SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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Awkward Davies: Sep 3, 2009; Grimey Drawer

I too could not finish Priory of the Orange tree. The high fantasy dialogue in particular was annoying.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 03:39

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# ? May 20, 2024 12:33

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I tried to read his other stuff but I got like five pages in and bad things started happening to a dog and welp I was out

That's how I reacted to "N pages in and bad things started happening to a bioengineered sex worker".

A Proper Uppercut posted:

It's been a while but I think my favorite Tim Powers would be The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides, with Anubis Gates bringing up the rear. But if his style of historical fiction or whatever you call it is your poo poo you can't go wrong for the most part.

My husband is on a Powers mailing list or otherwise follows Powers, and apparently he has a forthcoming novel that is to the Bront�s as The Stress of Her Regard is to the Romantic poets. My first reaction is "What did the Bront�s* do to deserve this?" but it will probably be very good.

It's obviously an early work, but I did love The Drawing of the Dark. Does anybody else remember James Blaylock? I loved both of their books, and I loved their passing the poet William Ashbless back and forth.

I am relieved to be able to remove Priory of the Ash Grove from the shopping cart.

* Okay, Branwell has it coming. Whatever "it" is, as long as it's nasty, he deserves it.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 03:48

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

It probably won�t be good, nothing he�s done recently has been.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 03:55

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

branedotorg posted:

I see she's written over 40 books and has a heap of good reviews but I know nothing about Michelle west. Has anyone read this or something else by her and give me something to compare it to?

I didn't see anybody answering you. Michelle West is also Michelle Sagara West is also Michelle Sagara. I enjoy her work a lot. I'd call it middle-of-the-road competent fantasy. She tends to write very long series, and the more books there are in the series the more badly they need editing. The Sun Sword series is a pretty typical clash-of-empires thing, with one empire being vaguely European and the other being vaguely Arabic. Try a sample of The Broken Crown and you'll probably know if you want to read more. Avoid the House Wars series, which is in the same universe and shares characters with the Sun Sword series. It falls victim to too-many-characters syndrome and by the end the main character has picked up every possible superpower plus a side of chili cheese chips.

I basically rate Sagara as "serviceable, if it hits your id". I prefer the Elantra series, the first one being Cast In Shadow. The heroine is in a multi-race (birdalikes, catalikes, dragons, and elves) urban milieu. She solves crime (literally; she's a member of the urban police force, called the Hawks). She has work friends who are catalikes, birdalikes, and two elfalikes. She also has a Mysterious Past (that she doesn't understand any better than anybody else does) and an Evil Elf who is trying to manipulate her and an Evil Human co-worker (spoiler for book 1) who once murdered their entire family. I think these are solid urban fantasy: you get the sense of the city and its environs as genuine living entities, not just elfpunk-by-the-numbers. Sagara does a good job, as the series passes, of making everybody's backgrounds and motivations much more complex than Kaylin, the protagonist, was able to understand in the first book. The language is much more Poughkeepsie than Elfland, which I think suits the books. There are multiple languages with multiple layers of formality, and Sagara does a good job of conveying how which language Kaylin uses affects how she speaks to other people.

Kaylin is also in a love triangle (more of a manipulation triangle) with the evil elf and the evil human, both of whom turn out during the series to be much more complex than "evil" can convey.

I like these; they're good bookcandy for me. They won't leave you thinking, and sometimes that is exactly what I want.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 04:17

Leng: May 13, 2006; One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind

No other road
No other way
No day but today

DurianGray posted:

For a book with a cool dragon on the cover, it did not have nearly enough stuff actually happening with dragons.

Priory of the Orange Tree is basically reskinned Skyrim set in not-Europe and not-East Asia with a severely truncated main quest line, complete with random wyrm attacks and a very nerfed Alduin who gets KO'd at the spawn point.

