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(obligatory mention of the Culture books)
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Aug 12, 2014 20:22
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Hedrigall posted:This is weird as gently caress, Echopraxia is coming out in UK/Australia and some other territories as Firefall, except it's not Echopraxia, it's an omnibus of Blindsight AND Echopraxia. Awesome, but now I'll have to go into my local and change my order. Or will I...the NA Echopraxia cover is pretty drat awesome too.
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Aug 12, 2014 21:30
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eriktown posted:(obligatory mention of the Culture books) Except for The State Of The Art, I fookolt fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 22:45
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fookolt posted:Except for The State Of The Art, I don't think The Culture is anything but "low-key". So you think it is low-key? (don't think + anything but = double negative)
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Aug 12, 2014 23:13
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less laughter posted:So you think it is low-key? (don't think + anything but = double negative) Duh  Thank you for the correction. I think The Culture is anything but low-key.
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Aug 12, 2014 23:39
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thehomemaster posted:Awesome, but now I'll have to go into my local and change my order. I already have the echopraxia ebook preordered but i want that omnibus so loving bad
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Aug 12, 2014 23:42
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House Louse posted:Echopraxia solo is being released a few months later, so it's not a bizarre move, just a cash grab. A few months? It comes out in less than two weeks.
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Aug 13, 2014 00:14
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I mean that where Firefall is being released, Echopraxia solo is coming out a few months later.
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Aug 13, 2014 03:26
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Book Depository is giving me 1 day until Firefall and 13 days til Echopraxia.
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Aug 13, 2014 05:02
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About the Powder Mage series recommendation on the last page: I don't think it's that good. The first was original enough that I gave the second book a chance even though the writing is pretty mediocre and the characters are flat, and then the second was just more of the same. The idea is good enough that I'll probably read the third even though it'll be a struggle, since it would be great in the hands of a better author. For instance, the class struggle between privileged/powder mages/everyone else would be really cool flavor if it was a bigger part of the story.
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Aug 13, 2014 05:08
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regularizer posted:About the Powder Mage series recommendation on the last page: I don't think it's that good. The first was original enough that I gave the second book a chance even though the writing is pretty mediocre and the characters are flat, and then the second was just more of the same. The idea is good enough that I'll probably read the third even though it'll be a struggle, since it would be great in the hands of a better author. For instance, the class struggle between privileged/powder mages/everyone else would be really cool flavor if it was a bigger part of the story. I tried to read the second book recently, and somehow can't remember a single detail about the first book, even though I had read it only a few months ago. That usually never happens to me.
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Aug 13, 2014 06:27
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Kellanved posted:Looking for a new sf to read, something in space and low-key. You should read the Culture books even though they're not really low key. Start with The Player of Games. Always happy to hear from Blue Planet fans. I've sold a bunch of short stories - you can find all my professional sales at sethdickinson.com. Hopefully one or two will click with you! I also have a trilogy coming out from Tor, but the thread will be spared my blibbering about them until next year when the PR starts ramping up.
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Aug 13, 2014 06:32
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Is there a Tom Clancy/Matthew Reilly of science fiction? I've got a few long flights coming up and want some airport fiction set in space. Recently read The Icarus Hunt and enjoyed it for what it was so something similar would be great. Are the rest of Timothy Zahn's books (other than the Thrawn Trilogy) worth reading? I see the Culture Series recommended all over the place and have the first couple on my Kindle ready to read but not sure if they are light enough reading for what I want.
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Aug 13, 2014 12:04
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Stupid Decisions posted:I see the Culture Series recommended all over the place and have the first couple on my Kindle ready to read but not sure if they are light enough reading for what I want.
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Aug 13, 2014 12:12
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Cardiovorax posted:Probably not, no. They're good, but even the lighter ones are pretty serious scifi. Use of Weapons in particular isn't something I'd recommend to anyone who just wants to read some space opera to kill a few hours. Noted, I do like my serious scifi as well so will save them for later. Thanks. Edit: And on the topic of serious scifi, it is incredibly annoying that the UK Kindle version of Echopraxia is being released a month after the hardback. Stupid Decisions fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 12:22
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General Battuta posted:
Congrats! I worked there for 13+ years and I'm happy to see from your site that Marco's your editor. He's a really good guy.
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Aug 13, 2014 12:29
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Kellanved posted:Looking for a new sf to read, something in space and low-key.
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Aug 13, 2014 12:40
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Forgall posted:Greg Egan's Diaspora. Just make sure you take a course in topology first. I love Greg Egan.
