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orange sky posted:Try to find some kind of wiki or dictionary that won't spoil the plot. There shouldn't be major spoilers if you're careful. But they're written by a non-native speaker! (I know this doesn't actually make them easier to read.)
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Mar 3, 2015 15:20
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orange sky posted:Try to find some kind of wiki or dictionary that won't spoil the plot. There shouldn't be major spoilers if you're careful. I actually really liked those books. They are pretty tough to get into but I didn't really feel it was the prose that was dense so much as the constantly hitting you in the face with concepts that you have to figure out contextually. I still have to read The Causal Angle.
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Mar 3, 2015 17:07
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MonkeyBot posted:I actually really liked those books. They are pretty tough to get into but I didn't really feel it was the prose that was dense so much as the constantly hitting you in the face with concepts that you have to figure out contextually. I still have to read The Causal Angle. I realize my opinion isn't widespread, the book is pretty well rated. But at a certain moment I just wondered if the same effect couldn't be produced in a more simplistic way than throwing everything at your face, all the time. Some times I think he had a word in english for something and he chose to call it "synthordinia" just because. And as it piles up and you get sentences like "She tries to summon a Repentant, but all her jinn rings are just as dead as the carpet, killed by the echo of the barakah gun". But as I mentioned, English isn't my first language (though I'm fluent).
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Mar 3, 2015 17:18
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The Three-Body Problem was such a great book. I can't wait for the sequel to be translated
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Mar 3, 2015 18:24
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Nuclear Tourist posted:Upcoming Alastair Reynolds book, Slow Bullets. Standalone, I think? Poseidon's Wake is coming in April too
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Mar 3, 2015 18:35
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Daktari posted:So am I the only one who's struggling a bit with The Dragon Never Sleeps? I'd say keep going - I was somewhat confused too but more gets explained/revealed as time goes on. By the end you'll know what's happening. That's another parallel it has with Dune - it sort of throws you in without much of a paddle. It would definitely benefit from a re-read.
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Mar 3, 2015 23:57
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orange sky posted:"She tries to summon a Repentant, but all her jinn rings are just as dead as the carpet, killed by the echo of the barakah gun". Admittedly some of these things replace a whole bunch of words with a single word, but it's also hard for some people to infer from context that "upload beam" actually means "disintegrator ray that makes an exact duplicate of you in a hard drive held in an orbiting platform"
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Mar 4, 2015 03:25
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Hedrigall posted:If you want to read a much-lauded SF author who writes tons of really offputting sex scenes, read Richard K Morgan. Also Frank Herbert. Dude gradually put more sex into the Dune books the further the series went until it was the overriding plot point.
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Mar 4, 2015 15:42
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Oh and John Varley. I'd post the Titanides "horse-vagina" Wikipedia excerpt here for like the 9th time, but everyone pretty much knows how it goes by now.
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Mar 4, 2015 15:48
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Hedrigall posted:Oh and John Varley. I'd post the Titanides "horse-vagina" Wikipedia excerpt here for like the 9th time, but everyone pretty much knows how it goes by now. I should just make an auto-scroll of that the Book Barn background image
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Mar 4, 2015 15:55
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Hedrigall posted:If you want to read a much-lauded SF author who writes tons of really offputting sex scenes, read Richard K Morgan. Is it bad that they are off-putting if that is point of the scene?
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Mar 4, 2015 17:21
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Captain Monkey posted:Anyone know if Blindsight/Echopraxia is getting a third book? I can't find anything online but I may suck at looking. He talked about it on his blog: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5438. It's probably a long way off since hes doing his intelligent squid/sentient money book next iirc.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:34
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Hedrigall posted:Oh and John Varley. I'd post the Titanides "horse-vagina" Wikipedia excerpt here for like the 9th time, but everyone pretty much knows how it goes by now. John Varley's not-Gaian Trilogy stuff is just as much about awkward sex writing. There was some book about a future version of humanity that had a computer AI controlling everything that was trying to figure out why people were committing suicide, since everything was essentially paradise for humanity. Characters had sex changes between chapters and everyone hosed everyone. Turned out the reason people were committing suicide was because they were getting bored having everything handed to them, so the computer stopped doing everything for everyone beyond the bare minimums for survival of the species and things magically got better. It was almost as bad as that Frank Herbert book The Eyes of Heisenberg.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:48
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Wade Wilson posted:John Varley's not-Gaian Trilogy stuff is just as much about awkward sex writing. There was some book about a future version of humanity that had a computer AI controlling everything that was trying to figure out why people were committing suicide, since everything was essentially paradise for humanity. Characters had sex changes between chapters and everyone hosed everyone.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:25
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I finished Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. The sex stuff didn't bother me so much as the detailed descriptions of the character's clothing. Oh, and ENZYME-BONDED CONCRETE!
