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fookolt posted:This looks particularly good: Be prepared for Randian sperging from book 2 onwards.
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Nov 22, 2013 20:32
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The Lone Badger posted:Be prepared for Randian sperging from book 2 onwards. gently caress, never mind 
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Nov 22, 2013 20:53
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It's...really not as bad as he makes it sound. There's one bit where a bunch of what are, essentially, spacegoing 4chan posters come up to the main character and are all "hey dude you got a lot of money, you should give us some" and he's like "no, I made all this myself, you can't have any of it" and then they get mad and ban him from the space party, and he grumps about how the only reason they don't have any money is that they don't want to do any work. That's the closest the series gets to "Randian Sperging". If anything it's more "Lensman fanfic". The books are quite good and I really enjoyed them. ************* Groke posted:Yeah, this is pretty drat good. Just a heads up: It's originally a two-volume series, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds but there's also a UK edition which collects both and is also just titled The Risen Empire (I have a copy of this). Just to prevent any confusion. Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Nov 22, 2013 |
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Nov 22, 2013 22:47
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Which really sucks. I enjoyed the Risen Empire so much.
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Nov 23, 2013 00:18
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It's...really not as bad as he makes it sound. There's one bit where a bunch of what are, essentially, spacegoing 4chan posters come up to the main character and are all "hey dude you got a lot of money, you should give us some" and he's like "no, I made all this myself, you can't have any of it" and then they get mad and ban him from the space party, and he grumps about how the only reason they don't have any money is that they don't want to do any work. That's the closest the series gets to "Randian Sperging". If anything it's more "Lensman fanfic". I just don't get why there are so few lefty/progressive sci fi writers out there. I guess it's just the long established history of conservative boners for huge lasers and militaries or something (don't get me wrong; I like those too!)?
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Nov 23, 2013 00:28
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It's...really not as bad as he makes it sound. There's one bit where a bunch of what are, essentially, spacegoing 4chan posters come up to the main character and are all "hey dude you got a lot of money, you should give us some" and he's like "no, I made all this myself, you can't have any of it" and then they get mad and ban him from the space party, and he grumps about how the only reason they don't have any money is that they don't want to do any work. That's the closest the series gets to "Randian Sperging". If anything it's more "Lensman fanfic". Given that Smith was, if not a fascist, certainly a fascist sympathiser with some goddamned horrifying ideas about eugenics and genocide that featured heavily in his writing, that carries concerns of its own.
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Nov 23, 2013 00:35
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It was also a product of the times - eugenics was not exactly a minority opinion around then. Remember, lensmen is OLD. It predates Hitler and the WWII facist stigma. Bhodi fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Nov 23, 2013 |
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Nov 23, 2013 04:24
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fookolt posted:I just don't get why there are so few lefty/progressive sci fi writers out there.
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Nov 23, 2013 06:36
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Miss-Bomarc posted:I think there are more than you might expect, it's just that they don't always cram their viewpoints into the book and get a rep for being That Kind Of Writer (the way a lot of right-wing authors insist on doing.) The personal is political though 
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Nov 23, 2013 07:33
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Bhodi posted:It was also a product of the times - eugenics was not exactly a minority opinion around then. I'm aware of that, but pastiches of and homages to works of that time have a nasty habit of uncritically bringing along their racist, sexist baggage as well. You often see this with works inspired by Howard and Lovecraft's stories, for instance.
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Nov 23, 2013 11:44
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Darth Walrus posted:I'm aware of that, but pastiches of and homages to works of that time have a nasty habit of uncritically bringing along their racist, sexist baggage as well. You often see this with works inspired by Howard and Lovecraft's stories, for instance. There's a lot of things wrong in those old stories. I remember a lensmen story where entire planets were wiped out by the "good" guys. The population of said planets was discarded with a reasoning along the lines of "Welp, they're pirates. It's what they deserve." Personally, I think a lot of this stuff was more founded on not thinking things through properly while writing than on actively being a shithead. Of course, sometimes the writers just failed Ethics 101: How not to be a racist and/or sexist shithead. But that's just me. I prefer thinking people are morons to thinking people are bastards. 
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Nov 23, 2013 14:16
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fookolt posted:I just don't get why there are so few lefty/progressive sci fi writers out there. Well, there's Eric Flint, for one. Also most of the current/recent generation of British writers that aren't named Peter F. Hamilton.
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Nov 23, 2013 15:11
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ed balls balls man posted:Which really sucks. I enjoyed the Risen Empire so much. Yeah, the fate of the Risen Empire has left me with an admittedly irrational hatred of YA. And this despite the fact that I read everything by Brandon Sanderson. I said it was irrational. YA 
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Nov 25, 2013 10:07
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Bought all of the Lost Fleet series last week and after finishing the last one this morning i can honestly say i feel thoroughly ripped off from the experience. Overpriced mulch doled out in excruciatingly small books, Jack Campbell can  out of my life with no regrets on my side.Time to reread Vernor Vinge & David Brin with a light sprinkling of Gary Gibson to get back in the groove. edit: vvvv bought them for the Kindle. Just Another Lurker fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 15:41
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Just Another Lurker posted:Bought all of the Lost Fleet series last week and after finishing the last one this morning i can honestly say i feel thoroughly ripped off from the experience. This is why I love being in a library-dense state with a loan network. I only have two bookshelves.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:44
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Play posted:I've also recently read the Larry Nivens series _____ (betrayer, juggler, destroyer,etc.) of worlds. Those are really good and are pure interspecies space operas which a lot of people would probably find enjoyable. I read the first one of those and thought it stunk pretty hard. Don't read Niven after about 1971 and under no circumstances read stuff he co-authored.
