Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

Lichy posted:

anything and everything by arkady and boris strugatsky, they're like asimov but russian and two dudes, also they wrote the novel that stalker vidyagames are based on(roadside picnic)

I just finished Roadside Picnic today, the Antonina W. Bouis translation. Absolutely fantastic 120 pages. So. Godamn. Good.


An excellent (and free) radio play of the fantastic A Canticle For Liebowitz.
https://archive.org/details/ACanticleForLiebowitz

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

fuck the ROW
Aug 29, 2008

by zen death robot
Keith Laumer writes Retief, the two fisted diplomat. He also wrote a great book called "The Monitors" and named the protaganist "Ace Blondel" which is pretty hilarious to me

tupac holocron
Apr 23, 2008
The son of Maryam is about to descend amongst you as a correct ruler, he will break the cross and kill the pig!
has anyone established whether douglas adams stole the title and premise of his book from jean mark gawron's algorithm or vice versa, or whether they were drawn from the same ur-matter? they both came out in 1978 and algorithm has a character who is basically ford prefect who wrote the quote galactic hitch-hiker's guide unquote, a morose computer, really bad poetry, etc. etc. etc.

harpomarxist
Oct 7, 2007

Useless twat opinions from everybody's favorite British coffee shop revolutionary!

brave nazi aviator posted:

has anyone established whether douglas adams stole the title and premise of his book from jean mark gawron's algorithm or vice versa, or whether they were drawn from the same ur-matter? they both came out in 1978 and algorithm has a character who is basically ford prefect who wrote the quote galactic hitch-hiker's guide unquote, a morose computer, really bad poetry, etc. etc. etc.


i mean, don't read Douglas Adams, what is wrong with you?

Snak
Oct 10, 2005

I myself will carry you to the Gates of Valhalla...
You will ride eternal,
shiny and chrome.
Grimey Drawer

harpomarxist posted:

i mean, don't read Douglas Adams, what is wrong with you?

Is this an answer? Because I am wondering as well...

fuck the ROW
Aug 29, 2008

by zen death robot

harpomarxist posted:

If we're continuing with short stories the Semiotext[e] SF anthology was *very* good. It had stuff by Anton Wilson, Burroughs, Sterling (with this amazing story - http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/weseethings/01.html) Gibson, Sheckley, Rachel Pollack...

lmao I think this guy is an anime jihadi

quote:

This was the jahiliyah -- the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God's sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.

harpomarxist
Oct 7, 2007

Useless twat opinions from everybody's favorite British coffee shop revolutionary!

gently caress the ROW posted:

lmao I think this guy is an anime jihadi

I totally am, except without the anime

harpomarxist
Oct 7, 2007

Useless twat opinions from everybody's favorite British coffee shop revolutionary!

harpomarxist posted:

I totally am, except without the anime

but maybe the point is to read and see how relevant it is :) merci gently caress the Row

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

BodineWilson posted:

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Gateway by Fred Pohl.

It's a great read. I'm really not a huge fan of any of his other books, but he really hit the spot with Gateway. It won the Hugo in 1978, so it's likely this isn't just a product of my own feverish tastes in lit.


Seconding this. Gateway is just fantastic partially in part because of its laser focus on a specific character and his interactions.

It's not too high on the weird sex front though. It's pretty much limited to zero-G sex while high or zero-G sex in a confined spaceship, both because there's nothing much else better to do.

MeLKoR
Dec 23, 2004

by FactsAreUseless
I kind of liked Hyperion\The Fall of Hyperion although The Culture has ruined evil AIs for me and I thought the human authorities were pretty loving stupid. Anyway I liked the Shrike\Tree\time travel ideas and the Canterbury Tales "gimmick" of the first book. All in all they were pretty solid as long as you didn't mind the dumb conspiracy\political parts.

I literally just finished reading Endymion\The Rise of Endymion and holy poo poo these books have some serious loving problems.

At the beginning I liked the Messiah vs Church\Pax setting but it was completely hosed up by the author's decision to incorporate so many characters from the first two books. He should have used the android, the poet and maybe the shrike, no one else. Instead to make it work he had to go completely "gently caress it, whatever" with time travel and the amount of retconning bordered on Brian Herbert Dune prequel levels. On top of that as the books progressed the Messiah aspect went "Children of the Mind" crazy which didn't help at all.

