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Kalenn Istarion posted:Has anyone ever read the English translations of Sapkowski's Witcher series? I enjoyed the games quite a bit so wondering if the translations were competent and kept the same tone as the Polish versions supposedly have. To add to what darnon already said, this came up in detail in the Witcher 2 game thread about 6 months ago. I'll go ahead and post what I mentioned there/then for a slightly less known but stellar translated story: funakupo posted:There is another short story of Geralt (Spellmaker) translated into English in the book A Polish Book of Monsters , translated by Michael Kandel. I really enjoyed the whole book of stories actually, so if you are eager to read anything Geralt in English, grab that.
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Oct 8, 2014 20:39
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Barbe Rouge posted:
Spoilers for "The Dark Defiles": I'm 3/4 of the way through the book and so far the Ahn Foi/Envoy Corps connection is still unconfirmed, although the fact that Firfirnar's name in the Imperial language is Vividara (Virginia Vidaura) is kind of indicative. I haven't figured out who Hoirann/Urann is yet, though. Hoirann = Harlan? Either way, unless there's something coming, I don't think anything has been definitively said. Edit: Oh, there's also a bit where someone talks about the Dwellers' personality traits; they sound pretty bang on for the characters as we know them in the Altered Carbon series.
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Oct 8, 2014 21:34
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regularizer posted:Was that good? I started it a while back but didn't get past the first few pages because it was so obviously The Hunger Games in space. It's enjoyable, but I'm not sure if it's 'good' If you're looking for anything the deviates from the hero's journey this ain't it. It's one of the most derivative things I've ever read, it's just done in a manner I found enjoyable. The closest thing I can think of is enjoying the old animated film Star Chaser: The Legend of Orin.
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Oct 8, 2014 22:08
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Kalenn Istarion posted:Has anyone ever read the English translations of Sapkowski's Witcher series? I enjoyed the games quite a bit so wondering if the translations were competent and kept the same tone as the Polish versions supposedly have. Honestly I didn't think they were that great. I love the games but the books weren't nearly as interesting as I thought they were hyped up to be.
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Oct 9, 2014 01:59
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GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:Honestly I didn't think they were that great. I love the games but the books weren't nearly as interesting as I thought they were hyped up to be. I've heard opinions on either end of the spectrum. I find the world-building interesting - the sort of mythology they use is something I've always enjoyed regardless of the plotting of the book itself. Makes me wonder how much of it was the translation though as the originals are often discussed as being quite good.
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Oct 9, 2014 05:21
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Slow Graffiti posted:It is the same with Excession, which happens to be published in the US by Spectra, just like Feersum Endjinn. Not sure why, but it looks like they didn't decide to convert them to ebooks. My best guess is that the rights are tied up in some sort of contract dispute. Otherwise, I'd have assumed they would have issued ebooks whilst Orbit US was reissuing all the Culture novels over the last few years.
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Oct 9, 2014 16:46
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Whoever mentioned it, thanks for recommending The Martian. Its outstanding! I blew through the whole thing in 2 days.
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Oct 9, 2014 21:51
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Whoever mentioned it, thanks for recommending The Martian. Its outstanding! I blew through the whole thing in 2 days. Yeah I can't remember who mentioned it but I loved it too. The first book in awhile I tore through in a weekend. The humor got a bit repetitive after awhile but other than that fantastic book. I've moved onto City of Stairs, just a few chapters in but really enjoying the setting so far. Edit: spelling The Gunslinger fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 17:40
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I just googled that title since I couldn't remember the author's name and I want to read it as well. I saw a link for a Ridley Scott movie in production by the same name. It was talking about how Donald Glover landed a part and all that. Anyway, is that movie based on the same book you guys have read?
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Oct 11, 2014 09:34
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Yeah. Adam Savage and guys from Tested discussed it recently on their podcast. If you've read the book, you might enjoy listening to this.
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Oct 11, 2014 09:47
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Bullio posted:I just googled that title since I couldn't remember the author's name and I want to read it as well. I saw a link for a Ridley Scott movie in production by the same name. It was talking about how Donald Glover landed a part and all that.
