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Poldarn posted:I never thought I'd enjoy a low-fantasy economic thriller but it's real good.
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Aug 17, 2017 18:00
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I just finished Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. Philip Jose Farmer was a lovely pulp writer who was grandfathered into the science fiction new wave because his ideas were, "like, really out there, maaaan." He was also apparently a really nice man, so I won't disparage him too much, but even Alfred Bester said he was only ever an idea guy whose execution wasn't great. I've tried to read Farmer more than once, and I can't stomach more than a paragraph of his lovely prose, it's so bad.
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Aug 17, 2017 18:17
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:One of the worse things in the Riverworld books was the author rehabilitating Hermann Goring as a super-impressionable guy who wasn't evil, he just
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Aug 17, 2017 23:20
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A human heart posted:that sounds really funny It's not worth reading the series, trust me & Stuporstar about that. I was duped into reading Farmer by a really cool 1970s commentary book named "Robots Robots Robots" that was about robots/mechanical simulacra from ancient pre-history myths to modern era stories & devices. It really went into depth regarding all the various simulacra that were created pre-industrial age. My favorites were Edgar Allen Poe's guesstimate essay on how the chess-playing Mechanical Turk worked (totally wrong btw), and Vaucanson's mechanical duck. Other than the Farmer recommendation, it was a solid book.
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Aug 17, 2017 23:52
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:
That's more or less true about humans in general tho, in that we're mostly the product of our environments.
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Aug 18, 2017 00:30
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Chairchucker posted:That's more or less true about humans in general tho, in that we're mostly the product of our environments. If you include the environment in the womb immediately prior to conception, sure. 
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Aug 18, 2017 01:07
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Number Ten Cocks posted:If you include the environment in the womb immediately prior to conception, sure. Sorry I don't really get what you're saying.
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Aug 18, 2017 01:09
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Chairchucker posted:Sorry I don't really get what you're saying. Your parents may have provided a substandard environment in the womb immediately prior to your conception, filled it with poor quality sperm and egg. Number Ten Cocks fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Aug 18, 2017 |
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Aug 18, 2017 01:12
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I think the main reason I'm confused is that you appear to be applying the 'biotruths' tag to something that is the exact opposite.
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Aug 18, 2017 01:18
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Chairchucker posted:That's more or less true about humans in general tho, in that we're mostly the product of our environments. To a degree. I assume you are referring to behaviour and personality rather than anything more essential. A lot of behaviours have strong biological bases (although biology is not the exclusive determinant and environment is important). Some of the more striking examples are the identical twins raised apart studies that show twins who have commonalities like both enjoying coughing in elevators to startle people, holidaying in the same location and smoking the same cigarettes. The influence of biology on political views is also interesting; we think of politics as complicated and so inherently environmental as to be separate from genes, but there is a high apparent hereditability of political views for people raised in households dominated by political views which are the opposite of birth parents'. Again, biology is not going to be the overwhelming determinant of these kinds of things, but it's very important.
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Aug 18, 2017 01:59
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:I just finished Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.
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Aug 18, 2017 02:18
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:Finished House of Suns and enjoyed it quite a bit, Reynolds really knows how to blow my mind with his far-future concepts and sense of awe-inspiring scale. I read that a few months back and generally agree, great concept that was pulled off well but the ending was abrupt. Fwiw Reynolds had said a sequel isn't out of the question. One other thing that was a bummer: the Spirit of Air seemed to be heavily implied to be the boy Abigail played with, which would make the whole book sort of a weird maybe-love story set over millions of years, which I thought was super cool, but Reynolds said in an interview that this was not the case and Valmik and the boy are unrelated.
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Aug 18, 2017 05:13
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Anybody know if the last couple of Old Man's War sequels are worth a read? I never thought the series was worth all of the Hugo + Nebula buzz it got, but i found it enjoyable and somewhat regret losing track of it around the time the spinoff from the protagonists' daughter's perspective was published. my bony fealty posted:I read that a few months back and generally agree, great concept that was pulled off well but the ending was abrupt. Fwiw Reynolds had said a sequel isn't out of the question. Don't know about a direct sequel, given the way House of Suns ended, but I'd definitely read a second book set in that same milieu.
