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I'm pretty happy now because back in march cherryh and watts and a few others didn't have kindle versions of books I wanted. So I kept poking that "tell the publisher" button for a few days and gave up. Now both she and watts have them coming out in kindle We just need the kindle of John Steakley's Armor to be put back up and I'll be real happy
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Aug 5, 2014 21:00
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Such an underappreciated book. Felix is the best.
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Aug 5, 2014 22:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I just burned through most of C.J. Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe novels and they're dramatically under-recommended in this thread, possibly because most of the action is political and takes place on space stations, and there's relatively little space pew-pew battling. Still great stuff all around though. I don't really think of CJC's work as space opera; otherwise I'd be recommending her with every post I make in this thread, because she owns. I'm actually just getting back into another serious Cherryh binge myself. I just finished Heavy Time, I'm halfway through Hellburner, Faded Sun is up next and I'm not sure what after that. Rimrunners and Serpent's Reach, possibly, it's been a while since I read those. I'm excited to see more of her books starting to appear on Closed Circle. I refuse to buy DRMd ebooks, but it would be nice to have actual high-quality official digital versions of all her stuff. Hardcopies are bulky and have a tendency to fall apart under heavy load -- I think I've bought the Chanur books three times each at this point -- but home-made OCRs are a pain to make and are never going to be as good as the official builds. Fried Chicken posted:We just need the kindle of John Steakley's Armor to be put back up and I'll be real happy I've actually got Armour, and I remember liking it when I read it ages ago, but I only have a hardcopy, so I'm probably not going to reread it anytime soon.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:38
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Syfy is bringing Scalzi's Old Man's War to TV as The Ghost Brigades.quote:Ghost Brigades follows John Perry, who at seventy five,enlists into the Colonial Defense Force to fight a centuries-long war for man's expansion into the cosmos. Technology allows experiences and consciousness to be transplanted into younger bodies that are outfitted to endure the harsher rigors of war in space. However, soon after John arrives, he finds himself involved with a mysterious woman, and at the same time, at the center of an unraveling conspiracy involving an elite fighting force known as The Ghost Brigades. I enjoyed Old Man's War but I haven't gone on to read any of the others, are they worth it? There's a Q&A on Scalzi's website that says the show will take elements from all the novels, but thankfully I doubt they'll have the main characters be green-skinned with yellow eyes, I don't think that bit would transfer well to TV. With this show and The Expanse novels being adapted into TV hopefully one or both will be good.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:59
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So the archon was not seen to die?
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Aug 6, 2014 03:22
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May not specifically be "space opera", but... Moving Mars by Greg Bear, worth getting? I saw it on the Kindle sale today, and I like the idea of student protest on Mars, but looking at Wikipedia it's apparently part of a series, so would reading it blind be not worth it?
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Aug 7, 2014 09:08
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With the caveat that it's been 20 years since I read it, it's only a "series" in a pretty loose sense, i.e. the dude wrote some novels that share a future history and this is one of them. Actually, what the hell, I remember enjoying it back then and it's $1.99 today, I just bought it.
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Aug 7, 2014 11:13
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I can't see what could possibly go wrong with a show about green people fuckin' and shootin'.
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Aug 7, 2014 13:21
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coyo7e posted:I can't see what could possibly go wrong with a show about green people fuckin' and shootin'. It's SyFy and not HBO is what could go wrong.
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Aug 7, 2014 15:29
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Chairman Capone posted:May not specifically be "space opera", but... Moving Mars by Greg Bear, worth getting? I saw it on the Kindle sale today, and I like the idea of student protest on Mars, but looking at Wikipedia it's apparently part of a series, so would reading it blind be not worth it? Definitely worth reading. I don't think it's actually connected to any other books, you should be fine.
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Aug 7, 2014 15:58
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MonkeyBot posted:It's SyFy and not HBO is what could go wrong. That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"?
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Aug 7, 2014 16:01
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jng2058 posted:That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"? Defiance season 2 is starting to find its feet.
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Aug 7, 2014 16:25
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jng2058 posted:That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"? Then they started showing pro wrestling and nothing was ever the same. It's a shame too because their Dune miniseries was really pretty good.
