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tokenbrownguy posted:I am struggling with To Shape A Dragon's Breath. The writing and dialogue are a treat. The boarding-school fiction is a good take on the genre. But the racism man. The ball busting colonialism is awful in a way it wasn't in Baru. I guess Anequs is just so much more powerless than the protagonists of most of the books I tend to read. But drat. It gets better for her, but the problems remain.
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Jan 11, 2024 05:47
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Has anyone read Our Wives Under the Sea, did you like it, would you recommend that or Gus Moreno's The Thing Between Us
tiniestacorn fucked around with this message at 07:29 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Jan 11, 2024 07:27
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lol this is what i mean about it being treated really weirdly "3bp isn't that bad if you compare it to books from the literal 50s"
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Jan 11, 2024 08:11
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tiniestacorn posted:Has anyone read Our Wives Under the Sea, did you like it, would you recommend that or Gus Moreno's The Thing Between Us Haven’t read Moreno but Our Wives Under the Sea is pretty good. Some very mundane creepiness and moments of very true-to-life character awkwardness/numbness. The easy comparison is to Vandermeer’s Annihilation if it was just the biologist at home wondering what’s up with her husband but the weirdness is a good bit more low-key than in that book. It is maybe a bit slight though, feels like with a bit of trimming it could have been an excellent novella.
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Jan 11, 2024 09:08
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Horizon Burning posted:lol this is what i mean about it being treated really weirdly "3bp isn't that bad if you compare it to books from the literal 50s" The Lensman series is super-duper-mega dated. It's still one of the foundational texts of modern space opera and it deserves a read at some point. At least, it does if you're serious about how we got to where we are today. The good General re-wrote a David Weber novel and made it good. I'm just saying that the Lensman series is right there for anyone who wants a rewrite challenge. Rewriting Weber is elevating mediocrity and some very unfortunate politics; rewriting Lensman would be updating generations of societal and cultural baggage.
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Jan 11, 2024 09:26
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Horizon Burning posted:lol this is what i mean about it being treated really weirdly "3bp isn't that bad if you compare it to books from the literal 50s" Right? I wasn't joking when I said Chinese SF was in its Heinlein era, the comparisons are real.
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Jan 11, 2024 11:37
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mllaneza posted:The good General re-wrote a David Weber novel and made it good. I'm just saying that the Lensman series is right there for anyone who wants a rewrite challenge. Rewriting Weber is elevating mediocrity and some very unfortunate politics; rewriting Lensman would be updating generations of societal and cultural baggage. "Challenge" sure is right! Children of the Lens posted:"I wouldn't wonder." Kit grinned wryly. "My ego could stand some stiffening right now. This isn't going to be funny. You're too fine a woman, and I think too much of you, to enjoy the prospect of mauling you around so unmercifully." "Help me step-lensson, I'm stuck in the anti-boskonian force field."
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Jan 11, 2024 12:11
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Horizon Burning posted:lol this is what i mean about it being treated really weirdly "3bp isn't that bad if you compare it to books from the literal 50s" mllaneza posted:The Lensman series is super-duper-mega dated. It's still one of the foundational texts of modern space opera and it deserves a read at some point. At least, it does if you're serious about how we got to where we are today.
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Jan 11, 2024 14:26
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mllaneza posted:The Lensman series is super-duper-mega dated. It's still one of the foundational texts of modern space opera and it deserves a read at some point. At least, it does if you're serious about how we got to where we are today. Lensman was where I tapped out, after reading much of Asimov / Heinlein / Clarke, and that was from an attempt in the early 2000s. I think the good ideas have basically filtered down into Buck Roger’s / Flash Gordon / Star Wars anyway, from what I saw on Wikipedia and in Heinlein’s presentation of the Lensman world. …I’d be interested in a rewrite but if done only with mindset updates I think it might still look like dead pulp.
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Jan 11, 2024 15:03
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GhastlyBizness posted:Haven’t read Moreno but Our Wives Under the Sea is pretty good. Some very mundane creepiness and moments of very true-to-life character awkwardness/numbness. The easy comparison is to Vandermeer’s Annihilation if it was just the biologist at home wondering what’s up with her husband but the weirdness is a good bit more low-key than in that book. I also haven't read the Moreno (but it looks interesting!) and would agree Wives is good, and worth a read if the pitch is interesting. But also agree that it feels slight - I actually thought it was a novella until I checked just now and saw it's 240 pages (but it's definitely a very quick 240. I almost wonder if there was some formatting futzing in the hard copy to stretch it to that page count? I read the ebook fwiw there.)
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Jan 11, 2024 15:37
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DurianGray posted:I also haven't read the Moreno (but it looks interesting!) and would agree Wives is good, and worth a read if the pitch is interesting. But also agree that it feels slight - I actually thought it was a novella until I checked just now and saw it's 240 pages (but it's definitely a very quick 240. I almost wonder if there was some formatting futzing in the hard copy to stretch it to that page count? I read the ebook fwiw there.) Hmm I have the trade paperback and I guess the font is pretty big? Separate to the discussion of volume, the hard copy also does a cool thing where the title pages for each section, which are named after different ocean depth zones, get darker as the book goes on. So like the Mesopelagic Zone title page is a pale grey and the Hadal Zone one is pitch black.
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Jan 11, 2024 20:04
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There's a big ol' Discworld Humble Bundle for Kobo folkquote:The titles in this bundle are available through Kobo.com. To access the content, create or log in to your Kobo.com account. https://www.humblebundle.com/books/...lins_bookbundle
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Jan 11, 2024 23:28
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^^^ Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EYTK2C/ 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004RD8544/ The Divine Invasion (VALIS #2) by Philip K Dick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVQZS4/
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Jan 12, 2024 00:37
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sebmojo posted:i think a bunch of people who aren't particularly sensitive to prose style were just super pumped about the unusual and intriguing ideas and I respect that, but yeah Having read perhaps three pages of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series before the obnoxious sexism made me give up, I'm pretty confident all the big ideas appear elsewhere and I'm willing to miss out on the "first" appearance of some. I think the worst part wasn't the horrible sexism, but the sense that Smith was actually making an effort not to be as sexist as he might be. Like, this was "moderate" amongst his kind of folks in his day. And we're not so far away from then, either.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:39
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Doc Smith is entertaining old school Pulp trash, I wouldn't call it essential unless you really want a sense of where the genre came from.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:45
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When it comes to 1930s SF, Liu probably grabbed a bunch of ideas from Stapledon. He was a strongly justice-minded socialist progressive, but Last and First Men does have a few moments of flagrant racism that stand out all the more because he’s not quite succeeding in applying his belief in the brotherhood of all humans. Those disappear after the first quarter of the book whereupon the world no longer resembles the present. Star-Maker, on the other hand, doesn’t have anything to politically date it due to having only one human character. That book reads as a passionately anti-fascist text, allegorically exploring the struggles of alien races against inequality and xenophobia.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:47
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pik_d posted:There's a big ol' Discworld Humble Bundle for Kobo folk
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Jan 12, 2024 04:33
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mllaneza posted:The Lensman series is super-duper-mega dated. It's still one of the foundational texts of modern space opera and it deserves a read at some point. At least, it does if you're serious about how we got to where we are today. While I haven't read it, I have read a lot of shorter '30s and '40s pulp and I'd say the Lensman series' main qualification today is that it isn't as dire as its contemporaries. Though it is great for its space profanity. How can you possibly go any harder than by Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy claws?
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Jan 12, 2024 04:51
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GTD Aquitaine posted:While I haven't read it, I have read a lot of shorter '30s and '40s pulp and I'd say the Lensman series' main qualification today is that it isn't as dire as its contemporaries. Though it is great for its space profanity. How can you possibly go any harder than by Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy claws? b]by Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy balls[/b] But Smith couldn't have gotten that published.
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Jan 12, 2024 05:16
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I read at least one Lensman novel and the only thing I remember is the utterly conscienceless massacre of scores of the bad guys with scifi versions of fixed WW1 machine guns. That was on like page 20 of the first novel. I have vague recollections of them stopping drug smuggling but that might be from the terrible Heinlein pastiche I read as a child I the 80’s.
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Jan 12, 2024 05:36
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Star smashers of the galaxy Rangers is a p funny pastiche of that kind of book, they cheerily destroy an entire civilization and the sole survivor goes oh well, I guess you thought you were doing the right thing
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Jan 12, 2024 05:43
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pik_d posted:Glad everything is back to normal, that sucks though, is this you?? There are no traffic signals in this picture
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Jan 12, 2024 06:29
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Remulak posted:I read at least one Lensman novel and the only thing I remember is the utterly conscienceless massacre of scores of the bad guys with scifi versions of fixed WW1 machine guns. No, a lot of Lensman is about smashing the galactic-scale drug trade. There's also a lot of murking henchmen with super machine guns.
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Jan 12, 2024 06:41
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mllaneza posted:b]by Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy balls[/b] I misread this as curving catboy balls And Smith definitely could not have gotten that published, but I would read it
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Jan 12, 2024 07:12
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StonecutterJoe posted:I misread this as curving catboy balls You're just reading the wrong Smith!
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Jan 12, 2024 08:41
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Safety Biscuits posted:You're just reading the wrong Smith! "She fell in love with a hom-in-id..."
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Jan 12, 2024 08:48
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Narsham posted:Having read perhaps three pages of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series before the obnoxious sexism made me give up, I'm pretty confident all the big ideas appear elsewhere and I'm willing to miss out on the "first" appearance of some. Lovecraft wrote a short essay in 1935 called "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction" where, even that early and with all of the faults of his own, he pretty accurately paints a critique of the space opera tropes of those early years that basically holds up today. Notably, he did say that Stapledon was one of the few exceptions to the genre's dreck. sebmojo posted:Star smashers of the galaxy Rangers is a p funny pastiche of that kind of book, they cheerily destroy an entire civilization and the sole survivor goes oh well, I guess you thought you were doing the right thing Highly recommend Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. Even if you haven't read the stuff it's parodying, as long as you have a general knowledge of the space opera pulp tropes I think you can get the humor in it.
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Jan 12, 2024 18:16
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Read Eversions by Alastair Reynolds. It was OK. Very much felt like a short story's worth of ideas and material expanded into a short novel. The twist and characters are fun but it gets repetitive before it gets interesting again and the central macguffins of the Edifice and the eversion aren't given nearly enough attention, they're just kind of there to facilitate the character drama. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but a Reynolds completionist.
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Jan 12, 2024 19:26
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Runcible Cat posted:"She fell in love with a hom-in-id..."
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Jan 12, 2024 20:12
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Danhenge posted:It gets better for her, but the problems remain. Thanks. Gonna hit some more vapid stuff and try to finish it out later.
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Jan 12, 2024 20:43
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Drakyn posted:The Implications of the username/avatar/subject matter combo here. Bigot.
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Jan 12, 2024 22:38
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I loved the Lensman books. For those who didn't like them, your mistake was not reading them at 13 in the 80's. 
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Jan 12, 2024 22:48
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Red Country (First Law) by Joe Abercrombie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076DEJMO/ Gods of the Wyrd (Forsaken #1) by RJ Barker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BH4KHZSS/ Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDDKVN0/
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Jan 12, 2024 23:17
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Read GRRM's Tuf Voyaging, which was a $2 deal posted by pradmer a couple weeks back. It was great! It's a collection of short stories about Haviland Tuf and his ecological engineering adventures... with cats! Imagine Doctor Who, but replace the Doctor with Varys from GoT and the TARDIS with a centuries-abandoned supership. I mean, maybe just imagine a short season of Doctor Who, in book form; each chapter is like a 90-minute read. One cool bit I learned after reading: the stories are in chronological order, but GRRM wrote like Chapter 4 in the 70s, then worked backwards and forwards in the 80s to give Tuf a more meaningful origin story and a conclusion. Also, I guess Tuf voyages through GRRM's sci-fi universe? I didn't know he had one.
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Jan 13, 2024 00:08
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fischtick posted:Read GRRM's Tuf Voyaging, which was a $2 deal posted by pradmer a couple weeks back. It was great! It's a collection of short stories about Haviland Tuf and his ecological engineering adventures... with cats! Imagine Doctor Who, but replace the Doctor with Varys from GoT and the TARDIS with a centuries-abandoned supership. I mean, maybe just imagine a short season of Doctor Who, in book form; each chapter is like a 90-minute read. I found Tuf Voyaging to be his best work, much fonder memories of it than SoIaF at this point.
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Jan 13, 2024 00:23
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edit: wrong thread
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Jan 13, 2024 00:28
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silvergoose posted:I found Tuf Voyaging to be his best work, much fonder memories of it than SoIaF at this point.
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Jan 13, 2024 00:30
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Remulak posted:His best work is and will always be Sandkings.
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Jan 13, 2024 00:33
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I'll have to check that out, then; never heard of it, somehow.
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Jan 13, 2024 00:36
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Anyone read or have some thoughts on diving into the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire? I’m looking for novellas or other shorter books that are sort of breezy and can fit in between other more doorstop books in my backlog. Murderbot worked well for this previously, but sadly I’m all caught up. Is there a dip in quality as it goes on? Does it lean too far into the YA or anything like that?
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