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Safety Biscuits posted:Regarding The Mote in God's Eye - deciding whether to read sf literally or metaphorically (or which mix) is a uniquely rich problem, maybe its main contribution to literature. It is correct to mock idiots who think Mote is one of those books cause it's proudly racist both literally and metaphorically, written by a guy who would be angry if you didn't get it.
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Jan 16, 2024 16:05
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I am legit surprised to see so many vehement defences of infinite growth as not inherently bad.
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Jan 16, 2024 16:09
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What is happening. I’m confused
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Jan 16, 2024 16:32
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Safety Biscuits posted:
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Jan 16, 2024 16:41
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General Battuta posted:Speaking of THE POWER, I just read a LeGuin short story I'd never heard of, The Matter of Seggri, which is (of course) quite good. It is about a matriarchal planet, in a bad way. I had to laugh at her confrontational word choices, the place where men are made available for breeding is called 'the fuckery'. CW though as the social power structure is one of outright slavery and sexual violence Le Guin has a whole little cycle of Hainish stories that explore different gender/sexuality power structures. They're all collected in the second volume of the Library of America set that I can't recommend highly enough.
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Jan 16, 2024 17:28
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Slyphic posted:I am legit surprised to see so many vehement defences of infinite growth as not inherently bad. Haven't read the book, but to this point specifically: "infinite growth is bad" can very quickly become a malthusian agenda. It's the third world's fault they're poor, they have so many babies!
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Jan 16, 2024 17:40
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Boy, that second half of Authority. I think the ending goes on a bit too long after the climax but the lead up is so good. That scene with Whitby in that attic was so unsettling.
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Jan 16, 2024 22:42
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Gaius Marius posted:The film Annihilation is also quite good and very different from the novel. Certainly the last good thing Garland has done or will do for the foreseeable future. He also must be a Wolfe fan because he just yanked the Alzabo right out of botns
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Jan 16, 2024 22:58
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Whirling posted:Boy, that second half of Authority. I think the ending goes on a bit too long after the climax but the lead up is so good. That scene with Whitby in that attic was so unsettling. I don’t read any horror other than King…but that moment is the only time I’ve been genuinely terrified reading a book.
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Jan 16, 2024 23:00
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Lex Talionis posted:I also liked the movie adaptation of Annihilation (though the book is even better) but am interested in understanding your take on Garland's career. It wasn't perfect but I thought Devs was much better than Ex Machina. I don't keep up with TV. Men and the Civil War Trailer were both absolutely terrible. I pray one day Kirsten Dunst will be in a good film again.
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Jan 16, 2024 23:22
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Groke posted:Andre Norton's Quag Keep had the literal dice rolling back in 19 goddamn 78. Is this the one where they had little bracelets around their wrists that had the dice on them? Or am I misremembering that detail?
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Jan 16, 2024 23:40
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General Battuta posted:You still meet a lot of people in SFF circles who sort of take it as unquestioned that explosive population growth is the great obstacle to all human progress and Something Must Be Done. There are probably more Great Replacement racists now, maybe they could be sort of mutually annihilated into pure photons and racist neutrinos
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Jan 16, 2024 23:49
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Elysium Fire (Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies #2) by Alistair Reynolds - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073P43TMS/
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Jan 16, 2024 23:53
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Safety Biscuits posted:Regarding The Mote in God's Eye - deciding whether to read sf literally or metaphorically (or which mix) is a uniquely rich problem, maybe its main contribution to literature. I have the same problem with, of all things, the Angry Birds movie. Friend of mine violently hated it as an "immigrants wanna steal and eat your babies!" movie, and I never quite dared ask if it couldn't be read as "if you live on an isolated tropical island and a load of funny-coloured guys with advanced tech show up be very careful" instead (not least because idiot racists try to paint immigration as colonization too). navyjack posted:Is this the one where they had little bracelets around their wrists that had the dice on them? Or am I misremembering that detail? Yes.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:16
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buffalo all day posted:I don’t read any horror other than King…but that moment is the only time I’ve been genuinely terrified reading a book. I read a whole bunch of horror but I think i might be able to say the same. It's pretty imprinted in my brain too, I knew exactly what that spoiler was going to be before I clicked on it
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Jan 17, 2024 01:24
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Hi thread. I’ve been reading a lot of Sci-Fi these past few months and I think I read the first Elminster book at on point in the last year. Mostly sci-fi though. I read within the last few months: The Sprawl Trilogy - William Gibson Snowcrash - Neal Stevenson Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu 75% done I enjoyed the first 2 of the Sprawl Trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive was a lot of character shifting. Snowcrash was great. Three Body is good. Should I read the Other books in Three Body’s trilogy? If not, is there something this thread thinks is the book I absolutely must read right now?
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Jan 17, 2024 02:13
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Modulo16 posted:Hi thread. I’ve been reading a lot of Sci-Fi these past few months and I think I read the first Elminster book at on point in the last year. Mostly sci-fi though. I am desperate, frantic for you to read CJ Cherryh's Pride of Chanur. It's short (200~ pages) and fun space opera about lion aliens finding a stowaway human in their cargo hold.
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Jan 17, 2024 02:53
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StrixNebulosa posted:I am desperate, frantic for you to read CJ Cherryh's Pride of Chanur. It's short (200~ pages) and fun space opera about lion aliens finding a stowaway human in their cargo hold. So, so good. And there's a dense, brilliant trilogy to follow, and a legitimately funny standalone after that. Then you can read Morgaine!
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Jan 17, 2024 03:23
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Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time.
