|
Arcsech posted:I finished Ann Leckie's new book, Provenance, recently. It's a nice, fun read with some interesting ideas. Definitely lighter than the Ancillary books, but still good. It's set in the same universe as the Ancillary books, but in a human society outside the Radch. It's interesting to get a different perspective on some things in that universe. This tank thing sounds interesting/funny enough to spend .99 on. I've never heard of the print publisher before but having a print publisher at all at least means an editor looked it over.
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 00:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 18:10 |
|
|
Finally read Charles Stoss's "Delirium Brief" out of morbid curiosity thanks to a library. I stopped caring about the characters around the time Bob got promoted to Mahogany Row/External assets Thoughts on Delirium Brief: It was interesting to read Stross's feeling about UK government services privatization, and the FYGM mentality of UK politicians; really could have gone without Stross novelizing his fetishes...again. One annoying note: Has that Laundry ritual of "Execute Sitrep One" check for tampering" EVER come back with "Yes, COMPROMISED. gently caress YOU". ? Because that would get me interested in the Laundry series again.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 04:51
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:The third-most-recent US president launched an unprovoked invasion, killing 1.2 million people, because his advisors convinced him of its merits in scriptural terms. The current US vice-president followed in the footsteps of his hero, Reagan, by causing a localised HIV epidemic because he felt women and gay people deserved death. The current-most-likely next prime minister of the U.K. (assuming no general election before the Conservative leadership collapses) is from one side of a vicious sectarian conflict that has only recently simmered down (and which he will likely reignite), has done his level best to restrict the rights of women and gay people, and will try as hard as he can to plunge the country off the cliff it's teetering over and reduce it to an ancap dystopia because he's that rare thing, a Catholic who buys into the prosperity gospel. Rees-Mogg isn't a norn. He is an inbred rabbit brained quiverfull nut job though. And likely to lead the Tory party into third or possibly fourth place. Religion is anathema for politicians in the UK. Who were you thinking?
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 06:20
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:Anybody have a good audible recommendation? I just finished the stone sky and need something new for the car. https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Columbus-Day-Audiobook/B01N48VJFJ
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 07:35
|
|
|
I've been directed to Matthew Hughes' Majestrum as something close to Vance's Dying Earth. Anyone have any views on it and how well it does this particular subenre? Also, does it lean more towards the fantasy or the science aspects of the Dying Earth setting? By that I mean is it pretty much a weird fantasy setting which is nominally Earth or a really weird setting where a lot of the phenomena have some obscure-but-nonetheless-there grounding in science or sci fi concepts (the New Sun would be an example of the latter).
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 11:28
|
|
|
Collateral posted:Rees-Mogg isn't a norn. He is an inbred rabbit brained quiverfull nut job though. And likely to lead the Tory party into third or possibly fourth place. Religion is anathema for politicians in the UK. Who were you thinking? He's not, but the British government run Northern Ireland - and will likely do so directly soon, thanks to the collapse of the power-sharing agreement - and since the Conservatives are in power during a gigantic economic crisis, and have a slim enough majority that they will try to hold off a general as long as they can, he can do a lot of damage before the next general election. He only has to be in power for months to cripple the country with a hard Brexit.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 11:41
|
|
|
Collateral posted:Rees-Mogg isn't a norn. He is an inbred rabbit brained quiverfull nut job though. And likely to lead the Tory party into third or possibly fourth place. Religion is anathema for politicians in the UK. Who were you thinking? Darth Walrus posted:He's not, but the British government run Northern Ireland - and will likely do so directly soon, thanks to the collapse of the power-sharing agreement - and since the Conservatives are in power during a gigantic economic crisis, and have a slim enough majority that they will try to hold off a general as long as they can, he can do a lot of damage before the next general election. He only has to be in power for months to cripple the country with a hard Brexit. johnsonrod posted:Holy poo poo... go back to loving D&D with this stupid poo poo. This isn't about books, wrong forum -- let the derail end please.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 12:17
|
