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day-gas posted:May I ask what you mean by Foundryside being juvenile? It’s been a little bit since I’ve read it, so I can’t remember anything specific, but juvenile is a word I personally can’t find a way to ascribe to the series. I tried to read it and there's an inanimate snarky object that the main character interacts with, and I found that really grating and gave up. I've finished two other books by that same author and Foundryside felt like he was writing to a younger crowd. Though I felt that both City of Stairs and The Company Man were also missing something to take them from decent to very good. But they weren't grating.
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Feb 13, 2024 03:58
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Thranguy posted:The series is actually going to be 19 books; Taltos and The Last Contract plus the cycle. I will cheerfully read two more of these!
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Feb 13, 2024 04:15
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Exordia chat: I can't take the black bars anymore so I went to look up when the gently caress this will actually get released in Australia to try and figure out why my library doesn't have its copy yet and I see this: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781250233011/ loving END OF APRIL!?!?!?!??!?!?!!? That can't be right. But it's on the publisher's website. But when I go to check out what my local bookstore says, Galaxy says 23 Jan 2024 and it is not in stock and also it is retailing for $64.95 here, which maybe I'm just out of date with buying hardbacks on release, but in my head that's entry level special editions money when you get maybe a new cover with a dust jacket and some sprayed edges. WHY  In the mean time, because of my lack of Exordia, I have started reading The Will of the Many and it is neither grabbing nor repulsing me.
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Feb 13, 2024 04:57
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Ccs posted:I tried to read it and there's an inanimate snarky object that the main character interacts with, and I found that really grating and gave up. I've finished two other books by that same author and Foundryside felt like he was writing to a younger crowd. Though I felt that both City of Stairs and The Company Man were also missing something to take them from decent to very good. But they weren't grating. Spoiler: its not actually an inanimate object.
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Feb 13, 2024 05:18
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Leng posted:Exordia chat: I can't take the black bars anymore so I went to look up when the gently caress this will actually get released in Australia to try and figure out why my library doesn't have its copy yet and I see this: https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781250233011/ It still astounds me how badly we get screwed down here with release dates sometimes. I've taken to just ordering the US editions. 
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Feb 13, 2024 06:00
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The Princess Bride is one of the greatest books of all time, and although the movie is perfect, it's worth reading the book for all the meta-commentary. I am so old that I read TPB when the commentary was printed in red, so old that I feared the movie would trash the book. It didn't, but the book is still worth your time.
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Feb 13, 2024 07:06
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I'm about 1/3 of the way through Exordia. Loving it so far. It feels in some ways like it's riffing on the groundwork laid by Blindsight but including a lot more modern day analogies. Spoilers for about 1/3 of the way through and some speculation from that point in the book: Incredible that it looks like it's going in the direction of forcing the US military/humans in general into a similar predicament the Kurdish faced in Iraq (ie promised support/salvation in exchange for their aid - and I think we are all pretty aware of how that worked out). While the ending may subvert this in some way, a logical conclusion based on the direct Iraq war comparisons made so far in the novel is that one of the aliens gets what they want from the humans and then immediately reneges on all of their promises, leaving Earth completely turbofucked. Double bonus points if the Kurds figure out this is going to happen, because of course that's what hostile invading forces are going to do. Really looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. Nice one, Battuta.
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Feb 13, 2024 09:48
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okay do I have to read Blindsight after I finish Exordia just to know what y'all are talking about?
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Feb 13, 2024 12:56
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you just have to read blindsight
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Feb 13, 2024 13:17
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:you just have to read blindsight
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Feb 13, 2024 13:24
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silvergoose posted:okay do I have to read Blindsight after I finish Exordia just to know what y'all are talking about? You'll just have to imagine you're Siri Keeton.
