The Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread: Read the OP, Bridge of Birds, and Murderbot

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread: Read the OP, Bridge of Birds, and Murderbot

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

NikkolasKing posted:

So my question - should I go for The Hobbit or the Children of Hurin?

Not even a question. The Hobbit is, in its entirety, pitched on a level lower than that of the pre-Rivendell parts of Fellowship. If you like Tolkien for his mythology, a few throwaway references to Gondolin aren't going to change the fact it's a book intended for 10 year olds. You want Children of Hurin, although keep in mind that while it's a good read and expands on the account in the Silmarillion, it's short by the standards of a modern novel and just as much of a post-mortem fix-up (if not more) as the Silmarillion was. Set expectations accordingly.

The tougher question is what someone with your interests should read after that. There's a lot more fragments of Silmarillion-like material in the History of Middle Earth series, but there are diminishing returns the deeper one gets into the arcana of Tolkien. The one "this is like that" I can offer is Jacqueline Carey's Sundering series, which is unashamedly a revisionist take on the Silmarillion with Morgoth as the...well, not quite good guy, but let's say the most sympathetic figure. And I guess there's always real history. I feel like the history of the Roman Republic and Empire hits some of the same notes (a long defeat in which heroism, art, and wisdom occasionally flourish only to be lost to catastrophes sparked by pride, malice, incompetence, mistrust, and plain bad fortune).

# ¿ Jun 30, 2013 00:32

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:31

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Hedrigall posted:

Please console me as to why that book could have won

The Locus is basically an online poll, with the caveat that votes by Locus subscribers count double. Guys like Scalzi who have a big online presence naturally can expect to do well. You'll notice Charles Stross won Best Fantasy, and while I haven't read The Apocalypse Codex I'd consider that at least as much of a stretch as Redshirts winning for SF. For similar reasons there's at least a decent chance Scalzi might win the Hugo as well, so start preparing yourself for disappointment now.

Hedrigall posted:

I hope professional critics really aren't praising Redshirts as the SF book of the year.

As you might expect, professional critics have very little time for Scalzi, but the only major award that reflects the opinion of professional critics is the Clarke, which is awarded by a small jury of critics who read every novel submitted by publishers. It's a British award, which unfortunately means some stuff that's only published in the US (ahem, like a lot of SF by female authors...) doesn't end up getting considered. It's also nominally an SF award, not a fantasy award, but this has been interpreted liberally enough in the past to include books like Perdido Street Station.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2013 12:24

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

I think the two Endymion books are okay and people who finish Fall of Hyperion still really liking the world shouldn't feel they must be avoided at all costs, just dial your expectations down. Endymion catches a lot of abuse because Hyperion was so fantastic that the dropoff from great to good (Fall of Hyperion) and then to okay (Endymion books) makes them much more disappointing. But I wouldn't call them bad. If anyone is confused, Dan Simmons has helpfully provided a great example of a truly horrible book by writing Olympos, completely ruining the otherwise quite good Ilium by association.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2013 02:17

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Darth Walrus posted:

On another subject, I've heard Daniel Abraham's name mentioned a lot, and was thinking of giving his work a go. Problem is, I have no idea what I'm in for or the quality thereof. Can the goon hivemind deliver its wisdom unto me?

I haven't read his newest series yet, but I really liked his Long Price Quartet, which I'd call a story about the effects of power, and the pursuit of it, on people and cultures. Although each book covers a short period of time, they are spaced out so that by the end of the series you'll have followed the characters across forty years of calendar time and seen how their decisions shape the world and, more frequently, how the world shapes them. There's not a lot of action, so I can understand it's not to everyone's taste, and I'm not surprised it apparently sold poorly, but to me it's an example of what epic fantasy can be when it's been purged of the wish-fulfillment, exaltation of "badasses", and the exhilaration in violence that underpins a lot of the more popular series. Don't get me wrong, those things have their place, and I like a lot of the authors who traffic in them, but hopefully we'll continue to see alternative approaches like this in the future.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2013 22:51

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

mystes posted:

I think it's mostly just that nothing she's written other than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and the original Earthsea trilogy has been that notable, and these were all written like 40 years ago.

Don't forget the weird but compelling Lathe of Heaven! Also written 40 years ago, don't get me wrong, but it's still an interesting read today. As for her more recent work, I haven't read it yet but I've heard good things about Lavinia.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2013 23:48

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

You're right that Ender's Game, especially read together with Speaker for the Dead, does not endorse genocide, but Kessel does a good job documenting how manipulative it is. In most kids books, it's enough to have the protagonist get accused of something they didn't do (i.e. kids thinking Harry Potter is the Heir of Slytherin). Ender's Game levels that up by accusing the protagonist of things he really does do, but orchestrating everything so it's not his fault. I don't really think this is as poisonous as Kessel makes it out to be, but it's certainly cynical. The whole "Ender the Xenocide" business in Speaker is less about condemning genocide and more about escalating that pattern (now a whole civilization hates him!).

