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Peter Watts and Joe Abercrombie once showed up at a bookstore I lived nearby at the time. Peter signed my copy of Blindsight and we chatted for a few moments. Seemed like a nice guy! Never did get around to read Echopraxia though, how was that?
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Mar 21, 2023 18:02
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tokenbrownguy posted:I'm reading Caves of Steel. I can smell the tobacco and asbestos and tabacco-flavored-asbestos This is the only Asimov novel that I've ever read. Can't say I had any any great desire to explore the rest of his catalogue afterwards.
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Mar 28, 2023 03:42
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How fitting that a time traveler would out themselves in the sci-fi/fantasy megathread.
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Mar 28, 2023 05:42
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FPyat posted:30 pages into The Blade Itself. So far it's entirely like what I always imagined a typical grimdark fantasy to be. I was kinda lukewarm about The Blade Itself but I'm glad that I plowed through the whole trilogy because I thought things picked up quite a bit by book 2 and 3. I really don't read much fantasy anymore so the fact that those books stuck with me ever since I read them in the early 2010's probably says something about something. A rare instance of a trilogy getting better with each book.
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Apr 2, 2023 05:28
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Megazver posted:On the other hand, here's my list of sources I check for "what new genre books have come out each month?": Thanks for this, been looking for some good sources for keeping tabs on new sci-fi releases. SF Signal was my go to for the longest time but they shut down years ago and I stopped frequenting io9 after it became some weird zombie sub-blog of Gizmodo.
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Apr 4, 2023 15:30
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zoux posted:The poorly named Quinn's Ideas (It started as an AsoIAF channel named Ideas of Ice and Fire but that well is truly dry now) is pretty good, the guy reads the good scifi, probably has the best Dune-related content on Youtube. He definitely focuses on concepts more than plot. I like that guy's channel. I think the heat death of the universe will occur before I read any more Dune novels and he does a good job of summing up all the cool worldbuildy poo poo without me having to endure the tedium of reading those snoozefests. I also enjoyed his videos on The Three Body Problem and Revelation Space.
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Apr 5, 2023 08:33
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Kestral posted:Just finished Ship of Fools and I genuinely don’t know why that book is mentioned alongside Blindsight. It’s like a worse Event Horizon. You’d think there would be so many more big works of space horror out there, it’s like peanut butter and chocolate, and yet! Maybe I'm just an uncultured swine but I really liked Ship of Fools, thought it had a fantastic atmosphere. Then again I also gravitate by default towards anything that has a "trapped on big spooky mystery ship" type plot.
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Apr 15, 2023 04:23
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It's a short story and not a book, but I always thought that The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka had some fantastically creepy descriptions of malicious AI turning humanity into paste.
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Jun 3, 2023 07:00
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Gotta say that The Last Policeman sounds like it's right up my alley. Thanks for the tip, I think I know what I'm getting with my next audible credit.
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Jun 13, 2023 04:57
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There's a season 4? News to me. Love, Death + Robots is very hit or miss, as is the curse of the anthology format, but it isn't all bad. The Alastair Reynolds ones are cool and S3 has some good stuff in it, especially "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Jibaro" IMO.
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Jun 26, 2023 09:04
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mllaneza posted:Go ahead and name an episode in any season where a woman has agency I don't know, the episodes I mentioned? I think I've watched the majority of S3 and the Reynolds ones but not a whole lot beyond that, I haven't really thought about it much in terms other than "that sci-fi thing on netflix" but it's entirely possible that I'm too slow witted to pick up on the virulently anti-woman subtext so I'll take your word for it.
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Jun 26, 2023 10:37
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Selachian posted:I remember reading that and being surprised the writer didn't find out until after his father's death, because Andrew Offutt being a porn author was a pretty open secret when he was alive. Maybe I'm in the minority here but if I had even the vaguest inkling that my dad wrote industrial quantities of smut for a living then I'd go to great lengths to flush that particular piece of information out of my brain, so I can't really fault the guy for claiming not to have known.
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Jul 1, 2023 23:21
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/thatsgoodweb/status/1680277550843527170 I know nothing about this book but I was immediately imagining a pitch meeting where someone goes "ok so what if we take the cyber dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic and mash it up with Planet of the Apes, but also Star Wars... wait where are you going"
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Jul 16, 2023 02:34
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I agree with the airport thriller take because I thought Leviathan Wakes was a genuinely good page turner, but I also find anything that mashes together sci-fi and noir to be catnip and I thought it did a pretty good job of it with the Miller character. I remember not liking the second book nearly as much, and I think I lost interest halfway through the third. Felt like the TV show made the story a fair bit leaner and more focused, even if they leaned pretty heavily into the cheese at times.
