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genericnick posted:Been reading the Brezhnev book Gradenko excerpted some time ago. Good job on that, I feels like most everything else is filler. Western academy gets pretty insufferable when writing about the USSR, even when they're doing a generally good job. What's re-Stalinisation even supposed to be? What is rehabilitating the dude supposed to do in the real world? Finished it. Funny how all the "democrats" went all starry eyed about markets. Wonder how that turned out
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Feb 1, 2024 12:30
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nonathlon posted:I loved Egan's early work. What his later work like? I see he's self publishing a lot. I read The Book of all Skies from 2021 and liked it a lot. It's a lot like some of his earlier works (the ones about crazy maths stuff) but a bit more accessible. I haven't read Zengedi but it seems like an outlier.
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Feb 1, 2024 14:21
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Precambrian Video Games posted:I finished Doomed City recently and liked it overall. It's very C-SPAM, and the afterword gave some interesting context. Andrei Voronin is a great character. Some of the longer bits of abstract political theory, often while characters under the influence, are... well, not very illuminating. It's also full of rampant misogyny and has at most one female character with even a modicum of agency, oh but she's just a slut as are the others who barely even get to say anything. It's pretty disappointing and not really excusable - yeah, the original draft was finished in 1972 but they could have given it a second thought before publishing it in 1989. This was pretty similar to my experience with doomed city. Great romp with a showcase of drunken political rants informed by living in the USSR. I think the swedish girl's character was interesting tho because she flaunts her sexuality but she's not ashamed of it. She's from a more modern and liberated time and place and it allows her to become "one of the gang". It seems to me the men accept her not just because they hope to get laid but also because her sexual liberation removes the social barriers that they are accustomed to having between men and women. After all, she is essentially the only woman character in the entire book. To me doomed city is sort of a "what if" book where the authors are trying to cram as many hypotheticals as possible into one madcap story and the function of the swedish girls is to explore "what if the sexual revolution happening in other parts of Europe continues". The idea and the character herself feel dated because they were a look into a future that's already in the past and we have such a more nuanced and realistic view now. It's interesting only as long as you are interested in understanding views from a bygone era and place. I recently finished roadside picnic and it was fun, but definitely a similar lack of female characters. Speaking of fun but dated books, Zelazny's amber series is a real gem. The first three make a sort of trilogy. It's about 12 siblings all fighting over control of a kingdom that their father created inside a pocket universe. Lots of alliance, betrayal, and whodunit with a gentle sci-fi fantasy veneer.
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Feb 1, 2024 15:21
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Greg Egan is fuckin nuts. his books have super fun ideas to wrap your brain around but he can't write characters to save his life. I really prefer his short stories
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Feb 1, 2024 22:58
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Permutation City is really good and I haven't read anything else by him. Gotta fix that.
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Feb 2, 2024 00:04
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nonathlon posted:I loved Egan's early work. What his later work like? I see he's self publishing a lot. Lets see... I think his best work is his early short story collections "Axiomatic" and "Luminous." There are some rough edges with a couple of the stories where he is still developing the themes and concepts that would be in his later novels, but some true gems like "Learning to Be Me," "The Safe-Deposit Box," "Transition Dreams," and "Reasons to Be Cheerful." His more recent short story collection "Oceanic" is good and I haven't read "Instantiation" or "Sleep and The Soul" yet. Thinking over his novels, I prefer those he wrote in the middle of his career like "Schild's Ladder," "Incandescence" and my absolute favorite: "Diaspora." "Incandescence" it should be noted was written in 2009 and the late 2000's is when I would say Egan starts to really focus on the math and writing about characters using the scientific method to discover the laws of their reality. It's probably the easiest of his speculative cosmology books to get into because its in our 3 space-like dimensions + 1 time-like dimension universe. It grew out of a thought experiment Egan had of how primitive would the technology of a society be before it couldn't discover Einstein"s theory of relativity. It turns out stone-age tech is all you need, if you live on something orbiting a black hole. "Dichronauts" is in a world of 2 space-like dimensions + 2 time-like ones. It reads like a Boy's Adventure story with the weird physics just there to shape the obstacles of the characters' quest. It's probably my least favorite of his novels. Egan would consider the Orthogonal trilogy his magnum opus and I thinks it's his most ambitious work. Set in a universe of 4 space-like dimensions there is no fudging of the math. From the base of a 4+0D universe a cosmology, planetary system, ecology, and society is logically built up. The first book, "The Clockwork Rocket" was really enjoyable, especially when it explored the gender politics of a species with such a different reproductive method than our own. "The Eternal Flame" wasn't quite as good. I liked it well enough while reading but it wasn't as memorable as TCR. The final book of the series, "The Arrows of Time" had an OK start and rough middle, but stuck the landing with the ending and wrapped up the trilogy in a really satisfying way. I love talking about Egan's work but none of my IRL friends like sci-fi this hard. What works of his have people in this thread read and what do you like most about them? For me its his ideas of trans-humanism, moving beyond our current culture's gender binary, and the malleability of qualia when any substrate can experience consciousness with enough computing power.
