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ThaGhettoJew - ahh! thanks! I ALWAYS end up with sequels when I buy random used books. Thanks! Vertigus- I've read Ship of Fools and really liked it! I'm also a big fan of a lot of Poul Anderson's ship stories.
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Apr 13, 2011 13:04
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I just finished House of Suns and I must say the Priors' solution to the conflict between causality and FTL was elegant. I really hope there's more to come from that universe, and I would be miffed if there isn't because honestly loving leaving us there as they're cracking Purslane out of Hesperus' shell would be a dick way to end a story. This leads me to a problem. I like the Space Opera genre, but I like it in space. You know the parts of Chasm City where they're in that lovely-rear end city mixing it up with all sorts of scuzzballs? Yeah, gently caress that. It struck the same flat note with me as Perdido Street Station, which I forced down like a forkful of collard greens. I don't like reading a lovely book situated in the way-the-gently caress-out-there future where everyone is in space and has their own spaceship and makes use of any of the myriad imaginative ways to travel interstellar/intergalactic distances, only to be interrupted by a bout of slumming it like some hamfisted hat-tip to Blade Runner. To boot, though, I got that same stink in my nostrils reading Hull Zero Three. Maybe it's a sanitation thing, because that whole setting was goddamn gross. I think that's what draws me towards the Culture books and whatnot. The idea of kilometres-long city-sized starships housing their own ecosystems is something I enjoy. Placing those cities on some backwater planet and having the protagonist deal with the author's riff on the denizens of Tatooine is not. Where can I go to find more of the things I like?
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May 10, 2011 09:25
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I just finished The Saga of Seven Suns and have previously read all of Alastair Reynolds books and most of the Culture novels. Would picking up Pandora' Star be worth it? I liked the saga but I liked the Culture and Reynolds books more since they are a bit more on the technical side.
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Aug 23, 2011 20:31
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Just finished reading The Clockwork Rocket after seeing a billion recommendations. Felt like a big waste of time. Some cool ideas, but lacks any compelling characters or stories.
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Aug 23, 2011 20:35
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TjyvTompa posted:I just finished The Saga of Seven Suns and have previously read all of Alastair Reynolds books and most of the Culture novels. Would picking up Pandora' Star be worth it? I liked the saga but I liked the Culture and Reynolds books more since they are a bit more on the technical side. They're ok. The technical side is pretty crap, and the writing is... not quite childish, but not sophisticated either. Plus Hamilton can't write an ending for poo poo. Vertigus fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Aug 24, 2011 |
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Aug 24, 2011 04:49
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Vertigus posted:They're ok. The technical side is pretty crap, and the writing is... not quite childish, but not sophisticated either. Yeah, Hamilton is occasionally trite, cliched or overblown but his stuff almost without exception does not suck. [1] His technical side is mainly citing make and model on weird tech gadgets so they sound like they're from a consistent and well thought out universe. The Confederation from the Night's Dawn series would made a badass RPG setting though. [1] Endings.
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Aug 24, 2011 05:29
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Hamilton combines way too many decent ideas together into the same book, and never successfully capitalizes on any of them.
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Aug 25, 2011 07:04
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I've seen Doc Smith mentioned a few times but not that widely discussed. I was thinking of starting a thread, but hey, I can ask stuff here! Does anyone know of much of his work that's been collected beyond Lensman, the Vortex blaster book, and the Skylark books?
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Aug 25, 2011 07:35
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I'm reading Pandora's Star right now and am really enjoying it. Parts of the book just go off on tangents (in that seventeen-characters-doing-things-on-other-worlds space opera kind of way) but there are other parts of the book that I can't wait to read, and there are lots of interesting ideas. Also if you like technical, have you read Red Mars/ Blue Mars/ Green Mars?
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Aug 25, 2011 14:35
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mllaneza posted:Yeah, Hamilton is occasionally trite, cliched or overblown but his stuff almost without exception does not suck. I don't know if "occasional" quite covers running with "Hey wouldn't it be wacky if Al Capone existed in the future?" for an entire book. Or series. I can't remember.
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Aug 26, 2011 06:09
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It should be noted that Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained feature, in my opinion, his best writing and worldbuilding, and avoid the worse excesses of both the Confederation and the Void trilogies.
