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Children of Time was tremendously less entertaining than the previous two books in that series. And I can't seem to get into Empire in Black and Gold. But I also finally got around to reading Grass by Tepper and that was really satisfying. Mixed start coming off last month's all horror stack of books. From a related project of mine, I'm looking at some old tie-in novels for Renegade Legion, a late 80s FASA wargame. The first is written by William H Keith Jr. who ranges all over from terrible to 'got some good scenes in it' for me, but the other three are a total unknown, Peter L. Rice. Long shot, but any of y'all read one of them?
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# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 01:33 |
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# ¿ May 9, 2024 10:22 |
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Memory, that one. I keep mixing up their names.
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# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 02:56 |
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The corvids were by far the most interesting plotline. I just really didn't want to spend so much time with the dirt farmers precocious child. After the disappointment of Children of the Apt, I'm in the mood for some good fantasy. I've been delaying reading The Shadow Saint by Gareth Hanrahan. His first* novel really impressed me both in the cross motivations and drives of the characters as well as the fascinating city they were in (strong Mieville vibes on the city) and I really want his second novel to be good. * Gareth has a long career writing tabletop roleplaying games and it shows through in the best ways at least in The Gutter Prayer.
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# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 05:08 |
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sebmojo posted:I am a huge fan of his rpg stuff, best writer in the field on balance. Gareth writes excellent stuff. Kenneth Hite is also top tier, and when those two collaborate it's phenomenal. Hite's Suppressed Transmissions is an awesome read, the good entertaining harmless kind of conspiracy theory insanity that's been subverted this side of the millennium. Though I have to give the best RPG writer crown to Patrick Stewart. Fire on the Velvet Horizon is 0% stats, 100% amazing high concept ideas but don't take my word for it: China Mieville posted:Superpositioning with strange panache, Velvet Horizon is an (outstanding) indie role-playing-game supplement, and an (outstanding) example of experimental quasi-/meta-/sur-/kata-fiction. Also a work of art. Easily one of my standout books of 2015. His short piece "Black Glass" is flat out some of my favorite short fiction, let alone for roleplaying games. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 7, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 7, 2023 22:04 |
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Kestral posted:That said, if I'm going to pick someone to give the RPG writer crown to, it's Jenna Moran
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 06:14 |
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zoux posted:a 70 year old in the body of a five year old wasn't as fraught in 1976
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# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 19:34 |
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It's always a bit startling when you suddenly become acutely aware that author's predilections have made their way into the prose. I think it was the third Max Gladstone Craft Sequence book when my brain went 'ping!' and I realized he's got a thing for female authority figures in business wear. The difference in the length of description of those characters clothing compared to everyone else's, the terms used, the consistency of certain elements... I'd place money on it.
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 01:25 |
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General Battuta posted:Maybe he is, for example, asking his lawyer wife what she wears? It's not something I look for, or particularly care about. Max is just one of the more glaring and non-skeevy instances that I recall, without being quite so blatant as say Ferret Steinmetz .
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 05:10 |
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Then say that to the people speculating about Butler as well. I'm sorry I said your friend finds his wife sexually attractive? I found it rather humanizing of him. It sucks you've been harassed by people about sex stuff, but this conversation in this thread is not a greasy incline. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Slyphic fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Nov 9, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 16:04 |
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Jedit posted:I'm pretty sure he's saying good or bad don't do it, and with that I agree. ... not everyone who writes about sex is writing their fetish, and we know that they're not. But it always seems to be used as a stick for beating people when we find a author we don't like, doesn't it? Jedit posted:Because dear god, "paranormal romance" is a genre that would raise no complaints if it showed up at a book burning. It's all terrible and it's incredibly likely to turn into a candid display of the author's personal fetishes. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 16:44 |
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FPyat posted:I'm debating whether or not to read Thunder and Gears of the City by Felix Gilman. I liked The Half-Made World, and these two books sound like they're inhabiting a space similar to China Mieville's work but preferring to focus the weirdness in a somewhat more literary direction. Anyone read them?
