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Moose King posted:The medieval sentient hive mind dog packs were more interesting than any of the space stuff in that book. I've heard A Deepness in the Sky is good too, but I've also heard it's about that grey ginger dude and he was awful and dumb, so I haven't read it. A Deepness in the Sky is pretty badass and describes a plausible non-FTL interstellar culture, liked it more than A Fire Upon the Deep (the hive mind dogs really were the best part of that). @OP In the same vein (plausible non-FTL interstellar cultures) there's House of Suns from Alastair Reynolds. His Revelation Space universe is kind of meh but The Prefect is pretty interesting. Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect - read it  nowChina Mieville's Embassytown - probably my favorite book from my favorite writer Iain M. Banks' The Culture is loving awesome, start with Player of Games, other high points are Look to Windward, Excession and Surface Detail. Most people also love Use of Weapons but personally I wouldn't rank it along the others I mentioned. Frank Herbert's Dune is amazing though most people would recommend you read only the first one. Those people are idiots. If however you're given a choice between loving a freshly deceased Ebola corpse and reading any of Brian Herbert's "prequels" go with corpse, you won't regret it. Everybody always mention Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (which is very good) but no one seems to know Fiasco which in my opinion is even better. War of the Worlds should be an obvious classical choice, The Time Machine is also cool. Personally Isaac Asimov did nothing for me. Maybe it was because of all the hype about it over the years but when I finally got around to read the Foundation series it felt pretty bland. I'll just name drop a few more titles: Contact, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Blindsight, Altered Carbon (the whole series is interesting), Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ e: Hyperion/Endymion are nice but I think The Culture has ruined evil AIs for me. MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 15:51
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Claven666 posted:The Left hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin is also pretty drat amazing poo poo how could I forget The Lathe of Heaven and especially The Dispossessed which is fantastic.
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Aug 5, 2014 19:06
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Neurosis posted:i didn't mind the left hand of darkness but the dispossessed annoyed the poo poo out of me I'm sure plenty of soviet geniuses dismissed western economics as well, being brilliant does not entail supporting capitalism. Given the character's upbringing I'd find it much more offensive if he suddenly "saw the light" and converted to a capitalist mode of thinking. Of course everything would look dreadful to him. And considering the way she tore down the utopian anarchist society by showing ways by which even a society with no private property and complete egalitarianism people would still get on power trips, loving others for "money" (in their case, prestige), censorship, pressure to conform and intellectual oppression you can't really say she was particularly biased against capitalism. It was more a case of everything is hosed everywhere and there will always be people on top no matter what. Those people on top will gently caress you over, resistance is ultimately futile and nothing you can do will change that. Everything is terrible forever. It teased you with this apparently functional egalitarian social model and then you scratch under the surface and *nope* it's horrible too. I loved it. Then again I also love 1984 and that's even more depressing. MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 23:36
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Callick posted:Gonna recommend all of Alastair Reynolds. The Revelation Space series, the one off books (Pushing Ice, House of Suns and Century Rain are some of my favorites), and Blue Remembered Earth are all utterly fantastic. I've been reading all of his books this year and having completed almost all of them I'm sad that I won't have any more of his material to read. He's quickly become my favorite sci-fi author of all time. Alastair Reynolds suffers a bit from throwing too many poo poo into the pile and then not being able to get himself out of the mess and that was particularly notorious in Revelation Space. He just kept pilling up crazy stuff without much concern for how to tie it all up and by the time you get to the middle of the last book you start to realize it isn't going to end up well at all. It's been several years since I read it but I remember thinking at several points as I was reading it "why would the Inhibitors make a plan this stupid and convoluted". And then he just kept adding poorly developed and explained layers on top of that. We gonna contact these Shadow guys, they are our only salvation from the Inhibitors, surely the ominous name couldn't possibly hint at anything. Oh poo poo no, that wasn't any good, we should instead contact the Nestbuilders, these guys finally seem on the level. Jump 500 years into the future "...and everyone was unintentionally hosed".  Don't get me wrong, there were some amazing set pieces and concepts in the series. The stuff with the generation ship on book two was really interesting, I could read a whole book about that and everything to do with the ghost ship exploration was really tense and creepy. Then you get to the reveal of that and welp  .Things gradually descend into bad weird and I feel it's because he didn't really have any idea where he wanted to go with the story and then couldn't wrap it up. The stand alone books (in which I'm including the The Prefect, prequel to Revelation Space) come off much better probably because they had to be wrapped up by the end of the book but while Pushing Ice and Century Rain also had great premises and several cool ideas they kind of fizzled out by the end. You didn't mention Terminal World, didn't like it or didn't read it? MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 02:18
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I've been considering reading some of his stuff but zombie Al Capone from space sounded like a profoundly retarded concept that didn't inspire much confidence in his other work. Judging from my posts in this thread would you advise me any of his trilogies in particular?
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Aug 6, 2014 03:19
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Second Variety is also good e: Automatic Retard posted:Try Fallen Dragon as a taster I suppose.
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Aug 6, 2014 04:24
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Neurosis posted:my recollection is that, while the anarchist society was shown to have some flaws at a systemic level, most of the individuals from the society were depicted positively due to their upbringing in the free love anarchist society while there were very few (no?) positive depictions of anyone in the Western society who all came across like thinly veiled caricatures in line with how the 'FIRST AGAINST THE WALL' types think about people It's been years since I read it but from what I remember the part of the story that takes place on the anarchist society revolves almost exclusively around the protagonist getting hosed over by his "superiors". I don't remember the capitalist society being depicted in a particularly outrageous way, it was your standard "Victorian" classist based society where the proles got their noggins bashed in if they dared protest the status-quo. It's not like such societies haven't existed. The reason you don't get to meet many good people in the capitalist society was simply that the protagonist was kept isolated from the common people until he managed to escape near the end of the book. It's not that everyone was bad ,it's just that the only people he was allowed to have contact with where either the ruling class or secret service agents there to keep him in check. e: In short, it's obvious that the book was written from a leftist perspective but it came off as pretty honest. It didn't pretend the leftist utopia was paradise, on the contrary it gave a pessimistic view of it. MeLKoR fucked around with this message at 12:46 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 12:41
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SnowblindFatal posted:The movie is absolutely magnificent! Watch it! Part 2 of the movie (they had to split it for some reason I've forgotten) is in the related videos. Stalker is one of the most best movies I ever saw but it is an incredibly russian movie, definitely not everyone will enjoy it the same.  Jim Barris posted:There's nothing I love more then watching a eastern European man lie in a tepid pond while reciting poems. Stalker comes highly recommended if you share this feeling. I mean technically that is something that happens but you can't just put it like that. 
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Aug 7, 2014 06:07
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WEEDLORD CHEETO posted:I really didn't enjoy the first two culture novels, do they get better
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Aug 8, 2014 01:12
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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.  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 |
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Aug 16, 2014 13:48
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Kilmers Elbow posted:So, about a third of the way through Hyperion and....it's OK. 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 |
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Aug 28, 2014 00:51
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SnowblindFatal posted:Stanislaw Lem - Solaris I'll add Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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Sep 2, 2014 12:53
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