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Neurosis posted:If you're fine with this kind of setup and conflict, I strongly recommend the Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis, starting with Bitter Seeds. Nazis develop superpowered soldiers in WW2; British warlocks are forced out of hiding to fight back. It's way less goofy than it sounds, and is largely a reflection on the personal costs of devotion to duty. A bit depressing, but nonetheless very good. I actually sauntered in to ask a question about another Tregillis series, but I'll second this. It's a story about wizards in WWII, only it remembers that war is a horrible thing. It's not going to bring tears to the eyes of hardened critics with its prose or anything, but it's a solid series if you can buy into the premise, which is pretty easy. It's Bletchley Park as magic, without the bad pun inherent in that pitch. Is the Alchemy Wars series worth picking up?
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Dec 9, 2019 17:43
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Steel Frame good. Japanese covers good. But also, about Steel Frame directly: The real strength of the story is the pressure it presents - here are these fallible, squishy humans who are constantly in danger from things larger and older than themselves. The book was incredibly good at generating that particular brand of anxiety, and then surprise, zombies from beyond the stars. I'd have taken even a plain old BDO story over space robot zombies in general, but it's especially a shame given how taut the book is otherwise.
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Mar 16, 2020 16:35
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Safety Biscuits posted:You want The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick, first part of an extremely loose trilogy. It is exactly what you're looking for. Was Mother as much of a non-stop misery grind as Daughter?
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Mar 23, 2020 16:25
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Kestral posted:Would love recommendations for more generational stories in SF or fantasy. I saw Centennial early in life and for all its faults, I have never stopped being fascinated by that sort of story. On the off chance you haven't read them, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt and Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns. They're both not exactly generational, which is the point of both books, but they deal with groups of people changing over time.
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Jul 16, 2020 21:13
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space marine todd posted:How is the Xeelee Sequence? I saw that somewhere recommended for fans of The Culture. That's an odd recommendation, because while I like the Xelee books, they're not very similar to the Culture novels at all. Baxter can't write characters beyond "the wry hero," "the sad hero," and "anti-science villain." It's definitely an ideas over style series, but they are pretty cool ideas. Get ready for a lot of deep time. Vacuum Diagrams is probably the place to start, since it's a nice sampling of the whole enterprise.
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Jul 25, 2020 18:12
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The upholstery over the stuffing was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
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Dec 20, 2020 15:56
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packetmantis posted:This doscussion is only reinforcing my opinion that the Culture books are for nerds who want to masturbate about the ideas therein rather than anything about the books or story themselves. The best Culture book is about the human costs of Special Circumstances loving around in another society because they had a Good Idea, and how all the magic hypertechnology in the universe can't actually make you happy. I'd go so far as to say Look to Windward is the best thing Banks ever wrote.
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Mar 7, 2021 00:16
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General Battuta posted:Sixteen Ways to Imagine You Are Siri Keeton How to Pretend You Are Conscious and Get Away With It. Alternatively, Sixteen Ways to Imagine You Are Siri Keeton Sixteen Ways to Imagine You Are Siri Keeton.
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Jul 14, 2021 20:15
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got some chores tonight posted:I read Shards of Earth due to the posts in this thread! It was good, I liked it. It feel like it's just competent space opera more so that anything transcendent, but that's perfectly satisfactory to me in a genre with a lot of amateurish writing and/or fascist politics. I haven't read any of his other books before and I'm not sure I will (I'm not sure I'll enjoy the spider book and it sounds like everything else is kind of bad) but maybe the thread will convince me otherwise! I also just finished Shards, and it was what I'd wanted from Inhibitor Phase after all. The spider book was pretty dang good and you should at least give it a try. The first dog book's not bad either, though I'd give the second one a pass unless you're desperately craving more.
