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So I was recommended Babel by RF Kuang. They said that if I liked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, this would be up my alley. I did like JS&MN: I loved the first third, then the later parts dragged a bit by comparison, but overall the style and prose was good fun. I have mixed thoughts about Babel, but noticed the writing was way less sophisticated than JS&MR. It felt like YA, but it's marketed to adults. There is simply no comparison to JS&MN in terms of the prose. This is not the first time I've run into this. I think "let's try read some SF published recently" and find that the stuff being marketed to adults and winning awards is written at a 6th grade reading level. So please tell me - who is writing and publishing sophisticated SF these days? Who is today's Gene Wolfe?
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Jun 22, 2023 12:45
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Tamsyn Muir? General Battuta posted:I don't like everywhere she takes it but Ada Palmer is a very dense and clever writer in TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING + sequels. And consciously Wolfe inspired. ulmont posted:Read Babel. The interesting bit in Babel is how magic relates to colonialism, which is given a fairy sophisticated portrayal. Yeah, I think Babel was really interesting in exactly the way you say. I wasn't trying to discourage anyone from reading it. I grated against it for a good chunk of the book because it wasn't what I thought I had signed up for. I thought from what I had read beforehand that I was getting something like Susanna Clarke and I really really wasn't, at all. Once I got with the program, I spent the next chunk of the book anxious that the plot and resolution were going to be simplistic nonsense, but that anxiety was not justified. She did a good job at what she set out to do, which was writing a book that you could hand to a bright 13 year old and they would come away with a sense of what colonialism is and how it works and some of the problems with pat simplistic answers for how to fix the system, all grounded in the reality of what empire does to those who resist it and those who go along with it. It also has good pacing and I was always keen to find time to pick it up and keep reading. That's pretty basic but if a book fails that, the rest doesn't really matter.
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Jun 22, 2023 17:55
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I liked Gideon and Harrow about equally. For the improvements in quality Harrow made, having less compelling characters pulled it back down a bit. I liked Nona the least, but still liked it a lot. It wasn't mysterious in the same way either of the first two books were. And in fact the central mystery of Nona's identity is obvious from very early on if you pay attention to the right things: there are only two possibilities (not the same two that the characters think) and one of those is ruled out if we trust what we read previously. But maybe I feel that way because I reread Gideon and Harrow and took notes while doing it right before starting Nona. If I hadn't done a reread, then there might have been more mystery in it. Then again, I enjoyed the backstory "history as told by God" chapters a lot - it was nice to get a clear exposition of how things got to be the way they are, at least from one point of view. There wasn't any attempt at mystery there, which made them a refreshing change of pace.
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Jul 8, 2023 06:44
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Awkward Davies posted:40k definitely. I feel like the Harry Potter vibes are only Gideon though. One thing I appreciate about Gideon is that it breaks the rules that Harry Potter would follow. If a Harry Potter book had 8 trials and 8 keys and 8 lessons, you would get to see all that poo poo. Even if Harry and the gang didn't solve all 8, someone would show up to exposit about to Harry and the reader about the ones he missed. In Gideon, you just don't get to have the whole picture. On a re-read, taking careful notes, you can put together things you miss on a first read, but you still only get about half. It would be very cool if Muir wrote the same story again but from the perspective of the third house. I've always had a thing for... is there a word for those? Periquels?
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Aug 1, 2023 16:38
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I'm two books into Ada Palmer's Terra Ignots and it's good poo poo. drat, that ending to book 2! You shoulda warned me! Thanks for the rec! My drat suburban library doesn't have the third one so I need to get a library card in the city to get it.
