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Darth Walrus posted:Plus, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to be at least somewhat uncomfortable with Special Circumstances’ dickery. Definitely. Banks may not have been quite as cynical about Special Circumstances as John le Carre was about MI-6, but the idea of a utopia continuing to thrive while ignoring or even romanticizing the amoral actions of its intelligence operatives wasn't meant to be a comfortable one.
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Feb 23, 2018 01:57
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the Culture chat: Consider Phlebas will always be superior to Use of Weapons to me. The bigger scope of events in Phlebas wins out versus the forgettable Zakalwe backstory in Weapons. Horza and Zakalwe were both mercs, only Zakalwe had the infinite resources of Special Circumstances backing him. The last few pulbished Culture books followed the trend of culture special circumstances ships shuttling clueless humanoids around the cosmos while the interesting bits usually involved Culture Minds humble-bragging/quadruple deke'ing Special Olympics tier(in comparison to Culture Minds) opponents. RIP Beats Working.
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Feb 23, 2018 07:31
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branedotorg posted:one release i really liked this year was 'the last good man' by linda nagata. I've read a couple of hers I thought were decent but didn't go as far as they could with some of the stuff she set up. But that was years ago and my recollection is hazy other than a dude getting his legs blown off and becoming a cheap mech like those in deus ex
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Feb 23, 2018 09:03
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:the Culture chat: Consider Phlebas will always be superior to Use of Weapons to me. That trend began in The Player of Games and only got worse.
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Feb 23, 2018 11:17
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Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away. Gurgeh stared at the board. He reflected that the best games were the games that were so hard. And that what this game was. Where would he move the space piece next? "Well, Gurgeh!" harrumphed the space alien. "Perhaps now you see that the game is so hard?" Gurgeh nodded. The game was so hard. That night, he thought about the space board. He glanded a drug that made the game less hard, but even then, it was still so hard. Gurgeh was immortal and rich, but still he didn't want to lose, because it would be better to win. But the game was so hard. The robot flew over. "Gurgeh!" said the robot. If you don't win, there will be a space murder, and maybe a space rape!" Gurgeh was appalled. "I must win the space game," he said. He sighed. The next day, the alien bragged: "I will win the space game! I am the best at winning the space game!" Gurgeh sighed. But then Gurgeh saw what he would do: instead of moving the space piece to the left, he would move it forward. The alien was so surprised. "But... but the game is supposed to be so hard!" But Gurgeh was very smart. He moved the piece again, and in a way that was so smart. "NOOOOO," shouted the space alien. Gurgeh had made the best move. He had made the best space move. The robot congratulated him, and the girl wanted to have sex with him. "Well," thought Gurgeh, "I will have sex with her. I am, after all... THE PLAYER OF GAMES."
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Feb 23, 2018 16:30
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Bhodi posted:Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away. Needs spoiler tags
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Feb 23, 2018 17:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Needs spoiler tags Bhodi posted:Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away. Fixed it for Hieronymous.
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Feb 23, 2018 17:52
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Bhodi posted:Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away.
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Feb 23, 2018 18:10
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Am I misunderstanding or does Seven Surrenders start with a pretty creepy rape chapter?
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Feb 23, 2018 20:42
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apophenium posted:Am I misunderstanding or does Seven Surrenders start with a pretty creepy rape chapter? Is this the Sniper kidnapping thing? Yeah, pretty much. Sniper is extremely into it (and passes up chances to say no), but there's no positive consent given, and the whole situation is in the context of a forcible kidnapping so... As clients/students of Madame, both Julia and Dominic are appallingly hosed up about sex. Fortunately the series does not seem to go full late-Dune-books with the weird sex, I think you're past the peak. There's the extra extra weird implication that this happens to Sniper a lot
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Feb 23, 2018 21:37
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honestly the fact that the entire series seems to hinge on Madame's hosed up enlightenment cosplay bordello has soured more and more for me with time. I haven't read the Will to Battle yet so I don't know if she sticks the landing but about a year out from reading Seven Surrenders I am not optimistic at this point.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:47
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I'm only halfway through The Will to Battle but I think it's focused more on the stuff I enjoyed (Hive politics, global intrigue, and a couple really weird people) and less on the stuff that bored me (Enlightenment cosplay sex), especially as Madame's place is burnt down and razed offscreen. Plus having literal Achilles as a major character is pretty awesome.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:52
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andrew smash posted:honestly the fact that the entire series seems to hinge on Madame's hosed up enlightenment cosplay bordello has soured more and more for me with time. I haven't read the Will to Battle yet so I don't know if she sticks the landing but about a year out from reading Seven Surrenders I am not optimistic at this point. You know what I'd read? I'd read an entire book about those engineers who make it their life's work to find and fix bugs in any system that gets people killed. gently caress the divine, they don't do poo poo. Those engineers are the ones doing good for humanity Bhodi fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Feb 23, 2018 |
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Feb 23, 2018 21:53
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General Battuta posted:I'm only halfway through The Will to Battle but I think it's focused more on the stuff I enjoyed (Hive politics, global intrigue, and a couple really weird people) and less on the stuff that bored me (Enlightenment cosplay sex), especially as Madame's place is burnt down and razed offscreen. Plus having literal Achilles as a major character is pretty awesome. To your second spoiler tag - this is probably Unenlightened of me, and the fact that i'm a parent bleeding through into my tastes here, but if she also doesn't find a really good way to deal with Bridger's suicide? self-deicide? whatever the series is retroactively ruined for me
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Feb 23, 2018 21:57
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This, except incredibly good.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:59
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Bhodi posted:You know what I'd read? I'd read an entire book about those engineers who make it their life's work to find and fix bugs in any system that gets people killed. gently caress the divine, they don't do poo poo. Those engineers are the ones doing good for humanity I've only just finished Seven Surrenders but I wonder how much it speaks of me that I instantly related to the Utopians the most, and continue to relate to them the most. They are basically trying to build Iain M. Banks's Culture, after all. I feel like I'm being set up by the author in the same way the utopian character of the world itself was slowly dismantled as the story progressed.
