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rmdx posted:Ada Palmer won the Campbell, though, and had the most moving acceptance speech of the evening. And she's currently singing her heart out during the intermission of the costume show. It's not fair for one person to be this talented. They just sung an inspiring song about space exploration. Worldcon is cool y'all
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Aug 12, 2017 19:24
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:Baens Law: The shinier the cover & the bigger the author name; the more you should avoid the book at all cost. Clarke Corollary: if the book is not authored solely by Arthur C. Clarke, avoid at all costs. Really useful rules of thumb when browsing old SF.
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Aug 20, 2017 07:50
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Harrow posted:I haven't read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but from what I understand people consider the Broken Earth books to be much better and more maturely written. I can't speak for that myself, though I can say she plays around pretty heavily with PoV and narrative voice. I've read both and I liked HTK but the Broken Earth trilogy is her best work yet by far.
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Aug 21, 2017 16:49
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I adamantly believe she's way too cool to be a goon.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:21
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I thought there were only supposed to be two books so now I'm even more excited.
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Aug 30, 2017 06:50
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It took a while but now it's finally happened to me on Amazon: I went to buy an e-book I already own.Thanks for the recommendation anyway.
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Sep 16, 2017 12:54
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I felt like Stross did a really poor job of writing Mo and it dragged down that particular book with it. I think I wrote about it in the thread several moons ago. Nothing just seemed to gel and come together in Annihilation Score. The lean/six sigma/corporate speak bullshit he has down pat though. It was particularly well done in Rhesus Chart.
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Nov 27, 2017 21:19
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I get that, but if that's what you're gonna do as the writer, then you are just putting more pressure on yourself to deliver. And it just didn't seem to match with her earlier characterization that her idea of coping with a nervous breakdown was dressing up and doing girl's nights and concerts (yes I know, she's a music buff, that's like half her character).
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Nov 27, 2017 21:54
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Victorkm posted:He's no Craig Schaefer. I'm still not convinced he didn't have a lot of these as drafts in a box somewhere and he's just polishing them and putting them out. Because if not, he's a madman in a good way.
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Nov 30, 2017 06:52
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I was a big Sanderson fan not that long ago, but I think it was only the avalanche I really enjoyed and it just takes too long to get to it in a massive fantasy novel.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:21
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GreyjoyBastard posted:
I'm in the middle of book 2 so that's Christmas sorted. 
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Dec 21, 2017 08:18
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Terra Ignota Book 3, The Will To Battle, (series started with Too Like The Lightning) is out
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In a vacuum I'm uncomfortable with someone taking Banks's notes and drawings and putting something together out of them, but Ken MacLeod is exactly the sort of person I'd trust the job with.
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Feb 17, 2018 09:15
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Kesper North posted:We don't know that it wasn't done at Banks's request or with his consent. He might just not have wanted to share the worldbuilding until he was sure we wouldn't be spoiled. That's a good point.
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Feb 17, 2018 09:55
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Bhodi posted:You know what I'd read? I'd read an entire book about those engineers who make it their life's work to find and fix bugs in any system that gets people killed. gently caress the divine, they don't do poo poo. Those engineers are the ones doing good for humanity I've only just finished Seven Surrenders but I wonder how much it speaks of me that I instantly related to the Utopians the most, and continue to relate to them the most. They are basically trying to build Iain M. Banks's Culture, after all. I feel like I'm being set up by the author in the same way the utopian character of the world itself was slowly dismantled as the story progressed.
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Feb 23, 2018 22:35
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General Battuta posted:Best depictions of hell and Satan in SFF, go That long-rear end internet story where Hell invades Earth and Earth invades Hell back and drops an atomic bomb on Satan. 
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Mar 2, 2018 17:49
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Tochiazuma posted:Tigana was one of the first Kay novels I read, I'd put it right up there with Sarantium/Lord of Emperors as my favourites. And if you haven't checked out Lions of Al-Rassan, it's also terrific. Gonna chime in that Lions and Tigana are my two favourite Kay novels. Tigana has a profoundly strong core idea that it sticks to the whole time, plus the antagonist is surprisingly deep and relatable even if he's still a piece of poo poo. I should read it again!
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Mar 11, 2018 07:01
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Everyone go grab Too Like the Lightning for free.
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Mar 21, 2018 18:20
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Oops. Point stands though.
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Mar 21, 2018 19:26
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C.M. Kruger posted:The Dragon Never Sleeps is his other scifi story and is good, basically it's about immortal legions of peacekeepers in space charged with maintaining the status quo. The Dragon Never Sleeps is very dense and mile-a-minute, I remember turning a page and ten years had passed. It's like six Dune books rolled into one and the vibe I got from it was Dune + Culture - to be clear, the Culture wasn't established when Cook wrote it, though of course Dune was Dune. I should read it again. It's really good. ' edit: Imagine a galaxy-spanning human empire dominated by a bunch of noble houses and mercantile barons, basically a Dune or Thousands Suns setting, except they once had Culture-level technology with massive warships and AI, and aeons ago they used this tech to build an immortal, gigantic Special Circumstances section armed to the teeth, who is ideologically committed to maintaining the empire and preventing any one faction from getting too powerful and destabilizing the whole thing. Also, they're the good guys. Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 18:24
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Grimwall posted:I hope there is a nice summary because I forgot... everything Pain and suffering and shaking my fist at Battuta for doing that to me.
