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Just finished The Void Trilogy. Yeah, that was a thing that happened.
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Sep 4, 2015 22:48
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I just got done reading the latest book of the Expanse series. Enjoyed it. Definitely recommend. I'm going to go against the trend and say I enjoyed the third/fourth book. 5th? Not so much. Didn't really have a resolution like the other books did. But seeing someone finally drop a rock on a planet was pretty cool. It'll be interesting to see the aftermath and whether Earth recovers & the sky clears or if it gets written off for the rest of the series. I enjoyed the running theme about humanity being its own worst enemy. We constantly gently caress it up. Whether it's governments & corporations or individuals who go power crazy. We're just apes flinging poo poo at each other and it's a wonder we've evolved as far as we have. Edit: For all the alien poo poo that gets thrown around, it's never been the main bad in the books. With maybe the exception of the end of the first. But even that was just acting on humanity's gently caress up. I got into these books by relating it with Kerbal Space Program and I loved how it dealt with the normal poo poo you don't often see in other space dramas. Gravity. Air. Food. Water. Vast distances where even communication becomes hard. Fights aren't pew pew lasers - they're missiles from very, very far away. I could also totally see how people born in low gravity might almost become a separate human species and racism/schisms form. Great stuff. Also keen to see more about the next big bad. Dark matter aliens? They exist outside the normal baryonic stuff? Do they pick on networked/hive creatures? Would humans have an advantage in that we're all separate whereas the protomolecule stuff was linked? Who the gently caress knows but I'm looking forward to the possible descriptions of these things. asdfsdfg fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 5, 2015 07:04
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Expanse #3 sucks so far. Sucked up to the 40% mark, was okay from 40% to 50% (Miller and Holden) but now its back to sucking in a big way. All the characters suck. Especially the villain. Bobby or Bill or whatever his name is is just a miller copy. I went back and read a bit of expanse #1 just to make sure I'm remembering it right, the way #1 handled the racism was so much more ... masterful than the hamfisted attempts in #3. Another crazy mao as the villain? The only neat thing in the book has been the use of the mormon ship and the idea of a 'slow zone' which A Fire Upon the Deep did about 12000x times better. Coming off of reading Expanse #1 and #2 this has been a pretty serious let down, I'm right now reading it just to finish the drat thing. Also the goopy horror alien poo poo is now cracking jokes about being a curious biological computer? It feels like its all leading up to a big deus ex machina. Goddamn, its like #3 isn't written by the same author(s). I'm disappointed.
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Sep 8, 2015 21:05
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Based on your reactions, you may like, #4 even less (but #5 might be one of the best in the series).
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Sep 9, 2015 01:29
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syphon posted:Based on your reactions, you may like, #4 even less (but #5 might be one of the best in the series). Yeah, agreed.
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Sep 9, 2015 01:53
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Man slowly going through Expanse 1 and feel like I have so much to look forward to. It's not perfect but better than that silver wings pew pew lasers I read last time it came up in the thread.
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Sep 9, 2015 06:16
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I think its kind of weird to read a female Samoan space marine as identical to the grizzled 50s noir detective who is complete with a pork pie hat... third book is definitely not my favorite in the series though. Not sure exactly when this is revealed in its entirety but space goop is assimilating stuff and using it to build a consciousness and it's wisecracking because miller was a sarcastic rear end in a top hat, the same way holden was able to reach julie Mao inside it on eden.
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Sep 9, 2015 06:31
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pile of brown posted:I think its kind of weird to read a female Samoan space marine as identical to the grizzled 50s noir detective who is complete with a pork pie hat... third book is definitely not my favorite in the series though. I was looking for "Bull". You remember him, the noir security officer with a drinking problem?
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Sep 9, 2015 11:15
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I gave up reading The Expanse book 1 because it wasn't space opera at all. Just boring people doing bugger all in space settings. At what point does it become good?
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Sep 10, 2015 17:26
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Darkrenown posted:I gave up reading The Expanse book 1 because it wasn't space opera at all. Just boring people doing bugger all in space settings. At what point does it become good? If you don't like Leviathan Wakes by the end of the book you will not enjoy any of them. Book 2 and Book 5 have the most political tension and space fightin', but they're all fairly character oriented. If you want to give book 1 another shot try skipping ahead to the discovery of the corpse in the bathtub.
