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jivjov posted:There's been some Dresden comics, which Butcher has story input on. And the next short story compilation (including a new one) is out in a couple months. Less than a month! June 5th, if Amazon is to be believed.
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May 12, 2018 23:46
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Yeroc2 posted:Less than a month! June 5th, if Amazon is to be believed. Ooh, nice! I got my J months confused and was thinking July.
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May 12, 2018 23:49
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It looks like they're doing with the Rivers of London series what I always find very annoying by changing the trade dress.
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May 13, 2018 01:31
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anilEhilated posted:I'd suggest skipping out and trying the second book. I remember being unimpressed by the first one, but the second I really like. 100% concur. I read the second book, really enjoyed it. Then liked every subsequent one. Finally read the first one and wasn't impressed. It's basically a Dresden Files situation, the first book is finding his voice and getting to grips with the character. Start with a later one and only go back if you're a completionist.
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May 14, 2018 15:12
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jivjov posted:There's been some Dresden comics, which Butcher has story input on. These (or, at least the ones I've checked out) are not very good, by the way. Lots of typos in the dialogue and hilariously out-of-character stuff like Harry telling a random bystander about Bob the Skull (in front of Molly) in one part of the comic, shortly after freaking out at Bob for suggesting Harry introduce Molly to him (Molly doesn't notice, even though she's standing between Harry and said bystander). Also the artists are terrible. Harry, Molly and Murphy are all drawn to look the same age.
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May 14, 2018 20:30
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A lot of people got cast for The Rook.
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May 16, 2018 07:57
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It's a drat shame Stephanie Meyer is involved. There's no way Bishop Alrich doesn't get transformed into a sparkler.
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May 16, 2018 12:10
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Eh. It'll be fine. I am willing to bet that whatever is going to be bad about is going to be for Meyer-unrelated reasons.
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May 16, 2018 12:41
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Also Bishop Aldrich was already basically a sparkler. Just a much grosser one behind closed doors.
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May 16, 2018 14:51
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I don't particularly care for Olivia Munn, and I really don't like that they're making up someone out of whole cloth for her to play. quote:Olivia Munn (The Newsroom) has been cast as Monica Reed, “a bold American intelligence officer with subtle supernatural powers who crashes into the Checquy investigation of her former lover’s death.” They better not be replacing Shantay with whatever...that...is. To be honest, this has all the hallmarks of being Yet Another Soap Opera With Superpowers, like Once Upon a Time or any of the CW DC Universe shows.  I wanted more of a comedic thriller.
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May 16, 2018 15:01
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K Prime posted:Also Bishop Aldrich was already basically a sparkler. Just a much grosser one behind closed doors. Aldrich is explicitly not a sparkler. They say repeatedly that he can only be at nighttime meetings. Since he's almost the last person who you get a dossier for, and the book doesn't say what he is before then, it's pretty confusing. Everyone is scared of him and he acts really weird. The few other vampires in the book are also night time only, blood drinking murderers. Not to mention they're born from eggs.
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May 16, 2018 15:47
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Alrich is great. And the way he's written is great. Pay attention to the (few) times he gets in a fight on screen. The PoV characters mostly can't (or don't want to) look too closely at what he's doing. You'll get brief glimpses of him pulling people's arms off, but mostly it's told via auditory clues. All the adjectives used shift towards wet, damp sounds.
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May 16, 2018 15:58
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K Prime posted:Also Bishop Aldrich was already basically a sparkler. Just a much grosser one behind closed doors. Yes, the vampire that cannot attend daytime meetings and was partnered with a Checquy member whose blood would ignite if exposed to open air during his training (to discourage him from attempting to feed on his partner) is "basically a sparkler". ConfusedUs posted:They better not be replacing Shantay with whatever...that...is. They are totally replacing Shantay with whatever that character is. Because having beautiful, badass black women in shows where Stephanie Meyer is involved in production will never happen. Monica Reed is going to be Meyer's self-insert character, you watch.
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May 16, 2018 16:15
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Because having beautiful, badass black women in shows where Stephanie Meyer is involved in production will never happen. Monica Reed is going to be Meyer's self-insert character, you watch. original article posted:Monica Reed, “a bold American intelligence officer with subtle supernatural powers who crashes into the Checquy investigation of her former lover’s death.” Looks like you're correct. Monica Jarvis-Reed in the book is a Cheque operative, not an American. And this is quibbling, but she's not subtle either. She kills people and a dragon by walking into them really hard.
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May 16, 2018 16:35
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LLSix posted:Looks like you're correct. Monica Jarvis-Reed in the book is a Cheque operative, not an American. And this is quibbling, but she's not subtle either. She kills people and a dragon by walking into them really hard. I'm definitely starting this series on my next day off. That sounds great.
