|
James White's stuff is really good, as you say especially since pacifism is usually treated so badly in sf. But there are two important caveats: 1. The sexism is kinda grating. This doesn't really get any better until much later in the stories (the ambulance ship ones) where he tempers it a liitle. 2. You will get heartily sick of learning the reason humans are classified as species type DBDG because it occurs in every single story (because they were all originally published separately).
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 03:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 22:19 |
|
|
Hobnob posted:James White's stuff is really good, as you say especially since pacifism is usually treated so badly in sf. But there are two important caveats: 1. I was warned about this in the reviews I read of his stuff, and I'm  but I'll hold my nose, dude was writing in the 60s. I'll pretend that if he had been immortal and lived forever his modern stuff would be cool and have lots of ladies in it as he grew out of bad views.2. This cannot be as annoying as learning what a paidhi is again. Cherryh. I'm reading book 15 in the Foreigner series. I know what man'chi is. e: one more note on 1 tho, it has been real frustrating because I want to run and rec this to a friend but she has zero tolerance for sexism in old sci-fi and here's another series she'd love but the author was a white dude writing in the 60s
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 03:27
|
|
|
Re: Black Company. I read it a year ago and remember liking the first book a lot, but only thinking the second and third book were okay. I dunno I guess I was expecting more action but ended up getting slice-of-life mercenary life? I enjoyed the trilogy enough but certainly didn't seek out anything after book 3. Is it more of the same past that or is there a significant paradigm shift coming?
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 03:48
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Darkwar starts brutally, and whoof. I love its premise but drat if it doesn't start by kicking you directly in the gut. about two months back, just as COVID was hitting australia I came down with a pretty bad pneumonia. Bed ridden for a week i smashed through the first 13 Garrett PI books. I had had enough by book six or so but just had to keep going. One day i'll go back and finish the last one. They're very cheesy and formulaic PI potboilers in a fantasy setting and mostly less bleak (YMMV). Anyway I don't think i've ever not liked a Glenn Cook book.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 03:59
|
|
|
branedotorg posted:about two months back, just as COVID was hitting australia I came down with a pretty bad pneumonia. Bed ridden for a week i smashed through the first 13 Garrett PI books. I had had enough by book six or so but just had to keep going. One day i'll go back and finish the last one. They're very cheesy and formulaic PI potboilers in a fantasy setting and mostly less bleak (YMMV). If you like Garrett, be sure to read the Nero Wolfe stories that Cook based Garrett on.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 04:05
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Starfishers: as I understand it, you read it first because Passage At Arms is better and tighter, being focused on submarine warfare in space. Starfishers meanwhile is an interrogation of the norse myths for the first volume, then it does its own weird thing for a while. Passage at Arms can go on either end of the main "trilogy". It's chronological versus publication order. The second BC book has 'angst boy' and the main BC plotline converge very nicely. Stuff happens and Croaker has to narrate a high powered magical duel that he doesn't remotely understand. The later books pick up the Company and drop it down very far away after a difficult journey. They vary wildly in tone and scope.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 04:05
|
|
|
branedotorg posted:about two months back, just as COVID was hitting australia I came down with a pretty bad pneumonia. Bed ridden for a week i smashed through the first 13 Garrett PI books. I had had enough by book six or so but just had to keep going. One day i'll go back and finish the last one. They're very cheesy and formulaic PI potboilers in a fantasy setting and mostly less bleak (YMMV). oh hey I forgot about those. I have the omnibus for the first 2-3 of those as well, throw it on the "unread glen cook omnibus pile" with the rest of them  also seconding the Nero Wolfe rec, those books are fantastic mllaneza posted:Passage at Arms can go on either end of the main "trilogy". It's chronological versus publication order. The second BC book has 'angst boy' and the main BC plotline converge very nicely. Stuff happens and Croaker has to narrate a high powered magical duel that he doesn't remotely understand. The later books pick up the Company and drop it down very far away after a difficult journey. They vary wildly in tone and scope. That's promising! Thanks for the previews. I just finished the second short story in Beginning Operations (James White) and was able to spot the exact line break where the story ended and the fix-up stuff began. Here's a brief summary of 'em so far: Story 1: Due to an accident, one man gets stuck with an alien baby, a how-to guide to the species, and absolutely no help otherwise. I was intensely charmed by this prologue, as it's clever, fun, and has a bit of blunt pathos. The creative solutions to babysitting the alien were very puzzle-esque in feel, which was fun to read. Story 2: In the big ol' space hospital, now in operations, we meet our hero. He's an rear end in a top hat! Which is to say he's one of the doctors, he is very self-assured, and he's about as smart as a box of bricks in non-doctor situations. The primary conflict here is that he's a hardcore pacifist and looks down on the "Monitors", who are a group of space-cops. He thinks literally every Monitor is a hardcore killer, and if he were in 2020 USA he'd be right with his ACAB attitude, but in the idyllic almost-utopian future, he is wrong and finds this out the hard way. Seeing as the second story was written first out of all of them, well... it's easy to see how weak it is in comparison with the first. Character development happens a little too conveniently/mechanically, descriptions can be awkward, and it's overall a bit dissatisfying. If story 1 was a 9/10, I'd give this one a 6 or a 7/10 - passing. I loved aspects about it (the aliens, the hivemind, the wounded parade, etc) but meh. The ending had a neat snapper of a line though. Overall (so far) I'd call this a great example of old-school sci-fi - a little Asimov-like in how mechanical it is at times, and you can tell the main characters are boy scouts in spirit - but it has this charm to it, and it's completely earnest about giving you weird yet plausible aliens. (PS I find it hilarious that I was planning to read Hammer's Slammers tonight but no, nope, pacifist doctors grabbed me and demanded my attention.) (PPS Don't think I'm neglecting Murderbot, I'm at page 120 and deeply enjoying it. I've been alternating books all day and it's a real good time. I missed reading sci-fi!)
