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Firefall by Peter Watts. Actually 2 books for the price of 1, Blindsight and Echopraxia. Hard science fiction by a marine biologist with a side order of pretty brutal pessimism. I enjoyed the absolute gently caress out of the two books and they are chock-full of ideas over-developed, under-developed and everything in-between on a level similar to Snow Crash. It features vampires (hominid predator species) in outer space and a crew meeting an alien species that has to figure out if the species is sentient or not. The second book is set roughly 15 years after the first and is mostly based on Earth with yet more vampires and quite a lot of transhumans of a few different varieties. You can read the first book for free on t'internet here.
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Mar 23, 2024 01:21
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 18:27 |
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Shattered Sea trilogy Half a King, Half the World and Half a War by Joe Abercrombie. I didn't know this was a YA series going in but the second book is very blatantly YA with two young folk not talking to each other like dopes, so... I really liked it, the characters behave like people rather than powered by plottm types. The plot itself is internally consistent with a rather signposted twist in the third one. A thing I very liked is most of the fighting characters are experienced enough to kill the person they fight, not try some idiot talking or grandstanding, that sort of thing (Oh this is fantasy by the way) and generally speaking everybody gets good at the thing they keep doing or apply themselves to, no-one is magically good at stuff because chosen one or prophecy. They are also quick reads and there's probably a collected slab for cheaper buying somewhere.
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Mar 24, 2024 19:53
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The Match by Mark Frost. I have read other books by him so he has earned the leap of faith I took with this book. It is an account - historical, not apocryphal - of a golf match back in the day arranged by monied golf guys between a set of amateurs and a set of professionals.Basically, he uses this match as the swing between what was and what is (now). I give not a single poo poo about golf. It really is a good walk shat on by dumb ways of getting about. Nevertheless, this is a good story, very well told and described a lot of things in a simple and elegant way. It made me give a poo poo about golf courses. (Not to any extent I'd lift a finger but, y'know...) Would recommend.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:49
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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling A bunch of They are surrounded by bears. A lot of bears. This dude interviews lots of the selfish arsehole people and eventually writes this book. Much to my amazement, he always manages to let them talk and never once points out they are all loving moronic selfish arsehole people. All of them. You will root for the bears, man you will root for the bears. Also there's a llama named Hurricane who is so cool and badass it takes on a bear and wins  .gently caress all these people. Since I got the paperback, there's an addendum at the end. You will be unshocked to hear they are overwhelmingly Trump supporters. GO BEARS!
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Mar 31, 2024 20:18
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Moon Lake, The Donut Legion, Jane Goes North by Joe R Lansdale, Champion Mojo Storyteller. Never read anything by him I didn't like. His most famous (so to speak) works would be the Hap and Leonard series, Bubba Ho-Tep and, probably, Cold in July. Anyway, all three of these are, to my knowledge, stand-alones. Moon Lake is about buried secrets in a small (East) Texas town and a quick and solid read although pretty much all his stuff rattles along. The Donut Legion is a tad odd in that I have the strong suspicion it started as a Hap and Leonard book and then Joe R changed it to be set in his town of Nacogdoches and just referenced all the poo poo he likes (He does that sort of thing in other works, like throwing out a shameless plug for his daughter's music career). It is good fun, with his sense of the absurd that threads through real life. Jane Goes North is a novella jam-packed full of gently caress yes and hilarity. Weirdly slight but profound and is about Jane going North to her (hypothetically) more successful sister's wedding and the road trip she takes with a woman who gives her a lift and, of course, all the shenanigans that ensue. If you can, I would recommend tracking down some of his collected short stories, especially any that contain Godzilla's Twelve Step Program, which is only like six or eight pages long and is an absolute banger.
