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Hedrigall posted:Did you guys see the Locus award winners? Scalzi is chair of the science fiction fantasy writers association, and has been involved in a fair amount of outreach and damage control this year. It wouldn't be shocking were there some degree of bias there. That said, I haven't read KSR since the Mars series ages ago, and found him super dry. I know 2312 got praise, but how accessible is it?
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Jun 30, 2013 12:52
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There's also a new Garret, P.I. Book coming out tomorrow. The last one, Gilded Latten Bones ended up being a pretty dramatic departure from the fairly repetitive priors, with Garret pretty much sitting around (with odd and excessive chamber pot usage) while getting a cast of pretty much every minor character mentioned ever to solve the mystery. It felt very much like a send off, so I'm curious as to what Cook is going to do with the series now. I don't have high expectations, but I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
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Jul 1, 2013 12:03
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The last book of the Thomas Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson is out today. The Last Dark. I know opinions are mixed about even the original books here, which are unarguably better than these recent publications, but I thought I'd put it out there. I've found the new series to be worth reading, albeit probably not necessary, if that makes sense.
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Oct 15, 2013 13:37
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More to the point, The Praxis/Dread Empire's Fall isn't gritty or dark much at all. I've harped on it before, but they're mostly notable because, despite being space opera and quasi-militaryish sci-fi, the protagonists aren't perfect. But the antagonists are perfectly incompetent, so it doesn't matter. I love the genre, but those books are thoroughly forgetable.
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Nov 22, 2013 01:55
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Pretty much no one recommends you read Absolution Gap. It's terrible and contributes nothing to the story. For what it's worth. New, shallow characters, nonsensical plot, deus ex machina in the last paragraph. It actively makes the previous two books worse.
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Dec 23, 2013 00:11
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SquadronROE posted:I've been upping the quality of my sci-fi reading lately, and it's been one of the most rewarding things I've done recently, especially as I start getting more into software engineering and thinking more along the lines of an actual engineer. Read Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky next, if you loved Fire. It is peripherally related in ways I won't spoil. The direct sequel to Fire is Vinge's least good book, so if you have a long list skip it for now. It has serious second book of trilogy issues. Charles Stross has a novel called Accelerando which is all about the singularity, but it has bad characters and it is one of the few books I've ever given up on. The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince are both excellent transhuman stories that are regularly posted about here. Velius fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jan 6, 2014 |
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Jan 6, 2014 19:47
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Qwo posted:There was mention of Simmons/Hyperion a few pages back, I might as well chime in and say that I'm about 3/4s through Fall of Hyperion. I actually like it a lot! I think it's a pretty gripping read, and it doesn't suffer from strokes of silly English teacher fan-fiction like the first book did (John Keats in a shopping mall shoot-out is reaaaaaalllllyyyyy dumb). I'm not sure how many more ways exist to say Endymion is bad. Like bad enough to retroactively make the first books worse. Which they do. You say you like the characters and universe, well, none of the characters carry over and the ending is made meaningless. Really, don't read them.
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Jan 9, 2014 14:32
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For the other two people who ever read the series, the next book in Glen Cook's Instrumentalities of the Night series apparently came out this week. I suspect it's going to be the end of the series, since the sales have been abysmal. I haven't even started it yet to see if it's worth recommending, but the series in general is kind of a tough sell - alternate world Dark/Middle ages with magic and the like, with Cook's typical flawed protagonists. I enjoy it but parts of it are pretty tough to get through, much more so than Cook's other works.
