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Danhenge posted:I liked it. The only tasteful threesome involving an alien I think I've ever read and may ever read. Have you heard the good word of Octavia Butler? err posted:I just finished Lathe of Heaven after reading The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness. I really liked it just like the others. Hell, are there even many SFF books from other authors (let alone just Le Guin) that are similar to The Dispossessed or LHOD, with that level of timely social commentary and a gripping plot with compelling characters but minimal violence. Parts of the Culture novels qualify but mostly fail on the last point. Becky Chambers is not so much on the, ah, gripping plot aspect.
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Jan 8, 2023 04:18
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pradmer posted:Recursion by Blake Crouch - $2.99 Thanks for reminding me - I read this and the short story Summer Frost by Crouch and hated both. Beyond everything about his writing, he namedrops brands like Thomas Friedman (Summer Frost features Boston Dynamics and a loving functional hyperloop). Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 8, 2023 17:39
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I just read Spiderlight and it was fun, though (presumably, haven't read it yet) not as spider-filled as Children of Time.
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Jan 10, 2023 20:56
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I liked most if not all of the Black Company books and thought Gardens of the Moon was a badly written mashup of a D&D campaign with DBZ power levelling characters, so take that as you will. I guess read Gardens of the Moon and see if you can get past (or don't even mind) the cringeworthy dialogue and characterization, and maybe someone who actually likes the series can sell on you on the rest.
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Jan 11, 2023 23:45
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WarpDogs posted:I've never understood the whole "and it was a D&D campaign the whole time!" complaint wrt Malazan I can't say for sure that I didn't know going in, since I didn't pick up Gardens of the Moon completely blindly, but I certainly got that vibe from the profusion of characters and plot threads while only a handful (who I presumed to be based on human players) are fleshed out. So at times it reads like a GM building on their campaign notes without editing out threads that the players never picked up on. Also, the dialog reads more like it's ad libbed than carefully crafted to sound like normal people talking (in abnormal circumstances, granted). Lead out in cuffs posted:I don't think I'd known that for sure, but I thought it was fairly obvious that the Expanse originated as a TTRPG. It didn't stop me enjoying it, but it was definitely a thing. I had no idea whatsoever from watching the show (haven't read the books yet). I did think it would make a good setting for a video game but that's more so because realistic Newtonian space warfare on the scale of a solar system sounds more interesting to me than WW2 in space. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 02:24
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Sinatrapod posted:While I only have a middling opinion on the book, they were using elephants as living generators, using their physical power to wind super-strong springs which could be used for all sorts of things, including fans. I don't think the book was particularly good but I think they put enough work into their Calories as Power Source conceit to find it pretty cool. I especially liked the flywheel guns that could be plenty lethal but you had to deal with the possibility of it misfiring and blenderizing yourself. I don't remember the flywheel guns at all. I just remember the Windup girl burning inside, almost always like a furnace but occasionally like an inferno, every dozen pages or so as she kept doing whatever anyway.
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Jan 21, 2023 07:28
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Holden was definitely annoying but I still enjoyed The Expanse.
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Feb 1, 2023 05:38
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I got to the goodreads review that said "Kaiju Preservation Society ... is light-hearted and very funny, full of present-day references and neverending quips and snark, almost a meme in book form" and decided it would not be for me.Ccs posted:Scalzi confused me. He was also responsible for a lot of the source stories for Love Death and Robots, which was a huge waste of great animation talent working on crap narratives. Hmm, I remember liking a fair few of the first season's episodes, but then I looked back and two of the better ones were written by Alastair Reynolds while the three most cringe epic meme lol stories were all Scalzi.
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Jun 25, 2023 20:52
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Ror posted:I actually thought being unimaginative was sort of his thing because the two biggest titles I knew from him initially were Fuzzy Nation and Old Man's War. It was a while before I found out that OMW is not actually a direct riff of The Forever War, but it winds up being a kissing cousin anyway since they're both descendants of Starship Troopers. Whoa whoa whoa, The Forever War is a distant cousin of Starship Troopers (which is the embarassing side of the clan).