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Sep 10, 2015 17:36
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I'm having the same thoughts about halfway through Leviathan Wakes. Nothing against the story, which is fine, but it wasn't what I wanted at all. I haven't read any sci-fi in years, and the preview for the Syfy show made it sound like a capital-letters Space Opera. The story so far is low stakes and small scope, which might be an unfair criticism of the first 300 pages of a 6-7 book series, but I have zero interest in reading another thousand pages or two and hoping it "gets good."
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Sep 10, 2015 23:13
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Dunbar posted:I'm having the same thoughts about halfway through Leviathan Wakes. Nothing against the story, which is fine, but it wasn't what I wanted at all. I haven't read any sci-fi in years, and the preview for the Syfy show made it sound like a capital-letters Space Opera. The story so far is low stakes and small scope, which might be an unfair criticism of the first 300 pages of a 6-7 book series, but I have zero interest in reading another thousand pages or two and hoping it "gets good." The stakes escalate significantly by the end of Leviathan. You've already GOT the book. Read it to the end, and make your decision then. Be forewarned that the stakes of the series do zoom in and out of focus a lot over the series. Sometimes its a huge planetary threat, sometimes something very personal, sometimes one that becomes the other and then back again.
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Sep 10, 2015 23:29
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Dunbar posted:I'm having the same thoughts about halfway through Leviathan Wakes. Nothing against the story, which is fine, but it wasn't what I wanted at all. I haven't read any sci-fi in years, and the preview for the Syfy show made it sound like a capital-letters Space Opera. The story so far is low stakes and small scope, which might be an unfair criticism of the first 300 pages of a 6-7 book series, but I have zero interest in reading another thousand pages or two and hoping it "gets good." Finish the book you've got, then make the decision. The escalation's one of the cooler parts of the series. By book 4 planets are literally exploding.
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Sep 10, 2015 23:47
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Yeah if you are waiting for fleets out maneuvering each other the scope rarely gets to that point except in a scene or two in each book. Its a big universe with some dramatic events but the focus tends to be on a smaller story tied into mr hero. I think the plot of the Expanse books is usually pretty solid but the side characters can really drag. Not that the main crew is that great, but the botanist dude, the revenge girl, and the hick dad chapters were really slow.
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Sep 11, 2015 00:05
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So the answer to "I don't like the first book so far" is "read all the rest of them and THEN decide whether or not you like it" 
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Sep 11, 2015 05:52
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Miss-Bomarc posted:So the answer to "I don't like the first book so far" is "read all the rest of them and THEN decide whether or not you like it" No. It's to finish that book since the concerns raised are directly addressed in that book. (Note I just finished it for the first time yesterday and did thoroughly enjoy it)
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Sep 11, 2015 06:32
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I'm sorta enjoying the 4th book. 1st was good! Quite good, I thought.
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Sep 11, 2015 06:42
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Darkrenown posted:I gave up reading The Expanse book 1 because it wasn't space opera at all. Just boring people doing bugger all in space settings. At what point does it become good? It doesn't. It just gets steadily worse.
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Sep 11, 2015 06:51
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So I just read Old Man's War and have gotten pretty stoked about military sci-fi. I have of course read Starship Troopers, but what else should I check out? I hear good things about The Forever War. .
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Sep 11, 2015 23:38
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Tias posted:So I just read Old Man's War and have gotten pretty stoked about military sci-fi. I have of course read Starship Troopers, but what else should I check out? I hear good things about The Forever War. . The Forever War is a good choice. So is Armor. If you don't mind Space Navy instead of Space Marines, I'm quite fond of In Death Ground and The Shiva Option. There are other books in that series, but IDG and TSO are by far the best, and you don't need to read the ones before or after them to get them. Do just those two and tap out. (I wish I had.  )And you should probably do the rest of the Old Man books too. I know not everyone loves all of them, but I've pretty much enjoyed 'em all. Except for the newest, The End of All Things which just didn't click for me. 