I think the worst charge you can level against the book is that it tosses around Important Things (child abuse, genocide) for what are essentially frivolous reasons (cementing reader/protagonist identification and sympathy). I know people think the book has Important Things to Say about those Important Things, but as Kessel says, no one actually commits genocide by accident, nor do we seem likely to start systematically abusing children to turn them into weapons.

Another line of criticism is that the novel basically tells teens and preteens who empathize with Ender what they want to hear: namely, that they feel alienated because other children, adults, and the system as a whole are all intentionally attacking them, and that despite appearances they are smarter and in a moral sense better than those around them.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2013 23:08

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Irony.or.Death posted:

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.

Well, fair enough. I guess I should have said that while these things can and do happen (genocide is a better example here than child soldiers though), they are also trivially evil. Genocide is bad, mmkay? That's not an important moral message. Meanwhile, depicting these things without dealing seriously with what they mean cheapens them. There's a reason why most people don't write fun books about the Holocaust.

Ender's Game is basically a fun book about genocide. Yes, there's suffering, but almost all of that...the suffering the reader feels, not just what they understand on an intellectual level...all happens to Ender. The deaths of aliens, not to mention the impact of the deaths of the kids he accidentally kills, are all kept carefully off screen. Card, or at least the Card of those days when he was at the height of his powers, could have raked us over the coals and shown us Bonzo's mother receiving the news, all his relatives crying at the funeral, etc. That would have really helped drive home the book's very muted argument against the children-as-weapons business. But he didn't, because then we'd be identifying with Bonzo and his family instead of Ender.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2013 23:36

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

systran posted:

I also am really tired of cheesy poo poo and wish there were more scifi that was "literary".

Well, I just listed some literary fantasy in the recommendation thread, so I guess I'm all warmed up for literary science fiction. I can even reuse the first one! This will be a long post, but hey, three people asked and if you random walk through SF looking for this sort of thing it can take a really long time.

As usual, though, it depends on what you mean by literary. Some people say literary when what they mean is good, or at least well-written. Others have in mind a sort of opaque style...by that measure, Chiang is not literary. To me, though, it means a well-written novel that is to a large degree (though not exclusively) about something other than the surface story, something deeper I guess, in which case Chiang still qualifies.

Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe - It's Jack Vance meets Jorge Luis Borges in a strange, dreamlike narrative where a thousand moments that don't initially appear to make sense turn out to have a hidden order. New Sun can be read (initially allows itself to be read might be the best way to put it) as fantasy, but the (excellent in their own ways) follow-ons Long Sun and Short Sun are more explicitly science fiction. Fifth Head of Cerberus is a standalone novel about identity that is not to be missed if you have any affinity at all for Wolfe's writing.

Light by M John Harrison - I think as a reader I'm pretty far toward the literary end of the SF spectrum, but I will reluctantly admit I actually bounced off this, deciding it was, well, a little too literary. I keep meaning to take another crack at it because critics I admire think a lot of this and its two sequels. Adam Roberts is another who maxes out this particular scale, though unusually for this sort of author he's very prolific and I'm not sure where the best place to start is.

God's War by Kameron Hurley - Theoretically this is a novel about a bounty hunter punching people a lot, so it's not literary in the conventional sense, but underneath the violent surface story is an immense amount of thought put into the world and its sociology. Mostly talked about for what it says about gender, but I would argue the trilogy overall has even more to say about violence and the effect it has on individuals and society.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner - This paints an amazingly realized, if now outdated, future of overpopulation and conflict. The speculation (thankfully) didn't prove all that accurate, but today it remains thought-provoking, and while the writing style is difficult, it gives the book a serious punch and is still influential today. Yes, Dos Passos came up with the format, but if Brunner hadn't used it to such incredible effect in this novel no one writing SF today would know who Dos Passos was. Instead, just in the last year, David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson wrote novels strongly inspired by it.

Air by Geoff Ryman - A poor central Asian town struggles to adjust when the Internet finally arrives. Despite Ryman's reputation as a "mundane SF" author it resorts to some handwaving toward the end, but his depiction of ripples in the pond of small town life is fantastic and his portrayal of a non-Western culture was (to this Westerner, at least) totally convincing. Ian McDonald is probably the go-to "white guy writing Asia" SF author these days and could probably stand to be on this list, but I'm not quite as fond of him.

Neuromancer by William Gibson - Gibson was writing about computers early but honestly the speculation here is nothing to write home about. Vinge's 1982 "True Names" and Brunner's 1975 (!) Shockwave Rider are much more impressive on that front. Gibson didn't actually understand much about computers, but he wrote so well it didn't matter. Many people hate the style, but it's given the book its longevity and penetration into liberal arts curricula. Unusually for a style-heavy book, the plot is actually pretty good, too.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny - Hieronymous Alloy posted this one in the recommendations thread as a literary fantasy; I hadn't included it because I don't consider it fantasy. It's a fascinating novel about the meaning religion has when it's definitely not true. A little more high-spirited than the other books on this list, though; takes time out of its busy schedule to arrange a truly excruciating pun a few chapters in.

