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Vehementi posted:
All quiet on the western front It's a classic as well and has been out for so long that I don't think it's a problem I just spoiled the ending.
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Feb 14, 2016 22:35
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Is it first person though? It does have the best sex scene I've ever read though, the soldiers are in a hospital and one's wife comes to visit. After a bit they draw the curtains and everyone else talks loudly and looks the other way.anilEhilated posted:We won't tell you which ones so you have to read all of them. You can thank us later. Well he wasn't looking for recommendations but fine, I was thinking of The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Peace but there might be others. You can see Wolfe playing with the idea but that's part of his fascination with the definition of "a person". Feels like there should be at least one classic about the hero in the afterlife, but I can't think of it. E: Got a real one - David Zindell's Neverness - Mallory is killed part way through and revived by the world-god. Safety Biscuits fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Feb 15, 2016 |
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Feb 15, 2016 00:16
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Walh Hara posted:All quiet on the western front It's by a science fiction author, so I'll recommend Haldeman's War Year. It's a nice, short first person account of the Vietnam war as experienced by a combat engineer.
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Feb 15, 2016 05:35
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Vehementi posted:Totally unrelated question: do there exist decent books that are told in the first person, where the narrator dies? Can't think of any, but I'm not well read and I am probably betraying some embarrassing miss of some classic novel by asking this. (I guess this has to just be a "yes I promise" or "no" question without spoiling by naming books) Not science fiction, but there is a certain well-known murder mystery in which the narrator turns out to be the murderer, which ends with him committing suicide after the detective figures it out.
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Feb 15, 2016 05:36
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fritz posted:When in doubt, go by publication order. Strict publication order would be a tiny bit weird in the specific case of the Vorkosigan series, because it would have you start with Shards of Honor (1986) but leave off Barrayar (which is basically the second half of the "how Miles' parents met and became awesome" story) until several books later. Basically, either start with Shards/Barrayar and then do the proper Miles books in publication order, or start with The Warrior's Apprentice (first proper Miles book) and go back to Shards/Barrayar a bit later; either works. (Personally I'd recommend the first option because while Shards may be a bit clunky to start off, Barrayar is way better and has Cordelia being awesome. And there's the "shopping" bit.)
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Feb 15, 2016 09:51
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House Louse posted:Is it first person though? It does have the best sex scene I've ever read though, the soldiers are in a hospital and one's wife comes to visit. After a bit they draw the curtains and everyone else talks loudly and looks the other way. Yep, all quiet on the western front is first person. I also remembered that Jim Butcher has the first person narrator die in one of his books (Changes, afterwards he's a Ghost in the next book)
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Feb 15, 2016 21:23
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So, I'm reading Dark Forest (I get to things when I get to them also it's Hugo season I guess) and it's enjoyable--it's had to shift gears somewhat since now the central mystery and threat has been revealed. I found the notion that the Trisolarians are terrible at deceit because their thoughts are visible on their bodies and are thus equivalent to speech to be interesting, but it also seemed to contradict the first book a little. Like the first contact Trisolarian--how would he have hidden his knowledge of Earth's transmission from the others? Aside from his physical isolation I guess. But he still understood that knowledge had to be withheld. They also seemed to have deceived some of the ETO people as to their genuine intentions, but I guess I'm not clear on how much of that was the Adventist faction keeping the wool firmly over all eyes. There's one quote I found interesting, and it isn't particularly spoilery. Pg 127, "What Comrade Zhang Beihai says is peculiar," a colonel said. "Is steadfast faith not built upon science and reason? No faith is solid that is not founded on objective fact." I squinted a bit at that since in the US at least so many religious beliefs are explicitly based on lack of 'objective fact', being reliant on the ineffability of god. Others are deathly resistant to empirical fact (creationism) and the US legal system even acknowledges that a religious belief can be "sincerely held" even if it is not true. (Hobby Lobby case, and time to speak some ill of the dead.) So I wonder at this colonel's idea of faith. Does this notion derive from faith in the Party, which at least keeps up a pretense of objective presentation and officially doesn't have much regard for religious faith? Or is that a translation which might have done better to use the word "belief" in the second sentence?
