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I was also underwhelmed by Anathem. I liked seeing the Avout and how they lived in the first half, but the second half mostly left me cold, and the philosophy just wasn't all that interesting. The replications were familiar and the speculation was unconvincing. I enjoyed it overall, but I wasn't blown away.
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Jun 19, 2013 18:40
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Less Fat Luke posted:I got more and more excited, and then I saw March 2014. Doh!
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Aug 15, 2013 10:10
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General Battuta posted:If any of you are into short fiction I have a piece up on Strange Horizons, one of my favorite pro markets. Even comes with a podcast! This was fantastic, thanks. And it has inspired me to get going again on a story of my own. For more content, I'm curious, how many people ITT have published SF/F, or tried to do so? I submitted to the James White Award last year, but didn't win.
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Aug 20, 2013 18:43
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When I finished Hyperion I enjoyed it but I could somehow tell that it was the high point of that writer's work and if continued would collapse. Nothing I've heard since has shaken that conclusion. And then Simmons put his crazy out in the open and it was all over.
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Aug 23, 2013 00:12
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There's two Foundation reading lists. 1. Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. or, 2. Foundation.
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Aug 31, 2013 19:36
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I've begun to have a sinking feeling when I hear a book I'm interested in is an SF Masterwork because it's usually the easiest edition to get and they're hideous.
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Nov 1, 2013 18:47
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The warning signs were there even in Hyperion, in retrospect it's got a bad case of 'one of the good ones takes out the bad ones in a juvenile and gratuitous way'. I thought Hyperion was a good book worth reading but felt no need at all to read more because I could feel the collapse looming just past where the book ended.
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Jan 3, 2014 20:24
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Irony.or.Death posted:I have been tossing a bunch of stuff into my Amazon cart, and realized I still have not read anything by Stanislaw Lem. This seems like a problem, but it's one of those problems that's really daunting because the man has written so much - is there any sort of generally endorsed starting point/particular standouts, or should I just grab a couple at random based on the titles? I guess I sort of expect the answer to be Solaris, but the blurb did not grab my attention so if you have positive enthusiastic words to say about it I would like to hear them. The state of Lem translation into English is pretty poor. My recommendation is the Cyberiad if Solaris doesn't appeal to you. There's also the Pirx stories. Both are a lot more light and accessible than the grim contemplativity of Solaris.
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Jan 10, 2014 14:00
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Cardiovorax posted:Nobody has that bad of a taste. Discworld novels have generally pretty distinct and awesome covers and they sell like hot potatoes. Don't bet on it. Though it wouldn't surprise me if genre publishers thought public taste was worse than it is.
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Feb 9, 2014 13:10
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I was also underwhelmed by The Quantum Thief. It blasts out a lot of neat ideas, mostly at the start, and the prose is solid, but the characters and plot are very conventional and so the book felt as a whole once the future shock passed. I'd recommend it to SF fans, but 'not much takeaway' is a good summary. I guess it could be called artisan burger SF.
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Feb 15, 2014 19:41
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Lem wrote in Polish and I understand the translations are considered quite choppy. I still got a lot out of him though.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:15
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fookolt posted:You could probably call it "genre.txt" and have that cover everything. I dunno, I don't doubt for a second that literary and nongenre are full of ludicrous people. Authors as a class are convinced that what they have to say is worth paying to hear. It's in the job description.
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Feb 20, 2014 03:27
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BananaNutkins posted:SF and F should be about entertainment. If you want to be socially progressive/regressive, fine, but the point of all this is to entertain. Why should it be about (a particular limited idea of) 'entertainment'? Some people want to write books that are thoughtful and interesting and other people want to read books that are thoughtful and interesting. Plenty of those books exist and are genre classics. Beyond that, having access to books about people like them or their friends, and which don't implicate the same in conspiracies to kill all Jews or whatever, helps make things entertaining for a lot of readers. quote:All this argument and these are the readership numbers: The collapse of short story magazines is mirrored across the collapse of print magazines in general, and you can see even in those numbers a reversal in two of them that have good electronic distribution methods. I'm not aware of any similar collapse in novel sales. And even if that wasn't the case, the SFWA failing to represent and serve its members would be a problem, one not solvable by 'write better (but still schlocky) books'.