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Jun 26, 2023 02:34
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I finally got around to reading Blindsight and hated almost every aspect of it, sorry to say. The vampire never stopped making me cringe and the sheer density of pseudo-profound technobabble in the dialogue and main character's thoughts was like nails on chalkboard. Honestly it made me pine for Alastair Reynolds' massive infodump monologues. On the flipside, I read both Dogs of War books a while ago and like the trans-nonhumanist aspects of it. The first one has a somewhat underwhelmingly generic military thriller plotline but the character development makes up for it.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:13
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genericnick posted:The Tchaikovsky ones? Yeah. Bees is cool.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:18
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I think I'm going to quit on the Goblin Emperor halfway through. It reminds me of the godawful second Imperial Radch book (Ancillary Sword) which inexplicably turned a compelling main character and space opera plot into Victorian household drama. I'm not really sure what the appeal is here because there are better slice-of-life stories (Monk and Robot), light historical fantasy (Guy Gabriel Kay must have written at least one unexpected inheritance novel), inheritance stories with actual relevant fantasy elements (Inheritance Trilogy), so I guess the confluence thereof is what swayed reviewers? Is there anything else particularly compelling on Kindle Unlimited while it's free? I see there's a new-ish The Far Reaches short story collection.
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Jul 3, 2023 02:52
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I liked all 4/6 novels and 2/6 novellas from the 2021 Hugos that I read, and the smaller fraction of the nominees from 2020 & 2022 that I read, whereas there's nothing besides Nona from this year's novel nominees that I'm even tempted to pick up, so... 
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Jul 7, 2023 20:34
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Well... is there something like that but slightly more subtle and poignant? I liked Spiderlight by Tchaikovsky.
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Jul 12, 2023 07:56
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I'm giving up on A Memory Called Empire about 25% in. I find the plot superficially similar to The Goblin Emperor, in that it's (somewhat implausibly) whirlwind court intrigue drama with a main character thrust into a leading role they're not ready for, except in AMCE it makes even less sense because she was specifically trained to fulfill her role, albeit hurriedly. Besides that, I have the same problem that both of them are rather unimaginative settings that really had little reason to be SFF at all and could have just been historical fiction. Perhaps that's a little unfair with AMCE because the imago implant that contains the memories/psyche of a predecessor is somewhat central to the plot, but the main character's breaks almost immediately and thereafter does little besides generating her anxiety. More to the point, though, a lot of people seem to praise AMCE's worldbuilding, and I just... don't get it. I can understand people enjoying the murder mystery/court intrigue even if I didn't and won't, but nothing about the universe seems particularly compelling. The empire is vast and sprawling, spanning most of the galaxy, but most of it is only vaguely hinted at. Lsel Station has a population of 30,000 and has some outsized importance that isn't particularly well-explained, and a culture that's only sketched out in brief. They want to avoid being annexed by the empire but rely on a solitary ambassador who rarely informs them of anything he does. The new ambassador arrives - again alone - at the capital city and jewel of the empire, an ecumenopolis/planet-city later stated to have a population of a few hundred thousand. The gently caress!? How tiny is this planet? It's described as having some tall towers and a large subway/train network with buildings covering most of the surface. I can't say I enjoy long-winded and detailed descriptions of architecture but there's virtually nothing here to express alien-ness, grandiosity or a particular flavour of post-scarcity society. The Teixcalaan culture is apparently obsessed with poetry but it's vastly complicated and untranslatable, so... who cares? Like with architecture and planning, I don't need pages and pages of detailed descriptions, but something to give an impression or understanding. Iain Banks did a decent job sketching the titular games in Player of Games without attaching an appendix of rulesets (like the drat naming scheme in The Goblin Emperor). Teixcalaan comes with its own inane naming scheme of Number Noun which I suppose is a matter of taste. Other than that, the other sci-fi element is the The first breakfast they eat is a boiled paste that has been processed for 16 hours to remove the naturally-occurring cyanide in the tubers it's made out of. It's delicious. I rolled my eyes but was at least reminded of an amusing review of the second Ancillary book. Something mildly traumatic happens and someone makes a soothing tea, luxuriously using fresh leaves instead of the old batch that had been there for a week (but would normally have been used for another week, since the stuff is expensive as it's an obsession in that particular space empire). "That's not how tea works!! What the gently caress!", the reviewer sputtered. I feel you.