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Sep 1, 2011 03:11
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Vertigus posted:I don't know if "occasional" quite covers running with "Hey wouldn't it be wacky if Al Capone existed in the future?" for an entire book. Or series. I can't remember. I didn't say he didn't occasionally run something overblown for several books... Huge swarms of combat wasps growing larger in every battle, attractive young people have tons of hot sex, yeah there's a lot of "overblown" in there. Personally, about 80% of the book read like the best Traveller campaign ever. And this is the Space Opera thread. Overblown is what we do here. Anyone want to deny discussion of E.E. Smith belongs in here ? Anyone want to argue that throwing an antimatter planet at an enemy homeworld isn't overblown ? Especially when in the next book he tops it and eventually ends up by using a "nutcracker" of two antimatter planets, moving faster than light, launched out of a giant wormhole that opens in low orbit ? Let's not get started on his heroes' heroin-like dependence on rare, bloody BEEFSTEAK... if the master of the genre can do THAT, Hamilton can have a pass for extra sex scenes, unnecessarily attractive and/or competent characters, and of course, Al Capone with a starship. It's still a good excuse to put a smooth motherfucker in a fedora on a starship.
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Sep 1, 2011 03:29
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mllaneza posted:And this is the Space Opera thread. Overblown is what we do here. Anyone want to deny discussion of E.E. Smith belongs in here ? Anyone want to argue that throwing an antimatter planet at an enemy homeworld isn't overblown ? Especially when in the next book he tops it and eventually ends up by using a "nutcracker" of two antimatter planets, moving faster than light, launched out of a giant wormhole that opens in low orbit ? Let's not get started on his heroes' heroin-like dependence on rare, bloody BEEFSTEAK... No I'm not arguing that Hamilton is "overblown", I'm saying that I think Hamilton's a poor writer who writes boring and flat characters with childish dialogue and occasionally redeems himself with interesting setpieces before ending a book with a stupendously lame attempt at wrapping up the million plot threads he couldn't bother to finish effectively. I think it's true that Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained were his best works, and I did get some enjoyment out of them, but Hamilton is not a representative example of space opera writers and it's unfair to imply that an attack on Hamilton is an attack on the space opera genre. Now if you want an author who can work with big ideas, manage fascinating plots and subplots, and create characters that will blow you away with their sheer humanity and depth, read Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Cycle. Vertigus fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Sep 1, 2011 |
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Sep 1, 2011 06:08
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Vertigus posted:Now if you want an author who can work with big ideas, manage fascinating plots and subplots, and create characters that will blow you away with their sheer humanity and depth, read Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Cycle. Ok on the Hamilton stuff. He;s by god not a great prose stylist, but he's readable enough to avoid being actually bad. I consider him more of "Tom Clancy with sex and starships" than classic space opera. It's starkly incredible that nobody has mentioned E.E. Smith recently, so I thought I'd mention the name of a giant. I can neither recommend this series enough nor adequately explain why someone should go through the hell the protagonists endure. It's every the Covenant series promised, more intricate in plotting than Game of Thrones, and the characters go through worse hell. And since it's a really clever adaption of the Ring cycle, I can't think of anything that's more space opera than this. He did an excellent piece of worldbuilding for the Gap Cycle. The end of book four is just about the best space battle I've ever read.
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Sep 1, 2011 06:50
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mllaneza posted:I didn't say he didn't occasionally run something overblown for several books... Huge swarms of combat wasps growing larger in every battle, attractive young people have tons of hot sex, yeah there's a lot of "overblown" in there. I absolutely loving loved the combat in Night's Dawn. If I hear someone I know started reading it, I'll just tell them to skip every part happening on Lalonde, every part about the chick from Lalonde, every space Al Capone part, and suddenly it's quite a good series.
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Sep 1, 2011 17:52
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HUMAN FISH posted:I absolutely loving loved the combat in Night's Dawn. That's pretty much what I do when I reread The Night's Dawn Trilogy. I just wish I could do something about the ending  And yes, the combat is awesome. Both the space and ground battles kickass. MajesticMonkey fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Sep 1, 2011 |
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Sep 1, 2011 18:43
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I finished the Night's Dawn books. Space combat was great. Everything else fell somewhere between eyerolling and loving awful. I kept hoping that the neutronium alchemist was the main plot and the stupid, stupid bullshit with the resurrecting dead souls was a terrible side plot, but no. Also the ending. gently caress that ending, it was some phoned-in poo poo. Now I am gonna read the Gap series. By God I will find scifi that I like that isn't written by Iain M. Banks.
