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XBenedict posted:I just finished the first Bobiverse book. It's a decent read. Parts of it feel a little "copy/pasted" in places, but it's an interesting read. Do the other books develop any more, or is it just more of the same? I liked the first book and thought it had lots of potential to explore and expand on concepts but the other books... didn't do that, really. They're enjoyable enough but in terms of big sci fi concepts I didn't think it made any particular progress. I don't think I actually finished the third so stuff might change in the last few acts maybe but it all ended up feeling very surface level to me.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:35
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Kestral posted:I'm not sure they even bothered with them in the audiobook version, which wouldn't surprise me since they also apparently got the pronunciation of every single name wrong. Xate Yawa is "Ex-ate Yah-wah" to me for all time. Bottom of page 74, 3/4 through chapter 5 (note: don't click on this if you haven't read book 1). Most of them aren't that long, just a stray line on the side. I also listened to the first two audiobooks, and I only learned about these parts when someone mentioned them in here. I never went back and re-listened but they never stood out to me in any way the first time through. Be neat if they made the audio mono for those snippets... IIRC my main pronunciation annoyance was in book 1 when she pronounced duchy wrong the whole time. Great narrator otherwise though! I've recommended the auidobooks to people despite the hiccups. NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Aug 31, 2020 |
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Aug 31, 2020 01:02
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Collateral posted:I heartily recommend the Audiobook read by Moira Quirk. Yeah. Linking 'cause Harrow spoilers I guess -- nothing big, just a fun snippet.
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Jan 19, 2021 05:42
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baru still getting crossover traction in Locked Tomb fanart fandom and it's pretty great. https://twitter.com/Marceline2174/status/1360494492273373187 https://twitter.com/snartemis/status/1361056395248816130 This one is marked spoilers but I'm not 100% sure why so linking. Also this. NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 16:33
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Yeah Baru is hiding behind Aminata. I guess they're all spoilers for book 2 but it's nothing earthshattering, my apologies.
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Feb 15, 2021 17:57
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uber_stoat posted:speaking of Piranesi, i am kind of obsessed with stories that describe vast mysterious structures that seem to go on forever. Neither of these are books so apologies but after I read Piranesi I wanted to scratch this same brain-itch so I spent some time with the game Echo and didn't regret it. Game itself is more weird and ambitious than good, but the aesthetic is really neat. Also potentially check out the manga / movie Blame! which features an awful infinite cyberpunk hellscape. It's extremely grim and I found the storytelling in the manga to be near incoherent in places but may be worth it for the visuals alone. E: oh also Manifold Garden. buffalo all day posted:Go get the collected Borges!! Go now!!! well no wonder he was good at stories like this 
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 21:56
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:I need a new audiobook to do menial lab work to, something that leans on horror or the unexplained supernatural for its gimmick preferably, but very open to trying something new. Audible has too much to sort through to figure this out for myself. Another for the pile: The Gone World, Tom Sweterlitsch. Heavy X-Files / Control (the game) vibes with more cosmic horror and time travel that has some really interesting mechanical wrinkles. Narrator does a good job with it too. It blew my socks off when I listened to it a couple years back. E: Body horror / gore warnings fwiw. NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 00:52
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freebooter posted:Out of curiosity: how many people here first encountered Dune not through the novel but through the 1990s RTS game on PC? Me, at a friend's house on his dad's PC. We played it for quite a while and managed to make it through to the end, and it has been a looooong time so I don't remember the specifics but I know we had huge trouble finishing it out and killing the last Harkonnen stronghold. We bounced off it for a while until I finally decided to read the book to see if there were any secrets at the end to beat the final battle. I couldn't make it through the book because it was too weird, so I got my parents to rent the Lynch movie and watched that instead. It was not particularly helpful.
