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coffeetable posted:Just noticed Evan Winter's got himself a four-book deal That's good to hear. I've been checking for more from him every now and then. Although I almost got tricked into re-buying it since the self-published version has been replaced by the Orbit version (as of Feb 12) and has a completely different cover 
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Feb 25, 2019 17:13
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My 9 year old son read Princess of Mars a several months ago and just completed his class science project (the solar system). I had no input. I just bought him the paint and the styrofoam.  If you can't see it he labeled Mars, and then under it, Barsoom. lol I just read murderbot, and am about to read the second one in that series.
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Feb 25, 2019 18:59
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Strix, the Hugo and Nebula Awards have always been rigged author popularity contests. I'm still mad about Thomas Olde Heuvelt's lovely novelette winning in 2015.
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Feb 25, 2019 22:18
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Ok, I'm in on "The Gutter Prayer" knowing nothing but 1 or 2 goons said it was good. The last time I did that with a book it was pretty good - "The Traitor Baru" I'm taking a brake from the 3rd Storm-light book, about 1/2 way though and I just need a change of pace, 1300 pages uhg. TGP, 30 or so pages in and so far good enough, my standards will be low I guess if it's a page turner and has quality creepy sex scenes it'll do stoneman totally has a stone dick and we are going to see it . Not really I hate creepy fantasy sex scenes unless it's the first law, then they are just funny.
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Feb 25, 2019 23:40
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Solitair posted:I'm still mad about Thomas Olde Heuvelt's lovely novelette winning in 2015. Reading the first two Asimov edited Hugo Awards collections in 2018 was a new tier of actively killing braincells via boredom for me. Your insane lifequest is like Ahab's, forever chasing the white whale whom never stops moving. Swap your impossible to finish lifequest for something much more interesting, like the Gardner Dozois (RIP big man) Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies....they only started in 1984 and have a hard cutoff date of last year/2017....again RIP Gardner Dozois. Power skimmed The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose because as I got deeper into it many of the examples in it/people of interest have aged super badly. Jordan Weisman: FASA creator, book managed to explain why that weird IP rights chain of custody for MechWarrior 4 exists. Weisman is addicting to spinning up new companies anytime he meets someone new. Peter Molyneux: hype, hype, hype, hype until the heat-death of the universe. Will Wright: part of the inspiration for SimCity came from Stanislaw Lem's The Seventh Sally (available in Lem's Cyberiad which most people in this thread probably own by now).
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Feb 26, 2019 15:43
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Today on reddit has too much time on their hands: Stats for braids tugged, skirts smoothed in Wheel of Time.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:19
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spacetoaster posted:My 9 year old son read Princess of Mars a several months ago and just completed his class science project (the solar system). That's quality parenting.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:Today on reddit has too much time on their hands: Stats for braids tugged, skirts smoothed in Wheel of Time. This is awesome. I remember years ago in the "bad thread" some goon found only a handful of "lemoncakes" in the whole text of Song of Ice and Fire, but it doesn't matter. It's got a life of it's own at this point. Tugs braid was overdone in the 4th WOT book and the tooth paste is out of the tube.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:20
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spandexcajun posted:This is awesome. I remember years ago in the "bad thread" some goon found only a handful of "lemoncakes" in the whole text of Song of Ice and Fire, but it doesn't matter. It's got a life of it's own at this point. I remember that. There were definitely some GRRM-isms that came up all the time in those books, though (nuncle, "words are wind", must needs).
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Feb 26, 2019 18:46
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Reading the first two Asimov edited Hugo Awards collections in 2018 was a new tier of actively killing braincells via boredom for me. https://twitter.com/dril/status/922321981 but i will check out those anthologies thanks
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Feb 26, 2019 18:59
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spandexcajun posted:This is awesome. I remember years ago in the "bad thread" some goon found only a handful of "lemoncakes" in the whole text of Song of Ice and Fire, but it doesn't matter. It's got a life of it's own at this point. If you read the thread a bit, someone looks at a book with only one braid tugging and finds a paragraph with 4 different instances of braid manipulation. It's not the best count.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:40
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Randallteal posted:I remember that. There were definitely some GRRM-isms that came up all the time in those books, though (nuncle, "words are wind", must needs). IMO the dark fantasy genre should just be renamed 'coin n' whores' as a counterpart to sword and sorcery.
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Feb 26, 2019 21:31
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I just read Voices of Heaven, it's good. Frederik Pohl is good.
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Feb 27, 2019 02:49
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 Warning, warning! The latest Ann Leckie book, The Raven Tower, is written in second person! Take whatever action you deem necessary.
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Feb 27, 2019 04:18
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You won three Hugos, and now your writing style is in vogue.
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Feb 27, 2019 04:44
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You struggle with this book, because after every sentence you think, "No I'm not."
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Feb 27, 2019 05:02
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You have read second person narratives before, and enjoyed them.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:05
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It worked for If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
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Feb 27, 2019 05:07
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I finally got around to reading Long Way / Small Planet. It was great, but the whole "I'm powered by kinetic energy harvested from my own movements" thing in the second one is irrationally bothersome. Just say you're powered by a chunk of unobtanium or something. gaah The whole "cozy sci fi" genre reminds me a lot of Lawrence Watt-Evans' fantasy novels, especially Ithnalin's Restoration, which I don't recommend often enough to folks Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Feb 27, 2019 |
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Feb 27, 2019 05:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I finally got around to reading Long Way / Small Planet. This is a running theme with her, I'm half convinced its a shibboleth. Book one has space ships powered by algae growing in tanks in the dark of space. Book three has space ships powered by people walking around the ship's hallways occasionally stepping on pressure plates.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:20
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pseudorandom name posted:You have read second person narratives before, and enjoyed them. You quite enjoyed the second-person chapters of Bank's Complicity, but you wonder if it would be sustainable over a whole novel.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:47
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You thought Stross did a pretty good job with both of his, especially how the second one actually had a very clever reason for the second person perspective.