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Sep 1, 2011 20:29
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boneration posted:I finished the Night's Dawn books. Space combat was great. Everything else fell somewhere between eyerolling and loving awful. I kept hoping that the neutronium alchemist was the main plot and the stupid, stupid bullshit with the resurrecting dead souls was a terrible side plot, but no. Also the ending. gently caress that ending, it was some phoned-in poo poo. I liked the space-seahorses living on a mechanical space-station orbiting a red-giant, that was pretty cool although unrelated to the plot. I can't help feeling sorry for his wife given his obsession with the supple bodies of 18 year old nymphomaniacs. Edit: I'll say a bit more in defence of Hamilton. Everyone knows he is a great writer of planetary extraction sequences and of space battles. I think this is because he is really very good at conveying scale and a sense of the forces involved in something as epic as space warfare or combat in a planetary gravity well. Planets are, you know, really loving massive things and interstellar combat is a pretty ridiculous proposition. Those sequences in his books always feel like they have real impact because his descriptions can live up to the size of the canvas he is painting on. Big things happen in his book, and he does manage to convey a sense of scale. But I agree, the actual style of his prose is nothing special and the long sections of exposition, dialogue and tying up of threads that the 1000+ page books all need to chug towards a conclusion can be pretty wearying. The creepy sex and wackier ideas don't help either. Ebethron fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 1, 2011 |
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Sep 1, 2011 20:47
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HUMAN FISH posted:I absolutely loving loved the combat in Night's Dawn. Likewise, in Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained, it's a better story if you skip the Ozzie has a magic hippy adventure in the elven pathways sections. That said, having read one of Donaldson's leper leper unclean books, I'd never call him a better author than Hamilton. Maybe that's unfair because I've never read the Gap Cycle or whatever it's called, but he seems way too fond of using ten obscure words where one common one would do.
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Sep 1, 2011 21:25
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Hobnob posted:That said, having read one of Donaldson's leper leper unclean books, I'd never call him a better author than Hamilton. Maybe that's unfair because I've never read the Gap Cycle or whatever it's called, but he seems way too fond of using ten obscure words where one common one would do. yeah, that's unfair. The Gap Cycle is head and shoulders above his earlier works.
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Sep 1, 2011 21:27
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Half done first Gap book, and my initial misgivings about Donaldson are gone. Those leper books were absolute poo poo but this is pretty good, if a little queasymaking.
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Sep 1, 2011 23:49
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Hobnob posted:Likewise, in Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained, it's a better story if you skip the Ozzie has a magic hippy adventure in the elven pathways sections.
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Sep 1, 2011 23:55
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Hobnob posted:Likewise, in Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained, it's a better story if you skip the Ozzie has a magic hippy adventure in the elven pathways sections. But then you would miss what is by far the best cliffhanger ending ever.
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Sep 2, 2011 01:48
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boneration posted:Half done first Gap book, and my initial misgivings about Donaldson are gone. Those leper books were absolute poo poo but this is pretty good, if a little queasymaking. It gets better after the first book, which was intended to be a standalone novella that Donaldson wasn't too happy with. The later books don't bombard you with horrible things at such a furious pace.
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Sep 2, 2011 03:00
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Miles Vorkosigan posted:But then you would miss what is by far the best cliffhanger ending ever. Endings he has trouble with, but Hamilton has cliffhangers down.
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Sep 2, 2011 05:50
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So after seeing a ton of "why aren't you reading it right now" regarding the Vorkosigan saga I decided to give it a chance, and I just can't get into it. I pushed through Shards of Honor and it was all right, mostly because I like books with decent female protagonists. Then I started on Warrior's Apprentice and it just feels awful. None of the characters are pulling me in, and Miles himself just seems to be one big batch of "let's tell a bunch of lies and see how far it gets me OH poo poo IT WORKED WHAT DO I DO NOW" and that's all he ever does. I was dreading turning pages because it felt like I'd just see another scene where Miles is physically frail but really smart and quick-witted and out-thinks his way out of any situation he runs into because he's just awesome. Do any of the characters actually change at any point or are the next 10 or so books more of the same?
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Sep 16, 2011 04:04
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It's possible you just don't care for it. Miles definitely develops over the course of the series, and the stories rely less on the "tell lies oh poo poo it worked stuff", but certainly "smart guy underestimated because of what he looks like" remains his strong suit. Komarr is a much-later 2nd entry point for the series that happens after some significant changes to Miles' life, so you might give that a shake. You also might want to try Barrayar since it's primarily following Cordelia, like Shards of Honor (and is its chronological sequel despite being written much later).
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Sep 16, 2011 04:58
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So I finished Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained and I really liked them. There were some things that was not so good but overall I am happy to have read them. Any other Peter Hamilton books that are recommended to read? I have previously read Greg Egans "Schild's Ladder" and I liked it so I bought "Quarantine" a couple of days ago and it seems quite good. But I guess Greg Egan is more sci-fi than Space Opera?
