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Owlkill posted:Children of Time is fantastic - can anyone recommend any of Tchaikovsky's other stuff? He seems to be a pretty prolific writer. Same; I've only read that and the sequel which was also good, am curious about how the rest of his stuff stacks up.
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Oct 14, 2019 12:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:It's in their wikipedia page with links to newspaper articles. I'm on phone so I can't link but IIRC they adopted children and the kids were found with lots and lots of bruises. And lost custody of the kids. In 19 goddamn 69.
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Oct 18, 2019 19:25
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Larry Parrish posted:its been a while since i read the first book (like, before the second book was even announced) but as i recall it wasn't 5 pages or so on the sexual dynamics of a group marriage. which moon is a harsh mistress does have. Nah, as far as I can remember it just went right into using an arranged contract-based marriage between two dudes as a plot point, clearly showing that this particular instance was bad and probably coerced/abusive but also implying that this was probably an abnormal case. Without lecturing the reader any about the subject.
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Oct 21, 2019 12:26
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Honestly I was hoping for aliens to show up. I got to the end of the series and actually they did, everything was manipulated by mysterious aliens all along
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Oct 25, 2019 06:09
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navyjack posted:The next two are good but it stays really bleak I rather admire the way he chose to end the series.
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Oct 28, 2019 08:56
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professor metis posted:I've enjoyed all of the Planetfall series (such as it is) except for the most recent, which I really hated. I think it had interesting ideas, but executed them in the worst way possible. But the other ones are all really good! I've enjoyed all of them including the latest. They all have horribly broken people in them, but they're broken in different ways.
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Nov 15, 2019 10:47
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Bhodi posted:It broke a lot of people's brains. RIP Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card, tons of others OSC's brain was kiiiiinda pre-broken, I guess. I mean, the cliché about the most vocal homophobes actually being self-hating closeted gays isn't exactly 100% accurate but in his case... on the one hand he's this deeply religious Mormon dude, married with children, arguing not only against the legalization of gay marriage but against the legalization of gay sex itself; then on the other hand he writes stuff like Songmaster which is less heterosexual than some actual gay porn.
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Nov 15, 2019 17:00
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There's more than a few books from that era where the cover is the best part.
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Nov 15, 2019 20:40
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StrixNebulosa posted:The Others opens with a prologue note explaining that in this version of Earth, there are no native peoples anywhere but in Europe, and instead there are were-critters and vampires and elementals who regularly eat humans, to the point that settling America featured a lot of Europeans getting eaten. Of course, this is a super light and fluffy universe compared to how it actually went down...and I'm still super confused at how a book that got published in the 2010s could get away with just wholesale erasing all native americans like it's no biggie. Erasing native americans is one thing; how in the blistering gently caress do you even get "Europe" and "Europeans" without, well, Africa and Asia? ...not sure if I actually want to know.
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Nov 19, 2019 23:24
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Larry Parrish posted:Unironically Auburey Marturin is the only series of books that are all basically identical that I didnt get tired of. I stopped at like #18 but like, it took a lot of willpower to read all 9 Lost Fleet books when I realized they were all going to be essentially identical to the first. (Which is why I actually like the spin off about the syndicate splinter state). Something about the way my man does his writing is just calming I guess. Makes you want to go back and time and join the navy from 250 years ago I guess. After a while you may start talking like an early 19th century Navy seaman.
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Dec 4, 2019 21:47
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mllaneza posted:Black Company has one POV per book styled as whoever is keeping the annals for the company at the time. Mostly; there's at least one book which switches annalists partway through (and briefly to someone who is hilariously borderline illiterate). And then there's that one book where the POV has got some kind of unstuck-in-space-and-time thing going on. Also (although it's been ages since I read them) many of the books share one particular guy's POV.
