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Famethrowa posted:I genuinely put aside Shadow just because my old Kindle has a crappy slow highlight dictionary function, and I really wanted to catch the meanings of those. I should upgrade just for that reason.
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Dec 17, 2021 04:02
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branedotorg posted:So, following on from this is was thinking of reading 'the borrowed man' and wondered if the thread recommends it?
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Jan 2, 2022 00:45
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It's an oversimplificiation but I think of authors as having varying strengths at (and interest in!) plot, character, prose, setting, and ideas. Readers are likewise often very focused on only some of those. Setting ("worldbuilding") used to be a big deal in fantasy but seems like it's gone out of style; I think people who really appreciate setting often read historical fiction. People who appreciate prose above all else probably read literary fiction (this is why literary critics are always complaining that "spoiler warnings" shouldn't be needed...they just don't care about plot). I say that because the Sanderson I have read was extremely good at a particular kind of plot, one that sets up mysteries like the TV show Lost, but which actually resolves them in a satisfying way. His Mistborn trilogy is better at this than almost anything I have ever read. Alas in every other respect it's thoroughly mediocre. I haven't read Way of Kings but will try it eventually because I think the effect is better at longer lengths; when I've read shorter books of Sanderson's (e.g. Alloy of Law) there's not enough space for the setup->resolution to be as satisfying. That's not the only reason he's successful. He brings a science fictional rigor to fantasy that appeals to a certain sort of reader (I guess you could call it setting) and of course his amazing productivity has served him very well. But I have been surprised there aren't more authors who aren't able to match his use of satisfying reveals; I guess it's harder than it seems. Or maybe his rigorous "magic" lends itself to it. But I can easily name 20 SF/F books that set up intriguing mysteries and then completely fail to deliver on them and then another 20 that have great characters or prose but which have bizarrely misfiring plots. I can even name other books with rigidly mechanical magic. But it's tough to point to authors who are as good at reveals. I'm sure others could make better suggestions but when I think of people who come close to what Sanderson does, Ada Palmer and (yes, really) Seth Dickinson come to mind (life not being fair I don't know if it would succeed, but if you ever make a Kickstarter I at least would back it!). I don't think they're quite as effective as Sanderson is in Mistborn...but fortunately they are better (it seems to me) in every other respect. But I think for different reasons those both give many readers ample reason not to like them. Mycroft's style of narration is a clear reason in Palmer's case; I loved it but it's not going to be to everyone's taste. And when I gave Traitor Baru Cormorant as a gift to an avid fantasy reader, she read a bit and told me, "I can tell this is really good, but my life is too stressful to read something like this right now." So maybe the secret to popularity is being very good at one particular aspect of writing and then being bland and inoffensive in every other area. I guess you could argue this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula, just replace plot revelations with interconnected storylines.
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Mar 5, 2022 18:47
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Just finished KJ Parker's Practical Guide to Conquering the World, his third "Siege" book. Probably my least favorite of the three but still good. Glad I read it. However he reminds me of later Iain M Banks in that he has this ideological belief that story structure and individual agency is a lie that he can't bring himself to tell, so in each of the Siege books (no details, just thematic/tone of ending spoiler) the first 90% is unrealistic story genius hero stuff and then at the last second he kneecaps the protagonist, has a damp squib sort of ending, and is like, hey man that's just life, you know. Which is fair, except why do the first 90% as contrived The Martian poo poo then? Just write literary fiction about professors cheating on their spouses if you want realism, sheesh. Per the Sanderson discussion, of course the answer is those realistic books win awards but no one buys them. Ol' KJ's gotta put food on the table but still look at himself in the mirror and see an artist. I enjoy mocking the hypocrisy here but these really are mostly fun books, just harder to recommend to friends than they should be.
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Mar 6, 2022 18:25
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I read all of Crown of Stars recently. It's a slow burn and never really hits the peaks one hopes it would, but I thought it did a better job than almost any other fantasy at reconstructing an early middle ages mindset about nobility, honor, and religion. A lot of authors (including one with a record setting kickstarter...) handle premodern settings by putting more or less modern people in a place with horses instead of cars and, maybe, make a bit of an effort to give them the manners and ideological nationalism of a Victorian. Crown of Stars reads almost like alternate history because Elliot pays so much attention to how people think in the setting, which has magic and monsters but also an alternate matriarchal Christianity (St Paul was a woman in this timeline and preached a Docetic doctrine). The only other strong example of that I've encountered is Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, about aliens arriving in the 1300s. But if you're one of the vast majority of people who doesn't think what I just wrote sounds interesting and you just want a fun, exciting fantasy novel, I wouldn't recommend it. As a side note, a year ago or so, Kate Elliot published book 1 of a space opera take on a gender-swapped Alexander the Great's childhood and I thought it was great, like someone found an unpublished Peter F Hamilton manuscript and edited out all of the unnecessary and somewhat problematic sex, leaving a cool, widescreen space opera that's long but not doorstoppy. Hope she puts out some sequels soon.
