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ClydeFrog posted:There is an odd phenomenon where some people don't value something as much when they get it for free. My kindle is littered with free books I've downloaded and not touched. However yours I paid for and read immediately one after the other True. I, too, have a massive collection of free books. Sometimes, though, just having a lot of people download it on Amazon can increase the rankings, so more people see it and buy the other book. I’m also pretty fine with giving it away to people on SA because so many people on these dead gay forums helped me get the books written and published. And, thanks so much for buying and reading! Glad you enjoyed them. I do have another in the works and a lot of it planned out, but it’s going to be a while. I’m currently working on the first book in another series.
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Dec 13, 2022 18:45
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I think quest for lost heroes also works as a older adventurer coming out of retirement for some new bullshit novel, but I'm not entirely sure I'm remembering it right. Maybe. Chareos does come out of retirement, but he is only in his early 40s and as much of the book is about Kiall, who is younger. Winter Warriors is about older characters, but they're not yet retired (and in the case of Bison, don't want to be). It could be that you're conflating the two a little - or possibly recalling either of the Waylander sequels. Gemmell wrote a lot of middle aged heroes.
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Dec 13, 2022 19:17
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branedotorg posted:Snake wood by Adrian Selby is about a clan of 20 legendary mercenaries hunted down one-by-one in retirement. Honestly I didn't like it much but there was an interesting element in that all magic is based on pharmacological experiments and use makes you faster/stronger etc but has side effects like dying and scaring Honestly it sounds cooler the other way. The Magic Drugs eventually turn you into a terrifying undead creature. So the side effects of "dying" and "scaring people" instead of "dyeing" and "scarring."
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Dec 13, 2022 23:21
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Yea, it's entirely possible. I guess the only thing I can do is recommend to reading all the Gemmel books  Cept for the last couple. Those kinda sucked and we're finished by his wife, and have a different tone because of it.
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Dec 14, 2022 00:07
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I liked the first Ancillary novel well enough and the sequels weren’t bad but reading them back-to-back was a little too much. The Raven’s Tower was absolutely tip-top tho. Similar experience as Harrow the Ninth, where at first the 2nd person was a little off-putting but then it got better and better and ended up an intrinsic part woven into the story, tho without the same kind of sudden reveal that Harrow had. Really enjoyable book.
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Dec 14, 2022 12:00
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Yea, it's entirely possible. I guess the only thing I can do is recommend to reading all the Gemmel books I remember them as being better, though it's been over a decade. They're higher rated on Goodreads too for whatever that's worth. She obviously had all his notes, and she does have a slightly different style, but come on, I doubt anyone was reading Gemmell because he was an incredible prose writer, what he was great at was writing the same story of a manly hero over and over again in slightly different ways, one who was incredibly violent, but also honorable and a very hard worker who you could trust to be a foreman, and always, always, made sure to eat their dinner in silence (seriously I swear that last trope appears in every book). Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 13:32
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Exactly. When you read several books about middle aged badasses running around killing monsters and whatnot, and then that style changes, it sucks when you are expecting the usual. I'm not saying they are bad books that should have remained unpublished. I'm saying if you are looking for "old guy smashing the poo poo out of everyone with his potentially magic axe", you will not dig those very much because the tonal change made em more... Light? I guess. Discussions of feelings and love and stoically enduring unrequited love, all while it seems like a violin softly plays in the background, instead of night raids and vivid descriptions of how a head flies through the air and asses are whupped.
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Dec 14, 2022 13:49
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That sounds better actually
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Dec 14, 2022 14:48
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She did lose her husband and then finish his book series, a big theme in every arc of the final book is loss, it even has a part where a storyteller character dies and the narrator practically looks at the camera and says (paraphrasing) "when a storyteller dies, they don't really die as long as people tell their stories". It does depict the Fall of Troy after all, which I think is quite thematic, so I didn't mind it. But I can see how it would be jarring. Spoilered just in case but the Greeks spoiled that millennia ago. Brendan Rodgers fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 17:44
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mewse posted:There's a book from the mid-80s called Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. I read it because Brandon Sanderson cited it as an inspiration to become an author, and it was pretty good. The protag is a middle aged woman. She doesn't save the universe. Dragonsbane (Winterlands #1) by Barbara Hambly - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004TC149G/
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Dec 14, 2022 18:29
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quantumfoam posted:?? I'd be curious to know which MC book he did this with. As far as I know, he generally took quite a while to write his books. He's my favorite author, so I like to think I'm well versed in MC trivia but I could definitely be wrong.
