|
Mr. Nemo posted:Read some kim stanley robinson. Aurora and The memory of whiteness. I liked the first one a lot more, but goddamn that was a weird tangent to end on. Totally unexpected. The ending of Aurora is Freya surviving her tumble in the ocean and crawling back to dry land. There are several things happening here: She'll be ok after this; the Earth is still a huge intimidating place but she went out and faced her fear head on and lived. The specific image of a creature pulling itself out of the water to make a new life on land is something you would see in a fifteen second montage of the history of life on Earth, it's one of the most important steps in our conception of evolution and of ourselves, as inheritors of that striving life-force. The people who launched the starships would have said settling new planets is like that first creature pulling itself on to land; human life expanding to new environmental niches in the stars. The obvious metaphor is of the ocean as vast, empty space, and new planets as the uncharted shores we'll land on. But KSR is giving us this triumphant moment back on Earth. Freya (humanity) flings herself out in to the ocean (interstellar space), she has some misadventures (most would-be settlers die), and is deeply thankful to be alive when she gets back after all her struggles. It's the whole novel summed up in a scene. Writing this it occurs to me that Euan goes to the ocean to die on Aurora. He says he's going to try to catch a wave then stay under. His death is the failure of the starship mission in miniature. He gets to that alien beach, undoes his helmet and breathes the air, and then dies. Freya does the same thing, except she does it on Earth and lives. She is figuratively reborn as a creature of Earth, having lived the evolutionary struggle out of the ocean in fractal miniature - in the trip out and back from Tau Ceti, in a ship, with others, and now personally, with just her own body (her fins having been shed like parts of Ship as it decelerates), as she nearly drowns herself trying to surf. It's basically the same ending as Gravity, is what I'm saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCq8gQWxkBQ Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Apr 13, 2021 |
#
¿
Apr 13, 2021 04:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 09:18 |
|
|
Mr. Nemo posted:Has anyone read The memory of Whiteness? I reread it just a few months ago. It's an odd one, for sure. It works a little better when you know the general outline and can free your mind up to catch the intricacies of the conspiracy, alongside the mostly unconnected music and culture stuff. But it doesn't really gel in to anything greater than the sum of its parts. The metadrama is a neat idea. The determinism vs free will stuff was... fine? I think it was a mistake to reveal it as a hoax, or attempted hoax, so early in the novel. Maybe if you stretch a little it's really the story of two artists, one whose art starts out uncomfortably constrained (by the awkwardness of the orchestra and his distaste for it as an instrument), ends completely constrained (by his belief in absolute determinism), yet still achieves greatness and composes timeless masterpieces. The other artist, who thinks he can twist people as much as he wants, who places no limits on his artistic ambition or the tools he'll use to realize it, drives himself insane when things don't go to plan. It's got a dreamlike quality that some of his other early work shares (Icehenge and A Short, Sharp Shock, some of his short stories), but I think he learned to condense those bits and put them to sparing good use in otherwise more grounded stories. Another thing that hurts Whiteness a lot is that the characters seemingly live in a post scarcity society and none of them really want anything, or change to get it. They're just sort of stubbornly pursuing their hobbies, which are esoteric and maybe deadly, but ultimately the stakes feel low, even given the ultimate philosophical debate they set up. The overall structure of the outward-in Grand Tour doesn't help either, because the metadrama conspiracy depends on the Tour continuing to the end, so we never really doubt they'll keep hopping from planet to planet, as everyone originally planned. KSR said on some podcast that he considers The Gold Coast (1988) his first real novel, where he felt he understood the form. I don't remember if he went in to detail on what exactly he meant by that, but he did point out that the main character in The Gold Coast, Jim, is essentially himself. So there's a reality to that character, and most the ones he writes afterward.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2021 04:56
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atf7wvPmhjo Pretty close, lol. I've never seen a picture of him with a ponytail but he freely admits he got his start as a California hippie in the 60s. Mr. Nemo posted:Do you think the California trilogy or science in the capital, if you've read them, are worth it? He's said that Rice and Salt is the one that's the most important to him personally, and it's definitely one of his best. He's one of my favorite authors, I've read all his novels and a majority of his short fiction. If I had to pick one of his three trilogies it'd be Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (plus The Martians). They come closest to Rice and Salt in terms of (future) history covered and the feelings you have for the characters by the end, and will present some new subject matter. They're his best known work, and while the