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Mars4523 posted:It's hard to imagine when 1) women can cut through shields and armor, fly and move super fast, shoot the wings off of flies and camouflage themselves incredibly well, throw fireballs, and raise the very earth against their enemies or augment their strength many times past human levels (and occasionally do some combination of any of these) just as well as the men, and 2) the conceit is that the Roman soldiers had a critical need for people who could do any of these things very shortly after they were dropped in Alera. If the enemy were battering at the palisade, would the legion officers keep a master Metalcrafter or Firecrafter in the camp because she was a women or would they shove a sword in her hand and immediately march her off to drill? You have a point. I guess he didn't put much thought into it as he could have, and was aiming for a society that was as 'roman' as possible to start from and because he wanted the plotline of Tavi being the only one smart enough to not be too sexist to realize women could fight.
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Aug 3, 2015 08:20
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New Michael Swanwick book out. I find him a bit hit or miss, anyone read it?
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Aug 3, 2015 08:24
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Barbe Rouge posted:I just finished K. J. Parker's new book, Savages. Did you like Savages? Have you read his Two Sword serial series? Was it any good? Also, no way. His Tom Holt books are Terry Pratchett-esque comedies, just a little less refined. Still pretty fun, though.
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Aug 3, 2015 08:35
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Drifter posted:Did you like Savages? Have you read his Two Sword serial series? Was it any good? Also, no way. His Tom Holt books are Terry Pratchett-esque comedies, just a little less refined. Still pretty fun, though. Yes, I liked Savages. Sharps is still my favorite, though. I'll start reading the Two of Swords today. Thanks for the clarification.
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Aug 3, 2015 08:49
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Barbe Rouge posted:I just finished K. J. Parker's new book, Savages. From what I've heard they're in the "[an average bloke who's somewhat of a loser], the ghost of [minor historical figure] and a talking [funny animal] go on an adventure to find the Dildo of Time!" vein of British comedy.
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Aug 3, 2015 09:01
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Mars4523 posted:Jim Butcher has never been the most progressive of writers, but what the hell is with the gender roles and politics in the Codex Alera series? They make no sense, especially the fact that legion commanders would willingly waste a large pool of extremely powerful Earthcrafters by allowing them to go into sex work (with all of the concomitant risks) rather than recruiting them as engineers or Knights Terra. Our Hero is literally the only person in the setting to think of using these women tactically, even though they have the known ability to raise massive siege walls in a matter of hours or open and exploit massive gaps in enemy defenses, given proper training. Far as I can tell (you didn't describe the series very well for someone who hasn't read the books) that's nothing to do with being progressive or not; it's a second-order idiot plot, i.e. a plot that only works cos everyone in the world's an idiot.
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Aug 3, 2015 09:01
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House Louse posted:Far as I can tell (you didn't describe the series very well for someone who hasn't read the books) that's nothing to do with being progressive or not; it's a second-order idiot plot, i.e. a plot that only works cos everyone in the world's an idiot. The premise of the series is pretty much the Roman Empire, surrounded by hostile barbarians (without magic), where every single person is born with the ability to manipulate at least one element, so magic is an everyday thing, and how strong your ability is is inherited, so the strongest people ended up becoming the nobility and breeding amongst themselves to produce stronger and stronger kids 'till many of the highest ranking nobles are pretty much walking nuclear bombs that could set off a volcano or collapse a city, including the women. Even among ordinary people though you still get the occasional person that could level a building or set a room full of people on fire It's was a decently entertaining series despite the silly premise, but ended up being a bit mediocre by the end. The main character is completely powerless (which isn't supposed to be something that happens) for the first two thirds of the series, which ended up making him considerably more interesting than how he was in the last book when he turned out to be the godliest crafter ever and completely sucked any tension out of the conflict. It honestly would have been a better series if he never got his magic poo poo back or at least only was a weakling like he was for one book. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Aug 3, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 10:03
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Well, more Theme Park Roman Empire. The climactic final fight with the Big Bad was basically something out of Dragonball Z, which in the context of the rest of the series meant that it really sucked. Mars4523 fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Aug 3, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 10:15
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Wolpertinger posted:The premise of the series is pretty much the Roman Empire, surrounded by hostile barbarians (without magic), where every single person is born with the ability to manipulate at least one element, so magic is an everyday thing, and how strong your ability is is inherited, so the strongest people ended up becoming the nobility and breeding amongst themselves to produce stronger and stronger kids 'till many of the highest ranking nobles are pretty much walking nuclear bombs that could set off a volcano or collapse a city, including the women. Even among ordinary people though you still get the occasional person that could level a building or set a room full of people on fire It sounds like a less interesting version of the Dark Sword trilogy.
