|
I am one (1) stressful event away from buying another book trilogy
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 01:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 08:31 |
|
|
TheAardvark posted:I have never in my life been able to read 2 books at once, but honestly I haven't tried in at least a decade. It feels off in a weird way. Yeah, I'm strictly one book at a time when it comes to fiction, although sometimes I'll read one fiction and one nonfiction at the same time -- usually when the nonfiction is heavy going and I want occasional breaks from it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 02:44
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:I am one (1) stressful event away from buying another book trilogy I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. For content, has anyone N.K. Jemisin's 'The City We Became' ? It's... interesting, so far, about a third of the way through. Modern-day weirdness in which cities that reach a certain level of "greatness" undergo a psychic awakening, embodied in human avatars who are their protectors and caretakers, and whose very first duty is to defend the city at the moment of its birth from extradimensional horrors that prey on vulnerable newborn metropolises. Neat concept, but I'm not sure it's something I can fully appreciate as a Californian. This book fuckin' loves New York, the city undergoing its awakening in the first part of what looks to be a trilogy, and if this degree of adoration were heaped on a country it would feel jingoistic and gross; applied to city I've only visited briefly, it just feels slightly baffling. I'd love to get the reaction of an actual New Yorker to this one. Kestral fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 02:53
|
|
|
Black Griffon posted:it takes an concerted fight against my diagnosed ADHD to not read every book I own at once, and the only way I get any reading done is by sticking to that. My preferred route to dealing with this is treating all books as single servings. Just read the whole drat thing at a stretch.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 02:59
|
|
|
Kestral posted:I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. I read it a couple of months back and was kind of underwhelmed. Maybe I missed a lot by being a non-American white guy who's never been to NY, but it just didn't grab me. The characters were fine and the concept was alright, but it all felt weirdly anaemic to me. I liked the "White Supremacy = Cosmic Horror" angle, but the rest of it fell flat. (End spoilers) Also maybe it'll turn out in the sequels that R'lyeh was lying to them and that cities don't cause whole universes to die, but if that's true it kind of undermines the themes. Edit: I read it in January though, so I might be misremembering bits. cptn_dr fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 03:16
|
|
|
I find Goodreads mostly useful for lists and categorisations. Also the people you're friends with always show up at the top of the reviews for any book, so if you follow enough decent, thoughtful and prolific review writers then you can avoid most of the sparkly-glitter-gif-yass-kween-5-stars crap.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 06:06
|
|
|
I was actually going to ask about the city we became, it seems like a very American novel, and I'm just not that familiar with the cities. Is it really hinging on knowing NYC to get invested/reliant on American pop culture knowledge?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 10:18
|
|
|
Kestral posted:I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. This description almost makes it sound like a prequel to the insanity in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence novels (in which Gods are basically avatars of collective consciousness, but they take place in a post-apocalypse for said Gods where humans usurp their power and cast them down into ruinous/catastrophic wastelands).
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 11:43
|
|
|
pradmer posted:Powder Mage Trilogy (Promise of Blood, Crimson Campaign, Autumn Republic) by Brian McClellan - $9.99 I loved hammer and the cross as a kid and it still holds up in a HH way... Alt-history where an English slave is shown by asgard gods new technology to fight with and against the ragnarssons and Alfred the great.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 12:48
|
|
|
branedotorg posted:I loved hammer and the cross as a kid and it still holds up in a HH way... Yeah, but it's pretty stupid. It's basically got a D&D version of the Norse pantheon complete with dedicated specialist priesthoods (only missing actual spell lists) and all the good guys basically think like openminded late 20th century center-left agnostic boomers. Edit: I mean, I did read & enjoy the whole trilogy. It was stupid but not boring. Groke fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 13:08
|
|
|
Asher's latest The Human is out. It is (sofar) exactly what you would expect.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 14:13
|
|
|
Kestral posted:I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. ha, fortunately for my wallet I no longer pay attention to the news. I'm mostly referring to the nightmare that is my brother having to live with us after losing his job. He flew out last month and got stranded here and things have been, hm. Which is to say: that's why I now own Kate Elliott's Crossroads + Spiritwalker trilogies and Valery Leith/Tricia Sullivan's Everien trilogy. I'm trying to not buy books without reading them, but stress-shopping is always a go. Given that Everien has like, no reviews I'm going to assume no one in here has read it, and so I will sell it via the same review that sold me on it: quote:3 and a half stars. third book of the trilogy called Everien, this whole set is an unusual fantasy, written under a pseudonym (presumably to distinguish it from her powerful sf genre work) by the writer Tricia Sullivan. the trilogy seems to have been written as one book, and then chopped