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Dec 10, 2021 15:15
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freebooter posted:Do read The Golden Globe - everyone should read The Golden Globe because it's just genuinely great. Good, silly/serious fun. The book is mostly this, but as fair warning to other folks there is some significant and monstrous child abuse early in the story. Golden Globe spoilers: Valentine repeatedly almost-drowning Sparky in the tub until he could perfectly recite Shakespeare was easily the most hosed up thing I've ever read from Varley by a country mile. Which is contextually presented as abjectly capital-W Wrong, and for somebody who wrote the books that required the Titanide sex chart I don't really feel like Varley's getting his rocks off while he writes in general. Just fair warning for folks who get bothered by that kind of thing.
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Jan 5, 2022 18:31
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SimonChris posted:Have you read this delightful Hugo award winning story? Sure haven't, and I think I'll keep things that way.
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Jan 5, 2022 22:55
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Stuporstar posted:I don’t know but I love the coinage and hope he does I mean, the literal meaning of the word is to cause or bring about from Ye Olde English. It's an entirely legit construction. And if you're interested in the use of the word "wreaking" without association with the word "havoc," have I got a series for you.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:03
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The Diamond Age is really Stephenson, for good and for ill. There are neat ideas in there that get bogged down in explaining the thing I'm interested in to you, at length, and the usual cringy content and bad ideas about people who aren't white beardy hackmaster types. The bit where he explodes the cyberpunk guy because You Didn't Understand Snow Crash, Plebes was pretty good, though.
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Feb 10, 2022 19:46
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Sibling of TB posted:You think between two fires isn't going to be horny? I know, right? Right from the get-go with the satan-eel, like - just jerk off, weirdo!
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Feb 15, 2022 17:35
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Destiny had an expansion come out.
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Mar 2, 2022 14:49
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The Greydon Saunders of Monte Cristo Greydon Saunders, but a clone wearing a hoodie for the hip 90s Greydon Saunder, winner of a Golden Globe for the makeup used to make Greydon Saunders look like Bruce Willis Greydon Saunders of Zur-en-arrh Planet of the Greydons, about a topsy-turvey world where libertarian is slave to Saunders The Usual Greydons The Sixth Greydon, it turns out this gag was dead the whole time
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Apr 11, 2022 19:40
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Swanwick pro picks are The Best of Michael Swanwick is what it says on the tin, his picks for his best short stories. They're all at least good, with some of them being superlative. Dancing With Bears, which takes one of his best short stories about a dog and his man and turns it into a full-length heist novel.
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May 16, 2022 15:22
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zoux posted:Pushing Ice always seemed to me like a spiritual cousin to one of my most favorite sci-fi books, Heart of the Comet by Brin and Baxter. Very similar vibes, also takes place on a dang comet. Because Catholicism. Seriously. Soldano is by accident or intent correct that the ship is evil, but he's also the highest spiritual figure available to us in the story - mentally sub out "Bishop" for "Pope" and it makes more sense, because the story positions him as doctrinally infallible. If he says it's bad news, and the Argonos needs to get out of there, he's correct in the eyes of whatever higher power exists in this story. Whether he's being manipulative, actually earnestly concerned for the ship, or because game recognize game when it comes to capital-E evil is unclear, and I would be shocked if that wasn't intentional. But also it doesn't make any difference. Veronica is unquestionably the most moral person in the story, but regardless of her moral intent, her beliefs are heretical. It doesn't matter if Soldano was honest and her death really was an accident, she was dead the second she put on the collar. The horror is not the thousands of tortured dead bodies, it's that the universe is playing by Catholic rules, and that may or may not include a loving deity, but it sure as hell includes Satan. It doesn't matter if you grasp what the plan was, or whether humans can understand the aliens. You didn't follow the rules, hosed around with Evil, and got got. It's not your place to know, or the place of anybody in the story except the Bishop, and even that's not certain.
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May 19, 2022 17:13
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ToxicFrog posted:What do people think "cis" stands for? I'm going crazy here trying to figure it out. I just assumed all the Fox talking heads were really obsessed with the former Soviet bloc.
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May 24, 2022 17:41
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The agony and the ecstasy of a blown snipe.