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Aug 13, 2023 08:41
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C.M. Kruger posted:Behold the deep science fiction lore of the Cassava tuber, which has to be soaked in water for 24+ hours. The CDC tells me 4-6 days. Anyway, I did not mean to imply that it was implausible, more just funny that it was the only example of foreign food used to reveal the character's ignorance to that point. neongrey posted:also thats definitely a reasonable extrapolation of how some oolong teas could be handled if the expense were an issue Maybe Imperial Radch ships have a special cryogenic flash freezer. I just found it amusing that that reviewer got very angry that they were making tea wrong with how often it's mentioned in those books (by contrast, I assume cyanide tuber paste will not come up again).
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Aug 13, 2023 14:32
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Lex Talionis posted:I liked Goblin Empire, the Ancillary sequels, and similar books more than you sound like you did. I think it's very much in that vein. I liked Ancillary Justice and Mercy (books 1 and 3) actually, but more so because Breq was an interesting character and the plot moved along in both. The world building wasn't a particular standout for me but it has been a while since I read them. RDM posted:I haven't read this in years but it's definitely not described as a small planet, the individual provinces have like 8-figure populations. Right, I misread and it's the palace (city-within-a-city) that has a population of several hundred thousand bureaucrats, but it feels claustrophobic because she just seems to shuffle between a few anonymous office buildings early on. I searched and 2/3 through it says the central province has 17 million people including the surrounding city followed by some brief descriptions of a large tower of some sort, so fine. Also the probably second most important character is named Three Seagrass and I keep thinking of three seashells instead. Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Aug 13, 2023 |
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Aug 13, 2023 19:35
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lol. Sinatrapod posted:I have similar feelings about Ancillary Justice, but I think my opinion on that one was hugely tainted by the audiobook's narrator who seemed to be trying out a brave new "No intonation whatsoever for anything" angle. I don't listen to audiobooks but that seems apropos for the character, though? Also for Murderbot. Anyway I got through the short and efficient Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky in a few hours and liked it, as with seemingly everyone else who mentioned it here. I don't think I've read a dud by him so far. Elder Race wasn't quite as clever as Spiderlight but I appreciated the brevity compared to Cage of Souls, which was good too but could have been pared down 10-15% without much loss.
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Aug 15, 2023 07:10
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I think the Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness stand well above the rest of the Hainish Cycle, but it occurs to that I haven't actually read Four Ways to Forgiveness yet. I should get on that. The only part of Le Guin's work I didn't really like was the Orsinia stories. They weren't really bad, just not particularly memorable or interesting. I'm not sure if they qualify as fantasy rather than quasi-historical fiction like Guy Gabriel Kay but that's just semantics.
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Aug 20, 2023 14:24
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I think I'm going to give up scouring Kindle Unlimited for anything else worth reading. I got through 30% of Gunmetal Gods, which seems to be self-published. Not-Romans crusade against not-Ottomans at such a breakneck pace that a siege of Ottoman-held not-Constantinople is resolved over maybe a couple of dozen pages. There's a bit of magic and some unnecessarily extended descriptions of child murder and I think every female character introduced in the first quarter of the book either dies or vanishes mysteriously. A few more were introduced shortly before I gave up and I wanted to warn them. On to A Master of Djinn, which I hope lives up to the promise of A Dead Djinn in Cairo/The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (both of which are worth a read regardless).
