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I loved KJ Parker's use of technology, but drat did I get tired of everybody dying at the end of the book/trilogy.
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Aug 24, 2023 19:40
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fez_machine posted:Yeah, sex pest God drat it . I was going to say that the Jhereg books are, if not tragic, somewhat melancholy.
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Aug 26, 2023 18:22
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I highly recommend Freya Marske's A Marvelous Light . Edwardian with magic, but it's focused on just how much capitalism and aristocratic systems suck. The hero, unaware of magic, is hired into a government office dealing with magic. His problem is that all non-magicians who become aware of magic are supposed to be brainwiped. His other problem is that he's under a curse. C.L. Polk's Witchmark is post-WWI (sort of) with magic. The hero, a physician, has to solve the mystery of somebody who shows up poisoned and dying at his hospital. In the process, the hero reveals his own magic, which is the sort that condemns him to be used as a magical battery for his more powerful sister. Also about how much capitalism and aristocratic systems suck. Both of these have great worldbuilding; neither is pennyfarthings-plus-cantrips. P. Djéli Clark's A Master of Djinn is set in a 1920s-ish Egypt where the Egyptian mastery of djinn thwarted colonialism and made Egypt a world power. The author's Cairo is richly drawn with details of food, milieu, and customs that aren't European-derived. The heroine is trying to solve a mass murder that turns out to be something much worse. (From an Amazon review: "Liked the characters, although few of the more competent characters were male. " drat straight.) All of these are also queer romances; they're romances in the way that Shards of Honor is, in that the developing romance is essential to the plot, but is not the only plot.
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Aug 27, 2023 01:25
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Chairman Capone posted:P. Djéli Clark was one of my professors when I was in grad school, and we also lived in the same neighborhood for a couple years so I'd often run into him walking his dogs and we'd chat for a bit. The funny thing is at the time I had no idea he was a fiction author (I think he might have had just one or two short stories published at the time) but we still talked a lot of science fiction, especially Star Trek. What does/did he teach?
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Aug 27, 2023 01:44
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This fascinates me, just as a difference between reading styles. I was engrossed in A Master for the worldbuilding and characters; I barely remember the plot. (Also, excellent food values.) I am crushed that P. Djeli is a pseudonym, although I can see why an academic would be cautious. My Kindle tells me I gave up on The Witch King at 28%, because I just didn't care. I liked Wells's Raksura books, so my reaction isn't just Murderbot-withdrawal. I have also just admitted that I'll never get past 14% of Max Wells's Empress of Forever. Book amnesty is an excellent thing, and I unlocked that skill too late in life. I'm also late to the thread. Have y'all talked about Nghi Vo? Because drat, The Empress of Salt and Fortune novella trilogy is magnificent. The viewpoint characters, an agender monk and their historian companion bird, have a prickly sense of humor that I really enjoy. The setting is a magic-imbued Vietnam, and the plots sock you in the face. The magic system is fun, and you have a real sense that the story began before the part you're reading and continues afterward. Mentioning Vo reminds me of the Vietnamese-French multiple-award-winning author Aliette de Bodard. She has several different universes going; I love the Xuya universe, a set of novellas and novels about complex relationships between intelligent spaceships and human beings. These, again, are based on Vietnamese culture. I would recommend starting with the novella The Tea Master and the Detective. If you'd rather start with a novel, last fall's The Red Scholar's Wake is about a pirate ship, and her reluctant wife, trying to determine who murdered her first wife. Oh, and it's a big ol' space opera. A great pleasure of both the Vo and the de Bodard novels is that they treat Vietnamese, and the historic culture of Vietnam, the way that other science fiction authors treat the languages and customs of different planets. "I'm using the words, I'm using the concepts, it's on you to pay close attention and figure out what is going on." Both authors are good at letting you infer meaning through context, although I did enjoy looking up some words and especially some foods.
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Aug 27, 2023 17:13
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It's not that Vo's writing reminds me of Bodard's; it's that "awesome writer whose worlds are Vietnam-based" reminds me of both of them. For one thing, it's fantasy vs. SF. For another, I remember Bodard as much sadder.DurianGray posted:Like I can see the interesting worldbuilding ideas and everything, but for some reason I always have a lot of trouble imagining the physical spaces the characters are in and that specifically is what throws me out of them. I haven't really encountered it with another writer!