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Sep 11, 2015 23:55
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jng2058 posted:The Forever War is a good choice. So is Armor. If you don't mind Space Navy instead of Space Marines, I'm quite fond of In Death Ground and The Shiva Option. There are other books in that series, but IDG and TSO are by far the best, and you don't need to read the ones before or after them to get them. Do just those two and tap out. (I wish I had. Just be aware that On Death Ground and Shiva Option are 100% relentless space battles with thinner than cardboard characters. Also a lot of "the new tier XII shields held the tier 7 warheads, but only for a moment before they were overwhelmed, the ship engulfed in explosions as it fell off the line." Basically it's Weber without being loaded down with Honor.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:18
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Velius posted:Just be aware that On Death Ground and Shiva Option are 100% relentless space battles with thinner than cardboard characters. Also a lot of "the new tier XII shields held the tier 7 warheads, but only for a moment before they were overwhelmed, the ship engulfed in explosions as it fell off the line." Sure, but Weber does good space battles. It's pretty much ALL he does well. If you're going to read Weber at all, these are the books to read first.
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Sep 12, 2015 03:56
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jng2058 posted:So is Armor. Second Armor. Feel free to skim the second section though.
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Sep 12, 2015 03:59
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Obligatory mention of Passage at Arms as the best "Spaceships are really just submarines in space" novel ever written. There isn't a whole lot of character development in the book and the characters themselves are kinda predictable (the Christian guy, the old man, the clueless newbie etc.), but that doesn't really matter because the rest is so loving good.Velius posted:Just be aware that On Death Ground and Shiva Option are 100% relentless space battles with thinner than cardboard characters. Also a lot of "the new tier XII shields held the tier 7 warheads, but only for a moment before they were overwhelmed, the ship engulfed in explosions as it fell off the line." It's based on a boardgame (Starfire), and it shows really badly at times. In some sections you can practically see the dice rolls. But I still love it, because the plot is fairly well done and even allows for the heroes to make a few mistakes early on (practically unheard of in most mil-sci-fi) before turning into an unstoppable juggernaut of a military machine. I'll also shamelessly plug my very own Weltenbrand, which is very much a Tom Clancy novel reimagined in space (minus the crazy right-wing political rants). Including tank battles on Mars involving Germans in tanks named after big cats, Daring Commando Raids(TM) and lots of space battles.
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Sep 12, 2015 04:40
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Velius posted:Just be aware that On Death Ground and Shiva Option are 100% relentless space battles with thinner than cardboard characters. Also a lot of "the new tier XII shields held the tier 7 warheads, but only for a moment before they were overwhelmed, the ship engulfed in explosions as it fell off the line." The only bad I can say about both books is this weird thing military SF-authors seem to have where they just describe space battle after space battle, but somehow forget to actually mention how the ships involved look. I guess the author just assumed we'd use our imagination, but it was still kind irritating when reading them and suddenly having the realization there never was a description of how the ships look. ArchangeI posted:It's based on a boardgame (Starfire), and it shows really badly at times. In some sections you can practically see the dice rolls. But I still love it, because the plot is fairly well done and even allows for the heroes to make a few mistakes early on (practically unheard of in most mil-sci-fi) before turning into an unstoppable juggernaut of a military machine. This explains so much. Looks like I wasn't the intended audience, then. Since I have no idea how ships in Starfire look, too.
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Sep 12, 2015 09:20
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Libluini posted:The only bad I can say about both books is this weird thing military SF-authors seem to have where they just describe space battle after space battle, but somehow forget to actually mention how the ships involved look. I guess I'm in the minority that couldn't care less how ships look like, unless that is somehow relevant to the plot or significantly different to what people would assume a star ship to look like (Battlefleet Gothic comes to mind). At the distances most hard-sci-fi space battles are fought you're firing on a radar blip anyway, and when you're flinging antimatter-tipped missiles around it matters little where the missile hits. So the ships are probably mostly box shaped with engines on one end.
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Sep 12, 2015 10:25
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Another great space battle book with some well thought out wrinkles and interesting aliens is "A Fire Upon the Border" by Kevin O'donnell. Not in Kindle alas, but available super cheap second hand on Amazon and similar. http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Border-Kevin-ODonnell/dp/0451450302 The ships in it I especially liked. Anything like a conventional surface ship analogue is abandoned entirely. They are literally hundreds of seperate pods of weapons, crew quarters and other systems linked together in a widely spaced, highly redundant lattice structure to maximise survivability. For the Starfire books I thought Crusade and Insurrection were also good as well. Don't bother with the more recent Exodus books that White wrote with a new co-author replacing Weber, they are garbage. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 12:49
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ArchangeI posted:I guess I'm in the minority that couldn't care less how ships look like, unless that is somehow relevant to the plot or significantly different to what people would assume a star ship to look like (Battlefleet Gothic comes to mind). At the distances most hard-sci-fi space battles are fought you're firing on a radar blip anyway, and when you're flinging antimatter-tipped missiles around it matters little where the missile hits. So the ships are probably mostly box shaped with engines on one end. It's nice you want to support bad authors, but just forgetting descriptions most people consider important is still dumb. Also "box shaped with engines on one end" is the most unimaginative thing said ever in the history of the universe.
