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Morlock posted:The only really good ones I've found so far have been Philip Reeve's Larklight series, which are hilarious pseudo-Victorian space fantasy. Marketed at kids, but don't let that stop you - they're awesomely good fun. e: come to think of it you can read the first chapters of all 3 at http://www.larklight.com/larklight.htm and see if they're for you. I haven't read Larklight yet, but Philip Reeve wrote an earlier series of steampunk books: Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain. I read them in high school and they are completely and totally AWESOME. Moving cities, Himalayan mountain fortresses, an underwater city of thieves, an enormous war, salvaged WMDs from the past, and lots and lots of aaaaairships :iamafag: I doubt I'll ever read any steampunk that tops them. (I also tried Court of the Air and forced myself to the last page. What a complete loving mess of a book.)
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# ¿ Jul 24, 2009 04:41 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:27 |
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Isurion posted:Have you read the Temeraire series? It's the Napoleonic wars with dragons. Took the words out of my mouth, except I was going to add "but it sucks." Can anyone recommend me some fantasy where people cross from our world into the fantasy world? Obvious choices are the Narnia and His Dark Materials series, and I've also read Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame and have Stephen King's Dark Tower series on my TBR pile. Anything else?
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# ¿ Jul 25, 2009 02:21 |
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delicious beef posted:1. Can anybody recommend me well-written post-apocalyptic themed stuff. I'm talking about stuff similar to The Road or I am Legend. Not so much interested in Sci-fi explanations of whatever the event is, but about people surviving in the aftermath. I really loved The Road, so something like that would be wonderful. John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. John Wyndham is a pretty great apocalyptic author overall, but Chrysalids is the only one of his books that I'd classify as purely post-apocalyptic, which seems to be what you're after. Also the "Sloosha's Crossing" section of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but that entire book is pure gold.
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# ¿ Jul 29, 2009 12:10 |
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Mustang posted:I just started getting into Science Fiction. All I've read so far are Ender's Game, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and the Foundation Series. I went to the local Borders to see if I could find one to pick up, but there's so many to choose from. John Varleys Eight Worlds series is awesome. It's about humanity being evicted from Earth by invisible, omnipotent aliens and forced to live on the other worlds of the solar system. The first one was written in the 70's and was called The Ophiuchi Hotline, and it talks about the actual circumstances of the Invasion, and how humanity has since survived on a hotline of technological information beamed to them from the star Ophiuchi. There's also a whole bunch of short story collections in the same universe; The Barbie Murders was pretty good. He wrote some more in the 90s which show leaps and bounds of improvement in his writing ability. Steel Beach covers the life of a reporter living on the moon under a benevolent dictatorship run by a computer, while The Golden Globe (one of my favourite books of all time) covers the adventures of a travelling actor as he tries to make it from Pluto to Luna in time for a production of King Lear, while being pursued by the mafia. They're not hard science fiction, and the last two books don't even focus on the Invasion much. They're just really amusing, enjoyable and funny (but still serious) travels through a fascinating sci-fi world. And they all stand alone, so don't worry about reading in order or anything. Robert Heinlein is also pretty good for light/adventurous science fiction, as long as you stick to his juvenile novels and stay the gently caress away from his 1,000 page adult novels about incest and libertarianism. Between Planets and Citizen of the Galaxy are probably the best juveniles. If you want first-contact set on Earth, John Cristopher's Tripods trilogy is aimed at young aduls but holds up really well, set hundreds of years after humanity has been enslaved by a race of gigantic robotic tripods. Follows the journey of two English boys as they try to reach a resistance hideout in the Swiss Alps. John Wyndham wrote two really brilliant first-contact novels: The Kraken Wakes, in which aquatic invaders land in the depths of the ocean and start terraforming (aquaforming?) the world against our will, and The Midwich Cuckoos, where aliens artificially inseminate human women with alien children in several strategic locations around the world. And that's the limit of my knowledge... I think I need to read more science fiction.
