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nashona posted:Next one comes out March 2019. Aw gently caress, I thought it was December of this year, guess it got pushed back.
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Sep 10, 2018 13:55
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aw dang i've been rereading the series and, wow, amos feels like a completely different character in book 1 to how he develops. it definitely feels like they hadn't nailed him down completely just yet.
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Sep 10, 2018 14:05
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https://www.orbitbooks.net/2018/08/27/tiamats-wrath-coming-in-spring-2019/Orbit posted:Fans of The Expanse: We know that you have been looking forward to TIAMAT’S WRATH this December. But because we are now entering the home stretch of this amazing series and we all want to make sure we get it right, we have asked the authors to give our editorial and sales teams some extra time to prepare for the launch.
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Sep 10, 2018 14:09
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Ainsley McTree posted:I'll second that; I've read it and it's good. It took me a minute or two to really grasp the tech level of the setting (and...there's vampires?) but once you settle in it's a good time. I didn't like Phlebas, I absolutely loved player of games, I had no clue what the gently caress was going on in use of weapons and its weird as gently caress chapter timeline, and I gave up halfway through excession and the boring ship talk about 2 years ago and haven't returned
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Sep 27, 2018 03:00
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Use of Weapons' chapter structure in a nutshell: each chapter of the "main story" is followed by a chapter about a different event in the protagonist's past. As the main story moves forward, the accompanying vignettes take place further into his past. Edit: Excession was a bit of a slog for me, though. A lot of it is basically chat logs, and I had trouble tracking those characters.
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Sep 27, 2018 03:09
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That's weird to me because Excession is my favorite Culture novel. The Affront make me laugh, the Mind politics are wacky, and the end is, um, not what I expected when I first read it.
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Sep 27, 2018 04:21
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Yeah, I just finished Excession and I quite liked it. It was interesting seeing things from the point of view of the Minds.
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Sep 27, 2018 04:29
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I know I'm in the minority on this one. I thought the other parts of the book were pretty good, but the chat logs dragged it down for me. Something about the format of those exchanges made it hard for me to remember who's who among the various ships, especially the ones we don't otherwise see much of.
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Sep 27, 2018 04:40
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The protagonist guy from Excession might be the worst person in the whole series* *this is probably hyperbole but god I hate him so much
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Sep 27, 2018 05:08
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General Battuta posted:The protagonist guy from Excession might be the worst person in the whole series* They both have fairly rotten personalities. A running theme in the book is abuse, treatment and (this is left ambiguous at the end) recovery/discovery. There is even a Mind that gets into meat minds, appropriately called Grey Matter (Meat Fucker).
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Sep 27, 2018 11:14
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General Battuta posted:The protagonist guy from Excession might be the worst person in the whole series* I mean, all he did was sleep with someone in a free-love society. His spouse stabbed a fetus to death and almost killed him over it.
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Sep 28, 2018 02:04
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ive seen the tv show but i wanna get into the books. how closely do they follow the tv show? am i going to be bored by the first 3 books because they follow super close or do they leave alot of poo poo on the cutting room floor like say harry potter.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:36
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The books are good, read them all. They're not that long anyway. The show follows them pretty closely, but not so closely that you could just jump right in.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:44
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snergle posted:ive seen the tv show but i wanna get into the books. how closely do they follow the tv show? am i going to be bored by the first 3 books because they follow super close or do they leave alot of poo poo on the cutting room floor like say harry potter. The Eros sequence is significantly longer, for instance. More time is given to Miller and Havelock on Ceres. There's some changes to the group dynamics (book has less need to add drama between the crew during the donnager sequence, for instance). I think the books are worth reading. I read them first, but am gonna read them all again before next season comes out.
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Oct 1, 2018 22:45
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thanks for the replies.
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Oct 1, 2018 23:05
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the books were longer than they needed to be. the show trims it down and in the process improves the material a lot.
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Oct 1, 2018 23:25
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The extra content is mostly people throwing away cold noodles E: also ty for the culture synopsis earlier; I’ll check out player of games and then that might be it for me, depending on how much I love it
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Oct 1, 2018 23:30
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Day Man posted:I mean, all he did was sleep with someone in a free-love society. His spouse stabbed a fetus to death and almost killed him over it. Nah, that's cool (the sleeping, not the fetus stabbing), it's the abandoning the Culture and having yourself physically altered to join a society which not only (!) engineered sentience out of its females but also genetically engineered said females to feel pain during sex  that puts him high up on the poo poo list.