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Feb 20, 2014 12:28
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I don't think anyone has proposed censoring books though? Some people have said they don't want to give their financial support to authors they consider bad people, but that's not censorship. Tom Kratman isn't obliged not to publish and readers aren't obliged not to leave his books on the shelves.
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Feb 20, 2014 13:01
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Having already been aware of urban fantasy, and introduced to the magical London concept by Kraken, Neverwhere didn't impress me. There were some good segments, but the whole was entirely too twee and somehow 'narrow' to provoke the sense of wonder and magic that (say) Kraken did. Gaiman's work other than Sandman hasn't really impressed me. I think fantasy has moved on from his style in general and he'll spend some time with a dimmed star as the reaction works itself out.
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Mar 8, 2014 23:03
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Technology making gender less significant is in itself an interesting avenue for SF exploration of gender.
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Mar 9, 2014 01:05
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All hyper powerful wizards are discrete since D&D has a granular level system.
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Mar 11, 2014 11:30
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The Honor novels are like Dune in that there's no real consensus on when to stop, but almost everyone agrees you should at some point. (Except unlike Dune, there's a lot of people who say 'before the first one')
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Mar 14, 2014 11:30
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Wolpertinger posted:You forgot 4) Military sci-fi where the authors jerk off to Space America sending the super manly, heroic, and perfect US Space Marines to go fight Space Socialists/communists/arabs  But it's unfair to judge a book by it's cover. (It's worse.)
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Mar 16, 2014 02:02
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Vox Day being the rallying point for the SFWA reactionaries is serendipitous in a way, since it means we can be happily free of ambiguity about how utterly poo poo they are. Most people are wise enough to choose symbols that are photogenic or at least able to sound reasonable. The SFWA rebels have chosen an open white supremacist. The social justice warriors have taken over our organisation, let's push Theodore 'half-savage' Beale as a counterattack! That'll show them how dumb they are!
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Apr 20, 2014 11:11
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In defence of the SFF community, the bigots are acting out so much because they're losing badly. They have failed to take or maintain control of the SFWA or its organs, and their managing to get Vox Day nominated to one of the minor Hugo categories is eclipsed by the continued dominance of progressive writers and writing in the awards as a whole themselves. The Hugos have (big) problems but I wouldn't say an excess of racist organising is one of them. edit: Cardiovorax posted:Hahaha, wow. That's amazing. In barely two full paragraphs he calls black people monkeys, equates gay marriage with marrying an animal, insinuates that interracial marriages are pretty much exactly the same thing and complains about hip hop. That's like a hat trick of bigotry. Small wonder the scifi fandom is considered a bad joke when it supports people like that. As an example, Beale was actually ejected from the SFWA in the fallout from that screed. The continuing low-level drama from that is probably behind this attempt to game him a Hugo.
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Apr 20, 2014 17:07
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General Battuta the other day a friend of mine said to me 'I really like stories by [General Battuta]' (I paraphrase) and I said to myself 'isn't that the guy who posts on SA' and I checked and lo it was. You have already achieved the heights of fame, only immortality remains.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:15
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Wolpertinger posted:you'd never remotely guess that he's mormon from pretty much anything at all in his books other than 'no real world cussing' and 'no on screen sex' which isn't exactly unique to mormon authors or even that big of a deal. Let's be honest, the latter would improve more SFF books than it would spoil.
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May 1, 2014 17:27
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For those of us who like SFWA drama, John C. Wright of 'The Golden Age' and 'is a loon' fame has quit. I'd quote highlights but the highlights are pretty much everything he said. The president is unconvinced.
Peel fucked around with this message at 17:25 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 17:17
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PKD thought communists were trying to take over the SFWA so I'm not sure that'd be a twist as such.