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Feb 27, 2019 05:54
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You encounter a book written in the second person. If you try to read it, turn to page 43 If you choose to ignore it, turn to page 210
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Feb 27, 2019 09:37
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Can someone remind me what the good Stanislaw Lem translation was? Also, talking about translations: I'm reading Eco's Baudolino currently. I guess I have to thank perma cat prison inhabitant BoL for harping on it. I do keep wondering though: BoL if you're on the lam currently: You keep insisting that the prose is everything, yet very few people in this thread can read the original Italian I suppose. So would your recomendation be contingent on one particular translation? Or is that not how it works?
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Feb 27, 2019 09:38
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I notice people here rarely mention Robert Silverberg. Given how prolific he is I don't doubt he's written a lot of crap, but does no one even rate his best? I ask because his Majipoor books are finally available on Kindle and I was considering buying them. The only thing I've read of his was Nightwings which I thought was a fantastic little novella somewhere between post-apocalyptic and Dying Earth which was a heartwarming story of redemption for the human race. Do his other works not live up? Also, I remember Hieronymus (I think) linking a page some time back of a guy who kept fairly extensive notes on sci fi and fantasy he'd read, presented in a rather ugly bare-bones website. He had more of a literary background than most sci fi/fantasy critics and had a focus on older (pre-1980s) works and wrote some interesting commentary. I seem to remember Hieronymus (or whomever provided the link) saying it was his go-to when he was looking for something new to read. I've lost the link; anyone have an idea what I'm talking about?
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Feb 27, 2019 09:57
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Neurosis posted:I notice people here rarely mention Robert Silverberg. Given how prolific he is I don't doubt he's written a lot of crap, but does no one even rate his best? I ask because his Majipoor books are finally available on Kindle and I was considering buying them. The only thing I've read of his was Nightwings which I thought was a fantastic little novella somewhere between post-apocalyptic and Dying Earth which was a heartwarming story of redemption for the human race. Do his other works not live up? http://greatsfandf.com/master-list/master-list.php
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Feb 27, 2019 10:10
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This looks like what I remember, thanks.
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Feb 27, 2019 10:11
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genericnick posted:Can someone remind me what the good Stanislaw Lem translation was? Michael Kandel did very skilled multiple language translations for 4 or so of Lem's books. Cyberiad, and most of the Tichy stories.
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Feb 27, 2019 14:58
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You are really enjoying the mockery on this page of the 2nd-person device, but you wouldn't want to read anything longer than a paragraph. In fact, you wonder why her editors/publishers didn't nix the idea before it got off the ground.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:27
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It’s actually pretty good. The reason some of it’s in second person is that the rest is in first person, and the first-person narrator is addressing the character in the second-person parts.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:29
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IIRC, "Acceptance", the third Southern Reach book, switched back and forth between third person and second person. That was a colossally unnecessary mindfuck.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:33
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Michael Kandel did very skilled multiple language translations for 4 or so of Lem's books. Greatly appreciated.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:38
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Finished up The Blighted City and honestly... can't really recommend. It's got a somewhat interesting synopsis but it's just not written well enough to save it from the weird poo poo the author threw in. I have pretty much no idea (save a decent guess on a plot point) at where the series is going. I don't mind that, but I don't care about the characters enough to actually give a drat about what might happen down the road. It's got zombies and old women trapped in 13 year old bodies and paranoid people and one weird goddamn plot device. There's better stuff out there to waste time on.
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Feb 27, 2019 15:45
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Looks like the Nebula list is bad because it got slated by a group of indie authors. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-nebulas-20booksto50-not-a-nudge-nudge-slate/
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Feb 27, 2019 17:15
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team overhead smash posted:You encounter a book written in the second person. I turned to page 210 and people were still talking about Wheel of Time then.
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Feb 27, 2019 17:32
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Skimming through, he's apparently one of the approximately three people alive who ever heard of Avram Davidson so, yeah, list approved. edit: Anyone actually read anything by Ernest Bramah? Going through this guy's description it seems to be a set of horribly Orientalist farces in the best retrotradition of Bridge of Birds, but he rates it at five stars while Hughart got two... Consider my interest piqued. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Feb 27, 2019 |
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Feb 27, 2019 18:00
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Demolished man but no stars my destination under Bester: what
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Feb 27, 2019 18:04
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Ornamented Death posted:Looks like the Nebula list is bad because it got slated by a group of indie authors. It seems like a bit of an overstatement to call it 'slated' when they got like, three things? onto some of the shorter fiction categories but it does bring up again the questions about appropriate self-promotion and online popularity. Their statement that self-published books are as valid as house published items is true, but they still have to stand on their own merits and I have no idea if the stories they favored do that. eta: though there's likely no way in hell that novella is beating Artificial Condition
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Feb 27, 2019 18:04
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General Battuta posted:It’s actually pretty good. The reason some of it’s in second person is that the rest is in first person, and the first-person narrator is addressing the character in the second-person parts. Maybe if I can get the hell out of the second person parts it will improve, but I'm bouncing off hard at the moment.
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Feb 27, 2019 18:40
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anilEhilated posted:Skimming through, he's apparently one of the approximately three people alive who ever heard of Avram Davidson so, yeah, list approved. I've read a couple of his Max Carrados short stories, which are mysteries featuring a blind private detective. They were okay but not anything that made me want to go out and hunt for more.
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