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Someone post that short story about people going to the airport written in the style of sci-fi exposition
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Dec 9, 2017 14:13
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Proteus Jones posted:I don't get the hate he gets. I mean, I don't think he's the pinnacle of Science Fiction or anything. For example, his characters have one of three voices. Closed Minded Authoritarian, Strong and Competent Woman Who Has No Time For Your poo poo, and Slyly Clever Anti-Authoritarian Snarky McSnarkson. But he write perfectly enjoyable pulp science fiction. He has some interesting ideas. Nothing mind shattering, but kind of cool. He's kind of a loud rear end in a top hat online and this bothers some people. Also the typical backlash of some people just not liking his works when he is generally universally praised as amazing on most other S/F book boards I'm on. But yeah perfectly enjoyable pulp sci-fi describes it pretty well.
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Dec 9, 2017 16:55
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I finally posted that review of the Dragaera books I was promising! Hope you guys enjoy it 
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Dec 9, 2017 18:23
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Runcible Cat posted:I think this was the novel I read an except from a month or so ago which was the ahem "nerve-racking" sequence where the robot discovers which of an antagonist's smart devices hasn't been patched and uses it to gain access to I forget what, something important I guess. It was something like 2 pages of an exploit on a smart garden sprinkler and I was reading it thinking, "this is what they picked to tempt people to buy the thing?" Yep. I think there was even a blurb comparing it to Snow Crash, and except for the tech being actually plausible it skirted the edge of "is this satire?" in the same way. I wanted Autonomous to be satire, because that would have made it bearable, but looking back I'm inclined to say it wasn't so. It was merely bad. A human heart posted:Endless exposition about kayaks would be good if the author was a cool smart person but I'm guessing that's not the case here because all science fiction authors are the kind of people who think computer science is 'radical' Yeah, my invocation of Moby Dick was to say Annalee Newitz is no Melville. I've read decent exposition in another novel this year, Sourdough by Robin Sloane, as the main character joyfully described how to bake bread, how to build a bread oven, and how to program a robot arm to crack eggs, so it can be done--but then Sourdough is only science fiction in the same way Vonnegut's Player Piano is science fiction. The character's journey was more important than the gimmick of possibly-intelligent sourdough starter. Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Someone post that short story about people going to the airport written in the style of sci-fi exposition This. This is exactly what that novel brought to mind as I was reading it. The author writes for Ars Technica and it shows, painfully. Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 19:26
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if you have a high acceptance of weird mish-mashes of themes, then I have the book for you to read! "Mad Amos," by sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster, is a WESTERN about a cowboy who rides a unicorn across the prairies & mountains & chases a dragon. Anyways, clearly the concept is the best thing about that book, but I will admit publicly to enjoying that very weird read, lol. It is sort of like the film "Cowboys & Aliens"
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Dec 10, 2017 03:56
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A3th3r posted:if you have a high acceptance of weird mish-mashes of themes, then I have the book for you to read! "Mad Amos," by sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster, is a WESTERN about a cowboy who rides a unicorn across the prairies & mountains & chases a dragon. Anyways, clearly the concept is the best thing about that book, but I will admit publicly to enjoying that very weird read, lol. It is sort of like the film "Cowboys & Aliens" ADF is an old favorite from my childhood, but he hasn't aged super well. He really had a skill for imagining alien worlds and ecosystems, though (which is why James Cameron licensed Midworld from him to serve as the basis for Avatar.) Sentenced to Prism was probably my favorite, though the Icerigger trilogy was great too.
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Dec 10, 2017 05:50
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Clark Nova posted:They're a thoroughly dehumanized stand-in for it'll spoil a few minor things about the first trilogy though like Gandalf being a vile monster
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Dec 10, 2017 05:58
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, comrade.
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MockingQuantum posted:I actually just finished them not long ago. I may give The Heroes a spin though. Do it, I like the standalones waaaay more (and don't dislike the trilogy).
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Dec 10, 2017 05:58
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navyjack posted:Another non-CHUD military writer is Myke Cole. His stuff is mil-Fantasy rather than Mil-Scifi, but he doesn’t fascism fap (if you follow his twitter, he’s a raging lefty who is always about one hosed up Trump thing from burning his coast guard officers uniform in protest, it’d be pretty funny if it wasn’t obviously hurting the guy). Yeah I really didn't expect that from skimming the first Shadow Ops book at the library a while back, I saw the part about how the EU was now the "European Caliphate" (complete with Shariah Law) and figured he was gonna be on the Kratman-Ringo spectrum.
