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A Proper Uppercut posted:I'll also second the Bujold rec, also in the fantasy vein, Robin Hobb. If we're also talking fantasy, I recommend Louise Cooper's Indigo Saga. It perhaps has a certain amount of "when did the author figure out the ending of her eight-book series?", but said ending is stuck hard. I'll stick my oar in for Stella Gemmell too. Her work is less muscular than her late husband's, but you can see her influence on him. It's hard to tell which parts of the final volume of the Troy trilogy were hers.
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Dec 25, 2019 17:47
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Ornamented Death posted:Mike Resnick passed away. I just heard from Janis Ian and came here to post. Sad news.
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Jan 9, 2020 16:44
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PST posted:(Also Mike Resnick died, and the pearl clutchers are all in a tizzy as people revisit his awfulness and bigotry) Mike Resnick was friends with gay musician Janis Ian for over 25 years and assembled a Who's Who of SF writers to write an anthology of stories inspired by her music. I heard about his death from her, on the day. Janis takes no poo poo from bigots and does not tolerate them in her life. So I'm going to need more detail from you on that.
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Jan 12, 2020 14:10
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ed balls balls man posted:Solidarity to the General. I thought Tyrant was his title for the last book? I hope things pick up for him.
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Jan 14, 2020 13:44
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quantumfoam posted:Susan Calvin tied that story collection together, and made it work. Other than Susan Calvin, weren't most of the other female characters in Asimov's stories love interests or something? It was Jupiter, and the story is collected in The Complete Robot anthology released in the 1980s. I forget the name of it though.
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Jan 15, 2020 12:23
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Victory Unintentional. Powell and Donovan are if anything better than Susan Calvin as protagonists, and they appear in even fewer stories.
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Jan 15, 2020 14:18
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freebooter posted: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" Which is looking even dumber as a take now Gibson's Alien 3 has been adapted.
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Jan 17, 2020 10:41
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FuturePastNow posted:Meanwhile Harry Turtledove found the correct use of twitter: Turtledove wrote a seven book series that was basically "what if both World Wars, but we're the Nazis and we're exterminating blacks?" He doesn't do nuance.
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Jan 22, 2020 15:06
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pradmer posted:Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey - $1.99 Sandman Slim is decidedly more grimdark than Dresden, but it's also significantly better.
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Feb 2, 2020 00:09
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quantumfoam posted:Anyway, dipped into the Rivers of London series last month(read the first 4 books). Didn't hate the books, don't blindly love them either. The "UK Wizard Cops" premise kind of aged badly, given all thats gone down in the UK since the series started. I enjoy the Peter Grant series, but they're kind of hampered for me by knowing that when Ben Aaronovitch wrote the first book he'd never actually been to Russell Square. (Source: Aaronovitch, B.)
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Feb 9, 2020 18:02
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ToxicFrog posted:The Girl With All The Gifts was fantastic. I think I got the recommendation from this very thread. It has a sequel now (The Boy on the Bridge) but I haven't read it, and Gifts works fine on its own. The Boy on the Bridge is a prequel, not a sequel. It's an odd duck; it resolves a question asked in the original book, so whichever book you read first, you're spoiling yourself on the other.
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Feb 12, 2020 12:43
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scary ghost dog posted:need someone to explain to me how “having medieval swords & sorcery” makes something derivative. I need someone to explain to me how being derivative makes something de facto bad. That said, I bounced off First Law like a brick wall because it read like an inferior imitation of Gemmell. I don't think I even finished the first book. YMMV, of course.
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Feb 18, 2020 19:54
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Evil Fluffy posted:Catelyn Stark. Her arrogance and stupidity directly lead to the Red Wedding because she thought some guest rules were an unbreakable shield against retribution. They were, technically. Catelyn just didn't notice that Walder Frey was weaselling around the rules by serving his guests with neither bread nor salt.
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Feb 21, 2020 12:21
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, I enjoyed it. The fact that he did weasel around them shows that there was a need to do so. If you want something similar from the other side, look at 71-Hour Ahmed in Jingo by Terry Pratchett. Ahmed got his nickname after he killed a man an hour before the third day of the customary hospitality period was over. For this he is considered by his countrymen to be unforgivable, even though he did it because the man he killed was a mass murderer. Customs can be hugely important in some cultures, and we're told through the story of the Rat King in Game of Thrones that guestright in Westeros is one of them.