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# ¿ Aug 23, 2009 08:44 |
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Green Mars is actually the second book, so read that next. Blue Mars comes last. They're the hardest sci-fi I've ever read so I can't reccomend anything else. edit: missed your part about Solaris, which I have been looking for a copy of for aaaages. If you're looking for reasonably hard sci-fi which has a huge amount of eerie dread, try Christopher Priest's Inverted World. If you're interested I wrote a spoiler-free review of it here, and I reccomend that you avoid looking up anything else about it because a lot of reviews drop huge spoilers (and if you get a modern edition, don't read the blurb). freebooter fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Aug 25, 2009 |
# ¿ Aug 25, 2009 03:36 |
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For NYC + zombies, try Monster Island by David Wellington. It's in print, but I read it back when it was a free online serial novel (which it still is), and it's great. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is a dystopia set in post-apocalyptic Canada, and it's a very easy read.
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# ¿ Nov 15, 2009 07:02 |
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Death Hamster posted:13. Guardians of the Flame series I could have sworn I was the only person who'd ever read these. Anyway, you have read the Discworld series, right?
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# ¿ Dec 4, 2009 14:27 |
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The Grand Judabuddha posted:It definitely gets better. The first two books are very different than the rest of the series. I suggest Guards, Guards or Mort as a first book: they've got more of the what you probably enjoyed in Good Omens. I remember hearing that Pratchett personally recommends Guards! Guards! as the best book to start with.
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# ¿ Jan 19, 2010 04:18 |
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Anyone know of any fantasy written from a first-person point of view? I'm tinkering with a story myself, but the main character is an amnesiac, and that's just so much easier if it's first-person. But fantasy in first-person seems... wrong, somehow.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2010 14:49 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:it's something like a 30 hour flight (including layovers), Ouch. Where are you flying to/from? I had an awful 32-hour flight last year between London and Perth, with a day-long layover in Brunei's lovely tiny airport, and all I had to read was Justin Cronin's crummy The Passage. On topic, can anyone reccomend me a book about very early 19th century life in Tasmania, or failing that, New South Wales? Non-fiction or historical fiction, it doesn't matter, I just want to get a feel for what things were like back then.
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# ¿ Mar 24, 2011 10:16 |
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Do Not Resuscitate posted:I feel Niven is just a poor writer and several times I read a few lines of Ringworld's dialog aloud to my wife for a good laugh. Reading it aloud really exposes it as stilted and unwieldy. Personally, I think Philip Jose Farmer did it better with the first Riverworld. Wow, really? I haven't read Ringworld yet, but the Riverworld series are literally the worst books I have ever forced myself through.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2011 05:19 |
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I'm looking for a readable book about the history of human civilisation. Like most people I've grown up with a patchwork of historical knowledge, fuzzy in most parts and brightening in areas that are more famous or have had movies made about them. I know, for example, that Australian society began when the First Fleet landed in 1788, and I know that the population really boomed with the Victorian gold rushes in the 1860s, but what about all the in between stuff? When did Sydney go from being a ramshackle bunch of houses to being a proper city - and what was society like when it did? That was just an example, though - I'm looking for a global history. Also so I can follow the rise of civilisation chronologically, rather than by area, which is how people usually seem to read about it.
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2011 17:04 |
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I'm looking for Australian fantasy, by which I mean fantasy that actually has Australian influences, not just stuff written by Australians. The country has plenty of fantasy authors - Sarah Douglas, Garth Nix, Fiona McIntosh etc - but they all write generic European/Tolkienesque fantasy for an international audience. (And I do mean fantasy, not sci-fi, of which there is plenty, especially of the post-apocalyptic variety.) I suppose what I'm looking for is a version of what Stephen King did in the Dark Tower series, which was undoubtedly a fictional fantasy world, but one based on an American setting rather than the typical European Middle Ages setting. The only Australian fantasy I can think of so far is Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and The Magic Pudding. Curiously, both of these were published in 1918, which is weird - aside from being a strange coincidence, I would have thought authors from the post-British Australia era would be the ones to be writing Australian-inspired fantasy, not authors born in the 19th century when we were a staunchly British outpost in foreign seas.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2013 10:16 |
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barkingclam posted:How about David Mitchell's number9dream? Seconding this. And the London chapter in Ghostwritten is one of my favourites. You'd probably have to be a bit more specific about London though - there's obviously less books about japan, but in the world of English literature, there are literally tens of thousands of novels set in London at every stage of its existence.