Embassytown by China Mieville - Mieville in general and this novel in particular shouldn't need much introduction, but this is a novel length exploration of language and consciousness. I wasn't crazy about The City & the City but plenty of people were and it's definitely literary SF.

The Bridge by Iain Banks - This surrealist piece is probably the most SF of his non-M "literary" novels (except Transition, which I loathed and so am going to ignore). His M novels are wonderful SF although I'm not sure how much the literary label really applies to them (unless we're just using it as a synonym for "good"). The best argument would probably be for Use of Weapons, but everyone who likes SF at all should read that regardless.

Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr - Countless post-apocalyptic novels have been written since this was published in 1960 but for my money it's still the best.

More off the beaten track, there's Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, a very strange novel about philosophy and religion, and the sadly almost completely forgotten Gameplayers of Zan by MA Foster, a hugely impressive look at a non-human psychology and its sociological consequences.

More generally, UK's Clarke Award is a juried award which in recent years has tended to be very literary in its values, so its shortlists are a good place to look for ideas. The Tiptree's shortlists might also be helpful, though they tend to be a little more obscure.

Finally, there's always literary authors who (whether they admit it or not) are actually writing science fiction! 1984 and Brave New World are worth reading for their own merits even when you aren't in school any more, and more recently there's Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale and Oryx and Crake, Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, McCarthy's The Road, Calvino's Cosmicomics, and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

Lex Talionis fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jul 23, 2013

# ¿ Jul 22, 2013 23:48

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

General Battuta posted:

Normally I would say 'read a book by a woman' but I actually don't know of any epic fantasy series by women that I would recommend off the top of my head, although I have heard that Elizabeth Moon is good...I must be missing something obvious. Curse of Chalion? Temeraire? (I haven't actually read either of these)

e: Jesus Christ, Earthsea, which may be more influential on modern fantasy than Tolkien in some respects. Not sure you'll like it but you should read it anyway.

Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy comes to mind. Patricia McKillip's Riddlemaster is another good one. If KJ Parker is a woman then the Engineer's Trilogy is pretty good too.

Male authors conspicuously absent from the original list who I'd recommend include Brandon Sanderson, Daniel Abraham, and David Anthony Durham. Even more conspicuous is the absence of Patrick Rothfuss, whose work I don't actually like but everyone else seems to love.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 05:07

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

along the way posted:

I'm not big on fantasy, to be honest, but I'm looking for a book or series with clever characters gifted or not or characters who aren't necessarily gifted or special who can use their wits instead. All the better if they're evil or not-entirely-good. I'm thinking of characters like Plagueis and Thrawn, I guess.

I think you'd like Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, a space opera about a near-invalid who talks his way into running a private army. Miles isn't evil, in fact he's more or less entirely good, but the series admits that even good people can cause, well, not-entirely-good outcomes. Start with Warrior's Apprentice, that's the first with Miles.

Also check out KJ Parker's Engineer's Trilogy, an epic fantasy trilogy in which a Thrawn-like mastermind (albeit one who studies engineering, not art) manipulates people and even countries to get what he wants: revenge.

Finally, and this may be a reach for you but more people should read them so I'm saying it here anyway, there's Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond and Niccolo series. They're historical fiction, not F&SF (though they've influenced many F&SF writers), and she uses a dense and sophisticated writing style that is worlds away from Star Wars novels (especially in the Lymond books, where the protagonist often makes otherwise boring conversations more interesting for himself by speaking entirely through quotations from classical literature and poetry, usually in the original languages), but in essence they are both stories about a world-historical genius wrecking havoc on everyone who gets in his way. As Zahn does with Pallaeon, she situates the perspective outside the head of the genius, leaving the reader (along with the other characters) guessing...and fearing...their intentions. I'll also note these are very long series, but I assume most readers of this thread should be unfazed by such concerns.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2013 23:30

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

BananaNutkins posted:

Anyone read Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay? I got it for my birthday and I really don't like it so far. For one, its incredibly boring. Nothing cool has happened in over two hundred pages. The omniscient viewpoint is jarring, with the narrator dropping in at climactic points to say stuff like, "But if he only knew what lay in store for him he would not have followed her..."

The plot is unrelatable to me. So what a fictional fantasy country lost its name? It's not worth dying for. Just move somewhere else you tools.

I like Tigana a lot. It's not Kay's best work (that would be Lions of Al-Rassan) but it's in the increasingly rare subgenre of political fantasy that's not hugely grim. Kay is a popular author and one I feel safe recommending to most people here.

