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Chairman Capone posted:I was going to say that Traitor is basically just two people discussing the morality of the Force for 200 pages, but then I remembered I was forgetting the Ganner segment! Traitor would have blown my 14 year old mind on the Force philosophy and torture stuff alone but Ganner having his own Thermopylae and glorious end guaranteed my mind was blown
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Dec 14, 2023 12:35
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buffalo all day posted:Will offer my rando opinion which is that the second book, Control, is just as good as book 1 and definitely scarier, but rather than a warped quest/adventure story it’s more like a John LeCarre novel that’s been twisted by Area X. Will second this, Authority gets poo poo on by a lot of people for not being the same as the first book but that septic, ingrown, paranoid bureaucracy-horror rules and offers some wonderfully creepy moments.
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Dec 28, 2023 16:27
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Reading Sam Miller's Blackfish City and it's good, maybe the best SF book I read this year. Vaguely cyberpunk noir set in a floating city in the Arctic circle, after climate change has done a number on sea levels. Got a real heart for its characters - a politician's aide, a fading MMA-style fighter who mostly does rigged matches, a delivery person/crimelord's gopher, and a wealthy nepobaby layabout - and pulling a sort of pulp fiction view of them bumping into or just missing each other as they orbit around the mysterious woman who's just showed up in town with a spear, a polar bear and a killer whale. I like the interstitial chapters which are written in the form of a local citizen news release/podcast-thing. Strong vibe similarities to Lavie Tidhar's Central Station, if less optimistic and less wedded to the fix-up form.
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Dec 31, 2023 17:47
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sebmojo posted:The biography said it was a mistake (and he got rincewinds beard wrong), but Pratchett didn't care because it's a rad picture There’s a quote from Pratchett somewhere about how Josh Kirby would always discuss the brief with him, listen politely, and then go off to do whatever the hell he wanted regardless. You could tell Pratchett was contrasting him with his successor, Paul Kidby, in approach but there was some kind of admiration there too.
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Jan 2, 2024 10:09
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branedotorg posted:Has anyone read anything by Sofia Samatar? Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain was recommended to me by an algorithmic site but I kept going and it also suggested Calypso by Oliver langmead, both to be released in 2024. Sofia Samatar is insanely good. The most gorgeous prose stylist writing fantasy atm and just an all round thoughtful writer. The Winged Histories should be, like, studied as a standout example of and deep reflection on ‘big’ heroic/epic fantasy, it’s just incredible. I’d second the short story in her collection, Tender if you like failing generation ship stuff. Strongly informed by her Mennonite background and very LeGuin-ish.
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Jan 3, 2024 19:08
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a computing pun posted:stuff about Baru This is an excellent response to a very literal ‘depiction is endorsement’ reading of the book
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Jan 6, 2024 11:05
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VostokProgram posted:I can't say I have a good explanation, but I have noticed the same thing. Where's scifi Jean Genet??? It's no Genet - which is definitely a gap - but Kai Ashante Wilson's Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is a good one and The Taste of Honey is explicitly a M/M romance that joyfully turns some stuff on its head. He doesn't seem to have anything out all that recently though. Hal Duncan's also worth a look, though again he hasn't published anything in nearly a decade... Ink isn't bad and Susurrus on Mars is a lovely SF novella about two stupid young dudes in love on Mars.
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Jan 6, 2024 22:03
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Never got past the first few chapters of Amberlough but is that perhaps a deliberate choice of atmosphere? “It could never happen here” and “I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon” sort of thing and then boom, nazis. I could easily see a book written by an American author in 2017 taking that angle, that the characters are just oblivious (which would also fit with the pop culture stereotype of Weimar German as glitzy, gay, inward-looking and doomed).
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Jan 8, 2024 10:44
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I’d second Peter Fehervari, he’s so good. Proper feverish horror stuff rather than OTT milsf bolter porn, and well-written, up there with the likes of Vandermeer and Cisco. Not sure how I’d feel about saying “he’s too good for Warhammer”, though it’s hard for the thought not to occur and GW certainly don’t seem to know what they have in him. Re: Three Body Problem, absolutely wild that it toned down the sexism but this one is so so awful that it becomes comical: SimonChris posted:Original:十五岁少女的胸膛是那么柔嫩 lol
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Jan 10, 2024 19:38
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tiniestacorn posted:Has anyone read Our Wives Under the Sea, did you like it, would you recommend that or Gus Moreno's The Thing Between Us Haven’t read Moreno but Our Wives Under the Sea is pretty good. Some very mundane creepiness and moments of very true-to-life character awkwardness/numbness. The easy comparison is to Vandermeer’s Annihilation if it was just the biologist at home wondering what’s up with her husband but the weirdness is a good bit more low-key than in that book. It is maybe a bit slight though, feels like with a bit of trimming it could have been an excellent novella.
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Jan 11, 2024 09:08
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DurianGray posted:I also haven't read the Moreno (but it looks interesting!) and would agree Wives is good, and worth a read if the pitch is interesting. But also agree that it feels slight - I actually thought it was a novella until I checked just now and saw it's 240 pages (but it's definitely a very quick 240. I almost wonder if there was some formatting futzing in the hard copy to stretch it to that page count? I read the ebook fwiw there.) Hmm I have the trade paperback and I guess the font is pretty big? Separate to the discussion of volume, the hard copy also does a cool thing where the title pages for each section, which are named after different ocean depth zones, get darker as the book goes on. So like the Mesopelagic Zone title page is a pale grey and the Hadal Zone one is pitch black.
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Jan 11, 2024 20:04
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silvergoose posted:I'll have to check that out, then; never heard of it, somehow. Besides being in the collection titled Sandkings, it’s also published in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s excellent, colossal anthology, The Weird. Worth a look in general.
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Jan 13, 2024 01:21
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Awkward Davies posted:This is from pages back, but any suggestions on where to start with him? I don’t like bolter porn but I do like the weirder corners of the black library. That post by bagrada is excellent but if you’re looking for a place to start…probably either Fire Caste or Requiem Infernal. Fire Caste is more obviously milsf but much more ‘surreal nightmarish space-Vietnam’ than ‘heroic space marine heroically crushes the traitor’. Very feverish, in the best way. This was Fehrvari’s first 40k novel. Requiem Infernal is straight SF-horror set on a convent world, though no less surreal. The author’s writing is a bit more mature and controlled. This was the first novel chronologically but with Fehervari’s “Dark Coil” books, the linkages are more thematic and esoteric so tbh I wouldn’t really worry to much about where you start reading, from that POV.
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Jan 13, 2024 13:08
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Lily Catts posted:Hello thread! Just looking for recs on fantasy stories about creepy forests. They could be magical or haunted. Something like Mirkwood or worse vibes. I prefer short stories but longer fiction is fine. Going to bring back Brian Catling’s The Vorrh and sequels here. A creepy forest is core to the plot thought tbh in the first book at least you only spend a chunk of time actually in said forest. For short fiction, try Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ for a dose of the deep creepiness on offer but even a seemingly mundane forest.
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Jan 15, 2024 13:40
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VostokProgram posted:Can I get some book recommendations that are SF/F but in the real world? For example, an urban fantasy where the author specifically sets it in say '70s Chicago and it's clear that the characters are truly in that city, they talk the way locals would, geography matches, it just all feels like it is actually happening in that place and time. You could try Joanna Kavenna's A Field Guide to Reality. Fantasy in the sense that Alice in Wonderland is fantasy. It’s set in Oxford and while there’s tons of other books that also depict the city, probably accurately in terms of landmarks and roads, Kavenna does that with a real feel for the place. Not the tourist-facing ‘dreaming spires’ image but the real, damp, pretty shabby town with its slightly tense mix of people and odd jumbled geography, particularly in how the rural and the urban are deeply intertwined. Only book that, to me, accurately reflected living in Oxford as someone who isn’t a student or academic. Kavenna got it.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:20
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Ooh. I've lived in Oxford (well Islip) for a good four months as a not-student, not-academic. Will add this to the list. Nice! Tbh it might hit even better then, for like Islip and Kidlington area. It perfectly captures the vacillation between “this is a charming and even magical place to live (summer)” and “I fukkin hate this smug damp shithole (winter)”.
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Jan 18, 2024 08:51
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This feels meaningfully different and tbh a good bit more serious than the usual run of Hugo nonsense but yeah, hard to disagree. Babel’s potential contentiousness and then weird absence was noted even at the time.
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Jan 20, 2024 20:03
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my bony fealty posted:I'm going to take this moment to recommend a short story collection called Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba. It's stories from different Palestinian authors all set in 2048 and imagining what the future might look like. I read Iraq + 100, an older title by the same publisher and also quite good, but hadn’t seen that this came out so thanks for the heads up.
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Jan 21, 2024 17:39
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Liquid Communism posted:From talking to friends, it's worse right now. The sole bid for 2027 at the moment is Tel Aviv. Genuinely thought this was a joke but no. Almost comical. The wider response to the Chengdu stuff seems to be kind of as expected, lots of folks explaining how this is Just What Worldcon Is Like and how nothing can ever be changed, oh well. It’s dispiriting and speaks to a crowd that’s much more obsessed with procedures and rules than… anything else really.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:05
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Read the preview for Exordia and got a real kick out of the bit where the stuff that makes humans unique is defined as - good long distance runners - really inbred, like wow and that’s pretty much it. Too much exposure to weird and irritating ‘humanity gently caress yeah’ online nonsense on my part made this like a soothing balm.
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Jan 23, 2024 12:14
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General Battuta posted:Here are some blurbs/reviews from other authors the thread likes. lol that Daniel Lavery blurb is such a Daniel Lavery blurb. Well done General!
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Jan 23, 2024 18:11
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DurianGray posted:Most of the BDSM/detailed sex scene stuff happens in the first 1/3. After that it's almost more of a travel adventure, and most of the sex scenes become fade-to-black. Same, after a certain point it shifts to a surprisingly conventional big epic fantasy through an alternate medieval Europe where the protagonist occasionally sleeps with people. Tame, yes, but also familiar, kind of like putting on a comfy old jumper.
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Jan 30, 2024 07:56
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The Clap posted:I guess here's where I ask for recommendations along the same vein even though nothing will probably hit quite like Between Two Fires did haha. Kate Heartfield’s Armed in Her Fashion is quite similar in its Boschian influences and whole “devils invade 14th c. Europe” setting. Possibly also Brian Catling’s Hollow, though I haven’t read it.
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Jan 31, 2024 20:42
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Demi is so great. I think this is about as mean as he gets.
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Feb 1, 2024 19:28
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:Armed In Her Fashion sounds really good, is it totally out of print? The only copy I can find available in the UK is £188.99 on Amazon, or I can get it delivered from the US for £60 or so. There doesn't seem to be an ebook at all. Oh right, her previous publisher, ChiZine, went under because they were just weren’t paying royalties and seem to have been extremely poo poo to their staff and authors. It’s been republished by Harper under the (inferior, imo) title The Chatelaine so you should be able to find it that way. The new cover’s not as cool either, very generic historical fiction.
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Feb 2, 2024 11:21
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RIP Christopher Priest. https://www.ninaallan.co.uk/?p=6855 A significant figure with a great body of work behind him, The Islanders blew me away for formal inventiveness and cool charm.
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Feb 3, 2024 17:19
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zoux posted:Speaking of bleeding-edge imaginations. His Hell illustrations are some of the most grotesquely appealing designs I’ve come across. His concepts, whether sci fi or supernatural approach inconceivable to me. He also wrote a book to go along with his Hell stuff called God’s Demon, about a rebellion in hell . I can’t really recommend it because I’ve failed to finish it twice, it’s really, really slow - but it’s not bad or clumsy, he can write well, especially since that’s his second art. And his conception of the geographies and “geology” and hierarchies of hell and the penance of human souls are really interesting. It’s a great exercise in worldbuilding, if not plotting or characterization. Barlowe’s hell art is great and agreed, he’s a solid writer, it’s just that’s overshadowed by what an amazing artist he is. I liked God’s Demon. He uses the multiple POVs well. When you see things through the eyes of a vaguely noble senior baron of hell feeling some angst about formerly being an angel, it’s got one tone. Then when you switch to the viewpoint of one of the damned mortal souls, basically an underclass/building material, it shows up aaaaallll the horrific stuff that the baron skimmed over or took for granted. Barlowe really likes and gets Milton, much more so than most SFF depictions of hell/angels/demons, but then is also perfectly willing to paint that with some really nightmarish stuff. There was a sequel to God’s Demon as well, which I’ve been meaning to get. Apparently it deals a good bit more with the Salamandrine Men, a tossed off line in William Blake which Barlowe sets up as the indigenous inhabitants of hell before the angels fell. Cool concept and would be interesting to see if he handles that decently or if it winds up being a sort of noble savage thing.
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Feb 16, 2024 10:46
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minema posted:I find I'm in a weird place where I don't necessarily want "cozy" but I do want low stakes/low action scifi and fantasy books and often "cozy" books are an easy way to guarantee this. I didn't enjoy Legends and Lattes though, it was all so surface feel-good I just couldn't engage. I do enjoy Becky Chambers work, the third one particularly (which maybe has the most "non-cozy" stuff happen?). But then I don't find the Farseer books particularly depressing so maybe I'm just all over the place. Same tbh. SFF with less focus on plot/action/quests/high stakes thriller business? Sign me up! But then when I read some 'cozy' stuff, it makes me think no, not like this.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:26
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Cormac McCarthy posted:James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. He’s being glib and very funny imo but agreed re: his work never being unclear. And Blood Meridian owns. Whatever about the bleakness, it’s masterfully, beautifully written and in par to halt has some of the most beautiful landscape writing ever put to paper.
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Feb 29, 2024 22:02
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I'd actually put him against someone like Jose Saramago, who never touched anything like quotation marks or other dialogue indicators. With Saramago it often really is pretty hard to follow who's saying what in the longer dialogues and it's not helped by his dislike of breaking pages out into paragraphs. It works for him, it's his style and he's not hindered by it to my mind, but it's very distinct from McCarthy's clarity.
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Feb 29, 2024 22:19
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fez_machine posted:Jack Vance often has very cosy and bucolic settings that are implacably hostile to the protagonist I only read Lyonesse but Jack Vance seemed implacably hostile to his characters in that. Extremely fun and arch writing style, good story in itself, but felt like there was a gleefully nasty streak running through it.
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Mar 2, 2024 02:30
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All Tomorrows is an interesting one because it’s not like Dougal Dixon’s pioneering horrorshow Man After Man wasn’t also extremely bleak. I mean it had one branch of posthumanity swinging back by earth without even realising it was their original homeworld, and causally abducting their distant cousins to use as a lobotomised manual workforce. All Tomorrows, by contrast, felt more 40k. That’s a bit reductive but it ends up with a few distinct big post-human factions taking a ‘there is only war’ approach and being ultra-fundamentalist about it. Same applies to the actual aliens. It’s simpler in a way, more space opera, and to my mind a bit less compelling for it (although the body horror is nearly as good as Dixon’s and I quite like the ending).
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Mar 4, 2024 17:57
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Chairman Capone posted:Which is the one that spun out the "Seasons' Greetings" meme? Man After Man. All Tomorrows is frequently good body horror but the art is more alien, whereas Dixon gets insane mileage from creepy post-humans that are more or less weird hairy dudes. The author of All Tomorrows also did some really quite detailed exobiology stuff for a world called Snaia, under the (awesome) pen name Nemo Ramjet. It’s tricky to find online but dude knows how to make things alien and it’s interesting to see how far you can stretch something while still tying the concept back to Earth animals, however loosely.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:37
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Runcible Cat posted:Howard Waldrop wrote a Frankenstein's Monster in the Hollow Earth story; Black as the Pit From Pole to Pole. This sounds dope. Like it’s doing some Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stuff.
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Mar 6, 2024 22:21
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zoux posted:I've never read anything she wrote but I looked at the wiki synopsis of her first novel I think more than the coziness, there’s something about it (having only read the first book) that feels very neat and compact. Nice simple message, minor friction, all tidily wrapped up. Like a middling Farscape episode. Nina Allan hit on the same features of the second one in her review as part of the Clarke award’s shadow jury a few years back: http://csff-anglia.co.uk/clarke-shadow-jury/to-boldly-go-a-closed-and-common-orbit-by-becky-chambers-a-review-by-nina-allan/ "Nina Allan” posted:For all its gesturing towards diversity and progressiveness, this novel could be put forward as a prime exemplar of the literature of reassurance. The set-up is familiar, the conflict is minimal, the resolutions are swift and painless. The dialogue reads like the script from a TV series that was a huge hit in an alternate universe and is probably set to become one in ours – about the only nod to futurology that this book contains. The whole review’s worth a read. It ends on this pretty dismissive note but she does accept it on its own terms as light tropes entertainment which can nevertheless grab you in the moment. I’ve heard better things about Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild Built, that it’s got a bit more depth and thoughtfulness about environmental matters in particular, but tbh the main character being a monk who goes around solving people’s personal problems with custom blends of tea is an immediate turn-off due to tweeness.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:29
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Mrenda posted:I have no issue with cozy anything. It's just a clunky book. And it seems people's reactions based on that that, from the likes of the wikipedia and commentary, were for her supporters to say, "They just want edgy stuff!" which isn't fair. This is definitely a Thing, yes. Mostly a feature of twitter discourse thankfully but it’s like there’s a narrowing of focus, where it’s assumed that anyone who doesn’t like her stuff (or who doesn’t find it startlingly new and unprecedented) is under suspicion of being a Grim Edgelord Bro.
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Mar 9, 2024 20:11
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thotsky posted:Where to start with "New Weird"? You’ve got good recs already but I’d also push the anthology, The Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. It’s sort of their case for a broad, wide ranging definition of the genre, not just the New Weird, which fits into what Jeff was angling for in that McCalmont article. Moreover though, it’s just a massive and brilliant anthology with pieces from about a hundred authors. One of those books that can spin you off into exploring the works of your new favourite authors very easily. Also Michael Cisco, he’s brilliant and considerably more out there than Vandermeer or Mieville. His The Narrator could be a good place to start. Had the trappings of a military fantasy but considerably stranger.
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Mar 24, 2024 09:24
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Ravenfood posted:Yeah, the Narrator is weird. I like it a lot but I had to focus more on everything and pay a lot more deliberate attention than with Mieville or Vandermeer. Would highly recommend but I found it harder than either of those authors. Completely accurate, Cisco’s a more ‘difficult’ and consciously experimental author than either, by some margin. And tbh The Narrator is considerably more conventional than works of his like Unlanguage (which rules but is more horror) or The Great Lover. I’d also say that The Narrator gave me strong Viriconium vibes in its approach to voice and worldbuilding.
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Mar 24, 2024 16:55
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anilEhilated posted:What you would consider a good entrance point to Cisco? Looking at my reader, it seems I've bought The Divinity Student a long time ago and never got to reading it, is that a good start? The Divinity Student is good, gives a good idea of his style, but it's his first novel so is maybe a little shaggier. Worth a look but I'd probably recommend The Narrator (Vandermeer wrote some high praise here: https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2011/01/06/seven-views-of-michael-ciscos-the-narrator/) or The Tyrant as a starting point. I've also heard high praise for his covid-era short story collection, Antisocieties though I've not read it myself.
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Mar 24, 2024 18:08
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mllaneza posted:Speaking of Le Guin, I can strongly recommend her take on Greek myth/history, she wrote about the life of Lavinia. She never gets a single line in The Aeneid, so now there's this for her. It's an interesting story with strong characterizations, unsurprising for Le Guin. Lavinia’s great. Beautiful writing and strangely, almost eerily postmodern in how Lavinia gets to talk to the ghost/premonition/spirit of Virgil, alone in the woods. Not that they’re in competition (and, like, it’s LeGuin) but I’d set her approach against Circe. There it’s kind of a reversal, what if Circe the mythological character was good, so let’s hit all the big moments of her story and some other myths from the opposite POV. I thought how elderly Odysseus was handled was quite good. With Lavinia, everything is smaller and more domestic, focused on the small rites and everyday details of rural life in (an imagined and almost knowingly too pastoral) Bronze Age Italy. Aeneas and the war pass through and are important drivers of the plot but are hardly less important than Lavinia’s troubled relationship with her mother. You can tell it’s something LeGuin wrote after Tehanu, even if you didn’t know the dates, and it fact it seems to me to be consciously an anti-epic, like an exercise following up on her essay, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’: https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction Lavinia is her late masterpiece and imo a strong contender for quietly the best thing LeGuin ever wrote.
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Apr 22, 2024 08:15
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