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I heard something about the writing for The Monster Baru Cormarant being finished, and I know Seth Dickinson posts here, so I was wondering if there's any hard info on when it'll be out? One of my non-goon friends really wants to know, she loving loved it.
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Aug 24, 2017 23:58
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I heard something about the writing for The Monster Baru Cormarant being finished, and I know Seth Dickinson posts here, so I was wondering if there's any hard info on when it'll be out? One of my non-goon friends really wants to know, she loving loved it. From three weeks ago: General Battuta posted:Baru 2 currently sucks and is way too long but I'll get it tamed
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Aug 25, 2017 00:03
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Thanks! I was about 1200 posts behind o. The thread so figured "gently caress it, I'll just ask"
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Aug 25, 2017 00:08
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The ending's really good, I just need to tighten up the beginning and middle and amp up the amount of money involved (in the narrative, not my contract  )
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Aug 25, 2017 00:24
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General Battuta posted:I just need to ... amp up the amount of money involved (in the narrative, not my contract Why not both?
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Aug 25, 2017 00:33
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Jedit posted:Which first book? There's two, three if you want to be super-pedantic. Legend is the one I read. I really liked the idea of Druss actually being this legendary soldier that people thought wasn't even real because his feats were so exaggerated. Then you find out that he is actually an old guy with arthritis and severe depression he isn't as fun. I was hoping for a main character that is just overpowered from the start. It's still pretty and the plot is basically a huge siege battle.
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Aug 25, 2017 00:42
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Blastedhellscape posted:I was tickled recently when I was reading Use of Weapons and came to a scene where the protagonist is in what’s essentially a near future society, and comes upon a group of tourists carrying what seem to be smart phones (the tourists have communications devices, and one person is using theirs to play a game while another person is listening to music). Seemed pretty prescient for a book written in the mid-eighties. Well yeah, the other half have them implanted I think one of my favourite mispredictions along that line is "tape", from Cherryh's books -- when she originally wrote them, it clearly meant actual magnetic tape, but these days you can easily read it as slang from a society where "tape" rather than "disk" became the ubiquitous synonym for "data storage".
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Aug 25, 2017 00:52
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Hey General Battuta, did you have any say it simply being called 'The Traitor' in some markets, or was that the publishers?
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Aug 25, 2017 01:02
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General Battuta posted:The ending's really good, I just need to tighten up the beginning and middle and amp up the amount of money involved (in the narrative, not my contract Sweet! Also, you wrote a female lead so well that my friend always says "she" or "her" when she's talking about the author, so, congrats?
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Aug 25, 2017 01:25
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ToxicFrog posted:That's one of the things I love about reading old SF. Computers, data storage, and communications in particular seem to be common blind spots; we have superluminal drives, but the computer to operate them fills half the ship and use magnetic tape... Another fun thing is that old SF authors were unafraid to hide their fetishes, and mother of god their fetishes got WEIRD. Example:Cordwainer Smith aka Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, whose favorite dinner party trick ant was chugging hydrochloric acid. Cordwainer Smith loved cats. I mean he LOVED cats so much I think he bribed his veterinarian to not report him to the police. Cats appeared in 3/4 of his scifi stories. Cats, cats saving the day, cat-human hybrids, cat aliens, cats being perfect interstellar meteor response systems, dudes failing in love with cat-computer interfaces, etc. Cordwainer Smith is probably the patron saint of furries. Offtopic: Just finished reading Alfred Bester's "The Deceivers", published @1981 and it was bad. Not as lovely weird as Bester's computer connection or golem100, but the Deceiver's was poorly written, dated, racist, gaybashing and dumb. There was a Mary Sue lead character, a all knowing narrator, a perfect shapeshifting love interest, a closeted gay villain that .... wasn't villainous. The villain of the book was captured & mentally broken by being pegged by animatronic robots for six straight days in a kid friendly circus act broadcast to the entire solar system. Alfred Bester cracked hard after his 3rd book, and morphed into proto-John Ringo. My advice for people interested in Alfred Bester is to read his first three books (Demolished Man, The Rat Race, The Stars My Destination) and pretend Bester either died after his 3rd book or Ludlum style ghostwriters took over.
