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Ccs posted:So I finished Between Two Fires last night. It was good! Was just waiting for the verdict to click "buy." Thanks! I really really enjoy well done fantastic/historical fiction. It's so rare. The Spirit Ring by Bujold is a good example of it done well. The Temeraire series was so *close* to being good and then turned *so awful* I'm still angry years later over what could have been if the author hadn't hosed it up.
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Feb 10, 2021 16:49
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Naomi Novik is a good enough writer that I think she kind of trapped herself with the Temeraire series in that it obviously started out as 'what if ships were dragons' and no one including herself expected it to take off. You can see the swerve where she actually starts thinking about some of the issues like 'how are these dragons fed' and 'what effect would it have on world history if air forces existed before industry of any kind.' You can also see from her later works that once she struck it big she stayed away from the long drawn out series and focused on tighter, focused, single volume works because she probably felt burned by that whole experience. She's obviously way more at home with fable inspired fantasy that's for sure.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:03
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What was the name of the historical/fantasy book about the 2 brothers that are no good outlaws? I read it but can't remember the name at all.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:03
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Aardvark! posted:What was the name of the historical/fantasy book about the 2 brothers that are no good outlaws? I read it but can't remember the name at all. I haven't read it yet but based on the description that sounds like it might be The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart?
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Feb 10, 2021 17:09
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Aardvark! posted:What was the name of the historical/fantasy book about the 2 brothers that are no good outlaws? I read it but can't remember the name at all. The Sisters Brothers?
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Feb 10, 2021 17:18
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MockingQuantum posted:I haven't read it yet but based on the description that sounds like it might be The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart? it was this, thanks. I remember enjoying reading it although it was a bit... repulsive at times?
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Feb 10, 2021 17:22
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Aardvark! posted:it was this, thanks. I remember enjoying reading it although it was a bit... repulsive at times? Yeah it's pretty great I just finished it about a week ago. They are both awful and the creatures they encounter are incredibly grotesque and thoroughly described.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:28
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Harold Fjord posted:Yeah it's pretty great I just finished it about a week ago. They are both awful and the creatures they encounter are incredibly grotesque and thoroughly described.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:31
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Benagain posted:Naomi Novik is a good enough writer that I think she kind of trapped herself with the Temeraire series in that it obviously started out as 'what if ships were dragons' and no one including herself expected it to take off. You can see the swerve where she actually starts thinking about some of the issues like 'how are these dragons fed' and 'what effect would it have on world history if air forces existed before industry of any kind.' You can also see from her later works that once she struck it big she stayed away from the long drawn out series and focused on tighter, focused, single volume works because she probably felt burned by that whole experience. Yeah that kinda is how it feels. Like how 'wait how are these dragons not just slaves, they're fully sapient' never quite manages to become The Point in a way I would have liked it to. I really like the books but they're definitely a series where if you find yourself not very engaged with one, you should quit there. You can tell she got started in Aubrey-Maturin fanfic - the O'Brian books scratch the same itch for me without any dragons in them at all. Just great characters.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:31
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Ccs posted:So I finished Between Two Fires last night. It was good! My favorite part of the book is still the bits where the devils are deceiving everyone, and even the protagonists aren't sure exactly what's true and what's false, although they usually have more of an inkling than everyone else. But eventually there has to be a climax and outright conflict, and I thought it was well handled. Thanks for the info on this one, and the update upon finishing. Adding it to my reading queue - sounds like it would check a number of boxes for me. I don't know if you've read Mark Alder's "Song of the Morning," but it sounds similar in concept -- it's set at the start of the Hundred Years War, as the forces of France and England each attempt to invoke God's aid in fighting each other, and angels hang out in the court Philip VI and what not. I'm just realizing there was a sequel I never got around to reading, which I guess I'll add to the queue also, but I recall enjoying it at the time. Might be worth checking out.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:46
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e: nvm, someone already beat me to it. Still, good historical fantasy is rare to find so I will be getting Between Two Fires. Trust this thread to always push my backlog. Anyhow, can recommend both Brothers Grossbart and Mark Alder. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Feb 10, 2021 |
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Feb 10, 2021 18:03
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HopperUK posted:Yeah that kinda is how it feels. Like how 'wait how are these dragons not just slaves, they're fully sapient' never quite manages to become The Point in a way I would have liked it to. I really like the books but they're definitely a series where if you find yourself not very engaged with one, you should quit there. Yeah, it started as, "The Napoleonic Wars with dragons." Which was cool, but then it becomes, "What if China and South America and Africa had enough dragons to tell Europeans to get hosed?" Which could also be a cool story, but the books are set in the 1800s, and there's been enough colonialism that The Napoleonic wars look more or less like they did in ours. So it never really comes together, and the main characters get shoved into positions where they matter less and less, and spend all their time on petty squabbling.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:06
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anilEhilated posted:e: nvm, someone already beat me to it. Still, good historical fantasy is rare to find so I will be getting Between Two Fires. Trust this thread to always push my backlog. Science Fiction & Fantasy: Desperately Trying to Push Out My Backlog.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:10
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I'm way behind on the thread and this was probably discussed years ago, but looking for opinions. I just read Leviathan Wakes on a recommendation from a friend, and I've never seen the expanse. Does the series ever get any more interesting? I picked up Caliban's War, and I'm not sure I should go through the rest of the series.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:32
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Silly Newbie posted:I'm way behind on the thread and this was probably discussed years ago, but looking for opinions. It's pretty much the same throughout. If you didn't like Leviathan Wakes, the rest of the series is unlikely to grab you either.
