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Hedrigall posted:I'm nearly finished The Uplift War by David Brin. It's good but not as good as Startide Rising - probably just because I like the fins more than the chims. I haven't read the second trilogy since Heaven's Reach came out...gulp...fifteen years ago, so even I would only take my opinion with a lot of grains of salt, but I really enjoyed the first two books. Yes, they seem like a side story and humdrum to boot after Startide Rising and Uplift War, but I thought the society depicted was quite interesting and the slow escalation into epic space opera quite satisfying. Unfortunately the third book, Heaven's Reach, was a mild disappointment. It advanced the main story like I mentioned and wrapped up most threads from the trilogy, but it didn't feel up to the standards of the earlier matieral and wasted a lot of time on a lame speculative idea that didn't really go anywhere (the business with the chimpanzee scout, for anyone who's read it). If you're a Brin fan I'd definitely recommend reading it, but if you were working through his books in quality order I'd say read Glory Season next instead.
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Aug 27, 2013 13:00
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Neurosis posted:Light is really good. Very dark, there is rarely any unmitigated good. Two of the characters are brokenly dysfunctional and almost completely deplorable. But the setting and writing is so cool it remains awesome. I had trouble getting through Nova Swing. Just didn't feel the same. Felt downright facetious at times. Taking a breather before book 3. Yeah, Light is just superb and its literary style combined with the setting is a joy to read. I, too, felt let down by Nova Swing, but I suspect I'd have appreciated it more if I hadn't read it back to back. Empty Space is right up there with Light in my mind and made me happy I continued reading. Any recommendations what I should read next? Should I just circle back to the Centauri Device?
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Aug 27, 2013 13:10
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coyo7e posted:Just finished The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman, as well as the second book in the series, The Last Four Things the third book is out as well however, I was annoyed to find that it's only available on kindle in the amazon UK kindle store (does anyone know of any issues with buying an ebook from another region's kindle store?) The last book is also out, which I have commented in this thread. Otherwise, I agree on your opinions. It was a good read, and not as over the top as Prince of Thorns was. The last book is actually quite interesting, although it is the weakest in the series, but you get Hoffman's explanation for various events in the book. Apparently he was raised in a Catholic school in England during the 60s, which I guess explains a lot. He has also borrowed a lot from various battles from the human history. He is apparently an extremely cynical being. Also, English Spartans.
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Aug 27, 2013 13:17
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Phoon posted:The new Shadows of the Apt came out a few weeks ago. The series is insane and I love it. At the beginning of the series they have airships and a few pseudo-rifles. Nine books in they are firing railguns at giant mechanical centipedes. Thanks for the head's up on this. I really enjoy this series and for some reason even the author's website hasn't mentioned that this book has come out! The lack of easily available US kindle edition is very annoying though >_<
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Aug 27, 2013 13:20
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I just finished Ready Player One and I've never been so disappointed in a book. The initial premise drew me in; the novel opened with a fairly grim description of a post-oil world in which the US is slowly collapsing and people are withdrawing into virtual worlds. The owner of one of these virtual worlds dies, bequeathing his fortune and control of the virtual world to anyone who solves his riddles. Unfortunately, the book pretty much forgets about the real-life setting after chapter 2 and it fully devolves into the story of how a shut-in won World of Warcraft forever. I persevered, thinking it'd come back to the dystopian setting once the protagonist won the competition, and show how he was going to tackle the problems with unlimited wealth, but at the end of the book he wins all the money, gets the girl and thinks "kissing is so good I'm never going back to WoW". And that's it. Nothing at all about the goddamn setting, or the fact that humanity is devolving into a bunch of shut-in freaks like the protagonist. The kiss is a snap resolution to the protagonist's own situation and, bar a couple of jarring "real life is where real things are" paragraphs earlier on, there's no development for the introverted troglodyte. This book could have been about a WoW obsessive set today for all the difference the setting makes, and that setting was the only goddamn good thing about the book. Ugghhhh. The (near universal) praise this book got seems to be on the strength of its 1980s nostalgia, as about literally one in five sentences is a reference to something from the 1980s. Unfortunately, they're really not handled that well; every single one pops up and the author demonstrates via some sperging from the protagonist quite how much depth he knows about the 1980s (e.g. part of the treasure quest involves quoting Monty Python's Holy Grail verbatim, or knowing the developer of a computer game's history, etc). It's a Dan Brown style adventure book set in World of Warcraft, and the puzzles solved involve having an encyclopaedic knowledge of this stuff, but it gets really pathetic. That's before the brief diatribes that were really loving awful (the protagonist gets a sex doll at one point because he's literally not left his apartment or spoken to anyone in six months and then gleefully decides that masturbation is less shameful. And this book seems to have a huge fanbase, glowing reviews and sits about 4-4.5 stars on goodreads, amazon etc. The Supreme Court fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2013 13:55
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I don't think there's ever been a good book about winning a video game.
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Aug 27, 2013 14:17
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Hedrigall posted:I'm nearly finished The Uplift War by David Brin. It's good but not as good as Startide Rising - probably just because I like the fins more than the chims. The second trilogy (Uplift Storm) is deeply, deeply frustrating. You will get the answer to d), and maybe some hints towards c), but nothing really about a) or b), and barely a mention of Creideki and the crew left behind on Kithrup. Antti posted:The best YA novel I've ever read, that is to say the best novel that has been called YA (it almost feels like a pejorative these days, in that a good novel can't also be YA), is Sabriel by Garth Nix. I can't second this enough. Sabriel is a bafflingly successful book - so good that even the author doesn't seem quite sure how to replicate it.
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Aug 27, 2013 14:21
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The Supreme Court posted:I just finished Ready Player One Yeah, it's really bad. Don't forget the super cliche Japanese brothers and the part in the story where he gets the "Ultraman capsule" and can turn into Ultraman for two minutes at a time.
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Aug 27, 2013 15:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't think there's ever been a good book about winning a video game. Only You Can Save Mankind, one of Terry Pratchett's Young Adult things. As an artefact of early 90s gaming culture it's a total nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers that, and it has a much more mature attitude to the whole thing too. Of course it's not really about winning the video game as such.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:26
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John Charity Spring posted:Only You Can Save Mankind, one of Terry Pratchett's Young Adult things. As an artefact of early 90s gaming culture it's a total nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers that, and it has a much more mature attitude to the whole thing too. There's also The Last Starfighter, technically a movie but there was an Alan Dean Foster novelization. It's "good" in the way that, say, D&D novels are "good" when you're 13. But also not really about the video game, that's just the hook.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:31
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Can I get some recommendations for well-written first contact stories, preferably hard-ish and including a socio-political bent? I've read, and love, Blindsight. I'm not adverse to older stuff, but I've already read Contact (naturally) and Rendezvous with Rama. I also like Vernor Vinge's stuff, but I'd prefer something more near-future. I wasn't a huge fan of Mote in God's Eye.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:44
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Wangsbig posted:Oh boy The Emperor of Thorns was underwhelming. The setting interested me enough to force myself through three pretty unlikable books but Mark Lawrence was too in love with his weird brooding anime prince to expand on the great world he created. It's really good despite how I make it sound. I still think Jorg is basically Joffrey, except the author expects us to like him for some reason. Oh boo hoo he got stuck in a thorn bush once. Totally an excuse to rape rape rape murder rape your way across half the known world. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Aug 27, 2013 17:00
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Wangsbig posted:Oh boy The Emperor of Thorns was underwhelming. The setting interested me enough to force myself through three pretty unlikable books but Mark Lawrence was too in love with his weird brooding anime prince to expand on the great world he created. I've read a lot of YA and picking the best isn't easy. But of all of them, if I could only have one on "the island", it would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_Cities They should be read in the following order (not publication order) Fever Crumb A Web Of Air Scrivener's Moon Mortal Engines Predator's Gold Infernal Devices A Darkling Plain This is adultish YA, not for little kids. I've read them twice, something I rarely do, because they were that good and the prequel made the most sense by being read first. Author is Philip Reeves, I never read any of his other works because they seem too "young" for me. My highest recommendation (competing with THG, Uglies, Everlost and Gone - all great but this is the greatest IMHO).
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Aug 27, 2013 18:13
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Christ, I just now realized that Scott Lynch is planning to write 4 more novels in his Gentleman Bastards series. Let's hope his mental state remains stable and...not-depressed.
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Aug 28, 2013 02:50
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Read Radix. Basically the same setting, with GRIMDARK RAPE RAPE DARKNESS replaced with a 70s acid-trip "man the cold war sucks why can't we just have free love" moralising. Thanks for the suggestions! I'll pick up Sabriel tomorrow. The rape in the series is limited to two sentences in the first part of the first novel. I don't say this to excuse Lawrence but there are so many legitimate reasons to dislike his writing and this series that I find it strange people keep making it about rape. Plus a wizard did it.
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Aug 28, 2013 04:32
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Wangsbig posted:Thanks for the suggestions! I'll pick up Sabriel tomorrow. I just want to second that Sabriel is excellent, and if you're looking for more "proper" YA, Garth Nix has also written a series called "The Seventh Tower" that is much more YA than the Sabriel trilogy. I haven't read any of those books since I was a YA myself, though.
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Aug 28, 2013 04:41
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I'm mostly looking to see what a talented author can do within the confines imposed by YA conventions. I never paid attention to the genre growing up so I'm not sure if it has changed radically since '95 when Sabriel was published, but if there are any modern books you guys could recommend, I'd love to check those out too. I'm open-minded but would prefer it if the books didn't get their start on fanfiction.net.
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Aug 28, 2013 04:57
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Paulo Bacigalupi wrote two YA novels, Ship Breakers and The Drowned Cities, that are pretty good. They're future dystopian sci-fi where most of the earth's resources are depleted.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:45
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Barbe Rouge posted:Christ, I just now realized that Scott Lynch is planning to write 4 more novels in his Gentleman Bastards series. He's said he's medicated now, where he wasn't before. Given that he's back to doing con tours and being outgoing, I'd say it's working. He's always been one of the less industrious writers, so while he won't be pumping books out once per year he'll probably not take another seven years to write one.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:47
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Wangsbig posted:The rape in the series is limited to two sentences in the first part of the first novel. I don't say this to excuse Lawrence but there are so many legitimate reasons to dislike his writing and this series that I find it strange people keep making it about rape. Plus a wizard did it. For people that are concerned about this it's worth noting that Emperor of Thorns does also have a rape scene, although again it isn't graphic.
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Aug 28, 2013 07:58
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anathenema posted:He's said he's medicated now, where he wasn't before. Given that he's back to doing con tours and being outgoing, I'd say it's working. He's always been one of the less industrious writers, so while he won't be pumping books out once per year he'll probably not take another seven years to write one. Medication for depression usually just puts a floor under your emotions, rather than being an easy fix. It can sometimes put a ceiling over them as well, which can be substantially better than the alternative. Or it might not matter, it depends on what mental state he has to be in in order to write.
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Aug 28, 2013 08:02
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Wangsbig posted:Thanks for the suggestions! I'll pick up Sabriel tomorrow. 1) rape two girls 2) burn them alive 3) laugh about it A rape scene would be horrifying. A rape scene where the rapist then burns his victims alive and has a jolly old chinwag about it with his mates while the girls are still burning pushes the thing into ridiculous territory. The fact that it never comes up again only makes it worse: the whole point of that scene is to be all WOW THIS IS SO DARK LIKE FRANK MILLER FOR REALS. You know where else "it's not his fault, somebody else forced him to rape" came up? Dominic Deegan. That's the only other place I've seen that's tried to pull something so completely ridiculous, but even Dominic Deegan didn't have the protag laughing about the whole thing while it was going on. And besides, 'a wizard did it' is such a cliche and such a terrible piece of writing that it's become shorthand for 'the writer gave up/can't be bothered explaining'. I made a promise to finish every book I picked up this year, and Emperor of Thorns was the book that made me break it. You're drat right I'm bitter. Even The Wise Man's Fear had Rothfuss' wonderfully readable prose to propel its broken engine through to the finish line. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 15:22
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For YA Sci-Fi, what about the Tripod series? I may be way off, because I haven't read them since I was about 12, but I remember liking them.
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Aug 28, 2013 16:12
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savinhill posted:Paulo Bacigalupi wrote two YA novels, Ship Breakers and The Drowned Cities, that are pretty good. They're future dystopian sci-fi where most of the earth's resources are depleted. Shipbreaker is fantastic. Another "YA" sci-fi series I enjoyed, and I usually hate YA, was the Chaos Walking Trilogy (Knife of Never Letting Go is the first book). I have no idea why that series or Shipbreaker are called YA beyond the fact that the protagonists are teenagers.
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Aug 28, 2013 17:16
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Wangsbig posted:I'm mostly looking to see what a talented author can do within the confines imposed by YA conventions. I never paid attention to the genre growing up so I'm not sure if it has changed radically since '95 when Sabriel was published, but if there are any modern books you guys could recommend, I'd love to check those out too. I'm open-minded but would prefer it if the books didn't get their start on fanfiction.net. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman The Book Thief by Markus Zusak Anything by Diana Wynn Jones The Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett Coraline, The Graveyard Book, or The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman There is also a dedicated YA thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3483444 Personally, I found a lot of books recommended in their OP to be pretty meh but not everyone does.
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Aug 28, 2013 17:21
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I really enjoyed His Dark Materials, although - similar to Left Hand of God - the author obviously spent a lot of time in Catholic schools or something. The movie is only about half of the first book iirc, and the rest of the books in the series are much, much diffrerent (I don't know how they would've pulled them off in a movie, tbh). I went to Catholic high school so I'm probably extra-lenient about this kind of over-the-top thinly-veiled criticism of organized religion.
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Aug 28, 2013 17:40
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Fremry posted:For YA Sci-Fi, what about the Tripod series? I may be way off, because I haven't read them since I was about 12, but I remember liking them. I loved these. I don't think you can go wrong with any of the YA John Christopher wrote.
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Aug 28, 2013 17:48
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The Supreme Court posted:I just finished Ready Player One and I've never been so disappointed in a book. I enjoyed this book but you nailed it with regards to missed opportunities. It felt like the trivia became more important than the story itself and that tends to ruin any possibility of a reread for me. I'm a sucker for dystopian settings and puzzle solving type books but a lot of them don't stand up well (Xanth and Spellsinger series for example) or flat out become annoying (Fallen Angels). Piers Anthony's books suffer a lot once you get exposed to better authors and realize what a shady perv he sounds like.
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Aug 28, 2013 18:11
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specklebang posted:I've read a lot of YA and picking the best isn't easy. But of all of them, if I could only have one on "the island", it would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_Cities Oh, well poo poo. I picked up Mortal Engines from the library assuming it would be the best place to start. Is it that big a deal? Should I send it back and get Fever Crumb?
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Aug 28, 2013 18:42
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snooman posted:Piers Anthony's books suffer a lot once you get exposed to better authors and realize what a shady perv he sounds like. Sounds? Dude literally wrote a preface in one of his books that defended pedophilia (the action, not the being attracted to children part). IIRC the same book had a story in it about how it's unfair that men are punished when little girls seduce them.
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Aug 28, 2013 18:49
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snooman posted:Piers Anthony's books suffer a lot once you get exposed to other authors I dare say. Though as I recall the only one I read was merely bad with puns and sentimentality rather than... well. Incidentally there's a TG thread about Xanth if you want to piss on his books in different company: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3560541. (E: I just added that thread to the OP under General Fantasy; is that an OK place to put them? Given their reputation I thought listing them under "comic fantasy" might give someone a nasty surprise...) AreYouStillThere posted:Oh, well poo poo. I picked up Mortal Engines from the library assuming it would be the best place to start. Is it that big a deal? Should I send it back and get Fever Crumb? I remember enjoying it by itself v  v
Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Aug 28, 2013 |
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Aug 28, 2013 20:47
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snooman posted:I enjoyed this book but you nailed it with regards to missed opportunities. It felt like the trivia became more important than the story itself and that tends to ruin any possibility of a reread for me. I'm a sucker for dystopian settings and puzzle solving type books but a lot of them don't stand up well (Xanth and Spellsinger series for example) or flat out become annoying (Fallen Angels). I had sort of mixed feelings about it ... it was a really quick read, so I didn't hate it and I read most of it while I was with family who were watching the Super Bowl, so given the alternative I guess it seemed better. I wouldn't call it a very well-written book, though. I think it's successful because it's a geeky wish-fulfillment book for guys. I am guessing that a lot of people that just love this aren't big readers, but identify with the protagonist, because honestly the story does seem like an ultimate fantasy for people who are super into RPGs and MMOs - a poor, socially awkward dude who gets ultra rich and gets the girl all from his skill at playing video games combined with his encyclopedic knowledge of geek culture. Oh and the girl is also great at video games and likes all of his same nerdy hobbies! But once they end up together they are magically cured of being nerds! It's like Twilight for gamer guys.
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Aug 29, 2013 00:57
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Lowly posted:I think it's successful because it's a geeky wish-fulfillment book for guys. My poorly written geekish wish fulfillment for the shy young man choice is the Cross Time Engineer series by Leo Frankowski. Written at about an 8th grade level, with lots of recaps in every volume it is about the Modern Day (circa 1988) engineer transported back to 1300's Poland 10 years before the Mongol invasion. Piled with a number of advantages by his time travelling uncle, and plain old smarter-than-you-ism, he invents steam engines, titty bars, and breech loading cannons, and aircraft. Kills the mongols, becomes the most powerful, beloved, and important person in the history of eternity, and bangs a _lot_ of totally it's ok because it is the middle ages 14 year old girls. And also spends a lot of pages describing a brand new metric system...so if you ever want to know a whole lot more about how somebody else thinks we should count time, or measure bushels of wheat...there you drat go.
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Aug 29, 2013 01:17
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AreYouStillThere posted:Oh, well poo poo. I picked up Mortal Engines from the library assuming it would be the best place to start. Is it that big a deal? Should I send it back and get Fever Crumb? Relax, Mortal Engines is the first book and is great. Fever Crumb is a recent prequel. Don't ever, ever listen to people who tell you to read a book series in internal chronological order. What would you recommend to people to watch first: A New Hope or The Phantom Menace?
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Aug 29, 2013 01:29
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I read Altered Carbon during a series of long train trips this week, and really enjoyed it. Are the other Takeshi Kovacs books worth reading?
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Aug 29, 2013 10:08
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:I read Altered Carbon during a series of long train trips this week, and really enjoyed it. Are the other Takeshi Kovacs books worth reading? Pretty much anything by Richard Morgan is worth reading, both his Scifi (Kovacs, Black Man, Market Forces) and fantasy. Although he specializes in having protagonists which are angry and violent.
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Aug 29, 2013 10:32
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I find his sex scenes a bit over the top. In the Takeshi books they seemed to rarely add anything to the storyline and little to the characters. I still like his books, though. I find Land Fit for Heroes better than the Kovacs books, but they're okay.
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Aug 29, 2013 12:53
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Neurosis posted:I find his sex scenes a bit over the top. In the Takeshi books they seemed to rarely add anything to the storyline and little to the characters. I still like his books, though. I find Land Fit for Heroes better than the Kovacs books, but they're okay. I think there is a pretty fair case to be made that the explicit sex scenes are, in part, meant to make the reader uncomfortable which is itself a commentary/observation on graphic explicit violence being more palatable to his core demographics. I think this is especially true in his fantasy series.
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Aug 29, 2013 13:16
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SHAOLIN FUCKFIEND posted:I read Altered Carbon during a series of long train trips this week, and really enjoyed it. Are the other Takeshi Kovacs books worth reading? Yes, definitely. Neither is really a detective story, so keep that in mind if what you liked most about AC was the way it worked as a hardboiled detective novel. That being said, I like the sequels at least as much as I liked AC, in part because the change of settings and style were interesting (also, in both sequels Morgan explores more stuff related to Martians and Quellism, which are just hinted at in AC -- I found that all a pretty good read).
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Aug 29, 2013 13:42
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Bizob posted:I think there is a pretty fair case to be made that the explicit sex scenes are, in part, meant to make the reader uncomfortable which is itself a commentary/observation on graphic explicit violence being more palatable to his core demographics. I think this is especially true in his fantasy series. I think it was just an excuse to use the word "cock" a whole bunch...
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