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Safety Biscuits posted:"Idyll Days on the Yann"? https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swld/swld09.htm I link this all the time in this thread because I want to gift people the experience of reading it for the first time
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Oct 1, 2020 04:28
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<reposted from off-site SFL Archives readthrough blog> SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 11 100% completion, 180 ruthlessly curated bookmarks. 17 items of interest. <reposted from off-site SFL Archives readthrough blog> quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2020 08:43
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freebooter posted:If we're talking about public domain books, what are people's general SFF reccs for those? Galaxy Magazine has been digitized and made freely available
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Oct 1, 2020 09:12
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freebooter posted:If we're talking about public domain books, what are people's general SFF reccs for those? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3923389 There was a good thread about old science fiction in the science fiction subforum. I'll just quote one of my personal favorites: skasion posted:A Voyage to Arcturus is 100 this year, so just about fits in the thread! This is a really unique one.
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Oct 1, 2020 09:17
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I was interested to find most of the New Writings in SF collections in the internet archive this week - I'd been hunting a vaguely remembered story for a while. Turned out be kind of crap (The Tertiary Justification by Michael Coney) but some other good stuff to re-read there.
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Oct 1, 2020 10:26
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Lemniscate Blue posted:And ER Eddison's "The Worm Ouraboros" is still on my shelf and I will read it some day. This is, actually, a loving hilarious read. I'm going to recommend some stuff that's strictly speaking not SFF nor even novels, but they're old as gently caress and have been ripped off by more SFF authors than I can count: - Norse sagas. Bunch of these. I'd especially recommend Njál's Saga which is a lot of fun. (Do get modern translations since older ones are likely censored; for instance the whole story in Njál's Saga of revenge and counter-revenge starts off with an argument over a divorce lawsuit, where the divorce was caused by the groom's penis being too big for his wife; this detail is typically omitted from older translations.) - Xenophon's Anabasis. Probably the oldest book I've read that I've enjoyed, outside of the Homeric epics. (Yes, yes, modern translation, I don't read ancient Greek.) Ripped off by about 50% of all MilSF authors at one point. Eyewitness account of a force of Greek mercenaries stranded deep in hostile territory and having to walk/fight their way back home through an awful lot of difficult and hostile terrain. (Kind of amusing how there's this one dude named Xenophon who has all these great ideas along the way.)
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Oct 1, 2020 12:10
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Groke posted:
We did it as BOTM a few years ago: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3762828
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Oct 1, 2020 12:14
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Frankenstein! I was thinking I'd forgotten something important and it's Frankenstein. It's a genuinely good read though you have to be down with Victor being kind of a histrionic idiot. And it is a bit noticeable that it was Shelley's first novel and she was young when she wrote it. Still great though.
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Oct 1, 2020 12:40
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I was digging around in pre-Tolkien fantasy for a while, and this is what I read in that vein that I recommend:
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Oct 1, 2020 13:05
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Agreed on Dunsany, but I'd say his short stories are better than his novels (which aren't bad either, though). Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow is also on Project Gutenberg and worth a look. You can also get Garrett P. Serviss's Edison's Conquest of Mars, which isn't good by any stretch of the imagination but still manages to be hilarious in an overwrought late-19th-century way.
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Oct 1, 2020 13:45
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Not strictly SFF, but still in the general arena of speculative fiction, G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is public domain and remains one of my favourite books.
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Oct 1, 2020 14:35
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H. Beam Piper is a bit on the colonialist side but Little Fuzzy, Cosmic Computer,4-Day Planet, and Space Viking stand up really well today. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8301
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Oct 1, 2020 15:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:We did it as BOTM a few years ago: Yes, I remember re-reading it in order to participate in that very thread. Again, surprisingly readable for being some dude's war journal from 2400 years ago.
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Oct 1, 2020 17:36
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William Hope Hodgeson's The Night Land, from 1912, really holds up as well. It's a weird early scifi earth where the sun has gone dim.
