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Darth Walrus posted:Elethiomel opens a furniture store. 
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May 17, 2016 21:26
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Hi all, I'm attempting to journey into reading more Science Fiction and Fantasy books, and really just get back into reading. I've not read a book in a long while, and on the suggestions of some friends I read Ready Player One. I found it personally to not be what I was really looking for. I loved the idea of a dystopian future and found that part very appealing. The constant 80's/90's actually felt fun hearkening back to my childhood, but the way it was described rubbed me the wrong way, as if the writer was trying to prove he knows so much more than all of us readers. Through the book I couldn't help but feel the main character was a Trilby clad goon, and it felt similarly that the writer himself fell somewhere on the spectrum. Again, just my personal biases showing through. I know I can google dystopian novels but I'm fearful I'll end up with a real stinker. I'm hoping there are some good suggestions. I see in the OP I'm probably gearing towards a cyberpunk aesthetic. House Louse posted:Cyberpunk Any books by these guys anyone seriously recommends? I browsed a bit, but the thread is almost 400 pages, and again, I'm a bad reader.
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May 18, 2016 00:34
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Neuromancer by William Gibson is legit good, and a good start to Cyberpunk in general. Give it a shot!
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May 18, 2016 00:47
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TheFonz posted:Hi all, Nah, "trilby clad goon" for Ready Player One is pretty much the consensus around here. Depends on what you're looking for and your tolerances, but William Gibson's Neuromancer is the wellspring of modern cyberpunk (it literally coined the word "cyberspace") even if slightly dated in some ways by modern standards. Legit good. Written in the 1980's. If you like it, read anything else by Gibson, he's never bad, even if some books of his are better than others. I'd also recommend The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. It was written in the 1940's but contains most of the elements of modern cyberpunk and was decades ahead of its time. Plus it reads like a the fuse in the Mission Impossible credits -- the action lights up and never, ever stops. So it's a really good choice for someone trying to get back into reading. Neal Stephenson can be very good or very bad -- he's much better at starting great novels than he is at finishing them. His best work is probably Cryptonomicon but it's more WW2 era historical fiction. The Altered Carbon series by Richard Morgan is decent fun-read pulp dystopia noir. So is Nightside City by Lawrence Watt-Evans. If you want something more intellectually challenging, try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, which the film Blade Runner was based on. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 00:47
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edit: ^^^ beaten hard on the classics  William Gibson's Neuromancer is the first big cyberpunk novel. You should definitely check that out, and if you like his style and the universe, go read the two other books, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Bruce Sterling was another of the original cyberpunk writers. Islands In The Net is one of my personal favourites from that time too. George Alec Effinger wrote When Gravity Fails, which is the first book in the Budayeen Cycle, set in the ghetto of a North African/Arabian city. Neal Stephenson also did one of the classic cyberpunk books with his Snow Crash book, but as with most NS books I've read, it's full of great ideas, massive infodumps and lackluster endings. More recent cyberpunk books are the "pulpy" Metrozone series by Simon Morden, set in London, and the Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard Morgan. I guess you could also add Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel series, though that's definitely not on the classics lists. It was simply that I just remembered it. Fart of Presto fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 00:57
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Fart of Presto posted:Neal Stephenson also did one of the classic cyberpunk books with his Snow Crash book, but as with most NS books I've read, it's full of great ideas, massive infodumps and lackluster endings. I always loved Zodiac. This is the best line: "The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide - a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol - nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms."
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May 18, 2016 01:53
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Thanks all! I picked up Neuromamcer and look forward to it. I also happened to pick up Foundation as I've always meant to read Asimov. Both were $8 each at this little local bookstore called Barnes and Noble. Bodes well I wanted a new book now instead of ordering from Amazon. I buy light bulbs from that drat site to avoid leaving my house.
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May 18, 2016 02:26
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ulmont posted:I always loved Zodiac. This is the best line: "The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide - a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol - nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms." I loved everything about that book. It's so loving 80s, in exactly the opposite way of Ready Player One. Zodiac is more how I remember it, that's for sure.
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May 18, 2016 03:16
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The only Stephenson I've outright disliked was Reamde, but boy was that bad, and I think I've read all of his major works between Zodiac and Seveneves. I do find it really interesting how thoroughly he shifted stylistically after The Diamond Age though.
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May 18, 2016 04:55
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Kesper North posted:Banks is no less cynical or brutal. He's just far more subtle. Indeed. The brutality in the end of Look to Windwards is pretty overt for being Banks. Maybe a better phrasing would be that Asher is much more in your face brutal. I still like Ashers AIs better than Banks, especially the war drones, with some exceptions (Mistake not ....)
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May 18, 2016 08:30
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Antti posted:The only "DON'T DO THIS" I've heard is that Memory shouldn't be read until you've read all the books before it in internal chronology. Exactly; or to be more precise, everything before Memory should be read before Memory, and everything after should be read after. Also to nitpick a little more, the two Cordelia books should really be treated as a single unit regardless of which order you read things in; a blindly mechanical publication-order readthrough would have them separated in a way that makes little sense. (They're probably most easily available as an omnibus volume anyway, these days, so the risk of someone doing it that way by mistake may be small, but still if we're nitpicking let's do it properly.) Also also, both Falling Free and Ethan of Athos can be read pretty much whenever (one is a very-distant prequel with no characters in common, the other is the side-quest adventure of a supporting-cast member with little connection to the main story).
