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BananaNutkins posted:All this argument and these are the readership numbers: It got mentioned upthread, but it's worth reiterating. This is for the magazines. When's the last time you saw one of those magazines in a B&N? When's the last time you read one of those magazines? They've been hard to find for years and years and years.
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Feb 22, 2014 03:51
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rchandra posted:If you've read Red/Green/Blue Mars, how would you compare 2312 to those? I liked the Mars books a lot but not The Martians or Antarctica. I'll have to defer you to my fellow posters on this one, as 2312 is the first of KSR I've read. I've enjoyed 2312 for the most part though, even if it is slow. Venusian Weasel posted:Yeah, I've always gotten the impression that KSR is one of those people who really needs a collaborator with his writing. He can really do worldbuilding in a way others can't, but he desperately needs someone who's good with writing characters to really make his worlds seem realistic. As mentioned, this is the first novel of his I've read so I have no idea if this is a common trait in his book. I will say that while Swan is a bit flat as a protagonist, Wahram is fantastic and I've basically loved every scene he's been in. Genette is pretty cool as well.
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Feb 22, 2014 03:59
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Coldforge posted:Translation: If you try to ban it, say through a blacklist, it just goes underground and becomes harder to keep track of, and probably gets even worse through the magic of "positive" reinforcement loops. What makes you think it's not there already? I found this at a used book store that was closing down a few years ago: http://www.amazon.com/The-Savaged-States-America-Futuristic/dp/B000OT1T3O/ only in a much more polished looking edition. (I wasn't paying attention and actually bought it, once I realized what I had it went in the trash, which was the first book I threw out for reasons not involving "mold" or "pages fallen out all over" as an adult)
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Feb 22, 2014 04:00
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anathenema posted:Anyway, can anyone recommend me something fun in fantasy that isn't totally stupid? It doesn't have to be brilliant, but something along the lines of the energy of the Gentlemen Bastards stories would be good. You know what doesn't get recommended often enough? This book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_for_the_Morning_Glory savinhill posted:Try Robert VS Reddick's Chathrand Voyage series. It's fun, has a ton of awesome adventure, and it also has a large scope with world building and history that has a lot of impact on the greater story and plot. These too! (I thought things sort of fell apart in book 4 but the first couple are just great)
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Feb 22, 2014 04:00
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Zola posted:I do still trot out the True Game series once in a blue moon, though. The full nine set or just the Peter books? Northshore/Southshore are good too, but I read the reviews of her latest and I'm not touching that.
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Feb 22, 2014 04:01
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fritz posted:It got mentioned upthread, but it's worth reiterating. This is for the magazines. When's the last time you saw one of those magazines in a B&N? When's the last time you read one of those magazines? They've been hard to find for years and years and years. Local B&N usually has Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, occasionally has Analog. They do have a tendency not to show up some months, though.
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Feb 22, 2014 04:23
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Those magazines are hardly the central pillars of the genre they used to be. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies - important markets, all online, all free to read.
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Feb 22, 2014 04:31
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Venusian Weasel posted:Local B&N usually has Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, occasionally has Analog. They do have a tendency not to show up some months, though. True, however as someone who dealt with paying for placement in B&N, Borders, Amazon, et al, as my job, any appearance in those magazines means gently caress all when you're trying to sell actual books into major distributors. They may be good venues for establishing your name in the industry, but they don't help much in trying to get your novel sold in at significant numbers..Not to say that the buyers for SF/Fantasy aren't huge nerds who love this stuff (which they are), but they usually need something more to base a significant buy on.
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Feb 22, 2014 04:56
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fritz posted:You know what doesn't get recommended often enough? This book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_for_the_Morning_Glory Hell yes. That book is so good. I know I have reccomended it here before at least once.