terraforming described wouldn't actually work (based on what we learned after he wrote them), it's still a crazy ambitious, meticulously crafted story. After Ministry for the Future, the Science in the Capital trilogy (collected, updated, and slightly condensed in to a single volume as Green Earth in 2015, if you're gonna read it do it that way) may well feel like a slower retread, in that it's broadly about climate change, and set in the nebulous near future. But it's also about parenthood, Buddhism, politics, and the big question of how to live in this economic/cultural/political/climate epoch. The answers are much less radical (as HaitianDivorce pointed out) but maybe more achievable on a personal level than in Ministry. The characters are also much stronger than in Ministry. It's worth reading as a quality work of fiction, but it's been supplanted by Ministry as a gut-punch/reality check/call to action. The California Trilogy is a different sort of thing, each novel is a separate alternate future: post apocalyptic (Wild Shore), depressing continuation of status quo (Gold Coast), optimistic (though not problem-free) ecotopia (Pacific Edge). They have a lot of thematic overlap, and are deliberately structured, such that I knew how some of the major plot beats were going to turn out in the last one I read just based on comparison to the others. They're all old enough that none of the futures they present are really credible anymore, but they're still well written and compelling on a character level - Gold Coast and Pacific Edge in particular, for their studies of relatable, loveable failsons. Icehenge is one of his earliest works, and it's basically three short stories stitched together. It shares the dreamlike/uneven quality of Whiteness. Interesting as a precursor to the Mars trilogy if you're a KSR completionist, but I would save it for much later. Shaman is an ice age adventure story. Antarctica is set in the near future and hits all the KSR staples (science, environment, politics, living with the land, survival in wilderness) with a dash of super interesting history, I find myself liking it a lot. 2312 features a much more realized (and realistic) version of the settled solar system compared to Whiteness, and the mystery plot finds reasons to take you to most major locations. Wildly imaginative, with some of my favorite writing of his in the short interlude chapters. Galileo's Dream is a fictionalized biography of Galileo, if you liked book 4 in Rice and Salt, with the proto-scientists trying to measure the speed of light and invent better cannons, this is basically the real version of that, with an alternate history/time travel framing device. The ending of this one in particular had me tearing up. New York 2140 is ok, it's an "apartment novel" where the characters all live in the same building and cover as many walks of life as possible, from street urchin to finance bro to globe-trotting internet celeb. Set in a half-drowned NYC after sea level has gone up 50 feet from where it is today, and based heavily on the 2008 financial crisis. Red Moon is set on a near-future Moon (mostly China-controlled), and in China itself. The security state is the main villain, the characters are on the run or in hiding for most of the novel. Similar to Aurora in terms of how AI is presented. I didn't connect with these two as much as the others, maybe just because of the characters, but they're still well written and interesting takes on plausible futures and plausible crisis/revolutions that could break the presented status quo. tl;dr unless one of the standalone novels sounds really good to you, just read the Mars trilogy and then continue from there. They're all worth reading, and the order doesn't particularly matter. Prolonged Panorama fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Apr 15, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2021 04:41
|
|
|
Player of Games is a pulpy action novel. It has some relatively slow parts but the whole thing is begging to be turned in to a big budget spectacle movie. It's 90% plot and it's great fun. 2312 is... maybe not the furthest thing from it, but pretty drastically different. There is a plot, but it's more like a slow tour of the future solar system, as we watch a few characters and their relationships change over time. It is full of fantastical ideas (in fact KSR had used "Banksian" as an in-universe adjective to describe some spectacular future construct, but had to remove it because it might be construed as a quid-pro-quo, since Banks had blurbed 2312), and punctuated by action scenes, but it's more about soaking in the characters and setting. It also has a unique structure - story chapters are intercut with 1-3 page bits that function as exposition, in the form of lists, "extracts" from in-universe books written before and after the events of the novel, short histories of the planets. They function as extended epigraphs, but some are oddly formatted, cut sentence fragments together, etc. It works in print, I'm not sure how well it works in narration. The first one is a list of craters on Mercury. Once you know they're coming and that their context won't immediately be revealed they get easier to absorb, and their overall spirit is playful. Come back to it when you're in a contemplative mood.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2021 05:14
