|
Please try actually reading some recent Gibson before you dismiss him out of hand. Christ. e: Also implying that Asimov wrote about robots purely for wank material... He was a dick. He also wrote some genuinely clever stories that are worth reading. StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Jan 15, 2020 |
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 03:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 22:56 |
|
|
I dismissed him after hating Neuromancer and I’m okay with that. Plenty more authors under the sun.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 03:51
|
|
|
Fallom posted:I dismissed him after hating Neuromancer and I’m okay with that. Plenty more authors under the sun. Now that's a valid reason to hate him. He has a style for better or for worse.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 03:52
|
|
|
Neuromancer, overall, was probably his best work. Extremely creative and stylish. A few warts but whatever, it was great.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 03:53
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Thinking back about Isaac Asimov, and his #MeToo gropiness: guess that's why Asimov wrote so many robot/3 laws of robotics stories. Robots can't speak out or fight back when they get groped or worse. That's a stretch. Especially since the human main character in I, Robot is female and the robots are almost all male.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 04:01
|
|
|
Pretty much got bored of Gibson's limited range of character archtypes (The Hacker, The Protector-Badass, the-Lead-Character-That-Needs-Protecting) in his stories by Idoru. Gibson's the Peripheral had a-lot of dangling plot points (and some hamfisted writing) which never got resolved for what appeared to be a one-off novel. The black box inter-connecting two universes with entropy deadlining the connection was the one interesting thing in the Peripheral for me. Silver2195 posted:That's a stretch. Especially since the human main character in I, Robot is female and the robots are almost all male. Susan Calvin tied that story collection together, and made it work. Other than Susan Calvin, weren't most of the other female characters in Asimov's stories love interests or something? Favorite 2 oddball Asimov story that never seems to make it into anthologies are Asimov's robo-brain/AI going let there be light story, and the story about 3 heavy-gravity robots visiting jupiter or saturn and inadvertently stopping a extinction level interplanetary war.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 04:58
|
|
|
The Machine That Won the War is timeless
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 05:03
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Now that's a valid reason to hate him. He has a style for better or for worse. for sure but he's got a lot of variation in that style, Count Zero for example reads very differently from Neuromancer despite being a more-or-less sequel. I don't love Gibson all that much but I think he's the kind of author where you can love or a few books and not the rest. one thing I'll say is that I never got much desire to re-read his books. I think I've read Neuromancer twice in 15 years and that's plenty.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 07:22
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Susan Calvin tied that story collection together, and made it work. Other than Susan Calvin, weren't most of the other female characters in Asimov's stories love interests or something? It was Jupiter, and the story is collected in The Complete Robot anthology released in the 1980s. I forget the name of it though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 12:23
|
|
|
Victory Unintentional. I always liked the one about Cutie, whose job is to keep space power beams on target and who quite reasonably determines that the outside universe is false data, they're obeying god, and the humans who visit the satellite are just being created with false memories because they can't handle the truth and then destroyed when they leave. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Jan 15, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 12:32
|
|
|
Huh. Is there actually another Baru book? I’ve only read the first one but I liked. How’s the second one?