But not to you. If you're two hundred pages in and feel this way, I don't think you're going to change your mind by gutting out the book. Nor are you likely to appreciate Kay's other work, which is very much of the same kind.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2013 00:16

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Geek U.S.A. posted:

Anyone know any good sci-fi about the discovery of a big unidentified object and that's not written by Clarke/Reynolds/Niven?

It doesn't seem like people write these things as much any more, but from the 80s there's Spinneret by Timothy Zahn, a fun book along these lines, and Eon by Greg Bear, which is more serious but also more out there (and more dated, thanks to the inconvenient end of the Cold War). More recently, Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns takes place entirely within a really big and really fascinating object. I really didn't like the characters but the world was undeniably interesting.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2013 13:20

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

tliil posted:

Part of the problem is that sci-fi tends to be written by less than social white guys. So even if they sympathize with all those things, they can't write them well. There are exceptions.

While there's a long way to go, I'd like to point out that at least things are still moving in the right direction. I don't have any statistics but I'm pretty sure SF today is far more diverse than ever before. I also think the earlier comment about SF being more progressive in the 60s and 70s is just hindsight bias. For every risk-taking progressive SF novel published back then there were thirty or forty that were none of those things. But safe, uninspired novels are much more likely to be crappy and thus most of them are deservedly long forgotten today.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2013 13:32

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

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!

I liked it. Contra systran, I thought the tone was the best part of the story. Using an obscure, unglamorous Sumerian god was a great choice, and the contrast between the (theoretically) numinous and the every day was perfect. My only complaint is that I don't buy Naveen's ultimate decision. To me it seems unlikely that he will have any more agency living in a different house, or a different city, or a different continent. The two "worlds" of modern physics are quantum phenomena and macroscale phenomena. If Hayden affects the beer six feet away then he affects the moon as well. Now, if Naveen is leaving so that he can protect his illusion of agency then I'm totally on board, but not only does he not claim this, it would be out of character for a self-professed rationalist to consciously seek to deceive himself.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 00:04

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

systran posted:

I'm usually pretty good at spotting what kind of language or culture something came from, but this totally went over my head.

You should read Snow Crash, which (whatever its other virtues) forces the reader to sit through enormous infodumps about Sumerian mythology. Stephenson bends the facts to fit his narrative so it's not even all that educational. But afterward you'll recognize Enki's name!

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 00:31

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Hedrigall posted:

I'm nearly finished The Uplift War by David Brin. It's good but not as good as Startide Rising - probably just because I like the fins more than the chims.

I wanted to ask though (please no spoilers) do the central mysteries get answered in the second trilogy? Or is more of a side story? It definitely sounds like a side story from the blurbs I've read. By the time I finish this six book series will I know definitively: a) about the Progenitors, b) who uplifted humanity (if anyone), c) exactly what the Streaker found, and d) what happened to the Streaker and its crew after Startide Rising?

Or has Brin yet to write all of that?

The second trilogy does advance the central mystery "arc". It won't seem like it's going anywhere for a while, yet by the end you'll know a lot more about many of the questions you mentioned. It does not, however, actually resolve the story, both in the sense that some fundamental questions remain open and the fate of certain characters remains in doubt. Unfortunately Brin seems to prefer his role as second tier futurist to writing novels, so who knows when he'll get around to writing more.

I haven't read the second trilogy since Heaven's Reach came out...gulp...fifteen years ago, so even I would only take my opinion with a lot of grains of salt, but I really enjoyed the first two books. Yes, they seem like a side story and humdrum to boot after Startide Rising and Uplift War, but I thought the society depicted was quite interesting and the slow escalation into epic space opera quite satisfying. Unfortunately the third book, Heaven's Reach, was a mild disappointment. It advanced the main story like I mentioned and wrapped up most threads from the trilogy, but it didn't feel up to the standards of the earlier matieral and wasted a lot of time on a lame speculative idea that didn't really go anywhere (the business with the chimpanzee scout, for anyone who's read it).

If you're a Brin fan I'd definitely recommend reading it, but if you were working through his books in quality order I'd say read Glory Season next instead.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 13:00

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

I thought Swan was a well-realized character that didn't actually fit the role the plot wanted her to play. From the beginning of the story it's clear that her grandmother's faction (correctly!) don't really trust her, yet she still gets everything she wants and frequently seems to have dozens of people just waiting to follow her orders. More generally the book was really fuzzy about how resources were allocated by the spacer communities, which is an unusually big liability in a book which talks so much smack about Earth's capitalism (the biggest offense is at the end when the inspector, who has just spent most of the book acting like he works for a Space Interpol with a wide ambit but little actual power or authority, casually confiscates a moon-sized spaceship from an uninvolved faction and laughs off sensible objections).