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Mar 5, 2015 00:57
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Mister Kingdom posted:I finished Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. The sex stuff didn't bother me so much as the detailed descriptions of the character's clothing. The sex stuff is rarely a big deal in any single Hamilton book - it's usually only a few words out of many, many thousands. It's only across multiple works that the pattern starts to emerge and get a bit creepy.
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Mar 5, 2015 01:08
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Miss-Bomarc posted:That was "Steel Beach", I think. The issue wasn't that people were bored--at least not in SB--it was more that people were still being rapists and child molesters and generally awful people, and the computer that was in charge of everything had limitations built into its programs that stopped it doing anything. I like Varley. He was one of the first sci-fi authors to really get into questioning gender roles and the like in his novels, and he's a pretty stellar world-builder. The key part of Steel Beach was that humanity remained awful even after everything was essentially provided for them, but also that their awfulness ended up infecting their nanny AI to the point where the nanny AI tried to kill its wards. I enjoyed that.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:21
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So I found this series, "Flight Records of the Northern Julie", while looking at poster art (the artist did covers for the series). The first book is "Mother Outlaw". I'm not too far into it; so far it looks like it'll be a sort of novelised "Let's Play" for Escape Velocity: Nova. Anyone else ever heard of it? I'll let you know how it goes.
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Mar 6, 2015 05:09
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Man, Escape Velocity: Nova... I used to love that game, but haven't played it in years. I really liked the game's setting and plot, even if it was completely ridiculous. I'd always get trapped into playing the Vell-os storyline, though.
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Mar 6, 2015 05:53
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Darth Walrus posted:There's definitely a pattern, and since the British AOC is sixteen for the purpose of Romeo and Juliet cases and eighteen otherwise, it's kind of skeevy. It's sixteen generally, unless the older participant is in a position of authority over the younger one eg a teacher. But yeah, there's a hint of the creep in Hamilton's sex scenes. The lust for Louise that the total nerd-boy who works in Tottenham Court Road in the last of the Nights Dawn books strikes me as particularly so.
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Mar 6, 2015 23:18
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TheHoodedClaw posted:It's sixteen generally, unless the older participant is in a position of authority over the younger one eg a teacher. But yeah, there's a hint of the creep in Hamilton's sex scenes. The lust for Louise that the total nerd-boy who works in Tottenham Court Road in the last of the Nights Dawn books strikes me as particularly so. While that was a transparent nerd fantasy, it did at least have the advantage of them both being the same age. It's pretty middle-of-the-road on the Hamilton creepometer, and actually markedly more healthy than Louise's more successful and narrative-endorsed relationship with Joshua.
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Mar 7, 2015 12:53
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So far "Mother Outlaw" is utterly generic. My earlier characterization of it as "EV Nova Let's Play" is actually pretty on the money. If anything, this reminds me of what we'd get if someone did the Dragonlance thing using MegaTraveller instead of AD&D. Apparently there was a lively movement in sci-fi genre trash fiction of stuff like this, though; The Retrieval Artist and The Idomeni series were kind of like it. And it's so loving weird that it's all women writing this stuff. I feel like such a goddamn pig for pointing that out but, seriously, maybe there isn't as much distance between trashy romance and trashy sci-fi as I always thought. If I'd found this when I was 13 I'd have eaten it up. Now it just seems kind of tiresome, although I'll probably finish it. Although my 13-year-old self is like "but DUDE there are like TEN BOOKS of this you HAVE TO READ THEM AAAAAAALLLLL" PS this book is also an illustration of why you need a loving copyeditor, despite people's insistence that copyediting is just a silly artifact of legacy publishing deadweight and you can TOTALLY just do everything yourself Miss-Bomarc fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Mar 8, 2015 |
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Mar 8, 2015 19:17
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Miss-Bomarc posted:If anything, this reminds me of what we'd get if someone did the Dragonlance thing using MegaTraveller instead of AD&D. This may be the best description of anything that I've ever read.
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Mar 8, 2015 20:37
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Miss-Bomarc posted:
I read that as DragonQuest at first and was trying to mesh the following paragraphs into some sort of sense... 
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Mar 8, 2015 21:16
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Miss-Bomarc posted:So far "Mother Outlaw" is utterly generic. The book seems to be free on kindle right now, so if anyone wants to get in its at least cheap.
