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Yeah if it's any consolation, I was fully aware of the naming convention and still not entirely hip to the jive on what was going on with the space traders besides the generalities. I was far too engaged by the spiders in sports cars.
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Mar 2, 2014 14:13
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General Battuta posted:Do I Yes
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Mar 2, 2014 15:43
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or do I 
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BananaNutkins posted:Also escapepod.com, podcastle.com, and drabblecast.com. omg those are great, can't recommend them enough. edit: Found it http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3608396 Kraps fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Mar 2, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 17:49
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But also this thread, I hope! Speaking of, I've got a space opera/military SF story up in Clarkesworld today, Morrigan in the Sunglare. It is a not-too-subtle tribute to one of my favorite game stories, FreeSpace 2.
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Mar 2, 2014 20:07
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I did mean Asimov but I have forgotten what his series was called. I've read all but like two of the culture series, the ones you can't buy for kindle, more recently. I'm sorry about my error. I finally broke down and googled. Foundation. Goddamn it. Krinkle fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 2, 2014 21:54
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General Battuta posted:But also this thread, I hope! Speaking of, I've got a space opera/military SF story up in Clarkesworld today, Morrigan in the Sunglare. It is a not-too-subtle tribute to one of my favorite game stories, FreeSpace 2. I know you've mentioned short fiction being available online for free in clarkesworld, etc - is there a SF/F short fiction RSS for the lazy to which i can subscribe, or something similar?
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Mar 2, 2014 22:19
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I'm reading The Dream of Perpetual Motion which I've had on my reading list for a while but never got around to. It's probably one of the most poetic fantasy-ish novels I've read in a long time, and even though the story's pretty good I love it for the voice. It's about Harold Winslow, a greeting-card writer who's been imprisoned on a zeppelin powered by a faulty perpetual motion machine by Prospero Taligent, the famous inventor who brought mankind out of "The Age of Miracles" with his wind-up men and other inventions, for some as-yet-unrevealed crime. On board the zeppelin, Harold is constantly berated by Prospero's adopted daughter who only wants him to talk to her. To protest his imprisonment in the only way left to him, he stays silent and writes his autobiography, which is what you actually read. If you're looking for something a little slower and less actiony, I highly recommend it.
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Mar 3, 2014 02:39
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General Battuta posted:Pretty good Nebula ballot this year! nvm, found it. God, did they really nominate Ocean At The End of the Lane? It is a bad book. WastedJoker fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 09:44
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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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Oh, it's bad? I was sorta interested in it because it got some praise and I've liked some of Gaiman's past books. I was planning to get it from my library (in ebook format) and read it on my Kindle, but I've been sorta putting it off. What about it was bad?
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Mar 3, 2014 10:06
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After reading a couple his novels I realized I'm completely and thoroughly uninterested in anything he writes outside of the Sandman universe.
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Mar 3, 2014 10:15
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TOOT BOOT posted:After reading a couple his novels I realized I'm completely and thoroughly uninterested in anything he writes outside of the Sandman universe. You could at least say why.
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Mar 3, 2014 10:38
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Crashbee posted:You could at least say why. I read Neverwhere, Stardust (I think), and American Gods and was pretty ambivalent about all of them afterwards. Nothing about the settings or writing really grabbed me. It's not that they're really bad or anything, it's just that reading stuff you don't give a gently caress about is a waste of time.
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Mar 3, 2014 10:44
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WastedJoker posted:nvm, found it. I really like some of Neil Gaiman's work (comically, Stardust and Neverwhere are two of my favorites) but I didn't like Ocean. It seemed like a re-hash of ground he handled more effectively in Coraline with an added dash of authorial self-insert.
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Mar 3, 2014 11:07
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I really like some of Neil Gaiman's work (comically, Stardust and Neverwhere are two of my favorites) but I didn't like Ocean. It seemed like a re-hash of ground he handled more effectively in Coraline with an added dash of authorial self-insert. I also felt that way about the Graveyard Book, which was too similar to Pratchett's Johnny and the Dead for me to really enjoy.
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Mar 3, 2014 11:11
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I really liked lots of Gaiman's stuff (Coraline, American Gods, Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and of course Sandman) but Ocean at the End of the Lane is just overhyped and frankly, tired. It can get so frustrating to see writers lean on the same story devices like crutches - yeah, I get it Gaiman, you're all so loving hip and cool with ~mythologies~ and ~fairies~ and the ~amazing power of stories~ and poo poo, but come the gently caress on. Do we really need to have YET ANOTHER iteration of the three old crones/the Fates/the Norns in your books, or YET AGAIN these loving ~fairies~ who are always around the corner if you can just ~believe in the magic~? After reading most, if not all, of Gaiman's stuff then this was just same old poo poo on repeat with half the effort. I'll even go as far as saying that for someone who is not familiar with Gaiman that it's not that interesting or fresh (as long as you are familiar with recent fantasy literature). Plus, the book was all hyped up to be really mature and for adults and poo poo, but it still did not deliver any real emotional impact or investment in the characters/plot as I expected from such a book. I felt that Coraline, a children's book, was more mature with how it dealt with themes of growing up and a child's relationship with her parents. If you want a mature fantasy book set in "reality" then I much rather recommend Among Others. It even has ~fairies~ and poo poo but treats it much better.