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May 25, 2022 13:30
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General Battuta posted:I've always wondered how a guy who wrote Flashback (a book in which Obama destroys America) or those weird blog posts (in which he time traveled back to visit himself and warn against the future caliphate) copes with the passage of time. Like, Obama came, Obama went, America's still here. The global caliphate hasn't materialized. How do you rationalize this stuff? Any Day Now is a pretty powerful belief, no matter what it's attached to.
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Jun 7, 2022 15:21
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:He kicked rear end on the xwing series. Not a patch on Aaron Allston and his novelized West End campaign.
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Jun 19, 2022 22:42
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I recently put a bullet in Yukikaze and Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayshi, and they were a weird experience. The series was talked up to me as "a guy who really likes fighter jets wanted to do his own version of Solaris," which is a near-perfect pitch for me. Unfortunately they didn't stick the landing. Part of my issue is that the first book is clearly a set of short stories bundled up with some post-facto edits made to string things together. The localization was fine - nothing to write home about, nothing to complain about, but it also means there's not a lot of artistry in the English version. As such, you're given a big chunk of somewhat bland words that boil down to "what if there were computers?" and that just isn't that exciting in the 2020s. I was left with the strange feeling of wanting to like something more than I actually did. I also finally got around to reading Children of Ruin. 's alright. It's following in Children of Time's footsteps and it can't be as shiny and new as its predecessor by definition, but it was a perfectly fine read. I hate to admit to reading Warhammer fiction, but I also grabbed Tchaikovsky's Day of Ascension and enjoyed it more than Ruin. Like, it's 40K licensed fiction, but it actually has cogent if not particularly novel things to say about faith and liberation in the plastic army men book. General Battuta posted:I'm so sick of defending you from shivan bombers It's about time someone said it.
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Jul 23, 2022 01:56
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quantumfoam posted:If the concept of the Uplift universe still sounds sort of interesting to anyone after the past page of posts, skip David Brin entirely and go to the original source, which is: Eh, I'll go to bat for Weird Paul here. I don't think it's out of the realm of science fiction to posit a scenario where a fictitious version of Werner von Braun was not actually a Nazi, contrary to reality. Beyond that, the rest of the Nazis in the Instrumentality stories are portrayed as spectacular fuckups who ended up killing themselves with their doomsday weapons because they weren't up to their own standards of genetic purity, and the unsubtle contrast is that the pre-Instrumentality True Men are brought down because they're up to the same kind of totalitarian eugenicist business. I would never argue that the Smith stories are without some extremely weird baggage, but they come down pretty squarely against eugenics and authoritarianism.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:42
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quantumfoam posted:The issues I have with the Instrumentality of Mankind origin story aren't really about that stuff, it's that: Don't get me wrong, Linebarger had weird sexual hangups even for a sci-fi writer. Just saying 'cause it's 2022 and everything is the way it is, dude seems against Nazism, and I figure he was in a better position to know the inner workings of Paperclip than anybody else in the field.
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Aug 16, 2022 21:52
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ToxicFrog posted:I don't know how orthodox an opinion this is, but IMO Downbelow Station is probably the worst A-U book to start with despite being one of the earliest ones published; it's an extremely dense read and while the Treaty of Pell is central to the setting, the immediate events leading up to it just...aren't that interesting if you aren't already invested. I think it works best after you've read most of the other A-U stuff. Just as a data point, Downbelow Station was the first A-U book I read and I loved it. I'm probably an outlier, though, since I hated Cyteen and I think I've stopped reading it at least three times.
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Aug 19, 2022 18:57
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Benagain posted:Oh yeah but I just read an intro where a bunch of naval spaceship people are frantically trying to get ready for a dress parade after two years of deployment and it's mentioned three times in five pages that without the cool competent Marines they would never have been ready on time. It doesn't get any better, because the Marines are also run by a secret cabal of not-Gurkas who can use their influence to radically alter regulations.
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Aug 20, 2022 20:26
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CaptainCrunch posted:Joel Shepherd's Spiral Wars? Yeah. I think it might be okay popcorn if it weren't intentionally written as a doorstopper, but as it is, I just can't get into any of Shepherd's books. Can't win 'em all when it comes to pulp.