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Dec 24, 2019 15:48
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Absurd Alhazred posted:To be fair, real-life ideas for how to use nuclear power were pretty out there around the late '40s to early '60s or so. Read up on Project Orion for a real head-scratcher. SLAM/Project Pluto, arguably the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. Where we can truthfully say, thank the gods for ICBMs being invented in time to make this look inefficient. Various civil engineering plans... have a stretch of coastline but no good harbour? Mountains kind of in the way of your planned highway? Never fret, uncle Oppenheimer has your back. Groke fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 10:07
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Ferrosol posted:Shards of Honour is the first book she wrote and is a prequel to the main stories, so it's not bad but is probably the weakest book she's wrote. On the other hand it does lead into Barrayar the second prequel which is probably one of the best books she wrote. So I'd recommend reading the two of them together and then if you like them moving onto the main series. Really though I'm just jealous of anyone getting to read the series for the first time. I can't recommend them highly enough Yeah, those two really should be read as a unit. Either before embarking on the first proper Miles book (The Warrior's Apprentice) or at some time between then and, I'd say, before A Civil Campaign (if for no other reason than getting the "shopping with Cordelia" reference in the latter.) Because as you say Shards is not her strongest work, but Barrayar... well... the "shopping" scene is one of the best things ever, just to pick an example.
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Dec 26, 2019 10:13
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Captain Underpants is legit good and cool. Same for the Dog-Man spinoff.
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Dec 27, 2019 23:57
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Kesper North posted:Illuminatus! is Wobbly propaganda. The Libertarians decided to adopt it because they liked the anarchism and it sounded like a billionaire industrialist was the good guy if you didn't read closely. I had the good luck to come across Illuminatus! as a teenager, a couple of years before I read loving Atlas goddamn Shrugged. Made reading the latter a... less intolerable experience.
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Dec 28, 2019 21:36
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Fallom posted:I was not a big fan of this book. The depiction of the relationship building between the caver and her handler was well done, but the book never did anything interesting with its setting and I lost interest in the plot well before the end. Pretty much what I took away from it. Thought it was promising but fell short of its potential (had some good creepy stuff but could have done more with that, etc.) so the end result was merely OK. Like, didn't feel that I wasted my time reading it, certainly didn't hate it, but also didn't feel it deserved quite as much praise as it had been getting. Absolutely not unwilling to try future books by same author. But, I guess I'm just a drat fence-sitter.
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Jan 11, 2020 13:24
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mllaneza posted:Read it anyway, there's some great encounters on that trip. Van Vogt very much belonged to his time and it's not difficult to understand why he's not more widely read these days, but man, he could imagine up some weird poo poo.
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Jan 11, 2020 13:25
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Moomins are either science fiction or fantasy or both and are also good and cool books. Indeed! Tove Jansson was a treasure.
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Jan 12, 2020 21:42
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Cardiac posted:Agreed. He was a regular on rec.arts.sf.written back in the day. So was James Nicoll, for that matter. There are a few other people from there who have since made it as published authors; off the top of my head I can think of Jo Walton and Ryk Spoor (aka Sea Wasp). And of course there were some already-established authors who posted there.
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Jan 20, 2020 08:53
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Kchama posted:I actually read Ryk E. Spoor's stuff when I was younger. I did a serious double-take the first time I saw Grand Central Arena in a bookstore and recognized his name. I've read quite a few of his books and generally find them to be good fun. Dude has an infectious enthusiasm about stuff he's interested in, and that's what he likes to write about, so.
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Jan 20, 2020 19:16
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shrike82 posted:Gibson’s still a good writer but his personal political views are OK Boomer level At least I guess he has the excuse of actually being a boomer.
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Jan 22, 2020 14:08
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quantumfoam posted:-Will Yoon Ha Lee's upcoming 2020 novel manage to avoid being set in a "bizzaro alternate universe Korea" like 95% of YHL's other short stories and novels? In any case, it's a refreshing break from bizarro alternate universe Europe.
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Jan 31, 2020 10:38
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90s Cringe Rock posted:That's... not obvious. At all. Like, all of them? There can be only one.
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Feb 3, 2020 20:19
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Black Griffon posted:I enjoyed Eon somewhat until everyone started to have sex with everyone else at the same time or something. It's been a few years. I read that when I was a hormonal teenager and I can only recall one sex scene. Sure, it was superfluous and awkward as hell (like 99%+ of sex scenes in SF) but it was like one paragraph. As far as I can remember.