I have now finished The Fall of Babel and thus the entire Books of Babel series. To recap:

Leng posted:

I finished Senlin Ascends last night and the whole time I was reading the book I pictured Thomas Senlin as some sort of weird alt-world where Mario is a British headmaster instead of an Italian plumber. The Tower of Babel and its ringdoms are intriguing but Senlin spends so long wandering around the Market and the Parlour and the Baths that I kept having to check the progress indicator on my Kindle app. By the time something happened, I was like OH THANK GOODNESS yet simultaneously resigned to knowing what the ending of the book was gonna be: Thank you Thomas! But your wife is in another ringdom! and then I had to read like...another 130 odd pages before the book actually ended since we already found out shortly after the midpoint exactly which ringdom it was.

Leng posted:

I have now read the sequels Arm of the Sphinx and The Hod King and enjoyed both a lot more than Senlin Ascends.

Book 4 has even more POVs, most of which are solidly written. There's something like 3 parts with part 2 being broken up into further sub-parts and even though there was non-stop action and build up, it somehow felt a bit slow for me, which I suspect is because the main plot that gets set up at the end of Book 3 implies a lot of quest objects to be collected and we end up seeing like all of one instance of said collection happening and the other 23 or 7 or 33 of the 64 variants of the painting just kind of get handwaved as "the Sphinx/Marat already has them" though we do see more ringdoms. Also, I did not expect the series to basically amount to a real life game of Sid Meier's Civilization though I did appreciate that nobody in the main love triangle ends up together which is a cool and realistic ending.

I am kinda bummed that Marya only got to stab the rear end in a top hat Duke once and had to be saved by Byron which is a nice character moment for Byron but also ugh that Marya ends up being subsumed by PTSD into giving up her music to and flinging herself full throttle into motherhood which I kind of hate as a conceit but makes sense for the character I guess.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 05:23

Bilirubin: Feb 16, 2014; The sanctioned action is to CHUG

BotM vote this month is a really too close to call election we need this threads particular expertise to weigh in over the next couple of days!

# ? Aug 29, 2023 05:35

Gato The Elder: Apr 14, 2006; Pillbug

sebmojo posted:

John spent this time trying to catch and kill the remains of the trillionaires descendants for reasons that are unclear.

John's closest friend/lover etc is the ghost of planet earth, Alecto, who is locked sleeping in a tomb on Pluto. The immortal chums, the lictors, who got sick of John's poo poo some thousands of years ago, have been plotting to kill him which is hard bc immortal. After a lot of shenanigans they get John's sperm and with the help of awake*, an anti empire freedom fighter, make a baby which crash lands on Pluto. This is Gideon. Awake* dies*.

Here are my cliff notes, spoilers for all to date.

I loving love Gideon chat so I wanna piggy back on this!!

re Alecto: she�s God. like there�s other plot stuff about her, but it doesn�t matter. Alecto is God made manifest and God gave themselves to John out of Love. And then John kills God out of even more Love.

Wrt to the first spoiler: There may be some kind of extended plot reason in a later book, but I think John�s personal motivation for chasing them is p clear (maybe even relatable): he did something terrible (kill god and every bit of life in the solar system) to stop them from escaping earth without consequence and he failed. He commits some fairly original sin (🙃) in pursuit of some ends-justifying-the-means bullshit and he fails to clinch the ends! He can either face some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about himself or he can double down on making his sacrifice �worth it�. He is not doing the former.

The whole series is that one Mountain Goats song/psa about the dangers of drinking too much Romantic philosophy: (ominously) �some things you�ll do for money, and some you�ll do for fun. But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one�

# ? Aug 29, 2023 05:36

Gato The Elder: Apr 14, 2006; Pillbug

I�m reading the Aubrey/Maturin books for the first time and they�re really good. Next I�m either gonna reread Master and Margarita or idk

# ? Aug 29, 2023 05:42

branedotorg: Jun 19, 2009

Arsenic Lupin posted:

Extremely comprehensive answer

Thanks! Not entirely my thing but I'm always looking for something else and I'll give the recommendation a go

# ? Aug 29, 2023 06:38

Lead out in cuffs: Sep 18, 2012; "That's right. We've evolved."

