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Lowness 72 posted:I just finished Children of Time. Had some slow parts. But overall I enjoyed the book. I was really hoping the spiders would win, but also didn't see a way for them to do so that didn't contradict the overall theme of the book, so I was very pleasantly surprised at the end.
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Oct 3, 2019 15:41
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big dyke energy posted:So I read Priory of the Orange Tree recently and thought it was loving phenomenal. I also realized that I've barely read any fantasy novels, apart from Terry Prachett and the one time I read the Hobbit. I'm looking for more sweeping epic fantasy written by women/lgbt folk, especially ones featuring women/lgbt characters. i know it's sci-fi but I've also read all of Becky Chambers' stuff as well, which I also love, and I think Record of a Spaceborn Few is my favorite of her Wayfarer's triology. Haven't read her new one yet, but I have a hold on it at the library. I don't really have a good recommendation for big fat single books that meet your requirement -- Priory is a bit unusual in that it's doorstopper epic fantasy but is also a single book rather than a trilogy or a never-ending series. That said -- in addition to all the existing recommendations -- you might want to check out Rachel Aaron's Legend of Eli Monpress (5 books + 1 prequel novella; fun as hell but not particularly queer) and Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series (an absolute shitload of books, but they're grouped into stand-alone trilogies; Arrows of the Queen is the first published, The Last Herald-Mage is -- so far, I've not read that many of them -- the gayest.) There's also a lot of recent fantasy that I wouldn't call "epic fantasy" or particularly similar to Priory but which is absolutely worth reading, most of which has already been recommended, but I particularly want to call out J.Y. Yang's Tensorate novellas, starting with The Black Tides of Heaven. tildes posted:This is pretty hard to narrow down because IMO that describes a lot of the best recent fantasy/sci fi. If you only read one thing from this list I think NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth series should be it. If you read two I’d probably add Anne Leckie or Naomi Novik. The Goblin Emperor specifically reminded me of The Priory of the Orange Tree. I liked both a great deal but I think I'd also be hard pressed to point at two more different recent fantasy novels, Priory is a world-spanning multi-viewpoint fantasy epic about dragon wizards trying to prevent the end of the world and Emperor is a cozy personal story about one dude getting dropped into the deep end of court politics and trying to make friends and not drown. StrixNebulosa posted:Fortress in the Eye of Time + its sequels by CJ Cherryh: 90s fantasy that's dense and delicious and about an old mage who tries to bring back an ancient magical hero but screws up and gets an amnesiac young man who loves birds instead. Said young man has to grow up in a hurry once his old mage gets attacked, and he winds up stumbling into the local province and meeting the Prince and for all that it's high fantasy it pays a ton of attention to details and the low-folk. You can treat the first book as standalone, and if you continue it turns into a kind of early version of Foreigner as Cherryh settles into exploring the implications of the first book, how the Prince secures his power and how the hero continues to grow up. It feels like a living universe. I bounced off Fortress several times before finally getting into it, but once I did I really enjoyed it; it suffers somewhat, I think, from the first ~100 pages being exceptionally slow paced and not much really happening. Once I did make it past that hump I found it and its sequels very cozy, though, and yes, they're definitely the prototype for Foreigner -- I did a lot of "oh hey, it's [character] from Foreigner!" while reading the first two books in particular. And yes, Cherryh is fantastic. I just wish she'd return to the Compact Space setting. quote:If you like [Janny Wurts], there's more - her earlier work is weak (sadly) but her Curse of the Mistwraith mega-series is 10+ books of truly epic fantasy. If you want something a bit lighter there's also her Daughter of the Empire trilogy co-authored with Feist; you don't need to have read any of Feist's other stuff to appreciate it and it's much less imposing read than either Mistwraith or Stormwarden. quote:Black Sun Rising by CS Friedman is another 90s fantasy author, and this one is a trilogy that's all nice and gothic. [...] For shame, leaving out Magister? That's another fantasy trilogy (full on fantasy this time, not fantasy with an SF backstory like Black Sun Rising) that thematically is almost a reprise of Sun and its sequels. That said, I think I enjoyed it more for having read BSR first, since it kind of takes one of the questions raised at the very end of the third book and just runs with it until it unrolls into an entire setting.