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Aug 25, 2017 02:35
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Ulio posted:Legend is the one I read. I really liked the idea of Druss actually being this legendary soldier that people thought wasn't even real because his feats were so exaggerated. Then you find out that he is actually an old guy with arthritis and severe depression he isn't as fun. I was hoping for a main character that is just overpowered from the start. It's still pretty and the plot is basically a huge siege battle. he's still able to wipe out dozens of dudes in Legend, irrc my impression was that he's still Druss, it's just that he used to be able to do Druss Things all day and all night, whereas now each Druss Thing requires some Icy Hots and a fistful of tylenol. it's like how michael jordan can still ball real good (and periodically shows up at Bobcats practice to remind everybody of this) but is out of commission for a week afterward ToxicFrog posted:That's one of the things I love about reading old SF. Computers, data storage, and communications in particular seem to be common blind spots; we have superluminal drives, but the computer to operate them fills half the ship and use magnetic tape... Asimov's punch-card space dreadnoughts in Foundation are great. I once wanted to run a GURPS rpg campaign that would work on retro-tech like that. Unfortunately I didn't want it quite enough to go through the...painstaking and not particularly enjoyable process of actually prepping and running GURPS. Plus I don't know any irl people who have an interest in golden-age sci-fi, so whatever group of players I assembled would only have ended up deeply confused. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 25, 2017 |
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Aug 25, 2017 02:40
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Another fun thing is that old SF authors were unafraid to hide their fetishes, and mother of god their fetishes got WEIRD. Too obscure to be the patron saint of anything, but he was a damned good writer.
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Aug 25, 2017 03:24
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mllaneza posted:Too obscure to be the patron saint of anything, but he was a damned good writer. Agreed. I picked up a "Sci-fi Masterworks" copy of one of his story collections at the local used bookshop and it surprised me. I always appreciate coming across Golden Age authors that somehow flew under the radar despite clearly having talent and vision.
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Aug 25, 2017 04:23
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mdemone posted:Agreed. I picked up a "Sci-fi Masterworks" copy of one of his story collections at the local used bookshop and it surprised me. I always appreciate coming across Golden Age authors that somehow flew under the radar despite clearly having talent and vision. If you haven't, get the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies, they're collections of the pre-Hugo authors that the SFWA felt deserved to be on a "best of" list. Great for finding niche authors like C.M. Kornbluth or Cordwainer Smith or Clifford D. Simak
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Aug 25, 2017 04:30
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mdemone posted:Agreed. I picked up a "Sci-fi Masterworks" copy of one of his story collections at the local used bookshop and it surprised me. I always appreciate coming across Golden Age authors that somehow flew under the radar despite clearly having talent and vision. SFF used to be extremely disposable so lots of people who read it have woeful blindspots and only read current bestsellers and books on those "10 best sci-fi novels ever!" clickbait lists.
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Aug 25, 2017 05:42
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Master Li looking swoll. Took me a sec to remember exactly how that reference worked.  and there is a slight flaw in its character
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Aug 25, 2017 07:28
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Captain_Person posted:Hey General Battuta, did you have any say it simply being called 'The Traitor' in some markets, or was that the publishers? Publishers. Ugly In The Morning posted:Sweet! Oh, that's awesome! I'm really glad to hear it.
