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General Battuta posted:It's completely standalone, not part of a series. It's in a setting a few other books share, but even more so than the Culture novels you can start anywhere. The Dispossessed is even set well before book 4, which is Left Hand of Darkness. And speaking of the Culture, I'm adding Le Guin's SF to the "so I'm all out of Culture books and want more". The protagonist in Left Hand is basically doing a Contact job, only it's a "normal" human visiting a society with radically different gender structure. The Dispossessed has a lot about anarcho-communism and a society with no laws, money, etc. I think they'll scratch the Culture itch for most readers. I'm on Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre right now. This is an amazingly plotted novel. About 20% of the way in I threw up my hands, gave up any pretense of having any idea what would happen next, and just settled in for the ride. There are no big twists, nothing anyone does is out of character, but nothing was predictable. Your mileage may vary. I'm on to Lathe of Heaven next after a comic book detour through Rat Queens (not Hugo winning quality, but a damned easy read).
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Nov 23, 2014 04:52
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RVProfootballer posted:I think you might have bought too much into the narrative in the story of the anarchists being some utopia. I read it not at all as anarchism > capitalism, but that the individual is going to struggle against any societal system. Correct. The whole point is that there will always be walls put up between people. That's Shevek's whole motivation.
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Nov 23, 2014 19:16
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Borachon posted:Just finished the Elizabeth Moon Paladin's Legacy sequence (Oath of Fealty through Crown of Renewal). Pretty generic high fantasy, but good overall. The characters were reasonably interesting, the story solid, and the writing was better than the (much older) Deed of Paksenarion sequence that preceeded it. It felt less like a D&D travelogue than that series did, and overall was a nice break from the heavier fantasy (e.g. Martin) I've mostly read in that genre lately. It was really nice seeing Paks just chilling out with her old friends. I'm looking forward to finishing the series when I get ahead on bills again.
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Nov 24, 2014 07:38
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The Ninth Layer posted:The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny is a good series. You might like the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust too. Both are packaged in collections of two or more stories in one; I think you can get an all-in-one of the Chronicles of Amber these days pretty easily. Glen Cook's Dread Empire series. Baen has them as ebooks.
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Jan 8, 2015 08:29
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anilEhilated posted:Speaking of Glen Cook, how about his Garret PI series? The premise seems like it could be a lot of fun... The Garret series is probably Cook's best stuff. They're a really solid love letter to noir detective fiction like Phil Marlowe or Rex Stout. They're a good mix of character development, mystery, and action. The world building is terrific too, Tun Faire is a vibrant, real place filled with interesting people. There's one terrible novel in about the middle of the series, but the quality bounces back nicely after that. I'd say the whole series is gold. Or lead, bronze, copper, silver… Mom and I are both dearly hoping that there's at least one more in the series.
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Jan 8, 2015 15:12
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Paolo Bacigalupi's The Drowned Cities is really good. It's also a really loving depressing book about child, and genemod, soldiers fighting over the flooded ruins of America. It's probably in the same sequence as Ship Breakers, only uglier. I recommend it, but have something cheery on standby because drat, that's grim.
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Jan 14, 2015 04:55
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So Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle got produced as a series. http://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle/dp/B00RSGFRY8/ The first (and only so far) episode is up for free. The script is not good, it's downright terrible in spots. But the production as a whole is very good. Even where the script is dealing out hackneyed cliches, the actors sell them really well. The production design is very nice, it's a good combo of 40s and 50s aesthetics. The color bits like Times Square decked out in Nazi propaganda are executed well and with taste. Seeing motherfuckers in Nazi uniforms walking around the city I live in (San Francisco) was infuriating. It's good. Watch it. Also read the book, we already know that's solid all the way through.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:02
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McCoy Pauley posted:So if this looks good to you, vote it up. 5'd. I do want to see where they're going with this, and I really hope they do the hotel sequence.
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Jan 18, 2015 02:40
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Munin posted:Bleh, barely any of the Glen Cook stuff being mentioned seems to be available on Kindle and of course the McAuley is £1.99 to the US's $1.99... uBy it from Baen, they'll let you download Kindle-compatible files.
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Jan 23, 2015 03:39
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Torrannor posted:If they can get the right actor. Nadia will always remain the best character though. After watching a few episodes of Orange is the New Black I want Kate Mulgrew.
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Jan 24, 2015 21:57
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Hobnob posted:Brunner's The Shockwave Rider is another proto-cyberpunk well worth anyone's time. Try Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net for a later (1988) but still oddly prescient view of the internet, and his Mirrorshades is pretty much the definitive cyberpunk anthology. Don't forget Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. That's a fantastic novel with some amazing world building.