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 13:39
|
|
|
90s Cringe Rock posted:Victory Unintentional. Powell and Donovan are if anything better than Susan Calvin as protagonists, and they appear in even fewer stories.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 14:18
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Depression sucks Indeed it does, and anti-depressants make you fat. It is a land of contrasts. Currently on Book 2 of the Merchant Princes, and other than the "Mills and Boon" sections I am really enjoying it. Sisters are doing it for themselves.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:10
|
|
|
Affi posted:Huh. Is there actually another Baru book? I’ve only read the first one but I liked. How’s the second one? But it's good, buy it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:41
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Resnick death: I've never read anything by Mike Resnick but I've read his daughter's fantasy trilogy. Laura Resnick wrote In Legend Born, The White Dragon, and The Destroyer Goddess, which we enjoyed well enough at the time. I guess she wrote a bunch of romance before those and has since moved into urban fantasy with the Esther Diamond series. I vaguely remember my mother or sister getting Dopplegangster but I didn't read any more of hers beyond that. Sucks about her dad, both that he died and that he used the power of his position to behave that way.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:it turns out they forced a split into four books (which may have been undone if the third book is really 752 pages? jeez) When GB turned in Baru 3, he tweeted about needing to start Baru 4, so the tetralogy seems to still be on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 19:43
|
|
|
Black Griffon posted:Anyone read Winter World by A. G. Riddle and have thoughts? Premise seems cool, reviews drawing similarities with Dan Brown makes me skeptical. I picked this up, and I'm 49% in now. In many ways it feels like babby's first sci-fi because you've got characters explaining the most basic concepts of gravity and orbital mechanics to people who absolutely know that poo poo, and in many ways it substitutes statistics for actual hard science, but it has that dumb little spark of mystery that makes poo poo like Dan Brown actually fun for some people (like me) even though it is, as I said, dumb. The author is pretty good at dropping small hints that lets you puzzle together the mystery before it's revealed, whilst still keeping it vague enough to keep you guessing. It's not particularly well written, but it's perfectly functional language, and there's way worse out there. I'm gonna finish this book, but it remains to be seen if it ends on a good enough note to buy the second one.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 19:51
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:As good as the first, maybe slightly less so because I was expecting it to get to the point where everything was 2/3 resolved but then it turns out they forced a split into four books (which may have been undone if the third book is really 752 pages? jeez) I've been stalled out on it like a third of the way through for months now. Guess I'll have to try to pick it back up.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 02:40
|
|
|
Clarkesworld has pulled that attack helicopter story.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 02:54
|
|
|
freebooter posted:Clarkesworld has pulled that attack helicopter story. https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1217447877770928129
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 02:55
|
|
|
Just finished Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, first of her Raksura series. By the end I found it to be almost as good as murderbot, or at least hitting the right emotional beats for me - it's comfort fantasy. Terrible danger and adventure happens, but in a way where I know things will work out and they do. Moon does make friends and find a partner. It's not particularly deep but I really enjoyed the world-building and the...well, everything. I've preordered book two, but I appreciate that this book ended in a satisfactory way. If it were a standalone I'd want more but I could be happy with the ending. Next up: finding out if I'm going to finish Hierophant's Daughter (cyberpunk vampire thriller) or Behind the Throne (space princess vs space assassins vs my inherent belief that in the future we shouldn't have monarchies but instead something better) first. I'm halfway through both and enjoying them a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 04:18
|
|
|
Murderbot is so good. I've only read the first two because I need to pace my purchases, but it's absolutely lovely.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 04:30
|
|
|
ed balls balls man posted:Solidarity to the General. We stand for Battuta. pmchem posted:Neuromancer, overall, was probably his best work. Extremely creative and stylish. A few warts but whatever, it was great. It's really hard to convey to those who came to the book later, just how much impact Neuromancer had. Cyberpunk went from almost zero to a major scene instantly. The book itself, the actual prose, was electric by current standards. Mirrorshades, razor blade fingernails, and glittering cityscapes of data sprang into existence like Athena from Zeus' forehead. Literature changed, the future changed. There was a before Neuromancer and an after. The most famous line in the book, the very first one in the book, is "The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel." Thanks to the march of time and technology, that is now a cloudless-sky blue. Neuromancer is now a message of hope. Enjoy this link to someone writing 15 years after the book Not Getting It. https://ianhamet.wordpress.com/2006/03/17/first-lines-neuromancer/
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 04:55
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:It's really hard to convey to those who came to the book later, just how much impact Neuromancer had. Cyberpunk went from almost zero to a major scene instantly. The book itself, the actual prose, was electric by current standards. Mirrorshades, razor blade fingernails, and glittering cityscapes of data sprang into existence like Athena from Zeus' forehead. Literature changed, the future changed. There was a before Neuromancer and an after. I agree, and I think the book was always going to be impossible for me to enjoy as much as others did given that I came to it so late. The part I enjoyed the most was seeing the root of all those ideas as if I were reading through a museum. However, I've been so inundated by that imagery that it had zero emotional impact on me. Without that impact, the only parts that stood out were the paper-thin characters and often-confusing or clunky prose. Tiny Timbs fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jan 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 06:02
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Just finished Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, first of her Raksura series. By the end I found it to be almost as good as murderbot, or at least hitting the right emotional beats for me - it's comfort fantasy. Terrible danger and adventure happens, but in a way where I know things will work out and they do. Moon does make friends and find a partner. It's not particularly deep but I really enjoyed the world-building and the...well, everything. What do you mean preordered? There are already like 4 or 5 of the Raksura books out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 06:17
|
|
|
Reading Neuromancer back in the 80s when a good amount of computers were still running monochrome displays and technology was on the cusp of exploding was pretty cool. The late 80s and early 90s were something else. Electronic music started to really dominate, dark industrial and goth started to be the theme songs of hackers and wearing trenchcoats and combat boots replaced the nerdy glasses wearing stereo type. Neuromancer was a big influence in that entire scene. BBS's started to give way to the Internet. People laugh at the movie Hackers, but those hacker cliques were real in a lot of cities. We really did rollerblade around with backpacks, snuck into steam tunnels, and made free long distance calls across the world - phreaking was a nightly ritual. Spending nights crashing at each others place coding war dialers, and terminals. Stacks of 2600 were in everyones room. It sounds so stupid to type this but as a teenager it was loving awesome and felt like living that book just a little bit.