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Mar 3, 2014 11:15
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I really like some of Neil Gaiman's work (comically, Stardust and Neverwhere are two of my favorites) but I didn't like Ocean. It seemed like a re-hash of ground he handled more effectively in Coraline with an added dash of authorial self-insert. Agreed, American Gods, Stardust and Neverwhere was great, Anansi boys ok, but Ocean felt like something he had already written before. I'm losing my interest in Gaiman, especially since Mieville writes similar things (Un Lun Dun, Kraken, Railsea) that are more enjoyable. Doesn't Gaimon only write "Young Literature" nowadays? On Mieville: Not wanting to start the typical derail about authors and politics, but the wikipedia entry on Mieville just reinforces my belief in not giving a poo poo about authors opinions unless it affects their writing.
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Mar 3, 2014 11:20
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Cardiac posted:On Mieville: Before the whole  starts about China Miéville, read this quote. It will explain everything you need to know about how much Miéville's politics affects his work:China Miéville posted:I'm not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters. Now that was slightly different with Iron Council, because I had the sense for some years that I wanted to write a third book that operates as a culmination, which was overtly political and precisely about my kind of politics in this world that I've created. So it was a book that was, if you like, deeply structured with politics, but that doesn't mean that it's a manifesto, that doesn't mean that it's an argument disguised as a novel, because even though those politics are central, I know that as a novelist I want to tell a story, and that means that I have to have characters that are engaging. Even if you don't agree with my politics or don't give a poo poo about them, the story has to be engaging. And that's the great thing about big, political radical movements. For instance, if you read about the Paris Commune, whether or not you agree with the position of the Communards, the Paris Commune is a tremendously exciting story. What I tried to do is write something which works as an exciting story but which treats the politics seriously. All of which is a long-winded way of saying I've never had any problems with the American market, because I don't think I'm patronizing or condescending to readers or trying to convince them of a particular political line. I'm trying to say I've invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that to, that's fantastic. But if not, isn't this a cool monster?
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Mar 3, 2014 12:11
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A deepness in the sky:Hedrigall posted:When you start getting chapters from that old bumbling Pham whatsisface dude's perspective, a loootttt will become much clearer. I think I just did? I guess maybe they don't do last name first and I was confused because I was meant to be. Tentatively, things are straight. It's a little weird to (30% spoilers)go in disguise when you're the most famous person in your culture but change the last name only? Like that monty python skit where Adolf Hitler was hiding in England, running for a by election under the name Mr. Hilter. I guess vzr and the others who aren't in the know just assume the guy from history is dead by now since he spent so long flying around at the speed of light in cold sleep and then hiding and the culture has moved so far beyond him. If the main antagonist grew up watching the space equivalent of mr. rogers neighborhood on the galactic PBS, he at the very least doesn't expect the founder of the modern Qeng-Ho to be one of his prisoners.
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Mar 3, 2014 12:26
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I did the February Blindsight read through like everyone else, but I am left with one thing I didn't understand: how did Rorschach's "cloak" work? They said refraction but I'm not following. Does anyone have a way to explain it and/or diagram to walk me through how it is invisible on all wavelengths from any approach up to 27 degrees?
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Mar 3, 2014 15:42
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(Big Deepness in the Sky spoilers) Yeah, basically, he became such a legendary figure that people named their children after him, and they their children, so he can use the name and no one will catch on. He disappeared for such a long time and grew older in the process so no one has an inkling it could possibly be him. Adolf Hilter would be the same if Hitler was a hero instead of a villain and if he'd been in cold storage and only emerged in the year 2500.
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Mar 3, 2014 15:42
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TOOT BOOT posted:I read Neverwhere, Stardust (I think), and American Gods and was pretty ambivalent about all of them afterwards. This is one of my pet peeves, ambivalent doesn't mean uninterested or bored. Loosely it means something more like conflicted, more closely it means being pulled in two directions, so that while the net effect may be the same as uninterested - no movement/decision/action - that effect is reached for different reasons. It is a subtle and useful word.
