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Megazver posted:He seems completely over making videogames, from what I've heard in the interviews, sorry. He's got a prequel coming out in November, Bookshops & Bonedust.
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Jun 25, 2023 15:57
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Hey thanks y'all for never shutting up about Gene Wolfe, you finally got me to read The Shadow of the Torturer and whaddya know it slaps. Good job!
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Jun 25, 2023 16:05
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Nona the Ninth (Locked Tomb #3) by Tamsyn Muir - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G14BQMM/ Children of Time (#1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DN8BQMD/ The Fifth Season (Broken Earth #1) by NK Jemisin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H25FCSQ/ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Illustrated Edition (#1) by Douglas Adams - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XUBC2C/ A Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire #1) by George RR Martin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QCS8TW/ Blindsight (Firefall #1) by Peter Watts - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003K15EKM/ Blood of Elves (Witcher #1) by Andrzej Sapkowski - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00276HAEY/ Hyperion (#1) by Dan Simmons - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004G60EHS/ The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084FY1NXB/ A Deadly Education (Scholomance #1) by Naomi Novik - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083RZC8KQ/ Terminal World by Alistair Reynolds - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003QP4NTU/
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Jun 25, 2023 16:46
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pradmer posted:Nona the Ninth (Locked Tomb #3) by Tamsyn Muir - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09G14BQMM/ Wow that's a lot of good poo poo. Nona the Ninth was the weakest of the Locked Tomb series but I appreciate that it gives a perspective of life on a non-Necromancer focused planet, it helps fill out the universe. Terminal World I read recently when I was burning through Alastair Reynolds books. It's OK, a kind of interesting setup for a story where each city is locked to a maximum technology level: One city might have modern technology, another might have highly advanced technology, and another city can't advance past 1800s level tech. It covers a lot of how things work in a world like this, with things like semaphore towers being the main way long distance communication can work. It's not the kind of book I would ever actively recommend, but if someone was thinking about reading it I would say go for it.
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Jun 25, 2023 16:58
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cptn_dr posted:
killer whales moving on from disabling boats, now stealing precious book sales from our sf author community
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Jun 25, 2023 18:33
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Megazver posted:He seems completely over making videogames, from what I've heard in the interviews, sorry. Making video games sucks rear end so I can hardly blame him
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Jun 25, 2023 18:38
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Scalzi confused me. He was also responsible for a lot of the source stories for Love Death and Robots, which was a huge waste of great animation talent working on crap narratives. And I include Joe Abercrombie in that, for some reason what I like about his work did not translate to screen in that short about rats. https://twitter.com/misterbloat/status/1672967411136442371 Ccs fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 19:13
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If you wished everyone IRL talked out loud like they were posting on reddit then you will love that book. edit: Jesus Christ it actually won a Locus Award, what a crock of poo poo. withak fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 19:16
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I was astounded at how bad that book was, and I only got like 10 pages in
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Jun 25, 2023 19:21
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The first excerpt seemed not so bad in a "the narrator is doesn't understand what's happening and is too panicky to explain better", but I actually leaned back from the second one. Jesus Christ.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:14
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Is that not a parody of rp1? Seriously?
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Jun 25, 2023 20:36
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I got to the goodreads review that said "Kaiju Preservation Society ... is light-hearted and very funny, full of present-day references and neverending quips and snark, almost a meme in book form" and decided it would not be for me.Ccs posted:Scalzi confused me. He was also responsible for a lot of the source stories for Love Death and Robots, which was a huge waste of great animation talent working on crap narratives. Hmm, I remember liking a fair few of the first season's episodes, but then I looked back and two of the better ones were written by Alastair Reynolds while the three most cringe epic meme lol stories were all Scalzi.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:52
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I looked at the list of Locus Winners and it's been a long time since I've had so stark a reminder that there's no accounting for taste. Also it's very odd to me that Nona was nominated for Fantasy.
