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pradmer posted:Jade City (Green Bone Saga #1) by Fonda Lee - $2.99 Fighting Trousers posted:My understanding is that steampunk isn't so much a genre as an aesthetic - lots of brass and exposed gears and goggles and ladies with their corsets on the outside. The actual content of the stories seems to be secondary. So, it essentially ends up being a great genre for folks who are impressed with their own cleverness and rigid status hierarchies.
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May 29, 2023 04:11
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The best steampunk is definitely about folks dealing with how lovely a steampunk world would be. In other news, I'm half way through Philip K Dick's The Simulacra (thanks for the on sale notifications, pradmer!) right now and man is it a trip. It takes place around the year 2040, where the US has expanded to include West Germany, we have time travel, personal rockets to Mars, and everyone is constantly smoking. So, not a lot of great foresight there, but the real fun stuff is the PKD-ness of it. PKD has this idea that our reality is contained within a spiritual thing he calls the black iron prison that we should all work to ascend out of in some way. This is discussed in a dissertation here (first sentence: "In February and March of 1974, Philip K. Dick communicated directly with God."), and questions about "what even is reality?" go through almost all of his work. It's fun stuff.
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May 29, 2023 16:29
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I call Expense Account Sinner. Yeah, that looks like around 158 books right there, with imprints ranging from Sundown Reader to Evening Reader
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Jul 1, 2023 17:23
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Kalman posted:Best thing Stephenson ever wrote. RDM posted:It's garbage. 80s supermarket checkout thriller about nonsense. The book summary posted:Meet Sangamon Taylor, a New Age Sam Spade who sports a wet suit instead of a trench coat and prefers Jolt from the can to Scotch on the rocks. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil—all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to some high and foul places... Or can they?
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Jul 4, 2023 04:10
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pradmer posted:God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4) by Frank Herbert - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001F0WXX6/ What is the story with these sales? Did some Amazon algorithm see that a lot of people were stopping at Dune #3 and decide to try to push people forward? Do the publishers feel this is the book that will be better appreciated right now? It is just 40% random because it is free money to sell a Kindle book?
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Jul 30, 2023 22:00
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pradmer posted:The Boy on the Bridge (Girl with All the Gifts #2) by MR Carey - $2.99
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Aug 10, 2023 03:23
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Remulak posted:It’s excellent; I’ve never experienced such a sense of utter dread in my life (from media). I think I posted about that in this very thread. Closest was watching 28 Days Later when the guy from the roof with a daughter exactly my daughter’s age at the time was gonna go into the tunnel. Even better than a recommendation is a recommendation not to read it while in uncertain circumstances! Thanks!
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Aug 10, 2023 05:18
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Ravenfood posted:Yeah I'll get right on reading War and Peace in elementary school.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:46
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fermun posted:I am a US citizen and I worked for the Indian Consulate for about 9 months where my job was 6 hours a day processing applications for Overseas Citizen of India documentation and then for 2 hours a day I was required to take off my dress shirt, where I was supposed to wear a heavy metal t-shirt underneath to look like a bouncer, and smoke a nicotine-free vape, wait for a car (driven by a guy from Nepal) to show up, then I'd open up a locked door and transfer 6 locked suitcases to the trunk (it was always 6, sometimes one or two would be clearly empty), hop in, and go to an off-site location where they'd do additional security checks if needed, phone/online customer support, and various other things. I would say maybe half the people working there were not Indian citizens. Neal Stephenson! I like your books but these nano-stories are a lot more manageable.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:06
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MockingQuantum posted:how is the baroque cycle? Any strong opinions? if it helps I liked Snow Crash and Diamond Age a lot when I was younger but thought both were silly, but fine, when I reread them as an adult, and I absolutely despised Seveneves. I'm not certain I've read any other Stephenson but I do like historical fiction, generally speaking. I remember enjoying the Baroque cycle. Lots of fun anecdotes and interesting bits of history. Lots of facts involves, with some definite and obvious story thrown in. Some parts I really liked, and I'm sure they're all his own tilt on history but I find them comforting (mild thematic and general plot spoilers) I liked the idea that progress improves when there is no strong central authority, you really saw that in the difference between England and France. I also liked the finance history and how gold was used for currency simply because of its density.. I'd like to read it again some day, but who's got that kind of time?
