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Flipswitch posted:
Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap are direct sequels. Chasm City takes place between RS and RA (IIRC) and involves a couple characters from the other books, but is mostly self-contained. He warned you away from AG because the ending is retarded. I enjoyed the first half, though. Edit: Actually wait, AG is the one with the moving temples right? Yeah, that whole book is kind of retarded, the only cool part Reynolds didn't even follow up on (the shell aliens that had been hiding from the Inhibitors for millenia) WarLocke fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Aug 26, 2010 |
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Aug 25, 2010 23:58
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Flipswitch posted:Thanks, I'll definitely give the first one a go when I get chance to pick up a copy (which would be now if I wasn't enjoyably struggling my way through The Brothers Karamazov) and I'll give Chasm City a shot regardless as there are other novels some people have disliked that I tend to have a soft-spot for anyway so it's worth a shot. I think I'm afraid to ask about the last bit of your post though. As Warlocke said, there are three 'main sequence' novels and then two spin-offs. The thing is the three books are pretty spread out in time, and while the universe concluding happens in Absolution Gap, it's quite stupid. Really, really stupid. In fact, the whole book is pretty lame, and the actual relevant plot material is a tiny fraction of the story, most of it is a bizarre side-plot that's only important because of the above stupid ending. I can't remember where the timeline stands at the end of Redemption Ark, it might be satisfying enough to just stop there. Also, don't read that spoiler. With regard to the Culture comparison, I'd say that reading Revelation Space would be all the introduction you'd need to the setting to be able to read any of Chasm City, The Prefect, or Redemption Ark.
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Aug 26, 2010 00:27
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Thanks gents, shall pick up a copy once payday rolls in. 
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Aug 26, 2010 02:17
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Can anyone recommend any decent novels that center on ships? I guess I'm looking for spaceship battles with as minimal cheese as possible.
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Aug 27, 2010 05:11
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Raere posted:Can anyone recommend any decent novels that center on ships? I guess I'm looking for spaceship battles with as minimal cheese as possible.
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Aug 27, 2010 05:56
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Drake's "Lieutenant Leary Commanding" is pretty ship-centric. Pretty much every book has multiple battles on land and in space, and the space battles always have ships being blown the gently caress up.
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Aug 28, 2010 04:01
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Mantic posted:Pretty much every book has multiple battles on land and in space, and the space battles always have ships being blown the gently caress up. But are they good explosions? Hemry's/Campbell's issue is that while lots of ships explode, you've got no emotional investment and insufficient technobabble to really envision and enjoy his clusterfuck fleet actions. "We just lost another twenty destroyers and a bunch of cruisers. Welp." Surprisingly and in stark contrast to just about everything else I've read, I feel that his stuff is one of the few that could benefit from more blathering on about the nature of the spaceships and they way they kill things. He does a good job establishing the spacedrive, but he seriously needs to step up the descriptive language. It's only in the sixth book of Lost Fleet that you find out the ships of the Alliance are shark-shaped, relative to turtle-shaped enemies. If someone could copy David Weber's neurosis for technology and paste it in to Hemry's stuff not sucking too hard, it would be splendid. From what I've read so far, Dan Simmons' space-Catholicism is really the only well-done non-plot-driving religion (to exclude Hamilton's Living Dream) that I've encountered. Feintuch's Christian-centric pan-monotheistic blathering is about the only thing more aggravating than Hemry's "To the honor of our ancestors"/"the living stars" nonsense. Also how do other people feel about Hamilton's conclusion to the Void Trilogy?
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Aug 28, 2010 06:04
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Tanith posted:Also how do other people feel about Hamilton's conclusion to the Void Trilogy? Weak and over the top, but it didn't ruin it for me. It was just a happy ending on a vast scale. Along the way there are lots of cool explosions and tons of neat ships and tech. What you really want is Campbell + Hamilton. You'd have a better story than some of Hamilton, more vivid characters than Campbell and plenty of technobabble and model numbers courtesy of Hamilton. It'd work out nicely.