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Aug 18, 2017 05:31
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my bony fealty posted:I read that a few months back and generally agree, great concept that was pulled off well but the ending was abrupt. Fwiw Reynolds had said a sequel isn't out of the question. this did occur to me to be likely or probable; in terms of parallels the ah... what's the original of the clone copy clan's name? abigail? anyway, her copy clan was partly a way to reach immortality, and that was one of the major drivers behind the spirit of air's history, too, so a connection between them had some resonance within the plot. it also would partly explain why he was willing to give himself up at the end. anyway seems like everyone else's experience of the book tallied with mine fairly closely. though i will say i found the first half of the book so loving cool, as it evoked this sense of grandeur and awe which felt gothic and romantic (which is a funny juxtaposition, since hard sci-fi systematises and explains, whereas romanticism was a reaction to empiricism and science chasing the magic and wonder out of the world), that the latter half being a comparative let-down is no great criticism and the overall book i would still give a 4.5/5 to.
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Aug 18, 2017 09:30
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Neurosis posted:this did occur to me to be likely or probable; in terms of parallels the ah... what's the original of the clone copy clan's name? abigail? anyway, her copy clan was partly a way to reach immortality, and that was one of the major drivers behind the spirit of air's history, too, so a connection between them had some resonance within the plot. it also would partly explain why he was willing to give himself up at the end. The scene where they start Damien Hirst-ing a dude is where the book started to lose me.
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Aug 18, 2017 09:43
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PupsOfWar posted:Anybody know if the last couple of Old Man's War sequels are worth a read? They're not that good and get progressively worse imho. Neurosis posted:To a degree. I assume you are referring to behaviour and personality rather than anything more essential. A lot of behaviours have strong biological bases (although biology is not the exclusive determinant and environment is important). Some of the more striking examples are the identical twins raised apart studies that show twins who have commonalities like both enjoying coughing in elevators to startle people, holidaying in the same location and smoking the same cigarettes. The influence of biology on political views is also interesting; we think of politics as complicated and so inherently environmental as to be separate from genes, but there is a high apparent hereditability of political views for people raised in households dominated by political views which are the opposite of birth parents'. Again, biology is not going to be the overwhelming determinant of these kinds of things, but it's very important.
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Aug 18, 2017 09:44
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Stuporstar posted:Philip Jose Farmer was a lovely pulp writer who was grandfathered into the science fiction new wave because his ideas were, "like, really out there, maaaan." He was also apparently a really nice man, so I won't disparage him too much, but even Alfred Bester said he was only ever an idea guy whose execution wasn't great. I've tried to read Farmer more than once, and I can't stomach more than a paragraph of his lovely prose, it's so bad. On the subject of Farmer and ideas, was the Dungeon series ever completed? I was only ever able to find the first three volumes of a planned six.
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Aug 18, 2017 13:28
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PupsOfWar posted:Anybody know if the last couple of Old Man's War sequels are worth a read? Bhodi fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 18, 2017 |
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Aug 18, 2017 15:10
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Jedit posted:On the subject of Farmer and ideas, was the Dungeon series ever completed? I was only ever able to find the first three volumes of a planned six. I remember reading all six of them.
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Aug 18, 2017 17:37
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PupsOfWar posted:Anybody know if the last couple of Old Man's War sequels are worth a read? I like the second one a good bit too, 3rd was awful and dropped the 4th when it didn't seem to be any better.
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Aug 18, 2017 18:30
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I haven't read the last two Old Man's War books but I was really let down by Zoe's Tale both for it being mostly a retread of the one before it and because it was about a ~super special teenager~ which is a trope I despise. Scalzi's teen girl voice is not good--it's mostly his normal middle-aged white dude voice with sarcastic comments about how all them olds just don't get it with the rock music, dig. I'll probably eventually read the last two but since they came out so much later I just hadn't kept up. Scalzi in general is firmly in the "okay" category for me--I usually find him readable but he doesn't introduce me to a lot that is new. That might be why some of his fans like him even, as he doesn't push their boundaries very far. Also he wrote a book about old people fighting in a space war around the time a lot of SF fans were right in the demographic that would've been eligible and you know all those old Heinlein-nards would leap at the chance. "Service guarantees Medicare!" hell i'd probably leap at the chance
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Aug 18, 2017 23:28
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Your parents may have provided a substandard environment in the womb immediately prior to your conception, filled it with poor quality sperm and egg. i love genetic determinism
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Aug 19, 2017 02:21
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A human heart posted:i love genetic determinism You can't help it.
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Aug 19, 2017 04:23
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Bhodi posted:I enjoyed them, especially in a "well, that escalated quickly" sort of way. Scalzi isn't at his best writing politics though. He's at his best when he sticks to the snarky smarter-than-you hero who planned for the final confrontation with the bad guy. I really enjoyed Android's Dream. Android's Dream is far and away Scalzi's best work and I really wish he would write more in that vein instead of endless Old Man's War extensions.
