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Is Hyperion the series with the Shrike, which is built up as this indestructible death machine right up until some character develops the ability to fight/destroy it by teaching it the meaning of Love or some bullshit?
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Apr 6, 2015 18:26
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Wade Wilson posted:Is Hyperion the series with the Shrike, which is built up as this indestructible death machine right up until some character develops the ability to fight/destroy it by teaching it the meaning of Love or some bullshit? Yes.
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Apr 6, 2015 18:35
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Kesper North posted:Yes. That character then becomes the programming core of the Shrike due to time shenannigans.
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Apr 6, 2015 21:17
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If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? I'm not even sure how to describe my tastes when it comes to MilSF, I like (relatively) 'hard' series (Legacy of the Aldenata, In Fury Born) as well as more 'space fantasy' stuff (Ashes of Empire), space navy (Harrington, Lt. Leary) as well as groundpounder stuff (Empire of Man, Safehold). I'm just all over the place.  I saw the Vorkosigan book mentioned a few pages back, I might try to track them down. I'm not sure what else to try.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:26
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? Completely shameless, albeit topical, plug (let me know if it gets on people's nerves): ArchangeI posted:If I had to describe it in a single sentence, it is one of Tom Clancy's saner novels set in the early 22nd century. You have multiple blocks all striving for dominance in the inner solar system, mankind is just starting to think about maybe colonizing Mars while already actively mining asteroids, with a kind of cold war brinkmanship thrown in the mix. Predictably, it all goes wrong at some point and the world has itself a good old fashioned throwdown.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:39
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It's been years since I read the books, but I remember Hyperion as very good, Fall of Hyperion as good, and Endymion/Rise of Endymion as pretty bad.
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Apr 7, 2015 01:36
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? Crest of the Stars is an interesting and obscure Japanese Space Opera/MilSF book series quite similar to the Harrington stuff. It got translated after it had an animu adaption that became popular in the early 2000s. Vorkosigan Saga would definitely hit the spot, as would Vatta's War.
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Apr 7, 2015 01:47
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? You might like the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. They get very repetitive after a bit, but they scratch that pulp MilSF itch pretty well. Poor Man's Fight by Elliot Kay is also pretty good too although I thought it hammed up the personal drama too much. If you're ok with self-published stuff, Evan Currie's "On Silver Wings" series was pretty fun too for what it is. The Vorkosigan series is awesome but most of the books aren't really much like the ones you mentioned. They're more about spy games/politics/mysteries than combat, although the scale is usually small, so you get much more action than you would from the political part of say a Weber book.
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Apr 7, 2015 04:21
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mister posted:The Vorkosigan series is awesome but most of the books aren't really much like the ones you mentioned. They're more about spy games/politics/mysteries than combat, although the scale is usually small, so you get much more action than you would from the political part of say a Weber book. The Vorkosigan series does tend to have some pretty funny dialogue as a rule too, the humor is top notch, though it's well balanced by more serious stuff.
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Apr 7, 2015 04:30
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Chairman Capone posted:Since the Falkenberg novels are set in the same continuity as the Mote in God's Eye books, I thought I'd take the opportunity to ask if anyone's read the third Mote book written by Jerry Pournelle's daughter, and if so, is it at least tolerable to read? Mote in God's Eye is one of my favorite books ever, and I even enjoyed The Gripping Hand for the most part, so I probably have higher tolerance for a lovely sequel to it than most, but "written by the daughter of the less-talented half of the original author pair" is a hard sell even so. I started it a few years ago, didn't finish it, and couldn't tell you what did happen that I read. Take that as you will.
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Apr 7, 2015 04:43
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? This isn't SF but if you enjoyed Harrington, go read the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series. Seconding Lost Fleet, although I haven't read the newer ones. Also, The Prince by Pournelle/Stirling as mentioned up thread, but maybe you've already read it (isn't it Baen?).
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Apr 7, 2015 04:48
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mister posted:Poor Man's Fight by Elliot Kay is also pretty good too although I thought it hammed up the personal drama too much. If you're ok with self-published stuff, Evan Currie's "On Silver Wings" series was pretty fun too for what it is. hannibal posted:This isn't SF but if you enjoyed Harrington, go read the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series.  Anyway, Marco Kloos' latest two aren't too bad and oh god i've just realized how much of the amazon $1 section i've read, what am i doing with my life. Ceebees fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 05:05
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Ceebees posted:He already said that he read Drake's RCN And the first few Harrington books are pretty much straight-up Hornblower anyway (I haven't read the books but I did watch the Ioan Gruffyd[? I probably mangled his name] Hornblower series as a youngster) Thanks for the advice, I'm gonna check those out.