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Aug 13, 2014 13:28
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Here's a question: What's the best anthology collecting the fiction from a current SF magazine/webzine? I'm interested in the Clarkesworld collections (which year had the best output though?) as well as Lightspeed; Year One, but I'm wondering what I should get first. What other magazine anthologies are good?
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Aug 13, 2014 14:26
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neongrey posted:No, it's 'on third thought, I really didn't want Fitz to be happy after all'. So I read this (Robin Hobb's latest) last night, and had this horrible, oily feeling of dread the whole way through. A lot of that was just my knowledge of all the horrible poo poo Hobb likes to put her protagonists (and Fitz in particular) through, but from Molly's pregnancy on, there's this very real sense that the story is always teetering on the verge of total catastrophe. When it does, finally (inevitably), all go to poo poo, it's almost a relief. Almost, because I cannot even imagine how far Fitz is going to go off the rails in the next book.  I was sceptical when I heard there was to be a new viewpoint, but it actually turns out perfectly fine. Hobb's greatest strength has always been her characterisation, and she brings Bee to life almost with a snap of her fingers, it's that easy. It did surprise me, however, how little the new perspective put Fitz into a new light. One of the most defining features of the Fitz books has always been how closely they cleave to our protagonist's (very limited) viewpoint, and how poorly that conveys how he is seen by others. Bee's perspective is itself so limited, however (and derivative of her father's besides), that it barely impinges on Fitz' character at all. One thing that bugged me was the chronology of the book- the story covers somewhere between eleven and nineteen years, and the breadth of that range should indicate just how poorly the book conveyed a sense of time passing. Or how little attention I was paying- I am notoriously bad at following chronology in books, but this was exceptional. Hobb covers most of this time in very broad strokes with very few chronological markers. The first indication I had that more than a couple of months had passed was when Winterfest came up for the second time- at which point the book saw fit to inform me, in an oblique manner, that seven years might have passed. At some point during this I actually managed to miss Patience's death- what feels like it should be a major event is reduced to an offhand comment and only detailed in flashback. It doesn't help that the Skill has now completely untethered Fitz and Chade from the normal course of ageing. Fitz is 47 at the start of the book, but physically no older than he was at the end of the last one. He could be in his mid sixties by the end, but there's no sign that he's changed at all. Beyond that, there's the perennial Hobb problem where her characters are either unable or (perhaps more likely, given the nature of the author) unwilling to come to conclusions that the reader reached books ago. I'd worked out who the uninvited guests where more or less immediately, and it takes Fitz what feels like an eternity to piece together Bee's true nature. And, of course, no one figures out who the "unexpected son" is, a mystery so obvious it might as well have been in the title. Less of a problem and more something that just struck me, was how divorced the whole thing is from Farseer politics. Every Fitz book has, eventually, come down to some scheme designed to help or hinder the Six Duchies. Here, it seems Fitz has finally gotten his wish to be left alone; the grand geopolitical situation (incorporation of the Mountain Kingdom, border raids by dragons, Chalced in civil war (under a female ruler, no less)) is wholly peripheral, delivered in asides and footnotes, and we are left with a laserlike focus on Fitz and his immediate relationships that hasn't really been seen since the opening sections of Assassin's Quest (a similarity which I suspect is wholly deliberate: this situation with Bee is Fitz' childhood 2.0). When the outside does, finally, intrude, it is only at the very end, and not from the Duchies or any of its neighbouring states but in a place so distant that, not only is it not marked on the traditional fantasy map, nowhere on that map has even heard of it. Which all means that the supporting cast from previous books don't really get a look in. Molly, Chade, Nettle and, of all people, Riddle are the only characters that get facetime of any significant length, but this didn't actually bother as much as I thought it should. There is a definite sense that their stories are complete, or at least irrelevant to this one- The Tawny Man trilogy seems to have done a perfectly good job tying up loose ends after all. The new characters are more or less universally unlikeable hindrances (well, it is a Hobb book) and don't really feature as more than (passive) antagonists. Fortunately, the Fitz-Molly, and later Fitz-Bee relationships prove to be more than ample fodder for a novel. I think, if I was going to give this book a grade, it'd be a B, or possibly a B+- I'm not sure I needed another Fitz book, but gently caress it- I've been living in this guy's head since I was twelve, at this point I'm up for whatever. The chronological issues, while jarring, ultimately don't harm the narrative all that much- all we really need to know is that Time Has Passed and Bee exists and is nine now. Of course, again, I've never had a great sense of time and if you're the sort of person who gets really loving mad because A Crown of Swords only covers a week then it might be more of a problem for you. Otherwise, I don't think it's going to appeal to anyone who's not a fan of Hobb's work (I know there're a number of you here), but if you're looking for more of the same, this is it. bonds0097 posted:I love Greg Egan. I was going to say yeah, I always liked Eon/Blood Music/The Infinity Concerto, then I realised, for the first time ever, that Greg Egan and Greg Bear are not actually the same person  What sort of stuff does Greg Egan do?
