|
I've actually read the entire Hyperion Cantos, and I thought the first book was also the best. Much to my chagrin, Aenea annoys the everliving crap out of me, but not enough to ruin the third book. I've also plowed through most Peter F. Hamilton stuff out there, and when reading it, I've found it easy to completely skip over his gratuitous sex scenes and pretend they didn't happen. That isn't enough to salvage the endings of the Night's Dawn Trilogy or Fallen Dragon, but at least everything before he tries to end things is largely enjoyable. And for those who listen to it on audiobook, John Lee is a fantastic narrator. What surprises me is that no one has mentioned Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall trilogy, which has all sorts of neat things like physics playing a huge role in his conceptualization of space combat. He also manages to wrap it up in a way that is not displeasing or particularly cliche. Certainly the flashbacks of one of the characters get annoying, but they do serve a purpose and they're not the meat of the books anyway. I'd recommend them. I've read some Vernor Vinge and honestly had a lot of trouble getting into it, given the way he just plunges you into his universe without much, if any explanation of what the gently caress is going on. In A Fire Upon the Deep, the only parts that made sense in the beginning were the narratives following the two children, because they were as ignorant of what was going on as I was.
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2009 07:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 02:07 |
|
|
Mike the TV posted:This is from a few pages back, but I have to say that I personally loved the ending to Hyperion. It punctuated perfectly that the book isn't about the end result of the pilgrims, but about their journey. I think the space Catholicism of the last two books in the series is interesting, but like the church, Aenea is also the biggest threat to the book's being good.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2009 07:07
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2010 06:21
|
|
|
Book two of Lost Fleet and Captain Falco... AND ALIENS?!?!?There's something that annoys me about repetitive phrasing in books, fortunately it seems to be limited to "SO COLD" and "THIS ISN'T HAPPENING IN REAL TIME!". Yes, we get the idea already. At least Campbell hasn't pulled a Hamilton and put a prodigious amount of awkward space sex in.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2010 18:48
|
|
|
Astroman posted:Captain Falco is awesome. No, it's reading it as "Captain Falcon" and thinking "why doesn't he just punch someone or use his knee? SHOW ME YOUR MOVES!" Also Geary's descent into craziness and not realizing that he's speaking out loud is getting old.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2010 03:13
|
|
|
I swear that Campbell has some sort of magnetic poetry set for writing his stuff. Drinking games with these books are ruinous.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2010 03:14
|
|
|
The alternate title for The Temporal Void is Edeard Tears poo poo Up.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2010 14:11
|
|
|
For shits and giggles, I just reread the Temporal Void and I forgot the absolute best part of the book: Gore Burnelli at the end. I'm so psyched for the end of the summer to see how he concludes this.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2010 19:05
|
|
|
Astroman posted:He sets himself up for both new storylines he's planning on following in this, by which I mean MY FULFILLMENT 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2010 03:53
|
|
|
I do wish he were more visually descriptive though, since space opera is something you want to imagine, and he's very sparse with mental imagery and background stuff. Shark-like being the only indication of what the Alliance ships look like is not helpful, especially when it doesn't come to book 6, and is only relative to a different fleet. I'm not asking for flowery nonsense, but a little help in this department would be nice.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2010 20:44
|
|
|
Miss-Bomarc posted:flying death kazoos. Excuse me what.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2010 04:56
|
|
|
WarLocke posted:"Horatio Hornblower in Space" Since I love everything Horatio Hornblower ever UP UNTIL FORESTER KILLS BUSH could you elaborate on the parallels?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2010 02:23
|
|
|
Miss-Bomarc posted:(Hornblower spoiler discussion) And a total gently caress-you ending, too; it's just "oh he got blown up offscreen, poor Bush I guess I'll cheat on the love of my life now" Wait did he manage to screw up Lord Hornblower more than I remember, or are you referring to that nonsense in Flying Colours? And did he do it again in Commodore Hornblower? It wasn't specified in the text, but I thought it might have been implied that he hosed up like that then too. Geary is actually pretty Hornblower-like, but I think it's not done as well, or not with enough variety. He has his problems, and they keep getting repeated. Hornblower's insecurities, while following a general theme, at least evolve or change such that they're at least not practically verbatim. Campbell said in an interview that he wanted people to sort of be able to pick up the later books in his series without being totally lost, but still, it gets a bit much. Take a shot every fleet council where Geary gets mad, says something and didn't realize it until everyone stared at him etc. I hope he doesn't go with that in his new stuff, because it's annoying and his prose can get terribly redundant. Also the ending of the Void Trilogy is coming in August 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2010 06:04