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Feb 16, 2016 02:15
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I read Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by PKD over the weekend. PKD is a dude who never seems very invested in telling a story. He's much more about exploring his ideas. Sometimes there's a bit more narrative pull on the actual plot, and other times there isn't. This book was definitely the latter. It wasn't a thrilling read, or one that went by quickly because it's all PKD writing endlessly about the existential horror of losing one's identity in an instant. Is it cool? Yea. Worth reading? Sure. Ubik is still tops for me out of the 5 PKD novels I've read.
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Feb 16, 2016 02:58
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On a whim I checked to see if there was a new Ted Chiang book coming soon on Amazon (there isn't), but the recommendations led me to Ken Liu, and his short story collection The Paper Menagerie Other Stories, as well as his novel, The Grace of Kings. The descriptions sounded interesting enough, and he has a slew of various SF/F literature awards (however dubious they may be nowadays), so I figure I should ask if they're worth checking out?
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Feb 16, 2016 07:19
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The Grace of Kings is p. good. Not quite Guy Gavriel Kay good, but p. good nonetheless.
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Feb 16, 2016 07:29
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David Malouf's Ransom is what Guy Gavriel Kay would write if he was any good, and it's Technically fantasy.
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Feb 17, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 08:09
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holocaust bloopers posted:I read Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by PKD over the weekend. PKD is a dude who never seems very invested in telling a story. He's much more about exploring his ideas. Stories aren't very important
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Feb 16, 2016 09:23
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occamsnailfile posted:Like the first contact Trisolarian--how would he have hidden his knowledge of Earth's transmission from the others? If I remember correctly, he didn't. All he did was immediately get a message to Earth saying 'shut the gently caress up'. He knew the Trisolarians would know about the signal
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Feb 16, 2016 11:01
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occamsnailfile posted:I squinted a bit at that since in the US at least so many religious beliefs are explicitly based on lack of 'objective fact', being reliant on the ineffability of god. Others are deathly resistant to empirical fact (creationism) and the US legal system even acknowledges that a religious belief can be "sincerely held" even if it is not true. (Hobby Lobby case, and time to speak some ill of the dead.) So I wonder at this colonel's idea of faith. Does this notion derive from faith in the Party, which at least keeps up a pretense of objective presentation and officially doesn't have much regard for religious faith? Or is that a translation which might have done better to use the word "belief" in the second sentence? For a long time "faith" had more to do with "keeping faith" and maintaining your covenant with your god. The idea that "faith" means "believing something for no good reason and in defiance of the evidence" is a surprisingly recent invention.
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Feb 16, 2016 17:04
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:David Malouf's Ransom is what Guy Gavriel Kay could write if he was any good What.
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Feb 16, 2016 17:31
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GrandpaPants posted:On a whim I checked to see if there was a new Ted Chiang book coming soon on Amazon (there isn't), but the recommendations led me to Ken Liu, and his short story collection The Paper Menagerie Other Stories, as well as his novel, The Grace of Kings. The descriptions sounded interesting enough, and he has a slew of various SF/F literature awards (however dubious they may be nowadays), so I figure I should ask if they're worth checking out? I heard lots of good things about Grace of Kings when it came out, but it didn't click with me at all. Here's what I said about it: PlushCow posted:I didn't enjoy Grace of Kings. It started off interesting but it quickly devolved into an outline and summary of plot points of an epic novel - This happened, then this, and then this battle that they won and this other battle too, and all character development has stopped and here are some more summaries of plot events. I got bored of it. Can't remember if goons enjoyed it or not, only that some were excited for it. Also another goon's reply: fritz posted:I was getting bogged down in it, and then the first female pov character showed up and she was a Timeless Beauty and was instructed to use her seductive wiles for the good of her nation and peaced out. I can't recommend it at all.
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Feb 16, 2016 17:50
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fritz, you mean the Timeless Beauty got told to use her sedutive wiles for her country and said "gently caress this", right? right?occamsnailfile posted:There's one quote I found interesting, and it isn't particularly spoilery. Faith and religion are two pretty difficult words, and Chinese religions are totally different to Western-style religions. That sentence looks like he means "faith in a thing" rather than "faith in a person", so belief might be better.