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Jul 19, 2023 11:32
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I may have an antidote. It's not fantasy or sci-fi, but if you want some pure existential climate change dread mainlined into your bloodstream, I recommend The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. Not saying that you necessarily need more of that dread in your life right now as we're currently in the hottest month ever recorded in human history, but still 
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Jul 28, 2023 10:16
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Clark Nova posted:A climate change book may hit too close to home at the moment, but it is likely to hit even closer to home in any future moments so now is the best time to read it "It's not the hottest summer of your life, it's the coldest summer of the rest of your life." Nuclear Tourist fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 28, 2023 23:46
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Reminds me a bit of All Tomorrows which I thought was pretty cool until I got to the part with the hyper-intelligent strain of future humans that had mastered the dark art of fart propulsion.
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Aug 3, 2023 03:54
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Drunk Driver Dad posted:Oh yeah, I gave up on Poppy War and Baru Cormurant both as well. Baru is one of those books I really have a hard time explaining why I wasn't into it. It was just like, "okay, I guess things are happening whatever" It set her up as a genius interesting character but from what I recall, it was just a plain old character who both hosed up a lot and did some things good as well. Nothing particularly gripping in it. Picked up Baru after the nonstop gushing about it in this thread and had pretty much the same experience. I think my brain is just too damaged from a constant intake of trashy sci-fi to appreciate the subtitles of fantasy courtroom intrigue type books. After a while the scheming and characters just kinda turn into white noise like a soap opera playing in the background and I find it very difficult to care about anything that's happening. I think I can see why people like it, if that makes sense, but it was very much not my thing.
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Aug 24, 2023 01:43
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Annath posted:Visiting New England, stopped in Providence. Ha, I live like a 5 minute walk from there. And yes, his grave is a rather modest affair. 
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Oct 7, 2023 20:49
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thotsky posted:What? No, that epitaph is baller. No argument there, but it's still a tiny little unassuming grave marker in a huge old cemetery and you could easily walk right past it unless you know what you're looking for. I suppose the decorations that people sometimes put on it make it stand out a bit though.
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Oct 7, 2023 23:59
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Chairman Capone posted:Yeah, like Arsenic Lupin said, the paper quality tends to be very bad and they are extremely fragile, but thankfully almost all of them are digitized and can be viewed freely on the Brown library website. I'll pick this up if I ever have the time to actually sit down and read a book again.
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Oct 8, 2023 04:53
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Anyone who knows anything knows that the refined gentlemen of culture are all playing Mörk Borg now. I'm actually in the middle of Shards of Earth at the moment and I've been enjoying it quite a bit so far.
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Oct 24, 2023 12:19
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sebmojo posted:Mork borg is kind of eh, it was just lots of rolling on small random tables and getting the same extremely flavorsome result half the time when I played it. Great typography though. Oh, bummer. Never played it myself but I thought the aesthetic was awesome/hilarious.
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Oct 25, 2023 05:22
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FPyat posted:Alastair Reynolds is my guy. House of Suns is his standout. Been on a bit of a Reynolds bender lately. I recently read two of his books in the Revelation Space periphery (Chasm City and The Prefect) and really enjoyed them. Also Pushing Ice which was very neat, and strangely a book I bounced off a couple of years ago but really dug this time around. Anyone got any strong opinions on Inhibitor Phase? Seems like a lot of people kinda hate it? I liked most of it and thought it was interesting to get some more details on how the Inhibitors work, but I felt like it fizzled out a bit at the end, especially concerning the ultimate fate of the Nostalgia for Infinity. Nuclear Tourist fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Nov 20, 2023 |
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Nov 20, 2023 05:14
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American Gods is the only thing of his that I really, really liked, I think I've read that book like 3 times.
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Nov 28, 2023 18:48
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Going to be incredibly disappointed if the Murderbot intro song isn't Robo Sapiens by Die Krupps.
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Dec 17, 2023 01:22
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my bony fealty posted:Alright I finished Baxter's Manifold: Space and now need more recs for big picture, epic timescale, fate-of-humanity type of sci fi. Really liked how characters would jump through time to return to a vastly different Earth and solar system. Three Body Problem trilogy aka Remembrance of Earth's Past.