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Aug 27, 2023 18:52
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Sibling of TB posted:On the other hand, going to reread the entire locked tomb series (4th time, 3rd time, 2nd time) if Alecto ever gets a confirmed date. I am starting to believe that I am just not smart enough to parse the plots out of the Locked Tomb books. I love the milieu and characters, but most of what was happening in Harrow the Ninth and Nona the Ninth sailed right over my head, even on reread. I got the surface events, but the stuff I was supposed to be intuiting, the stuff that Harrow and Nona didn't themselves understand, didn't register. Last night I was seriously contemplating reading plot summaries so I could go back and read the books. e re Alecto release date May 2023 Reddit comment posted:As a bookseller, and somebody who deals with publishers, Alecto likely isn't coming anytime soon. It is possible they may give us information relatively soon, but there hasn't yet been an ISBN, no cover, there has been no word of review/advance copies going out (which they've been historically stingy with for this series, but they do exist, and months in advance of the publish date), and no catalog entry in Edelweiss+, which is what most book retailers use to order stock, and ordering for fall of this year is already happening for most stores. The publisher has not released a date. Barnes & Noble doesn't have any secret knowledge. As someone with access to book retail ordering catalogs, there is no release date. There's no information at all yet. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 17:13
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Jimbozig posted:Take notes. Each house, who is who, who knows what. Excellent idea. I'll try it. Re The Sheep, I've never forgotten the point that, at the climate extreme point, running an air conditioner means that you're cooler and everybody else is hotter.
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Aug 28, 2023 19:25
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It's been awhile, but I remember The Wind-up Girl as being rape-y as well. Have forgotten the details. e: I am currently rereading Georgette Heyer, but stumbling over the anti-Semitism I cheerfully overlooked 30 years ago. Also Michelle Sagara's Elantra series, which I am not sure I recommend, but is very iddy and has fun world-building and lots of emotional complexity. And a long-running romance plot, if you like that sort of thing. Anyway, not diving into anything that advertises itself as "dark" or "bleak" right now. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 20:09
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That was an enormous help, sebmojo, thank you so much. I think the short story As Yet Unsent is set after the books we've read so far, in which case Nona is not necessarily dead, because Gideon/Harrow's body isn't decaying. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 00:59
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There are some amazing Ninth House enamel pins (originally kickstarted, now Etsy). Warning: the first one you see is a spoiler for Harrow.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:08
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(spoiler up to and including Nona) OMG, Alecto Barbie.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:19
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zoux posted:Is it rapey? Well the titular character is basically an engineered geisha who ends up in a seamy SE Asian expat bar where she is subjected to all kinds of deprivations and violations. It fits within the themes of the books but it's absolutely CW poo poo if that's one of your issues. e: (popping head up from reading multiple tazmuir essays) How did I overlook The Priory of the Orange Tree? Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 01:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I tried to read his other stuff but I got like five pages in and bad things started happening to a dog and welp I was out A Proper Uppercut posted:It's been a while but I think my favorite Tim Powers would be The Stress of Her Regard and On Stranger Tides, with Anubis Gates bringing up the rear. But if his style of historical fiction or whatever you call it is your poo poo you can't go wrong for the most part. It's obviously an early work, but I did love The Drawing of the Dark. Does anybody else remember James Blaylock? I loved both of their books, and I loved their passing the poet William Ashbless back and forth. I am relieved to be able to remove Priory of the Ash Grove from the shopping cart. * Okay, Branwell has it coming. Whatever "it" is, as long as it's nasty, he deserves it.
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Aug 29, 2023 03:48
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branedotorg posted:I see she's written over 40 books and has a heap of good reviews but I know nothing about Michelle west. Has anyone read this or something else by her and give me something to compare it to? I basically rate Sagara as "serviceable, if it hits your id". I prefer the Elantra series, the first one being Cast In Shadow. The heroine is in a multi-race (birdalikes, catalikes, dragons, and elves) urban milieu. She solves crime (literally; she's a member of the urban police force, called the Hawks). She has work friends who are catalikes, birdalikes, and two elfalikes. She also has a Mysterious Past (that she doesn't understand any better than anybody else does) and an Evil Elf who is trying to manipulate her and an Evil Human co-worker (spoiler for book 1) who once murdered their entire family. I think these are solid urban fantasy: you get the sense of the city and its environs as genuine living entities, not just elfpunk-by-the-numbers. Sagara does a good job, as the series passes, of making everybody's backgrounds and motivations much more complex than Kaylin, the protagonist, was able to understand in the first book. The language is much more Poughkeepsie than Elfland, which I think suits the books. There are multiple languages with multiple layers of formality, and Sagara does a good job of conveying how which language Kaylin uses affects how she speaks to other people. Kaylin is also in a love triangle (more of a manipulation triangle) with the evil elf and the evil human, both of whom turn out during the series to be much more complex than "evil" can convey. I like these; they're good bookcandy for me. They won't leave you thinking, and sometimes that is exactly what I want.
