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Shampoo posted:I found the beginning of Revelation Space to be pretty slow, but rest assured things get better from there. I would almost say you can skip Revelation. space entirely and not lose out on much. I preferred the second book, Chasm City much more. I really loved the warchive and the combat armor of Revelation Space. Speaking of Reynolds, I have most of his Conjoiner/Demarchist short fiction in various Dozois "Year's Best Science Fiction" anthologies, but have they ever been published as a whole? Robert Reed's stories about The Ship, a giant derelict discovered by humans and turned into a cruise ship around the Milky May, are pretty good. Though I think I liked the novella form of Marrow more than the actual book it evolved into.
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Jun 8, 2009 04:34
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Have other people read Ventus by Karl Schroeder? It's been a while, but I recall enjoying it quite a bit. He's written others, Permanence is the other one that I can remember distinctly, involving the clash of cultures of civilizations with different star drives get involved. Also been rereading David Gerrold's Trackers novels, which I think are based off of a failed TV pitch. The titular brothers are bounty hunters, get involved with the genetically-engineered vampires that were bred to destroy a galaxy-spanning superweapon, the dragons that are their enforcers, and end up getting way, way over their heads. Doesn't look like Roger MacBride Allen's books are available digitally--a pity, The Torch of Honor is a crazy novel about an interstellar space war with an incredible set-piece battle towards the end. Its sequel also has some of the most memorable aliens, whose biology actually works along Lamarckian principles.
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Jul 13, 2014 09:37
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Yeah, I almost wish "Dragon Never Sleeps" had been written today, when publishers (and audiences) are on board with a story being told in six or eight doorstop-size volumes. As you say, practically every chapter of DNS could have been a whole story by itself--which, sometimes is neat, but is also quite frustrating. I think I first encountered this book through either this thread of the Iain Banks one--such a great read. I've not read Cook's other SF work, Passage at Arms looks really interesting as well but I haven't read it.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:29
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Biomute posted:I had the same experience. Everyone says to read the next book, but the opening was so tremendously dull that I could not bring myself to do so. I sort of chalked the ending up to "lol Canterbury Tales, lol actual literature" and moved on. If I recall correctly, part of the problem with Hyperion is that Simmons wrote a book that was too drat long to publish as one volume, so his publisher suggested cutting the thing in two. The second book is padded out with a bunch of FORCE:space and what else is happening around galaxy, as I recall, and it takes forever to go anywhere. In recent years the dude has lost his mind so it's probably OK to move on to something else. Pity that Roger MacBride Allen's work doesn't seem to be available in ebook anywhere and is mostly out of print. I really loved "Torch of Honor" and "Rogue Powers," later collected into "Allies and Aliens."
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Apr 7, 2015 05:30
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Gamesguy posted:Any recommendations for near future science dramas similar to The Martian or Contact? Rendezvous With Rama, perhaps? (Don't read the sequels.)
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Jun 21, 2015 19:13
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Cythereal posted:Anyone familiar with Roger MacBride Allen's books? I picked up The Depths of Time from a bargain bin and enjoyed it well enough. Not great but fine for $5 and Amazon says there are two more in the series. Anyone know if they're worth ordering if I liked the first one? He has a couple of space opera books that I loved a lot. The Torch of Honor and Rogue Powers, later collected into an omnibus collection with the exceedingly-generic title Allies and Aliens. He also did a book called The Modular Man about loading brains into computers that's pretty great. He also did a series called The Hunted Earth about a wormhole network buried inside planets. Was thinking about that a lot with the Pluto pictures, since the first book is called The Ring of Charon.
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Oct 8, 2015 08:20
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For a while, Reynolds was writing Conjoiner short stories with the adventures of Nevil Clavain, starting on Mars and going throughout the galaxy--have these ever been collected into an omnibus edition? I think I've got copies of most of them in various "Year's Best SF" collections, but that's a lot of page to wander through. (His short stories are good, I really like "Diamond Dogs" a lot.)
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Jan 10, 2016 02:57
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Weird, I wonder why I thought there were more Conjoiner stories than just those two... I will have to take a look at the Zima Blue stuff, I'm pretty sure I have that laying around somewhere. A friend of mine has a long plane flight ahead and was looking for something to read during it. I suggested maybe going back and rereading some Culture novels. I'm reading through the Expanse books right now, the third book really needed more Chrisjen Avasarala in it. I think he may have read those already.
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Jan 11, 2016 06:24
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