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Bakerboy posted:Since Fall Kemp never finished the second trilogy. What the hell? He leaves so many plot threads dangling and reveals something that most of the readers had probably figured out by now?
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Jul 20, 2009 00:38
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Bakerboy posted:Too be fair, it's been a long time since I read it. He did a better job writing it than I did explaining it, probably. The whole point of the first novel was showing how fallible the library is!
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Jul 22, 2009 01:39
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Three stories into the first Man-Kzin Wars book and I've already hit interspecies furry erotica. Thanks for the QC, Niven.
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Aug 5, 2009 06:01
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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:If it's any consolation, that's pretty much the last of it too. Although I think that same author has a sequel in II or III. Reading that one now, the author is talking about a 12-year-old's tits. Can anyone recommend a book with a humanity uber alles theme? I have a weakness for books where humanity gets beaten or starts out as the underdog, then proceeds to kick rear end. Sort of like the first three books of the Uplift series, or that weird Niven book where the elephant aliens invade the solar system.
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Aug 6, 2009 23:52
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Thanks for the suggestions. I've read a bunch of Baxter's stories, but I got really turned off when I bought a novel by him that turned out to be a near-exact copy of Manifold: Origins. I probably should've mentioned that I've read Starship Troopers. It seems to me that it was more about mankind asserting its dominance rather than coming back from the brink of extinction or finding itself alone in a hostile universe.
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Aug 7, 2009 00:59
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Pumaman posted:I finished Judas Unchained a few days ago and I just realized the Void Trilogy is in the Commonwealth Universe. Usually, I have to work my fascination in the characters I read about out of my body before I can start a new book. How prominently do the major players from Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained feature in the Void Trilogy? Hell, do they feature at all? They feature very prominently
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Aug 10, 2009 01:30
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Vanilla posted:I tried reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Verge because it got some good reviews here, but I just couldn't get into it. Is that the one with the furries or the spiders I liked the spider one a lot but the other one was pretty bad
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Sep 29, 2009 03:20
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:poo poo forgot about that one... I knew I was forgetting one somewhere its just been so long. If you haven't seen Farscape you absolutely need to.
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Oct 1, 2009 04:47
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WarLocke posted:I'm regretting that I brought Ringo up now. He is pretty sick, but I guess I can kind of mentally separate the inner rapist or SS as saviors type stuff and just enjoy the over-the-top war stuff, which he does well IMO. Reminds me of when I started reading some book and put it down permanently when it go to the part about an alien torturing the main character's 12" genetically modified erection.
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Nov 6, 2009 07:58
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Can someone remind me of what the Neutronium Alchemist actually did? I recall getting to the end of the series and thinking "Wait, did they do something with that? I don't even remember"
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Nov 23, 2009 21:08
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Tanith posted:How do we feel about Campbell's Lost Fleet stuff? I picked up the first one, and I want to know if I should stop before I hurt myself or want to read the next five books. It's repetitive military pulp fiction but I found it enjoyable enough to keep up with the whole series. There's a lot of detail to the space combat if that's your thing, and some clever touches I'd never thought of or seen before.
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May 12, 2010 06:24
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I kind of hope he turns it into a solid series and gives up on the dimestore serial format.
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May 15, 2010 21:52
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I didn't like this book, please tell me why you think it's good so I can disagree with you
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Jun 12, 2010 21:07
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Tanith posted:There's no need to be a dick about it, I just didn't particularly enjoy them when I read them and wanted to see what about them inspired others, and if there were a reason for me to try again. Try mentioning what you didn't like about it, don't make people guess at it.
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Jun 14, 2010 01:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Agent to the Stars was his first unpublished book, they just threw it on the 'net for free once he became a "name." I really enjoy the majority of Scalzi's work, but Android's Dream is one of the few books I can remember putting down permanently after a hundred pages. I gave it to a friend to read and he had the same lack of interest. From what I can remember, the issue I had was that the "wackiness" seemed superficially Adams-esque but wasn't actually funny, and I found myself cringing more than being amused.
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Jun 15, 2010 03:53
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Decius posted:Zoe's Tale is a Young Adult Novel, it's not directly a fourth book of the series, which is the reason it has a different tone, perspective, focus and second perspective on the third book. That sounds like a retroactive take on it, given that if the other three books are not young adult novels how is a young adult supposed to even know what's going on?
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Jun 16, 2010 14:07
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Decius posted:Nah, he wrote it specifically as YA novel from the beginning, that's the reason the PoV is a teenage girl, which isn't really something your average SF-reader can relate very well to: Ok so it's as stupid as I thought. I really don't think Zoe's Tale works well as a standalone novel. Technically, yeah I guess you could get some enjoyment out of it, but it's a straight-up continuation of the series. It's like claiming that the third Dark Tower book works as standalone because it's a really cool story about a wasteland.
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Jun 17, 2010 21:31
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Ben Bova wrote lot of really neat books about manned missions with current era-ish technology to various planets in the solar system. They're listed under the "Grand Tour" section of the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bova
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Jun 18, 2010 03:22
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Tanith posted:I was referring to the non-Void books as other examples of Hamilton's completely losing it at the end of his books, and hoping against hope he hasn't painted himself into a corner with Edeard in said Void trilogy. Hamilton cannot write good endings. You know there's going to be a bad ending when you're down to the last 20 pages and the author still hasn't gotten around to wrapping it up.