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Mar 11, 2022 03:48
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Doctor Jeep posted:unconquerable sun is the name of the book Kate Elliot posted:Book 2, Furious Heaven, arrives in Winter 2023 (no set date yet, but it’s written and ready to go). I've heard some real horror stories from midlist authors about how inattentive editors are at the big houses, so I guess the answer must be that if you're not at the top of the popularity power law, it's not going to sell that much anyway and the publishers can barely be bothered to publish it at all, so they just put it in the first open spot on their schedule and stop thinking about it.
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Mar 13, 2022 16:48
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pradmer posted:Visitor (Foreigner #17) by CJ Cherryh - $4.99 Hard to believe but it's been 24 years since Heroes Die was published. I'm not nearly as enamored with its "invincible martial artist" shtick as I was back then, but the content between the fight scenes felt so rich and interesting I would have expected Stover to have a great career ahead of him. Instead I don't think he's published anything in a decade. I don't blame him for that, to be clear; being an author is a very tough and usually poorly paid job, but as a reader who would have liked to see what came next it's a shame. For her part, Cherryh somehow managed to publish 17 Foreigner books in a little less than thirty years. Individually they can't be making that much money but she's managed to stick out a midlist career long after the death of the midlist market. For most of that time I was frustrated by the fact Foreigner sequels were apparently more in demand than Alliance Union stuff and particularly a Cyteen sequel. But then we got Regenesis and, well, it's worth reading, but maybe Cyteen was a once in a lifetime moment. This made me look up another author who was very exciting but dropped off the map, Steph Swainston. Year of Our War felt important and powerful when it first came out, don't think I remember seeing it discussed here, at least recently. She burned out and stopped writing for a while, but it turns out she put out another book in the Castle series in 2016 and I didn't hear about and said three more were coming (but so far they haven't). When I was a teenager I spent a lot of time looking forward to forthcoming books and getting burned on them, series mostly forgotten now like Charles Sheffield's Heritage books (the last one was a disaster) and David Brin's Uplift trilogy (again, the last one was a disaster). Maybe the next wave of authors learned something from that; Martin and Rothfuss certainly found an elegant solution to the last-one-disaster problem, but the fans seemed to have gotten burned just the same. I think I do better these days at just appreciating what I have and taking what comes. Hopefully Martin and Rothfuss fans learned that too. Or maybe they're just contributing to the Brandon Sanderson kickstarter instead.
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Apr 5, 2022 01:14
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Marshal Radisic posted:I know this thread rarely talks about sf critics, but I wanna ask if anyone here knows of what ever happened to Jonathan McCalmont. He used to be active online in the late 2000s and through the 2010s on various blogs, had a regular column in Interzone magazine, and was on the "Shadow Clarke" jury for a year or two. However, sometime around the end of 2017 he seemed to completely vanish from the internet, and there's been no word of what he's been doing. Given how critical he was of how genre culture was evolving in the 2010s, I've wondered if he despaired of finding anything in science fiction to his liking and just abandoned criticism entirely. Don't get me wrong, he was often a colossal prick, but he had an interesting voice that's been missing from the landscape. The other thing that happened in that timeframe is that book discussions in that community moved from blogs like those of Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, and Abigail Nussbaum to Twitter. People who couldn't bring themselves to adapt to Twitter fell by the wayside during the transition. Really by "people" I mean me because I participated some in that scene up some until that point. Just speculating but I could see Jonathan McCalmont as the sort of guy who might have the same trouble. Anyway that's a lot to say given I don't actually know the answer to your question but it's fun to see a reference to those people on here.
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Aug 20, 2022 04:16
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Llamadeus posted:You're right and it seems to me like it's a left a gap in "serious" SFF criticism. Most of the blogs and review sites active today feel like they exist to receive ARCs from publishers. Theoretically there's a better ecosystem now for supporting niche writers with things like Substack and Patreon but (IMO) they work best for individual writers who can produce a large amount of material.
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Aug 20, 2022 12:22
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Leng posted:Reporting back. ...but drat, the way it transitions hard from kids trying to become the best magic samurai to flawed people in a faltering marriage struggling with grief is incredible. I can't think of too many other similar stories...Lord of the Rings has a pivot but it's pretty quick and also gradual, not super-sharp. The visual novel series Muv-Luv might be the closest thing. Anyway, things like this are basically impossible to recommend but it's interesting how the impact of the pivot is greater because of how silly it is at first, especially if you don't know the pivot is coming. Which yes I just spoiled but that's the trouble, no one would read it without knowing there was some change coming, but then that lessens the impact.