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Feb 11, 2020 09:45
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90s Cringe Rock posted:NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series is post-apocalyptic. It's also apocalyptic, a new apocalypse just kicked off, but it's post- as well. It's post a large number of apocalypses, of various severity, across many many centuries. Like, civilization is shaped around communities arranged for survivability.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:25
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biracial bear for uncut posted:It's also worth reading on it's own because it loving rules. It's also got one of the few really good and justified instances of extended sections told in the second person. Because large bits of it are actually one of the supporting characters narrating back the story of the main character's own life to her, for good reasons.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:36
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FuturePastNow posted:Has there ever been a sex scene in sci fi that wasn't awkward and superfluous? Asking for a friend. Well, there's straight-up "erotica" aka porn, where the sex scenes are the point and hence cannot be superfluous, and certainly some of that (like Chuck Tingle's stuff) must count as SF. No longer being a hormonal teenager, I don't particularly feel the need to read detailed descriptions of people loving, I already know what that looks like. I'm fine with amusing innuendo and romance plots but as far as I'm concerned the actual sex scenes might as well be replaced by "and then they hosed and it was awesome" or "and then they hosed and it was kind of disappointing" or whatever.
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Feb 12, 2020 23:05
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cardinale posted:J V Jones, who's currently working on the last book in the Sword of Shadows series after being on hiatus for a long time, Holy crap, I'd given up all hope... it's been a goddamn decade since the previous book!
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Feb 14, 2020 21:15
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Cardiac posted:At least it was not lesbian necromancers, which btw was one of the least accurate descriptions of Gideon. Well it wasn't all that inaccurate, it's just they were way too busy with other stuff to get around to any overt lesbianing.
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Feb 21, 2020 10:49
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anilEhilated posted:How much of it is romance and sex scenes? A few paragraphs. Cool book, enjoyed it lots. Didn't know it was goonwritten.
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Feb 23, 2020 14:33
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I tend to avoid posting/engaging in discussion about my own book because it feels very Self-Important Writer Online, but if you liked The Dawnhounds please consider nominating me for the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel this year. Done. Now go and write more books.
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Feb 24, 2020 09:46
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Why would you post that, it has nothing to do with books? Based on a J.G. Ballard novel, so genre-adjacent to this thread at least.
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Feb 24, 2020 09:47
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PawParole posted:Did anyone read Unto Leviathan? AKA Ship of Fools? Yeah, read that years ago. Good, though don't remember that much about it now.
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Feb 25, 2020 10:38
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eke out posted:None of the issues with the series' writing are really fixed in the last book so I suspect you'll have similar problems. If anything, the characterization gets thinner, if that's possible. Yeah, it's the kind of book you read for the wild ideas; the characters are ultimately two-dimensional, mostly.
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Feb 27, 2020 08:47
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Doctor Jeep posted:sounds like the steerswoman series except for 2 Also without #2 it also sounds like Sean McMullen's Greatwinter trilogy. Which is pretty good fun.
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Mar 8, 2020 21:52
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anilEhilated posted:How depresssing is it, for a Parker? Below average depressing, I'd say.
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Mar 13, 2020 02:02
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Black Griffon posted:Steel Frame good Not emptyquoting.
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Mar 16, 2020 12:03
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Those Japanese Bujold covers are especially sweet.
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Mar 16, 2020 13:11
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My favourite PKD novel is A Scanner Darkly. (Also he rrrrrrreally shone in the short story format.)
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Mar 17, 2020 13:52
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branedotorg posted:I read them in publication order starting in the early 90s. Same, except I started in the late 80s (whenever Wyrd Sisters came out) and backfilled the ones before that in completely random order (i.e. whichever order I could find them in). I had previously tried and quite failed to get anywhere in the Colour of Magic text adventure game on the C64 but at the time I didn't even realize it was based on a book.
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Mar 18, 2020 10:50
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