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What was your opinion on La Belle Sauvage? I found it to be hugely disappointing (boring and understuffed) yet at the same time am still looking forward to The Secret Commonwealth, I don't know why.
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Oct 6, 2019 10:07
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Cardiac posted:Utilitarian and aesthetic prose are not opposites imo, but flowery text for the purpose of flowery text makes me believe the author is a smug wise rear end. Too Like The Lightning is one of the few books I've abandoned in the last ten years. Found it insufferably pretentious.
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Oct 9, 2019 03:40
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JTDistortion posted:I would also like to give some credit to Bloodmage by Stephen Aryan. It's a pretty fast paced murder/politics book where no one has any time for romance whatsoever but they toss in about 2 or 3 lines to let you know that one of the protagonists is gay. It's 100% irrelevant to the story, but to be honest that's kind of what I'm looking for personally. It has been getting a lot better in recent years, but it can still be a bit hard to find lgbt sci-fi and fantasy that is not really trying to send any sort of message about sexuality. Sometimes all I want to do is read a dumb adventure book where the hero's inevitable romantic interest is actually relatable. I reckon for straight writers/readers, especially those who might not personally know any out gay people, "this person just happens to be gay" is a good message about sexuality in itself.
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Oct 11, 2019 04:34
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wizzardstaff posted:Someone from the previous thread recommended Eifelheim and it finally came in from the library. Thanks for the tip. It's a slow burn but just starting to pick up. That was me, hope you enjoy it  The modern-day timeline is definitely jarring compared to the rest of the book - it makes more sense when you realise he originally wrote it as a novella in the 1980s where it was just the modern-day timeline, with researchers stumbling upon the truth that first contact had already happened, just from examining the historical record. But he uses it kind of cleverly throughout - sometimes you learn of stuff which will happen later on in the medieval timeline based on what the researchers have discovered, but then when it happens it plays out differently to how you expect, etc. And the ending of the book makes the modern story thread feel very much earned and necessary.
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Oct 14, 2019 23:26
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Started Children of Time and finding it really, compulsively readable. One tiny detail I loved (spoilering this even though I'm pretty sure everybody who hears about it will learn what kind of alien/animal the book is about) was how one of the spiders off-handedly mentions another should take "maybe 24 warriors" with her, the same way we'd say "maybe 20 or 30." Because of course they think in multiples of eight.
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Oct 18, 2019 08:59
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ed balls balls man posted:Luna - New Moon suffers with the generic recommendation of ASOIAF in space but it's fantastic. I personally found book 3 in this trilogy to be really, disappointingly underwhelming but that's only because the first two are so awesome. He creates this fully realised world in the first book and then tears it apart in a sort of civil war/revolution/apocalyptic event in the second. Some absolutely brilliant setpieces throughout and he's definitely the most talented prose stylist working in modern science fiction. Hugely recommended even though I thought the end of the trilogy kind of sputtered out, and hey, that's just my opinion.
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Oct 20, 2019 12:19
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ed balls balls man posted:I have it sitting on my kindle but haven't actually read it yet! Agree about the setpieces bit especially. The best by far is the second half of the second book, with Lucasinho trying to get his little cousin to safety trekking across the surface with limited supplies, limited know-how and no real knowledge of exactly what's going on during this crazy uprising. But in terms of visual image, and being foreshadowed from literally the very first scene in the book, I loved Lucas making the ten metre dash from rover to airlock across the surface in his expensive suit and loafers.
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Oct 20, 2019 20:45
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less laughter posted:Goodreads.com → My Books → Want to Read I have 544 books on my list, which should take me about 12 years to get through.
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Oct 22, 2019 00:04
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Finished Children of Time - the sleeper starship story is a bit colour-by-numbers towards the end but I still really enjoyed it overall. Was particularly impressed with how he strings out the narrative tension/readability/whatever you want to call it, constantly switching by chapter between the two storylines and leaving cliffhangers throughout. 600 pages and I burned through it in a few days. I would really, strongly recommend it as a great book to read on a long flight.coolusername posted:Anyone have recs for books similar to Gideon in the vein of 'Snarky but not intolerable protagonist on an adventure with a buddy s/he has a complex relationship with?' in sci-fi or fantasy genre? Haven't read Gideon but I think City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett would fit the bill.