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Oct 2, 2018 01:40
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General Battuta posted:Nah, that's cool (the sleeping, not the fetus stabbing), it's the abandoning the Culture and having yourself physically altered to join a society which not only (!) engineered sentience out of its females but also genetically engineered said females to feel pain during sex Okay, fair point
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Oct 2, 2018 16:01
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Maybe I’ll just skip the whole series actually
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Oct 2, 2018 16:04
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For what it's worth those are unambiguously the bad guys.
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Oct 2, 2018 17:56
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Ainsley McTree posted:Maybe I’ll just skip the whole series actually The Culture isn't weird SF author fetish material, it just has some incredibly vile bad guys and deeply hosed up protagonists.
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Oct 2, 2018 18:42
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General Battuta posted:The Culture isn't weird SF author fetish material, it just has some incredibly vile bad guys and deeply hosed up protagonists. Ehhhhh it a little bit can be. Banks likes his torture.
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Oct 2, 2018 19:18
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sebmojo posted:Ehhhhh it a little bit can be. Banks likes his torture. Yeah there was some stuff in phlebas I didn’t love. I inferred that the people doing these behaviors were the bad guys but it doesn’t make it any better to read about for fun, personally. Aaaanyway, this isn’t the culture thread so I’m going to stop talking about it now; sorry for the derail 
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Oct 2, 2018 19:22
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Ainsley McTree posted:Yeah there was some stuff in phlebas I didn’t love. I inferred that the people doing these behaviors were the bad guys but it doesn’t make it any better to read about for fun, personally. It felt gratuitous in Consider Phlebas, but not in any of his later stuff.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:39
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It's weird to read Consider Phlebas without prior knowledge of what the Culture is and how it functions from reading other Culture books, even though the events (idiran war) of Phlebas are referenced in almost every other book. Edit: I mean it's a weird experience, not that you're weird for doing it, I've seen that reccomended as a good place to start the series, but I find Player of Games and Use of Weapons both to be easier points of entry. pile of brown fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Oct 4, 2018 18:58
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Finally caught up to the books awhile back, and decided to check on the release date of the final book only to find out its moved to March. I really hope the ending is decent. I was surprised at the direction of the series and its pretty cool, but the PM tease was real heavy. -_- Hopefully we get some cool info/insight from the PM/PM creators/enemy lol.
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Nov 24, 2018 08:31
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Tertius Oculum posted:Finally caught up to the books awhile back, and decided to check on the release date of the final book only to find out its moved to March. Semi-final. There's one book left after the March release.
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Nov 24, 2018 09:35
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I just finished PR and, while I on balance enjoyed reading it, think that it was a pretty drat strange one. Why a 30 year time skip? 10-15 would have done just fine. And they basically did nothing for 30 years? Things are exactly the same for them? We're to understand that Holden actually kept with the same job for 30 freaking years? That's an entire old school career. Very weird and kind of jarring choice on the authors' part. Singh wasn't that interesting, he was set up as an incompetent dipshit from the getgo. I think someone like Trejo would have been a more interesting pov character. And although I get that the bullet is setting up future books, I would have liked to see it do something more substantial this time around.
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Nov 24, 2018 15:50
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shirts and skins posted:I just finished PR and, while I on balance enjoyed reading it, think that it was a pretty drat strange one. Why a 30 year time skip? 10-15 would have done just fine. And they basically did nothing for 30 years? Things are exactly the same for them? We're to understand that Holden actually kept with the same job for 30 freaking years? That's an entire old school career. Very weird and kind of jarring choice on the authors' part. I'm still convinced that the time skip is a pointed message to George RR Martin (Ty's former employer), who was unwilling to do a five-year time skip, started writing up all the intervening events, and then drove his series off the road and into a ditch. But yes, reading PR was a bit of a jarring experience for me too. In particular, I think the time skip lessened the impact of [PR spoilers] Clarissa's death. At the end of the previous book, she had just gained acceptance into the family of the Rocinante by the major holdout, Holden. I had never thought about the fact that it could be strange that the crew still had ultimately the same career for three decades. They spent year after year careening from crisis to crisis, and now, just as you said, it's strange they had 30 years of routine jobs with perhaps a few more minor adventures. I find it hard to internalize the more advanced medical technology, so I still find it odd that they are still vigorous, e.g. Amos and Bobbie can still do a lot of damage.