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Feb 21, 2020 18:03
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anilEhilated posted:Oh, I've read them too, but they are a lot weaker compared to the later ones and may discourage a potential reader off Discworld. When I read TCOM and TLF for the first time, there weren't any other Discworld books to read. The best reason to start people with those two is because while they're fun, the series does nothing but get better until it peaks some time around Maskerade.
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Mar 17, 2020 14:22
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Alhazred posted:I honestly think that the movie improves Dick's stories. He had good ideas, but workmanlike prose. There's no way he could've come up with the "tears in the rain" bit for example. Hampton Fancher didn't come up with it either. I maintain that a SF book collection is like lesbian porn, in that there's no need to have any Dick in it.
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Mar 22, 2020 13:44
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pradmer posted:The Devil You Know (Felix Castor #1) by Mike Carey - $2.99 This is a very, very good series and I recommend it to all, particularly at $3 a volume.
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Mar 23, 2020 23:12
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ToxicFrog posted:I really enjoyed The Girl With All The Gifts so this is at least interesting to me, but I have two questions: 1) Mike planned a sixth book at one point, but the story is functionally complete after book 5. I think he's abandoned the idea now. 2) No weight at all, because the Castor books are so far above the Dresden Files that Jim Butcher couldn't see them with the Hubble Telescope.
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Mar 24, 2020 14:31
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Safety Biscuits posted:He also wrote Hellblazer for a bit, and that's a better comparison; the mystery aspect was quite strong. The first one was good, but I didn't read the rest. It's a much better comparison, honestly, in that Felix Castor and John Constantine are both scousers transplanted to London who got over their heads in magic a few years previous and caused someone a great deal of harm thereby. The difference is in how they responded to it. Constantine is a self confessed bastard who'll throw anyone under the bus, whereas Castor cares too much even when it's against his own best interests.
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Mar 24, 2020 16:16
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a foolish pianist posted:It looks like all the files are plain text. Lots of them don't have extensions, though. Who the gently caress is finding Burroughs unreadable? I read the original Barsoom trilogy just this year and they still stand up.
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Mar 25, 2020 15:07
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General Battuta posted:CHAPTER ELEVEN Thank you for this early excerpt from Baru Cormorant 4.
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Mar 26, 2020 18:31
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buffalo all day posted:Earthsea is a good call, it was intentionally written as fantasy that featured POC. She could just read Tombs of Atuan which has a female POC protagonist. Er, no it doesn't. The Kargs are explicitly white.
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Apr 3, 2020 15:10
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StrixNebulosa posted:It's very good, BUT it contains copious amounts of rape, child abuse, child murder, rape, violence, and other really distasteful subjects. Marlon James pulled no punches and it's grimdark as hell. You said "rape" twice.
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Apr 5, 2020 20:23
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StrixNebulosa posted:har har In case you missed the reference. Shame on Rat for not giving you a chance to supply the punchline yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bigZ1fmwD-Q
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Apr 6, 2020 08:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:Oh! I have never seen that movie, didn't know what you were doing. Well I'm embarrassed. I sort of assumed that everyone has seen Blazing Saddles. (You should correct that if you ever get the chance, BTW, it's almost as funny as Young Frankenstein.)
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Apr 6, 2020 21:11
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genericnick posted:I think I've never read anything by David Gemmell, but the name keeps turning up, any particular place to take a look? Start at the beginning with Legend. If you like that, move onto the Rigante novels, Jon Shannow and possibly Lion of Macedon. Gemmell's strength always lay in his flawed protagonists. Jon Shannow is probably the best of those because he's literally insane - a religious fanatic on an impossible quest to find Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to be a good and peaceful man when that's the last thing he can be - but they're all imperfect and they all have fears to face.