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Aug 7, 2014 18:32
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jng2058 posted:That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"? I kind of like Dominion 
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Aug 7, 2014 21:13
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jng2058 posted:That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"? Defiance is a great scifi show. They also seem to be making an effort to make actual science fiction shows now between this and the Expanse series they're making. I'm not a big fan of either book series but hopefully they're successful so Syfy goes on to license some better authors' properties.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:22
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Eureka and Warehouse 13 (though I think Eureka predated the re-branding) were ~alright~ pulp tv, though neither of them had much substance beyond "pretty people quip at each other and maybe something blows up" Defiance is the only show they've made since BSG that I would call "good", though.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:29
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They're also doing Scalzi's Old Man's War series too.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:35
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Chairman Capone posted:May not specifically be "space opera", but... Moving Mars by Greg Bear, worth getting? I saw it on the Kindle sale today, and I like the idea of student protest on Mars, but looking at Wikipedia it's apparently part of a series, so would reading it blind be not worth it? I read it when it came out, and eh, it was OK but not brilliant. I was expecting something on par with Blood Music or Eon, and it was a bit of a let-down. It's loosely connected to Queen of Angels and / (Slant), which are much better books, and most strongly connected to Heads which is a quirky little novella. But if I remember it can be pretty much read stand-alone. jng2058 posted:That's pretty wrong. Has SyFy made anything worth a drat since they went "SyFy" instead of "Sci-Fi"? I like Continuum, it's developed a fairly strong plot as it's gone on. Also somewhat amusing to see a SyFy show that doesn't try to hide that it's filmed in Canada.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:38
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Wait, Defiance is actually good? I saw it up until, I think, a great big battle in a canyon and lost interest pretty quickly. Might have to give it another shot then.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:41
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eriktown posted:They're also doing Scalzi's Old Man's War series too. And so the circle is complete. You realize that my question was in response to the news about Ghost Brigades, right? The point being that I've no faith in Ghost Brigades turning out well because I haven't seen anything from SyFy that was, at best, mildly amusing but totally disposable fluff. While most of what I've seen from them is worthless crap. So, to put it another way, is there anything in the productions of Continuum, Defiance, or Dominion that suggests that Ghost Brigades will actually be handled well and thus be worth watching? Because I'm having a hard time giving the home of Sharknado and the WWE the benefit of the doubt.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:19
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SyFy has absolutely nothing to do with the production of Continuum, they just license it from Showcase. So don't give them any points there. (Watch Continuum. Renew Continuum. Love Continuum.) Defiance s1 was a bit of a wash, but s2 has been showing a lot of potential (mostly by displaying a willingness to go Farscape-weird). Dominion... could be worse? It has decent production values, at least, and I like a lot of the cast. I dunno. I think the potential is there. I don't think either one of them is going to be the next Game of Thrones, but if it kicks off some new scifi-in-space-on-tv, I'll be reasonably content.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:58
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PlushCow posted:Cross-posting from the SF/F Thread: Ancillary justice was pretty cool that was my last sci fi I read and I'm looking to pick up another one to read. Now I liked that book no question and will read the next ones but I'm looking for something with a little more action with space opera in mind. Possibly dark since I just finished reading some horror short stories. Anything action packed though will be fun. Any suggestions that I should check out? Dr. Pancakes fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 04:00
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Dr. Pancakes posted:Ancillary justice was pretty cool that was my last sci fi I read and I'm looking to pick up another one to read. Now I liked that book no question and will read the next ones but I'm looking for something with a little more action with space opera in mind. Possibly dark since I just finished reading some horror short stories. Anything action packed though will be fun. Any suggestions that I should check out? Ian M Banks is the closest I can think of to Ancillary Justice offhand. I think the sequel to Ancillary is coming out in a couple or few months hopefully.
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Aug 8, 2014 04:50
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Syfy is also doing Ascension, a series (possibly miniseries?) about a generation ship launched towards Proxima Centauri in the early 1960s that looks very promising, especially by Syfy standards. Really, while I definitely will retain healthy skepticism until I actually see either one, I think it's also a bad idea to lump everything on Syfy in together. It's not like the Sharknado or WWE production staff will have anything to do with Ghost Brigades.
