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I read The Water Knife and liked it so much that I ripped through Bacigalupi's whole bibliography. Any other recommendations for near-future post-eco-collapse bio/cyber/ecopunk books?
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Feb 1, 2022 21:01
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Kesper North posted:I love Stand on Zanzibar but I've never read the last chapter because the final pages in the first copy I found had been eaten by rats and that honestly felt thematically appropriate enough to let stand It seems to be a malthusian novel which takes place in 2010. I remember trying Sheep Look Up and not being able to get into it, I'm looking for more modern stuff. Kalman posted:Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather and Distraction might fit the bill. I'll take a look, though I recall Sterling is a little too hard scifi for my small brain
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Feb 1, 2022 22:19
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Sigh I ended up re-reading Gridlinked by Neal Asher, which is a tight little space opera story with some cool ideas and great action. He starts off every chapter with some flavor text describing some tech or event in his universe ala Wikipedia, and there was one that made some dismissive comment about political correctness. It was bothering me so before I cracked book #2 in that series, I decided to look him up on twitter and it's just constant retweets of the Canadian trucker protest and Jordan Peterson bullshit and now I can't read any more of his stuff. Usually I can separate art and artist but I can't read scifi from somebody that stupid. So now I'm reading that killer cave book instead.
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Feb 8, 2022 22:42
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He's also a freaking climate change denier. How can you be a SFF author in 2022 and a global warming crank. Mr Crane is so coooool though
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Feb 8, 2022 23:09
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branedotorg posted:
Yeah I enjoyed this one as well. A little more on it, there are also humans who evolved in cold regions so it's a story about humans vs. sleestaks. Also the dinomen have almost no technical capacity but unreal biotech capacity and all their advances are purpose-evolved organisms, like for guns they use an animal they evolved to be long and vaguely rifle shaped that shoots poisoned darts from it's lengthened proboscis. I thought it would be trash based on the gimmicky title, but the guy has some really interesting ideas and the prose isn't bad. This book is also inextricably linked in my mind with another, utterly unrelated book series, I think because I thought they'd both be bad based on the cover and I read them at the same time. That's the Snowfall trilogy, which is a cool post-apocalyptic series in a world 600 years after a new ice age and has very few of the usual cliches and tropes we're used to in PA fiction. zoux fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 16:00
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Also, depiction and endorsement aren't the same thing. Scifi is largely about creating artificial situations that can't exist in our world and seeing how people would live in those situations. People like to bring up the Heinlein was a Bad Person thing (maybe he was, I never met him) but there is not a coherent ideology between say, Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. I think he was just trying out ideas rather than cycling between believing in hardcore authoritarian fascism, ultra sovereign libertarianism and the free love movement. ( I understand there's a lot of weirdo sex stuff in his later work but I never read those!)
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Feb 11, 2022 16:36
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Ahhh remember when Dan Simmons was fine.
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Feb 11, 2022 21:57
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I tried getting through the Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin. I'd read the first book some years ago, before the other two had even come out. As I remembered, the first book was quite good, ambitious and entertaining. It was very Stephen King (right down to the creation of a woowoo old black lady complete with dialect  ) but not in a bad way. The second book was less so, and in being less entertained I started to find his prose grating - overly flowery and indulgent, bordering on pretention. In the middle of the last book, when I got to the chapter that is a 100 page digression on the freshman year of college of the very first guy who got turned into a vampire, I started to realize that my time was getting wasted. I ended up putting the book down and reading a summary to find out about how the plot ended, something I almost never do. Very disappointing.Now I'm reading the Rifters trilogy after seeing someone call it "Watts at his most nihilistic" and woo boy, you ain't kidding. Also I think I have a soft spot for deep ocean thrillers, I also remember really liking Sphere as a teenager, which almost no one else did. zoux fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 16:38
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General Battuta posted:Stop before Behemoth, please Already purchased I'm afraid
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Mar 25, 2022 19:18
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It's such an unnecessarily mean spirited book. It crosses from philosophical pessimism into something I found genuinely spiteful and ugly. And I like Watts, I loved Starfish.
