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freebooter posted:But I'm on a generation ship kick at the moment after reading Aurora. Is The Book of the Long Sun worth reading for somebody who appreciated but ultimately disliked New Sun? johnsonrod posted:I must be the only person alive that doesn't like "The Lies Of Locke Lamora". I found it was a boring, generic fantasy, NOT VENICE, trope through all the typical fantasy bullshit and I quit it halfway though. I only bring this up because I've seen people recommend it over the last couple pages. e: Hooray for new title! anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Nov 22, 2015 |
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Nov 21, 2015 23:57
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Clark Nova posted:Read the summary for the Star Wars novel Darksaber. I can't believe I read the entire thing when I was a teenager. My introduction to Star Wars novels was Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy. Encouraged by those, I went to the library and checked out Darksaber, Children of the Jedi, The Crystal Star, and KJA's entire Jedi Academy trilogy. And I read them all. In retrospect, I spent a lot of time as a kid reading books (and playing games) that really weren't at all worth the time.
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Nov 22, 2015 00:36
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johnsonrod posted:I must be the only person alive that doesn't like "The Lies Of Locke Lamora". I found it was a boring, generic fantasy, NOT VENICE, trope through all the typical fantasy bullshit and I quit it halfway though. I only bring this up because I've seen people recommend it over the last couple pages. I also didn't like it but I don't bother to bring that up here often
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Nov 22, 2015 03:35
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Pierson posted:Are any of the non-Frank Herbert Dune books any good? Starting a re-read of the series, halfway through Dune and it is still super loving good. I know they brought KJA in to write them after he popped it, that does not fill me with confidence. Find a place that works for you and if you still want more Frank Herbert read The Godmakers or Destination: Void.
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Nov 22, 2015 05:33
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Nakar posted:Hell, many of the Frank Herbert Dune books aren't any good. Exactly where you should stop is a different matter and it's really up to you but the answer is definitely "before Brian and KJA get their hands on it." The book I prefer to stop at is Dune
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Nov 22, 2015 05:41
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Nakar posted:Hell, many of the Frank Herbert Dune books aren't any good. Exactly where you should stop is a different matter and it's really up to you but the answer is definitely "before Brian and KJA get their hands on it." The canonical answer is to stop reading when you stop enjoying them, because once that happens there will not be a later point at which you start enjoying them again. (I read the whole thing when I was young, i.e. all the Frank Herbert ones because no non-Frank ones existed yet, but gently caress if I can remember much about the last couple.)
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Nov 22, 2015 08:05
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The non Frank Dune books are so stupid. Probably the best example is that they for some reason retcon the bull that Leto's father killed into some weird insect creature. It was a completely unnecessary change that didn't add anything to the series.
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Nov 22, 2015 08:19
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Also Tleilaxu farting with the Baron.
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Nov 22, 2015 09:54
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:LeGuin, Gaiman. For LeGuin start with the Earthsea Trilogy and also try The Dispossessed. For Gaiman read Stardust and Neverwhere and if you like those read all of Sandman (Sandman is his best work but it's a big investment in time and money). Awesome post, thank you. Will definitely check out Isle of the Dead,. To be honest, even though Lord of Light is one of my most loved novels, I remember really disliking Chronicles of Amber, which just seemed generic sword and sorcery stuff. Still well-written for episodic fantasy, but a bit cringe-inducing. It also struck me as more of a light read and not having anywhere near the literary weight of Lord of Light. Since then I've thought that Zelazny might be a hit and miss sort of author and have been a bit hesitant about diving into the rest of his work. I do have Book of the New Sun sitting on my Kindle at the moment actually so I might give that one a go next. Nakar posted:
I think your tolerance for Gormenghast really comes down to your liking of the Gothic setting..personally I never found the first couple of books dry or overwrought but then I do really like gothic literature in general. TItus Alone is a different story of course and is one novel I will never bother rereading.
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Nov 22, 2015 11:11
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Ex-Priest Tobin posted:I think your tolerance for Gormenghast really comes down to your liking of the Gothic setting..personally I never found the first couple of books dry or overwrought but then I do really like gothic literature in general. TItus Alone is a different story of course and is one novel I will never bother rereading. Peake came down with Lewy body dementia while he was writing Titus Alone. The book is a perfect study of how the condition afflicts the mind. You may want to check out Titus Awakes, however. Only a fragment of it is Peake; the bulk of the writing was completed by his widow from his initial outline. The plot is crazy, but it's more readable.
