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General Battuta posted:I think we're going to see a lot of categories weren't won by the story that received the most first place votes but by a story everybody ranked second or third. There were a couple exceptions but for the most part the eventual winners had the most 1st place votes. It was such for Novel (and Piranesi came third, also after The City We Became. Second most 1st place votes.) The biggest swing was in Novelette, where the Helicopter Story had the most 1st place votes but ended up 5th out of 6. http://file770.com/wp-content/uploads/2021HugoStatistics.pdf
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Dec 19, 2021 09:21
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Jedit posted:As per Pratchett, retrophrenology is when you alter someone's personality by changing the shape of their head. With a series of carefully graded metal hammers, in the case of Zorgo. Provably works, too; when you apply a hammer to someone's skull, their personality observably changes. Usually they become upset, nervous or angry. Sometimes more passive.
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Dec 19, 2021 10:05
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Teddybear posted:Thread favorite Murderbot won the Hugos for Best Series and Best Novel for Network Effect. Perhaps tor will finally put the whole series on a sale at last and that hardback slipcase of the first four will stop winking at me and reminding me that it's only about £15 more than the drat ebooks come to in total.
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Dec 19, 2021 11:06
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Kestral posted:Network Effect beating Piranesi is just... Yeah, no, sorry. Network Effect was fun, Piranesi is an actual masterpiece that people will be marveling at decades from now. I'm going to go against the grain here and say I thought Piranesi was Good but hardly something I'm going to be marveling at forever.
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Dec 19, 2021 16:12
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bro beowulf won https://twitter.com/erik_kaars/status/1298500864206876672?s=20 clearly piranesi is better. really black sun is probably better. but i always thought the hugo is supposed to capture the zeitgeist and murderbot is THE zeitgeist. Copernic fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 16:12
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Lol that Beowulf is cool
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Dec 19, 2021 16:44
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Aardvark! posted:I'm going to go against the grain here and say I thought Piranesi was Good but hardly something I'm going to be marveling at forever. honestly I didn't even think it was that good, but that was definitely just me
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Dec 19, 2021 17:02
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Aardvark! posted:I'm going to go against the grain here and say I thought Piranesi was Good but hardly something I'm going to be marveling at forever. Nah I agree with this. It's unique, and it had big shoes to fill. It's of really good quality and lived up to the hype, but it's not exactly transcendent or whatever. I was blown away by it initially, but on reflection I think that has more to do with the vivid and memorable sense of place it has, rather than any kind of objective stamp of quality if that makes sense. e: Though considering her penchant for exquisite amounts of detail in her work, I did wonder if there was any logic or method to the numbering system for the hallways and such. Did anyone ever try to conceive of a map or were there hidden codes in that poo poo or anything? Knowing her it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. unattended spaghetti fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 17:15
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The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastards #1) by Scott Lynch - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKNJ2/ The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008QXVDJ0/ The City We Became (Great Cities #1) by NK Jemisin - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MFKQDJM/ Recursion by Blake Crouch - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HDSHP7N/ His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire #1) by Naomi Novik - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000GCFBQA/
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Dec 19, 2021 17:27
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Aardvark! posted:I'm going to go against the grain here and say I thought Piranesi was Good but hardly something I'm going to be marveling at forever. Maybe not like a timeless forever and ever classic, but I do think it’s clearly better than network effect. Murderbot as a series is great but I don’t really feel like network effect is the strongest entry even tho it’s a good book. I actually didn’t really like the city we became even though I do like NK jemisin’s other stuff but I realize I’m in the minority here for sure.
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Dec 19, 2021 19:33
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tildes posted:Maybe not like a timeless forever and ever classic, but I do think it’s clearly better than network effect. Murderbot as a series is great but I don’t really feel like network effect is the strongest entry even tho it’s a good book. I actually didn’t really like the city we became even though I do like NK jemisin’s other stuff but I realize I’m in the minority here for sure. I loved her trilogy but I thought the thread take on City was definitely negative. Love murderbot but network effect was definitely nothing incredibly memorable, imo - it was More Murderbot. Piranesi is breathtaking.
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Dec 19, 2021 20:02
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Fandom taste kind of sucks at the moment and the Hugos is capturing that Tor.com way over represented in the list of publishers nominated and publishers that won fez_machine fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 21:12
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buffalo all day posted:Piranesi is breathtaking. Mostly because it is such an effective demonstration of storytelling. Excellent world building combined with a great story in 200 pages.
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Dec 19, 2021 22:21
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Ken Liu's 2020 collection of short stories - The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is free on Kindle unlimited. The previous set, The Paper Menagerie was very good.
ClydeFrog fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 00:06
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Don't ever pay to mail something back to Amazon. I received some beat up books, they said they would not replace them until I returned them, and that they would refund me the shipping cost when I did. Once I had shipped them they refused to pay.