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Aug 21, 2022 23:14
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sebmojo posted:Cyteens Ariane Emory is kind of a sex criminal too I hated the Arianes so much I couldn't finish Cyteen. I don't really have that happen very often, and I suspect that was not the intended reaction, but christ what a monster.
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Aug 30, 2022 02:45
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Sailor Viy posted:I'm reading The Rediscovery of Man on recommendation from this thread. It's good, certainly unique. Some stories are very well-written, some clunky, some nakedly homophobic. Yeah, it's an interesting set of stories for exactly those reasons. If you haven't done so yet, go ahead and look up the biographical information on the author. I promise you he's one of the weirder human beings ever to write science fiction. As far as the connection to Dune, it was just the ambient environment at the time. Linebarger and Herbert were just decent enough at writing that we keep reading them, as opposed to all the other also-rans who used the same themes.
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Sep 9, 2022 00:35
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Stuporstar posted:Eapecially when everywhere but here, when someone asks for fantasy recs, is immediately swamped by a ton of fanboys going, “Have you read Brandon Sanderson?” This is only an acceptable question to ask if you are brandishing a bloody axe while wearing your goat-pupil contacts, tbf.
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Oct 4, 2022 23:21
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Cicero posted:What law would this actually break though? A human can look at an artist's work at 'train' themselves off the same style, and that's not illegal because 'reading' a work in order to mimic its style is not illegal, you have to reproduce specific content before you're in trouble. Looking at a picture of Mickey Mouse is not theft of intellectual property; you are not asserting a claim on the image itself, or the likeness of the character. Drawing your own picture of Mickey Mouse for non-public use is not theft because you generated an original work, though you may correctly be accused of plagarism. Photocopying a picture of Mickey Mouse is technically theft, but only becomes legally actionable if you show it to anyone - there's a potential legal carve-out if it's for purposes of parody as would be understood by a hypothetical reasonable person, but historically that has not held water when Disney comes knocking. Selling several thousand copies of an algorithmically-generated Mickey Mouseses, only he's occasionally got a hosed up eye or his hands turn into tentacles because your processing system is poo poo and pretending you've never heard of this "Mickey the Mouse" is going to get you sued into the dirt, because it is very poorly-disguised theft of a recognizable design that relies on training a computer to reproduce recognizable elements of an existing illustration. Only, see, the feds aren't going to prosecute anyone to protect small artists' work and they don't have the legal resources of a megacorporation, so someone else gets to profit off those artists' work while simultaneously excluding them from their career field. If I program a Markov chain to regurgitate randomized samples of cultivation fiction by feeding it an input of all the usual Kindle Unlimited suspects, and it is obvious that paragraphs are taken wholesale from the work of others, and I dump hundreds of thousands of copies of this crap onto KU for pennies and kill the entire market except for my creations, that is clearly ethically faulty, it is legally suspect at best, and it is a clear net negative for the written word as an art form and a way to make a living. grassy gnoll fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 09:11
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Also, in the nicest way I can I think to phrase this, "maybe this poorly-tested and ethically-dubious piece of technology used by corporations to gently caress people is good because it's not explicitly illegal" is one spicy take in this, the science fiction and fantasy thread.
grassy gnoll fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Oct 6, 2022 |
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Oct 6, 2022 09:14
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Yeah, that's a combination of angry-posting on my phone and it being early in the morning. "Ethically" is the word I was attempting to write out in response to the guy clapping in the CES audience and wondering when he'll be able to preorder his own Torment Nexus.