|
|
|
...I did not expect certain choice phrases to be simply lifted from CS Forester ("The Lords of the Admiralty, in their infinite wisdom"), but I'm willing to let it slide should these turn out to be good. Does this six-legged psychic cat-thing get more important, or is it just a bit of fun? Also Bomarc why don't you have plat so we can talk British naval fiction without making GBS threads up the thread?  e: Evolutionary Void is out on August 24. Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. I haven't wanted a book to come out like this since reading the Golden Compass.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2010 15:58
|
|
|
Someone explain why this thread loves Vernor Vinge, because I've read A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky and was not overly excited.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2010 18:59
|
|
|
Magnificent Quiver posted:I didn't like this book, please tell me why you think it's good so I can disagree with you 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.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2010 00:25
|
|
|
TLDR:  and "pew pew zoom zoom"I just don't really "get" his universe. In medias res does not do justice to what seemed to me to be a lack of exposition in AFOTD, which I've read more recently. On one level it was interesting in the sense of being a reader who's about as baffled as Johanna and Jefri were by the Tines, but that gets old after a while and never really having enough information to put together a full mental picture frustrated me. Likewise with his description of the universe and the different levels of it was over my head. Maybe I never bridged the gap of plausibility/enjoyment because I was too busy still trying to figure out what was going on instead of having some sort of implicit understanding that allowed me just to let it go. The conclusion wasn't particularly fulfilling either, and the purpose of traveling to the planet in the first place beyond simply rescuing the children, if this even merits spoiler tags? seemed vague. I felt that he didn't do a good job bridging the events of the very beginning and explaining their significance to the intervening book. The pace of exposition wasn't to my liking, and the fact that a great deal of the book takes place in a decidedly non space-operatic setting turned me off. The net-style bits of conversation didn't appeal to me much either, because while maybe true to the style of the universe and helping convey the actual dialogue between characters, it doesn't make for interesting reading. I was about as enthused by that as by the interaction in Hyperion or the Fall of Hyperion with one of the greater sentient intelligences. If he'd limited these sections to some net article at the beginning of each chapter about the current events or as some other form of associated fluff to help flesh out the universe, I would have liked that more. Feel free to disagree with me and point out why I should reread the stuff, but in general it just really didn't fit with my interests. Maybe Vinge is too cerebral an author for me, but space opera is supposed to be pew pew zoom zoom. E: can we also all agree that Peter Hamilton writes the most debilitatingly awkward sex scenes in the genre, or is there someone who can give him a run for his money in that regard?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2010 04:25
|
|
|
Velius posted:Vinge was explicitly calling back to the old days of BBS postings and usenet. Which itself ties in with the overarching concept of the Zones of Space; that is, the universe he made has fundamental limitations in terms of technological potential depending on geography. Without the Zones, Vinge believes that space-faring civilizations can't possibly be rendered in a fashion conceivable to us, which is what the Transcendant Powers represent. My fictional sensibilities disagree with his fictional sensibilities and in my mind this is not how universes work. v  v (and the  internet stuff does not resonate with me in the slightest.)And no I didn't miss the Blight, it was the pertinence of J&J to saving the universe that I didn't feel was made clear. Connecting the two plot threads in a meaningful way was something I felt didn't happen. I was hooked in by the prologue, but I felt the book went in a different direction I didn't care for after that, an experience analogous to reading the entire Dune series. Moving on: I've given up on Honor Harrington after the second book. On Basilisk Station was interesting, and I think one of the strengths of it was the fact that gender was almost completely irrelevant. The about-face on that subject in the second book, combined with Harrington's meteoric ascendancy to a point I refuse to believe one can improve upon without some ridiculous Mary Sue stuff bodes poorly for anything after this...and given that there are something like nine more books, stopping while I'm ahead seems prudent. Tanith fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jun 14, 2010 |