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Dec 19, 2023 07:32
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Just finished Between Two Fires by Chris Buehlman. Feels like it's been a while since I've read a book that really sucked me in but I found this to be a fantastic page-turner. Apparently a grimdark messianic plague adventure in medieval France was just what I needed, who knew.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:12
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Kestral posted:The problem is that Between Two Fires has a combination of delicious genre elements with surprisingly good prose and character writing, and the combination hasn’t been achieved anywhere elsewhere as far as various seekers in this thread have been able to determine. It really is a unique thing, more’s the pity. I’m certainly going to snap up whatever the author puts out next, although after reading some of his other stuff I’m a bit concerned that Fires may be his one truly great novel. I've been thinking about Between Two Fires quite a lot since I've read it and I've concluded that the reason why I liked it so much is because it's like a mashup of The Name of the Rose and a really neat D&D adventure.
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Dec 28, 2023 05:13
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zoux posted:hosed up ideas that make you go "gently caress" are one of the great joys of SFF, imo. I would take it one step further and argue that bleaker is better when it comes to SF/F, or at least those are the books I find the most memorable. I always thought that the mark of a great writer is the ability to invoke a thousand yard stare in the reader and make them mumble "holy poo poo that is messed up". Hard to suspend the disbelief more than that IMO. It's not that I'm opposed to cozy/feelgood type stuff but I prefer to get my fix of that through music and movies. Maybe I'm just damaged from having spent much of my 20's mainlining Warhammer 40k books which is a universe where nothing good is allowed to happen to anyone ever.
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Feb 13, 2024 21:38
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drat straight.
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Feb 13, 2024 21:45
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Just finished the collection of Viriconium stories by M. John Harrison. The first one (The Pastel City) was just a delightful old school fantasy adventure, I particularly liked the dwarf character with his Warhammer 40k dreadnought armor. Also a big fan of settings that involve people digging up weird old technology left behind by lost civilizations. The rest of the stories were fun too, but felt more like Fear & Loathing in Viriconium where you follow characters around while they get up to hijinks and misadventures interspersed with absurdist humor. The dude can write though, good excuse to reread Light I suppose.
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Feb 26, 2024 23:31
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prokaryote posted:Haven't read Machine Vendetta but I don't think Inhibitor Phase is as good as the earlier stuff in that series. In general I enjoyed Reynold's older works more than his newer ones... I didn't think Elysium Fire was very good I'm like 20% into Elysium Fire at the moment and I'm not hating it so far, space opera police procedural like The Prefect which I quite liked (and it helps if you've read before this). I liked some parts of Inhibitor Phase, it was interesting getting a bit more insight into what makes the Inhibitors tick and seeing post-apocalypse Yellowstone was pretty cool. I did not find the ending very satisfying though, especially regarding the final fate of the Nostalgia for Infinity.
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Mar 2, 2024 06:42
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Some of my favorite SFF audiobooks, a couple have already been mentioned. Just going through my Audible account for stuff where I really liked the narration. Simon Vance is probably my favorite audiobook narrator, he's done a lot of sf/f and thriller stuff and has that old timey British crooner voice that is just so soothing to listen to. The two books I have of his in my Audible library is Viriconium by M. John Harrison and Jerusalem by Alan Moore.
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Mar 3, 2024 17:48
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StrixNebulosa posted:Does anyone in here remember when I read Jack Chalker's Web of the Chozen? I thought All Tomorrows was pretty neat right up until the point where we encounter the big brained future humans who have mastered the dark art of zero-g fart propulsion. Before I stumbled upon All Tomorrows I was also kind of unaware that there's apparently a whole niche sci-fi biology subgenre that's all about coming up with weird ways in which humanity will evolve in the far future.
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Mar 4, 2024 17:39
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In my head I've always thought that Ship of Fools/Unto Leviathan would make a great sci-fi horror miniseries a la The Terror. Probably way too niche for something like that to ever happen, but still.
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Mar 5, 2024 03:18
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Going to take a trip on the information superhighway straight into the blogosphere.
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Mar 6, 2024 16:45
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Kestral posted:poo poo, this is actually the correct answer. Occluded, go check out Simon Stalenhag's books. Tales from the Loop is so good they made a (fantastic) tabletop roleplaying game out of it, which then got picked up by Amazon for a TV series that I can also highly recommend. They're not super long, unfortunately, but they're so, so beautiful and they nail that feel. As someone who grew up in 80's and 90's Stockholm suburbia, Tales From the Loop hits hard.
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Mar 26, 2024 03:42
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RDM posted:He wrote a truly terrible pentology about space Mormons that's battlefield earth level bad and one of my great regrets is that I've read the entire stupid thing The only space mormons I'll accept are the ones in Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse.
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Mar 27, 2024 04:58
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Going to admit that The Gone-Away World ended up on my DNF pile, I think I've tried to get through that book like three times now. I think someone ITT described it very accurately when they said that the prose was like "Vonnegut but with more lol random".
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Apr 1, 2024 15:42
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