To add insult to injury the human authorities were once again completely retarded. He could have arrived at the same initial setting by having the Church just grow increasingly more powerful for the same reasons it did after the fall of the roman empire, being the last extant trans-planetary organization with a proven record of multi-generational planning. Or they might have had the TechnoCore whispering in the minds of the Popes like they were divine inspiration, whatever. Instead the Church authorities in control knew for a fact that the AIs they were dealing with had almost succeeded in killing everyone just a dozen years before. :frogsiren:

There are faustian deals and then there is being a drooling moron.



Having said this should I waste my time with Ilium\Olympos?

MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Aug 16, 2014

Whorelord
May 1, 2013

Jump into the well...

vonnegut

Waroduce
Aug 5, 2008
Read Eisenhorn.


Can anyone recommend a time-travling solider story a-la A Dry Quite War? Or just time traveling with some conflict?

Kilmers Elbow
Jun 15, 2012

Kilmers Elbow posted:

(Have just ordered Hyperion thanks to this thread. Christ knows if I'll ever get around to reading it but it's been in my Amazon wishlist since the last ice age.)

So, about a third of the way through Hyperion and....it's OK.

My current impression is that the autobiographical accounts of the main characters are (thus far) a bit too long-winded and could have done with some trimming. It seems that the only relevant information to the broader mystery is to be found in the final dramatic revelations of each character's tale - which renders the majority of it somewhat superfluous.

Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying them; the separate narratives do have their own distinct feel to them. The diaries of Hoyt's mentor (forgot his name) do a fair impression of a quaint Victorian travelogue, and the General's section is pretty much full on space-opera. I'm currently into the Poet's section which, too, has its own flavour - but already I'm wary that much of what I'm about to read of the Poet's life and times are little more than delaying tactics before yet another climactic revelation.

We'll see.

my bony fealty
Oct 1, 2008

MeLKoR posted:

I kind of liked Hyperion\The Fall of Hyperion although The Culture has ruined evil AIs for me and I thought the human authorities were pretty loving stupid. Anyway I liked the Shrike\Tree\time travel ideas and the Canterbury Tales "gimmick" of the first book. All in all they were pretty solid as long as you didn't mind the dumb conspiracy\political parts.

I literally just finished reading Endymion\The Rise of Endymion and holy poo poo these books have some serious loving problems.

At the beginning I liked the Messiah vs Church\Pax setting but it was completely hosed up by the author's decision to incorporate so many characters from the first two books. He should have used the android, the poet and maybe the shrike, no one else. Instead to make it work he had to go completely "gently caress it, whatever" with time travel and the amount of retconning bordered on Brian Herbert Dune prequel levels. On top of that as the books progressed the Messiah aspect went "Children of the Mind" crazy which didn't help at all.

To add insult to injury the human authorities were once again completely retarded. He could have arrived at the same initial setting by having the Church just grow increasingly more powerful for the same reasons it did after the fall of the roman empire, being the last extant trans-planetary organization with a proven record of multi-generational planning. Or they might have had the TechnoCore whispering in the minds of the Popes like they were divine inspiration, whatever. Instead the Church authorities in control knew for a fact that the AIs they were dealing with had almost succeeded in killing everyone just a dozen years before. :frogsiren:

There are faustian deals and then there is being a drooling moron.



Having said this should I waste my time with Ilium\Olympos?

Im burning through the last one right now and yeah Endymion and it don't really hold their weight compared to Hyperion, the story is kind of just a generic action romp across a space and crazy planets woah desert world ice world jew world!!! with a really predictable messiah storyline.

I do like the idea of the far-future Roman Catholic church being genocidal maniacs, and I interpreted Lenar Hoyt as having gone batshit crazy and really thinking that God was speaking to him through the TechnoCore as a result of his trials in Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion. All the retconning going on which is literally explained by Aenea going "This was a lie." is pretty annoying too.

I'm still enjoying the books though!

quote:

My current impression is that the autobiographical accounts of the main characters are (thus far) a bit too long-winded and could have done with some trimming. It seems that the only relevant information to the broader mystery is to be found in the final dramatic revelations of each character's tale - which renders the majority of it somewhat superfluous.