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Aug 19, 2017 06:15
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Android's Dream is far and away Scalzi's best work and I really wish he would write more in that vein instead of endless Old Man's War extensions. Did you read The Dispatcher?
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Aug 19, 2017 12:41
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Mister Kingdom posted:Did you read The Dispatcher? Actually I'd missed that one, I'll give it a shot. Scalzi is almost always worth reading, it's just one of his books has fart-based assassinations and the rest don't. The world needs more comic SF; it doesn't need more MilSF, even if MilSF is what sells.
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Aug 19, 2017 13:02
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Farmer had the best covers (we got a few of his books in my bookshop)     
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Aug 19, 2017 13:26
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These covers are so weird I must read this author immediately just to have some kind of context. I love it. 
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Aug 19, 2017 13:35
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He has good titles also, "The Stone God Awakens" and "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" are both extremely good even if the books are not that great.
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Aug 19, 2017 16:38
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StrixNebulosa posted:These covers are so weird I must read this author immediately just to have some kind of context. I love it. That's exactly the same mistake I made.
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Aug 19, 2017 17:51
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I've had surprisingly good fortune picking books based on a cool title. Unfortunately my most recent gamble, which also had great cover art - didn't pay off:
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Aug 19, 2017 18:39
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Stuporstar posted:That's exactly the same mistake I made. Me too. I was 14 at the time, though.  http://i.imgur.com/kbOZodQ.jpg
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Aug 19, 2017 20:05
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Koburn posted:I've had surprisingly good fortune picking books based on a cool title. Unfortunately my most recent gamble, which also had great cover art - didn't pay off: I'm upset that you're telling me this is bad, because gently caress it looks good.
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Aug 19, 2017 21:10
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This is the one that got me: Sometime in my late teens I went through every bookstore in my area looking for SFF books with interesting psychedelic covers and noticed that most of my favorites were by Gene Szafran. I scanned them and stuck them on a website around 2000 because there was hardly anything about the artist up there at the time. It's now gone, but I still have the images, so I tossed them all up in an imgur album: http://m.imgur.com/a/Y2qb8 At some point I actually decided to read everything in my hoard, which led me to discover that I like Robert Silverburg (at least his golden period between 1967 - 1972), and helped me discover hidden gems like The Waters of Centaurus by Rosel George Brown. Unfortunately, it also introduced me to some of Heinlein's most heinous work like Farnham's Freehold, The Sixth Column, and Methuselah's Children. I've since gotten rid of a bunch of them, so all I have left are these crappy scans. Oh well. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Aug 19, 2017 |
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Aug 19, 2017 21:15
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Rough Lobster posted:I'm upset that you're telling me this is bad, because gently caress it looks good. Ya that cover is sooo rad.
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Aug 19, 2017 23:27
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Ulio posted:Ya that cover is sooo rad. You fools are falling into the BAEN cover trap. Baens Law: The shinier the cover & the bigger the author name; the more you should avoid the book at all cost. edit: actual content post. I got a few James Blish & Frederic Brown paperbacks when I got Farmer riverworld books. So far James Blish is incredibly readable & lightyears beyond Farmer talentwise. Even Blish's weirdest book so far (catholic faith crisis caused by evolved dinosaur planet) is 15x better than farmer's attempt at theology in riverworld series. Brown books should be good too, after all one of Brown's short stories was directly ripped off into a classic Star Trek OST episode. A really iconic one too the gorn one, the Star Trek OST bought the rights to the short story after producing the episode. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 20, 2017 |
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Aug 20, 2017 03:18
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Stuporstar posted:This is the one that got me: This is awesome, thanks for putting in the time.
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Aug 20, 2017 03:28
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Baens Law: The shinier the cover & the bigger the author name; the more you should avoid the book at all cost. Clarke Corollary: if the book is not authored solely by Arthur C. Clarke, avoid at all costs. Really useful rules of thumb when browsing old SF.
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Aug 20, 2017 07:50
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Koburn posted:I've had surprisingly good fortune picking books based on a cool title. Unfortunately my most recent gamble, which also had great cover art - didn't pay off: I liked that one, reminded me a little about The Demolished man or Philip K Dick. The slow degradation of the protagonist is interesting to follow.
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Aug 20, 2017 08:14
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ima let u finish in me posted:Me too. I was 14 at the time, though. Hey now I'm pretty sure that Pegasus centaurs do not have dicks coming out of their chest
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Aug 20, 2017 11:42
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