I really liked the world building for the most part but unfortunately the plot ends up depending on the inspector's ludicrous idea that somehow quantum computer AIs are pretty much OK if they are in a computer cluster somewhere but are unimaginably more dangerous entities when they are housed within a Cylon-style human replica body, as if a T-800 is somehow more dangerous than Skynet.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2013 01:07

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

quote:

So apparently Redshirts is considered to be in such immortal company as Ender's Game, Neuromancer, Dune, Starship Troopers, and a Canticle for Leibowitz?

In an earlier era, when many fewer novels were published and the voters completely ignored fantasy, it was common for the voters to have read a good percentage of the novels published in a given year, so the quality of the winning novel was much higher. But with thousands of SF and fantasy novels being published, including dozens if not hundreds that are at least "pretty good", it's really difficult to have enough people read your book in the same year it comes out without bringing a solid group of fans to the table, either as a result of your previous books (Bujold, KSR) or your online presence (Scalzi and McGuire/Grant).

Bodhin posted:

Looking at that list, wow - imagine how Mira Grant feels! All 3 of her books in the trilogy, once a year, as finalists. No winners.

It's worse than that since she's also had 2 novelette and 2 novella nominations and didn't win for those either. She has a group of core fans who seem to vote for everything she does (the 2013 nominating stats make this pretty clear, i.e. 4 short stories in the top 10 of nominations) but the general voters don't seem to like her. Why that might be is up for debate, and all her nominations may be causing some to view her as a self-promoter and vote against her out of spite, but Feed came very close to winning best novel and her self-published novelette "In Sea-Salt Tears" came fairly close this year, so it's probably just a matter of time.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2013 17:49

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Azathoth posted:

I haven't paid attention to the Nebula for quite a while, but could you talk a little more about this? In my mind, the Hugo and the Nebula are both equally prestigious and the highest awards possible, with all other awards ending up somewhere a bit lower. However, that opinion was mostly formed pre-2000, so it's quite out of date I'm sure.

Well, to a degree it's subjective. I don't care as much about the Nebula and I don't see people talking about it nearly as much as the Hugo award. Google result counts aren't totally reliable but "Hugo award" has almost twice as many hits as "Nebula award" so I might not be totally on my own here.

I actually think the Nebula, absent other issues, ought to be by far the most prestigious SF award. Unlike the Hugo, its voter pool is restricted to what we might call experts. Unlike the Clarke, it's not limited by the UK market requirement or the irritating tendency for publishers not to submit worthy novels for consideration. There are hundreds of film awards, but the Oscars are by far the most prestigious for basically these reasons (to extend the analogy for you film geeks, the Clarke is a more open version of the Palme D'Or and the Hugo is, hmm, maybe the MTV Movie awards?).

Yet I don't care all that much about it, and the most anyone could argue is that the Nebula is about even with the Hugo in prestige. Why? To start with, there's the dirty secret that although the average SFWA member might theoretically have more expertise than the average Hugo voter (and even that is debatable), it's almost certainly the case that they read less. The average SFWA member has a day job just like the average Hugo voter, but instead of only reading in their spare time they are using most of it to write their own fiction. Then there's the fact that the voting pool is small and made even smaller by the fact that most SFWA members don't nominate or vote. Unlike the Hugo Awards, SFWA doesn't release the statistics, and it's almost certainly because the number of votes involved is embarrassingly low. Which, if they are lower than the Hugos...well, it must be incredibly low. A small voting pool means weird outliers show up in the short lists and sometimes even win (most famously in 2010 with "The Leviathan, Whom Thou Has Made"), most voters know most nominees so they are tempted to vote for friends (and against enemies) instead of for quality, and with so few voters they are easier for publishers or self-promoting authors to influence via campaign.

Some evidence for this can be seen in Robert Sawyer's self-contratulatory post about winning in 1996:

"Well, prior to this year, the all-time record for number of Nebula recommendations was 27...[my amazing novel] broke SFWA's database when it exceeded forty"
"Voter turnout was the highest percentage this decade, with 344 out of 930 Final Ballots returned."
"Of the six finalists, four were published by Tor Books � and, in an effort to garner Nebula votes, Tor had sent free copies of all four titles to every one of the 900+ active members of SFWA"). That Sawyer essay is enlightening on a number of levels (as well as being nauseatingly self-congratulatory)...he claims the record in the 90s for novel nominations was 27 and that the SFWA database "broke" when his allegedly glorious novel received 40.

Also not helping was the fact that before 2010 or so the Nebula had a complicated eligibility formula that most people didn't understand as well as a three stage ballot. Since then it's been simplified and the voting pool was expanded to include associate members (beginning authors, basically, with only one or two short fiction sales), but they got rid of preference voting for the winners, which I think was a bad idea.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 01:40

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

House Louse posted:

I don't totally buy the argument that the Nebulas are less reliable because I think that would imply that juried awards are worthless - they seem to be halfway between juried awards and the Hugos' "anyone with the money" model. Although maybe you feel it's a worse of both worlds situation? (And if so what about, say, the BFAs, where members select the shortlists that judges choose from?)

