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Maybe I'm not being clear about it. It isn't the outcome I don't understand, but why (Mt. Char spoilers) father chose that way to do it, and why torturing them until one of them went mad to generate a monster to challenge the others was his only MO.
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Oct 26, 2015 23:57
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I really liked Deed of Paksenarrion, but was wary of the other books in the setting once Paks wasn't the focus. The Legacy of Gird spinoff didn't really seem that novel since they seemed like more traditional heroes quest stuff.
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Dec 4, 2015 02:51
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Oh. Apparently the last book in the Daniel Abraham Dagger and the Coin series is out. I enjoyed the earlier books, surprised this came out with so little notice. http://www.amazon.com/The-Spiders-War-Dagger-Coin-ebook/dp/B00QQQL830/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
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Mar 19, 2016 02:14
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One of my favorite things about Gibson is that he loathes Shadowrun. "[T]he admixture of cyberspace and, spare me, *elves*, has always been more than I could bear to think about."
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Apr 29, 2016 01:12
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I love most Vinge books but Children of the Sky is definitely his weakest. I'd put it on part with The Peace War, as in not actively bad reading but mediocre by comparison to anything else he's written. Very skippable plot wise as well, until and unless he writes another.
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May 16, 2016 22:53
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blue squares posted:After 30 pages of the first Expanse book I have groaned several times. I particularly hated the description of plastic buttons and switches as being "designed for high Gs." As if that could possibly matter. Hey, if you're strapped into an acceleration chair you're not going to be reaching up to a screen in front of you to push buttons, they'll be built into the chair right by your fingers. These details are really important to the narrative! My space-immersion!
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Jun 11, 2016 12:22
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anilEhilated posted:Hey folks, looking for an audiobook recommendation for the gym again - need something light, page-turny and not big on romance/sex scenes. Last thing I tried was Consider Phlebas and I gave up on that around chapter seven, just felt slow and meandering and frankly boring. Any ideas? How about Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Fouls Bane? There's a little sex but no romance at all, and it's from the seventies so maybe you haven't read it yet.
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Jul 11, 2016 13:50
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Kesper North posted:Just read Reynolds. He does what Hull Zero Three tried to do, except better, and David Bowie does the soundtrack. So more 'the only remotely competent person in the Galaxy winning against idiots'?
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Jul 24, 2016 00:03
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I pretty much agree with Morgan that gratuitous violence being acceptable (if not ubiquitous) in media while sex is forbidden is one of our more silly societal beliefs. If it bugs you move past it or read something else. For every scene involving licking drugs off someone's breasts, there's another describing chopping off of a head followed by excision of the base of the spinal cord. I feel like the wrong one of those is innocuous.
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Aug 5, 2016 17:53
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apophenium posted:Aside from Kovacs mentioning blood rushing to the tip of his sleeve's penis Altered Carbon is the book I didn't know I wanted to read. I love detective/mystery stories a lot and the sci-fi trappings give it an interesting bit of flavor. Are the rest of the books in the trilogy on par? They're really different. Broken Angels is about Kovacs working as a mercenary pacifying an uprising on a non-earth planet, while there are mysteries it's much less noir. Woken Furies is back on his home planet and there's a lot of dealing with his past and trying to protect someone. All three are good, but I'm probably least attached to the third one. Alastair Reynolds has a bit of mystery to some of his stuff. People here don't like it much but Century Rain is half noir, half sci-fi. Chasm City is great book with a mystery but it's more straight sci-fi.
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Aug 5, 2016 18:36
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I was trying to not ruin the setup. 🙁
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Aug 6, 2016 00:32
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Oh dear. Terry Goodkind in a book club. I find the notion fascinating, so I feel like I can't recommend you avoid it. I do feel obliged to ask how uncomfortable your group would be if there were hypothetical sadomasichistic sex ninjas? Also evil chickens?
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Sep 2, 2016 05:32
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tooterfish posted:I just found Accelerando on my e-reader and I can't for the loving life of me remember how it got there. I love Stross and gave up on accelerando very quickly. It's a tough sell, since it's basically him trying to do a by-definition-indescribable-to-humans Singularity: the novel. I'll try again sometime.
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Sep 3, 2016 00:14
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The Black Company also heavily inspired the Myth games. The notion of evil wizards etc wasn't exactly groundbreaking, but the point of view of fallible infantry grunts in over their head was pretty novel for fantasy.
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Mar 17, 2017 21:33
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FastestGunAlive posted:Portal fantasy; I remember reading "Orcs!" when I was in high school. The orcs open up a portal to our world and get their hands on military weapons and a soldier who trains them, then they wreck the elves using machine guns and Huey helicopters. I stopped reading because there was some unnecessarily long and explicit orc on orc sex scenes. I stopped reading fantasy for several years after that It's actually "Grunts!" by Mary Gentle. It was actually pretty decent as a genre parody. The premise isn't that a portal opens to our world exactly, but rather that a Dragon hoarded treasures from various worlds it accessed by portals. In its stash are a bunch of M-16s, marine uniforms and other gear - All cursed to make those who loot them take up traits of the former owners or something. The overarching joke being that Orks aren't very different from marines.
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May 9, 2017 00:44
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mllaneza posted:Tor's website gives a shoutout to Baru Cormorant on their website. Something to tell us about the sequel Batutta? I don't recall this scene at all, although it's implied by the story... What neither she nor Pinion could have guessed is how fully the Masquerade sinks its claws into her, so that the next time they see each other, a decade later, that moment of not knowing has created such a gulf that they have no way of understanding one another. Baru may have more technical knowledge than her mother, but Pinion knows that Baru is nearly lost to her.
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May 18, 2017 23:52
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I can't tell if this is a joke post. I actually have all those books but I'm sure they're long since out of print. They're pretty pulpy from what I recall. I would put them above Dragonlance/Forgotten Realms stuff but that's not saying much.
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Jul 7, 2017 14:32
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Ben Nerevarine posted:The Foppish Dandy Baru Cormorant Baru Cormorant 2: 2 Many Cormorants
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Sep 2, 2017 15:46
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cis autodrag posted:I actually find hell depictions to be the stupidest part of Banks's writing. Just non stop turborape and ultraviolence. It's not very creative at best and stomach turning in the most blasé way at worst. Surface details version is outshined in shittiness only by the villain in The Algebraist. I’m pretty sure hell being banal and stupid is absolutely the point.
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Mar 5, 2018 01:42
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Fallom posted:Marooned in Real-time and The Peace War by Vinge The Peace War is pretty iffy, I think it’s Vinge’s worst novel. Good ideas, but the plot and characterization are mediocre. Marooned is great though. In a sentence it’s about a policeman investigating a murder which might or might not be related to the disappearance of humanity a few eons earlier. Velius fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Jul 12, 2018 |
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Jul 12, 2018 13:36
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Deptfordx posted:I actually read both sequels as they came out, and I could not tell you a single thing that happened in either of them. Hey now, Azure Bonds was decent enough to get a Gold Box game made based on it. One of the better ones, as far as I can remember.
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Sep 2, 2018 19:12
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I’d recommend London Falling. It’s urban fantasy but it’s not goofy or light hearted at all. I can’t give a great summary of it and do it justice, but it’s really creepy. My biggest problem with it the characters aren’t very like-able.
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Oct 2, 2018 00:41
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General Battuta posted:Tor has the first two chapters of Baru 2 up, after the prelude which was already posted. You actually get back to Baru's POV instead of some poor guy on a boat! That was a lot of internal monologue. Some of it seems quite similar to your personal webpage discussion about the ending of Traitor, and maybe a little too explicit about the meaning and motivation of it. Or maybe I feel that way because I read your webpage? I’m kind of curious as to whether that sort of thing might have been suggested so the reader who misses the subtext doesn’t get too lost.
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Oct 3, 2018 23:44
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Khizan posted:I'm in the middle of it and I like it so far. As far as it goes, it's a standard Richard K Morgan book. Over the top alpha-male protagonist, dystopian setting, needlessly graphic sex scenes, well done action scenes. It's on Mars in the same setting as Thirteen, with COLIN and the lottery for passage back to Earth and such, but it's not actually related to Thirteen storywise and doesn't seem to share any characters. Nice! I love Morgan, although I agree he does have those issues you mention. I will say that the first two books in his fantasy trilogy were really enjoyable, and even have a Female protagonist... who is a lesbian and I’m not remotely qualified to say if she’s written as an alpha male with find/replace he -> she. On the other hand tons of (male on male) gay sex! Velius fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 12:34
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General Battuta posted:I'm wrapping up the third book now (should have it in by end of year) so if you live post your criticism I can Don’t kill him, do something like making him a micropenis-having infant rapist like Michael Creighton did with his critics!
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Oct 30, 2018 00:40
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Strategic Tea posted:I dunno I always feel pretty gross when I read other peoples' political strawman anti-fantasies, even if I enjoy the book. Blackfish City was another one like this (pointless housing crisis on a floating city) turns out you just have to reach the heavily guarded 'give poor people houses' button. A “good” right wing nut job one is Neil Asher’s Owner series. Evil socialists have taken over earth and only John Galt can kill them all, destroy their orbital laser platform, fly to mars, kill them all on mars, and save the solar system with the help of self reliance and helpless bad guys who haven’t learned how to do anything themselves without the government handing them everything!
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Dec 14, 2018 04:02
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StrixNebulosa posted:Haha, okay, thank you. That's about the best case scenario I could hope for, here. To the library! That’s the Owner series. It’s awful, albeit kind of hilarious in that it’s full of straw men villains for the heroic objectivist protagonist to righteously kill. I don’t know what happened to Asher, but it’s amazingly bad compared to the Polity stuff.
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Jan 5, 2019 20:25
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Very soon to be number one of two books (which I am very much looking forward to), I haven’t seen anyone ITT mention Tchaikovsky’s other new book Cage of Souls which I read a couple weeks back and wholeheartedly enjoyed, and which is p. much definitely a single book with a nicely tied up main story. By very soon you mean May 14th! I just restarted Children of Time and was pleasantly surprised when I checked that it’s so soon.
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May 4, 2019 23:46
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TheAardvark posted:Finally got around to reading A Fire Upon the Deep + A Deepness In The Sky. I think I actually liked A Deepness In The Sky much more. Somehow the Tines' scenes seemed to slog on and on, while the Spiders were pretty interesting throughout. I’d skip it. It doesn’t really go anywhere and leaves with a sequel hook, and I’m not at all certain Vinge is still writing. Deepness is definitely my favorite of the series. If you want more good Vinge try Rainbows End or Marooned in Realtime.
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Jun 25, 2019 18:03
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Vinge was writing about one novel per five years, but it’s been 8 since Children. I’m curious if he’s retired or decided against continuing that story.
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Sep 4, 2019 19:56
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my bony fealty posted:For some years as an older child the novelization of Azure Bonds was my white whale. It stood on my dad's sci fi/fantasy shelf, next to the other D&D novels that I devoured - the Dragons series, the Raistlin spin-offs, weird poo poo like Spelljammer - it even had an appealing cover with a sexy warrior lady and sweet lizard man. Actually, Azure Bonds predated the game Curse of the Azure Bonds. That’s why you can encounter Alias and Dragonbait in the game. Also, why do I remember the character names of lovely D&D novels decades later when I have trouble remembering poo poo from meetings a day ago?
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Sep 7, 2019 01:04
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