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Dec 14, 2022 22:00
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ectoplasm posted:I'd be curious to know which MC book he did this with. As far as I know, he generally took quite a while to write his books. He's my favorite author, so I like to think I'm well versed in MC trivia but I could definitely be wrong. Michael Crichton himself said he did so in his non-fiction book Travels (1988), but never said which book it was. With no context, I am guessing the written in 9 days book was one of his John Lange penname books.
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Dec 14, 2022 23:42
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I've just finally got around to Murderbot, and while I enjoyed the novellas as a solid set of B+ experiences, Network Effect has succeeded in absolutely beating out the flame of my interest. It kind of took a bunch of moderate annoyances from the novellas and blew them up into unignorable problems; the long, rambling and uninteresting descriptions of Murderbot doing Hacking Stuff, Murderbot uses extremely generic wordings so keeping track of what's actually happening is more arduous than it should be, all the human characters are about a trait-and-a-half deep, the worldbuilding is an extremely thin skeleton, grievous sessions of telling-not-showing where all the characters have a meeting to explain in excruciating detail what they're going to do, why they want to do it and precisely how to prepare to do the thing. I guess that's telling AND showing, which is maybe even worse. Oof.
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Dec 15, 2022 07:27
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Yeah I get that. Murderbot is supposed to not give a poo poo about regular humans, but they spend all day noting down and thinking about every human they can detect with or without the network does. And comments on how annoying they are. It gets old fast. I feel like 50% of the words in these books is whining about the humans being irritating, and maybe another 20% insisting that Murderbot isn't human at all despite literally everything to the contrary.
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Dec 15, 2022 07:59
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Sinatrapod posted:I've just finally got around to Murderbot, and while I enjoyed the novellas as a solid set of B+ experiences, Network Effect has succeeded in absolutely beating out the flame of my interest. It kind of took a bunch of moderate annoyances from the novellas and blew them up into unignorable problems; the long, rambling and uninteresting descriptions of Murderbot doing Hacking Stuff, Murderbot uses extremely generic wordings so keeping track of what's actually happening is more arduous than it should be, all the human characters are about a trait-and-a-half deep, the worldbuilding is an extremely thin skeleton, grievous sessions of telling-not-showing where all the characters have a meeting to explain in excruciating detail what they're going to do, why they want to do it and precisely how to prepare to do the thing. I guess that's telling AND showing, which is maybe even worse. Oof.
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Dec 15, 2022 14:28
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Empire of Sand (Books of Ambha #1) by Tashu Suri - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B8J34CC/
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Dec 15, 2022 23:39
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I finished reading Artifact Space. The main character is a bit of a Mary Sue, but it was some excellent milhist-flavoured space opera. You can kinda tell that the author actually used to fly jets on an aircraft carrier, lol. I also finally read the correct Raven Tower. Also very good, much better than "Hamlet as told by a rock" should be. I haven't been disappointed by an Ann Leckie book so far. The City We Became was also great. I think my only regret was not seeing more of Queens laying down some dimension-warping math-magic. Looking forward to reading the sequel.
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Dec 16, 2022 01:22
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I finished reading Artifact Space. The main character is a bit of a Mary Sue, but it was some excellent milhist-flavoured space opera. You can kinda tell that the author actually used to fly jets on an aircraft carrier, lol. I particularly liked "And now we're on your training flight, so I'm going to take a nap, do all my paperwork for me."
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Dec 16, 2022 07:45
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Larry Parrish posted:Yeah I get that. Murderbot is supposed to not give a poo poo about regular humans, but they spend all day noting down and thinking about every human they can detect with or without the network does. And comments on how annoying they are. It’s almost as though Murderbot’s assessment of itself is not 100% accurate! Like, yeah, no poo poo. Murderbot cares more about the people around it than it likes to admit to itself, and is perhaps not solely interested in an entirely isolated, self-absorbed lifestyle. Its behavior belies what it tells itself it is and must be. It’s like that’s a theme of the story.
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Dec 16, 2022 17:38
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bravesword posted:It’s almost as though Murderbot’s assessment of itself is not 100% accurate!
