TastyShrimpPlatter posted:

I bounced off The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet about halfway through, it was cozy but it never felt like there was actually anything at stake (I really wanted to like it more).

wizzardstaff posted:

IMO Small Angry Planet works better if you consider it an anthology of loosely independent scenes rather than a continuous narrative. There's a plot going on in the background, but the author chooses to zoom in on moments that depict something about the characters and their relationships rather than big stakes.

Granted, I only gained this appreciation for it on a second reading after I knew the whole story; the first time I was also frustrated in the same way you describe.

As others have said though, the other books do offer more in the way of stakes (especially the second one) and you can more or less read them in any order if you don't mind spoilers for an outcome in the first book.

Cardiac posted:

It is more the style than the actual author, where the purpose of the text is to be flowery with words instead of using words to drive the story.
Probably the one thing that turned me off Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell.

A Proper Uppercut posted:

How do people keep track of the books they want to read?

StrixNebulosa posted:

when did that happen?

quantumfoam posted:

Nebula awards chat reminds me...did the person who was doing the Hugo Award nominee re-read in the last SF&F thread finish or give up on their personal project?
Roughly 2/3 of the early Hugo Awards winners aged badly.

quantumfoam posted:

Good to hear. It sounded like an interesting personal project, and hadn't heard it mentioned in awhile.
Can't quite remember if you were re-reading all the yearly category nominations (novels/short stories/etc).

ulmont posted:

The original version opens with a car running off the road and slamming into a gas station because the driver is sick with Captain Trips. Things spiral downhill from there.

The unabridged version opens with yet another day at the office and takes, IIRC (and it has been quite some time) like 5 chapters of boring minutia to get to the same car crash.

...I mean, if you enjoy that bit, have fun, but I would certainly not describe it as "tight."

Ccs posted:

Also The Collapsing Empire is free this month from Tor. Is it any good?

freebooter posted:

About 200 pages into the uncut edition of The Stand. Really enjoying it and yes, it is very topical, particularly the chapter in which King describes how an infected Texas cop infects an insurance salesman he pulls over, which then creates a "chain letter" of death, every interaction multiplying exponentially and immediately sending it beyond any hope of quarantine. There's one particular sentence which is chilling precisely because it's summary, not scene, and we never really get a first hand view of the grisly work at the coalface beyond what the half dozen main characters witness: "Captain Trips brought bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and deadpits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, the bodies would rot where they fell."

I think I originally flicked through and read a lot of the uncut version in a school library or something, and then eventually read the original version myself, and have no idea which chapters are original and which are not. So far I am in favour of the uncut version. There's some stuff I remember reading and then not reading when I read the original book (if you follow) which is good stuff which adds to the story. The extra stuff like Starkey the military general and supervirus manager being dismissed and then driving out to the desert lab, cleaning up the soup off the face of the dead soldier he's been watching on CCTV for a week, and then shooting himself. That stuff's great! Less interesting is Fran's pregnancy and home drama but IIRC correctly that was all in the original version.

The one thing that really, really, really bugs me beyond measure: the superficial decision by either King or his publisher to update the uncut version to the year 1990 (as though the reading public would balk at the concept of a novel set ten years in the past) and basically just do a ctrl+H to replace any mention of years, while the story flows unchanged around those numbers. Sometimes he's edited obvious stuff like who the president is (but that still doesn't make sense! Why would a crew cut military hardass like Starkey have as much of a problem with Bush as he did with Carter!) but a lot of the time he just ignores it. There's a scene where Larry calls an ambulance for his mother but does so by looking up the local hospital's number in the phone book. We're told that protagonist Stu Redman, who is about 30, was "in the war," but since he must now have been born around 1960 I guess that means he served in Grenada. It's a risibly unnecessary and stupid decision and if anyone has a link to a longread or a blog post or a great review which rightfully excoriates King/the publishers for it, or rounds up some of the funnier examples of a time paradox, I'd love to read it.

edit - I was just googling around and come across a wikia page for what I think is the TV series which had the phrase "Tom treats Stu's pneumonia with advice from Nick's ghost" and it reminded me that, as I recall, the first act of this novel is the strongest.

edit 2 - God I love wikias. Who could forget this classic quote:

Quotes
"Not actual quote"
―Peter to Ray[1][src]

Kestral posted:

Has anyone finished The City in the Middle of the Night? The premise is interesting, but so was the premise for All the Birds in the Sky, and that's the only book I've put down unfinished in a decade.