The difference between the Nebula and the Clarke is that the Clarke jury reads every single novel before they even make a shortlist. There's an initial filter in terms of what gets published in the UK and what publishers choose to submit, but this still left 54 novels in 2011 and 60 in 2012. From that they pick a shortlist of 6 books, so it's pretty much a straight application of Sturgeon's Law. How many Nebula nominators do you think read 60 novels published in the previous year? It's very possible the answer is zero.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 18:21

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Darth Walrus posted:

Not to say that there wasn't a lot of misogyny (because female author writing speculative fiction)

I don't know about a lot. Overt misogyny towards female writers comes from a very tiny minority. A loud, obnoxious minority, but still a tiny one. Since we're talking about awards, consider that since 1975 women have won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel 15.5 and 15 times respectively. That's about 40%, which isn't quite even but it's pretty close, especially considering novels by male authors probably outnumbered (and still outnumber, if you ignore urban fantasy like the Hugo and Nebula voters do) those by female authors by considerably more than 60%.

This suggests, incidentally, that what is happening is that the left side of the female author bell curve is getting suppressed...great authors will get published and win awards no matter who they are; that's been true since Le Guin became the first woman to win a best novel Hugo in 1970. But an author who is merely "okay" has a better chance of being published if they are male. This in turn suggests that the easiest, most comforting explanation for the novels published disparity, namely that women are less interested in genre fiction than men and so less try to write it and less submit to publishers, isn't true, and that either there's bias at the publisher level (I've always doubted this since many if not most editors now are women) or else male readers are less willing to take a chance on an unknown female author, depressing sales and meaning female authors are more often dropped after their first contract.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2013 23:50

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Khizan posted:

Really, I think Sanderson's problem is that he does a workmanlike job at everything without excelling at anything. A jack of all trades while a master of none.

I don't think much of Sanderson's prose or characters. "Workmanlike" is honestly a little generous there. But there's a reason he's popular and it's his mastery, yes mastery, of rational world-building. For a lot people, this appeals because of the magic systems. It's basically science fiction; he's playing the exact same games with the rules of his magic that Isaac Asimov played in the original robot stories. Personally I find that neat but not really a compelling reason to read him but lots of people really like that.

What I really like is a different manifestation of that same rational world-building, the way the reader's understanding of a complex world slowly coalesces over the course of the work. When I finished the first Mistborn book, suddenly 15 different things that hadn't quite made sense clicked into focus. And when I finished the whole trilogy, a ton more things suddenly made sense, including many that I hadn't even realized weren't making sense before thanks to authorial sleight of hand. I enjoyed the mythology side of the show Lost while it was airing, but it didn't end up amounting to much. There's no consistent, grand unified theory to Lost; they were making it up as they went along. Sanderson doesn't make anything up as he goes along, there really is a consistent grand unified theory, and unlike say Gene Wolfe you actually can fully understand how it all fits together after a single read. I really, really love that and no one else does this even remotely as well as he does.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 23:25

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Irony.or.Death posted:

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.

Near the end of Book of the New Sun, Severian experiences an epiphany that pretty much blew my mind when I first read it and remained wonderful upon rereading. Naturally it means nothing without the context but for anyone who's read the book recently I'm talking about the sequence that ends with him throwing his boots into the ocean, that he "might not walk shod on holy ground". In general, Book of the New Sun is structured such that the story's climax is not something about the plot (which is "spoiled" on the first page) but a sequence of revelations about the nature of the universe.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 04:18

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

This. The entirety of the part I read was how badass this kid was, and how he was gonna stab people in the throat all the time, and he doesn't like being angry, cause it makes him angry. I'm all for batshit protagonists, but the writing in this book is just bad. It's literally written as "angry angsty kid being cool and angry and not taking crap off anyone cause he'll murder em, cause this kid is TOUGH!" and I need a bit more dimension to my books instead of "8th grade nerd's wish fulfillment fantasy cause he'll show those bullies one day, oh yes he will!".

I want to offer a measured alternative view here. I liked the trilogy because (a) despite what people are saying here it is, in fact, much better written than most fantasy novels, (b) although the world is a watered down version of the Dying Earth far future that Vance and Wolfe did much better, even watered down that's still pretty fun, and (c) contrary to what the many people who hate these books tend to say, as readers we are not required to sympathize with the sociopathic protagonist. Because the novel is written in a retrospective third person, there's no suspense about what will happen to Jorg. It's clear very quickly that every time he gets in a jam he'll do something ridiculous without having thought it through and it will all undeservedly work out for him. The suspense comes from the secondary characters, who are all far more sympathetic than Jorg and not at all protected by his plot armor (which turns out to have a pretty reasonable in-universe explanation, incidentally). Almost all of the minor characters in their very different ways try to turn Jorg from a heartless killer into something vaguely recognizable as human. This a plot as old as The Iliad but it's done pretty well here: by the end Jorg isn't cheaply redeemed through a woman's love or the power of friendship, but he develops a small measure of empathy for other people and is not quite as terrible a person as a result. Considering where he started from that's not a bad outcome.