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Jun 25, 2023 21:01
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Kaiju Preservation Society isn't good, but it feels exactly like what everyone involved wanted it to be. Scalzi wanted more money to buy guitars with too many necks and a church to convert into a house, his publisher paid him good money, and he was pretty open on twitter about how he wrote the book quickly for the paycheck. I found the book was OK enough to kill a few nice summer afternoons where reading a book was mostly an excuse to sit outside on a nice day. I feel like it's the exact kind of pop culture chasing fiction that will end up using AI assistance to finish get a book out in a month instead of several months.
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Jun 25, 2023 21:14
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This is just what Scalzi is these days. He signed a contract which gave him a huge pile of money, but he's been legally obligated to churn out a book a year ever since. That shouldn't be a huge issue for a full-time author, but he became a full-time Twitter Warrior roughly around the same time as he signed the contract, the Sad Puppies and later Trump exacerbating the issue. He admitted that he cranked out at least one of the recent novels (The Collapsing Empire) in several weeks to avoid missing the deadline; he almost missed the deadline because he spent most of that year Trumpscrolling and Trumpposting. I haven't paid much attention to the last few books, but I think I saw a similar admission about this one as well somewhere? Yeah. I hate to say this but (please don't ban me) amid all the bullshit, whining and bigotry the Puppies had a point about Scalzi getting awards mostly because of his social media and industry clout, not because his recent books are actually good.
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Jun 25, 2023 21:54
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Probably bad news for Locus, implicitly, since they weigh subscriber votes over general public ones. I'd guess the subscribers vote more or less like Nebula voters, minus logrolling effects, and the rest vote more like Dragon Award voters, and these are some Dragon Award results. So a lot fewer subscribers than when they last set the weighings. Meanwhile the Chengdau worldcon still hasn't gotten the Hugo nominations out (traditionally released on Easter, more recently a weekend away from that because that was an obviously bad idea from a PR standpoint.) Edit to add: If you think Scalzi is a full-time Twitter warrior then you clearly don't follow Harry Turtledove... Thranguy fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 21:57
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Chainclaw posted:Wow that's a lot of good poo poo. I'll say that the three books really reward rereading and I found nona vastly better second time through.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:31
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Thranguy posted:Probably bad news for Locus, implicitly, since they weigh subscriber votes over general public ones. I'd guess the subscribers vote more or less like Nebula voters, minus logrolling effects, and the rest vote more like Dragon Award voters, and these are some Dragon Award results. So a lot fewer subscribers than when they last set the weighings. I love seeing Turtledove constantly telling people to gently caress off, straight up. No sugar coating, no dunks, just "get hosed, nazi."
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Jun 25, 2023 22:38
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Thranguy posted:Edit to add: If you think Scalzi is a full-time Twitter warrior then you clearly don't follow Harry Turtledove... I don't really follow either, but I don't see how these are mutually exclusive. I think admitting that you almost failed a book contract because you were too busy fighting on Twitter does make you a bit of a Twitter warrior. If Turtledove can do that and also still release good books, I will concede he is indeed more powerful of the two.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:57
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Megazver posted:If Turtledove can do that and also still release good books, I will concede he is indeed more powerful of the two. I don't know about that. I've not read any of his books but I read some of what he's written for Analog in recent years, and I wasn't terribly impressed by the quality. Two of them involved an alternate prehistory where dinos evolved into intelligent beings and I think it's a bit dodgy he then had the equivalents of different ethnicities in our world be actual different species of dino-person over there.
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Jun 25, 2023 22:59
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Those quotes don’t sound so different from what I’ve seen of Project Hail Mary.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:02
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FPyat posted:Those quotes don’t sound so different from what I’ve seen of Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary is just more competence porn, it's basically the most egregious stuff of The Martian pushed farther. It's a good page turner, it's fun to read, but don't go in expecting anything more than the main character solving every problem The Martian style. I've actually been thinking about re-reading it, with so much incompetence in the news, especially around that submarine. A straightforward story of someone ably solving highly technical problems feels like it might be a chill re-read. It'll probably go next after I finish some Warhammer fiction I somehow roped myself into reading. It's definitely better than most Warhammer fiction.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:24
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Hot take: Scalzi always wrote like that and was never actually a great writer, nor is he very imaginative.