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Feb 10, 2021 19:13
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Opinions differ on this, but I actually think The Expanse books get worse as they go on. I quit maybe 4 or 5 books in because I felt like they abandoned some of the more genuinely interesting plot points and shifted focus to the least interesting aspects of the main characters. It might have gotten better after I quit but I haven't really heard anyone singing the praises of the later books in particular.
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Feb 10, 2021 19:22
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Glad so many people are gonna check out Between Two Fires! It's one of the best books I've read in a while, though maybe it felt particularly refreshing because it was historical fantasy tinged with a good dose of horror, which isn't a genre I read. I'm also fairly certain there were some homages to the manga Berserk in the story, although maybe the two are just similar enough in terms of their subject matter that they would seem like homages. A knight turning into a lion-esque demon in a cloud of mist and the protagonist losing an arm to demons at one point seemed like such direct homages though, and the protag has a revenge backstory involving a man who stole his wife, there are comets passing by the moon as opposed to an eclipse... I'd be surprised if the author hadn't read Berserk. I'm going to start the author's next book, "The Necromancer's House", today. It's set in modern times where a wizard who stole a cache of grimoire from the USSR when it fell is being hunted by Baba Yaga. Should be good!
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Feb 10, 2021 19:33
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Ccs posted:I'm going to start the author's next book, "The Necromancer's House", today. It's set in modern times where a wizard who stole a cache of grimoire from the USSR when it fell is being hunted by Baba Yaga. Should be good! So in addition to being John M. Ford, he's also Tim Powers? 
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Feb 10, 2021 19:55
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MockingQuantum posted:Opinions differ on this, but I actually think The Expanse books get worse as they go on. I quit maybe 4 or 5 books in because I felt like they abandoned some of the more genuinely interesting plot points and shifted focus to the least interesting aspects of the main characters. It might have gotten better after I quit but I haven't really heard anyone singing the praises of the later books in particular. It really felt like he exhausted his best ideas in the first three in or so (been a while I'm fuzzy on when I stopped caring) but just had to keep putting out one a year.
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Feb 10, 2021 20:21
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I liked the first one except for the alien zombie stuff, and gave the second one a chance but put it down after the prologue was nothing but more SUPER alien zombie stuff.
cptn_dr fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 10, 2021 |
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Feb 10, 2021 20:32
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cptn_dr posted:I liked the first one except for the alien zombie stuff, and gave the second one a chance but put it down after the prologue was nothing but more SUPER alien zombie stuff. A choice made on bad information, the second one has less of the viral-outbreak-zombie-attack stuff, and it’s the last book with any of that at all. I think the series gets a bit dull for other reasons (how many times do we really need to say “humans will carry their conflicts and grudges into space”, or “this weird thing becomes totally routine and we will write about it prosaically”) but it’s not really about alien zombies. In fact I got kind of sick of it once I realized it was never going to make any wild pivots or turns; it stays a fairly plodding investigation of how humans gently caress things up with ideology all the way through.
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Feb 10, 2021 21:02
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Patrick Spens posted:Yeah, it started as, "The Napoleonic Wars with dragons." Which was cool, but then it becomes, "What if China and South America and Africa had enough dragons to tell Europeans to get hosed?" Which could also be a cool story, but the books are set in the 1800s, and there's been enough colonialism that The Napoleonic wars look more or less like they did in ours. So it never really comes together, and the main characters get shoved into positions where they matter less and less, and spend all their time on petty squabbling. Yeah, the polite way to say it is that the Temeraire series shifts from being "historical fiction" to being "alt history." The interesting thing would be if she'd tried to keep it historical-consistent but with dragons (e.g., a plague hit all the colonial nation's dragons, so they're rare / outnumberd, etc). It would still have the fanfictiony "drop everything to search for DRAGON BABIES" problems but at least it would be more interesting. It ends up just feeling . . . indulgent. Rigorless.