into three roughly equal parts for publication, so that the finales of the first two books, arbitrarily set, are not written as such, which does not, let's say, encourage the reader to persevere. and the trilogy subject matter, time paradoxes, are not exactly a common theme in fantasy. as a result, reading the series can be confusing, and the fact that the landscape, the characters, and the plot are continually changing under the weight of chaotic time as it is engineered by a host of forces does not make it an easy read. Glen Cook's Black Company and Steven Erikson's Malazan books are the only books i can think of that have used time as a chaotic force in similar ways, and neither of them have made it the central conceit. A flawed but extremely interesting trilogy is exactly the kind of weird stuff I like to read, so as I read Kate Elliott I also sit by the mailbox sadly, waiting for my books to come.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 14:23
|
|
|
Experienced a nice meta moment when I used calibre to convert Vernor Vinge's True Names. Double ll's got converted to something else. The main characters name is Roger Pollack. Reading multiple books at the same time can be fun or mind-breaking. Never read Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path (it is schizophrenia bottom to top), under no circumstances read Critical Path and William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse at the same time. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Apr 16, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 17:46
|
|
|
Subterranean Press is giving away the ebook of Greg Egan's Phoresis. No idea if it's any good, though I think Egan is generally well regarded, but hey, it's free.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 19:45
|
|
|
Kestral posted:I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. I read the shorter, earlier version of that story. What I appreciated most about it was the harried, scattered prose emulating the main character's adrenaline-fueled fight or flight mental state. How much of that translates to the full book version?
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 20:42
|
|
|
Pretty much 20 years ago (god, it's been a while) I was conscripted in Finnish army, and during the service caught fever for reason or another. Was admitted to military hospital and had good time to read some books I had brought with me from back home. One book was Greg Egan's Diaspora, and reading the twenty page or so sequence in the beginning where new AI is born while at +39 C was something that has really, really stuck in my mind since. Heavy stuff.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2020 23:07
|
|
|
Forge of God by Greg Bear - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J52FOHI/ The second book is still on sale as well.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 01:23
|
|
|
TheAardvark posted:I have never in my life been able to read 2 books at once, but honestly I haven't tried in at least a decade. It feels off in a weird way. My usual routine involves on book I'm reading during my commute, usually a novel, and then something bulky and non-fiction I read at home if the mood strikes me. More than one novel at once would be hard.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 02:35
|
|
|
Alright, I'm gonna start reading the Hugo ballot now, starting with short stories. Honestly I'm a bit torn on the order of the top four stories, but I haven't decided if I'm going to actually vote yet. With my local library shut down due to quarantine and their ebook lending service backed up as much as it is, it might actually be cheaper to buy a membership to catch up with the novels and novellas. 1. "As the Last I May Know" by S.L. Huang 2. "Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island" by Nibedita Sen 3. "Blood Is Another Word for Hunger" by Rivers Solomon 4. "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" by Alix E. Harrow 5. NO AWARD 6. "A Catalog of Storms" by Fran Wilde 7. "And Now His Lordship Is Laughing" by Shiv Ramdas
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 02:38
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Given that Everien has like, no reviews I'm going to assume no one in here has read it, and so I will sell it via the same review that sold me on it: Lunsku posted:One book was Greg Egan's Diaspora, and reading the twenty page or so sequence in the beginning where new AI is born while at +39 C was something that has really, really stuck in my mind since. Heavy stuff. Permutation City was great too. Happiness Commando fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Apr 17, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 04:18
|
|
|
Happiness Commando posted:Do you anticipate getting into this moderately quickly, and if so, can you post with at least a mini review? If the mail isn't late, I should have the trilogy in hand next week. Assuming that I'm still in "give me all the fantasy ever" mood and getting new books excites me, I should start the first book next week. As for how long it'll take to read it - if it's really good, a few days. If not, longer. I'll report back when I know what's up. In the meantime I'm under 300 pages left in Crossroads 2 which means it's finally the length of a normal book! Depending on my mood I should have it done in a few days, and then onwards to the third and final volume! *All of my reading times vary on: mood, how absorbing the book is, how absorbing video games are, if I can read out by the garden or not, if my parents watch TV a lot and so turn off the lights in the main room where I do most of my reading, and how many distractions are going on. To those of you who aren't mood readers: I envy you. Being able to bang through a book regardless of whether it's speaking to you or not must be amazing and/or efficient. I've been wanting to read sci-fi for months now but the brain keeps telling me no, it's fantasy hour, bring out the horses.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 04:28