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Oct 9, 2019 14:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:I haven't read Magister! I read everything she wrote in the mid 2000s and Magister hadn't released then and I haven't been back yet.... partly because the sequel to In Conquest Born was a dud. I adored that book and then the Wilding happened and I was so excited for it and oh. Nope. So I was wary of trying her other new stuff. The Wilding was a disappointment, yeah. And it's not like In Conquest Born needed a sequel, anyways. I liked Magister a lot, though, and I think it's technically better than BSR and closer to what big dyke energy was asking for. I do prefer BSR overall, though; I just love the aesthetics of the setting. Also, Gerald Tarrant is my favourite 900-year-old vampire scientist theologician horse-fancier.
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Oct 9, 2019 15:32
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tildes posted:On further reflection you’re probably right. I guess the beginning of Priory is what really reminded me of Emperor, but Priory then expands out a ton and Emperor doesn’t/Priory doesn’t have much of the initial phase. Belay that specific recommendation. I mean, I would still wholeheartedly recommend TGE, just not for the specific query of "I'm looking for Big Gay Epic Fantasy". foutre posted:Does Priory of the Orange Tree have a kind of storybook (for lack of a better word) vibe a la Spinning Silver, or does the "retelling of George and the Dragon" tag line not really mean that? It really doesn't, no.
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Oct 10, 2019 16:11
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Orv posted:Per General Battuta's inside quote I would like to know more about these sixteen years of Yoon Ha Le short fiction I really should have been reading before now, if anyone's got a good dish. Ninefox Gambit was excellent and I'll be grabbing 2-4 tonight but I'm definitely down for just more of his brain. I think if you pick up The Fox's Tower, Conservation of Shadows, and Hexarchate Stories that'll cover most of it.
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Oct 11, 2019 01:50
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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. I'd recommend Children of Ruin if you liked CoT; I didn't like it as much but it's still a fun sequel. I also enjoyed Spiderlight (Shelob-style giant intelligent spider gets transformed into a human and forced to join a generic D&D adventuring party) and Cage of Souls (a Dying Earth novel about an exiled revolutionary). I got a few books in to Shadows of the Apt before bouncing. IMO it's completely skippable unless you're desperately craving a gigantic epic fantasy series that doesn't do anything particularly exceptional.
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Oct 14, 2019 12:16
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A Proper Uppercut posted:How do people keep track of the books they want to read? A giant text file for "might want to read this". Once I decide I definitely want to read it and get the book, it goes into my (custom) book journaling software and into Calibre with an "unread" status.
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Oct 19, 2019 12:16
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General Battuta posted:What are the best/most horrifying submarine books. Any kind, from contemporary/thriller to hard SF. For nonfiction, Shadow Divers is terrifying (about the investigation of a sunken Nazi submarine by a team of divers) and Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage is entertaining as hell. No submarine fiction comes to mind offhand, though.
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Oct 23, 2019 01:10
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ZekeNY posted:Glen Cook's Passage At Arms is very Das Boot in space. gently caress, how did I forget Passage at Arms?
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Oct 23, 2019 02:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Is it just me, or does it seem like all the really interesting new books are being written in SF, not fantasy? Just in the last like two years I've read and really enjoyed Traitor Baru, Priory of the Orange Tree, Spiderlight, Swordheart, The Red Threads of Fortune/Black Tides of Heaven, Descendant of the Crane, and The Raven Tower, and that's just what comes immediately to mind. I'm pretty sure all of those have come out in the past five years and a few of them came out this year. There's a lot new happening in fantasy, if you go looking for it. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Oct 31, 2019 |
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Oct 31, 2019 01:39
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DACK FAYDEN posted:oh man I remember really liking this book and I've totally forgotten what it was but I think I was waiting on a sequel The book is A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White (and its sequel, A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy), and the sequel you're waiting for is The Worst of All Possible Worlds.