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Apr 26, 2018 16:59
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I was idly reading The Island a few days ago and didn't realize until today that The Freeze-Frame Revolution is about Sunday and the obliquely referred to war against AIs. I bought it immediately. 
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May 30, 2018 10:49
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NoNostalgia4Grover posted:May I suggest the subgenre name of "social science" scifi/fantasy? Aka the polar opposite of milfiction. I feel like this term should be reserved to the sort of thing Ada Palmer and General "Seth Dickinson" Battuta are doing.
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Aug 4, 2018 23:07
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occamsnailfile posted:Amazon has the whole Divine Cities trilogy (City of Stairs et alles) for 2.99 if one liked those, or hd been putting off reading them. This is a criminally low price, I've read the first two and I paid 2.99 just to have the third one and to have them all on kindle.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:58
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Proteus Jones posted:Don’t be. The author gets more royalties at the regular price. Bennett said on twitter what he gets hasn't changed, the publisher's probably just using this to gin up publicity for the new book
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Aug 17, 2018 05:56
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It was streamed last year from Helsinki as well  E: NK Jemisin triple! Sulphagnist fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Aug 20, 2018 |
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Aug 20, 2018 04:44
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hannibal posted:Next Baru Cormorant book looking pretty good. The Hexarch Shuos Baru is the most ambitious crossover event in history.
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Aug 26, 2018 06:18
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General Battuta posted:Now read the sequels If there's another name with Clarke on the jacket, it's just part of a big racket If Gentry Lee's the other name, destroy it with a cleansing flame
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Sep 2, 2018 08:30
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I wanted to get Monster in hardcover like I already have Traitor, but it was cheaper to just preorder Monster and buy Traitor again as ebooks just to have a matching pair  I guess I'll just keep using the physical copy of Traitor to rope new people in.
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Sep 6, 2018 06:53
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Rand Brittain posted:I never pass up an opportunity to recommend my pal Jenna's books, so I'm going to plug An Unclean Legacy, about a deathless sorcerer preparing for his upcoming death, and his children's reactions to their presumed inheritance. Eh, this from the summary feels fairly blatant: "Montechristien Groeneveldt" Still, colour me intrigued.
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Oct 8, 2018 18:01
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Cardiac posted:Considering the laundry files are mostly nerd jokes I wonder what you see in the series then? An illustration of UK bureaucracy? They should make it The Thick of It (Cthulhu Edition).
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Mar 26, 2019 19:09
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Dante posted:I just finished the murderbot diaries and I found them really enjoyable. I also read (most of) the Culture series and I found them to be similar in that they're well written, quick reads and good crunchy entertainment. In general I enjoy sci-fi as a genre, but I find the writing to be a bit of a slog at times. What are some other sci-fi books I might enjoy? You could try - Yoon Ha Lee's Machinaries of Empire series - House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds (be warned that it's the best novel by Reynolds so far, by far) - Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and then A Deepness in the Sky - Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series - Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds (a duology) - I won't die on the hill of "well written", but in terms of quick reads and crunchy entertainment, James SA Corey's The Expanse series (now a very good TV show as well!)
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Jun 21, 2019 07:46
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The_White_Crane posted:I'd second Leckie's Imperial Radch series and add Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, but I'd also say that while I really liked the Machineries of Empire series, Lee's writing is pretty damned baroque, and if one of your common problems with sci-fi is that aspect of it then you might not be a fan. That's a fair point on Machinaries, and I never miss on a chance to recommend The Risen Empire in the vain hope that one day Westerfeld will wrote more stories set in that universe.
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Jun 21, 2019 17:45
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PupsOfWar posted:idk if the prose in Machineries is that dense or unnavigable once you've worked out what the Calendar is The calendar stuff is basically magic. Once I accepted that the rest was simple. General Battuta posted:He won't but he's willing to hand out the planned ending if you talk to him. The Lynx leads a coup on the capital, Rana Carter becomes the new Empress, roughly. I don't remember what happens to the captain and the senator. Oh, that's something at least. Huh. Thanks.
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Jun 21, 2019 19:04
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Murderbot got a Hugo, as did some other good things. Good Hugos and Jeannette Ng won the Campbell and took no prisoners in her speech https://medium.com/@nettlefish/john-w-campbell-for-whom-this-award-was-named-was-a-fascist-f693323d3293 Mary Robinette Kowal was given a Hugo for the first Lady Astronaut novel by an actual lady astronaut!
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Aug 18, 2019 22:26
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The SFF scene was run by white guys for 70 years and I'm happy to have literally everyone else in charge instead. ulmont posted:This was apparently corrected, but the Hugos were a bit of a shitshow all around. This also did get sorted out but the convention committee, i.e. the Powers That Be, had to be involved. They also tried speech to text captioning during the ceremony and that was also a shitshow. Veteran attendees have bitched about the queues once again but that's really a function of the fandom growing so much.
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Aug 19, 2019 13:52
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Space Opera came dead last in the preferences and I am rather glad that my antihype on that got validated. It was fine but not Hugo finalist material at all. Ben Nevis posted:Do we know what the hat thing is? https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1163210202830770176?s=09
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Aug 19, 2019 20:30
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