|
|
Umm too (much (nesting (of meaning))). Quiverfull.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 18:22
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:I've been directed to Matthew Hughes' Majestrum as something close to Vance's Dying Earth. Anyone have any views on it and how well it does this particular subenre? Also, does it lean more towards the fantasy or the science aspects of the Dying Earth setting? By that I mean is it pretty much a weird fantasy setting which is nominally Earth or a really weird setting where a lot of the phenomena have some obscure-but-nonetheless-there grounding in science or sci fi concepts (the New Sun would be an example of the latter). I think I've mentioned Hughes once or twice -- he's the only writer I've seen who can get close to Vance's style. The Henghis Hapthorn books (of which Majestrum is one) are what I'd call weird fantasy or science fantasy, although they're nominally set in the far future.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 20:34
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:I've been directed to Matthew Hughes' Majestrum as something close to Vance's Dying Earth. Anyone have any views on it and how well it does this particular subenre? Also, does it lean more towards the fantasy or the science aspects of the Dying Earth setting? By that I mean is it pretty much a weird fantasy setting which is nominally Earth or a really weird setting where a lot of the phenomena have some obscure-but-nonetheless-there grounding in science or sci fi concepts (the New Sun would be an example of the latter). Paula Volsky's The Luck of Relian Kru is a pretty decent Dying Earth pastiche, and Michael Shea's The Quest for Simbilis was written with Vance's permission as a sequel to Eyes of the Overworld - this was before Vance himself wrote Cugel's Saga. Shea also wrote the Nifft the Lean stories, which are very Dying Earth-ish, though not AFAIR explicitly in that world.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:48
|
|
|
There's always The Night Land and Viriconium.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:52
|
|
|
occamsnailfile posted:ASOIF leans pretty heavy on the War of the Roses at least initially, Honor Harrington obfuscates with its chatter about individual missiles but uses a lot of Nelson's career (and Robe S. Pierre of course) but we don't call them poo poo because they draw on historical events Saberhagen has done this with some of the Berserker novels. Off the top of my head, he's done Midway and the Siege of Malta.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 22:32
|
|
|
occamsnailfile posted:ASOIF leans pretty heavy on the War of the Roses at least initially, Honor Harrington obfuscates with its chatter about individual missiles but uses a lot of Nelson's career (and Robe S. Pierre of course) but we don't call them poo poo because they draw on historical events Not to mention Belisarius showing up all over the place.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 23:06
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:Paula Volsky's The Luck of Relian Kru is a pretty decent Dying Earth pastiche I could never get into this one, but I remember really liking her "Wolf of Winter". quote:Shea also wrote the Nifft the Lean stories, which are very Dying Earth-ish, though not AFAIR explicitly in that world. They're also extremely out-of-print.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 23:20
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:Paula Volsky's The Luck of Relian Kru is a pretty decent Dying Earth pastiche, and Michael Shea's The Quest for Simbilis was written with Vance's permission as a sequel to Eyes of the Overworld - this was before Vance himself wrote Cugel's Saga. Shea also wrote the Nifft the Lean stories, which are very Dying Earth-ish, though not AFAIR explicitly in that world. thanks, will check those out i got 10% through majestrum last night; enjoying it quite a lot so far so it seems the recommendation was a good one. Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's always The Night Land and Viriconium. way ahead of you on those. different medium but the torment game that came out this year did dying earth really well.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 00:48
|
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:Worked for Vonnegut And Čapek
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 19:36
|
|
|
have there been any good first contact/space/weird exploration books in the past year or so? I've probably read everything older than that, but its hard to keep up with new releases sometimes
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 20:32
|
|
|
Doorknob Slobber posted:have there been any good first contact/space/weird exploration books in the past year or so? I've probably read everything older than that, but its hard to keep up with new releases sometimes Have you read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky? It came out in 2015 so not under a year but I'd say it loosely meets your criteria. It's also a really awesome book and I take any opportunity I can to recommend it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 22:51
