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Ika posted:Is the shadowmarch series by Tad Williams decent? Is it something that's more like LOTR, or malazan, or WOT? It is Tad Williams, so closest to Robin Hobb or Stephen Donaldson. Ie he excels in making his characters suffer, but he has very good world building and good storylines. Shadowmarch was pretty good, it is not the greatest series ever, but I liked it.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:07
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Shadowmarch was a slog for me, just way too much going on and as soon as I'd finally start getting into one character's storyline it would switch to another character I didn't care about yet. I gave up towards the end of the second book cuz there were just too many story threads that I wasn't invested in and didn't seem close to becoming relevant to the ones I did care for.
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Aug 16, 2014 20:21
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Well, after doing a second read of The Old Man War I have to rectify my initial impression on the book. Now I've found it to be good. Probably not "outstanding", but simply good. After ending it for the second time, I have gone ahead and read "The ghost brigades". With that second book in the series most of the problems I had have dissapeared. Now I find that universe really interesting. And I have liked a lot the moral ambiguity of all the forces involved. I mean, the Colonials have a darkish side, but they are not cartoonish villains, and even the man-eating, space cheating Rhaey seem to have their point. On the other hand, I feel myself (almost) guilty... because I have to confess I have actually enjoyed some B.V. Larson stuff  . I have read the three Undying Mercenaries books and the first two Star Force ones. To be honest, the first one in Undying Mercenaries (Steel World) is sooo bad I really thought it was a mil-fic parody. And the first one in Star Force (Swarm) has no way to take it seriously. Buuuuuut... we,, they are entertaining and very silly, so I had a good time reading those (and they are cheap).
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Aug 16, 2014 20:46
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Loving the gently caress out of Magician's Land so far. I'm about 55% in. Finding out who Betsy is was a huge shock; Janet's story about visiting the Wandering Desert was badass as gently caress; and Rupert Chatwin's diary was really cool, even if it did retcon the Cozy Horse to be a woolly mammoth!
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Aug 17, 2014 09:25
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Just a heads up. New Harrison Peel books are out on amazon. Both books 3 and 4. Dunno if they suck or not but I just bought em. Love the series and the character. It's sort of airport thriller meets cthulhu lovecraftian horrors.
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Aug 17, 2014 13:03
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Cardiac posted:It is Tad Williams, so closest to Robin Hobb or Stephen Donaldson. Alright thanks for all the replies. I'll give it a try.
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Aug 17, 2014 13:16
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Amberskin posted:Well, after doing a second read of The Old Man War I have to rectify my initial impression on the book. Now I've found it to be good. Probably not "outstanding", but simply good. After ending it for the second time, I have gone ahead and read "The ghost brigades". With that second book in the series most of the problems I had have dissapeared. Now I find that universe really interesting. And I have liked a lot the moral ambiguity of all the forces involved. I mean, the Colonials have a darkish side, but they are not cartoonish villains, and even the man-eating, space cheating Rhaey seem to have their point. Scalzi is the best YA writer.
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Aug 17, 2014 18:52
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Hedrigall posted:Loving the gently caress out of Magician's Land so far. I'm about 55% in. Sometimes his weird style really works, and Janet's story was really the epitome of it. “That’s how I got my new axes.”
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Aug 17, 2014 21:35
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Hugo winners are in.quote:BEST NOVEL Ehhhhh.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:44
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Better than Wheel of Time getting it, and at least she's good people? v v
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Aug 18, 2014 00:12
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The characters in the Magicians trilogy might as well have been pulled directly from my old circle of tiny liberal arts college friends. Quentin and his hosed up buddies are probably the fantasy characters that I most identify with, which I'm sure says something about me. They're self-aware though, at least. I liked The Magician's Land. My only real complaint is that Quentin immediately got rewarded in every way possible for getting some of his poo poo together. I don't mind the guy having a happy ending, but it started feeling a little much, especially with the relatively short amount of time for the resolution.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:22
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Megazver posted:Hugo winners are in. I enjoyed it. Certainty a different spin on space opera or whathaveyou. Neptune's Brood was doomed by being a sequel to the sexbot cover novel, which I still haven't read in spite of loving Stross. No idea what Parasite or Warbound are, haven't heard a whisper of either. Wheel of time certainly didn't deserve to win given how terrible the ending was. 13 books to end with that?
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Aug 18, 2014 00:25
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If you check out the full voting statistics, it's interesting to note that Vox Day's Opera Vita Aeterna was soundly trounced by No Award in the novelette category, and Larry "Ideological Purity Campaigner" Correira's own Warbound barely beat No Award for fifth place in the novel category.
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Aug 18, 2014 00:28
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Cardiac posted:It is Tad Williams, so closest to Robin Hobb or Stephen Donaldson. GRRM might murder everyone you love, but death is too easy for Hobb. She is the Queen of Pain and suffering and I am a masochist.
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Aug 18, 2014 01:27
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zoux posted:I'm rereading Blindsight and I have a question: what does topology mean in the context of information? It's how your network is set up. It has a dual meaning here though. Topology is the study of the surface, but the surface is generated by the whole of the object. Siri translates meaning without understanding - he converts the surface, but even he doesn't understand what creates what he is translating. It is part of the chinese room idea. It also goes deeper to his understanding of people, he interacts literally by reading only surface cues, and has no understanding of the emotions and internal life that makes people tic. Drakhoran posted:If you check out the full voting statistics, it's interesting to note that Vox Day's Opera Vita Aeterna was soundly trounced by No Award in the novelette category, and Larry "Ideological Purity Campaigner" Correira's own Warbound barely beat No Award for fifth place in the novel category. That whole slate came dead last in every category except best editor, where they came second last.  Has anyone here read Neuropath? I'm trying to, he mirrors the ideas and tone of Watts stuff but doesn't have the prose to carry it. I'm 3 chapters in and it seems off so far.
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Aug 18, 2014 03:13
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What is your guy's thoughts on Moorcock's Elric series? I think it's rather interesting for a fantasy, as it resembles allegorical/mythological fantasy like Gene Wolfe's books rather a than a typical sword swinging and spell flinging pulp.
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Aug 18, 2014 04:13
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Fried Chicken posted:Has anyone here read Neuropath? I'm trying to, he mirrors the ideas and tone of Watts stuff but doesn't have the prose to carry it. I'm 3 chapters in and it seems off so far. The only book I've ever physically dunked into a trash can. In addition to being poorly written the science is garbage. It's a shame - the fundamental ideas he wants to get at are very interesting! He just neither understands nor executes well on them.
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Aug 18, 2014 05:21
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Megazver posted:Hugo winners are in. I thought Ancillary Justice was pretty good, myself. My one complaint about it is that it spent a lot of time on that gendered language stuff only for it to not matter at all, and so all that stuff kind of felt like a waste. This may just be because this thread mentioned the gender-language thing so much that I just assumed it would be more important than it actually was, though.
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Aug 18, 2014 06:08
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Fried Chicken posted:It's how your network is set up. It has a dual meaning here though. Topology is the study of the surface, but the surface is generated by the whole of the object. Siri translates meaning without understanding - he converts the surface, but even he doesn't understand what creates what he is translating. It is part of the chinese room idea. It also goes deeper to his understanding of people, he interacts literally by reading only surface cues, and has no understanding of the emotions and internal life that makes people tic. One of the most interesting ideas in applied math these days is trying to do this: applying topological techniques to analyze data sets. As an analogy for everyone not tuned into math, you know how music visualizers can take a song and spit out a series of images related to it? Imagine looking just at the visualizations of the songs without the songs themselves. If you had enough of them to analyze you might be able to find patterns; eventually, if you had the right kind of visualizer, you might be able to look at a visualization and tell me whether it's live or a studio performance, give me the band that most likely performed it, even hazard a guess at who the drummer might be or what instruments they were playing. Just by looking at the kinds of shapes and patterns that the song generates without hearing the song itself. The problem with doing this for music is that you'd likely need thousands or millions of visualizations to really start figuring out these patterns. The "good" news is that corporations have massive data sets on all their clients these days. You can essentially create a "data visualizer" and then have a computer sort through massive assloads of pictures to look for patterns in the shapes and see if you can turn up anything meaningful. I'm not sure if anyone's actually been successful in using things like homology to analyze data sets (if any of you know please let me know) but I think the idea is goddamn fascinating, and it sounds like the kind of idea that would be realized in Blindsight's universe. That's what Siri's doing, metaphorically if not literally. He's looking at the visualizer without hearing the song.
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Aug 18, 2014 07:58
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amuayse posted:What is your guy's thoughts on Moorcock's Elric series? I think it's rather interesting for a fantasy, as it resembles allegorical/mythological fantasy like Gene Wolfe's books rather a than a typical sword swinging and spell flinging pulp. The Elric series is a classic and still good to day. It is a classic tragic hero tale and I personally love all the weird imaginative parts of it. The influence of the Elric tales can be seen in the Malazan books and Anomander Rake as well as in other series. But it is in some ways still rather pulpy. Rougey posted:Christ, I just finished reading Fools Assassin. Hobb is worse than GRRM, since she makes you care for her characters and then she kills them. GRRM just have morally ambigous characters that he kills off in plot twists. The death of Nighteyes still makes me sad like other deaths of companion animals. Ten thousand men crucified by the road (Deadhouse Gates) don't come close. Just started reading it and it is with familliar joy and dread I encounter old friends. Sometimes I feel like the best ending for Fitz was how it ended in the first series.
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Aug 18, 2014 08:13
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Velius posted:I enjoyed it. Certainty a different spin on space opera or whathaveyou. Neptune's Brood was doomed by being a sequel to the sexbot cover novel, which I still haven't read in spite of loving Stross. No idea what Parasite or Warbound are, haven't heard a whisper of either. Wheel of time certainly didn't deserve to win given how terrible the ending was. 13 books to end with that? You should read it (but I liked Saturn's Children too), it is set thousands of years later and is very loosely connected with what happened in the first book. It's more "Bitcoins suck for interstellar, sub-light trading: The Book".
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Aug 18, 2014 08:14
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Khizan posted:I thought Ancillary Justice was pretty good, myself. My one complaint about it is that it spent a lot of time on that gendered language stuff only for it to not matter at all, and so all that stuff kind of felt like a waste. This may just be because this thread mentioned the gender-language thing so much that I just assumed it would be more important than it actually was, though. The thing that bothered me about it is that an intelligent space ship that can rip holes on space time, interpret a thousand points of view at once, and practically read the thoughts of its crew based in their vital signs, and whose primary purpose is interacting with foreign cultures should probably be better at decoding gender. I enjoyed the book, but the gender thing felt contrived to make it ~unique~.
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Aug 18, 2014 11:51
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I'm pretty sure it's because Radch society doesn't differentiate between genders like we do; when she goes to the local capital everyone's described as wearing the same general style.
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Aug 18, 2014 12:01
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Ancillary Justice is honestly a joke of a book. It's a total and ridiculously transparent ripoff of the Culture books, even to the point where the language of the empire intentionally uses gender-neutral pronouns. If it was any more obvious about its plagiarism it would just be a reprint of Use of Weapons.
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Aug 18, 2014 12:02
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regularizer posted:I'm pretty sure it's because Radch society doesn't differentiate between genders like we do; when she goes to the local capital everyone's described as wearing the same general style. Right. But the Radch constantly expand by annexation of cultures which do differentiate between genders. The protagonist has been participating in this process for thousands of years. She shouldnt be bewildered by the concept.
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Aug 18, 2014 12:32
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Cardiovorax posted:Ancillary Justice is honestly a joke of a book. It's a total and ridiculously transparent ripoff of the Culture books, even to the point where the language of the empire intentionally uses gender-neutral pronouns. If it was any more obvious about its plagiarism it would just be a reprint of Use of Weapons. Wasn't it also one of the entries where the publisher only gave out a sample of the book to the panel instead of the complete text?
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Aug 18, 2014 13:29
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Subterranean Press has a grab bag up for sale again. Has anyone here ever bought one? Did you feel you got your monies worth?
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Aug 18, 2014 14:45
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Eh... never bought one but 150$ for a blind hope is a bit much. I can get by with a bag of crap from woot for 8$ cause, gently caress it's 8 bucks. 150 bucks for something I "might" like is a bit much to ask. That's just me though. Going through their book catalog they have some cool stuff. I'd say if you have 150$ to blow, there are worse ways than getting almost 500$ worth of books.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:08
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Jedit posted:Wasn't it also one of the entries where the publisher only gave out a sample of the book to the panel instead of the complete text? I think someone said upthread that this year was a bit of a special case because 4/5 of the nominees had the same UK publisher.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:18
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fritz posted:I think someone said upthread that this year was a bit of a special case because 4/5 of the nominees had the same UK publisher.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:19
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Cardiovorax posted:And people wonder why everyone laughs at sci-fi awards. You're gonna have to unpack that a bit.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:21
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Would you take a non-genre literary award seriously if 80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher and the panel of judges had only gotten to see excerpts instead of the whole book and the winner was this obviously plagiarized?
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Aug 18, 2014 15:25
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Cardiovorax posted:Ancillary Justice is honestly a joke of a book. It's a total and ridiculously transparent ripoff of the Culture books, even to the point where the language of the empire intentionally uses gender-neutral pronouns. If it was any more obvious about its plagiarism it would just be a reprint of Use of Weapons. No it isn't. The Radch is a completely different society to the Culture both in terms of its internal structure and how it operates internationally (overt imperialism vs. liberal interventionism). At best you could argue that the Radch is a criticism of the typically underemphasised imperialism of the Culture, which even if you could sustain (I'm not convinced) leaves you in the position of condemning a book for plagiarism for the high crime of being in dialogue with recent works in its genre. The ship AIs don't even work the same way or have a similar relationship to their crew. You might as well call Mutineer's Moon or the Andromeda TV show culture-esque.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:27
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Cardiovorax posted:Would you take a non-genre literary award seriously if 80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher and the panel of judges had only gotten to see excerpts instead of the whole book and the winner was this obviously plagiarized? The Hugo Awards are not juried. They are popular awards. The 'panel of judges' is every member of Worldcon. Some of the publishers of nominated works decide to contribute their nominees to a DRM-free ebook packet available for download by every person eligible to vote (edit: and this itself is a fairly recent institution). The Nebulas are the ones with a panel of expert judges. Peel fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 15:29
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Cardiovorax posted:Would you take a non-genre literary award seriously if 80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher and the panel of judges had only gotten to see excerpts instead of the whole book and the winner was this obviously plagiarized? Do you have any thoughts regarding the translatlantic nature of hugo nominations and how publishers differ in the US, Canada, and UK? (ignoring the rest of the English speaking world here).
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Aug 18, 2014 16:14
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Caerulius posted:The thing that bothered me about it is that an intelligent space ship that can rip holes on space time, interpret a thousand points of view at once, and practically read the thoughts of its crew based in their vital signs, and whose primary purpose is interacting with foreign cultures should probably be better at decoding gender. I enjoyed the book, but the gender thing felt contrived to make it ~unique~. This is the very first time I have seen something concrete about the book besides the gender stuff. Like, I heard a lot of good things about it all over the place but the only thing it seems people would talk about is the gender-language in the book!
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Aug 18, 2014 16:14
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Well the Nebulas are voted for by SFWA members so they're not really a juried award, though I suppose they're closer it than the Hugos are. Must be a lot of overlap, though.Cardiovorax posted:Would you take a non-genre literary award seriously if 80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher and the panel of judges had only gotten to see excerpts instead of the whole book and the winner was this obviously plagiarized? Firstly, "80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher" is wrong. Publishers are not patrons; 80% of the novel shortlist was not published by Orbit (it was 3/5); and there are sixteen books (physical objects, published by publishers; not short stories, etc) on the Hugo shortlists, of which only the three novels are from Orbit. Secondly, the "panel of judges" (i.e. Worldcon members, so everyone who cares about the Hugos and has $40 to spare) was quite capable of reading the whole of Ancillary Justice through such quaint institutions as bookshops and libraries. There were 3,587 judges in total, by the way, of whom 3,137 thought they had read enough to vote for Best Novel. Please try to post a little better. In this thread, if nowhere else.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:20
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Not even the Nebulas? I stand corrected. Maybe I was thinking of the Clarke. Which Ancillary Justice also won. I voted for it but only reluctantly. It's a decent book, especially for a first novel, but not nearly so good it deserves a clean sweep of awards. Srice posted:This is the very first time I have seen something concrete about the book besides the gender stuff. Like, I heard a lot of good things about it all over the place but the only thing it seems people would talk about is the gender-language in the book! The gender stuff isn't even very important to the book itself. But it's the current trend so it gets a lot of attention. This is why I think the book has made such a splash - it landed in exactly the right place at the right time. In defence of Breq's confusion, her intellectual capability is radically diminished by the time she's making errors on the ice planet.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:33
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House Louse posted:Please try to post a little better. In this thread, if nowhere else.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:40
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Ancillary Justice was okay but I honestly do think it won just because of the gender thing, which wasn't really even made very interesting within the story.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:49
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