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StrixNebulosa posted:Just finished Gridlinked. Huh. What a weird and unsatisfying book. Half of it was on a madman's pov that ultimately went nowhere, and the central alien mystery was left kind of unresolved. Kind of. I understand that the Dragon wanted the Maker framed for killing 10k people, and that Cormac figured this out and nuked the Dragon's orb, but I still want to know who/what the Maker is, so naturally the book ends before we really talk to it. Gridlinked is very much a first authors book. Also, with Asher you are there for the violence and xenobiology, everything else is kinda secondary to that.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:49
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ToxicFrog posted:FYI, the questions you have are mostly answered in the sequels to Gridlinked, which The Skinner isn't -- it's in the same universe but has no characters or plotlines in common with the Agent Cormac books. Ah, noted! I might grab that second book instead of Skinner, or both of them...we'll have to see how much steam destroys my wallet this year. Cardiac posted:Gridlinked is very much a first authors book. And in his first book he hadn't figured that out yet, huh? Eesh, we spent so many chapters in Pelter's head and basically nothing came out of it except for Mr Crane, who was admittedly awesome.
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Jun 17, 2019 17:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:Just finished Gridlinked. Huh. What a weird and unsatisfying book. Half of it was on a madman's pov that ultimately went nowhere, and the central alien mystery was left kind of unresolved. Kind of. I understand that the Dragon wanted the Maker framed for killing 10k people, and that Cormac figured this out and nuked the Dragon's orb, but I still want to know who/what the Maker is, so naturally the book ends before we really talk to it. I disliked it so much I doubt I'm ever going to pick up another one. I liked the weird, but agree completely about the unsatisfying and the whole "madman's pov that ultimately went nowhere" was one of my biggest issues with it as well. A couple of cool ideas that I enjoyed and a few good action beats but, not my thing and based on defences here (such as Cardiac's "there for the violence and xenobiology, everything else is kinda secondary to that") yeah, probably never going to be my thing even if they improve in other respects. But not everything needs to be everyone's thing so that's fine and I have made my peace with that! Based on what people have said here the violence ramps up and gets increasingly sadistic over time and it sounds like he's a big fan of alien/future/xeno/tech that allows characters to be forced to endure an otherwise impossible amount of pain, repeatedly, without relief which has got to be one of, if not my least favourite SF trope... even if some of my favourite authors have been guilty of it. Unless I'm confusing him with someone else (I'm not, I checked and complained about it when I first read the book as well). Gravy Jones fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jun 17, 2019 |
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Jun 17, 2019 19:39
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Finished Ted Chiang's Exhalations collection and really enjoyed it. Not all of them hit for me, but The Lifecycle of Software Objects left me with this growing, lingering sense of unease that was a really good read. I want to read more about AIs/robots but really, something fluffier like Murderbot this time,.
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Jun 18, 2019 09:32
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coolusername posted:Finished Ted Chiang's Exhalations collection and really enjoyed it. Not all of them hit for me, but The Lifecycle of Software Objects left me with this growing, lingering sense of unease that was a really good read. I want to read more about AIs/robots but really, something fluffier like Murderbot this time,. Have you read Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad? I can also recommend Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover or John Sladek's Roderick books.
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Jun 18, 2019 11:25
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Gravy Jones posted:I disliked it so much I doubt I'm ever going to pick up another one. I liked the weird, but agree completely about the unsatisfying and the whole "madman's pov that ultimately went nowhere" was one of my biggest issues with it as well. A couple of cool ideas that I enjoyed and a few good action beats but, not my thing and based on defences here (such as Cardiac's "there for the violence and xenobiology, everything else is kinda secondary to that") yeah, probably never going to be my thing even if they improve in other respects. But not everything needs to be everyone's thing so that's fine and I have made my peace with that! Asher is not for everyone and some one in this thread likened him to the non-subtle version of Banks, which is an apt description. I had to look book at the plot for Gridlinked and remembered how little of that book survives into the remaining series. As for the ramp up of violence, it is more a case of basically making the conflict galaxial with all that means in terms of kill counts. I wouldn't say that is becomes more sadistic over time, but torturing his protagonists is kinda common. Interestingly, with the exception of the war drones, none of the protagonists are that interesting or engaging.