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Nov 22, 2015 12:22
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Ex-Priest Tobin posted:Awesome post, thank you. Will definitely check out Isle of the Dead,. To be honest, even though Lord of Light is one of my most loved novels, I remember really disliking Chronicles of Amber, which just seemed generic sword and sorcery stuff. Still well-written for episodic fantasy, but a bit cringe-inducing. It also struck me as more of a light read and not having anywhere near the literary weight of Lord of Light. Since then I've thought that Zelazny might be a hit and miss sort of author and have been a bit hesitant about diving into the rest of his work. Zelazny was a deliberately experimental writer so almost every single one of his books is profoundly different from the others in a lot of ways. Each one is sortof a gamble but only because Zelazny himself was generally taking a gamble and sometimes his gambles don't work. That said, the Amber books were almost certainly intended as a pure potboiler cash grab; you can literally watch him making up the plot as he goes along. He got what he wanted and they were his most popular works by far, but yeah, they're also his most generic. Other "Good Zelazny" to try: Creatures of Light and Darkness (very weird; each chapter is written in a different form, i.e., play, lyric poem, epic poem, etc); A Night in the Lonesome October (written from the viewpoint of Jack the Ripper's dog).
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Nov 22, 2015 15:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Zelazny was a deliberately experimental writer so almost every single one of his books is profoundly different from the others in a lot of ways. Each one is sortof a gamble but only because Zelazny himself was generally taking a gamble and sometimes his gambles don't work. It feels weird to me that Moorcock was such a contemporary of Zelazny's, an architect of the New Wave, and yet also the write a novel in a weekend guy. I suppose some of that was 'demystify the craft and focus on ideas' in a way that wasn't 'all stories are engineering problems' but it still always strikes me when reading authors from that period.
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Nov 22, 2015 15:57
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occamsnailfile posted:It feels weird to me that Moorcock was such a contemporary of Zelazny's, an architect of the New Wave, and yet also the write a novel in a weekend guy. I suppose some of that was 'demystify the craft and focus on ideas' in a way that wasn't 'all stories are engineering problems' but it still always strikes me when reading authors from that period. That was just to pay the bills - his and New Worlds' - I think he said that his first really serious novels were the Jerry Cornelius quartet; everything before was at least partly commercial.
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Nov 22, 2015 16:09
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Ex-Priest Tobin posted:I think your tolerance for Gormenghast really comes down to your liking of the Gothic setting..personally I never found the first couple of books dry or overwrought but then I do really like gothic literature in general. TItus Alone is a different story of course and is one novel I will never bother rereading. Titus Alone isn't even available on Kindle. If you wanted to check it out, you'd have to order an old, used copy of the book like I did, or else get the one-volume edition of the trilogy in hard copy.
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Nov 22, 2015 16:09
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Unpopular opinion: Dune is a bad fantasy book with a simplistic battle between good and evil, unmemorable characters and lots of weird nerd fetishism about badass desert warriors. I particularly liked the head of the evil clan whom you could tell was evil, see, because he was a fat, corpulent pedophile.Jedit posted:Peake came down with Lewy body dementia while he was writing Titus Alone. The book is a perfect study of how the condition afflicts the mind. I found Titus Alone fascinating because it's difficult to tell how much of it was affected by his deteriorating mind and how much of it was always supposed to be a very different, very strange book. For the first two books it feels like Gormenghast is the only solidly real thing in the world, and anything beyond is just a dream; then in Titus Alone it feels like maybe Gormenghast was only ever a dream.
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Nov 23, 2015 00:24
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I just finished Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) for the first time in my life and came away with a pleasant feeling. It took a long time for me to get into it but once the Sumerian stuff started coming out the pace picked up and I couldn't set it down. This is in contrast to Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) which I did not enjoy. Once I reached the end of the book and was greeted with ten "questions for discussion" I realised why. The switching back and forth between random characters and times meant it was hard for me to really connect with any one character. The storytelling is there, for sure, but there are so many threads that none of them feel properly fleshed out. I wanted to know more about everything and in the end that only happened with Clark, who is definitely the best character. After that I read A Dance of Cloaks (David Dalgish) and I can confirm it is total poo poo. Senseless violence, a jumped up 13 year old with even more superpowers than Kvothe and absolutely no character development. The very opposite of Lies of Locke Lamora.
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Nov 23, 2015 01:06
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The premiere of The Expanse is now available to watch legally on most streaming services. Here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvZeQD1Vf2s
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Nov 23, 2015 06:26
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muscles like this? posted:The non Frank Dune books are so stupid. Probably the best example is that they for some reason retcon the bull that Leto's father killed into some weird insect creature. It was a completely unnecessary change that didn't add anything to the series. KJA and Brian Herbert still maintain that everything they're writing is based on thousands of pages of notes Frank Herbert left. Because I'm sure Frank intended for his magnum opus to end with a good Paul ghola fighting an evil Paul ghola and Duncan Idaho becoming Ghola Jesus. Actually that last part isn't so far-fetched considering Heretics and Chapterhouse...