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May 18, 2016 08:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you like Hornblower then you owe it to yourself to read the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. Yes. This is a standard recommendation which always comes up in this type of discussion and this is not without reason. Another recommendation for scratching that "mil-SF itch" which I also always make (and I'm sure I've made it before in this very thread): The "Destroyermen" series by Taylor Anderson. It's ocean-going rather than space-going and the tech is WW2 era and below, but other than that it's got everything that you'd want from such a series -- exploration, alien encounters, basebuilding, tech development, fleet actions, land battles, great big explosions, some pretty memorable characters. The basic conceit is that a couple of US Navy ships from WW2 are sucked through an interdimensional vortex into an alternate Earth where humans never evolved and instead there's a civilization of intelligent and kind of nice lemur-people in danger of extermination from a civilization of kind of not so nice dinosaur-people. It's also immediately obvious that the protagonists are not the first or only humans to come there since the lemurs use a version of Latin as a secret ritual language and have copies of sea charts obviously made by British people during the Age of Exploration. It is not difficult to initially pick a side and start shooting, but things get vastly more complicated from there...
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May 18, 2016 08:58
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Really enjoying Something Coming Through by Paul McAuley. You'd think a mix of detective noir; ancient alien intelligence remnants; space colonisation; conspiracy thriller; near future standard England and sorta-western frontier imagery would be a bit of a mess, but it's very smoothly put together.
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May 18, 2016 11:19
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TheFonz posted:Hi all, You will fit in splendidly here.
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May 18, 2016 12:17
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Nah, "trilby clad goon" for Ready Player One is pretty much the consensus around here. I have to confess, I enjoyed it as a bit of blatant nostalgia porn for nerds of exactly my vintage; but I felt dirty afterwards.
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May 18, 2016 12:48
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Groke posted:I have to confess, I enjoyed it as a bit of blatant nostalgia porn for nerds of exactly my vintage; but I felt dirty afterwards. I felt roughly the same, but without feeling dirty. I have no urge to reread the book, but I wasn't offended by it like so many of the
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May 18, 2016 12:54
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Fart of Presto posted:edit: ^^^ beaten hard on the classics You can't mention classic cyberpunk without The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. More recently I read Trouble and her Friends by Melissa Scott, which is not quite the same vintage (early 90s) but was also delicious.
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May 18, 2016 13:26
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Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution novels are pretty cyberpunk, with bonus communism. Sometimes even in space!
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May 18, 2016 14:07
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TheFonz posted:Any books by these guys anyone seriously recommends? I browsed a bit, but the thread is almost 400 pages, and again, I'm a bad reader. I see everybody has gushed about the classics, so I'll just go ahead and skip all that and just go straight to recommending Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief trilogy. It's, by far, one of my favorite trilogies. I do agree that you should go ahead and read some classics first to get a grip on the whole cyberpunk think, but it could be interesting to just dive head first into the mindblowing world of TQT. Disclaimer: it may take several reads to "get it", but good news is that it just gets better with each re-read.
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May 18, 2016 15:50
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Moxyland by Beukes certainly hits the dystopian vibe, and I'd feel comfortable calling it cyberpunk as well. Generally, I enjoy her writing, though the others are somewhat further afield.
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May 18, 2016 18:35
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Dammit, a friend asked me about a book I can't remember and it's driving me nuts. It's an urban fantasy novel. Dude has amnesia and can't remember anything but he works for this dude who always wears sunglasses (and is a demon or something). Turns out the amnesia dude can't die (or stay dead anyway) because he absorbs the life force of anyone near him when he kicks it, and comes back from the dead. Any ideas on it? He can't remember anything and I'm stuck trying to remember wtf the book was either.
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May 18, 2016 18:52
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Dammit, a friend asked me about a book I can't remember and it's driving me nuts. Dying is My Business by Nick Kaufmann. I found the main character's obliviousness about how he obviously works for an evil guy who's loving him over incredibly obnoxious. Come on, you're amnesiac, not mentally retarded.
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May 18, 2016 19:28
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AH. That was it! Cool. Kinda sad to see there was no book 3 to the series.
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May 18, 2016 19:59
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It's a new series. I'm pretty sure he's still writing it.
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May 18, 2016 20:08
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I see everybody has gushed about the classics, so I'll just go ahead and skip all that and just go straight to recommending Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief trilogy. It's, by far, one of my favorite trilogies. I do agree that you should go ahead and read some classics first to get a grip on the whole cyberpunk think, but it could be interesting to just dive head first into the mindblowing world of TQT. Disclaimer: it may take several reads to "get it", but good news is that it just gets better with each re-read. On a similar note, I love recommending Accellerando. Where TQT is strictly post singularity, Accellerando starts near future and takes us through a version of the singularity. It's pretty fun and can be read for free. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html
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May 18, 2016 20:10
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Megazver posted:It's a new series. I'm pretty sure he's still writing it. I hope so. It's been about a year and a half but the newest book he has is a new one for a new series that came out last year. I hate to admit it, but I'm being spoiled by Craig Schaefer and his ability to have like 3-4 books out in a year.
