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Done with Gideon. If you scrape off the bones(but why would you?), the story turned out to be a nice isolated island paranoia thing, though it never leans too hard into it, the characters are interesting, the setting is verywarhammer and the author's voice is Let's Play riddled with dad jokes. And I don't even mean this as a critique.
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Oct 8, 2019 00:12
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Ben Nevis posted:I don't think Land Fit for Heroes series by Richard K Morgan was mentioned. It probably counts, and is definitely lgbt friendly. Which is exactly how I feel about it. Quite OK when I read it, but I forgot it exists before the third came out.
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Oct 10, 2019 21:45
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Wachter posted:Well, I just finished Peter Watts' Firefall, which is the omnibus of Blindsight and Echopraxia, and while Blindsight was a genuinely fascinating piece of existential horror, wheeeeeeeooo was Echopraxia a huge humming pile of poo poo stinking up my Kindle. It was boring as hell, but I really switched off when the vampires went from scary autistic predators into omnipotent space wizards who can line up beer glasses by stomping on the floor, and give you epilepsy by drumming their fingers. I recently reread Blindsight and it was as great as I remembered it. I liked Echnopraxia just fine when it came out. No idea if it holds up on the reread, but I really wasn't bothered by your spoilers.
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Oct 25, 2019 13:17
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feedmegin posted:Ken McLeod and China Mieville would both like a word. I think Steven Brust is also a trot?
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Oct 26, 2019 12:20
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tokenbrownguy posted:Finished Steel Frame. The action was difficult to follow most of the time, and the mechs had more personality than most the characters. But the setting was solid and the internal narration of the protagonist was cool. Solid 3/5. I also read it and found it very solid. However, I'm slightly disturbed that people who seem to have watched the same Anime as me close to 15+ years ago are writing books now.
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Nov 12, 2019 22:03
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Finished a reread of Echnopraxia. It...really didn't hold up. I think it took something like 150 pages until I got sucked back into the story and Bruk's fedora atheism made the nerd discussions a bit more tedious than in Blindsight. Or maybe they just felt more tacked on? Still a lot of neat ideas though. And I couldn't help but read the last couple dialogues in the voice of ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN so all is forgiven.
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Nov 21, 2019 23:52
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anilEhilated posted:To be fair that is just Kraken being a lot more playful when it comes to language - it's a word invented to fit the situation; on the other hand, bathoses and puissances in descriptions are just Miéville having showing off this new thesaurus he Scar talk: It is still my favourite book of his and I don't really love BasLag
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Nov 29, 2019 11:48
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PST posted:Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon/Steel Remains et al) is a massive loving terf Terfs are some of the dumbest poo poo. I mean even suppose you believe all trans people suffer from some kind of social delusion that just reduces the court cases to something like defending the god-given right to call fat people fat to their face. What has to be wrong with your brain if you don't get this?
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Dec 20, 2019 11:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:This will probably get an eye roll but I honestly think Robert Jordan writes *battle* scenes very well, with a veteran's eye. You believe his characters have seen real combat. I have to agree with this. It was also one of the main reasons I dislike the Sanderson finals. He really doesn't (or didn't) write good battle scenes.
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Dec 21, 2019 23:54
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I'm halfway through a rearead of the Dune novels after close to 20 years. The parts I remember being impressive are still holding up. The social system really made sense in the context provided. With the sole exception of the Jihad. Who are they even at war with? The Atreides got themselves the throne of a HRE like entity, that went along with a controlling stake in the CHoam trade monople. The Landsrat(sp?) as the counter force collecting the aristocracy seems intact, as well as the MAD situation and the conventions of war, as far as I can make out. So what planets are they conquering? Whose planets get cleaned of all live? There are battles with names, but no enemies. There was no mention of rebellion, or defeated Great Houses.
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Jan 4, 2020 15:11
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Kalman posted:The Jihad, as suggested by the name, was fundamentally a religious war—replacing the aristocracy and its individual fiefdoms, along with the quasi-secular OC bible and minor religions, with a united religious state venerating Muad’Dib. On further consideration I can kind of buy this. One point that is raised in the second novel is the negotiation with the guild about the secret asylum planet after 12(?) years, so that points to the Great Houses as the opposite site. And they would still be around in a somewhat reduced state, because of the atomics they control. Then I'd chalk up the description of the wars to number inflation, which Herbert does almost to Warhammer standards. There are also the Ixians as possible opponents.
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Jan 5, 2020 20:31
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I recently finished Southern Reach. I must admit every further entry felt more like an unmotivated prequel than a continuation of the story. I was really into it at the start, but pretty done with it by the end. I don't really mind the ending though.
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Feb 3, 2020 21:14
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pseudanonymous posted:PKD had mental illness problems exacerbated by serious drug use. I doubt he had a clear confidence in there being a single observable reality. I feel every second book of his I read had a drug that changed the world when you take it.
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Mar 17, 2020 13:51
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I think I've never read anything by David Gemmell, but the name keeps turning up, any particular place to take a look?
