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Kestral posted:I'm not advocating for fiction in which there is no evil or conflict, which would be deeply tedious, hence why I haven't enjoyed Becky Chambers and find Look to Windward plodding rather than transcendent. I'm advocating for more fiction which isn't actively a downer to read! The Watch stories are the most cynical things to come out of Discworld, but when you read them you can come away with a feeling like, "Yes, good things are possible, even if the struggle continues." This is... not as common a vibe or message as I'd like, personally. I find all of this really interesting and shows how varied people's experiences of the same books are -- and how different individual concepts of what's 'hopeful' are. Becky Chambers' stuff (which I personally enjoy) does have conflict, it just tends to be small and very personal conflicts, which you don't see a lot in SFF. I think The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a perfect example of her writing small conflicts, where most of it is just people trying but not quite getting along with each other, and being worried that a traffic jam will make them late for various important obligations. The most harrowing thing that happens is a character having a medical emergency. (And summarized like that, it definitely doesn't sound all that thrilling! But I dig it.) Personally, I think Baru (so far) and Fifth Season (the whole Broken Earth Trilogy) are actually pretty hopeful. The worlds they're set in are messed up and the overall atmosphere is depressing, but the characters are still motivated to do something about it. The Broken Earth ends with Essun successfully ending the Seasons, civilization starting to rebuild and her becoming a Stoneeater who is still motivated to keep making the world better -- you can't ask for a more hopeful resolution than that. Even if Baru ends up concluding on a sad note, the end of the third book was a definitely very nice reprieve (seriously, having her friends give her a birthday party made me tear up). I'll also admit that despite really enjoying other Le Guin I've read (Left hand of Darkness and the Dispossessed), I kind of bounced off of Wizard of Earthsea. It's certainly well written, but it just didn't hold my interest enough to make me want to read any of the sequels. I can't pinpoint exactly what makes me not care much about it, but I think it might have been that Ged is just too competent? (Which is funny because I love Murderbot and that's also competence porn.) I think that's why it also doesn't strike me as necessarily 'hopeful' because there wasn't anything all that terrible to have to hope against, it was just Ged fairly easily solving each Monster of the Week that cropped up. I can see all that being cozy though, if that's what sort of story strikes one as cozy.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:38
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They are books for kids after all. I sort of feel I missed my window to read Earthsea, and have no desire to back capture it at this point.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:41
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StrixNebulosa posted:So I picked up Catherine Asaro's first book (the newer edition from Baen), Primary Inversion and I'm settling in to read it and I looked up the author to see if any other goons had read it, and found this amazing post from 2016:
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Aug 17, 2021 20:42
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Bilirubin posted:They are books for kids after all. Yep, I know I put "probably would have enjoyed this a lot if I read it as a kid" in my reading notes for it. StrixNebulosa posted:"Diamond Star ... a sci-fi book where the central plot is about an exiled prince becoming a holo-rock star, power ballads and all." OK that sounds rad, I am tempted to check it out.
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Aug 17, 2021 20:50
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DurianGray posted:I find all of this really interesting and shows how varied people's experiences of the same books are -- and how different individual concepts of what's 'hopeful' are. Becky Chambers' stuff (which I personally enjoy) does have conflict, it just tends to be small and very personal conflicts, which you don't see a lot in SFF. I think The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a perfect example of her writing small conflicts, where most of it is just people trying but not quite getting along with each other, and being worried that a traffic jam will make them late for various important obligations. The most harrowing thing that happens is a character having a medical emergency. (And summarized like that, it definitely doesn't sound all that thrilling! But I dig it.) A lot of A Wizard of Earthsea is about Ged screwing up, though. The core plot is about him dealing with a problem he created through his own arrogance. And the later Earthsea books, especially Tehanu, do have some terrible stuff to have hope against, for what it’s worth.
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Aug 17, 2021 21:02
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DurianGray posted:. I can't pinpoint exactly what makes me not care much about it, but I think it might have been that Ged is just too competent? (Which is funny because I love Murderbot and that's also competence porn.) I think that's why it also doesn't strike me as necessarily 'hopeful' because there wasn't anything all that terrible to have to hope against, it was just Ged fairly easily solving each Monster of the Week that cropped up. I can see all that being cozy though, if that's what sort of story strikes one as cozy. It’s too bad you gave up because the second book is all about a problem Ged can’t solve!
