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definitely very little light about Cherryh's work.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:47
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Brainiac Five posted:Medusa's Web felt an awful lot like Tim Powers trying to write a better version of Three Days to Never, and I definitely preferred the more science-fictional approach to mashing together Gnosticism and Kabalistic Judaism. I remember Three Days to Never being pretty bad. So is Medusa's Web actually worth my time?
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Apr 6, 2016 03:52
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Rough Lobster posted:I remember Three Days to Never being pretty bad. So is Medusa's Web actually worth my time? Yes. I mean, you might want to look up who some of the people are around the middle of the book, but it's really good and really weird. I think the closest thing in his books to it is Dinner at Deviant's Palace, or some of his short stories.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:54
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apophenium posted:I started reading Downbelow Station a week or so ago and have found it incredibly interesting but also a little more dense than some of the sci fi I've been reading as of late. Cherryh doesn't hold your hand. Plot lines get thrown at you left and right and POV characters switch around pretty swiftly. It feels like a lot of pieces moving slowly, and I can already see bits where things are starting to come together. It's really impressive so far, but not the light space opera I might have otherwise expected. It absolutely blows up towards the end, stick with it. I was really impressed by Downbelow's heft and scale.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:23
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Brainiac Five posted:Yes. I mean, you might want to look up who some of the people are around the middle of the book, but it's really good and really weird. I think the closest thing in his books to it is Dinner at Deviant's Palace, or some of his short stories. Thanks, I'll have to check it out. I did a lot of wiki'ing during Declare so that's no issue.
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Apr 6, 2016 07:26
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Just don't expect another Declare or Stress of Her Regard. It's pretty solid but nowhere near his best. I like the theory that it's him pretending Three Days To Never never happened, though.
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Apr 6, 2016 07:50
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holocaust bloopers posted:Is Cherryh extremely your poo poo or is she that consistently good? Like the others said, she can be very good but also pretty dense in her writing, and, depending on the book, quite bleak and oppressive. To give you an impression of what made Cherryh work for me: it was bookended by House of Suns, Blindsight/Echopraxia, Use of Weapons, Stross' Merchant Princes series, and Three Body Problem beforehand, broken up by reading Declare and some non-fiction, and followed up with Marooned in Realtime, some Greg Egan, Excession, Hyperion, and Aurora. Out of _all_ those books, Cyteen turned out to be one of my absolute all-time AAA+++ favorites, and even secondary stuff like Heavy Time, Rimrunners, and Merchanter's Luck were solid 4/5 stars IMO. Guess I'm a huge sucker for Bildungsromans. Chanur was extremely my poo poo because it's fun space opera, and the Foreigner series was great for the first 9 books as well, but overall I was most impressed with her Alliance/Union stuff (hence starting with Downbelow probably being a good idea).
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Apr 6, 2016 10:11
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We have a CJ Cherryh thread, although it doesn't see much traffic.  Cherryh is fantastic and everyone in this thread should read her. That said, Downbelow Station is one of her heaviest works, and I think it gets a lot easier if you've read other A-U stuff first and thus have some more context for it. Cyteen is just as long but goes down a lot more smoothly, and the Foreigner and Chanur series and the other A-U books are all much more approachable.
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Apr 6, 2016 12:58
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RIP Cherryh thread. Heavy Time and Rimrunners felt exceptionally claustrophobic to me so I wouldn't necessarily call them more approachable (not to mention their mental instability/sexual violence angles).
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Apr 6, 2016 13:13
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Oh hey, incoming sidequel to Planetfall. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/04/coming-soon-atlas-emma-newman-sequel-planetfall/
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Apr 6, 2016 16:47
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taser rates posted:Oh hey, incoming sidequel to Planetfall. That's cool! Planetfall was quite a ride.
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Apr 6, 2016 17:58
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So I just finished Baru Cormorant, and I'm trying to decide between Oryx and Crake, The First Law trilogy, the Three Body Problem, or something completely different for my next book. Anybody want to help me decide? haha
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Apr 6, 2016 21:12
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First Law trilogy. Fourth option: Aurora by KSR.
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Apr 6, 2016 21:32
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Oryx and Crake.
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Apr 6, 2016 21:51
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Honestly you can't go wrong. All three of your choices are solid picks.
