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Khizan posted:The Aubrey and Maturin novels are really really good. My only problem with them is that the ebooks are ~$10 each and there's 23 or so of the loving things. I could cut that price in half by skimming through the used bookstores but then I'd have to store the loving things. Without real library access I'm just not willing to jump that far into a series that long. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Aubrey-Maturin-Novels-volumes/dp/039306011X may be your best option.
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Jul 3, 2014 00:55
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ToxicFrog posted:
Yeah, she basically has a magic hacker wand that's powered by plot magic. It's still nowhere near as bad as Honor Harrington. I just burned through most of C.J. Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe novels and they're dramatically under-recommended in this thread, possibly because most of the action is political and takes place on space stations, and there's relatively little space pew-pew battling. Still great stuff all around though.
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Aug 4, 2014 18:29
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Fried Chicken posted:Shame they aren't on kindle At least some of them are? Downbelow Station is. http://www.amazon.com/Downbelow-Station-20th-Anniversary-Collectors/dp/0756400597
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Aug 4, 2014 23:25
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Welsper posted:So I was a dumb nerd and read Wright's The Golden Age, and I was foolish enough to think the Libertarian BS in that was just some sort of unreliable narrator type device to show the privilege and naiveté of the protagonist. I'm now in the second book, and I'm at the stage where the protagonist is being set up as a benevolent Jobs Creator, while taking a moment every three pages to poo poo on poor people, who are portrayed as lazy and drug-addled. Does Phoenix Exultant eventually get back to the inter-faction intrigue or is it doomed to 200 pages of Going Galt? It gets worse, if that's possible. I actually like that trilogy despite that just because it's really imaginatively written, but it's propaganda more extreme than anything of Heinlein's. Maybe libertarians are good at imagining fantastic, unreal worlds.
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Aug 19, 2014 12:24
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Miss-Bomarc posted:I used to be thinking the same thing, that it was just "here we see the tragic flawed hero character", and then I read some of the other stuff that Wright wrote, and man, gently caress. that. guy. I'm a big one for kill-the-author in art appreciation, but seriously, Wright is king fucker chicken. He's literally insane. He hears voices and sees visions. http://www.scifiwright.com/2011/09/a-question-i-never-tire-of-answering/ Imagine how insufferable Richard Dawkins would be if he had a psychotic break, started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary, and converted to Catholicism.
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Aug 21, 2014 16:07
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syphon posted:Am I the only one on these forums that didn't like Blindsight? Maybe I'm not into "hard" sci-fi, but I felt it was a little too introspective/obtuse, and the advances in humanity somehow made it so I couldn't relate to the characters at all. I finished the book, but didn't really enjoy it at all. I have little interest in reading it. I'm sure it's good but I'm also sure it's really depressing.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:16
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Piell posted:Honor Harrington is the best gun duelist and the best sword duelist and has a magic talking cat and gets to eat whatever she wants without getting fat and a duchess and the only female noble on Grayson and has a mechanical arm with a gun in it and in a polygamist relationship and she thought she was ugly but really she was the prettiest and wins all the battles. This guy gets it. Reading that series was like injecting industrial caulk into my frontal lobe. Run Honor Harrington through this test and she drat near breaks it: http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm TLM3101 posted:
Plenty of space operas have done Boy's/Girl's Own Adventures and still avoided the Mary Sue trap. I mean, hell, there are acres of wooden-ships-and-iron-men novels that form the base model for the Honor Harrington books, and those books are absolutely full of flawed protagonists and enemies that don't always wilt away at the slightest brush with the protagonists' superior moral force. Compare with, say, Horatio Hornblower, or Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Or, hell, if you want to compare with pure space-wish-fulfillment novels, try something like Scalzi's Old Man's War (where the protagonist has a mental breakdown because he realizes he's fighting in pointless wars for the wrong causes), or hell, even something like Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy or Colin Greenland's Harm's Way -- novels that might be wish-fulfillment but that have some small degree of depth and protagonists who sometimes make mistakes. David Weber is a Bad. A bad bad bad. Do not read. Ever. If you are confronted by a David Weber, run away. If you cannot run away, consider blinding yourself, if possibly only temporarily.
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Sep 2, 2014 19:57
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I felt like the lost fleet books were good bad books. They had some obvious flaws but they're enjoyable popcorn and they don't contain anything I found deeply objectionable (i.e., no villains named "Rob S. Pierre", no extended rape scenes). Their worst flaw is probably how repetitive the descriptions get but you can just skip those parts.
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Oct 25, 2014 16:22
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Wade Wilson posted:I don't know, The Human Division seems to have stopped in a good place to me. "Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today" was a pretty good exposition dump ending that tells the reader how everything is ending up. The Human Division really pissed me off. I bought it a chapter at a time expecting a complete story and I got, at best, half of one.