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 04:20
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:The Penric & Desdemona novellas are some of Bujold's best work. Basically, it's the Chalion setting, a temple sorcerer dies unexpectedly, so her demon goes to the nearest available host - a younger son of a poor local noble. They The only thing I would say against starting them without reading the books first would be that A) the books are really good too and I say this as somebody who's not a fan of Fantasy in general, and B) you're gonna lose out on some of the theological details and so on. Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you like Garrett, be sure to read the Nero Wolfe stories that Cook based Garrett on. Raymond Chandler is good too.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 05:30
|
|
|
Welp, murderbot was awesome. Only nitpick I can throw out about it is he actually (gasp) refers to a human as a friend! That's... Hold on I'ma clutch my pearls a bit. It's so shocking... Finished up The Odds by Jeff Strand, and it was kinda fun. Weird as hell, but entertaining.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 06:38
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:The Penric & Desdemona novellas are some of Bujold's best work. Basically, it's the Chalion setting, a temple sorcerer dies unexpectedly, so her demon goes to the nearest available host - a younger son of a poor local noble. They Anything by Bujold is good
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 06:54
|
|
|
PawParole posted:Anything by Bujold is good Yes, but in this case, more so.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 07:00
|
|
|
I have the Black Company Trilogy and I keep meaning to read it but the prose is so loving droll, and I keep meaning to read The Dragon Never Sleeps but same reason. There's just something about how he writes.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 13:12
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Welp, murderbot was awesome. I think you mean clutch your function.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 15:05
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing I read it like 20 years ago now but The Code Book by Simon Singh was the most readable book about codes and cyphers I've ever come across. It discusses the history of how simple cyphers were used in medieval Europe and stuff, up to the modern day. Highly recommend.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 16:45
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Welp, murderbot was awesome. He also does this in the fourth novella. At the end, when he is reintegrating his memories, he finds a note about Ratthi that's just 'my human friend' and basically goes 'that sounds really weird but the note seems pretty sure about it so I'll roll with it'
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 17:01
|
|
|
mewse posted:I read it like 20 years ago now but The Code Book by Simon Singh was the most readable book about codes and cyphers I've ever come across. It discusses the history of how simple cyphers were used in medieval Europe and stuff, up to the modern day. Highly recommend. Agreed. The Code Book by Simon Singh has an exceptional lay-out design with nice examples and lots of sidebars, bought a copy of it, unironically, in the NSA Cryptological Museum, when I visited there and played around with a Engima machine. Someone, not me, uploaded the ebook 1st edition of Kahn's The Codebreakers to the internet archive project (archive.org). 1st edition of the Codebreakers is still pretty informative despite cutting off circa the late 1960s, since The Codebreakers is more of a all-inclusive history of secret writing from steganography to invisible inks to ciphers and codes and the various peoples/groups/government agencies that have worked on codes, ciphers, cipher machines, code-breaking machines etc. Another fantastic book is Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to Al-Qaeda by Kristie Macrakis which expands in detail upon invisible inks. It's very readable, and comes with recipes for making your own inks (visible/invisible) at home. Loaned my copy of it out just before COVID-19 lockdown happened, and am kicking myself because making up inks (visible/invisible) is a near perfect boredom killing project right now. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 17:39 on May 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 17:35
|
|
|
Well, I think it turns out I’m just an old fart. After looking through some other magazines and the Hugo winners and not liking any of them, I went back to issues of Asimov’s from the 80s and 90s. I liked pretty much every single story! Many of them have that optimistic ST:TNG feel with competent, secure adult characters solving problems, which makes them actually fun to read rather than the depressing dystopian slog of the modern stories. Plus you get to see people who had the balls to write in and insult Asimov personally in the letters page (“I’ve only read two of your stories, and I found both of them boring, unworthy of being published...”), neat ads for futuristic technology such as the answering machine, and illustrations for all the stories. Hey, there was even a puberty metaphor story that was really funny and well written (“Boobs” by Suzy McKee Charnas)!
