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Tochiazuma posted:Tigana was one of the first Kay novels I read, I'd put it right up there with Sarantium/Lord of Emperors as my favourites. And if you haven't checked out Lions of Al-Rassan, it's also terrific. Gonna chime in that Lions and Tigana are my two favourite Kay novels. Tigana has a profoundly strong core idea that it sticks to the whole time, plus the antagonist is surprisingly deep and relatable even if he's still a piece of poo poo. I should read it again!
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Mar 11, 2018 07:01
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Solitair posted:I kind of enjoyed the Hunger Games trilogy when I first read them, but the feelings evaporated pretty fast after I set them aside and now I feel nothing about those books, except that the box set I got them in still looks nice. I only ever saw the Hunger Games movies but I mostly recall that in the third one terrorists dressed up as refugees to attack the capital. And by terrorists I mean "the protagonists." Also: dismissing YA fiction aimed at young girls comes off as hella misogynistic. Hunger Games is dumb but the romance elements are a small part of a bigger story, and there are just as frequently romance elements in books aimed at young boys. Like RPO. Which has the dumbest goony fumbling nerd romance bullshit ever. (not addressed to quoted poster) Fifth Season introduced us to a new fantasy world that wasn't based on Eurotolkien tropes and did so with an interesting perspective trick. Obelisk Gate suffered a bit after that since we knew the gimmick and the plot and it was mostly establishing character and moving pieces into place for the third act--this is a problem that a lot of trilogies have, where the second (or less commonly, the third) book seems a bit to be spinning its wheels to keep the engine warm. I enjoyed Obelisk Gate but I wouldn't have voted it for the Hugo either. C'est la vie. I'm in the camp that felt Stone Sky stuck the landing in a satisfactory way and it's worth finishing, but the first one is just a hard act to follow.
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Mar 11, 2018 07:24
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occamsnailfile posted:I only ever saw the Hunger Games movies but I mostly recall that in the third one terrorists dressed up as refugees to attack the capital. And by terrorists I mean "the protagonists." I also find it unfortunate that the villains of the piece are weird, effete city-dwellers, as opposed to the plain, rural blue-collar folk of District 12.
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Mar 11, 2018 07:36
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occamsnailfile posted:
There is nothing wrong with fiction that's aimed at young girls as the primary audience and there's nothing wrong with romance. You should maybe reexamine who's the misogynist here.  (Nah, it's cool.)
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Mar 11, 2018 07:41
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Finished up Smoke Eaters by Sean Grigsby, and honestly it's a bit of a let down. Interesting premise, but just... meh storytelling, bad plot decisions, and quite a bit of "What the gently caress?". Basic plot is dragons exist like 150 years from now and have come up out of the ground and set poo poo on fire. Whole country is clusterfucked by this, and "Smoke Eaters" are a special breed of firefighters who are immune to dragon smoke and heat to a point. Guy ready for retirement as a fireman finds out he's a smoke eater and ends up having to join, and then the rest of the plot happens. Only problem is, the idea is kinda neat, but the execution is just ham fisted crap. I guess, I mean it's not as horrible as some books I've read, but it's damned sure not something I'd recommend unless you happen to be a firefighter and haven't read any books about your profession, or are curious about what a future firefighter would be doing. 3/5 stars. It'd make a solid b movie from Syfy but that's about the best I can rate it.
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Mar 11, 2018 08:10
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Finished up Smoke Eaters by Sean Grigsby, and honestly it's a bit of a let down. Interesting premise, but just... meh storytelling, bad plot decisions, and quite a bit of "What the gently caress?". Sounds like Reign of Fire, that Christian Bale/Matthew MacConaughey vehicle from about fifteen years back, with added superpowers.
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Mar 11, 2018 11:15
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I guess, I mean it's not as horrible as some books I've read, but it's damned sure not something I'd recommend unless you happen to be a firefighter and haven't read any books about your profession, or are curious about what a future firefighter would be doing. 3/5 stars. It'd make a solid b movie from Syfy but that's about the best I can rate it.
