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What I remember about the first Cat Wizards book is that it turns into absolute carnage. They have to fight dinosaurs I think? And it is absolutely brutal, hordes of shrieking velociraptors and explosions and poo poo, it's wild.
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Mar 4, 2021 04:03
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packetmantis posted:All novels are "pointless." The point is enjoyment. Novels are frequently attempting to make some sort of argument, and if the reader finds the argument to be incoherent or ridiculous, it might be reasonable to describe it as "pointless" from the position of the reader. General Battuta posted:What I remember about the first Cat Wizards book is that it turns into absolute carnage. They have to fight dinosaurs I think? And it is absolutely brutal, hordes of shrieking velociraptors and explosions and poo poo, it's wild. Yeah it rules. The other books in the series aren't that great but the first one is pretty excellent. Danhenge fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 04:09
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Sinatrapod posted:Same here. He's got his idiosyncrasies, but he's written some of my absolutely most favorite books. I do wish Seveneves had been two books so he could have taken his time and really spread his nerdy wings on the distant future parts instead of shotgunning them so vigorously, but I still had a fun time and a lot of the wacky orbital infrastructure stuck in my brain. The Baroque Cycle, Anathem, and Reamde are some all-time favorites of mine. Seveneves is the only one I haven't finished.
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Mar 4, 2021 05:02
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Re: Trek novels. Diane Duane also wrote Spock's World, which I still think was pretty neat as a history of Vulcan and a discussion of its place in the Federation. Margaret Wander Bonano wrote Probe, which is a sequel to Star Trek IV (the one with the whales) that takes place sometime after V. She swears it suffered unauthorized and uncredited rewrites and is not the book she wrote, but I've read the original manuscript she released for "Music of the Spheres" and I liked Probe better.
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Mar 4, 2021 05:08
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. Space Communism says Iain M. Banks's The Culture series to me. It's Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism sci-fi where humanity is now sort of like a beloved pet or pesky but lovable little kid for a society of benevolent artificial intelligences, who have created a fulfilling post-scarcity society for the race that spawned them. Of course, humans always find a way to be dissatisfied with paradise, so Culture novels tend to follow people who don't quite fit the mold of their society and get caught up in events larger than themselves. They can be read in any order, but The Player of Games is a good intro point. StrixNebulosa posted:Becky Chambers is your next stop! For a reader new to broader sci-fi stuff, this has to be prefaced the note that Becky Chambers is very popular and does fit with some of the stories that draw people to Trek, but is also A Very Specific Vibe: comfy slice of life stories in the future, low stakes, strong romantic elements, and often not a lot actually happening. They're quite different from most of what's on the market, but the advertising copy can be deceptive.
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Mar 4, 2021 05:16
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Re: Trek novels, you might also want to check out the work of John M. Ford. He did The Final Reflection, an interesting take on Klingon culture that was completely wiped out by TNG but oh well, and How Much for Just the Planet?, a Trek comedy that's actually funny. As for other Doing Cool poo poo in Space books, a lot of people like the Expanse series, although I'm middling on them myself.
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Mar 4, 2021 05:53
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Selachian posted:Re: Trek novels, you might also want to check out the work of John M. Ford. He did The Final Reflection, an interesting take on Klingon culture that was completely wiped out by TNG but oh well, and How Much for Just the Planet?, a Trek comedy that's actually funny. I have both of these but haven't gotten around to reading them yet. I'll move them up on the doomstack.
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Mar 4, 2021 06:23
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Danhenge posted:Yeah it rules. The other books in the series aren't that great but the first one is pretty excellent. WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY CHILDREN? is a moment I often think of.
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Mar 4, 2021 06:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:Can one of you explain why Seveneves part 3 was bad instead of going straight for the "it sucked forever" / "it was good" debate? Because you could summarize the events in a paragraph long epilogue. Instead it's like 80 pages or something absurd.
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Mar 4, 2021 07:16
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The ending shows the results of what everyone was working for throughout the whole book. Why the hell would it be summarized?