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Apr 5, 2024 23:44
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The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie, consisting of The Blade Itself, Before They are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. Fantasy England/Britain is at a point where it is top heavy with useless tools while Skyrim and fantasy Ottoman Empire wade into them with their shitkicking boots firmly on. We follow three(ish) main characters - arrogant tosser rich cavalry officer guy, Skyrim survivor type with rabies and the occasional psychotic break and a dude who used to be an officer until he got captured by the Ottomans, tortured to gently caress for two years and then became a torturer himself. Also mages are fundamentally all utter wankers. I really enjoyed the books as people behave like people I have met in real life, up to and including making really dumb decisions while insisting they aren't. Book two has quite possibly the best sex scene I've ever read and holy poo poo do bad guys (and mages) love telling everyone about how loving great they are, no really smugsmug. Abercrombie seems to have kicked off a recent resurgence of GrimDark fantasy in that most of the characters are very unlikable/dislikable but still quite believable as humans. I think there's in the region of six more books to go following various minor and new characters around and some are more genre bending than just basic fantasy. I really enjoyed this intro trilogy and it's nice to have a bunch of books by the same author to get through instead of "It'll be out next year, pinky swear" type poo poo.
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Apr 22, 2024 18:31
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Masters of Doom by David Kushner. As it turns out, I found this to be rather a heffalump of a book. It was written in 2003, about id software, the two Johns and the rise of gaming and thus is very much a slightly comedic book in some of its underlying assumptions. It keeps 'splainin' some stuff to the reader, like games and computer games and role-playing games which, in this, the age of the nerd as the centre of pop culture, is ridiculous and some of the explanations of things have not aged well. Anyway, it focuses on Johns Carmack and Romero. Similar in certain ways, complementary in others and super-opposed in yet more. John Romero got into the fame and the culture-surfing and kinda forgot to do the basic stuff for quite a while, culminating in Daikatana, a flailing fiasco of a thing. John Carmack likes to code and just is not arsed about coming across as either human or giving a gently caress about most things. I did not know Carmack was basically responsible for the birth of the modding community and is ideologically baffled and repelled by the concept of patents. Also, he sort of takes poo poo from a lot of people in the book and, indeed, the writer of the book. At the start, he is described as distant and weird and socially awkward/non-existent. Towards the end of the book, all the people around him struck me as berating him and asking him to behave in a manner contrary to his manner (which is a constant) and even the writer starts calling him a psycho. Romero wanted the good times to keep rolling and enjoyed deathmatches (Which I think he coined but I could be wrong) but sorta forgot the coding and art and y'know, the making of the product end of things. He was fairly right about gamer culture though, at least, as regards the gaming part. Anyway, as it leaves the two back in the day, Carmack is getting back into rocketry and it looks like Romero is getting his poo poo together for some phoenix metaphor. These days, Romero lives up in Galway and became an Irish citizen a few years ago. He seems to have chilled the gently caress out. Carmack works for Facebook, er, Meta designing worlds and universes, that better work properly. A really good book that I enjoyed but also of its time and weirdly dated in some respects.
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Apr 24, 2024 18:29
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anilEhilated posted:Carmack is an Ayn Rand fan so I'd argue the psycho assessment is correct at least to an extent. I can see where her poo poo might appeal to him but he still strikes me as someone just saying things to people that seems to satisfy them when he just wants you to gently caress off so he can code happily.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:13
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Life's Work by David Milch. Yes, he of Deadwood fame and yes, he started writing this book when he found out he has a form of Alzheimer's. As a book, it's not an autobiography despite it being autobiographical in nature and it's not a ____, despite it being ____ in nature. It is not even just a book written by David Milch as others helped. His father - and, by extension - his father's immediate family seem to be very interesting people who probably have some stuff the statute of limitation still hasn't run out on. His Dad was the designated straight arrow although he seems to have made no money whatsoever after becoming a doctor, extracting small pieces of metal from people who weren't there anyway dunno what you're talking about. David himself likes vices and doesn't give a poo poo how much they cost. David questions everything and tries to answer the questions and he doesn't ever give a gently caress who you are, it just doesn't occur to him. He is far more interested in what you do and why and what he does and why. The big overview takeaway is that he had an idea for a show about Saul/Paul of Tarsus fame and the show would follow this itinerant apostle around and every time he joined up with the others, they pretty much would send him straight back out to convert people far away, where he wouldn't bother the rest of them. By his own account, he gave HBO a