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May 16, 2018 16:50
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:I'm definitely starting this series on my next day off. That sounds great. Well, for the dragon, she technically jumps out of an airplane and lands on it, really hard. The series is full of random one-offs like that. Some of them are badass, some of them are whimsical, and all of them are weird.
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May 16, 2018 17:00
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Not just walking into them really hard, she's literally an orbital drop cannon. Just sits in the sky waiting for the call and boom. Monica one of my favorite checquy operatives just for her ability, but if they're conflating her with Shantay that's a real shame.
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May 16, 2018 17:00
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I am suddenly REALLY needing to finish Who Fears Death to get to The Rook sitting under it 
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May 16, 2018 17:13
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Deathlove posted:I am suddenly REALLY needing to finish Who Fears Death to get to The Rook sitting under it Honestly The Rook is my favorite book in the list of suggestions in the OP. The sequel is also really good, if not quite as good as the first. I just re-read both books (finished Stiletto last night), and I still love everything about the series. However, all the little one-off absurdities are the part I love most. The supernatural in this world is just weird. For example: there's a house that, if you enter the second floor, destroys your credit score. It plays no part in the story. It is no more than a single-line aside, in fact, but the whole series is just full of weird poo poo along those lines. The extreme weirdness is actually something of a plot point in the second book. The Grafters are terrified of the supernatural because they can't explain it, they can't predict it, and it's the complete antithesis of everything they stand for. The Grafters are just as scared of the Checquy as the other way around.
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May 16, 2018 18:01
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ConfusedUs posted:For example: there's a house that, if you enter the second floor, destroys your credit score. It plays no part in the story. It is no more than a single-line aside, in fact, but the whole series is just full of weird poo poo along those lines. Almost sounds like Discworld meets STALKER.
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May 16, 2018 18:35
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:Almost sounds like Discworld meets STALKER. There's a definite undercurrent of whimsy much like you'd get in Discworld, just with more body horror. The actual organization is more like "what if MI6 employed the X-Men instead of James Bond?"
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May 16, 2018 18:39
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ConfusedUs posted:There's a definite undercurrent of whimsy much like you'd get in Discworld, just with more body horror. And also 'What if Xavier's School was government run and designed to churn out emotionally distant adults'
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May 16, 2018 18:41
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Zore posted:And also 'What if Xavier's School was government run and designed to churn out emotionally distant adults' And also "How can you handle the supernatural in the most bureaucratic way possible?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByWvG3KfOmo
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May 16, 2018 18:48
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ConfusedUs posted:“How can you handle the supernatural in the most bureaucratic way possible?" I would watch a Sorkin-style Rook series.
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May 16, 2018 18:52
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LLSix posted:Looks like you're correct. Monica Jarvis-Reed in the book is a Cheque operative, not an American. And this is quibbling, but she's not subtle either. She kills people and a dragon by walking into them really hard. My favorite part about that dragon story is what happens to the pawn that found it and tried to "bond" with it. My reaction to it was pretty much the same as Bishop Aldrich's.
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May 16, 2018 19:27
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I hope we get a third one that follows Alrich as PoV character. He's great. With how this series tends to go, (Alrich spoilers) it'll turn out that he's as scared of running into the other vampires again as everyone else is of him, or something along those lines.
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May 16, 2018 20:15
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pseudonordic posted:I would watch a Sorkin-style Rook series. You can't go around saying things like this. It is pure torture. Shame on you.
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May 16, 2018 20:58
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ConfusedUs posted:And also "How can you handle the supernatural in the most bureaucratic way possible?"
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May 16, 2018 21:11
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pseudonordic posted:I would watch a Sorkin-style Rook series. The West Wing but with superpowers is exactly what I want from a Rook series. Not...whatever it is that article seems to be indicating. gently caress.
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May 16, 2018 21:12
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anilEhilated posted:Nah, that's Laundry. Well, up until the last book, anyway.
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May 16, 2018 21:57
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I just now finished the second book, Stiletto, and it was also very good! Even if it was super obvious that Gestalt was involved again and everyone involved should have figured that out by the time they captured the clone. And if the ending just sorta comes out of nowhere with a bit of a thud. But it was still really good! I've got five days left on my ebook loan of Locke Lamora, so I guess I'm gonna be focusing that next!
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May 17, 2018 21:53
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Looks like The Labyrinth Index is available for preorder, with a release date of 30 October.