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Jan 8, 2023 23:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:Are there other books and/or book series out there that do the same thing Malazan does? Big cast / historical vibe, where you have to figure out what's going on, piece together the worldbuilding, etc? If you know of any that are worth it, tell me! The Acacia trilogy by David Anthony Durham is a bit like this. Starts out suspiciously like Game of Thrones but then takes it in a, well, Malazanian direction without ever becoming the sprawling slog that Malazan does. I thought this overall was really strong and am still disappointed it didn't get more attention. Another one might be Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars trilogy which does a much better job than Malazan IMO act making the characters seem like historically-situated people. It too has a strange cosmology (weird magic like Malazan but also a near-alternate history thing where St. Paul was a woman and Christianity became much more matriarchal) that you have to piece together what the heck is going on and how it all fits together. This one unfortunately is also like Malazan in that it also sprawls into a bit of a slog, but I finished it whereas I petered out in book 7 or 8 of Malazan and the ending was solid. Not historical but with science fiction, seems like people don't talk about Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief trilogy much anymore but that's one where it seems impossible to understand for 1.5 books and then it all starts making sense, so much sense that the third book feels a bit dull.
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Jan 13, 2023 04:07
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Tolkien seems to have coined the term "Secondary World" and included worlds that tenuously link to our in it like Middle Earth, but what was the first to drop the link is a really interesting question. I'd never heard of Phantasmion but past that Peake's Gormenghast (first novel 1946) and Franz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (first story published 1939) seem like candidates. In both cases I don't think it's quite so explicit as, I don't know, Song of Ice and Fire that there's no connection to our world but nevertheless there isn't really one.
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Feb 18, 2023 00:46
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Coming a bit late but re: authors in the Gene Wolfe tradition, the previously mentioned Ada Palmer is the person who comes to mind as a novelist but for a novella I'd add Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and for short story collections Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners. Also the question was about today's Gene Wolfe and he's really more "yesterday's Gene Wolfe" with Gene Wolfe alas being at least two days ago now but Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide deserves a mention as well. For an author who was "your favorite author's favorite author" it's a little surprising there aren't more books that are clearly Wolfe-inspired, but I guess sales-wise Wolfe was at best a midlist author so maybe the engines of commerce are actively fighting his influence. Too Like the Lightning (which I love) did get nominated for a Hugo but lost badly and its Goodreads rating count is almost a tenth of, say, Gideon the Ninth or Babel: An Arcane History.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:11
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neongrey posted:scalzi is generally ok qualitywise, meets deadlines, gets people into the genre (or so i'm told), and is pretty much scandal free, so it makes sense he'd get the ginormous contracts, that's a great package deal there, even if most of us are not going to be particularly interested in his work He does seem to be a genuinely nice guy and hey people with far more talent than he has have elected to cash in instead of knuckling down to produce one more true masterpiece (maybe it's a hot take but I'd put both Zelazny and Iain Banks in that category for instance, maybe CJ Cherryh too? probably lots of candidates here) so good for him.
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Jun 29, 2023 04:18
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GhastlyBizness posted:I get why Old Man's War was popular in the early 00s, as a mildly liberal response to Heinlein with a lot of quipping, but the scale of the positive response was weird. Like you already had prominent works like Armor or The Forever War doing stuff in that milsf space for decades, and Scalzi's offering didn't feel so much in dialogue with them as doing what they did in a rougher, more adventure story way. GhastlyBizness posted:Tbh I think that may be a product of, well, SFF's occasionally short memory of itself? Or maybe a better way to put it would be the relatively short lifespan of most books in the consciousness of the readership (which is always going to have tons of people coming into it afresh, that eternal september thing). The other example that comes to mind is how everyone was raving about Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice in 2013, for how it played with gender and pronouns. It certainly did that well and interestingly (though I thought the portrayal of soft imperialism via constant tea ceremonies was actually cooler) but it was sold and discussed as the big unprecedented thing. (honestly I feel a little gross talking so much about popularity and sales instead of the books themselves but I guess I find it interesting and have been thinking about it a lot lately)
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Jun 29, 2023 14:02
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buffalo all day posted:This book [Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro] is incredibly good!! Not sure why he doesn’t get nominated for hugo/nebulas as his last three books have been increasingly straight SF or Fantasy but he won the noble prize after putting out this book! I won’t spoil what’s SF about it (teenagers going to a boarding school in England where something strange is definitely going on), read it! Meanwhile, apart from the metaphor, the whole focus of the book and the reason it's celebrated is the close attention to the day by day lived experiences of ordinary people living relatively ordinary lives, a deep character focus you almost never see in genre fiction. Even character-focused genre fiction has very little time for the ordinary. Mainstream fiction like this aspires to hold a mirror up that you can see yourself in, genre fiction wants to show you something new. I know most genre boundary stuff is fake and artificial but I maintain this is a real distinction. Ishiguro gets the tiniest amount of distance from ordinary with the SF element but doesn't want any more distance lest it turn off his readers. I think many veteran SF readers will read this and be like "yes, and...?" A spoilery concrete version of my argument for those who've read the book: The characters occasionally dream of living different lives but they never even muse on the possibility of breaking the rules and escaping the system even though they are products of the same individualist western culture that has produced all manner of idiosyncratic rebels. Why? Real people in this situation would at least consider escape, and genre characters in a YA dystopia would be actively working on it by chapter three and go on to destroy the whole evil system by the second sequel. But donation isn't real, it's a metaphor for aging. Completion is a metaphor for inevitable death. People who read mainstream fiction can't imagine a way to escape death, so the characters can't either.