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Aug 27, 2023 16:01
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The Killer of Mice and Men: A Fallout Story
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Aug 27, 2023 18:17
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anilEhilated posted:I actually liked that book a lot, it's a almost a fantasy thriller. It gets a lot weirder and more interesting as it goes on, too. Agreed on the treatment of women, though - the second book in the series is a lot better about this since both main protagonists are the "woman behind the throne" type. Oh, I didn't realize it was a series. Well, I thought the magic/gods/religion might eventually lead somewhere, but I couldn't get past the minimal characterization and uninspired dialogue. The setting made me think of Jack Whyte's Templar books, the first of which was so disappointing (for somewhat different reasons, to be clear) I couldn't finish it either despite enjoying most of the Camulod books... as a younger reader, anyway. I'm not sure I'd still like them on a re-read.
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Aug 28, 2023 06:25
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pradmer posted:The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - $0.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F9KHTVI/ Thanks, this looks like a good use of credits. cptn_dr posted:gif-filled Goodreads reviews I'd be more mad about these if they weren't such a good way to identify reviews to skip.
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Dec 4, 2023 01:21
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ToxicFrog posted:I quite enjoyed Cage of Souls, Dogs of War, Spiderlight Ditto (plus the second Dogs of War book), and I haven't even read any Children of X books. Cage of Souls was maybe too long for its own good but if you want something with a Heart of Darkness vibe, you may not mind.
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Dec 5, 2023 09:16
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Here's what Murderbot's face should look like for the majority of the screen time: Kestral posted:Murderbot feels genuinely unfilmable. The entire charm of the premise is that you've got what is essentially the Terminator, but its internal monologue is funny and charming. Its outward presentation to everyone else - which is the only thing we can really get in a modern TV show, since TV and film consider voiceovers to be the Great Satan - is not just uninteresting but inscrutable without the inner voice. I think an unusually competent writing/production tram could do an at least interesting take on the series from the alternate perspective of the humans interacting with Murderbot without resorting to hokey voiceovers or other such gimmicks. A more direct adaption seems less likely to work. I mean the Mandalorian works with helmeted characters (I don't think it's a good show for other reasons).
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Dec 16, 2023 21:30
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sebmojo posted:picked up ancillary justice because it was cheap in a pile and... it's fine? feels a little assembled out of familiar influences, the cold planet from le guin, the ship minds from banks, the tense conversations from cherryh, bits of the plot from traveller campaign secret of the ancients. i slurped it up in a day and it was pleasant enough to read but didn't really leave much trace when i was done. Are the sequels more interesting? I liked the concept of Justice of Toren but yeah Breq's story isn't as memorable. The second book is barely scifi, it's almost entirely set on a tea plantation/planet and IMO a terrible slog (a Goodreads review called it "Sense and Sensibility and Spaceships" and that stuck with me) while the third is better and more like the first.
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Dec 17, 2023 23:16
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My Little Pony is all grown up.
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Dec 26, 2023 23:26
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Lex Talionis posted:I think I've mentioned this in the thread before, but this book has absolutely no business being any good. Its magic system is Avatar: The Last Airbender with only a few of the serial numbers taped over, massive portions of the narrative are spent on what I think is Naruto stuff (I haven't actually seen any Naruto but, you know, fetishizing martial arts and trying to learn the ultimate techniques and be the very best, blah blah), Yeah it kind of is in the sense that they extol the virtues of vigorous training but true power comes from fairly literal magic and bloodlines. But I thought it was a reasonable attempt to introduce rules-based order into elemental not-bending. Lex Talionis posted:and several important and very serious older characters keep indirectly referring to their college days when they would go out at night as masked superheroes (I assume this craziness was some earlier book or something). I think there were short stories and the setup for the next novel(s) seemed to go back in that direction but then the author announced there wouldn't be any more books in the universe, which... is probably for the best, it worked well enough but needed at least one fresh angle. Lex Talionis posted:Also I will spoiler this because I can't remember if it's a spoiler or not but the overall plot concerns the noble Japanese getting sneak attacked by perfidious enemies from North America and...look WW2 was a long time ago but...really? I dunno, I thought it was a fairly standard critique of pre-Meiji Japanese isolation and imperial Japanese arrogance and patriarchy. Not especially fresh but more coherent than, say, Legend of Korra, where some villains have legitimate grievances about magic in a modern era with, uh, mostly unsatisfactory resolutions.
