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mllaneza posted:I'd say that Chapterhouse gets better and really wraps the series up nicely. Your mileage may vary wildly. Chapterhouse ends on a pretty big cliffhanger... Then it's go time for THE DUNE ALLSTARS FEATURING GOOD PAUL MUAD'DIB GHOLA VERSUS EVIL PAOLO MUAD'DIB GHOLA WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! That is a thing that happens in the BH/KJA books.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:00
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I remember liking Children and God Emperor when I was young. Then a few years back I tried to do a readthrough of the series and couldn't get through Children. I should try it again someday, see if I still like God Emperor, and maybe finally get to the last two. Dune itself remains one of my favorite books ever, and I consider Messiah to be an essential part two.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:07
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Ornamented Death posted:I've never looked at the last two or three books as declining in quality, just shifting the kind of story Frank was telling. His biggest misstep, in my opinion, is making such a drastic shift so quickly. True, "declined" is the wrong word. God Emperor was still very good, but the tone and direction were a hard right turn in a lot of ways.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:21
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MockingQuantum posted:If by Culture you mean the Iain M. Banks books... no. I started Consider Phlebas in college but got busy and put it down, haven't yet tackled the series since then. I started with Player of Games after this very thread almost unanimously advised against starting with Phlebas and I'm happy for it. Player was a great intro to the Culture universe and also just a rad book in general.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:32
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mllaneza posted:I'd say that Chapterhouse gets better and really wraps the series up nicely. Your mileage may vary wildly. Yeah but ultimately I think if Heretics is your breaking point, nothing in Chapterhouse is gonna make you feel good about reading it.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:38
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Robot Wendigo posted:Finally finished Magic Bites today. I really enjoyed it. The world was interesting to me, with just enough hints and 'Oh, that's cool' moments to keep me intrigued. Kate was good company. Now I'm about to start the first book in the Felix Castor series, because I apparently have that first person urban fantasy itch. I think that series takes a sharp turn downwards a few books into it when the romance arc with the packleader kicks into full swing. Turning into the "mate of the alpha werelion millionaire packleader" seems to be a pretty big hit to Kate's capability.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:39
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Cpt. Mahatma Gandhi posted:I started with Player of Games after this very thread almost unanimously advised against starting with Phlebas and I'm happy for it. Player was a great intro to the Culture universe and also just a rad book in general. Oh I thought they were in a pretty specific numerical order. I'll try Player of Games at some point then, though I don't remember Phlebas enough to say I hated it or anything.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:41
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Finally read Bridge of Birds after figuring out Amazon's gimmick where they are selling the omnibus, which it turns out is a solution I like. "My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character." 
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Aug 26, 2016 03:44
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MockingQuantum posted:I gave up after God Emperor myself. I agree that it wasn't terrible and was enough in the same world of the first three that it was readable, but I think I made it maybe 20-30 pages into Heretic before I realized it wasn't what I wanted out of a book. I'm always impressed at the variety of impressions the series makes on people who generally agree that the first book is great. Heretics is my favorite in the series after Dune.
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Aug 26, 2016 03:55
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Ornamented Death posted:I think you would dig the Daniel Faust books. They cover similar ground as the Sandman Slim books, but are better-written and Faust isn't the caricature that Stark is. My personal ranking goes Faust > Castor = Verus, but they're all good slightly pulpy fun. (I may have been influenced by Mr Schaefer being a writing machine and also producing a fantastic intrigue-assholes fantasy series)
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Aug 26, 2016 03:58
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GreyjoyBastard posted:My personal ranking goes Faust > Castor = Verus, but they're all good slightly pulpy fun. Oh my gosh Revanche Cycle is so much better than I thought it was going to be back when I started the first book. They're so quick to read, too, I think I started the first book the last week of July and I'm almost done with Queen of the Night.
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Aug 26, 2016 04:01
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MockingQuantum posted:Oh I thought they were in a pretty specific numerical order. I'll try Player of Games at some point then, though I don't remember Phlebas enough to say I hated it or anything. The nice thing about Culture is that you can dive in pretty much everywhere you want because it's not really a series but a universe where all the novels and stories are set in, but Player of Games into Use of Weapons is the normal rec to get started. The Algebraist is not a part of Culture but another Iain M. Banks space opera you may enjoy if you like Culture.