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Jun 18, 2019 15:01
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Owner Harrington
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Jun 18, 2019 15:09
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Cardiac posted:Asher is not for everyone and some one in this thread likened him to the non-subtle version of Banks, which is an apt description. Some of this sounded familiar so I checked post histories and we've had this conversation before, so probably little point in going around in circles! That said, even a brief look suggests our tastes are, for the most part, pretty similar. So instead I will ask: I've seen you suggest that the Luna series (which I've been enjoying so far) isn't as good as Macdonald's earlier work. What do you recommend?
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Jun 18, 2019 15:58
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90 pages into Cowl by Neal Asher a friend had it for me to borrow and this is much better - I'm invested in Polly and Tack, and the time travel is bonkers.
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Jun 18, 2019 16:09
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Cardiac posted:Asher is not for everyone and some one in this thread likened him to the non-subtle version of Banks, which is an apt description. Mostly agree; Sable Keech was set up interestingly but then just didn't develop (although I thought what he did after the book which we only heard of in passing was funny). The crab-thing in Orbus had some mildly interesting development going on - Asher may actually be better at writing non-humans.
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Jun 18, 2019 17:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:90 pages into Cowl by Neal Asher a friend had it for me to borrow and this is much better - I'm invested in Polly and Tack, and the time travel is bonkers. Is that the one where timelines fall on a wave so that the most common/likely ones fall in troughs and require little energy to cross into, where as the peaks require more and more energy to reach depending where on the wave you start from?
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Jun 18, 2019 18:04
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The last 5th of Fall is kind of a damp fart.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:19
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Nevvy Z posted:The last 5th of Fall is kind of a damp fart. Oh man! I've been digging it so far despite the flak it's gotten here, but I'm 53% through it.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:22
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Sibling of TB posted:Oh man! I've been digging it so far despite the flak it's gotten here, but I'm 53% through it. If there's one thing to hate about Kindles, it's the sudden burst of precision that has replaced "about 80 pages in".
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Jun 18, 2019 18:32
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Jedit posted:If there's one thing to hate about Kindles, it's the sudden burst of precision that has replaced "about 80 pages in". i get antsy when i dont know how many pages there are what is a "location" amazon??????
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Jun 18, 2019 18:50
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I recently read Westside by WM Akers and figured some might like it. It takes place in a prohibition era New York City, where the west side of the city has become dangerous, and not just in a typical urban way. People regularly disappear, reportedly they're taken by the shadows. Naturally, a fence is built down Broadway segregating the city into "normal" New York, and the Westside where people disappear and technology fails. Our heroine is a detective specializing in tiny mysteries. As you may suspect, one of these leads to some not so tiny mysteries that threaten the city itself. Pretty solid read, reminds me a bit of Sean Stewart's stuff, which I'm always on the lookout for. If a prohibition era half malevolent New York strikes your fancy, you'll probably enjoy it.
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Jun 18, 2019 18:52
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Proteus Jones posted:Is that the one where timelines fall on a wave so that the most common/likely ones fall in troughs and require little energy to cross into, where as the peaks require more and more energy to reach depending where on the wave you start from? Yeah! If you kill your dad before you're born it suddenly takes a lot more energy to get back to your present.
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Jun 18, 2019 21:15
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Max Gladstone's space opera, Empress of Forever, is out today, and it is suitably epic thus far (about 25% in). Very much enjoying these spacecraft descriptions, among many other things... quote:The ships fell into two factions, judging from design: one swooping, multicolored glass and beautiful, like fighter jets designed by Gothic architects with an unlimited stained glass budget. Those were tiny, darting gnatlike between the others. The second faction looked like three-dimensional fractals, Mandelbulbs and Mandelboxes and Sierpinski pyramids made out of prisms, black wire, and hate. There were more hate fractals. They were larger, and they were winning. What else was new. quote:Beyond the door lay a hangar. And in the hangar there was a ship. Viv loved the ship at first sight. She was a matte-black bird of metal and glass with a falcon’s beak, and massive drums that might be engines or turbines beneath her stubby wings. There were panels and seams on her skin, hatches for personnel and connectors for hoses, a ramp, raised, for ingress, sized right for human beings. People had made this ship, or something like people—with their hands, with machines their hands made. It was not leftover godstuff, not some stained-glass glory or hate fractal curse. People built this ship to go places.