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Aug 29, 2023 04:17
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Gato The Elder posted:I’m reading the Aubrey/Maturin books for the first time and they’re really good. Next I’m either gonna reread Master and Margarita or idk It's an entirely different experience because you don't get to enjoy the prose or the subtlety, but Master and Commander -- actually not a dramatization of that book, but more or less a Good Bits Version of the series -- is one of the most successful movie adaptations I've ever seen. If you want to see what the Napoleonic ships look like, this is your movie. Paul Bettany is superb as Maturin (although not dirty enough), and Russell Crowe is pitch-perfect as Aubrey. It should have revived the thrilling sea movie, but totally failed to do so. I often listen to the excellent soundtrack.
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Aug 29, 2023 15:45
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sebmojo posted:Idk
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Aug 30, 2023 16:32
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I sometimes skipped the sea battles
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Sep 2, 2023 19:41
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I'm only there for the goat-buggering.
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Sep 2, 2023 20:18
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quote not edit, off to touch peaches (not a euphemism)
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Sep 2, 2023 21:15
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It is the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail.
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Sep 3, 2023 01:12
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General Battuta posted:I think an overlooked bit about Aubrey Maturin is that they’re extremely funny. The last passage I read had the crew convinced that the French were feeding them bread full of holes so as to fill them up with air until they popped. Stands to reason.
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Sep 3, 2023 05:11
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With the usual Anthony prepubescent stuff, IIRC. His SF was so much better than the Xanth books, at least the first book in each separate series was. Such inventive worldbuilding.
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Sep 3, 2023 22:00
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My son had a problem in middle school: each week he was supposed to write down words in his reading that he didn't understand, then write out the definition. He had, and has, a vocabulary that would choke a goat. Patrick O'Brian got him through: orlop decks and cataplasms and shrouds to the rescue! His teacher complained that he wasn't doing the assignment right. My son pointed out that those were genuinely the only words he'd found that he didn't understand.
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Sep 4, 2023 01:46
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Ask me about the Chaucer paper I wrote explaining tournament rules in The Knight's Tale based on my knowledge of D&D weapons . Got a good grade, too. Tl; dr the weapons rules in the tournament forbade weapons that were strong against chain mail, iirc.
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Sep 4, 2023 06:13
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If you haven't yet, and if you like personality-centric thrillers, do try All Systems Red ASAP. The most credible first-person robot viewpoint I've ever seen.
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Sep 4, 2023 17:33
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Quorum posted:That makes sense, the banned weapons are arrows, battle-axes, knives, and short swords (the last of which are explicitly described as stabbing weapons). Basically the late medieval equivalent of requiring weapons to be wrapped in pool noodles. Neat! Thanks! I actually did do some research after getting the thesis from D&D.
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Sep 4, 2023 17:55
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torgeaux posted:They are the best depictions of autism in my view. In a good, accessible way. I've heard a lot of people with autism say that. It makes sense, given what I've read about autism, but I wouldn't know.
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Sep 4, 2023 19:08
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Plus truly appalling amounts of narcissism. Not just the "okay, let's cover up my mutilating a fellow-soldier" moment, but "My mother may be having sex, I must take my entire family plus my wife who is in the middle of an important professional contract across the galaxy to cockblock!" No, I've never forgiven him for that.
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Sep 5, 2023 00:45
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GhastlyBizness posted:It’s described in an afterword in some editions. She consciously wrote it to be an apologia for Christopher Columbus and his actions in the new world, her idea being that his atrocities, slave taking, etc were mistakes borne of “radical ignorance”. She was reacting to the broader cultural reappraisal of him that accompanied the 500th anniversary of his voyage, trying to get back some of his gloss as a good, if flawed, man.
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Sep 6, 2023 18:09
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Strategic Tea posted:Freed from the clutches of the corporations, all I need is to engage a cutthroat PR agency and achieve a 98% unregretted microlike impression ratio on X, The Everything App Nowadays, or so I hear from my friends in the trenches, major houses often expect you to show evidence of a solid social-media presence and following before they even offer on a first novel. The bestseller-or-don't-bother model is endemic.