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Mar 11, 2018 17:13
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Yea, and if it had been as interesting as Reign of Fire it'd be an amazing book. It's just... not. The premise sounds cool, but holy crap it devolves into some standard by the book sci fi weird poo poo. For the curious who don't mind book spoilers : Old dude who's retirement age but can beat out those whippersnapper kids? CHECK Attempts to tug the heart strings by introducing someone who could be the character's kid, only to kill them off in a completely arbitrary yet totally "CALLED IT" way? CHECK THOSE DAMNED SOCIALIST CANUCKS AND THEIR hosed UP WAYS? CHECK. Super magical science that lets the old guy have a new body and become years younger? CHECK (complete with actual mentioning of Old Man's War earlier in the book, so chekov's novel?) Bad guy with vague/weird motivations that are never really spelled out? CHECK Last one isn't a checklist thing, but the mayor of the city (after literally most of the book is people complaining about budget cuts and how there's no money for stuff) somehow buys an ARMY of robots to take over the police/fire depts, for some reason. It's literally explained as a "He's taking over the city and wants power!" but the entirety of the book has the dragons smashing the gently caress out of the robots, so I dunno what the hell was going on with that, nor do I understand how a mayor of a small town can afford to buy an army of robots, nor do they even mention them being available in other formats like workers or butlers or loving anything else. Just specially built cop and firefighter robots. loving weird. The best way I can think of to describe this book is it's like a Clint Eastwood movie sci fi novel. The old dude knows best, no one listens to him, but by gum he's gonna prove it to em! It's just... it's not bad, but it had such an amazing premise (cause I loved RoF), and it just misfired so badly.
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Mar 11, 2018 17:52
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I think it’s been a while since I mentioned this so I’ll plug it again. SSF’s post above about great premises fallen flat reminded me of this book but as an example of something that doesn’t fail; if you want something with a ridiculous premise that absolutely nails the execution and is really fun to read, you should read The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson. I won’t say anything else about it and nobody should spoil it by looking it up.
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Mar 11, 2018 20:14
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a foolish pianist posted:Sounds like Reign of Fire, that Christian Bale/Matthew MacConaughey vehicle from about fifteen years back, with added superpowers. Off topic, but when I first saw the trailer for The Great Wall I thought it was going to be a Reign of Fire prequel. I was supremely disappointed.
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Mar 11, 2018 21:48
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grassy gnoll posted:Unrelated, I reread Revelation Space the other week. There's some rough prose in this book. I wasn't able to find anything to that effect, but it really feels like this was a serialized story before it was collected into a novel - there's a bunch of "as you knows," chapters repeat things we just learned between each other, and sometimes even within the chapters themselves. The plots feel pretty disjointed even after they've all woven into each other, and the characters are still pretty flat. What a coincidence, I reread Revelation Space a couple of weeks ago too. The first time I read it was about 15 years ago and I barely recalled anything about the plot because I was a callow teenager at the time, but my goodness did I recall the imagery once I started reading, and it didn't disappoint. The inhospitable surface of Resurgum, the snippets of Yellowstone and Chasm City, and everything about the Nostalgia for Infinity. Rereading Volyova's opening dropping through the ship gave me shivers. But hey, perhaps I'm just easily pleased. I gotta agree about the rough prose (I was constantly correcting sentences in my head for better flow as I read) and the weird serialized tells, but I'm not sure I agree with the judgement of the characters as flat. I think part of that is due to the timescales involved, and also due to Volyova just being incredibly weird. There's part of the story where I think the reader is meant to infer she's a sociopath, but then other parts where she acts as if she's on the autistic spectrum, but ultimately I think it all serves to reinforce how disconnected the Ultras are from human norms.
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Mar 11, 2018 22:01
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andrew smash posted:I think it’s been a while since I mentioned this so I’ll plug it again. SSF’s post above about great premises fallen flat reminded me of this book but as an example of something that doesn’t fail; if you want something with a ridiculous premise that absolutely nails the execution and is really fun to read, you should read The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson. I won’t say anything else about it and nobody should spoil it by looking it up. Yeah, I got burned BAD by The Dinosaur Lords, River of Teeth, and a few others lately. Great concepts, bad BAD execution. The Smoke-Eaters falling in to that group is a sad surprise.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:17
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I get the urge to write something wild and crazy, because the writer can shrug off bad reviews and be all like, "Its a book called Taken by the T-rex, why would you expect great literature" but when the reviews are better than expected they can pat themselves on the back, knowing they took an awful concept and made it readable using their superior writing talents.
