|
AARD VARKMAN posted:I read Blake Crouch's Upgrade. it's bad airport fiction but I was apparently in the mood for that, despite some incredibly dumb stuff in the plot. I really enjoyed Daemon by Daniel Suarez, it's got a sequel called Freedom thats also worth a look.
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 17:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 14:25 |
|
|
Remulak posted:Blake Crouch seems to write in a very YA'ish style that grates on me. I still read a bunch of his books though, he keeps things moving. Upgrade was especially bad on the overall writing quality front, compared to his previous books. And yet he made up for it exactly like you said: it basically never slows down, like a movie, and I spent the whole time going "god this is not good" and yet stayed up until 2am reading it. the essential airport fiction experience
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 17:32
|
|
|
Dark Matter felt almost explicitly crafted for a TV pickup, so I'm not surprised at all by the news - and Recursion was so constantly widescreen in its barrelling plotline that it absolutely must be on a Hollywood cinema production pile right now.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 17:36
|
|
|
MartingaleJack posted:Instead of nerding out about cryptography/WWII (Cryptonomicron) or metaverse/libertarianism (Snow Crash) or the history of financial systems/alchemy (Baroque Cycle) or nanomachines/China (The Diamond Age), Anathem is obsessively nerdy about philosophy/the Voynich manuscript. Drakyn fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Sep 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 17:50
|
|
|
I found upgrade to be basically just middling. I mean, for a novel about human augmentation and DNA noodling, it's surprisingly boring and bodyhorrorless. The Gideon series by Lincoln/child is pretty good. The first Wyman ford novel Impact is also pretty good. I haven't read the others in the series. I hear good things about the Nora Kelly books but again, haven't read em. I dunno, crouch does good work but lately it seems like he gets this amazing idea and then just writes a completely different story than I'm expecting, and it's usually more boring.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 18:11
|
|
|
(Re: airport thriller novels) Someone mentioned Lincoln Child, so I’ll throw out a recommendation for Deep Storm - there’s a black site located under an oil rig, Atlantis, artifacts of unknown/unimaginable power, mysterious illness, all the good stuff. Also check out The Fold by Peter Clines, where scientists invent the “Albuquerque Door”, which is basically a stargate to travel long distances in an instant.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 18:19
|
|
|
60% through revelation space and I am probably not going to pick it back up. way too many words for something that looks very much like it's going to end up being mass effect but with not a single interesting character and the author refuses to get to the point. edit: yep it's mass effect Orc Priest fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Sep 13, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:16
|
|
|
Orc Priest posted:60% through revelation space and I am probably not going to pick it back up. way too many words for something that looks very much like it's going to end up being mass effect but with not a single interesting character and the author refuses to get to the point. Hmm yes the book that heavily inspired Mass Effect 'is Mass Effect'
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:26
|
|
|
Going to watch Aliens, the movie that's Halo
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:27
|
|
|
On my way to read A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series that's Dragon Age
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:27
|
|
|
Or read some Dune, the books that are Star Wars
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:27
|
|
|
Breathe, General! Breathe!
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:28
|
|
|
Don't Breathe, the horror movie that's uhhh
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:29
|
|
|
Decline and Fall off the Roman Empire, the book that's Tetris
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:30
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Hmm yes the book that heavily inspired Mass Effect 'is Mass Effect' mass effect is better than this tripe, so it wins out. those are the rules
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:30
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Hmm yes the book that heavily inspired Mass Effect 'is Mass Effect' he's right that the ending sucks. revelation space was so cool for the first half and then rapidly became so bad i felt like the author owed me my day back
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:33
|
|
|
I'm gonna go read Ready Player One, the book that's Ready Player Two?
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:34
|
|
|
Lol fair, but also -Orc Priest posted:not a single interesting character and the author refuses to get to the point. - he's not wrong. AARD VARKMAN posted:And yet he made up for it exactly like you said: it basically never slows down, like a movie, and I spent the whole time going "god this is not good" and yet stayed up until 2am reading it. the essential airport fiction experience "Airport fiction" makes people think of James Patterson but I think there's something to be said, in any genre, for books which are really easy to read and which also constantly keep you engaged. I've spent enough of my life on intercontinental flights sitting in some foreign airport at 6am with my body feeling like it's 10pm, completely exhausted but also unable to sleep, to know that sometimes you don't necessarily want to be reading the extremely complex and well-written literary award winner, or even the somewhat complex and OK-written award nominee. You just want something that zips along. And I reckon it's probably a bit like writing a children's book: people imagine it's easy to do, but doing it well is a different matter, and authors who manage it are extremely "good writers" in their own sort of way.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:34
|
|
|
Orc Priest posted:mass effect is better than this tripe, so it wins out. those are the rules Ah yes, far better than tripe is the series that begins with “Your Choices Matter” and ends with “your choices gave you +237.5 warscore and -38.3 warscore which is less than 200 so you can choose only two of three flavored lights to give you ending slides. Thank you for playing Mass Effect.” The Relevation Space series has issues, but they’re almost exclusively in the third book. If you don’t like it, stop - just don’t act like a really bad video game story that blatantly copied it is better. (What’s that, dark matter makes suns explode faster? Wait let’s ditch that plot for uh, robots and organics can’t get along because it’s less clearly copied)
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:37
|
|
|
Velius posted:What’s that, dark matter makes suns explode faster?