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Oct 22, 2019 08:56
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Minority opinion: I loved Fall of Hyperion possibly more than Hyperion. Maybe because I don't read much mil scifi, but I thought there were some truly memorable world-shattering sci-fi setpieces. Endymion is... fine? Good, even? I really liked the whole idea of rafting down this river that runs across multiple post-apocalyptic worlds. Then the only thing I remember about Rise of Endymion is the massive, bloated, boring, hundreds-of-pages-long middle section that takes place on the Not-Tibet planet. I don't think it's a coincidence that it was written in 1997, the same year as Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun came out, and when there seemed to be some kind of fever pitch Western obsession with Tibet. Oh and the other thing I remember is that Simmons seemed to think he'd written a happy ending: We get to spend two years together before you get hauled off to death by torture, but hey, two years is a nice long time!
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Oct 24, 2019 00:14
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I knew Orson Scott Card was a raving right-wing weirdo, but didn't realise Dan Simmons was. I was pretty young when I read the Hyperion series, which I think is all of his that I've read, but he didn't strike me as the type. Speaking of Simmons, I haven't read the book and have heard mixed things about it, but the TV adaptation of The Terror is absolutely amazing. Easily one of the best TV series of the decade, stellar performances, fantastic period set design, pitch perfect writing and dialogue, go and watch it if you haven't.
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Oct 25, 2019 01:23
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Just finished The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters and enjoyed it a lot. It's about a cop trying to solve a suicide he suspects is really a murder when there's only six months to go until life on earth is wiped out by an incoming asteroid. More of a detective novel than a scifi novel, but still a good amount of worldbuilding as to how society would react if we knew there was six months left and there was nothing we could do about it. One thing which would have been better was if the suicide did, in fact, turn out to be a suicide and being convinced it was a murder was just the protagonist's own way of coping, by finally getting to be a proper detective on a proper case. Which is where I thought it was going to go for a bit, but it doesn't.
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Oct 27, 2019 03:55
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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? Someone on Twitter the other day was spitballing the most influential fantasy novel of the last 20 years. My kneerjerk response was J Strange & Norrell, but that's "best" rather than "influential," because it's really just an Austenian fairytale. The fantasy novel which did something new and seminal, most people seemed to agree on, was Perdido Street Station. And that really is right at the limit of 20 years ago.
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Oct 31, 2019 02:37
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Reading The Secret Commonwealth and it's fine, but I have the same issue with it as I did with La Belle Sauvage: Pullman appears to have completely lost the ability to edit. 200 pages into Northern Lights, and Lyra's already gone to London with Coulter, run away, met the gyptians, sailed to the North, met Iorek Byrnison. 200 pages into The Secret Commonwealth and everybody's still faffing about in Oxford doing this juvenile cloak and dagger stuff. I find my attention wandering while reading and have to keep turning back to the page.
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Nov 6, 2019 06:02
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I don't think it should be the only factor you rate something by, but it is significant, especially in the SFF genre. Like, the specific book I was referencing which brought this up is supposed to be a YA adventure novel. It should be pretty tightly paced. If my attention is wandering because Philip Pullman has decided he wants to write about an insurance assessor interviewing somebody about a workplace injury (OK, this is a cover story for a spy, but still) then that's a mark against it. But of course there are many great works of sci-fi and fantasy which are difficult reads. Gormenghast springs to mind. Cardiac posted:And with a reading speed of 150 pages an hour And this, to me, is crazy and sounds like those people who listen to podcasts at double speed.
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Nov 7, 2019 07:00
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That's probably correct. They read like YA but are really targeted at a specific set of adult readers. "gently caress" gets dropped a fair bit in the second one, and apparently in the first one - I don't remember this even though I only read it a year ago, which is maybe a testament to how much my attention was wandering off or maybe it was just subtle, but fortunately around page 100 in the second book there's a clunky Previously On exposition scene which even includes a phrase like "I'll hand over to Hannah now" - a character is raped. But even if it's not YA it's still an alternate universe fantasy adventure, and it just feels glacially slow sometimes.