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# ¿ Nov 13, 2023 16:19 |
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I found the companion book, Harbors & High Seas by John B. Hattendorf super useful while reading them, but also strongly recommend Aubrey/Maturin. If you're OK with skewing into horror a bit, NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, narrated by Katherine Mulgrew is easily the best audiobook (I'd read the print book first, listened to the audio book on a road trip with my wife, it was even better read aloud) I've ever listened to. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Nov 13, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 13, 2023 20:30 |
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MockingQuantum posted:oh no, I just started Doomstalker, am I in for a bad time? Slyphic fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Nov 17, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 17, 2023 21:48 |
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Different strokes and all, I loved it beginning to end, maybe especially the end. I loved the slow 'zoom out' of the books from tribal raids to galactic war. The darkwar books had me hangdog at work the next day for staying up way too late reading them.
Slyphic fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Nov 17, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 17, 2023 22:06 |
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American War was a concept I adore, but it kept throwing me right out of the narrative. Blowing up a server farm leaving drones in a permanent autonomous random kill mode, the camps being overrun with empty plastic water bottles from a post-petroleum source. And the Bouazizi Empire doesn't make any sense. Climate change has done its damage, the equator is a desolation, petroleum extraction and refinement is globally banned and yet the preeminent world power is a band of nations across North Africa and the Middle East? I think it gets literally handwaved in one scene. I'm also still pissed about this one paragraph that the book never really refutes or examines further, possibly because I grew up exactly where the opening chapters are set and that kind of lazy mean spirited child rearing was endemic: quote:Without speaking, Martina turned and slapped her son across the face. The boy, stung and reddened, was left speechless. So lengthy were the intervals between those moments when his mother’s innate hard strength showed itself that the boy was often lulled into forgetting it existed at all. I remember checking the back and front matter after reading it and not seeing any mention of a science editor or consultant, and I think it suffered for that lack. Either that, or it really needs to be shelved in GenFic.
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# ¿ Nov 18, 2023 22:51 |
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It made literary sense, it just didn't make logical sense. I think if he skipped the post-petroleum plotline, which really didn't do much of anything to the story, he could have made a wildly more believable world. Have the Bouazizi empire as a successful revolution of the OPEC bloc, have the American war trash the internal oil reserves and production and then conveniently for the Bouazizi they can't seem to get it back up because dang it, the other side keeps drone and suicide blasting any attempt to restart production. Climate change + equatorial power is just such a glaring mismatch that I need more than the nothing he gave me to suspend that disbelief. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Nov 19, 2023 |
# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 00:49 |
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buffalo all day posted:I’m pretty picky about the sf stuff I read so maybe I’m missing something, but I genuinely can’t think of a book I’ve read written about a competent engineering man who’s running a family that was written in the last…25 years? 30? This feels like an ad for a deeply transgressive and provocative book that traveled through a wormhole from 1985, not so much for a world where Gideon the Ninth and NK Jemisin are crushing Hugo awards.
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2023 16:08 |
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Competent engineering man has gone extinct. This is the age of competent engineering wizard society.
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2023 16:26 |
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fez_machine posted:You're right, but it was seriously annoying that people used your post as an opportunity to mock a decent book nobody in this thread had actually read.
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2023 22:10 |
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I keep having to remind myself by reading half of one that that the 60s Star Trek books were the exceptions to licensed property books and it's all second order Sturgeon's Law for the rest of the field. Renegade's Honor by William H. Keith Jr. had an adequate middle sandwiched between some terrible checklist writing that managed to flub fundamental aspects of the property while being overall less interesting than reading the short blurbs spread throughout the rulebooks for the game it's based on (Renegade Legion by FASA, the creators of Battletech). Cardboard characters that exposit their badness while running down a baddy checklist of cruelty. Characters explaining things to people that definitely already understand them while staring through the 4th wall. Getting in-universe core tech like how shields work completely backwards. Taking painstaking care to describe the weapons on a fighter craft, but doing so in the most superficial way so it wasn't even a Tom Clancy / David Weber style weapon fetish infodump, it was just like he was cribbing off a chart. I went in with pretty low expectations but it still disappointed me. That cover promised so much, with that bitchin' stache and mullet.
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# ¿ Nov 30, 2023 16:27 |
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I like to pair my books with my trips. Had been saving Daryl Gregory's Revelator for the next trip back to the family farm in more-gators-than-cellular-service-bars Louisiana, which I just got back from. Damned good book. Moonshiners, cults, cosmic horror, but not at all in the HPL mythos style those words are conjuring up. I love how Gregory writes families. His books always feel like SF&F that got mis-shelved in Horror because they're unsettling. Just this refreshing refusal to stick to genre conventions that apparently has his publisher flumoxed. Not my favorite of his novels, that's The Devil's Alphabet about the societal effects of a genus of extremely disfiguring and mind altering virus that is extradimensionally transmissible told through a burned out cook's trip back home to bury his father, but strong recommend and a palette cleanser I needed.
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# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 00:50 |
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Doktor Avalanche posted:oh, he's good Daryl Gregory's Spoonbenders, Chapter 1 posted:Just before it happened, he was kneeling in a closet, one sweaty hand pressed to the chalky drywall, his right eye lined up with the hole at the back of an unwired electrical outlet box. On the other side of the wall was his cousin Mary Alice and her chubby white-blonde friend. Janice? Janelle? Probably Janelle. The girls—both two years older than him, juniors, women—lay on the bed side by side, propped up on their elbows, facing in his direction. Janelle wore a spangled T-shirt, but Mary Alice—who the year before had announced that she would respond only to “Malice”—wore an oversized red flannel shirt that hung off her shoulder. His eye was drawn to the gaping neck of the shirt, following that swell of skin down down down into shadow. He was pretty sure she was wearing a black bra. Doesn't quite set up the story promised on the back of the book about MK Ultra / Yuri Geller / Men Who Stare At Goats shenanigans. It delivers that story for sure, it's just that a couple of the characters are teenagers and not the sexless Disney channel automaton's you normally read about protagonizing.
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# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 19:29 |
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Murderbot is a reflection of whoever is reading it. It's Bella Swan turned up to 11, the mirror in which everyone can see themselves, achieving representation points with seemingly everyone except the transgender, because the one thing Murderbot doesn't do is actively express a particular gender. Caveat, I think I only read the first two books before deciding it wasn't for me.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 16:33 |
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I was including trauma and coming-of-age in the mirror. Everyone is able to look past the elements that don't fit their reflection to see the bits that fit perfectly. It's got something for (almost) everyone. I think Murderbot is a masterfully purposefully crafted reader reflection to maximize it's potential empathy. Kudos to Martha, it took skill to pull it off. I'm just done with reluctant hero stories, so it's not for me at all.
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 17:03 |
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Murderbot is so clearly aping Aliens that I thought it was an adapted fan fiction after I read it.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2023 00:57 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:Real art is expensive and since people will buy books regardless of cover, there's no incentive to get a real cover I will also hunt down specific editions and covers of books I love, if they have an edition with a really good cover. Major Ryan posted:Have read Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy ...
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# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 16:49 |
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I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I read the Coldfire trilogy, those covers leapt off the library shelves into my greedy child hands. But I can't recollect a single thing about them, even after that summary. I guess I get to reread them again for the first time.
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# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 21:53 |
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Runcible Cat posted:This is the best description possible of that book and I hope you don't mind that I plan to steal it.
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# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 23:50 |
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RoboCicero posted:Just finished Children of Time. What a great, old-school sci-fi book. Big trundling generation ships, first contact, existential horror, weird science. It's got it all! I just put a hold on the sequel at my library but I'll probably just go ahead and buy the next one, haha.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 19:41 |
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Each book was two related but distinct stories; the generation ship and the spiders, the octopuses and the monosentience alien, the corvids and the alien device. I love 5 of those stories, and one of them yes had a satisfying ending, but I absolutely hold the process of getting there against it.
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# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 22:23 |
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Speaking of Ash and Mary Gentle, I could have sworn her first book in more than a decade was due out next month, but it appears to have been pushed a full year back to Dec 2024. I was very excited for it.
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# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 00:03 |
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I can't recall what book it was, other than one I recommended to a friend. He was listening to the audiobook format, and the reader hit a big number with a superscript power notation, and read it in a rising tone. Like 36,822x10³ as "thirty six thousand eight hundred and twenty two times one hundred and thrᵉᵉ?" in a rising hesitantly inquisitive form. It's been a running gag ever since with us.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 06:18 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:I'd only recommend the spin off book The Silver Spike which covers what happens to Darling and the people who stay behind in the north. Unfortunately the trip south takes six books of declining quality and is really just a slog. Port of Shadows the 2018 interquel is really terrible, don't both reading it.
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# ¿ Dec 27, 2023 17:40 |
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General Battuta posted:This is THE WEIRD, right?
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# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 20:26 |
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Fivemarks posted:Don't worry, I like Fantasy too, and had the exact same problems with Fantasy. And everyone was like "no you'll feel represented by these books about Necromancer Lesbians making bone puns" and wouldn't listen when I said I wasn't really down for that.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 00:16 |
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pseudorandom name posted:Warning: The Magicians is a bad trilogy that you shouldn't read. (The TV show is great, though.) My Shark Waifuu posted:Counterpoint: I enjoyed The Magicians trilogy. It's been years since I read them, but I remember that it captured young adult emotions around "I've achieved everything I thought I wanted ... why am I still depressed?" fairly well. No argument about the TV show, though, getting outside of Quentin's viewpoint is definitely an improvement. And the Golden Enclaves actually really disappointed me with the last book. Loved the first, as said, I love a good magic school book. I also gave up on Temeraire[sic?] after the second book, but Uprooted is in my top ten all time novels. I would definitely believe she wings series, but surprised if she doesn't at least have the general shape of each book's plot in mind.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 16:18 |
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:I read the Magicians while dating my now-wife while she was in a hard science PhD program, and the parallels between the people there and the book were really fantastic. I admit it's not the best series and Quentin can get real annoying, but it captures the vibe of people studying fundamental aspects of the world because they're all freakishly intelligent and motivated fairly well.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 18:33 |
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I didn't mind the shift between the first and second books, but the third one introduced my most hated trope bar none when El becomes a prophecized chosen bullshit protagonist. drat near dropped the book right then and there. I'll skip books that start that way, almost as fast as I'll pass on 'maybe the PoV character is crazy and hallucinating? or is she?'
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 21:01 |
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Benagain posted:I mean you already knew from page 1 book 1 she was prophesied to do some great and terrible stuff and was actively fighting that.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2024 23:51 |
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# ¿ May 9, 2024 10:22 |
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2010-2022 I kept up a reading log, just a paragraph or two per book, but I kept notes on what I read, averaging about 50 novels per year. 2023 was an abominable year and that got away from me, but late December was the least harrowed I've felt in ages and I'm excited to get back into the habit. Buehlman's Blacktongue Thief lived up to the hype and the year is off to a good start. Most of the criticism I've seen of it is around the ending and I can understand why, but also I've never been bothered by Stephenson's last pages so yeah, a great time with a book was had. This thread prodded my brain to pick up the copy of John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost that's been fermenting on the shelf next. (I like to add books to a list, find them for cheap, and then read them when I can't remember why I wanted to read them. I like to go in with no expectations or preconceptions if possible).
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# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 00:45 |