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BadOptics posted:It's a very good book with the small exception of the author's weirdo rant out of left field at the very end. Still gave it 4 stars on Goodreads. Hope you enjoy it! Weirdo rants are cool and more sci fi should have them
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Mar 28, 2016 04:24
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Reads TFR thread.... Jfc tell me the Looking Glass series isn't like Ghost.
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Mar 28, 2016 04:28
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The recent discussion of intrasolar series motivated me to finally get around to reading Schisimatrix Plus, which I'd read a couple of pages of before but nothing more. I am finding it insane how ahead of its time it was, as of about 1/3 in. Replacing a few elements like the preponderance of wires, this could have been written at any time in the last decade. Certainly it seems to have aged a lot better than its contemporary, Neuromancer (which I still like and think is a really good book).
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Mar 28, 2016 07:03
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gfanikf posted:Reads TFR thread.... It's not. You should read it. It's awful, but not in the same way. enter the ~~~anime zone~~~
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Mar 28, 2016 07:08
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If it makes you all feel better by imagining that im morbidly obese then ok, go with that. My life and your beliefs do not need to line up, so you will probably be more satisfied by projecting your hang ups toward me. Enjoy!
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Mar 28, 2016 08:45
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coyo7e posted:If it makes you all feel better by imagining that im morbidly obese then ok, go with that. My life and your beliefs do not need to line up, so you will probably be more satisfied by projecting your hang ups toward me. Enjoy! I don't need to know you're fat to know you're a whiny idiot.
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Mar 28, 2016 09:07
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coyo7e posted:If it makes you all feel better by imagining that im morbidly obese then ok, go with that. My life and your beliefs do not need to line up, so you will probably be more satisfied by projecting your hang ups toward me. Enjoy! what the heck are you talking about dude
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Mar 28, 2016 09:38
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A human heart posted:Weirdo rants are cool and more sci fi should have them Too many books have them already.
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Mar 28, 2016 12:13
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chrisoya posted:It's not. You should read it. It's awful, but not in the same way. Well I think I can work through that.
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Mar 28, 2016 13:14
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coyo7e posted:If it makes you all feel better by imagining that im morbidly obese then ok, go with that. My life and your beliefs do not need to line up, so you will probably be more satisfied by projecting your hang ups toward me. Enjoy! Can you go find some way of dealing with whatever personal problems you're going through besides making weird and worrying posts in this thread?
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Mar 28, 2016 13:52
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Yeah some of us are trying to find rad trashy military Sci fi and sort out all the bondage porn.
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Mar 28, 2016 14:06
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https://twitter.com/willsmith/status/714505213332234240
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Mar 28, 2016 18:35
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Not sure if this is a sale thing or intro price but Amazon has the first book of Turtledove's Worldwar series for $1.99 on Kindle AND the audio book, which is 25 hours, is $3.99 on audible.
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Mar 28, 2016 19:28
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Patrick Spens posted:Ringo's work is dumb as all hell, and often quite creepy. But he can write fun action scenes. Ringo's books are pretty much dumb as hell 'ooh-rah' bait, but the creepy poo poo really only applies to the Paladin of Shadows books (and maybe his newer zombie apocalypse stuff? I haven't read them). The Looking Glass books have basically no creepy poo poo in them, they're just a bunch of fun dumb stories about space marines running into Weird poo poo. The Special Circumstances books are similar, except the main character is a soccer mom infused with power from the White God a fighting demons and cthulhu monsters. The Troy Rising books have one instance of the creep (the Johansson Worm, that puts blondes into perpetual heat) that gets mentioned twice over the course of the series. The rest is pure Big loving Space Architecture and Adventures of a Space Marine Bus Pilot.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:28
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There is some creepy poo poo in his posleen stuff, but it's general pervy fetish bait and minor racism, except for the kratman book. It's not focused on loving children, I think, there's a general sense that while magic space medicine may have made women hot and blonde and with huge breasts, they're at least adult. I haven't read them for a long time though. I don't think the kratman book has kid-loving, although that would probably improve it.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:37
