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It's like there was a messy divorce and the UK got the good covers and the US got use of the baru name.
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Jul 15, 2023 07:43
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 ...and I really liked it! I was complaining a few months ago about how the modern noirish first-person urban fantasy has a problem with snarky, overly modern dialog and internal monolog. I was glad to find this was not the case with All-in. Really liked the main character as well, which was a surprise because I tend to loathe the protagonists in these types of books. Mild premise spoilers for anyone who wants to go in completely blind:Great choice to take the protagonist from literally the LA noir era, and really nice job with his voice in that regard, and mixing modern and quaint ways of talking. I like that you trust you audience to understand certain character arcs and motivations without spelling them out, and I like the world-building, I love anything that has real historical figures laid on top of its secret magic vampire underworld. Questions to the author and full spoilers: I loved Eddy's Henry Hill arc, and how he didn't even realize he was spiraling at the end. At first I was more interested in the modern story so I was like "make with the vampire siring already" but by halfway through I was equally invested in both, so having them both payoff at the end of the book worked very well. What's your theory of vampire evil? Eddy's kind of a hard-luck dirtbag, but he's a good guy who tries to do right by people. All the other vamps are just straight up bad guys. So is Eddy good because he was a somewhat bad guy before, or is that something that comes with age, or a secret third thing you want to save for the book? Is Felix a jötunn? Who's that guy in your amazon author pfp and does he have any hot racing tips? I liked this quite a bit more than Jim Butcher and taste is relative but this is at least as good as that series so I'd definitely recommend the book to fans of that type of urban fantasy. zoux fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jul 15, 2023 |
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Jul 15, 2023 20:25
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zoux posted:
Hah! I recall seeing that comment and thinking "ah hell. They're not going to like my book if that's the case. Eddy's a total wise rear end." Glad you found it to your taste after all. zoux posted:
It's a third thing. zoux posted:Is Felix a jötunn? zoux posted:I liked this quite a bit more than Jim Butcher and taste is relative but this is at least as good as that series so I'd definitely recommend the book to fans of that type of urban fantasy. Honestly thank you! This sort of recommendation is so, so gratifying. Especially since Butcher's work is one of my inspirations, albeit in a "come on. I can do better than this stuff!" sort of way.
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Jul 15, 2023 20:47
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Marshal Radisic posted:I read that essay a few months ago, and I've been turning it over in my mind ever since. Near as I can tell, it was one of the last pieces Jonathan McCalmont wrote before he left online sff criticism entirely, though he did briefly return to his blog almost a year ago to pen a memorial for Maureen Kincaid Speller, longtime senior reviews editor of Strange Horizons.  She was a wonderful person.Marshal Radisic posted:What I keep coming back to in the piece is McCalmont's central assertion that the relaxation of genre boundaries that kicked into high gear in the 2000s was not due to the success of the New Weird as a movement, which in McCalmont's estimation was aiming for something more ambitious but ultimately never got a chance to cohere. Today it feels like even Mieville, who seemed like such a giant, is being forgotten. I guess it doesn't help that he was canceled to some degree and he hasn't published much in a decade. But I don't know. In the 90s there were all these people that still revered Clarke and Heinlein and Niven even though it was decades since their good work. Maybe attention spans are shorter. Or maybe I'm still confused about popular vs. critical darlings and Scalzi is today's Niven. Anyway, it's funny reading those excerpts and seeing how aggressively M John Harrison was fighting for his artistic independence against evil labels. Recently a friend read Perdido Street Station for the first time and asked how he could read something similar. If only there was one of these evil marketing categories available! Especially since we somehow have ChatGPT but
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Jul 15, 2023 21:15
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CaptainCrunch posted:It's a third thing.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:18
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Danhenge posted:Cleverness. Buncha sharp cookies 'round here. BTW, can I steal that phrase? I'm stealing that phrase.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:29
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Lex Talionis posted:Though looking back I did come up with Steph Swainston as one of the suggestions. Apropos of nothing, but I am reorganizing my library and came across the Castle Omnibus and goddamn I remember loving that book, and never hearing anyone say a word about it. I wonder if it holds up to a reread.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:37
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Jordan7hm posted:Apropos of nothing, but I am reorganizing my library and came across the Castle Omnibus and goddamn I remember loving that book, and never hearing anyone say a word about it. I wonder if it holds up to a reread.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:38
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Foreigner (#1) by CJ Cherryh - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006JHXPDW/ The Pariah (Covenant of Steel #1) by Anthony Ryan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PV49R1G/ Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y5L7H71/ Kushiel's Dart (Kushiel's Legacy #1) by Jacqueline Carey - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055DLCAY/ Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016CQUL4U/ Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077FC55Y/
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Jul 15, 2023 22:56
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anilEhilated posted:Were there more than three books? I remember the first two being decent and the third one basically going nowhere. The omnibus has 1-3, and then there’s a prequel called Above the Snowline which I picked up but never finished. And apparently one more called Fair Rebel that came out fairly recently.