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May 2, 2014 17:40
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I didn't find myself at all interested in the prospect of a sequel to AJ, personally, even with the hook ending. The future events promised didn't sound especially interesting, and I think a lot of readers and writers are too averse to letting superficially major events stand outside the narrative of the book itself. To me the story felt complete. I don't think I'll read the sequel unless it reviews better than the first. As to the book itself, the characterisation of Seivarden failed to convince me and in general its imaginative reach exceeded its grasp. It's not a book I'm sad to see winning awards but I'd be surprised if it was really the best book of last year, and it certainly doesn't deserve the sweep it's been making so far. Definitely hits all the right buttons for modern SF criticism though. Anyone else here read Servant of the Underworld? I've been impressed by Aliette de Bodard's short stories but I didn't think she was able to manage the tonal shift past the halfway point. Once Neutemoc is saved the new threat didn't convince me and the story gradually became a world-saving fantasy adventure rather than the lower-key mystery it had been before, which was unwelcome. Longer and ultimately larger in scope than it needed to be.
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May 9, 2014 14:05
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Interesting that Wheel of Time was released then, but that's already sold most of the books it ever will. Since they have so many books involved the usual argument that the chance of victory helps publicity is muted. Even if one of them wins, the other two get no help, and the membership of this year's Worldcon is huge due to the Wheel of Time offer. From an economic perspective it makes a good deal of sense. From an ethical perspective I can't convince myself that they're obliged to provide the novels. I really hope the comments I'm seeing from some that they'll take it out on the novels in the voting don't pan out. I'm pretty curious which book will win this year though. Not because it's a great showdown of top-quality literature but because every entrant has some kind of associated drama. Correia crudely campaigned for his nomination and associated himself with a white supremacist, the Wheel of Time has a large fanbase, but is controversial in its presence and just plain bad for most of its length, and the three 'normal' books now aren't in the voter packet and are attracting an attendant backlash.
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May 16, 2014 18:12
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anathenema posted:Besides, they're going up against Memory of Light, which kind of makes campaigning pointless. Technically they're going up against the Wheel of Time as a whole. I'm holding out hope that new readers delving into the complete series and getting stuck in the quagmire of the later Jordan output will counterbalance the series fans.
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May 16, 2014 22:50
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'grossly exaggerated' lol The man was thrown out of the SFWA for targeting other members with racist abuse through official channels. Unless he's being accused of physical assault I'm not sure what people are supposed to be exaggerating? The Vox Day affair is actually incredibly entertaining since you get to see all these authors & etc. trying the usual 'he's not that bad, no witch hunts, stop oppressing us' whining with an actual virulent all-but-open racist misogynist prick, or thinking that he's a good choice to 'troll the far left' with. Which does actually tell you a lot about their own political compass, if they managed to get all the way to deciding to do that without some part of their brain begging them to stop.
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May 22, 2014 15:44
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I'm not interested in MilSF or noirish urban fantasy, I deal with its presence in this thread by skimming those posts until I come across one on a topic that interests me, or making one myself, because this is the thread for general SFF discussion, not some specific interesting-to-me subclass of SFF discussion.
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May 24, 2014 17:18
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BadOptics posted:Have you read The Left Hand of Darkness? I've only gotten about a third of the way through it so far, but it's an interesting mix of sci-fi/fantasy. Depending on how the book ends I might pick up the rest of Le Guin's novels (even though I have quite a few SF/F series to finish off). I have, but I don't have much intelligent to say about it. I'm inclined to agree with the sentiment I've often seen that the play with gender ultimately failed in that the characters mostly just read as men, but it's entirely possible that's a consequence of my perspective. As a story and world-description exercise I found it effective, especially the trek across the ice.
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May 25, 2014 03:07
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They should hire S. A. Corey to do the Assassin's Creed novelisations.
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Jun 18, 2014 03:28
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If your New New Space Opera doesn't have a sect of rokoist terrorists who demand all resources be put to building super-intelligent AIs, I'm not interested.