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Jun 18, 2019 23:20
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oh poo poo, gladstone's making spacebooks now??
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Jun 19, 2019 00:07
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I read the first couple chapters of that on some website a month ago and I was super into it, but the book wasn't out yet.
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Jun 19, 2019 03:01
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Gravy Jones posted:Some of this sounded familiar so I checked post histories and we've had this conversation before, so probably little point in going around in circles! That said, even a brief look suggests our tastes are, for the most part, pretty similar. So instead I will ask: I've seen you suggest that the Luna series (which I've been enjoying so far) isn't as good as Macdonald's earlier work. What do you recommend? All the discussions here go in circles. We are on our nth iteration of Weber or Simmons which could have been copy-pasted without anyone noticing. I have sofar never been disappointed by McDonald and I recall River of Gods, Dervish House and Brasyl to be good if you like cyberpunk-like fiction in India, turkey or Brazil. McDonald in general have a rather focused storyline with good pacing, but his main strength is trying to extrapolate current national culture (in the good way) to how it would adapt technology. There is also a severe lack of the usual future is grim and depressing, although you still have the usual large controlling multinational companies of cyberpunk. I liked Luna, but IMO his other books are better. It is kinda an amalgam of his other books in that he could mix Brazilian, Russian, Chinese, Australian and African cultural settings in one book without making it too weird. Neurosis posted:Mostly agree; Sable Keech was set up interestingly but then just didn't develop (although I thought what he did after the book which we only heard of in passing was funny). The crab-thing in Orbus had some mildly interesting development going on - Asher may actually be better at writing non-humans. That is why there are no baseline human POVs in his latest series. I also get the feeling he is getting more depressed and cynical with regards to humanity as judged from his latter books.
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Jun 19, 2019 05:21
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I've been waiting for my local library to get it in, but I own every single other one of Gladstone's books so I might as well just buy it...
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Jun 19, 2019 06:15
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Cardiac posted:
Unfortunately, his wife died relatively young a few years ago, which I don't think has helped in that regard.
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Jun 19, 2019 09:06
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https://twitter.com/Mark__Lawrence/status/1141356383331389440
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Jun 19, 2019 16:36
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New Yorker profile of Liu Cixin. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds
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Jun 19, 2019 18:14
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Drone Jett posted:New Yorker profile of Liu Cixin. This is pretty interesting but as a heads up the first few paragraphs are pretty spoiler-filled.
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Jun 19, 2019 18:27
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Quinton posted:Max Gladstone's space opera, Empress of Forever, is out today, and it is suitably epic thus far (about 25% in). I'm about 80% of the way through (sorry Kindle haters) and it's very, very good. I was especially pleased that what I had assumed was going to be the final plot twist was just a mid-way change of acts.
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Jun 19, 2019 19:13
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Neurosis posted:Asher may actually be better at writing non-humans.
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Jun 19, 2019 19:30
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hhahaha
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Jun 19, 2019 19:45
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That cover on the left is like indie author tier.
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Jun 19, 2019 20:08
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Sandra Bernhard no!
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Jun 19, 2019 20:17
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I like that one on the left. Grotesque figures are always better than the generic cover of the right.
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Jun 19, 2019 20:22
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papa horny michael posted:I like that one on the left. Grotesque figures are always better than the generic cover of the right. I wasn't sure which was supposed to be the bad one. The one on the left is bizarrely off-scale, the one on the right looks like Aubrey Plaza's character from The Little Hours somehow ended up in a video game. I mean I'd play that game but still
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Jun 19, 2019 20:24
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They are both bad.
