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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished Leviathan Wakes, and enjoyed it quite a bit. How are the rest of the Expanse novels? Second one is great, third one is mediocre, fourth one is pretty good, fifth one is apparently very good again (haven't yet managed to read it).
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Jun 15, 2015 13:15
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Amberskin posted:Alastair Reynolds is loving good. Really? Anyway, I just found these neat photos of sf authors' writing rooms. (I'm fascinated by the places authors write.) Michael Swanwick's is the best office, but Samuel R. Delany's is the best photo: http://www.whereiwrite.org/ The Nebulas are out but nobody seems to care - Annihilation beat The Goblin Emperor, Ancillary Sword and The Three-Body Problem. Also, Wolfgang Jeschke has died: http://www.locusmag.com/News/2015/06/wolfgang-jeschke-1936-2015/
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Jun 15, 2015 15:15
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House Louse posted:Really? Margaret Weis' room has the best dog, E. E. Knight's has the best cat, Delaney has the best beard, and there's no evidence of children in Piers Anthony's room.
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Jun 15, 2015 15:32
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Amberskin posted:Alastair Reynolds is loving good. I listened to all of Galactic North while driving from Wisconsin to Colorado and have no regrets
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Jun 15, 2015 15:33
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House Louse posted:Really? Well, I have to confess I had some sleep in between, and some work-related pauses  . I begun reading it during my underground trip to work on friday morning, resumed at home on evening, kept reading until I went to sleep and followed on Saturday morning. It took aproximately 24 hours of elapsed time...The book is a blast, and the only thing I could complain is the ending looks a little bit rushed on a perhaps somehow confusing about which read race did what, and who did really built the neutron-star based computer thing, unless it was made by the Inhibitors and I got it wrong thinking otherwise.
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Jun 15, 2015 15:44
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Amberskin posted:Well, I have to confess I had some sleep in between, and some work-related pauses recently re-read this one myself. none of the involved races built it, its builders are not identified. the inhibitors knew it would draw attention from emerging cultures and built one of their lures near it and the amarantin found them both, and Sylveste also found them a million years later Also for whatever reason i didn't remember this, but on my reread it struck me that Sylveste is a real rear end in a top hat. He's still right a lot of the time but still. andrew smash fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Jun 15, 2015 |
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Jun 15, 2015 15:56
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Amberskin posted:Well, I have to confess I had some sleep in between, and some work-related pauses I hope you didn't disturb anyone else on the underground  "tirade" means rant, I'm teasing youchrisoya posted:Dude's got good lungs and can scream for hours, I guess. Couldn't have put it better myself.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:02
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andrew smash posted:Also for whatever reason i didn't remember this, but on my reread it struck me that Sylveste is a real rear end in a top hat. He's still right a lot of the time but still.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:15
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House Louse posted:I hope you didn't disturb anyone else on the underground Thanks! I was not aware about this "false friend".
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Jun 15, 2015 16:21
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If you didn't like any of the characters (as people, not characters) in Revelations Space, just wait until the next book, because Clavain joins the cast and he's the dreamiest embittered vet in the galaxy. I'm not being sarcastic, I read Galactic North before Redemption Ark, so had been introduced to Clavain through the short stories first, and I was so excited when I found out he was going to be a major character in the books.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:37
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People say it's not needed, but reading the two Clavain short stories as prologues to Redemption Ark makes the whole thing much more epic.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:56
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I'm suddenly tempted to look up E.E.Knight's books on the account of him having a really cute cat. edit: Actually, I'd argue that reading the short stories before Redemption Ark is just about the only way to enjoy Clavain's character; he's a tremendous Mary Sue in that one and pretty hard to take seriously on that account.
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Jun 15, 2015 17:06
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House Louse posted:Anyway, I just found these neat photos of sf authors' writing rooms. (I'm fascinated by the places authors write.) Michael Swanwick's is the best office, but Samuel R. Delany's is the best photo: http://www.whereiwrite.org/ Just saw an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, he used to write in cafes etc but for the past five years or so has written exclusively outside, under a tarp, next to his house. He watches birds. 
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Jun 16, 2015 03:54
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With the enders game series, will I get majorly annoyed at the  kids crap or is it a bit more quality read?