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Nov 23, 2015 07:00
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freebooter posted:Unpopular opinion: Dune is a bad fantasy book with a simplistic battle between good and evil, unmemorable characters and lots of weird nerd fetishism about badass desert warriors. I particularly liked the head of the evil clan whom you could tell was evil, see, because he was a fat, corpulent pedophile. The thing that struck me when I re-read Dune a couple of years ago is how little happens on-screen. The entire book is a series of conversations between two characters, who describe amazing things happening... somewhere else. Herbert created a hugely imaginative setting but Dune often feels like a screenplay for a low-budget sci-fi miniseries that can't afford any decent props. Mandatory Assembly fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Nov 23, 2015 |
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Nov 23, 2015 10:46
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UncleSmoothie posted:Herbert created a hugely imaginative setting but Dune often feels like a screenplay for a low-budget sci-fi miniseries that can't afford any decent props. Which is why the SciFi miniseries worked as well as it did - they did it like a stage production.
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Nov 23, 2015 10:56
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UncleSmoothie posted:The thing that struck me when I re-read Dune a couple of years ago is how little happens on-screen. The entire book is a series of conversations between two characters, who describe amazing things happening... somewhere else. That's pretty much Herbert's MO. Read his non-Dune works and it's very similar in many cases. He was interested in systems (political systems, ecological systems, etc.) and his work reflects what he was interested in.
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Nov 23, 2015 13:12
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A lot of Frank's The Dosadi Experiment takes place in alien legal courts or between two people talking privately, if I remember correctly.
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Nov 23, 2015 16:14
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General Battuta posted:Buy my book I did, I read it, I loved it, I recommend it, DO IT.
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Nov 23, 2015 16:58
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freebooter posted:I found Titus Alone fascinating because it's difficult to tell how much of it was affected by his deteriorating mind and how much of it was always supposed to be a very different, very strange book. For the first two books it feels like Gormenghast is the only solidly real thing in the world, and anything beyond is just a dream; then in Titus Alone it feels like maybe Gormenghast was only ever a dream. It's telling that Titus Alone has almost twice as many chapter breaks as Gormenghast but is something like 1/3 as long. I don't think that was unintentional. If Peake was serious about the series being about Titus's entire life then it makes sense he'd be contrasting the stagnant feeling of the gothic era and the meaningless newness of the 20th century in the early episodes so that Titus comes to understand both why he hates Gormenghast and why he needed it. We just never ended up getting the payoff on it later in his life. I'm not sure I'd say it's a better book than Gormenghast, but it was refreshing to have to cap off the previous books. It's a situation where I can appreciate Peake's designs but I just am not a huge fan of the work as an actual story. But at the same time I have to forgive it somewhat because of when he wrote, and what he was emulating; I'm just not a big fan of the genre he was referencing. Also the continuity error in the courtroom scene, however amusing, reminds me of Peake's errors elsewhere.
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Nov 23, 2015 17:42
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My last two posts in this thread have been really cynical so here's some balance: Emma Newman's Planetfall is a good read with a really unusual character driving the plot. One of the best things I've read this year.
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Nov 23, 2015 18:49
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Kesper North posted:The premiere of The Expanse is now available to watch legally on most streaming services. Here is a youtube link: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Too much for Globalization, uh?
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Nov 23, 2015 20:24
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Amberskin posted:"The uploader has not made this video available in your country." We can handle Canada, if that helps: http://www.space.ca/show/the-expanse/episode/dulcinea/694196/
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Nov 23, 2015 20:34
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Shab posted:A lot of Frank's The Dosadi Experiment takes place in alien legal courts or between two people talking privately, if I remember correctly. It was a lot of talking privately--in a setting that was specifically called out as being massively overcrowded with scarce resources. I've never been able to get all the way through Dune but the Fremen and the Dosadi were both members of an outsider group that lived in extremely harsh conditions, and once they were unleashed upon the rest of civilization they steamrolled all those soft lazy well-fed folks. I'm not a huge Herbert fan obviously though that's more from not really digging his writing style than anything.
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Nov 23, 2015 22:55
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Kesper North posted:We can handle Canada, if that helps: http://www.space.ca/show/the-expanse/episode/dulcinea/694196/ Problem fixed. I created a VPN account just to watch that. And I'll probably pay for it because my netflix account will multiply by +10 just for eight more bucks. By the way, this series is going to be good. And Miller is really Miller.