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Aug 4, 2023 23:55
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I was in the library and spotted Gnomon and remembered this thread said it was good and picked it up just on that without knowing anything about it. I'm 50 pages in and it's great so far! If I had known it was going to be about a fascist "utopia" I might have held off since I just finished Seven Surrenders and I usually go for variety in my reading. But I'm in it now and it's good, so I'll see it through. Anyway, my initial reaction to Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders: The books posit a utopia of freedom under dictatorships: a world where the problems of dictatorship have been solved by allowing anyone to change which dictator has authority over them at a whim. So the dictators can't be bad or else they would lose all their people! A perfect solution. The only thing that could go wrong is if all those dictators got together and started colluding. The rulers have a panopticon. Everyone is tracked at all times. They have the ability to forecast social unrest and intervene before it occurs. They have people who can discern your secrets at a glance. They have laws against having certain kinds of discussions in groups of 3 or more. Their control is so great that they don't even need the heavy glove of authority. But still, it's a utopia. Yes, there are slaves, but the only one we see is someone who committed the worst crimes ever and thinks he deserves it. And the mass of people are happy - we know they are because the dictators believe it. Our PoV never strays from the dictators so if they are wrong we don't see any evidence. All the rulers agree that everyone is free - the freest society there ever has been! The book asks the question of whether you would destroy utopia for a better utopia. What could be a better utopia? Well, according to the asker of the question, it's one where earth stays basically the same, but he and his kin get to be kings of mars, too. I wondered as I was reading it when we would get to see anyone who is not part of the rulers and their direct functionaries, but of course we never do, except when they are an audience or a mob. To show us how they really feel would give the game away. The book is modeled after the enlightenment and we care about Voltaire and de Sade and the crowned heads and their various personal servants and factota, and we read about their ideas of freedom and governance and their ideals. Because that's what the enlightenment is: the ideals. There's no need to examine what happens when those systems of government actually govern. If it all went wrong in the end, that could never be a failure of the ideals anyway, only a failure of the leaders to live up to those ideals in reality. Anyway, by the end of the second book, these fuckers have managed to gently caress up every single one of their promises of their ideals to society, even the most fundamental, and I love that the dissonance is never resolved. Why should it be? Do we think our overlords in the real world ever bother to recognize the dissonance between their promises and our reality? When they could point fingers at each other instead? Or maybe I'm just reading in things that aren't there, filling in the gaps with my own feelings. Maybe the author really does think that she's written a utopia. Maybe she's a liberal who has described the fascist end of the liberal project without seeing it for what it is. That would be sad. I prefer to think that she's just being utterly scathing with every word she doesn't write and every character she doesn't show and every realization the narrator never has. There's also some fascinating religious stuff in here, but that would be a whole other post. I'll check back in after I've read the next two books, I guess!
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Aug 6, 2023 06:19
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Lex Talionis posted:Why is it that the Hives seem to represent Europe, Japan, and that's about it? Oh God yes, I forgot to even mention the "reservation" in Africa that gets two brief passing mentions and no elaboration. Seems pretty grim!
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Aug 6, 2023 15:57
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Everyone posted:Otherwise publishers and readers will go "Ewwww! No grrls allowed in the fantasy riters club!" Readers maybe, but publishers? You look on the publishers websites and you see plenty of men and women being promoted. I just opened up tor.com and checked the last 10 bylines on their articles and found 7 women and 3 men. Clicking on fiction, the ones above the "see more" are 5 women, 9 men, and 1 NB person. For awards, of the last 7 years of writing hugos (novel, novelette, novella, short story), I think the only man who won was part of a man/woman writing team. If I didn't miss anyone, that's 28 straight awards for women. I am not in the industry at all, so I may be totally mistaken and if someone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, please do. All I can say is that as a reader who wants to see women get the opportunities and recognition they deserve, it appears to me that major SFF publishers are doing a good job of promoting and recognizing women authors this decade. (And Hugo's are committee-nominated and audience-voted, right? So at least the readers committed enough to have a membership are very supportive of women.) I would love to see data from the same time period (post sad puppies) on what effect the gender of an author has on sales in the SFF market. Is any such data available? I teach stats and it would make a fun little project for me to analyse it. **Also note that I just gathered my data for this post by opening up websites and googling any names I didn't recognize. I know that this is a convenience sample and certainly not rigorous. If I miscounted or misgendered anyone, it was accidental. (E.g. maybe there's another NB author but I saw an article call them by a binary pronoun and drew the wrong conclusion.)
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Aug 17, 2023 16:23
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Patrick Spens posted:As far as I know Anthony doesn't actually have any skeletons in his closet. His writing is obviously sketchy as hell, but he himself never did anything. Skeletons on the front lawn.
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Aug 18, 2023 04:14
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Here's another vote for Artemis being Andy Weir's worst. It was okay, but I agree with all of the aforementioned problems. Plus some privatized space program BS. Plus the authoritarian strongman (but a woman) with a heart of gold trope. He seems to like those, since he did another one in PHM. He seems to not want to deal with how international cooperation actually works so he just says "and all the countries just picked someone badass and made her the boss and she is good at it."
