Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

Astroman posted:

These will be about Geary having to struggle with deciding to take over, right? And the other will be about the aliens? I think these will be awesome plot threads, but I worry that if he moves as slowly on those as he did this one it'll be 20 more books before it's over, not much will have happened.

This is what he says about them on his website:
I have contracts for two follow-on series. One will be called The Lost Fleet - Beyond the Frontier. These will continue to follow Black Jack and his companions as they deal with events surrounding VICTORIOUS. The other series (The Phoenix Stras) is set in a formerly Syndic star system as the people there cope with the ongoing collapse of the Syndicate Worlds.

# ¿ May 15, 2010 05:38

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 2, 2024 15:21

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

VelociBacon posted:

Alright thanks guys, I'll look for the earlier books.

The Culture books can be read in any order, but generally the accepted best starting ones are Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, or The Use of Weapons. These three were written before any were published and so can serve as an entry point fairly well. Consider Phlebas is sort of weird because it really expects a lot from you in that it's a story about The Culture from someone outside of The Culture written in a way that assumes you will figure out who The Culture are and what they stand for eventually. If you read any of the other books first then you get that out of the way already and will probably have an overall more enjoyable reading experience. I personally feel the best one to start with is The Player of Games and the best overall book in the series to be Use of Weapons followed by Excession.

There are a few exceptions to the standalone nature of the series, so you should read Consider Phlebas before Look to Windward and Use of Weapons before Surface Detail, since they are very loosely involving things from the earlier book otherwise they're all total standalone books set in the same world. Also, as others mentioned, The Hydrogen Sonata is a capstone to the series so I'd recommend as others have to read at least 2 or 3 in the series first.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2015 22:58

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

WarLocke posted:

Finished Consider Phlebas earlier. Great book, although I'm kind of conflicted on the ending. It just seemed so... depressing. If Banks was trying to illustrate the uselessness/waste of war, did he loving ever succeed.

Started On Silver Wings. Seems pretty decent so far. Pretty milporn-ish, lots of words dedicated to talking about awesome power suits and corneal implants and blood-borne super-healing bacteria and such. But the... antagonists are straight out of more fantastic sort of sci-fi. It's giving me a kind of 'Star Wars by way of Tom Clancy' vibe that's strangely palatable.

e: On the third of Currie's books. They're nothing really special, but fun mil-scifi. There's one sequence in particular in the third book where the main character is riding down a space elevator on top of the car and in a gunfight with alien snipers on the ground that's ridiculous as hell in the most awesome way.

Iain M. Banks posted:

"I've read so many SF books where the action is terribly, terribly important to the fate of everyone and everything. That fate of a whole planet can hang on the outcome of a protagonist's actions. Sometimes, the fate of the entire universe! Well, if you look at history, this is very unusual indeed. What usually happens is that people suffer and die and get involved in all sorts of mayhem and catastrophe and it doesn't make that much difference in the end.

"That was one of the idea behind Consider Phlebas. There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, `What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliche of SF's `lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know."

Banks wrote Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, and The Use of Weapons during the Vietnam War, gave them all an edit during the early 1980s, and did a final edit and publish in 1987, 1988, and 1990 respectively. These first 3 that he wrote before he had gotten anything published feel more deliberate in what he wanted to say than the rest, to me. They had spent 15+ years being rewritten.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 09:13

fermun: Nov 4, 2009

I recommend reading just Use of Weapons if you would like to only commit to 1 book, but reading Player of Games then Use of Weapons if you'd like to commit to 2+.

The Use of Weapons twist I did not find as surprising as everyone else seems to, I feel it was very properly foreshadowed and the whole novel built towards its pleasantly horrific conclusion in a very satisfying manner.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2015 08:17

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Charge your lasers, and prepare for lightspeed: The SPACE OPERA thread.