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Aug 16, 2023 04:45
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got some chores tonight posted:I genuinely don't know if I can recommend it. I couldn't stop reading the first three, but there were times where I was just trying to get through it. I have a lot of thoughts on the book, but its been so long since I read it that I won't go into it except to say that I was hoping the JEDD plot would go in a different direction.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:33
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Stephenson is absolutely the last person I would guess for authors who wrote with a fountain pen, tied with Plato.
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Sep 11, 2023 20:35
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:My uncle gifted me a box full of Philip K Dick novels. It’s not every single one of them, but it’s a lot.
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Sep 16, 2023 09:32
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Annath posted:Visiting New England, stopped in Providence. You should check out Lovecraft's tombstone too. It's in Swan Point Cemetery, which has some great memorials near the river, and there's often something weird done to Lovecraft's grave around this time of year. The grave itself isn't anything special tho
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Oct 7, 2023 20:41
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Can anyone recommend a good recent science fiction or fantasy short story collection? pradmer posted:Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang - $1.99 Exhalation has some really great stuff. It's more thinky than exciting or emotionally engaging, but there are stories that will stick with you
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Oct 8, 2023 20:50
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General Battuta posted:I think the Jade books are at their best when they're closely aping 70s crime lit (including most obviously The Godfather). The martial arts stuff is fine but for me the real meat is drugs, sex, domestic violence and terrible family dynamics. Also food and the relationship between small business and crime. Fonda Lee has a background in management consulting and it comes through in the books. I like the do-crimes-punch-things side, but if you want a book with some magic (which is small and never expands) and international business relations that is more believable than "Kingdom of Valley Men vs Clan of Daffodil Haters", then the Jade books are pretty much the only choice. The series focus definitely shifts from punches to business over the trilogy, and I love it. I love that this crime family has great plan for doing med schools and media outreach.
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Oct 9, 2023 19:00
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Has anyone read the full Machineries of Empire series? The first book is Ninefox Gambit. How is it? I've been curious about it for a sec, but I occasionally see some mixed reactions. I enjoyed the first book, but dropped the second around 30% through. The author tried to portray the main character as a strategic genius, but its all space magic bullshit with no real rules, so it felt like a narcissist describing their hypothetical D&D game. The first book was carried forward on the audacity of the space magic bullshit tho.
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Oct 15, 2023 21:43
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I started A Player of Games recently and I feel like it's just gonna be "look how dumb and evil this thinly veiled equivalent to modern society is! Doesn't it make you think?" Like, I want to know more about the games and the Culture, I don't need a book to tell me that capitalism, racism, and sexism is bad. Yeah, player of games is neat but it doesn't have much actual culture stuff going on, and I think people suggest it as an entry point because of that. I don't remember it being overly moralistic in the sense of people learning Important Lessons or anything, but there's a lot (which you've already seen) about this one culture guy (who is himself a weirdo by Culture standards) just seeing people being jerks and not getting it. There's one overarching culture question it gets into, particularly at the end: What is even the point of people in the AI driven society? In player of games, it becomes clear that the AIs wanted Jerk City to fall apart, so they picked one person out of their unthinkably huge society, and manipulated and managed him over the course of years into knocking that society apart. Any anxiety or personal growth was just some friction in this larger machine, which the main character doesn't really care about, he was just there to play a game.
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Nov 5, 2023 22:58
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Eh, I really like Look to Windward and I'd argue it's the most Culture book because its just a bunch of (non-Culture) folks farting around in Culture Utopia, but just being in Utopia doesn't mean their problems are solved, but it does mean that the idea of "accomplishment" is very different.
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Nov 6, 2023 01:21
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Throughout all recorded history, people have been searching for "Academia, but less self-important".
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Nov 16, 2023 03:17
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pradmer posted:Against a Dark Background by Iain M Banks - $2.99 Not a Culture book, but one of my favorite Banks Books. Probably based on a role playing game.
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Dec 6, 2023 02:55
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I almost done with Children of Time, really loving the book, and I was hit unexpectedly hard by crazy space-mom Kern finding out her children weren't highly evolved primates, they were highly evolved spiders, but she still loves them and now she has a deeper understanding of what they've been going through. I think its a situation we can all relate to.
