|
Lord Hydronium posted:Speaking of which, how is New York 2140 (for anyone who's read it)? I'm halfway through it and it's okay. Suspect it will be more on par with 2312 than Aurora.
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 00:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 07:31 |
|
|
Just hit the last section of American Gods Kind of disappointed in the direction the story is going, was kinda hoping the "war" wouldn't be quite so literal EDIT: Also there better be some kind of justification for the absurd level of coincidences in the end of the second section because if not, fuuuccckkk
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 00:34
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:It's a pretty good book but I wouldn't call it great or a classic. Read this.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 00:49
|
|
|
Jack2142 posted:Boneshaker was pretty bad. Nah, it was just an overall average book. It has no business being a Hugo finalist, though.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 01:08
|
|
|
my bony fealty posted:I picked up the compendium Tales of the Dying Earth a few days ago and blitzed through it. I love dying Earth settings and I shamefully had not read the master until now. More Jack Vance. Any Jack Vance will do. I'd say go for the Lyonesse books next, myself, they're basically his take on trad fantasy in his own unique way, and if you love Cugel and Rhialto you'll love them too.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 01:33
|
|
|
Lord Hydronium posted:Speaking of which, how is New York 2140 (for anyone who's read it)?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 02:55
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:Nah, it was just an overall average book. It has no business being a Hugo finalist, though. Maybe it was better than I remember, I don't think I have read it since 2009 or so admittedly "Steampunk Seattle with Zombies" got me interested and I remember being underwhelmed.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 04:07
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:I'd move on to Vance's Demon Princes books, they are great. I thought about this, until I saw the ebook price was almost 18 bucks for the first one. That's batshit crazy.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 06:06
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I thought about this, until I saw the ebook price was almost 18 bucks for the first one. That's batshit crazy. The "first one" is actually the first three of the five books on the series. (Or you can buy them individually for six bucks each.)
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 06:15
|
|
|
That's... slightly better, actually. I didn't read the synopsis or details, since above mentioned DON'T DO THAT, so yea that's on me. Still,  for an ebook, even if it is a collection. drat. Never really thought I'd see the day.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 06:24
|
|
|
RoboCicero posted:I'm genuinely curious why people love it so much! It's not a Big Idea story, it's not particularly funny compared with the pillars of the genre, the story is a completely average traipse across various exotic locales...what's the deal? Hieronymous Alloy posted:Thanks, I was wondering if we had anyone here of Chinese background who had read the book. I'm Chinese-American and it's been years since I've read Bridge of Birds so caveats abound, but: as a high school student, I enjoyed it as a light, happy fantasy, and loved it because it was the first time I had ever read a fantasy that covered China in a way that felt familiar and respectful...and wasn't super racist or exploitative. Hughart didn't exoticize people or culture to the point where it felt alien or foreign (again: see exploitative). All the characters felt like people rather than caricatures, as Hieronymous Alloy mentioned in one of his posts. The mythical China he described had at best a tenuous relationship to historical China, but I guess I assumed he wasn't trying to be precise, only close enough to get the reader settled into the world. And it was culturally recognizable, if about as predictable and cliche as the HK historical dramas my family always liked to watch over dinner (well okay, Bridge of Birds was tragically short on the ghosts of grandparents gossiping and berating you, but you can't have everything). In fact, that first time I remember being stunned to see someone Chinese in a fantasy book at all. Hell, even fantasy not-China as a setting was pretty amazing. I'm (still) not used to seeing someone like me in a book at all, so the experience was and is startling and weird and once I got over all that baggage, actually kinda nice! Compare with something like Memoirs of a Geisha, which made high school me so loving uncomfortable with how strongly every description screamed Asian fetish that I shoved it into a dark corner after I finished and never wanted to revisit. I'm not gonna sit here and say that Bridge of Birds is perfect (no book is), but at least for me, the difference was like night and day. That said, I'm all for more people writing fantasies based on other cultures, just as I'm all for writers from other cultures getting to write stories that aren't based on their own cultures. tl;dr: I found it a fun book, but admit I'm biased because of personal reasons. I didn't find it culturally problematic though. saphron fucked around with this message at 06:47 on May 5, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 06:44
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:That's... slightly better, actually. It's three full novels. Twenty bucks is totally reasonable.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 07:35
|
|
|
FYI City of Stairs #3 is came out this week https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31522139-city-of-miracles I'm about half way through and it's better than #2, not quite as good as #1.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 08:23
|
|
|
coffeetable posted:FYI City of Stairs #3 is came out this week my biggest problem with #2 is how it felt like it was using #1 as a blueprint. is this different? don't know why i'm asking actually i'll probably read it regardless.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 10:05
|
|
|
One last suggestion I remembered for the whats-what-in-contemporary-fantasy list: how's Declare for alternate history?