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Aug 13, 2014 16:41
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Huh, I guess I will go out of my way to get the new Fitz book, then. Sounds like I will like it.
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Aug 13, 2014 17:47
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Autonomous Monster posted:I was going to say yeah, I always liked Eon/Blood Music/The Infinity Concerto, then I realised, for the first time ever, that Greg Egan and Greg Bear are not actually the same person Fictionalized physics courses with extremely shallow characters. (I like Greg Egan but you aren't really reading him for his plots or characters, you're reading for the batshit crazy physics thought experiments the books center around.)
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Aug 13, 2014 17:55
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another person signing on who just finished the magician's land. was very happy and felt the last book tied all the story together to a complete ending. Quentin is actually the strongest character for a change and by the end you aren't exasperated by him you are rooting for him instead of spending all your time wishing he wouldn't be such a oval office also: part of the strongest part for me in the series was that when alice was dead she stayed dead, at least for the second book and the vast majority of the third. When she comes back it is satisfying however
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Aug 13, 2014 18:14
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Nevvy Z posted:I don't remember that chapter. But it's a long story. It'll pick up more, they are still gathering the Fellowship. The Blade Itself (First Law series , Joe Abercrombie) spoilers: I'm just past the fencing tournament after the major three POV character's paths have crossed and now they're sharing chapters and I have been reading page after page so fast. The lighter prose has been a godsend for this. It's not like an ASOIAF book where you get a really amazing chapter end and then know you have three pages of forest description before anything else happens. (Plus you get that little thrill from each POV intersecting, while ASOIAF constantly denies you that.) Logen is a great character. I like West too. Not sure what to make of Glokta, but I really enjoy his angry little perspective. I can't stand Jezal and I hope he has some comeuppance on its way. No idea where the Dogman's story is going. And I don't really like Ferro(?) - her chapters are the slowest. Not trusting Bayaz at all after he cheated the tournament. The magic is the worst part of the book so far. All our heroes fight and survive on blades and words, but then there are these important things decided by people who can just shimmer and seemingly do anything. 
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Aug 13, 2014 20:28
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So I just finished Leviathan's Wake and am starting Caliban's War and apparently SyFy's adapting the Expanse series into a TV series? I find that a bit hard to swallow, not just because it'll be in the hands of Syfy ( ), but because how on earth are they going to cast this thing? What I absolutely love about Leviathan's Wake (and from what I've read, Caliban's War) is just how freaking diverse the solar system is. It's not the typical space is a Whites Only area because everyone else died off or are mysteriously absent once we made the transition to interstellar civilization, you really feel that the solar system is populated with all of Earth's cultures and that these cultures mix and adapt to off-Earth life in weird, unique ways.I mean, we've got Naomi who is apparently a mix of African, South American, and Asian (and the protagonist's love interest!); the pilot, Alex, is an Indian man with a heavy Texan drawl because of how settlement went down in a particular area of Mars; most of the setting's power-players aren't white (Fred's black, Chrisjen's an Indian woman, the Mao people are chinese-europeans(?)). The series is just full of so many non-white/mixed major-ish characters that I am honestly worried that we'll get the normal whitewashing affair and the SyFy adaption will lose this one very big departure on how scifi authors generally envision the future. There's this one really great passage in Caliban's War where James is looking at Naomi (I think) and he thinks to himself how generic he feels in comparison to the wild ethnic mix her Belter heritage has afforded her. And, well, he's right. He's just some Montana farm boy who would be your stock white protagonist were it not for a few caveats in his background (coming from a group family where he had, like, 6 or 8 parents due to how population control is enforced on Earth) and the fact that the series' authors have done an amazing job with populating the solar system with all of Earth's peoples rather than those fair ones hailing from the Western developed world. Don't give my worries any credence, SyFy.
