|
Chainclaw posted:Player of Games I liked. Use of Weapons I think I gave up on like 1/3 of the way through. Whenever you don't have something to pick up, go and try Use of Weapons again. It's excellent, after you get the hang of the chapter thing, and the ending is loving crazy.
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 06:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 04:37 |
|
|
Ooh! Good news! Book 10 of Behold Humanity came out on the 15th! I'ma scurry off and get it and disappear for a few days. (◕ᴗ◕✿)DOKI DOKI┏(＾0＾)┛
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 08:50
|
|
|
What books would you guys recommend like the Dark Profit Saga? Looking for some fantasy/sci fi comedies/satires, while the 3rd book doesn't come out.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 09:01
|
|
|
NPCs is pretty good. Basic idea is NPCs in a game have to take over after a team kill in a bar, because the king goes batshit if adventurers die. By Drew Hayes. Always the Caverns and Creatures series by Bevan. Four guys get sucked into a game as is the usual plot except these guys are all assholes. Well, 3 of them are. Things get weird. Beware of Chicken is good, as is Battle Mage Farmer. That's all I have off the top of my head at the moment, but I'll add if I think of anymore. Oh yea, Dungeoneers series but I forgot who wrote it. Attempted Vampirism by L G Estrella is good.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 09:12
|
|
|
Thanks a lot for the list 
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 09:26
|
|
|
I think all of them are on KU if you have a membership. Hope you dig em!
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 09:53
|
|
|
orange sky posted:What books would you guys recommend like the Dark Profit Saga? Looking for some fantasy/sci fi comedies/satires, while the 3rd book doesn't come out. I think even the author would agree that Dark Profit Saga is slightly-less-good Pratchett pastiche, so I'd suggest Discworld.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 10:14
|
|
|
orange sky posted:What books would you guys recommend like the Dark Profit Saga? Looking for some fantasy/sci fi comedies/satires, while the 3rd book doesn't come out. Dungeon Crawler Carl is great. Its Evil Dead humor meets Running Man. It's (deliberately) a bit on the gross side, though, so be aware.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 11:09
|
|
|
orange sky posted:What books would you guys recommend like the Dark Profit Saga? Looking for some fantasy/sci fi comedies/satires, while the 3rd book doesn't come out. They don't exist in digital so check you library, but Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming and the sequel If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Zelazny are worth a read. Every millenium Heaven and Hell have a contest to highlight the inner good or evil in humanity and whomever wins controls the fate of humanity for the next 1000 years.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 14:23
|
|
|
orange sky posted:What books would you guys recommend like the Dark Profit Saga? Looking for some fantasy/sci fi comedies/satires, while the 3rd book doesn't come out. Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward is great. After the forces of Good win the final battle, the last Assassin, a Drow Sorceress, a Druid, and a silent Black Knight team up to restore the Balance before the world is destroyed by a happy rainbow of positive energy. Kindle and audible available
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 16:22
|
|
|
navyjack posted:Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward is great. After the forces of Good win the final battle, the last Assassin, a Drow Sorceress, a Druid, and a silent Black Knight team up to restore the Balance before the world is destroyed by a happy rainbow of positive energy. Become what you must, Warrior of Darkness
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 16:24
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:NPCs is pretty good. NPCs is really fun. It's like a more serious version of Viva la Dirt League's Epic NPC Man. Meanwhile, Hayes just released Villians' Vignettes Volume I for his Villains Code universe.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 16:32
|
|
|
Finished reading Julie Czerneda's recent standalone book To Each This World and really enjoyed it. I love her aliens and am a sucker for the whole subgenre of "ambassador to weird aliens" so kinda right up my alley. And for the seasoned Czerneda veterans I am happy to report there is no terrible tacked on romance, this ones pure alien and human cultures
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 16:34
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:NPCs is pretty good. The 'Unconventional Heroes' series (starting with Two Necromancers, a Bureaucrat, and an Elf) by LG Estrella is a drat fun set of books. Hell, I'll second everything listed here. ps Dungeoneers is by Jeffery Russell (i've read the series like 4 times, it's fun)
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 19:46
|
|
|
Thief's Magic (Millennium's Rule #1) by Trudi Canavan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EXTQV2A/
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 22:21
|
|
|