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Aug 17, 2021 21:53
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Anyone read The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson? Really interesting mix of dimension hopping (in a Sliders sort of way), involves a woman from a chaotic area ruled by a mad max style warlord; who “got out” and works for a fancy corporation that exploits parallel dimensions. I thought partway it would get too miserable but really it never “goes there”. Lots of class/race stuff that works well in the story and pays off. The prose is good too! Exactly what I look for in SF.
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Aug 17, 2021 22:01
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buffalo all day posted:It’s too bad you gave up because the second book is all about a problem Ged can’t solve! In fact it barely has Ged in it! I like the framing that Wizard of Earthsea is about a boy who is forced to be normal but perseveres to become the most powerful wizard, while Tombs of Atuan is about a girl who is forced into a role as the most powerful priestess and just wants to be normal.
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Aug 17, 2021 22:32
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I hope that guy eventually found out about Norman Spinrad's Little Heroes. Oh nooooooooohahaha I read that book as a teen in the 90s and all I can remember about it is thinking, “This boomer sure hated the 80s” lol That and it had bachelor chow before Futurama E. Oh and “Sally Cyborg” was basically the Music 2000 bit from Look Around You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRMFQxd7ye8 Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Aug 17, 2021 |
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Aug 17, 2021 22:50
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Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones - $3.50 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008LV8TSU/ Death Masks (Dresden Files #5) by Jim Butcher - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003X0AW6Q/
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Aug 17, 2021 23:08
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Kestral posted:I'm not advocating for fiction in which there is no evil or conflict, which would be deeply tedious, hence why I haven't enjoyed Becky Chambers and find Look to Windward plodding rather than transcendent. I'm advocating for more fiction which isn't actively a downer to read! The Watch stories are the most cynical things to come out of Discworld, but when you read them you can come away with a feeling like, "Yes, good things are possible, even if the struggle continues." This is... not as common a vibe or message as I'd like, personally. This is only tangentially related, but I noticed in my ongoing re-reading through the Discworld series that it's kinda odd the Watch books are so deeply about the general concept of justice but never about what you'd define as criminal justice. We see the Watch go from a bunch of losers to a fully functioning modern police force and never get one whiff of whatever Ankh-Morpork's judicial or corrections system is. I think there's one off-hand comment in Night Watch about how Vimes will make sure Carcer gets a fair trial before he hangs. That's not necessarily a criticism, per se - you can still write a book about the watchman on the walls, the people who make sure that at least wrongdoers get caught, whatever happens next; and the false notion that policework is mostly about solving mysteries and ends with the arrest is prevalent across the whole police procedural genre - but it was definitely something that's stuck out to me as an adult which I totally missed as a kid.
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Aug 17, 2021 23:41
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The Watch books honestly feel the most explicitly hopeful to me out of any Discworld books if for no other reason than it's quite explicitly taking the concept of ACAB seriously but then asks "... but what if they didn't want to be bastards anymore?" which is really something you need the lens of fantasy for. That sounds glib and it is a little but its also something you need to have a designed/written society for just to make it even possible to take the notion very far. I love sociological fantasy so that's a lot of why the watch are my favourite subseries.
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Aug 18, 2021 00:24
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StrixNebulosa posted:So I picked up Catherine Asaro's first book (the newer edition from Baen), Primary Inversion and I'm settling in to read it and I looked up the author to see if any other goons had read it, and found this amazing post from 2016: i've read a few from the Baen free library, back when it used to come on a cd-rom, and didn't love them but i do love that she formed a band to perform the music from her books.
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Aug 18, 2021 00:46
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Finished up The Blacktongue Thief. Pretty good. Sometimes felt like a throwback to older sword and sorcery stuff. As evidenced by the last thing I wrote up, Vita Nostra I’m a sucker for magic that feels mysterious as opposed to bland, and this succeeds on that score. Bonus points for breathing some life into extremely worn out tropes. The goblins in this were pretty neat, and there’s some interesting commentary on humanity brokering a very uneasy peace with them, which you rarely see. Prose is really good. Buehlman tosses off aphorisms that you’d swear have been or could be in common usage, and some parts of the book were just laugh out loud funny. At times it felt like an elevated take on a lower level D&D adventuring party. Rogue, druid, and fighter. That doesn’t sound like a compliment, but it is. Basically if you’re down for a witty adventuring party going on a road trip, like some humor blended with some grit, and like your magic feeling primitive and weird, you’ll probably dig it. Ends on a fairly big cliffhanger, so be warned there, but it’s satisfying on its own. Oh, and for you animal lovers, the cat lives.