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Oct 1, 2020 18:19
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A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2) by Becky Chambers - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CNLOZ3G/ The Last Wish (Witcher) by Andrzej Sapkowski - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0010SIPT4/
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Oct 1, 2020 22:55
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I read this short story by Stephen Baxter, lol at the brits, eh containment? What's that. Now that is a guy that comes up with a lot of unique ideas and interesting settings. Unfortunately it feels like he often falls short in making the settings as interesting as I feel they could have been. Also some potentially really interesting characters in some books, like Luru Parz in the xeelee books that I felt could've gone places, but never did. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/moon6.htm
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Oct 2, 2020 10:26
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Trying out a new thing (why fix & edit typos at two websites instead of one) SFL Archives Vol 12a readthrough update 01 16% completion, 26 bookmarks 30 items of interest quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2020 16:55
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Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074ZJQT6P/ The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01E6HYNGE/
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Oct 2, 2020 17:27
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Silver2195 posted:The Rougon-Macquart novels aren't just concerned with how people act, but why, i.e., the hereditary basis of human psychology and how it interacts with environmental factors. I say "hereditary" rather than "genetic" because this is a pre-Mendelian understanding of heredity. Zola understood inheritance of psychological traits in terms of Proper Lucas's prepotency theory. See the explanation here, and check out the pie chart family tree! I kind of see what you're going for here, and think I may have come up with an example that might fit. Auel's Earth's Children series mentioned in the archives that quantomfoam has been going through. A huge portion of the societal building is absolutely mired in 70's pop-sociology.
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Oct 2, 2020 21:41
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Gnoman posted:I kind of see what you're going for here, and think I may have come up with an example that might fit. Auel's Earth's Children series mentioned in the archives that quantomfoam has been going through. A huge portion of the societal building is absolutely mired in 70's pop-sociology. Or the Doc Savage pulp novels, where Doc "fixes" criminals by operating on their brains (in one book, he describes how he discovered a "violence gland" in the brain that causes criminal behavior)? Horrific today, but back in the 30s psychosurgery was the hot new thing.
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Oct 3, 2020 00:49
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Finally had some downtime and managed to finish Baru 3. Great work General Battuta. Book 2 ended abruptly and suffered from publisher decisions, but drat if the payoffs in the third book weren't worth it. Baru 1 is still my favorite just on the grounds on it being more straightforward and tight but Baru 3 definitely expanded the world and did it super engrossingly. I hadn't reread the second book before diving in and I gotta say that the early parts of the book were pretty good at catching me up. I'm looking forward to B4ru and the eventual Space Baru if ever you manage to write it, but if you can't it's still an extremely solid trilogy. Gotta say that swerve at the end had me  . I've been waiting for Baru Falcrest politicking since the end of book 1 and finally got a taste at the end of the book and then you had to go and throw another curveball
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Oct 3, 2020 02:43
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Working on a Dramatis personae list for the SFL Archives readthrough attempt I'm doing. Because A) it's going to be a useful SFL Archives reference tool, B) writing some of this stuff down will let me free up some braincells to focus on other things and C) references to unicorn-goats, dolphin-loving, Heinlein Defense Squads, behind-the-scenes SF-LOVERS moderator drama, and epic-scale SFL Archives meltdowns sometimes need to be expanded on. I currently have the following written up on Lauren W.@UCLA-Security == Lauren W. @ UCLA-Security: Lauren W. was one of the earliest recorded posters in the SF-LOVERS mailing list(They had post #7(?) in SFL Vol 01). Lauren W. had a vast knowledge of SF-related TV series & and movies & radio broadcasts, and posted complete episode guides for at least 4 different SF tv-series 18 yrs+ before wikipedia & IMDB existed. Lauren W. started up a prototype Nick @ Nite block of programming for a local SF Bay television channel roughly 1.5 yrs before Nick @ Nite launched globally in July 1985. The movie WARGAMES 1983 made Lauren W. meltdown exceptionally hard, spending a solid 2+ months ranting how Wargames 1983 was terrible/inaccurate/making light of their 1980's computer-security job. Lauren W. never recovered their cool after their Wargames 1983 meltdown and stopped posting in the SFL Archives sometime in mid 1984. ==
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Oct 3, 2020 03:26
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Battle Ground by Jim Butcher is out. I had spaced on it coming out so soon after the last one, but I think it came out Tuesday. Picked up a copy of The Loop cause it sounds like it'll be interesting and creepy enough with body horror to make a good read.