Coming a bit late but re: authors in the Gene Wolfe tradition, the previously mentioned Ada Palmer is the person who comes to mind as a novelist but for a novella I'd add Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and for short story collections Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners. Also the question was about today's Gene Wolfe and he's really more "yesterday's Gene Wolfe" with Gene Wolfe alas being at least two days ago now but Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide deserves a mention as well. For an author who was "your favorite author's favorite author" it's a little surprising there aren't more books that are clearly Wolfe-inspired, but I guess sales-wise Wolfe was at best a midlist author so maybe the engines of commerce are actively fighting his influence. Too Like the Lightning (which I love) did get nominated for a Hugo but lost badly and its Goodreads rating count is almost a tenth of, say, Gideon the Ninth or Babel: An Arcane History.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2023 23:11
|
|
|
I've been going through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series, currently on Johnny Alucard and... okay. The series is generally described as maybe "alternate fantasy history." In this case "What if Dracula defeated Van Helsing and his group?" That's not what this series is. Instead it's... When I was kid, maybe 10-12 I liked to think I could cook. One "dish" I made was baked beans and vienna sausages cooked together with whatever seasonings I'd dump into the saucepan. Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, packets of Arby sauce and horseradish sauce. The end result was best describe as "dun-colored glop." I liked it pretty well and used it as a dip for potato chips, but I was an idiot kid. Anno Dracula is literary "dun-colored glop." Instead of "What if Dracula beat Van Helsing?" it's "What if Dracula beat Van Helsing and also some kind of weird extra-dimensional portal caused every pop culture character of various eras to be real and present in this world. So, in the first book, there's Dracula (mostly off-screen) and Jack the Ripper and some new characters. And Mycroft Holmes and Professor Moriarty and Fu Manchu and it only gets "more" from there. I admit I don't hate the series. Apparently "dun-colored glop" is still a little bit my jam, but still, fair warning.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 04:47
|
|
|
There's a lot of critical and commercially successful authors who exist in a sphere of their own without having other copy cats and influencees crossing over; often it's less that people don't want to write novels like that as much as it is just straight up difficult to write novels in that style, especially lacking their particular circumstances. Imagine trying to write Nabokovian prose without being a polyglotal émigré who was raised with a silver spoon only to have it snatched away, had their father assassinated and brother die in a concentration camp, and then remade their fortune off the back of controversy and cinema. Even if you could Chatgpt the prose to near levels it would be edited to hell. Same with Wolfe, you can try to make your catholic infused esoteric puzzle book novels all you want, but you'll never help design the pringles machine, and that's the difference.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 06:37
|
|
|
Everyone posted:I've been going through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series, currently on Johnny Alucard and... okay. The series is generally described as maybe "alternate fantasy history." In this case "What if Dracula defeated Van Helsing and his group?"
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 10:14
|
|
|
Lex Talionis posted:For an author who was "your favorite author's favorite author" it's a little surprising there aren't more books that are clearly Wolfe-inspired, but I guess sales-wise Wolfe was at best a midlist author so maybe the engines of commerce are actively fighting his influence.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 12:17
|
|
|
Everyone posted:I've been going through Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series, currently on Johnny Alucard and... okay. The series is generally described as maybe "alternate fantasy history." In this case "What if Dracula defeated Van Helsing and his group?" Yeah I agree with this. Utter nonsense but I kinda love em anyway? I've been sucked back into Jean Auel's 'unnecessarily detailed sex scenes but you can skip them' cavepeople books. Any other author describing completely irrelevant bullshit in this kind of fine detail would make me insane but for some reason I can read her going on about this stuff all day. I think they're probably very bad. But boy can I read them for hours. And she's been hugely successful so I guess I'm not the only one.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 12:59
|
|
|
HopperUK posted:Yeah I agree with this. Utter nonsense but I kinda love em anyway? Auel's in the same category of Dune - it is pretty much guaranteed that you will decide you hate the series and stop reading them, but that point is different for everybody. Personally, I stopped reading right after the timeskip in the last book.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 13:18
|
|
|
HopperUK posted:Yeah I agree with this. Utter nonsense but I kinda love em anyway? *looks in Wikipedia* Huh. She's a) a lady, b) American, c) still alive. Huh.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 13:35
|
|
|
Leng posted:Okay I will read Babel and report back. My library had the book in paperback. I have now read Babel. I made it past the pre-emptively defensive foreword that:
Page 1: First sentence after the epigraph tells us we're in Canton. The omniscient third POV begins with some English professor so, fine, I'll let that slide. ("Canton" is a romanization of "Guangdong" in Mandarin pinyin for the province. If you were to use the romanization system that was actually developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, you would be using Jyutping, which uses numerals to denote tones, e.g. "Gwong2dung1".) Page 2: The professor is there to go save a boy in a plague-ridden city. Language magic with silver. OK, this is cool, I don't mind that. Also page 2: we shift into the boy's POV and there's a Mandarin word—yīnggōubí—in his narration which makes me borderline lose it. How can you tell it's Mandarin? Well, because it's pinyin. Which is a system of romanization for Mandarin. People from "Canton" don't speak Mandarin; we speak Cantonese. The expression is "jing1 ngau1 bei6" in Cantonese, or written 鷹鉤鼻 in Traditional Chinese, which literally means "eagle/falcon-hook-nose". This is the kind of important character detail that you should maybe not gently caress up if your entire book is a thesis on colonialism and language. Page 3: redundant infodump about plague in the city. Yawn. Page 4: recovery from plague timeskip. It's fine. Page 5: Boy goes to see professor in his study. He can speak English with a near-perfect London accent because the professor paid an English tutor from London to live with him and speak English exclusively with him. (She's dead but she spoke passable Cantonese.) My "~special protagonist~" senses are tingling and I have to suppress an eyeroll. Page 6: Silver bar appears. Again. Boy's internal narration for it—yínfúlù—is IN loving MANDARIN. AGAIN. There's also a footnote to give you the full quote of the paragraph that the boy didn't have good enough English to read in case you needed a blunt statement of the theme. I'm getting riled up. Page 7, top half: This Be Magic scene. Silver bar has writing engraved on either side: English letters and Chinese characters. This is correct; there is one unified system of written Chinese characters. Page 7, middle: Professor—presumably a Language Wizard/Sorceror/whatever-they-are-called-in-this-world-because-that's-not-yet-been-explained-except-for-the-mention-of-"silver-work"-in-the-foreword—tells the boy to "Say them out loud. Chinese first, then English."  NO. WRONG. Nobody speaks loving "Chinese" because Chinese, when referring to the spoken form and not the written one, is not a single language but a group of many languages. The next sentence is leading into the use of actual Chinese characters and by now, I am so angry that I'm ready to throw the book if I see Simplified Chinese characters.Page 7, middle, next line: The Chinese characters—囫圇吞棗—are written using Traditional Chinese. Good save. Page 7, middle, line after that: Boy reads them aloud as "Húlún tūn zǎo". OMFG STOP WITH THE MANDARIN THIS SHOULD BE IN CANTONESE. It's "fat1 leon4 tan1 zou2" in Jyutping. The last character is the character for dates (as in the fruit). Page 7, bottom: There's a whole thing about how the silver bar hums and the boy suddenly starts choking on the taste of dates. And more loving Mandarin. I am just about done. Page 8:  But instead of having to learn Potions and Charms and Defense Against Dark Arts, we're doing (actual dialogue quoted from the professor character here) "Latin, Greek, and of course, Mandarin." This is supposed to be set in ~1829, not ~2019. The push to have a national spoken language across all of China didn't begin until ~1912. It makes no sense to push Mandarin over Cantonese or Hokkien or Hakka or Taishanese or any of the other Chinese languages because at that point in history (since Kuang is being soooooo particular and insistent on being accurate to history except for when she doesn't feel like it) it simply wasn't dominant the way it is today. Pages 9-10: It's "pick a name" time. Boy chooses "Robin Swift" and begins the complete erasure of his identity, cue themes, etc. All fine, expected, etc. Page 10, bottom half: they go to the harbor to take ship to London. Page 11, first line of dialogue: white man berates Chinese man. We get butchered Mandarin ("Knee how?" for "Ni hao") this time, followed by the same phrase (你好 which are the characters for "you" and "good", i.e. "you good?" as the general greeting with the literal meaning "are you well?" / "how are you?") in Cantonese (the ONLY Cantonese that's appeared on the page so far), and of course it's butchered too: "Lay ho?" (for "nei5 hou2") Page 11, middle: Professor says "I don't speak the Cantonese dialect." Reminder: this guy is a a literal, magic professor of languages. You'd think he should maybe know that Cantonese is not a loving dialect; it's a language. Usually I'm the first one to point to the "character's views =/= author's views" but for this? No. Kuang should know better. She was born in that province and has two masters in Chinese studies and translates Chinese science fiction. Come on. Pages 12-16: ship travel time skip montage to complete the erasure of Robin's identity as Chinese, with thoughts popping up "in Chinese" and people asking him to "speak a few words in Chinese for their entertainment". The writing is better than The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic but I'm skimming at this point because I have the total shits with this book now. DNF at the end of Chapter 1 because this is loving offensive. I genuinely can't remember the last time I was this angry from reading just one chapter in a book. Thanks, Kuang, for writing and publishing yet another book that somehow rips off Chinese history and culture and yet mangles it so badly at the same time. The PRC is hellbent on eradicating Cantonese completely and I'm still working through my existential crisis related to that because not only does my Australian-born child no longer speak Cantonese as her dominant language even though