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:02
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Welp, murderbot was awesome. Khizan posted:He also does this in the fourth novella. At the end, when he is reintegrating his memories, he finds a note about Ratthi that's just 'my human friend' and basically goes 'that sounds really weird but the note seems pretty sure about it so I'll roll with it' I find it interesting that you guys gender Murderbot as male. Mostly because my brain has decided it's female and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The books are of course scrupulous in presenting it and ART as neuter.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:24
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm still correcting myself but Martha Wells has said in interviews that Murderbot's pronouns are it/its.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:30
|
|
|
Should probably take murderbot's word for it's identity.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:30
|
|
|
I have that problem IRL, I have a friend who is they/them and my brain likes to go "ah!, she/her!" and no. No. I have to catch and correct myself and it's an ongoing process. 
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:33
|
|
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I find it interesting that you guys gender Murderbot as male. Mostly because my brain has decided it's female and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. The books definitely do a good job making Murderbot genderless, but I also see it as "feminine". I actively try not to but it creeps in. I think it's because it is difficult for me to imagine a perfectly androgenous being, as it's not something I've ever interacted with, so my brain just defaults to a mental image that happens to be feminine.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 18:40
|
|
|
I think I also have a kind of instinctive aversion to using "it" since people use it as a way to be lovely towards people with "they/them" pronouns so often, I find myself always instinctively using they/them instead for murderbot.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 19:23
|
|
|
TheAardvark posted:The books definitely do a good job making Murderbot genderless, but I also see it as "feminine". I actively try not to but it creeps in. I think it's because it is difficult for me to imagine a perfectly androgenous being, as it's not something I've ever interacted with, so my brain just defaults to a mental image that happens to be feminine. I've got no trouble associating Murderbot with "it" when thinking or speaking English, but it's a lot harder when using my first language, since "robot" is masculine in there. And then it sort of crashes together and leaves me tossing out pronouns at random. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 19:37 on May 8, 2020 |
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 19:26
|
|
|
KOGAHAZAN!! posted:I find it interesting that you guys gender Murderbot as male. Mostly because my brain has decided it's female and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. For me I think it's because in a first-person perspective I tend to assume the gender of the author until proven otherwise.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 19:34
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:It's the opposite of androgynous though: neither rather than both. The problem is Murderbot has a human face, and it's a hell of a lot harder to imagine a human face as perfectly genderless than it is a robot.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 19:44
|
|
|
  This should be my last big arrival this month, but definitely not the least. Passage at Arms: Glen Cook does submarines in space. I'll tuck it with Starfishers. Northworld: From what I understand, this is a series where Iron Man gets stuck on a low-fantasy viking planet and has to fight to survive. Rinse repeat for three books. I'm expecting one competent man to survive against all odds (TM) and that's going to be fun but not heavy. (If I want heavy from David Drake I'll read his Redliners) The Man Who Never Missed: One competent man survives against all odds - and decides to become a freedom fighter and turn against the not-USA. It has a bunch of sequels about this rebel movement and I hope I like this one enough to continue, as they sound fun for pulpy action sci-fi fares. Only Forward: This review did it again. The book sounds like it starts with an interesting worldbuilding premise with a protagonist who moves through varying social strata, and then it gets weirder. It's hard for me to describe, but I'm curious enough to pick this up. Dreamer: Sci-fi set around the concept of the Austrialian "Dream", the protagonist is an Austrialian Aboriginal person (is that the right phrasing?) and it's queer to boot. I'm very curious, I know very little about this culture. Solitaire: Same reviewer did it again. Sci-fi I've never heard of, with the warning that the summary of the book contains big spoilers that the reviewer wished they hadn't read beforehand. Roads of Heaven: Old feminist(esque?) sci-fi, about a woman in a future society that doesn't value women. She loses the right to her starship, but a mysterious man offers her a deal: get married to him and a partner of his, pilot his ship, and be free. Also, alchemy is the reason why FTL works, apparently. That's all of it, phew! It's all books I'm happy to own because they all sound really cool. Even though it will take me a while to get through them, I love having the kind of book collection that feels like a "best of" the used bookstores I've frequented in my lifetime. Lots of weird and interesting finds, but without all of the chaff.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:11
|
|
|
I liked Northworld a lot as a kid, but it's pretty heavy at times. The middle book especially has a fair bit of rape and misery. It's based on Norse myths which are as hosed up as mythology tends to be.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:23
|
|
|
This is pretty interesting because I've only read the first two Murderbots, but I automatically gendered it as masculine in my head. I think the key is how it is "learning emotions" at a late developmental stage, which makes for the irony and humor, but also reminds me of how boys/men mature on a slower timescale than girls/women. Basically I'm thinking of it like an autistic young man, even though that's obviously problematic it's apparently what my brain has decided to do.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:24