So I like it, but I don't love it either. Although I like Jorg's muted character arc, the actual plot and setting don't really go anywhere interesting. Also, on violence the trilogy tries to have its cake and eat it too. While doing everything necessary to support my anti-Jorg reading, there's no question that in the action scenes it plays to the cheap seats and invites us to marvel at how Jorg's lack of inhibitions when it comes to violence constantly catch his more civilized enemies off guard. And I don't know if I agree with calling these books grimdark. To me, grim dark rubs your nose in the entrails, the disease, the pain, and the misery. All that is present in these books, but the narrative is so internal to Jorg that it's very muted. Jorg rarely has anything very bad happen to him personally, and since he's a sociopath who doesn't care about other people, he doesn't devote much space to what they're going through. And while I'm not a fan of grimdark in general, at its best it can say that unlike most fantasy it doesn't sugarcoat violence. I thought the violence in this trilogy was a little too sanitized by Jorg's perspective.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2013 04:49

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Inadequately posted:

I recently picked up a Golden Age science fiction anthology and quite enjoyed it. It's fun reading early science fiction and seeing how the genre has changed over the years. Does anyone have any recommendations for good Golden Age/pulp sci-fi? I found an old copy of Triplanetary at a local store, so I think I'll start off with the Lensmen series.

I couldn't really get into Lensmen but I enjoyed the first few John Carter books, starting with A Princess of Mars. Those are in the public domain so you can get them from Project Gutenberg. Depending on your definition of pulp, a collection of Arthur C Clarke's stories and Asimov's Foundation trilogy (just the trilogy) would also be good. Probably not pulp but apparently required reading if you're interested in the history of the genre is something by Olaf Stapledon, either Last and Fire Men or Star-Maker (I confess I haven't gotten to him yet myself). And if you're willing to venture outside the core genre to literary proto-SF, 1984, Brave New World, Out of the Silent Planet, and Voyage to Arcturus are all from the "Golden Age" period and well worth reading today.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 04:23

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

ManOfTheYear posted:

The last time I read fantasy was when I read Hobbit for the hundreth time when I was nine years old, after that I've been dwelling on non-fiction, reading history, political history, criminology, true crime and some popular science stuff. Learning new things is fun. Now, though, I'm having an urge to check out some fiction, but my criteria is that it shouldn't be pure entertainment. Well written and exciting is all fine, nothing wrong with that, but I want books that in one way or another make me think. Like if the books have some interesting philosophical stuff or the theme is morally or otherwise (for example it's about political or racial issues) interesting. Well written is a huge plus. If the books are adult and mature fantasy, that would be fun.

Science fiction is alright too.

Edit: Oh, and if the books would have something interesting to say about religion, it would be extremely interesting.

Hieronymous Alloy is right, start with Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. It's fantasy, science fiction, religion, philosophy, and awesome all in the same book. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun merits the same description, but despite being genre it's uncompromisingly literary so be prepared to read between the lines (almost all of Wolfe's work has interesting things to say about philosophy and religion, but start there). Agree on Lions of Al-Rassan as well, fantasy about how group loyalty comes between friends. I also think David Anthony Durham's recent Acacia trilogy, while a little dry, had some interesting things to say about race.

If you don't mind more overtly religious material, there's The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell. If you really don't mind more overtly religious material, move on to Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis. If you'd rather read a religious novel by someone who inexplicably had religious beliefs that have been pretty much defunct for fifteen hundred years (gnosticism) there's David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus.

On the philosophy end, if you like classical philosophy then check out Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If you're more interested in the modern philosophy of consciousness then try China Mieville's Embassytown.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2013 22:26

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Fallom posted:

The important distinction, to me, is that The Sparrow directly confronts and deconstructs religious philosophy while C.S. Lewis uses allegory (or supposition, according to him). I think they end up being very different in practice and The Sparrow definitely isn't going to have the reader going "waaaait, this book is about Jesus, isn't it?".

Guys, I didn't recommend Narnia, I recommended Out of the Silent Planet, which is not in any way an allegory nor does it disguise its religious material for kids. The aliens explicitly worship the Christian god, and undaunted by this Weston advocates secular humanism. Just like in a Ted Chiang story, the novel takes as a given that a certain form of Christianity exists and then works out the implications. It's just as direct as The Sparrow, and though of course you know going in where Lewis's loyalties lie, it's rare these days to see humanism attacked by anyone more sophisticated than the Taliban and I think for anyone interested in this stuff it's worth understanding where Lewis was coming from. (The two sequels have their moments but, alas, are not really worth reading.)