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Feb 13, 2024 13:33
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Re: Foundryside trilogy I enjoyed the first two, but I don't think it sticks the landing. He increases the stakes with every book and I just felt it got to unfocused, and a little too anime in the fight scenes. It's not bad, I was just left unsatisfied. Edit:Oh, if you haven't read it, totally read Vigilance though. That's an incredible novella, I blazed through it barely remembering to breath. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 13:36
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Bennett went out of his way to shake up the setting in the second two books so that it would feel like three books and not just one long one split into three parts, and he certainly succeeded in that respect. The problem with that approach, of course, is that by book three all the aspects of the setting and characters that I’d found evocative and intriguing in book one had been gradually stripped away. If you’d pitched me book three as a standalone novel, I wouldn’t have read it; I only bothered with it because I was already invested in the characters. I also didn’t like the ending at all. Spending the entire book fighting against the prospect of being consumed by a hive mind only for the destiny of humanity to be revealed as combining into a different hive mind, just a voluntary one, fell really flat for me. I get that it was intended as an allegory for totalitarianism versus collectivism, but it just felt really terrible. bravesword fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 15:30
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silvergoose posted:okay do I have to read Blindsight after I finish Exordia just to know what y'all are talking about? Personally, I found a lot of the concepts interesting but didn't actually like the book itself. But I'm also the only person ITT with that opinion, as far as I can tell, so yeah, you should probably read it.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:30
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ToxicFrog posted:Personally, I found a lot of the concepts interesting but didn't actually like the book itself. But I'm also the only person ITT with that opinion, as far as I can tell, so yeah, you should probably read it. I too did not actually get into Blindsight. Just too bleak for me and I do not say that lightly.
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Feb 13, 2024 15:33
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ToxicFrog posted:Personally, I found a lot of the concepts interesting but didn't actually like the book itself. But I'm also the only person ITT with that opinion, as far as I can tell, so yeah, you should probably read it. Nah, you’re not. I find the philosophical core of Blindsight utterly repellent, but it was still interesting and worth reading, so when people recommended it I say nothing cause people can find out for themselves whether it’s for them or not
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Feb 13, 2024 16:25
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Blindsight is bleak as hell, but it's an interesting premise and it's based around an idea that was novel to me, so I still enjoyed it. I'm sure it's been done before, and it's kind of a similar idea to some versions of AI in other sci-fi works but I still liked it.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:33
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You have to read the sequel to understand that Blindsight is not bleak it is optimistic and we are going on an adventure
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Feb 13, 2024 16:41
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Harold Fjord posted:You have to read the sequel to understand that Blindsight is not bleak it is optimistic and we are going on an adventure That's the second time you've said this and I'm not sure what you're referring to because AFAIk the quote is from a different series.
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Feb 13, 2024 16:52
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Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two endings. I finished Exordia and i haven't been able to read anything for days. Reminds me of that weird zombie book where they gave us consciousness so they could come back and eat it later. Reminds me of everything I've ever liked in Neal Stephenson. God drat it that was a lot of book. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Feb 13, 2024 |
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Feb 13, 2024 16:58
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Stuporstar posted:Nah, you’re not. I find the philosophical core of Blindsight utterly repellent, but it was still interesting and worth reading, so when people recommended it I say nothing cause people can find out for themselves whether it’s for them or not hosed up ideas that make you go "gently caress" are one of the great joys of SFF, imo.
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Feb 13, 2024 17:38
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silvergoose posted:okay do I have to read Blindsight after I finish Exordia just to know what y'all are talking about? General Battuta is the author of Exordia and their avatar has been a (very slightly modified) Blindsight quote and the cover for as long as I've been aware of them on SA, if that's any endorsement of it.
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Feb 13, 2024 20:48
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zoux posted:hosed up ideas that make you go "gently caress" are one of the great joys of SFF, imo. I would take it one step further and argue that bleaker is better when it comes to SF/F, or at least those are the books I find the most memorable. I always thought that the mark of a great writer is the ability to invoke a thousand yard stare in the reader and make them mumble "holy poo poo that is messed up". Hard to suspend the disbelief more than that IMO. It's not that I'm opposed to cozy/feelgood type stuff but I prefer to get my fix of that through music and movies. Maybe I'm just damaged from having spent much of my 20's mainlining Warhammer 40k books which is a universe where nothing good is allowed to happen to anyone ever.