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# ¿ Jan 25, 2013 01:16 |
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Can anyone recommend any good fantasy short stories?
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2013 04:16 |
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Hedrigall posted:Can we just make it official that Guards Guards is THE starting book for Discworld? Pratchett himself recommends it as the starting point, which is about as official as you can get.
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2013 12:48 |
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noirstronaut posted:Was the general consensus on 1984 & Animal Farm? Are they like books you read in high school because you have to or are they enjoyable? They're both important books, but I found 1984 quite dull. Animal Farm, on the other hand, is both important and hugely entertaining and easy to read and relatively short. George Orwell's non-fiction is also worth reading - I actually prefer it over his fiction, especially Down and Out in Paris and London.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2013 01:15 |
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BlazinLow305 posted:I've posted a somewhat similar request as the one I'm about to make now a few months ago, and now that I've read up most books in my queue I need more. I typically read sci-fi and fantasy, and I still have plenty of those left. However, for breaks from that I'm looking for a mystery/thriller type. Let me be specific, I don't care for any straight up crime, who done the murder? type mystery, I prefer something with a more vague possible supernatural element maybe. The TV show LOST for example in a way. It doesn't have to be that specific, but something along the lines of "Woah, there is no possible explanation for this crazy rear end poo poo going on!" if that makes sense. I prefer something newer, as in written in the last decade or two, and somewhat easy to read. If it falls under the jurisdiction of horror or something like that, that's fine too I suppose. Under The Dome by Stephen King would be a good example although I've gotten tired of him specifically, his stuff usually starts out good but just get's a little..eh. Also that book The Sign by Raymond Khoury is a good example of what I'm after. I've found recently that I really enjoy this type of fiction as well - mystery with a speculative element, not "who could have murdered Jane Doe?" (answer - a person). So, with the caveat that these are all sci-fi as well, I'd recommend: - The Mist by Stephen King (I know you said you'd gone off him a bit, but this is absolutely the best thing he ever wrote) - Inverted World by Christopher Priest (do NOT read any reviews or plot synopses) - Hyperion by Dan Simmons, specifically "The Priest's Tale" which is at the very beginning - The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
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# ¿ Feb 6, 2013 02:30 |
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I'm looking for recommendations of Australian apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic science fiction (set in Australia, not just written by Australians). I seem to remember the stuff being everywhere when I was a kid - no doubt in school libraries stocked with a mandated quota of Australian YA novels - but now all I can remember is Nevil Shute's On the Beach. And Mad Max, obviously.
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# ¿ Jun 7, 2013 13:05 |
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Sandwolf posted:I just finished World War Z and am looking for something similarly..enrapturing? My usual favorite author is Vonnegut but I'm looking for something a bit more concrete, less abstract, you know? Something with historical fiction elements would be nice too. World War Z is presented as a fictional history but most historical fiction is a lot more "literary" and less "readable" than historical fiction. I don't like those terms - it sounds snobby and I enjoyed World War Z a lot - but if that's the kind of thing you're used to reading you might find most historicla fiction less enrapturing. Having said that, historical fiction I've enjoyed includes The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (1850s Oregon and California), Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (19th century Pacific voyage) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Dutch trading post in 1790s Japan). You might enjoy Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which takes place in a number of different time periods in the past, present and the future.