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Mar 15, 2014 23:47
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Man, Sci-fi release dates are really boom/bust. Looks like my current set of pre orders includes: May 20th: Severed Streets, Paul Cornell (sequel to London Falling) May 27: Skin Game, Jim Butcher June 3: On the Steel Breeze, Alastair Reynolds June 17: Cibola Burn, James S. A. Corey July 1: Rhesus Chart, Charles Stross July 1: Tower Lord, Anthony Ryan July 15: Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi August 5: Widow's House, Daniel Abraham August 5: Magician's Land, Lev Grossman ... October 7: Dark Defiles, Richard Morgan October 7: Foxglove Summer, Ben Aaronovich Meanwhile I haven't bought a thing since Words of Radiance, and before that was Republic of Thieves or something. Do publishers assume more people read in summertime or something? Velius fucked around with this message at 12:13 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 11:57
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Combed Thunderclap posted:For anyone interested in The Rhesus Chart, you can read the first chapter right now by getting a sample from Amazon or the iTunes book store. I'm really looking forward to it, especially since Stross now seems quasi-permanently tied up in the Merchant Princes series thanks to his apparent obsession with it and/or the dread magic of publishing contracts and Snowden went and published the next Halting State book before Stross could write it. I finished the merchant princes during the break between Laundry books. It's actually pretty interesting, albeit not very marketable apparently. Is he writing more of them now or something? I just remember him complaining about bad sales or something.
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Jun 27, 2014 00:02
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Every time this comes up, it becomes clear that everyone either loathes Endymion or thought they were kind of okay. I'm in the former boat. Fall of Hyperion has an ending, and the story makes sense. Endymion retcons absolutely everything, ruins the Shrike, and has some seriously creepy pedo vibes.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:01
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InMyHighCastle posted:I'm thinking of getting stuck into Mark Lawrence's latest novel, Prince of Fools; I'm a big fan of Joe Abercrombie's stuff, and I've heard that Lawrence's writing is similarly grim 'n gritty. Very iffy. They're ultra grim dark, to an almost comical extent. The setting is actually interesting, but I found the last book in particular to be a serious slog to a fairly unsatisfying ending. Velius fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 00:12
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ed balls balls man posted:Err apparently The Magician's Land is out tomorrow but I can't find a kindle edition on Amazon UK or US, is it just not going to happen? I preordered it ages ago, and as far as I can tell it's still in the store.
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Aug 4, 2014 23:41
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CaptainScraps posted:There's one thing that pissed me off about the Magician's Land. As soon as Alice came back, Quentin suddenly started going "Oh, she's such a better magician than I am. She was always better than I was. And now she's still super better. Discount the fact that I've been training for 10 years and went into super sperglord magician mode after getting my collarbone torn to shreds. Grossman has explicitly said in interviews that (end of The Magicians spoilers) Quentin hunkering down and becoming totally badass at magic after what happened to him was a mistake. I think, thematically, it made some sense that he essentially got everything he ever might have aspired to magically, but still been so filled with ennui that it didn't matter, hence why he goes back to the Wall Street job. Then when he actually wrote up the sequel he had to de-power Quentin to make the Hero's Quest stuff sensical. But really, from the start we've seen that Alice was way more invested with whatever it was that made people actually attempt to do things with magic than Quentin, even after they got involved.. So it didn't bother me that much.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:52
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savinhill posted:I love his fantasy series, if I was to compare it to another I'd say it's most like Abercrombie. The last book is supposed to be coming out later this year too. I, also, really enjoy the Land Fit for Heroes. The setting is interesting, and it's more than a little refreshing to have two of three leads in a fantasy series be GLBT. It's only a little grim, not excessively so, and has the usual violence Morgan is known for.
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Aug 14, 2014 01:44
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big scary monsters posted:I've just finished reading Alistair Reynold's Redemption Ark. Revelation Space was cool and Chasm City was better, but I found this one a little disappointing. Does the series start to trail off now or is it worth picking up Absolution Gap? I hated Absolution Gap, and I've enjoyed most of Reynolds stuff. There's virtually no space action that I can recall and most of the book centers on some dumb cultists. Then comes the ending, which I found extremely dissatisfying to the extent of making the earlier books worse in retrospect. I'd recommend stopping at Absolution and reading the other stuff he's written. I might be in the minority but I actually liked Century Rain, although Chasm City and House of Suns are probably his most well regarded stuff. Reynolds newest series I found to be a total snoozer. Velius fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 22:36
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Megazver posted:Hugo winners are in. I enjoyed it. Certainty a different spin on space opera or whathaveyou. Neptune's Brood was doomed by being a sequel to the sexbot cover novel, which I still haven't read in spite of loving Stross. No idea what Parasite or Warbound are, haven't heard a whisper of either. Wheel of time certainly didn't deserve to win given how terrible the ending was. 13 books to end with that?