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Sep 12, 2015 13:22
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Libluini posted:It's nice you want to support bad authors, but just forgetting descriptions most people consider important is still dumb. Also "box shaped with engines on one end" is the most unimaginative thing said ever in the history of the universe. Calling someone unimaginative after criticizing a book for forcing you to use your imagination is pretty hilarious.
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Sep 12, 2015 14:20
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I have to say I've never given a poo poo about how ships look beyond maybe their weapons layout if it matters to the battles, and I've never heard about that being a thing people got upset over either. How's it relevant? I've never read accounts of historical battles and threw them away for not describing what a pike/rifle/T-34 looks like either. If it's a thing that bothers you, fair enough, but I don't think it's a universal concern. On the subject of Starfire, Crusade is ok too if you liked In Death Ground/The Shiva Option, although it's an earlier book and it shows. Insurrection is pretty terrible though, and the ones Steve White writes without Weber are awful.
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Sep 12, 2015 16:38
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ArchangeI posted:Calling someone unimaginative after criticizing a book for forcing you to use your imagination is pretty hilarious.  A book by it's very nature forces you to use your imagination. Your imagination still needs some description to work, though. Not everyone has a bland enough mind to just replace everything with boxes.
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Sep 12, 2015 17:33
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You should look into the first two books of the Red Rising trilogy. While the first book is military sci-fi, it's not space based. The second book is though. Both are fantastic, and have incredibly well done audiobooks available on Audible. Probably my favorite current sci-fi series, but don't take my word for it: Red Rising on Goodreads: 4.2 with 41,000 votes. Red Rising audiobook on Audible: 4.5 with 5,000 votes. Golden Son on Goodreads: 4.5 with 20,000 votes. Golden Son audiobook on Audible: 4.7 with 3600 votes. It's basically Spartacus in space. Arcanen fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 17:41
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Darkrenown posted:I have to say I've never given a poo poo about how ships look beyond maybe their weapons layout if it matters to the battles, and I've never heard about that being a thing people got upset over either. How's it relevant? I've never read accounts of historical battles and threw them away for not describing what a pike/rifle/T-34 looks like either. If it's a thing that bothers you, fair enough, but I don't think it's a universal concern. Those are things that exist in the real world, and many historical nonfiction includes photos, especially books specific to a particular battle or event where said weapon played a large role. I'm honestly a little astounded you can ask "how is it relevant." Here is an entire fictional universe created by some author that you are presumably being immersed in, where military matters, battles, and specifically spaceships play the most important role in said universe (obviously the characters don't in milsf, hah), and you don't think it's relevant to describe these ships? I already know I'm not the target audience for these kinds of books, but man, I just don't get it. I guess for me so much of the appeal of scifi is the interesting and fantastical stuff, whether it is aliens or 10 meter tall fighting robots or kilometer long spaceships or whatever. "The box with engines shot 1,000 missiles at the other box with engines" just seems like the antithesis of that. sourdough fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 20:46
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You can be interested in the plot or the world in the large strokes but less interested in lengthy physical descriptions. I have to admit I kinda skim through long descriptive passages when doing light reading especially if the author isn't particularly good at it or it just isn't very interesting. Like I just finished Echopraxia which was alright but I got bored with the extremely detailed descriptions of the ship and each hub section so I started zipping through them. Since that book aims for harder scifi I'm sure the author spent a lot of time working out how the ship worked and some people found it fascinating but it wasn't doing that much for me. I could see an author who tended to read like that and was more concerned with what ships were doing for their plot to fail to ever describe them. Though it does seem a little weird to not at least toss out a vague description at some point (it's a giant cone pointed away from its large exhaust end, whatever). FuzzySlippers fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 22:06
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I just hated growing up and reading the pulp novels where the cover art had nothing in common with the descriptions in the books. Even early HH had these star destroyer looking things where every book mentioned but didn't describe the "double hammerhead" inherent in each ship design
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Sep 12, 2015 23:57