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Feb 2, 2024 15:29
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I guess I should link Egan's adorably web 1.0 website:https://www.gregegan.net/. Not only does he have formulas and infographics to explain some of his work, he has a bunch of stories freely hosted online there.
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Feb 2, 2024 17:00
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Now that's the website of someone who has strong opinions about linux distributions.
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Feb 3, 2024 10:38
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Peggotty posted:Now that's the website of someone who has strong opinions about linux distributions. 
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Feb 3, 2024 21:58
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Yadoppsi posted:I guess I should link Egan's adorably web 1.0 website:https://www.gregegan.net/. Not only does he have formulas and infographics to explain some of his work, he has a bunch of stories freely hosted online there. lol https://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/Applets.html
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Feb 3, 2024 23:25
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Reading cyclonopedia, no idea what's going on and growing steadily more angry
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Feb 11, 2024 00:28
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Any books on Occupy Wall Street? Like a history or timeline?
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May 4, 2024 19:05
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tonight I finished reading Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe's Waterloo" I picked it up from a bargain bookstore for a song about a week ago - I'd never heard of the author or this apparently long-running book series before, the back-of-the-book blurb seemed interesting, and I was immediately engrossed. The way he describes the little details of what life was like during that time was gripping: soldiers using discarded breastplates to shave with, the dynamics of nobles between themselves and towards the lower classes, the painstaking detail of how a cannon is loaded and shot, or how a musket is primed and aimed and volley-fire is unleashed. The last chapter, detailing the final crucial minutes of Waterloo as the redcoats snatch victory from the jaws of Napoleon's elite guards had me whooping and cheering as I sat on a park bench. it's enough to rekindle my interest in the period and in more of Cornwell's books - I've already picked up another in the Sharpe series (apparently Waterloo is the penultimate volume in the run)
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May 8, 2024 14:29
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and that's how ff's are made
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May 8, 2024 15:43
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started gravity's rainbow today. vineland put off me pynchon for a long while but now this is excellent.
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May 8, 2024 15:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:tonight I finished reading Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe's Waterloo" That's the book series whose adaptation basically got Sean Bean's career to start, right?
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May 8, 2024 16:19
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err posted:Any books on Occupy Wall Street? Like a history or timeline? Bevin's new book, "If We Burn" has a big section about Occupy. Its a really good book in general too.
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May 10, 2024 09:59
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i finished the underground sea, a short john berger collection on mining and miners' strikes. the last essay is cool – since i read it, i've been thinking about where you'd place current/past protest movements within berger's framework     
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May 27, 2024 07:04
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tristeham posted:started gravity's rainbow today. vineland put off me pynchon for a long while but now this is excellent. i also like Inherent Vice a lot, and Bleeding Edge is kinda interesting as a fan of y2k. vineland is kinda interesting to me from the setting just because I grew up around there, but yeah it's not great
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May 27, 2024 08:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:tonight I finished reading Bernard Cornwell's "Sharpe's Waterloo" Tha gently caress...
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May 27, 2024 09:45
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Probably Magic posted:That's the book series whose adaptation basically got Sean Bean's career to start, right? Yes, the TV show is entertaining too. I was also recommended Hornblower to watch but never got around to it (nor reading those books). I read most of the Sharpe books when I was 12-13 and learned a lot of age-inappropriate language. Along with that, Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles were breezy reads. They're more military fiction style pre-Athurian tales than, say, the Crystal Cave (which is also good). Years later I picked up the first book of his Crusades/holy grail Templar series and it's so terribly bad, do not read it for any reason.
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May 27, 2024 13:44
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the Camulod chronicles taught 10 year old me the swears whoreson and whorespawn, which I still use to this day. would recommend.
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May 27, 2024 13:56
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I started reading "Road to Nowhere" by Paris Marx and I'm on the fourth chapter... don't know if I care for it yet.
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Jun 9, 2024 00:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:The last chapter, detailing the final crucial minutes of Waterloo as the redcoats snatch victory from the jaws of Napoleon's elite guards had me whooping and cheering as I sat on a park bench. wait what's the alternate history here e: oh I’m confusing him with Turtledove. I really enjoyed his Grail Quest series, beginning with An Archer's Tale. it's the same thing you describe except the opening of the Hundred Years' War. it's why I bought and am taking lessons on a longbow indigi has issued a correction as of 01:14 on Jun 9, 2024 |
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Jun 9, 2024 01:12
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