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Aug 18, 2021 02:04
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BurningBeard posted:Finished up The Blacktongue Thief. Glad you enjoyed it. Buehlman's stuff is all great, I highly recommend Between Two Fires and The Necromancer's House. I also enjoyed The Lesser Dead.
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Aug 18, 2021 02:25
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neongrey posted:The Watch books honestly feel the most explicitly hopeful to me out of any Discworld books if for no other reason than it's quite explicitly taking the concept of ACAB seriously but then asks "... but what if they didn't want to be bastards anymore?" which is really something you need the lens of fantasy for. That sounds glib and it is a little but its also something you need to have a designed/written society for just to make it even possible to take the notion very far. I love sociological fantasy so that's a lot of why the watch are my favourite subseries. It's been a while since I reread them, but their transformation to a functional, or rather, militarized and well-funded police force capable of bringing down a dragon, going through a liberal inclusivity reform so you might be getting your head kicked in by a multicultural group of guard officers, remaining at the beck and call of Vetinari throughout and defusing any revolutionary potential by making the guard leadership a member of the bourgeoisie is kind of peak ACAB. thotsky fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 02:25
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Kind of a shot in the dark but I am itching to read something new and have no idea what. I’m desperate for an easy trashy comfort read, and because the Shadow and Bone Netflix show has been going around with some of my friends, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t think I would actually be that into it — too YA? I would love something that vibes like old Tamora Pearce books but aged up a bit. A totally unrelated example that did this for me in the past was Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, which I was offhand recommended by a friend and got super sucked into for some reason. I am totally braindead from work and would love to bury myself in some dumb fun adventures for a while. Third possibly relevant tidbit is I just binged the entire Mission to Zyxx sci fi comedy podcast and loved it, and now that I’ve run out I must fill the void. Sorry for the complete crapshoot of examples — anyone have any recommendations anywhere in these ballparks? I’m completely out of touch with current fantasy/sci fi (either would be cool). I kind of wonder if I should finally get around to Discworld but I’m a little too braintired to know where to start.
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Aug 18, 2021 02:31
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redcheval posted:Kind of a shot in the dark but I am itching to read something new and have no idea what. I’m desperate for an easy trashy comfort read, and because the Shadow and Bone Netflix show has been going around with some of my friends, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t think I would actually be that into it — too YA? I would love something that vibes like old Tamora Pearce books but aged up a bit. First thing that came to mind was Elizabeth Moon's Deeds of Paksenarrion series, which might fit the bill?
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Aug 18, 2021 02:32
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The Wheel of Time is turning into a big Amazon show in a few months and the first book (the eye of the world) should give you all the big dumb adventure you could ask for.
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Aug 18, 2021 02:44
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buffalo all day posted:The Wheel of Time is turning into a big Amazon show in a few months and the first book (the eye of the world) should give you all the big dumb adventure you could ask for. should I actually read those? I have never heard anything but griping about them, and they totally passed me by.