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Mar 11, 2018 23:24
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MikeJF posted:Matter is deliberately extremely disorienting on the first read, because the whole point of the book is about how there's these different levels of peoples and civilisations at different powers, and suddenly things that you think are incredibly important can not matter at all to the people above you, and he builds that into every layer... the shells of the shellworld, the social strata of the characters, the civilisations of the universe... and ultimately, as it turns out, the narrative of the book itself, when suddenly a plot that's been brewing on a higher level that you're barely aware of drops in and sweeps aside every story that you thought mattered, to smack you with the same feeling that all these characters have been suffering. Huh. This explanation makes me hate Matter a lot less.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:08
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BananaNutkins posted:I get the urge to write something wild and crazy, because the writer can shrug off bad reviews and be all like, "Its a book called Taken by the T-rex, why would you expect great literature" but when the reviews are better than expected they can pat themselves on the back, knowing they took an awful concept and made it readable using their superior writing talents. Hey, it works for Hollywood. You could go the Ready Player One route and just focus entirely on pop culture references that have mass appeal. Perhaps the main character eats laundry detergent and finds himself back in the 1990s, and instead of investing in tech companies, invests heavily into every major fad and gets out right before the bottom falls out. With his encyclopedic knowledge of when each one of the Beanie Babies™ will be retired, he can't lose! Will his 20 years of Pogs™ experience and his lucky Slammer™ be enough to win him the biggest tournament of all time? (Yes it will.)
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Mar 12, 2018 00:19
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:The best way I can think of to describe this book is it's like a Clint Eastwood movie sci fi novel. The old dude knows best, no one listens to him, but by gum he's gonna prove it to em! This just reminded me of Niven/Pournelle/Barnes Legacy of Heorot, which is basically that sentence, drawn out twice in a row.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:37
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The most interesting thing RP1 does is give pretend validation to obsessive nerds that all the archaic but totally pointless knowledge they've spent their life accumulating might actually be worth something. Its the dream of going on Jeopardy and getting only categories that you know, but way more pathetic.
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Mar 12, 2018 00:40
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Hungry posted:What a coincidence, I reread Revelation Space a couple of weeks ago too. The first time I read it was about 15 years ago and I barely recalled anything about the plot because I was a callow teenager at the time, but my goodness did I recall the imagery once I started reading, and it didn't disappoint. The inhospitable surface of Resurgum, the snippets of Yellowstone and Chasm City, and everything about the Nostalgia for Infinity. Rereading Volyova's opening dropping through the ship gave me shivers. But hey, perhaps I'm just easily pleased. The bits of Chasm City that we get to see, where it's this disgusting, decaying waste, were great. I remember the scenes aboard the ship being equally evocative and creepy, but they fell a little flat for me this time. I'm wondering how much of that is transposing my memories from the later books onto this one. I think Volyova is absolutely the most successful characterization in the book. She's an awful person with terrible goals, but there's a discernible logic to everything she does. I dunno if we have enough information to make a judgement on her mental state, but a big part of that stems from the intense other-ness she conveys. She's a great example of how weird the Ultras have to be and why they do all the bizarre things they do. Compare her to Sajaki. He's not really alien, so much as not fleshed out. We're told he's very clever, and he acts like a jerk. He repeats things we've found out from other viewpoints slightly ahead of some of the other characters that share his frame of reference, and Khouri, Volyova and Sylveste all have some line to the effect of "Gosh, this guy would probably kill me if he felt like it." Captain Brannigan gets more depth to him. The other Ultras, we're told they're weird, and they die to further the plot, and that's about it. Sylveste has the same problem. He gets to announce things that we've already puzzled out in someone else's chapter, and he's kind of snotty. Khouri has this line towards the end where she calls him an rear end in a top hat, but says aloud how she's never met anyone who was such a noble rear end in a top hat. All we've seen of the dude is him making poor archaeological decisions and being snarky to people holding him captive, and then he gets to make a heroic sacrifice. It's real rough. Khouri and Pascale are just kind of there. Khouri I can forgive, since she's our viewpoint character and just needs to ask questions and stay out of the way. Pascale at least gets to do some underhanded stuff. I think most of my issues come from reading his later stuff more recently, and it was kind of a shock. RS has some real first novel problems with it, but Reynolds gets progressively better until you're getting stuff like House of Suns and The Prefect. I guess what I'm ultimately getting at here is that The Prefect was real good, and folks should read it.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:27
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I just noticed there is a sequel to the Prefect, but some reviews said it was really bad. What is some actually good fantasy I can read? Sometimes I really like the idea of fantasy, but I almost never like actual fantasy. I'm looking for something that is character driven and not goony. I don't like urban fantasy, steampunk type poo poo, Sanderson, Rothfuss, etc. I liked Book of the New Sun a lot, but Wolfe is a bit too far from any kind of norm and I consider him a genre of his own almost. I tried A Wizard of Earthsea but honestly found it very generic with nothing really compelling going on. It read too much like an allegory or something. I have liked certain China Mieville stuff, but I find him kind of dorky sometimes. I think the City and the City and Embassytown were my favorites from him, though neither are actually fantasy. I read one of the Bas Lag ones, and it was sort of cool, but it was ultimately pretty forgettable. I tried the Goblin King a year or two ago, and when it ended I asked myself "Really, that's it?" I read most of "Uprooted," but stopped reading it like 75% of the way in because the pacing started to feel so off, but I did like it a lot at first and the tone + setting. I absolutely hate Joe Abercrombie. His original trilogy is like the exact example of what I most hate about fantasy. Him and Sanderson are probably what I most dislike, the "look how cool this is" factor, for Abercrombie making it read like a videogame, and for Sanderson getting obsessed with his magic systems. Possibly the genre isn't for me...I liked the first three Game of Thrones books okay. I liked the Traitor Baru Cormorant. I like the idea of a world that is total different from this one, but I usually end up getting disappointed with however the author ends up executing it.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:37
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I'm confused as to how Abercrombie reads like a video game.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:51
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angel opportunity posted:What is some actually good fantasy I can read? Generally speaking I suspect that second bit is the case for you. That said, I'd recommend City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett as a fantasy story cut from a different mold that most of what is discussed in this thread.