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Dec 18, 2014 13:53
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Oh, I don't mind open-ended serialization, but I . . well, here's how it was billed:quote:What does “not strictly a novel” mean here? Well, The Human Division is probably best described as an “episodic narrative” — it’s a collection of individual episodes that each tell a complete story, arranged chronologically, so that if you read them all in sequence you get a larger narrative arc. The closest analogy would be a season of a television show, and indeed The Human Division is arranged into thirteen “episodes,” including a double-length “pilot episode,” entitled “The ‘B’ Team.” I'm normally fine with that kind of thing. The problem I had with Human Division (and I admit I'm working from memory here, I haven't read it since the serialization) is that I felt like he never wrapped up any of the major plot threads he set up. If I'm watching a season of a TV show, I expect some degree of resolution in the finale; maybe a cliffhanger, sure, but I expect the major arcs to conclude. That didn't happen, and that's why I got annoyed. When I hear "open ended serial" I think something like John Carter of Mars or Tarzan, where each book has a unified plot (but there's probably a giant cliffhanger at the end). Instead of plot-with-cliffhanger I got "buy the remaining half of the story in a few years." When I'd already paid a premium to buy the book chapter by chapter that wasn't a pleasant surprise. That said we're all kinda off on the wrong foot anyway. Scalzi's latest isn't Human Division, it's Locked In, which is a decent book if not particularly original.. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Dec 18, 2014 |
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Dec 18, 2014 16:25
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Hedrigall posted:Oh and John Varley. I'd post the Titanides "horse-vagina" Wikipedia excerpt here for like the 9th time, but everyone pretty much knows how it goes by now. I should just make an auto-scroll of that the Book Barn background image
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Mar 4, 2015 15:55
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Oh god, the Honor Harrington books are sooooo baaaad. Seriously, go read Scalzi's Old Man's War instead.
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May 8, 2015 15:39
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janssendalt posted:I'm currently half-way into Leviathan Wakes and I like it sufficiently enough to finish this part, but it's not the kind of Space Opera I was looking for. Ok, hrm, tough call. Fire on the Deep and Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge might be your best bet. If you want something slightly fun/silly, the early Stainless Steel Rat books might be worth looking at -- a bit schlocky but fun.Later books in the series get megabad. Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester is always a good choice, but it's a single protagonist and a bit dark in places. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:25 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 13:22
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The funniest thing about Vinge is that he is arguably a Golden Age writer. His first published story was sold to John W. Campbell, the editor who basically shaped Golden Age SF. Vinge just didn't get famous till the 90's.
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May 29, 2015 19:18
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faceglaven posted:I did enjoy the politics aspect of that series, I wish there were more series with that kind of focus, aside from vorkosigan saga I haven't really come accross any. It's really hard to do well (see: the trade federation in Phantom Menace) and few authors even try. Asimov's Foundation series, sortof. Some of LeGuin's stuff, maybe, depending on what you're looking for. Problem is that political SF tends to be about political ideas, not about political horse-race competition. Wheel of Time does a decent job on the fantasy side of things. Goblin Emperor does *great* fantasy politics. The old Deryni Chronicles books are cheesy-as-hell 80's fantasy but they do have some very good medieval politics sequences -- papal interdiction, excommunication, etc.
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Jun 7, 2015 06:33
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Chairman Capone posted:
LeGuin's "Hainish Cycle" books maybe, depending on how you shave your definitions. They have light-speed travel with time dilation, and ansible FTL communication gets developed a few books in. There are a few series that don't have FTL and stay within the solar system, too, like the Expanse series, or John C. Wright's Golden Age books.
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Jul 19, 2015 17:06
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gfanikf posted:Quick question what general separates hard Sci fi from non hard Sci fi? Is it like Star Wars vs Star Trek (though the former is more fantasy)? It's largely a false distinction but the technical definition is that hard SF is based on a scientific concept, whereas other SF doesn't and is just taking place in a futuristic setting. So something like Niven's "Neutron Star", which is story literally about neutron star physics, is hard SF, but a story like Roger Zelazny's " A Rose for Ecclesiastes ", about a human being's reaction to an alien religion, isn't. (Both are excellent.) For good space opera look up Vernor Vinge, Fire on the Deep and Deepness in the Sky. Not sure if they have audible versions. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Oct 26, 2015 |
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Oct 26, 2015 19:34
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Charles Stross almost singlehandedly killed off hard SF space opera (at least for me )by starting a series where he dealt with the impossible, causality violating difficulties of FTL travel in a way consistent with Einsteinian science, all explained clearly in a way i could understand, then refusing to finish the series because even he admitted it just wasn't workable past a certain point.
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Oct 26, 2015 19:42
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Declare is a legit classic.
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Oct 27, 2015 18:02
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