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chrisoya posted:There is some creepy poo poo in his posleen stuff, but it's general pervy fetish bait and minor racism, except for the kratman book. It's not focused on loving children, I think, there's a general sense that while magic space medicine may have made women hot and blonde and with huge breasts, they're at least adult. I haven't read them for a long time though. Yeah the Aldenata stuff is trickier. There's definitely pervy nerd bait (one nerd character literally gets buried alive in rubble with a hot girl and they're like 'we're gonna die, let's gently caress') and it has the space ship I mentioned before with tit-shaped beam weapons and a fighter craft bay that's its womb and accessed by a big vulva.  I didn't mention them in the previous post because they're probably the closest Ringo comes in a non-Ghost book to that kind of creepy poo poo, but they don't have anyone literally loving 16-year-olds so I kind of can't consider as bad as the Paladin of Shadows stuff.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:52
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So how about that Empire Ascendant, did anyone read it? I was really pleasantly surprised: I liked Mirror Empire a lot, it was real crunchy and complex, but it was very much a book about getting the world and the many many narrative threads up to speed. Empire Ascendant hosed with conventional narrative expectations in a way I loved. The Red Wedding or Ned Stark's death are memorable and awesome because they strike at the safety of the Designated Protagonist, and Empire Ascendant feels like a whole book running on that principle. You get characters set up for mythic messianic special destinies, and then they gently caress it up, they lose that mantle of designated awesomeness, and they have to figure out how to keep going on pure bloody resolve. You get crazy last-ditch plans that fail atrociously and cunning maneuvers that never go off because the enemy's too good. You get unprepared leaders cast into a maelstrom of political dissent, armed only with good character...and it's not enough. There's something deeply raw and brutal about Kameron Hurley's stuff that keeps me coming back even when I trip on the structure or pacing. It's like raw spirit - you sign up for an rear end-kicking and it delivers. I am biased because we're more professional acquaintances! But I liked this book a lot.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:05
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I've had Mirror Empire on my Kindle forever, I should read it.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:11
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General Battuta posted:I am biased because we're more professional acquaintances! But I liked this book a lot.  This sounds really great! Another plus is how it's a 2 part series -- thought it was a trilogy initially.Speaking of great books, I know I plugged it before but I'm going to plug Luna: New Moon again. One warning is that it ends on one hell of a cliffhanger, but I found it one of the best books I've read recently -- high-stakes political maneuvering set in a near-future where humanity has colonized the Moon, but the logistics of it means living on the Moon is a fraught existence in the center of a cutthroatsociety that literally debits you for every single breath you take. It pivots away from the lower class fairly early on (which is a bit of a shame imo) but the way it follows each child of one of the most powerful families on the moon and the struggle for politics and dominance as their matriarch grows close to her death is gripping as heck. Anyone who is a fan of politics or near-future science fiction definitely shouldn't miss out on this! Also the next book is out in September as Luna: Wolf Moon  The description for the book contains pretty major spoilers though!
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Mar 28, 2016 21:28
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General Battuta posted:So how about that Empire Ascendant, did anyone read it? I was really pleasantly surprised: I liked Mirror Empire a lot, it was real crunchy and complex, but it was very much a book about getting the world and the many many narrative threads up to speed. I actually didn't know about either of these books. Gonna need to read them, thanks.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:28
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Everyone looking for mil-SF, if you can stand the fact that the protagonists wear smart black uniforms with silver piping and skull amblems on their hats, Death's Head is a decent series that is heavily combat oriented. Here's the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death%27s_Head_(series) The author is allegedly Jon Courtnay Grimwood, using the pen name David Gunn. e: I should probably make it clear that the dudes in the novels aren't the space SS, aside from the uniforms thing. Take the plunge! Okay! fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Mar 28, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 21:36
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I wasn't able to finish the Hurley book I read. I like my grimdark with fewer bugs in.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:37
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Kesper North posted:I wasn't able to finish the Hurley book I read. I like my grimdark with fewer bugs in. God's War? I enjoyed it but the setting was so totally bleak that I'm still getting round to the rest of the trilogy. Especially at the end, when you learn that the emissaries from a far away world of infinite possibilities? They're just another sect of vaguely Abrahamic religious nuts, come to buy weapons.