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Oct 11, 2014 09:47
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mallamp posted:Martian? Yes, but people* will say it's Gravity ripoff and it'll flop. *People who haven't read the book
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Oct 11, 2014 16:24
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Has anyone read Ancillary Sword yet? I'm gonna start it later this week. Also, can anyone recommend an entertaining and well-written sci-fi book with aliens and spaceships that's not space opera? I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately.
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Oct 11, 2014 17:16
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regularizer posted:Has anyone read Ancillary Sword yet? I'm gonna start it later this week. Also, can anyone recommend an entertaining and well-written sci-fi book with aliens and spaceships that's not space opera? I've been reading a lot of fantasy lately. I just finished it last night - generally enjoyed it. I think it's overall a better book than Ancillary Justice with two caveats: it's paced a lot slower, and the ending is a bit abrupt. It's not at all a book plotted like the first one with lots of action: the focus is really on world building and social interaction. Which it does very well, but it leads to the above caveats.
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Oct 11, 2014 18:38
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Firefall Kindle ebook is on sale, looks like it's currently number 1 in SF. http://www.amazon.com.au/Firefall-Peter-Watts-ebook/dp/B00KFDQXD0/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1413080555&sr=1-2
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Oct 12, 2014 03:25
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thehomemaster posted:Firefall Kindle ebook is on sale, looks like it's currently number 1 in SF. Cripes, $2 for the anthology this soon?
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Oct 12, 2014 03:42
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Popcorn time with Requires Only That You Hate: https://ello.co/mamatas/post/cQb3OJi5-wI4TDe3Koq_ww 
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Oct 12, 2014 06:22
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thehomemaster posted:Firefall Kindle ebook is on sale, looks like it's currently number 1 in SF. You're a champion. On the week of release it was announced that it was delayed in Australia. I read Caliban's War and then started The Martian, figuring that I could pick it up once I was done. Didn't realise it had come out, and I get another copy of Blindsight as a bonus!
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Oct 12, 2014 10:01
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:*People who haven't read the book
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Oct 12, 2014 10:46
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Want to thank this thread for the City of Stairs chat, since it prompted me to buy the book and I'm loving it so far (roughly 60 pages in). The world feels cohesive and well realized and every scene/conversation advances the plot in a meaningful way, which is a nice contrast to American Gods, which I finished right before this and left a sour taste in my mouth for having pages and pages of stuff that didn't end up feeling relevant by the time I was done.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:08
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I recently finished The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell. I really, really enjoyed it... however I can't help but think that he (probably obviously!) just keeps re-iterating on the same story idea and structure over and over again. That being said it's excellent and if you liked Cloud Atlas I'd definitely recommend it. Spoilers for it: Wow Holly Sykes got hosed in the end. Sure she only has a few years left, but at least the Horologists could have brought her along with the kids; enjoy being raped and murdered by warlords instead of a seniors home in Iceland!
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Oct 13, 2014 23:17
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House Louse posted:Popcorn time with Requires Only That You Hate: https://ello.co/mamatas/post/cQb3OJi5-wI4TDe3Koq_ww Mind explaining any of the gently caress of this?
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Oct 14, 2014 01:06
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Hedrigall posted:Mind explaining any of the gently caress of this? Requires Only That You Hate is / was a blogger who was really aggressive throughout multiple online communities under multiple names. Some of her targets were deserved, others not so much. Turns out she's also an up-and-coming author, with a story in a thing edited by Nick Mamatas, who doxxed her on that ello link. More: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5121496.html Personally I wish she had stuck with punching up, I can't in good faith do anything other than put her on my 'do not buy or read' list. ETA: Mamatas is coming off looking like an rear end too, which is pretty disappointing. fritz fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 01:21
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As an aside, Requires Only That You Hate would be a pretty good name for a Culture warship.
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Oct 14, 2014 01:50
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RoboCicero posted:As an aside, Requires Only That You Hate would be a pretty good name for a Culture warship.