phenomenal pitch that they loved....but, "We already have a show set around Roman times. We love the idea, though. Can you maybe set it in a different time period?" He said sure and thus it transmogrified into a show set in an illegal town called Deadwood where gold was God. He doesn't devote a lot of time to the minutiae of television making, only noting he has nearly always been hands-on writing, forever trying to get the most accurate and truthful behaviour from his characters and regards that truth as only partially revealed to him. The actor and the actor's sense of the character must also be consulted. Inevitably, this leads to delays but also some loving great TV. I don't know if I enjoyed the book or, for that matter, even understood it exactly, but I read it start to finish and would recommend it. I guess my best pithy description is that it is a monograph of things Milch thought it important to write down and tell you about him and his life. And maybe yours, too, a little. Monica Bellucci fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 18:49
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The Dirt by Motley Crue and Neil Strauss. As you'd expect, it's about the band and their behaviour. Three of them are utter arseholes and one was/is restricted in arsehole behaviour by way of a progressively fusing spine. When they're not doing all the drugs and Jack Daniels they can, they are usually going on about how much they love women, in between denigrating them and hitting them and each other and anyone within striking distance. At no point do they stop being arseholes, they just turn into occasionally sober arseholes. The book practically itemises their crimes and, no, they don't ever feel or say sorry about any of it, just worry about going to prison and reassure themselves that they are good people (they really are not). The movie is fairly similar but it does move some stuff around and makes them seem like unwitting boys who don't quite understand how their behaviour comes across. They were, in fact, quite witting and behaved like that deliberately. Good book but they are uniformly repellent arseholes with gently caress all introspection and no remorse.
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May 2, 2024 15:32
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 18:27 |
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In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. (Also a movie of the same name with Thor and Spiderman and Thomas Shelby.) This is a book about the (in)famous incident between a whaling ship and a sperm whale that inspired Moby Dick. Long story short, in 1720, a whaler called Essex got rammed repeatedly by a big sperm whale and, well, sunk, basically. The survivors then spent the next while making the wrong decision every time and starving and dehydrating. Eventually, they had to draw lots as to who got et. Some of them made it home and all of those were hosed up in one way or another. As books go, this'n is sourced to gently caress, assiduously. The main spine is from two accounts, one by the first mate, Owen Chase, the other by new addition, cabin boy Thomas Nickerson. Chase's account was published soon after getting home and was the document up until Nickerson's account turned up in 1960 and then authenticated 20 years later. There's a few different reasons given as to why the whale rammed the ship twice, Chase guessed malevolence, others not present think repairs conducted aboard ship at the time would sound to the male whale like a call from another male in challenge. Either way, getting rammed by a big loving sperm whale fucks up your big rear end ship so much you have to abandon it in the middle of the Pacific. Three whaleboats, hastily refit for the open ocean, left the remains of the Essex shortly after. Now, despite being roughly a weeks sail from Tahiti, they decided to get back to South America a couple thousand miles away because they thought Tahiti was full of cannibals. Many months of starving and dessicating later, two men bumped into a ship, having eaten everyone else in that boat. Others in another boat were rescued soon after and eventually those left got home in 1721. It is a very good read and gets across both how much they were starving, both by their own accounts and by basically "People doing X need Y calories per day and these poor fuckers were getting around 20% of Y, not to mention gently caress all water". Owen Chase comes across as kind of a dickhead - also, you need to be at least a bit of one in his job - and also a person of tremendous fortitude and charisma, despite making a lot of wrong decisions. Likewise, Nickerson seems more thoughtful and measured in his account, probably because it was written years afterwards (and never edited) while Chase had his account out inside of a year. His account was also honest enough to declare it was written for the money as prospects had dried up a bit and he had a family to support. Both men returned to sea for a while. As did a few others who survived. The bit that threw me completely was that every other sailor who heard about what happened accepted it immediately, no ifs, ands or buts. The men had had to draw lots as to who died to feed the rest and this detail sealed it for sailors. If things are that bad, well, you draw lots, that's how it be. People who weren't sailors were rather less forgiving, presumably being unaware of how a ship operates, especially under severe privation. Still, despite some impressive sailing, most of the decisions were wrong ones and they were near [land with food and water] a few times but decided, no, there could be cannibals so they accidentally became what they feared. A very good book about a very interesting story, told well and with contrasting first-hand accounts. Absolutely recommended.
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May 5, 2024 17:17
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