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Nov 7, 2019 11:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:A true Mary Sue protagonist is never, ever *wrong*. By the end of the story, all their actions will have been justified. Yeah, I think a Mary Sue character can be flawed, but only when the author is oblivious to those flaws (generally because they are the author's own). The archetypical example for me is whatever the self-insert protagonist was called in Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein. An uber-competent, super-smart galactic sex adventurer who spends much of the book contemptuously lecturing straw men. sebmojo posted:If I hated perdido st for those reasons what mieville should i read? The city and the city? Yes. The Bas-Lag books are the work of a writer with an overactive imagination throwing all of his ideas at the wall; The City & The City is a much more disciplined novel in which he takes one (1) idea and fully develops it. It's also a novel which develops that (ridiculous on the face of it) idea so well that by the third act, when there's brilliant setpiece culminating in a character breaking the rules, it's genuinely shocking.
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Nov 20, 2019 23:20
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Finished Countdown City, the second book in the Last Policeman trilogy. Probably objectively the weaker book (or at least has the weaker central mystery) but I really loved it in a morbid way as the impact date gets closer and society starts breaking down more and more. Looking forward to the last one.
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Nov 22, 2019 01:06
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Xotl posted:My general feeling as well. Through the whole trilogy I felt that the story of the book was always secondary to the story of the end of the world: it sticks in my mind much more than any of the individual plots. As he's willing to avoid info dumps and has a trilogy to space things out, it all progresses at a wonderful, terrible pace. Yeah, one of the things he does really well is explore how the infrastructure of the state responds to an increasingly unmanageable situation. One of the eerie bits near the start is when Palace describes how the Concord police force is doing no more investigation, no more community policing: there's just a patrol car on every corner ready to bring an immediate response to any suggestion of violence, rioting or looting, and that's all. It sort of feels like semi-police state stuff (especially given the other impressions we get), but really, from the point of view of the state government, it's an understandable response to try to keep things as peaceful as possible for as long as possible with their limited remaining resources.
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Nov 22, 2019 06:58
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genericnick posted:Scar talk: It is still my favourite book of his and I don't really love BasLag I agree. PSS is enjoyable but all over the shop, Iron Council has that one good bit with the Wild West montage (with the sort of magic daemon cowboy... IIRC?), but The Scar had the most compelling storyline, situation and characters. From what I remember. Still flawed as hell, but the standout of the trilogy and a book I really enjoyed reading. The City & The City is also flawed as hell and I don't remember it any better than Bas-Lag, five years down the track from when I went on a Mieville kick, but I definitely remember it being the most polished and genuinely good of his books that I've read. I randomly read This Census Taker earlier this year, and I only remember it because I'm now going back over my list and thinking about my top ten for the year, and gently caress me dead that was a bad book. Textbook example of an SFF writer thinking they finally had the chops to go full literary and failing in spectacular fashion.
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Nov 29, 2019 11:56
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Bhodi posted:Aubrey–Maturin is so good. I'm on the 5th book in the series and Jack is already old and seasoned so I don't know how he can squeeze 15 more books out of this. It bugs me that these are such cult classics and yet nobody seems to have done a long, deep dive recap/discussion podcast about them.
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Dec 3, 2019 23:55
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I have been reading that (only up to Master & Commander myself) but I would love an in-depth discussion by smart people that runs for like an hour or two for each book. I think because I listened to a really great podcast about The Terror and it just reminded me of Aubrey-Maturin.
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Dec 4, 2019 05:12
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I wrote a thing about the ten best books I read in 2019, at least half of which were SFF: https://grubstreethack.wordpress.com/2019/12/30/top-10-books-of-2019/ Pretty good year on the whole - in the last couple of years I've only read about six or seven books I thought were good enough to bother extolling their virtues.
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Dec 30, 2019 05:11
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I read the first one yesterday and it was fine but forgettable. Not sure what the fuss is.
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Jan 1, 2020 23:52
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Philthy posted:The first one is a bit forgettable. The author really didn't have a direction and just published a very basic scenario short. The second book and beyond you really get more in-depth writing about murderbot and the world-building is quite excellent. I personally don't think it's A++++++ territory, but its definitely a fun pulpy read, and I'm looking forward to more books having finished them all. They sort of remind me of the very early Conan books in a way. Hmmm OK maybe I'll stick with it. I've resolved to read 60 books this year and those ones are conveniently short. my bony fealty posted:I dunno, recommend me good climate change fiction please? I'll probably finish this but I had hoped to like it a lot more I quite liked Clade by James Bradley.