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Feb 16, 2016 18:06
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Picked up Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen yesterday. I only planned to read a bit over lunch, but ended up sitting at the buffet for something like 3 hours, just nursing my drink because I could not put it down. I'm sad that the Vorkosigan universe seems to be wrapped up, but that was a great and fitting way to tie the bow. 
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Feb 16, 2016 22:38
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I just finished Windup Girl and I read Water Knife not too long ago. I'm interested if anyone has any more recommendations for similar books(bio-engineering and global warming gone rampant). Would it be right to call it near future speculative fiction? Not even sure if this is the right thread to ask.
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Feb 17, 2016 06:34
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Reason posted:I just finished Windup Girl and I read Water Knife not too long ago. I'm interested if anyone has any more recommendations for similar books(bio-engineering and global warming gone rampant). Would it be right to call it near future speculative fiction? Not even sure if this is the right thread to ask. Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and its sequels have one hell of a bio-engineered apocalypse.
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Feb 17, 2016 06:41
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Reason posted:I just finished Windup Girl and I read Water Knife not too long ago. I'm interested if anyone has any more recommendations for similar books(bio-engineering and global warming gone rampant). Would it be right to call it near future speculative fiction? Not even sure if this is the right thread to ask. Maybe Steven Boyett, Ariel and didn't Kim Stanley Robinson have a trilogy about global warming gone amok? Might not be the same thing. Also a short-story collection called Welcome to the Greenhouse which has a lot of stuff about climate change again but a lot of that is engineered. Also, some disturbing content.
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Feb 17, 2016 06:54
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Phanatic posted:What. Guy Gavriel Kay is not a good writer, though his books are usually interesting and at least worthwhile. If he was a good writer, he would probably write something like Ransom.
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Feb 17, 2016 07:24
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Dave Langford's site has a series of three ebooks available collecting all of Algis Budrys' SF and fantasy criticism from the pages of F&SF from 1975 to 1993. I've never read Budrys' own work, but his criticism is wonderful, and man does reading it ever give you an idea of what the field was like and what it felt like to move through the months and years right at that time: who was seen as important, who was thought to be up and coming (the reviews of that new George RR Martin guy, for instance), what forms of distribution and publishing mattered or would mattered, etc. His entry on the hugely publicized and marketed release of Brooks' The Sword of Shanara, for instance, is both wonderful in capturing the 100% completely different world that was fantasy in 1977 and amazingly prescient as to what was to come in it. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of the field or actual criticism. http://io9.gizmodo.com/5965300/there-is-no-snarking-about-books-like-algis-budrys-snarking-about-books http://ae.ansible.uk/ebooks.php
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Feb 17, 2016 07:38
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Guy Gavriel Kay is not a good writer, though his books are usually interesting and at least worthwhile. If he was a good writer, he would probably write something like Ransom. I really enjoyed Under Heaven, but the sequel River of Stars wasn't nearly as good. It seemed exactly the same as UH except less happened. Maybe Kay can do 'everything you did and cared about was meaningless before the forces of history' but not much else? Also I guess I was a little disappointed to learn how heavily it borrowed from the literal history of China.
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Feb 17, 2016 18:18
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Strategic Tea posted:
Was that your first Kay? That's his thing, kind of like Tim Powers. The Sarantine Mosaic's one of the most beautiful stories I've ever read, if he's a bad writer, oh well. That one's drawing heavily the 6th century Byzantine empire: Justinian, Theodora, Belisarius, the Nika riots, , the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the monophysite heresy, etc. Tigana draws heavily from the warring city-states of Italy during the Renaissance, and is achingly gorgeous. A Song for Arbonne is during a Crusade in France. He draws from real-world history and changes the names to create wonderful books. But like with Tim Powers, maybe it's a case where the more you know about the events that actually happened the more you like the books, I don't know.
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Feb 17, 2016 18:35
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Not really, I recognized most of the events in Sarantium and it still bored me to tears. Powers can at least (usually) create an engaging storyline, with Kay I found I wasn't really interested in the characters or plot.
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Feb 17, 2016 19:08
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Latest genre related book bundle from Humble Bundle: Sci-Fi Classics Pay what you want
The Stars My Destination is of course a stone cold classic, but it's also the only one of these I've read. Any other must-reads? Any turds?