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:44
|
|
|
Velius posted:The Relevation Space series has issues, but they’re almost exclusively in the third book. I love Reynolds and more or less liked the series overall, but this just absolutely isn't true. They're worst in the third book, but they're clearly there in the first: wooden characters, tendency to waffle, a plot that's structurally all over the shop and an inability to kill the darlings he'd already written over the course of 20 years of short stories and wanted to incorporate into the book. (I actually think he's a much better short story writer than a novelist, because the form prevents him from getting distracted too easily.) Revelation Space is mostly about Vibes imo.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:48
|
|
|
Reynolds at least often manages to put in some cool SF stuff: megastructures, technology, imagery, etc. Mass Effect is a generic space opera/milSF setting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:52
|
|
|
Velius posted:Ah yes, far better than tripe is the series that begins with “Your Choices Matter” and ends with “your choices gave you +237.5 warscore and -38.3 warscore which is less than 200 so you can choose only two of three flavored lights to give you ending slides. Thank you for playing Mass Effect.” Yes people were indeed giant babies about me3 Tbf it wasn't great, but people just lost their goddam minds over it, not saying your specifically were one of them unless you were in which case you should take this intensely personally
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:52
|
|
|
i had zero desire to read any sequels by the end of the first book
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:53
|
|
|
re mass effect first game sucked, second games complete gameplay overhaul and somehow even worse story should have let everyone know to avoid the third. I was dumb enough to play it too though. its pretty much the series that taught me that Western developers when they have a 'story driven' game to sell actually have no plan or way to make their game engaging so they're not even trying to market the gameplay
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 21:55
|
|
|
freebooter posted:I love Reynolds and more or less liked the series overall, but this just absolutely isn't true. They're worst in the third book, but they're clearly there in the first: wooden characters, tendency to waffle, a plot that's structurally all over the shop and an inability to kill the darlings he'd already written over the course of 20 years of short stories and wanted to incorporate into the book. (I actually think he's a much better short story writer than a novelist, because the form prevents him from getting distracted too easily.) I just finished Revelation Space, being the first I'd read of Reynolds, and I enjoyed it. It's a decent mix of megastructures, brain hacking, entities that are genuinely alien in their thinking (including various of the human characters), stellar-epoch-scale events, archaeology, and a handful of mysteries. It's very obvious that he was an astrophysicist, and all the tech has a "hard-SF" veneer to it that's also satisfying. And I didn't find the plot too bad -- it was definitely all over the shop, but partly that was because he was going for an element of mystery. I found that to be just about right -- there were a few mysteries that I was able to figure out before the big reveal, which is also part of the enjoyment. At least it wasn't like later Gene Wolfe in that way, although to be honest I feel like he could have gotten away with more use of unreliable narrators. But yeah it's all true about the wooden characters and tendency to waffle. He also has a slightly annoying device where a character is imparted some major chunk of exposition by some greater entity, which gets glossed over and only actually imparted to the reader dozens of pages later. I did slightly forgive him for the wooden characters, in that most of them are either so cybernetically-modified, or have their brain so thoroughly infested with other entities and weird manipulations, that "wooden", or at least "inhuman", actually seemed appropriate. I will likely be reading the sequels at some point.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2022 23:16
|
|
|
AARD VARKMAN posted:also holy poo poo this article is 2 weeks old
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 00:20
|
|
|
Orc Priest posted:60% through revelation space and I am probably not going to pick it back up. way too many words for something that looks very much like it's going to end up being mass effect but with not a single interesting character and the author refuses to get to the point. this was very fashionable in 1994 when it was written. that was drat near 30 years ago. standards change and, on the whole, books are better now. even his! (some of them. Revenger was definitely better. The most recent Inhibitors books arguably share the same issues you mention here, plus feel vaguely desultory, like he's having to write them for contractual reasons, because he is) you're quite right about the story on the face of it, to be honest. i regard revelations pace (  ) as more of, as another poster remarked, a vibe. it's like going to a show particularly to hear some spooky music and pretend to be immersed in a mysterious milleau for a while. dude's conjuring a feeling and a world more than he's telling a story, but i feel that's a valid approach to writing. not to everyone, mind, but i like it.in other news i am now 60% of the way through nona and this train has no brakes
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 04:45
|
|
|
I have no interest in Alastair reynolds but recall that the final boss of ME2 was a giant robot baby that was made out of liquefied people. Reynolds must be really really bad if that’s what you’re holding up as superior