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Oct 12, 2021 16:53
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CommieGIR posted:Watch the SciFi Miniseries and try again? I will send this to my 10 year old self and see if it has a code he can enter in to get extra weirding modules. Vaguely related story: while pressing my nose against the window at Babbages at the mall a year or two later I saw a demo of Doom on a loop. Mind blowing graphics at a time and I had to know what it was so I asked the clerk. "Doom" he said "Dune?" I asked, perplexed. "Doom" he confirmed. "Wow this isn't ANYthing like the book..." I replied, even more confused. There's no real punchline here, I just remember it to this day and it means Doom and Dune are forever linked in my head. arrested development beads.gif Incidentally I did end up listening to the audiobook of Dune earlier this year and I think it holds up pretty well. The cast performance was pretty decent but didn't seem complete; not everyone had a voice actor and sometimes people WITH an actor were read by the narrator anyway for some reason? The one book in a vacuum is very hero's journey stuff and I understand the later books deconstruct the white savior portion but I don't know how long it takes to get there. Reading them until they get bad is the general advice, but is the arc really complete at any point?
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Oct 12, 2021 17:59
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Anyone that says they understood everything in those books the first time through is a liar. Even second or third time is probably pushing it. You're doing fine as long as you're enjoying it.
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Nov 22, 2022 22:05
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gently caress cancer.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:36
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John Lee posted:then I have to deal with both a personal and a philosophical disagreement You don't, is the thing. People can have different opinions. To me, coming in and saying 'I liked it actually and here is why ______' is not a reply to the OP really anyway, it is for anyone else reading the thread. Now I have a secondary opinion and might check a thing out I wouldn't have otherwise. If the OP replies in a way non conducive to a discussion, you don't need to deal with it at all if you don't want to. Just move on to the next thing.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:56
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John Lee posted:Yeah, but then I'm on record as being a dumbass to at least one person in the thread*, and if I post that I liked twenty books then at least twenty people think I'm a dumbass, and soon the entire situation becomes untenable as people dislike me more and more. Yeah but what about the 5 people that agree with you? The other 20 people can suck it / agree to disagree. It's all subjective and anyone reasonable here knows that. If someone says 'the prose is bad' it is understood not to be stating an objective fact, it's just shorthand because otherwise you have to start every sentence with 'i think' or 'in my opinion' and it just wastes words and time and makes everything feel kinda mealy-mouthed. If you're stuck in a loop of 'it's bad' 'i think it's good actually' then try to define why you think it's good, or what else about the work makes it worth it. If you can't do that or it doesn't help, that's fine! You don't need to win, just leave it and wait for the next page.
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Nov 30, 2022 23:21
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We did Martians Chronicles and I'm pretty sure that was it? We had a research project in 10th grade to read some short stories / find and cite critical analysis and I had a big argument because I wanted to do Philip K Dick and my teacher thought there wouldn't be enough 'real' academic work on him (there was.)
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Dec 6, 2022 17:52
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Malazan is maybe the highest on the ladder for me for both 'this series is amazing' and also 'this is not for everyone.' I don't mean that in a gatekeepy way; i just can't fault anyone who bounces off it hard for any number of reasons that I wouldn't argue about. In addition to the general dark-but-arguably-not-grim tone there is a lot of sexual violence and plot threads that go nowhere or aren't mentioned in 4 more books, massive character bloat, and a very deliberate sense of not giving you the whole story at all times. I never once got the gross horny-author vibe from the sex at least, but even so there's a big trigger warning here. I still think it's worth a shot if you like big doorstopper fantasy. If you can get into it and like it there are big rewards and some of the later set pieces are just  but it's a hell of a road to get there.
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Jan 12, 2023 01:54
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Armauk posted:I'm interested in reading the series. Does the story focus on a set group of characters, like Wheel of Time, or is the reader introduced to new people each book? New people each book, mostly. There is sort of a central group that kinda coheres over time and most books will have familiar faces surfacing but even then a bunch of them will be doing different stuff in completely different locations. Many of them will eventually converge multiple books later. Just as a for instance book 5, Midnight Tides (which is some people's favorite one in the series) contains I think 0 character overlap with any of the previous books. It could probably be read as a standalone (do not do this.) It's worth saying that if anyone does end up picking things up because of the discussion here, there's a thread that like any thread loves new people reading and reacting. efb like a potsherd from an ancient civilization that no one remembers how to pro'noun'ce NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 03:06
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Blindsight was clunky, willfully obtuse in places and unsatisfying as a narrative but it's absolutely the thing that has stuck with me the most over the last, oh, decade in terms of ideas explored. Echopraxia was decent but felt sort of like leftover bits and world building he couldn't fit in the first one. If I had read them in high school I wonder if they would have turned me into an (even more) insufferable shithead though.