we were so, so, so careful to do everything we could to pass our language on to the point where she didn't even speak English before she was two years old, everybody—everybody, including random strangers and (sometimes) my own parents—tells us we should forget teaching her Cantonese and focus on Mandarin instead. No. Just no. Cantonese is a language spoken by over 85 million people worldwide. There are entire art forms with rich histories unique to Cantonese, such as Cantonese opera. Classical Chinese literature was WRITTEN for Cantonese—a lot of those classical poems just don't sound right when not spoken in Cantonese. I do not need to read a book that is purportedly about how language is weaponized by colonial powers committing the same erasure of my language in a IN THE loving OPENING SECTION OF THE BOOK WHEN THE MAIN CHARACTER HASN'T EVEN GONE THROUGH THE ERASURE PROCESS YET because the author could not be assed to care about Cantonese, the mother tongue of the province she was born in and that her family, presumably as people who were from that province, speaks. This is not an "inconsistency". This is not a case of "introduc[ing] falsehoods only when they serve the narrative" (as Kuang so blithely claims in that damned foreword). This is a misstep on a nuclear level. Is it deliberate? I hope not. Is it just wilfully ignorant? Maybe. Kuang only ever refers to "speaking Chinese" in interviews I've found and from the way she's written Robin and how front and center she is about how much of a vehicle he is for her own experiences (like losing most of her Chinese), I would not be surprised to learn that she perhaps originally spoke Cantonese, forgot all of it after immigrating to America, then re-learned Chinese (Mandarin Chinese) as part of her university coursework. Still. How the gently caress did this win the Nebula and so much praise without a single mention of this glaring flaw in ANY of the reviews I could Google? Did she not have a single alpha or beta reader, or critique partner, or sensitivity reader who realized, "hey, uh, you know people from 'Canton' speak Cantonese; maybe Robin's internal narration should be in Cantonese"? Or did the issue get raised and then ignored? Like I did not enjoy Black Water Sister either, but to give credit where credit is due: Zen Cho absolutely NAILED the cultural identity aspects and the Manglish. Now excuse me while I go haul rear end to finish revising my current book so I can go haul rear end even more to publish another Cantonese rhyming children's picture book before I need to move on to writing book 3 and the PRC succeeds in wiping Cantonese off the face of the earth.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 13:51
|
|
explanations of why, in a work of historical fantasy, even though oysters were poor people food she decided to transplant her own 2019 experience of seeing lots of oysters at attending a swanky Oxford event into a time period because maintaining the authenticity of ~her first experience~ was more important than whatever the actual characters would have been experiencing;
final sentence of "if you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction" instead of the typically humble "gratitude and appreciation to <insert list of people and texts drawn upon in the course of research> for <insert topics researched>; any errors that remain are my own" whereupon my reaction was, "maybe YOU should have remembered that and not written this foreword"
|
I just want to say I really appreciated that post, it was very thoughtful and while I already knew Cantonese was a distinct language it was still very informative.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 14:00
|
|
|
silvergoose posted:I just want to say I really appreciated that post, it was very thoughtful and while I already knew Cantonese was a distinct language it was still very informative. Same. I had my issues with Babel and greatly appreciated the insight from someone who appears actually knowledgeable on the topic. e: Even more annoying, but being more careful about her choice of language there actually would have fit super nicely into her overall themes, yet she chose not to. (Though if she had handled it with her usual subtlety, I can see it not working well at all.) I can almost forgive something like the oysters, which she calls out in the foreword, because it could read really differently to someone not familiar with the economic status of oysters or something, and keeping the emotional component to her at least has a reason for verisimilitude ish instead of realism, but getting the language wrong in a book about language and colonialism and identity erasure is something else. Ravenfood fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jun 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 14:10
|
|
|
That's incredibly bad. I know Cantonese is a language and not a dialect and I don't know poo poo. Why go on and on about how well researched your book is if it isn't? Just admit you did your best but probably made mistakes. Baffling decisions on every level.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 14:22
|
|
|
Leng posted:My library had the book in paperback. You sound like you're thiiiisssss close to doing a Let's Read smack-down on Babel like you've been doing with The Thorough but Bland Mixing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 15:20
|
|
|
I assume the defensively written foreword is there because RF Kuang debuted while on Twitter and has therefore been metaphorically beaten within an inch of her literal life by the same people who talk a lot about community and growth, the ritual birth trauma of the young SFF writer.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XB49BG4/