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# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 12:18 |
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You will absolutely love the crap out of Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell, then. Regency alternate history/fantasy in which the creepy, malevolent denizens of Faerie play a pivotal role in the plot. Critically acclaimed and longlisted for the Booker Prize to boot.
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# ¿ Jul 22, 2013 11:27 |
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This will sound like a weird ask, but I'm moving to England next year and am trying to re-stoke my flagging Anglophilia. What are some good books that are really, solidly, y'know... English? Across any genre. Examples of what I mean which I've already read would include Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, Wolf Hall, The Day of the Triffids, Black Swan Green. Examples I've thought of but haven't read yet include stuff by Dickens, the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Raffles stories and stuff by PG Wodehouse.
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# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 03:29 |
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Couch Life posted:I really enjoy the survival aspect of apocalypse stories and was wondering if anyone had anything in that style? Stuff like The Walking Dead, but not a comic book. Fantasy is good as well. Really, any gritty survival story about a (preferably) small group of people against holy poo poo things. I'll back up Enfys on The Death of Grass (No Blade of Grass in the US) - one of the few PA stories I've read that follows the brutal logic of survival all the way through. The Day of the Triffids is a classic as well. I also really enjoyed Peter Heller's recent novel The Dog Stars, set in a plague-devastated Colorado, which doesn't bring anything new to the genre, but everything it does it does very well - especially liked the main character's partnership with a man he doesn't quite trust. Oh, and not really a book recommendation, but if you enjoy The Walking Dead you really must play the game, which is far superior to the TV show (and I say that as a fan of the show). It's the kind of game even people who don't play games can enjoy, since most of it involves interacting with your fellow survivors and managing relationships, and it has by far one of the best and most heart-wrenching stories I've ever found in a game. Available on all iOS platforms too.
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# ¿ Jan 18, 2014 04:09 |
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regulargonzalez posted:Huxley's Brave New World is great. Orwell's 1984 gets all the mass media love (and it's legitimately good too) but I like BNW better. Sadly, our society is combining the worst elements of the two (constant survellience + continual feed of entertainment to distract and inure us from poo poo we should actually care about) For my money Animal Farm is the far superior and more enjoyable book to 1984. The second is one of those books that is really important to society, and needed to be written, but is actually a tedious drag to read.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2014 02:54 |
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Really? The Gunslinger I remember as being a relatively simple and easy to follow book. Was it the prose or the structure? I do vaguely remember a flashback sequence but don't recall it being distracting. It's common opinion, even amongst fans, that the series goes horribly downhill towards the end. Like, off-the-wall crazy nonsensical poo poo.
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# ¿ Jan 20, 2014 14:12 |
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End Of Worlds posted:Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest books and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, in no particular order. I loved Cooper and Rodda when I was around that age. Rodda's "Rowan" series is pretty great as well for young readers.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 07:15 |
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End Of Worlds posted:I think you're confused on this one. Monster Island was the one in which a bog mummy uses wizard-zombie powers to fight a group of Somali pirates who have come to NYC to find AIDS medication for their queen or something. Also the primary antagonist is another zombie wizard named, I believe, Gary. Maybe I'm looking back with rose-tinted glasses because I read it way back when it was on the internet and I was still a teenager, but I quite liked Monster Island and Monster Nation... a lot of the stuff about Egyptian bog mummies etc. sounds stupid in description but I thought it worked while I was reading it. At least I did at the time. Nation is definitely the better book, being a prequel dealing with the slow collapse across the US. Regarding post-apocalyptic stuff in general, no recommendation is complete without any John Wyndham, especially Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes. Chas McGill posted:Don't get too hung up on the order of the Discworld books. There are a number of mini-series with continuity in the cast of the characters etc, but a lot of them are pretty much standalone. So, skip the Colour of Magic and try something like Small Gods (Discworld theology is really interesting) or Guards!, Guards! (detective pastiche with one of the series best characters), or Mort (an introduction to DEATH, who is probably the most iconic Discworld character). Apparently Pratchett himself recommended Guards! Guards! as the best entry point to the series. I agree about Mort, though, I think that's the first book where he really hit his stride. Reading the first three books is something you should go back later and do; it's interesting to see how the series developed but they're not actually very good. The first two in particular are basically just a send-up of Dungeons & Dragons, which is weird to look back on 30 books down the line when he's writing what I'd consider to be truly great literature.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 03:48 |
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Kea posted:Hey goons hope to get a recommendation on my next book to read. I am a huge fan of urban fantasy books in general but honestly theres a very good chance I have read any that might be suggested. Im also a fan of fantasy and sci fi in general and would like something a little on the lighter side if at all possible. No recommendations of GRR martins stuff (Hated it) pulpy fiction and sci fi is definately up my alley. For lighter scifi try some of John Varley's stuff, particularly Steel Beach and The Golden Globe. The latter is probably one of my favourite novels of all time, about an actor/con man making his way from Pluto to Luna for a production of King Lear, while being chased by an unkillable mafia hitman.
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# ¿ Apr 11, 2014 02:49 |
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Could somebody recommend me a good history book on England/Britain/the UK, ideally only one book or a couple of volumes? Not one of those massive Oxford 12-part series or whatever, I don't have the patience for that. Obviously it would have to be pretty concise/limited but that's OK. It would also be good if it assumes no background knowledge on the part of the reader (I'm not British). I guess it goes without saying but I'd also like it to be... good. I read Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore a few years ago, which is a history of early Australia, and he had a fantastic, almost novelistic or authorial way of writing which I really enjoyed. I'd love something like that.
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# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 20:32 |
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What's a good place to start with Graham Greene?
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# ¿ Nov 25, 2014 11:01 |
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Schurik posted:I'm getting back into reading after 6 or 7 years of not being able to focus due to various circumstances, and I'd appreciate some general ideas on where to start/continue. I love me some Pratchett and Adams, got a bit into RR Martin, never turn down some King, on the literary side I'm into Dostoevsky, Sartre and Hesse, and when it somes to genre fiction in general I love character-based sci-fi and all types of fantasy. There's a bunch more but I thought I'd generalize heavily and list some stuff everyone knows. I speak german fluently so anything goes there, too. Just throw some of your favorites my way, I'm open to anything. Character based sci-fi: The Golden Globe by John Varley, fairly light-hearted romp about a conman/actor trying to get from Pluto to Luna for a starring role as King Lear while pursued by an unkillable hitman. Best narratorial voice ever. Reminds me of Pratchett in the sense that he has a deep understanding of what makes people tick. Also the first two Hyperion books by Dan Simmons. For character-based/literary fantasy I'd recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, widely agreed to be one of the best fantasy novels of the last 15 years, and I've just recently read and loved the first two Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake - really, really unique and "literary," for want of a better word. If you never turn down King and haven't read everything he's written, then here's my opinion on his best books as someone who thinks he's extremely talented and capable of both brilliant novels and utter trash: The Long Walk, The Mist, the beginning of the Dark Tower series before it all goes downhill (but it's still worth reading just for those first few books).
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2015 14:00 |
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Rollofthedice posted:I understand that this is comically vague, but - is there any good fantasy or sci-fi books that are just really loving beautifully written? I mean like Guy Gavriel Kay or Le Guin on a good day. Stuff that makes you pause on a sentence and just marvel at how great it is. I have a lot of love for Lions of Al-Rassan and A Wizard of Earthsea, and wish I could find books in the genre that are as evocative. I'm iffy on the books as a whole but there are some absolutely beautiful moments of writing in TH White's The Once and Future King.
