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Decius posted:Who are a major plot point for the rest of the series, although without direct appearance - or nearly so. These will be about Geary having to struggle with deciding to take over, right? And the other will be about the aliens? I think these will be awesome plot threads, but I worry that if he moves as slowly on those as he did this one it'll be 20 more books before it's over, not much will have happened.
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May 14, 2010 22:59
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Astroman posted:These will be about Geary having to struggle with deciding to take over, right? And the other will be about the aliens? I think these will be awesome plot threads, but I worry that if he moves as slowly on those as he did this one it'll be 20 more books before it's over, not much will have happened. I have contracts for two follow-on series. One will be called The Lost Fleet - Beyond the Frontier. These will continue to follow Black Jack and his companions as they deal with events surrounding VICTORIOUS. The other series (The Phoenix Stras) is set in a formerly Syndic star system as the people there cope with the ongoing collapse of the Syndicate Worlds.
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May 15, 2010 05:38
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fermun posted:This is what he says about them on his website: That sounds cool as hell.
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May 15, 2010 17:57
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I kind of hope he turns it into a solid series and gives up on the dimestore serial format.
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May 15, 2010 21:52
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USMC_Karl posted:Yeah, after you read the first two or three books you'll notice there is a really set formula that Campbell follows each book. Velius posted:Weber's Honorverse is horrible tripe, but the battles in the novels are actually pretty entertaining. If his characters weren't so ridiculous it'd be a lot more tolerable. He also has a duology of "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option' which are also horribly written and characterized, but the books are 95% straight up battles that end up being pretty entertaining.
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May 16, 2010 01:10
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I swear that Campbell has some sort of magnetic poetry set for writing his stuff. Drinking games with these books are ruinous.
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May 16, 2010 03:14
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Somehow I'm just a sucker for his stuff though. He lacks the punch and brilliance of say, John Scalzi, but I still like him so much more than other authors who can get a bit repetitive.
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May 16, 2010 03:58
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Astroman posted:Somehow I'm just a sucker for his stuff though. He lacks the punch and brilliance of say, John Scalzi, but I still like him so much more than other authors who can get a bit repetitive. Yeah, I definitely get all his new stuff. It's more "see it for its shortcomings" than "don't read it". I heartily recommend his books if you like Mil-SF just a little bit. John Geary is a great character as are some of the secondary officers. His battle scenes are easily worth ignoring the few flaws Campbell has.
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May 16, 2010 04:40
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One bit of space opera that hasn't been mentioned yet is Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake. It suffers a little from a Stross-esque focus on ideas rather than characters, but as a Scot I'm rather partial to the thought of a Glaswegian gang controlling a galaxy-spanning wormhole network and making money by thieving post-human relics.
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May 17, 2010 14:06
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coffeetable posted:One bit of space opera that hasn't been mentioned yet is Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake. It suffers a little from a Stross-esque focus on ideas rather than characters, but as a Scot I'm rather partial to the thought of a Glaswegian gang controlling a galaxy-spanning wormhole network and making money by thieving post-human relics. I read that a few months ago. It's fantastic.
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May 17, 2010 17:23
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Anyone read anything by Peter F. Hamilton? I'm almost done reading The Dreaming Void (never read any of his other books) and the subplot is about ten times as interesting as the main plot  I find myself trudging through the main story chapters just to get to the awesome subplot story chapters.
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May 20, 2010 04:06
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I finally read House of Suns after hearing nothing but glowing reviews, and I was not disappointed. Really, really good book.