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May 18, 2016 20:40
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Oh, uh, cough, yeah. http://www.goodreads.com/author/1137883.Nicholas_Kaufmann/questions
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May 18, 2016 21:02
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I'm following a suggestion from the thread and I have begun to read the Academy series, by Jack McDevitt. Nothing to get excited, but it is an easy a nice reading (and that is what I was looking for after reading Watts). The setup is nothing new: the humanity has begun to explore the stars and has found traces of long gone civilizations, including some awesome monuments placed around the nearby stars (including one in our own Solar System). To this point, it is quite similar to the beginning of the Revelation Space series (which beguns in an archeological site) and has some flavour to the Polity (without the man-eating crabs and rest of monsters). The development is quite predictible, and after reaching 30% of the second book I can't say I've got specially engaged with any of the characters. The picture of the beginning of a starfaring society is interesting, and I hope the series exploits more this aspect. To this point, it is archeologists in space (with some surprises). Overall, I'm happy with the recommendation and I'll probably read the whole series.
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May 18, 2016 22:53
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https://twitter.com/scottlynch78/status/733062366313648128
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May 19, 2016 00:00
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No wait, I was thinking of the other guy this is gonna be exciting for me. I liked all 3.
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May 19, 2016 00:31
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I bet he's glad to have that thorn out of his side. Seriously, good for him. As someone who struggles with depression - and for whom depression and writing are absolutely incompatible with one another - I really empathize with what he went through / is going through, and I'm glad he's writing again, even if the books aren't as good.
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May 19, 2016 02:45
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I've been listening to the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi at work, and I've loved them all so far. Skipped Zoe's tale. Currently on the last book and I was wondering if anyone has a good mil-sci fi recommendation kinda similar to this series? I like the whole "upgraded human" thing a lot. Other similar books I've read are the forever war and the red. Thanks edit: Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I see everybody has gushed about the classics, so I'll just go ahead and skip all that and just go straight to recommending Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief trilogy. It's, by far, one of my favorite trilogies. I do agree that you should go ahead and read some classics first to get a grip on the whole cyberpunk think, but it could be interesting to just dive head first into the mindblowing world of TQT. Disclaimer: it may take several reads to "get it", but good news is that it just gets better with each re-read. Yes. Yes! YES! Please read this series.
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May 19, 2016 07:29
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Dammit, a friend asked me about a book I can't remember and it's driving me nuts. Talking about urban fantasy amnesia, what the gently caress's happening with the Rook sequel? Wasn't it meant to be out last summer?
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May 19, 2016 10:27
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Junkenstein posted:Talking about urban fantasy amnesia, what the gently caress's happening with the Rook sequel? Wasn't it meant to be out last summer? It's coming out June 14. Actually doing so, this time.
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May 19, 2016 10:47
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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I see everybody has gushed about the classics, so I'll just go ahead and skip all that and just go straight to recommending Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief trilogy. It's, by far, one of my favorite trilogies. I do agree that you should go ahead and read some classics first to get a grip on the whole cyberpunk think, but it could be interesting to just dive head first into the mindblowing world of TQT. Disclaimer: it may take several reads to "get it", but good news is that it just gets better with each re-read. Schisimatrix would be the classic example best corresponding to TQT, I think. TQT is fantastic, though the third novel suffers by comparison go the other two.
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May 19, 2016 11:19
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Amberskin posted:I'm following a suggestion from the thread and I have begun to read the Academy series, by Jack McDevitt. The first book is one of my all-time favourite SF books. But I found all the rest to be various degrees of completely forgettable, and even more so when they attempt to explore the central problem of the first: the omega clouds. But man, when they first start coming across all those burned out ruins, I remember getting a shiver. I think his other series is much more sustainable and has a higher quality overall. Again, the first book is one of my absolute favourites, and the best of the series. A Talent for War is terribly misnamed and has one of the worst covers I've ever seen, but is a lot of fun exploring myths and how history is formed. Xotl fucked around with this message at 01:19 on May 21, 2016 |
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May 19, 2016 14:13
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Neurosis posted:Schisimatrix would be the classic example best corresponding to TQT, I think. TQT is fantastic, though the third novel suffers by comparison go the other two. Third novel does suffer, and it really didn't help that they didn't get Scott Brick to narrate it because his narration of 1 & 2 is phenomenal. I'm probably going to do another re-read after I'm finished with The Expanse series.
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May 19, 2016 17:04
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TheFonz posted:Hi all, this guy??? 
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May 19, 2016 17:29
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New Reynolds novel info:quote:The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives. August, motherfuckers. And there's two other new books by Reynolds coming out before then: his collaboration with Stephen Baxter called The Medusa Chronicles is out this month, and the massive 800-page Beyond the Aqulia Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds is out in June.
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May 20, 2016 14:34
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Hedrigall posted:New Reynolds novel info: Ooh neat. Are these parts of a series?
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May 20, 2016 14:42
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