Although, Birds may soon be joined by an unlikely partner: Gormenghast. I loved Titus Groan, but picking up the sequel a year later, I quickly remembered that I hate Steerpike with a violent passion. Spoil something for me, Gormenghast goons: how much screen time does that bastard have this time around, and does he get his just desserts? I cannot endure an 18+ hour audiobook, however beautifully written and well narrated, in which that son of a bitch gets what he wants.

pseudorandom name posted:

Hugo nominees were announced today: https://conzealand.nz/blog/2020/04/08/hugo-and-retro-hugo-finalists-announced

Solitair posted:

I picked up A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine on a whim after seeing some people in the SFF thread talk it up. I don't remember why; the book was engaging enough but felt insubstantial and familiar. It's a book of political intrigue where the protagonist is thrown into the deep end on an unfamiliar planet and has to piece together the conspiracy already in progress. There's an interesting technological conceit, where she has her predecessor's mind implanted into her brain and has to merge personalities with him in exchange for all of his expertise. Said implant is on the fritz for most of the book so there can be suspense, so it has to cede focus to the cultural differences between the protagonist's home station and the planet where she's assigned, banter, and coded poetry, which is a neat idea that I also wish got a closer look.

buffalo all day posted:

I'm a pretty fast reader but Memory called empire was a total slog for me. The main character does basically nothing for the entire book. I think someone else in the thread pointed out - she's completely passive. I loved the plot hook - diplomat investigating her predecessor's death under mysterious circumstances - but it all just ends up being so drat boring.

freebooter posted:

I think King's racism is a pretty standard subconscious Maine attitude - having zero contact with black people even in the most fleeting sense during his formative years meant he only knew them from film and TV and came to think of them as a funny old folk with their own weird talk and customs, but who aren't "real" Americans in the sense that he probably thinks of them.

While I'm playing armchair psychologist though, I also noticed that in the section introducing Randall Flagg he's wearing all kinds of flag pins, reading all sorts of radical literature from the far right to the far left, is said to make his way around college campuses etc. Which is obviously a product of the 1970s body politic, but also made me think that good old all-American working class high school graduate Stephen King had a deep suspicion of any questioning of the American status quo and maybe a vague inferiority complex about all those drat college kids and their radical ideas. Then I looked it up and he does actually have a BA from the University of Maine, so what do I know?

It's occurred to me I've read like 20 of his books without knowing much about the author or his life path, and it's interesting to try to glean it from his writing, particularly the way The Stand leaves his typical confines of Maine and rambles all over the USA. Obviously he knows much of New England back to front, though he seems far more familiar with New York City than Boston. He also seems to have spent a bit of time in California as well. A lot of the other scenes are written with a bit less confidence; less of a distinct sense of place.

I have a firmly-held opinion that, while nobody would ever call him America's greatest writer, he is America's most American writer; his prose is littered with pop culture and snatches of song lyrics and and even references to commercial jingles in a way that just seems fundamentally mid-to-late century American; utterly unique to its time and place. Apart from his fantasy or science fiction stuff, I think he's written a grand total of two scenes, in all his millions of words, that took place outside America: a short story set in London and a brief part of Salem's Lot in Mexico.

StrixNebulosa posted:

TOOT BOOT posted:

I thought it was pretty decent other than that last bit where the dozens and dozens of pages could be summarized in like 2-3 sentences.

StrixNebulosa posted:

I only got into goodreads because I joined book chat discord and they all do it, so I had to join in. Yaaay peer pressure. Now I can argue over whether a book deserves 4 or 5 stars.

Pros:

- makes brain happy as page numbers go up whenever I update them
- can see how many books I've read in a year
- easy to see what I've read in a given genre; "what's the best sci-fi for me to read" a friend asks and I can just look
- throwing books on the TBR list means I can check it whenever I go buying books
- the discontinued-for-good shelf is fun to glare at

Cons:

- owned by amazon, the biggest fuckers
- occasionally really slow to load
- annoying to add in your backlog
- my "review to come" category taunts me endlessly
- goodread reviews are 80% garbage with reaction gifs and the most stupid readers I have ever met. stop giving 1 star to a book you don't understand! don't penalize a book for your stupidity!

Kestral posted:

I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books.

For content, has anyone N.K. Jemisin's 'The City We Became' ? It's... interesting, so far, about a third of the way through. Modern-day weirdness in which cities that reach a certain level of "greatness" undergo a psychic awakening, embodied in human avatars who are their protectors and caretakers, and whose very first duty is to defend the city at the moment of its birth from extradimensional horrors that prey on vulnerable newborn metropolises.

Neat concept, but I'm not sure it's something I can fully appreciate as a Californian. This book fuckin' loves New York, the city undergoing its awakening in the first part of what looks to be a trilogy, and if this degree of adoration were heaped on a country it would feel jingoistic and gross; applied to city I've only visited briefly, it just feels slightly baffling. I'd love to get the reaction of an actual New Yorker to this one.

Xtanstic posted:

If you don't mind spoiling the gist of it? I usually enjoy Scalzi but found book 2 too mild to bring me back and finish off the series but I am kinda curious how the series resolves.

tildes posted:

Is Lock In worth reading? It’s my last Scalzi book more or less apart from a few random Old Man’s War ones.

Also book 3 ended up being decent, it definitely wraps up the story.

eke out posted:

it is very funny that anyone posting on somethingawful in 2021 feels superior to anyone else for what they enjoy doing