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Nov 24, 2018 16:40
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Eh, it was only neccessary to build laconia as a legit threat which was ultimately unnecessary because their strength is their bullshit magic tech. I wish it had been done differently because we barely got a glimpse of rebuilt universe before they kicked it all down. The characters never had a chance to breathe.
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Nov 27, 2018 07:37
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It's hard to overstate how big a time jump thirty years is. That's a whole generation. Just look at how different the world is now from thirty years ago, and apply that to a setting where technology has made a quantum leap forward beyond anything we've ever seen. And yet Holden has been doing the same thing for thirty years and nothing happened in the interim?
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Nov 27, 2018 07:44
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I think the whole generation thing was the point. They wanted the setting to have proper adults who grew up not knowing Earth at all. It's a really interesting idea and honestly I think it worked with the perspective of the rear end in a top hat who ran Medina. Hopefully it'll lead to interesting things if we end up spending more time on other colonies in the next couple books. It's not about the magic bullshit tech, it's about the people. The Expanse has always been good about that at least. That said it can be about the people and still bad. I've got mixed feelings on the time skip but I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm just interested to see where they go with the story next.
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Nov 27, 2018 08:13
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Also there was a tweet by the authors that 30 years in their time is more like 15. Age wise I'm assuming. I do feel like the tech wasn't as far along, but if its a bureaucratic hell to do research the right way (I would have wondered what Mao would have progressed?) Then maybe that's why. Idk
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Nov 27, 2018 12:49
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They also wanted Earth to be back on its feet and the transport union firmly in control and accepted...just in time to be replaced. Thirty years seemed appropriate for that, at least.
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Nov 27, 2018 13:17
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I never really thought the 30 year time jump was that big of a deal  They mention anti-aging drugs at least once, probably just to try to cover their butts so people aren't asking, "how is a 50-year-old Holden still going?" Honestly I just want more spoopy PM tech, don't care how we get there!
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Nov 27, 2018 13:41
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Even if 30 years is 15 from a physical level, it's still 30 years time wise. That's college graduate to gold watch and retirement party in terms of careers. Holden and the crew were already feeling a little stagnant towards the end of the last one, and this one...what happened? Oh well, the decision was made, and so it goes. Really hope we get some new characters involved next book. I have to say, PR set up the return of my least favorite character in the entire series, so I am not encouraged. But I'm sure it'll be an entertaining read regardless. I just wish we'd seen more from the bullet out of PN. Okay, it appeared on the ship, they surrounded it with curtains, space is boiling, and...what? They didn't even set up further problems, we just never heard about it again beyond Holden talking to Duarte. Is the Tempest still jetting around with that thing in it? I know we'll learn more next book, but I feel like they could have at least teased something.
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Nov 27, 2018 16:04
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I read Rising shortly after it came out, and have since spaced some of the more nuanced plot points. Remind me what you lot are referring to with "the bullet?" The tempest was the Laconian war ship right?
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Nov 27, 2018 16:49
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hatelull posted:I read Rising shortly after it came out, and have since spaced some of the more nuanced plot points. Remind me what you lot are referring to with "the bullet?" The tempest was the Laconian war ship right? The black "bullet" that Holden and... Mari? named. I'm getting characters from different series mixed up, but the doctor/biologist lady who was thirsting for Holden on the first alien planet. They think it's a weapon from the aliens that killed the makers of the PM, or possibly it is the aliens that killed the PM? Anyway. After the Tempest fired it's crazy super-weapon, one of the "bullets" almost immediately appeared on the ship in a hallway, correlating with the universe-wide loss of consciousness that is similar to what killed Marcos when he traveled through the Gate. I think there's a single chapter about it, then when Holden hears about it he's like "oh gently caress go find this thirsty biologist IMMEDIATELY" to Duarte.
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Nov 27, 2018 16:55
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shirts and skins posted:Even if 30 years is 15 from a physical level, it's still 30 years time wise. That's college graduate to gold watch and retirement party in terms of careers. Another example (though one could equally chalk this up to being social-norm driven and not lifespan-driven? but perhaps not?) is how societies used to consider people as basically adult (marriage, childbirth, war) once they hit puberty instead of 18-21 as we do today. Waiting til you're 18 to have sex? That's almost more than half your lifespan! Granted, it's not like Expanse humans are fantasy elves who might truly see 30 years as being nothing at all, but I don't find it to be outlandish either.
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Nov 27, 2018 21:56
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