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Apr 6, 2016 21:55
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trip9 posted:So I just finished Baru Cormorant, and I'm trying to decide between Oryx and Crake, The First Law trilogy, the Three Body Problem, or something completely different for my next book. Anybody want to help me decide? haha They're all very different, so it really depends on what you're in the mood for. Oryx n Crake for literary post apocalypse, First Law for gritty character driven fantasy with great dark humor, and Three Body is big idea sci fi from what I've read of it
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Apr 6, 2016 22:00
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So I know Three Body Problem is more of an "ideas" sci-fi book. Oryx and Crake is a "literary" post-apocalyptic novel (never read Margaret Atwood before)? I've had The First Law trilogy on my read list for a while now, but I don't remember why I added it. Can someone sell me on it? What makes it stand out? For context, fantasy series I've read recently are Malazan and Got. I bounced off of Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" around The Sword of the Lictor, not because it was bad but because I knew I wasn't in the right headspace to read and completely absorb it right now. I'll prob go back to it later. Also not a fan of Sanderson, his stuff always comes off as very "YA" to me, in a bad way. Edit: savinhill totally stole my thunder haha trip9 fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 22:10
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Whatever you pick, you'll read a good book! You have a great problem
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Apr 6, 2016 22:30
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First Law Trilogy has some really great unlikeable protagonists, the kind you will love to hate. Energetic action scenes, very character driven. It's "grimdark" but still a lot of fun.
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Apr 6, 2016 22:35
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I wouldn't read First Law if you just read Malazan. That is basically what I did and I think it affected the series for me. Come back to First Law after reading one of your other choices.
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Apr 6, 2016 22:47
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Hand Row posted:I wouldn't read First Law if you just read Malazan. That is basically what I did and I think it affected the series for me. Come back to First Law after reading one of your other choices. I finished Malazan a good 7 months ago, so it's not like I'd be coming fresh off that. To make things more difficult I've also added "Dan Simmons horror" to the list of potentials. I like to make things hard on myself.
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Apr 7, 2016 00:13
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I'm enjoying The Girl with Ghost Eyes by M.H. Boroson. The main character and setting are great, although I have no idea how authentic the portrayal of 1900's San Francisco Chinatown or the supernatural world is. It's odd how many Asian-inspired fantasy series with female protagonists are floating around that are written by white male authors. What's crazy is that they're actually pretty good, or at least not egregiously steeped in Orientalism.
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Apr 7, 2016 01:01
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trip9 posted:a "literary" post-apocalyptic novel (never read Margaret Atwood before)? It's not Morrow's best work (Towing Jehovah is probably my personal favorite) but it fits the bill of literary post-apoc.
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Apr 7, 2016 01:26
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coyo7e posted:If you are interested in a literary post-apoc novel, you might also check out James Morrow's This is How the World Ends. Towing Jehovah is fully awesome, as are the other two entries in the Godhead trilogy. I've been reading his Only Begotten Daughter and while it's very much treading the same path, it's just as enjoyable in its own way. Morrow is a treasure, even if he stays in his lane more than most talented authors do.
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Apr 7, 2016 01:42
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Towing Jehovah is good enough that I've had two copies get stolen after loaning them out. And I keep buying it again because poo poo, how can I not want to read it again?! So much poo poo going down.. I mean even the opening with the dude's father "sinking" a butane lighter in the gravy bowl to poo poo on him for wrecking his oil tanker..  The only other book I've had get that kind of reception/theft-ratio were the New Perspectives MS Excel textbooks, and I always got reimbursed by work for those.
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Apr 7, 2016 01:59
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That Vandermeer collection looks amazing. I wish I could buy it now, so I guess I'll be buying The Weird in the meantime. Also, I've been rereading Baru Cormorant along with Battuta's writer's commentary. But it looks like that's still a work in progress, so I guess that's something I'll come back to do in-between new books. House Louse posted:Not even professional book reviewers ever reach the end of their backlogs. It's daft to stress about it. Same reason I don't like those "Number Nouns You Must Verb Before You Die" books. Life's not a checklist. (Ninja: I don't think you're being stupid about it. I think I'm agreeing with you.) Those books need another, less forceful title. I have all four editions of the "1001 Books" one and I find them more exciting than irritating. They taught me a lot about classic lit that I never heard of in English class at school. Yeah, I'll never finish them all, but I'd probably hate a lot of them anyway, and that's beside the point in my mind.
