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ToxicFrog posted:Right, I know it's set by the publisher, but Amazon still knows whether DRM is enabled or not, they just don't, as far as I can tell, expose that information; Pretty sure you get a notice at the end of the book description on the store page: "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." So presumably if it doesn't show that then the book does have DRM. I dont know if that statement is completely authoritative, but I see it more often than not on books I buy on kindle. Hobnob fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Aug 19, 2022 |
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Aug 19, 2022 04:23
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smug n stuff posted:I just started reading Gideon on the recommendation of a friend, and while the setting and story so far are pretty interesting, I’m finding myself getting quite irritated by the prose style, where Muir combines super obscure “vocabulary words” with 21st century slang and also made-up SFF jargon. It just doesn’t feel like it adds up to a natural voice, I guess it feels “forced.” Does that style change beyond the first few chapters, or will I just have to get used to it to enjoy the books? the gagworthy twee poo poo does not get any better, no
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Aug 19, 2022 04:28
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there's a lot of demand for  writing lately and mostly in makes me feel like I'm imprisoned in the 4th grade for eternity
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Aug 19, 2022 05:02
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I hate all twee/snarky/online-poisoned SFF writing, except for Muir's, which I love  can't really explain why except she's the 1 who pulls it off
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Aug 19, 2022 05:14
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RDM posted:Darkwar by Glen Cook Thirding this. Glen Cook's thing is fantasy worlds with deeply scary sorcerers. We usually see them fully formed, steeped in power and malignancy for generations. Darkwar is his exploration of how a sorcerer powerful to break her world over her knee, and willful enough to do it, gets that way. Also it's science fiction, not fantasy - there's even a genuine first contact situation.
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Aug 19, 2022 05:16
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cptn_dr posted:Thanks for all the suggestions, friends. Gonna go raid my local second hand bookshops this weekend and grab a bunch of the Cherryh I know they've got, and see what else I can track down. Ok, picked up Pride of Chanur and Merchanter's Luck, and grabbed Downbelow Station from the library. That's a good start, I reckon.
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Aug 19, 2022 07:22
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Sailor Viy posted:I hate all twee/snarky/online-poisoned SFF writing, except for Muir's, which I love Yeah, same, but if you hate it then you will hate the books.
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Aug 19, 2022 07:33
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Sailor Viy posted:I hate all twee/snarky/online-poisoned SFF writing, except for Muir's, which I love At least she made sure that all the references to lovely millennial meme culture are appropriate, since the god-emperor and his founding OG cronies are literally a bunch of lovely millennial nerds.
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Aug 19, 2022 07:53
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ToxicFrog posted:I get why, KU has a huge reader base so given the choice between "KU" and "literally everywhere else except KU" it probably does make financial sense to target the latter, but as someone who just wants to pay authors for books and then read them KU is like the least convenient way to do that. I haven't put a new book out in a couple of years but will be doing so soon, and I'm strongly considering taking my stuff (or at least my current series) out of KU, where I've always been, because I'm no longer sure it actually does make financial sense. Amazon isn't quite the monopoly it used to be and the very slow ratcheting down of page-read payout KU gives you has meant that self cannibalisation (i.e. you make less money on KU than if they buy the book off Amazon outright, but they wouldn't necessarily have done that if it wasn't in KU) is also increasingly less worthwhile. Are trad published authors even in KU? I don't actually use it a reader myself, I mostly buy print and have a Kobo which subjects me to a Kafkaesque IT nightmare every time I want to borrow a book off an Overdrive library, but I assumed KU was basically just for self-pubbed stuff.
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Aug 19, 2022 08:40
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There's a couple. Hell, I just found out a few days ago murderbot was on there.
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Aug 19, 2022 08:50
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there's a lot of manga on there now which is nice because manga publishers really love charging $11 for one volume that's like 100 pages and barely advances the story at all.
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Aug 19, 2022 09:10
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:There's a couple. Hell, I just found out a few days ago murderbot was on there. Well hang on, how does that work? I read Murderbot off Overdrive via my local library. And at a glance on google I can walk down the road and buy it at Dymocks. (The answer to this is going to be that there are different rules for trad pub authors and self pub authors, isn't it)
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Aug 19, 2022 09:58
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sebmojo posted:Yeah, same, but if you hate it then you will hate the books. Yeah I absolutely adore the books, but include a caveat anytime I recommend them, which is if you're allergic to random memes in your sci fi, just don't bother, you're not going to like it.
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Aug 19, 2022 11:32
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Finished The Player of Games and I'd say it was pretty good, but not great. I read it cause people have said it's a good intro to the Culture but I don't know if it'd make me want to continue if I hadn't heard good things about the series as a whole. Still I'll pick up Use of Weapons at some point and see how I go. Anyway I'm in the mood for a boat book and I was gonna ask for recommendations but then I realised I have Master & Commander and The Happy Return sitting on my shelves unread so now I'm excited to get into those.