|
|
|
johnsonrod posted:Have you read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky? It came out in 2015 so not under a year but I'd say it loosely meets your criteria. It's also a really awesome book and I take any opportunity I can to recommend it. yeah, I thought it was pretty good
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 22:55
|
|
|
Steven Erikson also recently announced a scifi first contact book, this time a serious one.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 22:59
|
|
|
NoNostalgia4Grover posted:ters around the time Bob got promoted to Mahogany Row/External assets While I HOPE Stross's fetishes don't include segmented alien worms hiding in women's vagina's and snapping off dude's dicks I too found the sex stuff tiresome. (I think that's what you were referring to?) Rough Lobster fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Oct 17, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 03:05
|
|
|
For Stross, that was subtle. And no, I'm not joking. Stross tends to echo back to that creepy Heinlein-Niven "novelize your fetish-fantasies to make them mainstream" school of writing. Anyway. something got me re-reading A.E. Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" @1950, a short story collection about a human interstellar exploration ship encountering weirdness in space. The humans aren't the draw in the book (except for the last story), instead it's the exponentially more dangerous alien encounters that are the real draw. The first story is about an alien panther-thing being picked up on a dying alien planet by the exploration ship + then things go badly(or super-right depending on your viewpoint). Gary Gygax borrowed the physical description + some of it's powers when designing the "displacer beast" monster in Dungeons & Dragons. Another story in is about an alien encounter in deep deep space. Which really feels like a super-rough draft of the alien Xenomorph from the Aliens movie franchise. No lie, 20th century fox settled a lawsuit over the crazy amount of similarities in the movie versus the short story. There is also encounters with a hive-mind alien race inhabiting a cluster of star systems, then finally a uh, the term 'encounter' seems so limiting when its the exploration vessel versus a entire galactic consciousness evolved from bacteria.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 04:26
|
|
|
NoNostalgia4Grover posted:For Stross, that was subtle. And no, I'm not joking. I... Really don't agree, at least about the Laundry books. The sex parasite stuff can get a bit much, I agree, but from the books themselves and comments he's made on Twitter it really seems like he's going for a body horror angle with that stuff rather than fetish-fantasy. That said, I haven't read his other stuff beyond Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, which I don't recall having much weird sex stuff, although it has been a while.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 04:40
|
|
|
Arcsech posted:That said, I haven't read his other stuff beyond Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, which I don't recall having much weird sex stuff, although it has been a while. Stross doesn't usually go for weird sex stuff. It's showing up in Apocalypse Codex and Delirium Brief because the bad guy is an American Christian Evangelical type with Mythos influences and later actual mind control. Europeans really don't understand the level of shame present in American sexual culture. There's absolutely no way that the Rev. Schiller could be an antagonist without weird sexuality turning up. It's for the same reason you can show a murder on American TV and not an act of love (or lust). Nobody is bitching about the combined maternity/ICU ward, and that is really good and really scary body horror. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Oct 16, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 04:57
|
|
|
Stross is cool with interesting ideas and is able to handwave plausiblity into pretty shaky story concepts & narratives. Bitcoin transactions as the basis for a entire book for example. Sometimes he just lets his freak flag fly, with smaller doses in the Laundry series@, or less restrained like his Heinlein homage book, the spammer torture from Rule 34, or Glasshouse. Again, Stross is cool with interesting ideas and is able to handwave plausiblity into pretty shaky story concepts & narratives. @Spoiling the Laundry stuff because there was more than I remembered, and I skipped reading 2-4 books in the Laundry series, the books after Schiller cult pt 1 to be exact. Laundry series that I remember offhand: the male sucubus lure for Mo in book 1 pt 2, the sex dream nightmare/the goodBad Bond girl from book 2, the sex death cult sex bed Bob gets tied to for plot reasons in Fuller book, the Schiller cult pt 1: Your mouth-my mind-worm & pt2: genital mutilation 4 AlienJesus
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 06:51