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Mar 12, 2018 02:51
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Ccs posted:I'm confused as to how Abercrombie reads like a video game. There's an absolutely garbage scene in like the second book where logen becomes the bloody-nine to fight a bunch of shanka and like legit a boss shanka comes out who's strong and wearing armour and poo poo. It's literally a boss fight. It's terrible. There's definitely other scenes like that but that's the first one to come to mind.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:06
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angel opportunity posted:I just noticed there is a sequel to the Prefect, but some reviews said it was really bad. NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season trilogy is worth checking out, it’s won a bunch of awards recently and is definitely on the “literary” end of the genre. City of Stairs is a good rec. The Half Made World by Felix Gilman is a goon-authored book with a bunch of really interesting ideas. The Lies of Locke Lamora gets recommended a lot as fantasy Oceans 11 with a darker side.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:13
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Ornamented Death posted:Generally speaking I suspect that second bit is the case for you. That said, I'd recommend City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett as a fantasy story cut from a different mold that most of what is discussed in this thread. I was gonna recommend that too. And also the Wolfhound Century series by Peter Higgins. Story about a policeman in fantasy Russia circa the 1930s hunting down a terrorist but getting involved with much stranger stuff.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:14
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angel opportunity posted:I just noticed there is a sequel to the Prefect, but some reviews said it was really bad. Book of the New Sun is Dying Earth, a subgenre it shares with Jack Vance and M. John Harrison's Viriconium, although the religious layering is Wolfe's own twist. I bounced off Earthsea in a similar way. It might be because the elements that once seemed transgressive are now standard, and it's left being "not bad for a children's book". Have you tried Zelazny? Lord of Light/Creatures of Light and Darkness is what got me reading fantasy again.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:23
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grassy gnoll posted:Compare her to Sajaki. He's not really alien, so much as not fleshed out. We're told he's very clever, and he acts like a jerk. He repeats things we've found out from other viewpoints slightly ahead of some of the other characters that share his frame of reference, and Khouri, Volyova and Sylveste all have some line to the effect of "Gosh, this guy would probably kill me if he felt like it." Captain Brannigan gets more depth to him. Well, on that last bit... Anyway, I read Redemption Ark before Revelation Space, and I think that inoculated me a bit too some of the awkward characterisation in Space, since the carry-over characters got more in that book.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:58
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Thanks everyone! I actually read like half of City of Stairs but it got boring and I stopped reading it. I did kind of like a lot about it and possibly didn't give it a fair shake. Zelazny is a really great suggestion. I'd been wanting to try him but didn't remember for some reason. I'll probably start reading Lord of Light tomorrow. I was also thinking of checking Canticle for Leibowitz even though I don't think that really counts as fantasy. I read the Fifth Season (just book 1) and I found it okay but not great, and I wasn't compelled enough to read book 2, though it was a lot closer to what I like than most fantasy. Wolfhound Century sounds kind of cool, but the reviews look a bit all over the place, and from reading them I feel like there's a 50/50 chance of me liking it. I might keep it as a possibility at least.
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Mar 12, 2018 04:50
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Read Wolf Hall
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Mar 12, 2018 04:55
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Read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
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Mar 12, 2018 05:35
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impulse-bought a first edition of book of dust part 1 (the His Dark Materials sequel) at a cute little used book shop that had literal piles of books on the floors and cats running around. it was like some place out of a movie. it appears to have had some printing issues (the different sub-bindings have different width pages so it's jaggy looking) thus it landing in a 2nd hand shop while in unread condition. i'll post a review when I manage to finish (life has a way of keeping me from reading).