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Oct 14, 2014 02:48
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Kalman posted:I just finished it last night - generally enjoyed it. I think it's overall a better book than Ancillary Justice with two caveats: it's paced a lot slower, and the ending is a bit abrupt. It's not at all a book plotted like the first one with lots of action: the focus is really on world building and social interaction. Which it does very well, but it leads to the above caveats. It's smaller and a little more relaxed than Justice was. I have no idea if she's going to wrap everything up in just one more book--there's a lot of dangling plot threads.
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Oct 14, 2014 03:03
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coyo7e posted:Yeah or the title of a novel. It has panache. It's a 40K reference. That game is good at that sort of thing.
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Oct 14, 2014 04:01
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fritz posted:Requires Only That You Hate is / was a blogger who was really aggressive throughout multiple online communities under multiple names. Some of her targets were deserved, others not so much. Turns out she's also an up-and-coming author, with a story in a thing edited by Nick Mamatas, who doxxed her on that ello link. More: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/5121496.html Bit rude of me not to link to Nicoll's LJ considering that's where I heard the news, oops. Anyway it seems Mamatas did it with Benjanun Sridaengkeuw's (for it is she) consent, but he's still looking like an rear end for defending her statements that people should be given an acid bath.
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Oct 14, 2014 05:03
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House Louse posted:Bit rude of me not to link to Nicoll's LJ considering that's where I heard the news, oops. His LJ comment section is a ton better now that that 'harvey_ritt' guy isn't posting on it anymore.
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Oct 14, 2014 05:14
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Requires Only That You Hate used to be very good at spotlighting cool-but-unheralded writers who are genuinely limited by the male-dominated industry establishment. I would not know about Aliette de Bodard or Yoon Ha Lee if it weren't for her, for instance. Then the blog devolved into easy-pitch criticism of mainstream anime and went off the rails PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 06:33
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PupsOfWar posted:Requires Only That You Hate used to be very good at spotlighting cool-but-unheralded writers who are genuinely limited by the male-dominated industry establishment. I would not know about Aliette de Bodard or Yoon Ha Lee if it weren't for her, for instance. One time I clicked her twitter (that is to say the one linked on that blog) when it was still public and saw rants about things like how the Thailand publishing industry is terrible because they publish translations of popular books like Harry Potter instead of publishing works by Thai authors (which is a terrible argument that's made even funnier knowing she was trying to get published during that time). And also a rant about how people who can't speak Thai without an accent should "get the gently caress out of Thailand" Yep.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:48
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No one deserved the viciousness of Requires Hate/ Winterfox / Benjanun Sriduangkaew. She was a nasty person a decade ago when on livejournal and she's even worse today. As Required Hate, her harassment drove one author to give up writing due to fear of such attacks and another author attempted suicide. Nick Mamatas, being the jackass he is, mocked that author's suicide attempt. From what I've heard, Benjanun Sriduangkaew has been making nice to the pro sf community, including authors that she's attacked on the Requires Hate blog, which is hysterical, since as RH, she was all about being open and honest. She's since deleted her Requires Only Hate blog, probably to cover her rear end. She did the same with livejournal when she first started blogging as Requires Hate, so that there wasn't any proof that she was the one abusing people. Apparently as Benjanun Sriduangkaew, she's been contacting book review blogs and asking them not review certain authors books because they were racist to her. And if you look at the authors she attacked as Winterfox and Requires Hate, a lot of them are women, non-white or both. Mamatas probably shouldn't have revealed her name, he claims he did for her safety but it was probably just publicity for his book. But whatever, I'm just glad I know, 'cause I probably would have picked up her book otherwise.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:27
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PupsOfWar posted:
I just have a vague memory of that blog having lots of low-hanging-fruit rage performance articles on subjects like "If you like Tolkien, you're a racist, because orcs are black people and dwarves are Jews," or (and maybe I'm remembering this wrong?) how Paolo Bacigalupi's Wind-up Girl was evil cultural appropriation because Bacigalupi isn't of Thai or East Asian origin. I get why people read that kind of criticism and it's interesting as far as it goes, but it always seems sort of intellectually lazy to me. All works of art are flawed and all can be torn down, but only rarely are the flaws in a work what make it interesting or worthy of study. We read Tolkien despite the racist elements, not because of them.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:30
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Tolkien, if nothing else, has the excuse that he genuinely didn't mean to be racist to anyone. There is no mean-spiritedness at all in his writing. Some of that stuff looks suspicious in retrospect, but he very clearly and very vocally was not anti-semitic or anything like that. He famously sent a very angry letter to a Nazi publisher who tried to get him to come and make racist speeches against Jews. The rest of his correspondence supports this. Dwarves are partially based in Hebrew culture and language, but they're also completely sympathetic. That's more than most modern fantasy authors can say about themselves.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I just have a vague memory of that blog having lots of low-hanging-fruit rage performance articles on subjects like "If you like Tolkien, you're a racist, because orcs are black people and dwarves are Jews," or (and maybe I'm remembering this wrong?) how Paolo Bacigalupi's Wind-up Girl was evil cultural appropriation because Bacigalupi isn't of Thai or East Asian origin. I thought it was because she was identifying basic errors in Bacigalupi's Thai language and worldbuilding in the very first couple of pages?
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Oct 14, 2014 16:53
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Darth Walrus posted:I thought it was because she was identifying basic errors in Bacigalupi's Thai language and worldbuilding in the very first couple of pages? I'd pull up the specific article so we could actually talk about it directly but she's taken them all down so oh well. Going from memory her criticisms seemed technically valid but very superficial, written more to generate pageviews from RAGE and CONTROVERSY than anything else. Mountains out of molehills.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:07
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fritz posted:His LJ comment section is a ton better now that that 'harvey_ritt' guy isn't posting on it anymore. LJ commenting is horrid. I can't believe people still sign up for it. mania posted:Mamatas probably shouldn't have revealed her name, he claims he did for her safety but it was probably just publicity for his book. But whatever, I'm just glad I know, 'cause I probably would have picked up her book otherwise. I get the impression Mamatas did it with her consent. I haven't seen anyone call him out on it, though. Darth Walrus posted:I thought it was because she was identifying basic errors in Bacigalupi's Thai language and worldbuilding in the very first couple of pages? It's deleted, but hey: http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2...nsive-claptrap/ Her beef with Bacigalupi boils down to: his Thai is bad, he mentions a "peasant", and he didn't mention any Thai people in his acknowledgements. Most of her upset is that other people are calling his Thailand exotic and authentic. Some of which I agree with, some I don't, but when it leads to stuff like quote:Bacigaluslkgs;lkjhgsh is an ignorant, appropriative bag of feces. I say this as an absolute judgment, without any ambivalence whatsoever. When it comes to this man I offer no forgiveness, no mercy. I don’t care what his intentions were. All I want to do is apply a giant clue-by-four to his skull but even then I suspect it still wouldn’t do any good. If other writers make me angry, then Bacigalupi makes me incandescent, because when the average rear end in a top hat pens some sexist tripe he’s likely than not has been called out on it at least once. You think I was angry about Cindy Pon’s books? Hahahaha. You are in for a treat. it's childish, at best.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:34
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Wayback Machine to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/2011122...rl-still-stinks
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Oct 14, 2014 18:03
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Yeah I dunno-- She's certainly done some lousy stuff, but she's also been getting some serious stalking poo poo happening as a result, and the one in no way excuses the other. And yeah, if she wants to move past what she did then, I have no problem with that. If not everyone wants to forgive her, that's okay too, but I'm really not down with "she was horrible, therefore I get to be horrible and threaten and etc too". So yeah I'm gonna wait and see once the lockdown ends. House Louse posted:I get the impression Mamatas did it with her consent. I haven't seen anyone call him out on it, though. That's my understanding; I still think he shouldn't have done it but they're still talking amiably afaict so I don't think it's a big deal.
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Oct 14, 2014 18:54
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If she wanted to move past her being a tremendous rear end in a top hat she could have, I dunno, tried to make some amends or shown some awareness that her behavior was pretty lovely instead of changing her identity and trying to suck up to the same people she spent years harassing. And no one here even mentioned any threats or harassment, please tell us more about how you're not down with things that no one here is doing.
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Oct 14, 2014 19:26
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