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Dec 10, 2017 06:27
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C.M. Kruger posted:Yeah I really didn't expect that from skimming the first Shadow Ops book at the library a while back, I saw the part about how the EU was now the "European Caliphate" (complete with Shariah Law) and figured he was gonna be on the Kratman-Ringo spectrum. I forgot about that and man it doesn’t fit with how he presents himself and it really bugs me now. I wonder if it has more to do with the creeping authoritarianism that is showing up in the States in the books (anybody with the magic superpowers basically has no rights and certain powers are an automatic death sentence).
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Dec 10, 2017 06:47
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Proteus Jones posted:
i dont like that he stuck in a loop and kept rewriting old mans war. also he was the first serial i bought on amazon for my kindle and when the collected novel came out it was cheaper than the combined episodes with a chapter that i never received. the element of punishment for supporting him wasn't endearing. i checked out for a few years, really liked the recent novella about the life enders and tolerated the collapsing empire thing.
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Dec 10, 2017 12:36
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branedotorg posted:
Yeah, that's every kindle serial. Why the gently caress buy thirteen installments for a dollar, when the final compilation is obviously going to cost like half of that? Or sixteen episodes two dollars each then the final compo is ten bucks hahaha gently caress you.
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Dec 10, 2017 13:09
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branedotorg posted:i dont like that he stuck in a loop and kept rewriting old mans war. Yeah that serial thing really pissed me right the gently caress off, I think it might've been the last book of his I bought. I think his publisher is making him write more Old Man's War stuff, essentially. His best novel remains The Android's Dream because he just cut loose his filters and wrote.
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Dec 10, 2017 14:42
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He is actually contracted to write the next, like, ten novels he writes in the 100k+-10% wordcount range. You can really see it in The Collapsing Empire, even he says it's the exact length and amount of story he planned it to be.
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Dec 10, 2017 15:18
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I picked up Red Shirts because the premise sounded pretty neat. I don't know if was the prose or Wil Wheaton's narration but every character sounded exactly the same. Dialog scenes were very hard to follow but it didn't matter because no one said anything interesting. I found the book to be extremely tedious and the premise squandered. It was a Bad Book. Then it won a Hugo.
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Dec 10, 2017 16:47
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Kesper North posted:ADF is an old favorite from my childhood, but he hasn't aged super well. He really had a skill for imagining alien worlds and ecosystems, though (which is why James Cameron licensed Midworld from him to serve as the basis for Avatar.) Sentenced to Prism was probably my favorite, though the Icerigger trilogy was great too. I also liked ADF back in the day--he tried to write some screwball satire SF now and then which...didn't work all that well even to high school me, but his alien-ecosystem stuff was better. Sentenced to Prism was probably the best of those, and he's done at least two 'exploration team in an alien rainforest where they are entirely out of their league' novellas which were pretty good. They're just both in random collections where nobody will ever see them. At least one was called Forbidden Planets. Also thanks to whoever pointed out that Orbit sale. Strange Practice is one I've been looking forward to a lot, and Jade City was on my list. I grabbed a couple of others that sounded intriguing since it's nice to support new talent.
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Dec 10, 2017 19:15
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Stuporstar posted:Yep. I think there was even a blurb comparing it to Snow Crash, and except for the tech being actually plausible it skirted the edge of "is this satire?" in the same way. I wanted Autonomous to be satire, because that would have made it bearable, but looking back I'm inclined to say it wasn't so. It was merely bad. Oh god oh god oh god please let it be satire; I caught up on the bad books thread and found this in it: grittyreboot posted:Autonomous by Annalee Newitz "She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body." I hate everyone who had anything to do with getting this abomination into print.
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Dec 10, 2017 23:55
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Seems like average sci-fi to me.
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Dec 11, 2017 00:02
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSp1dM2Vj48
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Dec 11, 2017 00:21
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The outrage over the book/movie cements it as Twilight for boys.
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Dec 11, 2017 00:23
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That was not the tone I got from the book at all lmao.
