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I've only read one of Mieville's books so far (Perdido Street Station), but I would say not really. If I squint hard enough I can see some stylistic similarities, but he was very much into creating his own world rather than recasting existing mythology.
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Jul 11, 2013 01:10
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Lex Talionis posted:...nor do we seem likely to start systematically abusing children to turn them into weapons. You can enlist at 17, you know. That's certainly not 6, but I don't think it's really as safe as you're suggesting to skim over that one as obviously implausible. edit: And, poo poo, if the book is supposed to be about humanity as a whole and not just the US it's certainly a thing that is happening right now as we speak with actual 6 year olds. Probably not as well organized, but very much with that sort of goal.
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Jul 17, 2013 23:21
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McCoy Pauley posted:I just finished Peter hamilton's "Great North Road," and loved it. Usually I move on to my next book immediately, but it has left me wanting to sit down and think about everything the boom contained. Just immensely satisfying in its scope and the way everything wove together by the end. The Night's Dawn trilogy is goofy as hell but I thought it was fun.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:55
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Give them The Worm Ouroboros, most of them won't understand enough of the writing to figure out that it's an extremely silly typical fantasy story.BlazinLow305 posted:spaceships It might run afoul of your no gimmicks stipulation, but check out the Night's Dawn books. I guess it's technically just a trilogy but they're like a thousand pages each and I think the original release split them all into three books.
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Aug 21, 2013 15:46
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Nope, that was my first one too. I don't think I'd recommend it as a starting point to others, though, despite being personally pleased.
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Aug 26, 2013 04:06
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Fallom posted:The thing that bothers me most in science fiction is characters experiencing metaphysical revelations about the universe relayed as lengthy and rambling stream-of-consciousness passages. I'm on book 2 of the Galactic Center Saga and I'm kind of regretting it. I'm reasonably confident that nobody has ever done a good job writing a character experiencing a metaphysical revelation about the universe, but yea the multi-page stream-of-consciousness version is definitely the worst.
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Sep 25, 2013 03:16
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So, Hyperion. Just finished it this morning and I feel fairly confident that it ended on the highest note it's going to reach but somehow there are three(?) more books. I remember seeing a couple people in here say that Fall was also good, which seems totally implausible but I am curious enough that I have to at least ask for more opinions. Stick it out for one more book, or abandon ship now and pretend he never wrote another word so I can say I genuinely liked the thing?
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Nov 28, 2013 19:59
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House Louse posted:You're talking about the last story...right? Yes, although honestly I'd offer a weak defense of the non-ending too. So much was riding on the importance of something being unknown at that point that any attempt at explanation would have been disappointing; like a book about death where the last paragraph is a description of the afterlife. There's no way to keep that from sucking. Which I guess is just another way of saying I'm so used to terrible endings in SF that an author not even trying seems like an improvement. Irony.or.Death fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 05:39
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I liked Heroes Die quite a bit; I'd say the execution is about as good as could be hoped given the premise. Haven't picked up the next one yet although I keep meaning to.
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Jan 2, 2014 05:26
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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. Also, add another to the thread's Locke Lamora tally - that was a really fun read. Thanks, thread.
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Jan 9, 2014 20:33
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If the goal was just to get people reading female authors there's a fair case to be made that directing them towards Mists of Avalon would be extremely counterproductive. It's been too long since I read the thing for me to chime in on whether it's really a good book or not, but it certainly didn't endear itself to me as a teenager and I am not a person who has ever cared about an author's gender. Related: Has anyone else here read Martha Wells' stuff? I really, really enjoyed The Death of the Necromancer, but that was like a decade ago and I've never seen anyone else mention her name. It doesn't really fit into the mystery genre, but it's a lot closer to that than it is typical fantasy. I'm almost tempted to call it a sort of proto-Locke Lamora although I worry about overselling it - still, I think more people should read it.
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Jan 23, 2014 07:26
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Azathoth posted:After reading the first draft, Jonathan L. Howard's editor should have taken away Howard's thesaurus until such time as he could prove that he could use it responsibly. It had a definite "look at this big word I know!" feel and distracted from the narrative flow when I had to look up what puscillanimous or lugubrious meant to understand what he was trying to describe, and this comes from a guy who loves Gene Wolfe, so I'm not afraid or annoyed by obscure vocabulary, just how it was implemented there. This puzzles me a little because, as someone else mentioned, it feels perfect in the context of Johannes' character. Conceding that I only started it last night and have caught myself being mildly annoyed at the writing a couple of times, so maybe it does get worse, but so far no issues that really detract from how much fun the book is.
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Feb 3, 2014 23:39
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You are absolutely not going to get a coherent picture of the Taltos stuff's setting from any single one of the books, but once you've ready any random 3-4 of them you will probably have a good handle on things. It's definitely disorienting at first but I actually kind of like how it works out - it just means that, yeah, your first exposure will seem incoherent. That also makes it sort of tough to answer your question about how episodical they are - there are a lot of common threads and there are a lot of important events you'll learn a little bit about in each of several different books. I think they're all pretty thoroughly interconnected, but you're definitely not going to find a cliffhanger directly setting up the next book very often. edit: On reread this doesn't seem like a great answer to your questions, but I've never read anything else that fits together the same way they do and I'm having a little trouble pinning it down, I guess. Sorry!
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Feb 21, 2014 23:30
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I've only read a tiny sampling of Arthurian stuff and I'm right there with you; the core story isn't nearly as interesting as how many people the story has snared. I would really enjoy seeing that megapost.
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Mar 17, 2014 20:35
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