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Aug 25, 2017 16:51
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you haven't, get the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies, they're collections of the pre-Hugo authors that the SFWA felt deserved to be on a "best of" list. Great for finding niche authors like C.M. Kornbluth or Cordwainer Smith or Clifford D. Simak There's also the Golden Age megapacks, each of which is a collection of work from a particular author. Good mix of famous names and people who've fallen into obscurity. Though unfortunately they are not ~curated like an anthology would be. they're like one dollar, easy to load up your kindle with a couple. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Aug 25, 2017 |
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Aug 25, 2017 17:06
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Megapacks are good, SFWA Masterwork collections are good too. Some classic pulp authors are readable, others are unreadable, and you are never sure which category a given author will fail into from story to story. My advice for reading Cordwainer Smith is to take extended breaks after each story. Otherwise Cordwainer Smith's cat-fixation fetish is really apparent and offputting. Definitely try to track down non-Star Trek James Blish stories, Blish managed to coin themes & phrases that are still being used in science & scifi to this day. One of the the best ways to sample old pulp scifi authors is to search your local public library systems for old Hugo award book collections. Theodore Sturgeon curated Russian sci-fi authors are pretty good, if Sturgeon did a Introduction to the English editions, the stories are readable.
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Aug 26, 2017 07:21
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General Battuta posted:and amp up the amount of money involved trash your silver for gold, easy fix
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Aug 26, 2017 08:39
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Another fun thing is that old SF authors were unafraid to hide their fetishes, and mother of god their fetishes got WEIRD.  How does this work
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Aug 26, 2017 14:34
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ToxicFrog posted:
It works in an awesome way. Read Cordwainer Smith and find out.
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Aug 26, 2017 16:01
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Cordwainer Smith is great. I read his collected short stories straight through on a long weekend of airports and air travel a few years ago and the cat thing isn't THAT bad. I have norstrilia sitting on a shelf waiting for a good time to binge.
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Aug 26, 2017 16:51
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PupsOfWar posted:he's still able to wipe out dozens of dudes in Legend, irrc This is basically it. Druss at sixty is still very much a warrior, but he knows he's past his prime and is trading on his reputation. But that doesn't change who he is; he convinces himself that he's gone there to die, but the truth is that he went because he was needed.
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Aug 26, 2017 18:13
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Here's a hot tip for The Traitor Baru Cormorant re-readers (only a minor spoiler if you've never read it, I think): Pay pretty close attention to the bar scene with the actress. She is more than she appears to be. I have previously confirmed this with General Battuta on Twitter.
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Aug 26, 2017 18:30
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McCoy Pauley posted:It works in an awesome way. Read Cordwainer Smith and find out.
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Aug 26, 2017 18:30
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andrew smash posted:Cordwainer Smith is great. I read his collected short stories straight through on a long weekend of airports and air travel a few years ago and the cat thing isn't THAT bad. I have norstrilia sitting on a shelf waiting for a good time to binge. Norstrilia is where the cat loving fetish becomes overt. I made the mistake of reading Norstrilla first, THEN the Best of Cordwainer Smith collection. Save your Norstrilia readthrough for another long weekend of air travel jetlag. In a desperate effort to avoid talking more about that guy..... Karl Capek's "War with the Newts" is definitely worth tracking down. It goes from funny to dark quickly. Finding a paperback copy for $1 is one of my greatest used bookstore scifi finds.
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Aug 26, 2017 19:40
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Grimson posted:Here's a hot tip for The Traitor Baru Cormorant re-readers (only a minor spoiler if you've never read it, I think): if this is the scene I'm thinking of, isn't it pretty obvious this is the case?
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Aug 26, 2017 19:58
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Just finished reading Alfred Bester's "The Deceivers", published @1981 and it was bad. This is so disappointing. I still have his later books on my to-read pile and 
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Aug 26, 2017 20:30
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I'd even caution against buying The Stars My Destination. It's got some really cool ideas hidden demonic facial tattoo that shows when excited, just about everyone can teleport, and the opening sequence when Foyle is marooned is truly harrowing, but... I really feel like the book was hurt by being such an "homage" of a better story (The Count Of Monte Cristo). It really took me out of it when those elements started to show themselves.That story's been retold and copied enough. I still liked the writing enough that I at least want to check out The Demolished Man.