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Aug 13, 2014 21:03
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nutranurse posted:So I just finished Leviathan's Wake and am starting Caliban's War and apparently SyFy's adapting the Expanse series into a TV series? I find that a bit hard to swallow, not just because it'll be in the hands of Syfy ( When I read Leviathan Wakes I mostly just got annoyed by (among other things) the way the authors set up this ethnically/culturally/linguistically diverse milieu and yet had the most whitebread central protagonists possible (holden and miller). The second book improved on this by adding bobbie and christjen as major PoVs, but drat. But yeah, I will expect Syfy to whitewash most of the cast until proven wrong. I would feel better about their current plans if they weren't adapting The Expanse and Old Man's War at the same time, since I don't see where they have the budget and resources to do justice to both. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Aug 13, 2014 21:10
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PupsOfWar posted:When I read Leviathan Wakes I mostly just got annoyed by (among other things) the way the authors set up this ethnically/culturally/linguistically diverse milieu and yet had the most whitebread central protagonists possible (holden and miller). The second book improved on this by adding bobbie and christjen as major PoVs, but drat. Yeah, I was a bit annoyed with Miller and Holden given that we've got this huge cast of people who are atypical for most scifi right at our peripherals while reading, but you know what? I can kind of see why you'd stick to 'Buck Rogers Space Hero Man' and 'Burned Out Detective' for the first book. They do provide an easier way to ease into the setting because, well, Holden for all intents and purposes is us because he is the closest link we have to the old America (and even this link is tenuous at best once more is revealed about his backstory), while Miller... I dunno. Miller's a hard-yet-easy character for me to parse because he really just was a burned out detective who just so happened to have grown up on a space-station. The way his character was written makes it seem like when the authors were coming up with him they emphasized detective first and spacer second because he's really not that different from other detective-types—it's just his situation that's different (which is what really matters for a detective story, I guess). Ultimately I'm alright with him, but I am loving Bobbie's and Christjen's PoV's way more than anything we got from Miller in the first book. SyFy's doing an adaptation of Old Man's War too? At the same time? Jesus, this poo poo is doomed to fail. 
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Aug 13, 2014 21:22
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Kalman posted:Fictionalized physics courses with extremely shallow characters. Egan is very much in the 'speculative' part of speculative/science fiction. Sometimes that's very math/physics heavy but sometimes he's exploring cool philosophical ideas. He has a neat short story about a couple who desperately want to understand each other by perceiving the world through the mind of the other. It's weird and a little sad. Permutation City is pretty awesome and approachable. He also has that book about an MMO set in Iran (Zendegi) that's not too out there with science and math. If you've never read him, I would definitely check out his short story collections. Axiomatic is a great intro and has some awesome stories (Infinite Assassin is an awesome story about assassins, the multiverse and Cantor's infinities). I definitely agree that he is not the ideal choice for someone look for character-driven sci-fi. It's very ideas based, much like early Asimov stories.
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Aug 13, 2014 21:59
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bonds0097 posted:Egan is very much in the 'speculative' part of speculative/science fiction. Sometimes that's very math/physics heavy but sometimes he's exploring cool philosophical ideas. He has a neat short story about a couple who desperately want to understand each other by perceiving the world through the mind of the other. It's weird and a little sad. Yeah, I did not mean to say Egan isn't good at what he does - he absolutely is, and I like his fiction a lot. (That short story you mention is excellent, and is part of a series of his stories examining possible ramifications of an upload-type technology.) Just, you know, don't go into it expecting characterization or scintillating prose.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:01
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I'm struggling through Way of the Kings because someone said it would go insane DragonBall Z poo poo but I'm now like three quarters in and... It's just so boring. Nothing is happening. Kaladin moans about and is a sad sack of poo poo. The girl is exited about studying and the General is thinking of retirement. This has gone on for hundreds of pages. Jesus. It doesn't help that the pov characters have zero interaction and everyone else has a one note personality. Should I just give up again or soldier through?