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Apr 14, 2020 14:12
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Yea, Murderbot is genderless (literally, as far as I know), but I always just associate killer robots as male in my head. I dunno why. I just default to "he", same as when I refer to ships as "she". Habit, I guess. Murderbot sounded female to me. If I had to guess a reason it's that it is Martha Wells writing and using the first person. quantumfoam posted:Vance was pretty good and most of his fantasy + scifi stories have aged well. No overt jail-bait obsession, no overt author-insert hero worship, no overt eugenics or racism slant. Did you read Planet of Adventure? Edit: That was the one Vance story I dropped half way through, but I always have a bit of a problem with his straight adventure parts. genericnick fucked around with this message at 08:59 on May 11, 2020 |
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May 11, 2020 08:50
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I had to look up which of his books the Centauri device actually was and the wiki synopsis starts with:""The Centauri Device - Wikipedia" posted:Harrison has said that the book breaks what were then the central tenets of space opera, namely that the protagonist plays an active role in driving the plot forward, that the universe is comprehensible to humans and that the universe is anthropocentric.[1] These preconceptions were still common in the more literary space operas of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany's Nova (which Harrison described as "highly readable but finally unsatisfying") and, in terms of tone, Harrison's novel more closely hews to the unconventional genre-bending of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, with the bleak cosmic outlook being influenced by Barrington J. Bayley's The Star Virus.[2] Edit: I might not actually have read it. Nothing here rings a bell, except it sounds like stuff he would write. genericnick fucked around with this message at 14:34 on May 20, 2020 |
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May 20, 2020 14:22
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quantumfoam posted:
Weird, I never even heard of her.
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Jun 5, 2020 21:09
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fritz posted:RH should have stuck with going after people like Bakker. Bakker is definitely guilty of writing a few books that aren't very good, but I'm not aware of anything he has done that warrants being harassed by weirdos? genericnick fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jun 28, 2020 |
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Jun 28, 2020 21:39
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Qwertycoatl posted:Curse you amazon Same. I had it preordered from the (localish) book store and they just gave up and cancelled it. Logistics is hard.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:15
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No black pages on Harrow. 0/10 I was robbed.
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Aug 16, 2020 15:51
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Finished Harrow and it's still goofy fun. Honestly it was a bit weaker than the first and could probably have done with a bit more trimming. Also, in the 10kth year of the God Emperor's reign, the English language evolved entirely to dad jokes and memes.
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Sep 8, 2020 12:26
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Drakyn posted:"No war! No war! No war!" the people shouted as Richard led the men up the street at a dead run. awesmoe posted:Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken’s head rose. Kahlan pulled back. Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway. “Shoo,” Kahlan heard herself whisper. There wasn’t enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn’t tell if it had the dark spot, But she didn’t need to see it. “Dear spirits, help me,” she prayed under her breath. The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest. We had some good times. I think the ASIOF forum had something like 50 threads writing parodies.
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Sep 18, 2020 12:31
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Moreau posted:I just finished reading the entire 7 book Prince of Nothing saga by R Scott Bakker and ... dear god, why did no one get that man an editor? I rarely feel like my time reading is ill-spent, but this was certainly a new low. Yeah, talk at the time was that the editor quit after the first 3 and then, well whatever happened happened.
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Nov 9, 2020 14:10
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Crashbee posted:The implausibility of the vampires kinda spoiled the book for me too. I mean, in the real world just making potatoes more resistant to disease is super controversial, but you're telling me someone thought it would be a good idea to create a race of creepy super-smart monsters that feed on humans and terrify everyone? No-one would think that's a good idea. It's not like there's even any twists, it ends exactly the way you'd think. I mean the controversy barely slows the adaption of the potatoes and several major countries had a bioweapon research program that was rather unadvised.
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Dec 4, 2020 22:36
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I can't for the life of me remember what novel that was, but the protagonist was researching elephants and being a great embarrassment to his family's business empire. Then the matriarch died and he gets pulled into the search for the McGuffin she hid. Involves travel in the solar system. Somehow I mixed that up with Robinson's 2312, but that wasn't it, was it?
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Jan 4, 2021 15:23
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Hobnob posted:Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth? I kinda bounced off it (despite generally liking Reynolds) so I may be wrong. Yeah that was it, thanks.
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Jan 4, 2021 15:40
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PeterWeller posted:The rub is that Chandler wasn't writing about how much of a stone loving badass Marlowe is while Morgan is definitely writing about how much of a stone cold loving super badass Kovacs is. Morgan isn't writing noir so much as he's using its trappings to dress up his sci fi power fantasy. Yeah that is spot on. The books were just too much of a power fantasy for me to really love them. And they always ended in a made for TV shootout scene.