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Aug 22, 2023 03:27
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Sailor Viy posted:(Fwiw I liked PHM, I think it's fun to read an author who knows so clearly what he wants to write about and just makes a beeline toward that.) Yeah, for sure. I don't want to be too negative on Artemis. If it had sucked, I wouldn't have read PHM. It was good enough. I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it, but if someone said they were interested in the idea I wouldn't try to warn them away either. Basically, if it sounds good to you, you should read it. If you haven't read Weir's other books, you should read them first.
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Aug 22, 2023 05:37
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DurianGray posted:Currently I'm reading Witch King by Martha Wells. At about 40% in, it's been sort of slow. It feels like she's done a lot of worldbuilding on- and off-screen, but so far not much has happened in the "current day" chapters or the "past" flashback chapters that interleave each other. It's not bad, per se, but it's definitely slow (I am hoping it might pick up a bit in the back half?). The descriptions of space in the action scenes are often confusing, which is something I noticed in Murderbot, too. I would argue that the book IS a lot like a Murderbot but fantasy in large part. The tangly plot, the sometimes overly detailed descriptions of space and action. But it doesn't have Murderbot, who is such an incredible character that even when Wells gets bogged down, Murderbot's voice and pov are just plain fun to read. Kai has some of the same "I don't even want to be here!" vibes that Murderbot has, but the fun bits are replaced by mopey bits.
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Aug 27, 2023 14:19
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I know this is dumb, but seeing a book titled "A/The ____ of ____ and ____" is just a turnoff for me now. (This only goes for new books. Books written pre-game of thrones get a pass. The Years of Rice and Salt is still good.)
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Aug 27, 2023 17:44
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I am starting to believe that I am just not smart enough to parse the plots out of the Locked Tomb books. I love the milieu and characters, but most of what was happening in Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth sailed right over my head, even on reread. I got the surface events, but the stuff I was supposed to be intuiting, the stuff that Harrow and Nona didn't themselves understand, didn't register. Last night I was seriously contemplating reading plot summaries so I could go back and read the books. Take notes. Each house, who is who, who knows what. I did this on my reread and I got a lot out of it.
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Aug 28, 2023 18:29
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Gaius Marius posted:What is that haircut
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Sep 6, 2023 17:19
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LiterallyATomato posted:Hello! Seconding the Black Company. I re-read them a couple of years ago and they still hold up. That is, my opinion was the same as when I read them before: the first 4 are top notch, then there's a bit of a dropoff as the later books get weirder. So read the first 4 (the "books of the north" and "the silver spike") and then press on or not as suits you.
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Sep 13, 2023 05:44
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Doobie Keebler posted:I think my love of Piranesi and also the Master and Commander books helped keep me interested in Jonathan Strange. Most books feel like a race: Start at one point and follow the main character through the plot as things speed up to the finish. Jonathan Strange felt like a meandering walk through Victorian England with a vague idea of the destination. Overall I enjoyed it but it took forever to get through with my limited reading time. If I hadn't been reading JS&MN on an airplane crossing the ocean, I'm not sure I would have finished it. I adored the first third, but it lost steam in the second third and dragged in the last third.
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Sep 17, 2023 22:27
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MarksMan posted:On a side note, does anyone else feel like something gets "lost" sometimes in audiobooks versus reading the actual book? I feel like the characters and story sometimes become more "alive" when reading a book versus listening to it. For example, I feel like "Dune" wouldn't have hit the same if I had first heard it versus read it. I'm not sure if it's just having that visual component and the syntax of the writing or what. Unfortunately, I rarely have time to sit down and read nowadays, so audiobooks can at least fill in shower times, drive times, etc. even if it may take a couple months sometimes to get through one that way. I find I remember audiobooks way less well than books I read. I think when I get distracted while reading even briefly, I go back, but when I get briefly distracted while listening, I just keep listening.
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Sep 26, 2023 01:28
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pradmer posted:Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel - $2.99 My review of this book is to quote Le Guin: The GOAT posted:A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. I actually enjoyed it okay. Mandel is a fine writer and the book mostly succeeds as literature. It just sucks at being sci-fi.