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Apr 7, 2016 06:55
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Hand Row posted:I wouldn't read First Law if you just read Malazan. That is basically what I did and I think it affected the series for me. Come back to First Law after reading one of your other choices. They are pretty different both in plot as well as in writing. First Law is basically an adventure comic turned into a book series with well known archetypes. First Law is also much more straight-forward in the telling. Bakker and Erikson would be different however. Regarding Bakker, I read rumours here that the last book, The Unholy Consult, is finally on the way out after having been stuck in publisher hell for a long time?
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Apr 7, 2016 07:56
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Holy poo poo, the ending of The Belly of the Bow.
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Apr 7, 2016 08:51
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taser rates posted:Holy poo poo, the ending of The Belly of the Bow. Yup. That's K. J. Parker for you.
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Apr 7, 2016 13:42
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Cardiac posted:They are pretty different both in plot as well as in writing. I didn't mean to imply they are similar. It was just a tough transition for me and it made me appreciate First Law less. I really would recommend not reading Fantasy right after Malazan because it will probably be disappointing. But does not apply if you didn't love Malazan as much as I did. In related news hooray new Malazan book this month!
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Apr 7, 2016 14:32
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ulmont posted:Yup. That's K. J. Parker for you. Yea, I really should have been expecting something like that by now with how much Parker I've read, but drat. And really, it's Gorgas's response as much as the act itself.
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Apr 7, 2016 14:56
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Started reading Dune recently and holy poo poo it's just as good as everyone says it is. Are the other Dune books just as good?
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Apr 7, 2016 18:39
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^^^^^ Everyone agrees that the series takes a dive at some point, nobody will agree where. I love the later Frank Herbert ones, other people cannot stand them. I always advise people to read an even number of Dune books - A lot of "the point" of Dune is actually in Dune Messiah, Children of Dune has a lot of faffing about that only comes together in God-Emperor, and if you've pushed through the bonkers stuff in Heretics you might as well finish the whole thing, because the climax of Chapterhouse is glorious. Cardiac posted:
It's being split in two, one this year one next year. So The Great Ordeal is technically The Second Apocalypse Part 2, Part 3, Part 1. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 7, 2016 |
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Apr 7, 2016 18:40
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Samiz posted:Started reading Dune recently and holy poo poo it's just as good as everyone says it is. Are the other Dune books just as good? Yes, but for increasingly esoteric values of "good". Each book gets weirder and weirder. The standard advice is to keep reading in sequence till it gets too weird for you personally then stop.
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Apr 7, 2016 18:43
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I always thought of the First Law series as a really dark comedy, first and foremost. Also it's a very character-driven story. Abercrombie seems to have a lot of fun with creating strong first impressions for his characters, then completely undermining those impressions as we learn more about the people's backstories, inner workings, and the psychological journeys that the characters are going on. I think I read somewhere that he was a psych major.
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Apr 7, 2016 18:48
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taser rates posted:Holy poo poo, the ending of The Belly of the Bow. That was the point where I decided not to read the third book. I love KJP, one of my favorite writers, but Jesus Christ...
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Apr 7, 2016 19:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yes, but for increasingly esoteric values of "good". Each book gets weirder and weirder. The standard advice is to keep reading in sequence till it gets too weird for you personally then stop. Yeah, it doesn't get "better" or "return to form" so, for example, whenever you go "when do they go back to riding around on giant worms kicking rear end I'm bored?" that time never comes again. If you are into the trippy woo-woo nature of prophecy and what it means to be human stuff, then you can ride the wave to the end. Basically, when you get bored, stop, because what you're waiting for ain't comin back.
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Apr 7, 2016 19:44
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And because it can never be stressed enough, if Frank Herbert's name isn't on the cover, avoid that poo poo like the plague.
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Apr 7, 2016 19:47
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Blastedhellscape posted:I always thought of the First Law series as a really dark comedy, first and foremost. This sounds interesting, I might do First Law next since it seems like it's a "fun" read (though I'm actually gonna be listening to it on audible I think).
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Apr 7, 2016 19:56
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Ornamented Death posted:And because it can never be stressed enough, if Frank Herbert's name isn't on the cover, avoid that poo poo like the plague.
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Apr 7, 2016 20:43
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