Oh man just wait until you read the detective's tale

bonestructure
Sep 25, 2008

by Ralp
CJ Cherryh - the Faded Sun trilogy (Kesrith, Shon'jir, and Kutath)
Larry Niven - Ringworld (sequels get a bit iffy, though)
Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake
James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
F. Paul Wilson - the LaNague Chronicles (An Enemy of the State, Wheels Within Wheels, Healer)
Samuel R. Delaney - Dhalgren
Doris Lessing - Memoirs of a Survivor
Tanith Lee - Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine
Andre Norton - the Janus, Forerunner and Dipple series
JG Ballard - the linked series of The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World; and Crash, Concrete Island, and High Rise.

I like hard SF worldbuilding, so that's what most of this is.

bonestructure fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Aug 27, 2014

MeLKoR
Dec 23, 2004

by FactsAreUseless

Kilmers Elbow posted:

So, about a third of the way through Hyperion and....it's OK.

My current impression is that the autobiographical accounts of the main characters are (thus far) a bit too long-winded and could have done with some trimming. It seems that the only relevant information to the broader mystery is to be found in the final dramatic revelations of each character's tale - which renders the majority of it somewhat superfluous.

Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying them; the separate narratives do have their own distinct feel to them. The diaries of Hoyt's mentor (forgot his name) do a fair impression of a quaint Victorian travelogue, and the General's section is pretty much full on space-opera. I'm currently into the Poet's section which, too, has its own flavour - but already I'm wary that much of what I'm about to read of the Poet's life and times are little more than delaying tactics before yet another climactic revelation.

We'll see.
Man, you're going to have a really bad time with these books.



my bony fealty posted:

I do like the idea of the far-future Roman Catholic church being genocidal maniacs, and I interpreted Lenar Hoyt as having gone batshit crazy and really thinking that God was speaking to him through the TechnoCore as a result of his trials in Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion.

That's what I thought in the beginning but in the end it turns out that no, they both knew. The Pope was a puppet with no real power, the guy from the Inquisition was secretly running poo poo from the start along with the AI ambassador. But both he and the Pope (and presumably several other people) knew from the start they were dealing with the TechnoCore. This was less than 20 years after the near complete genocide by the AIs. Both the Church and the AIs were pretty dumb to be honest.


Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of a revived church in space thing, a less outrageous Imperium of Man but in the same vein. What annoyed me is that they could have done it without the TechnoCore. Just the willingness to sacrifice their lives traveling between the stars and having an organization that has survived 3000 years would make them the only game in town in the post-portal universe. They could even keep a semblance of lifetime connections if they planed their travels and having synods every 500 years, taking advantage of time dilation to run a loooooong game.

I think when he wrote Hyperion he realized "immortality granting parasites could have serious implications in an interstellar civilization without instantaneous travel times" and he decided that retconning his last book was the best/laziest way to write a story about it.



Maybe he's just another late term Orson Scott Card and Hyperion was the best he could do? I was hoping someone who'd read Ilium\Olympos would chime in because I'm not going to risk another 30 or 40 hours reading mediocre poo poo.

MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Aug 28, 2014

my bony fealty
Oct 1, 2008

MeLKoR posted:

Man, you're going to have a really bad time with these books.


That's what I thought in the beginning but in the end it turns out that no, they both knew. The Pope was a puppet with no real power, the guy from the Inquisition was secretly running poo poo from the start along with the AI ambassador. But both he and the Pope (and presumably several other people) knew from the start they were dealing with the TechnoCore. This was less than 20 years after the near complete genocide by the AIs. Both the Church and the AIs were pretty dumb to be honest.


Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of a revived church in space thing, a less outrageous Imperium of Man but in the same vein. What annoyed me is that they could have done it without the TechnoCore. Just the willingness to sacrifice their lives traveling between the stars and having an organization that has survived 3000 years would make them the only game in town in the post-portal universe. They could even keep a semblance of lifetime connections if they planed their travels and having synods every 500 years, taking advantage of time dilation to run a loooooong game.