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Mar 4, 2021 09:11
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More like 300 pages rather than 80. I found it very hard to suspend disbelief in part 3. The timeskip is about the length of real recorded history, and by the end the population is in the billions, but it gives off the strong impression that nothing really happened in all that time except for civil engineering. It really goes in to the old sci-fi trope where in the far future everyone's cultural references are to the 20th century. The races being separate despite intermixing for 5000 years is also odd because it doesn't just rely on genetic engineering to do that, it also relies on the overwhelming majority of people all wanting to do that, over a multi thousand year timescale and a change in living situation greater than the difference between the stone age and the present day. Qwertycoatl fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 09:18
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Kestral posted:That's a tough one, and it's going to depend on what kind of maturity the kids have developed, and the sorts of fantasy they've been exposed to so far. I've met (and probably was) precocious well-read ten year olds who could handle it, because the mythic adventure story would cloak the weirder, darker threads of what's going on, particularly later in the book, but kids obviously vary a lot among their cohort. Thanks, this is exactly what I was after. I'll probably listen to the audiobook myself and see what I think. The sticking point, if there is one, will be the sex stuff as that is something we haven't encountered in books yet. Also regarding the Iain [M] Banks chat above, I always found it interesting that Banks, a socialist, wrote books which were to my understand critiques of communism. I once saw him speak (when Stonemouth was released and meant to ask this question, but ran out of time before I got picked. He died shortly after so I never got to go again. Does anyone know if he ever commented on this?
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Mar 4, 2021 09:29
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Randomly picked up Alastair Reynolds' short story collection Beyond the Aquila Rift at a bookstore the other day and am reminded of how much I like him. The only other collection of his I've read is Galactic North, and I think he's actually better at the shorter form. The titular story, Beyond the Aquila Rift, is just an instant classic of the creepy sci-fi mystery genre.
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Mar 4, 2021 10:36
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StrixNebulosa posted:Can one of you explain why Seveneves part 3 was bad instead of going straight for the "it sucked forever" / "it was good" debate? On a writing level it was Stephenson's generally flat prose, underdeveloped characters (not helped by switching to a whole new cast for the last act) and an infodump:plot ratio of at least 1:1 if not higher. Qwertycoatl posted:I found it very hard to suspend disbelief in part 3. The timeskip is about the length of real recorded history, and by the end the population is in the billions, but it gives off the strong impression that nothing really happened in all that time except for civil engineering. It really goes in to the old sci-fi trope where in the far future everyone's cultural references are to the 20th century. On an ideas level this was what killed it for me. Civilization is further away from the 21st century than we are from the Trojan War, in an unimaginably different environment from the one we evolved in, and yet everyone acts like Gen X-ers in the early 2000s. It's been a while but iirc there's a throwaway line where an exposition source basically says "oh yeah, we thought about transhumanism but didn't go there, and we sort of gave up on that social media stuff too" and then never brings it up again, which I found hard to see as anything except Stephenson hastily trying to justify why society hasn't changed in millennia.
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Mar 4, 2021 10:55
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. To add to the already listed names Janet Kagan and John M Ford's novels are supposed to be pretty good as well.
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Mar 4, 2021 11:57
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How Much For Just The Planet? is the best Star Trek novel but I can't imagine how a musical comedy would work in audiobook form without a pretty solid budget.
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Mar 4, 2021 12:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:Can one of you explain why Seveneves part 3 was bad instead of going straight for the "it sucked forever" / "it was good" debate? It's extremely jarring. The first 2/3 are a Michael Chrichton-esque pot-boiler techno-thriller set amidst the collapse of society and death of the planet. It's exciting and the propulsive plot lets you push by the shaky writing. Then there's a cut, and all of a sudden it's this far-future world with no real plot and no real stakes. It's basically like an RPG sourcebook: here are the elves, here are the orcs, here are the dwarves, here's where they live. The dwarves and orcs are allied. Etc. etc.
