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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (Song of Ice and Fire) by George RR Martin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00S3R6HAE/ Red Rising (#1) by Pierce Brown - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CVS2J80/ Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HE2JK7G/ The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B3S9TLS/
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Apr 26, 2024 22:45
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i'm re-reading the hyperion cantos and the religious elements stand out in an odd way now knowing how dan simmons went nuts after 9/11 i'm not as down as others on the second half of the quadrilogy - transforming the setting into a post-fall theocracy founded on a macguffin from the first two books was interesting.
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Apr 26, 2024 23:35
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I’m re-reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and tbh finding it kind of tedious. Every other page is “oh look, another random thing that Stephenson has to spend a page bringing you up to speed on the history of” or “oh look, some other random bullshit theory with a stupid name that some Fraa has to explain”. And what was the point of the whole “going over the pole” sojourn? It takes a long time and he’s basically just slogging around. Stephenson can be so exhausting.
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Apr 27, 2024 01:31
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In retrospect, Colonel Kassad was an interesting example of an author trying to write “one of the good ones.”
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Apr 27, 2024 02:28
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It's the shortest way to Russia.
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Apr 27, 2024 02:28
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re-reading Artefact Space, and then try to reread Weber, and man, Cameron is so much better at this than Weber is.
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Apr 27, 2024 04:12
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He was always better at grills
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Apr 27, 2024 04:25
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I would pay good money to see General Battuta rewrite the rest of the Honorverse, not just Mission of Honor. For anyone who hasn't seen the first one, behold.
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Apr 27, 2024 10:17
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shrike82 posted:transforming the setting into a post-fall theocracy founded on a macguffin from the first two books was interesting. I really enjoyed Endymion for that reason. Captain de Soya, the Pax, their interstellar logistics, etc. were so sick. But then I DNF’d The Rise of Endymion and I doubt I’ll pick it back up. Couldn’t get past the romance between the grown man and the child with future-adult-brain or whatever. I know it was present in both books, but the ratio of cool space Catholics to creepy poo poo really nosedived in the last book for me.
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Apr 27, 2024 13:12
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Reading some Greg Bear, Hull Zero Three, bout to start Forge of God. Just finished blood music, or “That Escalated Quickly: The Novel”. I was getting some serious Crichton vibes in the beginning, but the scope expanded somewhat. The guy who said he didn’t like Crichton because his books lacked lasting consequences: I think you’d like this one.
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Apr 27, 2024 14:32
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Blood Music is so fuckin creepy man. Man! Zombies ain't got nothin on this
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Apr 27, 2024 15:02
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Have you read the original short story, I’m curious what he added. It’s still a pretty short book. My guess would be the survivors in LA and Brooklyn
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Apr 27, 2024 15:04
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Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:10
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Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:45
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Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places. If you really want the old school classics of this, try King Solomon's Mines or _She_ by H. Rider Haggard.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:48
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zoux posted:Have you read the original short story, I’m curious what he added. It’s still a pretty short book. My guess would be the survivors in LA and Brooklyn My vague and old memory is that the short story basically just covers the first part of the novel, ending when only about three people are infected but it's clear that it's going to get everywhere
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Apr 27, 2024 16:02
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Qwertycoatl posted:My vague and old memory is that the short story basically just covers the first part of the novel, ending when only about three people are infected but it's clear that it's going to get everywhere Oh wow that is a huge follow on. So I guess all the strong anthropic principle/observer effect breaking the local universe and noosphere and getting downloaded into noocyte form was all new? Does explain the shift in tone from taut technothriller to world spanning apocalypse tho Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places. Hull Zero Three is nothing but exploration and not knowing wtf is going on
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Apr 27, 2024 16:51
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The Complete Revanche Cycle by Craig Schaefer - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071VZRD8D/ King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1) by Kate Elliott - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AFXJKCG/ Thief's Magic (Millennium's Rule #1) by Trudi Canavan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EXTQV2A/
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Apr 27, 2024 17:10
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I hate Hull Zero Three!
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Apr 27, 2024 17:38
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Awkward Davies posted:I’m re-reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and tbh finding it kind of tedious. Also there’s weird anachronisms. Like he just had a character use the word “métier”, which is a French loan word. It’s supposed to be set on a different world. Was there a France on this other world? I know I’m being pedantic but it’s a little weird.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:43
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I love weird anachronisms that force the reader to acknowledge that everything is a translation convention.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:46
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Like if it’s just in the text, whatever. But a character speaking the word makes it part of the history of that world, doesn’t it?
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Apr 27, 2024 17:50
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Every other word is also historically contingent, though, we’re just less aware of it. Like if someone’s “taken aback” in a secondary world, that should be pretty immersion breaking, but it’s not because we don’t know/notice that this common expression is a fairly particular bit of slang. What’s familiar becomes invisible but that invisibility conceals its history. We treat what we recognize as default and justified, but it’s really peculiar to a time and place.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:54
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General Battuta posted:Every other word is also historically contingent, though, we’re just less aware of it. Like if someone’s “taken aback” in a secondary world, that should be pretty immersion breaking, but it’s not because we don’t know/notice that this common expression is a fairly particular bit of slang. Hm true, that is interesting.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:56
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General Battuta posted:Like if someone’s “taken aback” in a secondary world, that should be pretty immersion breaking, but it’s not because we don’t know/notice that this common expression is a fairly particular bit of slang. Especially if the person using it is from a culture with no maritime tradition.