"I can see that. Cool mutations."

Gato The Elder posted:

I loving love Gideon chat so I wanna piggy back on this!!

re Alecto: she’s God. like there’s other plot stuff about her, but it doesn’t matter. Alecto is God made manifest and God gave themselves to John out of Love. And then John kills God out of even more Love.

Wrt to the first spoiler: There may be some kind of extended plot reason in a later book, but I think John’s personal motivation for chasing them is p clear (maybe even relatable): he did something terrible (kill god and every bit of life in the solar system) to stop them from escaping earth without consequence and he failed. He commits some fairly original sin (🙃) in pursuit of some ends-justifying-the-means bullshit and he fails to clinch the ends! He can either face some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about himself or he can double down on making his sacrifice “worth it”. He is not doing the former.

The whole series is that one Mountain Goats song/psa about the dangers of drinking too much Romantic philosophy: (ominously) “some things you’ll do for money, and some you’ll do for fun. But the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one”

I'm pretty sure Alecto is the planet soul of Earth, aka Gaia. That kinda makes her the goddess of Earth, but I'm not sure that she's God in the omnipotent monotheistic sense. There's plenty of room left in the setting for an omnipotent creator or malicious demiurge or whatever to show up. We knew there's all kinds of weird as-yet-unexplained poo poo, like the new demons or various aspects of the River.

And re John, he told a good yarn, but there was also nobody else with memories of that time to fact check him. I'm 100% sure he lied at least some of the time, and not totally unsure that whole story wasn't a complete fabrication. So I'd be very hesitant about assigning motivations to John just yet.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 07:16

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Yes and yes. John is low key the best villain in fiction because he's so kind and sorry and dorky

# ? Aug 29, 2023 07:37

buffalo all day: Mar 13, 2019

Gato The Elder posted:

I�m reading the Aubrey/Maturin books for the first time and they�re really good. Next I�m either gonna reread Master and Margarita or idk

# ? Aug 29, 2023 13:09

Benagain: Oct 10, 2007; Can you see that I am serious?; Fun Shoe

I bounced off master and margarita hard last time I tried it, should give it another shot.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 14:49

Stuporstar: May 5, 2008; Where do fists come from?

Benagain posted:

I bounced off master and margarita hard last time I tried it, should give it another shot.

Try a different translation? I�ve read the Diana Bergin one because it was an uncensored version, but it didn�t really click with me. I bought the Mirra Ginsberg and Richard Pevear translations, but haven�t read them yet

# ? Aug 29, 2023 14:58

DurianGray: Dec 23, 2010; King of Fruits

I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (published through Penguin/Random House) and it was a lot of fun. I had also bounced off my first attempt 12 or so years ago, but I binged through it in a few days when I tried it again earlier this year, and it's probably one of my all-time favorites now.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 15:16

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Gato The Elder posted:

I�m reading the Aubrey/Maturin books for the first time and they�re really good. Next I�m either gonna reread Master and Margarita or idk

One of us! One of us! I envy you, reading these for the first time. If you want to know more about O'Brian's naval language, A Sea of Words is a helpful companion.

It's an entirely different experience because you don't get to enjoy the prose or the subtlety, but Master and Commander -- actually not a dramatization of that book, but more or less a Good Bits Version of the series -- is one of the most successful movie adaptations I've ever seen. If you want to see what the Napoleonic ships look like, this is your movie. Paul Bettany is superb as Maturin (although not dirty enough), and Russell Crowe is pitch-perfect as Aubrey. It should have revived the thrilling sea movie, but totally failed to do so. I often listen to the excellent soundtrack.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 15:45

Gaius Marius: Oct 9, 2012

I've never read a P&V translation that flowed well, they also seem to have tried to corner the market on all Russian classics which makes me suspect that they were more interested in becoming the default translators of the language rather than the best translators of any specific work. Burgin & O’Connor is the way to go with M&M.