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Jun 16, 2015 10:40
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I've only read Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead but from what I understand only Ender's Game is about kids in space. Even that is more like "Yo these kids are hosed up and look at these dudes making these kids even more hosed up". Speaker for the Dead is very different. It's more about cultural clashes, marital drama and about how Ender really, really, wants to gently caress his sister. Well that's what I took from it anyway. It's a pretty good book actually. It takes place decades after Ender's Game in Ender's subjective time and centuries after the events of Ender's Game. There are kids but it's not kids I've also read the first three or so books in the Ender's Shadow series and yeah those were more like kids acting like adults do and I got pretty annoyed by it. The first one was good but they kinda went downhill from there...
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Jun 16, 2015 11:04
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Depending on how much you care about who writes the books you read, Orson Scott Card might soil the whole series for you.
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Jun 16, 2015 11:42
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I liked Ender's Game way back when I originally read it but didn't really like the sequels all that much. They have very little connection to the first book in plot or even really thematically.
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Jun 16, 2015 12:43
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I'd say read Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead and then forget the other books even exist. They are not good.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:07
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Technically, just about the only thing in Ender's Game related to the sequels is the last chapter, which also happens to have more plot than the entire rest of the book, so you could try just that.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:08
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Selachian posted:I'd say read Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead and then forget the other books even exist. They are not good. _Xenocide_ has the single most deus ex machina ending I can recall reading. Can I rant about Seveneves here?
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Jun 16, 2015 15:29
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Amberskin posted:Thanks! I was not aware about this "false friend". Sorry, didn't realise English wasn't your first language. ded posted:With the enders game series, will I get majorly annoyed at the That's the least of your worries! Seriously though, I thought they were really poorly characterised as children, they read as teenagers to me.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:53
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I just finished The Adjacent and it left me with many questions, so while doing a little googling I saw that the Prochous sections take place in the Dream Archipelago, and this is something Christopher Priest has written about before. Does anyone know if reading his other work, particularly books with the Dream Archipelago, will make The Adjacent clearer? Are they linked at all as part of a loose series or is it self-contained?
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Jun 16, 2015 16:57
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Phanatic posted:_Xenocide_ has the single most deus ex machina ending I can recall reading. Please use spoiler tags.
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Jun 16, 2015 18:00
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General Emergency posted:I've only read Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead but from what I understand only Ender's Game is about kids in space. Even that is more like "Yo these kids are hosed up and look at these dudes making these kids even more hosed up". There's only one book where they're kids, and it's by far the best one in the series - but if there's one major criticism of it it's that the protags don't remotely feel like normal kids anyway, so... I think you'd be fine. But I'd echo the above about the series as a whole. Phanatic posted:_Xenocide_ has the single most deus ex machina ending I can recall reading. There's a Neal Stephenson thread. Albeit misspelled. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3611188
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Jun 16, 2015 18:37
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I can't decide how I feel about The Explorer and The Testimony by James Smythe. The Explorer was an interesting story setup that had a lot of possibilities but in the end came off as pretty unsatisfying to me. I don't often go for hard sci-fi but the science in this was appalling. The latter half of the book is an exercise in frustration and feels like a different author polished it off. The Testimony was a mess, there's a lot of subplots that don't go anywhere and the structure did it no favors either. In both books Smythe sets up interesting mysteries then proceeds to take the reader through a convoluted journey without a real attempt to answer them. Sometimes the journey is the destination but these weren't deft enough to manage it for me. Perhaps I just need to read the first half of his books and just put them down. Or find something better. The Gunslinger fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 18:58
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Are there any fantasy/scifi/steampunk/whatever books about explorers?
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Jun 16, 2015 19:26
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General Emergency posted:Speaker for the Dead is very different. It's more about cultural clashes, marital drama and about how Ender really, really, wants to gently caress his sister. IIRC, Speaker for the Dead explicitly states (from an omniscient-narrator viewpoint) that Ender doesn't want to gently caress his sister. I think there was some odd subtext in Ender's Game that made a statement like that necessary, though.
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Jun 16, 2015 19:50
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ravenkult posted:Are there any fantasy/scifi/steampunk/whatever books about explorers? Joke response: A whole lot of Star Trek books.
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Jun 16, 2015 20:28
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I think if you didn't read Ender's Game as a teenager you probably missed the window for it being some kind of mind-blowing, life-affirming experience. Also, check out the conspiracy theories about the book being Hitler apologia, not because they're necessarily true, but because they're loving funny.
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Jun 16, 2015 20:49
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ravenkult posted:Are there any fantasy/scifi/steampunk/whatever books about explorers? Pretty common in SF - an early subgenre was the "puzzle planet" type of story where explorers from a spaceship would land on a new planet and try to solve it's mysteries. For example, see Brian Stableford's "Hooded Swan" and "Daedalus" series. Then there's stuff like Gateway, Rendezvous with Rama and Eon in which alien structures are being explored, and more recently Darwinia and Vandermeer's Annihilation which both deal with exploration of a mysterious region of Earth.