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Aug 26, 2017 20:55
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Stars my Destination is a pretty solid book with some troubling bits. It definitely rips off Count of Monte Cristo, given that Stars My Destination was published in 1956/57, I am willing to forgive the homage. For something written in the past 20 years(age of the internet) that rips off Monte Cristo, I am way less forgiving. I enjoyed it's self-teleportation gimmick, and guess where Neal Stephenson ripped off the "everything is a incorporated franchise" from Snow Crash...that would be Stars my Destination. Demolished Man is strong. and definitely deserved to win the 1st ever Hugo award. Stuporstar posted:This is so disappointing. I still have his later books on my to-read pile and Bester's later books have fragments of interesting ideas floating in sky galaxies of stupidity. Nobody ever replicated Bester's tricks with type-setting to demonstrate sensory input or in-the-moment actions. Because it's a massive pain in the rear end to get right. That style of type setting would be amazing for action writing in modern day scifi. Here's a half -assed homage to that style code:
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Aug 27, 2017 03:37
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Neal Stephenson sucks NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Nobody ever replicated Bester's tricks with type-setting to demonstrate sensory input or in-the-moment actions. Michael Moorcock did it in the Jerry Cornelius novels. Pretty sure he said he got the idea from Bester.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:06
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I vaguely remember the Jerry Cornelius series. Always pictured Jerry as a thinly novelized adventures of David Bowie constantly morphing into different album cover looks. Moorcock books got weird and focused on recreating 1940's radio serials the last time I read something recent by Moorcock.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:28
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Alfred Bester also invented bullet time.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:45
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Stars My Destination was so far ahead of its time we still haven't entirely caught up to it, but you can tell it was basically a lifetime's worth of ideas in a single book. It doesn't matter that he didn't write much else after that; he didn't need to. He invented cyberpunk fifty years ahead of schedule.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Stars My Destination was so far ahead of its time we still haven't entirely caught up to it, but you can tell it was basically a lifetime's worth of ideas in a single book. It doesn't matter that he didn't write much else after that; he didn't need to. He invented cyberpunk fifty years ahead of schedule. Give it time. One of these days, we'll Bester.
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Aug 27, 2017 05:09
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Stars My Destination was so far ahead of its time we still haven't entirely caught up to it, but you can tell it was basically a lifetime's worth of ideas in a single book. It doesn't matter that he didn't write much else after that; he didn't need to. He invented cyberpunk fifty years ahead of schedule. There's so many throwaway scenes in it that could be entire stories on their own - the ward full of sickness-fetishists, the Cellar-Christians - oh poo poo, does the bloke who's on the drug that makes him think he's a python mean Bester's also the Father of Furries?
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Aug 27, 2017 11:45
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Lord of Light by Roger Zelzany is some good stuff.
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Aug 27, 2017 13:19
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Stars My Destination was so far ahead of its time we still haven't entirely caught up to it, but you can tell it was basically a lifetime's worth of ideas in a single book. It doesn't matter that he didn't write much else after that; he didn't need to. He invented cyberpunk fifty years ahead of schedule. Stars My Destination is one of those books it feels like you've already read because of how heavily it influenced writers in the 60 years since it was written. It's still really good though, the ending in particular. It was funny catching references to it in the next 2 or 3 random sci-fi books I read as well. ugh its Troika posted:Lord of Light by Roger Zelzany is some good stuff. Agreed. Most of the old Hugo award winners are still really good with a few exceptions ("They'd Rather Be Right" being the most glaring.) http://www.sfadb.com/Hugo_Awards_Winners_By_Year was my go-to reading list for a long time and it rarely disappointed.
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Aug 27, 2017 23:00
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Doorknob Slobber posted:if this is the scene I'm thinking of, isn't it pretty obvious this is the case? I dunno, apparently no one had ever mentioned or brought it up before when I asked him on Twitter.
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Aug 28, 2017 06:11
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