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TLM3101 posted:On the other hand, Killiks. I have it on good authority that Episode 7 will be called Attack of the Bugnest Orgies... But really, the general sense of the EU being nothing but Imperial warlord of the week + Dark Jedi + superweapon was really a staple of the 1990s Bantam-era run (not that quality-wise got a lot better after, but still...) And even in that EU chunk, I think the Thrawn books, the X-wing series, and the Black Fleet trilogy are all solid space warfare-centric works, at least given they're media spinoff novels.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:31
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Chairman Capone posted:I have it on good authority that Episode 7 will be called Attack of the Bugnest Orgies... I'm not nearly as familiar with the Star Wars EU as I probably should be, but I caught enough to be mildly horrified by the huge variation in quality. The Thrawn series, however, I remember as good, solid and fun books. Though that might just be me wearing my nostalgia goggles.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:43
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Elyv posted:So I haven't read much EU stuff, but the superweapons are like ancient stuff that people stumble across, don't really understand, and then fight for, right? In the Honor books, I don't believe there's any of that, actually. The superweapons basically come from the good guy side in the biggest war in a really long time coming up with a ton of technological breakthroughs and then getting mass-produced. The problem is that the factions with the newly developed ships basically can't lose in a straight-up fight to the factions without them. True, it was more a sense of the one-upmanship that I was getting at. Though yeah on reading, 'Star Wars EU' is a bit harsh. Things you can't take back and all  In dunno, I just think when you reach the point where the Death Star is chump change and Vader was actually a puny amateur, something is wrong. It practically invalidates the original stories.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:06
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TLM3101 posted:I'm not nearly as familiar with the Star Wars EU as I probably should be, but I caught enough to be mildly horrified by the huge variation in quality. The Thrawn series, however, I remember as good, solid and fun books. Though that might just be me wearing my nostalgia goggles. Nah, the Thrawn books -- in dramatic contrast to all the other SWEU stuff I read in my misspent youth -- still hold up. In general, Zahn isn't one of those genre-redefining authors whose books leave you going "holy poo poo, I need to tie down all my friends and force them to read this", but they're consistently fun and solidly written.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:39
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The X-Wing stories are pretty good, too. No real galaxy threatening superweapons, just solid stories that show that even though the Empire is losing, they can still kill people easily and fighting them is still relevant, even though the emperor is dead. Also has a MC who is actually a Jedi but doesn't know it, but, you know, let's not look at that too much.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:52
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ArchangeI posted:The X-Wing stories are pretty good, too. No real galaxy threatening superweapons, just solid stories that show that even though the Empire is losing, they can still kill people easily and fighting them is still relevant, even though the emperor is dead. One of the last X-wing books even inverts this by having the New Republic fight a warlord they thought had a superweapon, only to find out he was just making it up to seem like he was just as bad as all the other warlords.
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Sep 3, 2014 23:03
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Well it's finally happened -- I'm reading a Star Wars book again (A New Dawn). Probably been more than 15 years. Anybody else picked it up yet? Am I wasting my time more drastically than I think?
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Sep 4, 2014 03:33
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Strategic Tea posted:True, it was more a sense of the one-upmanship that I was getting at. Though yeah on reading, 'Star Wars EU' is a bit harsh. Things you can't take back and all Then I recalled going to Crater Lake, Oregon in the early 80s with my family and spending the allowance my parents gave to me to buy a sticker book which was comprised of nothing but scenes from Episode 4, and stickers of characters from the movie (the mos eisly cantina was the best page by far, as were its stickers) and then I realized it was never actually anything but an engine to drive the sales of childrens' toys.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:01
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Decius posted:Compare it with series that actually feature complete characters like the Vorkosigan Saga or the already mentioned Aubrey/Maturin - you don't need to always make the threat bigger and badder, because you have a big and rich tapestry of directions and ways to introduce barriers and conflict for the heroes. That's because Miles is his own worst enemy.
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Sep 4, 2014 11:09
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I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera).
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Sep 8, 2014 05:25
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blue squares posted:I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera). Very. The 4th book in the series came out a month or two ago and continued the good showing.
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Sep 8, 2014 05:40
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Alternate opinion: no, it is an amalgamation of irritating characters and dumb scifi.
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Sep 8, 2014 05:43
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blue squares posted:I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera). Yes, but it starts do drag with book 3, which isn't helped by them underutilizing the best and most interesting characters in book 3 and 4. The promise of the first book is better than the delivery of the 3rd and 4th if it makes any sense. The increase of size and scope from a trilogy to a tentive 9-book-series (so far) doesn't fill me with confidence that things get better. Decius fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 06:03
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blue squares posted:I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera). Yes. I have not read the fourth book of the series but the first is good, second, still good, then others who know more about books/the genre say there is a drop in quality as it's been expanded from 3 to 5 then to 9 books. I've read a lot worse in other genres so once the price of book 4 drops, I'll be picking it up as well since it has to be better than some of the crap I've read.
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Sep 8, 2014 06:22
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blue squares posted:I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera). pretty bad, severe lack of style, meandering, dumb/boring protagonists, etc. lattermost problem admittedly addressed somewhat in the sequel PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 06:30
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blue squares posted:I saw a book called Leviathan Wakes at the book store by a James SA Corey. Is it any good? It looked cool but I know nothing about it (or space opera). I'd think you'd get your money's worth. Not a timeless classic such as Dune, but it's a pretty fun read. The only thing I could fault it on is that the protagonist from Earth is one of the more annoying characters I've read in a novel. I think the only space opera that can come close in "I really dislike reading about these people" is The Praxis and Blindsight (which makes up for this by being terrifying as hell).
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Sep 8, 2014 07:10
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Rereading The Void Trilogy right on the heels of The Commonwealth Saga (instead of two years apart like the first time I read them). OMG these books are amazing. Peter F. Hamilton drinking game: Every time he describes an object or vehicle as "ovoid" take a shot.
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Sep 8, 2014 17:04
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Applewhite posted:Rereading The Void Trilogy right on the heels of The Commonwealth Saga (instead of two years apart like the first time I read them). OMG these books are amazing. If I did this with enzyme-bonded-concrete in the The Commonwealth Saga, I would be dead. I'm going through the trilogy right now for the first time and the first book really dragged on for awhile kind of like the first 1/3rd of Pandora's Star but man Book 2 is pretty intense.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:04
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Bolow posted:If I did this with enzyme-bonded-concrete in the The Commonwealth Saga, I would be dead. Neural nanonics, is all I have to say. Hamilton desperately needs his editor to forcibly disable the text-macro function of his word processor.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:21
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Bolow posted:If I did this with enzyme-bonded-concrete in the The Commonwealth Saga, I would be dead. I'm going through the trilogy right now for the first time and the first book really dragged on for awhile kind of like the first 1/3rd of Pandora's Star but man Book 2 is pretty intense. I'm about halfway through the second book. Reading it with my wife (she's reading for the first time). I can't wait for the awesome parts coming up to blow her mind.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:32
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Hobnob posted:Neural nanonics, is all I have to say. Hamilton desperately needs his editor to forcibly disable the text-macro function of his word processor. Hobnob's neural nanonics datavised the post to the private forum, where he had bought a membership for ten fuseodollars
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Sep 8, 2014 21:32
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General Battuta posted:Hobnob's neural nanonics datavised the post to the private forum, where he had bought a membership for ten fuseodollars The payment was untraceable. He'd made it from a one-time account over the unisphere.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:52
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Any other Alastair Reynolds fans here that can chime in on Poseidon's Children? I've read all of his other novels and loved all of them but haven't had the opportunity to pick these up. Are they at least as good as Revelation Space?
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Sep 8, 2014 22:00
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Applewhite posted:Rereading The Void Trilogy right on the heels of The Commonwealth Saga (instead of two years apart like the first time I read them). OMG these books are amazing. How about every time a ship "smoothly accelerates" or really "smoothly" does anything. I don't remember if that was as big an annoyance in those two series, but it seems like every other paragraph had someone or something doing something "smoothly" in the Night's Dawn trilogy.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:27
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Razzled posted:Any other Alastair Reynolds fans here that can chime in on Poseidon's Children? I've read all of his other novels and loved all of them but haven't had the opportunity to pick these up. Are they at least as good as Revelation Space? They're good, but no, not as good as Revelation Space. The second book in particular has this weird quality in that it slows down in the last act, contrary to every other Reynolds book which speeds up with more action towards the end. Became a bit of a slog to finish, sadly.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:43
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Razzled posted:Any other Alastair Reynolds fans here that can chime in on Poseidon's Children? I've read all of his other novels and loved all of them but haven't had the opportunity to pick these up. Are they at least as good as Revelation Space?
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Sep 9, 2014 06:27
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How do the Reynolds fans here feel about Terminal World and Century Rain? The latter I enjoyed, but Terminal World just didn't grab me, one of the main characters is boring and unlikable, and the world just isn't fleshed out in the way I like (that keeps me reading Peter F Hamilton).
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Sep 10, 2014 06:55
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Personally I'm the other way around, I thought Terminal World was extremely fascinating. Century Rain I thought was all rightish, but the ending was one of Reynolds's worst.
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Sep 10, 2014 13:03
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Well I guess I'll be powering through Echopraxia the rest of the week so I can read something more enjoyable. It's like this book has all the bad stuff from Blindsight and little of the good/awesome/terrifying.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:45
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About a third of the way through Echopraxia, and nothing interesting has happened. Is this worth powering through? 'Cause I'm getting a bit bored of following a sadsack around a lovingly detailed but otherwise standard ship and not actually hearing about any of the cool poo poo that I know is going on somewhere else.
Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 11:21
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ToxicFrog posted:Wait, poo poo, there's Glen Cook that I haven't read? So have you done this yet?
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Sep 12, 2014 14:54
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Barry Foster posted:About a third of the way through Echopraxia, and nothing interesting has happened. Is this worth powering through? 'Cause I'm getting a bit bored of following a sadsack around a lovingly detailed but otherwise standard ship and not actually hearing about any of the cool poo poo that I know is going on somewhere else. Just finished it this evening; it definitely felt like Watts wrote up a cool short story only to go back and add in 200 pages of boring, useless filler. If Watts writes another book in this setting I'll probably just skip it rather than possibly pay full price for a book that's two thirds time wasting fluff. Edit: To answer your question more specifically; if you're like me and have to finish books you've started, it gets a bit better once they get to the Icarus station. If not, you could probably just drop it as you won't see anything interesting until about the 230-250 page mark. BadOptics fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 09:42
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As with Blindsight, the most interesting part was the footnotes. So if anyone's wondering, just skip straight to them.
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Sep 14, 2014 10:19
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Tanith posted:How do the Reynolds fans here feel about Terminal World and Century Rain? The latter I enjoyed, but Terminal World just didn't grab me, one of the main characters is boring and unlikable, and the world just isn't fleshed out in the way I like (that keeps me reading Peter F Hamilton). I really liked Terminal World actually. I thought the world was really cool but I may also have just been filling in a lot of the blanks with my own imagination. Either way though I thought the story was pretty fun to follow along with. The steampunk vibes were really great.
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Sep 15, 2014 19:02
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I liked Century Rain more even with it's many many many flaws. Reynolds books aren't really consistent, but I've learned to enjoy to good and keep going despite the bad. :P Anyway, I haven't read anything from this new series starting with Blue Remembered Earth - what are they about? On the previous Weber discussion, it boggles the mind that Baen publishes Bujold along with Weber and Ringo etc.
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Sep 15, 2014 19:50
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I mean, how can you not love war-babies?
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Sep 16, 2014 01:55
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Tanith posted:So have you done this yet? Had to get the book first! It's in my queue once I finish Most Secret War.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:28
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Tanith posted:How do the Reynolds fans here feel about Terminal World and Century Rain? The latter I enjoyed, but Terminal World just didn't grab me, one of the main characters is boring and unlikable, and the world just isn't fleshed out in the way I like (that keeps me reading Peter F Hamilton). I remember somewhat liking Century Rain, but I detested Terminal World. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and it seemed like he just wanted to use Vinge's Zones but then went and wrote an excruciatingly boring story with them. I mean, the framework for the story was interesting, but the execution was just one dull boring grind after another until you just wish Flanders was dead. And there's no payoff, things just sort of peter out and then you're looking at the back cover. Between that and House of Suns I stopped reading Reynolds for a while.
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Sep 17, 2014 16:55
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Most likely mentioned. The Saga of the Seven Suns series, Kevin J Anderson, good read almost halfway through and similar to the Fire and Ice series format, ie each character has a chapter as events unfold.
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Sep 22, 2014 04:08
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BoilerRoom posted:Most likely mentioned. Is it better than the Dune prequels? That was my first and only (  )KJA, and I like pangalactic family feuding, but I'm wary.
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Sep 22, 2014 04:42
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