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Jun 16, 2015 21:52
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Something in the last decade would be good to be honest. Annihilation might be a good idea though.
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Jun 16, 2015 22:08
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Hobnob posted:Pretty common in SF - an early subgenre was the "puzzle planet" type of story where explorers from a spaceship would land on a new planet and try to solve it's mysteries. For example, see Brian Stableford's "Hooded Swan" and "Daedalus" series. Then there's stuff like Gateway, Rendezvous with Rama and Eon in which alien structures are being explored, and more recently Darwinia and Vandermeer's Annihilation which both deal with exploration of a mysterious region of Earth.
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Jun 16, 2015 22:42
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ravenkult posted:Something in the last decade would be good to be honest. Annihilation might be a good idea though. The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy just came out last month and it's described as a post apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It sounds really awesome & original(i read his previous novel Red Moon and it was both of these)
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Jun 16, 2015 23:08
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Hobnob posted:Pretty common in SF - an early subgenre was the "puzzle planet" type of story where explorers from a spaceship would land on a new planet and try to solve it's mysteries. For example, see Brian Stableford's "Hooded Swan" and "Daedalus" series. Then there's stuff like Gateway, Rendezvous with Rama and Eon in which alien structures are being explored, and more recently Darwinia and Vandermeer's Annihilation which both deal with exploration of a mysterious region of Earth. I remember some books by Hal Clement about exploring quite extreme planets. With the plus that the explorers in that books were mostly aliens. Mission of Gravity, Close to Critical and Cycle of Fire come to my mind. Dragon's Egg and Starquake (by Robert L. Forward) are also two books about extreme explorers, with the added bonus of depicting a civilation developing on the surface of a neutron star.
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Jun 17, 2015 12:33
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So I just finished reading Nemesis Games (5th Expanse Book) and figured I'd drop off my impressions. It's definitely a good book and does a surprising amount to move the universe forward and change up the status quo. Like, about 10 chapters in before they start dropping enormous, earth-shattering stuff that really does a lot to shake things up. That said, it still feels a little bit set-uppy and the climax is weaker than any of the other ones so far. It's a lot of moving pieces around, but I haven't been this excited about the series since after the first book. There's also a lot of POV chapters for the main four and it's got a lot of backstory-fleshing-out going on, which I appreciated.
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Jun 17, 2015 22:24
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CaptCommy posted:Like, about 10 chapters in before they start dropping enormous, earth-shattering stuff that really does a lot to shake things up.
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Jun 18, 2015 07:35
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Did I miss the discussion over The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu? I just finished it and thought it was really well done. Anyone who has been looking for an epic-feeling fantasy with lots of political machinations, gods meddling with mortals, battles, etc should really check it out. The Chinese "warring states" flavor he gives it is also really refreshing -- it's nice to read something that's not another medieval European fantasy. Also there's a nice mix of male and female characters and everyone is pretty fleshed out with positives and negatives -- there really isn't a true "villain" and it's much stronger for that. I'd put it alongside The Goblin Emperor as a hopeful example of a new trend of "competent decent folk doing their best" fantasy. A refreshing change.
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Jun 18, 2015 12:45
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johnsonrod posted:I just finished it last night actually. I'd kind of agree with you. There was a lot of predictable plot lines that the author's foreshadow rather clumsily early on. What the hell, they ruined Naomi's character for me.
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Jun 18, 2015 21:41
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Figured I would post this here too: Are there any series like Game of Thrones in space? Google throws up The Expanse series which is nothing loving like GoT. Dune is probably the closest I've read and I liked the concept they reworked into Jupiter Ascending - so basically any powerful families/houses fighting over a resource or a throne in a space opera setting (with lots of grey characters and deaths)? From looking around, there doesn't seem to be anything, which is kinda surprising, it's a decent concept to run with.
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Jun 18, 2015 21:46
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Dune maybe? That's... actually the only expansive kind of powerful families fighting over a resource kinda book I can think of and I've read a lot of scifi. Maybe some of the milscifi genre? Oh yea, finished up 14 by Peter Clines. The Fold was a lot better, but mainly because of pacing issues. Same general overview/idea as the other book (minus the doorway stuff), but all in all it wasn't too bad. Wouldn't smoke the tires hauling rear end to go buy a copy, but if you happen to like The Fold it's worth picking up sometime. Stupid_Sexy_Flander fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 22:15
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