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Mar 28, 2016 22:11
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General Battuta posted:So how about that Empire Ascendant, did anyone read it? I was really pleasantly surprised: I liked Mirror Empire a lot, it was real crunchy and complex, but it was very much a book about getting the world and the many many narrative threads up to speed. I really didn't care for it much. I thought Mirror Empire was pretty good, but I only made it a small ways into Empire Ascendant before giving up on it, and I almost never give up on books. My biggest problem, really, was that I got fed up with the pronouns and the gender stuff. I got tired of dealing with the "Okay, Person A uses pronouns she/her to discuss person C, but Person B uses ze/hir to talk about person C, and who is talking about who and..." stuff. The story already had a convoluted structure and some pacing problems and when you added that on top of it, I found that I just didn't care enough about it to deal with it. General Battuta posted:The Red Wedding or Ned Stark's death are memorable and awesome because they strike at the safety of the Designated Protagonist, and Empire Ascendant feels like a whole book running on that principle. Eh. I don't know about that. The death of Ned Stark is memorable and awesome because it comes out of the blue. The entire book up to this point is set up to send Ned to the Wall, and then Joffrey calls for his head and the story takes a sharp left and jumps off the rails. This was a huge moment. Almost unprecedented. The Red Wedding was the same way. You're expecting Robb's betrayal and wedding fuckery to screw things up for him later, you're not expecting an immediate trainwreck so it's a gigantic WHAT THE gently caress JUST HAPPENED moment. For all the books get talked up as "EVERYTHING IS AWFUL AND EVERYBODY DIES!", not a whole lot of main characters actually really die. This means that all of these sudden deaths have a pretty huge impact, because while you know that it can happen you don't know that it will happen. It's almost a literary jump scare, in that they only really work when you're not prepared for them. Mirror Empire Ascendant doesn't have that same effect because it's a brutal clusterfuck and you know that it will happen, so there's none of that "Oh my god what just happened" feeling, you knew that it was coming and so it has much less impact.
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Mar 28, 2016 22:29
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Strategic Tea posted:God's War? I enjoyed it but the setting was so totally bleak that I'm still getting round to the rest of the trilogy. Yeah. Religious fanaticism is a huge trigger for me, so I'm not surprised I put the book down. I should probably try something else of hers - anything you'd recommend as another place to start?
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Mar 28, 2016 22:57
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Hm, I don't think I see the red wedding Ned beheading as jump scares. They're surprising because conventional narrative sets up a chain of errors leading to looming catastrophe as a way to create tension - then, at the last moment, the protagonist is saved by right action or intervention. The bus is careening towards the day-care but at the last moment Spider-Man webs it! Game of Thrones just skips the flinch and lets the most obvious course of action play out. Ned is a stubborn good guy who can't do politics, oops. Rob puts love above treaty obligations and aw shucks. At least that's why I find those events satisfying! They breach the narrative contract to avert disaster by embracing naturalism. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Mar 28, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 23:05
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It's like the cinematography in Children of Men! A camera that smash cuts and judders with violence eventually inures us and makes the action artificial. A dispassionately observing camera that never flinches is ironically more affecting.
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Mar 28, 2016 23:10
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WarLocke posted:Ringo's books are pretty much dumb as hell 'ooh-rah' bait, but the creepy poo poo really only applies to the Paladin of Shadows books (and maybe his newer zombie apocalypse stuff? I haven't read them). I quit reading Ringo with We Few and I would consider Despearaux's transition from space marine to useless big-titted blond to be creepy as well as dumb, but your mileage may vary.
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Mar 28, 2016 23:14
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General Battuta posted:Hm, I don't think I see the red wedding Ned beheading as jump scares. They're surprising because conventional narrative sets up a chain of errors leading to looming catastrophe as a way to create tension - then, at the last moment, the protagonist is saved by right action or intervention. The bus is careening towards the day-care but at the last moment Spider-Man webs it! This is why it bugs me when people are all "that silly old GRRM killing characters left and right!" I mean there's some of that but the deaths are not artificial or unearned in any way.
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Mar 28, 2016 23:43
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Antti posted:This is why it bugs me when people are all "that silly old GRRM killing characters left and right!" So far there are only two viewpoint characters we can point to and say "that person is definitely dead", excluding prologue POVs. High Warlord Zog fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 23:53
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Khizan posted:Mirror Empire Ascendant doesn't have that same effect because it's a brutal clusterfuck and you know that it will happen, so there's none of that "Oh my god what just happened" feeling, you knew that it was coming and so it has much less impact. That was my takeaway from it as well, "terrible things happen to viewpoint character A, then terrible things happen to viewpoint character B, then to C, then to A some more, and repeat," and that gets a little much after a while. RoboCicero posted:
Wiki's calling it a trilogy, last book fall 2017.