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Aug 19, 2022 13:04
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If you have KU and haven't read This is How You Lose the Time War, it's on KU and you have a homework assignment
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Aug 19, 2022 13:23
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Hobnob posted:Pretty sure you get a notice at the end of the book description on the store page: .cptn_dr posted:Ok, picked up Pride of Chanur and Merchanter's Luck, and grabbed Downbelow Station from the library. That's a good start, I reckon. Pride of Chanur is the good poo poo, though, and while it works perfectly fine standalone, there's three more books about Pyanfar Chanur and her swashbuckling crew (and one epilogue book about Hilfy) to pick up if you finish it and want more. mllaneza posted:Glen Cook's thing is fantasy worlds with deeply scary sorcerers. We usually see them fully formed, steeped in power and malignancy for generations. Darkwar is his exploration of how a sorcerer powerful to break her world over her knee, and willful enough to do it, gets that way. Also it's science fiction, not fantasy - there's even a genuine first contact situation. Speaking of Cook, Passage at Arms might appeal to people looking for grimy, tense sci-fi. RDM posted:If you have KU and haven't read This is How You Lose the Time War, it's on KU and you have a homework assignment
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Aug 19, 2022 14:52
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Taffy Torpedo posted:Finished The Player of Games and I'd say it was pretty good, but not great. I read it cause people have said it's a good intro to the Culture but I don't know if it'd make me want to continue if I hadn't heard good things about the series as a whole. Still I'll pick up Use of Weapons at some point and see how I go.
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Aug 19, 2022 15:24
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freebooter posted:I haven't put a new book out in a couple of years but will be doing so soon, and I'm strongly considering taking my stuff (or at least my current series) out of KU, where I've always been, because I'm no longer sure it actually does make financial sense. It depends on your niche really. As far as I'm aware, LitRPG, progression fantasy and romance etc are all still mainly KU dominant. freebooter posted:Are trad published authors even in KU? Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:There's a couple. Hell, I just found out a few days ago murderbot was on there. Gideon the Ninth is too, the last time I checked. freebooter posted:Well hang on, how does that work? Yes. Including how they're compensated for the books that go into KU, I believe, though I'm maybe 60% confident on that particular detail (I have a vague recollection of reading it somewhere).
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Aug 19, 2022 16:23
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:I'm surprised people recommended Player of Games over Excession - but each to their own. Player of Games is more relatable due to having more human characters at the focus of a more straightforward story. I like Excession more because there's more going on and a lot more moving parts to the plot of the book, but it'd be a lot to take in on first exposure to the setting.
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Aug 19, 2022 17:14
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ToxicFrog posted:Speaking of Cook, Passage at Arms might appeal to people looking for grimy, tense sci-fi. I dunno if it got chopped up in editing but it's pretty hard to get through - it feels like the narrative is all over the place and it's hard to follow who most of the characters are.
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Aug 19, 2022 17:18
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Leng posted:Okay, so long thoughts incoming on Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhou. Interesting write-up! I tore through Iron Widow in a day, which is impressive since I've probably DNF'd 90% of the sff novels I've picked up in the last two years. It's definitely wish-fulfillment, you're spot on there, but it's fun and it's well-paced and it didn't make me want to die by the time it was over. The only real complaint I have about it was that putting teens in a poly relationship is ludicrous, like telling someone to run their first marathon in iron boots, but I think the book was initially supposed be to adult so I'll give it a pass.
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Aug 19, 2022 17:29
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:I'm surprised people recommended Player of Games over Excession - but each to their own. RDM posted:The Dragon Never Sleeps is also a pretty decent one off scifi story from Glen Cook.
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Aug 19, 2022 17:34
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Problematic Pigeon posted:Well, now we finally know who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. Oh gently caress this killed me.
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Aug 19, 2022 17:55
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mllaneza posted:Player of Games is more relatable due to having more human characters at the focus of a more straightforward story. I like Excession more because there's more going on and a lot more moving parts to the plot of the book, but it'd be a lot to take in on first exposure to the setting. Nick Hornby's attempt to review Excession is an all-timer demo for this: quote:[N]othing in the twenty-odd pages I managed of Excession was in any way bad; it’s just that I didn’t understand a word. I didn’t even understand the blurb on the back of the book: “Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.” This is clearly intended to entice us into the novel—that’s what blurbs do, right? But this blurb just made me scared. An artifact—that’s something you normally find in a museum, isn’t it? Well, what’s a museum exhibit doing floating around in space? So what if it did nothing? What are museum exhibits supposed to do? And this dying sun—how come it’s switched universes? Can dying suns do that?
