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90s Cringe Rock posted:Orcamancer is a good word. Blackfish City is a good book. Cyberpunk and Inuit culture can work together pretty well, who knew? My brief little review of it in another thread made it to the author. https://twitter.com/sentencebender/status/1006545982526558211
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Jul 12, 2018 18:52
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Ccs posted:Though the one thing Wolfe doesn't try to do is inject much humor into Severian's journey, so I suppose that's one thing other stories can provide. There's a lot of humor in BotNS it's just utterly impenetrable on the first read-through.
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Jul 12, 2018 22:19
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So I finished Greg Bear's The Forge of God. The writing was...not great, but I really enjoyed the concept, even if it conveyed by really bad dialogue. Is Anvil of Stars any better?
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Jul 12, 2018 23:29
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A Proper Uppercut posted:So I finished Greg Bear's The Forge of God. The writing was...not great, but I really enjoyed the concept, even if it conveyed by really bad dialogue. Is Anvil of Stars any better? I like Anvil of Stars a lot better.
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Jul 12, 2018 23:30
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A Proper Uppercut posted:So I finished Greg Bear's The Forge of God. The writing was...not great, but I really enjoyed the concept, even if it conveyed by really bad dialogue. Is Anvil of Stars any better? It's better, but it's incredibly different in tone. From a bittersweet celebration of Earth in its final hours, you'll be jumping into a dark, bleak war story - don't be fooled by the cutesy names slapped on everything, the society depicted is incredibly hosed up if you think about it.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:24
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ToxicFrog posted:Bafflingly, most of her other A-U stuff, including Regenesis and Downbelow Station, is available on Google Play. And a Cyteen audiobook is available on Closed Circle. But a Cyteen ebook seems to be entirely absent. I'm glad I found a hard copy at a library clearance sale.
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Jul 13, 2018 00:36
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Just knocked out another book, Moving Mars by Greg Bear. Bear can be a weird guy like most sci-fi authors, but Moving Mars was less so than usual for him up until the last couple of chapters. I'm still not sure what exactly he was going on about beyond that I recognized a few of the same terms and concepts as things he also used in The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. This book is not set in the same universe as those, but Bear was clearly thinking in certain technological and scientific directions for both. I like Moving Mars, but I'm not convinced it was good. About the first third of the book ended up not mattering at all, all the complexities and history of Earth - some of which were quite interesting - ended up being irrelevant when Earth became faceless bad guys and the Martians either aw-shucks salt of the earth (well, mars) heroes or traitors in league with Earth. I was expecting something more interesting than what I got, and in my mind I'm going over possibilities of what could have been happening in the background but there's not really a point to it. I've been reading a number of these "Humans settle Mars, Mars makes remarkable technological discoveries, Earth declares war on Mars out of fear and colonialism, Mars effortlessly wins via those technological discoveries" books from my library lately, but none of them have been very good.
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Jul 13, 2018 04:42
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Yeah I agree, I read Moving Mars when it came out, and apart from a few ideas, I never really liked it. It's set in the same universe as his novella Heads, strangely enough (which was fun but probably isn't worth tracking down), and also I believe loosely linked to the (much better) Queen of Angels and / (Slant), which are both worth reading. The only other stuff by him I can recommend is Eon, Eternity, Blood Music and Hull Zero Three. Hobnob fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Jul 13, 2018 |
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Jul 13, 2018 05:46
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Cythereal posted:
thats a pretty specific subgenre
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Jul 13, 2018 07:31
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PupsOfWar posted:thats a pretty specific subgenre Starsiege was a great game and trendsetter. Now I kinda want to reread red rising.
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Jul 13, 2018 12:44
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PupsOfWar posted:thats a pretty specific subgenre It's the fourth or fifth book with that plot I've read from the library in the past couple of months. Moving Mars sure was better than Rolling Thunder at least, which is blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy on top of being a very boring sci-fi book.