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Feb 15, 2015 15:33
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Speaking of whimsical fantasy books, I've been reading a bunch of Maguire recently. I got Out of Oz, so I re-read the Wicked Years series. The fourth book is a great wrap-up to the series and easily the best of the bunch. Now I'm about halfway through Egg and Spoon and I'm really impressed by it. He managed to make a village full of Russian peasants slowly starving to death a magical, whimsical place and I don't know how he manages that. Then things take off and get truly fantastic in both senses of the word. I'm reading it in small pieces so I get more sessions with the really cool stuff. Not a book to devour in one sitting, I'm savoring it in small bites and loving each one. It's also loaded with strong female characters, so it hits another criteria . Here, I'll steal a review from the Amazon page. The New York Times Book Review posted:Though the story bears some marks of a heroic quest, it is really a series of dreamy, expertly painted vignettes, set pieces both absurd and spectacular. … Maguire’s wit is shown to best advantage when in sync with his lush whimsy… In this surfeit of myth and mayhem, there are also moments of poignant quiet, when the grand quest of saving the magic of Russia recedes. In these moments, the human comes to the fore, and our focus narrows once more to a child longing for a parent, a mother longing for a child, the aching burden of living through suffering that life demands again and again. … It is impossible not to root for girls and watches and aunts alike, and to cheer their little victories as acts of grace.
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Mar 7, 2015 17:40
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occamsnailfile posted:So my sister posed a book request to me, which was "Fantasy novel with a strong female protagonist, and a best friend who is also female." I am stumped, can't think of any off the top of my head--strong female leads are more common than in the past, but female lead without a sassy talking animal/dude friend is harder for me to tabulate. Going through my own reading lists for the past couple years doesn't produce much. Maguire's Egg and Spoon is really good, and has two female protagonists whose friendship develops nicely throughout the book. His Oz series has strong female characters too, but no so much as friends except for a stint between Elphaba and Galinda while they're at school together.
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Mar 15, 2015 01:29
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Arcsquad12 posted:Are there any decent Gunpowder Era fantasy novels out there? And don't say Harry Turtledove. H Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is pretty drat good.
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Mar 31, 2015 04:52
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Hedrigall posted:Read Mort, Wyrd Sisters and Guards Guards. All will be well. Don't try to read Discworld in publication order. Not first anyway, it's pretty rewarding to reread in pub order though. There are excellent reading order guides available. Once you've read the above-mentioned three books, pick a series you like and run with it. http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/
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Jun 3, 2015 02:49
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ulmont posted:I liked Dread Empire, but I recommend Instrumentalities of the Night over Dread Empire. I'm rereading Instrumentalities now, since I can finally afford the fourth book. And yeah, overall I really love the Dread Empire series and think everyone should read it… it does have its weak spots. I'd say the worst of it is that there's so drat much going on. Instrumentalities also has a lot going on but has the benefit of having fewer POV characters. I'd say take your pick of which faux-Europe setting you want to play with. Dread Empire: Medieval Europe during or just after the first wave of Islamic expansion. Complicating everything, China is a magical superpower and has something even better than the Roman legions. There are fuckoff huge battles with deeply scary magic going on that can be seen from hundreds of miles away. Lots of characters. Instrumentalities: Early Renaissance Europe during the Dual Papacy. All the gods are real, belief gives supernatural entities both form and power. The political situation is deeply complex with analogues for the Catholic Church, Holy Roman Empire, Spanish Reconquistas, Crusader States, a close replica of Salaladin, something Ottomans, and… There's drat near everything except England, because magic is getting weaker and that was keeping the glaciers at bay. So Scandinavia and England are under a mile or two of ice. Throw in to that mix a highly competent infantry officer as protagonist, and a wandering religious master for the moral center of the story. A big battle has numbers in the low thousands per side since nobody can afford much more and not-France hasn't re-invented the standing, professional, army yet. Oh, and a (newly invented) cannon loaded with iron and silver shot can kill any supernatural entity. The Instrumentalities of the Night don't take kindly to that. Read 'em both, pick which one you want to tackle first. While you're trying to decide, try The Tower of Fear. Here Cook is playing with a Roman occupation of a Jewish city. The city was conquered by betrayal. And there's an actual evil wizard in that tower. He's only mostly dead. It's all about the street-level, day to day existence of a neighborhood. Mostly. ToF doesn't get enough love, it's probably the best of his standalone novels, edging out The Dragon Never Sleeps by a remarkably small margin.
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Jul 12, 2015 22:09
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Velius posted:If you've read one Shannara book you've read every Shannara book. If you've read Lord of the Rings, you've read a Shannara book.
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Jul 15, 2015 05:31
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angel opportunity posted:I'm loving red Mars...it feels like I'm actually on Mars watching it be terraformed and colonized It's amazing the sense of knowing Mars as a real place you get from the books. He really does manage to make the planet a character.