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Jan 7, 2020 23:02
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shrike82 posted:I was reading the blurb for William Gibson’s new book that’s coming out in a couple weeks’ time - it’s a follow-up to the Peripheral. That’s cool but the present day narrative takes place in an alternative timeline where Hillary Clinton won. Gibson has been exhibiting terminal centrism for sometime now on Twitter so I hope he doesn’t bring it into the book I ended up unfollowing him because he was constantly retweeting the tedious opinions of overpaid blue-check pundits from CNN or the NYT or whatever other places employ boring, well-heeled commentators who haven't had a relevant political thought in at least ten years. There's something very depressing about seeing one of the great counter-cultural writers of his generation age into the epitome of a white liberal boomer. But I got the strong impression it's set with Clinton winning because he simply couldn't be hosed rewriting it, and The Peripheral was the most enjoyable thing he'd written in ages, so hopefully it's good.
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Jan 12, 2020 11:26
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SimonChris posted:If the birthdate was part of a larger bio, I wouldn't think too much about it, but this definitely seems odd. Sorry what's the red flag here? Is it linked to the Nazi 1888 thing? I was born in 1988 too but yeah I'd never put that in my bio.
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Jan 13, 2020 09:03
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Clarkesworld has pulled that attack helicopter story.
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Jan 16, 2020 02:54
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I never actually read the original story, but there's something very... telling? Frustrating? Tedious? About the way that the reaction to it and the discussion surrounding it has played out almost entirely over Twitter, the worst possible place to discuss anything related to identity politics.
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Jan 17, 2020 04:35
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mllaneza posted:Enjoy this link to someone writing 15 years after the book Not Getting It. Lol this is great. It refuses to accept that a metaphor or simile can be anything other than rigidly accurate and completely misses the point of comparing the sky to a dead television channel: it's a world utterly consumed by technology, a sentence that seems written by somebody whose first instinct is to analogise the natural world to the artificial world. edit - further lol at every one of his commenters disagreeing with him, and his assertion that Gibson is a good writer because his Alien 3 film could have been the best in the series because "Hicks was the hero, Ripley was barely in it" freebooter fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 04:47
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Wow, so she had to out herself as trans because of an outrage mob. Great stuff.
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Jan 17, 2020 09:28
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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. Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy is a... deconstruction is probably too generous, but they're smart, funny books which constantly get undersold as "Harry Potter for grown-ups." Featuring a flawed protagonist who starts off the series as a mopey teenager resulted in lots of 1-star Goodreads reviews from the kind of people who fill their reviews with gifs, but yeah, he'd definitely fit the bill of self-absorbed without being a total jerk. I really think they're some of the best fantasy of the last ten years or so. Having said that I've just recalled there is a scene of sexual violence in the second book. It's not gratuitous and doesn't get lingered upon, IIRC, but it is pretty brutal in the context of the plot.
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Jan 21, 2020 12:39
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XBenedict posted:I’ve bought a lot of books from the Bookbub email. I’ve been subscribed for several years. It’s decent. There is a fair share of self published Amazon drek, but there is a lot of good stuff too. As someone who saw the sales of my self-published Amazon drek skyrocket when I once got accepted into a Bookbub deal, I strongly urge everyone to sign up to Bookbub
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Jan 22, 2020 02:41
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SFF I read in January: All Systems Red (Murderbot1) - This was quick and fine but mostly forgettable. Fires’ Astonishment - A virtually unknown fantasy book I read because it was recommended by Philip Reeve; a really good, solid, Middle Ages tale of an evil sorcereress and a dragon, written in Booker-worthy prose. Half the Day is Night - Really didn't like this and it appears to be a common opinion. It's by Maureen F. McHugh, who wrote China Mountain Zhang, which is great, but somehow the same basic formula (ordinary people living in a scifi world) which worked so well in that one just drags interminably in this. Also the world of CMZ (a communist America) had a concrete impact on the day to day lives of the characters; in this one it's an underwater dome city, but it may as well have been a space colony, or even just a present-day story about expats in the developing world. It's not bad on a page to page level, it's just really dull. Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days - Short, good, compelling stuff. (Can't recall when else I've ever seen two novellas paired as one book in this century, but I suppose he had clout with his publisher by this point). Reynolds is very reliable for an engaging 4-star sci-fi potboiler. A Wrinkle in the Skin - short post-apoc novel by the deeply underrated John Christopher, one of Wyndham's contemporaries; a series of earthquakes kills billion and remaps the terrain and the protagonist treks across the now-dry seabed from the Channel Isles to England to search for his daughter. Some great, memorable scenes in here, undercut by a more obvious-than-usual note of 1960s misogyny and British class prejudice. Dark Matter - An airport thriller down to its bones, but the very best kind of airport thriller. The only thing I can say without spoiling things is that it's a parallel universe story. I was also really impressed by the third act, which went in a totally unexpected direction. If you can get over Crouch's Paterson-esque writing style (I've never actually read a Paterson book but I imagine this is what they're like) it's a great story. Highly recommended, especially if you have a cross-country flight coming up. Black Griffon posted:I also adore big dumb object stories. What's your favorite (and everyone else's too)? Pushing Ice. The story goes on so much longer than I thought it would; not in the sense that it's too long, in the sense of "a lot of other writers would find their imagination runs out here and they'd just end it on a vaguely mysterious note." Reynolds just keeps pushing (hey-o!) and it's enthralling.