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Feb 10, 2021 21:10
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, the polite way to say it is that the Temeraire series shifts from being "historical fiction" to being "alt history." The interesting thing would be if she'd tried to keep it historical-consistent but with dragons (e.g., a plague hit all the colonial nation's dragons, so they're rare / outnumberd, etc). I got a fair way in (The Gang Goes To Australia) and then started reading the wikipedia summaries and amnesia plot? yikessssss. absolutely encourage reading the first if it seems interesting, but it's all downhill from there I unreservedly love everything else she's published, though, so it's all good
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Feb 10, 2021 21:22
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MockingQuantum posted:Opinions differ on this, but I actually think The Expanse books get worse as they go on. I quit maybe 4 or 5 books in because I felt like they abandoned some of the more genuinely interesting plot points and shifted focus to the least interesting aspects of the main characters. It might have gotten better after I quit but I haven't really heard anyone singing the praises of the later books in particular. This is true, Cibola Burn (#4) just piles on extra complications for the characters that don't seem organic to the story of weird stuff on the world waking up and settler drama, the world is largely empty and the alien machines are barely mentioned which makes the planet seem lame even though they do have a few interesting bits in there. Also lol at the dumb plot of the character in love with Holden for no reason. Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes (5 and 6) are okay but the ending seems to just happen because the books were running out of pages. They also set up the next two books, but that often gets in the way of what is happening in the current books and it isn't the plot that has been promised since the first few books with finding out what killed off the aliens that made the gates. Also everyone is old now that they had to push things ahead just to have the characters around for the plot. Supposedly the next two books are the last but dump trucks full of money might keep upping the numbers. I'll still keep reading them because at this point I want to see what happens in the end but I already am prepared to be disappointed
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Feb 10, 2021 21:34
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General Battuta posted:A choice made on bad information, the second one has less of the viral-outbreak-zombie-attack stuff, and it’s the last book with any of that at all. Hah, never trust a prologue I suppose.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:30
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Thanks all. I wanted more interesting alien stuff, and less "man, humans are dicks, and governments are worse". I didn't feel like the authors had a good enough grasp on international politics to write Space Cold War as an interesting concept on its own, and it really needed the hard sci fi and alien aspects to carry it. "What did these alien gods intend with our planet" was a pretty good hook. I'm guessing it was a space highway.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:46
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Silly Newbie posted:I'm guessing it was a space highway. You are 100% correct.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:51
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The Expanse books are firmly okay. The first three are probably the best, and it's clearly where the series was supposed to end. Then they got extended out. Four is okay and I think would make a fine 'epilogue book' but it isn't. Five is generally seen as the best of the novels. Six is easily the worst. Seven and Eight are kind of okay but, as a reader, I was really noticing how tired I was getting of the series during the eighth book. Hopefully, they can wrap the series up with an interesting final book but I second Battuta's notion that it stays exactly the same the whole way through. How many times can you read about how a quasi-sociopath with delusions of grandeur gets stupidly owned by good ol' boys? In this book, the bad guy is a CEO, in this one a cop, in this one a scientist, in this one a 'revolutionary' - but they're all the same kind of character. The fact that the series stays focused on individual bad actors instead of any kind of structural thought is a mark against them, especially when those characters all feel like they came from the same template. They're also books that I think you could cut the word count by, like, fifty percent and tell the story in the exact same way but with far less downtime and plodding from encounter to encounter and musing about space kibble or what spaceship corridors smell like. There just isn't enough going on with the characters to justify the word count, until you get to Book 5 or so. Just watch the TV series. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 01:40
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I agree 100% on every book basically having a black-hat moustache-twirling obvious bad guy that you know is going to fail by the end (or in the next book). They're alright books if you want that sort of thing and enjoy watching how exactly the bad guy gets beat, but a lot of the antagonists lack any real depth and are just there to shepherd the plot along. The books were even worse for me because I found Holden to generally be a sanctimonious dumbass who, more often than not, lucked his way out of problems and fumbled his way into success. I get the feeling he's intended to be tenacious and scrappy and principled, but mostly I found him infuriating and inconsistent. He reminded me a lot of protagonists from the era of fantasy where basically every novel was someone's D&D campaign, so in the balance the heroes always won, the baddies were always vanquished, and no significant harm could come to the main character. It really undercut the tension in the books for me. Honestly I was pretty surprised that Miller just straight-up died, though even he sticks around as basically a Force ghost, or did in the books I read, which felt a lot like the writer trying to have his cake and eat it too. Criticism aside, I'd agree that they're firmly okay. I've definitely read better but I've also read much worse. But if the first book doesn't grab you, definitely don't bother with any more, they're all functionally the same offering taste-wise.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:35
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IIRC the story basically came about as a homebrew scifi TTRPG campaign that they decided to write a book about instead. Also, seconding the word count thing, as well as it just being meh for a good portion of the series. I haven't bothered reading books 7 or 8 because I didn't care for the time skip. Also the stuff that Marco Inaros does is why I haven't watched the current season of the show because it's so loving dark and my life is depressing enough.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:45
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That actually really helps. You all have echoed what I thought about it, but articulated way better. Leviathan's Wake plodded and had some serious one dimensional characters, and fell flat, but was at least competently written. I find myself totally unsurprised that one of the authors was tight with GRR Martin though. Thanks.