I think when he wrote Hyperion he realized "immortality granting parasites could have serious implications in an interstellar civilization without instantaneous travel times" and he decided that retconning his last book was the best/laziest way to write a story about it.



Maybe he's just another late term Orson Scott Card and Hyperion was the best he could do? I was hoping someone who'd read Ilium\Olympos would chime in because I'm not going to risk another 30 or 40 hours reading mediocre poo poo.

Man I finished The Rise of Endymion and I am pretty disappointed. I did enjoy the story, but it really wasn't what I wanted to read after Hyperion and it felt like it took the parts of the first 2 that I didn't like and expanded on them while leaving the parts I did like as an afterthought. Feels like so much wasted potential.

Regarding the Cruciform, the implications of it were dealt with pretty thoroughly in the Hyperion I thought - you can live forever, but it makes you a retarded eunuch in the process. It felt more like Simmons having zero ideas and using the Cruciform exactly as he did the Farcasters, that is that the Pax was a clone copy of the Hegemony and a dead-end of human progress in favor of AI evolution. The end of The Fall of Hyperion made it seem like the Ousters and former Web humans would come together to create a real revolutionary civilization, leading to the far-future hints of Kassad's story when the ultimate battle of mankind vs. the TechnoCore plays out, but nope, just more of the same with lots of confusion and retconning and unnecessary side-characters thrown in. I still don't know why Kassad or Het Masteen or Rachel were in The Rise of Endymion nor remember half the names of the random characters introduced for the last third.

MAKE NO BABBYS
Jan 28, 2010
I only scrolled through the first two pages but really?! He requests sci fi with weird sex scenes and NO ONE suggests Heinlein? smdh.

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

Starship Troopers and The Moon is A Strange Mistress are both good.

my bony fealty
Oct 1, 2008

MAKE NO BABBYS posted:

I only scrolled through the first two pages but really?! He requests sci fi with weird sex scenes and NO ONE suggests Heinlein? smdh.

stranger in a stranger land is really fuckin good

MAKE NO BABBYS
Jan 28, 2010
Stranger in a strange land is my favorite, Friday was cool, the cat who walked through walls was cool, there were some other good ones but then some get reallllllllll weird and incesty/poly

E: gently caress, I forgot Time Enough For Love and the Lazarus Long series... I Will Fear No Evil was rad too.

MAKE NO BABBYS fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Sep 2, 2014

Ratios and Tendency
Apr 23, 2010

:swoon: MURALI :swoon:


Anyone know of any books with -

-no ftl transport or communications
-no wormholes
-no time travel
-space stuff is mainly done by drones, probes and robots
-main themes other than war/fighting
-ideally a non-autist author that can approximate a believable ~human character when required

?

SnowblindFatal
Jan 7, 2011

Ratios and Tendency posted:

Anyone know of any books with -

-no ftl transport or communications
-no wormholes
-no time travel
-space stuff is mainly done by drones, probes and robots
-main themes other than war/fighting
-ideally a non-autist author that can approximate a believable ~human character when required

?

Stanislaw Lem - Solaris

MeLKoR
Dec 23, 2004

by FactsAreUseless

SnowblindFatal posted:

Stanislaw Lem - Solaris

I'll add Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

SnowblindFatal
Jan 7, 2011

MeLKoR posted:

I'll add Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Scifi is a nice genre since you can stick to the definite classics and you know they'll deliver. It doesn't carry the same kind of nostalgic baggage as more traditional literature. I read A Farewell to Arms years ago since I heard it's kind of a big deal, and gosh darn it was meaningless and boring. Become a deserter, fall in love, your love dies. WOW WHAT A DEEP THOUGHTFUL TRAGEDY WAR SURE IS HELL oh wait she died in a regular hospital and would've died even if there wasn't a war going on. Seriously who cares. Now I'm not saying all of Hemingway is crap, but that particular piece, supposedly a classic piece of literature, was poo poo.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kilmers Elbow
Jun 15, 2012

Re: Hyperion, I just finished the detective's tale - it was pretty terrible. The whole chapter was a nasty mix of amateur young adult romance, terrible exposition and sucking William Gibson's dick. Ugh. I'm just about to start the Consul's story, let's see if it can pull me back in.

  • Locked thread