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Uh, so Death's End is breaking my brain in ways I didn't even think possible 
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Apr 9, 2019 13:35
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the thing with Simmons is that, once you're familiar with his politics, you see signs of it sorta sprinkled throughout his oeuvre it's not some ringo/kratman/correia situation where 5 pages in they'll helpfully indicate "just so ya know, I'm a fascist and this space fight book is all about my opinions" more like...once you've seen it, you can't un-see it, and this affects your reading or re-reading of any Simmons book, even things like Hyperion that he wrote long before he allegedly went off the deep end. 90s Cringe Rock posted:I seem to remember some good spaceship firing torpedo action in Dread Empire's Fall, but I can't confirm that it's a major part, it was some time ago. this reminds me Williams is doing a new Dread Empire trilogy now!
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Apr 9, 2019 13:38
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PupsOfWar posted:the thing with Simmons is that, once you're familiar with his politics, you see signs of it sorta sprinkled throughout his oeuvre That's too bad if he's a chud or whatever, I've only read the Hyperion books, Ilium/Olympos, Drood, and The Hollow Man and I didn't see anything that I found to be particularly problematic. Sounds like Flashback is a doozy.
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Apr 9, 2019 14:19
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gohmak posted:Can we talk about Naomi Nagata getting her Yang Wen-li on? I kind of wish they spent more time on the Laconia campaign. My only problem with the book is not prettending the brat was a hostage to make the escape. I think they would have blown her up in that case. Making sacrifices and doing your duty (especially with her dad out of contact and giving you no guidance) is the whole Laconian thing, it was only because she made it unclear whether she had authorization to go that they let her. And eventually when they had time to think they did try to kill her.
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Apr 9, 2019 16:58
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PupsOfWar posted:this reminds me Williams is doing a new Dread Empire trilogy now! I didn't know that, but I liked the first one. Does anyone know what the differences are between the original editions of Dread Empire's Fall and the author preferred text?
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Apr 9, 2019 17:24
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pseudanonymous posted:That's too bad if he's a chud or whatever, I've only read the Hyperion books, Ilium/Olympos, Drood, and The Hollow Man and I didn't see anything that I found to be particularly problematic. Sounds like Flashback is a doozy.
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Apr 9, 2019 18:13
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quote:The Global Caliphate, an Islamic organization obsessed with destroying the Jews, somehow gained access to these proto-voynix and after replicating 3 million of them, battled the New European Union around 3000 AD. In 3200 AD, the Global Caliphate upgraded the Voynix and programmed them to kill Jews. oh
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Apr 9, 2019 18:27
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They also made a virus to kill all the Jews, but somebody missed a negative sign and it accidentally killed everyone but the Jews instead. Dan Simmons yall e: They also made a submarine full of black hole bombs to blow up the Earth. Those wacky Caliphates
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Apr 9, 2019 18:32
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Correction, sir. That’s suck up the Earth.
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Apr 9, 2019 18:33
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Triple Simmons  quote:He knew that less than a couple of hundred miles northeast of where the effelbahn ended there, there was a sixty-mile-wide circle of the terrain fused into glass where thiry-two hundred years ago the Global Caliphate had fought its determining battle with the N.E.U. - more than three million proto-voynix pouring over and past two hundred thousand doomed human mechanized-infantry knights. Something about this passage is driving my dog crazy!
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Apr 9, 2019 18:40
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All this talk of Caliphates makes me wonder if Helm by Steven Gould holds up. (The religious war was just a bit of back story at the very beginning.)