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Aug 26, 2016 08:32
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Finally read Bridge of Birds after figuring out Amazon's gimmick where they are selling the omnibus, which it turns out is a solution I like. Goddamn it! You said the magic words and I have to start another re-read! I have a JOB, you know?!
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Aug 26, 2016 09:06
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I just looked and what the hell he copied an entire debate he had with me once onto his blog At least he was copying good posts 
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Aug 26, 2016 09:25
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Robot Wendigo posted:Finally finished Magic Bites today. I really enjoyed it. The world was interesting to me, with just enough hints and 'Oh, that's cool' moments to keep me intrigued. Kate was good company. Now I'm about to start the first book in the Felix Castor series, because I apparently have that first person urban fantasy itch. Warning - the Castor books are good, but the final book is not written.
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Aug 26, 2016 09:52
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I read Spiderlight the other day.  This image has never been more apt.
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Aug 26, 2016 09:52
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andrew smash posted:I'm always impressed at the variety of impressions the series makes on people who generally agree that the first book is great. Heretics is my favorite in the series after Dune. I'm like 40 pages from the end of it so won't read any response just yet, but I'd be curious to hear your impressions of Heretics. I could see liking it despite it not feeling very Dune-like, combined with not liking books 2-4, making you rank it 2nd behind Dune.
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Aug 26, 2016 10:43
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MockingQuantum posted:It was really tragic for me how badly the books declined. I read Dune at kind of a critical time in terms of shaping my tastes in books and I absolutely loved it. Messiah and Children weren't quite as revolutionary but were still very different than anything else I had come across. Then God Emperor.. was.. a lot of people love god emperor. i found it staggeringly dull as i was pummeled by authorial filibuster after authorial filibuster, none of which were particularly profound.
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Aug 26, 2016 13:36
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RVProfootballer posted:I'm like 40 pages from the end of it so won't read any response just yet, but I'd be curious to hear your impressions of Heretics. I could see liking it despite it not feeling very Dune-like, combined with not liking books 2-4, making you rank it 2nd behind Dune. I liked the entire series, messiah probably is right after heretics for me. I liked heretics for a lot of reasons that are hard to articulate, but one of them is that it's such a huge shift from God emperor which is very contemplative and heavy. It was kind of refreshing to read the adventures of miles teg, super saiyan.
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Aug 26, 2016 13:54
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andrew smash posted:I'm always impressed at the variety of impressions the series makes on people who generally agree that the first book is great. Heretics is my favorite in the series after Dune. Alright, finished Heretics, so here are a few scattered thoughts: The tone and setting was just so different. Herbert spent time describing people finding old junker cars and refurbishing them, characters walking around through much more stereotypical scifi settings on Gammu, running and gunning with laser guns. This ridiculously long-winded passage bothered me a lot for some reason, just so repetitive and inconsequential and poorly written: quote:This room, about five meters long and four wide, was a place for doing very high-level business. The merchandise would never be an actual exposure of money. People here would see only portable equivalents of whatever passed for currency—melange, perhaps, or milky soostones about the size of an eyeball, perfectly round, at once glossy and soft in appearance but radiant with rainbow changes directed by whatever light fell on them or whatever flesh they touched. This was a place where a danikin of melange or a small fold-pouch of soostones would be accepted as a natural occurrence. The price of a planet could be exchanged here with only a nod, an eyeblink or a low-voiced murmur. No wallets of currency would ever be produced here. The closest thing might be a thin case of translux out of whose poison-guarded interior would come thinner sheets of ridulian crystal with very large numbers inscribed on them by unforgeable dataprint. The Teleilaxu were set up as ultimate villains, with some secret strategy going back thousands of years, for the first quarter or half of the book, and I thought that would be something really interesting. Then Waff, the Masters of Masters, ends up being some dumb schlub that gets outmaneuvered easily by typical Bene Gesserit religious manipulation, and the new ultimate Face Dancers can be detected easily anyway. The Bene Gesserit go from being super wise and completely controlled to completely ruled by their emotions; anytime the Matres are mentioned, any BG in hearing has to exclaim "whores!" It's ridiculous and not at all fitting, imo. Teg apparently became the Flash + prescient because he got tortured; maybe this gets explained at all in Chapterhouse? The focus on sexual stuff was done really poorly, with the Duncan Idaho scene with the Honored Matre being really in stark contrast to how Herbert handled sex in any previous book. Again, the way they set up the Tleilaxu breeding something into the gholas sounded like it might have an interesting reveal. But I guess they just wanted him to be a sex god? And him getting the memories of all the previous gholas made him a sex god??? That that is the entire premise of the Honored Matres was also dumb. It could have been handled as something interesting, like harnessing the unconscious species-wide drive to procreate and warping it somehow to the destruction of humanity, sort of an anti-God Emperor thing, but Herbert just didn't put any effort into that. He sorted of dropped hints that that was what he had in mind, I think, but that was it, and it isn't clear how being sex gods individually relates to that. There were other little things that didn't make sense or get resolved (why were Odrade and Lucilla bred to look very similar, what was the point of Duncan being imprinted to an Ordrade lookalike?), but I think that's probably true in the earlier books as well. Anyway, I'm glad I finally read it, and I'm going to hit Chapterhouse next. I just honestly don't really see how the KJA/post-Frank books will be much "worse", in the sense of being like any other poorly written generic scifi book. Like there's some Butlerian Jihad prequel book(s), right? Besides being more poorly written, I suspect it'll feel as much like Dune as Heretics did for me.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:09
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Words can't describe how much worse the BH books are than anything Frank wrote. Seriously, they make you doubt the authors' very literacy, let alone storytelling skills or what not.