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:I liked Northworld a lot as a kid, but it's pretty heavy at times. The middle book especially has a fair bit of rape and misery. It's based on Norse myths which are as hosed up as mythology tends to be. Ah, good to know, thank you for the warning. mdemone posted:This is pretty interesting because I've only read the first two Murderbots, but I automatically gendered it as masculine in my head. I can agree with the reading of Murderbot as autistic, as it clearly has problems dealing with emotions, especially unfamiliar ones. I relate to some of its struggles, and that's part of the appeal of reading it - emotions are hard and Murderbot clearly doesn't have access to a good support network for most of the series, thanks to being viewed as literally property. Roads of Heaven: ayep it's a feminist novel, it opens with the court scene where our heroine literally cannot interact with the court without being assigned a male guardian, because this is a culture made up of fuckheads. That said, I am intensely pleased by how the author didn't wallow in misery - I popped this open expecting structure more like... "heroine discovers her grandpa died, has to put up with pages of misery and sexism before we get to the court, has to suffer humiliation in court as she loses her ship, and then the mysterious dude pops up with the offer to let her pilot in exchange for marriage." I was braced to have to put up with that to get to whatever's next, but instead, no! Twelve pages in, mysterious dude is volunteering to be her guardian (and he'll help her as much as he can) if she's willing to pilot his ship for a job for him. There's no blackmail or awfulness, just him laying it out like a business proposal and her accepting. She's had full agency for these twelve pages despite the culture, and she continues to have it, and now the plot can begin. I'm not going to read much more of it currently but it's going into the docket for reading sooner rather than later because I want to see more. This seems good for 80s feminist sci-fi.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 20:37
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:I'm not going to read much more of it currently but it's going into the docket for reading sooner rather than later because I want to see more. This seems good for 80s feminist sci-fi. Roads of Heaven and its sequels were an absolute blast, and while I've read a bunch of other stuff by Melissa Scott now and enjoyed all of it, I think those are still my favourites. She's a contemporary (and acquaintance) of C.J. Cherryh, started writing around the same time, and likes to investigate some of the same themes, so I'm kind of baffled that my Cherryh-loving parents didn't have her on the shelves as well. I only found out about her books a few years ago!
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 22:31
|
|
|
TheAardvark posted:The problem is Murderbot has a human face, and it's a hell of a lot harder to imagine a human face as perfectly genderless than it is a robot. I picture Murderbot as the Terminator cosplaying as Master Chief, because that's basically what it is.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 23:23
|
|
|
The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081BU42O/
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 23:46
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:The Man Who Never Missed: One competent man survives against all odds - and decides to become a freedom fighter and turn against the not-USA. It has a bunch of sequels about this rebel movement and I hope I like this one enough to continue, as they sound fun for pulpy action sci-fi fares. This series starts so well. Stop when the creepy sexuality pops up, it goes off the rails hard a few books in and in retrospect I should have stopped sooner than I did.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2020 23:57
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:This series starts so well. Stop when the creepy sexuality pops up, it goes off the rails hard a few books in and in retrospect I should have stopped sooner than I did. Ah, the Dune rule. Understood, thank you!
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 00:08
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Roads of Heaven and its sequels were an absolute blast, and while I've read a bunch of other stuff by Melissa Scott now and enjoyed all of it, I think those are still my favourites. oh I forgot to respond to this - can you believe I just realized that Melissa Scott also wrote Trouble and Her Friends?  I meant to read that, then buy more stuff by her. My fault, but also I don't care because that's now four cool books to read.  Also regarding parents and their book collections, I am intensely frustrated that my dad only had the "big" names - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and like one or two more dudes. He introduced me to sci-fi as a genre and I'm so appreciative of that, but also dad! There's so much actually good stuff out there! Unfortunately, he no longer reads recreationally. 
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 00:11
|
|
|
Yea, Murderbot is genderless (literally, as far as I know), but I always just associate killer robots as male in my head. I dunno why. I just default to "he", same as when I refer to ships as "she". Habit, I guess. Weirdly enough, ART presented itself in my brain as a neutral character, but with a male voice.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 00:15
|
|
|
How did those Stross novels where robots gently caress spaceships handle it
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 00:16
|
|
|
The twist in Saturn's Children is that the robots are actually human.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 01:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 22:19 |
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Roads of Heaven and its sequels were an absolute blast, and while I've read a bunch of other stuff by Melissa Scott now and enjoyed all of it, I think those are still my favourites. The first is the best, the second two have a slight sense of just needing to finish the story. Still decent though.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2020 02:08
|
|