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Dec 4, 2013 02:35
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fritz posted:I read the first one of those and thought it stunk pretty hard. Don't read Niven after about 1971 and under no circumstances read stuff he co-authored. I've brought it up a few times before here but I read whatever his latest short story collection was (Stars and Gods, I think) and goddamn, he has gone off the deep end the last few years. I used to accept all the ridiculous hyper-conservative BS in the stuff he co-wrote with Pournelle because I assumed it was just Pournelle putting that stuff in, but nope, Niven's recent works have definitely just lifted the blinders. There was one short story all about how a Kzinti wanted to understand mankind's martial spirit, and so decided to name himself after the greatest warrior in the entire history of all of humankind. The name he finally decided? Ronreagan. Then there was another story about how the Green Party in the future has ruined the environment and destroyed the economy (see also: Fallen Angels). The real kicker though was a story about a group of heroic rebels who go around killing IRS agents because the IRS is actually this evil conspiracy group who uses taxes to destroy ingenuity and suppress technology development and America would be in an amazing scientific golden age without taxes. That collection alone was enough to make me swear off Niven from then on. And I used to be about the biggest Niven fan ever.
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Dec 4, 2013 02:48
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Groke posted:Well, there's Eric Flint, for one. Unfortunately he just isn't a good writer.
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Dec 4, 2013 16:29
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Mr.48 posted:Unfortunately he just isn't a good writer. Cory Doctorow too, but he doesn't qualify as good either.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:50
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Just Another Lurker posted:Bought all of the Lost Fleet series last week and after finishing the last one this morning i can honestly say i feel thoroughly ripped off from the experience. You could have asked about Lost Fleet. I'm not alone in being very vocal in my dislike in this and the general Sci fi thread.
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Dec 4, 2013 22:34
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Velius bitching about The Lost Fleet posted:Read book one. I really like military sci-fi. Conclusion: "This is neat!" Quoting myself from three years ago, because it's still true. Mil Sci-fi is a tough genre to find decent stuff. Velius fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 22:38
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Just Another Lurker posted:Bought all of the Lost Fleet series last week and after finishing the last one this morning i can honestly say i feel thoroughly ripped off from the experience.  Velius posted:Quoting myself from three years ago, because it's still true. Mil Sci-fi is a tough genre to find decent stuff. Bonus points for difficulty: it's a zombie versus jarheads book where the only survivors hole up on the British Isles. They go to Africa to fight zombies, who they constantly refer to as "Zulus".  The Amazon ratings are especially telling. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 23:43
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coyo7e posted:Bonus points for difficulty: it's a zombie versus jarheads book where the only survivors hole up on the British Isles. They go to Africa to fight zombies, who they constantly refer to as "Zulus". This loving genre. I checked the author's blog, and was a little hopeful when he had an entry about vegan thanksgiving, but nope: http://www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge/index.php?story=2007-02-23 nope: http://www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge/index.php?story=2007-09-15 nope: http://www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge/index.php?story=2008-08-30
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Dec 5, 2013 03:25
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Glen Cook has war in space stuff. The Dragon Never Sleeps has some beautiful battles in it, you just can't go wrong with 250-tonne antimatter shells. It qualifies as Roman-legions-in-space too. Passage at Arms is a love letter to Das Boot and Run Silent, Run Deep. There's a lower proportion of spaceships blowing up in the Shadowline/Starfishers trilogy, but read those too. Shadowline is mostly mercenary wars in the far future. The next two are more military intelligence missions gone wrong. He put a couple of stories from that setting in his new collection Winter's Dreams, which also has some very good dying earth swords and sorcery.
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Dec 5, 2013 05:14
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Cook's technobabble justifying Space Submarines was impressive.
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Dec 5, 2013 05:36
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Velius posted:Quoting myself from three years ago, because it's still true. Mil Sci-fi is a tough genre to find decent stuff. Have you read David Drake's Hammer's Slammers stuff? It's very... nasty and real feeling.
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Dec 5, 2013 08:28
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I just finished Abaddon's Gate. While it's a decent enough little series, one thing really stood out to me. The author(s) managed to create a sci-fi setting that's epic and interesting and its all done with more or less today's technology. There's one notable exception (a fusion drive that brings fuel cost/capacity into limits feasible for traveling the solar system), but almost everything else in the setting is comparable to our technology today. They don't travel faster than we can now (either FTL or Wormholes), they don't have artificial gravity and they don't fight with lazers or transporters. Instead, they use thrust or rotation for gravity, haven't left the solar system, use something equivelant to the internet for communication, and fight with guns and nukes. The familiarity with the tech level really set my imagination off like no other story has in a long time! (Ok there's a couple exceptions like the mech armor or the medical and agricultural tech that we don't have... But I'm thinking more about the space travel setting in general).