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Aug 18, 2014 00:25
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Cardiovorax posted:Never mind that Banks did it first, twenty-five years ago and like an order of magnitude less obnoxiously. He actually managed to make an interesting commentary on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis out of it, instead of mediocre tumblr bait. I'm trying to think of a more pretentious post that could have made the same points, but I don't think I can. I feel like we have enough material at this point for a Cardiovorax post bingo game. We get it, really, you think Ancillary Justice, Hugo Award winner, was not an original work or interesting to you. Please stop haranguing.
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Aug 19, 2014 14:20
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The next book in Richard Morgan's Land Fit for Heroes series comes out tomorrow in the US, "The Dark Defiles". It's substantially longer than the first two and I think concludes the series. Looking forward to it greatly.
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Oct 6, 2014 21:57
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FAGGY CLAUSE posted:Looking for a book with just some bad rear end character(s). Think I've read all the Gemmell books that I'd be interested in and Abercrombie. Anything else out there I haven't thought of? Richard Morgan's Land Fit for Heroes trilogy just finished. The characters are pretty bad rear end.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:23
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JackKnight posted:Has anyone read 'Metaplanetary' & 'Superluminal' by Tony Daniel? Those two books are pretty much my favorite out of all the books I have read. Can't get much better than a semi sentient wild Jeep that consistently evades people who hunt wild Jeeps for sport. And that isn't even the best part. These books are massively detailed, with tech that is wildly ambitious and political situations that are similar to current day, but also very heavily influenced by tech, plus AI rights, wars, evolved humans, etc. :-D I only read Superliminal, which wasn't advertised as a sequel. Made it a bit difficult to follow, but good high concept ultratech Sci fi. Pity they sold so badly there's no actual ending.
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Oct 22, 2014 01:12
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regularizer posted:A few pages back someone recommended a sci fi book about a spaceship whose captain acted a lot like Zap Brannigan. Can anyone tell me the name? Probably Steven Erikson's Willful Child. It was fun, if not super deep.
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Dec 13, 2014 14:50
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While Asher's Polity stuff is generally enjoyable, provided you can get past the bland characters to the vivid settings and action, his Owners series is hilariously bad. Evil socialists are running earth into the ground, and it's up to our Hero to murder all of them. Then go into space and murder more of them. Then go to Mars and murder still more mustache twirling wealth-redistributors. It reads like bad Crusader: No Remorse fanfiction or something. Nothing but random violence inflicted by our Hero on Bad people, with occasional level changes to a new location. Velius fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Apr 24, 2015 |
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Apr 24, 2015 16:18
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Cardiac posted:If you interpret the Earth government in the Owners series as socialists I don't know what to say. They do have an interesting case of environmentalism in the series. You're right, I can't actually remember what, if any, supposed rationale existed for the evil 'World Government' to be in charge of everything. I just know they were characterized as 'euthenizing the lucky' and burning alive unlucky people who get on their bad side by like page 2, and had an evil prison and evil space station with associated set piece battles. I must have missed the sentence mentioning the basis for their evil takeover somewhere among the exploding heads. Honestly, I can get past over the top strawmanning of political opponents in sci-fi, that comes with the genre, and clearly this isn't on a caliber comparable to Rob S. Pierre leading the Socialist Government of Haven or something. My biggest issue with the Owners is just how much of a downgrade in quality it is compared with the Polity stuff. Not that the latter were classic literature, but they had almost unparalleled creativity in the world building. Then we get the Owners which is completely generic dystopian fiction: Overpopulation? Check. Evil world government? Check. Space station with lasers pointing downwards? Hell yes. Brooding hero with a grudge, hot scientist girlfriend, and AI sidekick? drat right. It's just missing Megaweapon to be straight out of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Asher had seemed to be a more more cynical/realistic Iain Banks in his take on AI and so on, and this latest schlock reads as worse than Amazon self-published mil-sci fi, it's just very startling. Velius fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Apr 26, 2015 |
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Apr 26, 2015 03:27
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Kesper North posted:Poseidon's Wake isn't being released in the US until February 2016?! Yup. The publishing industry is a bunch of relics that can't adapt to change, I can't wait for them to go under.