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Dec 11, 2017 01:40
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C.M. Kruger posted:figured he was gonna be on the Kratman-Ringo spectrum. quick, somebody draw up a Kratman-Ringo spectrum diagram that works like a Hertzsprung-Russell spectrum diagram, but where the axes are racism and misogyny PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Dec 11, 2017 |
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Dec 11, 2017 01:51
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Altered Carbon trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8PsZki6NGU
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Dec 11, 2017 04:31
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navyjack posted:I forgot about that and man it doesn’t fit with how he presents himself and it really bugs me now. I wonder if it has more to do with the creeping authoritarianism that is showing up in the States in the books (anybody with the magic superpowers basically has no rights and certain powers are an automatic death sentence). The military is hardly the most progressive place in the world though so I'd give him a bit of leeway I suppose. Though, seeing a article about race in the roman empire, looking up what the author had written and finding it was the same person certainly made me go "huh." of course I also found this while googling around to try and find out what the actual deal with the caliphate is: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/archshadow-reads-shadow-ops-by-myke-cole.484951/page-5#post-30784828 quote:gently caress! I just realized something horrible. Other than the SOC phone lady the females in this book are So maybe he's just a hack genre author that leans left in real life?  Bear Sleuth posted:I picked up Red Shirts because the premise sounded pretty neat. I don't know if was the prose or Wil Wheaton's narration but every character sounded exactly the same. Dialog scenes were very hard to follow but it didn't matter because no one said anything interesting. I found the book to be extremely tedious and the premise squandered. It was a Bad Book. The anime Re:Creators was a loving dumpster fire that coasted downhill on it's character designs, soundtrack, and wasted potential from the first few episodes. I dropped it somewhere around 3/4 of the way through and I'd still say it did a better job at "media is real, and it's furious for what we've made it experience" than Red Shirts did.
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Dec 11, 2017 06:18
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Bear Sleuth posted:I picked up Red Shirts because the premise sounded pretty neat. I don't know if was the prose or Wil Wheaton's narration but every character sounded exactly the same. Dialog scenes were very hard to follow but it didn't matter because no one said anything interesting. I found the book to be extremely tedious and the premise squandered. It was a Bad Book. Getting a Hugo hardly seems like a mark of quality. See Jemisin, where Fifth Season was great and well deserved, but Obelisk Gate was hardly BOTY and Stone Sky definitely don't deserve it. As for Scalzi, I stopped reading him when the cost of each book went up and quality down, which was somewhere around Fuzzy nation.
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Dec 11, 2017 08:54
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Cardiac posted:Getting a Hugo hardly seems like a mark of quality. Indeed, this does indicate that a Hugo is hardly a mark of quality. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 11, 2017 09:08
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I'm finally getting around to reading Bridge of Birds and I have to say I really don't see what the fuss is about.
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Dec 11, 2017 10:08
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Someone has been doing some VFX work unofficially related to Blindsight and it's just awesome: https://vimeo.com/246726143 The visuals look amazing, especially for Rorschach. He's got some bitching wallpapers here - http://blindsight.space/
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Dec 11, 2017 16:20
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occamsnailfile posted:Also thanks to whoever pointed out that Orbit sale. Strange Practice is one I've been looking forward to a lot, and Jade City was on my list. I grabbed a couple of others that sounded intriguing since it's nice to support new talent. I wasn't that enamored of Strange Practice. I found it to be pretty predictable.
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Dec 11, 2017 16:39
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freebooter posted:I'm finally getting around to reading Bridge of Birds and I have to say I really don't see what the fuss is about. It's partly a sum-of-the-parts thing where no aspect of the book is particularly bad (characters are all likeable, prose style is innovative for fantasy, setting is unusual for english-language fantasy, etc), partly that the most common single recommendation request people make is "I'm sad, I need a book that's happy" and it hits that nail very squarely on the head. It's job is to be a pleasant distraction and it does it very well.
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Dec 11, 2017 17:44
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Less Fat Luke posted:Someone has been doing some VFX work unofficially related to Blindsight and it's just awesome: Watts endorsed the work on his blog, iirc, so I guess it's unofficially official?
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Dec 11, 2017 19:43
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Groke posted:Speaking of which; a little while ago I read an old Edmond Hamilton story, it was in that huge Vandermeer-edited anthology. Roaring space opera from the 1920s. It was loving hilarious because More than that it's implied they could basically have whatever they wanted and that's literally the thing she wanted the most.
