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I am close friends with the author of 'Adventures of the Detachable Penis' and I so seldom get a chance to brag about it.
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May 15, 2020 19:23
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I think it was someone in this thread who mentioned Engine Summer, and I want to thank them because I just finished it and it was excellent. Dreamy and confusing and not much happens in it, but I loved it.
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May 17, 2020 19:08
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Selachian posted:If you liked it, you really need to try Little, Big. I also enjoyed Crowley's Aegypt novels. Noted, thank you!
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May 17, 2020 20:16
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pseudorandom name posted:Star Trek's magic-rock powered space ships are more realistic than Becky Chambers' push pedal powered space ships or self-winding robots. Not really? I mean the bar of 'believable' is subjective I suppose.
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May 24, 2020 20:44
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pseudanonymous posted:
Eeeehhhhhhh. There's some good stuff *in* them but the sexual politics are all hosed up.
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Jun 7, 2020 19:08
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I love Always Coming Home and I just read Engine Summer and adored it - any recs for similar books? Cultural exploration, not too much hand-holding? I really like how CJ Cherryh will just start you in the middle of a setting and let you pick it up as you go along, too, that's my favourite trick in sf/fantasy stuff.
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Jul 2, 2020 22:18
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It'd be worth checking out some collections of short science fiction too, that's one way to start narrowing down the kind of style you like, and themes you like, if you're not super familiar with the genre.
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Jul 6, 2020 00:08
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CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union stuff takes place far, far from Earth, though I'm not sure it could be said to be 'space opera' exactly, it's not usually very light-hearted.
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Jul 20, 2020 12:43
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pradmer posted:
Anyone read these? The sample pages were pretty good but it's not on sale in the UK.
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Jul 20, 2020 19:12
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Lunsku posted:I do think you've sold me on Cherryh finally. She's been on my "pick this up maybe" list for a while - one of those writers who've never got Finnish translations, so I would think locally a bit underlooked. I'm v pleased, she's a wonderful writer. Elegant with her world-building and exposition.
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Jul 27, 2020 23:28
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quantumfoam posted:David Brin's Uplift universe stories are worth reading for the galactic species and Interstellar Universal Library concept in them. For a 2020 new to David Brin's Uplift stories, yes there is awkward interspecies sex scenes in each of the Uplift books that can/probably should be skipped over. What's that?...... *high pitched clicking and sqeaking*....... DolphinFucker heavily disagrees with that last statement. I got about four pages into the first Uplift book and there was a bit where the main character was mentally drooling over how hot a woman looked in a bikini and I decided maybe I didn't feel like reading them after all.
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Aug 1, 2020 01:34
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Random Acts of Senseless violence is about a twelve-year-old girl's life during the self-destruction of America. Society crumbles and she notices about as much of it as you'd expect a kid her age to notice. It's all written from her perspective and sometimes she's a little poo poo, but overall I got very attached to her and I liked the prose. e: Oh there's always On The Beach if you're more in a mood for slow miserable existential nightmare apocalypse but I feel like that might not be quite the thing HopperUK fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 00:49
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DurianGray posted:It's pretty close to the Voynich Manuscript (weird illustrations, unreadable fake language) but much newer and a lot less mysterious. It was written and illustrated by an Italian artist named Luigi Serafini and was published in 1981. It goes for a pretty penny these days since it basically never gets reprinted, and I'm still kicking myself that I didn't pick one up from my local used bookstore when they had a copy for about $90. I was able to get a copy of the recent reprint a couple years ago for my friend's birthday for about 50 quid or so. It's gorgeous.
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Sep 12, 2020 11:30
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It seems to me there is a qualitative difference between reading about something that factually happened to educate yourself about history, and reading about something in a work of fiction. I wouldn't say 'the Malazan books should not contain that stuff' - clearly he can write whatever he likes, it's fine. But I wouldn't read those books now, knowing that's in there and executed so casually. I mean, dogs die a lot and are mistreated horribly in real life but I wouldn't read a detailed account of animal torture in a fictional work either because it would upset me. That 'avoid history books then' take is loving horrible.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:23
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PawParole posted:I really like generation ships and first contact scenarios. I’m into the sociology of sci-fi far more than the whiz-bang technology. Same! That's why I love the Alliance-Union stuff by CJ Cherryh so much. All about people, and the people things they do, in space.
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Sep 21, 2020 20:16
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Safety Biscuits posted:Does this happen? The review Strix Nebulosa linked made it sound pretty interesting. It happens, more or less. The young man bonded with the alpha female wolf has sex with multiple other men and while he is there voluntarily, it isn't anything he wanted, and it traumatizes him badly and never really goes away, he's dealing with it throughout the rest of his time in the books. I've read two or three of them, I forget now. She's a good author but it's not going to be for everyone, to say the least.
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Sep 24, 2020 20:53
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pseudorandom name posted:One of the single most important life skills I learned as an adult is that you don't have to finish books once you've started them. I know? I read em until I didn't feel like it any more and then I stopped. I mean I have untreated ADHD so I can't remember the last time I finished a book lol 
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Sep 25, 2020 00:10
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If anything I could do with chilling out a bit. I give books hardly any time to charm me these days. If I'd been like this as a kid I'd never have gotten into genre fiction in the first place probably.
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Sep 25, 2020 01:12
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Remember how in Turnabout Intruder, the main baddy ends up going insane and hysterical because her FEMININE WOMAN BRAIN couldn't handle the strain of starship command? I'm guessing it's that kind of thing.
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Sep 30, 2020 23:59
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freebooter posted:If we're talking about public domain books, what are people's general SFF reccs for those? War of the Worlds is one of my favourite books. I probably read it once a year or so. It's fantastic. Though I did also enjoy Moby Dick, so.