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Apr 27, 2024 17:56
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Awkward Davies posted:Also there’s weird anachronisms. Like he just had a character use the word “métier”, which is a French loan word. It’s supposed to be set on a different world. Was there a France on this other world? I know I’m being pedantic but it’s a little weird. This is a really funny complaint for this book in particular
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Apr 27, 2024 18:04
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Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places. Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon is exactly what you want.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:11
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John Lee posted:This is a really funny complaint for this book in particular It’s not my only complaint, just one from the most recent page I had read.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:21
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Its also incredibly funny for 'loanwords' to stick out because English is basically all loanwords and weird merging of other languages. Like does it break immersion when the word Pork is used because that's also derived from a French loanword while a more 'pure' way to express it in English would be pigflesh. Language in general is complicated and highly attuned to a specific time and culture. And expectations for how it works for other times and cultures are also seen through that same view and choices are often taken to translate things into terms the viewer/reader will understand or emotionally resonate with better. Like if you're familiar with the TV show Deadwood there's a fascinating behind the scenes where they talk about how they updated the swearing because if you use period accurate ones, it didn't have the same emotional impact for viewers as a visceral 'gently caress' or 'poo poo'. Zore fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 18:30
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Yeah and why do these "aliens" use English pronunciation and stuff?!? It should be illegible alien speech inside quotes.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:31
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Zore posted:Its also incredibly funny for 'loanwords' to stick out because English is basically all loanwords and weird merging of other languages. Like does it break immersion when the word Pork is used because that's also derived from a French loanword while a more 'pure' way to express it in English would be pigflesh. And of course the pig/pork divide (along with sheep/mutton and cow/beef) are themselves reflective of class divisions, with the working phrase - the animal - associated with the lower-class English word while the upper-class French word becomes associated with the product.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:36
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One of my favorite jokes in a fantasy novel, I think it was in a Discworld book, was where they have the solution to a wordplay puzzle and its absolute nonsense in English and there's a little footnote that says it works in the original Morporkian. For as much as people dunk on that Star Trek episode with the alien that can only communicate by saying snippets of cultural stories, English and most other languages are about a half step from functioning exactly like that already. Zore fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 18:39
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General Battuta posted:I hate Hull Zero Three! Yeah I was only able to finish after I started skimming the paragraphs upon paragraphs of unparsable descriptions of mysterious debris filled volumes
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Apr 27, 2024 18:45
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Zore posted:One of my favorite jokes in a fantasy novel, I think it was in a Discworld book, was where they have the solution to a wordplay puzzle and its absolute nonsense in English and there's a little footnote that says it works in the original Morporkian. Yeah, pretty much every abstract concept uses metaphor to describe it that’s so dead it’s no longer visible. Reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By, I was thinking about how an sff novel might better represent another culture by coming up with a completely different set of metaphors for common concepts, like not thinking of time as a limited resource as we do. I noticed while translating some hieroglyphics the metaphor “beatifying time” to mean leisure, which is such a foreign way to think about time that I’ve pondered it for a while. Considering an sff novel a story translated into English is something else I think about a lot. Like in reading translated fiction, I’ve noticed the tendency to either completely localize it so it uses common English idioms in place of the original ones, or the more unusual choice of directly translating foreign idioms to better represent the original culture. The same choice is heavily skewed the same way in sff, probably just due to the relatability of the former and the latter is more effort. I really prefer the latter tho
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Apr 27, 2024 19:46
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Zore posted:For as much as people dunk on that Star Trek episode with the alien that can only communicate by saying snippets of cultural stories It's one of the most beloved episodes and show up on top 10 lists all the time.
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Apr 27, 2024 19:50
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thotsky posted:It's one of the most beloved episodes and show up on top 10 lists all the time. Huh really? I'm mostly familiar with tedious nerds bitching about how the universal translator didn't work and calling it 'unrealistic'. Glad that's not the general perception, I really like that episode.
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Apr 27, 2024 20:00
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Zore posted:Huh really? I'm mostly familiar with tedious nerds bitching about how the universal translator didn't work and calling it 'unrealistic'. Glad that's not the general perception, I really like that episode. Yeah I feel like its people making fun of it (because it is silly) while also recognizing that its a cool concept
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Apr 27, 2024 20:51
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Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places. If you like a horror slant, try The Hollow Places by Kingfisher.
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Apr 27, 2024 21:34
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Zore posted:For as much as people dunk on that Star Trek episode with the alien that can only communicate by saying snippets of cultural stories, English and most other languages are about a half step from functioning exactly like that already. Philip J. Fry, his eyes narrowed.
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Apr 27, 2024 21:38
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Kalman posted:Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon is exactly what you want. Just a generally safe recommendation. The twist has been picked up by nearly everything since, but it's a classic for a reason.
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Apr 27, 2024 22:25
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