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Fiendish Dr. Wu posted:I have Consider Phlebas queue'd up for my next read. Working on Fall of Hyperion now, and really enjoying it. Consider Phlebas is exceptional. Along with Use of Weapons and Excession it's among my favorite Culture books. (My favorite Banks SF book, Feersum Endjinn, isn't a Culture book; it's a standalone but is well worth reading.) Also, has anyone read Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha series? I just finished the first book, God's War, and had mixed feelings about it; the world building is fantastic -- it's set on a world dominated by Islamic sects who are able to work insect magic (!!!) -- but I found the pacing to be somewhat off. And as for books that I'm excited about, I just read an astounding short story collection by John Langan called The Wide Carnivorous Sky. Langan uses metafictional tropes that are usually reserved for literary fiction (eg, writing in the second person; constantly breaking the 4th wall; recursive stories within stories; etc) to bring new life to old horror tropes such as zombies, The Exorcist, vampires, Lovecraft homage, etc. He also has very good characterization and attention to detail -- highly recommended if you like horror fiction.
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Jun 16, 2013 22:04
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Slavvy posted:Can anyone recommend me hard-ish sf with at least halfway decent characterisation? I highly recommend Peter Watts for this. He's a marine biologist by training, so his work has a lot of really fascinating hard-sf extrapolation in it (in fact, he's the only hard sf author I can think of who tends to compress his ideas to the point that I wish one of his books was actually expanded to two or three books), but his books are also firmly rooted in character; in fact the characters are central to his books rather than ancillary ornaments as tends to be the case in most hard sf. As for starting points into his work I would recommend either Starfish (the beginning of his deliciously grim Rifters trilogy) or Blindsight. His books are available for free on his website here, along with various pieces of short fiction that are also well worth reading. Smapti fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 17:08
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Azathoth posted:Take a look at Monument by Ian Graham. It's pretty dark, but succeeds in telling a self-contained story in a single book. It isn't well-known, but the author tells a story that most other authors would stretch to a trilogy and does so without feeling like it was compressed. Yes! I second this. Monument has one of the best antiheros as a main character I've ever read. This isn't an "antihero" in scare quotes like in other genre novels (eg a gritty and morally flawed but still fundamentally decent person) -- no, the main character in Monument truly is despicable, which is a very difficult thing to pull off; but Graham does a fantastic job of it. And his plotting and world-building is top-notch. If I recall correctly this is Graham's only genre work, which is a real shame.
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Jun 18, 2013 00:07
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