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:There's absolutely no way that the Rev. Schiller could be an antagonist without weird sexuality turning up. It is my understanding and expectation, now, that IRL every single American family-values charismatic preacher is IN THE BEST CASE a hypocritically closeted homosexual, and in every other case secretly into some sort of horribly weird sex. At least, no revelation of such has any further surprise value.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 11:33
|
|
|
Finished The Sparrow - dug the plot and the protagonist well-enough, liked the themes and some of the questions raised, did not like the dumb 1-dimensional characters and most of the writing (thought the whole time "this author is either a crime journalist or science academic," the latter of which turns out to be true - so boring and declarative 95% of the time!) - I don't feel much desire to read the sequel anytime soon, but does the writing and/or characterization improve at all?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 01:54
|
|
|
Groke posted:It is my understanding and expectation, now, that IRL every single American family-values charismatic preacher is IN THE BEST CASE a hypocritically closeted homosexual, and in every other case secretly into some sort of horribly weird sex. At least, no revelation of such has any further surprise value. This is 100% correct. Public American figures are huge on projecting their issues.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 06:26
|
|
|
So, Phillip Pullman's The Book of Dust is finally coming out in a couple of days. Or at least volume one is. 8 years the original release year he quoted.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 20:29
|
|
|
Casimir Radon posted:So, Phillip Pullman's The Book of Dust is finally coming out in a couple of days. Or at least volume one is. 8 years the original release year he quoted. "Amateur," wheezes George Martin
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 21:12
|
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:"Amateur," wheezes George Martin Edit: I'm hoping he didn't disappear up some New Atheism butthole in the intervening years. Casimir Radon fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Oct 17, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 22:06
|
|
|
PSA: new Vlad Taltos book is out. I'm about halfway through and really enjoying Vlad navigate his way through a 90s point-and-click adventure game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 00:05
|
|
|
The Ninth Layer posted:PSA: new Vlad Taltos book is out. I'm about halfway through and really enjoying Vlad navigate his way through a 90s point-and-click adventure game. Fuuuuuuuuuuck yes Although I'm a few books behind now, and seriously considering just holding off until The Final Contract is out and I can binge-read the whole series in one go. At least I have Magister Valley to look forward to?
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 02:56
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Fuuuuuuuuuuck yes I didn't even know this one was out. Just bought. So there's only one one more left? I remember starting these when I was a freshman in high school --Jherig had just been published. Holy poo poo, 34 years for these so far. I'm... old? When did that happen? 
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 03:20
|
|
|
Brust's original plan was to have nineteen books in the series (Taltos, The Final Contract, and the seventeen Houses). Vallista is the fifteenth book, so there should be four more to go.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 03:27
|
|
|
Proteus Jones posted:I didn't even know this one was out. Just bought. Only one left?  There's four left (not necessarily in this order): Lyorn, Tsalmoth, Chreotha, and The Final Contract, for a total of 19 (one for each House, plus Taltos and The Final Contract). At the current rate that means the series will be finished sometime around 2026.  Plus the Paarfi books -- Magister Valley is the working title for a new Paarfi novel, which was draft-complete last year and thus hopefully coming out sometime this year or early next.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 03:30
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Only one left? drat so we're looking at probably 45 years of semi-regular Vlad books. That's impressive. Also, new Paarfi book!! 
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2017 03:32
|
|
|
There's actually a lot to unpack in Vallista. Like all the good Vlad books (or, "all the Vlad books"), it benefits from careful reading.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2017 01:49
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:There's actually a lot to unpack in Vallista. Like all the good Vlad books (or, "all the Vlad books"), it benefits from careful reading. Absolutely. This books just keeps unpacking, becoming and richer and deeper as it goes on.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2017 04:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 18:10 |
|
|
Proteus Jones posted:Absolutely. This books just keeps unpacking, becoming and richer and deeper as it goes on. Reader, I murdered him.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2017 05:30
|
|