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Nov 23, 2015 23:04
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Khizan posted:The book I prefer to stop at is Dune This. I can't even return to the second and third Herbert Dune novels.
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Nov 24, 2015 01:30
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Kesper North posted:The premiere of The Expanse is now available to watch legally on most streaming services. Here is a youtube link: That was really good!
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Nov 24, 2015 01:41
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Can anyone recommend me one of them space books featuring a non-antagonistic alien hivemind? I'm just curious to see what one would look like, I'm in the mood for some good and/or bad science fiction and virtually every hivemind I've read about ends up locked in an ideologically inevitable conflict with humanity as an allegory for something or other. Are friendly hiveminds a thing in sci-fi, or should I give up my hopes of reading about Spaceman Spiff sharing a drink with Xothgor the Galactic Swarm?
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Nov 25, 2015 03:51
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Doctor Soup posted:Can anyone recommend me one of them space books featuring a non-antagonistic alien hivemind? I'm just curious to see what one would look like, I'm in the mood for some good and/or bad science fiction and virtually every hivemind I've read about ends up locked in an ideologically inevitable conflict with humanity as an allegory for something or other. Are friendly hiveminds a thing in sci-fi, or should I give up my hopes of reading about Spaceman Spiff sharing a drink with Xothgor the Galactic Swarm? The Tines in Vernor Venge's A Fire Upon the Deep maybe? Not really a species-wide hive mind, though. I don't want to spell it out completely because figuring out what the hell is going on in the first few chapters is part of the fun. The Conjoiners in Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space series and related works aren't aliens but are pretty well fleshed out and about as sympathetic as any other faction. I feel like I'm forgetting something really obvious...
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Nov 25, 2015 04:13
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Doctor Soup posted:Can anyone recommend me one of them space books featuring a non-antagonistic alien hivemind? I'm just curious to see what one would look like, I'm in the mood for some good and/or bad science fiction and virtually every hivemind I've read about ends up locked in an ideologically inevitable conflict with humanity as an allegory for something or other. Are friendly hiveminds a thing in sci-fi, or should I give up my hopes of reading about Spaceman Spiff sharing a drink with Xothgor the Galactic Swarm? The Buggers from the Ender's Game series eventually become friendly. Also, it's a webcomic, and the hivemind is human, but one of the characters from A Miracle of Science is a representative of a telepathic superintelligence distributed throughout the entire population of Mars. Patrick Spens fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Nov 25, 2015 |
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Nov 25, 2015 05:29
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Doctor Soup posted:Can anyone recommend me one of them space books featuring a non-antagonistic alien hivemind? I'm just curious to see what one would look like, I'm in the mood for some good and/or bad science fiction and virtually every hivemind I've read about ends up locked in an ideologically inevitable conflict with humanity as an allegory for something or other. Are friendly hiveminds a thing in sci-fi, or should I give up my hopes of reading about Spaceman Spiff sharing a drink with Xothgor the Galactic Swarm? Maybe Serpent's Reach, by CJ Cherryh?
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Nov 25, 2015 06:09
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Doctor Soup posted:Can anyone recommend me one of them space books featuring a non-antagonistic alien hivemind? I'm just curious to see what one would look like, I'm in the mood for some good and/or bad science fiction and virtually every hivemind I've read about ends up locked in an ideologically inevitable conflict with humanity as an allegory for something or other. Are friendly hiveminds a thing in sci-fi, or should I give up my hopes of reading about Spaceman Spiff sharing a drink with Xothgor the Galactic Swarm? Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke presents joining the hive mind as the next step in human evolution. It's sort of hard not to feel uneasy about it as a regular old human reader, but I guess the entire point of ascending to a higher plane of existence is that it's going to be very alien and daunting. It's also IMO his best book, at least of the ones I've read.
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Nov 25, 2015 10:45
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Shab posted:A lot of Frank's The Dosadi Experiment takes place in alien legal courts or between two people talking privately, if I remember correctly. And that legal system is deeply ingrained into the society of a species of viciously murderous frog people. As bizarre as Whipping Star is, Dosadi is weirder. Gowachin. Accept no substitute in your fiction.
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Nov 25, 2015 10:53
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freebooter posted:Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke presents joining the hive mind as the next step in human evolution. It's sort of hard not to feel uneasy about it as a regular old human reader, but I guess the entire point of ascending to a higher plane of existence is that it's going to be very alien and daunting. Is this book standalone or part of a necessary series?
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Nov 25, 2015 14:35
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Drifter posted:Is this book standalone or part of a necessary series?
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Nov 25, 2015 14:39
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Also it is going to be a miniseries in a couple of weeks on Syfy.
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Nov 25, 2015 17:35
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