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Feb 22, 2014 05:21
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Zola posted:I used to really enjoy Sheri Tepper because she's one of the few authors that has been able to surprise me with a plot twist. Unfortunately, she seems to have become increasingly shrill and (dare I say it?) anti-man with each subsequent book. By the time I got to The Fresco, I gave up. At the end, when Benita becomes sort of superwoman due to her friendly alien backup and there's the little diatribe about not needing men (what the gently caress is the difference between a woman relying on a man and relying on some super-powerful alien? She still isn't doing gently caress-all on her own behalf without needing help), I gave up. The most baffling one is Grass, wherein the female lead must defeat the patriarchy, her marriage, the catholic church, space mormons, the urge to participate in charity, the aristocracy, psychic horses, and animal cruelty. Then there's an alien sex scene (because it's sci-fi) and she goes to another dimension with her new alien fox friend.
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Feb 22, 2014 11:01
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fritz posted:What makes you think it's not there already? I found this at a used book store that was closing down a few years ago: Don't know, don't care. Someone asked for the meaning of a post, and I provided; end of my involvement. I'm just here for book recommendations.
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Feb 22, 2014 11:50
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crowfeathers posted:The most baffling one is Grass, wherein the female lead must defeat the patriarchy, her marriage, the catholic church, space mormons, the urge to participate in charity, the aristocracy, psychic horses, and animal cruelty. Then there's an alien sex scene (because it's sci-fi) and she goes to another dimension with her new alien fox friend. Sometimes I read posts like this and I have a really hard time believing that you aren't making this poo poo up. What was that other series? Honor Harrington or something? People are loving weird.
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Feb 22, 2014 12:00
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fritz posted:The full nine set or just the Peter books? The Peter books, I'm still trying to get my hands on the other six.
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Feb 22, 2014 13:01
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fookolt posted:Sometimes I read posts like this and I have a really hard time believing that you aren't making this poo poo up. What was that other series? Honor Harrington or something? People are loving weird. The Waters Rising is pretty bizarre by all accounts as well.
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Feb 23, 2014 11:54
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Darth Walrus posted:The Waters Rising is pretty bizarre by all accounts as well. That article has my least favourite thing and my most favourite thing this week: an extended debate on horse rape, and quote:Gene Wolfe is the Blessed Walrus of Obliqueness
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Feb 23, 2014 13:20
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About right.
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Feb 23, 2014 13:37
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Darth Walrus posted:The Waters Rising is pretty bizarre by all accounts as well. Good God, I am so glad I stopped at The Fresco.
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Feb 23, 2014 16:26
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fookolt posted:Sometimes I read posts like this and I have a really hard time believing that you aren't making this poo poo up. What was that other series? Honor Harrington or something? People are loving weird. She also wrote The Companions, where the protagonist discovers that god lives in a parallel dimension and talks directly only to the trees on a specific alien planet through the "language of scents", which means they have to team up with a woman who was genetically engineered by a perfume company because only she can understand it, and then there's a sentient tree that figures out how to walk, and humanity was designed by space dogs (the space dogs are also slavers and kidnap people into an alternate dimension), and everyone hates humanity for being the only race in the universe to "take pride in their work" The way the protagonists win is they ask God (through tree perfume) to solve all the problems, which God does, and also God destroys all of humanity except for people who are members of PETA (this is accomplished with the use of sex dolls that make you autistic) It's ok though because the hero saved the animals
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Feb 23, 2014 20:28
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crowfeathers posted:I care a little, because people with strong political views will tend to put money into those interests (I.e. OSC and his anti-homosexuality). If they're dead or the books are public domain though that's not an issue. Yeah, I have given a lot of money to Mieville so I guess I've done my part to feed the revolution. Bad part: I'll probably end up before a communist execution squad if that unlikely event happens.
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Feb 23, 2014 21:52
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Darth Walrus posted:The Waters Rising is pretty bizarre by all accounts as well. This is amazing. It's like the anti-thesis for Oh John Ringo No. Part of me would love to see a thread of these horror screeds but I'm quietly afraid of what it could turn into.