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 14:52
|
|
|
Declare is amazing but it's a bit niche and I wouldn't classify it as alt history. I think you could actually call it historical fiction, with fantasy elements. It's doing its own Tim Powers thing. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:13 on May 5, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 15:11
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:One last suggestion I remembered for the whats-what-in-contemporary-fantasy list: how's Declare for alternate history? AFAIK everything in Declare matches up with real history. You just have to believe in the supernatural elements and a very effective intelligence operation to believe it actually happened and have your mind blown.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 15:50
|
|
|
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=s9_acs...rd_i=1000677541 A few good classics in today's kindle daily deals including Foundation, Stranger in a Strange Land, 2001, and Cat's cradle.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 17:15
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Declare is amazing but it's a bit niche and I wouldn't classify it as alt history. I think you could actually call it historical fiction, with fantasy elements. It's doing its own Tim Powers thing. To expand: Powers tries to learn as much as he can about some series of events in history and depicts them with essentially no changes but comes up with a nutso fantasy/occult explanation underpinning known events which ties them together. Declare is loving good.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 17:46
|
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:Just hit the last section of American Gods
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 17:59
|
|
|
freebooter posted:I need to get around to reading Embassytown. I found all three Bas-Lag books to be a frustrating mix of brilliant imagination and an inability to know what to cut, but The City & The City was a very solid, unique fantasy novel. I tend to internally classify TC&TC as social science fiction instead of fantasy, but it really is pretty unique. I should probably read more Mitchell though, I've only read Cloud Atlus and The Bone Clocks.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 19:02
|
|
|
I just finished the paper menagerie and I enjoyed it but found the pro Chinese bias a little but overwhelming at times, I'm not saying there is no counterpoints but they were pretty sparse. Am I a horrible anti Chinese person or did anyone else get this vibe? I've not noticed it in any review so I'm starting to think I'm a dick.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 19:44
|
|
|
taser rates posted:I tend to internally classify TC&TC as social science fiction instead of fantasy, but it really is pretty unique. I should probably read more Mitchell though, I've only read Cloud Atlus and The Bone Clocks. Me, I just think of it as a noir detective story with a really weird setting.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 19:53
|
|
|
taser rates posted:I tend to internally classify TC&TC as social science fiction instead of fantasy, but it really is pretty unique. I should probably read more Mitchell though, I've only read Cloud Atlus and The Bone Clocks. Black Swan Green and Thousand Autumn's are both great. The rest aren't essential.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 22:50
|
|
|
Jack2142 posted:Maybe it was better than I remember, I don't think I have read it since 2009 or so admittedly "Steampunk Seattle with Zombies" got me interested and I remember being underwhelmed. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either; I don't regret the time I spent reading it but I also wouldn't recommend it to other people. Her Cheshire Red books were much better and it's a shame she seems to have written the first two books of a 3-4 book series and then lost interest.
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 23:08
|
|
|
Kalman posted:The "first one" is actually the first three of the five books on the series. (Or you can buy them individually for six bucks each.) Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:That's... slightly better, actually. I own it on Kindle, it's actually all five. THE STAR KING THE KILLING MACHINE THE PALACE OF LOVE THE FACE THE BOOK OF DREAMS
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 23:25
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:To expand: Powers tries to learn as much as he can about some series of events in history and depicts them with essentially no changes but comes up with a nutso fantasy/occult explanation underpinning known events which ties them together. Declare is loving good. What the consensus for other books like Declare that are worth checking out (I mean, other than more Tim powers books). Specifically Cold War occult books? I have The Witch Who Came In From the Cold on my kindle but won't get to it until I finished City of Miracles (which is great so far).
|
|
#
?