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Jun 26, 2023 00:44
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Kesper North posted:Hot take: Scalzi always wrote like that and was never actually a great writer, nor is he very imaginative.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:08
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I liked old Man's war and read enough of his books to realize every new book he writes was half as entertaining as the previous book. I haven't read any of his recent stuff but I assume thanks to exponential decay it's about as good as KU porn novels.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:10
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I thought old man’s war is a decently imaginative and unique take on military sci fi, in an extremely frothy and non-serious way. It’s a perfectly fine, forgettable read. Kaiju was really bad though.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:19
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Kesper North posted:Hot take: Scalzi always wrote like that and was never actually a great writer, nor is he very imaginative. I actually thought being unimaginative was sort of his thing because the two biggest titles I knew from him initially were Fuzzy Nation and Old Man's War. It was a while before I found out that OMW is not actually a direct riff of The Forever War, but it winds up being a kissing cousin anyway since they're both descendants of Starship Troopers.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:25
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I will confess that I got in a twitter spat with scalzi once and it ended amicably with him venmoing me a dollar.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:39
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Megazver posted:This is just what Scalzi is these days. He signed a contract which gave him a huge pile of money, but he's been legally obligated to churn out a book a year ever since. That shouldn't be a huge issue for a full-time author, but he became a full-time Twitter Warrior roughly around the same time as he signed the contract, the Sad Puppies and later Trump exacerbating the issue. He admitted that he cranked out at least one of the recent novels (The Collapsing Empire) in several weeks to avoid missing the deadline; he almost missed the deadline because he spent most of that year Trumpscrolling and Trumpposting. sure that bit is true but it wasn't what was stopping them from winning awards, that was the terrible, terrible quality of the books vox day and larry correia et al write. even being a neo-nazi isn't the kicker, it's the bilious poo poo they spew as authors that keeps them out of the awards.
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Jun 26, 2023 02:12
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Ror posted:I actually thought being unimaginative was sort of his thing because the two biggest titles I knew from him initially were Fuzzy Nation and Old Man's War. It was a while before I found out that OMW is not actually a direct riff of The Forever War, but it winds up being a kissing cousin anyway since they're both descendants of Starship Troopers. Whoa whoa whoa, The Forever War is a distant cousin of Starship Troopers (which is the embarassing side of the clan).
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Jun 26, 2023 02:34
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Initially I thought Scalzi was one of those authors who got too big for their britches and just refused to listen to editors but it seems like he's just crapping stuff out last minute so there might not be time for an editor to even touch it now. I'd blame Ernest Cline for the writing style but he's a symptom, not the disease. Scalzi got very mad at a friend for what they said on a podcast and it was hilarious just how upset he was, taking time from his literal 3 million dollar writing deal to attack a tiny podcast.
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Jun 26, 2023 08:43
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Ccs posted:Scalzi confused me. He was also responsible for a lot of the source stories for Love Death and Robots, which was a huge waste of great animation talent working on crap narratives. LD&R was misogynistic garbage. Every story* just absolutely poo poo on women having any agency or existence outside of the context of their man. It all clicked for me when in the episode about the farmers fighting aliens with giant mechs, al the conventionally attractive women were tradwives who got in the bunkers with the kids, while the only woman to participate in the defense was old, ugly, and unpopular. I persevered. Then I got to "Good Hunting" and gently caress me, they absolutely poo poo all over the female character, ultimately leaving her literally sexually objectified. Apparently there are four seasons of this show. * Up to where I stopped watching at S1E8.
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Jun 26, 2023 08:55
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There's a season 4? News to me. Love, Death + Robots is very hit or miss, as is the curse of the anthology format, but it isn't all bad. The Alastair Reynolds ones are cool and S3 has some good stuff in it, especially "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Jibaro" IMO.
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Jun 26, 2023 09:04
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mllaneza posted:LD&R was misogynistic garbage. Every story* just absolutely poo poo on women having any agency or existence outside of the context of their man. It all clicked for me when in the episode about the farmers fighting aliens with giant mechs, al the conventionally attractive women were tradwives who got in the bunkers with the kids, while the only woman to participate in the defense was old, ugly, and unpopular. I persevered. Then I got to "Good Hunting" and gently caress me, they absolutely poo poo all over the female character, ultimately leaving her literally sexually objectified. Apparently there are four seasons of this show. You got six episodes further than I did before drawing the same conclusion. It's a loving vile show.
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Jun 26, 2023 09:08
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Jedit posted:You got six episodes further than I did before drawing the same conclusion. It's a loving vile show. I was very much watching a trainwreck. Then the Fox Spirit episode happened, and I had my nose rubbed into the poo poo I was watching. I am as sorry I watched that as almost anything I've seen in my decades on the Internet. "Vile" is very much the right word for it. Nuclear Tourist posted:Love, Death + Robots is very hit or miss, as is the curse of the anthology format, but it isn't all bad. The Alastair Reynolds ones are cool and S3 has some good stuff in it, especially "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Jibaro" IMO. Go ahead and name an episode in any season where a woman has agency, I'll check it out, I'm kinda interested to see if they kept the misogyny up or if it was some sort of season-long aberration.
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Jun 26, 2023 09:16
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mllaneza posted:LD&R was misogynistic garbage. Every story* just absolutely poo poo on women having any agency or existence outside of the context of their man. It all clicked for me when in the episode about the farmers fighting aliens with giant mechs, al the conventionally attractive women were tradwives who got in the bunkers with the kids, while the only woman to participate in the defense was old, ugly, and unpopular. I persevered. Then I got to "Good Hunting" and gently caress me, they absolutely poo poo all over the female character, ultimately leaving her literally sexually objectified. Apparently there are four seasons of this show. It doesn't help that literally every single story is written by a man. Even in cases where the original stories were good, they often skip important points in ways that diminish the message. For example, in the original "Sonnie's Edge" short story, Sonnie makes it clear that her backstory as a sexual assault survivor is complete bullshit she made up because she knew the men would eat it up and stop looking for her real edge. Her body was actually destroyed in a random accident, and her real edge is that her brain is physically in the monster, so she is fighting for her life. The animated version skips this important point, so you instead get the impression she was raped so hard that she needed a new body.
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Jun 26, 2023 09:20
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mllaneza posted:Go ahead and name an episode in any season where a woman has agency I don't know, the episodes I mentioned? I think I've watched the majority of S3 and the Reynolds ones but not a whole lot beyond that, I haven't really thought about it much in terms other than "that sci-fi thing on netflix" but it's entirely possible that I'm too slow witted to pick up on the virulently anti-woman subtext so I'll take your word for it.
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Jun 26, 2023 10:37
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I like the LD&R with the intelligent yogurt. The three robots got a chuckle but wasn't worth the sequel. But yeah a lot of the episodes really feel dated in their handling of characters.
Whale Vomit fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 11:53
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Megazver posted:I hate to say this but (please don't ban me) amid all the bullshit, whining and bigotry the Puppies had a point about Scalzi getting awards mostly because of his social media and industry clout, not because his recent books are actually good. This is pretty fair really. The Puppies didn’t win because they were all truly poo poo authors… but Scalzi’s never been great. I’m pretty ok saying that he is where he is more because of his place in the early 00s blogging space and stance as a fixture in the SF writers community than because of any real chops as a writer. And in fairness to him, it’s not like he hides any of this, he’s pretty open about the need to churn stuff out and being guided by commercial realities. Not just on his recent books either, I mean Redshirts won both the Hugo and the Locus and it’s just… not even actively terrible but just a tossed off Star Trek parody. Like a middling Futurama episode with a snarky Whedonesque meta element.
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Jun 26, 2023 12:12
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Good Politics and bad writing won over worse writing and abhorrent politics. edit: to be fair likeable, or tolerable, on trend writing has always had the edge over literary heavy hitters in winning SF and Fantasy awards any way fez_machine fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 13:17
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