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Aug 18, 2021 02:48
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Aardvark! posted:should I actually read those? I have never heard anything but griping about them, and they totally passed me by. There’s a whole thread for them and many different takes. I think in the genre of multi-thousand page epic fantasy they are still best in class especially since GRRM decided to stop writing (note that this is damning with faint praise). There are fantasy trilogies and single books that are better but if you want a long series this is as good as it gets IMO.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:08
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thotsky posted:It's been a while since I reread them, but their transformation to a functional, or rather, militarized and well-funded police force capable of bringing down a dragon, going through a liberal inclusivity reform so you might be getting your head kicked in by a multicultural group of guard officers, remaining at the beck and call of Vetinari throughout and defusing any revolutionary potential by making the guard leadership a member of the bourgeoisie is kind of peak ACAB. I haven't got back up to Night Watch yet in my re-read but from memory it is very much not a pro-revolutionary book (while also not being pro-lovely government), and Pratchett himself was in a lot of ways a small-c conservative not particularly in favour of radical change. Interesting Times for example has a left-wing cadre trying to upend the Ageatean Empire's elite and he overlooks any nuanced examination of that in favour of a take along the lines of "the ordinary people don't care who's in charge and just want to be left alone." I don't think he was an outright cynic but I do think he held the belief that most people, by and large, are both selfish and not very curious about how the structures of our society work, and we inevitably end up with the government we deserve. Aardvark! posted:should I actually read those? I have never heard anything but griping about them, and they totally passed me by. If you love big long fantasy novels then you'll probably like them? They're exceptionally derivative and get extremely tedious and long-winded especially around the halfway point, but I enjoyed the first few well enough when I read them as a teenager.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:09
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My favorite dumb fun adventure is Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire and its sequel/second half. "Dumb" is too harsh but they are not complicated books, just a flashy space opera about a principled starship officer, a galactic senator, and a transhumanist commando. I also love Zyxx dearly, and if you like that style of ensemble humor then you should definitely start Discworld. There are lots of flowcharts with recommended entry points if you search "discworld reading order" but the correct answer is Guards! Guards! Also a Zyxx vibe but more wholesome and less funny is thread favorite Becky Chambers' The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, about a crew of space construction truckers making a found family.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:14
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freebooter posted:exceptionally derivative and get extremely tedious and long-winded An entire genre…owned…
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Aug 18, 2021 03:19
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buffalo all day posted:An entire genre…owned… Haha well I mean... George R.R. Martin for the most part writes economically. At least the early books of ASOIAF are hundreds and hundreds of pages long but never felt bloated to me. Whereas Robert Jordan is notorious for all this endless detail about smoothing skirts and tugging braids in the middle of his long chapters of dialogue.
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Aug 18, 2021 03:28
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freebooter posted:Haha well I mean... George R.R. Martin for the most part writes economically. At least the early books of ASOIAF are hundreds and hundreds of pages long but never felt bloated to me. Whereas Robert Jordan is notorious for all this endless detail about smoothing skirts and tugging braids in the middle of his long chapters of dialogue. I was wondering how long it would take for someone to mention braids. Wheel sucks. I'd skip it personally. I do remember really quite liking the first book way back when. Got as far as the sixth one but I can't remember a drat thing about them other than there being some big climactic battle at the end of each against some minor big bad in what felt to me like a very copy pasted fashion. Oh and Jordan has braids, Martin has food. unattended spaghetti fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 03:37
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BurningBeard posted:
The thing about epic fantasy is that you can reduce any long series this way (which is why all epic fantasy is bad and should be skipped) (and yet also people love it). The first three RJ books tell a reasonably contained story and are about 2500 pages in length. Feel free to give up at any point if it’s not your thing although I suggest giving the first book about to the halfway point just to give it a fair shake.
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Aug 18, 2021 04:10
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all right I might as well, it sounds like. I'll read it once I finish the 4 Earthsea books. 2 was great btw. Should be a fun transition going from some of the most economical fiction I've ever read to Wheel of Time
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Aug 18, 2021 04:24
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redcheval posted:Kind of a shot in the dark but I am itching to read something new and have no idea what. I’m desperate for an easy trashy comfort read, and because the Shadow and Bone Netflix show has been going around with some of my friends, that’s the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t think I would actually be that into it — too YA? I would love something that vibes like old Tamora Pearce books but aged up a bit. Hobb has a whole bunch of books fwiw. I think the two series that follow the original Farseer books have mixed reception, but the Liveships trilogy is pretty well regarded?