Philthy fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jan 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 06:48
|
|
|
a foolish pianist posted:What do you mean preordered? There are already like 4 or 5 of the Raksura books out. Mass market paperback editions, finally!
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 11:33
|
|
|
Christopher Tolkien died. https://twitter.com/TolkienSociety/status/1217865106652123137
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 19:08
|
|
|
gently caress. knew it was just a matter of time but that sucks. a real legend, the fantasy genre owes sooo much to him.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 19:20
|
|
|
my bony fealty posted:a real legend, the fantasy genre owes sooo much to him. Christopher Tolkein? Not J R R Tolkein? I read the Silmarillion back in the day and a couple of the other historical Middle-Earth things he put together from his fathers unpublished work and enjoyed them as a nerdy young teenager and sorry to see Christopher go, but I don't think his work had a significant impact on fantasy unless I'm missing something?
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:32
|
|
|
freebooter posted:Clarkesworld has pulled that attack helicopter story. File 770 has a writeup.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
team overhead smash posted:Christopher Tolkein? Not J R R Tolkein? As I understand it, he was the main editor and did a lot to get JRR's works out there. Therefore, we owe him. We owe him a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:37
|
|
|
team overhead smash posted:Christopher Tolkein? Not J R R Tolkein? His dad did more, but it was a team effort.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:39
|
|
|
90s Cringe Rock posted:Christopher Tolkien died. That is sad. Tolkien Society: Please keep Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson away from the Tolkien papers.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:44
|
|
|
team overhead smash posted:Christopher Tolkein? Not J R R Tolkein? sure, the Sil and History of Middle Earth etc. ensured that the well of Tolkien lore will never run dry and for better or worse set a precedent for exhaustive "worldbuilding." I dont have stats or anything but surely many fantasy writers have found themselves more deeply immersed in Middle Earth thanks to Christopher's work. some influence on other media too, loads of Rings-related or inspired video games that draw on non-trilogy material.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:45
|
|
|
Tolkien Society: please immediately public domain everything and let everyone do whatever they feel like to the legendarium. unironically.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:45
|
|
|
90s Cringe Rock posted:I'd say he's got a hell of a lot of good Middle Earth stuff published that could easily have been forgotten, but then I'm the kind of idiot who giggles at /r/SilmarillionMemes and shitposts about Fëanor. Also most.of LotR was originally written in the form of letters to Christopher. He was an active participant in the creation.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 20:53
|
|
|
I actually read the Silmarillion before I read any other Tolkien stuff (thanks to Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle-earth) and I really enjoyed the world he (helped) craft through it. edit: I really enjoyed this series as a refresher BTW https://www.tor.com/2017/09/20/welcome-to-the-silmarillion-primer-an-introduction/ Nail Rat fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jan 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 21:03
|
|
|
A great blow to hobbitists and professionals alike.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 21:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 22:56 |
|
|
Speaking of hobbitists, some fucker copyright takedowned the Finnish LotR miniseries Hobitit on YouTube and I only just found out about it and had time to watch the first episode. Bilbo is not the best actor but as well as the "elves did rings, Sauron lost his, Déagol had a bad time" sequence they did the whole Riddles in the Dark and
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2020 21:28
|
|