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Oct 31, 2019 17:33
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:On the zombie fantasy books front there's Mira Grant stuff, which I haven't read but seems to have sold a lot, and Peter Clines' Ex- stuff, which I have read but wouldn't call great or guess was hugely successful commercially. I'm not sure I'd file either of those as fantasy; Ex-Heroes is the eclectic grab bag of superscience, magic, demons, and steroid abuse that's typical of the superhero genre, just run through a zombie apocalypse, and Newsflesh is more of a political thriller set in near-future post-zombie¹ America than anything else -- Seanan McGuire mostly writes urban fantasy, but that's why her zombie books use a pen name. ¹ Not post-zombie-apocalypse, though.
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Oct 31, 2019 18:28
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DACK FAYDEN posted:There we go. Thanks! You're welcome! It was a guess, but I figure there can't be that many unfinished SF series starring a racecar-driving wizard.
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Nov 1, 2019 02:15
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MockingQuantum posted:Anybody have strong opinions on Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series? A very light sci-fi/fantasy book club that I might be joining is doing it for their next book and I'm trying to decide if I'll join or tell them I'll wait until the new year (which I might do anyway, given my schedule). I like space opera but have always kind of given "big space battles, also some story" kind of books a pass, I can't tell if this falls in that category or not though. The books are very repetitious, the characterization is weak and the romance subplot is spectacularly dumb and gets worse as the series continues. I'd rank it above Weber but below, say, Glynn Stewart.
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Nov 12, 2019 22:34
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quantumfoam posted:This is Emma Newman's 2015 story Planetfall you're talking about, correct? I have a probably-unfair intense dislike of Planetfall because it was pitched to me as a Big Dumb Object story and it really loving isn't. GreyjoyBastard posted:The poster who posted this Wait! I advice you to think more carefully and lurk more, before you post this!
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Nov 15, 2019 16:55
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quantumfoam posted:I usually go into new2me books blind outside of their book leaf notes. That's often the case for me, but in the case of Planetfall I only got it in the first place because I asked for BDO recommendations and at least two people -- in this thread, I think, or one of its precursors -- recommended it in that vein.
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Nov 16, 2019 03:41
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nessin posted:I'd need to re-read the opening sequence to double-check but I didn't get any of that. I don't remember her borderline rebelling, just personal grumbling with internal thoughts like anyone would expect of a soldier and I don't remember any troops actually disobeying beyond expressing whether they should be there or not in the moment. It seems pretty obvious to me, and did the first time I read the book, with no discussion and no prior knowledge of the author, too. The book isn't a puzzle to be solved, you don't need to spend ages turning over every stone, but you do need to actually read all the words on the page; YHL doesn't ever sit you-the-reader down and give you a big expository dump explaining what's happening, but all the information you need is there, so he shouldn't have to. In the opening battle, you have this: quote:Her soldiers weren’t going to like her, but that didn’t matter as long as they lived. “Formation override,” Cheris said into the relay. Her breath was silver-white in the air. She barely felt the cold, bad sign. “Squadrons Three through Six, adjust formation.” She wrote the equations on one hand with the other, letting the kinetic sensors pick them up for transmission. This clearly establishes that: - What she's about to do is, or at least could be seen as, heretical. - Heresy is bad and preventing heresy is the responsibility of Doctrine. Her implants/armour/whatever warns her that she's about to do a heresy, but she can override it. - The soldiers under her command don't want to do a heresy. quote:Squadron Four was resisting the order. Pir’s Fan was something they knew and understood. The modifications she had sent them were not. The sergeant protested formulaically, all but quoting the Kel code of conduct. The formation didn’t belong to the Kel lexicons. Unconventional thinking was a danger to a well-tested hierarchical system. Her orders did not advance the best interests of the hexarchate. And so on. This further establishes that her troops have something ("formation instinct") which is meant to mean that they are incapable of disobeying her orders, but Four's sergeant believes so strongly that what she's asking is heretical (even if he stops short of saying that outright) that it no longer works on him, presumably because he no longer sees her as his commanding officer. (In the following paragraphs Four is annihilated to the last man as a result of not joining the new (heretical) formation, so the fact that she basically just gave them all dishonourable discharges in the middle of a battle is ultimately irrelevant, although it does establish both the difficulty, and consequences, of disobeying formation instinct.) If all you got from that was "personal grumbling with internal thoughts like anyone would expect of a soldier [and her troops] expressing whether they should be there or not in the moment" you really weren't paying attention. quote:And her superiors made the call to pull them back before the mission was done with basically just a couple lines of dialogue back and forth with Cheris. And if some were going to be executed (also not clear) then their reaction is so outside the normal expected responses that just throwing out there and expecting the reader to understand or empathize is insane. Intellectually I can imagine how your statement of events can be reached with some help of outside statements by the author or some extensive discussion with others who know the author's style but trying to reach that interpretation by just reading the book is mind boggling to me. I have no idea where you're getting that from: quote:“I have bad news,” Cheris said. “They’re breaking up the company.” This, again, makes it very clear that being "processed by Doctrine" doesn't mean that they're going to be executed, but that the company as a unit will be disbanded, and most of the troops in it expelled from the military and the modifications that make them Kel revoked. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 00:56
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Larry Parrish posted:anyway im sad to hear about ann leckie's fantasy because I really liked the ancillary series Why are you sad about it? The Raven Tower was fun as hell. The one some people ITT are complaining about (Provenance) is in the Ancillary setting.