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Nov 25, 2023 19:17
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Danhenge posted:He's been writing a long time, I figure a fair amount is stuff he'd worked on before taking up writing full time. This makes a lot of sense. I know from my RPG design work that if I were to quit my day job and work on writing games full time, and if I had an editor and publisher helping me, I could get a lot of games out very fast because I have so many projects outlined and mostly-written in Google docs. I'm sure a lot of writers are like that, too.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:53
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Kestral posted:For the folks who've read Malazan, should I try to get back into it if I stopped during or just after Memories of Ice? I remember finding Gardens of the Moon in the early 2000s, devouring it, and I can still remember a lot of it clearly - but I cannot remember a single thing about Deadhouse Gates or Memories of Ice other than some fairly miserable scenes in a slave mine. I'm not sure whether I DNF'd Memories, or finished it and just didn't feel like continuing, or simply took a break after three straight Malazan books and never got around to it again. It feels like a thing that should be up my alley as a Black Company / anthropology / tabletop RPGs nerd, but the fact that I didn't keep going has me worried about spending a couple thousand pages reading something I'll ultimately DNF a second time, especially since I've grown less tolerant of doorstopper books over time. I read Gardens of the Moon, didn't enjoy it enough to go on to the next one. Tried again a few years later, same thing. A few years after that I gave it another go on audiobook. Still nope. As much as it seems like it should be my sort of thing, I'm just not into it. Not sure why: probably the prose played a part; also the characters just didn't quite have the memorable quality that the Black Company did. As someone who doesn't re-read often, I think it's funny that I've read a book I don't really like 3 times. Even most of my favourites I've only read once or twice.
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Dec 6, 2023 05:09
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Gaius Marius posted:the ReReading Wolfe podcast I just went to check this out and they have been releasing biweekly 2+ hour episodes for 4 years, and have just hit the third book. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to listen to over 1000 hours about BotNS (and waiting 6 more years for the opportunity). But if that sounds good to anyone in this thread, go check them out!
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Jan 17, 2024 23:58
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buffalo all day posted:the misadventures of this indistinguishable band of urchins just keeps on going, huh. I’m a third of the way through the drat book, can we get back to the interesting stuff It does get better soon. But yeah, that part could have done with some punching up. Speaking of parts of books that could have done with punching up, the first 125 pages of Perhaps the Stars...
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Feb 1, 2024 02:17
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redleader posted:blindsight, but the script is written by joss whedon And the non-neurotypical characters (every character) are played a la Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts.
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Mar 5, 2024 23:11
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Stuporstar posted:I’ve become so hyper-critical I don’t even trust publishers anymore (after stumbling on too much aged-up YA poo poo being trad published as adult sff). So I read the first page of everything to pick up the tone and the most glaring problems are usually, helpfully, extremely obvious from go Yeah, I thought I would be safe from this if I stuck to stuff winning major awards, but it turns out no! "Aged-up YA poo poo" as you call it is winning nebulas.
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Mar 11, 2024 17:40
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Tarnop posted:Could you post some examples that you've found? I'm reading sci fi again after a nearly 10 year period of being unable to concentrate on any book long enough to finish it, and I'm using the various awards nomination lists to build myself a reading list. It would be nice to skip the YA books that don't declare themselves as such I've just in the past couple of years or so come back to reading sci-fi after a bunch of time spent away, and I wanted to read new stuff in addition to the classics. I was finding that the classics have been much more interesting to me, but then again I think that's because I used to be tuned in enough to know who to avoid. I'm not reading Heinlein or Eddings or any of the other authors I know I wouldn't enjoy. I figured I could read new things that were winning awards, but it's been hit and miss. The Fifth Season and Network Effect were good and had sequels that kept me busy. Those were the hits. When I referred to "aged-up YA," Babel was primarily what I was referring to - it's not a bad book, but it's too YAish for my tastes and I think it's strange that it would win a nebula (and it might have won the hugo too, if not for some weird censorship poo poo around Worldcon). I picked it up because it was compared to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and I think that's just insulting - that book has complex and beautiful prose. I was also not into This is How You Lose the Time War. It got praise for its writing, but I did not enjoy it. For a novel with two characters narrating, their voices were very hard to distinguish - which is WEIRD because the book had two authors and they each wrote a different character. Yet they STILL managed to write them in the same voice! (How??) It's also got a very low reading level, but because of the style of the prose I wouldn't necessarily call it YAish. In the end, I got sick of it because each chapter seemed the same as the last. It's not even very long and managed to become tiresome. (How??) This book should have been a hit for me - I love time travel and time loops and that sort of weirdness, but it somehow was just a complete miss. Anyway, I've started reading stuff based on this thread's recommendations and had better success. Blindsight was very good - I'd say great except for some notable weaknesses that bring it down a bit. Too Like the Lightning was great. Gnomon was even better.
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Mar 11, 2024 19:41
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voiceless anal fricative posted:What's with the snobbery over YA fic and "aged up YA fic"?. I love me some YA fic. It's like how sometimes when you're hungry you just want to smash some maccas, you know? I'm not going to act all guilty for reading those Rebecca Yarros books. I actually have nothing against it at all. I'm the same way and will read YA when I feel like it. I read the first Percy Jackson book since my kids are into it, although that's middle grade, not YA. (It turns out that Percy Jackson is absolute trash writing, but that's independent of it being middle grade.) I just don't appreciate being sold a book as being like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and then finding out that it's written like Harry Potter and the Evils of British Colonialism - it's just not what I signed up for and it's not the kind of YA I would choose to read anyway. If I want a book about the evils of colonialism, I want something more nuanced. And when I choose to read YA, I want silly escapism, like you said. I posted a bunch more about Babel right after I read it, with I think plenty of nuance in my review. Anyway, I don't mean to come off as a snob. I'm just trying to give useful advice to someone who in their own words wants to avoid "aged-up YA poo poo."
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Mar 11, 2024 20:43
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pseudorandom name posted:People have started using "YA" to mean "books I don't like" instead of "books that are stored on one side of the children's section of your library" and they get really mad at you if you point this out. Babel isn't stored in the children's section, but it absolutely could be. That it's not is purely a marketing choice by the publisher. The writing level is around 5th grade. Shelving books written at a 5th grade level alongside books written for adults is exactly the thing people complain about. I like reading YA books sometimes and would like to find them in the YA section. When I find them in the adult section, it's annoying.
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Mar 11, 2024 20:52
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I'm just curious about what's YA about This is how you lose the time war? The closest novel I can think of to it is The first fifteen lives of Harry August. It very clearly seemed aimed at more of a literary/LitSF audience. I'm the one who posted about it and I specifically said I wouldn't call it YAish because of the style. The sentences are short and uncomplicated, but in a literary and poetic way, quite unlike YA. I said I disliked it for other reasons. voiceless anal fricative posted:Ugh yeah I read the first Percy Jackson book a few months back ahead of reading it to my kid and the prose is just awful. But whatever, it's a cool story and I think he'll love it in 6 months or so. When he's 7 or 8 I just want him to enjoy reading.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:29
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Mustang posted:Finally got around to finishing the second half of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Definitely up there as one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy series. Absolutely keep going with Wolfe. Book of the Long Sun is great - maybe not quite as good as New Sun, but still very worth reading. Book of the Short Sun is the best. I liked it better than New Sun. Fifth Head of Cerberus - superb Wizard Knight - excellent Pirate Freedom - very good His short story collections: excellent. I don't remember exactly which ones I read. I think The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Innocents Aboard, and Starwater Strains. I haven't yet read Soldier series. I think I'm saving it, but I'm not sure what for.
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Mar 30, 2024 02:10
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I'm just going to DNF Echopraxia unless you guys tell me that it actually gets really good. I'm 31% in and the protagonist has not done one loving thing, just gotten dragged from baffling situation to baffling situation with a bunch of smug assholes who won't tell him what is going on. I don't mind the mystery, but at some point I need the protagonist to protag a bit.
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Apr 21, 2024 06:21
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I kind of feel like if you didn't think the wizards bit was funny, you might just not jive with his humor? If the repartee and banter doesn't do it for you, and if you aren't tickled by the bickering pettiness of these masters of reality, then I don't know what you would get out of the rest of Vance. It's like Wodehouse. Yes, it's just posh Englishmen and you certainly don't have any reason to care about their petty grievances. The inconsequential nature of their concerns is part of what makes it funny. Nearly every Vance character is selfish, pompous, and concerned with transparently frivolous self-justification.
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May 7, 2024 02:53
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