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May 6, 2015 23:30
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Why is "never before published" somehow a worthwhile blurb to put on the cover of a novel? I'm trying to figure it out but it doesn't make sense.
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May 8, 2015 02:50
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robotox posted:Could any of you fine folks direct me to some books in the vein of Stross' Laundry Files, Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, and Cornell's Shadow Police series? Basically, anything sci-fi or fantasy that has a noir/detective/crime vibe. I've read most of the classic cyberpunk stuff. Alistair Reynolds's Chasm City is half noir mystery, and excellent. His Century Rain is alt history noir but not that well regarded here, its at best okay.
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May 11, 2015 01:26
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Alhazred posted:Just finished The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Have to say that after reading Harry Potter it was refreshing to read about students at a magical university that are more concerned about loving and doing drugs than saving the world. It was also kinda neat how it showed that living in an eldritch society would probably suck (the prom queen is burned for example). The Magicians explores a similar premise. Pretty polarizing around here, but I enjoyed them a great deal.
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May 21, 2015 20:04
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Paragon8 posted:That's fair. It's not that magic is "hard", it's that it's mind destroyingly, dehumanizingly hard and awful. The people capable of doing magic are all broken or crazy, and the extent of their difficulties parallels their willingness to devote their lives to essentially mastering hacking reality through exploiting the weird loopholes people discovered in "magic". Which seems to consist of absurdly precise finger and hand motions, memorizing completely useless bullshit and learning dozens of useless, dead languages. It's utterly dissatisfing and pointless outside the whole magic thing. In the first book you have people who manage to do that trying to figure out what the hell to do with their lives once they're done with school, how to become adults or grow, when they can potentially achieve almost anything with the snap of a finger. It makes almost any achievement devoid of value or satisfaction. In that situation it isn't surprising the characters are unlikeable, and the two sequels are very much focused on how they grow up. Velius fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jun 4, 2015 |
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Jun 4, 2015 02:00
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Drifter posted:If you don't like THAT Dread Empire, you should go read Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire. Fuckin' nice set of books. Except for the part where they have no tension whatsoever. When the very premise of your story is that the two protagonists are the only people with functioning brains in the galaxy there isn't much to keep the reader interested. I actually liked the characters a lot, but Jesus, have someone face a challenge sometime.
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Jul 7, 2015 00:27
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Linnear posted:Has anyone read the newer Shannara books? I'm feeling kinda nostalgic with the news of the Shannara series on MTV and feel like revisiting the world. If you've read one Shannara book you've read every Shannara book.
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Jul 14, 2015 17:58
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corn in the bible posted:People like to talk about the pedo stuff in Piers Anthony but somehow everyone forgives the endless rape apologia in Stephen Donaldson This is just disingenuous. There is rape in Donaldson's books but it's never not a horrific act. That's central to one of the major themes of the first Covenant trilogy and the Gap series is much more complicated than "rape apologia".
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Jul 25, 2015 12:59
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The problem is that whole series is a burden for the reader >_< Well, no one said Donaldson was a fun read. I know I bailed on the Gap series after book one. Saying he loves and endorses rape is just kind of silly.
