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General Battuta posted:I really like Startide Rising, I think it’s great. It's certainly a fun book but there's a lot about it that makes me go hmm. Like all the action and stuff is good, and the uplift setting is interesting but I feel like "the universe is ruled by alien forces who are unstoppably superior to us technologically and often in military skill, and have a very different value set than ours, and who are actively conspiring to prevent us from acquiring technology" should really be an occasion for genuine dread rather than the exasperation, which is all that any of the human characters in Uplift ever seem able to feel about the any of the Galactics. The thing that always feels missing from uplift is the idea that these incredibly powerful alien civilizations might have a point, and that just giving into them and being absorbed into their culture might be on the whole better for us.
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Aug 16, 2022 18:39
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:41 |
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day-gas posted:It's definitely very "humanity gently caress yeah" and "humans are super duper cool and special" which was grating all the way through the three books of the series I read. It's IMHO kind of even more grating because of the Terrans' total (and in some cases fully self-inflicted) material inferiority to the Galactics. "Yes, the murderous hunter-ant people kick our rear end 3 to 1 in an even fight, and every galactic civilization is our materially better, richer, and probably has a higher standard of living than us, but our creativity, for instance the way we refuse to embrace the higher end galactic technology and still use spin sections on our ships shows we're superior." It's a surprisingly spiritual view for a book that is so textually skeptical of religion. General Battuta posted:Yeah the gee-whiz plucky wolflings vs. stodgy alien orthodoxy is a bit eyeroll (and even more so when combined with Brin’s space cadet dialogue). Buuuuut hey. Maybe it’s necessary to counterbalance all the tragedy and loss in the book. poo poo don’t go too good for the Earthkids. This is certainly true, but I still found myself rooting for the galactics, especially because they're generally a lot more interesting than the humans.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:19
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zoux posted:I do like how the Tymbrimi sponsored us, as a bit To be honest I actually do like a lot of the stuff in Uplift. Like, Uplift War and Startide Rising are both pretty cool. They're just a bit hampered, as with all of Brin's work, by his boring 1990s liberal politics. I found myself, as an alien, just wanting an entire book entirely from the galactics perspective trying to deal with these ridiculous wolflings who lucked out onto a verdant planet and almost became senior patrons by default, but are not utterly unable to actually defend that claim.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:25
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So, cause he died recently and I've liked some of his stuff I read in the distant past, I was reading through Eric Flint's stuff and I ended up reading the books he wrote with Weber, especially the Torch books, (in this case Torch of Freedom) and it kind of brought home to me the thing I ultimately dislike about Weber books. Like, it's not even the ridiculous advantages Weber often gives his protagonists. There's plenty of books with extremely strong protagonists, even extremely strong protagonist cultures that don't come off as nearly as annoying. The problem is the way that god seems to favor them. Like the Mesans are about to do a big attack to waste Torch, and the heroes have found out about it not through any cleverness or anything, but just cause some dude owed money to an arms dealer and blew the whole operational secrecy so that some dude he was buying supplies from wouldn't kill his rear end somehow. I'm trying to get to like, the one space battle in the whole series where the bad guys have in some ways a tech advantage but that combined with how twee is kind of cramping my style.
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Aug 16, 2022 19:43
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The big thing is usually those books are so bad that I don't have to read them. Startide Rising is good enough I want to read it quality just makes it uncanny valley.
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Aug 16, 2022 20:18
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Honestly, someone should do humans as the stogie (neoliberal) orthodoxy vs younger but far more creative aliens.
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Aug 16, 2022 23:07
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Danhenge posted:IIRC being a client species is a really poo poo deal if you get on one of the bad ones and even the nice ones generally have a relationship only somewhat better than overt slavery. And as far as the galactic technologies were concerned, they didn't have access to most of it because buying access the library cost them an arm and a leg and they were pretty sure that they'd still gotten a poo poo deal on an inferior version, IIRC. It seems like the humans basically get forced to oppress the dolphins and chimps anyway though. Like, galactic civilization is for sure not very nice, but that just makes its potential cultural superiority over us all the more sinister and frightening, a prospect that cheers me up immensely.
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Aug 17, 2022 01:05
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Artefact Space by Miles Cameron is like, strange, because on one level it's your very standard quasi-mil-SF space opera about finding fulfillment by joining the navy, and on the other hand it's executed in an incredibly charming way, and doesn't come off as incredibly reactionary. Also the enemies seem legitimately threatening despite the main character being the standard mil-SF hot, slightly vunerable junior officer who is somehow superhumanly lucky and good. It's like the good version of one of those Baen novels from 20 years ago
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Sep 11, 2022 02:03
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Jerry Pournelle is a great read if you ever actually want to understand how a certain kind of conservative guy thinks. It's like, he's smart enough to recognize that institutions are failing and stuff but way to racist and in his ideology to embrace anything to fix them other than a return to crowned heads.
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Jan 5, 2023 23:26
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So, I'm looking for some cyberpunk novels with female protagonists that aren't ones I've read before. So not Gibson, Trouble and her friends, or the like. Does anyone have any ideas?
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Jul 18, 2023 22:38
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buffalo all day posted:The Fortunate Fall is the best one. I posted about it a while back, if you search for it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortunate-...xt%2C677&sr=1-2 This? General Battuta posted:I may be in the tiny minority here but I think the closest the Expanse books got to greatness was the Dead Space poo poo. I'm a sucker for space horror and I think they should've leaned into "the gods died but they left behind their plague-instrument." Instead they get embarrassed by people making fun of 'vomit zombies' and the horror element pretty much all vanishes after book 2. It's actually a shame because while "vomit zombies" is definately a slightly silly way of phrasing it, the absolutely matter of fact way it presents them and the whole incident in question is great. We know they're zombies. The characters know they're zombies, but it does nothing to make what they're doing less hideous. FBH991 fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 20, 2023 |
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Jul 20, 2023 04:16
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re-reading Artefact Space, and then try to reread Weber, and man, Cameron is so much better at this than Weber is.
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Apr 27, 2024 04:12
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General Battuta posted:I hate Hull Zero Three! what's so bad about Hull Zero Three?
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Apr 27, 2024 23:43
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 02:41 |
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about half way through SA Barnes Ghost Station. It's pretty good so far as a space haunted house, though I do sort of feel like it sometimes is not really using technology that it feels like it should have in order to avoid having to deal how you do spooks with that. The concept of having a psychological horror novel where the main character is a troubled psychologist is great though, because it means that your main character can spend a lot of time trying to figure out if she's crazy or not.
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May 1, 2024 01:09
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