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May 20, 2010 06:37
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Hung Yuri posted:Anyone read anything by Peter F. Hamilton? Hamilton is an idea writer who works in a scene-based structure with a heavy emphasis on the visual and the technical. He writes a lot of cool bits and strings them together in a reasonably good story. Besides the seriously :facepalm: bits, the Night's Dawn books are incredibly cool adventure stories with compelling visuals. He's also a master of slapping a model number on a gadget to give all the tech he pulls out of his rear end a veneer of authenticity. It's like if Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Anaïs Nin and Larry Niven collaborated on a series. Those complaining about the sex scenes should remember that he's at least throwing together incredibly hot people (thanks to biosculp and good genes) working to save the galaxy (it's melodrama but it works). There's maybe too much of it, but I'm entirely content with my mental image of Ione. The Commonwealth novels manage to be very intense thrillers set in what should be a nearly-sterile utopia (we see some people who are broke, but no poverty). He runs a lot of characters through a very complex situation and generates an interesting plot made up of a whole bunch of disparate pieces. It still has a lot of softcore action and it's still mostly the beautiful people. I think he made this series a bit darker than Night's Dawn not to be edgy, but to be a bit more meaningful. It works, more of the characters have depth and realistic flaws instead of dramatic flaws. It's also a very cool setting. The future society is a bit bland, this is the first Commonwealth-wide event that wasn't covered in the society pages. Well, a few First Contact situations, but that's more cultural than societal. A few planets cut off or having a regime change forced does not a turbulent path make. There are main characters who were born in the 20th century. But it works because it's consistent enough, if completely vague in a number of important details, and has cool stuff in it. I hope I like the latest trilogy more than you did. I haven't picked it up yet because of something Hamilton is all too good at: cliffhangers. He ends installments in the most awful places. Dire poo poo goes down and the book ends before you can say "oh sit". After Night's Dawn I don't start one of his series until he's bloody well done with it. I laughed my rear end off at the motherfucking waterfall into space when I could just pick up the next book and keep going. I hope he hasn't toned things down too much, I like Hamilton best when he's trying to make your head pop with poo poo like "Al Capone has a personal spaceship" and "flying a glider through a terrifying alien hurricane to get launched into space over a big fuckoff mountain". As long as I keep thinking "this would make a great movie" every time I finish a chapter I'll keep reading his books.
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May 20, 2010 07:43
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I probably like it a lot less, since I wasn't aware that this book was the first in a series in the same universe as other books he's written (Pandora's Star, Judas Unchained) so going into reading the book I'm basically thinking "what the gently caress is a u-shadow" and such. Of course, it seems all the relevant technological back story was in those books. This book, even the main story was highly imaginative, but I found it much harder to just accept some of the technology he creates in this story rather than the subplot. Without getting too spoilery, the subplot feels more like an archaic fantasy (which is noted once or twice by the actual characters within the book) and has elements that are easier to relate to that don't require a leap of faith into how the world looks. The part I didn't really like was the fact that the main plot covered several different characters at any one time, perhaps to show how each of the different factions and such were handling the universe that was going on outside of The Void, but most times it simply wasn't as interesting as the magical setting he writes every other chapter.
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May 20, 2010 09:26
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Hung Yuri posted:Anyone read anything by Peter F. Hamilton?
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May 20, 2010 12:44
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The alternate title for The Temporal Void is Edeard Tears poo poo Up.
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May 20, 2010 14:11
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Tanith posted:The alternate title for The Temporal Void is Edeard Tears poo poo Up. I feel like re-reading the first two Commonwealth books now, though this time I think I'll skip the Silfen subplot.
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May 20, 2010 16:03
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lilbean posted:Pretty sure the subplot becomes the real plot (or merges with it) if we're thinking of the same thing. Give the second book a read for sure if you liked those sections. That makes me feel so much better then, I was worrying about getting the second book only to hear more Advancer vs Higher vs ANA dribble "oh my god the factions are waving their new technology dicks around  "
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May 20, 2010 22:18
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Trig Discipline posted:I finally read House of Suns after hearing nothing but glowing reviews, and I was not disappointed. Really, really good book. I really enjoyed House of Suns. I actually imported the UK version because I couldn't wait for the US version to be released. Speaking of which, is there a specific reason (other than we like money, and American's don't like the letter u) that UK and US books have different editions? I'm doing most of my reading now on the Nook, and while the nook is awesome for impulse purchases, the fact that I'm limited to the B&N library and Google Books means that there is a LOT of awesome, pulpy SciFi that I just can't get. The Star Wars books? Nope. Those Elizabeth Books? Other than the Vatta series, nope. Anything that's slightly obscure SciFi made before 1996 or so? Nada. It's frustrating.