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ScienceSeagull posted:Rec me some sci-fi/fantasy that's set in a world where alternative/obsolete/pseudoscientific theories are actually true, e.g. the Earth is in fact flat and 6000 years old, alchemy and humor theory are valid models, etc. Such as some of Ted Chiang's stories, and Garfinkle's Celestial Matters. Son of the Morning by Mark Alder is historical/fantasy fiction set at the beginning of the 100 years war. The premise is that all the "divine right of kings" stuff from the middle ages was true, that God set up class order, ordained that there were those to rule and to be ruled. Angels are real, they are weirdo beings that are entranced by beauty so kings build huge cathedrals to entice them to come live there and fight on the side of that king. So there are angels and demons all over the place, but what's interesting is that it still largely follows the actual history of the period, the battles of Sluys and Crecy still happen, the whole Despenser conspiracy is a major factor, Edward III, Phillip VI, Charles V, Charles the Bad of Navarre and Isabella of France are all major characters. It's also quite satirical and very funny at times. There is a sequel, and it is quite clearly the middle book in a trilogy, but he's never written the third book and I can't find out if he means to or not. zoux fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Mar 30, 2022 14:47
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Benagain posted:I accidentally read the second book and Between Two Fires almost back to back, which was an interesting comparison. Yeah I just started Between Two Fires after devouring some of Buehlman's other books. The 100 Years War is one of my favorite historical periods so I'm excited to read it.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:03
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TOOT BOOT posted:I finished The Blacktongue Thief last night. It was pretty good, though not quite as good as Between Two Fires. If he wrote more books in this universe I would definitely read them. Between Two Fires is outstanding, his best work imo. Looking at my Kindle history, I purchased The Lesser Dead on March 3, and now I've read all his books, and enjoyed them all. I love it when you find a new author you like and can just rip through their whole catalog. I did start the Blacktongue Thief and it is good, but I might shelve it and wait for the rest of the series to come out, I really hate waiting for books when I'm in the middle of a series.
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Apr 7, 2022 16:19
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Opopanax posted:I at least want to get through the Frank Herbert ones and then I'll see how it goes with the son, but so far I feel like things have been better than I'd been made to expect. I know that people say this all the time but it's really true in this case: don't read those books. Everything you like about the Herbert books is tossed out the window for a boring rear end by-the-numbers space opera that strips all the mysticism and wonder from the Frank books. It doesn't help that his co-author is the worst Star Wars EU writer, which is saying something. (it also has that EU disease where every single thing from the originals has some significance going back centuries or some sort of secret relationship to a major character or family. )
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Apr 7, 2022 19:54
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That's probably gonna be about halfway through God Emperor
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Apr 7, 2022 21:22
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Is there a term for that wry British self-aware writing style that Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett do? I ask because Stross has always struck me as a poor imitator of that style.
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Apr 29, 2022 19:10
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NoneMoreNegative posted:Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent reads and do a lot of stuff you won't have seen before (I never read The Children of the Sky, book 3 in the series, does it hold up to the first two?) It does not.
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May 3, 2022 16:04
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Pushing Ice always seemed to me like a spiritual cousin to one of my most favorite sci-fi books, Heart of the Comet by Brin and Baxter. Very similar vibes, also takes place on a dang comet. Finished Ship of Fools and the atmosphere was pretty cool but I do hate that they never give even the slightest clue to the nature or motivation of the aliens. They hung a thousand babies on meathooks, I wanna know how come
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May 18, 2022 21:13
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Clark Nova posted:Being charitable, they probably meant something in the stellar neighborhood like Betelgeuse blowing up. I can understand not being charitable though, given every single other thing mentioned about the book so far There's nothing in the stellar neighborhood that we know about that could cause a supernova that has an effect on us. We also know, pretty well, what the eventual fate of our own G-class main sequence star will be. Stars have to be a certain mass to become supernovae, and the bottom limit of that is around 10 solar masses. What's baffling about saying our own sun will eventually go supernova is that our sun will absolutely devour the earth and moon as it expands into a red giant some billions of years from now. Our own star will (very likely) eventually destroy our planet, just not through exploding. A much more meh ending, which would seem to fit this book much better anyway.
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May 20, 2022 17:30
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Are you guys using a metaphor or does this author literally use extensive HP references in her book
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May 20, 2022 18:14
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Ben Nevis posted:"agnostipagan." What is this, bothering people with crystal astrology BS that you don't actually think is real
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May 20, 2022 19:41
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https://twitter.com/ImogenWK/status/1528711340273065991 Hmmm lit fic sounds boring and predictable. Have these readers considered branching out into the exciting world of genre fiction?
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May 23, 2022 18:45
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I'm about 90% done with The Legion of Stars and I gotta say it is absolutely horror. Cronenburg himself would cover his eyes.
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May 25, 2022 20:15
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The horror thread is (rightfully) constantly going gaga over Between Two Fires, Buehlmann rules. I'm reading Blindsight for the second time, excited to actually understand what's going on this time. But it made me curious, are there other future sci-fi books that have vampires in them that aren't from some 20-book romance series?
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May 26, 2022 16:44
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Now the second question: are these books good or ridiculous
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May 26, 2022 17:54
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Still on my space vampires bullshit - I have an image in my head of a vampire on a desiccated and infernal earth, the last living thing on the planet, as the sun expands towards engulfing it some billions of years hence. But I can't remember if it's a mental image I got from a book, or if I saw it in movie or show or comic book. Or even if I made it up, does that sound familiar to anyone?