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Mar 10, 2015 02:03
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New Vorkosigan novel coming next year. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8046824-new-book
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Mar 20, 2015 22:02
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Non-war book about "grownups". Romance?
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Mar 20, 2015 22:46
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Biomute posted:Non-war book about "grownups". Romance? The last one about his cousin was pretty much romance.
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Mar 20, 2015 23:15
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savinhill posted:The last one about his cousin was pretty much romance. And A Civil Campaign before that. And Barrayar, for a lot of it. Romance mixed with other items is pretty much Bujold's stock in trade.
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Mar 21, 2015 19:34
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Piell posted:Oh you have not seen half of Honor's Marysue-ness. She's the best gun duelist and sword duelist and gets a sweet robot arm and laser eye and teaches her cat how to do sign language and has a polyamorous marriage and fires literally a million missiles all at once.. The series starts off pretty god but each book is worse than the one before, so just stop when it gets to be too much. She gets captured and raped but thats ok she just falls in love with her rapist and goes to war against her former homeland.
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Mar 23, 2015 04:48
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ulmont posted:And A Civil Campaign before that. And Barrayar, for a lot of it. Romance mixed with other items is pretty much Bujold's stock in trade. She does that thing rather well and Cordelia is a hell of a great character in any case; this is a guaranteed buy for me.
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Mar 23, 2015 12:25
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Groke posted:She does that thing rather well and Cordelia is a hell of a great character in any case; this is a guaranteed buy for me. I'll definitely buy and most probably enjoy it, but I was kind of hoping for a By Vorrutyer novel. I just love the clever ones.
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Mar 23, 2015 13:59
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Kesper North posted:I'll definitely buy and most probably enjoy it, but I was kind of hoping for a By Vorrutyer novel. I just love the clever ones. I'm actually hoping for a whole bunch of side-quest adventures of supporting-cast characters. There are many good ones to choose from.
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Mar 23, 2015 14:05
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Piell posted:Oh you have not seen half of Honor's Marysue-ness. She's the best gun duelist and sword duelist and gets a sweet robot arm and laser eye and teaches her cat how to do sign language and has a polyamorous marriage and fires literally a million missiles all at once.. The series starts off pretty god but each book is worse than the one before, so just stop when it gets to be too much. Honor is pretty Mary Sue-ish though. It's pretty drat annoying, and one of the reasons why I like Cassandra Kresnov so much. Sandy is literally perfect: gorgeous, blonde and white in a (Indian and Southeast Asian dominated) world where blonde and white is seen as exotically sexy, super smart, has an aimbot in her head and can tear power armored soldiers limb from limb if she tries hard enough. But she still comes off as more human than Honor does, with human motivations, flaws, and doubts. Of course thanks to not being written by David Weber she also doesn't talk like a robot, despite more or less being one. Mars4523 fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 17:49
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"To be fair"
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Mar 23, 2015 18:30
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How would you know the book is over unless the character levels up at the end? 
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Mar 23, 2015 19:17
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XBenedict posted:New Vorkosigan novel coming next year. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/8046824-new-book I am being completely sincere when I say I'm totally up for a sci-fi story about an elderly couple getting laid and playing politics. I'll miss the element of mayhem that Miles brings to his stories when he's the main character, though - Bujold's work can be slightly drab without it.
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Mar 23, 2015 19:55
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Groke posted:I'm actually hoping for a whole bunch of side-quest adventures of supporting-cast characters. There are many good ones to choose from. Alys Vorpatril and Simon Illyan, Geriatric Spies! They could totally star in something a la RED. (Come to that, Helen Mirren would make a great Alys).
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Mar 24, 2015 02:49
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I'm reading The Forever War after a long break from reading scifi for fun, and I'm surprised at how jarring the idea of a software-less future is. I have read a lot of classic scifi but not for a long time. The idea of humans interacting with technology through mechanical controls seems absurd to me. The most shocking thing was the idea of the powered suits with dumb mechanical waldos that allow control inputs that will kill the driver, but almost all of the technology strikes me as bizarre. Weapons that have to be aimed by hand, no drone weapons, dumb optics that allow retina-burning settings... it's very weird, and it surprises me how weird it is to me. Not to mention the very weird opening of the war with seemingly no coherent strategy or objectives. Oh and the very messed up gender attitudes but I understand that's part of the science fiction.
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Mar 24, 2015 06:19
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The whole smartphone thing wasn't in our consciousness 15 years ago much less 40.
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Mar 24, 2015 07:19
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