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May 21, 2010 21:37
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Hung Yuri posted:That makes me feel so much better then, I was worrying about getting the second book only to hear more Advancer vs Higher vs ANA dribble "oh my god the factions are waving their new technology dicks around Without getting too spoilery, things really pick up in the second book. The faction subplot doesn't go away, but the rivalries escalate and Hamilton focuses more on how that tension influences the other subplots than just describing them and their tech in the first book. I don't remember the precise timeline, but the Commonwealth trilogy took place about 400 years from present day, so tech was still easy to understand and aside from a few surprises like inter-planetary wormholes, everything felt like the natural progression of current technologies. The Dreaming Void takes place about 1000 years after Commonwealth, so I think he really went out of his way to explain to readers what the new technological and political state of society is. Personally I was incredibly interested in the ANA factions since that's where most of my favorite characters from the last trilogy were sitting, most notably Gore Burnelli and his daughter. mllaneza posted:I hope I like the latest trilogy more than you did. I haven't picked it up yet because of something Hamilton is all too good at: cliffhangers. That was my intention at first too, but I couldn't resist and read the first two this fall. Boy did I regret that; the cliffhanger is less literal this time around, but it's so much stronger. Hung Yuri, if I were in your position I'd hold off on getting the next book until Hamilton's done with the trilogy and check out the Commonwealth saga in the meantime. About a third of the significant characters are really established in that series, and a lot of the tension and mystery came from which powerful characters and factions were missing, but hinted at in the Void trilogy. Sumac fucked around with this message at 03:20 on May 22, 2010 |
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May 22, 2010 03:17
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Hrm, it comes out in the end of august, so perhaps I'll do that. I've got other books to read anyways.
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May 22, 2010 03:33
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For some reason I got to thinking of an old book I read and had a strange desire to find it or something like it, except I can't remember the author or title. Hopefully someone can help me, although I seem to remember it being rather unremarkable in the long run. I don't remember much of the later books, I know believe it was several books long, but the first book was about this kid and his family getting capture by space pirates and it was mostly about how the kid got into this zero-g duel with one of the pirate crew members and won. After that they made him a member of the crew and he went on to try and secure his family while steadily working up the ranks. I don't think he managed to get them all, and eventually in the later books he more or less took over the whole operation and it became almost a independent nation that he was operating. I think the final book or two wasn't even focused on him, but his sister or children.
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May 23, 2010 01:54
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nessin posted:For some reason I got to thinking of an old book I read and had a strange desire to find it or something like it, except I can't remember the author or title. Hopefully someone can help me, although I seem to remember it being rather unremarkable in the long run. I'm really hoping you aren't referring to Piers Anthony's "Bio of a Space Tyrant" series. He's a great author when you're 11 and love hearing about sex and and violence and high drama, but holy poo poo does his style not age well. The first one is subtitled "Refugee" I think.
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May 23, 2010 04:16
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ThaGhettoJew posted:I'm really hoping you aren't referring to Piers Anthony's "Bio of a Space Tyrant" series. He's a great author when you're 11 and love hearing about sex and and violence and high drama, but holy poo poo does his style not age well. The first one is subtitled "Refugee" I think. Sounds about right. I mentioned I remembered it being unremarkable, and I was a teenager when I read it. Besides, I didn't even remember it having sex/violence/high drama. I just remembered it being something about Space Pirates and I've been playing a game lately with Space Pirates in it, so it sparked my memory. Edit: Hell if you can recommend a better book about space pirates, go for it. I'm just on a space pirate kick. nessin fucked around with this message at 04:32 on May 23, 2010 |
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May 23, 2010 04:27
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nessin posted:Sounds about right. I mentioned I remembered it being unremarkable, and I was a teenager when I read it. Besides, I didn't even remember it having sex/violence/high drama. I just remembered it being something about Space Pirates and I've been playing a game lately with Space Pirates in it, so it sparked my memory. Nearly everything Anthony writes is YA-level titillation, jokey wordplay, and mary-sues with babby's first moral conflicts. Great for puberty, not so much later. The Space Tyrant series in particular dips pretty fetishistic at times, IIRC. The first thing that comes to mind even remotely space-piratical is the first Miles Vorkosigan book or so by Lois McMaster Bujold, "The Warrior's Apprentice" and then maybe "The Vor Game". The main character cons his way into hijacking a mercenary fleet and then a war. There is a moderate amount of swashbucklery, but it's more about fast talk and interpersonal relationships of various kinds. The series as a whole is Space Opera as all hell and pretty easy to read, although it does trend somewhat beta-male.