May 5, 2017 23:27
|
|
|
taser rates posted:I tend to internally classify TC&TC as social science fiction instead of fantasy, but it really is pretty unique. I should probably read more Mitchell though, I've only read Cloud Atlus and The Bone Clocks. Reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is pretty rewarding after reading The Bone Clocks; I thought Mitchell just picked Marinus up and re-used him, but when I went back and re-read Thousand Autumns, he'd definitely already decided Marinus was a perpetually reincarnated immortal. Marinus even makes regular comments about it, but the other characters just chalk it up as him being eccentric. Solitair posted:Black Swan Green and Thousand Autumn's are both great. The rest aren't essential. I really love Ghostwritten too, especially the Mongolia chapter. His only meh books are Number9dream and Slade House.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 00:43
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:Depending on specifically where you're at, keep going. There's reasoning behind some of the coincidences - although some of them didn't have a justification that I remember and really stuck out. The coincidences that annoyed were the things with Sam and then Audrey at the end of the second section
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 00:47
|
|
|
by.a.teammate posted:I just finished the paper menagerie and I enjoyed it but found the pro Chinese bias a little but overwhelming at times, I'm not saying there is no counterpoints but they were pretty sparse. Am I a horrible anti Chinese person or did anyone else get this vibe? I've not noticed it in any review so I'm starting to think I'm a dick. I noticed it in The Man Who Ended History and while there are many points where he's not wrong, he painted the whole with an entirely Chinese-viewpoint brush. It's a difficult subject because a lot of the people who question the Chinese narrative about WWII are really vile nationalists, but his portrayal of those issues as completely ignored and rug-swept by the status quo isn't really accurate either. It struck close to home to me because I was writing at the time about how China would exaggerate or constantly bring up Japanese war crimes as a diplomatic bludgeon in other areas. I wouldn't say you're a dick, he lays it on a little thick. On the other hand, like, The Litigation Master and the Monkey King is pretty harsh on dynastic China. Pretty much when I go into one of his stories I expect a war crime to come up somewhere but I haven't read all the stories in the collection, just a few that turned up in magazines I was looking at. I remember another one about wine that did something with memory that wasn't so harsh maybe. Paper Menagerie itself doesn't have any atrocities but is Amy Tan levels of 'bawwwwwwww' by the end. That's not a bad thing, it's just something to be prepared for. Michael Swanwick is the only other author who comes close to gut-punching as regularly.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 01:26
|
|
|
i find the thinking strange that you could feel morally implicated at all just because you got a vibe that might or might not be true on the limited information you had.McCoy Pauley posted:What the consensus for other books like Declare that are worth checking out (I mean, other than more Tim powers books). Specifically Cold War occult books? read colder war by Charles Stross, available here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm i'm not a big stross fan by any means, but it is flat out loving amazing, and it might be the best lovecraftian story i've read period (and i read a lot of that kind of stuff) otherwise, austin grossman did an okay book called crooked that kind of takes a similar approach to powers - it's about richard nixon's rise to power and fall and his entanglement with a magical/lovecraftian cold war with russia. not quite as good as the other things mentioned but i had fun and it led me to finding some things out about nixon i didn't know.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 01:52
|
|
|
poo poo, I read a trilogy a few years back about the british in ww2 and if they had a warlock department. As I remember I found it pretty great and the warlock stuff gets more hosed up as the series progresses but I can't for the life of me remember the name lf the series. 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 09:05
|
|
|
Biplane posted:poo poo, I read a trilogy a few years back about the british in ww2 and if they had a warlock department. As I remember I found it pretty great and the warlock stuff gets more hosed up as the series progresses but I can't for the life of me remember the name lf the series. Are you talking about the Milkweed Trilogy by Ian Tragillis? I remember the ending of Bitter Seeds really unsettled me.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 09:12
|
|
|
flosofl posted:Are you talking about the Milkweed Trilogy by Ian Tragillis? Yeah that's the one. And yes, what I thought started at first as a relatively wacky concept quickly dove head first into hosed up territory like the guys son 
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 10:12
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:i find the thinking strange that you could feel morally implicated at all just because you got a vibe that might or might not be true on the limited information you had. It's now morally wrong to even entertain incorrect thoughts and it's starting to creep into even well adjusted peoples' thinking. Doubly so if non-western cultures are involved.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 11:24
|
|
|
The only thing I remember about American Gods is that it was very forgettable, but I just saw a Youtube ad for the TV series and it struck me - whether or not the TV series turns out to good - that it's the kind of story that would be way more suited as a TV series or film than a book.
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 12:13
|
|
|
freebooter posted:The only thing I remember about American Gods is that it was very forgettable, but I just saw a Youtube ad for the TV series and it struck me - whether or not the TV series turns out to good - that it's the kind of story that would be way more suited as a TV series or film than a book. Gaiman's always struck me as a more visual writer who works better in comics than in pure words. I think you're right!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 13:13
|
|
|
Personally I think American Gods is amazing and its one of my favorite novels!
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 16:56
|
|
|
American Gods is mediocre and it's not at all one of my favourite novels. I honestly have never seen anyone defend it on the basis of it's literary qualities. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 17:10 on May 6, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 17:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 07:31 |
|
|
Yes we know, literary quality
|
|
#
?
May 6, 2017 17:09
|
|