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Aug 28, 2010 09:38
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I just finished two worth Space Opera books in the past couple weeks. The first, House of Suns, has already been mentioned here a few times. It just came out in paperback, and I picked it up. I've read some of Reynolds before, but the universe in House of Suns is pretty awesome. Eons-old human civilizations with a sprinkling of 6 million-year-old humans and post-humans just doing their thing. He throws around 'small' multi-kilometer ships and doesn't even blink at 200,000-year voyages, 99.99% lightspeed, and a variety of solutions to supernovae inconveniencing nascent civilizations. And set against all that, a forbidden love and assassination plot. The other was Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor. It's something of a pulp book, but I just loved it. He dedicates it to EE 'Doc' Smith, which should tell you something. It's about what happens when humans finally break the light speed barrier in a few hundred years. The AI-equipped probes they've sent off on FTL drives come back with either no data, damaged, in a wildly different place than expected, or don't come back at all. So they mount a manned mission in a large ship. (Minor spoilers on the book's setting): The humans all have AI assistants in some form--the more luddite among them have theirs on their belts as sort of a personal google, while the near-transcendent have them installed in their heads collating their memories and routing thought processes through them. When the ship transitions to FTL, everything goes wrong. The AIs simply halt, the fusion reactor stops working, and they're in an airless sphere 20,000 kilometers wide, containing a to-scale replica of the solar system. Eventually they find their way into the structure and emerge into the Grand Central Arena--a to-scale replica of the universe, which facilitates the meeting of alien races. The humans are the newest Emergents, and are stuck--since their fusion reactor's dead, they can't generate the power to get home, so they have to negotiate and compete with the various factions within the Arena for energy and information. Should they trust the suspicious and widely-distrusted alien that appointed himself their guide in exchange for saving his life? The faction who worships those who built the Arena? The faction that wants to find and destroy the Makers for forcing the universe to play their game by their rules? The mysterious faction that everyone is wary of, but trusts implicitly, with what amounts to magical powers? How can a race-ship pilot and a handful of scientists make decisions that will impact the entire future of humanity? I'm hoping for more from Spoor in the GCA setting, since he's obviously set it up as Just The Beginning.
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Aug 28, 2010 21:52
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Pyroclastic posted:I just finished two worth Space Opera books in the past couple weeks. I just read this one a few months ago, and I loved it.
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Aug 28, 2010 22:03
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Magnificent Quiver posted:I'll check these two out but I swear to god if they handwave away the paradoxes I'm going on a burning spree. Trust me, there's no hand-waving in that book. Maybe some flower waving, but they're meta flowers..
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Aug 28, 2010 23:11
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coyo7e posted:I'm sorry my reference was a little obscure, it's the first sentence of the book, 'Dhalgren' by Samuel R. Delany. I tried several times to finish Dhalgren but never got more than two thirds of the way through. I liked the theme but it got sort of weird and side-tracked a bit and I just lost interest. It's much different to his more famous books, Nova and Babel-17. The orchids are a cool idea though.
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Aug 29, 2010 07:00
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I know the Vorkosigan universe has been mentioned previously in this thread. It seems that earlier this month Baen has put up an uncorrected e-ARC of the new book on their webscriptions site. Five chapters are free and the whole book is also available. Has anyone else read it yet? http://www.webscription.net/p-1289-cryoburn-arc.aspx
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Aug 30, 2010 01:50
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Midget Fist posted:I tried several times to finish Dhalgren but never got more than two thirds of the way through. I liked the theme but it got sort of weird and side-tracked a bit and I just lost interest. It's much different to his more famous books, Nova and Babel-17. Yeah the thing is, the final 1/3 is really where all of the true exposition occurs. It's intended to be fragmentary but it really tells you a lot about what's going on through insinuation. Dhalgren's a book you need to read twice to fully get, it's a shame you only got through the easy part and petered out before everything really came around.