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Aug 1, 2015 03:40
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Dick Trauma posted:Anything out there like the Heechee Saga? People exploring incomprehensible alien artifacts and culture is fun. I love doing this to people. Gateway/Heechee goes from "really avant-garde for 1979" to "yeah, post- and trans-humanism just happened" in a very beautiful and very modern way.
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Aug 18, 2015 07:17
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Kampfy Von Wafflehaus posted:Has anyone read The Jesus Incident? The Jesus Incident is part of the series that starts with Destination Void. And yes, and it's also really good.
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Aug 21, 2015 14:21
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Junkenstein posted:How does Cixin Liu's The Wandering Earth compare to the Three Body books? I've read some of Liu's short fiction, including that one. It's really good and well worth reading. 482 pages is probably a collection of his shorter work. Go for it !
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Oct 8, 2015 17:09
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Drifter posted:The first few are the best. I thought the quality went down a bit after them. I see a lot of people dissing the Books of Sleepy in here. I found her one of my favorite narrators with a really easy to read style.
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Oct 13, 2015 02:09
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Don't forget the Shadowline/Starfishers trilogy. They're set in the same universe as Passage at Arms and they're good milsf. The first one, Shadowline, is a Norse-mythos themed take on free companies of mercenaries locked into a very personal struggle. A great deal of the book concerns warfare on the bright side of a Mercury-like planet; the rest is family fuckups and betrayals. There's some space combat, but it's mostly personal or land-based. The two Starfishes books follow up a decade or so later with one of the sons of the main guy from Shadowline on assignment in Naval Intelligence. He and his partner handle a nasty situation on one planet, then get thrown back together on a long-term undercover assignment to infiltrate the Starfishers. They're a space-based splinter of humanity that have made a deal with the Starfish - semi-energy being living in deep space whose life processes produce the key component for the ftl radio that binds civilizations together. There's lots of spy stuff, some space combat, and Big Secrets In The Stars. Highly recommended. A couple of short stories in the Winter Dreams collection round out the setting.
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Oct 14, 2015 18:09
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CaptainScraps posted:Are there any books about building up a kingdom or a settlement? Just a chill kind of fantasy book about building up a new village? I like Leslie Fish's A Dirge for Sabis is an excellent example of exactly that. It follows the first person to develop a working cannon suitable for field use. Unfortunately it isn't ready when the barbarians come, so he and his team of journeymen, apprentices, and assorted hangers-on have to run for it. They set up shop out in the sticks somewhere and start community building. The whole shared world series that CJ Cherryh was trying to put together was a good idea; unfortunately Leslie Fish was the only writer who did much to flesh out Cherryh's outlines so it wasn't well received. And yes, I was expecting more from Mercedes Lackey's volume.
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Oct 31, 2015 20:32
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Drifter posted:Tell me about Stephen Donaldson's Gap series. Ok ! I just read it, so it's a good time to ask that. [quote} Is it like a horrid sexual fantasy amalgam of Piers Anthony, George R.R. Martin, and Robert Heinlein or is it worth reading? [/quote] Nope ! There is in fact horrible sex, a fairly large amount of it, but it isn't written for titillation, and there' no real detail to any of it. What it is, is an intrigue driven plot about how people stay human under horrible pressure. The science fictiony bits are neat; there's real character progression; and as a whole the (real) story is very satisfying. This series also has some of my favorite space combat prose ever. High g, rotating for internal gravity, reasonable accounts of real Newtonian space navigation. Except Donaldson obviously has never calculated v = 0.5at^2 in life. I forgive him, the stuff is gripping, dramatic, and important to the story. I recommend the series pretty highly, but feel free to put it down anywhere.
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Nov 8, 2015 09:38
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UncleSmoothie posted:Herbert created a hugely imaginative setting but Dune often feels like a screenplay for a low-budget sci-fi miniseries that can't afford any decent props. Which is why the SciFi miniseries worked as well as it did - they did it like a stage production.
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Nov 23, 2015 10:56
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Shab posted:A lot of Frank's The Dosadi Experiment takes place in alien legal courts or between two people talking privately, if I remember correctly. And that legal system is deeply ingrained into the society of a species of viciously murderous frog people. As bizarre as Whipping Star is, Dosadi is weirder. Gowachin. Accept no substitute in your fiction.
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Nov 25, 2015 10:53
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chrisoya posted:Do not read Children of the Sky. I like the Tines, and the whole setting, less after reading CotS. And there was stuff in there. Go for Shadowline. It's a wonderfully bizarre mix of Norse myth, the Free Companies of early Renaissance Italian warfare, and a pretty neat far future setting. The second two books follow Mouse, who sort of has the framing story for the whole thing, through his career in Naval Intelligence.