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Feb 23, 2014 22:23
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This is amazing. It's like the anti-thesis for Oh John Ringo No. Part of me would love to see a thread of these horror screeds but I'm quietly afraid of what it could turn into. The thing that's really awful is that she has such interesting ideas! In The Fresco, for example, there is a set of painted panels with incredible religious significance to the aliens who live there. There are scholarly treatises based on the panels which interpret each element and its meaning, and there's a whole philosophy based on the interpretation of the, etc etc etc. So what happens when the panels are cleaned? It sounds like it would be a loving fantastic novel, doesn't it? And instead we get man-hating diatribes. Ugh. She has been pissing me off so bad for the last decade or so, which is why I gave up buying her books completely.
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Feb 24, 2014 00:32
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I just finished Starfish by Peter Watts and I still don't fully understand what will happen if behemoth makes it to the surface. Here is what it says in the book: "Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of ßehemoth." Can someone dumb it down for me?
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Feb 24, 2014 21:06
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Yes. Land-based life on Earth depends on a trophic pyramid - a system by which sunlight is turned into biomass, which in turn gets eaten by organisms higher up the pyramid adding to their biomass, which in turn is eaten by organisms still higher up. We are very near the top of this pyramid. The very first layer of this pyramid involves plants, which are dependent on microorganisms for a number of basic functions - fixing nitrogen, decomposing dead crap into rich soil, so on. Because it has a very low-level biochemical advantage in terms of reproductive efficiency, Behemoth will outcompete these microorganisms, eating all their poo poo and driving them extinct. Then everything higher up the pyramid will starve.
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Feb 24, 2014 21:26
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Thanks. It's much clearer now and makes sense of the 'agricultural concerns' line from earlier.
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Feb 25, 2014 15:02
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Pretty good Nebula ballot this year!  Ancillary Justice and Hild, to nobody's surprise, but I'm happy to see Six Gun Snow White up there too.
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Feb 25, 2014 18:42
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Angry Robot is doing a reddit AMA in r/fantasy if you wanna ask em some questions or read about the publishing biz. Answers are starting at 4pm cst.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:35
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General Battuta posted:Pretty good Nebula ballot this year! Just checked it out and bought most of the novels in the list. Female authors seem to be well represented, is this typical with the Nebula?
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Feb 26, 2014 04:33
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On the many, many, recommendations of this thread I finally read Blindsight. It dragged me in so completely I finished it in one sitting. But drat does it make me feel stupid. I feel like I barely grazed the meaning of what was actually going on. Would anyone have a link to a good "For Dummies" explanation or discussion?
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Feb 26, 2014 19:22
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Huge-rear end Blindsight spoilers, but if I had to boil the book down into one Humanity has always assumed cognition and consciousness are intrinsically tied. Consciousness is actually a computational bottleneck, an exaptative accident - an evolutionary tumor that hurts the brain's performance and creates disruptive, maladaptive social behavior. Most life in the universe has no self-awareness, and that life is going to out-compete us. We may be the only living things who will ever know we lived. Fallom posted:Just checked it out and bought most of the novels in the list. Female authors seem to be well represented, is this typical with the Nebula? I don't know but it's really encouraging.
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Feb 26, 2014 19:34
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General Battuta posted:Huge-rear end Blindsight spoilers, but if I had to boil the book down into one As good a time to ask as any. I reread it recently and one specific thing confused me when they're testing the two scramblers: they try to ask "what do you see" and the scrambler only says Rorschach, which is wrong because it can also see the other scrambler. They realize it took the question as "what are you aware of." But they had just gotten done working through the realization that the scramblers have no self-awareness. Was it that they asked "what has awareness," and if so, why would Rorschach be the correct answer? Did I misread that? Does anyone else remember this part? I'll try to find a page and exact quote, but it confused me.