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Jul 4, 2014 21:10
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You sold out, GB. You used to be cool. Now it's all about the money. (I liked your squid story)
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Jul 11, 2014 22:26
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The Culture is good but it's not what he's asking for. It doesn't dwell much on intricate worldbuilding or history. It just creates an appropriate stage for that novel's drama, with some callbacks.
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Aug 5, 2014 19:03
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Cardiovorax posted:Ancillary Justice is honestly a joke of a book. It's a total and ridiculously transparent ripoff of the Culture books, even to the point where the language of the empire intentionally uses gender-neutral pronouns. If it was any more obvious about its plagiarism it would just be a reprint of Use of Weapons. No it isn't. The Radch is a completely different society to the Culture both in terms of its internal structure and how it operates internationally (overt imperialism vs. liberal interventionism). At best you could argue that the Radch is a criticism of the typically underemphasised imperialism of the Culture, which even if you could sustain (I'm not convinced) leaves you in the position of condemning a book for plagiarism for the high crime of being in dialogue with recent works in its genre. The ship AIs don't even work the same way or have a similar relationship to their crew. You might as well call Mutineer's Moon or the Andromeda TV show culture-esque.
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Aug 18, 2014 15:27
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Cardiovorax posted:Would you take a non-genre literary award seriously if 80% of contestants were patronized by one publisher and the panel of judges had only gotten to see excerpts instead of the whole book and the winner was this obviously plagiarized? The Hugo Awards are not juried. They are popular awards. The 'panel of judges' is every member of Worldcon. Some of the publishers of nominated works decide to contribute their nominees to a DRM-free ebook packet available for download by every person eligible to vote (edit: and this itself is a fairly recent institution). The Nebulas are the ones with a panel of expert judges. Peel fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 15:29
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Not even the Nebulas? I stand corrected. Maybe I was thinking of the Clarke. Which Ancillary Justice also won. I voted for it but only reluctantly. It's a decent book, especially for a first novel, but not nearly so good it deserves a clean sweep of awards. Srice posted:This is the very first time I have seen something concrete about the book besides the gender stuff. Like, I heard a lot of good things about it all over the place but the only thing it seems people would talk about is the gender-language in the book! The gender stuff isn't even very important to the book itself. But it's the current trend so it gets a lot of attention. This is why I think the book has made such a splash - it landed in exactly the right place at the right time. In defence of Breq's confusion, her intellectual capability is radically diminished by the time she's making errors on the ice planet.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:33
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Either Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation or Foundation. The first is a different sort of beast to the latter two, which are more conventional adventure yarns, and everything after them gets daft.
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Aug 18, 2014 18:48
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The gender stuff in AJ isn't bad, except insofar as we think Breq should have had more mastery of gender distinctions than she did. It's more substantial than the intriguing but unrealised-in-text footnote that was the constructed status of Marain because it actually spends some time with the difficulties a person could have trying to recall and deploy distinctions vitally important in her host society that she wasn't raised to make. But it's still ultimately just a neat worldbuilding detail, so it shouldn't be given too much focus - the book's look at imperialism is more important but less soundbitable. You could probably do a reading comparing the two but I'm not going to reread AJ so soon.GENDERWEIRD GREEDO posted:The author called too much attention to it by making the main character remark so often on how much trouble it had dealing with gendered language, especially before saying things which had no apparent gender associated with them (I sure hope I don't mess up this phrase, argh it's so awkward and I don't want to offend anyone by getting the gender wrong...."Yo what's up"). Like Systran said I took this as comments on the non-English language she was speaking - of course the distinctions don't render in English, because English doesn't make those distinctions, just like Radch doesn't make the distinctions English does. It doesn't translate, which is the point. I thought that was made clear in the text but maybe I'm misremembering. e: my main problem with the response to AJ (beyond the excessive praise) is all the people describing it as 'Banksian' which as I made clear to Cardiovorax I just don't see at all, either as praise or condemnation. Peel fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Aug 19, 2014 |
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Aug 19, 2014 02:05
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