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Aug 26, 2016 14:29
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RVProfootballer posted:Anyway, I'm glad I finally read it, and I'm going to hit Chapterhouse next. I just honestly don't really see how the KJA/post-Frank books will be much "worse", in the sense of being like any other poorly written generic scifi book. Like there's some Butlerian Jihad prequel book(s), right? Besides being more poorly written, I suspect it'll feel as much like Dune as Heretics did for me. Omnius explains that to complete his domination of humanity, he requires the superior Kwisatz Haderach of the two Paul gholas. Paolo and Paul are forced to duel, during which Paul is mortally wounded. Victorious, Paolo takes the ultraspice
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Aug 26, 2016 15:40
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Jedit posted:Warning - the Castor books are good, but the final book is not written. The series ends pretty well exactly where it did, though. You could add another book and I'd like another book, but I don't think it really needs one.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:50
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I dropped by a used bookseller's who are closing shop tomorrow. I grabbed everything interesting looking on my first go, but I might go for a second pass tomorrow. I grabbed every single SF anthology and CS Friedman's In Conquest Born. They had a fuckton of Andre Norton and Alan Dean Foster there. Both authors are unknown to me, is there anything by them I should keep an eye out for? They also had a bunch of Philip Jose Farmer, I only know the Riverworld series and I already have all of it.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:57
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I watched the Shannara Chronicles on Netflix and the "high fantasy world built on the ashes of modern human civilization" seems to be totally my thing. Would I enjoy the book series as a whole (even though S1 seems to be randomly based on The Elfstones of Shannara specifically)?
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Aug 26, 2016 16:58
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BH/KJA also wrote a prequel trilogy about Paul's father Leto, which I read before I first read Dune, probably loving up my perception of the series.Kraps posted:I watched the Shannara Chronicles on Netflix and the "high fantasy world built on the ashes of modern human civilization" seems to be totally my thing. Would I enjoy the book series as a whole (even though S1 seems to be randomly based on The Elfstones of Shannara specifically)? The first is a Lord of the Rings ripoff, which is probably why the show skipped to Elfstones.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:23
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Do Wolfe's Long Sun books get better? I'm not as impressed with Nightside the Long Sun as I was with Shadow of the Torturer or New Sun in general.Neurosis posted:a lot of people love god emperor. i found it staggeringly dull as i was pummeled by authorial filibuster after authorial filibuster, none of which were particularly profound. Part of me wishes a miniseries or movie of God Emperor existed though. Good or bad, it'd be something else visually (the potential for Hilarious CGI Leto notwithstanding). I can understand why it'd never happen because people would have even less idea what the gently caress is happening than usual without the context of the Dune series preceding it.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:23
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Dune getting the HBO series treatment would make me very happy
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Aug 26, 2016 17:29
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Yeah, but I don't think we currently have the CGI skills to accurately render Leto's gigantic rubber strap on.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:31
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Antti posted:They had a fuckton of Andre Norton and Alan Dean Foster there. Both authors are unknown to me, is there anything by them I should keep an eye out for? They also had a bunch of Philip Jose Farmer, I only know the Riverworld series and I already have all of it. You know how every other grognard gets all nostalgic about Heinlein juveniles? Norton wrote more of them and wrote them better. My favorite was 'Star Rangers', she also had the 'Galactic Derelict' and 'Witch World' series, but basically anything from the 50s - 70s. Also James Nicoll wrote a bunch of Norton reviews that may be of interest: http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/contributor/662 Alan Dean Foster's stuff is mostly pretty forgettable for me, the 'Spellsinger' books are 'ok', and some people like his 'Pip and Flinx' books. I remember these being ok too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_Trilogy
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Aug 26, 2016 17:44
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Nakar posted:Do Wolfe's Long Sun books get better? I'm not as impressed with Nightside the Long Sun as I was with Shadow of the Torturer or New Sun in general. opinions are varied. a lot of people like what the long sun did (genres played with, a massive identity point at the end which makes you review what you've seen); i preferred the short sun, which is a lot closer to the new sun in terms of style and the particular identity trick it was playing.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:54