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 06:15
|
|
|
verbal enema posted:Just read The Last Human by Zach Jordan and thoroughly enjoyed myself the whole time. i was hoping someone might want to talk about this :c
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 06:54
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:I just finished Revelation Space, being the first I'd read of Reynolds, and I enjoyed it. I actually read Revelation Space years and years ago, liked it okay but not enough to scramble to read the sequels, and then read a few of his other books over the years which I liked a lot better and so I went back and finished the Rev Space trilogy during the pandemic probably a decade after I read the first book. I do think that unfortunately the bad aspects of the first book only grow stronger as the trilogy progresses, though I won't say what I think they are because it's kind of spoilery and YMMV. Chasm City - the "standalone" novel that's in the same universe - is probably the best of them, which is ironic since it takes place hundreds of years before Rev Space and is only really part of the series because a publisher retroactively decided it should be so. But that's a really solid novel 9/10 novel for me. And it does sort of brush up against the main plot in one really good scene, in a way which is only creepy and chilling if you already understand what Rev Space has laid out as the crux of the series. Anyway aside from that I'd really recommend his stand-alone novels Pushing Ice and especially House of Suns, the latter of which is his best work IMO and I think quite often in the consensus opinion too. Kesper North posted:(some of them. Revenger was definitely better. The most recent Inhibitors books arguably share the same issues you mention here, plus feel vaguely desultory, like he's having to write them for contractual reasons, because he is) Inhibitor Phase is a perfect example of why I think he's better suited to writing short fiction. The first 100 pages or so are loving great, and then he gets bored and just repeats the plot of Absolution Gap.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 07:51
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Hmm yes the book that heavily inspired Mass Effect 'is Mass Effect' Fair, but Chasm CIty IS Blade Runner freebooter posted:(I actually think he's a much better short story writer than a novelist, because the form prevents him from getting distracted too easily.) ding ding ding I like Reynolds, but only his short fiction and 'House of Suns' are strong recommends imo
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 10:32
|
|
|
LCQC posted:Fair, but Chasm CIty IS Blade Runner Pushing Ice, also. And the most recent one, Eversions (which is also a pretty short and to-the-point little novel.)
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 11:03
|
|
|
Speaking of short fiction I really enjoyed Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, and now I'm in the middle of her short story collection Spirits Abroad and it's been super fun. Nothing groundshaking but some nice emotional depth and some pretty entertaining setups blending Malaysian folklore & the modern day - like an undead teen is living with her undead aunties and is going through undead puberty and has to deal with a crush on a living classmate that the aunties don't approve of, or best friends figuring out their relationship when a dragon falls in love with one and the other is jealous. The premises can be a little goofy but they're treated well so it doesn't come across as meme-y or flip. Her other Sorceror to the Crown books were nice light reads, too, but more in the Jonathan Strange bent. idiotsavant fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Sep 14, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 15:17
|
|
|
I would say that RS’s direct sequel is much more fast-paced and thrilling.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 15:52
|
|
|
Yeah, Chasm City is just a real damned good novel.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
Completely forgot about Eversion, read it the day it came out and it slaps. Was very different from what I'm used to from Reynolds in terms of plot structuring, and his dialogue was either better or he's learned to keep it tighter. Not a spoiler but this involves ships and ship terms, and Revenger had a lot of ship terms - I think he bought a sailboat or something. Either way he got SUPER into boats.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 16:45
|
|
|
do you think Amazon broke google results for their own books intentionally in response to their having to remove digital purchasing from their Android apps? if so they have done a great job annoying the gently caress out of me in two different mediums 
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 16:51
|
|
|
also while i'm yelling at clouds i would like to know why amazon now defaults to trying to sell me the audiobook of every book where that is available. i have not listened to an audio book in 20 years, i have bought 1000 books on the kindle store. hello? maybe default to the kindle version? god drat it
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 16:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 14:25 |
|
|
AARD VARKMAN posted:also while i'm yelling at clouds i would like to know why amazon now defaults to trying to sell me the audiobook of every book where that is available. i have not listened to an audio book in 20 years, i have bought 1000 books on the kindle store. hello? maybe default to the kindle version? god drat it For me it defaults to Kindle when almost every purchase I've made is of a paperback.
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2022 17:42
|
|