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Nov 23, 2019 17:40
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occamsnailfile posted:I think it's more this--the Raadch expansion kind of ground to a halt as Anaander lost their drat mind over meeting a power that casually eclipsed their own. Yes. This is all laid out in the first book. The Radchaai economy is predicated on constant, aggressive expansion, and Anaander are well aware of that. This had been the status quo for over a thousand years when the Presger were encountered. Anaander took the arrival of the first Presger Translators and their desire to negotiate as a sign of weakness and made plans to destroy them. The Presger responded by orchestrating the disaster at Garsedd, as a way of saying "we strongly recommend that you not gently caress with us". That let directly to the Presger Treaty, which is (according to the Presger, anyways, and they're the ones who enforce it) binding on all humans (and other Significant species), not just the Radchaai. But it also resulted in Anaander's fragmentation into "we must never have another Garsedd and must find a new economic model for the Radch" Anaander and "we must build up our power and destroy the Presger; the power of the Radch shall not be checked" Anaander. Her policy of conquest is not and never was about protecting humans from the Presger. Xenix posted:Breq says that they don't care much about gender, not that they don't have a conce (perhaps even important)pt of it. I believe she even goes on to say at one point that she doesn't understand the signifiers because 1) she spent millennia not having to worry about identifying genders by anything other than what the implants in her human crew told her and 2) they change from place to place in non-Radchaai space, which is where she had the most trouble with it. The relevant quotes: quote:Radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak—my own first language—doesn’t mark gender in any way. This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms. quote:“[...] You might just be very good with languages—inhumanly good, I might even say—” She paused. “The gender thing is a giveaway, though. Only a Radchaai would misgender people the way you do.” quote:I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai—never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned, tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn’t need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home. To me, this sounds like Radchaai do have gender, but (a) it's completely irrelevant in public and (b) it's not coded into their language or fashion in any way. It is presumably relevant to romantic relationships among the Radchaai, at least sometimes, which is not something that would often be germane to the operations of a ship. As far as I can tell, Breq never mentions implants in relation to gender (her ability to immediately access anyone's personnel file would be more relevant, in any case). Her "I can't see under your clothes" could be taken to be a reference to implants, but I think it makes perfect sense taken at face value. There's no indication that she was programmed not to understand gender, and while on the one hand she's spent years outside the Radch, on the other hand she's spent that time bouncing between societies with completely different gender norms, and that is weighed against thousands of years of practice speaking a completely genderless language in a functionally genderless society.
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Nov 24, 2019 03:45
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Look Sir Droids posted:Just finished Children of Time and have not read this thread at all, so going way back for this quote reply. ...yes? I didn't say "the spiders don't win", I said that before reading the ending, I couldn't see a way for them to win that didn't involve just killing the humans, which would go counter to the other 90% of the book showing that the spiders operate by befriending, subverting, or controlling threats to them. So, the ending was a pleasant surprise in that it revealed a solution to the human problem that was consistent with the rest of the book.