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fritz posted:You know how every other grognard gets all nostalgic about Heinlein juveniles? Norton wrote more of them and wrote them better. My favorite was 'Star Rangers', she also had the 'Galactic Derelict' and 'Witch World' series, but basically anything from the 50s - 70s. Also James Nicoll wrote a bunch of Norton reviews that may be of interest: http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/contributor/662 I don't know about better, the juveniles were some of Heinlein's best work. That said, Norton's stuff really is excellent. Much of it is on Project Gutenberg: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/author?name=Norton%2C%20Andre While you're there, try some H Beam Piper: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8301 Little Fuzzy, Cosmic Computer, and Space Viking are good places to start.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:00
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fritz posted:You know how every other grognard gets all nostalgic about Heinlein juveniles? Norton wrote more of them and wrote them better. My favorite was 'Star Rangers', she also had the 'Galactic Derelict' and 'Witch World' series, but basically anything from the 50s - 70s. Also James Nicoll wrote a bunch of Norton reviews that may be of interest: http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews/contributor/662 Thanks! I'm gonna write down the Norton series' names and try to catch more than one of them. I have a bunch of singletons from other series in my shelf and I never get around to them because I'm neurotic that way.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:00
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Neurosis posted:opinions are varied. a lot of people like what the long sun did (genres played with, a massive identity point at the end which makes you review what you've seen); i preferred the short sun, which is a lot closer to the new sun in terms of style and the particular identity trick it was playing. Personally, I'm not a big fan of them but consider them worth it because Short Sun is amazing.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:33
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anilEhilated posted:The problem here is that you need to have read Long Sun to get anything out of Short Sun. Anyway, the four Long Sun books are all fairly different in theme and tone (each being a spoof of a different genre) so chances are that even if you don't like one, it'll last for a while. agreed,
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Aug 26, 2016 18:34
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Khizan posted:The series ends pretty well exactly where it did, though. You could add another book and I'd like another book, but I don't think it really needs one. I have the feeling you haven't read The Naming of the Beasts. I don't know how anyone can get left on a cliffhanger like that and say "the series ends well, it doesn't need another book".
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Aug 26, 2016 18:50
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Kraps posted:I watched the Shannara Chronicles on Netflix and the "high fantasy world built on the ashes of modern human civilization" seems to be totally my thing. Would I enjoy the book series as a whole (even though S1 seems to be randomly based on The Elfstones of Shannara specifically)? The post-apocalyptic stuff is a lot more low-key early on in the book series, it just becomes something that must be addressed when moving to a visual medium. The book series is all right, I would not call it great and it has some quirks that I despise (constantly referring to characters, in dialogue and out, as firstname lastname, eg, minor stuff but obvious stuff) but it can be perfectly entertaining as long as your expectations are in that area. I don't know that I know anyone who loves it, but I've never see anyone say they really regret reading it. (I am sure they are out there because there always are people but yeah)
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Aug 26, 2016 20:35
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Last page mentioned the Daniel Faust series, and it so happens that today's Kindle Daily Deal is The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust Book 1) by Craig Schaefer for $0.99. I do enjoy a Dresden book once in a while, as they are just quick mindless fun, but I wouldn't mind something else in the genre. Gonna try this as the introduction price, like any good drug, is pretty good.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:38
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Plus if you have kindle unlimited, they are all on there I think, even his fantasy series and the sister series to Faust, the Harmony Black series (which you should not read till after book 3? of the Faust series).
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Aug 26, 2016 20:59
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Book 4 actually. Edit: This is wrong, it's book 5. Patrick Spens fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 21:09
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