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Aug 30, 2010 04:39
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Eunabomber posted:I know the Vorkosigan universe has been mentioned previously in this thread. It seems that earlier this month Baen has put up an uncorrected e-ARC of the new book on their webscriptions site. Five chapters are free and the whole book is also available. Has anyone else read it yet? Yup. It's good. That's a great ending but we've all be dreading it for many books now.
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Aug 30, 2010 05:00
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mllaneza posted:Yup. It's good. That's a great ending but we've all be dreading it for many books now. I know. I knew it was coming, but still... I hope LMB decides to write a new book sooner rather than the 8 years since the last one.
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Aug 30, 2010 05:04
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Eunabomber posted:I know. I knew it was coming, but still... I hope LMB decides to write a new book sooner rather than the 8 years since the last one. loving hell, you are going to cost me 15$ for electrons.
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Aug 30, 2010 05:26
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coyo7e posted:Yeah the thing is, the final 1/3 is really where all of the true exposition occurs. It's intended to be fragmentary but it really tells you a lot about what's going on through insinuation. Well I think I still have it at my mum's house so I can always give it another go! A lot of the imagery has stuck with me despite not having finished it.
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Aug 30, 2010 06:47
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Based on the recommendations of this thread I just finished A Fire Upon the Deep. Now I'm really disappointed that Vinge follow up is a prequel. I feel like I know everything I need to know about the history of the setting, and what's really interesting to me is seeing how things progress from the game changing ending of Fire. Is the follow-up worth it?
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Sep 9, 2010 17:21
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Strange Matter posted:Based on the recommendations of this thread I just finished A Fire Upon the Deep. Now I'm really disappointed that Vinge follow up is a prequel. I feel like I know everything I need to know about the history of the setting, and what's really interesting to me is seeing how things progress from the game changing ending of Fire. Is the follow-up worth it? Well it's a prequel in one sense, but Deepness in the Sky is mostly unrelated to Fire Upon the Deep. They basically share one character. I really liked Deepness in the Sky, though. Just go into it as though it were a separate thing entirely, because for all practical purposes it is.
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Sep 9, 2010 17:25
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Strange Matter posted:Based on the recommendations of this thread I just finished A Fire Upon the Deep. Now I'm really disappointed that Vinge follow up is a prequel. I feel like I know everything I need to know about the history of the setting, and what's really interesting to me is seeing how things progress from the game changing ending of Fire. Is the follow-up worth it? As Trig said, it's a prequel in the sense that it's the same universe, with one character shared, but it's totally disconnected aside from that, you'll have to read it and see - it will be obvious what we're talking about once you start the book, but I don't want to spoil anything.
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Sep 9, 2010 18:12
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WarLocke posted:Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap are direct sequels. Chasm City takes place between RS and RA (IIRC) and involves a couple characters from the other books, but is mostly self-contained. Errr Chasm City is set substantially before even Revelation Space, as the city still has physical domes, and the main character meets Khouri at the end of the book. Absolution Gap has some pretty cool technology in it, the Temple Crawlers drags a bit, and the ending is something you need to have read his short stories to fully understand (Galactic North mostly). The only niggle I have with the series is that the rules for the drives seems to change between Revelation Space and Redemption Ark. With the Nostalgia's drives able to ramp up to 8+G's in short bursts, but the drives in Redemption are not able to even burst above 1G. But its pretty minor. The other books in the universe add quite a bit of detail, and are enjoyable on their own (The Prefect, and the other stories in the Galactic North collection, Diamond Dogs is pretty weird though).
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Sep 9, 2010 22:47
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Just read Scalzi's Old Man's War, and liked it a great deal more than I expected. Are the other two set in this universe good too?
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Sep 12, 2010 07:06
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Tanith posted:Just read Scalzi's Old Man's War, and liked it a great deal more than I expected. Are the other two set in this universe good too? I liked them a lot, although the third book shifts the setting away from the military setting to the colonial, which some people didn't like. The fourth is a YA novel with a PoV-switch retelling of the third book/telling of the part of the story that wasn't seen in the third book. If you like the military aspect you should at least read the second book, if you care for the setting and/or characters too I would recommend the other two books too.