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Jul 15, 2023 22:59
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CaptainCrunch posted:Buncha sharp cookies 'round here. BTW, can I steal that phrase? I'm stealing that phrase. I kind of assumed you were referring to this : https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Shovelhead Although I guess the phrasing might be my own misremembering? You're welcome to it either way.
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Jul 15, 2023 23:01
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Well, just finished Fine Structure by qntm. That went places. Thought it was a bunch of unconnected short stories at first.
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Jul 15, 2023 23:08
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Groke posted:Well, just finished Fine Structure by qntm. That went places. Thought it was a bunch of unconnected short stories at first. It’s so good and weird, oh my god what a trip. Between Fine Structure, There Is No Antimemetics Division, and their excellent short fiction, QNTM is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. Anyone who wants Big Ideas SF from someone who can also write, pick up their stuff.
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Jul 15, 2023 23:26
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Danhenge posted:I kind of assumed you were referring to this : https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Shovelhead Oh, wild. No, I never actually got into VTM other than a cursory read of the sourcebooks back when it first came out. Mostly for the kickin' rad pen and ink spot illustrations.
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Jul 16, 2023 00:14
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Battle Mage Farmer I stuck this series on my list after reading your post, and recently did a free trial of Kindle Unlimited. Pretty fun series, I like how quick of a read they are, only took me about 2 weeks to get through the series so far. Pretty excited for the 6th one.
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Jul 16, 2023 00:37
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I really liked em. It was a nice change of pace from the usual "oh I'm in a new world, let me become a god" books that usually come out. Great companion piece to "beware of chicken". I really loved the last book where he got back from the other world and was literally destroying the world around him by just existing because he had way too much mana. Sort of a walking nuclear explosion in a way. Made an interesting mental image.
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Jul 16, 2023 01:14
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https://twitter.com/thatsgoodweb/status/1680277550843527170 Ah yes the Uplift War
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Jul 16, 2023 02:05
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/thatsgoodweb/status/1680277550843527170 I know nothing about this book but I was immediately imagining a pitch meeting where someone goes "ok so what if we take the cyber dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic and mash it up with Planet of the Apes, but also Star Wars... wait where are you going"
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Jul 16, 2023 02:34
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/thatsgoodweb/status/1680277550843527170
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Jul 16, 2023 03:47
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Kestral posted:It’s so good and weird, oh my god what a trip. Between Fine Structure, There Is No Antimemetics Division, and their excellent short fiction, QNTM is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. Anyone who wants Big Ideas SF from someone who can also write, pick up their stuff. Yeah, the idea density was pretty high. Some of the chapters set at various points in the future would have been whole books in the hands of some other authors.
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Jul 16, 2023 10:11
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Ok baru 1 down, on to 2 hell yeah
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Jul 16, 2023 10:33
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Good post. I liked a lot of McCalmont's stuff. He was often pretty acerbic but the quality was there. Agreed about that whole blogging scene. You're probably right that ultimately the numbers game meant its influence was going to fade (or was illusory to begin with) but I'd also put that decline to the increased intertwining of marketing, reviews and similar that accompanied twitter becoming the 'main' space, which brought with it, or maybe just foregrounded, a different and more 'positive' critical culture. Could also be a British vs American critic thing too, you can look at the reaction to the Clarke awards 'Shadow Jury' in 2017/18; a lot deeper and more outright critical than many other critics and that seemed to get a lot of "if you can't say anything nice..." pushback. But yeah, just on numbers, in retrospect I guess it was unlikely that capital N New capital W Weird was ever going to be a tidal wave. Lex Talionis posted:But I guess it worked out because I got to deploy my Comic Book Guy-style knowledge of the genre and felt like a valuable friend since I recommended him a book (Senlin Ascends) and he loved it. It never occurred to me to mention "New Weird" to him or even use it myself to think about recommendations, though looking back I did come up with Steph Swainston as one of the suggestions. That's cool! Tbh it's the obvious comparison but Senlin Ascends reminded me of Gormenghast, so obviously well before Mieville, Swainston and co. Feels like it takes the pressure off a little when you don't have to situate it in a larger genre history but also don't have to just fall back on a broad "it's fantasy but not knights and dragons". Marshal Radisic posted:As it happens, there was a recent piece by Moreau Vazh which caused a stir by looking at the recent attempts to make "cozy horror" a thing and drawing similar conclusions McCalmont did. I don't think his argument entirely holds up for the decades between the emergence of the New Wave and the turn of the millennium, but his discussion of the evolution of genre culture from the year 2000 to the present complements and expands McCalmont's argument. Agreed on the patchiness of some of his timeline but it's a good article. His pointing out of the defensiveness and wagon-circling behaviours of at least a bit of the Very Online SFF Authorship in the years after the whole puppies thing is spot on.
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Jul 16, 2023 10:39
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I don't believe it's been mentioned here yet, but the new short story Detonation Boulevard by Alastair Reynolds, is available to read here https://www.tor.com/2023/07/12/detonation-boulevard-alastair-reynolds/ (yes, it's a Sisters of Mercy reference)
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Jul 16, 2023 10:44
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sebmojo posted:Ok baru 1 down, on to 2 hell yeah How the gently caress is "hell yeah" your response to the end of Baru 1 lmao
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Jul 16, 2023 12:49
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Hell yeah wasn't a response to the end of Baru 1, but the fact that they are starting Baru 2. Makes a lot of sense to me. I'm gonna "Hell yeah" when 4 comes.
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Jul 16, 2023 13:01
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fermun posted:Hell yeah wasn't a response to the end of Baru 1, but the fact that they are starting Baru 2. Makes a lot of sense to me. I'm gonna "Hell yeah" when 4 comes. It's like an all u can eat treachery buffet and her plate is loaded
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Jul 16, 2023 13:12
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Leng posted:
Have now finished The Burning God. It's better written at the sentence and scene level but the character work remains lacking and it's kind of a structural mess. The best written portion is Part I, which actually did build decently and looked like we were going to get some semblance of actual character development for Rin and get some series level payoffs for the Trifecta. Then it all basically falls apart from there. Rin continues to flip back and forth more often than a seesaw. Kitay continues to be ineffectual at checking Rin's worst impulses and has no agency of his own. Nezha continues to have no clear and consistent motivation of his own. (Note The plot is...random isn't really the right word for it seeing as how it's basically copy pasted from recent history but the weird uncanny valley of not being historical fiction and not truly an original fantasy really magnifies all the flaws. It's like someone got a puzzle, took the pieces they liked and left the other 80% in the box, and then tried to build it by mashing similar-looking but definitely not the right pieces together and papering over the rest with DIY cardboard cutouts. You can tell what they were trying to do but the final picture just makes no sense. The entirety of Part II is incredibly  to the point where it seems like it was a plot contrivance to a) shoehorn in an analogy to a historical event for ??? reasons and b) get out of a corner caused by introducing the original fantasy elements because Rin literally had no way of getting rid of the Trifecta on her own.Part III was straight up nonsensical. The climax fight scene of the battle at Arlong was an rear end pull. Lampshading it did not make it any better. The final scene and the epilogue could've worked if the character work was there, but it wasn't and so everything fell flat. Every time "I love/d him/her" came up made me  and go "Really? When did that happen?"Is it super bad? No, I guess, in that I'm not hopping mad like I was after DNFing Babel at the end of Ch 1. I genuinely do not get the hype though. I hope I enjoy The Grace of Kings more. I have also started A Day of Fallen Night and so far it's been like four world building prologues in a row.
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Jul 16, 2023 13:21
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CaptainCrunch posted:Oh, wild. No, I never actually got into VTM other than a cursory read of the sourcebooks back when it first came out. Mostly for the kickin' rad pen and ink spot illustrations. I never really played myself, but this was described to me as a teen by another teen and it stuck with me.
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Jul 16, 2023 14:05
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fermun posted:Hell yeah wasn't a response to the end of Baru 1, but the fact that they are starting Baru 2. Makes a lot of sense to me. I'm gonna "Hell yeah" when 4 comes. Yeah I know I was just jokin around
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Jul 16, 2023 14:50
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The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTSL3843/
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Jul 16, 2023 16:33
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pradmer posted:The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany - $2.99 Haha I went to find this on Amazon UK and the blurb was obviously AI generated. It started with 'Certainly!' and then continued with text. I just looked again seconds later and it's been replaced with a row of hashtags. Somebody's cheaping out on their ebook descriptions.
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Jul 16, 2023 16:52
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HopperUK posted:Haha I went to find this on Amazon UK and the blurb was obviously AI generated. It started with 'Certainly!' and then continued with text. I just looked again seconds later and it's been replaced with a row of hashtags. Somebody's cheaping out on their ebook descriptions. It’s (e: likely) out of copyright (at least in the US) so this is probably just someone trying to make a quick buck, not surprising.
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Jul 16, 2023 17:38
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Kalman posted:It’s (e: likely) out of copyright (at least in the US) so this is probably just someone trying to make a quick buck, not surprising. Yeah, it's on Gutenberg. I prefer his shorts but it's good old stuff.
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Jul 16, 2023 17:46
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:It's like there was a messy divorce and the UK got the good covers and the US got use of the baru name. What are you guys taking about? The US covers at least for books 2 and 3 are way better than UK. UK cover is just some generic bronze mask with badly photoshopped fire or water or waves. The US covers are actual illustrations. The first isn’t my favourite cause it makes Barus face look too light but I guess it’s supposed to be made of porcelain or something. Also I watched Never Let Me Go. One advantage of a movie is a book can’t make me cry but put the right score over that same story and it’s the waterworks.
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Jul 16, 2023 21:28
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Yeah that us cover is pretty good. Still baffled by the name change, it's worse in every way.
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Jul 16, 2023 22:09
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I really liked em. It was a nice change of pace from the usual "oh I'm in a new world, let me become a god" books that usually come out. Great companion piece to "beware of chicken". Do you have any thoughts on Dungeon Crawler Carl? I always see it recommended along with those.
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Jul 17, 2023 00:09
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sebmojo posted:It's like an all u can eat treachery buffet and her plate is loaded A Proper Uppercut posted:Do you have any thoughts on Dungeon Crawler Carl? I always see it recommended along with those. Dominion of Blades was the only actually good execution of the "stuck in a vr mmo" premise I've ever read, since by the end of the first book you have both a coherent reason why and actual stakes for pain and death
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Jul 17, 2023 00:18
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Do you have any thoughts on Dungeon Crawler Carl? I always see it recommended along with those. That's one I keep seeing stuff about but I haven't managed to read any of them. I guess they kinda have to be good to be popular. I think there's even a screenplay being workshopped.
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Jul 17, 2023 00:47
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buffalo all day posted:This book is incredibly good!! Not sure why he doesn’t get nominated for hugo/nebulas as his last three books have been increasingly straight SF or Fantasy but he won the noble prize after putting out this book! I won’t spoil what’s SF about it (teenagers going to a boarding school in England where something strange is definitely going on), read it! A Proper Uppercut posted:Do you have any thoughts on Dungeon Crawler Carl? I always see it recommended along with those.
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Jul 17, 2023 02:03
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DACK FAYDEN posted:yeah if you were waiting for the traitor to drop then it was totally a "hell yeah" "The" traitor? I think every character in that series is a traitor to someone/something and it is glorious.
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Jul 17, 2023 05:08
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