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:The series really is a marathon, but don't skip The Martians, the short story collection. There are some real gems in there, particularly the account of climbing Mons Olympus. The cool thing is that novella (confusingly titled Green Mars) was published long before Red Mars - 1985 vs 1992 iirc. And he reused the title for the 1995 novel. But yes, it is a high point (ha), and the way he wrote some new stories to connect his pre-trilogy Mars short work and the trilogy itself makes for some fun meta-reading. You can tell he's having fun with it too, instead of obsessively trying to make it all fit seamlessly. He does the same with all his work - he'll reuse/remix ideas but (thankfully) doesn't try to maintain a single KSRverse. If he likes it he puts it in and changes it so it makes sense in the context of that single work. General Battuta posted:Stealth thread favorite David Mace holds up pretty well politically. I've torn through the majority of his work on your/the thread's recommendation, he really does rule (spoken as a white guy). Part of it may be that he's from England but seems to have mostly written about US characters; it gave him the objective distance to see US race/sex/gender relations more clearly, but maybe not the exact right vocabulary (for a US reader anyway). Aside from what you pointed out, there are also some odd chunks of dialogue or turns of phrase that are perfectly comprehensible but feel like a non-American either guessing wrongly about informal American speech or unconsciously slipping in English patterns in a way that's slightly jarring.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2021 19:59
|
|
|
Hiro Protagonist posted:I have a weird recommendation request, mainly because it may be either too subjective or too difficult for me to articulate, but I thought I'd ask. Does anyone have good examples of books with really epic feeling moments? Moments that make you exclaim "gently caress yeah!"? It's closer to "relentless action" and a string of anime-worthy mega-setpieces than singular peaks of epic, but I'll mention The Mirrored Heavens and its two sequels by David J Williams. You can get a nice preview for them at the (dated) website for the trilogy, but the gist is a Second Cold War in the 2110s that's about to go hot, featuring power-armored spec ops folks chasing a mysterious new terrorist organization all over cyberspace and the Earth-Moon system. The second novel, The Burning Skies, has the longest and craziest action sequence I've ever read.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2021 04:55
|
|
|
AnimeIsTrash posted:I'm looking for a book or series about space colonization/space travel kind of stuff. I really enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Aurora, and was looking for something along those lines. What all do you folks recommend? 2312 by KSR is pretty in-line with Aurora and the Mars Trilogy, it's a mystery-driven whirlwind tour of the solar system in the process of being settled.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2022 01:42
|
|
|
AARD VARKMAN posted:But honestly I don't think there's anything that truly compares to the Culture books. I read a lot of space opera over the intervening years looking for more and have never been satisfied. GCU Nothing Truly Compares (d)ROU Never Been Satisfied agreed, unfortunately
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2022 19:11
|
|
|
Yeah my man is in for a lot of heart probing and chitter chatter as the Mars trilogy goes on lol
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2022 17:37
|
|
|
quote:Maybe the problem isn’t that women have come to dominate the fields traditionally occupied by men, but that men don’t really want to think about how economic conditions and changing cultural values have made them more like women. It's just so weird to pick the Mars trilogy of all novels to pin this criticism on; KSR wrote it as a "Mr. Mom" stay-at-home dad in the early 90s while his scientist wife paid all the bills. His Science in the Capital trilogy has a main character in that exact situation, but the fingerprints of that experience (which he loved!) are all over the Mars books too if you care to look. For a gross example: quote:A man’s literary interest had to be justified by ambition, linked to his masculine capacity for action, or contextualised in real-world exploration. The three traditionally powerful and active male characters in Red Mars, the seemingly "natural" protagonists, who fit these three criteria perfectly, one each, are all dead by the end of the first novel, their political project a complete failure, leaving the women and "beta" males (who have collectively accounted for the majority of the POV pagecount) to rebuild and raise the next generation. Somehow, the series continues without reviving these archetypes, and people (including men) keep reading. quote:But the thing is, women don’t just read novels to understand ourselves: we read them to understand each other. Literary fiction is how we can study human frailty, making the world of feelings, friendship, love, personal dilemma, rivalry, money and psychology rich terrain for exploration. And, with the selfishness of a voyeur, I want to know what that’s like for men. That means more male novelists, sure, but also more male readers. Take a break from Mars, and explore the cosmos of emotional minutiae. We could all do with a lot more of your chitter-chatter. The main complaint about Red Mars (and Green and Blue even moreso) from "traditional" sci-fi readers is that there's too much focus on the characters' relationships, feelings, petty fights, rivalries, and mood swings. The later books are famously slow and full of chitter-chatter!