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Jul 13, 2018 13:48
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Solitair posted:I'm glad I found a hard copy at a library clearance sale. Yeah, it's not that hard to find hardcopies (now; there was a long period where it was extraordinarily difficult to find for some reason) and I've bought it multiple times over the years, and if you really need an e-copy you can probably  it in about five minutes. It's just baffling that there doesn't seem to be an officially sanctioned ebook when Cherryh is generally all in on the ebooks and most of her other stuff is just a click away.I wonder if there's some sort of contractual fuckery dating back to its original publication going on. Comedy option: buy the audiobook and then use a speech-to-text system to transcribe it into an ebook
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Jul 13, 2018 14:26
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I feel like a great deal of trouble will be solved if we just assume from the outset that the colony world will demand independence and plan around it, rather than acting like it is a tremendous surprise.
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Jul 14, 2018 10:45
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I had a dream about the Gandalara series, and it led me to get a big clue as to where/why Gandalara is! I'm still in the middle of book three, I still don't know if everything has a sci-fi or a fantasy explanation, but I at least have the beginnings of an explanation as to why there's so much salt everywhere: the ocean evaporated, or boiled away, leaving the salt covering the ocean floor. The meteor at the beginning of the series is very likely responsible for this, and I bet there's some kind of apocalypse scenario here...as well as a far-future Earth, where the climate's been changed so utterly. Mind you, this doesn't explain why it doesn't rain, and while I have guesses about the impassable walls fencing everyone in, I'm still a ways out from answers. But it's neat to wake up going "oh hey this is why the setting is like it is" after a dream, instead of the usual "where did THAT dream come from?"
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Jul 14, 2018 10:55
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Just started Revenant Gun and, three chapters in, it's clear I don't remember nearly as much of Raven Strategem as I thought I did. 
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Jul 14, 2018 11:53
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Kesper North posted:I feel like a great deal of trouble will be solved if we just assume from the outset that the colony world will demand independence and plan around it, rather than acting like it is a tremendous surprise. That's what happened in Moving Mars, Earth learned from what happened to Luna and from the beginning was careful to keep Mars utterly dependent on Earth because colonialism. Then a team of Martian scientists discovered teleportation and interstellar travel and Earth put its contingency plans into motion. The book ends with the Martians teleporting Mars out of the solar system and halfway across the galaxy because they couldn't beat Earth.
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Jul 14, 2018 14:06
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Barring massively altered Earth geopolitics I feel like Earth ever coming together to go against its colonies is less likely than particular Earth nation-states tugging the leash on their colonies. Such vastly different planet-scale politics can, of course, be changed through technology, but my experience of the Earth/Mars conflict stories is that the cultures haven't changed enough to explain how Earth can act as a unified force.
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Jul 14, 2018 14:40
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Neurosis posted:Barring massively altered Earth geopolitics I feel like Earth ever coming together to go against its colonies is less likely than particular Earth nation-states tugging the leash on their colonies. Such vastly different planet-scale politics can, of course, be changed through technology, but my experience of the Earth/Mars conflict stories is that the cultures haven't changed enough to explain how Earth can act as a unified force. I think Heinlein does a good job of covering this in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; the short version is that while all the various Earth nations disagree on a lot of things, they all agree that the Martian prisoners should not get uppity.
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Jul 14, 2018 14:44
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Neurosis posted:Barring massively altered Earth geopolitics I feel like Earth ever coming together to go against its colonies is less likely than particular Earth nation-states tugging the leash on their colonies. Such vastly different planet-scale politics can, of course, be changed through technology, but my experience of the Earth/Mars conflict stories is that the cultures haven't changed enough to explain how Earth can act as a unified force. This is one of the things that frustrates me most about Moving Mars. The first third or so of the book seems to be setting up the idea that Earth is not a unified force and there's a lot of complicated politics and back-and-forth. Then in the second half of the book Earth is a faceless unified villain.
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Jul 14, 2018 14:53
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The UED existing always ruined my Brood War immersion 'United Earth does stuff' is like the laziest trope but I guess it's just an extension of the planetary monoculture that pervades sf.