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Mar 12, 2018 07:12
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oi Angel Opportunity have you read all the Terry Pratchett yet?
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Mar 12, 2018 07:32
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angel opportunity posted:Thanks everyone! an honest question: why do you keep trying with fantasy if you don't really like it? There's a lot of surreal/fantastical literary stuff out there that you might enjoy more. Like Anna Kavan's Ice, Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Saramago's Blindness, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe, Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians, Maqroll novels, Krzhizhanovsky.... If you're dead set on reading genre, one author that I haven't seen mentioned here (probably because she was published by a small house in the UK), is Aliya Whiteley. She had a fun novel about mushroom women The Beauty Burning Rain fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 08:09
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angel opportunity posted:fantasy that breaks the mold e: If you liked BotNS, how about the rest of Wolfe? Wizard Knight is as close to straight fantasy as he gets. And then there's the rest of the Solar cycle... anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 08:13
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Wizard Knight and rest of the Solar Cycle are very good. Long Sun is the weakest and unfortunately it has to be read before Short Sun but it's still good.
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Mar 12, 2018 08:24
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Burning Rain posted:an honest question: why do you keep trying with fantasy if you don't really like it? There's a lot of surreal/fantastical literary stuff out there that you might enjoy more. Like Anna Kavan's Ice, Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, Han Kang's The Vegetarian, Saramago's Blindness, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe, Coetzee's Waiting for Barbarians, Maqroll novels, Krzhizhanovsky.... Yann Martell (of Life of Pi fame) might scratch that itch. He isn't nominally a fantasy author, but he has one hell of an imagination in the "where does he get this stuff ?" sense. Try The High Mountains of Portugal for some very interesting ruminations on life, loss, Agatha Christie as Gnosticism, and how to adopt an ape in the 21st century. His short story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios was deeply moving and wildly inventive; there's a powerful morality at play as well.
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Mar 12, 2018 09:01
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grassy gnoll posted:RS has some real first novel problems with it, but Reynolds gets progressively better until you're getting stuff like House of Suns and The Prefect. I guess what I'm ultimately getting at here is that The Prefect was real good, and folks should read it. I'm three quarters of the way through Chasm City right now (which I'd not read before) and there has been a very clear step up both quality of his prose and his plotting. Not touched any of Reynolds later works yet, so that's great news. Yeah now that I've had some time to think about Revelation Space some more, there's more errors in characterisation and narrative construction than I first noticed. Khouri's issues get a pass from me because I saw her later actions and decisions as corrupted by the loyalty therapy, but Sajaki is a terrible case of telling without showing. We're told over and over that he's a violent and dangerous man and "worse than he used to be" but the narrative never gives him any opportunities to be violent or dangerous, so he comes off as kind of an idiot a couple of points, and far less sociopathic than Volyova herself. Also I just remembered we never get any explanation at all for the bit where he pulls the huge comedy syringe out of his pocket. The story just jumps ahead again and never fills in the gap. Sylveste, eh, I think he operates as a piece of narrative machinery more than a character. I liked the idea of a deposed and imprisoned leader, and the way several years had passed every time the narrative jumped back to him. His motivations are kind of required in order to drive the plot. I think I just liked Volyova so much that most of the other characters' issues went by unnoticed.
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Mar 12, 2018 10:10
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Sajkai's meant to be a cipher with confusing motivations because the real Sajkai's been dead for decades and he's been overwritten with Brannigan, but I agree it's poorly executed.
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Mar 12, 2018 10:50
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I just finished Revelation Space for the first time. I thought the first 2/3rds were solid, it’s really once the stories collide that it felt like the characterizations collapsed. Sylveste is the only character that seemed unchanged but like the poster above says, he’s almost more of a plot device than a character. Khouri and Ilia were the only other two characters given a lot of focus and it felt like their motivations vanished at that point. It especially didn’t make sense for Khouri since her entire life had been shaped by her primary motivation, which she just straight up forgot once Ilia mentioned that it was “probably a lie.”
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Mar 12, 2018 12:43
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cis autodrag posted:it appears to have had some printing issues (the different sub-bindings have different width pages so it's jaggy looking) Do you mean deckled edges?
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Mar 12, 2018 15:06
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I read all of the Southern Reach trilogy and I liked it a lot. I've read Glass Bead Game three or four times and love it. I've read Wizard Knight and liked it. I'll check out some of the other stuff you listed in there that I hadn't heard of.
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Mar 12, 2018 15:20
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