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Dec 16, 2022 18:20
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bravesword posted:It’s almost as though Murderbot’s assessment of itself is not 100% accurate! Yeah, but there's only so much repetition I can take before I'm irritated.
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Dec 16, 2022 18:25
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Larry Parrish posted:Yeah, but there's only so much repetition I can take before I'm irritated. It's this. The books are meant to be formulaic and repetitive within their series, and that's fine: Murderbot is an iconic hero, not a dramatic one, it stays true to its essential nature and any growth it experiences is basically beside the point, like Sherlock Holmes or Batman. But, they're also incredibly repetitive within a given story, and god it adds up fast.
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Dec 16, 2022 19:39
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Kestral posted:It's this. The books are meant to be formulaic and repetitive within their series, and that's fine: Murderbot is an iconic hero, not a dramatic one, it stays true to its essential nature and any growth it experiences is basically beside the point, like Sherlock Holmes or Batman. But, they're also incredibly repetitive within a given story, and god it adds up fast. Yeah I enjoyed the novellas, given I spaced them out a fair bit, but Network Effect really exposed a lot of the stuff that I personally didn't enjoy about the books, over and over. That was the one that made me feel like I was pretty much done with Murderbot, even if the rest are novellas.
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Dec 16, 2022 19:44
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I finished the Born Queen series, which is a solid fantasy story that doesn’t do anything amazing but includes some of the best written descriptions of hand-to-hand combat I’ve come across. very easy to follow and visualize the action. The author, Greg Keyes, is mostly a licensed novel guy, so my expectations weren’t very high. I didn’t love the pacing, there were a few overly convenient contrivances and it was rushed towards the end. Good prose, good use of language, and decent characterization, 3.5-4 stars. Oh he also has this nasty habit of end of chapter cliffhangers that end up being nothing when you get back to that character’s pov. So looking through my backlog for some fantasy series to give another chance and I’ve started both Mistborn and Prince of Thorn and I have reservations Mistborn: Sanderson’s prose is really clumsy. Too much inelegant exposition, I gather he’s a lot more interested in the world he’s built than the story. Characters are thin. I’m at the part where vin is meeting the rest of the team for the first time and they’re doing that awkward thing where characters say each others names in strange ways just so Sanderson can tell us what they’re called . I also don’t really like heist stories. Prince of Thorns: better prose, better voice, some decent turns of phrase. But I’m concerned about the psychopath teenage protagonist who really doesn’t act like any 13 year old I ever heard of. I’m not necessarily opposed to an sociopathic “hero”, I think it could be done in an interesting way, but combined with the age of the character I’m having trouble suspending my disbelief. Either of these series improve on my concerns or are so good that I should soldier on? Both of them show up frequently in Top 10 lists and if these are top ten…
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Dec 16, 2022 21:49
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zoux posted:I finished the Born Queen series, which is a solid fantasy story that doesn’t do anything amazing but includes some of the best written descriptions of hand-to-hand combat I’ve come across. very easy to follow and visualize the action. The author, Greg Keyes, is mostly a licensed novel guy, so my expectations weren’t very high. I didn’t love the pacing, there were a few overly convenient contrivances and it was rushed towards the end. Good prose, good use of language, and decent characterization, 3.5-4 stars. Oh he also has this nasty habit of end of chapter cliffhangers that end up being nothing when you get back to that character’s pov. The first Mistborn book is the best of the three in that trilogy IMO, so take that as you will. But even the first book branches out from bring a traditional heist story after the initial few chapters, so there's that too.
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Dec 16, 2022 21:57
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Admiralty Flag posted:The first Mistborn book is the best of the three in that trilogy IMO, so take that as you will. But even the first book branches out from bring a traditional heist story after the initial few chapters, so there's that too. I tried the first Mistborn multiple times years ago, some of my friends rave about it, meanwhile that whole Cosmere thing has become gigantic and I feel like I'm missing out, but I just know, Sanderson isn't for me.