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Jul 14, 2018 16:02
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Just finished Emma Newman's Planetfall. I really liked it, a strong standalone novel with an ending I found pretty satisfying.
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Jul 14, 2018 21:15
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished Emma Newman's Planetfall. I really liked it, a strong standalone novel with an ending I found pretty satisfying. I liked the protagonist a lot, was interesting. I read that and Dark Orbit around the same time, which I think I also enjoyed.
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Jul 15, 2018 00:02
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished Emma Newman's Planetfall. I really liked it, a strong standalone novel with an ending I found pretty satisfying. Planetfall was pretty good. The hoarding slow reveal was good, the climax where everything smashed up was better, and definitely agree that the ending was satisfying yet reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey movie ending in a much better presented way. StrixNebulosa posted:I had a dream about the Gandalara series, and it led me to get a big clue as to where/why Gandalara is! I'm still in the middle of book three, I still don't know if everything has a sci-fi or a fantasy explanation, but I at least have the beginnings of an explanation as to why there's so much salt everywhere: the ocean evaporated, or boiled away, leaving the salt covering the ocean floor. The meteor at the beginning of the series is very likely responsible for this, and I bet there's some kind of apocalypse scenario here...as well as a far-future Earth, where the climate's been changed so utterly. Interesting theories. The Gandalara books are pretty short, and I was able to finish everything over a weekend. As I said previously in this thread I got a strong "John Carter of Mars"/Edgar Rice Burroughs vibe while reading them, which is not a slam or diss or any kind of insult. E.R. Burroughs is mostly forgotten today, in his era E.R. Burroughs was bestselling author that would be equivalent to Stephen King/George RR Martin in todays terms, minus the bleakness/misery factors of both those authors. Edgar Rice Burroughs was the person everyone in the fantasy or adventure genres or ripped off, if just for the fact that Burroughs created a character template/writing style that could be reused for just about any setting or time period.
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Jul 15, 2018 01:16
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Interesting theories. Please, please do not take my slow speed at reading them as disinterest - they're good! The writing is just, it's so very readable. My trouble is that I'm always reading a dozen books at once and my focus is the worst. The second omnibus should arrive soon, too, which should help put a kick in to finish book three. (Which has been the weakest of the three so far, but that's mostly because it shifts from interesting desert-backdrop story into a more standard medieval-esque kingdom setting, which is intensely boring to me. Like. It's not a stock medieval kingdom, but we're moving from the desert, to the cities bordering the desert, to the warband/settlement, to... this. This kingdom with slaves and canals and a strict "no one can change professions" and there's so much corruption and privilege and it's like, it's well-written but it's not my jam. ...Also plot-wise it's less looking for the answer to mysteries and more straightforward, which is not as compelling.) Anyways: I am finding that this pulp style is appealing to me, when it's done well, and I'm enjoying what little I've read of Leigh Brackett so far - as I found the Book of Skaith in my old books a while back and finally cracked it open.
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Jul 15, 2018 01:36
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I tend to read fast, and had the complete Gandalara series in front of me when I started reading them over a weekend. Definitely check out more Randall Garrett stuff, and the first John Carter of Mars book. Another dead but surprisingly readable in 2018 old author is Talbot Mundy. Mundy's Jim Grim series is probably best classified as urban fantasy of the 1910s-30s. Mundys books tend to mostly take place in the 1910s - 1930s middle-east, and india, have multiple characters of different races/sexes/religion, and contain staggeringly little race-baiting stuff for that time period.....if you want staggering amounts of race-baiting stuff for those time periods read Sax Rohmer.