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 17:01
|
|
|
pradmer posted:I Am Legend by Richard Matheson - $1.99 Pro click. Great classic. Far beyond any of the attempts that have been made at adapting it to a movie.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 17:20
|
|
|
With the alternate ending the Will Smith one is alright
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2023 17:22
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:I assume the defensively written foreword is there because RF Kuang debuted while on Twitter and has therefore been metaphorically beaten within an inch of her literal life by the same people who talk a lot about community and growth, the ritual birth trauma of the young SFF writer. It was there, and in the front, to basically say "hey, this is a true depiction of the British Empire, except for these things I changed around a bit" And then the book proceeds to give you an introductory tour of imperialism, colonialism, classism, and racism and culminates with the two important lessons of "violence is the only option" and "you can't trust a Liberal". Pretty good read, TBH.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 00:44
|
|
|
Whenever I try to read anything that gets compared to Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell I have to stop reading it due to disappointment. This does not include Lud in the Mist though which by being a progenitor of JS&MN feels like it’s own thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 02:16
|
|
|
Leng posted:Babel. Great post. Wife and I have considered teaching our toddler son Cantonese as that is her native language but we currently live with her parents who say a lot of very bad things in Cantonese and she doesn't want him to know what they are saying. He has picked up some words, we don't know the extent of his vocabulary because we aren't sure just how much he learned. It does help we live in San Francisco so there is plenty of access to resources, but when we move somewhere where we can actually afford a house, none of those resources will be there. Kuang seems to be escaping some of the flame out and scatted into the wind a lot of the buzzy young diverse authors have hit so I expect her to be around for a while, maybe twitter dying will help but I'm betting it just means booktok will make scifi/fantasy even worse in the near future.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 03:09
|
|
|
Leng posted:My library had the book in paperback. Lovell talks about "the Cantonese dialect" because that's what English speakers called in 1830 - in fact, a bit of Wikipedia suggests that it was "Canton dialect", and the word "Cantonese" wasn't invented till 1855, but I'll trust Kuang's research here. It's the same reason he talks about "Canton" and "Peking" and the sailor butchers Mandarin and Cantonese. And he wants Robin to learn "Mandarin, of course" because it's what he knows and is more prestigious at court (page 26). As for "dialect", the book also uses it for Mandarin, so it looks like a bad translation of 方言. I was going to say that the book explains why Robin is thinking in Mandarin, but there's a footnote a little later on that scotches that. He and his family were originally northerners (page 16) and he seems to have picked up Cantonese on the streets, which is why he reads aloud in Mandarin. It's contrived and looks like Kuang's doing it to make things easier for herself, but fair enough... until the footnote on page 26 (in chapter two) which states that he grew up bilingual and that Cantonese was his preferred native tongue. quote:I would not be surprised to learn that she perhaps originally spoke Cantonese, forgot all of it after immigrating to America, then re-learned Chinese (Mandarin Chinese) as part of her university coursework. I agree this seems likely, especially given the tin ear for Chinese in The Poppy War. "Sinegard", seriously?
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 05:10
|
|
|
I enjoyed Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and look forward to more. I'd like more Rebel Outlaw, but I'll take what I can get of fuzzy fiction.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 08:41
|
|
|
Ninurta posted:I enjoyed Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and look forward to more. I'd like more Rebel Outlaw, but I'll take what I can get of fuzzy fiction. He seems completely over making videogames, from what I've heard in the interviews, sorry.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 09:04
|
|
|
cptn_dr posted:I'm about to start reading Deep Wheel Orcadia, which is a verse novel written by Orcadian poet Harry Josephine Giles. I have no thoughts on it yet, but I'm assured it's very, very literary.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 10:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 04:37 |
|
|
90s Cringe Rock posted:I love this book! The orcadian is better for reading aloud but the translation complements it really nicely. It felt like a bit of a chore when I started out (I understand why they took the compound word approach to words that don't translate directly, but it's not the choice I'd have made) but then I settled into a routine of "Read along while listening to the Orcadian half of the audiobook, check English translation if needed", and now I'm enjoying it a whole lot more. It's taking me back to some of the dual language books I read while studying comparative literature at Uni, so it's simultaneously nostalgic and something completely new and unique.
|
|
#
?
Jun 25, 2023 11:14
|
|