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Mar 29, 2016 00:58
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fritz posted:Too many books have them already. You sound really boring
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Mar 29, 2016 01:34
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I got bored with the series before the Red Wedding, but Ned's death was neither striking at the main character's safety nor out of nowhere. It was foreshadowed since his very first appearances - he sees the symbol of his house killed by the symbol of the Baratheons, and then muses about how he belongs in the family catacombs. He never has an protagonist safety, and then he's in prison and summoned by a little poo poo who's being manipulated by a lot of guys who hate Ned. The thing that really bugged me about A Game of Thrones was that the plot revolves around succession rights that Martin never explains, so it's totally arbitrary. No, I don't want fantasy books to have huge apendices on their legal system, but if it's the lynchpin of your plot, that's different.
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Mar 29, 2016 01:51
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What was hard to understand about it? Robert's eldest son would be king after he died, but since Joffrey isn't really his son, it would have passed to his eldest brother Stannis.
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Mar 29, 2016 02:39
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A human heart posted:You sound really boring About twenty years ago I read a series about a super-special ops dude working for an immortal space emperor and in the middle of one of the books there was a rant about lyndon johnson.
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Mar 29, 2016 03:08
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fritz posted:About twenty years ago I read a series about a super-special ops dude working for an immortal space emperor and in the middle of one of the books there was a rant about lyndon johnson. that's cool, and probably the best part of that book
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Mar 29, 2016 04:28
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TOOT BOOT posted:What was hard to understand about it? Robert's eldest son would be king after he died, but since Joffrey isn't really his son, it would have passed to his eldest brother Stannis. Yeah, this is not something I would expect on the list of people's biggest complaints about the books.
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Mar 29, 2016 05:39
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General Battuta posted:So how about that Empire Ascendant, did anyone read it? I was really pleasantly surprised: I liked Mirror Empire a lot, it was real crunchy and complex, but it was very much a book about getting the world and the many many narrative threads up to speed. I really loved The Mirror Empire, so I was looking forward to Empire Ascendant, but when I finally got around to reading it I actually found it really tough going. I didn't reread Mirror Empire first and I kinda assumed I'd be able to remember everything by the time I was a few chapters in, but it added so many new characters and viewpoints I was completely confused and I gave up part way through. I think I'll wait till the third one comes out and read them all together, see if I like it better. But I'm reading Hurley's other trilogy at the moment, the Bel Dame Apocrypha, and really enjoying that one! Just finished the second and starting on the third. I actually love the religious themes going through it all. It very much feels like a lived in world with different countries and cultures unlike a lot of other stories set on colonised planets.
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Mar 29, 2016 06:17
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General Battuta posted:Hm, I don't think I see the red wedding Ned beheading as jump scares. They're surprising because conventional narrative sets up a chain of errors leading to looming catastrophe as a way to create tension - then, at the last moment, the protagonist is saved by right action or intervention. The bus is careening towards the day-care but at the last moment Spider-Man webs it! I can go with that on Ned's death. It was the first death of its kind of the series. He was cast as the central protagonist. He had all kinds of plot hooks that seemed set to pull him to the Wall. Jon. Benjen. The most honorable lord of the North choosing between his oaths and his loyalties. So I was absolutely loving shocked when he died. After that, though, I don't agree with that at all because Ned's death set the tone of the books after that. It made it clear that nobody had plot armor, that nobody was safe. That it was not a conventional narrative where you follow the hero through the series, secure in the knowledge that the hero is safe because it's only book 1 of 3. After that, the surprising thing to me has never been what happened, it has always been when it happened. As soon as Robb announced his betrayal of the Freys, you knew that he would come to grief from this decision. It was inevitable. So the surprising thing wasn't that he died, it was that he died so suddenly. And that's why I called it a jump scare. I knew the monster was in the house already; the only surprise was where he'd find it. And that's why it doesn't work for me in Mirror Empire Ascendent. When there's a monster in every room, it's not a surprise anymore.
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Mar 29, 2016 07:46
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General Battuta posted:It's like the cinematography in Children of Men! A camera that smash cuts and judders with violence eventually inures us and makes the action artificial. A dispassionately observing camera that never flinches is ironically more affecting. But then all the pretty faces would have to learn how to act and fight. Hollywood can't have that now, can it?
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Mar 29, 2016 07:52
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