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Nov 29, 2019 20:49
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nessin posted:As someone who has done investigations into compromised "hardened" and "isolated" systems in such a way that should be difficult if not outright impossible to be compromised as they were, the capacity for human's to gently caress up like that is entirely believable and realistic. Yeah, "interplanetary human society ends up getting turbofucked by malware" is if anything the single most plausible part of that book.
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Nov 30, 2019 17:22
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StashAugustine posted:Hey, asked an offsite for book recommendations for a present. Anyone read To Say Nothing of the Dog? It sounds like a good fit and I'd like impressions By Connie Willis? I remember liking it, but I also read it like 10+ years ago so I don't remember what I liked about it.
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Dec 16, 2019 00:37
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Sex is about sexual reproduction. There are two sexes involved in sexual reproduction. In some rare cases there are also binary sexed individuals (who produce both gametes) or unsexed individuals (who produce no gametes). Maybe come back when you have a better than third grade understanding of biology. Better yet, don't come back at all. StrixNebulosa posted:To turn this into a good thing: I know of two trans authors off the top of my head: Yoon Ha Lee and Caitlin R Kiernan. Are there any others out there? I've got money and a need for more books to hoard. Off the top of my head: - Alex White (A Big Ship at the End of the Universe is a rec I got from this thread (and enjoyed) - Alex Acks writes steampunky mystery-y stuff; I got Murder on the Titania in a bundle and it made a nice snack read - Bard Bloom writes weird but fun sci-fantasy furry stuff like Snake-Armed Girl and Mating Flight - I've only read one thing by Kate Diamond (The Cloudship Trader) but it was fun, if short - If you're into romance J.S. Fields wrote the Ardulum trilogy I have a nagging feeling that I'm forgetting someone I've read recently but it might be another author already mentioned ITT.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:13
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General Battuta posted:I guess it's worth articulating, for anyone in the bleachers who's wondering why everyone yelled at the reddit guy, that 'biological sex is real' isn't the problem. Yes, there's a physical sex, and most people do fall in the XX or XY karyotopes. There are developmental consequences of these karyotopes which generally but not exclusively sort into two big heaps, 'male' and 'female'. Those wacky social justice warriors aren't denying this. It's also worth noting that, even if you're just talking about "biological sex" and not gender, looking just at karyotype is reductive and incorrect and if you are doing Actual Science you really need to treat sex as the fuzzy, partially overlapping piles of mostly-correlated traits it is, and not as two discrete buckets, or your data will be garbage.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:54
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bagrada posted:I've read the Coldfire trilogy and some of Michelle Sagara West's older novels (Darklands were the first ebooks I got on a kindle, I got the 6 book series chonker paperbacks back in the day because of the cover art, and more recently read her Queen of the Dead trilogy). I'll have to check out the other stuff you listed. I could have sworn I read a trilogy by Kate Elliott with three books titled something like "The Sword", "The Crown" and "The Scepter". They aren't in her Wikipedia bibliography though. I'll have to check the shelf at my parents' house next time I go by to see who that was. My memory is terrible and I read about every fantasy series my Waldenbooks or B Dalton stocked back then. If you liked Coldfire you should also check out her Magister trilogy, which is textually unrelated but kind of a sequel thematically.
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Dec 24, 2019 01:05
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Mr. Peepers posted:OK. About a year ago I decided I wanted to read more female SF authors. Since then I've read some novels by Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed) and Murderbots, of course... and that's about it. Help me get back on this train. I prefer harder SF but will settle for anything good. I've been meaning to check out Cherryh since she's brought up regularly but have no idea where to start. Start with The Pride of Chanur, it's accessible, fast-paced, and stands fine on its own but also has four sequels if you want more stuff in the same setting after finishing it. With that as a baseline, the Merchanter books are in the same wheelhouse (but set in human space) while Foreigner is more slower-paced, relaxing, and political. I'd recommend Bujold and Chambers if half the thread hadn't already beaten me to it. If you want some mil-SF/space-opera-y light reading but without the brainworms of e.g. Weber, check out Elizabeth Moon, in particular Vatta's War and Serrano. I haven't seen anyone recommend Melissa Scott yet (Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Trouble and her Friends), and that's a shame. For one-shots, Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty and A Matter of Oaths by Helen S. Wright are both really good -- I think I got the recommendation for the former from this thread, and for the latter from C.J. Cherryh. Oaths is available for free on the author's website. Also, no-one seems to have recommended Ann Leckie, and while I know the sequels are a bit divisive (I loved them) Ancillary Justice was fun as hell.