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Dec 11, 2017 19:56
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I really loved L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s "The Order War." I wish he would spend a little less time setting up the universe that the character lives in, though. I think I get the point that the universe is orderly & settled & well organized. No need to go on & on for pages & pages just to make that point!
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Dec 12, 2017 00:44
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A3th3r posted:I really loved L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s "The Order War." I wish he would spend a little less time setting up the universe that the character lives in, though. I think I get the point that the universe is orderly & settled & well organized. No need to go on & on for pages & pages just to make that point! So good news / bad news. Bad news: Modesitt basically has one plot and you have read it now. Good news: if you liked it Modesitt has like 50 variants in at least 10 different science fiction and fantasy universes to read.
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Dec 12, 2017 02:22
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Jo Walton's collected TOR blog posts book "What makes this book so great" helped me realize why I can't stand Miles Vorkosigan. If you replace 70% of the spaceship battle action reports in the series with romance, and gender-swap the main character/give the main character actual physical disabilities, Miles Vorkosigan is a better written Honor Harrington. Thinking I might re-read of "monday begins on saturday" or one of the lighter stanislaw lem books like the star diaries. Sentient spacefaring potatoes loving up asteroid belt explorers was a great side-side story.
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Dec 12, 2017 02:52
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Jo Walton's collected TOR blog posts book "What makes this book so great" helped me realize why I can't stand Miles Vorkosigan. "Better written" is worth a lot though. Just getting rid of goddamn Rob S. Pierre is worth many points for Vorkosigan.
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Dec 12, 2017 02:56
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The earliest two Vorkosigan books with the female lead were good, the rest of the series, ugh, just doesn't mesh with me. Let me put it this way, at gunpoint I would rather re-read ANY of Dean Ing's extremely bad stories than Vorkosigan or Harrington series books. To clarify this, Dean Ing was fascinated by the old wild west, survivalism + the lifestyle of russian boars to be more specific fascinated by the sex-life/dicks of russian boars. If you can block out that horrifying spoiler text, Dean Ing's Quantrill series had interesting kinda-plausible futuristic weapons + futuristic vehicles set in a post-apocalypse US south-west territory/doomsday preppers wet dream. Quantrill series summary for people smart enough to avoid reading it. The USA was sneak attacked 3 or 5 times simultaneously, destroying almost everything except the rocky mountains/south-west territories. The east coast got nuked to hell, the midwest & canada got ravaged by airborne hyper syphilis-aids released by the russians, and the west coast was invaded by Japan/China who got genocided by that hyper syphilis-aids, and israel migrated to lagrange point space stations right before the entire middle east was turned into radioactive glass. The only functioning government left in the USA was dominated by the mormons, who authorized ultra-secret death squads to kill off their political + physical enemies. Oh yeah, the secret death squads operate under the cover of a Fallout New Vegas desert rangers organization called Search & Rescue. Quantrill is a special snowflake who survived the east coast nuking as a schoolboy, became one of the secret death squad people because of his mad physical gunslinger skills, faked his death, overthrew the mormon dictator government, became a new-old west marshall, settled down with a child bride who herself escaped from Fallout-tribals. There is also a running plot about a mutated russian boar named Bael who acted as the child bride's protector, and uh thats all I can safely mention about the boar.
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Dec 12, 2017 04:06
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Jo Walton's collected TOR blog posts book "What makes this book so great" helped me realize why I can't stand Miles Vorkosigan. If you change a bunch of this one book it’s better than this other book?
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Dec 12, 2017 04:39
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's partly a sum-of-the-parts thing where no aspect of the book is particularly bad (characters are all likeable, prose style is innovative for fantasy, setting is unusual for english-language fantasy, etc), partly that the most common single recommendation request people make is "I'm sad, I need a book that's happy" and it hits that nail very squarely on the head. It's job is to be a pleasant distraction and it does it very well. Ah OK that makes more sense
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Dec 12, 2017 05:00
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Bear Sleuth posted:If you change a bunch of this one book it’s better than this other book?  Re-check that text you quoted, I was comparing series versus series. Nice to encounter a fan of David Weber's writing. What is your favorite Weber series?
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Dec 12, 2017 05:03
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