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Jul 15, 2018 07:07
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Finished Green Mars. Just about as good as red mars, the "constant sex between old people thing" is somewhere between overstated and revealing of kinda weird choices. I can definitely see that the age treatment thing was a contrivance to keep the same characters over a story that would be hundreds of years, but KSR uses it to drive the larger background conflicts in the story as well so I can't really fault him for it. As with Red Mars, the single best character in the book is Mars itself. That's also not necessarily a criticism, at least to me, because it has a strong sense of place and really drives wonder at the planet and the changes being wrought on it. Also it's kind of sad that it can never really happen because of the perchlorates thing that nobody knew about at the time. Oh well that's why it's science fiction
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Jul 15, 2018 14:57
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I finished Ninefox Gambit from the recommendation in this thread and I liked it a lot. The writing stumbles in a few places but it has such an interesting world and yet I don't think the author really indulges in in it like so much fantasy. The plot zips along much better than you'd expect for a book where the protagonist spends a lot of time sitting in a chair giving orders.
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Jul 15, 2018 21:16
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FuzzySlippers posted:I finished Ninefox Gambit from the recommendation in this thread and I liked it a lot. The writing stumbles in a few places but it has such an interesting world and yet I don't think the author really indulges in in it like so much fantasy. The plot zips along much better than you'd expect for a book where the protagonist spends a lot of time sitting in a chair giving orders. The other two books are good too. The sequels get a tiny bit more into the weird tech too. The fungal canisters and moth ships have more to do with your avatar than I first suspected.
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Jul 16, 2018 01:31
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my bony fealty posted:The UED existing always ruined my Brood War immersion I mean it gave off some pretty dictatorial vibes. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a government that had conquered earth - and it's clearly interstellar, just in another chunk of the galaxy, so it's not like a couple Battlecruisers couldn't keep an entire planet in line. There's obviously probably some squabbling and politics and internal strife, but an army attacking a region of space that is essentially Space Australia months or possibly years away from earth wouldn't really be showing that. Plus, as the amount of space that people can live in gets bigger and as it gets easier to travel and communicate, it's not really that surprising for me to imagine planets becoming more homogenized. I could easily see in the distant future if there was somehow a government that ruled over the entire planet for decades or centuries, especially one that conquered the world and as such took autonomy away from other countries and gained control of education and the media, having a lot of the biggest cultural differences get worn away over time. We're a lot better at propaganda and subtle brainwashing nowadays than previous would-be conquerors in history. Honestly, I'd have found more UED stuff more interesting than Evil Space Gods. Who knows, maybe they'll go back to that now that Amon is dead and Kerrigan and Raynor died on the way to their home planet. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 02:12
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Wolpertinger posted:I mean it gave off some pretty dictatorial vibes. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a government that had conquered earth - and it's clearly interstellar, just in another chunk of the galaxy, so it's not like a couple Battlecruisers couldn't keep an entire planet in line. There's obviously probably some squabbling and politics and internal strife, but an army attacking a region of space that is essentially Space Australia months or possibly years away from earth wouldn't really be showing that. Plus, as the amount of space that people can live in gets bigger and as it gets easier to travel and communicate, it's not really that surprising for me to imagine planets becoming more homogenized. I could easily see in the distant future if there was somehow a government that ruled over the entire planet for decades or centuries, especially one that conquered the world and as such took autonomy away from other countries and gained control of education and the media, having a lot of the biggest cultural differences get worn away over time. We're a lot better at propaganda and subtle brainwashing nowadays than previous would-be conquerors in history. Blizzard did indeed explain the UED in out of game stuff, and the UED was indeed a fascist government that rose to power when the Zerg and Protoss were discovered. Ambitious demagogues on Earth whipped people into a frenzy over fear of alien invasion and used that fear to get into power and establish a brutal military dictatorship throughout human space - the region where the Starcraft games happen being about twenty years' journey from UED space. The UED was originally just a harmless sort of interstellar UN between Sol and the colonies, but anti-alien paranoia lead national governments to start giving far more power to the UED until the Directorate effectively became the [tyrannical] government of human space. The UED was envisioned as being a bigger deal than it ended up being in the series - it was meant to be a fully fledged fourth race as advanced or more so than the Protoss, but time and money constraints forced the development team to axe all of that and justify the UED using the same units as the regular Terrans plus a couple of new ones as being an expeditionary force specifically equipped with antiquated technology to eliminate the possibility of anyone capturing or reverse-engineering their tech.