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Jul 14, 2023 23:56
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buffalo all day posted:Glad you liked the book. buffalo all day posted:I’ve read sf all my life btw and definitely didn’t have the reaction of “and…?” To me it fit naturally with, like The Twilight Zone or alt history - worlds that are recognizable but also off-kilter. You also make an interesting point about catgirls being familiar and comfortable to genre fans. Maybe some kinds of genre fandom are motivated that way. But I don't think that explains what people are getting out of authors like Greg Egan or Peter Watts or Ada Palmer or Seth Dickinson. Or even fans of more popular authors like Martin, Sanderson, Rowling, etc.
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Jul 15, 2023 03:07
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Marshal Radisic posted:I read that essay a few months ago, and I've been turning it over in my mind ever since. Near as I can tell, it was one of the last pieces Jonathan McCalmont wrote before he left online sff criticism entirely, though he did briefly return to his blog almost a year ago to pen a memorial for Maureen Kincaid Speller, longtime senior reviews editor of Strange Horizons.  She was a wonderful person.Marshal Radisic posted:What I keep coming back to in the piece is McCalmont's central assertion that the relaxation of genre boundaries that kicked into high gear in the 2000s was not due to the success of the New Weird as a movement, which in McCalmont's estimation was aiming for something more ambitious but ultimately never got a chance to cohere. Today it feels like even Mieville, who seemed like such a giant, is being forgotten. I guess it doesn't help that he was canceled to some degree and he hasn't published much in a decade. But I don't know. In the 90s there were all these people that still revered Clarke and Heinlein and Niven even though it was decades since their good work. Maybe attention spans are shorter. Or maybe I'm still confused about popular vs. critical darlings and Scalzi is today's Niven. Anyway, it's funny reading those excerpts and seeing how aggressively M John Harrison was fighting for his artistic independence against evil labels. Recently a friend read Perdido Street Station for the first time and asked how he could read something similar. If only there was one of these evil marketing categories available! Especially since we somehow have ChatGPT but
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Jul 15, 2023 21:15
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Jimbozig posted:The books posit a utopia of freedom under dictatorships: a world where the problems of dictatorship have been solved by allowing anyone to change which dictator has authority over them at a whim. So the dictators can't be bad or else they would lose all their people! A perfect solution. The only thing that could go wrong is if all those dictators got together and started colluding. I really like the last two books and they have lots more grist for this mill so looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it. For those who finished the series though: Alas it seems like Ada Palmer is bought in to all this pretty hard! I was really expecting JEDD to be Napoleon who sweeps away the incestuous old order and creates a new enlightened set of laws but...Ada Palmer is a renaissance historian, she likes the renaissance, and she has no interest in letting her setting progress towards some kind of analogue with modernity. She's also into SF fan culture and clearly identifies with the Utopians, even though as Jimbozig alludes to there's a great argument they are actually the bad guys. So...oh well. But what's marvelous and actually strange is that she does very little to jeopardize the cynical reading. Everything works pretty well if you think JEDD is a brainwashed fraud created by Madame as a proxy so she can take over the world. I don't think this was intentional--in a book with this many layers of narration it's easy to pick and choose what you want to believe--but regardless I love that I can still draw my own conclusions.
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Aug 6, 2023 14:40
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General Battuta posted:I think the (later Terra Ignota book spoilers) gundam with achilles in it was just a step too far for me though I do admire the chutzpah.