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Feb 13, 2024 21:38
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A Nuclear Tourist wants bleak radioactive hosed up poo poo huh???
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Feb 13, 2024 21:42
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drat straight.
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Feb 13, 2024 21:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:Huh? That sentence indicates to me that he absolutely hates paperwork, but unlike Marcus he gets it done. Yeah, I was hoping someone else who's read the series would chime in, as I figured you aren't bothered by a sentence like this, you love the series, and I don't want to get into an argument about how to assemble a sentence to explain what the problem is and in the process trash something you love and advocated passionately for ITT. I'm taking from your response that if this sort of sentence recurs over the course of the series, it isn't something that would stick in your craw or disrupt your reading. I did not get from this sentence that the Hawks generally dislike paperwork: only one Hawk has been presented in relation to paperwork and hating it (Marcus), and his assistant (presumably also a Hawk) presumably handles paperwork well but her likes and dislikes have not been established. It seemed reasonable to assume, in the absence of information, that a bunch of detail-oriented legal investigators might actually enjoy paperwork, so I guess this is new information presented in a way that's trying to avoid being straight narrative exposition, but in a way that really didn't land for me? The context is part of the problem: Kaylin is seeing the Hawklord in his office, he invites her to sit down, she enters as he says "Good. Please come in" and then we're told about the expression and get another sentence about the Hawklord attending meetings and not swearing in front of his superiors. There's no word in this segment, including in the description of the office, referring to paperwork or to the Hawklord doing paperwork. Nor has anyone complained halfway into the book about how Kaylin never does paperwork. If he was looking at Kaylin like a piece of complicated paperwork that he didn't want to deal with, this would make sense to me. But it's just a dropped-in piece of information about the Hawklord not liking paperwork, in the middle of a scene where paperwork has no relevance whatsoever. If the comparison is left unspoken and implicit, than Sagara presumably expects her readers to be in the same place she is, and I'm not. I guess my problem is that it struck me as a complete non-sequitur and evidently I didn't get the intended meaning from it. I may just bow out of the series if this is going to keep happening to me; not everybody has to like the same things. I like the setting and characters, so it's a disappointment, and I was hoping someone could tell me it wouldn't keep happening. ToxicFrog posted:Personally, I found a lot of the concepts interesting but didn't actually like the book itself. But I'm also the only person ITT with that opinion, as far as I can tell, so yeah, you should probably read it. I read Blindsight too, found it intensely fascinating (I think I finished it in two days while at a professional conference that I was hosting), read the author's notes afterward, thought the whole premise and underlying argument were complete bullshit, and have no interest reading anything else by the same author. Not a bad book, and a good attempt to approach genuine alien-ness, but I really don't have any desire to read it again and I certainly would never say that I liked it. I don't know what the cognitive equivalent is of that feeling reading through HP Lovecraft's work where you're suddenly neck-deep in his virulent racism, but reading Blindsight for me was something like that only to do with philosophical viewpoint. I admit that without the extensive defensiveness of the author's notes, my take-away might have been more positive.
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Feb 13, 2024 21:52
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The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081BU42O/ Sins of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder #1) by Brian McClellan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTV4/ The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00723IP9Q/ The Futurological Congress (From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy #3) by Stanislaw Lem - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008IGK68O/
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Feb 13, 2024 23:32
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Narsham posted:Yeah, I was hoping someone else who's read the series would chime in, as I figured you aren't bothered by a sentence like this, you love the series, and I don't want to get into an argument about how to assemble a sentence to explain what the problem is and in the process trash something you love and advocated passionately for ITT. Senior people in management don't generally do paperwork. They have minions.
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Feb 14, 2024 02:07
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Narsham posted:I read Blindsight too, found it intensely fascinating (I think I finished it in two days while at a professional conference that I was hosting), read the author's notes afterward, thought the whole premise and underlying argument were complete bullshit, and have no interest reading anything else by the same author. Not a bad book, and a good attempt to approach genuine alien-ness, but I really don't have any desire to read it again and I certainly would never say that I liked it. I don't know what the cognitive equivalent is of that feeling reading through HP Lovecraft's work where you're suddenly neck-deep in his virulent racism, but reading Blindsight for me was something like that only to do with philosophical viewpoint. That seems to be a pretty normal reaction to Peter Watts the human. I think he's allowed back in the US these days, but I can't be sure about that.