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May 27, 2022 16:17
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genericnick posted:Have you read Echopraxia? Yes, but I don't remember much. I'm probably gonna read it again after I finish blindsight. I dunno if it's like this for you guys, but I don't feel like I really wholly grasp any given sci fi/fantasy novel until a second read, because on the first read I'm spending the first 100 pages trying to figure out what the gently caress is going on, what the rules of the world are, what the neologisms mean. But on the second read, where I know that stuff, I get so much more out of it. Like you read Blindsight and he's referring to scramblers, Big Ben and vampires in the first sentence. zoux fucked around with this message at 21:04 on May 27, 2022 |
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May 27, 2022 21:01
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tokenbrownguy posted:The Windup Girl and The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi are the books I think when this topic comes up. The latter is probably more well-known but the former is truly excellent. Weird economies of physically stored energy in springs, ancient orders of monks dedicated to preserving seed banks, hundreds-foot seawalls keeping coastal regions in bizarre pocket-cities. Both are great and so are the three Shipbreaker books. They're marketed as YA but I cannot understand why. Sometimes you pick up a YA book, say Steelheart, and within 20 pages you're like "oh this is written for children" and sometimes you pick up a YA book, say The Knife of Never Letting Go, and the themes and language and "sensitive material" are indistinguishable from anything you'd read in a novel "for adults". I have no idea what qualifies a book as YA but I imagine it has to do with marketers cramming a whole bunch of unlike novels into a very hot genre.
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Jun 7, 2022 15:39
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Finished my Blindsight reread. Just a marvelous novel that is so densely packed with ideas about intelligence, consciousness, the nature of self, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, etc. A masterpiece. Now I'm reading a book about uplifted spiders? It kicks rear end. Speak of uplift, which Brin book do you prefer Startide Rising or Uplift War zoux fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Jun 7, 2022 |
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Jun 7, 2022 20:59
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Really digging Tchaikovsky's stuff lately. I'm reading Children of Ruin after finishing Children of Time and his aliens are so good. The whole story of the Portiids is related in such an interesting and elegant way, you get to the point where you cannot wait to see what happens when they meet humans for the first time. Also, I kinda like spiders now wtf? There's also just a sprinkle of that ironic English Adams/Prachett idiom in his prose that really makes it readable. This thread costs me so much fuckign money.
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Jun 10, 2022 19:37
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Groke posted:We're going on an adventure! Literally just read that chapter. Marvelous.
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Jun 10, 2022 21:05
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NoneMoreNegative posted:If you like Spiders you should pick up Vinge's 'A Deepness in the Sky', whose arachnid friends have a warm, bucolic Tolkienesque society Oh, one of my favorites
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Jun 11, 2022 00:01
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How does Watts' Icarus Array work exactly? Sending "blueprints" for anti-protons? What does that mean?
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Jun 13, 2022 19:31
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I see, that makes sense (in the spooky action from a distance manner anyway)
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Jun 13, 2022 20:08
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Well you get a shitton more thrust out of antimatter reactions
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Jun 14, 2022 00:14
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https://twitter.com/ByIanJames/status/1536863641194049536 I'm gonna be a Merry Perry 
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Jun 15, 2022 02:26
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FPyat posted:https://schicksalgemeinschaft.wordpress.com/2022/06/11/children-of-time-adrian-tchaikovsky-2015/ This is really bad but one thing in particular stood out. quote:Also: the virus is woke. “There is a place in her mind where the nanovirus lurks and it tells her that all her species are kin, are like her in a way that other creatures are not, and yet the weight of society crushes its voice.” The idea is that the virus creates a feeling of kinship in asocial animals because that's more adaptive, but it's interesting that that's the first place his mind went. Bad critique.
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Jun 15, 2022 16:19
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General Battuta posted:There’s a lot to unpack in there but I’ll admit the idea of buying indulgences to offset the harm done by Tacitus some two thousand years ago feels vain in both senses of the word. Lmao Tacitus, the lone antisemetic Roman. Say, what ever happened to the Second Temple anyway That page is like the platonic ideal of YA book twitter. zoux fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jun 15, 2022 |
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Jun 15, 2022 17:35
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Cancelling Herodotus for referring to dog sized ants as "gold-digging"
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Jun 15, 2022 17:45
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https://twitter.com/dogunderwater/status/1537106608739721229quote:Did you read The Odyssey? And if so, when?
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Jun 15, 2022 21:51
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HopperUK posted:And the thing that annoys me most is that she said it's written in a prose-y way, when it is a poem. I get what she meant but like - she's a writer. Words mean things. Her advice to other aspiring writers is "get on Twitter'. YA book twitter is easily the most toxic, most backbiting community on twitter. e: you'll have to take my word for it they took down the article lol
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Jun 16, 2022 00:30
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