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Feb 23, 2018 22:35
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Bhodi posted:Gurgeh stared at the space chess. He considered moving the space king over to the space rook, but then he didn't. Instead, he moved it to the right. He nodded. The robot flew over, and said something bitchy. Gurgeh chuckled, then sighed. "Robot," he said, "please fly away." The robot made a light from his head and then he flew away. That One Vignette From Consider Phlebas Except Now It's 300 Pages Long by Ian M. Banks
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Feb 23, 2018 22:59
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Oh, cool. Ken Lange's sequel to Accecssion of the Stone Born is out. Dust Walkers, on KU if you wanna take a peek. I really liked the first book, hoping the second one is as fun. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079CQRT7X
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Feb 23, 2018 23:10
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Anyone read anything good lately, SF or Fantasy? I just finished Children of Time and really liked it, but I'm totally drawing a blank as to what to go to next. Bonus points for a good audio book narration.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:23
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The Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell audiobook is excellent.
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Feb 24, 2018 01:41
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Anyone read anything good lately, SF or Fantasy? I just finished Children of Time and really liked it, but I'm totally drawing a blank as to what to go to next. Bonus points for a good audio book narration. I finished Kings of the Wyld a couple of weeks ago and wholeheartedly recommend it. No idea how the narration is, though.
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Feb 24, 2018 03:01
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andrew smash posted:The Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell audiobook is excellent. I'm half way through this and haven't been enjoying it. The narration is fine, the Victorian English society and sensibilities are grating.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:11
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That’s Regency, not Victorian. But if you don’t like it you are probably not going to like the rest of the book and it is a very long book. Sorry it didn’t work for you.
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Feb 24, 2018 05:29
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Out of curiosity, how do they deal with the footnotes?
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Feb 24, 2018 05:56
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taser rates posted:Out of curiosity, how do they deal with the footnotes? The narrator says "Footnote 1" reads the footnote where it appears in the text
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Feb 24, 2018 06:50
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andrew smash posted:That’s Regency, not Victorian. But if you don’t like it you are probably not going to like the rest of the book and it is a very long book. Sorry it didn’t work for you. It took a long time to get going, but it seems to be picking up steam now. I'll finish it, but I'm unlikely to ever recommend it to anyone.
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Feb 24, 2018 06:51
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That’s too bad. It sounds like what you hated was one of the things I loved about it. It really tiptoes along the line between pastiche and parody. I think the early scenes with Norrell, Lascelles and Drawlight, and Childermass were my favorite parts of the book although the war and the Duke of Wellington were excellent also.
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Feb 24, 2018 07:30
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andrew smash posted:That’s too bad. It sounds like what you hated was one of the things I loved about it. It really tiptoes along the line between pastiche and parody. I think the early scenes with Norrell, Lascelles and Drawlight, and Childermass were my favorite parts of the book although the war and the Duke of Wellington were excellent also. The Duke is the best!
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Feb 24, 2018 08:35
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Microcline posted:That One Vignette From Consider Phlebas Except Now It's 300 Pages Long by Ian M. Banks You say it like it's a bad thing.
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Feb 24, 2018 08:42
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General Battuta posted:Is this the Sniper kidnapping thing? Yeah, pretty much. Sniper is extremely into it (and passes up chances to say no), but there's no positive consent given, and the whole situation is in the context of a forcible kidnapping so... As clients/students of Madame, both Julia and Dominic are appallingly hosed up about sex. Fortunately the series does not seem to go full late-Dune-books with the weird sex, I think you're past the peak. The explanation of the Black Laws in The Will To Battle suggests that it was consensual in the sense that there is a Black Law against blocking a person’s ability to communicate (which has been ruled to include everyone’s tracker implants) and anyone can call Romanova to ask to become a Greylaw at any time, at which point your Blacklaw captor had better let you go lest every other Blacklaw hunt them down and torture them to death
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Feb 24, 2018 09:03
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andrew smash posted:That’s too bad. It sounds like what you hated was one of the things I loved about it. It really tiptoes along the line between pastiche and parody. I think the early scenes with Norrell, Lascelles and Drawlight, and Childermass were my favorite parts of the book although the war and the Duke of Wellington were excellent also. I have a violent aversion to people who think they are inherently better than other people for some reason. A book where the characters are mostly English aristocrats had the odds stacked against it. I enjoyed the war because it was mostly about a wizard doing clever wizard things, but the early parts of the book that are mostly about various aristocrats trying to gain reputation with other aristocrats (and avoiding doing any magic for some reason) really didn't do it for me. I've just got back from the war and it is being foreshadowed that fairies are about to become significantly more involved in the plot. I'm curious where it is going because they seem like "super aristocrats" who don't care about the regular aristocrats as long as they are treated with appropriate deference. It'll be interesting to see how the various gentlemen adapt to no longer being at the top of the social hierarchy, though I expect they'll accept it as the natural God ordained order and it will annoy me because nothing has really changed.