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Aug 18, 2021 04:33
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DurianGray posted:I find all of this really interesting and shows how varied people's experiences of the same books are -- and how different individual concepts of what's 'hopeful' are. Becky Chambers' stuff (which I personally enjoy) does have conflict, it just tends to be small and very personal conflicts, which you don't see a lot in SFF. I think The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a perfect example of her writing small conflicts, where most of it is just people trying but not quite getting along with each other, and being worried that a traffic jam will make them late for various important obligations. The most harrowing thing that happens is a character having a medical emergency. (And summarized like that, it definitely doesn't sound all that thrilling! But I dig it.) Yeah, different readers definitely pull different vibes out of the same book. For me, while I enjoyed Broken Earth and (what's so far been published of) Baru enormously, those are not worlds that I found especially uplifting to mentally inhabit. On the other hand, The Silmarillion is chronicling a slow apocalypse and the collapse of much which is bright and beautiful, but it's never cynical, and never... loses heart? I suspect I'm not able to properly articulate what I'm getting at here, so I'll drop the subject after one more attempt: When I say we've given up on the part of the dynamic range that isn't dark, cynical, or depressing, that we need fiction that gives us something to aspire to or hope for. It's not necessarily about how a book ends (although that's a meaningful part of it). It's not necessarily about being able to mentally "inhabit" a world that is better than ours (although it can be). It is definitely about the experience of the reader, where they are exposed to hope, joy, and wonder and are able to experience these things vicariously. These are vital psychic nutrients, and they are in short supply in the real world. We need fiction with an edge to show us the things that ought to be different. We need fiction that... shines, I suppose, to help us engaged with the better parts of human nature. Bilirubin posted:They are books for kids after all. While Earthsea was written in response to a publisher's request for a YA book, they're not "for" kids specifically: Le Guin had Things To Say about the idea of segregating stories into age-specific categories, which I wish I could find offhand and would love to read again if anyone has it handy. I came to the series in college and fell in love with it, so it's certainly something you can come to as an adult. neongrey posted:The Watch books honestly feel the most explicitly hopeful to me out of any Discworld books if for no other reason than it's quite explicitly taking the concept of ACAB seriously but then asks "... but what if they didn't want to be bastards anymore?" which is really something you need the lens of fantasy for. That sounds glib and it is a little but its also something you need to have a designed/written society for just to make it even possible to take the notion very far. I love sociological fantasy so that's a lot of why the watch are my favourite subseries. neongrey gets it. I can add nothing else to this perfect summary of my thoughts except to echo it.
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Aug 18, 2021 04:38
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Raybearer sequel is out, Redemptor. The original was pretty all right 👍🏻
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Aug 18, 2021 05:55
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Has anyone read the sequel to The Goblin Emperor yet? I mostly enjoyed the first book and was wondering if the second is more of the same?
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Aug 18, 2021 06:16
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pradmer posted:Death Masks (Dresden Files #5) by Jim Butcher - $1.99 Are the Dresden books worth reading? There's a second-hand shop near me with what looks like the whole series pretty cheap, but I don't recall anyone in this thread saying anything good about them. Any standouts? Crashbee fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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Aug 18, 2021 07:30
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Aug 18, 2021 07:31
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Aug 18, 2021 07:32
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Kampfy Von Wafflehaus posted:Has anyone read the sequel to The Goblin Emperor yet? I mostly enjoyed the first book and was wondering if the second is more of the same? Yerp. Imagine a goblin priest detective from a Becky Chambers novel stuck into a bunch of random murders from a grim edgy police procedural. Do recommend, though definitely different (somehow less personal?) stakes then the first.
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Aug 18, 2021 08:05
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Crashbee posted:Are the Dresden books worth reading?
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Aug 18, 2021 08:11
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Crashbee posted:Are the Dresden books worth reading? There's a second-hand shop near me with what looks like the whole series pretty cheap, but I don't recall anyone in this thread saying anything good about them. Any standouts? Sham Bam has you covered. They're terrible urban fantasy books that anyone only gave the time of day because the amount of urban fantasy 'detective' (there's no detecting) books out at the time were roughly zero. They were written with the sole purpose of being By The Numbers Designed To Sell Dreck. They are not worth it.
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Aug 18, 2021 08:18
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BurningBeard posted:Hobb has a whole bunch of books fwiw. I think the two series that follow the original Farseer books have mixed reception, but the Liveships trilogy is pretty well regarded? The Liveship series may be her best work and the sequel Fitz trilogy (the Fool series) is a good follow up. The series only gets shaky with the Liveship sequels (the Dragons series) and the third Fitz trilogy (the Fitz and the Fool), neither of which are awful but don't measure up to previous books and kind of feel bolted on after the conclusion of the Fool series. But the first three trilogies is some good readin'
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Aug 18, 2021 08:56
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thotsky posted:defusing any revolutionary potential by making the guard leadership a member of the bourgeoisie is kind of peak ACAB. That's certainly a take when you consider that there is an entire book about the bourgeois head of the guard leading a revolution in his city. And no, the Dresden Files aren't worth reading. Read Rivers of London if you're OK with cops not all being bastards, or the Felix Castor novels if you don't.
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Aug 18, 2021 09:40
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