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May 23, 2010 06:01
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For shits and giggles, I just reread the Temporal Void and I forgot the absolute best part of the book: Gore Burnelli at the end. I'm so psyched for the end of the summer to see how he concludes this.
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May 24, 2010 19:05
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Tanith posted:For shits and giggles, I just reread the Temporal Void and I forgot the absolute best part of the book: Gore Burnelli at the end. I'm so psyched for the end of the summer to see how he concludes this. While I enjoyed the book, I do kind of have an issue with that aspect of it. Namely (spoilers?) that there's really no frame of reference or reason for folks like us as to why this dude's force fields are puny and laughable, while that guy has the bestest force fields ever and he can punch right through the first guy's force field and tear out his heart. And meanwhile the alien guys have really terrible force fields except those other aliens just totally had better ones. I mean, part of it's that it's ultratech, so actual descriptions are either meaningless or silly (huzzah, I have class XII shields, villain!), but there's a fair amount of actual implications to the various tech levels and availabilities. I guess my issue really is that for a sci-fi series, there's effectively no in-universe justification or explanation for any of it, be it that this guy has really good power sources or whathaveyou, it's just that this guy's gold colored force field is totally hardcore.
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May 25, 2010 00:59
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The impression I got was the rich elites dominated anyone else because they were rich and elite and only rich and elite people are elite enough to be rich enough to be just that much better than anyone else.
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May 25, 2010 01:53
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nessin posted:Hell if you can recommend a better book about space pirates, go for it. I'm just on a space pirate kick. The early Miles Vorkosigan books are reasonably space-piratey. Warriors Apprentice is nearly YA in its unlikely cooincident meetings, but is space opera and adventury as hell, and does involve stealing several rocket ships. You can pick up the compilation "Young Miles" and get the first two and a half books of 12.
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May 25, 2010 23:10
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Slo-Tek posted:You can pick up the compilation "Young Miles" and get the first two and a half books of 12. Wrong. You pick up "Cordelia's Honor" and get the first two of 12. Miles is nothing without his family background. And Sergeant Bothari. His stuff in Warrior's Apprentice lacks vast amount of depth without the preceding books.
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May 25, 2010 23:44
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mllaneza posted:Wrong. You pick up "Cordelia's Honor" and get the first two of 12. Miles is nothing without his family background. And Sergeant Bothari. His stuff in Warrior's Apprentice lacks vast amount of depth without the preceding books. I like them in roughly the order they were written and published, rather than in universe-chronological order. Shards of Honor and Barrayar are better than Warriors Apprentice and Vor Game. So reading the somewhat mature-themed and psychological prequels before you read the space pirating and hijinx books makes things seem a little uneven, to me.
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May 26, 2010 17:28
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Slo-Tek posted:I like them in roughly the order they were written and published, rather than in universe-chronological order. Shards of Honor and Barrayar are better than Warriors Apprentice and Vor Game. So reading the somewhat mature-themed and psychological prequels before you read the space pirating and hijinx books makes things seem a little uneven, to me. Shards of Honor is actually the first chronologically with, if memory serves, Ethan of Athos as second.
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May 26, 2010 17:51
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Comstar posted:The impression I got was the rich elites dominated anyone else because they were rich and elite and only rich and elite people are elite enough to be rich enough to be just that much better than anyone else. Exactly. Look at your home "theater" system, and then look at Paul Allen's. Now fast-forward 1500 years.
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Jun 1, 2010 03:33
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Comstar posted:The impression I got was the rich elites dominated anyone else because they were rich and elite and only rich and elite people are elite enough to be rich enough to be just that much better than anyone else. That's what I took from it too. Even back in the Commonwealth saga there wasn't any significant central government pushing military research, only private dynasties and great families, so it makes sense for one of their patriarchs to have access to exotic wetwiring developed for his personal, exclusive use.