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2010 19:09
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:Good catch. Weber even goes so far as to have Honor be able to eat all the deserts she wants without gaining an ounce. If you want the honest truth, it was finding out she didn't keep the eye patch that ruined it for me.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2010 02:21
|
|
|
WarLocke posted:Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine is for all intents and purposes a space opera minus the space ships, and I highly recommend it. I haven't read the sequel(s), though, so no idea if the quality continues on. The Miocene Arrow, book two in the trilogy, is basically "Meanwhile in America, land of biofuelled WWI-technology air-feudalism,". Book three actually brings both of the worlds together and wraps things up pretty well. The entire series is a hoot, and not just because it's about librarians controlling post-apocalyptic Australia.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2010 01:55
|
|
|
Psion posted:Stopping after #2 is early but not unreasonable; stopping after #4 is required. Commodore Hornblower notwithstanding, that series gets pretty crap once he's no longer a regular ship captain. The fact that Weber started his character at a point the equivalent of four or five books into the story precluded any reasonably paced development of the character. I don't want to know how he's going to try and top book number 2, not in book 3, and definitely not in book 11 or whatever he got up to. Don't get me wrong, It's an interesting universe, and the tropes of Good Monarchy/Bad Egalitarian are comparatively fresh. It's just that I feel he painted his protagonist into a corner, and has now decided to paint over everything else with the gaudiest goddamn color Sherwin Williams has ever made because it's all he has left. Unfortunately even the space-politics get sort of stale, because the antagonists just become so comically evil. Takin' your star systems, rapin' your women. I don't mind expository technobabble, but what you quoted is definitely going over the top. Forester pretty much limited his nautibabble to ropes and sails, and you don't need a particularly vivid description to evoke the image of a group of people tugging on a rope to make a boat do something, or going over the mechanics of something like heating shot as the characters encounter it themselves. There seems to be a sweet spot of proper integration and pacing in terms of introducing new concepts to a universe to either explain something fundamental or to simply expand people's mental picture of it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2010 01:41
|
|
|
Hung Yuri posted:Thank you for suggesting me to stick with Judas Unchained. I'm up to the third chapter after putting it off again and again, and it's starting to get really interesting. The joy that is Peter F. Hamilton. I'm still wondering how he's going to tie things up in the Evolutionary Void and if he can avoid the major pitfall of everything else he's written thusfar. See: Edeard at the end of the Temporal Void, Fallen Dragon , Night's Dawn  ...Maybe his dreams of the world outside the void will show him what happens as a result of him mucking about with time, so that he stops? Tanith fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jun 25, 2010 |
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2010 17:43
|
|
|
Hung Yuri posted:Wait a second. Are you telling me Edeard is in Fallen Dragon and Night's dawn? I thought that was a separate universe? Paul Atreides is actually Edeard. Didn't you read the books by Herbert's son? ... 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.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2010 02:24
|
|
|
Magnificent Quiver posted: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. The length of the Night's Dawn stuff almost justifies something that goofy, and the hangin' up my hat, bangin' the Lord of Ruin forever, here're the keys to Dad's Lady Mac, don't scratch the thermal insulation/micrometeorite foam as you're takin' here out and don't get frisky with any voidhawks was more disappointing than the hilarious DEUS EX MACHINA and space seahorses. Fallen Dragon was probably the biggest kick in the nuts, it was concise enough to have REAL potential to have a genuinely interesting and somewhat regular interesting ending, and even Lawrence literally says "Sweet loving fate" when he realizes where Hamilton's taking the plot. Wake up, Peter, your subconscious is trying to reach you through your characters. Hung Yuri posted:I've been meaning to read dune, but I sort of realize I just like the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. That's probably the only way you could make it through the entire series. If you're going to read Dune, you must take a shot every time you read about "X within X within X". Additionally, you are mandated to stop after God Emperor. Nothing good happens after God Emperor. I remember at the time thinking "Man, if only he'd written about the universe BEFORE the Kwisatz Haderach stuff!" and then his son and KJA came along and utterly crushed my hopes forever.  