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Aug 6, 2023 16:58
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tiniestacorn posted:I got Battuta's latest book, Exordia, from NetGalley and have been reading it before bed and it's very good. Excited to spend more time with my best friend, Ssrin. Wikipedia posted:Expected on: January 23, 2024
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Aug 7, 2023 02:14
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eXXon posted:I'm giving up on A Memory Called Empire about 25% in. I find the plot superficially similar to The Goblin Emperor, in that it's (somewhat implausibly) whirlwind court intrigue drama with a main character thrust into a leading role they're not ready for, except in AMCE it makes even less sense because she was specifically trained to fulfill her role, albeit hurriedly. I liked AMCE too but remember it as being worse than I thought at the time (just checked my contemporaneous notes) because instead of merely trying to be a good anxiety/comfort novel, Martine tries to write a great novel. I approve of her ambition but it didn't work out. She nails the moves from her subgenre influences but the book has its sights set on exploring the combination of menace and seduction of a powerful empire and for me fails entirely at this. The empire feels like a small town and nothing about it seems particularly bad, so it's not menacing, and the amazing and seductive culture amounts to prestige TV plus improvisational poetry you'd have to be completely fluent in their language to hope to understand. I think the Baru Cormorant books are just orders of magnitude better on this front since they understand that what makes the culture of colonial empires seductive is first and foremost economic (they can pay you a hell of a lot more than you can make in your village) and technological (running water, medical care that works) factors. That's what brings people in, not Vergil or Shakespeare. The closest thing to a media-first empire is the modern American hegemony but to write a book exploring that you can't use some handwaved analogues to Rome and Victorian Britain.
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Aug 13, 2023 18:09
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got some chores tonight posted:As a rebuttal to the last few posts about it, I think it's a very poor interpretation that Ada Palmer thinks the Terra Ignota world (as described in the first book) is a utopia, given the framing of the first two books is a history of how the government collapsed. All the stuff that seems bad, yes, does turn out to be bad in the later books! Of course, the cynical reading that Madame orchestrated all this to rule the world through a brainwashed JEDD is still available, she "dies" off screen and in an extremely perfunctory way. In this reading, Mycroft is a creative serial killer who is captured by Madame and in return for freedom helps her convince people that Utopian toys are the result of Bridger's "powers" when actually he was a regular kid (or didn't exist at all).
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Aug 18, 2023 17:50
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Benagain posted:Based on our recent conversation I have decided that the world needs a sci Fi novel set in a future solar system where all the plot details are based on the 30 years war and Germany is represented either by the belt or Jupiter's moons. Probably the latter now I think of it. An example of what you're talking about with plot is Kate Elliot's Unconquered Sun, which is sort of a retelling of Alexander the Great's life as a Peter Hamilton-style doorstop space opera. I haven't read the second one yet (might wait for the third since it's supposed to be a trilogy) but thought it worked well in the first book. We don't really know much about Alexander's life so most of the details are author-invented and therefore fresh and new, just sprinkled with little bits of "lol spot the reference" for the knowledgeable (e.g. Bucephalus is a spaceship instead of a horse).
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Sep 3, 2023 21:50
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"Memory holing" happens to almost all art, it's unavoidable. Unless we all stop reading any new books, we're going to collectively forget about the older ones as time goes on. It's probably worse in science fiction in particular since SF often doesn't age as well as other genres, but it happens with everything. I'm kind of a near-term AI skeptic and tired of the current hype cycle around it but I do have a small hope that large language models can somehow help with the recommendation problem. It's been 25 years and they know all of my book purchases and yet Amazon still cannot recommend me books I want to read. This seems like a much easier problem to me than having an AI actually write a good book from scratch. And there's clearly a lot of money to be made solving this problem. If we have to suffer the indignities of capitalism we should at least reap the benefits and have someone get richer than God by solving this problem.
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Oct 14, 2023 16:13
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I never really thought about this before but I guess before home video was common, a novelization was the only practical way to revisit the story of a movie you liked? Since then I'm not sure there's much of a point, unless like me you were a kid who wasn't allowed to watch any movies rated higher than PG but was allowed to check out whatever he wanted from the library...
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Oct 15, 2023 15:59
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Given the mixed reception to Machineries of Empire, are there any recent space opera series that people would recommend? Or individual books, I'm not too picky.
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Oct 16, 2023 03:39
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Anode posted:Why did he get so dull?
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Oct 17, 2023 03:57
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mewse posted:Fog with malicious intent isn't a very interesting villain. buffalo all day posted:It feels like Serenity/Firefly - a gang of outcasts on a ship creating a surrogate family. Cozy and enjoyable.