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Apr 9, 2019 18:41
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like, the progression is that you find out from his latter works that Simmons is a severe islamophobe, then you think "well, what about Kassad?", then you start to wonder uh...how many hands Simmons was typing with, so to speak, when he wrote the backstory bit about Kassad blowing up those jihadis on Islam PlanetJedit posted:I didn't know that, but I liked the first one. huh I didn't know there were multiple editions I've only got whatever printing had the misleadingly action-packed interior cover art spread PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Apr 9, 2019 |
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Apr 9, 2019 18:49
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Johnny Truant posted:Uh, so Death's End is breaking my brain in ways I didn't even think possible
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Apr 9, 2019 22:54
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Book owns. Even if I have a quibble with how gender roles are presented in it. I agree. At first it's kind of a minor detail but it gets more attention than it really should. I just finished the chapter where Sophon meets Cheng Xin and Luo Ji for the last time before leaving Earth, and while I absolutely knew it was coming, the sentence of her telling Cheng "oh yeah btw Yun Tianming wants to see you again" was just like fuuuuuuuuck! I also spent probably twenty minutes trying to conceive of the fourth dimensional bubbles that Gravity and Blue Space encounter. This book loving has it all, goddamn!
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Apr 9, 2019 23:32
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General Battuta posted:IMO it's a mess. But hopefully it'll read a lot better as a piece with the third book. It was basically one huge thing split in half-ish. Ah that explains a lot. I was worried that book 4 was the result of book 3 being split off, rather than book 2 being split into 2 and 3.
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Apr 10, 2019 01:24
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Telsa Cola posted:Any books with small tidbits of old earth stuff? Bit of an odd request but some of my favorite scenes in books are when people have like the mona lisa or a space orbiter as an old artifact or whatever. The Prince of Thorns/Red Queens War by Mark Lawrence
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Apr 10, 2019 03:46
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Are V.E. Schwab's books good? The covers look great, but the superhero one sounds a bit too edgy for me. Shades of Magic series does sound interesting though.
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Apr 10, 2019 07:42
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Not really. They’re kind of bland and unremarkable.
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Apr 10, 2019 07:59
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I read the first Shades of Magic book, and I liked the premise but the actual execution was pretty boring.
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Apr 10, 2019 08:13
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PupsOfWar posted:this reminds me Williams is doing a new Dread Empire trilogy now! Oh gently caress that's right. I enjoyed the first one, and Williams' writing in general. Aristoi is one of my beloved books and he writes a rippin' good space opera.
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Apr 10, 2019 09:21
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I enjoyed the superhero books she did.
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Apr 10, 2019 10:34
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Selachian posted:I read the first Shades of Magic book, and I liked the premise but the actual execution was pretty boring. Mind explaining why it was boring?
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Apr 10, 2019 10:53
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Was it here that someone linked to a hilarious Goodreads review of Abercrombie's books aping his style? I can't find it anymore. edit: nvm found it - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/385334385?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1 Cicero fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 12:30
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Schneider Heim posted:Mind explaining why it was boring? It's been a couple years since I read it and I don't have a copy (library book), so from memory: None of the characters really grabbed me. In the case of the male protagonist, Kell, part of that was probably expectations. The jacket and early chapters made me expect something like a dimension-hopping rogue and con artist in the mold of Kickaha the Trickster from the World of Tiers books, and of course he isn't really anything like that. I couldn't really get interested in the whole business of his being an adopted member of the Red London royal family.The female protagonist, Lila, was more interesting, and I wish there had been more of her. But when they finally got together, I didn't feel any chemistry between them, either as partners or lovers, whichever direction Schwab planned to take them in later books. Villain-wise, the evil twins who ruled White London were okay. I enjoyed the bits I got of their rivalry. But I felt there was a lot more tell than show about how bad they were, and in the end they came across as pale imitations of better-drawn monsters. Holland wasn't a particularly interesting villain, because his only personality trait was "better than Kell at magic" and he spent most of the book as the twins' puppet, with no apparent motivations of his own. As for the setting -- the idea of parallel versions of the same city is interesting enough, but they came across to me as thinly described: Real World, Magic World, Crapsack World, Hell World. To me, the point of using parallel worlds is to explore how they're similar and different, and in the case of real-world settings like London, to play with familiar locations in worlds that operate on very different rules. I didn't get any of that sense of place from this book; they might as well have just been generic fantasy cities that happened to be called London. I did like some of the descriptions of Red London, and wish there'd been more of that. Of course, that's just me. There are clearly quite a few people who enjoyed the book.