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Jan 13, 2024 18:10
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Poldarn posted:The Culture novels have some pretty interesting space fights, but its not a huge feature of the series. It's not what I'd recommend someone who's looking for a great space battle, but I really liked the bit in Surface Detail where The ship knows there's someone following them, so they put their human occupant in all sorts of safety gear and offer to give them a projection of what's happening. At one point when the fighting has started, the ship says "This is my favorite part". It turns out the fight took around 12 seconds and the ship just slowed it down so they could show off to the passenger.
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Mar 10, 2024 05:55
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I've been picking up like 2% of the highly recommended stuff Pradmer posts and I have a queue that will take a year to go through if it stopped growing.
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Mar 11, 2024 18:35
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mdemone posted:loving fine, I will buy my first Ishiguro today if you all promise to stop banging on about him
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Mar 14, 2024 19:28
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mystes posted:I read the first book of that and I really need to read the rest Terra Incognita is a great series that I read at an odd point in my life, and I don't think I can ever really recommend but I also really want to re-read. It has a lot of ideas that seem dumb, but then a layer comes off and you realize the author also sees these ideas are dumb. You'll probably read the last book but I thought it was a letdown because it went in a direction I did not want it to go. Ramrod Hotshot posted:In the spirit of this post - are there any sci fi stories where “the far future but no space colonization” is the premise? Thematically, I'll recommend Against a Dark Background. It's a space adventure set in a single, non-Earth solar system, but by the end you realize this system has re-invented space travel at least 3 times, they've advanced and fallen back, and are now mining garbage dumps from a thousand years ago, all because they are a solar system way outside the galactic ring. They can't see other stars or go anywhere, so they are just trapped in their own multi-planet world, getting slowly claustrophobic.
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Mar 17, 2024 03:36
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In Against a Dark Background I think the classes are: Lawyer, Soldier, Historian, Spy, Heiress. And everyone has combat training and magic that makes them work well together just because. Where ttrpg-ish books fall apart is when they're just about the fighting and the spooky dungeon and showing off how cool the main character is. Those are not problems in this book.
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Mar 17, 2024 23:09
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Very good book, occasionally wish I never read it E: One could say it... bugs me
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Mar 21, 2024 04:03
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That got me a little pumped for Exordia 2
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Mar 23, 2024 21:19
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frogbs posted:Ugh, sorry guys, wasn’t quite awake this morning. To each their own, but I remember 3BP having a compelling and odd mystery, but horribly, laughably flat characters and it replaced thoughtfulness with cynicism (more so in the later books). Children of Time is not perfect but it is the far side of the world from that.
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Mar 28, 2024 17:47
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I'd compare the first book more to a quick ghost story than sci fi. It has a spooky Lovecraftian "look at this weird town and their unexplained traditions" vibe. If you go in expecting something light and atmospheric, you'll enjoy. If you want a metaphor for humanity or hard sci-fi, no.
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Mar 31, 2024 21:25
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Stuporstar posted:Omg there’s another Garth Marenghi book and it’s on sale today. https://www.amazon.com/Garth-Marenghis-Incarcerat-TERRORTOME-BESTSELLER-ebook/dp/B0CSYZ8TVS Book 1, TerrorTome is on sale https://www.amazon.com/Garth-Mareng...ps%2C104&sr=8-1 I'm phone posting so sorry about the url junk. E jfc that's what you were saying my brain is just a puddle today sorry
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Apr 10, 2024 00:20
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I'm good at a variety of engineering math ranging from Fourier to Bayes to complexity, and eigenvalues have always made me irrationally angry, partly because of stuff like that. I can't tell if it means something, or if it is the mathematical equivalent of 2 people wearing the same outfit to a party.
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Apr 12, 2024 04:35
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There's a common point between Crichton and Declare that makes it unsatisfying to me. They both take place in essentially the real world, so despite having big stuff happen, it all unravels by the end and essentially nothing changes. It ends up feeling like the message is "Here's some interesting stuff, it will have no impact."
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Apr 18, 2024 17:39
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I'm open to just being someone who doesn't like historical fiction, but I thought the Baroque Cycle illustrated some parts of history I wasn't familiar with and showed some historical themes that were interesting to me. I feel like Crichton's work (which I haven't read in forever, so maybe its just my high school brain talking) was more about the plot and the plot just circles back on itself.
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Apr 18, 2024 18:50
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eighty-four merc posted:I don’t think they were sentient. This sounds like some perfect sci-fi bullshit, I need to check this book out but I just started BotNS. One more To Be Read
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Apr 25, 2024 18:07
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