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Dec 26, 2023 23:56
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silvergoose posted:9. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet I had mixed feelings about this book too, mostly in the way the plot trickles slowly as tensions and conflicts are defused with minimal effort and some minor emotional toil. I'd say that's even more true of To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which is at least shorter and has a more focused plot but minimal character development and even less tension. You could level similar criticisms at the Monk and Robot books but for whatever reasons I enjoyed them more. Partly it's because the titular characters are charming, but mostly I think it's because the world is built to largely be safe and so any expectations for grand conflicts are minimized early on, with less suspension of disbelief required.
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Dec 30, 2023 10:34
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Lex Talionis posted:The Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Very fun fantasy/science fiction dichotomy and mental health material kind of wasted in a boring, over-simple story. Yes it's a novella, but with a bit more effort this feels like it could have been one for the ages. Still worth reading. I read The Jack Vance Treasury recently, not long after finishing Elder Race, and several of the stories in there - The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle in particular - made me think of it. Maybe it's just the superficial similarities of largely forgotten sci-fi tech in a low-tech world (of course there are many other non-Vance examples) but I wonder if Tchaikovsky was going for a retro vibe/homage with the plot of Elder Race. Anyway, the Treasury was worth reading and has an autobiographical afterword where Vance discusses some of his own influences which... well maybe one day I'll get to, I haven't really enjoyed much of the pre-WW2 SF&F for its own sake rather than just as context for later writing.
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Jan 1, 2024 23:18
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I finished the first Baru book recently and not to be a Futurama robot but... I thought there would be more accounting. In some seriousness, the scene where Baru offhandedly suggests simply inventing futures contracts* gave me strong grad school vibes, wherein the professor says "well just try this, I'm sure it's described in <book that doesn't exist, or describes no such thing>" and the this is left as an exercise to the reader. I was hoping for a scene where months later Bari gets a progress report and says "no you're doing it wrong, didn't I say to do <thing she never said, if you care to flip back>?" * notwithstanding the criticism in e.g. this thread that, lacking a regulated exchange, they are merely ho-hum forward contracts.
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Jan 6, 2024 19:39
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buffalo all day posted:is this what book discussion is like in cspam, because christ that post sucks The C-SPAM book thread covers everything, including nonfiction, and is sadly underutilized. On that note, if anyone wants to read about a character's development of "lib-brain", the Doomed City is an interesting read, since the main character starts off as ostensibly deeply ideologically motivated but... well... develops. Also he's an ABD PhD student which makes it even funnier to me. Fair warning, it has thick layers of misogyny. You'll probably get more out of it if you have a good understanding of Soviet history, which I do not, so I'm sure I missed many layers of allusion and metaphor.
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Jan 6, 2024 19:51
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Hughart is sui generis; like nothing but themselves. Hmm, I thought The Story of the Stone (sequel to Bridge of Birds) was kind of like Pratchett and Vance riffing on The Name of the Rose. But fair enough, I can't think of a really similar single author.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:55
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SHOCKING - author of backstabbing bird trilogy slams "engaging with the science fiction 'community'".
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Jan 22, 2024 18:09
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Alastair Reynolds' books have some decent space combat (mainly the Revelation Space series). The Fall of Hyperion also ended with things exploding in space rather entertainingly IMO (I have heeded the warnings to stop there, though).
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Mar 11, 2024 04:49
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The Revelation Space series is similar in scope and style to 3BP. Reynolds' characterization is also not very good (though it has been improving) and it's heavy on infodumps but not as sexist, from what I remember.
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Mar 28, 2024 22:37
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