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Apr 7, 2015 05:12
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Biomute posted:I had the same experience. Everyone says to read the next book, but the opening was so tremendously dull that I could not bring myself to do so. I sort of chalked the ending up to "lol Canterbury Tales, lol actual literature" and moved on. If I recall correctly, part of the problem with Hyperion is that Simmons wrote a book that was too drat long to publish as one volume, so his publisher suggested cutting the thing in two. The second book is padded out with a bunch of FORCE:space and what else is happening around galaxy, as I recall, and it takes forever to go anywhere. In recent years the dude has lost his mind so it's probably OK to move on to something else. Pity that Roger MacBride Allen's work doesn't seem to be available in ebook anywhere and is mostly out of print. I really loved "Torch of Honor" and "Rogue Powers," later collected into "Allies and Aliens."
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Apr 7, 2015 05:30
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mister posted:You might like the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. They get very repetitive after a bit, but they scratch that pulp MilSF itch pretty well. I started plowing through the series not too long ago, and when you go through them quickly, the repeated introductions to events and themes gets grating. I'm on book 6 and generally enjoying it, but the space combat is simultaneously realistic and arcadey, and weirds me out a bit. Speed of light is a major factor in how combat works (which is fun), especially since fleets typically engage each other at a combined 20% the speed of light (any higher and the firing computers get too inaccurate thanks to relativistic distortion). Engagements are over in the split second they're in weapons range, but then the fleets turn, accelerate again, and usually re-engage at that same sort of velocity again, apparently within minutes. The ships are obscenely fast for a series otherwise pretty grounded by space opera standards. The fleet formations are typically light seconds across, but somehow collisions happen several times throughout the series. Fleets are composed primarily of battleships, battle cruisers, light and heavy cruisers, and destroyers, but everything other than the battleships and battle cruisers seem there just to bulk fleets out. They pretty much never do anything but get blown up. Battleships and battle cruisers seem to have no trouble shredding them in large numbers. But, it's kinda neat to see how a century of pointless war made everything change and how disruptive Geary is to all that. He's skirting mary sue-dom, though. I love that every cover is depicting a Geary in battle armor with a rifle, but he literally never leaves the ship and during any 'ground' engagement he's either ordering bombardment or watching over a Marine's helmet cam from the flagship bridge.
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Apr 7, 2015 06:58
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Ceebees posted:I imagine that Poor Man's Fight is insufferable if you aren't between the age of 20 and 30. I mean, i actually fall into that age range, and i've never been pandered at so hard. I doubt the sequel is better. Ha, yeah I fall towards the middle-ish of that age range, and I thought it was a bit heavy-handed but fun when it wasn't laying it on too thick. I only read the first Kloos book, but didn't like it at all. I thought the transition between Earth and the alien stuff was too abrupt and too jarring of a shift in tone and just didn't work. I know what you mean about the amazon self-publishing section. I saw all this stuff that looks OK but not great and thought "but it's only $1. Even if its not amazing, it's still only $1 and there's always the chance it might be great." Then I ended up with way more terrible unfinished books than I'd ever admit to owning and a very few that were OK. I don't buy from there anymore unless I hear good reviews from people I trust and/or it looks amazing.
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Apr 7, 2015 07:11
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Pyroclastic posted:But, it's kinda neat to see how a century of pointless war made everything change and how disruptive Geary is to all that. He's skirting mary sue-dom, though. I love that every cover is depicting a Geary in battle armor with a rifle, but he literally never leaves the ship and during any 'ground' engagement he's either ordering bombardment or watching over a Marine's helmet cam from the flagship bridge. I quit reading because he never loses.
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Apr 7, 2015 08:37
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Hey, since we're talking space opera dash mil SF here, I'm gonna once again recommend Scott Westerfeld's Succession duology, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. I think it's available as an omnibus since that's how I read it, just be mindful of what you are buying/ordering/borrowing. It's one of the best syntheses of military SF with space opera political intrigue that I've ever read. There's a some cool action scenes interpersed with one of the protagonists navigating through the rotten edifice of an interstellar empire where the elite are immortal thanks to science, and the latter half has an incredibly tense space battle that kind of goes with the "submarines in space" cliché but puts in a lot of twists based on the physics of space warfare. Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 09:06
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Antti posted:Hey, since we're talking space opera dash mil SF here, I'm gonna once again recommend Scott Westerfeld's Succession duology, The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds. I think it's available as an omnibus since that's how I read it, just be mindful of what you are buying/ordering/borrowing. I'm going to check this out. It sounds roughly similar in tone to The Dragon Never Sleeps. I mean, really different, but your description made me think of it for some reason. Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire Falls was really good, too. Is that Space Opera-ish?