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Dec 16, 2022 22:10
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I read the first couple of Stormlight novels and liked them quite a bit, but when I saw it was still half unwritten I shelved it until it’s done. So it’s weird to me, I’m not sure why I like Stormlight but I struggle with anything else he’s written
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Dec 16, 2022 22:14
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More Discworld books by Terry Pratchett The Color of Magic (#1) - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W9399S/ Equal Rites (#3) - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W9393Y/ Mort (#4) - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W967UQ/ Prince of Fools (Red Queen's War #1) by Mark Lawrence - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G3L1338/ The Book of Merlyn (Once and Future King) by TH White - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C7H2YHD/
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Dec 16, 2022 22:57
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Great books there
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Dec 16, 2022 23:29
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Has anyone read Ad Infinitum: A Science Fiction Novella about Time, Free Will, and Complexity? I just saw it pop on my recs. Given it's a former academic I can only assume the novel will either be mind blowing and totally reshape how the reader sees the universe, or dry as a milkbone.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:44
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bravesword posted:It’s almost as though Murderbot’s assessment of itself is not 100% accurate! unreliable narrator is a dumb meme
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Dec 17, 2022 03:05
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Hey everyone, I've started a blog/newsletter about strange & obscure classic SFF novels. If that sounds interesting you can check it out here: https://paperback-picnic.ghost.io So far I've written about Roger Zelazny's bong rip wizard novel The Changing Land; Octavia E. Butler's psychic slave story Patternmaster; and Midnight at the Well of Souls, by thread certified Worst Person Jack L. Chalker. If you like the blog, I'm also keen for recommendations of more books to review. I'm especially interested in books that are mostly forgotten, that have strange or unique premises, or that have an interesting backstory behind them (e.g. Zelazny randomising the chapters of Roadmarks, or Moorcock rewriting Gloriana in response to feminist criticism).
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Dec 17, 2022 03:11
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Sailor Viy posted:Hey everyone, I've started a blog/newsletter about strange & obscure classic SFF novels. If that sounds interesting you can check it out here: https://paperback-picnic.ghost.io Try reading the committed men by M John Harrison or the short story collection M John Harrison mostly disavowed, The Machine in Shaft Ten. I say mostly disavowed because three of the stories in it got republished (with minor to major changes) later in other places, and another story in it gives background on the Nastic civilization from MJH's much later novel Light. I'm also convinced the Kefahuchi Tract from MJH's Light/Nova Swing/Empty Space trilogy is the result of the titular Centauri Device from MJH's The Centauri Device going off and loving up half the Milky Way in space and time ways. Another weird book to try is the worm ouroboros, which directly inspired JRR Tolkien and a bunch of others. Or if you want to read what Ernest Cline or Patrick Rothfuss would have written if they were active as authors in the 1980's/1990's check out Emerald Eyes by Daniel Keys Moran.
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Dec 17, 2022 06:01
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Horizon Burning posted:unreliable narrator is a dumb meme if that's unreliable narrator then isn't basically every first person story ever unreliable narrator
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Dec 17, 2022 06:09
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Sailor Viy posted:Hey everyone, I've started a blog/newsletter about strange & obscure classic SFF novels. If that sounds interesting you can check it out here: https://paperback-picnic.ghost.io Great idea and I look forward to reading more. If you want forgotten and a cool premise, I suggest AA Attanasio's The Last Legends of Earth, from 1989. I would be very curious to have someone else read this thing and give their impressions, because it's a fabulous mix of stilted and wild and weird.
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Dec 17, 2022 06:39
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zoux posted:I read the first couple of Stormlight novels and liked them quite a bit, but when I saw it was still half unwritten I shelved it until it’s done. So it’s weird to me, I’m not sure why I like Stormlight but I struggle with anything else he’s written it's likely that it was written with several years less experience writing than the Stormlight books.
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Dec 17, 2022 06:41
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Horizon Burning posted:unreliable narrator is a dumb meme Meme?
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Dec 17, 2022 06:52
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Horizon Burning posted:unreliable narrator is a dumb meme that's a trope not a meme
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Dec 17, 2022 09:55
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Xotl posted:Great idea and I look forward to reading more. This does sound wild. Wikipedia says it's the fourth in a series, do you reckon it can be read as a standalone?
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Dec 17, 2022 10:26
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Sailor Viy posted:This does sound wild. Wikipedia says it's the fourth in a series, do you reckon it can be read as a standalone? I've never read the other volumes and from what I recall they're not necessary. One of the characters is from one of the earlier books, but I don't recall being confused by her contribution while missing that knowledge. Of course, there's probably added dimensions from reading the others, but it's so far in the future that the connections to the others I would assume are pretty tenuous and every review I've ever read says it stands alone just fine. Xotl fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 11:37
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