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I’m talking about Redemption Ark, which compensates for the previous books’ lack of space battles.
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Sep 14, 2022 19:32
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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 Kobo does the same thing, drives me nuts. I don't listen to audiobooks and have never bought from there, while meanwhile I have about 200 ebooks in my reader, why not have totally seperate stores?
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Sep 14, 2022 20:05
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Opopanax posted:Kobo does the same thing, drives me nuts. I don't listen to audiobooks and have never bought from there, while meanwhile I have about 200 ebooks in my reader, why not have totally seperate stores? "Create a profile, give us your preferences and allow us to track your every move so that we can create personalized content and shopping experience for you." Okay, well, can you default display the medium of items that I am most likely to buy. "No, not like that."
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Sep 14, 2022 20:24
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Why would they spend precious eyeball time on their website trying to sell you the thing you already are buying? It seems clear to me they want to get people into buying ebooks if they don't already and audiobooks of they don't already because those things make the reading experience easier in some ways and they may be able to sell you more (or just complimentary) products.
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Sep 14, 2022 20:40
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A day in, and there's 1.5m for Stormlight figurines: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brotherwise/stormlight-premium-miniatures I think the man might be addicted to kickstarters at this point.
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Sep 14, 2022 20:57
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Audiobooks from Audible are either expensive or involve a subscription, so of course Amazon push them as hard as they can.
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Sep 14, 2022 21:05
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FPyat posted:I’m talking about Redemption Ark, which compensates for the previous books’ lack of space battles. I think I probably did like Ark better than Space, and it has one of my favourite examples of Reynolds' love of hard sci-fi: the chase between two vessels going at near light-speed and the way they try to deploy traps and countermeasures against the chaser. My other favourite example is in Pushing Ice when they find the spacesuit with a manufacturing date in the future which turns out to be eminently possible.
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Sep 14, 2022 21:47
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idiotsavant posted: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. Have you read The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo? It's pretty similar, although set in the 1890s. Apparently they made a Netflix show out of it now.
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Sep 14, 2022 21:48
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freebooter posted:I think I probably did like Ark better than Space, and it has one of my favourite examples of Reynolds' love of hard sci-fi: the chase between two vessels going at near light-speed and the way they try to deploy traps and countermeasures against the chaser. That was a great chase, really enjoyed how trying to go FTL is not a great idea in a hard scifi universe.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:25
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Drakyn posted:I thought this with a dose of Great Mannism was most Stephenson work. Stephenson always struck me as libertarian-adjacent without quite being libertarian, if that makes sense? The anarcho-capitalism of the world of Snow Crash is clearly meant to be seen as a bad thing, but it's also more functional than a lot of people would assume/argue a world like that would be. (Though I'm not quite sure how seriously we're supposed to take the setting of Snow Crash anyway; it feels like a parody of cyberpunk tropes early on, but the book seems to gradually take it more seriously.) And while there's obviously nuances to it, there's a general idea running through what I've read of his works that technology is cool and, by extension, so are engineers and "hackers". He seems like the kind of person who's appalled by Elon Musk now but thought Elon Musk was cool a few years ago.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:49
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Reamde onward really makes it clear that he thought the worlds of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were good things.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:53
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He invented bitcoins a good 10 years in advance but foolishly thought it'd have to be backed by gold.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:53
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Cryptonomicon was written late enough in the dotcom bubble that several real-world electronic gold companies already existed.
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Sep 14, 2022 23:54
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pseudorandom name posted:Reamde onward really makes it clear that he thought the worlds of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age were good things. The world of The Diamond Age has some good points alongside the horrifying ones, I'd say (especially when you consider that most of the horrifying parts have parallels in the present-day real world); a lot of things seem to have improved from the Snow Crash era, though some of that may be differences in narrative focus as much as actual changes.
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Sep 15, 2022 00:07
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Silver2195 posted:And while there's obviously nuances to it, there's a general idea running through what I've read of his works that technology is cool and, by extension, so are engineers and "hackers". He seems like the kind of person who's appalled by Elon Musk now but thought Elon Musk was cool a few years ago. Don't read Seveneves it's fuckin terrible.
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Sep 15, 2022 00:15
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I dunno, the part where Carly Rodham Holmes almost doomed the human species was kind of funny.
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Sep 15, 2022 00:20
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RDM posted:There's also a Neil degrasse Tyson insert. Is he a villain
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Sep 15, 2022 01:04
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The word that comes to mind when I think of Stephenson novels is ''adequate.' They're mildly entertaining but they just kinda slide ride off you without leaving any residue.