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FuzzySlippers posted:You can be interested in the plot or the world in the large strokes but less interested in lengthy physical descriptions. I have to admit I kinda skim through long descriptive passages when doing light reading especially if the author isn't particularly good at it or it just isn't very interesting. That's pretty much my point. If it is relevant to the plot or tells us something about a character, it is absolutely required to be described. If its not relevant then its just infodumping for the sake of infodumping, in a genre that is already rife with infodumping. It's the epitome of "none of this mattered to the crew at this particular moment"-syndrome. Telling authors, particularly new authors, that they need to describe everything a character sees is what causes authors to either give descriptions that read like police warnings or go into incredibly creepy detail about the creamy skin and the big tits of the new XO, whose mop of unruly red hair reflected her personality etc. etc.. None of which matters. For a book with the scope of In Death Ground what a ship does is far more important than how it looks from an angle no character ever gets to see. You can literally imagine them as boxes with engines and not miss anything. But the real reason why no one should give any details about a ship that aren't absolutely vital to the plot are the smartasses that come up and go "Uh hey on page 237 of your 800 page novel you say that the high-gains antenna is on the left side of the ship between the aft missile tube and the secondary airlock, but on page 659 you say the ship sends a transmission to another ship behind it while the engines are running. Since you wrote on page 496 that the ship uses ionized plasma as a propulsion method, shouldn't that have garbled the transmission into uselessness?"
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Sep 13, 2015 02:54
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Shakugan posted:You should look into the first two books of the Red Rising trilogy. While the first book is military sci-fi, it's not space based. The second book is though. It's such a unique series. Red Rising was like a weird Hunger Games/mythic Olympic science fiction competition, then Golden Sun was space battles, betrayal, land battles, betrayal, and more battles of all types into all out war. But I would also recommend it.
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Sep 13, 2015 21:38
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Tias posted:So I just read Old Man's War and have gotten pretty stoked about military sci-fi. I have of course read Starship Troopers, but what else should I check out? I hear good things about The Forever War. . David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books are pretty excellent in terms of military science fiction, though they're about a ground-based mercenary company and not space opera in any fashion. He's a Baen author, which is usually a bad sign, but he's also a Vietnam veteran who saw actual combat and it shows; his writing is definitely not "rah rah Space America gently caress Yeah Kill all Space Browns!!". If you look him up in the Baen Free Library he's got a couple of military science fiction books available there for free. The Tank Lords is one of the Hammer's Slammers books. Redliners and Seas of Venus are standalones. They're a pretty good sample of his writing, too, so if they don't appeal you can pretty much write him off.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:32
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RVProfootballer posted:Those are things that exist in the real world, and many historical nonfiction includes photos, especially books specific to a particular battle or event where said weapon played a large role. Do note that the ships are described, mostly in their capabilities and what they are doing, it's just their visual description which is not detailed. We're told their size, weight, types of weapons and armour, details about their roles and design philosophy, important systems, details about when said important systems blow up, etc. And while spaceships of course don't actually exist they are common enough in scifi that the concept should be familiar to a reader of the genre, much like anyone reading about WWII battles probably knows in general what a tank looks like - but they don't need to know the exact height or the number of roadwheels on a Panther tank to read about the battle of Kursk. I guess if the starfire books are your first contact with the concept of a spaceships you might be slightly puzzled, but even then warships are certainly a real world thing and the reader should be able to make the leap from spaceships to [war]ships, but in space. How the ship looks only matters if it affects how the battles are fought, e.g. in the Honor books most ships have their weapons on the broadsides and their firing arcs and ability to maneuver in formation are limited by their grav wedges - plus they are invulnerable to weaponsfire from above or below and slighly protected to the sides but not at all at the front or rear, this is relevant as it greatly affects the battles, but in starfire the ships have a basically magic reactionless drive and are pretty agile, so where exactly their weapons are placed never matter. Fleets are made up of hundreds of ships and they explode by the dozen, the exact shape of the hull is never important.
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Sep 14, 2015 13:40
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The majority of this kind of descriptions are like special effects shots in a movie. They aid in the immersion if they are done well, but nobody would notice when they are cut. And if they are done badly, they are really distracting.
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Sep 14, 2015 16:31
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