|
|
|
I have only one book reading setting, and that is "my physical body no longer exists in this realm until the book is completed or i hit a good chapter to stop on." I can't read before bed because I will end up reading until my morning alarm goes off and then only realise that it's 8 hours later. But a big hefty trilogy is excellent for 20 hour plane trips though.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 05:45
|
|
|
So I know at least some people who watch or read scifi actually know something about this here science stuff. I do not. I just watched an X-Files episode about a potential parasitic infection out break and while it was a parasite and not a virus it reminded me of stories like Crichton's The Andromeda Strain or King's The Stand. I love stories like this but whenever I talked about how realistic they made the horror people came along and said actually bioweapons suck and viruses wouldn't really spread and be that dangerous. I just believed them but given the current state of the world, I've grown skeptical. So, scifi readers who know science, are viruses and bioweapons actually as deadly as stories claim or not? i
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 05:47
|
|
|
Uh well there’s some history that would instruct you much better than any bunch of SF nerds. For most of human existence disease was probably the primary killer, especially in warfare. The Andromeda Strain and The Stand both present hyper-ridiculously extreme scenarios (with the Strain behaving more like a chemical agent that kills people in seconds than a microorganism, and the Stand virus being a bioweapon of incredible efficacy.) But viruses which kill millions of people absolutely do exist. AIDS has killed nearly half as many people as World War II. It’s a common myth that only unsuccessful diseases kill their hosts. Selection can favor a highly virulent strain as long as its enhanced virulence pays off in terms of reaching more hosts (before the existing host dies) than a gentler strain would. Especially if the disease lives in a zoonotic reservoir where it can chill, and only behaves aggressively when it gets into humans, there’s reason to think a single virus with a long incubation period and asymptomatic transmission absolutely could kill a significant fraction of the world. You’re asking for a simple answer to a complex question. Anyway read SPILLOVER by David Quammen. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Apr 17, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 05:59
|
|
|
There are also parts of the world that are very hard to live in because disease and disease vectors are so common. Anywhere with sleeping sickness is kind of a no-go zone for settlement, historically.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 06:02
|
|
|
Cardiac posted:Asher's latest The Human is out. ...please specify which country, as I immediately rushed to Amazon to find it not yet available in the glorious USA  ...and while I took a virtual trip over the pond for several Asher books (mostly not available here, IIRC), I seem to have bought the other two in that trilogy legit so I guess I should keep it up.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 06:04
|
|
|
Happiness Commando posted:Do you anticipate getting into this moderately quickly, and if so, can you post with at least a mini review? Egan has a new short story collection out. It's pretty good. And it has a series of shorts that are connected and could have been a novel. Not too much weird physics stuff except for one of them too.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 06:08
|
|
|
coolusername posted:I have only one book reading setting, and that is "my physical body no longer exists in this realm until the book is completed or i hit a good chapter to stop on." I can't read before bed because I will end up reading until my morning alarm goes off and then only realise that it's 8 hours later. Fwiw I found that audiobooks, where you set it up a ways off from your bed and set a sleep timer helps with this. I have a very similar problem reading at night and it definitely makes it easier to just stop before you've spent way too much time awake.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 06:24
|
|
RIP ZEEZ
|
NikkolasKing posted:So I know at least some people who watch or read scifi actually know something about this here science stuff. I do not. It's not sci-fi, but I just finished reading Charles Mann's two non-fiction books 1492 and 1493 about the pre-Columbian Americas and the Columbian Exchange respectively, and the accounts of what infectious disease can do to an unprepared population are insane. The upper estimate for the impact of introduced European diseases is in the region of 90% mortality in the century after Columbus - basically depopulating an entire continent. I don't know how solid the figures are but the qualitative stories of what measles, smallpox, malaria and influenza did to Native American societies are horrifying. Until the discovery of quinine, European expeditions to Central Africa typically expected 50% casualty rates from malaria and yellow fever, making the interior of the continent all but impenetrable. And those were naturally evolved diseases, not bioweapons. On the one hand, we know a lot more about epidemiology and how to contain pandemics than ever before. On the other hand, we're a far more crowded and interconnected world now than ever before, and current events show there's a big gap between knowing how to deal with these things and actually dealing with them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 07:39
|
|
|
Solitair posted:I read the shorter, earlier version of that story. What I appreciated most about it was the harried, scattered prose emulating the main character's adrenaline-fueled fight or flight mental state. How much of that translates to the full book version? The first (long) chapter is written in a completely different style from the rest of the book, and from your description I'm guessing that it's the short story. After that, the perspective shifts to the people who become the individual boroughs of New York, as they awaken into their power as secondary avatars of the metropolis. I haven't gotten all the way through yet, but as of about halfway through, it hasn't returned to the original narrator, and the style is very different.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 08:10