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Feb 3, 2020 23:39
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quantumfoam posted:Be careful. Pushing Ice has good scope, however it also has one of the worst most shitbag vindictive characters I have ever read, which is why I can't recommend it blind to anyone. Yeah characterisation is not Reynolds' strong suit (but that's true of most sci-fi authors) and IIRC a significant plot thread basically relies on two leading characters behaving like petty teenagers for decades on end and nobody else in their supposedly professional crew batting an eyelid. Reynolds in particular seems to have an issue with characters who are needlessly hostile to each other. This is most notable in Revelation Space but also really present in Pushing Ice. I'm sure he's a nice guy in person but he seems to base all his character writing off backstabbing political dramas.
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Feb 4, 2020 03:49
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Bhodi posted:Is this the body horror story about trying to earn technological relics by transiting an inscrutable alien labyrinth / testing place? Man, I loved that story. So good. That's Diamond Dogs, yeah. I also thought it had a particularly good ending for that kind of mystery that revolves around what could possibly be at the top of the tower - you don't get to find out in that story itself, it just ends with the narrator stuck in his hosed up cyborg dog body trying to find a way back to the tower planet, but then in the next story there's a throwaway line about this alien WMD which says that according to rumour it was found at the top of a mysterious tower, so that implies that maybe he got there in the end.
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Feb 4, 2020 22:45
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I'm glad somebody enjoyed it, because I found it quite the opposite: bloated and sprawling and unimaginative and I was even falling asleep during some of it. It has its moments (the Prague chapter was genuinely good) but it mostly struck me, like its predecessor, as a book written by a famous author whom editors daren't challenge anymore. It was the bloat that really bugged me. 200 pages into Northern Lights and we're already well into the second act, Lyra meeting Iorek Byrnison for the first time; 200 pages into the Secret Commonwealth and we're still faffing about with tedious amateur spy crap in Oxford and there's another 450 pages to go but they no longer seem like something to anticipate. I think my main complaint is that the world he presents no longer seems quite magical. It just feels like our own world, with furry friends. We gets hints of stuff, like the distant citadel in the desert, but the rest of it is a German writer working at his desk or a shoehorned refugees-in-the-Meditteranean moment or the dull politics of the Calvinist church (this was not interesting in the original trilogy and I don't know why he thought it would be interesting here).
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Feb 6, 2020 09:46
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What was the deal with Simmons again? He became a Trump supporter or something? Or was it more alt-right than that?
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Feb 9, 2020 03:38
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Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic? I know self promotion of a self-published book is terribly gauche, but the first book in my End Times series will be free on Amazon this Thursday and Friday. It's set in Australia, a day-by-day journal following a survivor from the beginning of the outbreak. It's well reviewed, I dunno, check it out! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N4JX2M1 Also, fellow SA poster Jase Kovacs has just finished his Ebb Tide trilogy which is a zombie apocalypse story set at sea in the South Pacific, so all three books in the trilogy are now on sale for 99 cents for... I think the rest of Tuesday? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MRZA23Y
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Feb 12, 2020 01:59
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Reading Grass by Sherri S. Tepper and I was tempted to actually abandon it, which I rarely do, because drat it is sloooooow. But 100 pages in it's picked up really nicely and is shaping up into an interesting sci-fi mystery, so I'm glad I stuck with it.
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Feb 13, 2020 08:42
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