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Sep 19, 2011 12:04
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I'm a huge whore for exciting space battles. I read all the Honor Harrington stuff which was nice because it was interesting between battles too. I don't mind the occasional infantry engagement but from what I'm hearing I probably wouldn't like Ringo's stuff too much. Any suggestions? I've read barely any Niven stuff except the Mote in God's Eye. I also read some Greg Bear stuff mentioned earlier in the thread. I guess I'm kind of a low-brow scifi reader. Gotta have those space battles! I'm not too big on the really conjectural 'how would development X affect human society' books usually. Edit: I also read most/all of the Culture and Uplift novels. They were ok even though the Culture novels were almost entirely carried by their characters and settings for me, the tech level is too high and fanciful for my tastes. Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Sep 19, 2011 |
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Sep 19, 2011 14:47
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Psykmoe posted:I'm a huge whore for exciting space battles. If you want huge fuckoff space battles Try E.E. Smith's Lensmen series or Weber's Mutineer's Moon Series.
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Sep 19, 2011 17:07
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Psykmoe posted:I'm a huge whore for exciting space battles. I read all the Honor Harrington stuff which was nice because it was interesting between battles too. I don't mind the occasional infantry engagement but from what I'm hearing I probably wouldn't like Ringo's stuff too much. Any suggestions? I've read barely any Niven stuff except the Mote in God's Eye. I also read some Greg Bear stuff mentioned earlier in the thread. Outside of a few short stories Niven's work is devoid of space battles - he's said that he's terrible at writing them so the only time they really appear in his work is when he cowrites with someone else (like Pournelle in Mote). But he let other authors write in his universe in the Man-Kzin War story collections, which contain lots of space battles. I haven't read any of the more recent ones, but the earlier ones are all worth checking out. There are loose story progressions/continuity but since they bounce around a lot, I'd say the best bet is to read them in the order published.
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Sep 19, 2011 19:45
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Vertigus posted:It gets better after the first book, which was intended to be a standalone novella that Donaldson wasn't too happy with. The later books don't bombard you with horrible things at such a furious pace. I just finished the first book, and holy gently caress does Donaldson write about anything but rape?
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Sep 19, 2011 19:49
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Schizo posted:So after seeing a ton of "why aren't you reading it right now" regarding the Vorkosigan saga I decided to give it a chance, and I just can't get into it. The early books (both in internal chronology and publication order) are the worst in that regard, but Miles never stops being the kind of person who dives headlong into situations he doesn't understand trusting his wits to get him out of it in the end. He just gets the official government approval and the firepower to back him up. Memory and A Civil Campaign are the peak of the series, I think. If all else fails, try those and then go back to read the others if you like them. I generally don't bother with the non-Miles books when I reread the series, and sometimes skip The Warrior's Apprentice, despite its short length.
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Sep 19, 2011 20:24
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Twiin posted:I just finished the first book, and holy gently caress does Donaldson write about anything but rape? The series pretty quickly moves away from that, though it kind of defines the main characters' actions from that point on.
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Sep 20, 2011 16:21
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I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and...I don't understand poo poo. I've read the first 60 pages and so far I don't understand anything, some kind of wolf people? Does it get more explained later? It just seems like I missed something.
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Sep 21, 2011 12:28
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TjyvTompa posted:I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and...I don't understand poo poo. Keep reading.
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Sep 21, 2011 14:17
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TjyvTompa posted:I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and...I don't understand poo poo. I've read the first 60 pages and so far I don't understand anything, some kind of wolf people? Does it get more explained later? It just seems like I missed something. It helps if you know a little about network topography, but only in way knowing a bit about 17th century banking & the blood lines of europe during the reformation helps when reading stephenson. Which is to say i always feel smug reading these things & then let down when that's a smartest thing i do in a week.
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Sep 22, 2011 04:04
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Yuppie Scum posted:The series pretty quickly moves away from that, though it kind of defines the main characters' actions from that point on. Half way through book 2, and man am I tired of it. It's just so lazy. Anyone have a recommendation for something similar?
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Sep 22, 2011 04:44
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branedotorg posted:It helps if you know a little about network topography, but only in way knowing a bit about 17th century banking & the blood lines of europe during the reformation helps when reading stephenson. As a Software Engineer who at one point worked for a very large corporation and love everything Lovecraft, I feel the exact same way about reading Charlie Stross Laundry series. ("My god, I get every reference, this book was made for me!")
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Sep 22, 2011 14:38
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TjyvTompa posted:I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge and...I don't understand poo poo. I've read the first 60 pages and so far I don't understand anything, some kind of wolf people? Does it get more explained later? It just seems like I missed something. I just started too. There are alien wolves who share a pack consciousness, and that's about all I've got. I like it so far though!
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Sep 22, 2011 15:57
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