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May 18, 2018 09:00
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Just finished Fated, the first Alex Verus book. It was mediocre until the end which was pretty bad. The fateweaver and the dragon prophecy are so badly written as to be nonsensical magibabble. Alex's divination power works however it the plot needs it to for any given scene. For example, In the second scene (in the park) Alex is able to see futures where Cinder makes different choices and use that to guide his own actions. Despite that, it's a frequent plot point in the second half of the book that he "can't see past a choice someone hasn't made yet." Jacka seemed to be trying to make Luna a strong female character, in that she's mentally resilient and makes reasonable efforts to control her own destiny. Unfortunately, she's actually an incredibly useless damsel in distress who only enters the plot to be kidnapped or incorrectly question Alex's judgement. I say incorrectly because she's almost always wrong and it is presented as perfectly fine for Alex to bully, or in some cases, physically force, her into doing what he says. Alex calls her a "good girl" more frequently than he uses her name even though she repeatedly asks him not to. I did enjoy the in-joke reference to Dresden as a wizard who advertises in the yellow pages.
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May 18, 2018 16:18
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Well, I can only say some things you rightfully criticise are the "first book syndrome" issues, and will be done better later on. Others will be used to show Alex - and others - growing as characters and persons.
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May 18, 2018 17:13
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Aerdan posted:Looks like The Labyrinth Index is available for preorder, with a release date of 30 October. I really, really need to catch up on this series
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May 18, 2018 18:51
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LLSix posted:Just finished Fated, the first Alex Verus book. It was mediocre until the end which was pretty bad. The fateweaver and the dragon prophecy are so badly written as to be nonsensical magibabble. It's more that the moment people have to actually think about and how they're going to act and make a decision that prediction becomes extremely vague and difficult - but a lot of the time people don't actually really /think/ about what they're going to do - they just do it, it was already decided what they were going to do seconds, minutes, or hours ago, or they're acting on habit or instinct which makes predicting people in a combat situation possible, or interacting with someone who has already decided how he's going to react. Essentially, to completely foil future sight it requires conscious thought about their actions, which people tend to use less than they'd think, especially when fighting or in danger. In a fight, if he sticks his head out, someone who has been waiting for him to stick his head out with a spell or gun ready is going to shoot him 99.99% of the time. There's no thought about that. In a conversation where someone's already decided that they're going to kill you, and nothing you can reasonibly do could convince them otherwise, he can see that. Sometimes using this doesn't work, as he can still only guess the 'probably' instead of the 'definitely' when it comes to people - sometimes acting in ways they didn't expect forces them to change their mind which throws his future-sight completely off track, and having people in the equation tends to be the #1 reason he is incapable of truly long term prediction - At best, he can see people that have already left to go to a place arriving at a destination, since they already made the decision to go and are almost totally unlikely to end up not doing so, barring some sort of obstacle. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 16:10 on May 19, 2018 |
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May 19, 2018 15:53
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Wrapped up Stiletto just now. O'Malley seems quite fond of flashbacks, world-building, and nested storytelling. I think I enjoyed it more when it served as a deliberate and isolated plot device for Myfanwy. In Stiletto, it too often felt like various characters expositing Chekhov's guns at each other. The book also ended with an audible thud. Like, Odette was already a fairly passive protagonist but leaving her a bystander during the climax was dumb and bad. Decent enough that I'd read a third book in the series, but still a definite dropoff from The Rook. Fake edit: I wish someone could get O'Malley—and many other pulp authors, come to think of it—to scrape a third of the adverbs out of their text. I don't have any specific aversion to them, but the tenth or twelfth instance of "incredulously" does start to grate. Just a tad.
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May 23, 2018 10:38
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ConfusedUs posted:I just re-read the entire Alex Verus series over the last week-ish. It was better than I remembered, I remembered it being pretty good. I did about the same thing, read all of Alex Verus over a week or so and it wasn't bad. Quick reads, which is nice. And I don't know about Richard. I think wherever he went he got some sort of different magic. Alex talks about the gates he makes being odd somehow, and while it could be a focus that doesn't seem like something Richard would have been gone for 10 years figuring out how to get.
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May 24, 2018 19:28
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:That's not as bad as the narrator for the October Daye series who, eleven loving books into the series, still hasn't learned how to pronounce "geas" correctly. I tried to read the first Daye book because the InCryptid stuff is fun, but it seemed like mostly the main character gets knocked around a lot and then falls backward onto the solution with her very convenient plot power. Does that get better?
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May 25, 2018 16:40
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Dawgstar posted:I tried to read the first Daye book because the InCryptid stuff is fun, but it seemed like mostly the main character gets knocked around a lot and then falls backward onto the solution with her very convenient plot power. Does that get better? Only if by "better" you mean "falls into bed with an assortment of magical boifus".
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May 25, 2018 17:08
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