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Jun 1, 2010 03:55
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I just finished reading the four Virga books by Karl Schroeder. What an amazing series - I suppose from a literary point of view they're not exceptional, but just the creativity and the amount of detail and really unbelievable creations in that series blew me away. It's like if Larry Niven, Stephen Baxter, and Robert L. Forward had pooled their imaginations. Basically the Virga series is set in a giant habitat called Virga, a fullerene shell the size of Earth orbiting Vega, within which is a zero-G habitable environment dotted with hundreds of fusion reactor suns, with each sun powering the ecosystem of an independent nation. At the center is a larger fusion sun that creates circulating air currents throughout Virga, but as a side effect of its operation causes high-end electronics not to function within the sphere. As the nations drift around on the circulation air cells they are drawn into conflicts with each other. The first three books are, at least outwardly, largely about the struggle between the nation of Slipstream, the nation of Aerie which it conquered and is trying to liberate itself, and their common enemy, the totalitarian Falcon Formation. But as the series progresses that struggle is increasingly tied into the revelations that the reason the central sun causes disruption to electronic equipment is to save Virga from "Artificial Nature", a transhumanist/AI amalgamation that absorbed all other human societies in the galaxy and is trying to subvert Virga as well, and in the fourth book other post-human (and potentially extraterrestrial) civilizations also residing in similar isolated enclaves make contact with the Virgans and attempt to form an alliance against Artificial Nature. Does anyone know if he's planning on continuing the series? The last book ended on what seemed like an obvious setup for a continuation, but none of the other books really follow on from the previous one so it seems like it would be a bit out of place.
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Jun 3, 2010 23:06
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I just finished Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds, and I have to say it's my least favorite of his books by far. The main plot is great, but the two main characters are both massively unlikeable and constantly bicker like middle school girls.
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Jun 3, 2010 23:12
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Chairman Capone posted:I just finished reading the four Virga books by Karl Schroeder. What an amazing series - I suppose from a literary point of view they're not exceptional, but just the creativity and the amount of detail and really unbelievable creations in that series blew me away. It's like if Larry Niven, Stephen Baxter, and Robert L. Forward had pooled their imaginations. Okay, this is making me reconsider. I was very deeply disappointed by book one - I thought the characters were all cardboard and the writing pretty weak. Do the later books still have Hayden as a main character? Did you notice other differences between the first and later books?
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Jun 4, 2010 01:16
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Guess what I got today? 
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Jun 4, 2010 03:03
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onefish posted:Okay, this is making me reconsider. I was very deeply disappointed by book one - I thought the characters were all cardboard and the writing pretty weak. Do the later books still have Hayden as a main character? Did you notice other differences between the first and later books? Hayden is a second-tier character in the fourth book, and isn't in the second or third at all. Minor character spoilers: of characters from the first book, Lady Fanning is the only character who returns in the second book, Hayden is the only character who returns in the fourth book, and there are a few characters who return in the third book: mainly Admiral Fanning, the Slipstream ambassador, the kid bosun, and cameos at the beginning and end by Lady Fanning. I do think the quality of the books increases as the series goes on, and they all have different focuses. The second book is set entirely on an ancient habitat cylinder that is now occupied by dozens of feudal states the size of an acre or less and is mainly Lady Fanning engaging in a lot of subterfuge and intrigue among all the pocket kingdoms; the third book is maybe most similar to the first book, as it involves the resolution of the Slipstream-Aerie-Falcon plots, but is more interesting when it explores the politics of other nations (Falcon Formation is run by a press corps whose purpose has evolved to where reporters control the state and their purpose is to conceal news, and there is a nation whose populace is controlled by regulated indoctrination of fairy tales). The fourth one is more of a standalone from the earlier three, and focuses more on the conflict with and nature of Artificial Nature, which for me was the most interesting part of the third book also, along with the revelation of details on Virga's past and the other intelligences outside Virga. There were a few parts in the sequels that I wasn't too fond of, though. The third and fourth books introduce a nation whose ancestors were genetically-engineered to resemble anime characters (big eyes, small mouths, etc) and the fourth book is set in a nation run by a party obviously supposed to represent the American religious right and anti-intellectual populism, although I will say that while it is hamfisted, it was still done in an interesting way all citizens have to read the newspaper and mark off on little boxes whether they agree with or disagree with stories, the newspapers are collected and tallied, and the replies determine the official ideology and policies of the nation and society.
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Jun 4, 2010 03:10
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Astroman posted:He sets himself up for both new storylines he's planning on following in this, by which I mean MY FULFILLMENT 
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Jun 4, 2010 03:53
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