I also discovered web annotations awhile ago that might be of interest to some
https://cr.middlebury.edu/public/russian/Bulgakov/public_html/howto.html

# ? Aug 29, 2023 16:16

StrixNebulosa: Feb 14, 2012; You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Gaius Marius posted:

I've never read a P&V translation that flowed well, they also seem to have tried to corner the market on all Russian classics which makes me suspect that they were more interested in becoming the default translators of the language rather than the best translators of any specific work. Burgin & O’Connor is the way to go with M&M.

I also discovered web annotations awhile ago that might be of interest to some
https://cr.middlebury.edu/public/russian/Bulgakov/public_html/howto.html

I can't verify this but IIRC the P&V edition casts shade on the Briggs edition, and that left a sour taste in my mouth. You might think you've done a better job, but c'mon.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 16:33

Awkward Davies: Sep 3, 2009; Grimey Drawer

I started "How High We Go in the Dark". I'm not too far in and woof it's already real dark.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 16:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Benagain posted:

I bounced off master and margarita hard last time I tried it, should give it another shot.

I got an Audible audiobook of I dunno what translation but it was great.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 17:15

tiniestacorn: Oct 3, 2015

Leng posted:

Priory of the Orange Tree is basically reskinned Skyrim set in not-Europe and not-East Asia with a severely truncated main quest line, complete with random wyrm attacks and a very nerfed Alduin who gets KO'd at the spawn point.

Also the sentence-level writing is just not interesting.

Awkward Davies posted:

I started "How High We Go in the Dark". I'm not too far in and woof it's already real dark.

I had to bail at the euthanasia rollercoaster for terminally ill children, but I want to get back to it.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 18:18

Awkward Davies: Sep 3, 2009; Grimey Drawer

tiniestacorn posted:

Also the sentence-level writing is just not interesting.

I had to bail at the euthanasia rollercoaster for terminally ill children, but I want to get back to it.

lol that's exactly the point in the book when I went to go make that post

# ? Aug 29, 2023 18:50

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

It isn�t worth going back to, it just falls further down the bland magical realism nonsense rabbit hole until you stop reading it.

# ? Aug 29, 2023 18:53

Danhenge: Dec 16, 2005

I actually liked that one ok, it's a little less grim after the roller coaster, as I recall.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 04:12

grassy gnoll: Aug 27, 2006; The pawsting business is tough work.

sebmojo posted:

Yes and yes. John is low key the best villain in fiction because he's so kind and sorry and dorky

I didn't like the first book much and am not going to finish the series. So what does homeboy get out of setting up his trusted agents to want to murder and/or thwart him? Orgone? Kicks? Internet cred?

# ? Aug 30, 2023 06:43

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Idk

E: he's kind of an enigma, but to be clear he's not trying to get the newbies killed in Gideon, that's being done by one of his lictors to draw him in. He does tell another one of his lictors to try and kill harrow but that appears to be a way of activating her full power, I'm not sure it's explained very clearly

# ? Aug 30, 2023 07:15

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

Stuporstar posted:

Try a different translation? I’ve read the Diana Bergin one because it was an uncensored version, but it didn’t really click with me. I bought the Mirra Ginsberg and Richard Pevear translations, but haven’t read them yet

What did they censor?

# ? Aug 30, 2023 08:15

Leng: May 13, 2006; One song / Glory
One song before I go / Glory
One song to leave behind

No other road
No other way
No day but today

branedotorg posted:

https://subterraneanpress.com/newsannouncing-no-choice-a-free-ebook-by-k-j-parker/

Free KJ parker novelette from subterranean press

Thank you for posting this! Just snuck it in as a quick read while cooking dinner and it was a nice short dose of KJ Parker humor in between heavier stuff.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 10:12

DurianGray: Dec 23, 2010; King of Fruits

genericnick posted:

What did they censor?

https://welovetranslations.com/2022/10/31/whats-the-best-translation-of-the-master-and-margarita/

This seems a pretty comprehensive comparison of the main translations (with example text from each). It also mentions some of the specific stuff that was cut.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 12:52

Stuporstar: May 5, 2008; Where do fists come from?