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Sep 12, 2010 07:27
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Trig Discipline posted:Well it's a prequel in one sense, but Deepness in the Sky is mostly unrelated to Fire Upon the Deep. They basically share one character. I really liked Deepness in the Sky, though. Just go into it as though it were a separate thing entirely, because for all practical purposes it is. I read Deepness first based on a friend's suggestion and will be starting Fire soon. They're disconnected enough that the order I'm reading in doesn't matter much right?
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Sep 12, 2010 12:44
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dethblud posted:I read Deepness first based on a friend's suggestion and will be starting Fire soon. They're disconnected enough that the order I'm reading in doesn't matter much right? Hardly matters at all.
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Sep 12, 2010 14:49
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I read 'House of Suns' over the summer. Fantastic, unapologetic, intelligent hard space-opera. I really liked the art-deco aesthetic and the awesome sense of deep time the story imparted. The rise and fall of galactic civilisations harked back nicely to Aasimov and, outside of sf, the historical accounts of Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun. It was dark but humanistic. As a major Reynolds fan, I'd defend Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Their plots aren't as strong as Revelation Space, and Chasm City leaves them all standing, but they aren't so bad as people are suggesting, plenty of strange warped characters, extreme technology and strange worlds. The short story collection Galactic North helps tie up lots of the loose ends from the series. I've picked up Eternal Light by Patrick McAuley. Anyone got an opinion of him as a writer?
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Nov 3, 2010 01:31
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Ebethron posted:As a major Reynolds fan, I'd defend Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Their plots aren't as strong as Revelation Space, and Chasm City leaves them all standing, but they aren't so bad as people are suggesting, plenty of strange warped characters, extreme technology and strange worlds. The short story collection Galactic North helps tie up lots of the loose ends from the series. The only Reynolds book I've read was Terminal World and I didn't much care for it (apart from the admittedly cool hints that the world they're on is actually Mars in the far future). Should I still try his other stuff?
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Nov 3, 2010 01:46
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Ebethron posted:I read 'House of Suns' over the summer. Fantastic, unapologetic, intelligent hard space-opera. I really liked the art-deco aesthetic and the awesome sense of deep time the story imparted. The rise and fall of galactic civilisations harked back nicely to Aasimov and, outside of sf, the historical accounts of Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun. It was dark but humanistic. Yeah, I just read it for the second time this year. It's my favorite of his by a long shot.
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Nov 3, 2010 03:19
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Mike the TV posted:Up next is Olympos, the sequel. I'm hoping beyond all hope that Simmons doesn't ruin this series as well, but I know it may happen. Olympos is without exaggeration the worst book I've ever read. Bar none. For why its such an abomination I'm just going to quote myself from another thread: The Palestinians with the help of the French create a virus to kill everyone, but the devious Jews find a cure for themselves (and don't share with anyone) and get stuck in some sort of timewarp. Then the Muslims build an army of Jew-killing robots programmed to be servants of the remainder of the population and go into Jew-killing mode at some point in the future when the Jews get out of the timewarp (I think they also try to blow up the earth with a black hole). Further in the future they go into their killing mode but the Jews still arent out so they start killing everyone until some good robots from Saturn's moon show up to save everyone. Also, theres some post-humans playing gods on Mars, and a portal to Shakespeare's imagination or some poo poo like that. I wish I was making this up. I'm spoiling all of this on purpose because nobody should read that book ever.
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Nov 3, 2010 05:19
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Sure when you list plot points straight, it reads like poo poo. Frankenstein was an allegory against miscegenation. 
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Nov 3, 2010 05:30
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papa horny michael posted:
Fixed that for you. That book is irredeemable excrement.
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Nov 3, 2010 05:32
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Pyroclastic posted:I just finished two worth Space Opera books in the past couple weeks. I think it's his best book.