Still, this reminds me that the short stories of Ted Chiang are not to be missed by anyone interested in religion and SF. Manoftheyear, and indeed anyone who hasn't read them, should check out "Tower of Babel", "Hell is the Absence of God", and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate". The first two are in his amazing collection Stories of Your Life and Others, the third is available on Amazon as a standalone.

As for recommending Wolfe to someone new to fantasy...well, I think Wolfe is just as hard to read if you've read 100 normal SF or fantasy novels. I always caveat a Wolfe recommendation with a warning about the difficulty, but when people come from out of genre and talk about wanting good writing, I'd rather point them to the best writing than risk reinforcing the (mostly correct, admittedly) stereotypes about genre writing by sticking with safer choices.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2013 02:19

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

tankfish posted:

I was wondering if anyone has any recommendation's on books where the main heroine grows into a evil/iron queen?

There are several main characters but otherwise David Anthony Durham's Acacia trilogy qualifies.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 00:53

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Fremry posted:

Are there any good books out there (sci-fi or thriller maybe) with an ocean setting?

If something a little more along fantasy lines is okay then China Mieville's The Scar takes place pretty much entirely in a moving pirate "city" built out of hundreds of ships all lashed together. It's the second of his Bas-Lag books but they can be read in any order.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2013 02:35

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Pyroclastic posted:

The back of the book has a sample of his next book, Mysterium which sounds a lot like the concept behind Flint's 1632 series. Small American town gets zapped back in time and space (in this one, I think it's Turkey shortly after the time of Christ, but the sample doesn't go with the town). Has anyone read it? It worth picking up?

I read Mysterium a long time ago and my recollection is that the story was pretty good but that I didn't think the ending did enough to pay off the mystery setup. Wilson is very good at setting up these really perplexing SF mysteries but he gets better at actually resolving them later in his career. I liked his later novel Chronoliths better: really fun premise and, I thought, a pretty solid ending. His most popular novel is Spin, which won a ton of awards and must have sold well since he wrote two sequels. I liked but didn't love Spin, but it's the Wilson I recommend to people who are interested in this sort of story. Haven't read the sequels. The knock on both Chronoliths and Spin, at least for me, is that the characters aren't all that likable, but your mileage may vary.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2014 13:33

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Kalman posted:

I recall Destination Void being pretty good. I mean, it isn't Dune, but non-Dune Herbert is still pretty good.

Destination Void is really interesting but people should be warned it's not an accessible adventure epic like Dune, it's a seriously odd book that is part confined psychological thriller and part exhaustive philosophical treatise on the nature of consciousness. Like Embassytown meets The Explorer or the movie Cube.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2014 12:30

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

Too Like the Lightning is like Gene Wolfe set to "Normal" difficulty. This is pretty much the highest praise I can give a book...I love Gene Wolfe but see his brilliance as being mostly orthogonal to how opaque he insists on making his narratives.

I draw the comparison because Too Like the Lightning features:

First person narration that is itself a text situated within the novel's world and heavily sprinkled with reminders of this.
The narrator's often fascinating philosophical reflections on the story they are telling
A focus on religious and philosophical concerns that feel rather old-fashioned (explicitly here, less so in Wolfe)
A narrator who initially seems way too "special" to be anything but pandering to the reader (and while it seems unlikely he died and didn't realize it ala Wolfe, whatever JEDD did to him to make him incapable of killing might end up pretty close

But it's "Normal" difficulty because the broad outlines of the plot seem evident after a single (albeit careful) read and it's if anything too progressive about gender instead of Wolfe's problematic approach to female characters. Highly recommended, though the story just stops for now, it doesn't end.

For those who have read the book, I enjoyed how initially Mycroft seems like a "I feel unnecessarily guilty about my not-all-that-dark past" emo stereotype, then whoops, he really did do seriously bad things, and oh, he's still hiding Saladin's existence, and boy, suddenly it's much more scary that he still knows how to evade trackers. I think he'll end up having a semi-sympathetic motive in the end given the railroad track ethics discussions toward the end of the book and the survivor's (forget the name) efforts to destabilize the world system the moment they're back from the Moon. But then by the end of the book, the world system seems more and more ominous, with the world leaders seeming rather corrupt and maybe even colluding against their own populaces, so maybe Mycroft will discover he was manipulated into it.

I can see how the gender stuff might annoy people but I loved it and thought it was far more thought-provoking than the Ancillary books. And while the way religion worked was wholly unbelievable (as was the idea that there are 800 million flying cars instead of telepresence) it was still fun (in particular the revelation of what the J in JEDD stood for made me laugh out loud at how offensive it would be to that society).

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 19:11

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:31

Lex Talionis: Feb 6, 2011

I would definitely advise reading Urth of the New Sun only when the four books of Book of the New Sun are fresh in your mind since there's lots of callbacks and even explicit commentary by the narrator about the earlier parts of the story.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2019 13:26

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > The Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread: Read the OP, Bridge of Birds, and Murderbot

Popular Human posted:

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Bodhin posted: