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AlternatePFG posted:I finished reading Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (I've been various sci-fi classics by different authors) and I loved it, I thought the descriptions of the vastness of space were simultaneously beautiful and unsettling. I was wondering if the any of the sequels are worth reading (I'm perplexed as to how there could be sequels in the first place) and if not, what other sci-fi books have a similar tone? Some of them are really lame. I can't remember which one, but the big awesome reveal (the book acts like it is awesome but it is exceptionally boring) of it is that A planet is a giant diamond. I did not like Anathem. I am avoiding that author from now on. It is a very long book that starts out slow and has a second act that feels like a different book. Nothing is very satisfying and it has a twist that will make you roll your eyes. There is a lot of tedious poo poo where the author reinvents Socrates, Plato and the cave metaphor. When I say "re-invent" I actually mean "gives a new name to every aspect of Platonic thought but doesn't change any of the elements." angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 13:22
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It's all set up, but it basically has two narrative arcs. For just giving everything a new name, the author still makes sure to spend 500 pages explaining those concepts that you learned in intro to Philosophy (but now with different names).
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Jun 19, 2013 13:47
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You might want to spoiler tag that. Yes, I read the book and I understood it, yet I don't think explaining Occam's Razor from the ground up and giving it a new name makes for engaging reading or good storytelling.
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Jun 19, 2013 17:47
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I'm like halfway through book 2 of Hyperion and am not much feeling it any more. Should I keep going? I really was into the first book, especially the beginning. The whole "world" always felt a bit thin, but I hugely enjoyed the narrative structure of essentially five short stories. The first short story with the people of the cruciform being my favorite. Everything relating to the cybercore feels totally fake and stupid to me. The whole Keats thing is feeling like the author's favorite poet shoe-horned into the story. It was somewhat bearable in the first book but now he's pushing it further in the second along with more cybercore stuff. Everything happening now with the shrike, tree, and the timetombs is starting to strain plausibility and I'm doubting the author's capacity to come up with anything satisfying to bring the plot back to something that isn't just weird for the sake of weirdness. Am I off base or should I just stop while I'm ahead?
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Jun 23, 2013 19:30
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Could someone with an ebook of Hyperion do a ctrl+f for "lapis" and "lapis lazuli"? I'm pretty sure it will be over 25 times for "lapis". Every time he starts describing scenery you know you are in for something being lapis. In the second book he once even said something like, "hinting at lapis". He can only describe colors in terms of how close or far they are from lapis.
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Jun 24, 2013 13:28
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torgo posted:Can anyone recommend some sci-fi books about contact with incomprehensibly alien aliens? Blindsight is a good example of what I'm looking for. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is another book that touches on this theme, but I have the feeling if I read the rest of the trilogy, the aliens' motivations will be revealed to be pretty "human" in the end. The Story of your Life by Ted Chiang. I found a link to the PDF of it on google, but I don't feel like it's legal. I would buy the whole short story collection on Kindle because it's cheap and the rest of the stories are good. The Story of your Life is specifically about contact between humans and an incomprehensible alien race.
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Jun 28, 2013 13:11
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gohmak posted:keep reading. The ending is the whole point of the saga. I had already decided to stop reading it. It's really tempting to read your spoiler. I will wait to see if people come up with a good argument against you.
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Jun 28, 2013 21:40
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As someone who has read all but the last Wheel of Time book, I recommend not reading any of it. I enjoyed parts of it, but it just drags so badly and so many pointless plot arcs are introduced along the way. If you stop early you'll feel like you wasted your time, if you finish you'll spend too much time. Just don't read it.
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Jun 29, 2013 16:16
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Neurosis posted:To be fair, it's pretty explicit that seemingly magic technology like FTL is possible in the Vinge books... Just not in Earth's locality. I think Vinge's "zones of thought" concept works so well because the higher zones being so magical is in direct contrast to the slowness (I forgot the exact term) not allowing FTL travel, gravity manipulation, or post-singularity AI. It reaches a good mix of fantastic and real. My personal reason for greatly preferring sci-fi with no FTL travel isn't so much that I am a physics nerd and don't think it would be possible (this is one of Reynolds' main reasons), it's more about the sense of scale you can create by setting a maximum speed. The fact that the speed limit also happens to be the one that we think exists in the real world adds to the immersion. If the FTL travel is not written in as having huge restrictions and drawbacks, it does nothing for me other than shrinking an entire galaxy/universe into a small space. When I read sci-fi, if a planet is 20 light years from Earth, I want that to feel like a vast and insurmountable distance. Even if the author creates some kind of work-around and 20 light years is not that big of a deal, SOMETHING needs to be a big deal and a vast distance to create a sense of scale. In Embassytown Mieville has a type of hyperspace (I can't remember what he called it) where a planet that was 200 light years away in physical space would be right next door using hyperspace, but a planet even two light years from Earth might take forever to reach using Hyperspace. I liked this concept because it made it so ANY distance in physical space still felt vast. I think a lot of authors like adding in FTL because they are more intrigued by the concept of "space battles" and multiple worlds. If you have FTL ships, you can still have battles in space and you can write in a bunch of alien races and worlds that all feel close to each other. For some people that is cool on its own, but I really need to have everything feel far away.
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Jul 17, 2013 13:43
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They should cast a goon to play Kvothe.
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Jul 19, 2013 17:44
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Is there anything out there even comparable to Ted Chiang? I just started reading Nexus by Namez Raam... it seems pretty good so far but it's too early to tell. I also am really tired of cheesy poo poo and wish there were more scifi that was "literary".
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Jul 22, 2013 21:51
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Lex Talionis posted:Super useful post with good sci-fi Thanks a ton for this. I will make use of this list and bookmark it.
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Jul 23, 2013 02:41
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savinhill posted:I just finished House of Suns, before that I read Terminal World as I wanted to try out some of Alastair Reynold's non-Revelation Space novels. I liked both of them a lot. What are peoples' opinions of his other non-RS material? Terminal World and Century Rain are what I classify as Reynold's "not worth reading they are so bad" novels. Troika is also very loving bad, but won't waste nearly as much of your time. I think Chasm City is one of his best standalone novels. It takes place in the RS universe but is a self-contained novel. The Prefect is the same way and also quite good, but I recommend having read RS before you read The Prefect; it's less self-contained. Pushing Ice is middle of the road. I enjoyed it, but whenever Reynolds tries to do something "character based" it just shows how much that's not his strong point. Galactic North is a good short story collection that's totally worth reading. A lot of the short stories tie into the RS universe, but they are fine if you don't read it. Blue Remembered Earth is iffy to me. I enjoyed it and many of the concepts, but the characters were boring and the plot felt almost tacked on. If the second and third book in this trilogy go somewhere, it could make this book better by proxy, but I'd wait to see what people say about the second book before you bother with this one.
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Aug 2, 2013 17:34
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Lex Talionis posted:Well, I just listed some literary fantasy in the recommendation thread, so I guess I'm all warmed up for literary science fiction. This huge effort post was the last post on a page and went very under appreciated. I'm around 100 pages into Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf. I really like it so far, even if I have very little idea where it is headed or will end up.
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Aug 6, 2013 16:57
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General Battuta posted:If any of you are into short fiction I have a piece up on Strange Horizons, one of my favorite pro markets. Even comes with a podcast! Congrats on getting published in Strange Horizons. I know you aren't really asking for a crit, but I thought I'd give some impressions anyway: This premise reminded me a bit of Ted Chiang's The Story of your Life. I have been seeing a lot of premises like this lately. In Strange Horizons, just a week or two ago, there was the story about the woman experiencing days out of order. Your twist on it was original enough that I didn't mind the similarities; I enjoyed the characters and the gradual reveal of Hayden's godhood. Keeping the beer cold was a unique and effective method of introducing how Hayden was a god and what it meant. The ending worked for me mostly because it showed that Naveen was probably most interested in Hayden the god and not Hayden the person, which was a clever touch. I didn't care for the two characters' names. They both were equally not-common in a way that made it difficult for me to keep them straight. The names of the gods (like Enshagag) struck me as somewhat pulled out of the air. The names meshed with the lighter tone you created, and they left in some ambiguity as to whether Hayden really was a god (though the beer thing exhaustively ruled this possibility out for me.) Hayden being born to ease the pain in someone's foot was just too light and too much information for me. I would have enjoyed the piece more if Hayden had not revealed any of these details about being a god. The explanation of how things were set and just happened to benefit Hayden was strong enough on their own, I didn't need to know names and facts from when he was a god. If you did tell me them, I wanted the to be more compelling names and facts. The ideas and characters were strong, but the overall piece was less effective, to me, because of the tone in the areas I mentioned. The beer temperature alone would have set a light tone for me, but the other things pushed it too far. quote:For more content, I'm curious, how many people ITT have published SF/F, or tried to do so? I submitted to the James White Award last year, but didn't win. I submitted a flash fiction piece to dailysciencefiction.com. I'm assuming it will be rejected, but I'm going to keep trying. I'm writing a novel now, but I really love short fiction and want to try to get some short fiction published before I even bother trying to get the novel published. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Aug 20, 2013 |
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Aug 20, 2013 19:34
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Wow... I really should have googled "Enshagag". That really changes my interpretation given that this was referenced from a real god. It makes the tone not as light as I thought. I'm usually pretty good at spotting what kind of language or culture something came from, but this totally went over my head.
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Aug 21, 2013 00:17
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I'm reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun... it probably would be too much for high school students though. quote:Wolfe makes extensive use of allegory within the series, as Severian is identified as a Christ/Apollo figure: he is destined to revitalize the Sun and save the Earth while at the same time destroying it. Adding further to the books' many riddles is Wolfe's usage of archaic, obscure (but never invented) words to describe the world of the far future. In an Appendix at the end of The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe explains that this is one of the difficulties in translating Severian's writing ("in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence") into English. An example can be found in Severian's fuligin cloak ("the color that is darker than black"), probably derived from fuliginous, an obscure and archaic word meaning sooty.[10] Other examples are optimates, named for a political faction in Republican Rome, aquastor, a spiritual being that appears in the works of Paracelsus, and fiacre, a small carriage (which is, in fact, a French word with that meaning).
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Aug 21, 2013 13:47
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Wangsbig posted:I felt the same way. Then I read the second half and felt worse. I got halfway through book two and gave up on it forever. Did you feel that the "Keats" thing was going a bit too far in book one? Maybe it felt like he was trying to give a nod to an author he liked and got slightly carried away? Well in book two you get a ROBOT JOHN KEATS as a viewpoint character, wait actually I think you get two robot Keats, each a different version. That female detective character falls in love with the first robot Keats, by the way.
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Aug 22, 2013 20:38
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The Supreme Court posted:I just finished Ready Player One Yeah, it's really bad. Don't forget the super cliche Japanese brothers and the part in the story where he gets the "Ultraman capsule" and can turn into Ultraman for two minutes at a time.
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Aug 27, 2013 15:20
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I need to read a lot more multi-book scifi. I used to think of Reynolds as the go to recommendation for Space Opera, but so much of his stuff is very hit or miss. Most everything in the Revelation Space universe is good, but the third book in the main trilogy really started popping at the seams. People have a huge issue with how he dedicated a massive portion of the third and final book to something that felt more like a separate novella, and the ending to that book and the whole trilogy is, dare I use the word "objectively", poo poo. I happened to like the sidetracked plot line of the third book enough that it didn't totally put me off, but I had some other huge issues with really stupid physics ideas turning into plot lines his fascination with the inertia suppression, the conjoiners goofy time talk tunnel, the guns that they got on the ship via that time talk tunnel, etc . You can also argue that he did not do a great job on follow through in many cases. The first book in the series builds up a plot aspect The weapon cache that ends up fizzling and being largely irrelevant later on. Reynolds is not known for having great character-driven stuff, but there are enough memorable characters within the trilogy to be enjoyable for me. I think Reynolds is actually stronger on stand-alone and more contained works. My top three Reynolds books are, in this order: House of Suns, Chasm City, and the Prefect. The latter two of those take place in the Revelation Space universe. Reynolds also has some really bad stand-alone works that should be avoided at all costs. I have listed them a few times already in this thread. If I ever get a break from writing I want to start reading some more "epic sci-fi" series and see if there is something out there that is heads and shoulders above Reynolds. The only other thing I tried was Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction which is just god awful and should not be read for any reason.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:21
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Peter F. Hamilton is famous for having Al Capone's soul take over someone's body in the year 2800 so that he could have Al Capone as a character in his trilogy.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:38
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I recently read Nexus by Ramez Naam. http://www.amazon.com/Nexus-ebook/dp/B009U9S6B2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378399985&sr=8-1&keywords=nexus+book It reads like "modern cyber punk" and I enjoyed it. The action is done well and the ideas that it plays around with are fairly interesting. It is near future and takes place mostly in Thailand, but it hits a lot of political conflict, cyber-enhanced agents, etc. Some of the characters felt a bit forced to me and there was some clunky writing, but it was a quick and enjoyable read. It didn't do anything egregiously terrible. I think the author used to work for Microsoft and has researching background in hard sciences and that shows well through the narrative.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:55
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Carrier posted:Or, alternatively, read a book because its what you want to read rather than as some dumb attempt to stick it to the patriarchy. Can you give me a more extensive list of male authors? I hate reading stuff by feminazi writers, it really emasculates me to read that poo poo. Also do you know if any "male" authors are actually women using a male pen name in order to avoid "discrimination"? I'd like to steer clear of those as well.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:19
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Ted Chiang is really wonderful. You will read through his whole body of work in a few days (because there is not much of it) and you will then be here asking, "Is there anything like Ted Chiang?" and you will feel so sad that there's nothing left by him to read.
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Sep 23, 2013 21:03
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andrew smash posted:If you like Ted Chiang's short fiction and have not read Borges you should pick up Ficciones and give that a shot. Unfortunately I have already read ficciones twice. I'm reading gene Wolfe now because he was heavily influenced by Borges also. Unfortunately Wolfe is significantly harder to digest than both Chiang and Borges.
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Sep 23, 2013 23:45
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andrew smash posted:Hell is the absence of God is amazing Yeah, the premise of this one is simply spectacular.
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Sep 24, 2013 03:05
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General Battuta posted:As ever, I'm gonna recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts, a first contact story that challenges some of our fundamental assumptions about the human experience and the nature of alien life. It's free to read too: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Prologue I believe this link is okay; if it's not please feel free to tell me and I will edit it out.
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Sep 24, 2013 15:25
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House Louse posted:I wanted to compare Chiang to Wolfe, but I think the comparison ultimately fails because Chiang's much more wedded to science fictional techniques. Pop into the thread, or onto the Urth mailing list if you want to stare into the abyss... Thanks for the recommendation, and I didn't realize there was a thread!
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Sep 24, 2013 18:46
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quote:a character experiencing a metaphysical revelation about the universe quote:Hesse Most everything by Hesse features a moment like this and it generally is always done quite well: Steppenwolf has Haller temper his restlessness and suicidal thoughts by reconciling all the different aspects of himself (the Steppenwolf, Maria, Hermine, Pablo, and the Bourgeois Harry); Narziss and Goldmund has each character achieve a similar insight about the nature of the universe by very different means; the Glassbead Game is about a game that tries to capture "the universe" into a game, and the climax is Knecht's decision to give up the game and the society that created it. In "genre" it is pretty much never done well (not counting Gene Wolfe here) because the focus of the writing is not on internal revelations. Most genre scifi/fantasy is focused on more external factors, and even when internal conflicts are heavily featured, they almost always are manifested by and overshadowed by physical struggle such as spaceships shooting at each other, people fighting, or political entities at war. To try to shoehorn a metaphysical revelation within spaceships shooting each other is not going to work well unless the focus of the writing is really inside the head of the protagonist, and the spaceships are just on the periphery. Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is a good example of how it can be done; even though Severian has a giant sword and gets in physical conflicts, these fights are given little focus e.g.: "and I sliced off the horse's head," followed by a full paragraph of internal thoughts and feelings about himself, his past, and the characters around him. Even in the big duel at the end of the first book, where he fights using the plant, the entire duel is described in only a page or two, because the real weight of the scene is the reveal that Severian was betrayed and how that affects him. The end of the first chapter even tells you that Severian will become Autarch, so that takes even more focus and tension out of external events. In Rothfuss' Name of the Wind series, you have a kind of similar setup to Book of the New Sun, but this also doesn't lend itself to using internal revelations as climactic moments. There is a framing story told from an older Kvothe, so you know he's going to live to at least middle age, and it's all first-person so you are mostly in his head, but so much of the conflict is tied up in "I have x amount of money and need y amount of money or I'll be kicked out of school". Big climactic moments often involve, "I got a windfall of x amount of money, so now I can pay my tuition, BUT..." and then tension is created because he spends the money on something stupid or otherwise makes a poor decision that leads to further conflict. There are internal moments of conflict, but they are fairly hamfisted: "Denna!" I gave up on this series, but I don't think Rothfuss ever bothered trying to make deep revelatory scenes that served as ends of rising action, which was a good decision given his existing sources of tension. The closest thing he does to revelatory climaxes are the scenes of Kvothe playing music; these scenes have some interesting internal dialogues, but most of the tension is tied up in external rivalries, proving himself to others, and impressing Denna with the music rather than discovering something greater than himself through the music. The first book in Name of the Wind also had the fairly random dragon scene, which struck me as Rothfuss thinking his book was lacking more typical fantasy scenes of fighting scary stuff or being challenged with a more life or death situation. The scene felt so random because it didn't mesh with the established forms of tension used in the previous hundreds of pages of the story. Having a story about people fighting with swords or lasers, and all of the tension being from that, and then suddenly trying to make a climactic moment of the guy with the sword or laser realizing that humanity is more inter-connected than the character previously thought, and stopping all of the action for him to muse on this, is going to be as jarring as the random dragon scene was in Name of the Wind. For the record, I like books that just have cool spaceship fights and sword battles, but I do prefer them to be more in between both extremes: I think Scalzi's Old Man's War is a good example, it has "cool poo poo happening" and most of the focus is on that, but there is a strong and steady undertone of how war changes a person for the worse. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 16:09
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Kraxxukalf posted:I was in the book shop the other day and came across "Prince of Thorns" by Mark Lawrence, which seemed pretty interesting. I do enjoy a good fantasy tale, and also anti-heroes, so I was wondering if any of you have read it and/or would recommend it? Reviews seem quite favourable, and from what I can tell its part of a trilogy that's already done? Calling surreptitious muffin to the thread!
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Sep 27, 2013 12:22
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I will probably be the one voice to come out against Abercrombie here, but I really hated the trilogy, and I always feel an obligation to say something against it when the rare person who hasn't read it gets a recommendation for it. Keep in mind that something like 95% of goons loving love it, so you likely will too. It is entertaining and keeps you wanting to read for the first book and a lot of the second; it reads a lot like an action movie mixed with an RPG, complete with random mini-boss fights. It sets up some rather compelling world-building and unique ideas that you feel intrigued by and can't wait to learn more about, and then it fails to follow through on most of these ideas and leaves them barely fleshed out. Since the trilogy was so highly recommended, I kept trusting that the author couldn't possibly be dropping the ball as badly as it felt like, and I kept reading. Maybe one-third or halfway through the third book I realized that he indeed did not really know where he was going and was going leave a lot of stuff unresolved and half-baked. There were some unnatural character arcs, characters that never really developed, characters that were loving PAPER-THIN cartoons, and some very questionable plot structures. I could feel things popping at the seams during book two, and in book three I didn't see a way for Abercrombie to salvage anything. The further I got into book three, the more disappointed I felt, and the climax of book three and the whole trilogy was truly terrible. I won't go into too much more detail because people will say, "It wasn't for me" or that "The other books not in the trilogy clarify x or y thing!" I still will maintain the trilogy is objectively flawed and that there is much better stuff out there. edit: To be more productive, the Lighthouse Duet by Carol Berg is a fantasy series with an interesting protagonist and characters that introduces a lot of nice concepts and ideas, then follows through on all of them and wraps up with a satisfying ending. angel opportunity fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Sep 27, 2013 |
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Sep 27, 2013 15:41
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General Battuta posted:Continuing a pretty good year for my short fiction, I've got [url=http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dickinson_11_13/]a story up on Clarkesworld today I really enjoyed this story and I can see a lot of elements from your recent post on world building in that story. Do you have any advice for writing with these higher-end markets in mind? Some people in my writing group want to workshop together and aim for it. Beyond reading the magazines I want to submit to and writing a lot, is there anything you learned from experience that most people wouldn't think of?
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Nov 6, 2013 17:42
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In Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space series there is a subplot about a man being a spaceship. There is also a disembodied brain running a spaceship in one of his short stories set in the Rev. Space universe.
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Nov 10, 2013 15:14
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I just finished book one of Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay. I was enjoying it a lot as I went through it, but once I finished and thought more about it I realized that it mostly just let me down. I don't want to read book two either. The main character started out being interesting and modest, and when he encountered his first big problem, he transformed suddenly into a giant Mary Sue for the remainder of the book. The ending was the worst: The climax is the protagonist showing off all of his Mary Sue intelligence and wit to impress the royal court. His "weakness" is that he just speaks his mind, but it's turned into a cop-out resume answer (I am just too organized and work too hard sometimes!) because every time we see him speaking without thinking, it ends up benefiting him. The author also had a strange way of telling instead of showing. The most egregious example was the main characters encountering this demon god-like creature, it just stood there in the forest watching them. The author then shifted between three characters' view points and had them just run exceptionally long internal monologues telling themselves how they felt about seeing this. The creature that the characters see and think about was never mentioned earlier, we get all of their feelings about seeing it AND the exposition explaining what it is in one big dump. There was a similar thing to this toward the very end of the book the dolphins where someone says something that seems perfectly normal to the reader, but we then hear that the protagonist "Feels a chill run up his spine" or that "His heart beat with trepidation," followed by an exposition dump of why this innocuous thing is actually significant. I still kind of liked the experience of the book and there were some enjoyable moments. All of the weird writing things I just mentioned could probably have worked with greater moderation or mixed in with more actual stuff happening. The style of long internal monologues and feelings worked well for the protagonist encountering art that moved in, but it fell flat in other areas.
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Nov 11, 2013 23:42
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Alistair Reynolds is more or less worth reading if you avoid his bottom of the heap books. At his best (House of Suns and Chasm City), he takes a great idea and interweaves it into a compelling plot that creates a true sense of scale in the galaxy. In his best books, his physics stuff is meshed in perfectly with the plot and enhances it. His worst books (Century Rain and Terminal World) put completely flat characters into a half-imagined world where some physics idea he had one night overtakes the plot, pacing, and characterization. I think Century Rain, Terminal World, and maybe Troika, are the only things I've read of his (and I've read most of his stuff) that are not at all worth reading. Everything else is better than the majority of cheesy space opera you might come across.
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Nov 13, 2013 02:04
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I read the later 2000 books and would most definitely not recommend them. Compare the cool reveals at the end of 2001 and 2010. In 2001 Bowman turns into some kind of god, and in 2010 he turns Jupiter into a second sun. What happens in 2061? There is a mountain that springs up on Europa, and the reveal is that the mountain is of SOLID DIAMOND!!!
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Nov 19, 2013 15:57
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It's interesting how many Mormons seem into fantasy/sci-fi. Did Orson Scott Card start that tradition, or is it something else? I did the online version of Sanderson's Write About Dragons this year, which was at BYU (a Mormon university). He brought in a lot of guest lecturers, and all of them were of course Mormon. People like Sanderson are weirdly practical about their religions; Sanderson said some odd stuff such as (all quoted from memory, so not direct quotes): quote:"We've all seen the Mormon edits of Die Hard." quote:"While at conventions, I would go to the bar and chat up agents. They'd be drinking their beer or scotch, and I'd come up with my Sprite. I don't even like Sprite, but I'm a Mormon in a bar, so what am I going to do?" quote:"So when you're doing your taxes, you can deduct your home office as a business expense to the government. As for your tithing to the LDS, it's up to you if you want to count the pre or post-deduction amount for your percentage... just do whatever you feel comfortable with." By contrast, he talks about motivating himself to write by getting to open up a new pack of M:TG cards whenever he finishes editing a chapter. And none of his books or subject matter really feel "Mormon." All of these Mormons that lectured for his class felt like very modern people who were not particularly crazy or "tea party" etc., but if they hit certain topics or areas, they just felt kind of weird and alien. I've never known a Mormon in real life, so it struck me as more odd than it will to people living on the Southwest U.S., I imagine.
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Nov 23, 2013 20:17
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Koryk posted:Why is it free on Amazon? Guess I just "bought" it then!
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Dec 5, 2013 18:29
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Have you tried Solaris? Since you liked His Master's Voice?
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Dec 9, 2013 23:38
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I liked the first Hyperion book, but the second book in the series became really off the rails. The plot was stupid, the characters were ridiculous, goofy and uninteresting things were happening; it was just bad. That summary of his new crazy story is absolutely ridiculous, but his bad writing was already enough for me to not bother reading more from him.
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Jan 5, 2014 18:43
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