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Apr 7, 2015 09:57
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I've actually read The Dragon Never Sleeps too, and I wondered if I should bring it up, but it's not really the same. The tone is actually quite different. TDNS has this almost mythical style in story and writing whereas The Risen Empire is more, well, "normal." There's like this membrane between you and the events in TDNS, like you're reading a take on something that happened a long time ago, that dealt with people who were larger than life already at the time. The Risen Empire is more about regular (but certainly important) people who become more important as the story goes on.
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Apr 7, 2015 10:26
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mister posted:Ha, yeah I fall towards the middle-ish of that age range, and I thought it was a bit heavy-handed but fun when it wasn't laying it on too thick. And now one of the books is Hugo nominated, ladies and gentlemen... Drifter posted:
Mars4523 fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 19:13
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I'm re-reading The Fractal Prince before I delve head first into The Causal Angel and I still can't sort something out: Why did Jean and Perhonen feel they needed to lie to Meili about Jean's plan on Earth, and what exactly was the lie? I get what the plan was, but I'm unclear what the lie was. (near the end of Chapter 11: The Thief and the Scars) (here's a good chapter summary to refresh anybody's memory) Edit: was it simply that she wouldn't like what they have to steal and then have to do to the gogol? (based on her reaction when he takes it back to Perhonen) Edit2: answered my own question. I guess that's where she drew the line. Fiendish Dr. Wu fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 23:33
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One of the subplots in that series is the age-old debate about "is a copy of a person THE actual person, or just AN actual person, or just a copy that's not even a person?" The message is kind of obscured with all the nattering about gogols and partials and thoughtwisps, but it's pretty much like that. Mars4523 posted:Marko Kloos's books are fuckawful...And now one of the books is Hugo nominated, ladies and gentlemen...
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Apr 8, 2015 02:35
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Miss-Bomarc posted:The Hugos this year are an amazing sea of drama. If you don't give a poo poo about industry awards, like I do, it's kind of fun to watch. Oh Boy, Here We Go Again.
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Apr 8, 2015 04:11
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Jet Jaguar posted:If I recall correctly, part of the problem with Hyperion is that Simmons wrote a book that was too drat long to publish as one volume, so his publisher suggested cutting the thing in two. The second book is padded out with a bunch of FORCE:space and what else is happening around galaxy, as I recall, and it takes forever to go anywhere. I'm reading Fall of Hyperion now and it suffers badly from being a separate volume. There's a ton of pointless exposition re-explaining everything for some hypothetical hopelessly lost reader whom the author/editor imagines might be reading the second book first. Hyperion introduced seven characters with complex backstories reaching back decades or even centuries and all of them need to have their specific thing wrapped up and the constant exposition trying to catch readers up on that is dragging. Fall of Hyperion also suffers from Hyperion's most glaring flaw of total non-characterization of the Ousters, the big invading fleet of space-dwelling Transhumans who one of the characters spent years with but never describes in detail. About halfway through Fall of Hyperion the Ousters are literally kicking down the doors to civilization and the reader inexplicably knows less about them than most of the characters. It's a shame because Hyperion was really, really good and some of Fall of Hyperion works well. The shift from the pilgrims' narrating their own stories within the frame to the Keats replicant becoming the narrator for the frame story (and starting to lose his mind as a result) is an interesting direction to go rather than just give up and resort to a nameless 3rd person narrator. If nothing else it's clever; I really liked how the narrator drifts from sensible 3rd person limited to weird and inexplicable 3rd person omniscient, and another character soon points this out to the narrator. When the narrator's story isn't blatant padding there are interesting things going on with the technocore and the government and the war that all resolve mysteries from the pilgrims' tales. It doesn't have much hope of matching the virtuosic short story collection from Hyperion in terms of writing quality but it's a decent finale. It would be nice if it could be re-released at some point in a single volume with the padding and redundant exposition stripped out of the last third. And it helps that a lot of the concepts are just cool. The part where Kassad gets a little bit of the Shrike's control over time and sees how unstoppable it really is was crazy and great. He throws a rock at a guy in like 1/1000 time and when it leaves his hand he can see the shockwave of the sonic boom and the guy just explodes from the impact. Or the fact that this whole sudden conflagration is a result of several hypotheses over what the opening of the Time Tombs actually does and that both sides are either fighting a desperate last stand or the opening move in sweeping their opponents away because neither side knows who sent the Time Tombs into the past from the far future or for what purpose but are sure it must be related to their cause. Stuff like that makes it easier to slog through an imperfect second volume to find out what happens. I wonder when Simmons inserted the evil editor character from the poet's tale. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 15:50
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William C Dietz' Legion of the Damned is pretty decent mil-sf with ground combat. The one I recall was basically a reenactment of the battle of Camaron - think French Foreign Legion, except they just stick criminals' brains into mech bodies until their term of service is finished and they get new identities etc, like the real FFL does.Pyroclastic posted:I started plowing through the series not too long ago, and when you go through them quickly, the repeated introductions to events and themes gets grating. The entire premise is "what if all the spaceships were british redcoats and used similar tactics and then a 'MURICAN comes and shows them how the master race does things!?"