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Jul 26, 2015 02:53
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flosofl posted:So, does anyone remember the Julian May book series of the Pliocene Saga and the related Milieu Trilogy? They turned up in my Amazon recommendations, and I'm looking to get them again. I remember loving them when I was in HS (and far less critical of what I read) when they were first put out in paperback by Del-Ray and had amazing Michael Whelan cover art. I'll write up on whether they stood the test of time and my fully developed cynicism if anyone's interested. I still have that book, and the others. Like you I adored them back in the nineties, I've revisited them a couple times since then. They're not half bad, although the series could probably have used a few more female characters. Aiken Drum us a pretty awesome character. I could have handled a bit more resolution in the end but open questions are fun too,
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Aug 8, 2015 21:46
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Snuffman posted:No spoilers, I've always thought Vernor Vinge wrote some of the best endings: just the right amount of closure, wrap up, villain getting comeuppance and sequel plot threads unresolved. This makes me very sad. Admittedly, the way Fire is setup makes a sequel to Deepness impossible, or at least hard to justify, but Vinge is so good that the mediocrity of Children is just depressing. He writes one every five years or so, so a stinker makes the wait pretty long.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:25
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gohmak posted:probe, huh? I really didn't like that part. I get that (dark forest spoilers) People in the future were really complacent and hadn't faced the same challenges of the past characters but "let's put 3000 spaceships within a few hundred kilometers of each other is beyond any possible justification. I felt like the book had way too much filler too. The cultural revolution stuff in book one was integral to the decision to call the trisolarians and was useful character development besides. In Forest we spend half the book looking into back story on Luo Ji that really doesn't influence anything. Maybe something is lost in translation but the whole lazy layabout thing making him impossible to predict didn't end up having anything to do with the eventual resolution of things, which instead relied on his prior theorizing. Speaking of which, two plot points I can't recall resolved: why was Luo chosen as a wallbreaker when no one knew about his tall with Dr. Ye? Just 8 billion to 1 coincidence? And second, did the mind control thing inducing a need to flee ever manifest in anything? The guy who deserted couldn't have been exposed...
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Aug 29, 2015 01:34
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less laughter posted:I wouldn't call books 6 and 7 children's books tbh, there's some pretty dark and hosed up poo poo in those. Like camping. Oh god, the camping.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:45
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Junkenstein posted:How long does this primitive alien stuff last in A Fire Upon The Deep? It's not that I don't find it interesting, just not really what I signed up for. There's a lot. It's one of the reasons I prefer Deepness, the perspective shifts in that are a bit less jarring.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:29
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anilEhilated posted:Regarding the Cook talk, I'm gonna chime in as the guy who likes the Garrett PI series. The first book isn't anything special, but it'll get going - a series as long as that has got to have its ups and downs. While the individual stories are usually good, the real star of that show is the setting - Cook manages to develop his fantasy city and its place in the world in a very believable way throughout quite a few historical events (as well as a couple of utterly bizarre ones - aliens, anyone?) and shows how its affected. The Garret books are enjoyable. Old Tin Sorrows is probably my favorite too, although I did like the most recent two books, Gilded Latten Bones and Dread Bronze Ambitions as well. They're pretty far removed from the rest of the series though, especially Gilded, and change the tone a lot. In the middle some of the books blur together a lot.
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Oct 15, 2015 16:15
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I figure finished Library at Mt. Char a few weeks ago and was reflecting on it again today. Obvious end of book spoilers follow: So Father set things in motion for Carolyn to succeed him, which is very obvious from the ending. What made her the choice though? He says David begged and screamed, while Carolyn never did, as though that was some key difference. Also that she was far more monstrous when sent on that path by repeated grilling. So what? What is it about facing torture and horror without backing down that makes one an ideal successor? Is it just because that's how he arose, and that's the only trait he can think about in his successor?
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Oct 26, 2015 23:39
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