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Dec 5, 2013 09:06
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I think there's an entire subgenre called "mundane SF" which is exactly like that.
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Dec 5, 2013 09:27
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mllaneza posted:Glen Cook has war in space stuff. The Dragon Never Sleeps has some beautiful battles in it, you just can't go wrong with 250-tonne antimatter shells. It qualifies as Roman-legions-in-space too. Passage at Arms is a love letter to Das Boot and Run Silent, Run Deep. There's a lower proportion of spaceships blowing up in the Shadowline/Starfishers trilogy, but read those too. Shadowline is mostly mercenary wars in the far future. The next two are more military intelligence missions gone wrong. He put a couple of stories from that setting in his new collection Winter's Dreams, which also has some very good dying earth swords and sorcery. Interesting.  And thanks Velius for shining a light on my ignorance. Jack Campbell; making Thomas DePrima seem like a Nobel Laureate. 
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Dec 6, 2013 23:36
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syphon posted:I just finished Abaddon's Gate. While it's a decent enough little series, one thing really stood out to me.
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Dec 7, 2013 12:38
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Spug posted:Yes, this is what makes the series cool. Don't listen to Hedrigall, the Expanse series is hard sci-fi and manages to make it interesting. Hey I wasn't criticizing the books, there actually is a genre/movement called "mundane SF" and the Expanse series fits into it in a lot of aspects!
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Dec 7, 2013 12:52
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Bhodi posted:
Oh dear god this book has the best amazon review *ever*. quote:This is a book that delivers what it promises, so if the description sounds interesting you'll probably get along with it. It's also incredibly subtle and there is no hint of overcompensation or euphemism in a kilometre-long mushroom-shaped star carrier named America forcing its way into enemy star systems and firing teardrop shaped fighters out of the hole at its tip.
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Dec 8, 2013 02:21
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It blew my mind when I read about Ian Douglas on Wikipedia and learned that it was just a pen name for William H. Keith, who also had a lengthy career writing "men's adventure" novels in the 70s and 80s.
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Dec 8, 2013 03:48
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Hedrigall posted:Hey I wasn't criticizing the books, there actually is a genre/movement called "mundane SF" and the Expanse series fits into it in a lot of aspects! Haha, poo poo, you're right, sorry.
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Dec 9, 2013 14:42
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Miss-Bomarc posted:It blew my mind when I read about Ian Douglas on Wikipedia and learned that it was just a pen name for William H. Keith, who also had a lengthy career writing "men's adventure" novels in the 70s and 80s. Hah, that makes sense. I mean, the eponymous Star Carrier is itself named "America." I saw that and I thought "this series is written by a man who has looked into the gaping abyss of mil-sf Flag Porn and said to himself "This is good. But I can do it better."
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Dec 9, 2013 16:25
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Also for UK nerds, I finally got round to trying the Honor Harrington books as I was in a lazy mood, and the first two are currently free on Amazon. On Basilisk Station is the first and I found it a pretty decent read for what it is. Far and away better than the Lost Fleet books, which honestly feel kinda garbage in comparison. Apart from the cat, what the gently caress is the deal with that. Take the cat out and nothing would change. The only reason I can see for the emphasis on it at the start was to confirm HH as a Mary Sue.
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Dec 9, 2013 16:33
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ed balls balls man posted:Also for UK nerds, I finally got round to trying the Honor Harrington books as I was in a lazy mood, and the first two are currently free on Amazon. On Basilisk Station is the first and I found it a pretty decent read for what it is. Far and away better than the Lost Fleet books, which honestly feel kinda garbage in comparison. Oh you have not seen half of Honor's Marysue-ness. She's the best gun duelist and sword duelist and gets a sweet robot arm and laser eye and teaches her cat how to do sign language and has a polyamorous marriage and fires literally a million missiles all at once.. The series starts off pretty god but each book is worse than the one before, so just stop when it gets to be too much. Edit: Also you can get almost all of the series/side stories totally and legally free here (Torch of Freedom link). Piell fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Dec 9, 2013 |
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Dec 9, 2013 16:49
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The cat makes her telepathic and helps her locate soul mates too. She also has a gun in her finger.
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Dec 9, 2013 17:07
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I ended up being kinda disappointed with Gary Gibson's Shoal sequence--I dunno, the whole thing just seemed sort of anticlimactic. It's a shame, because the first two books hooked me pretty hard, but the third was just... predictable.
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Dec 9, 2013 18:18
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Piell posted:Oh you have not seen half of Honor's Marysue-ness. She's the best gun duelist and sword duelist and gets a sweet robot arm and laser eye and teaches her cat how to do sign language and has a polyamorous marriage and fires literally a million missiles all at once.. The series starts off pretty god but each book is worse than the one before, so just stop when it gets to be too much. Is that spoilered bit hyperbole or are you being serious? I don't know which answer would make me want to read the book more or less.
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Dec 9, 2013 18:36
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