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Feb 14, 2024 07:13
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Narsham posted:Yeah, I was hoping someone else who's read the series would chime in, as I figured you aren't bothered by a sentence like this, you love the series, and I don't want to get into an argument about how to assemble a sentence to explain what the problem is and in the process trash something you love and advocated passionately for ITT. I also bought and read Cast in Shadow after SkipNebulossa's recommendation and it would definitely be the writing style that put me off reading any further. The characters were fine, the plot actually wasn't half bad, the lore and world building obviously made up a really good chunk of the book and you could see that really becoming A Thing over multiple books. I can see why this would be a favourite series for someone, but it wasn't really for me. And yeah, it's tough to put that into precise words other than I didn't think the quality of the writing was very good?
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Feb 14, 2024 08:50
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I love Blindsight. I think it hits a particular nerve of bleak sci fi Machiavellian realism that is unique and feels like a genuine expression from the author. Worth trying once, even if you decide it's not your thing. Disclaimer: I know nothing about Peter Watts the person except he got beaten up at the Canadian border once and  'd about it for about 10 years.Edit: idk if he was actually beaten up but that's the vague memory I have of that thing. No I'm not going to google it.
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Feb 14, 2024 12:31
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Nuclear Tourist posted:I would take it one step further and argue that bleaker is better when it comes to SF/F, or at least those are the books I find the most memorable. I always thought that the mark of a great writer is the ability to invoke a thousand yard stare in the reader and make them mumble "holy poo poo that is messed up". Hard to suspend the disbelief more than that IMO. No thank you. My real life is bleak enough. I don’t need to marinate in it.
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Feb 14, 2024 17:23
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Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. Anyone have any suggestions?
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Feb 14, 2024 21:47
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Sally Sprodgkin posted:I love Blindsight. I think it hits a particular nerve of bleak sci fi Machiavellian realism that is unique and feels like a genuine expression from the author. Worth trying once, even if you decide it's not your thing. Peter watts is fine afaik he is just suffused with a particular strain of depressive realism.
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Feb 14, 2024 21:57
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Just finished Children of Ruin (Book 2 if you don't remember the order from the title like me). After Children of Time, which is admittedly a hard act to follow, it was a little bit of a letdown. I don't think it did a good job adopting a central theme and wavered too much between "wow, we gotta learn to communicate", and concepts of virtual / simulation becomes so powerful it blurs the line between simulation a real thing. I think if Tchaikovsky had picked just one and stuck with it, he could have kept the trim narrative, or he had the option of adding a lot more pages and explore more thoroughly. In any case, "Not great, not terrible." I have an embarrassment of riches to choose from for the next book, and for the next few months. Children of Memory The Final Architecture series Volume 12-20 of Aubrey / Maturin The last half of the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo The Traitor Baru Cormorant Various Roman history nonfiction
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Feb 14, 2024 22:05
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Read Baru next
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Feb 14, 2024 22:10
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Peter once got flesh eating bacteria in him and documented the process as it ate his leg. he's a unique guy. like Ligotti. it comes through in his work.
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Feb 14, 2024 22:13
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The Company by KJ Parker - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002B9MHQ8/
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Feb 14, 2024 23:11
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sebmojo posted:Peter watts is fine afaik he is just suffused with a particular strain of depressive realism. Hell, same
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Feb 14, 2024 23:37
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Looking for some more low stakes/cozy SFF for audiobook listening. I've found that style works better in case my attention wanders. Some stuff that worked well was Murderbot, Wayfarers, Goblin Emperor and the sequels, Legends and Lattes and the sequel. i can't speak to the audiobook version, but i don't think you can get much cozier than becky chamber's a psalm for the wild-built and its sequel a prayer for the crown-shy
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Feb 14, 2024 23:55
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