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Nov 28, 2023 01:21
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I see Tchaikovsky as having gotten back in touch with the 80s SF of David Brin, which otherwise has mostly been ignored in the last two decades, and while I liked the books of that era and it's mostly all to the good, he also brought back some of the weaknesses. The planet hopping space opera of The Final Architecture is great, the lengthy psychic ruminations on the metaphysics of the "unreal"--metaphysics made up on the fly by the author--brought it down a little bit for me. It's been many, many years since I've read Brin at this point (unfortunately much of his fiction has a smugness that thankfully Tchaikovsky entirely avoids) but I remember otherwise interesting books like Earth and Kiln People getting into these turgid endings involving intricate dissections of the story's metaphysics. I'm okay with intricate dissections of the human condition, even the human condition so distantly defined as "what if feudalism but with space ships", but when it's wading deep into the author's made up nonsense it feels pointless. Anyway I really liked Final Architecture overall as I think I said a few weeks ago here and I know everyone's mileage will vary, but for me personally if you delete everything from Idris' viewpoint, not too much would be lost...
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Nov 30, 2023 01:36
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StrixNebulosa posted:Speaking of weird original books, has anyone read The Cusanus Game by Wolfgang Jeschke? It's German sci-fi/weird that I'm curious about :
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Dec 3, 2023 22:04
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So I finally read Gideon the Ninth. I waited until now per my policy of waiting for series to finish (it's not finished but the last book is about to come out). I managed to avoid all knowledge of what it's about except for the famous summary "lesbian necromancers in space" so I wanted to warn/reassure people who are in a similar boat that at least in the first book, there's very little in space, the lesbian aspect is quite muted, and while yes, there is lots of necromancy, it is mostly just the aesthetic of the fantasy magic. I know nothing about the author and I know it's patronizing to say stuff like this, but it at least reads like the author hasn't known anyone who's died, so death and the raising of the dead is dealt with in a manner almost completely devoid of emotion or sentiment. That's just an observation, not a criticism; it's a fun fantasy book and I almost always prefer reading fun books to Important Books Grappling With Mortality. The other thing I knew about it was it referenced memes, which sounded pretty dire, but this was also overstated. The prose and especially the main character's dialogue are written in a very contemporary idiom that feels out of place for a while but then I got used to it and it was fine. I guess my version of the short summary would be "Fate/Stay Night but with an invented world, goth aesthetics, and much better pacing". If you don't know FSN specifically, it's an anime (or close enough, I know it's a game), and there's a strong anime influence here. I think that's the right frame of reference because although compared to most books, the Neal-Stephenson-Meets-Tumblr style seems jarring and too informal, but compared to anime, it's restrained and respectable. I enjoy some anime but also find it a bit much so this was right up my alley. An alternative comparison is to Brandon Sanderson, who also constructs intricate secondary worlds and gives readers a lot of satisfaction via revelations about the setting and magic. Tamsyn Muir also is very good at structuring the mystery plot and making a compelling setting, drops the video gamey aspects of Sanderson while also paying a lot more attention to what characters are feeling and writing in a very polarizing style instead of with flat unadorned prose. I enjoy Sanderson but sometimes find him a bit bland so this was also right up my alley. I think someone here recently compared her to Gene Wolfe which might have put it in my head to start this now. The first book exhibits few Wolfean characteristics; now that I am a little ways into the second book (which is also doing a lot more with "in space" and a little more with "lesbian" in the original summary) I am starting to see more, but we'll see. I love Wolfe but he's definitely too obscure so I love it when people borrow his tricks and use them in more readable books. Anyway, tldr: a fun book that is unusual in covering all the literary bases pretty well: plot, principal characters, setting, style. My only real complaint was that for a lot of the book I struggled keeping the side characters straight but the dramatis personae at the front was unusually helpful. Looking forward to reading more.