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Aug 19, 2022 18:23
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ToxicFrog posted:I don't know how orthodox an opinion this is, but IMO Downbelow Station is probably the worst A-U book to start with despite being one of the earliest ones published; it's an extremely dense read and while the Treaty of Pell is central to the setting, the immediate events leading up to it just...aren't that interesting if you aren't already invested. I think it works best after you've read most of the other A-U stuff. Just as a data point, Downbelow Station was the first A-U book I read and I loved it. I'm probably an outlier, though, since I hated Cyteen and I think I've stopped reading it at least three times.
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Aug 19, 2022 18:57
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rollick posted:Nick Hornby's attempt to review Excession is an all-timer demo for this: I can't believe someone who reviews culture and media doesn't know that artifact has multiple definitions.
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Aug 19, 2022 19:01
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Excession is like the only Culture novel I really don't care for.
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Aug 19, 2022 20:31
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smug n stuff posted:I’m finding myself getting quite irritated by the prose style I *almost* dropped the book like less than 50 pages in because of it, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it eventually won me over and I now consider her bonkers prose a feature not a bug.
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Aug 19, 2022 20:32
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Princep's Fury (Codex Alera #5) by Jim Butcher - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015DWL0S/ The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DCGJ6WC/
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Aug 19, 2022 22:52
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I know this thread rarely talks about sf critics, but I wanna ask if anyone here knows of what ever happened to Jonathan McCalmont. He used to be active online in the late 2000s and through the 2010s on various blogs, had a regular column in Interzone magazine, and was on the "Shadow Clarke" jury for a year or two. However, sometime around the end of 2017 he seemed to completely vanish from the internet, and there's been no word of what he's been doing. Given how critical he was of how genre culture was evolving in the 2010s, I've wondered if he despaired of finding anything in science fiction to his liking and just abandoned criticism entirely. Don't get me wrong, he was often a colossal prick, but he had an interesting voice that's been missing from the landscape.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:02
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freebooter posted:Well hang on, how does that work? I read Murderbot off Overdrive via my local library. And at a glance on google I can walk down the road and buy it at Dymocks.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:10
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Nae posted:I think the book was initially supposed be to adult so I'll give it a pass. Yeeeep, in the author notes at the back, it says the first draft was way, way, way darker and this is a book where the final published version has Zetian and Li Shimin waterboarding somebody with alcohol and Zetian straight up annihilating the Sages and her family in the capital of Huaxia. I'm kind of curious as to how the adult version would have read.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:15
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The first Cherryh I read was Finity's End and it was a *great* introduction to the A-U universe so for like the eighth time I'm suggesting Finity's End. To start.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:26
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HopperUK posted:The first Cherryh I read was Finity's End and it was a *great* introduction to the A-U universe so for like the eighth time I'm suggesting Finity's End. To start.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:27
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AcidCat posted:Excession is like the only Culture novel I really don't care for. Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel about it. It was a good book but it's the most recent Iain M Banks I've read and it hasn't really stuck with me, much in the same way that Inversions didn't. I definitely wouldn't recommend it as an entry point. But everyone is different, my first Culture novel was Surface Detail, after which I read the first three published and then started picking at random. Maybe I'll like Excession better on the second read.
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Aug 19, 2022 23:28
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HopperUK posted:The first Cherryh I read was Finity's End and it was a *great* introduction to the A-U universe so for like the eighth time I'm suggesting Finity's End. To start. I was looking for more Cherryh to read, but this one is a bit hard to track down. It doesn't seem like it exists digitally?
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Aug 19, 2022 23:44
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mllaneza posted:Player of Games is more relatable due to having more human characters at the focus of a more straightforward story. I like Excession more because there's more going on and a lot more moving parts to the plot of the book, but it'd be a lot to take in on first exposure to the setting. I don't know about you, but I like jumping into the pool at the deep end. ToxicFrog posted:My top picks would be Excession or Use of Weapons, but PoG is a common starting point recommendation. Earth getting blown up in HHGTTG comes to mind too. rollick posted:Nick Hornby's attempt to review Excession is an all-timer demo for this: Why would he expect everything to be explained in the blurb or at the start of the book? Or is he one of those people who like infodumps? Or does he just not understand concepts like black-body radiation, that suns die, or other things that're covered beyond high-school physics class?
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Aug 19, 2022 23:51
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Some things aren't for you and that's ok. That said Isn't Nick hornby the one who raged out at Radiohead for kid a E: yep (added link above)
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Aug 19, 2022 23:57
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sebmojo posted:Some things aren't for you and that's ok.  Critics were a mistake.
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Aug 20, 2022 00:02
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Sonderval posted:Years late to the party but just finished Gideon and Harrow. God drat they were good. I am now in the mood for more weird fantasy sci fi mashup unknown power etc. I know the next book isn’t far off but is there anything of a similar vein? I’ve always liked the idea of starting fantasy then oops all sci fi. It's definitely a lot more light-hearted but maybe check out Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race.
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Aug 20, 2022 00:12
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