I like paranoid space Holy Roman Imperialism with more betrayals and deception than every book written by Robert Ludlum, just not what Brian Herbert did with it.It would be entirely possible to jack that premise of a universe, drop the sandworms, drop the fremen, ditch the mysticism, even simplify the spice down to some mineral on a shithole that makes space travel happen, and let it go in a completely different direction. Having reread Campbell's Lost Fleet for lack of anything better to do, I've come to conclude I like it more on the second go-through. The literary redundancy was less noticeable, and I think I had some of the visual preconceptions I'd picked up from the last read-through and used those to fill in the gaps. I might want to go through it again after rereading Walter Jon Williams Dread Empire's Fall just to have his visuals fresh in my memory to make up for Campbell's gaps.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2010 03:35
|
|
|
If you like Peter F. Hamilton: do not read the Night's Dawn trilogy. Seriously, do NOT. Evolutionary Void's out on the 24th. Please don't gently caress this up.Also I've decided that I like Campbell/Hemry's Lost Fleet series, because it is pulpy in a Battlestar Galactica sort of way with interfleet drama, "No I should be commander!" hissyfits and a character named Captain Falco.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2010 04:38
|
|
|
Adar posted:Unfortunately, David Feintuch (the Seafort writer) pulled a GRRM with a twist - he died while writing the last book in the series, and while the publisher has the manuscript they've never gotten anyone to sign a release. I just plowed through the first four of these, and by the end I wanted to do nothing but strangle the protagonist. I don't know if the departure from his narrative in the next book will make it any better, but I'm disinclined to read it. I liked what technobabble there was, and the way it drives (no pun intended) the plot was interesting. It's just...Seafort. He needs to get run over by one of the armored buses that tour lower Manhattan. Feintuch has taken all of Horatio Hornblower's recrimination, self-doubt and self-condemnation and crammed them twenty times over into a character incapable of controlling his emotions. Most of the books are him blowing up over something trivial at subordinates or feeling bad about it later before going on and doing the exact same thing.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2010 01:54
|
|
|
Mike the TV posted:I really liked Dan Simmons's Hyperion. I did not like the series after the first book because I think he ruined it halfway through Fall of Hyperion, but I enjoyed the first so much I bought Ilium to see if he could perform the same sort of magic and beautiful prose. Did you mess around with Endymion and Rise of Endymion? Space Catholicism as a concept, and Space Priest and Co. as characters are awesome, and the rest of the books are terrible. On the topic of ruining series: Evolutionary Void tomorrow!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2010 00:48
|
|
|
Hamilton continues to slowly improve. There is hope for the future. That is all. (Of course the ending doesn't make sense, but it's no Fallen Dragon or Night's Dawn poo poo.)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2010 08:20
|
|
|
Mantic posted:Pretty much every book has multiple battles on land and in space, and the space battles always have ships being blown the gently caress up. But are they good explosions? Hemry's/Campbell's issue is that while lots of ships explode, you've got no emotional investment and insufficient technobabble to really envision and enjoy his clusterfuck fleet actions. "We just lost another twenty destroyers and a bunch of cruisers. Welp." Surprisingly and in stark contrast to just about everything else I've read, I feel that his stuff is one of the few that could benefit from more blathering on about the nature of the spaceships and they way they kill things. He does a good job establishing the spacedrive, but he seriously needs to step up the descriptive language. It's only in the sixth book of Lost Fleet that you find out the ships of the Alliance are shark-shaped, relative to turtle-shaped enemies. If someone could copy David Weber's neurosis for technology and paste it in to Hemry's stuff not sucking too hard, it would be splendid. From what I've read so far, Dan Simmons' space-Catholicism is really the only well-done non-plot-driving religion (to exclude Hamilton's Living Dream) that I've encountered. Feintuch's Christian-centric pan-monotheistic blathering is about the only thing more aggravating than Hemry's "To the honor of our ancestors"/"the living stars" nonsense. Also how do other people feel about Hamilton's conclusion to the Void Trilogy?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2010 06:04
|
|
|
Just read Scalzi's Old Man's War, and liked it a great deal more than I expected. Are the other two set in this universe good too?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2010 07:06
