|
pseudorandom name posted:Becky Chambers absolutely does not understand thermodynamics. See also: the ships that grow algae to produce fuel to power the engines that power the lights that grows the algae and the ships powered by their occupants stepping on the pressure plates that line the corridors. She actively doesn't want to, I think. Deliberate choice to reject the "hard sf" style. She puts that stuff in to chase away the people who want it, like a soft fluffy pastel version of Eco's monastery door.
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2024 20:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 07:26 |
|
|
mewse posted:I still don't know what cozy means, can I request another 100 posts debating it?  
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2024 23:37
|
|
|
tetrapyloctomy posted:Tet Jr is super into The Wind in the Willows right now. My wife bought him a Yoto card with the audiobook and then I found an unabridged version that he absolutely loves. I had never read it, and I spent more than forty years of life thinking that Mr Toad was the same character as Toad from the Frog and Toad stories. It really is a great story, which is good because he's listened to it roughly six hundred times over the last month. I love how the chapters alternate between the driving Toad action narrative and the more contemplative chapters. The second illustration there is from the edition I had as a child, illustrated by Tasha Tudor. I kept that specific "Shan't" illustration on my office wall as a public defender.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 01:18
|
|
|
Benagain posted:Wait what's up with eco's monastery door? A deliberately ahistorical thing in name of the rose? Loved that book but also well aware a bunch went over my head. He wrote elsewhere that he wrote the monastery door deliberately to be an immensely, absurdly over the top tour de force of medieval history and theology aimed at the nerdiest of medieval nerds, essentially. If that sort of thing pissed you off? The rest of the book was full of it, so you might as well leave now. If you were into it OR willing to skip it, you'd cross the threshold and enjoy the rest of the book. It's a test for the reader. You can pass or turn back, your choice.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 02:32
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:Lol I'm sorry you had a bad time playing dnugeons and dragon mrenda SF & F Megathread: I'm Sorry You Had a Bad Time Playing Dungeons and Dragons
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2024 19:01
|
|
|
Kinda hard to claim a "universal" story structure that Little Red Riding Hood doesn't fit into.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2024 17:16
|
|
|
fez_machine posted:Yeah, the idea is that the common appeal of the structure can be turned into Hollywood mega-millions and it's not entirely wrong (see Dan Harmon's story circle) Yeah, Campbell more managed to find *a* repeatable story structure rather than *the* universal story structure. But he sure plays fast and loose with a lot of stuff in the process.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2024 19:51
|
|
|
thotsky posted:it means it has biker werewolves that gently caress in it That's paranormal romance If they don't gently caress that's urban fantasy
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 03:45
|
|
|
Ok I went and read scholomance I'm mad that it was really good Naomi Novik is a really good fanfic writer and I don't know how to feel about that
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 20:58
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:there are no original ideas; ergo everything is fanfic; ergo naomi novik is a really good writer See the ultimate problem is that she absolutely butchered the Temeraire series by turning Patrick O'Brian + Dragons fanfic into dragon romance 2: dragon babies; she did a marvelous job of turning an adult fantasy concept into YA fanfic, and the end result is like watching someone carve Carrera marble into into novelty lawn flamingos, it's just a sad waste OTOH "what if Wicked, but Harry Potter, while . . . Communism?" Turns out to be a marvelous concept for a YA novel, and she doesn't gently caress it up by making it YA since it's already that. I could've read four more books in a row. Just good poo poo all through.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2024 21:14
|
|
|
Stuporstar posted:I need some recommendations for cyberpunk noir. The kind where some kinda cyberspace figures into it. I can only remember reading Neuromancer, Snow Crash and maybe a few short stories in anthologies. read the rest of william gibson.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2024 00:21
|
|
|
StumblyWumbly posted: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." That's historical fiction though. At the most dramatic, historical fiction can still only bring us to today. Anything else puts you over in Alt History with the Gettysburg Gatlings. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Apr 18, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 17:51
|
|
|
mdemone posted:I enjoy when historical fiction swerves into alt history at the last possible moment and you suddenly realize you've been had It makes me so angry I hate it of all things This whole time you've just been *making everything up*? Like a fabulist!? The whole point of historical fiction is the dance of believability and that swerve shatters it
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 18:23
|
|
|
zoux posted:
Temeraire mostly
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 18:33
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:Temeraire never makes any pretense to being anything other than alt history though? Unless you think "napoleonic war with dragons" counts as historical fiction somehow It begins as an extremely direct rewrite of the Aubrey / Maturin series, except with dragons, which isn't that different from the sort of thing Powers does in Declare. So while there are alt history elements initially it seems to be playing the "we will stay roughly aligned with actual history, except" game that Powers is playing in his fiction. An extraordinarily auspicious beginning and then it fails in that promise rather rapidly and rather dramatically.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 18:46
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:how do you feel about a dozen or so Aubrey-Maturin books taking place in a magical world where 1813 is about 30ish months long Look, some things gentlemen just don't talk about