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Feb 26, 2014 19:59
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Tepper isn't crazy, she's a nice old lady.quote:When Sheri becomes Head Queen, what three things will get changed first? Sure, let's sterilize all the criminals and mentally ill and stick them in concentration camps. Suddenly I'm really happy with my decision to stop reading Grass after 50 or so pages.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:08
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General Battuta posted:Huge-rear end Blindsight spoilers, but if I had to boil the book down into one Thanks! So the stuff about the vampires shows that the same thing was in progress on Earth, except for the accidental advantage the right-angle flaw gave Homo Sapiens? The stuff at the end was the reconstituted vampires wiping us out? Why would they wipe us out when they need us around to eat? They had that whole hibernation mechanism to prevent overfeeding in the first place.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:22
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CaptainCrunch posted:Thanks! So the stuff about the vampires shows that the same thing was in progress on Earth, except for the accidental advantage the right-angle flaw gave Homo Sapiens? The stuff at the end was the reconstituted vampires wiping us out? Why would they wipe us out when they need us around to eat? They had that whole hibernation mechanism to prevent overfeeding in the first place. When we brought them back we adjusted the traits a bit. We had fixed the need to eat us, but left in the angle glitch as a way of controlling them by controlling their medicine supply They didn't need us any more, and "fixed" the quirk of history
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Feb 26, 2014 20:34
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CaptainCrunch posted:Thanks! So the stuff about the vampires shows that the same thing was in progress on Earth, except for the accidental advantage the right-angle flaw gave Homo Sapiens? The stuff at the end was the reconstituted vampires wiping us out? Why would they wipe us out when they need us around to eat? They had that whole hibernation mechanism to prevent overfeeding in the first place. I reread it recently. This is actually mentioned - they don't need humans anymore. Genetic engineering took care of the nutritional maladaptation that forced them into cannibalism. It's discussed right around when they're talking about the Euclidean disorder - Szpindel mentions that supposedly, removing that ruins vampire savantism, but then says that they didn't have any problems fixing the metabolic pathway, insinuating that humans left the Euclidean disorder in to prevent vampires from taking over, but took out the part that forces them to consume humans to live.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:37
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Ah! I missed that tidbit. Ok, I don't feel quite so flummoxed anymore. Than you, guys.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:40
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HUMAN FISH posted:Tepper isn't crazy, she's a nice old lady. Does she think the Humane Society is for humans?
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Feb 26, 2014 20:46
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At first I thought Sheri was a fictional character and it was a question of what's going to happen in the next book of the series when Sheri becomes Head Queen of the Tribes of Lost Ezalend or some bullshit. Then I looked into it. Now I just feel… disappointed. And I don't even know who this author is in the slightest.
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Feb 26, 2014 22:08
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Bolverkur posted:At first I thought Sheri was a fictional character and it was a question of what's going to happen in the next book of the series when Sheri becomes Head Queen of the Tribes of Lost Ezalend or some bullshit. She's utterly insane. The most recent Tepper book I read was Raising the Stones, in which several things are shown to be irredeemable. Specifically, these are Space Islam, societies that are not matriarchal, and Catholics. The plot involves an attempt by Space Muslims (who also are the only people in the known universe to own slaves) to take over a doomsday weapon in order to destroy all societies in which women have freedom. The protagonist is the son of a Space Imam and wants to rediscover his father's culture, but eventually realizes that all traditions are evil, and Islam even more so, and that he should have listened to his mother and not left home. Then a group of children accesses an ancient fungus that is powered by imagination and the fungus replaces their religion with "a religion that actually works" and they pray for it to kill all the evil people, which it does, and the heroes are triumphant and slavery is abolished. The book ends with the promise that, through transplanting this fungus to other planets, all human problems can be abolished because it will replace all other religions. Also the woman from Grass is mentioned, she has become a Christ-like figure and is the basis of all religions besides the Islam surrogate.
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Feb 26, 2014 22:27
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crowfeathers posted:She's utterly insane.
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Feb 27, 2014 00:50
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crowfeathers posted:She's utterly insane.
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