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Aug 13, 2014 22:25
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It's a Sanderson novel. If you don't like it yet it won't get any better.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:30
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I picked up H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy collected editions at Half Price Books the other day. I liked Scalzi's recent retelling, and decided to keep an eye out for the originals. They're so 1960s it almost hurts. Nice little stories, but really badly dated. The first book is largely about the political and legal maneuvering about the Fuzzies' sapience. It tends to stay pretty tech-vague except with things like easy antigravity and apparently unbeatable lie detectors. They have video phones and video recorders, and even high-speed video transmission. Except recording is all done on a spool of wire and 'high speed' literally means they can transmit a copy at 60x normal playback speed. It is a little unusual (by today's standards, at least) that all 8 of the other sapient species are inferior to humans; even the Fuzzies wind up being mentally equivalent to 10-year-olds. It talks about adopting Fuzzy families and basically treating them as clever, affectionate pets, but with the rights and legal protections of humans. A strange mix of progressivism and...Imperialism? Paternalism? The Big Bad Company loses its "And you thought what we did to Earth was bad" level of exclusive exploitation rights, but rather than the Fuzzies getting the native rights to their planet, it just turns into a public domain landgrab. The second book really starts dating itself. The corporate bigwig literally has a secretarial pool of 'girls' to do office work. There's a monolithic 'Computer' that's described like a blinkenlights state-dependent phone switchboard that a Fuzzy fucks up by re-arranging lights and plugs. It mentions how Newton didn't even have carbons as a backup copy when his dog wrecked a paper he spent months on! Piper was only a couple years from his death at age 60 when he wrote these, so even that computer must've seemed utterly fantastical to him, but for a story set over 500 years into the future, it still seems...short sighted.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:34
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General Emergency posted:I'm struggling through Way of the Kings because someone said it would go insane DragonBall Z poo poo but I'm now like three quarters in and... It's just so boring. Nothing is happening. Kaladin moans about and is a sad sack of poo poo. The girl is exited about studying and the General is thinking of retirement. This has gone on for hundreds of pages. Jesus. It doesn't help that the pov characters have zero interaction and everyone else has a one note personality. Should I just give up again or soldier through? I about stopped reading, but the ending is pretty tight and closes up the plot threads nicely. You're not missing out on a lot if you just stop, but it does have a satisfying climax.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:41
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I've got pretty much zero doubt that any fiction written within the last few years will seem at least as shortsighted, maybe more. The 60s were still the era of "technology and science can do everything, jetpacks here I come!" while modern times are rather more disillusioned with the promise of rapid technological progress, so the current preoccupation in scifi is less on the science and more on the fiction.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:42
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Picked up Fool's Assassin, been reading it all afternoon. Objectively there's odds and ends like specific bits of writing that I don't love, but I think this is exactly the book I needed to be reading this very second and I feel very warm and fuzzy about it.
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Aug 14, 2014 00:36
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regularizer posted:About the Powder Mage series recommendation on the last page: I don't think it's that good. The first was original enough that I gave the second book a chance even though the writing is pretty mediocre and the characters are flat, and then the second was just more of the same. The idea is good enough that I'll probably read the third even though it'll be a struggle, since it would be great in the hands of a better author. For instance, the class struggle between privileged/powder mages/everyone else would be really cool flavor if it was a bigger part of the story. I think its decent. Not really recommendation material. It really does have a lot of cool points, but the story just gets bogged down by uninteresting plot lines. Adamats entire plot in the second book was pretty boring, with the Proprietor reveal and bo killing vetas really being the only interesting points. Tamas's story was also pretty boring for the entirety of the second book. What I really didnt like about the second book was how angsty Taniel is. His relationship with Ka-Poel was interesting in the first book but his whole idc about authority yo gently caress off generals im the best shooter in the army shtick was very annoying. As you said, Ill still read the third book. Anyone got any recommendations for a new series to start? I was thinking of reading Richard Morgans fantasy series as I really liked the Altered Carbon books, but I haven't heard all that much about it.
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Aug 14, 2014 00:52
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I read the Fuzzy books when I was a little kid and thought they were awesome :3 IMO they're not a bad way to teach kids that even those who don't look, sound, or act like you are people too (...unless they're women, I guess, this is the sixties.)
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Aug 14, 2014 01:21
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spootime posted:
I love his fantasy series, if I was to compare it to another I'd say it's most like Abercrombie. The last book is supposed to be coming out later this year too.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:35
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savinhill posted:I love his fantasy series, if I was to compare it to another I'd say it's most like Abercrombie. The last book is supposed to be coming out later this year too. I, also, really enjoy the Land Fit for Heroes. The setting is interesting, and it's more than a little refreshing to have two of three leads in a fantasy series be GLBT. It's only a little grim, not excessively so, and has the usual violence Morgan is known for.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:44
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Velius posted:I, also, really enjoy the Land Fit for Heroes. The setting is interesting, and it's more than a little refreshing to have two of three leads in a fantasy series be GLBT. It's only a little grim, not excessively so, and has the usual violence Morgan is known for. Some nice Crowning Moments of Awesome, too.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:52
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