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Jan 15, 2021 18:46
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Bhodi posted:I would be down with this but I really hated The Magicians. They are given massive power and they did literally nothing to help anyone around themselves while whining about how nothing makes them happy. It's the unmitigated selfishness of it all, painted in a light that was supposed to make them sympathetic. They are absolutely contemptible characters. Sometimes it can be fun to read about contemptible characters, but this is absolutely not one of those cases. I read a lot of books with unlikeable characters, but specifically self-centered, low-level depressive and whiny ones are just not that fun. Over privileged and boring. Very NYT in a way.
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Feb 5, 2021 17:04
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From one of the Covid threads:BattleMaster posted:speaking of covid denial, notorious racist H. P. Lovecraft, who was racist even for his time and told to tone it down by colleagues, would have been anti-lockdown today H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, 2 December 1925 posted::
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Mar 12, 2021 11:06
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I've been reading Richard Morgan's The Dark Defiles and now I remember why I dropped the series more than a decade ago. I'm a third through and I think every interaction any character had was them being 100% tiresomely aggro. It's just incredibly one-note. I have somewhat fond memories of Altered Carbon and its sequels, but there it probably worked better since you had only the single POV who spent every encounter rolling 2 D6 on the intimidation table.
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May 31, 2021 21:57
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genericnick posted:I've been reading Richard Morgan's The Dark Defiles and now I remember why I dropped the series more than a decade ago. I'm a third through and I think every interaction any character had was them being 100% tiresomely aggro. It's just incredibly one-note. I have somewhat fond memories of Altered Carbon and its sequels, but there it probably worked better since you had only the single POV who spent every encounter rolling 2 D6 on the intimidation table. Finished it, for what it's worth. And what it's worth is not much. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that all POVs he ever wrote are the same and while his shtick kind of fit in Altered Carbon, if you take the same POV, split it in three characters and drop them into a fantasy setting it gets much more grating. If you'd cut every interaction that was a character being needlessly insufferable until they get a rise out of their opposition, only to make them back down with their badass staring technique you'd safe half the weight. Come to think of it, I picked Altered Carbon up in the same batch as Bakker and Abercrombie, but today I really would only recommend the latter.
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Jun 3, 2021 11:24
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Groke posted:Because of you guys I just started on Between Two Fires and holy crap, this thing is, well, fire. I also read it because of this thread and it's pretty good.
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Jun 9, 2021 16:39
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Gato posted:Just read Declare on the strength of the recommendations from a few pages ago. Had a lot of fun reading it, really pacy and tightly written, but I'm feeling a bit more mixed now that I've had time to digest it a bit more. The cosmic horror stuff was very well done, especially since it steered away from most of the usual Lovecraft tropes. I wasn't completely convinced by the romance subplot, but I thought the reflections on faith were really interesting - it's not often you see an unambiguously positive portrayal of organised religion in modern fantasy. Yeah Declare really contains a lethal dose of Cold War. I still enjoyed it, but there were certainly parts I found hard to stomach.
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Jun 10, 2021 12:08
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Zurtilik posted:I'm sure if I roll through the thread I'd find this answer somewhere, but oh well, lazy posting keeps the thread alive?! The Freeze-Frame Revolution was published three years ago. Does that make the cut?
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Jun 22, 2021 14:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:
I read both of those and enjoyed them. The second contains a lethal concentration of dad jokes however.
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Jun 22, 2021 15:26
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breadnsucc posted:the amount of money they were paid in advance by their publishing company i'm assuming, then if you read their books for 'free', and they aren't poo poo books that should be tossed into a fire or whatever I suspect, and I don't know, I'm just guessing here you can do this fancy thing called send money and in this crazy insane world of ours there are so many fancy ways to give money to people without also giving money to predatory publishers and distributors Sure, but most novels are group efforts to some extent. Since we're in the Science Fiction thread I want to point to Scott Bakker's output before and after his editor quit as one of the most egregious examples.
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Jun 24, 2021 17:01
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BurningBeard posted:I loved Heroes Die, and actually found out about it thanks to one of this thread’s prior incarnations. I think there were three in all? I liked them overall, but it's a clear case that none of the books improves on the one before.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:35
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Armauk posted:I'm about 30% through The Blade Itself and finding a bit dull. It does pick up eventually for the series, right? Yeah, Abercrombie markedly improved as he continued to write.
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Jul 5, 2021 16:39
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Ccs posted:Best Served Cold moves at a better clip than The Blade Itself so that's part of it. It is very much a book full of irredeemable characters, even more so than The First Law though. So that can definitely alienate people. Yeah, but it's better to alienate people with one book instead of a trilogy. Irredeemable characters are an Abecrombie fixture and if you really don't enjoy Best Served Cold you'll find little to like in his other books.
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Jul 7, 2021 15:08
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Ccs posted:I wouldn't start with Fencer. It's not bad, and I haven't finished The Proof House (the last book) yet, but it feels like it lacks focus. Not as much as Parker's Scavengers trilogy, which was the only series of his I quit reading, but it really pales in comparison to The Folding Knife, 16 Ways to Defend a Walled City (and its sequel), and The Two of Swords. There is a sequel to 16 ways?
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Jul 9, 2021 15:35
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