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Sep 15, 2022 01:11
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tiniestacorn posted:Is he a villain Don't read Seveneves it's fuckin terrible. pseudorandom name posted:I dunno, the part where Carly Rodham Holmes almost doomed the human species was kind of funny. RDM fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Sep 15, 2022 |
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Sep 15, 2022 01:35
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i actually liked the first 2/3 parts of Seveneves despite the annoying character inserts. the idea of the moon exploding and giving humanity a few years to save itself is a cool enough notion i didn't mind all the issues. part 3, his explanation for why star trek aliens are humanoids, was pointless garbage
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Sep 15, 2022 01:35
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freebooter posted:My other favourite example is in Pushing Ice when they find the spacesuit with a manufacturing date in the future which turns out to be eminently possible. I still have no idea how artifacts from other human societies were able to get to the location before the Rockhopper given that it was probably the fastest human vessel ever. "Yeah the hare went full tilt for millions of years and still the tortoise managed to beat him."
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Sep 15, 2022 01:56
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RDM posted:Melon Busk is a brilliant tech tycoon who comes to the rescue of the incredibly lovely plan to survive space apocalypse with his private spaceship, giving his life so everyone else can live. To be fair, he dies by bleeding to death through his anus because he was an idiot who didn't understand the giant nuclear engine he created. Also a bunch of his acolytes make a break for Mars and literally everyone else is just "lol RIP", and you never hear from them again. I didn't really find the portrayal to be all that flattering, but that might just be an eye of the beholder thing. AARD VARKMAN posted:i actually liked the first 2/3 parts of Seveneves despite the annoying character inserts. the idea of the moon exploding and giving humanity a few years to save itself is a cool enough notion i didn't mind all the issues. part 3, his explanation for why star trek aliens are humanoids, was pointless garbage Yeah same. It was a little contrived, but there was a lot of fun hard sci fi action in the process. I don't regret reading it. The third half needed to be its own novel, or series of short stories or something. About half of it was the most painful exposition imaginable, and the story itself was pretty bland.
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Sep 15, 2022 02:57
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I didn't really find the portrayal to be all that flattering, but that might just be an eye of the beholder thing. I felt like the Elon Musk character was a joke in the book. It was not a flattering portrayal. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Sep 15, 2022 |
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Sep 15, 2022 04:32
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I'm going to ask here since the find a book thread was not able to help me: I'm looking for the name of a sci fi author. might have been part of the new wave sci-fi. several of his works had strong environmentalist themes and one story in particular was about a man who wakes up, doesn't remember anything and sees visions of a ruined earth. he starts walking and arrives at this town where it is always twilight and time does not seem to pass. thanks
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Sep 15, 2022 10:13
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I think Elon Musk must break Neal Stephenson's heart. You can tell by his books that he believes engineers and software designers and "hackers" are who are going to pen the future, and his protagonists of this stripe usually get involved with preposterously huge finance schemes to achieve these goals, but they're almost never interested in money for its own sake or the benefits it brings. They're almost always after higher ideals, safety for the oppressed, better futures for their kids, ending slavery, a more equitable balance of power in society etc, so it must just make his jaw clench to see the poster boy for Future Tech Money turn out to be a total dog turd. I mean we all know in the modern age how lovely and flawed a lot of these people are in the real world, but that's with the hindsight of 15+ years of twitter's magical ability to force assholes to out themselves publicly at our command so I can't really blame him for his original optimism. I remember thinking Musk was super rad for years until he started slowly peeling his human skin off and calling cave diver rescue workers pedos for not using his magic prototype submarine out of nowhere.
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Sep 15, 2022 10:25
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Orc Priest posted:I'm going to ask here since the find a book thread was not able to help me: john christopher?
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Sep 15, 2022 11:12
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Orc Priest posted:I'm going to ask here since the find a book thread was not able to help me: Ballard, maybe?
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Sep 15, 2022 11:16
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fez_machine posted:Ballard, maybe? Yeah that sounds v ballardy
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Sep 15, 2022 11:28
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pseudorandom name posted:[i]Reamde[/i My god this was a slog.
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Sep 15, 2022 15:46
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Just kinda echoing the Reynolds feels some posts up. Redemption Ark was the best out of the four main Revelation Space novels for me, and even it had parts that made me go a bit ehh. Of what I've read, House of the Suns has been comfortably the best, and I also enjoyed the two Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days short stories very much which makes me think I should pick up the Galactic North short story collection.