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Aug 8, 2014 08:32
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PupsOfWar posted:Cachat, Zilwicki and co. are more fun than Honor at this point, so I don't mind things getting twisted around for them in principle. Doesn't excuse the other deficiencies (terrible pacing, etc) of the most recent books, though. Personally, I fear Weber has written Henke into a corner. With the latest plot development I read, it looks he can either kill her off to show how dangerous the Mesan Alignment is, or he lets her decapitate the central enemy of this arc prematurely. At which point he can pretty much stop writing Honor Harrington books, since there is no real enemy left. Or we can expect more books with thousands of Solarian ships burning in the night, I guess.
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Aug 8, 2014 12:32
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With how quickly the Mesan Alignment seems to be toppling, it looks to me like the next big thing could be the Solarian League civil war. During which Manticore wins everything because Weber can't write stories that have meaningful negative outcomes for the protagonist
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Aug 10, 2014 08:09
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Strobe posted:With how quickly the Mesan Alignment seems to be toppling, it looks to me like the next big thing could be the Solarian League civil war. During which Manticore wins everything because Weber can't write stories that have meaningful negative outcomes for the protagonist Weber really lost me over time. I remember a point where even important and likable characters died, which showed he could create tension if he wanted to. Nowadays Weber makes his guys and gals so goddamn obnoxiously superior, their very appearance deflats the story, since enemies automatically lose as soon as they show up. It's remarkable that in comparison, the main protagonist of the series Perry Rhodan, who is literally immortal in this series named after him can create more tension even when written by literally dozens of different writers.
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Aug 10, 2014 12:09
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Weber-wise, I just miss the olden days of swashbuckling fun with books like Honor Among Enemies. Small-scale cruiser engagements were always more fun to read about than 430 Manticoran Superdreadnoughts shooting 6,000,000 missiles at 952 Havenite Superdreadnoughts who return fire with 11,000,000 missiles, even before we moved on to the Solarian League and their vast fleet of literal floating targets. Even when game-breaking tech became a factor, smaller engagements allowed it to exist in a more entertaining context. Likewise, Honor herself (despite her many, many Mary Sue qualities) was more fun to follow when she was a brilliant-but-under-appreciated minor officer working her way up through the ranks. Now she's her navy's most prominent fleet admiral (and a prominent admiral/mythic hero in a completely different navy), holder of all of their highest honors (some of them twice!), a Duchess, a Grayson super-duchess, phenomenally wealthy, and part of a happy polyromantic union with cute kiddos and everything. Where do you even go from there? I mean the natural direction when you've got a hero riding that high is to break them down and see what happens, but Weber ain't gonna do that, at least not in any interesting way. He killed her goodpal, Alastair, but that dude had not had any character-development since the first book and I don't think anyone really cared. He killed off some of her close retainers, which I reckon just cost him the greater angst that would've occurred when they became elderly and infirm. He caused massive casualties to the Harrington family, but wimped out of hurting Alfred or Allison and just offed a bunch of cousins we had never even met. He should never have wimped out of killing Honor off, but I'm not sure her kiddos would have been any more interesting unless he also found a way to dismantle the massive support structure she had accumulated. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Aug 10, 2014 |
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Aug 10, 2014 17:32
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ToxicFrog posted:So I've now read the first five RCN books, and they're pretty fun, although some things are a bit jarring and betray its origins in Aubrey-Maturin, like every involved nation being pretty much horrible. quote:- In the second book, when Mundy hacks the minefield so that it won't regard their ship as a valid target...
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Aug 10, 2014 21:39
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Miss-Bomarc posted:That's partly Aubrey-Maturin and partly just David Drake (seriously, that guy is emo as gently caress.) Aah, you're right, I was thinking of the third book, The Far Side of the Stars -- the Alliance minefield around Gehenna. Specifically, this: "The computer's solved the minefield code," Adele said as her wands moved in tight arcs, transmitting new orders to the node which controlled the defense array. "I'm setting the command node to reject all signals to attack the Goldenfels. I'll have it . . . there, we're clear."
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Aug 10, 2014 21:55
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I think one is probably better off handwaving stuff like that away with notions like hardware safeguards and the like, and acknowledging that explaining the limitations of Mundy's hacking powers is beyond David Drake's authorial abilities whilst retaining the pacing and "age of sail" feel the combat in these books have.