E. ^^

genericnick posted:

What did they censor?

I know the Ginsberg translation was based on the first published version in Russia where the censors had at it for its sexual liberty and a few other things.

Coincidentally, the Hugh Aplin translation is on sale today https://www.amazon.com/Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov-ebook/dp/B08KH4LZDM

Unfortunately the ebook isn�t even available in Canada :negative:

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Aug 30, 2023

# ? Aug 30, 2023 13:00

RDM: Apr 6, 2009; I LOVE FINLAND AND ESPECIALLY FINLAND'S MILITARY ALLIANCES, GOOGLE FINLAND WORLD WAR 2 FOR MORE INFORMATION SLAVA UKRANI

grassy gnoll posted:

I didn't like the first book much and am not going to finish the series. So what does homeboy get out of setting up his trusted agents to want to murder and/or thwart him? Orgone? Kicks? Internet cred?

His 10,000 year war of extermination against the descendants of people who didn't listen to him is taking too long and it's depressing all the people he manipulated into murdering their closest friends because it was more convenient for him than the not-murdering-your-brother way of getting from A to B.

"What if God was sorta omnipotent but not omniscient at all and his job before God was university HR"

# ? Aug 30, 2023 15:10

grassy gnoll: Aug 27, 2006; The pawsting business is tough work.

RDM posted:

and his job before God was university HR"

Ah, okay, now it all makes sense.

# ? Aug 30, 2023 15:18

pradmer: Mar 31, 2009; Follow me for more books on special!

Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085N3NDDG/

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000TO0TDK/

# ? Aug 30, 2023 16:09

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

sebmojo posted:

Idk

E: he's kind of an enigma, but to be clear he's not trying to get the newbies killed in Gideon, that's being done by one of his lictors to draw him in. He does tell another one of his lictors to try and kill harrow but that appears to be a way of activating her full power, I'm not sure it's explained very clearly

The Locked Tomb Series: I'm not sure it's explained very clearly

# ? Aug 30, 2023 16:32

DACK FAYDEN: Feb 25, 2013; Bear Witness

DACK FAYDEN posted:

my turn to post things that are on sale

Vita Nostra: A Novel $1.99

Trip report: I didn't really have expectations of what this would be like going in, but if I did it absolutely would have been nothing like them. Really good book, set at a magical school but it's not a "magical school book". Big fan.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 02:00

Ccs: Feb 25, 2011

That reminds me there's a sequel to Vita Nosta. Reviews seemed divisive though so I haven't picked it up yet.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 03:17

pseudorandom name: May 6, 2007

It's fine. More of the same, really, which is the problem.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 03:22

propatriamori: Feb 13, 2012; there can be no peace until everyone is safe

Is 793 pages in too late to say that I adore everything Greg Egan has written? I could imagine someone criticizing his work/characters as all being kind of self-similar Scientist Saves the Day (or does their best), except for a pivot early on from X-files-ish sci-fi horror.

The Clockwork Rocket is what I started with, though you could do worse than looking up his works online and reading several of the short stories. Singleton and Oracle are a neat pair, and both are there. Riding the Crocodile and Glory are both set in the same universe (The Amalgam), along with a couple other stories and a novel.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 08:28

Groke: Jul 27, 2007; New Adventures In Mom Strength

I like Greg Egan. He bloody well shows you his math.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 09:26

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# ? May 20, 2024 12:33

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

Nothing he's written after 2010 has attracted me enough for me to buy it, but his 90s work solidly make him a legend.

# ? Aug 31, 2023 10:42

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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