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Feb 17, 2016 21:07
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Wild Cards involves literal corpse buggery and many other awful things, amid which are a few pieces of actual good writing.
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Feb 17, 2016 21:21
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Fart of Presto posted:
I'd say that  Clarke's book qualifies as a smelly, oily turd.
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Feb 17, 2016 21:35
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How the gently caress does all Zelazny's Amber poo poo count amoung Sci-Fi classics? It's loving fantasy. 
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Feb 17, 2016 21:37
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Fart of Presto posted:The Stars My Destination is of course a stone cold classic, but it's also the only one of these I've read. The Demolished Man is a must-read if you liked The Stars My Destination.
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Feb 17, 2016 21:44
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Those are some of Zelazny's least good books. They're still very much worth reading but that's his c-list. The bundle is worth it for the Beater alone though.
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Feb 17, 2016 22:12
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Stuporstar posted:How the gently caress does all Zelazny's Amber poo poo count amoung Sci-Fi classics? It's loving fantasy. Fantasy or no, those are not, I note, actually the Amber books written by Zelazny, they're the ones written after his death by someone else. I haven't read them but I assume they're more or less equivalent to the Brian Herbert Dune books.
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Feb 17, 2016 22:19
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Fart of Presto posted:Any turds? There's some Wild Cards books in there.
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Feb 17, 2016 22:27
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neongrey posted:Fantasy or no, those are not, I note, actually the Amber books written by Zelazny, they're the ones written after his death by someone else. I mean, they're not great but they're not THAT bad. (Probably because they weren't making GBS threads on a masterpiece but instead were just vaguely tarring a fun pulp series.)
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Feb 17, 2016 22:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Those are some of Zelazny's least good books. They're still very much worth reading but that's his c-list. Yeah, that's why I singled out the Amber books specifically. neongrey posted:Fantasy or no, those are not, I note, actually the Amber books written by Zelazny, they're the ones written after his death by someone else. Huh. So they don't even count as classic fantasy then (I thought I didn't recognize them, but I stopped reading the Amber series halfway through, so I can't recall most of their titles). If it weren't for all the Bester books, it would be shittiest bundle I've yet seen. The only Bester I don't have on that list is The Computer Connection though, so I guess I'll pass on this one.
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Feb 17, 2016 23:14
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Footfall by Larry Niven and the other guy is doing nothing for me. I'm 200 pages in and completely uninterested in seeing how the story goes. It's all developing slowly with a giant cast of characters who bog down the pace.
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Feb 17, 2016 23:23
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holocaust bloopers posted:Footfall by Larry Niven and the other guy is doing nothing for me. I'm 200 pages in and completely uninterested in seeing how the story goes. I was just thinking about that book last week and how I really enjoyed it when I was a teenager. So, I picked up and read A Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle last week and their writing style has not aged well. The idea was okay but the characters and dialogue were downright awful. There were some pretty ridiculous lines like, "Being the only women on a navy ship was starting to get to Sally. She missed talking about cooking and other girly things. One day she went to the mess hall just to talk to the cooks about recipes until they chased her off! Sigh!" or "Sally tried to explain to her alien guide just how absolutely useless human females were when they were pregnant!". Or the Muslim trader guy who's portrayed as sneaky and cowardly and only interested in money. I get that it was written in the 70's but there's a ton of other great sci fi from that period that never had stuff like that. The wasn't the deal breaker for me though. It was just a poorly written book. It kind of reminds me of books like the Dragonlance series that I loved as a kid but when I tried to reread them a couple years ago couldn't get past a few pages.
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Feb 18, 2016 00:00
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I've never read any Niven, but I'm under the impression he's an ideas guy rather than a good writer. Then again, the book seems to have been very well received when originally released. Is there anything by Niven that doesn't read like an engineer's report? Do I have the guy wrong?
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Feb 18, 2016 00:04
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I've read a few books by Niven. They're big budget disaster epics with broadly drawn characters that adhere to a strict mold. Lucifer's Hammer was enjoyable, A Mote In God's Eye was fun. Football is a slog of constantly shifting storylines. Many of which are thoroughly boring.
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Feb 18, 2016 00:10
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