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Aug 3, 2015 10:47
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Drifter posted:It sounds like a less interesting version of the Dark Sword trilogy.
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Aug 3, 2015 10:55
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I haven't read that book series in over 15 years, but that's what I thought of upon hearing that whole 'in a world where EVERYONE had powers, one man didn't have ANYTHING...' muckluk.Mars4523 posted:This sounds horrendously bad from the Goodreads blurb. Dear god, those character names... Joram, Blachloch, Sayron Gimli, Frodo, Saruman 
Drifter fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Aug 3, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 11:15
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It seems like it has a pretty different tone to it though, Codex Alera is like.. half military fantasy half political thriller for most of it. The most entertaining parts I remember were mostly giant military battles with magic, so the main character's shtick was that he was a good tactician and capable of leading troops with all their powers in clever ways to beat a greater force despite having none himself. Which is why when he suddenly got the power to level the whole enemy army by himself it became considerably less interesting (also it shifted to fighting essentially the Zerg)
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Aug 3, 2015 11:33
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Drifter posted:I haven't read that book series in over 15 years, but that's what I thought of upon hearing that whole 'in a world where EVERYONE had powers, one man didn't have ANYTHING...' muckluk. i think he was taking issue with " renegade warlock of the dark Duuk-tsarith caste"
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Aug 3, 2015 11:42
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That book sounds bad, but you can do that thing with most of human history... "Everyone is born smart and capable, and it makes no sense for the author (of human history) to make it so only the leaders were men (of the primary race of the region). It's like they really wouldn't realize that everyone was capable and could..."
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Aug 3, 2015 14:10
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Just a little heads up: All this talk about Craig Schaefer and his Daniel Faust books, it seems the kindle version of the first one in the series is only $2.99 on Amazon right now: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Down-Daniel-Faust-Book-ebook/dp/B00JYIUH8O No idea if it's a limited offer or something, but I grabbed it immediately in case I want to read it when I'm done with my current list.
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Aug 3, 2015 14:50
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andrew smash posted:minor point but his shakuhachi isn't a sword, it's a flute that he uses like a weapon. It's easy to miss but Reynolds explains what the deal is with Sajaki early in the book. When they go to the Rust Belt he dresses up like one of their cops, which means wearing a bamboo hat and carrying around a shakuhachi.
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Aug 3, 2015 14:50
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I tried to read Worm a while ago, got to 2.3 or 2.4 and just gave up on it, it's like a garbage comic book without the cool art or someone with fun ideas doing the writing.
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Aug 3, 2015 15:03
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Apparently Fools quest by Hobb is out (well,sent today by mail). Time to get ready for more delicious pain and suffering.
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Aug 3, 2015 15:16
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I haven't read Worm, and that is because when I looked into it, it sounded derivative. By that, I mean that it's the sort of thing that people write as a reaction to their mental image of what superhero comics contain, without actually having read them either ever, or in a very long time. Soon I will be Invincible was very much the same way, though it was still enjoyable. I might read the rewrite of Worm because I do like superheroes, but many of the book-form stories about them are written by people writing about a genre they understand poorly. Sort of like the way people have the idea of sci-fi being just lasers and robots and dumb pulp stories.
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Aug 3, 2015 16:20
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Sjonkel posted:Just a little heads up: All this talk about Craig Schaefer and his Daniel Faust books, it seems the kindle version of the first one in the series is only $2.99 on Amazon right now: http://www.amazon.com/Long-Down-Daniel-Faust-Book-ebook/dp/B00JYIUH8O All his ebooks are really cheap, because he's self-published. (Which makes the high quality all the more astounding).