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Oct 1, 2020 01:53
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Frankenstein! I was thinking I'd forgotten something important and it's Frankenstein. It's a genuinely good read though you have to be down with Victor being kind of a histrionic idiot. And it is a bit noticeable that it was Shelley's first novel and she was young when she wrote it. Still great though.
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Oct 1, 2020 12:40
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Is there a physical book I can get with the Lord Dunsany stuff in it? Everything on Amazon looks shady or low-quality or weird.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Like 3/4ths of Dunsany's books are public domain and available online with an easy search. There are good editions of two of them here: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=dunsany I know, but I was asking about a physical book. Thanks anyway! And thanks everyone for the tips.
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Oct 4, 2020 02:34
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Feel like I could mention Frankenstein again too. It's really good honest.
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Oct 6, 2020 20:24
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I've been reading a lot of bad books lately. Thread, recommend me your best or favorites in SF/F. I'm not going to list what I like because I wouldn't mind going outside my comfort zone or usual suggestions. Finity's End by CJ Cherryh Watership Down by Richard Adams Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin The Dark Tower by Stephen King - first 3 books are the best
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Oct 12, 2020 12:40
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Random Acts of Senseless Violence takes place during the collapse of the US but it's not really SF. Great though.
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Oct 14, 2020 19:05
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algebra testes posted:Circe looks cool, is it worth adding to my pile of "i will get to one day" fantasy? The Madeline Miller book? It's very very good.
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Oct 24, 2020 16:35
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Boody posted:For anyone in the UK Orconomics is available to read for free as part of Amazon's Prime Reading. Ooh thanks for the tip.
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Oct 25, 2020 17:13
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Not to be a downer but it's not like rape isn't present in the actual lives of a lot of women, you know? Not that I love it just showing up all the time but it's something a lot of authors probably have experience of.
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Dec 3, 2020 12:19
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Our ridiculous nationalists get really excited still about the one time we won the football World Cup back in 1966. *Really* excited, that we won *once*, almost sixty years ago.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:13
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Went back to Riddley Walker after falling away from it and read through in a white heat to the end. What an incredible book. Even if I did have to read most of it out loud to myself in a dodgy country accent.
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Dec 10, 2020 01:15
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No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this house was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over furniture. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of Homebase as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of recliners within them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be three-piece suites within IKEA, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of the M25, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this living room with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
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Dec 20, 2020 01:12
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I started the Uplift omnibus once and the 'weird attitude to women' showed itself on page 3 or so and I put it aside in disgust. Glad to see I wasn't just feeling grumpy that day.
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Jan 8, 2021 12:29
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I enjoyed Diane Duane chiming in all 'well that's me told then'. I think a lot more authors start off in fanfic than that OP would suspect. I know Naomi Novik did and her work is excellent these days.
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Jan 17, 2021 14:39
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Collateral posted:I've heard that fanfiction is very bad though, with its own structural rules, social hierarchy and general hive mind consensus for each fan area of it. I could be wrong, so please correct me if so. It *can* be but this is kind of a separate issue, almost, in terms of fan communites being potentially toxic. That's a wholly different issue to just 'writing fanfic makes you a bad author' which is obviously just not the case.
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Jan 17, 2021 15:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The Temeraire series was so painful and disappointing. It starts out with a great concept but by about three books in none of the characters felt like believable people any more, just ludicrously modern sentiment generators swanning about the landscape. Yeah I hear that, I dropped off that series too. But 'Uprooted' is really good.
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Jan 17, 2021 17:46
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Benagain posted:Naomi Novik is a good enough writer that I think she kind of trapped herself with the Temeraire series in that it obviously started out as 'what if ships were dragons' and no one including herself expected it to take off. You can see the swerve where she actually starts thinking about some of the issues like 'how are these dragons fed' and 'what effect would it have on world history if air forces existed before industry of any kind.' You can also see from her later works that once she struck it big she stayed away from the long drawn out series and focused on tighter, focused, single volume works because she probably felt burned by that whole experience. Yeah that kinda is how it feels. Like how 'wait how are these dragons not just slaves, they're fully sapient' never quite manages to become The Point in a way I would have liked it to. I really like the books but they're definitely a series where if you find yourself not very engaged with one, you should quit there. You can tell she got started in Aubrey-Maturin fanfic - the O'Brian books scratch the same itch for me without any dragons in them at all. Just great characters.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:31
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Riot Carol Danvers posted:I'm gonna post a warning for Ancillary Justice here: the narrator for the first audiobook is godfuckingawful, so if that's your preferred method, I'm sorry. If you can manage to get past that, the book is really really good. Went to look this up and realised it is the actual book I'm currently reading. I need sleep.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:02
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CJ Cherryh in some of her books writes just excellent prose. Clear, evocative, sweeps you into the world. I was blown away by Finity's End when I read it. She isn't flashy but she's effortless.
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Feb 14, 2021 01:12
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Ooo thanks for the Czemeda tip! Here's a bit of Dunsany - this website seems to have most of him. It's a particular style and I have a copy of Tales of Wonder here somewhere, and you get like - a chapter of a story, not a whole story. But if you like it, you'll like it a lot, I reckon. https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/tawo/tawo07.htm e: I mean, I love this. Not for everyone maybe but I love this. Lord Dunsany posted:Observant men and women that know their Bond Street well will appreciate my astonishment when in a jewellers' shop I perceived that nobody was furtively watching me. Not only this but when I even picked up a little carved crystal to examine it no shop-assistants crowded round me. I walked the whole length of the shop, still no one politely followed. HopperUK fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 13:46
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