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Nov 3, 2010 16:45
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Ebethron posted:As a major Reynolds fan, I'd defend Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Their plots aren't as strong as Revelation Space, and Chasm City leaves them all standing, but they aren't so bad as people are suggesting, plenty of strange warped characters, extreme technology and strange worlds. The short story collection Galactic North helps tie up lots of the loose ends from the series. I love Reynolds, especially the stand-alones like Chasm City, but Absolution Gap was astonishingly bad. (spoilers follow) Nothing the characters did in the book mattered at all in the end, and in marked contrast to the other books Reynolds has written, none of the characters were remotely interesting or sympathetic. The ending is also a huge downer given that it renders the actions across the entire series basically meaningless. Maybe, since he's an astrophysicist, that's sort of his point (it's a really, really big universe), but it's not like the journey, particularly in Gap, was remotely meaningful even as events happened. I stand by my view that people interested in Reynolds should read everything he wrote except Gap, and possibly not bother with Ark either - the latter at least isn't too bad, it just gets a bit too wacky in the 'science'. Velius fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Nov 3, 2010 |
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Nov 3, 2010 17:10
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Ebethron posted:I read 'House of Suns' over the summer. Fantastic, unapologetic, intelligent hard space-opera. I really liked the art-deco aesthetic and the awesome sense of deep time the story imparted. The rise and fall of galactic civilisations harked back nicely to Aasimov and, outside of sf, the historical accounts of Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun. It was dark but humanistic. There's something that bugged me about House of Suns - If the purpose of masking the light emissions of galaxies was to prevent the violation of causality by faster-than-light travel, how would that then account for the violations caused by taking information through the wormhole itself? For example, a ship can fly through the wormhole to Andromeda, record the relative position of some stars, and then bring the information back to the Milky Way. It seems like a weird oversight for somebody who refused to use FTL in their earlier novels and probably spent a lot of time thinking of a way to implement it realistically.
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Nov 3, 2010 19:45
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Magnificent Quiver posted:There's something that bugged me about House of Suns - Because wizards.
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Nov 3, 2010 20:07
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Hedrigall posted:Should I still try his other stuff? I'd recommend giving Chasm City a shot. It's much better written than Revelation Space and has the most compelling plot and characters of any of his novels. Century Rain is great as well, but it is noirish-mystery meets sf, not so much of a space opera. Velius, Absolution gap - yeah it is no question the worst of the main sequence of revelation space novels. I think in some ways it was too constrained by the short story Galactic North, which removes the emphasis from the inhibitors. The 'twist' also seemed too massively improbable to me, too brittle a plan by far. Still some interesting threads in the novel though, such as the saga of the Nostalgia for Infinity itself.
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Nov 9, 2010 06:42
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I've been listening to The Lost Fleet on audiobook, and I just reached this exchange in book 3: Geary- "Its like shooting fish in a barrel." Captain Dwhaetver- "More like dropping bombs in a barrel full of fish!" I had to pause it at that point. So far, the endless restating of the basic principals of his universe and combat in it are starting to grate on my nerves.So is some of the cheesy dialogue. Does it get better in the last half of the series?
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Nov 18, 2010 08:13
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HerrMorden posted:I've been listening to The Lost Fleet on audiobook, and I just reached this exchange in book 3: It's incredibly repetitive the whole way through, particularly in the context of the relationships and 'tension' amongst the crew. It also suffers, in a similar fashion to Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall series, from a lack of any remotely threatening adversaries. When your setting pits awesome, heroic, brilliant tactician character against moronic mooks over and over the tension starts to fade, even with ever-dwindling ships, etc. The first book or two is probably sufficient, unless you get really into the setting for some reason.
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Nov 18, 2010 10:34
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Can I recommend Eric Flints The Course of Empire books its about life on earth after we have been invaded and occupied by an Alien race. Its interesting in that it subverts the whole yeah humanity kicks rear end books and Flint for one seems to be able to write genuine alien feeling aliens. Also it talks a lot about the moral dilemma you face when you are under occupation by a much stronger power.
Ferrosol fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Nov 18, 2010 |
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Nov 18, 2010 19:46
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