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Dec 20, 2021 00:31
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thotsky posted:Don't ever pay to mail something back to Amazon. I received some beat up books, they said they would not replace them until I returned them, and that they would refund me the shipping cost when I did. Once I had shipped them they refused to pay. Are you sure you were dealing with Amazon? Anytime I’ve needed to return anything, they’ve provided the shipping label.
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Dec 20, 2021 00:37
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That's definitely some random seller, not Amazon itself.
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Dec 20, 2021 00:58
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Just realised Knot of Shadows, a Pendric and Desdemona book I hadn’t read, must have been released in the last few months. A nice simple story. The investigation I to the mystery is fairly basic without many twists and turns, but it’s nice just to see the characters again.
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Dec 20, 2021 01:53
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a foolish pianist posted:Are you sure you were dealing with Amazon? Anytime I’ve needed to return anything, they’ve provided the shipping label. Yeah this is how Amazon does it. You may be able to make a complaint to actual amazon.
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Dec 20, 2021 02:06
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a foolish pianist posted:Are you sure you were dealing with Amazon? Anytime I’ve needed to return anything, they’ve provided the shipping label. It was through Amazon customer support, might have been that they were proxying for someone, but it was not like a used book vendor or anything. The return label was not prepaid and the return cost was really high because it was a huge rpg box set and I live in Norway. They promised it would be okay, but after the fact they turned around and said due to Amazon return policy they could only give me like 15 bucks or something in Amazon credit. Nowhere close to the amount I paid. Looks like something like that is still in their stated policy if you dig a bit: If you choose to ship the item on your own, you'll pay the carrier when you ship your return. If the return is the result of an Amazon error, we'll refund your return shipping costs up to a maximum amount. I have experienced quite a bit of changes to Amazon policy over the years, used to be I did not have to return anything. Maybe prepaid is a US thing, although I have certainly done it that way with other online vendors. In any case, I don't shop at Amazon anymore. I had photo evidence of the hosed up box and goods, and chat logs of their claims, but you can't actually do anything if they decide to just keep your money unless you have paid with a credit card. thotsky fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Dec 20, 2021 |
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Dec 20, 2021 02:10
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Oh, yeah, each national branch of Amazon is somewhat independent I think so maybe Norwegian amazon sucks. Sorry =(
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Dec 20, 2021 02:18
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I love Piranesi because Magician's Nephew was one of my favorite books growing up and Clarke really just went and made a fanfic of it and it owns.
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Dec 20, 2021 02:49
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I was going through my Abebooks and Book Depository (both owned by Amazon) order history yesterday and realised I have six or seven books from separate orders that were "shipped" around August and have still just never shown up.
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Dec 20, 2021 02:54
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There are some incredibly bad sellers on Abe. Unfortunately, it's often the only place I can find the more rare books.
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Dec 20, 2021 04:03
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D-Pad posted:There are some incredibly bad sellers on Abe. Unfortunately, it's often the only place I can find the more rare books. It's where I got my (really nice) copy of the Codex Seraphinianus!
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Dec 20, 2021 05:17
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freebooter posted:I was going through my Abebooks and Book Depository (both owned by Amazon) order history yesterday and realised I have six or seven books from separate orders that were "shipped" around August and have still just never shown up. It feels like Amazon owns everything related to books and book-adjacent media but the publishing houses at this point.
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Dec 20, 2021 05:46
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For those who wanted to try Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shards Of Earth, it's 99p on Amazon UK at the moment.TOOT BOOT posted:It feels like Amazon owns everything related to books and book-adjacent media but the publishing houses at this point. I'm sure they're working on it...
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Dec 20, 2021 14:43
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For me, Piranesi was really elevated by the audiobook. I'll never not recommend it to people. Just so good.
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Dec 20, 2021 15:53
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A Proper Uppercut posted:For me, Piranesi was really elevated by the audiobook. I'll never not recommend it to people. Just so good. Very glad to hear this because I just got it in the Audible sale
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Dec 20, 2021 16:20
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Huh. I read it and enjoyed it quite a bit, maybe I'll check out the audiobook too sometime.
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Dec 20, 2021 16:41
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Aardvark! posted:I'm going to go against the grain here and say I thought Piranesi was Good but hardly something I'm going to be marveling at forever. Don't let /r/fantasy hear you.
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Dec 20, 2021 17:51
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The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081BU42O/ Sins of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder #1) by Brian McClellan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTV4/ Countdown City (Last Policeman #2) by Ben H Winters - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B6OV90E/
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Dec 20, 2021 18:16
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D-Pad posted:There are some incredibly bad sellers on Abe. Unfortunately, it's often the only place I can find the more rare books. I've been using it for years (it was a way better deal when the Australian dollar was worth $1.10 US) and used to assume I was helping out mom and pop second-hand stores before eventually noticing they'd all coalesced into five or six vendors with names like Reuseabook ad Better World Books and Discover Books. I now assume they're gigantic operations that hoover up cheap books from thrift shops and have an Amazon-esque army of wage slaves sorting through them in a series of warehouse complexes.
