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Chairman Capone posted:I just finished reading the four Virga books by Karl Schroeder. What an amazing series - I suppose from a literary point of view they're not exceptional, but just the creativity and the amount of detail and really unbelievable creations in that series blew me away. It's like if Larry Niven, Stephen Baxter, and Robert L. Forward had pooled their imaginations. Okay, this is making me reconsider. I was very deeply disappointed by book one - I thought the characters were all cardboard and the writing pretty weak. Do the later books still have Hayden as a main character? Did you notice other differences between the first and later books?
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Jun 4, 2010 01:16
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Pyroclastic posted:The other was Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor. It's something of a pulp book, but I just loved it. He dedicates it to EE 'Doc' Smith, which should tell you something. I just read this book, and came to this thread to either recommend it or see if anyone else had. It was totally pulp, but I also had a blast with it. And I'm usually really picky about my books - I put down anything I'm not really enjoying, I'm pretty sensitive to really bad prose, and so on. But this one delivered exactly what I wanted: lots of action, lots of aliens, "science" mysteries, new-world rules to learn, arena challenges, problems-solved-by-clever-application-of-speculative-technologies, characters in over their heads and emerging victorious anyway, and so on. If I were nitpicking, I'd say it was really long and spent a whollle lot of time on exposition about the Arena; the characters, while not offensive or *too* flat, weren't exactly deep either; I'm not sure I actually followed the science; the central mysteries aren't resolved or is any progress even really made on resolving them by the end (though it's almost certainly a series opener)... but I'm not nitpicking. Brain off, grin on, watching humans dropped into, coming out on top of, a sudden first-contact situation with not one alien species, but hundreds. Like you said: I hope the book does well, because I'd pick up a sequel.
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Nov 22, 2010 04:21
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Antti posted:Okay, it took me a while because of other commitments getting in the way, but I just wrapped up Scott Westerfield's The Risen Empire. I recommend it heartily, and there's been talk of it before in the thread, but for the love of God, be warned that it has a really epic climax setting up a sequel that may or may not ever be written. Wait, there WAS a sequel to The Risen Empire, called The Killing of Worlds. But Westerfeld has said he has no plans to write any stories after THAT in that universe. edit: Oh, I see, they were republished in one edition with that name. Yeah, unlikely to be more books, Westerfeld sells tons of YA novels that tens/hundreds of thousands of people love, and his sci-fi got much less attention.
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Feb 20, 2012 08:28
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I just actually reread a sci-fi book, which I almost never do -- GRAND CENTRAL ARENA, by Ryk Spoor. Reread because the author has started posting snippets and deleted scenes from the sequel (which is coming out, at least as an e-ARC, in a bit over a month), and I wanted a refresher, but also because it was such a fun world. This is one of those books I've liked more the further away from it I get. It's pulpy, but there's actually not that much *good* pulp like it out there. There was a pretty solid post about it way earlier in this thread -- http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3149277&pagenumber=12&perpage=40#post381443745 -- and I read the book for the first time because of Spoor's "Big Idea" post at Whatever: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/03/the-big-idea-ryk-e-spoor/ It's hard to quantify what makes me enjoy this more than most space opera pulp--except, I suppose, that it's all three of 1) as grand in scale as any space opera I've read, 2) yet still focused on individual actors who are allowed to--made to--matter, and 3) optimistic. I highly suggest checking it out, and giving it a shot if the summary appeals.
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Jun 17, 2013 22:38
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rafikki posted:I liked Spoor's stuff Spoor's stuff is great space opera fun and I want many more Grand Central Arena books. I have no interest in most of the stuff Spoor likes/annotates with, but that stuff isn't actually intrusive or even particularly noticeable in the work itself. I had *no idea* he was into anime until reading that part of his website. So yeah, nobody should let that kill their interest if they're looking for some all-out large-scale space ridiculousness. onefish fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Dec 17, 2014 |
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Dec 17, 2014 23:18
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Darth Walrus posted:He literally has Marc DuQuesne, Kim Possible, and Sun Wukong team up against Ensign Mary Sue. It's pretty intrusive. And yeah, it's anime as gently caress. The heroine literally has blue hair, for a start, and her love interest is a white-haired pretty-boy who keeps inserting Japanese words and phrases into his dialogue. Hmm. Blind spot for me, I had no idea who Marc DuQuesne was, though the Hyperion Project stuff implied he was our-Earth fictional. Sun Wukong is nearly mythological -- and again, Hyperion Project. Which I guess is an excuse, but -- it made sense within the world and he actually did something reasonably interesting with it. I've forgotten anything about Kim Possible. I'll acknowledge the Mary Sue ensign bit as being a bit off the mark, though. I'm not a tremendously visual reader, I guess -- I just skipped over the fact that Sandrisson is anime-esque until it was pointed out. (Lots of people have blue hair, so I didn't make that leap initially in Ariane's case.) But sure, you make valid points, if that's all stuff you'll notice that will bug you.
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Dec 18, 2014 05:25
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