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Dec 9, 2023 21:17
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Now have read Harrow the Ninth. Sorry for the long and spoiler-bar-heavy post. I enjoyed this a lot, even more than the first (which I really did enjoy, various nitpicks notwithstanding). It does a good job feeling totally different from the first while still delivering a similarly structured story (it's mostly different necromancers in a different haunted house, to borrow someone upthread's description of the first book). I thought the writing was even better this time out, which is kind of unusual since a lot of debut authors spend years on the debut and then get deadline crunched on the sequel. A lot less distractingly contemporary than the first book and just more serious overall, which for me was a big improvement (though maybe not realistic given Gideon is "writing" most of it? Also boy is the dad joke obnoxious here in a way it wouldn't have been in the previous book, ugh) This time it's overtly a puzzle box, a very well done puzzle box so far (sequels pending), and those are basically my favorite kind of story. I liked that even on a first read I had the chance to infer things before they were revealed (Ortus the First's real name and how it was being obscured by the search/replace, for instance, or the way the second person narration correctly identifies a sword's pommel, suggesting it was Gideon). Really glad I read this right after the first one. If I had read this when it first came out, I would have been stuck doing my A-AB-ABC-ABCD permuted reading of the series like I did for Terra Ignota. I really loved the ambiguity of the ending. The Emperor seemed so laid back and chill, I assumed he would turn out to be a monster, but from what is revealed so far the ethics of killing him are very dubious given the collateral damage (pending further reveals, sure) The whole AU scenes of the previous book thing is very, very anime and the justifying magic-babble wasn't very convincing but there's a reason anime does it, it was fun the get more time with the underused characters (especially since the lyctor characters weren't as fun to be around) Gene Wolfe influence watch: stronger but still mild (identity games but--amazingly--no one has died without realizing it? Nonius and the Sleeper getting warped by poetry is starting to get there, but--so far--I don't think anyone has started accidentally becoming the thing they are pretending to be) Three relatively minor nitpicks that many, many books also fall into but are pet peeves of mine:
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Dec 12, 2023 04:40
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As for my inflammatory statement earlier about death and loss, I should have expressed myself better. First, I was just talking based on Gideon the Ninth, obviously, and not the sequels. I do appreciate that Harrow the Ninth pays a lot more attention to death and loss both in big ways and in some smaller ways and that Gideon the Ninth was obviously written to set these up, so I'm sorry I said anything about the author. That was dumb. But the underlying feeling I was trying and failing to talk about before is still there for me, so at the risk of further angering people, let me try one more time. As I've gotten older I've become just a tiny bit uncomfortable with the way, to take a famous example, Star Wars has a bunch of pilot extras get killed to amp up the tension and therefore the heroism of its lead character and then, well, literally leaves them for dead and never bothers to mention they existed. Even the old EU novels mostly couldn't muster much empathy for those pilots, they were too busy getting more extras in position to get dramatically killed around the protagonists. Like other nitpicks in my last post, this is something tons of fiction does so it's silly to hold it against anyone, but since Gideon the Ninth felt like it was using necromancy for plot twists and window dressing, I thought about it more than usual. I haven't (but I'm sure someone on the Internet has) counted how many skeletons--remains of a human being who lived and loved and feared and died--are conjured in the book only to get crushed, broken, obliterated, or just abandoned a few seconds later. Hundreds? Maybe a thousand? Several of you pointed out the cavalier handling of these things makes sense given the setting and yes, I totally believe that Harrow doesn't give two shits about these skeletons, who they were, and what their death and their extremely short and usually dumb resurrection means, if anything. But I don't live in that world, I live in this one. And look, I really enjoyed the book, so I guess I don't really give two shits about all these dead extras either. But I kind of wish I did.
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Dec 12, 2023 04:41
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Lex Talionis posted:the cavalier handling of these things (I also didn't notice I posted them into the wrong thread, gah)
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Dec 12, 2023 04:41
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Benagain posted:okay I forget if people already recommended but you should check out The March North by Graydon Saunders because it's one of the very few books I've read where this doesn't happen, lots of people die but the effects of it are front and center in both the plot and characterization of the survivors. But anyway, yes, you're right, I wouldn't have thought of it in these terms but it is a great example of a story that reckons with the effects of having extras die. It's a bit obscured due to the general unforgiving obscurity of the whole thing, but it's definitely there. Since then I have read the second Commonweal book and my general review of the series so far is that it reads like it comes from a somewhat distant alternate universe and is in dialogue with a ton of books in a fairly different fantasy genre that don't exist in our timeline. It's difficult to say anything with confidence but we can surmise that in this other timeline, perhaps television was never invented and so writers took to the word processor's convenience without any conception of "pacing" a story (note there's no fantasy equivalent to television in the Commonweal despite its many other similarities to modern life). Perhaps authors in that timeline use crude, sub-ChatGPT AI assistance when writing, so that "iterate through each character in the scene for a non-verbal reaction to each line of dialogue" has become a normal convention. How did the books cross into our timeline? It seems that Glen Cook's Black Company crossed into theirs, so maybe these coming back here restored the balance. Anyway self-effacing humor aside, "reads like nothing else" is overall a good thing and I do intend to read the rest soon.
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Dec 16, 2023 02:41
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sebmojo posted:picked up ancillary justice because it was cheap in a pile and... it's fine? feels a little assembled out of familiar influences, the cold planet from le guin, the ship minds from banks, the tense conversations from cherryh, bits of the plot from traveller campaign secret of the ancients. i slurped it up in a day and it was pleasant enough to read but didn't really leave much trace when i was done. Are the sequels more interesting?
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Dec 17, 2023 23:58
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pradmer posted:The Sword of Kaigen by ML Wang - $0.99 BUT while reading with lots of eye rolling (and some guilty pleasure too, I really liked A:TLA and its magic system is fun, and I went through a martial arts phase as a teenager) I was blindsided by an out-of-nowhere left turn into an examination of grief and loss that I found far more emotionally affecting than 99% of what I get from far more respectable and critically acclaimed spaceships and wizards books. It's hard to recommend, both because you have to wade through a lot of other stuff to get to it, and because any more clear articulation of it would be a big spoiler, but hey, it's on sale, if this sounds at all intriguing why not give it a try?