|
|
|
The flaws in the Lost Fleet series, as far as I'm concerned: Definitely the repetitive language, but perhaps even more so, the lack of real descriptive language. If you can tell me what these spaceships look like, I'll be grateful. The closest we come to having any conception is in book SIX, when they are described as "shark-like", and that's only relative to things that are turtle-shaped. Every loving time there's a fleet conference, he reiterates the description of that room, but can't be bothered to give us a sense of anything else beyond that and the bridge? Building off of that, his chosen model of space combat can't really be conveyed interestingly. Combat is measured in nanoseconds, and people are just along for the ride. In the Honorverse, ships can take a goddamn beating, so you actually get some more narrative or descriptive language out of things blowing up. In the Dread Empire's Fall stuff, you have the neat idea of missiles trailing along after smaller ships to be guided to their targets and the lack of inertial dampening ruining everyone's day. Hemry has the chance to shine here with technobabble, and completely blew it off. Even when he does describe abandoning a ship, it's so spartan that readers really can't picture what's going on. We have space lasers, space missiles, and a space BFG-9000 that only the Alliance has. He does nothing to make the weapons unique or interesting; we don't get visits to the crew in charge of the missile launchers, we don't have inoperable lasers because aliens stole our juice and the drama of trying to fix that. Drink every time Hemry talks about his glorified blueshift because holy poo poo we're going There are maybe ten characters in the series, none of whom really change at all, save for one going completely nuts. This is a fleet of hundreds of ships, I think we can have a bit more than that, ideally outside of FLEET CONFERENCES. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that we need Hemry to create the structure of a series, and then force Peter F. Hamilton to fill in the blanks while threatening to break a bone for every superfluous and gratuitous sex scene he tries to sneak in.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2010 19:57
|
|
|
Miss-Bomarc posted:Actually, David Drake could do a better job with the ship combat. Yes, but we need Hamilton to provide details for EVERYTHING ELSE TOO. Alternatively the editors can make him write about one ship at a time and name them the S.S. Gore Burnelli and I think we'd get sufficient space-asskicking. Change the names, string them together and you've got a fleet action.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2010 06:59
|
|
|
Kellanved posted:So I just finished with the latest book in Jack Campbell's Syndic series and I'm looking for something in the same vein. Something about the smaller faction and how it builds itself up , grabbing resources from around, etc. Any ideas? Has Hemry gotten a better editor yet? His stuff gets terribly repetitive, which might be a result of splitting everything into bite-sized books, and I still remember how annoying it was to get the same description of the fleet conference room again and again and again. Can you spoil the interesting bits of Beyond the Frontier like what the hell's up with the aliens and the Syndic stuff for me? Wikipedia's no use at all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2013 02:40
|
|
|
Reynolds' Century Rain is a hoot. Alternate 1950's noir detective AND space opera in the same book.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2013 17:05
|
|
|
Just Another Lurker posted:Bought all of the Lost Fleet series last week and after finishing the last one this morning i can honestly say i feel thoroughly ripped off from the experience. This is why I love being in a library-dense state with a loan network. I only have two bookshelves.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2013 15:44
|
|
out of my life with no regrets on my side.
|
Cook's technobabble justifying Space Submarines was impressive.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2013 05:36
|
|
|
Player of Games works well because it gives the reader a decent idea of what the Culture is like through the protagonist's reactions to a similarly alien culture.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2014 23:16
|
|
|
Cardiac posted:For all his failings in plots and characters, Hamilton is at least good at world building and introducing cool concepts. This is exactly why he should collaborate with people. Let Hamilton flesh out the universe and make it interesting, but have someone else write the ending and veto any particularly egregious sex scenes.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2014 17:15
|
|
|
gohmak posted:Endymion Federico de Soya was the only good part of this and its sequel.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2014 02:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 02:07 |
|
|
Glen Cook's The Dragon Never Sleeps also has ancient largely autonomous spaceships, some of which are completely AI-run, and might be a bit crazy.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2014 08:02
|
|