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Jul 16, 2018 02:34
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ToxicFrog posted:Just started Revenant Gun and, three chapters in, it's clear I don't remember nearly as much of Raven Strategem as I thought I did. I noped out of Revenant Gun after Chapter 1 and went back to Ninefox Gambit. I'm glad I did. I enjoyed the first two books a lot more the second time, having an idea of what the setting is all about really helped. After that, Revenant Gun was really good. Chock full off weird tech, but the exotics are literally "sufficiently advanced technology". I then tried Kindle samplers of her two short story collections and will be picking them up soon. Lee is as good at two page short stories based on fairy tales as she is with space opera trilogies. How has she been publishing since 1999 and only now becoming talked about ?
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Jul 16, 2018 03:13
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He, and it turns out you need to write milsf to hit it big, I guess. Or just keep trying and get lucky despite having written extremely good poo poo for years.
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Jul 16, 2018 04:28
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90s Cringe Rock posted:He, and it turns out you need to write milsf to hit it big, I guess. Or just keep trying and get lucky despite having written extremely good poo poo for years. Scalzi has said the whole reason he wrote Old Man's War was that he looked at what sold and mil-sf was the top category.
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Jul 16, 2018 04:31
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90s Cringe Rock posted:He, and it turns out you need to write milsf to hit it big, I guess. Or just keep trying and get lucky despite having written extremely good poo poo for years. I thought yoon ha lee was a trans woman?
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Jul 16, 2018 04:48
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andrew smash posted:I thought yoon ha lee was a trans woman?
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Jul 16, 2018 04:51
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Been rereading Feist's Riftwar cycle. I read them all as I was growing up and have a guilty love for them. The later books were plagued with sloppy writing and editing (such as when Feist literally mistakes Pug for his son and has him doing a plot point that isn't actually him, or something like that, it's been a while since I've read that book). However, I'll still stand by the first trilogy, which is pretty much one of my favourite coming of age fantasy stories there are. And The Empire Trilogy is something else entirely, those three books I like even more than the Riftwar Saga trilogy. I'm up to the Conclave of Shadows now and while I like it more than I did when I read it the first time, it's still not as great as the earlier sagas. Has anyone read his new book, in a new series? King of Ashes or something like that? Testicle Masochist fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 08:51
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So I finished that book someone mentioned before Empire of Silence. It sure was something. Basically it read like Dune fanfiction written by a Rothfuss fanboy. It wasn't bad as such just incredibly derivative. From Dune it riffed personal shields that stop bullets but not blades, noble houses, ATOMICS, gladiatorial matches, duels between nobles, religious overtones and eugenics. No giant worms though. From Rothfuss it took the story structure and beats. As a summer read I think it's fine. Doesn't challenge you in any way and is so familiar you can just sorta go with the flow.
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Jul 16, 2018 09:02
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Just started reading skullcracker and wow. This is definitely an antidote to my boredom from reading too much sci fi.
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Jul 16, 2018 11:26
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Also since you are talking about mil sci-fi my friend is still convinced Honor Harrington is as popular as it is because it's the only mil-scifi with focus on giant fleet battles. Basically the entire rest of the genre is either single ship/carrier saves day or Marines in SPACE!!! Neurosis posted:Barring massively altered Earth geopolitics I feel like Earth ever coming together to go against its colonies is less likely than particular Earth nation-states tugging the leash on their colonies. Such vastly different planet-scale politics can, of course, be changed through technology, but my experience of the Earth/Mars conflict stories is that the cultures haven't changed enough to explain how Earth can act as a unified force. Spiral Wars solved this by blowing up earth. The story takes place after Humans finished their genocide of the race that blew up Earth and their fascist government is trying to desperately hold on to power they are losing, now that they lack a clear external threat.
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Jul 16, 2018 15:21
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Also since you are talking about mil sci-fi my friend is still convinced Honor Harrington is as popular as it is because it's the only mil-scifi with focus on giant fleet battles.
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Jul 16, 2018 15:22
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