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Dec 26, 2023 19:06
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2023 reading (SF/F only): Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - Didn't read this for a long time since it didn't seem like my kind of thing. I was right. Very well-written but meh. Thessaly series by Jo Walton - Read the first two years ago, came back, re-read those, and finished the third. To me the series peaks about 80% of the way through the first book; the rest is interesting but not nearly as thought-provoking. Curse of the Mistwraith by Janny Wurts - Read two-thirds after the talk on this thread but gave up. Some interesting things but couldn't get on with the way it's written and the way the characters are handled. Inda Series by Sherwood Smith - Another series I hadn't finished previously; twice in the past I'd read the first three, now I read all four. Weird series, starts out with military school, then Ender's Game meets Sid Meier's Pirates!, then the big military campaigns and palace intrigue of epic fantasy but it gets increasingly disinterested in that stuff in favor of slowly disentangling the big cast's complicated relationships and putting them to rights. Glad I finally finished it. Very underrated, I think a lot of people struggle with the avalanche of names and terms at the beginning. Empire of Exiles by Erin M Evans - Cozy epic fantasy murder mystery. Very competent debut novel, though I don't really think cozy and murder go together and I'm not really into cozy in any case. The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jiminez - Incredible and innovative writing in service of a slightly silly plot. Thematically confused IMO but man this is amazing at what it does well. Huge improvement from the author's first novel. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco - Sort of SF/F adjacent. Has its moments but I thought it was overrated. Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh - I liked this when I read it two decades ago and hadn't read much Cherryh. Hasn't really held up; despite the Hugo award, I think this is in the bottom third of Cherryh's science fiction output at best. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - Absolutely amazing character writing, wish it was doing something more interesting than a story/world that combined amounts to a simple metaphor. Empire of Silence by Christopher Rucchio - Very lightly remixes and combines a bunch of much better books (e.g. Dune, Book of the New Sun, etc.) into a worse book. An author to watch when they are older and (hopefully) better and more original. The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch - "Inception meets True Detective". Yes but do these things go together? As with the actual Inception, kind of falls apart if you think about it too much. If you like cosmic horror you'll probably like it better than I did. Maybe I dislike this more than it deserves because I keep getting this title confused with The Gone-away World, which I loved. Final Architecture trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Fun SF. Not as good as his Children books but that's a very high bar. Really drives home how rare it is to see space opera done well. Weird that David Brin was so popular in the late 80s yet these days only Tchaikovsky seems influenced by him. The demand still seems to be there. The March North by Graydon Saunders - Fascinating world, fun Glen Cook-influenced military fantasy, and some really bizarre authorial choices. Well worth the effort to get it. The Black Company by Glen Cook - Reread this to compare against the previous. My opinion hasn't changed from 15 years ago: you can see why this was amazing at the time, but it tries to have its cake and eat it too. Are these bad guys or not? Also, actual mercenaries are trying to get rich off loot and retire. No idea why these guys fight, the narrator doesn't seem to know either. Surprising amount of "found family" in here so maybe it was ahead of its time. This is one where the influenced book (March North) improves on the original in most respects. The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell - Really enjoyed the historical fiction elements and the way the druids are depicted. Don't like Arthur stories much and didn't like Arthur here either and that's really the point, so...oh well. Maybe I'll try one of his non-Arthuriana series in 2024. A Succession of Bad Days by Graydon Saunders - The military fantasy is gone, we're going to wizard school instead. Wizard school with a huge amount of wish fulfillment, but the wishes being fulfilled aren't the usual ("the kids at school are mean to me even though I'm smarter", "I am a horny man", etc.), it's the wishes of a construction worker who dreams of lifting and digging without hurting his back. Very long, bizarre writing tics, terrible pacing, no real ending to speak of. Glad I read it. The Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Very fun fantasy/science fiction dichotomy and mental health material kind of wasted in a boring, over-simple story. Yes it's a novella, but with a bit more effort this feels like it could have been one for the ages. Still worth reading. Locked Tomb series - Thought the last one was coming out so read these three. Oops. Still, probably enjoyed these more than anything else this year. If you're on the fence, don't be put off by the over the top fans or "lesbian necromancers in space", it's a Sanderson-ish "how does the world work?" mystery with a lot more attention to characters and some really cool literary pyrotechnics. Some rough patches of writing in the first book but gets stronger as it goes on.
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Dec 31, 2023 23:57
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:18 |
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Fivemarks posted:Basically, I'm looking for books that don't exist. It's hard to know for sure what to recommend without hearing more about what you like, not just what you don't like, but some things that came to mind:
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Jan 2, 2024 23:42
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