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Mar 4, 2021 15:36
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General Battuta posted:What I remember about the first Cat Wizards book is that it turns into absolute carnage. They have to fight dinosaurs I think? And it is absolutely brutal, hordes of shrieking velociraptors and explosions and poo poo, it's wild. Yep, that's the one. The Book of Night with Moon is probably my favourite Duane overall, in large part because I just love the basic concept of "a team of cats who are wizards and their day job is maintaining the interdimensional portal hub hidden inside a mundane subway station". I don't like the others as much, but I do love the scene in To Visit the Queen where they're activating a defensive spell against the Lone Power sustained by the ghosts of all the mummified cats of Egypt, and the Tearer goes "these are not the humans you loved and protected! your humans are thousands of years dead, and you owe their descendants nothing!", and the ghosts reply "do they still worship our descendants with soft pillows and delicious treats and warm fires? yes? then the pact is unbroken and you can gently caress off" Rand Brittain posted:WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY CHILDREN? is a moment I often think of. That ending rocked so hard.
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Mar 4, 2021 15:44
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ToxicFrog posted:Yep, that's the one. That's the most delightful cat wizard thing I think I've read in a long time. Gosh I should find and read that book. (does she kill off a character at the end of To Visit the Queen though)
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Mar 4, 2021 15:47
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re: seveneves. I cooled on Stephenson a lot faster and earlier than this (Cryptonomicon and Anathem annoyed me constantly; there's this endless smug assuredness he drips everywhere), but 'what if we all sat down and decided to work way too hard to make racism incredibly true and real and then both this and our society's fabric didn't really change in any form for literally thousands of years?' felt egregious as hell even for him. StrixNebulosa posted:That's the most delightful cat wizard thing I think I've read in a long time. Gosh I should find and read that book.
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Mar 4, 2021 15:56
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I picked up The Unspoken Name because Tor was offering it free as this month's ebook. It's good so far! Books about traveling with wizards are definitely my thing, although I suspect as with a certain other popular fantasy series that this would-be Gandalf is not going to turn out to be all sunshine and rainbows. The main character is an orc, but this does not play into the narrative at all so far aside from mentioning she has tusks and the wizard does not, and that she's reticent to pronounce certain words because a lot of spit would fly. As with Malazan I find orc characters vaguely hilarious and pointless. It's just a human with a dental issue that makes them look sillier whenever I try to picture them. Maybe later it will come into play, but there's been no suggestion that being an orc conveys any sort of extra strength, and the world appears to be mostly populated by orcs. So it's just a cosmetic gloss on the world for people who like that sort of thing.
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Mar 4, 2021 16:30
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Ccs posted:I picked up The Unspoken Name because Tor was offering it free as this month's ebook. It's good so far! Books about traveling with wizards are definitely my thing, although I suspect as with a certain other popular fantasy series that this would-be Gandalf is not going to turn out to be all sunshine and rainbows. That's honestly beautiful in contrast with Tolkien's "orcs are savage foreigners" presentation. I love it.
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Mar 4, 2021 16:45
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I have about 15 pages left in Memory and this one just arrived today, but work is getting in the way 
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Mar 4, 2021 17:54
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Gato posted:It's been a while but iirc there's a throwaway line where an exposition source basically says "oh yeah, we thought about transhumanism but didn't go there, and we sort of gave up on that social media stuff too" and then never brings it up again, which I found hard to see as anything except Stephenson hastily trying to justify why society hasn't changed in millennia. ...but their complete avoidance of any and all microtechnology because "we just build big and reliable instead even now when we've recolonized Earth" does not
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Mar 4, 2021 18:37
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DACK FAYDEN posted:...but their complete avoidance of any and all microtechnology because "we just build big and reliable instead even now when we've recolonized Earth" does not I remember scratching my head at that. It went something along the lines of: "Yeah, a 21st century kiddo had better wifi than us, or could fit more than 2/3 books on their flashdrive, because we didn't really focus on that for reasons. It sucks, but we make do. Brb, lemme slide my way down this enormous tunnel in space towards a massive space slingshot, don't think too hard about transistors and stuff, bro."