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Nov 27, 2015 03:19
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Patrick Spens posted:If you aren't enjoying it, just skip to Passage at Arms. Reading the earlier book is in no way required for understanding and enjoying passage. Shadowline does pick up nicely, thing actually start happening. As for Passage, I put it first in the reading order because a) it's the best book of the four and b) it's set well before the others and c) there's a Climber reference in the third book, and if you've read Passage you really get how much poo poo is hitting the fan.
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Jan 16, 2016 07:00
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Casimir Radon posted:I may try A Civil Campaign again some day. Doesn't change that I think it's the weakest entry in the series. Funny, if you dig into all the Regency Romance and Shakespeare references in it, it's her most finely crafted novel. As for Chalion, she did a novella called Penric's Demon last year and it's really really good. It ma only be in ebook formats, but it's great. The wrong person ends up catching a demon when a temple saint dies. He turns out to be the exact right person.
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Feb 9, 2016 03:26
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Walh Hara posted:All quiet on the western front It's by a science fiction author, so I'll recommend Haldeman's War Year. It's a nice, short first person account of the Vietnam war as experienced by a combat engineer.
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Feb 15, 2016 05:35
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Groke posted:Also also, both Falling Free and Ethan of Athos can be read pretty much whenever (one is a very-distant prequel with no characters in common, the other is the side-quest adventure of a supporting-cast member with little connection to the main story). [i[Ethan of Athos[/i] takes place during or shortly before Cetaganda. There are some fun references (and a callback to it in Cetaganda but it's just a Quinn side story.
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May 20, 2016 19:16
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flosofl posted:From what I understand the next two books after Nightmare Stacks are dealing directly with CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. That was a year or two back I heard that, so that may have changed and I haven't read the latest one yet. Early on in Nightmare Stacks Alex makes the observation that the Laundry expects to be on a wartime footing in a year or so. They're rating up for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN in a big way. That makes CASE NIGHTMARE RED breaking out a really unwelcome surprise. Some of the other CASE NIGHTMARE RAINBOW scenarios get some talking time in the book.
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Jun 30, 2016 19:46
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Grimson posted:I think it's reasonable (and correct) that Cassie guessed his parents were much less likely and able to take such advice seriously and so didn't bother, but figured his sister was likely to bail fast. Cassie did at least mark a warding sign on their front door so the Wild Hunt would pass them by.
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Jul 1, 2016 23:00
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Marshal Radisic posted:So, does anyone here have any opinions about David Wingrove's Chung Kuo books? I had a friend who was reading the first series back in the early 2000s, but I never picked it up. I'm just asking since I'm picking up his new "Roads to Moscow" trilogy and I just want to know what he's like. If the new series has significantly less hideous sexual violence, go for it.
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Jul 15, 2016 05:39
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Ken Liu is a fantastic translator, he really deserves that award.
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Aug 21, 2016 05:06
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Solitair posted:I only just noticed this because I took Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form for granted, but I'm surprised and a bit disappointed that Fury Road lost to The Martian. Like the Oscars, the Hugos don't have a "Most Awesome Movie" category.
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Aug 23, 2016 02:31
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Darth Walrus posted:The series has its ups and downs, and as a rule, the odd-numbered ones seem to be better than the even-numbered ones for some reason, but Jennifer Morgue is generally considered the lowest point, so if you're past that hump, everything else should be reasonably smooth going. Really ? I like Jennifer Morgue a lot better than Annihilation Score. There's some good stuff in AS, but it falls short. Maybe it's because I'ma sucker for James Bond-ish stuff. And anyone who gave up on the series at any point should still check out Nightmare Stacks. Case Nightmare Red crossed with a romantic comedy is pretty awesome.
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Aug 24, 2016 18:38
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MockingQuantum posted:I'm looking for a solid Space Opera type novel that might have a little more teeth than The Expanse series. I'm about halfway through Nemesis Games and it's still good, I enjoy the Expanse novels, but as has been said here before I think some of the big picture concepts that would make people call it a space opera don't actually have a lot of bearing on the moment-to-moment events of the series. Not a criticism, just an observation. Let's go thematic and get you reading the Vorkosigan series by Bujold. She does more real work with gender issues than the Ancillary series did, and they're fantastic reads.
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Aug 25, 2016 05:52
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RVProfootballer posted:Goddamn, Heretics of Dune really went off the rails. I'm going to power through it and Chapterhouse because I want to finish the originals once and for all. For me, God Emperor wasn't great but fit with the first three books well enough, but Heretics is just bizarrely unlike the rest. I'd say that Chapterhouse gets better and really wraps the series up nicely. Your mileage may vary wildly.
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Aug 26, 2016 02:58
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