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Apr 10, 2019 13:55
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Telsa Cola posted:Any books with small tidbits of old earth stuff? Bit of an odd request but some of my favorite scenes in books are when people have like the mona lisa or a space orbiter as an old artifact or whatever. A Canticle for Leibowitz
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Apr 10, 2019 14:16
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Telsa Cola posted:Any books with small tidbits of old earth stuff? Bit of an odd request but some of my favorite scenes in books are when people have like the mona lisa or a space orbiter as an old artifact or whatever. A transcript of that one Mass Effect 2 DLC with Kasumi.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:20
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Telsa Cola posted:Any books with small tidbits of old earth stuff? Bit of an odd request but some of my favorite scenes in books are when people have like the mona lisa or a space orbiter as an old artifact or whatever. The short story "Pots" by C.J. Cherryh.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:29
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Telsa Cola posted:Any books with small tidbits of old earth stuff? Bit of an odd request but some of my favorite scenes in books are when people have like the mona lisa or a space orbiter as an old artifact or whatever. I've always been fond of Jack McDevitt's "Eternity Road" for this.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:31
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PupsOfWar posted:the thing with Simmons is that, once you're familiar with his politics, you see signs of it sorta sprinkled throughout his oeuvre Ah, the Lex Mieville. For some of us that is not a problem, as long as the story is good. Well, as long as it doesn’t go off the deep end like Olympus.
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Apr 10, 2019 18:17
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Simmons' stories aren't good, though. For all of Miéville's preachiness, he's a good writer. e: By genre standards, at least. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 18:21
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Whoa thank you for the flurry of recommendations y'all. Ill start working through them.
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Apr 10, 2019 19:22
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How to tell you're reading military sci-fi for the kids: clusterfuck is literally spelled like this: cluster**** And the heroine apologizes for saying it
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Apr 10, 2019 19:37
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anilEhilated posted:Simmons' stories aren't good, though. For all of Miéville's preachiness, he's a good writer. China Mieville, world's tallest dwarf.
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Apr 10, 2019 19:41
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anilEhilated posted:Simmons' stories aren't good, though. For all of Miéville's preachiness, he's a good writer. I really don't understand this recurring comment that Mieville is "preachy". It just seems like people don't like the idea of socialism, rather than think about it they condemn its inclusion in a book.
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Apr 10, 2019 20:11
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pseudanonymous posted:I really don't understand this recurring comment that Mieville is "preachy". It just seems like people don't like the idea of socialism, rather than think about it they condemn its inclusion in a book. If Mieville is preachy, then Ken Macleod is a preacher with a megaphone who won't shut up
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Apr 10, 2019 20:15
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pseudanonymous posted:I really don't understand this recurring comment that Mieville is "preachy". It just seems like people don't like the idea of socialism, rather than think about it they condemn its inclusion in a book. Think it's more that "Mieville is addicted to showing off how intelligent/educated he is" by cramming 20 complicated words in a sentence where 3 simple words would fit. Socialism in fantasy + scifi works is under-represented, that is agreed on. Offhand, China Mieville, Ken MacLeod, and Mack Reynolds are the only fantasy/scifi authors I can remember, without googling, who do "socialism".
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Apr 10, 2019 20:20
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Iain M. Banks.
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Apr 10, 2019 20:22
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Think it's more that "Mieville is addicted to showing off how intelligent/educated he is" by cramming 20 complicated words in a sentence where 3 simple words would fit. So he's not preachy at all and instead people don't like his writing style but rather than say that they claim he's preachy?
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Apr 10, 2019 20:31
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tooterfish posted:Iain M. Banks. Also Kim Stanley Robinson
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Apr 10, 2019 20:36
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pseudanonymous posted:So he's not preachy at all and instead people don't like his writing style but rather than say that they claim he's preachy? Pretty much, yeah.
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Apr 10, 2019 20:40
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