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Aug 3, 2015 17:02
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occamsnailfile posted:I haven't read Worm, and that is because when I looked into it, it sounded derivative. By that, I mean that it's the sort of thing that people write as a reaction to their mental image of what superhero comics contain, without actually having read them either ever, or in a very long time. Soon I will be Invincible was very much the same way, though it was still enjoyable. I might read the rewrite of Worm because I do like superheroes, but many of the book-form stories about them are written by people writing about a genre they understand poorly. Sort of like the way people have the idea of sci-fi being just lasers and robots and dumb pulp stories.  " sub-plot that was going nowhere interesting. Someone like Whedon or Bendis or that insane Scottish guy has done better in the last ten years, if your'e looking for that sort of thing.Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
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Aug 3, 2015 18:00
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Drifter posted:I haven't read that book series in over 15 years, but that's what I thought of upon hearing that whole 'in a world where EVERYONE had powers, one man didn't have ANYTHING...' muckluk. Of course, that's also the premise of Piers Anthony's first Xanth book.
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Aug 3, 2015 18:12
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Selachian posted:Of course, that's also the premise of Piers Anthony's first Xanth book. The tone and execution of the Xanth books and literally anything else worth reading are wildly different.
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Aug 3, 2015 18:24
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Kesper North posted:All his ebooks are really cheap, because he's self-published. (Which makes the high quality all the more astounding).
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Aug 3, 2015 18:30
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Barbe Rouge posted:I just finished K. J. Parker's new book, Savages. I haven't read any Parker, but I doubt it. Holt has written one book under his own name and published it about fifteen times. The best iteration is Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, which is basically "Vikings versus Yuppies".
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Aug 3, 2015 18:42
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Mars4523 posted:This sounds horrendously bad from the Goodreads blurb. Dear god, those character names... Haven't read the series in years, they probably don't stand up at all, but I do remember liking how the series goes completely crazy in the last book and space marines invade magic-land because it turns out Earth had been hunting for the source of magic all along and the mages are all really descended from mages of old that fled persecution. Then it's all mages tanks dragons and SPESH MARINES.
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Aug 3, 2015 19:51
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Yeah, I have a lot of fond memories of the series but I read it when I was like eight. I dread the notion of revisiting it now.
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Aug 3, 2015 20:11
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Barbe Rouge posted:I just finished K. J. Parker's new book, Savages. His fantasy comedies are really in a much different style than the material he writes under the Parker name. As everyone else in the thread said, they're about nebbish British people encountering mythological figures, though as a whole they're far more pessimistic about the human condition than Pratchett ever was. Holt's historical fiction, on the other hand, reads a lot more like Parker. I'd recommend getting ahold of his The Walled Orchard duology (Goatsong, The Walled Orchard). They're the memoirs of a comedic playwright living in classical Athens who got a ringside seat to the Peloponnesian War and the collapse of Athenian democracy. They're pretty much K. J. Parker stories in an actual historical setting.
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Aug 3, 2015 21:33
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Mars4523 posted:It's hard to imagine when 1) women can cut through shields and armor, fly and move super fast, shoot the wings off of flies and camouflage themselves incredibly well, throw fireballs, and raise the very earth against their enemies or augment their strength many times past human levels (and occasionally do some combination of any of these) just as well as the men, and 2) the conceit is that the Roman soldiers had a critical need for people who could do any of these things very shortly after they were dropped in Alera. If the enemy were battering at the palisade, would the legion officers keep a master Metalcrafter or Firecrafter in the camp because she was a women or would they shove a sword in her hand and immediately march her off to drill? But before Octavian used the camp followers as siege engineers, the only use of woman were as spies and assassins. It was an extremely stratified and patriarchal society. Hell, even as High Ladies no woman had any real authority other than that of her High Lord husband or father. I'm not disagreeing with your "why didn't they do this, it makes so much sense to?" But I would say that given the history of their society starting as a lost Roman legion and their camp followers, they needed to be extremely regimented and everyone needed to know their place and not deviate in order to ensure survival. A couple of generations pass and I can see this as becoming ritual and tradition and forming the basis of the evolving society as opposed to the simple pragmatism that was necessitated by survival. Personally, given the fragments of what we know of Alera's human history, I'd say it's internally consistent.
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Aug 4, 2015 00:07
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Drifter posted:It sounds like a less interesting version of the Dark Sword trilogy. I was going to make this comment. I'm pleasantly surprised that someone else made that connection. Shame on those of you making GBS threads on the Darksword books because of silly things like character names. You should be making GBS threads on the Darksword trilogy because the third book was terrible. The first two books ruled, though.
