|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:What immediately springs to mind is Arturo Perez-Reverte's mystery novels -- The Club Dumas and The Flanders Panel, both mysteries deeply informed by history. I can second at least The Club Dumas, I really enjoyed it. Its movie adaptation, The Ninth Gate, is a bit more famous in the Anglosphere, but is really only about... 60/70%-ish of the original book plus a very different ending? As the name suggests, enhanced by knowing at least the Three Musketeers, but not mandatory to enjoyment. I can't speak to The Flanders Panel except generally liking Perez-Reverte's work, since I've also read most of his Captain Alatriste series (the Three Musketeers' depressed Spanish cousin).
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2023 01:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 08:59 |
|
|
Martha Wells's "Murderbot" SF series is the first thing that popped into my mind. Most of it is novellas so they go down pretty quick. Murderbot (the name the character gave itself) is very cynical but there are a lot of people around it as the series goes on who are determined to make it feel like it has a place in the universe with people who care about it. I find them fun, though arguably Murderbot is a little overpowered since it has a pretty advanced hacking suite in its head in a universe where there's a lot of computer control everywhere, which means it solves a lot of problems through hacking various systems to give itself an advantage. The first is All Systems Red.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2023 06:21
|
|
|
Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's The Difference Engine is considered a major work of the genre. I've got mostly positive impressions left from having read it, but also it's been so long I don't really remember anything in detail.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2023 06:19
|
|
|
Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, starting with Gideon the Ninth. I don't do audiobooks myself, but I've heard much praise for Moira Quirk's performance of those. Maybe Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire, starting with Ninefox Gambit. I'm enjoying that quite a bit right now in between everything else I'm also reading because I have no attention span.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 2, 2023 02:22
|
|
|
I'm sure there are a million to choose from out there, but I'd love a strong recommend on a biography of Bugsy Siegel. If possible, not too dry but not too lurid either, not just telling the story of Murder, Inc. A biographer who gets lost in the weeds explaining the surrounding events of the time is a bonus, not a detriment - I really enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist and The Black Count for doing just that.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2023 18:20
|
|
|
Is there a particular strongly-recommended English translation of Water Margin? (S. L. Huang's recent retelling "The Water Outlaws" is on my radar as well, but even so.)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2023 03:40
|
|
|
I can't speak to the audiobook quality themselves, but I loved the Runelords books when I was in high school and college. (EDIT: This is at the exact level of damning and/or complimentary that anyone reading this thinks it is.) They are pretty standard early-2000s Tor fantasy fiction, following on the heels of Wheel of Time but before Brandon Sanderson really became a thing. They're not great but also not memorably terrible so there's a reason they got eclipsed so heavily. These four are the whole first series - there's a sequel series focusing on the first series' protagonists' kids, and while much more ambitious I think they're also notably worse overall. Like Farland clearly forgot stuff that happened in the first series and broke some of the rules he laid down for magic, which much like Sanderson later, was something he originally held to strictly to make the plot "make sense" around it. Also the main bad guy of much of the first series is Raj Ahten, a vaguely Middle-Eastern-to-Indian decadent rear end in a top hat whose whole, uh, thing has aged a bit poorly. I recall his home society gets treated more even-handedly than usual for such things when the series actually goes there, especially given the time in which it was written and published, but it's still got some issues. The main hero of the series is also pretty bland, but the books do go on to cover stuff from other people's perspectives who are slightly more interesting. Looking elsewhere in the bundle, Lois McMaster Bujold's stuff is usually good or at least relatively light fun, but The Sharing Knife series is one of the only things of hers that I couldn't get into. I don't think it's necessarily poorly written, but it leans way more heavily on romance novel stuff that I just don't really enjoy so I couldn't stick with it. For some reason the fourth book, Horizon, also looks to be missing from the bundle, and that's supposed to be a direct continuation of the third book so there might be an unsatisfied cliffhanger there. disposablewords fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Sep 14, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2023 20:04
|
|
|
Glen Cook's Black Company series? Good (or "good") does win out but people go through some poo poo to get there.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2023 21:31
|
|
|
Annath posted:I'm looking for recommendations for any entertaining book/series that contains both scifi/technology and magic. Think... Shadowrun? Yoon Ha Lee's "Machineries of Empire" trilogy (starting with Ninefox Gambit) is space fantasy where "exotic technologies" (magic) are run by very complicated math enabled by proper cultural observance of a properly-designed calendar. Yes, literally. J.S. Morin's "Black Ocean" stories (starting with Salvage Trouble) are science fantasy where for the most part physics holds sway as we know it, except magic also exists and is the explanation behind FTL and some other super-advanced technologies. Very lightweight, the books are closer to novellas than novels and are meant to feel like reading an episode of a TV series. Robert Jackson Bennett's "Founders Trilogy" (starting with Foundryside) comes at it from the other direction, being a fantasy series with magic that works like technology, systematized to the point that the first book is basically written like a cyberpunk story. It edges back over into more epic fantasy in the subsequent books, but mostly because people are figuring out how to use the magitech in new ways and on grander scales.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2023 23:28
|
|
|
More than a dash of sci-fi and time travel, but that makes me think of This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. An epistolary novel written between two agents of different timelines each fighting to make sure her future is the one that comes to pass, taunting and flirting and getting more and more emotionally intimate through their communications despite how they've never met.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2024 04:45
|
|
|
Off the top of my head and my small Kindle library... Martha Wells is a solid read usually. City of Bones was a pretty good standalone, though I've heard good things about her two fantasy series, Ile-Rien and Raksura. I keep meaning to get into them but also get distracted easily. N.K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the start of a trilogy but stands on its own fine as well. It gets a little racy at times but I don't think it crosses the line. Been a while since I read it, though. Katherine Addison is someone who's been recommended to me but I've yet to get into anything of hers. The Goblin Emperor is the big one, to my knowledge. Addison is also apparently a pen name and she writes other fantasy as well under her real name of Sarah Monette. Lois McMaster Bujold's "World of the Five Gods" books, starting with The Curse of Chalion. The first couple are set in fantasy not-Spain and how the gods work in the world is super important to the stories. Miracles abound and they are not always happy. If you want something shorter, she's got a bunch of novellas set in the world but away from the novels, the Penric series, starting with Penric's Demon. The Penric novellas start comedic but get pretty heavy at times. She's also got a completely-unrelated-to-anything-else standalone called The Spirit Ring which I thought was pretty alright. T. Kingfisher, the pen name of Ursula Vernon, writes a lot of fantasy. Some novellas, some novels, of a varying range of light-hearted to much more serious. Ursula K. LeGuin and the Earthsea series are classics for a reason. Mercedes Lackey is a big name as well, particularly with her Valdemar novels. I've only read Ann Leckie's sci-fi but she's got a fantasy novel The Raven Tower that's in my to-read list. Nghi Vo. I've only read The Empress of Salt and Fortune but it was really good.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 04:11
|
|
|
Perez-Reverte has the "Captain Alatriste" series which starts, appropriately, with Captain Alatriste. The English translation is pretty good. They're set during a latter stretch of the Spanish Golden Age, while the Thirty Years' War is raging. He's also got a bunch of stand-alones set across various points during the past few centuries, including various titles set during the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and stuff in the present day. The Club Dumas is a present-day (well, early 1990s when it was written) novel that the movie The Ninth Gate was based upon.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2024 01:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 08:59 |
|
|
Maybe the works of Alastair Reynolds? He's got some stand-alones and does hard SF. Had an acquaintance who praised Pushing Ice pretty heavily.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2024 22:49
|
|