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Sep 15, 2022 17:13
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Sinatrapod posted:I think Elon Musk must break Neal Stephenson's heart. You can tell by his books that he believes engineers and software designers and "hackers" are who are going to pen the future, and his protagonists of this stripe usually get involved with preposterously huge finance schemes to achieve these goals, but they're almost never interested in money for its own sake or the benefits it brings. They're almost always after higher ideals, safety for the oppressed, better futures for their kids, ending slavery, a more equitable balance of power in society etc, so it must just make his jaw clench to see the poster boy for Future Tech Money turn out to be a total dog turd. id like to think that he's smart enough to not believe people's PR marketing about themselves and instead consider what they actually do but a lot of people seem to believe that poo poo whole hog. like you apparently lol.
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Sep 15, 2022 17:42
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Larry Parrish posted:id like to think that he's smart enough to not believe people's PR marketing about themselves and instead consider what they actually do but a lot of people seem to believe that poo poo whole hog. like you apparently lol. Yeah I was gonna say, Musk is neither a hacker, nor an engineer, nor a "software designer". He's a rich kid with a BS in economics and physics who just watched too much Star Trek in the 80s and then built up a cult of personality around himself. And in Seveneves, which was written in 2007: habeasdorkus posted:I felt like the Elon Musk character was a joke in the book. It was not a flattering portrayal. So I think Stevenson had Musk's number even back then. If anything, Stevenson's tends to set up Musk-like characters as the evil villains exploiting the "noble" engineers for their own nefarious ends. (See: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell). Stevenson still hero-worships techbros in an unhealthy way, though.
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Sep 15, 2022 17:52
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Lead out in cuffs posted:To be fair, he dies by bleeding to death through his anus because he was an idiot who didn't understand the giant nuclear engine he created. Also a bunch of his acolytes make a break for Mars and literally everyone else is just "lol RIP", and you never hear from them again. Three cheers for the savior of humanity. It's absolutely possible the book was making GBS threads on him the entire time and I just forgot, I don't remember anything besides a handful of plot highlights. Teal neGrasse Dyson did plot exposition and was the last man alive and I don't remember a single other thing about that character.
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Sep 15, 2022 20:10
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RDM posted:Teal neGrasse Dyson did plot exposition and was the last man alive and I don't remember a single other thing about that character. He's the one who realized on live TV that the moon's seven fragments would grind themselves to dust and eject a cloud of meteorites that would sterilize the Earth and then told the President this very important information. (Naturally the perfidious Chinese figured this out weeks earlier but didn't bother to tell anybody.)
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Sep 15, 2022 20:23
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General Battuta posted:He invented bitcoins a good 10 years in advance but foolishly thought it'd have to be backed by gold. Extremely telling. "Awesome grasp on the science and technology hand-in-hand with an inability to think about or present interesting social implications" is a huge part of why the back 1/3 of Seveneves is such a hollow shell
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Sep 15, 2022 21:11
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Doktor Avalanche posted:john christopher? I've read almost all John Christopher's stuff but this doesn't ring a bell Lunsku posted:Just kinda echoing the Reynolds feels some posts up. Redemption Ark was the best out of the four main Revelation Space novels for me, and even it had parts that made me go a bit ehh. Of what I've read, House of the Suns has been comfortably the best, and I also enjoyed the two Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days short stories very much which makes me think I should pick up the Galactic North short story collection. Galactic North is really good. (The titular story itself is great but now really loving annoys me because Reynolds decided he could use it in lieu of writing an actual ending for Absolution Gap.) Beyond the Aquila Rift is a really great collection too, though IIRC there's some repeats between the two.
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Sep 15, 2022 21:27
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Doktor Avalanche posted:john christopher? well thanks for that Proustian wave of nostalgia as i realised the author of the death of grass also wrote the tripods books and then watching the TV adaptation as a young lad 
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Sep 15, 2022 23:38
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HaitianDivorce posted:Extremely telling. "Awesome grasp on the science and technology hand-in-hand with an inability to think about or present interesting social implications" is a huge part of why the back 1/3 of Seveneves is such a hollow shell
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Sep 15, 2022 23:49
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Apparently there was another Hitchhiker's guide by the Artemis Fowl writer. I'd assume it's a write off but it says he was asked to do it by Douglas Adams' estate, any good?
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Sep 16, 2022 02:37
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No
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Sep 16, 2022 02:39
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