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Mar 3, 2014 15:54
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Definitions of words change, sorry for your sperg buddy
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Mar 3, 2014 16:22
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Piell posted:Definitions of words change, sorry for your sperg buddy This one hasn't. Sorry for your worthless posting. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambivalence
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Mar 3, 2014 16:55
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Fried Chicken posted:I did the February Blindsight read through like everyone else, but I am left with one thing I didn't understand: how did Rorschach's "cloak" work? They said refraction but I'm not following. Does anyone have a way to explain it and/or diagram to walk me through how it is invisible on all wavelengths from any approach up to 27 degrees? I read this book last year, so refresh my memory. Is Rorshach the name of the ship or the race on the ship? I think it works like they have octopus like mimetic cells that can change their color, and they just watch your eyes to see when the microsaccade movement is about to switch on, then they stand still and look like whatever is behind them. Imagine if someone was completely blind but except by photographs they were loudly telegraphing with an old timey exploding powder flash pan. If you could time it by moving forward by holding up a series of body sized paintings of the hallway behind you, you could sneak up on them. The aliens just instinctively saw how we processed visual information and only moved during the gaps when our eyes were "off". (your eyes jerk around kind of un-smooth like, and to keep you from getting nauseous, your eyes shut off while jerking to the new position. Your brain then turns them on and in retrospect tells you a story that there was continuity between the two pictures and you believe it because you can't call your own brain a liar) Krinkle fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 19:36
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Krinkle posted:I read this book last year, so refresh my memory. Is Rorshach the name of the ship or the race on the ship? I'm asking about the ship; the aliens are called "scramblers". Your explanation about the aliens is good, though the comparison I would use is a strobe light and only moving during the dark periods rather than an old timey camera But yeah, asking about the ship
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Mar 3, 2014 19:51
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I don't remember the ship in Blindsight having a cloak, or cloaking anything. It just had insane magnetic fields that wrecked brainwaves and sat there broadcasting gibberish to stall for time. It eventually just rammed the earth ship. I don't remember it cloaking anything, not it's magnetic field, not the sight of it, nothing. From soup to nuts it was pretty loving overt! I'm really at a loss what you could mean, then!.
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Mar 3, 2014 20:16
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On their inbound flight, the humans saw the giant mass without seeing anything else. Eventually they put out some drones on different trajectories and they pick out Rorschach, the ship. I remember them talking about this cloaking, but quite sure it is different than either the scrambler's moving during saccades or the strong "hallucinogenic" magnetic fields generated by Rorschach.
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Mar 3, 2014 20:25
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Read the new Mira Grant Parasite book this weekend. It was OK but way too many parallels/callbacks to the Newsfeed trilogy that really diminished it for me, in many ways it really feels like the same story just in a setting with a different premise. Kind of disappointed, I hope the rest of the trilogy will be better.
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Mar 3, 2014 20:25
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RVProfootballer posted:On their inbound flight, the humans saw the giant mass without seeing anything else. Eventually they put out some drones on different trajectories and they pick out Rorschach, the ship. I remember them talking about this cloaking, but quite sure it is different than either the scrambler's moving during saccades or the strong "hallucinogenic" magnetic fields generated by Rorschach. Yeah, this. they mention "refraction" as key to how it did it, and it relied on figuring out where Theseus would be to preposition itself, but other than that I was pretty hazy on the physics of what they were doing.
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Mar 3, 2014 21:04
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Krinkle posted:I don't remember the ship in Blindsight having a cloak, or cloaking anything. It just had insane magnetic fields that wrecked brainwaves and sat there broadcasting gibberish to stall for time. It eventually just rammed the earth ship. I don't remember it cloaking anything, not it's magnetic field, not the sight of it, nothing. From soup to nuts it was pretty loving overt! I'm really at a loss what you could mean, then!. It doesn't (Blindsight ending spoilers) ram the Earth ship, it attacks with a magnetic weapon using its control over Big Ben's field lines, just as Theseus attempts to ram it with antimatter payload. Mutual annihilation. e: andrew smash I'm confident there are good compilation websites out there with RSS feeds, but I haven't used them and can't give good advice. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 21:09
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General Battuta posted:It doesn't (Blindsight ending spoilers) ram the Earth ship, it attacks with a magnetic weapon using its control over Big Ben's field lines, just as Theseus attempts to ram it with antimatter payload. Mutual annihilation. Technically it triggers what would be a corneal mass ejection if it were a normal star or a relativistic jet if it were a neutron star or magnetar instead of brown dwarf. It spun up and condensed magnetic fields to an absurd strength so the matter was stripped to ions and them propelled out at high velocity. Basically a planet sized particle cannon. Which they used to try to take down a vessel carrying a few thousand tons of antimatter. Boom
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Mar 3, 2014 21:17
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Fried Chicken posted:I did the February Blindsight read through like everyone else, but I am left with one thing I didn't understand: how did Rorschach's "cloak" work? They said refraction but I'm not following. Does anyone have a way to explain it and/or diagram to walk me through how it is invisible on all wavelengths from any approach up to 27 degrees? I don't know the particulars, but basically it could cloak itself from being viewed at a single viewing angle. When Theseus sent out probes, once the probes were viewing Rorschach at a 27 degree angle to Theseus, Rorschach became visible because it couldn't cloak itself from the multiple viewpoints of both the probes and Theseus, so it didn't all of a sudden become visible, but rather they were able to put together a composite picture based on what the various probes were seeing. 27 degrees is just the angle at which the directional cloaking fails, I guess. e: has anyone read Pines by Blake Crouch? The kindle version is only $2 and it's well-reviewed. regularizer fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 22:35
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Dropping this here because I only found out about it today: Robin Hobb is writing another trilogy about Fitz.