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Jun 19, 2019 20:42
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Quinton posted:Max Gladstone's space opera, Empress of Forever, is out today, and it is suitably epic thus far (about 25% in). Max Gladstone is very good and I’m excited to dig into this book on my day off, so I’m glad to hear people are liking it. I just hope it doesn’t mean he’s done with magical economics and skeleton CEOs yet
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Jun 19, 2019 21:14
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Speaking of Craft Sequence, I'm wondering whether I should continue. I read Three Parts Dead, absolutely loved it end-to-end. I enjoyed Two Serpents Rise but the characters didn't grab me as much and the story was a bit meh, but still got through it in a week or something like it. I just finished Full Fathom Five, and it was kind of a slog. It took me forever to finish, the book felt so backloaded that I was wondering around the halfway mark if anything was going to happen. The mystery felt kind of sparse, though I ultimately liked the end quarter of the book or so, where some of the storylines from the previous two books actually got tied in in a substantial way, and some of the reveals happened (though the last reveal somehow felt both extremely telegraphed and pretty abrupt). With all that in mind, should I keep going? I loved all the magic lawyer stuff in the first book, I loved Alt Coulumb as a setting, I liked the characters quite a bit, but neither of the next two books really grabbed me in the same way. I mostly appreciated that by the end of FFF, it felt like there was indeed an overarching storyline that was going to happen, rather than them being kind of one-off books. Is that actually the case? edit: the Deathless Kings and all of their background and origin was super interesting, but a lot of the rest of Two Serpents Rise felt a little fumbled, like given all the ideas the book had, they should have been more engaging or better executed or something.
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Jun 19, 2019 21:27
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IYKK posted:They are both bad. e: This one:  e2: Regarding Craft Sequence - IMO, Full Fathom Five is the weakest one (although it gets better on the reread when you aren't miffed by seeing the plot twist from miles away) and the next two specifically revisit the settings of Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise and you're given some background for characters of the latter. I'd suggest sticking with it. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Jun 19, 2019 |
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Jun 19, 2019 21:34
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MockingQuantum posted:Speaking of Craft Sequence, I'm wondering whether I should continue. I read Three Parts Dead, absolutely loved it end-to-end. I enjoyed Two Serpents Rise but the characters didn't grab me as much and the story was a bit meh, but still got through it in a week or something like it. I just finished Full Fathom Five, and it was kind of a slog. It took me forever to finish, the book felt so backloaded that I was wondering around the halfway mark if anything was going to happen. The mystery felt kind of sparse, though I ultimately liked the end quarter of the book or so, where some of the storylines from the previous two books actually got tied in in a substantial way, and some of the reveals happened (though the last reveal somehow felt both extremely telegraphed and pretty abrupt). I did not personally love Last First Snow, but it fills in a lot of the background from Two Serpents Rise and Three Parts Dead. I really like Four Roads Cross (back in Alt Coulumb as a setting) and a Ruin of Angels. anilEhilated posted:e2: Regarding Craft Sequence - IMO, Full Fathom Five is the weakest one (although it gets better on the reread when you aren't miffed by seeing the plot twist from miles away) and the next two specifically revisit the settings of Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise and you're given some background for characters of the latter. I'd suggest sticking with it. Yeah I think I liked Full Fathom Five more on a second read than a first read, but it's definitely a little slower moving than some of the books.
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Jun 19, 2019 21:51
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Quinton posted:Max Gladstone's space opera, Empress of Forever, is out today, and it is suitably epic thus far (about 25% in). good looking out I was just looking for an audiobook for a long drive this week
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Jun 20, 2019 03:28
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Grimson posted:I did not personally love Last First Snow, but it fills in a lot of the background from Two Serpents Rise and Three Parts Dead. I really like Four Roads Cross (back in Alt Coulumb as a setting) and a Ruin of Angels. Conversely, Last First Snow was probably my favourite, but my favourite characters are Elayne Kevarian and Kopil, so I figure I'm probably an outlier. Edit: But yeah, Full Fathom Five is probably the weakest first time 'round. I say stick with it.
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Jun 20, 2019 03:41
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