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Apr 14, 2020 14:55
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Gnoman posted:Something like Captain Tripps from The Stand would be destroyed as soon as the capabilities were discovered, because nobody wants a weapon that is guaranteed to wipe out the user as well as the target. That sort of agent only makes sense if it is somehow far deadlier than intended, or if the people using it are simply omnicidal. I admire your optimism. What would more probably happen is that whoever developed Captain Trips would keep it and try to develop a vaccine.
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Apr 17, 2020 09:22
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Safety Biscuits posted:Speaking of dinosaurs, here's something to discuss. Who is the oldest currently active sf writer? I'm referring to their careers, not the number of candles on their cake. Michael Moorcock was first published in the late 50s, but doesn't seem to have published anything since 2015. Samuel R. Delany's first novel was in 1960, and he published a novella in 2018, which seems like it counts, and Larry Niven (first published in 1964) has, according to Wikipedia, a co-authorship credit on a book this year, but you don't know how much he wrote... Ben Bova has been active since 1959. E: Christopher Priest is still working as well.
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Apr 21, 2020 00:36
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rocode posted:Just got the email for this! Do I not recall that the planned split in Tyrant was cancelled, thus sparing GB the Martinesque mountain climb of trying to find a title for the extra book?
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Apr 28, 2020 15:51
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quantumfoam posted:The best book that handles that kind of plot twist is probably Mission of Gravity. Only a Goon would need to reach the next paragraph before realising that the people who weigh 550lbs aren't human.
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Apr 30, 2020 09:19
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pseudanonymous posted:So now they’re only asking like 10$ more than it’s worth. I get you don't like Sanderson's writing, but he volunteered to give his book away and Tor aren't even replacing their regular Book Club drop with it. Was there any particular need to be a prick about this?
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May 3, 2020 09:17
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Safety Biscuits posted:William Gibson's Desert Island Discs interview is online, and you should be able to listen to it wherever you are. Even if you're not, check out his choice of luxury for a desert island. To save people the trouble: he wanted a junkyard.
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May 3, 2020 13:10
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pseudanonymous posted:Are you really stupid enough to think he’s not doing it to make money? He’s doing it so people read the first book then buy the rest. If his books were as bad as you make out there would be no danger of people buying the others. You're having a "nobody is allowed to like this thing I don't like" moment.
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May 3, 2020 15:16
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:I’m subbed to several SF/fantasy magazines but it’s driving me nuts that at least one of these (usually more) turns up in every single issue: We've read Murderbot, you know.
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May 4, 2020 11:03
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Ninurta posted:Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga (Pandora & Judas Unchained) are probably his best works. Pandora's introduction was fantastic and unlike his other works I think the plot really benefited from behind condensed into a duology rather than a trilogy. It's unfortunate that he decided to double dip with the Void trilogy which takes place 1,000 years later and ruins anything that was interesting in the series. And Misspent Youth, which is a prequel.
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May 5, 2020 08:16
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quantumfoam posted:"action, weapons and armor, fighting sick rear end foes as a nobody": Strontium Dogs and the Judge Dredd 2000 AD series popped to mind. Dredd doesn't really fit the "nobody" bill, considering that he's known and feared throughout a city of 800 million people and considered so important to law and order that they installed a replacement under his name when he retired.
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May 5, 2020 19:25
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Cardiac posted:Fahrenheit is a lovely metric, which in contrast to Celsius have no good translation to Kelvin. (5F - 160)/9 - 273 = K. Really, though, you should be using Rankine in that situation because it's the absolute scale for Fahrenheit. 0°R = -459.67 °F.
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May 6, 2020 09:47
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TheAardvark posted:The problem is Murderbot has a human face, and it's a hell of a lot harder to imagine a human face as perfectly genderless than it is a robot. I picture Murderbot as the Terminator cosplaying as Master Chief, because that's basically what it is.
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May 8, 2020 23:23
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Safety Biscuits posted:Yes - it's more similar to the early Discworld book with the great spell that scares all the other magic out of Rincewind's head. That would be because in the early Discworld novels Pratchett was explicitly parodying Vancian magic. (Congratulations, it's not often we see a Reverse Hogwarts in the wild.)
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May 12, 2020 00:12
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:57 |
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OK, I bought The Monster. General B, I have faith in you to deliver a title for the fourth book. Don't let me down.
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May 14, 2020 13:49
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