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Dec 20, 2021 22:49
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If you can't find the book you're looking for on eBay or Bookshop (or get it straight from the publisher), it's extremely easy to weed out bad AbeBooks sellers big and small by checking the "Seller-Supplied Images" box in your search, and you also know what the book actually looks like instead of wondering whether or not to trust some boilerplate "Very Good" blurb (don't). Incidentally, pretty much anyone left after that will be a mom-and-pop operation or some collector.
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Dec 21, 2021 00:19
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A lot of times they are just mom-and-pop operations that still just hoover up books from Goodwill and tag sales. If it’s got an ISBN you can figure out the value in a second and buy it to put away in a storage unit until someone randomly buys it. The customer service on the buying side of this business is highly variable.
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Dec 21, 2021 00:28
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I thought Piranesi was really good! It's probably still my book of the year (of 2020)! I recently finished The Blacktongue Thief. I was vibing with it, basically until the last 10-20% beginning with the anal rape. It was gross and essentially pointless, other than to grimdark the book a little bit. And then the book basically just ended with a "well, sequel coming soon". It wasn't even a cliffhanger; he basically just stopped writing. Otherwise, it was a lot of fun up until that point!!
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Dec 21, 2021 03:17
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Sham bam bamina! posted:If you can't find the book you're looking for on eBay or Bookshop (or get it straight from the publisher), it's extremely easy to weed out bad AbeBooks sellers big and small by checking the "Seller-Supplied Images" box in your search, and you also know what the book actually looks like instead of wondering whether or not to trust some boilerplate "Very Good" blurb (don't). Incidentally, pretty much anyone left after that will be a mom-and-pop operation or some collector. I've actually started limiting my searches to Australia purely because of international shipping issues, and this also seemed to weed out all the big warehouses. So costly though! edit - Just got a bunch of emails back from Abebooks vendors saying that my deliveries are outside their "30 day refund window" even though their own shipping estimate is 21-36 business days which seems like a pretty good scam to me. I also noticed looking more closely that they're both based in Ogden UT even though they have different names so I suspect it's the same big warehouse. Avoid Ogden I guess. I think there's also one in Portland ME that I wrote off ages ago as being shonky. Stuff from the UK's big operations seems reliable, though. freebooter fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 21, 2021 03:30
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Sham bam bamina! posted:If you can't find the book you're looking for on eBay or Bookshop (or get it straight from the publisher), it's extremely easy to weed out bad AbeBooks sellers big and small by checking the "Seller-Supplied Images" box in your search, and you also know what the book actually looks like instead of wondering whether or not to trust some boilerplate "Very Good" blurb (don't). Incidentally, pretty much anyone left after that will be a mom-and-pop operation or some collector. This is it exactly. I've messaged several sellers asking for images when I was looking for a very specific edition and they only had a generic picture and they just reply that they have a giant warehouse of books and can't supply images of any books. That being said I've also got some incredible deals when they've listed a rare edition or limited version of a book at the same price the regular edition would be because they can't take the time to be bothered.
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Dec 21, 2021 06:47
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freebooter posted:I now assume they're gigantic operations that hoover up cheap books from thrift shops and have an Amazon-esque army of wage slaves sorting through them in a series of warehouse complexes. That's exactly what Discover Books and their many aliases (if you get a book with a white barcode sticker that has a number beginning with PQ or DB, it came through them) is. They buy in mass bulk from libraries and thrift stores, do a half-assed sort (discarding more sellable books than they sell because they try to automate as much as possible), and don't really know poo poo about conditioning. They pay like poo poo, the warehouses are filthy enough to be a health hazard (from all the book dust and absolutely no cleaning or air filter), and they have a habit of firing anybody who knows anything about the market because those people are a threat to management. Worked there for 4 years.
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Dec 21, 2021 13:25
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Gnoman posted:That's exactly what Discover Books and their many aliases (if you get a book with a white barcode sticker that has a number beginning with PQ or DB, it came through them) is. They buy in mass bulk from libraries and thrift stores, do a half-assed sort (discarding more sellable books than they sell because they try to automate as much as possible), and don't really know poo poo about conditioning. This maybe isn't the thread for it but I'd be absolutely fascinated to hear more about that. I've tried googling about them, assuming somebody would have done up a long-read expose at some point, but only ever found puff pieces: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/71003-finding-a-world-of-good-in-used-books.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html
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Dec 21, 2021 14:56
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