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2015 10:18 |
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A Tin Of Beans posted:Read it, and it's ... okay, but a little - objectifying/fetishizing of the culture, almost? I don't know, the main character is a white dude who has a thing for a prostitute GMO robot girl who can't sweat or whatever and it's kind of. Ehhh. There were a ton of cool ideas and decent prose in it but the weird-rear end treatment of the female lead was frustrating. I haven't read it yet but I remember a reviewer talking about how it opens with a description of how exotic the dragonfruit it is... Anyway, you did mention writers just to look out for, so, I haven't read any of his fiction yet, but Vajra Chandrasekera is a Sri Lankan scifi writer who's made his way onto my TBR list from the strength of some of his essays and articles I've read, particularly this blog post about the drive for diversity and the term "people of colour" in the SFF world - http://vajra.me/2015/04/15/margin/
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# ¿ Aug 21, 2015 16:55 |
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Mira posted:Not really expecting a response on this since it's so specific, but any good books on the history of Zainichi Koreans in Japan? Any fictional books that feature Koreans living in Japan? There are some marginal Zainichi Korean characters (or at least one, IIRC) in Number9dream by David Mitchell. Not a big part of the story though.
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# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 16:30 |
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Hedrigall posted:Nerd alert for this question, but I'm enjoying the hell out of Wil Wheaton's RPG campaign show Titansgrave (if you like his other Youtube show, Tabletop, go watch this one!) and I especially dig the world they created for it, and I want to read novels set in worlds similar to it. Doesn't check every box but you may enjoy the comic Prophet, spearheaded by Brandon Graham - https://grubstreethack.wordpress.com/2014/09/19/book-review-prophet-remission/
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 18:42 |
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The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is very good for that too.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 07:32 |
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Jack the Lad posted:Can anyone recommend other books which feature characters applying modern/future knowledge to a low-tech setting/period? If you can get past the incredibly-cheesy-but-treated-seriously premise of "D&D players sucked into the world!" in Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series, it's actually a pretty well-written and compelling series of books in which people from the real world introduce modern stuff like gunpowder, steam engines and democracy into a generic high fantasy setting over the course of about 25 years.
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# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 18:38 |
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Ryoji posted:Any good books about a human against nature or maybe about a man/woman trying to survive in a foreign environment? I quite liked Alive, which is a non-fiction account by Paul Piers Read of the 1970s Andes plane crash. What everybody knows about it is that the survivors turned to cannibalism, but it was a huge long ordeal with so many more aspects to it than that. Also since you mentioned Tunnel in the Sky, I also loved Chris Beckett's Dark Eden which is about the 500+ inbred descendants of a pair of astronauts who crashed on a rogue planet of eternal night with geothermal trees and horrible alien wildlife.
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# ¿ Oct 11, 2015 11:23 |
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In terms of books I enjoyed as a kid and would like to read to my own kid one day, I loved The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. (Yes, they made a series of increasingly poo poo movies about it, but the book is solid.) Anything by Philip Reeve is also good, particularly the Mortal Engines series. And I think I was around 12 or 13 when I first read and loved Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (may be called The Golden Compass in some countries.) And age 12 is definitely about the right time to start getting into Terry Pratchett. The Johnny books are YA ones he wrote in the '90s, but more modern ones you'll be likely to find in a store are the Tiffany Aching series - haven't read them myself yet, but people I trust rave about them. (And if you can find them, I absolutely adored the YA Bromeliad trilogy - Truckers, Diggers and Wings.)
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# ¿ Oct 12, 2015 17:01 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:27 |
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anilEhilated posted:Gibson's Pattern Recognition? Doesn't go too hard on the dystopian slip you seem to be itching for but you can see the seeds of it in the corporate interests subduing what's regarded as art - definitely hits the pre-cyberpunk vibe. I've always thought of Gibson as an author with a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic outlook on the future. Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of the few future depictions of London I can think of in which it's not a dystopian ruin, and although I haven't read it yet, a lot of people said The Peripheral depicts a future which in certain ways is horrific but in other ways is a paradise. Which I think is probably how someone from the 1800s would view the modern world.
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# ¿ Oct 20, 2015 08:32 |