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Jan 17, 2024 04:30
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rivers of london
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Jan 17, 2024 04:53
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Modulo16 posted:Hi thread. I’ve been reading a lot of Sci-Fi these past few months and I think I read the first Elminster book at on point in the last year. Mostly sci-fi though. The thread demands you read these following series and books: Graydon Saunders' Commonweal series Lois McMaster Bujold's The World of Five Gods series Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series
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Jan 17, 2024 04:58
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VostokProgram posted:Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time. Modulo16 posted:Should I read the Other books in Three Body’s trilogy? If not, is there something this thread thinks is the book I absolutely must read right now?
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Jan 17, 2024 05:00
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and then The Dispossessed after LHOD, and while you're here can I get you to read the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"
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Jan 17, 2024 05:07
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Netflix dropped a trailer for Spaceman yesterday and I just finished reading Children of Time and my palps are being rustled.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:20
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RDM posted:Dresden Files for Chicago. Dresden Chicago doesn't bear that much resemblance to actual Chicago, so it probably wouldn't scratch the itch Vostok is looking for.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:44
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An English friend is emphatic that the Rivers of London gets the geography all wrong.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:47
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Arsenic Lupin posted:An English friend is emphatic that the Rivers of London gets the geography all wrong. I hadn't noticed but I am only a casual visitor to London, I don't live there.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:53
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Hughart is sui generis; like nothing but themselves. Hmm, I thought The Story of the Stone (sequel to Bridge of Birds) was kind of like Pratchett and Vance riffing on The Name of the Rose. But fair enough, I can't think of a really similar single author.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:55
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VostokProgram posted:Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time.
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Jan 17, 2024 06:05
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RDM posted:The city we Became for NYC. Dresden Files for Chicago. By all accounts, Butcher has gotten very well deserved amounts of poo poo for how completely inaccurate his depictions of Chicago are for the first handful of books (which tbf, he has acknowledged). For all I know they get better in that regard but the setting always has a bit of a "I saw this in a guidebook" feel imo. Slyphic posted:War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. Very precisely and authentically Minneapolis in the mid 80s amidst a fey territorial dispute, but also from the PoV of a working professional musician. Bull, on the other hand, comes by her details honestly, having been a long time Minneapolis resident and working musician. She was in a band for a few years in the 80s, with Steven Brust and Jane Yolen's son, weirdly.
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Jan 17, 2024 06:30
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Precambrian Video Games posted:Hmm, I thought The Story of the Stone (sequel to Bridge of Birds) was kind of like Pratchett and Vance riffing on The Name of the Rose. But fair enough, I can't think of a really similar single author. As i mentioned, the site maps authors based on if they're recommended together based on some book recommendation network. Its not doing some deep machine learning analysis of their texts to build a similarity index or whatever.
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Jan 17, 2024 06:39
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MockingQuantum posted:By all accounts, Butcher has gotten very well deserved amounts of poo poo for how completely inaccurate his depictions of Chicago are for the first handful of books (which tbf, he has acknowledged). For all I know they get better in that regard but the setting always has a bit of a "I saw this in a guidebook" feel imo.
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Jan 17, 2024 06:45
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Arsenic Lupin posted:An English friend is emphatic that the Rivers of London gets the geography all wrong. I am a keeper of the knowledge and I have opinions about the book Rivers of London, let me tell you sir!
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Jan 17, 2024 06:48
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buffalo all day posted:I don’t read any horror other than King…but that moment is the only time I’ve been genuinely terrified reading a book. It was just very good and evocative horror for me and then Whitby loving jump scares me because he crawled in from a vent somewhere and had been sitting there the whole time. loving incredible scene. Whirling fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 07:09
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VostokProgram posted:Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time. This is a very unlikely one I'll admit, but Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan is set in a future Bristol, England and, from someone who's been to Bristol many times, is essentially spot on. Like, from time to time I knew where I was in the city just from the building descriptions. It's also a cool book about a post-crash collective society, technoshock, survivor guilt and won some awards. But mostly, it's a book about Bristol.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:49
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MockingQuantum posted:By all accounts, Butcher has gotten very well deserved amounts of poo poo for how completely inaccurate his depictions of Chicago are for the first handful of books (which tbf, he has acknowledged). For all I know they get better in that regard but the setting always has a bit of a "I saw this in a guidebook" feel imo. IIRC, he's said in Q&A sessions that he originally wanted to set it in the KC/St.Louis area, because he was born in that area and knows it, but was basically told "The Anita Blake books are set there, you need to pick another city so you don't look like a copycat", so it just got kinda shoved into Chicago. Doesn't help at all that this was all back in the year 2000-ish before it was trivially easy to scout areas via the internet with things like google earth.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:10
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VostokProgram posted:Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time. You could try Joanna Kavenna's A Field Guide to Reality. Fantasy in the sense that Alice in Wonderland is fantasy. It’s set in Oxford and while there’s tons of other books that also depict the city, probably accurately in terms of landmarks and roads, Kavenna does that with a real feel for the place. Not the tourist-facing ‘dreaming spires’ image but the real, damp, pretty shabby town with its slightly tense mix of people and odd jumbled geography, particularly in how the rural and the urban are deeply intertwined. Only book that, to me, accurately reflected living in Oxford as someone who isn’t a student or academic. Kavenna got it.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:20
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Shocked there has been no mention of Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which won awards and focuses a lot on a creepy forest.
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Jan 17, 2024 11:34
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I think it got plenty of mention, but happy to fifth or sixth Uprooted. That's a top ten book of all time for me.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:45
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There's a pretty creepy forest in the Gone World...
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Jan 17, 2024 17:57
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