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Mar 4, 2014 02:23
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Geez, let the poor guy relax for once. (I will read it and roll around in it because boy howdy do I love me some good angst porn)
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Mar 4, 2014 02:30
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Fried Chicken posted:Yeah, this. they mention "refraction" as key to how it did it, and it relied on figuring out where Theseus would be to preposition itself, but other than that I was pretty hazy on the physics of what they were doing. Well, I'm not a physicist, but I'll give it a shot. The basic concept of refraction is the direction of electromagnetic waves will change when the medium through which they're travelling changes. It's easiest for us to observe with visible light -- this is how prisms work, and why sticking a pencil into a glass of water makes the pencil look bent -- but it can happen with any frequency of radiation, not just visible light. It's basically a boundary effect; light will go straight when passing through air, and it will go straight when passing through water, but it will change direction when passing from air into water. It's also possible to bend waves with local field conditions, for instance with gravity or with a sufficiently strong magnetic field. This is proven, and has been repeatedly verified experimentally. With sufficiently advanced technology, it might be possible to use this to make a cloaking field that only worked from certain directions. To cloak yourself, you'd create a sufficiently strong magnetic field (or some other field effect) between yourself and the observer. If the observer tried to see you with radar, the pulses they sent would hit the field and refract, going off at an angle rather than hitting you and bouncing back. When you emitted energy, the energy would hit the field and refract, going off at an angle instead of going to the observer. What the observer would actually see would be bent radiation from other angles; if you were in space, where things are overwhelmingly essentially empty, this would be very hard to detect. To cloak something huge across a wide range, you'd need a huge amount of refraction, and thus a very powerful field. With the amount of cloaking that Watts talks about, you'd be looking at a magnetic field that was strong enough to perturb planetary orbits or rip apart a star. Given some of the other things that Rorschach does, that almost makes sense. However, I'm not entirely sure how one could prevent an observer from noticing such a field.
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Mar 4, 2014 05:06
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regularizer posted:
Yes. It reads like a bad Dean Koontz novel. It's hackneyed and cliche and predictable at every turn. Even the big plot twist. I didn't guess the full details, but I knew it was coming, and I figured it would be something along the lines of what it was. I'm usually oblivious to this kind of thing, but I picked out everything in The Pines. I probably would have liked it a lot more if it at least tried to hide where it was going.
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Mar 4, 2014 05:11
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Is there a dog? I mean, I own the book, and I just haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but if there's a god damned magical dog that saves the day I'll just delete it and move it out of my to read list.
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Mar 4, 2014 06:34
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HollowClown posted:Well, I'm not a physicist, but I'll give it a shot. except that to bend light you need a gravity field, not a magnetic one. Photons are packets of electromagnetic force, meaning they composed of an oscillating electric and magnetic field and have linearity so the two fields don’t change each other at all.
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Mar 4, 2014 06:49
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Hedrigall posted:Before the whole Yeah, I have grasped as much. I love all of Mievilles work and I never felt like he was pushing Marxism upon his readers, which is perfectly fine to me. Suffice to say, he is no Dan Simmons. I am just slightly annoyed that such a good author believes in a stupid utopian ideology like Marxism and the revolution, And just to be clear on this, I am more or less a social democrat. The quote on Iron Council by Mieville is interesting, however. I reread it last month and I like how the book tries to capture how different resistance groups are formed and working. It is best seen for Ori, who starts in an environment, where they are doing non-violent subversive attempts to organise unions and people through various means. Ori is not satisfied by this, since it is slow and boring and becomes radicalized through Toros group, which uses violence as a mean to the revolution. That Ori gets used as a play piece for creating unrest in the city, is in some ways reminiscent of how the Germans sent Lenin back to Russia during WW1. The only thing I'm missing in the book for an accurate portrayal would be the inevitable fallout among the revolutionary groups if they had succeeded in their struggle.
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Cardiac posted:I am just slightly annoyed that such a good author believes in a stupid utopian ideology like Marxism and the revolution, And just to be clear on this, I am more or less a social democrat.
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