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Dec 25, 2019 17:58
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gently caress me I also forgot to mention Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series, about a member of a roving organization of cartographer-researchers who ends up at odds with the Mages' Guild actually the only people on this backwater planet who have electricity and radios over her investigations into mysterious iridescent blue gemstones with silver veins running through them actually fragments of solar panels from a crashed satellite. (Spoilers are for like halfway through the first book, although the second one was spoiled by the cover of the first book in my edition, and, IMO, knowing that enhanced my enjoyment of the book.) Regrettably it's meant to be a five-book series and she's only written the first four so far, but I'm not sure the fifth will ever get finished and the first four are good on their own, so.
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Dec 26, 2019 13:53
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cptn_dr posted:Take care, General B. Hope things look up soon.
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Jan 13, 2020 12:34
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tima posted:Hey lack of insurance sucks, let us know if we can crowd fund some health care for you. Oh poo poo, is that what's happening?
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Jan 14, 2020 04:04
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ed balls balls man posted:Solidarity to the General. That is indeed pretty sweet.
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Jan 14, 2020 13:22
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freebooter posted:Clarkesworld has pulled that attack helicopter story. File 770 has a writeup.
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Jan 16, 2020 20:35
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freebooter posted:
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Jan 17, 2020 05:34
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Kesper North posted:What's really confusing the gently caress out of me is that - somewhat atypically - all my SF-reading trans friends have said they really loved the story and that it spoke to them and their experience, even to the point of showing it to family members and partners to provide basis for discussion. I also had a number of female friends comment that they felt it was absolutely written true to a female voice. I'm not gonna pretend I have the basis to understand what the issues are with the story, but the trans community itself seems remarkably divided on it, and I haven't actually seen the side that hates the story present what their problems with it are. Is that something anyone here might be willing to lay out for me? Some of the tweets linked from the F770 post earlier in this thread do a better job of laying it out than I will here, but the tl;dr is: - the story is full of stuff that's right out of common TERF rhetoric like "scientists are transing your children", persistent confusion between gender and sexuality, etc - it also falls flat in a few ways (the supposedly post-gender, post-binary society that enabled the basic conceit is undermined by stuff like the paragraph that talks about how easy it is to figure out someone's gender based on what they're wearing; the amount of dysphoria you would experience when you're not a helicopter is barely touched on) which make it seem like the TERF talking points are the point of the story and the rest was just backfilled to support them - there's also a weird aside where it basically says "are you a trans person fighting for your rights? well this is your fault" - the title immediately primes people to read all of the above in the worst possible light I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt when she says this was a well-intentioned attempt to reclaim the meme that went badly wrong, and I hope she's doing ok, but I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people found it unpleasant or hurtful, or were concerned that it was just giving ammo to shitheads. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 20:07
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avoraciopoctules posted:I'd like to read a fantasy novel with a wizard protagonist. Flashy magic, hopefully something they had to work for rather than being born with. At least a little smug and self-absorbed, but not a total jerk. I would rather avoid stuff with torture or sexual violence. Hmmm. The first thing that comes to mind is C.S. Friedman's Magister trilogy. The protagonist is a witch (a spellcaster who draws on her own life-force) and the book opens with her working to learn the secrets of the Magisters (an all-male order of immortal mages who can work magic without shortening their own lives). At the same time, the magisters end up discovering an existential threat to human civilization that they need to deal with. There's some of this in Steven Brust's Khaavren Romances pentalogy, and in The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron, but it's not the main focus in either -- it's something the supporting characters do. Less obvious recommendation: the Wizardry series by Rick Cook, about a programmer who gets sucked into a fantasy world and needs to figure out how to apply his programming skills to develop a new school of magic. I found the first book kind of rough and probably wouldn't have stuck with it if I hadn't already read some of the later ones, but had a blast with books 2-5. They have a lot of programmer humour in them, though, which is my jam but may not be what you're looking for. mllaneza posted:I'm going to throw out a weird one, Glen Cook's Darkwar. Seconding this rec, Darkwar is great. That's honestly probably a better recommendation than anything I came up with above.
