|
I often struggle to get started with reading a new book but for some reason nothing motivates me more than an impending adaptation by total hacks. So I'm currently ripping through The Three Body Problem and sequels, finally, and having a grand old time. I don't normally get on with hard sci fi but mix in some political philosophy and apparently I can't get enough.
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2024 08:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 08:09 |
|
|
PriorMarcus posted:The Villeneuve Dune films are good but let's not pretend they didn't get around the books being "unfilmable" by cutting out anything that could be called "unfilmable". That's true but then the achievement is in doing this and still producing a coherent film while still conveying the feel of the things that were cut. I think they do a good job of the former but they do smooth off the edges a bit too much
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2024 12:14
|
|
|
Blastedhellscape posted:Holy poo poo. I've been hearing that The Forever War is a classic of science fiction forever, but I just sat down and read it recently, and it really holds up. It's weird. Despite getting everything technically wrong about the way culture and technology would go from 1974 to 2024, it all felt kind of familiar (All the bad things will just keep getting worse, there's no sense that there's anyone in charge, and 'war is good for the economy!' will be taken to it's logical, ugly conclusion where everything is based on fighting a manageable war, forever). It's a great read, I recommend it to people frequently. Sadly, the theme of increasing alienation from a world riddled with contradictions is evergreen
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2024 05:28
|
|
|
theblackw0lf posted:Is this showing some scenes from the second book? https://x.com/netflix/status/1765754366479192297?s=46 The second book is definitely going to be part of the first season. There's an episode called Wallfacer
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2024 19:13
|
|
|
Cardiac posted:Who gives a gently caress, it is scifi. Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing and once it breaks then people will start to notice the problems and the writing no longer has a nice flow. That breaking point is going to be different for individual readers and we even have sub genres acknowledging those preferences. So I suppose the answer to "who gives a gently caress" is people with different aesthetic preferences to you. Zombies aren't a good catch-all counter example because zombie fiction is extremely broad and a large proportion of it uses explicitly supernatural origins for zombies or just says that no one can explain why it's happening. For some readers, a handwave is better than an obviously wrong explanation
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2024 09:41
|
|
|
Poldarn posted:Agree w/r/t great space battles, I think that that space battles that do occur are very interesting. Excession is the book that's mostly ships talking to each other so it's probably that one Consider Phlebas has an excellent space battle-esque sequence where they have to sacrifice the orbital to avoid the mind being captured
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 10:38
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:Yeah, I thought I would be safe from this if I stuck to stuff winning major awards, but it turns out no! "Aged-up YA poo poo" as you call it is winning nebulas. Could you post some examples that you've found? I'm reading sci fi again after a nearly 10 year period of being unable to concentrate on any book long enough to finish it, and I'm using the various awards nomination lists to build myself a reading list. It would be nice to skip the YA books that don't declare themselves as such
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 17:51
|
|
|
StumblyWumbly posted:I've been picking up like 2% of the highly recommended stuff Pradmer posts and I have a queue that will take a year to go through if it stopped growing. Hmm 29 pages of posts, yeah that should keep me going
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 18:45
|
|
|
Appreciate the effortful response, thank you!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 19:45
|
|
|
Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Asher wrote about a guy that had such high divorced UKIP guy energy he brexited the planet rather than let the UN turn him woke. I want to cough this sentence back out of my brain like a hairball
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 20:16
|
|
|
RDM posted:If it's not The Chosen One But They're A Teenager In School, it's not YA. Yeah I suppose I should have been more specific in that it's this particular story archetype that I'm pretty burned out on, so I'm building a reading list of sci fi and fantasy books that aren't that. No snobbery intended
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 20:36
|
|
|
I really liked the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go. Been meaning to read the book for a while now
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2024 00:47
|
|
|
Hobnob posted:Both the film and the book are really good, especially if you come to them in the dark, and even more so if you're already familiar with the tropes of boarding school fiction. Pretty soon you notice what's not in the story. Yeah that was me when I saw the film. It got good reviews in whatever I was reading at the time so I went in not having seen a trailer. I'm also English so I grew up reading a bunch of weird boarding school poo poo.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2024 11:53
|
|
|
Before I had easily available GPS navigation I just spent a lot more time lost
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2024 23:43
|
|
|
If you've paid for the book then I think the universe will be ok with you downloading an epub with the old cover from lib gen or wherever
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2024 16:09
|
|
|
HopperUK posted:I enjoyed Harry Potter up until the last one and I was an adult the whole time. I'm not going to pretend I didn't just because now I see they're shallow and vacuous and they're written by a horrible bigot. I did enjoy them and I get why other people do. These days I'm way more concerned with prose and underlying message and stuff. I was a dope then. Yep same. It definitely contributed to me becoming a more critical reader
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2024 17:10
|
|
|
Oh ok I'll tell my dog to stop barking
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 02:37
|
|
|
thotsky posted:it means it has biker werewolves that gently caress in it Like digimon
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 03:31
|
|
|
A Proper Uppercut posted:It's a movie, very underrated imo. Very good movie, can confirm. It completely went under the radar because it got lost in the shuffle when the studio who produced it got bought, after it wrapped but before it was released. Also imo it suffered from having a poster, name and trailer that made people think of The Bye Bye Man (awful) and Slenderman (feels wrong to bad mouth him here but the media it generated was generally bad)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2024 12:48
|
|
|
This week I have finished one book and added like 10 from this thread to my To Read list 
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 01:10
|
|
|
Hobnob posted:Please tell me the Brontë book contains references to Glass Town, Gondal and Angria and I'll snap it up immediately. Not sure if you're into graphic novels but if you are you should check out DIE
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2024 09:00
|
|
|
Can confirm I enjoyed it when I was 13 or thereabouts
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2024 08:40
|
|
|
Group theory was the point where my brain rejected any more maths learning when I was in school. I should bump Exordia up the list
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2024 06:02
|
|
|
frogbs posted:Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky I think they meant which viewpoint
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2024 15:12
|
|
|
A friend who also enjoyed the 3BP books recommended Peter F Hamilton to me, but I haven't read any yet so I don't know if that's a good recommendation
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2024 18:09
|
|
|
For the sake of my friend I will read a few chapters, but I won't get my hopes up
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2024 18:43
|
|
|
Slyphic posted:Specifically, if you're going to read one of his books, either Pandora's Star for a series or Dragonfall for a standalone. There's no thread consensus on his overall quality as a writer, but that those are his best seems pretty uncontroversial. If you don't like his style and feel like dropping him, the only thing I'd say is find the specific chapter about Morning Light Mountain in Pandora's Star and read that, and then proceed with writing him off. Thanks for the recommendation. The Reality Dysfunction was the one my friend suggested, I don't know how that compares. It's an older book at least
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2024 01:40
|
|
|
Sweet, I'll read Pandora's Star at some point then and feign ignorance when my friend says I read the wrong one
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2024 01:55
|
|
|
Well, barring any sudden application of peer pressure there's like 200 books on my list before I get to Hamilton so I'm good for a while
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2024 02:36
|
|
|
gurragadon posted:Also, are the sequels to The Three-Body Problem worth reading? I don't usually read sequels because they tend to go off the rails. I enjoyed them a lot, but I found the first third of the middle book kind of rough. If you're looking for more philosophical stuff it's definitely there but the focus remains plot
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2024 20:20
|
|
|
zoux posted:I think we should teach the controversy
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2024 19:38
|
|
|
Kestral posted:There was some discussion in here a couple weeks back about a movie, The Empty Man, that people were pretty enthused about. I've just paused watching it to ask the folks who liked it: if I've realized basically from the start of the film that this is a tulpa story, with everything that implies about its progression and resolution, am I still going to get much out of the rest of this surprisingly long movie? I also worked it out pretty early and I still enjoyed the rest of the film. It didn't really feel like a story that was reliant on a twist, and watching the pieces start to fall into place for the characters was fun
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2024 06:31
|
|
|
Mikojan posted:So, the 3 body problem. Is it worth reading? I really enjoyed all three books, although the first part of book 2 is a bit cringe worthy. If you like the plot and dislike the sentimental character stuff (which was almost all a creation of the show) then I think they're well worth reading
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2024 07:30
|
|
|
voiceless anal fricative posted:If you can appreciate books purely for the sci-fi concepts then yes 3bp is worth reading. But the characters suck, the author has very weird ideas about gender and women, and the exposition is done almost entirely by characters going on 5-10 page monologues in which they explain everything like a robot. The overall narrative... Interesting. You never really expect the major plot points, but in a good way I guess. This is pretty much how I felt. The ideas were so interesting I just didn't care that the characters weren't
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2024 08:36
|
|
|
FPyat posted:The downside of their success is that some Western readers bring themselves to the conclusion that the books are written that way because it is the conventional fashion for Chinese literature to have bad characterization. We’re talking exaggerated “the oriental mind does not value human individuals like we do” stuff. I just read the "about the author" page and it said former engineer and it all made sense. Engineer brain transcends culture
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2024 16:42
|
|
|
habeasdorkus posted:Darmok is definitely considered one of the best episodes ever, I've never even seen anyone get snippy over the universal translator not working. What nerds.. It's also a terrible argument because the universal translator does work. It translates phrases like "his arms wide" into English.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2024 06:59
|
|
|
Maybe just imagine the whole book, this writing stuff is tiring
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2024 14:40
|
|
|
Aphex- posted:Thanks! That's really good to know, I guess I've never dipped into it yet because of the amount of books there are in Discworld and couldn't decide which one to try out first. Sounds like this is a winner. There are a lot of books but they never get to the ridiculous page count of many fantasy series. I'd say the average is around 250-300. They're generally very easy to read too, as long as you're cool with footnotes
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2024 21:18
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:I thought it sucked at the time, but most people seemed to disagree with me. The gentleman with thistle-down hair was particularly badly handled - Marc Whatsisface being scowly and menacing when the gentleman is supposed to be fey and twee and not someone you take seriously until oh poo poo. I thought it missed the tone completely and didn't come close to being as good as the book
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2024 22:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 08:09 |
|
|
Subjunctive posted:I remember liking this a bunch I read it a couple of months ago, it's great. The point of view changes are excellent, each character has a very distinctive voice
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2024 00:28
|
|