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Feb 11, 2021 03:08
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MockingQuantum posted:I haven't read it yet but based on the description that sounds like it might be The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart? $1.99 on Kindle right now.
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Feb 11, 2021 03:12
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Drone Jett posted:$1.99 on Kindle right now. Hey thanks!
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Feb 11, 2021 03:18
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muscles like this! posted:I started reading Armor and I liked the opening section with Felix but once it switched to Jack Crow the story just started to drag. The way everyone just fawns on Crow whenever he introduces himself plus every time he gets into a fight he just effortlessly beats up whoever got a little old real quick. My first few rereads of Armor I straight skipped the Jack Crow section, so I co-sign.
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Feb 11, 2021 03:31
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Drone Jett posted:$1.99 on Kindle right now. Sold! Let’s see if this book is as horrifying as reviewers attest. Also unfortunately the author of Between Two Fires other book The Necromancers House isn’t available in ebook format. It seems insane for his publisher to not have released one, all his other books are available that way. There’s even an audiobook version, how can there not be an ebook? I’m still getting my hands on a copy but it’s harder to recommend something when it’s not a click away. drat. Ccs fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 03:34
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It's always weird when well-known stuff lacks an ebook. There's no kindle version of A Canticle For Leibowitz either.
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Feb 11, 2021 07:07
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That seems somehow appropriate.
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Feb 11, 2021 07:32
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I'm in a spec fic rut and I need to read something good please. Most recently I've read (and did not like): the expanse books (the actors in the show give the characters so much more life than the books every did!) martha wells books about horny shapeshifting dragon people that never get as interesting as the Dying Earth premise promises Before that I read and really liked: conversations with friends (not spec fic; very good) baru books memory called empire murderbot books the space between worlds jo waltons just city trilogy too like the lightning and friends everything by becky chambers
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Feb 11, 2021 07:53
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I'm so annoyed about the Expanse books; I remember really liking Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quarter and I don't get how the same person wrote both series
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Feb 11, 2021 07:56
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Continuing to read more Philip K. Dick nominees/winners because compared to Hugo/Nebula they're often quite obscure. Strange Toys by Patricia Geary, a magical realism novel about a girl whose sister is a witch or something (?) and who encounters magical stuff herself. Told in three parts in first person with her as a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old, and a 30-year-old who's become a bodybuilder for some reason. Geary's a perfectly good writer on a sentence to sentence and characterisation basis, but I read this around the same time I watched Labyrinth (because I'm also getting around to watching all the really famous movies I've never seen) and was reminded of something Ebert wrote in his review of that film: when everything is weird and magical and crazy, there are no rules, therefore there are no stakes. The protagonist of Strange Toys (whose name I've already forgotten) is forever running into mysterious strangers or ethereal doorways and none of it ever adds up to anything coherent. This actually won the award, in 1987, and I don't think it deserved it. Memories by Mike McQuay, also from 1987, and a slightly better book than Strange Toys. The basic concept is that a scientist in the dystopian underground-dwelling far future accidentally creates a drug that allows one to depart the body and travel back through time, taking control of the bodies of one's ancestors; and the prisoner she tested it on is a descendant of Napoleon, who promptly seizes the ability to live as an emperor instead of languishing in his lovely life. He's also a psychopath ex-soldier and the scientist is terrified he'll change history for the worse, so skipping around through time, she recruits her own ancestor and the novel's main character, a 20th-century psychiatrist, to try to "cure" him. Most of the book takes place around the turn of the 19th century. There's the core of a good idea and a good novel here, but it's very bloated, weighed down with awkward sex scenes and fairly shallow recreation of Napoleonic era politics. (It didn't help that I read it directly after an Aubrey-Maturin novel.) There's also at least one maddening loose end: David's psych patient, whom he later learns was skipping through time also - where did she come from and who was he? I was sure that when he later ended up searching for Silv across the ages, he'd eventually find her there - but instead she just never gets brought up again.
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Feb 11, 2021 08:44
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