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Apr 9, 2015 19:39
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Ceebees posted:Oh Boy, Here We Go Again.  http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/04/08/_2015_hugo_awards_how_the_sad_and_rabid_puppies_took_over_the_sci_fi_nominations.htmlquote:The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation…
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Apr 9, 2015 19:42
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Am I the only one who loves the idea of a story exploring gay and transgender issues through the medium of blowing poo poo the gently caress up?
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Apr 9, 2015 21:08
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coyo7e posted:William C Dietz' Legion of the Damned is pretty decent mil-sf with ground combat. The one I recall was basically a reenactment of the battle of Camaron - think French Foreign Legion, except they just stick criminals' brains into mech bodies until their term of service is finished and they get new identities etc, like the real FFL does. That's mostly just the first book, though. The focus of the later books is more political and the military part of mil-sf falls by the wayside to a large extent, though seeing the hostile aliens' approach to making cyborgs in response to getting their asses kicked by the human cyborgs is interesting.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:14
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ArchangeI posted:Am I the only one who loves the idea of a story exploring gay and transgender issues through the medium of blowing poo poo the gently caress up? Metaphors are communism, and have no place in red-blooded american literature.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:56
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Cythereal posted:That's mostly just the first book, though. The focus of the later books is more political and the military part of mil-sf falls by the wayside to a large extent, though seeing the hostile aliens' approach to making cyborgs in response to getting their asses kicked by the human cyborgs is interesting.
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Apr 9, 2015 22:34
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coyo7e posted:Cool, I will have to check out the rest. I found the first in a trash bin somewhere and enjoyed it well enough.. It was better than that Steel World DustWorld etc series I read a few months back.. That's the BV Larsson or whoever, right? Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire stuff was better at doing "humans getting integrated into galactic society by a force much greater than them."
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Apr 10, 2015 00:34
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WarLocke posted:If I have absolutely abysmal taste in books and have read (and enjoyed) the majority of the Baen catalog, where would I go from there? I don;t know if you've read all of these, but the Legion of the Damned series by William C. Dietz sounds right up your alley. The titular legion is basically "what if the French Foreign Legion was made up of the disembodied brains stuffed into giant bipedal war machines?"
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Apr 14, 2015 07:38
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Patrick Spens posted:"what if the French Foreign Legion was made up of the disembodied brains stuffed into giant bipedal war machines?" Sold! 
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Apr 14, 2015 07:47
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Patrick Spens posted:I don;t know if you've read all of these, but the Legion of the Damned series by William C. Dietz sounds right up your alley. The titular legion is basically "what if the French Foreign Legion was made up of the disembodied brains stuffed into giant bipedal war machines?" Authentic French overuse of definite articles in a second language. I like this post.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:02
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Dang, I guess I didn't sell the criminal brain thing hard enough when I recommended the series a few days ago. 
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Apr 14, 2015 17:35
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Jet Jaguar posted:I really loved "Torch of Honor" and "Rogue Powers," later collected into "Allies and Aliens." Still no epub however they are available as unabridged audiobooks on Audible.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:33
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coyo7e posted:Dang, I guess I didn't sell the criminal brain thing hard enough when I recommended the series a few days ago. Sorry, I missed that you'd just recommended that earlier. And yeah, there is less focus on the cyborg FFL in the later books, but there is still plenty of combat.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:59
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I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever. I've read all of the Ian Douglas books, and I loved Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis. I guess I'm kind of looking for more stuff like that. I'm not even sure if Space Opera is the genre most of that stuff falls under, but I know this thread dips pretty heavy into general milsf so I figured y'all were a good source to go to.
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Apr 26, 2015 18:49
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Internet Wizard posted:I'm on the lookout for some scifi, preferably milsf, that has ancient astronaut themes. Quality isn't necessarily a priority, so long as it isn't like, weird Ringo style stuff like child rape or reenacting Mogadishu with super soldiers or whatever. Not sure if it qualifies as 'ancient astronauts' but Weber's Excalibur Alternative is about a 14th century English troops forced to fight for aliens.
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Apr 26, 2015 19:04
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