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Mar 4, 2021 18:46
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packetmantis posted:The ending shows the results of what everyone was working for throughout the whole book. Why the hell would it be summarized? I feel like the book could have ended after part 2 and I'd have been satisfied.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:56
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Varsity posted:I remember scratching my head at that. It went something along the lines of: "Yeah, a 21st century kiddo had better wifi than us, or could fit more than 2/3 books on their flashdrive, because we didn't really focus on that for reasons. It sucks, but we make do. Brb, lemme slide my way down this enormous tunnel in space towards a massive space slingshot, don't think too hard about transistors and stuff, bro." My memory is that they can't build orbital chip fabs as good as the ancient Earthers.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:05
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crazyvanman posted:Also regarding the Iain [M] Banks chat above, I always found it interesting that Banks, a socialist, wrote books which were to my understand critiques of communism. I don't think they were critiques of communism at all. The Culture was explicitly Banks' personal heaven, it was quite literally fully automated gay space communism. The only two things about the Culture that the books really pick at in a critical way are 1. the humans are basically pets of the Minds, since Minds render humans totally obsolete and 2. the Culture LOVES to do a righteous violence, probably in part because Banks likes to write it and is aware of this enough to be critical about it. For books set in utopia a lot of them are tragedies. The Culture books are in general very positive about the Culture though. Every attempt I've ever seen to read them as secret dystopias is quite strained.
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Mar 4, 2021 19:46
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They did do a war that killed hundreds of billions to prove a point though, which was maybe a little much to prove you're not wusses
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Mar 4, 2021 20:00
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multijoe posted:They did do a war that killed hundreds of billions to prove a point though, which was maybe a little much to prove you're not wusses the good thing about the culture books is that you can in universe go "nah, it was exactly the right amount, they worked it out"
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Mar 4, 2021 20:32
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Yeah, there's no anti culture Culture book for the same reason there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. The Culture is always the protagonist.
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Mar 4, 2021 20:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, there's no anti culture Culture book for the same reason there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. The Culture is always the protagonist. some of the books (use of weapons and matter specifically) make a point of showing that blind-spot in the culture's thinking - of showing that to the culture, because 6 billion dead was provably better, they dont need to feel bad about the 6 billion. the humans in the books are there to show the costs of the culture's attitude. and thats like, The Point of the culture books. reading a book about a giant society that was right all the time with no conflict whatsoever would be boring. The books are interesting because they show the costs of applying that philosophy. But something doesnt have to be wrong just because it has costs. awesmoe fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 21:07
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I finished Between Two Fires and enjoyed it quite a bit. Picked it up blindly on the recommendation of the thread and was surprised it was set in medieval France. Early in the book with the talk about the monster in the river I didn't know whether it was going to be some supernatural monster or a crocodile (it was a supernatural monster). Gotta pick up that new arkady martine. Just started reading the red queen's war trilogy by mark lawrence and it seems basically the same style as the broken empire trilogy.
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Mar 4, 2021 21:24
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General Battuta posted:1. the humans are basically pets of the Minds, since Minds render humans totally obsolete and Nope. Out of the teeming trillions of Culture baseline humans, there are a few that can out-predict a Mind. The strategic expert in Use of Weapons was one of those one in a trillion people. The trillions of "pets" are the breeding pool that produces small-m minds like hers and those few people justify keeping the baseline humans around.
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Mar 4, 2021 21:53
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I mean I think it's more that the Culture has moved past the point where humans are valued by their output or their contributions to society.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:12
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Humans made ethical AI and the ethical AI continued to make more ethical AI. Humans exist and prosper because it would be unethical for them not to.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:21
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humans are no threat to the Minds and sometimes the little critters do interesting and surprising things. and they don't eat much, why not keep them around.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:27
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mllaneza posted:Nope. Out of the teeming trillions of Culture baseline humans, there are a few that can out-predict a Mind. The strategic expert in Use of Weapons was one of those one in a trillion people. The trillions of "pets" are the breeding pool that produces small-m minds like hers and those few people justify keeping the baseline humans around. Didn't he come out of a non-Culture culture?
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Mar 4, 2021 22:31
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The problem with the Minds is that they're so stupid. Sure, they can make a great many decisions very quickly, but their decisions are never really shown to be particularly clever. They're often at odds with each other, and their petty plots and squabbling are the same as any human; the scale is just bigger. I guess it's kind of impossible to write a Mind that comes across as smarter than the author, but it makes for a weird plot hole.
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Mar 4, 2021 22:38
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That's not a plot hole!
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Mar 4, 2021 22:51
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