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Oct 6, 2022 20:54
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sebmojo posted:If i put a hundred paintings by an artist up on a wall and think very hard about them then make another painting in the same style i don't have to pay royalties. This is because internalizing another artist's work and synthesizing a new product is a creative action, which a computer is not currently capable of; Zima Blue this ain't. If you did the thing you described, you would still be producing original artwork, even if it were strongly influenced by your sample artist of choice. You would be making decisions about what aspect of each painting to include or exclude, consciously or not, in addition to the random elements added by your reproduction process - your paints wouldn't be the same, you might have a motor tremor that affects your brush handling, you've got a foot fetish and that changes the framing of your compositions, etc. Your work would likely be criticized as derivative of the original artist, and that might impact both your success and whether or not anyone gave you the time of day. Or you might be the next Lichtenstein, raking in critical acclaim and millions of dollars off of exactly the kind of reproductive process you're describing. Who knows, fine art is bullshit. What AI art does is comparable to taking paintings directly from an artist before they can be sold, running them through an industrial blender, and feeding the colorful canvas pulp into a mold that got photoreproduced off a Kinkade print. In fairness, you could argue there might be artistic merit if this were in a gallery space and the viewer was being confronted with the process as the art itself, but it's not. It's entirely a commercial endeavor - insert someone else's images, get cheap knockoffs. To bring this back around to fiction, Kevin J. Anderson is unquestionably a derivative hack. He's also actually produced a creative work, mostly by himself. If he literally published a Madlib you wrote with the blanks filled in with "ultraspice" and "Paaulo" and so on, that would not be an original work of art, and he would be profiting off your labor. pseudorandom name posted:The bits of the input image were copied and manipulated into the ML model, making the ML model a derivative work of every single input image, and the bits of the ML model were copied and manipulated into the output, making the output a derivative work of the ML model and by an extension a derivative work of the original input images. Transformative and derivative works are established in laws based around the assumption of legal agency on the part of the person creating the work. Without a conscious person in the loop, you're in a hell of a legal quandry. I don't have an answer for this part of things. However, legally sampling a song requires getting a license for both the actual recording you're sampling and the musical composition. Unless the recording artist or their publisher is uncommonly generous, this involves a contract and money exchanging hands. The dipshits running these programs are not only not licensing the art they're using as their sources, they're often deliberately not doing so, like that rear end in a top hat who outright told Stephen Stalenhag he was going to steal his art and put him out of business.
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Oct 7, 2022 03:47
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General Battuta posted:All I will say is that there is an element of this that is on topic. Which is, the thread has in the past had conversations about whether it's good or bad that fantasy is becoming increasingly algorithm-driven, increasingly about shifting startup costs onto the author and away from the publisher, increasingly about creating product in huge volume to hit very targeted niches (often by exploiting the algorithm). Actual serious question: how would you go about creating a democratized publisher? Assume we can't decapitate the board and nationalize Penguin Random House. Best I've got is to have a bunch of authors successful enough to have discretionary funds to come together to create their own co-op imprint, buy some press time, and promote the work of newer authors in addition to all the other work they do. I also don't see any group with that level of income and stature being both in a position and inclined to share, let alone the shop succeeding without someone really aggressively riding herd on the staff/creators, staying focused for more than ten minutes, no affairs, and so on.
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Oct 7, 2022 23:30
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I thought Scanner was better prose than UBIK, personally. But my favorite PKD story is still "Second Variety," so I'm kinda basic.GreyjoyBastard posted:hi, I'm not dead, Hi, Dad, I'm- oh oh no
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Oct 10, 2022 05:29
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sebmojo posted:It's part of the standard mod training package 
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Oct 13, 2022 20:19
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FPyat posted:A person took issue with me stating that science fiction protagonists tend to be scientists, military officers, and other technically minded occupations. Thought I could only say that because of ignorance of the work of the past fifty years. I appreciate the desire to propagate a broader view of what the genre is and can be, but I stand by my statement. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of classic sci-fi that's about manly men of science doing science things who either go to far or complete the author's thought experiment, and as a result there's a lot of work inspired by those stories. Detective fiction is a genre famously about "an [X], but they solve mysteries" and I'd still wager the majority of mystery protagonists are current for former cops, professional Poirots, etc.
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Oct 17, 2022 03:41
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AARD VARKMAN posted:I'm on book 3 of Marko Kloos's Frontlines series now and still enjoying it quite a bit. At what point do the protagonists defeat them with the combined powers of love and music?
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Nov 14, 2022 20:54
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