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Aug 4, 2015 00:22
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I'm gonna blow your mind. There are four Darksword books!
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Aug 4, 2015 00:37
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occamsnailfile posted:I haven't read Worm, and that is because when I looked into it, it sounded derivative. By that, I mean that it's the sort of thing that people write as a reaction to their mental image of what superhero comics contain, without actually having read them either ever, or in a very long time. Soon I will be Invincible was very much the same way, though it was still enjoyable. I might read the rewrite of Worm because I do like superheroes, but many of the book-form stories about them are written by people writing about a genre they understand poorly. Sort of like the way people have the idea of sci-fi being just lasers and robots and dumb pulp stories. Soon I Will Be Invincible read like it was based in the ridiculous pre-Crisis comics that Grant Morrison masturbates over. It was readable but not particularly good. Worm's much different in tone, and much of it is about the slow disintegration of society due to the large scale threats posed by supervillains (which greatly outnumber superheroes).
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Aug 4, 2015 00:52
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A really good superhero novel is A Once Crowded Sky by Tom King. It deals with a world that used to have superheroes and worked by comic book rules (like one character has emotional problems because his loved ones kept dying and coming back to life) but a big disaster happens and there's only one guy left, a former sidekick who refused the call to action.
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Aug 4, 2015 01:37
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Ornamented Death posted:I'm gonna blow your mind. Yeah I read that one too. It was... okay? I think? Not good, but eh. I think it was a bit neat that the main character was mute, but that's probably damning with faint praise. neongrey fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Aug 4, 2015 |
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Aug 4, 2015 01:39
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Centripetal Horse posted:You should be making GBS threads on the Darksword trilogy because the third book was terrible. SPESH MARINES. neongrey posted:Yeah I read that one too. It was... okay? I think? Not good, but eh. I think it was a bit neat that the main character was mute, but that's probably damning with faint praise. Yeah...that one was enough to convince 13 year old me that the "Death Gate Cycle" (which I loved, as naive fantasy/scifi enraptured youth  ) did not need a sequel.
Snuffman fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Aug 4, 2015 |
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Aug 4, 2015 07:19
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Don't forget Darksword Adventures, the freeform-ish, incredibly incomplete roleplaying system based off the books. It had some interesting ideas, but it recommended using hand signals in lieu of dice, and didn't have enough of the rules included to properly play.
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Aug 4, 2015 07:31
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The Amazon monthlies look like they got updated overnight. All the currently released books in Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series are down to £1.99 on Amazon UK for the month. James Clavell's Shogun part one (of two; the rest of the six books are basically standalone if memory serves) is down to £0.99, but might not be as fun without Toshiro Mifune and all the hammy acting of the TV Miniseries. Otherwise nothing is jumping out at me.
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Aug 4, 2015 11:20
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Shogun the book is amazing, shut your butt mouth.
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Aug 4, 2015 11:24
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Neurosis posted:Worm's much different in tone, and much of it is about the slow disintegration of society due to the large scale threats posed by supervillains (which greatly outnumber superheroes). It's not even that, really. The story presents the slow breakdown of society as the inevitable consequence of superpowers existing fullstop. It just isn't set up to deal with an entirely separate class of human being that's vastly more powerful than the bulk of the general populace. I like Soon I Will Be Invincible, as it happens, but I'll grant you it's... not really a complete book. Dr Impossible makes for a great character study, and I think the book pulls off this neat trick where, from the outside, he looks like this preposterous, eccentric, larger than life Dr Doom type, and then on the inside he comes across as this much more nuanced, human character, and the book manages to link those two together in a way that the one seems to flow naturally from the other. Fatale, unfortunately, is bland and her arc goes nowhere, much like the plot in general. A lot of the book seems to exist to facilitate these subtle little pastiches of superhero tropes (like Dr Impossible/CoreFire's backstory mutating every other chapter, because they've been about thirty-five for the past sixty years), which is cute but not something you should be building a novel around. Megazver posted:Shogun the book is amazing, shut your butt mouth. It'd have to be, to justify that godawful TV series.
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Aug 4, 2015 11:42
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Nullkigan posted:The Amazon monthlies look like they got updated overnight.
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