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Aug 11, 2014 02:05
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ToxicFrog posted:Aah, you're right, I was thinking of the third book, The Far Side of the Stars -- the Alliance minefield around Gehenna. so the character literally handwaves away the problem  man am I glad I left this series back when she escaped from prison
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Aug 11, 2014 07:03
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Just had a brainfart on how the Honor books could get interesting again. Kill off her entire family or something so she goes completely bonkers and flies away with her fleet after bombing manticore/sol/some planet. And then switch pov and deal with the fallout, hunting down and fighting against the unstoppable Honor Harrington and the fleet she stole. Bonus points if she doesn't lose any of her combat abilities. So yeah, the whole fallen hero thing - as long as it isn't done half assed (read: redemption) it would be interesting to read. He missed the point where he could kill her by a few books now.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:43
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Kellanved posted:Just had a brainfart on how the Honor books could get interesting again. Kill off her entire family or something so she goes completely bonkers and flies away with her fleet after bombing manticore/sol/some planet. And then switch pov and deal with the fallout, hunting down and fighting against the unstoppable Honor Harrington and the fleet she stole. Weber has already demonstrated how he would handle this sort of story. Read (or don't, gently caress if I care) Path of the Fury, and it's pretty much literally that, except substitute "most advanced ship in the fleet" for "her fleet" and add "and the ancient greek Fury tagging along for the ride". Not even loving joking. The main character loses her family (twice, kinda, if you read the 'prologue' novel), her government does poo poo about it, and she goes hunting the perpetrators down in direct contravention (and opposition) to 'friendly' forces. But of course, Weber is incapable of writing that in such a way that the other "good guys" don't secretly (or openly) support her and despise what they're doing, even to the extent of willingly disregarding orders in order to give her a better shot at doing what she's doing, because wheeeeeeee she's the protagonist.
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Aug 12, 2014 22:20
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One of the most frustrating things about Weber is his willingness to set up interesting conflicts and then sabotage them completely by painting one side as Right and Competent.
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Aug 12, 2014 22:52
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Strobe posted:Weber has already demonstrated how he would handle this sort of story. Read (or don't, gently caress if I care) Path of the Fury, and it's pretty much literally that, except substitute "most advanced ship in the fleet" for "her fleet" and add "and the ancient greek Fury tagging along for the ride". speaking of Path of the Fury/In Fury Born, I came across a web-original story the other day that is more or less a better version of the same narrative. On the Spacebattles.com forums, of all godforsaken places. Premise: multistellar human civilization is attacked by a large, technologically-superior confederation of alien races, who are a very transparent knockoff of the Covenant from Halo (I suspect this whole thing might have started out as a halo fanfic at some point). Late in the war, the humans' state-of-the-art flagship manages to outduel and destroy one of the aliens' supposedly-invincible capital ships (though it is crippled and suffers total crew loss in the doing), which prompts the aliens to Get Serious about the war. The ship's AI takes command, but, by the time it makes it back to Sol space, Earth has been glassed and humanity is practically wiped out. The AI snaps and heads off into the void, where it spends thousands of years preying on the alien confederacy until it becomes a sort of interstellar boogeyman. Story picks up when some far-future human sepoys stumble into the rogue ship's path. It still has its issues (being internet fiction by some nerd), but I think it's a cut or three above most Baen output and worth the read-through if anyone found the "rogue warship AI on a vengeful rampage" premise of In Fury Born super intriguing but would like to avoid Weberisms. Author is pretty good at making sympathetic enemy characters (their government lies to them about all the hardassed oppressive poo poo they do) and the heroes, while not ~amazingly deep~ or anything, outstrip your average MilSF protagonist. There were also some episodes of Andromeda that tacked a similar premise, iirc. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 01:35
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I started this. It's not bad so far.
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Aug 13, 2014 14:29
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eriktown posted:I started this. It's not bad so far. Since Weber's apparently gone bonkers, judging by his latest books, I've to start this. I'm a sucker for tales about advanced AI!
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Aug 14, 2014 00:54
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Libluini posted:Since Weber's apparently gone bonkers, judging by his latest books, I've to start this. I'm a sucker for tales about advanced AI! Tried Asher?
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Aug 14, 2014 10:16
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Cardiac posted:Tried Asher? Man, I really don't think he's all that. I especially find his AI particularly interesting. His planetary romances - Spatterjay and so on - are actually pretty good though.
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Aug 14, 2014 14:44
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