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Jun 26, 2010 03:45
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Bringing Jesus into a sci-fi space opera is, at least for me, the only thing that ruins a novel faster than having King Arthur and Lancelot wander in from stage left. Dan Simmon's Hyperion series had the same drat problem. All this great setup and mystery, then -- Space Jesus is the Answer to Everything! Space Jesus! Time travel ruins every book I've ever read that had it. By comparison I'm ok with Jesus figures as long as they're not horribly blatant.
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Aug 11, 2010 03:31
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Flipswitch posted:Wait, hold up, what? No you've got it right, Hamilton's books are just straight-up retarded and mostly irredeemable. There's much better space opera out there. His latest dreamworld series or whatever isn't bad though.
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Aug 11, 2010 23:42
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Hung Yuri posted:Like what? Hamilton is mostly my biggest foray into (the books anyways) space opera. For starters, this thread isn't "The Peter F. Hamilton" thread. Check out the other posts, people talk about a lot of great books. Personally, I like The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson.
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Aug 12, 2010 22:02
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coyo7e posted:...To wound the autumnal city. Trig Discipline posted:The Door Into Summer as well. I liked it anyway. I'll check these two out but I swear to god if they handwave away the paradoxes I'm going on a burning spree.
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Aug 22, 2010 21:23
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Mike the TV posted:Up next is Olympos, the sequel. I'm hoping beyond all hope that Simmons doesn't ruin this series as well, but I know it may happen. Not only does he ruin it, he apparently learned his lesson from the Hyperion series and figured out how to ruin a series twice as fast.
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Aug 24, 2010 00:33
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Ebethron posted:I read 'House of Suns' over the summer. Fantastic, unapologetic, intelligent hard space-opera. I really liked the art-deco aesthetic and the awesome sense of deep time the story imparted. The rise and fall of galactic civilisations harked back nicely to Aasimov and, outside of sf, the historical accounts of Toynbee and Ibn Khaldun. It was dark but humanistic. There's something that bugged me about House of Suns - If the purpose of masking the light emissions of galaxies was to prevent the violation of causality by faster-than-light travel, how would that then account for the violations caused by taking information through the wormhole itself? For example, a ship can fly through the wormhole to Andromeda, record the relative position of some stars, and then bring the information back to the Milky Way. It seems like a weird oversight for somebody who refused to use FTL in their earlier novels and probably spent a lot of time thinking of a way to implement it realistically.
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Nov 3, 2010 19:45
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Tanith posted:The flaws in the Lost Fleet series, as far as I'm concerned: 
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Nov 18, 2010 21:02
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Chairman Capone posted:I don't think Heinlein purposefully decided to make Starship Troopers a fascist apology, but at the same time, that doesn't mean it isn't one. It's a utopian fascist state where happy citizens voluntarily support a benign government where power is vested in a small cadre of soldiers and which is militaristic, nationalist, and racist (through the sci-fi lens where aliens stand in for ethnicity). Just because George Lucas didn't purposefully set out to include racist stereotypes in the Star Wars prequels doesn't mean they're not there. The power is not vested in a "small" cadre of soldiers, but in quite a large percentage of the population. I think Heinlein even mentions that the vast majority of those in the military never even see combat.
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Dec 3, 2010 01:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The important thing to recognize about Heinlein's fiction is that it was aimed at 12 year old boys. I don't mean that as an attack or slur --- Heinlein was a masterful writer -- but a lot of what he was trying to do, especially with MIAHM, Starship Troopers, SiaSL, etc., was to give 12 year old boys poo poo to think about and challenge their assumptions. Starship Troopers especially is meant to be more a fun thought experiment than a serious proposal. Like the other guy said, this is wrong - but it's really, really wrong. Heinlein wrote stuff aimed at kids, but it's obviously so. Have Spacesuit Will Travel is a good example. The whole story is filled with whimsical life lessons and 50s stereotype family interaction. Starship Troopers is definitely not intended for 12-year-olds, just like Stephen King's It wasn't intended for 12-year-olds even though I got a hold of it when I was that age and ruined my brain. Then again, I could say that Star Wars novels are definitely aimed at 12-year-olds but you know how that goes. Magnificent Quiver fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Dec 8, 2010 |
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Dec 8, 2010 01:01
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Ebethron posted:The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod (starts with Cosmonaut Keep)uses a similar device of a mystery built into the stellar civilisation it deals with, slowly unravelling it over three books. He's a fellow Scottish left-leaning sf writer like Banks. MacLeod can be a love him or hate him writer though, so YMMV. Personally I think he's the bees' proverbial. Smart science, good pacing, a sleetstorm of ideas and references to everything from libertarian politics, to theology, to bong addled pot-head culture, to evolutionary biology. Oh and communists in space. All his books have communists in space. I started reading Cosmonaut Keep on your recommendation and I've been enjoying it. The author definitely throws you in the deep-end, but it's really rewarding once you start piecing things together and the pace picks up. Honestly, I'd say that the first half of the book is really slow.
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Dec 18, 2010 08:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Look up Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt. It's sort of pre-Star Trek Star Trek (written in the 1950's) I felt like a heel once I figured out what all the constant Beagle references in sci-fi meant. http://www.aboutdarwin.com/voyage/voyage03.html
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Dec 31, 2010 18:12
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