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2022 04:09
|
|
|
We will always Stan Stan!
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2022 04:20
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Jackie is my least favorite character in that nobody, including the narration, seems to have any empathy or respect for her. Jackie gets a short POV chapter in The Martians, about raising Zo as a baby and toddler. It fleshes her out a little bit, but that just deepens the sense of sadness around her character.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2022 22:08
|
|
|
If you haven't read The Years of Rice and Salt, it's one of KSR's best. More alt-history than sci-fi, but all about [history of] science/culture vs action, covers six or seven centuries, hops all around the world, etc. Galileo's Dream is also about culture and science, and there's a far future (2900s CE iirc) timeline plot that intertwines with the historical Galileo stuff. Not an all-timer like Rice and Salt, but I'd put it on the list. Greg Egan's Diaspora hits the timespan/science buttons really hard.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2022 05:41
|
|
|
Time for a reread of Count Zero and Pattern Recognition.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2022 17:34
|
|
|
There's no apostrophe in the title, it's just Rainbows End. But yeah that's a good one.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2022 09:39
|
|
|
The Traitor Flag Baru Cormorant
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2023 03:15
|
|
|
I specifically thought "that reminded me of The Library at Mount Char" after finishing qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division a few weeks ago.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2023 21:09
|
|
|
BurningBeard posted:Hey speaking of KSR, anybody got opinions about Shaman? I read it when it came out. It's more of a straightforward coming of age/adventure story than usual from KSR. The shamanic stuff isn't a huge emphasis from what I remember, but it's pervasive in a way that feels realistic. Typical KSR emphasis on the environment and outdoor survival, obviously. Thinking about it, a decade later, it could almost be a greatly expanded prehistoric chapter from Rice and Salt, in terms of trying to imagine and inhabit different times and cultures, but then telling a fairly straightforward story within that context. There are pieces of it that have stayed with me, in particular a revelation about the style of some cave paintings. I want to reread it eventually.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2023 19:53
|
|
|
Mr. Nemo posted:Is Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth a replacement for the entire trilogy? Or is there a trade off between reading one or the other? It's a slightly shortened/condensed single volume version. The figure he usually gives is 15% shorter compared to the trilogy. Having only read Green Earth it doesn't feel rushed or chopped down. KSR said something about cutting a lot of descriptive text treating the DC area like one of his Mars scapes, as if it were a place no reader could ever see or visit, beyond that I'm not sure what else was dropped. It's still plenty long and fleshed out. He regards it as the definitive edition and is happier with the shorter version. If you like KSR I'd recommend it, although the "what do we do about climate change" conversation has moved on considerably.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2023 03:15
|
|
|
Finished Exordia, what an awesome ride. I went looking on Google for any fanart (would love to see takes on Blackbird) but this caught my eye instead. The final gutpunch. (page one Exordia spoilers)  It might be somebody's profile pic, a bunch of other unrelated images that show up from Goodreads are, although I couldn't find it in a quick scroll through the reviews. But why attribute to coincidence that which is adequately explained by malice?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2024 04:04
|
|
|
The Conan novella Red Nails fits pretty well.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2024 22:05
|
|
|
occluded posted:stories about navigating through fantastical worlds in kind of a mundane way? Any good recommendations? All of Simon Stalenhag's narrative artbooks have this vibe, but particularly The Electric State.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2024 00:23
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:read the rest of william gibson. Particularly Spook Country, given the elements listed.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2024 00:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 09:18 |
|
|
I thought it was Just Fine but "cloud modest" and "WE! ARE! HERE!" from the intro/outro really stuck in my mind.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2024 00:19
|
|