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Mar 23, 2023 01:52
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No audio book for ship of fools, darn. Maybe stars are legion? Oh what's this? Aaand credit spent. Thanks, thread!
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May 18, 2023 00:47
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Halting state. Never read the sequel. Has stross been up to much besides the laundry books of late? I fell off those at some point. I like Stross but he mostly has good ideas that don't quite pan out or he gets lost in details I don't care about much. For another 2nd person, try Raven Tower.
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Jun 15, 2023 18:58
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Megazver posted:of course the person reading those books is named 'Moira Quirk' lol If you are of a certain age and nationality you may already know Mo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvaqPO3v8LI NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 21, 2023 |
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Sep 21, 2023 14:26
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MarksMan posted:I also listened to "All Tomorrows" for the first time on that trip and that was good as well in an existential dread kind of way. I liked the insane time scales of the story. Since you mention the timescale, how about House of Suns by Alister Reynolds? It does deep time better than most while still telling an actual human scale story and not JUST being about big sci Fi ideas like you get from someone like Greg Bear. Alt option Marooned in Realtime by Vinge which has some existential horror that still gives me the heebies.
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Sep 24, 2023 22:02
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Mustang posted:... how strange it is compared to a lot of other fantasy settings, and having no idea what's actually going on and having to figure it out as you go. Any Graydon sock puppets around? Seriously though if this is what you like check out the Commonweal books by Graydon Saunders. 💯
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Nov 2, 2023 19:18
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Should have mentioned that the Commonweal books are self published, won't find in bookstores. https://dubiousprospects.blogspot.com/2018/09/where-to-get-my-books.html?m=1 Part of the reason they're a meme around here is that self published is usually a mark of low quality but this one is notably different. And while I'm linking stuff, if you need a companion for book of the new sun, the Ranged Touch people started a podcast on it a bit ago, https://rangedtouch.com/shelved-by-genre/
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Nov 2, 2023 21:36
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Jedit posted:An ellipsis is, of course, the tasteful line of asterisks that indicates a transition between scenes and is used in the more genteel romantic fiction as a literary fade to black when the couple get it on. That's a dinkus. 
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jan 30, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 21:13
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Comedy recommend: Deepness In the Sky, Vernor Vinge. it also features spiders for half the PoVs I said this in the 3BP thread in tviv, maintain that it's a good set but curious of others here have others: NmareBfly posted:Stephen Baxter? The Manifold trilogy in particular, in which each book pokes a different solution to Fermi. Or the Xeelee sequence, which has an even grander arc. Alistair Reynolds has some good stuff, House Of Suns I thought was super good and is standalone. Pushing ice.
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Mar 28, 2024 20:12
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Hard sci Fi very very frequently has caricatures not characters, it's kinda baked into the genre expectations for me. I think it's partially just because of the scope of a lot of the stories? If you call yourself hard Sci Fi, it's probably because you're going to be looking at deep time and a vast cold universe where individual actual people barely have a role except maybe to observe. Part of why I think I liked House of Suns so much; it managed to have both. Oh and as a counterpoint to Children of Time specifically, Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. If what you want is a generational colony ship. E: v- 
NmareBfly fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Mar 29, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 23:06
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Suggestions for good book club fare, on the lighter (or shorter) side? In terms of the genre we've read How to Lose a Time War and the Ted Chiang short stories in addition to Dune but I think the last one only flew because of the movie. Pondering Piranesi or Circe but I've read both already so I feel more on the hook if people hate 'em. Piranesi I adored but might be a little too slight in terms of narrative, too. Next on my personal list is Spear Cuts Through Water, which looks pretty intimidating sell. Especially given we just barely got through Yiddish Policeman's Union with a record number of DNFs, I'm trying to find something way less dense. Oh, Raven Tower feels like a good option...
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May 3, 2024 04:28
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Thanks all! Throwing some of these out there for a vote. Or maybe I just tell them we're gonna read Exordia. 😈
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May 3, 2024 16:57
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FewtureMD posted:The sequel to this is also on sale for $1.99! I didn't realize there was one! I enjoyed but didn't totally love DODO 1, any reviews on 2? 1 had some neat ideas but kinda meandered then ended badly, so I'm not opposed to a continuation but how is it?
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May 5, 2024 22:50
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