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Sep 7, 2023 18:09
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Neal Stephenson writes those big ol' doorstops with a fountain pen. Proof.
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Sep 11, 2023 18:20
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General Battuta posted:The US and Russian space programs both have a ton of magic rituals, including magic chairs to sit in, a magic card game and a magic tire to piss on. Humans will never stop
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Sep 12, 2023 19:20
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Armauk posted:I thought he wrote his novels in Emacs. He probably made the switch after the Baroque Cycle, at the behest of his hand. Neal Stephenson posted:“I’ve written every word of it so far with fountain pen on paper. Part of the theory was that it would make me less long-winded, but it hasn’t actually worked.”
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Sep 13, 2023 03:04
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LiterallyATomato posted:Hello! (e:f,b) Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser founded the thief-and-barbarian genre. The first book is a short-story collection Swords and Deviltry Steve Brust's Jhereg; sword-and-sworcery meets noir detective. The author is a sex harasser, so you may not want to throw him money. (has anybody read Kings of the Wyld? It looks interesting based on the blurb.)
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Sep 13, 2023 04:20
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Phanatic posted:Powers’s secret histories are generally excellent, although I felt Stress of Her Regard was an uneventful slog. I like the Romantic poets. My reaction to SoHR was "This is more than I ever wanted to know about the Romantic poets." I very much fear this happens to the Brontës. Surprisingly little is known about them (other than their writings), and people have put the most ridiculous things into the gaps. Also, nobody should ever give more than ten seconds' thought or screen time to Branwell. He was not a mysterious hidden figure, he was a complete and utter failson. Selachian posted:Tanith Lee's Cyrion is pretty good if you want a S&S protagonist who's more intellectual than the usual barbarian warrior.
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Sep 13, 2023 17:35
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I forgot to mention The Worm Ouroboros. There is nothing like it in the English language.* Swords, sorcery, great lords doing great things (and bickering). It's all written in extremely Jacobean prose. Grab a sample and see if it's your thing. High adventure in elevated language. * Okay, Gormenghast is at least its second cousin, but it isn't S&S.
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Sep 15, 2023 06:24
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Groke posted:It's kind of hilarious how the author starts out with a point-of-view character from our world astral projecting into the otherworld, and then after a chapter or two just loving forgets about him and never mentions him again. Gaius Marius posted:That's because Conan owns and should be impossible to gently caress up. The first movie is one of the greatest films of all time. Nghi Lo's latest, Mammoths at the Gates, came out, and although I don't like it quite as much as the first three, there's still a lot to admire, and Vo's prose continues amazing. I think it's because I don't find the central mystery as compelling. If you haven't read Vo, the central characters of these novels are Chih, a cleric of the Singing Hills, an order that collects stories, and their companion Almost Brilliant, another member of the order who has an eidetic memory and is a neixin, something like* a bird. In each of the books, Chih tells and is told stories, and in the process reveals a hidden truth. In The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the title empress has just died, and Chih goes to visit Thriving Fortune, an old house that has just been declassified because of her death. It turns out to have been the Empress's summer house, and the caretaker asks Chih's help in doing the final inventory. Chih does help, and listens to the stories the caretaker tells about the objects they find. In the process, they learn about the caretaker, and about the Empress, and about hidden secrets. Here's a passage from Into The Riverlands, the second book. quote:They called her Wild Pig Yi because she grew up wrestling wild pigs for fun. When she was a baby, her father quarreled with her mother, and to hurt her, he took Yi and abandoned her in the forest, assuming she'd be little more than a mouthful for some passing pig. Vo is Vietnamese-American, and the world of the Empress of Salt and Fortune novellas is a fantasy pre-industrial Vietnam. It's a great deal of fun for somebody who grew up immersed in European fantasy to see something new. * it's way more complicated than that.
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Sep 15, 2023 20:10
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anilEhilated posted:Isn't this public domain? Lud-in-the-Mist is another of the fantasy novels that is like nothing but itself. It's similar to "Leaf By Niggle", a little, but that's in mood rather than in content. I'm fuzzy-headed and I wish I could do the book justice. It's weird and interesting.
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Sep 16, 2023 00:46
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fritz posted:I love those books, but Into the Riverlands is the third one. Headpiece filled with straw, alas.
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Sep 16, 2023 01:57
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