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I’m reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which is fine. Did anyone think that her curse is extremely inconsistent? Like, she’s at a cafe right now. The waiter is described as coming around “every 10 minutes or so”. How did she successfully order and receive coffee? Her curse seems to take effect almost immediately when she’s out of sight. And like, if any of the people she sleeps with so much as go to the bathroom, that’s kinda it right? And then they come back and find a strange woman in their living room they don’t remember?
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Nov 21, 2023 02:23
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Almost finished all of Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet novels. Very competent "fleet tactics" mil-sf for the first 5, but the "Beyond The Frontier" sequel series, 3 books in, have been.... boring.
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Nov 21, 2023 02:37
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I had an image in my mind of what Wolfe's There Are Doors was, something like a sliders flavored romance. Gotta say finding out it's half one flew over the cuckoos nest half buddy road trip with Oliver North was quite surprising Very interesting though so far. The protagonist is so mediocre and unmoored in his world that it's hard to get a grasp of what's happening, he's always reaching out to get a hold of his lost girlfriend, Lara because it's the only thing that's grounding him and everytime he gets close she fades away. Reminds me of the Man Who Fell to Earth film in how discombobulated it is, and how impossible it is to discern reality from the abstract.
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Nov 21, 2023 03:26
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Bilirubin posted:I just want to say, once again, how much I appreciate these posts and the money I have saved from them. SOOO, you get an AV! But I would like to crowd source it so folks, if you have benefitted from this daily book intel, please suggest a fitting av for Pradmer! I nominate this picture of a guy with a book on his hat. 
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Nov 21, 2023 03:33
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Ccs posted:I nominate this picture of a guy with a book on his hat. This, but can someone animate a bunch of those books in different colors raining down in the background because that is what happens to my TBR every time I see one of these posts.
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Nov 21, 2023 03:40
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Awkward Davies posted:I’m reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which is fine. Did anyone think that her curse is extremely inconsistent? Like, she’s at a cafe right now. The waiter is described as coming around “every 10 minutes or so”. How did she successfully order and receive coffee? Her curse seems to take effect almost immediately when she’s out of sight. And like, if any of the people she sleeps with so much as go to the bathroom, that’s kinda it right? And then they come back and find a strange woman in their living room they don’t remember? Lol I read this for a book club and multiple people had the same complaint about the bathroom. It definitely does not make sense, but I think as a fairy tale you kind of have to just hand wave away reality a bit. I was bothered more by it hitting every single rung on the “tall dark and handsome stranger who’s bad for you” cliche ladder
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Nov 21, 2023 05:05
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The thing that drives me batty about Addie LaRue is that is shares the premise of a curse that makes everyone forget you with one of the famously long and dense My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfictions, Background Pony by shortskirtsandexplosions, a writer who produced multiple Tolstoy-length overwrought stories about damned ponies. Yeah, I've read things I'm not so proud of.
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Nov 21, 2023 05:18
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I found V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic trilogy to not so much be a story as a sequence of events divorced from cause and effect and resolved to never read anything by her again.
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Nov 21, 2023 07:49
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Lol true that. Yeah I liked the world building in those ones but the story itself didn't excite me either
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Nov 21, 2023 10:16
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Anybody read this and have an opinion about it? https://x.com/doctorow/status/1726918627713274169?s=20 Doctorow is probably the main reason I still read Twitter but I've been less than impressed with his fiction writing is why I ask.
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Nov 21, 2023 13:46
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Naomi Kritzer owns. Not read it or the shorts it's based on, though.
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Nov 21, 2023 14:16
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Leng posted:[*]Helen Lowe - The Wall of Night (4 books, 4th in progress) - this is probably a bad pitch, but take the core premise of "a wall to stand against a long-forgotten evil" from A Song of Ice and Fire, cross it with a prose style that's somewhat reminiscent Lord of the Rings, but make the Chosen One a girl and have a diverse ensemble cast that's at least 50% women who are actual multi-faceted complex characters instead of some archetype I think of it as P.C.Hodgell's Godstalk except without a lot of the dumb parts and more thoughtful.
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Nov 21, 2023 14:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Anybody read this and have an opinion about it? She's been anthologised several times in the various year's best anthologies covering every major editor. The title story was collected in a David G. Hartwell Year's Best anthology. https://www.sfadb.com/Naomi_Kritzer_Chronology
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Nov 21, 2023 14:52
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The ebook is just 6 bucks. I've added a sample to check it out. If it seems interesting I'll post up.
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Nov 21, 2023 15:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Anybody read this and have an opinion about it? I’m pretty picky about the sf stuff I read so maybe I’m missing something, but I genuinely can’t think of a book I’ve read written about a competent engineering man who’s running a family that was written in the last…25 years? 30? This feels like an ad for a deeply transgressive and provocative book that traveled through a wormhole from 1985, not so much for a world where Gideon the Ninth and NK Jemisin are crushing Hugo awards.
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Nov 21, 2023 15:40
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pseudorandom name posted:I found V.E. Schwab's Shades of Magic trilogy to not so much be a story as a sequence of events divorced from cause and effect and resolved to never read anything by her again. I quit after the first book. Sounds like that wasn't a bad decision.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:05
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buffalo all day posted:I’m pretty picky about the sf stuff I read so maybe I’m missing something, but I genuinely can’t think of a book I’ve read written about a competent engineering man who’s running a family that was written in the last…25 years? 30? This feels like an ad for a deeply transgressive and provocative book that traveled through a wormhole from 1985, not so much for a world where Gideon the Ninth and NK Jemisin are crushing Hugo awards.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:08
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buffalo all day posted:I’m pretty picky about the sf stuff I read so maybe I’m missing something, but I genuinely can’t think of a book I’ve read written about a competent engineering man who’s running a family that was written in the last…25 years? 30? This feels like an ad for a deeply transgressive and provocative book that traveled through a wormhole from 1985, not so much for a world where Gideon the Ninth and NK Jemisin are crushing Hugo awards. Fair, but heinlein still looms large (see:scalzi). I'm not really a huge fan of Jemisin or Tamsyn. Broken Earth felt like a less nuanced rehash of LeGuin and Gideon felt like fast food, fun in the moment but not afterwards (all the meme-ery really bothered me). I'm not saying they're bad they're just not making me think "this is good enough for me to recommend it to other people." The currently working SF authors I've been most impressed by are probably Scalzi and Martha Wells, and Scalzi has fallen into the Neil Gaiman trap of writing quantity over quality lately. Adrian Tchaikovsky and Vernor Vinge too maybe if you count Vinge as current. And all of those still have a fair bit of retro feel "competent man" protagonist, even if Murderbot is a subversion of the trope.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:23
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Competent engineering man has gone extinct. This is the age of competent engineering wizard society.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:26
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Slyphic posted:Competent engineering man has gone extinct. This is the age of competent engineering wizard society.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:28
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actually that's the sequels
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Nov 21, 2023 16:28
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"But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a #Heinlein dad would suuuck." I'm not gonna tell Doctorow about all the incest erotica he could find on amazon if he went looking for it  E: to make this less of a cheap swipe I'll say that a book about being raised by an insufferable libertarian crank is probably deeply relatable for a lot of people, even if the oeuvre it's responding to isn't very relevant anymore Clark Nova fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 16:28
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A story being raised by an insufferable libertarian crank doesn't sound very... sci-fi.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:59
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*Bioshock oceanscape* One day, my son, all this will be yours - it writes itself!
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Nov 21, 2023 17:04
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OddObserver posted:A story being raised by an insufferable libertarian crank doesn't sound very... sci-fi. the high-concept speculative fiction component is that the dad didn't run away and start loudly complaining about child support payments to every stranger he meets
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Nov 21, 2023 17:08
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Clark Nova posted:"But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a #Heinlein dad would suuuck." Yeah, my brain went there first on reading that as well.  Heinlein, that man had issues.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:27
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"#Heinlein dad" is just funny considering that not only did Heinlein not have kids, it was a huge sore spot for him and John W. Campbell regularly mocked him about his lack of children proving that he didn't have any real connection to society and it was at least one of the things that drove Heinlein into being a total rear end in a top hat later in life (far from the only thing, though). I think I've mentioned it here before, but highly recommend Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlen, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee if you're interested in the Golden Age authors and their personal lives (and fights with each other).
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Nov 21, 2023 18:57
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Anybody read this and have an opinion about it? Update I've been reading and it's been good. Weird that people want this to be some up to the minute response to currently dominant modes of Sci-fi at the moment and not like a reply to culture in general (never mind that it's a fix up of work that was first published in 2015) . As if there doesn't exist multiple examples of bad tech dad in our actual reality. Feels like annoyance with Doctrow has been displaced on to this largely inoffensive work. Clark Nova posted:the high-concept speculative fiction component is that the dad didn't run away and start loudly complaining about child support payments to every stranger he meets You will never guess what the big twist is fez_machine fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 21:01
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fez_machine posted:Weird that people want this to be some up to the minute response to currently dominant modes of Sci-fi at the moment and not like a reply to culture in general (never mind that it's a fix up of work that was first published in 2015) . As if there doesn't exist multiple examples of bad tech dad in our actual reality. Feels like annoyance with Doctrow has been displaced on to this largely inoffensive work. I will bravely say that if a book is presented through a comment about how the book is a response to a dominant mode of, specifically, SF, it doesn’t seem weird to talk about whether that is true
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Nov 21, 2023 21:23
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Chairman Capone posted:"#Heinlein dad" is just funny considering that not only did Heinlein not have kids, it was a huge sore spot for him and John W. Campbell regularly mocked him about his lack of children proving that he didn't have any real connection to society and it was at least one of the things that drove Heinlein into being a total rear end in a top hat later in life (far from the only thing, though). Also, he was so much of a traditionalist rear end in a top hat that during a period when his second divorce wasn't final and his books weren't selling, when he was living lived his then-fiancee, later third wife, in a trailer, he wouldn't allow her to work because [paraphrase] "There's a word for a man who lives on a woman's income."
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Nov 21, 2023 21:40
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buffalo all day posted:I will bravely say that if a book is presented through a comment about how the book is a response to a dominant mode of, specifically, SF, it doesn’t seem weird to talk about whether that is true You're right, but it was seriously annoying that people used your post as an opportunity to mock a decent book nobody in this thread had actually read.
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Nov 21, 2023 21:45
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fez_machine posted:You're right, but it was seriously annoying that people used your post as an opportunity to mock a decent book nobody in this thread had actually read.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Fair, but heinlein still looms large (see:scalzi). Have you read the other two books in locked tomb? They are very different, to the point that a lot of people who loved Gideon immediately bounce off harrow. I put Muir in the comfortable company of gene Wolfe, her stuff is incredibly layered and rereadable.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:49
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Bilirubin posted:I just want to say, once again, how much I appreciate these posts and the money I have saved from them. SOOO, you get an AV! But I would like to crowd source it so folks, if you have benefitted from this daily book intel, please suggest a fitting av for Pradmer! Thanks! I think this is the best place around to talk about books because it's a pretty relaxed audience that's avoided devolving into memes and outrage like twitter and the rest. I've already got more books on my read list than I have time for and I hope to have many more thanks to recommendations from this thread. Skyward (#1) by Brandon Sanderson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BJLB5LY/ The Nonexistent Knight (Our Ancestors #3) by Italo Calvino - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ALJH6ZC/ Right to the Kill (Harmony Black #5) by Craig Schaefer - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YN4KZ5J/ Black Tie Required (Harmony Black #6) by Craig Schaefer - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086WFLGQH/
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Nov 21, 2023 22:50
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Clark Nova posted:"But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a #Heinlein dad would suuuck." We could do with more fiction like the Venture Bros tbh
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Nov 21, 2023 23:24
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Also, he was so much of a traditionalist rear end in a top hat that during a period when his second divorce wasn't final and his books weren't selling, when he was living lived his then-fiancee, later third wife, in a trailer, he wouldn't allow her to work because [paraphrase] "There's a word for a man who lives on a woman's income." A cooool guy. That's the word, not a description of Heinlein. Who I don't think I ever read any books from, although I do thank him for writing Starship Troopers so that it could be made into such a brilliant satirical movie. I did once listen to a podcast about Stranger in a Strange Land, which was amusing. https://www.theincomparable.com/sophomorelit/18/
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Nov 22, 2023 02:05
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Ccs posted:A cooool guy. It was impressive how the biggest scifi names back then were also all gigantic pieces of poo poo.
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Nov 22, 2023 02:14
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Kchama posted:It was impressive how the biggest scifi names back then were also all gigantic pieces of poo poo. Yup. 
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Nov 22, 2023 02:43
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Finished Liberty's Daughter. Pretty good, but much stronger at the start than at the end when the premise kind of takes a step back to nanobots. The plucky teenage heroine manages to get enough done that it begins to strain credibility pretty quickly and I was far more down for covert union organising in a libertarian state and the conflict between father and child than what the novel eventually delivers. There's also a weird kind of softening of it sucking to live in a libertarian state to it sucks to live at sea and in confined spaces that goes on over time.
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Nov 22, 2023 08:49
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Beware of chicken #3 is out now!
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Nov 22, 2023 09:12
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