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Jan 21, 2020 16:03
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DreamingofRoses posted:Edit: Shameless page snipe. I’m working on Daughter of the Empire right now and I’m enjoying it. How’s the rest of the series? The thing I liked about the first book was the focus on underdog Mara and her cunning plans, and book 2 delivers more of that; it actually felt like book 2 had two major story arcs back-to-back and would have done ok split into books 2 and 3 of the trilogy, and it concludes the main arc begun in book 1 quite nicely. Book 3 picks up a few years later and has a rather different focus; I found it started out weak and while it did improve over the course of the book and ended strong, I never liked it as much as I did the first two. It feels like the first two books are "the trilogy" and book 3 is more of a coda.
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Jan 31, 2020 02:56
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FPyat posted:Vernor Vinge and David Brin are the other Hugo-winning go-tos. Cherryh and Bujold don't do aliens in their space opera settings, I believe. Sounds like you haven't read the Chanur books or Serpent's Reach. Cherryh does a lot of aliens, just not in the main A-U books.
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Feb 7, 2020 18:08
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mllaneza posted:Speaking of which, I read and liked Alliance Rising. It has some traces of the outline-itis you get when a big name writer and a relative newcomer collaborate on a book, but not as bad as some I've read. This book covers the founding of the Merchanter's Alliance and the last gasp of Earth Corp to maintain power before the FTL route to Sol is opened up. Good plot, solid characters. Fancher isn't really a newcomer (IIRC she has 6+ published novels and has been an uncredited collaborator on a lot of Cherryh's stuff for years), but I don't think she nearly as much experience as her wife, no. Cherryh's record is a hard one to match.  I am looking forward to reading it (more so than the next few Foreigner books, honestly), but what I really want to see more than anything else is more Compact Space, with a sequel to Cyteen (a proper one) being a close second place, and it doesn't look like she's particularly interested in returning to either. feedmegin posted:Wasn't Empire specifically co written with a woman, Janny Wurts? Yeah, and I honestly liked it more than any of the ones written by Feist alone, although it's been a while since I read them. IIRC (but my recollection may be faulty) the original four books avoid this problem by not really having any female characters at all. I believe this was also pretty much the case in the Serpentwar books (but it's been even longer since I read those). ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 16:26
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quote? edit? why not both
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Feb 9, 2020 16:32
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Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic? World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is old enough and well-known enough that you've probably already read it, but I'll list it here for completeness. The Girl With All The Gifts was fantastic. I think I got the recommendation from this very thread. It has a sequel now (The Boy on the Bridge) but I haven't read it, and Gifts works fine on its own. Newsflesh by "Mira Grant" (Seanan McGuire; first book Feed) is post-zombie but not post-apocalypse; it's a political thriller in a US that has changed due to the ever-present zombie threat, but not collapsed. Blood tests to get into crowded buildings, mandatory firearms training for professions at risk of zombie encounters, pets large enough to go zombie are illegal, etc. The first book is about a team of journalists following a presidential candidate who someone seems to be trying to assassinate. Parasitology, also by Mira Grant, is more post-apocalyptic but less zombie. I didn't like it nearly as much, largely due to how passive the protagonist is and how much time she spends waiting for other people to rescue her, but it's in the same wheelhouse as what you're looking for.
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Feb 11, 2020 13:48
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jng2058 posted:To expand on this, get the audiobook version, and indeed, get the expanded audiobook version. It's put together like an in-universe documentary, with a unique voice actor for every character. It's awesome and well worth a listen even if you've read the book already. The expanded version is unabridged and twice as long as the original release and is, in my opinion, the definitive version of the book. Was the expanded version ever turned back into a book? I hate audiobooks but would like to read it.
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Feb 11, 2020 21:34
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