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:So I know at least some people who watch or read scifi actually know something about this here science stuff. I do not. In general, diseases can and have killed enormous numbers of people in pandemics. The Black Death killed something like half or more Europeans. Exposure to smallpox and measles killed something like 9 out of 10 pre-Columbian residents of the Americas. Disease is deadly, beyond question. Bioweapons, however, are another story. People designing weapons don't want that kind of legality, because it can and will easily spread to and infect your own lands. Something like Captain Tripps from The Stand would be destroyed as soon as the capabilities were discovered, because nobody wants a weapon that is guaranteed to wipe out the user as well as the target. That sort of agent only makes sense if it is somehow far deadlier than intended, or if the people using it are simply omnicidal.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 09:09
|
|
|
Gnoman posted:Something like Captain Tripps from The Stand would be destroyed as soon as the capabilities were discovered, because nobody wants a weapon that is guaranteed to wipe out the user as well as the target. That sort of agent only makes sense if it is somehow far deadlier than intended, or if the people using it are simply omnicidal. I admire your optimism. What would more probably happen is that whoever developed Captain Trips would keep it and try to develop a vaccine.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 09:22
|
|
|
Just read This is how you lose the time war, and I enjoyed it! Seems to be a real hit or miss book judging by goodreads (possibly because people go in for sci-fi but it reminds me a lot more of regency romance full of pining and longing in sci-fi trappings?), but it was a definite hit for me. I desperately wanted them to have a happy ending by the 30% mark.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 10:11
|
|
|
Jedit posted:I admire your optimism. What would more probably happen is that whoever developed Captain Trips would keep it and try to develop a vaccine. Yeah Russia kept both their research and manufacturing programs going secretly long after everybody got together in the late 60s and agreed that bioweapons were bad and should be done away with. There was the 1971 Aral smallpox leak, a 1977 flu pandemic in Russia where a 1950s H1N1 strain mysteriously showed back up again, the 1979 anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk, and research into weaponizing Marburg/Ebola continued into at least the 90s. And since the Aral sea is going away, all the poo poo they disposed of by dumping it into the lake is blowing around in the wind now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGwMEXYQE7E https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2017/10/global-helse/vanishing-aral-sea-health-consequences-environmental-disaster?PageSpeed=noscript quote:Living in the Aral Sea area has detrimental consequences for fertility, both in people growing up in the area and for adult immigrants (23, 24). Furthermore, in the late 1990s infant mortality was between 60 – 110/1000, a figure far higher than in Uzbekistan (48/1000) and Russia (24/1000) (25). At the same time, body mass index (BMI) was inversely correlated with blood concentration of PCBs, DDTs and DDEs in children between 7 and 17 years, advocated as an effect of malabsorption. Values of insulin-like growth factor type 1 (IGF-1) tended to correlate with a reduction in body mass index (26). It is known that low IGF-1 values may be associated with high concentrations of DDT or DDT metabolites in the body (27).
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 10:19
|
|
|
ulmont posted:...please specify which country, as I immediately rushed to Amazon to find it not yet available in the glorious USA Sweden and physical copy. As for reading, I have noticed that I literally read my self to sleep with my latest kindle which doesn’t happen with my older one (not backlit) or with physical books.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 14:42
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/jamesdnicoll/status/1251161731553849344
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 16:10
|
|
|
Solitair posted:I read the shorter, earlier version of that story. What I appreciated most about it was the harried, scattered prose emulating the main character's adrenaline-fueled fight or flight mental state. How much of that translates to the full book version? The short story is basically the first chapter.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 16:54
|
|
|
Honestly? I would probably pay a dollar for this to see if it was any good. It's a concept I haven't seen anyone else write before.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 17:09
|
|
|
Just posting to say that the final Interdependency book by John Scalzi was fun and Kiva Lagos still rules as a character. Also there is a very nice note in the Acknowledgments at the back of the book everyone needs to read. Some Pinko Commie fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Apr 17, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 18:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 20, 2024 08:31 |
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:Honestly? I would probably pay a dollar for this to see if it was any good. It's a concept I haven't seen anyone else write before. It was in the recent Cats storybundle at the pay-what-you-want tier, but I think that bundle is over now.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2020 18:44
|
|