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 21:29
|
|
|
Stuporstar posted:
I miss Plebs
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 21:34
|
|
|
Ben Nevis posted:In theory I love this. In practice I found it sooo draggy. All of powers' books drag a bit for me, until they don't. There's almost always a moment where they click and take off, though a couple never did for me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2024 15:41
|
|
|
Kalman posted:Though also somewhat unreadable. That's just Frank Herbert generally.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 22, 2024 19:09
|
|
|
Gully Foyle posted:Anyone got recommendations for a good bit of exploration-based fiction? I just read Lovercraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and I realized I have kind of missed reading that old-school style of exploration fiction. Or something like Rendezvous with Rama (original one obviously). There's just something fascinating for me about people exploring completely alien or strange places. If you really want the old school classics of this, try King Solomon's Mines or _She_ by H. Rider Haggard.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2024 15:48
|
|
|
Deptfordx posted:Just finished Robert Jackson Bennets The Tainted Cup Wait someone did this other than glen Cooke? Well thats a buy
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2024 00:41
|
|
|
Kestral posted:Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a thread favorite, and one of my favorites as well, so I figure this might be the place to ask: is the 2015 TV adaptation some kind of weird tonal parody of this book, or have I misinterpreted a book I've read half a dozen times? I finished a reread of it last night and started on the first episode of the show, and I was astonished at how different the tone of the show feels. Scenes that felt deadly serious in the book are played for laughs (I'm thinking particularly of [spoiler]Strange's father trying to murder his servant), and some of the characters don't even seem to resemble their book versions: John Segundus I always read as sober and earnest and probably pretty nerdy, while the show portrays him as bumbling, flustered, and energetic. Runcible Cat posted:I thought it sucked at the time, but most people seemed to disagree with me. The gentleman with thistle-down hair was particularly badly handled - Marc Whatsisface being scowly and menacing when the gentleman is supposed to be fey and twee and not someone you take seriously until oh poo poo. It's been a while since I watched it but I remember thinking it was better than I'd expected it to be. The thing with Regency writing, especially Jane Austen which Clarke is drawing on heavily tonally, is that the tone is nuanced and has multiple layers of irony and meaning depending on the narrator, the speaker, the viewpoint character, the author, etc. There are individual sentences in Austen that have five or six or more layers of meaning and interpretation and each layer is completely different or even antithetical to the others. And film just can't do that in the same way. So what you end up getting in even a good Austen interpretation is at most one or two layers done well, and the rest just . . .missed. Which is pretty much what we got with the JS&MN television adaptation. From what I recall they got a good bit of the humor and some of the horrors of war with the Wellington scenes but missed a lot too. There was a website for the JS&MN book, when it first came out, that had in-character essays about the book. Norrell wrote an essay condemning it because it was a novel and written by a woman; Strange wrote a letter praising it for the same reasons. Both stated that they hadn't actually read it at all. I wish I could find it again but I think it's down now and I'm not sure that wayback machine preserved it.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2024 22:49
|
|
|
I still buy hardback for anything with significant illustrations or annotations. Otherwise being able to inflate the print size is too important.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2024 15:25
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:. Sometimes thread favorites just aren't for everyone! This stuff also changes over time. There are some books that were slam dunk thread favorites years ago that people just aren't as into any more, for a variety of valid reasons (the Ethshar books and Bridge of Birds spring to mind but aren't the only examples). Tastes change and what people are looking for changes. Anyway Between Two Fires remains my favorite fantasy book that's gotten big in the past few years. I wish more people were writing historical fantasy. A lot of modern fantasy I read feels so heavily "produced" that even when it's well executed I feel like it's just a pile of tropes rearranged in a more-interesting-than-typical pattern. I want stuff that surprises me and gets weird with it, and that typically means "highly influenced by a decade or so of research into something esoteric that otherwise shouldn't be a novel." I did like Robert Jackson Bennett's new Tainted Cup book, but that's just because I'll read anything sufficiently nero-wolfe-esque. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:41 on May 13, 2024 |
|
#
¿
May 13, 2024 16:36
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Have you read ASH A SECRET HISTORY It's on my kindle but I think it got lost in the shuffle; I hate the current kindle interface, it's designed to make you buy new stuff, not remember the things you have already bought. Thanks for the reminder.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2024 18:03
|
|
|
pradmer posted:The pics! I think it's a girl but waiting on vet visit in a few days. Unnamed so far. She's a little cutie! Oh my GOODNESS
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2024 12:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 07:26 |
|
|
General Battuta posted:It was METAL FROM HEAVEN by HA Clarke. I didn’t get on with the first few chapters at all but by the end it had turned into something like Disco Elysium, or China Mieville if he was a stone butch lesbian. It is not a cozy book about twee lesbian bandits or a romance, it’s about labor movements and rejecting liberal reform and communism and revolutionary violence. Agree with its politics or not, it’s a book of substance. well that's a buy
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2024 19:26
|
|