who on the surface seems to be simply a extremely neurodivergent, kind-hearted young man, a absolute dictator of the world just felt extremely unbelievable. I was willing to believe that the people around him, a lot of which are members of a weird 18th century sex cult, would come to revere him as some kind of divine being, but your average joe? Why? Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 4, 2022 14:00
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Geisladisk posted:Just finished the Terra Ignota series and thoroughly enjoyed it. This is the first time I've seen someone write about this series in a way that peaked my interest, so now I'm considering checking these out. But I have to ask a potentially spoilerific question: do they eventually come to an answer of, "Maybe religion is Good Actually" and restore world religious practices? Because if so, I'll just pass on that series.
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Jul 4, 2022 18:26
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Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0819VCQKH/ Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota #4) by Ada Palmer - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GJQK46D/ The Empire of Gold (Daevabad #3) by SA Chakraborty - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YG44LJD/ Last Exit by Max Gladstone - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0927D8C8N/ Dragonfly Falling (Shadows of the Apt #2) by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003GK223Y/ Excalibur: A Novel of Arthur (Warlord Chronicles #3) by Bernard Cornwell - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006WOVIWW/ The Ninth Rain (Winnowing Flame #1) by Jen Williams - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X5CBYYD/ Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I1W23IG/
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Jul 4, 2022 18:35
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Kestral posted:This is the first time I've seen someone write about this series in a way that peaked my interest, so now I'm considering checking these out. But I have to ask a potentially spoilerific question: do they eventually come to an answer of, "Maybe religion is Good Actually" and restore world religious practices? Because if so, I'll just pass on that series. Religion is very important to a lot of people in the books, and to its world in general. Although public religious expression is forbidden, private expression is positively encouraged, and people will regularly meet with trained professionals who will help them think through religious beliefs without expressing a preference for any religion in particular. And to answer your specific question, this aspect survives to the end Further, bigger, spoiler on the subject: turns out there is a religious belief that's actually correct, but it's not one that exists in the world today Qwertycoatl fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 4, 2022 19:03
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Geisladisk posted:Just finished the Terra Ignota series and thoroughly enjoyed it. This write-up made me really intrigued, so I went to go buy the first book only to discover that I bought it 11 months ago and it never made it back to the front page of my kindle. This thread is a horror for my backlog, thankyou.
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Jul 4, 2022 19:11
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Fortune's Pawn (Paradox Book 1) by Rachel Bach - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0092XHX42/ Heaven's Queen (Paradox Book 3) by Rachel Bach - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ECE9MZY/ This was on my wishlist as it kept showing up in the customers also bought fields of similar spaceship books but no idea if good, all the comps are tv shows and movies. Books 1 and 3 are on sale
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Jul 4, 2022 19:28
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Tars Tarkas posted:Fortune's Pawn (Paradox Book 1) by Rachel Bach - $2.99 I DNFed the first one because I hated the vapid chip-on-her-shoulder space marine dude-with-boobs main character and the mediocre cliche-ridden writing grated on me I suggest reading the first chapter of book one to see if you can stand it before you buy (which I majorly regret not doing)
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Jul 4, 2022 20:18
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Stuporstar posted:I DNFed the first one because I hated the vapid chip-on-her-shoulder space marine dude-with-boobs main character and the mediocre cliche-ridden writing grated on me
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Jul 4, 2022 20:43
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:It's such a pity when butch women are written one-dimentionally, because they absolutely don't have to be and it gives off a bit of a stereotypical flavour that seems like would be best avoided. This. Though I have no idea if the protagonist’s dimensions get filled out over the course of the series because I couldn’t get past chapter one One of the best butch female characters I’ve ever read is a main character in the goon-written web serial Into the Mire. I can’t recommend it enough https://intothemire.com
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Jul 4, 2022 21:08
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Stuporstar posted:This. Though I have no idea if the protagonist’s dimensions get filled out over the course of the series because I couldn’t get past chapter one The best female butch character I've ever read isn't in science fiction, but it's Reese Conlon from Radclyffe's book Safe Harbor that's the first part of the Provincetown Tales series. First time I had such deep respect for a character in a book, and by extension Radclyffe.
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Jul 4, 2022 21:18
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what is the deal with the prominence of Geese as a motif and as metaphor grist in yoon ha lee's Hexarchate books I'm doing a re-read lately (including the short story compendium which wasn't out when I read the novels originally) and I don't think I've seen geese referred to this often in any body of work, including audubon's Birds of America and a variety of joyce carol oates stories set in bucolic small towns known primarily for goose-watching is there a symbolic significance to this that I am missing, or is YHL just a goose guy "with his calendrical sword in hand, Shuos Jedao is as swift and deadly as a wild gosling," mused the Rahal analyst PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jul 4, 2022 |
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Jul 4, 2022 21:55
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Beachcomber posted:I'm looking for a sci-fi short story. I may have even encountered it here first. I gave tracking this down a shot, couldn't find it. (Unlike, say IMDB, none of the resources tracking Science Fiction really track what's inside those stories, especially short fiction). If it was published free online, it probably appeared in one of these http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/index.php/Magazines#Webzines_.28Online_Magazines.29
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Jul 4, 2022 23:08
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Tars Tarkas posted:Fortune's Pawn (Paradox Book 1) by Rachel Bach - $2.99 I read the first two awhile back. It's big action set pieces and romance, not particularly compelling on either. Although the character is tough, I'm not sure butch is how I'd describe her, especially as the romance interest is a brooding tough guy etc. In my experience anything that says it's like firefly is pretty average and this one mentions it in every blurb
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Jul 4, 2022 23:50
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PupsOfWar posted:what is the deal with the prominence of Geese as a motif and as metaphor grist in yoon ha lee's Hexarchate books Maybe it's something to do with the fact that geese are notorious assholes. Most wildlife run away if you get too close, there's a good chance a goose will chase you if you get close.
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Jul 5, 2022 00:06
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Lord Bob posted:
My backlog and my wallet. 
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Jul 5, 2022 01:19
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FewtureMD posted:My backlog and my wallet. True that. The first of the Baru Cormorant Is Called Mean Names trilogy should arrive Wednesday.
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Jul 5, 2022 03:25
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It is the poster that buys the book. But is the poster to blame? No, for it is the thread that moves the poster
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Jul 5, 2022 05:07
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New Cradle is out but I'm deep into Commonweal book 4 so I guess I'm going to wait.
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Jul 5, 2022 05:18
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