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Oct 3, 2020 08:05
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Finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. General Battuta, more than any other author I can think of, has the astonishing ability to come up with little turns of phrase that are so densely packed with world building that you just stall out for a few seconds contemplating the implications. An excellent book.
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Oct 3, 2020 11:50
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Im like a quarter into it after seeing it mentioned so much here and it's excellent. Goonspeed.
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Oct 3, 2020 14:05
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The Fifth Season (Broken Earth #1) by NK Jemisin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H25FCSQ/
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Oct 3, 2020 18:25
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pseudorandom name posted:Finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. General Battuta, more than any other author I can think of, has the astonishing ability to come up with little turns of phrase that are so densely packed with world building that you just stall out for a few seconds contemplating the implications. An excellent book. Wait like what
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Oct 3, 2020 18:55
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swld/swld09.htm This is absolutely mesmerising.
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Oct 3, 2020 19:16
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I just wanna say the full cast production of Dune is absolutely mental. Every character is voiced perfect
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Oct 3, 2020 20:25
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ClydeFrog posted:This is absolutely mesmerising. quote:When people ask me about “a book that changed my life,” one of the several hundred honest answers I can give them is A Dreamer’s Tales. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/UKL-Review-Joshi-LordDunsany.html
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Oct 3, 2020 20:42
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Simone Magus posted:I just wanna say the full cast production of Dune is absolutely mental. Every character is voiced perfect The new film?
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Oct 3, 2020 20:59
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Or the Broadway musical?
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Oct 3, 2020 21:07
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https://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/30903/dune-by-frank-herbert-read-by-scott-brick-orlagh-cassidy/ Some audiobooks do full cast readings.
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Oct 3, 2020 21:22
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mewse posted:The new film? Of the novel
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Oct 3, 2020 21:58
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Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:21
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HopperUK posted:Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird. abebooks is your best option for this.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:27
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HopperUK posted:Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird. The Penguin Classics edition "In the Land of Time: And Other Fantasy Tales" is a decent collection. Not as nice as finding a hard copy of The Gods of Pegana or The Book of Wonder, but better than nothing.
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Oct 3, 2020 23:58
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HopperUK posted:Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird. 
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Oct 4, 2020 00:38
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General Battuta posted:Wait like what Sorry, I was a bit muddled in my praise here. In my defense, somebody kept me awake into the early morning with a good book. You're really good at coming up with obsolete terms for familiar concepts that might not actually be familiar and you have little quirks of world builiding like the Falcrestian gesture to ward off evil being pantomimed handwashing (did that come about naturally because of their obsession with hygiene, or was it deliberately introduced in order to promote/reinforce the handwashing?) and then the followup of the standardized mental health exercises being described as washings. Some other little things I found delightful: - Xate Yawa getting high on weed, looking me directly in the eye and telling me how to pronounce her name. - The thinly veiled poor ol' Freckles, thought of ants and died. - Gratuitously making GBS threads on homeopathy, because you can.
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Oct 4, 2020 00:44
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HopperUK posted:Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird. Like 3/4ths of Dunsany's books are public domain and available online with an easy search. There are good editions of two of them here: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=dunsany ClydeFrog posted:This is absolutely mesmerising. Another thing I really love about Dunsany: He's not following any pattern. Idle Days on the Yann especially just violates every supposed "rule" of storytelling there is. There's no beginning, no end, not really, you just get a chunk of story, like a random chapter excerpted from some un-recorded whole. There's no real conflict, just a series of scenes. There's no plot and little suspense. Just some characters drifting through scenery. And that's all you need. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 00:59
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