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Feb 24, 2018 11:02
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Urcher posted:I have a violent aversion to people who think they are inherently better than other people for some reason. A book where the characters are mostly English aristocrats had the odds stacked against it. Norrel is a crotchety buffoon who plays at expertise and the entire plot is a result of him loving up the first major spell he casts in a very obvious and elemental way. Half of the time the book is really great deadpan wit but the other half it flies a bit to close to trying to parody by being exactly like the thing it's parodying. A huge amount of imagination and technical mastery went into the book but it comes across as slightly less than the sum of its parts.
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Feb 24, 2018 13:01
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andrew smash posted:To your second spoiler tag - this is probably Unenlightened of me, and the fact that i'm a parent bleeding through into my tastes here, but if she also doesn't find a really good way to deal with Bridger's suicide? self-deicide? whatever the series is retroactively ruined for me Same here. As a parent of young children, I was really torn up by the whole scene at the end of Book II, but especially the line where Mycroft realizes what he's going to do and yells "Bridger, you’re not putting on a costume, are you?”
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Feb 24, 2018 17:25
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The Norrell and Strange BBC miniseries is also excellent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE1nsOoTJos
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Feb 24, 2018 19:03
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pseudorandom name posted:The explanation of the Black Laws in The Will To Battle suggests that it was consensual in the sense that there is a Black Law against blocking a person’s ability to communicate (which has been ruled to include everyone’s tracker implants) and anyone can call Romanova to ask to become a Greylaw at any time, at which point your Blacklaw captor had better let you go lest every other Blacklaw hunt them down and torture them to death Sniper is not a Blacklaw, Sniper is a Humanist.
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Feb 24, 2018 19:13
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https://twitter.com/liza/status/967466516231925761 Insanely cool article here about a real old-school sci-fi novel. 
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Feb 24, 2018 19:48
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Diane Duane was one of the best Star Trek authors. Recently, I heard through my publisher that she'd hit a financial crunch and was having an ebook sale. https://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/ I am only mildly embarrassed to admit that the cat wizards series is actually good, there's some really good characterization and worldbuilding in there. I'm almost done with book one and have picked up the next two in the trilogy. RPGers will appreciate a really good take on semi-Vancian magic. Stealing the Elf King's Roses is also good. It's a pity she exhausted the setting in one book instead of giving us a series.
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Feb 24, 2018 22:36
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Dude, the cat wizard books are probably her best works. Creative, fun... there's dinosaurs in one!
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Feb 24, 2018 23:27
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Her wizard books are clever in a number of ways. She has the excuse of a magical pseudo-Heaven (Timeheart) which lets her mercilessly kill off characters in what is nominally a children's/YA series; the logic of magic provides a great excuse for why adults sit back and advise while children/youth solve problems, because you're given your allotment of magical power up front and adults tend to be fairly tapped out; and there's a bittersweet emotional spine to the books about the inevitability of death in a universe touched by the Lone Power, and the need to do something meaningful with the time we have. I remember the cat wizard spinoff being loving horrifying as a kid, didn't the cat wizards end up in extremely lethal combat with a dinosaur zerg rush?
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I don't think I've read anything by Duane that I actually disliked, although she's not one of my beloved must-read authors either. I still have my (severely battered) original copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard on the shelves somewhere and over the years I've bought ebooks of most of her stuff. The one big thing of hers I haven't read is the Middle Kingdoms books, but they sound extremely my jam; the main thing stopping me is that I don't like starting unfinished series and she just started work on the last book, The Door into Starlight, last year. And yes the cat wizard books are great. General Battuta posted:I remember the cat wizard spinoff being loving horrifying as a kid, didn't the cat wizards end up in extremely lethal combat with a dinosaur zerg rush? Yeah, they're a lot more gruesome in places than the Young Wizards books and I think aimed at a slightly older audience. The same book also features a cat nearly being eaten alive by rats and later graphically describing the drowning of his littermates, multiple major character deaths, and an underground society of dinosaurs enslaved by the Lone Power and reliant on industrial-scale cannibalism to survive. The fight you refer to is concluded when Saash modifies her rat-exploding spell to target saurians instead and loving detonates every dinosaur in earshot. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 23:36
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