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nessin
Feb 7, 2010

Evil Fluffy posted:

I’m curious about this as well. The first book ending was not what I expected but it was interesting. I think the reason for the collapse early in the book was bullshit though.

youre telling me a super advanced intergalactic human empire was also too stupid to have its life support systems isolated? Even modern governments have critical systems that are closed and wouldn’t be able to receive a doomsday computer virus, allowing them to keep on running properly while everything connected to the space internet went to hell.


Evil Fluffy posted:

I know, but the reason for the collapse being so total is because of the thing I said. A thing that wouldn’t have happened in a super science civilization because hardened, remote setups for critical systems is not some unrealistic thing and that they just didn’t exist in the empire is nonsense. Especially since even the arkship techs knew how to do it and why.

It’s just a point that came across as nonsense and a desperate attempt to explain wipe no the slate clean, more or less.

As someone who has done investigations into compromised "hardened" and "isolated" systems in such a way that should be difficult if not outright impossible to be compromised as they were, the capacity for human's to gently caress up like that is entirely believable and realistic.

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sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

The Scar, as I se it now, is about a protofeminist from an oppressive society falling in love with an utterly toxic jerk. I don’t really appreciate it anymore. Iron Council is much better, at least it deals with themes of colonialism and workers’ solidarity in a somewhat meaningful way. PSS is just bleak and worthless, the author piling one horror on top of another until everything becomes meaningless.

Yes, it was a hateful slab of words

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
It has a lot of pretty cool artpunk D&D-ish scenery and I guess there might be some characters or plot as well, I dunno, I don't recall any.

A Proper Uppercut
Sep 30, 2008

A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good?

team overhead smash
Sep 2, 2006

Team-Forest-Tree-Dog:
Smashing your way into our hearts one skylight at a time

Look Sir Droids posted:

That’s exactly what I find interesting about the ending. It’s a good philosophical question that I’m not sure was intended since it gets handwaved as having no downsides.

The thing is this wasn't an issue of whether it's good or bad in isolation. It's a question of whether it's better or worse than the alternative, which in this case is genocide. The obvious answer is "of course it's better".

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

A Proper Uppercut posted:

A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good?

Most of them are yeah but they vary a bit up and down. MS is clearly the best thing in the series but there are a couple others that are about as good (my favorite is Ithanalin's Restoration but read Spell of the Black Dagger first).

A Proper Uppercut
Sep 30, 2008

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Most of them are yeah but they vary a bit up and down. MS is clearly the best thing in the series but there are a couple others that are about as good (my favorite is Ithanalin's Restoration but read Spell of the Black Dagger first).

Nice, I will continue on then.

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound

A Proper Uppercut posted:

Nice, I will continue on then.

I think the ones everyone acknowledges as weakest are "With a Single Spell," "Blood of a Dragon," and "Taking Flight." WaSS is still worth reading though because the characters pop up again frequently in the later ones.

Valder has a couple minor cameos later on but he doesn't show up much.

A Proper Uppercut
Sep 30, 2008

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I think the ones everyone acknowledges as weakest are "With a Single Spell," "Blood of a Dragon," and "Taking Flight." WaSS is still worth reading though because the characters pop up again frequently in the later ones.

Valder has a couple minor cameos later on but he doesn't show up much.

Just started WaSS, just because it said it was the second book.

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

A Proper Uppercut posted:

A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good?

It might be too slice of life for you but I really enjoyed Healer's Road. Goblin Emperor wasnt exactly comfortable, but was also very good. I have no idea if those are anything close to Misenchanted Sword cuz I haven't read it yet.

Megazver
Jan 13, 2006
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/dmiknk/cozy_fantasy_books_featuring_a_group_of/f51mdkw/

A Proper Uppercut
Sep 30, 2008

Larry Parrish posted:

It might be too slice of life for you but I really enjoyed Healer's Road. Goblin Emperor wasnt exactly comfortable, but was also very good. I have no idea if those are anything close to Misenchanted Sword cuz I haven't read it yet.

I'd definitely put Goblin Emporer in there too, I loved that book. I'm not even sure if Misenchanted Sword falls into the cozy category, it's more traditional farmer boy gets involved in big things type fantasy that I first read as a kid, so maybe more nostalgia than cozy, at least for me.

Will check out Healers Road, slice of life does it for me too.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


nessin posted:

As someone who has done investigations into compromised "hardened" and "isolated" systems in such a way that should be difficult if not outright impossible to be compromised as they were, the capacity for human's to gently caress up like that is entirely believable and realistic.

Yeah, "interplanetary human society ends up getting turbofucked by malware" is if anything the single most plausible part of that book.

Polikarpov
Jun 1, 2013

Keep it between the buoys

ToxicFrog posted:

Yeah, "interplanetary human society ends up getting turbofucked by malware" is if anything the single most plausible part of that book.

We regret to inform you that your life support system is an always on IOT device with wifi you can't disable and a default password you can't change.

Riot Carol Danvers
Jul 30, 2004

It's super dumb, but I can't stop myself. This is just kind of how I do things.
All it takes is one Ted Faro

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
My mom likes reading cozy mysteries so I gave her A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and she's digging it pretty hard, though she says all the 'physics stuff' (the explanation of the warp drive) was hard to follow. She digs things where the characters just kind of chill and interact and maybe there's a murder or something but it's not a long torturous exploration of interlocking war crimes and cycles of abuse or whatever. This is a victory because I had to argue with her for years to admit that SF/F could even be a legit genre aside from Tolkien.

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

It might be too hard (science, topics) for her but Cherryh's Foreigner series is 80% talking about alien politics over tea and it gets cozier over time.

Either way, score! Getting a reader to branch out and have a good time is the best.

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

The other 20% is assassins killing each other.

Deptfordx
Dec 23, 2013

A Proper Uppercut posted:

A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good?

To add to the list, I really enjoyed The Unwilling Warlord.

A Proper Uppercut
Sep 30, 2008

Deptfordx posted:

To add to the list, I really enjoyed The Unwilling Warlord.

Well that's the next one in the series, and I'm going to finish up WaSS this morning, so looking forward to that.

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I'm not sure what I expected when I read the description of Misenchanted Sword, but drat that's a good book. Its like Schwarzenegger from Commando goes home with his daughter and then realizes that, actually, living life with a bunch of war injuries loving sucks and his journey to get a VA claim funded three generations after we disbanded the military

Wolpertinger
Feb 16, 2011
I just finished reading Joel Dane's Cry Pilot which was really, really, weird, and really interesting - I've gotta give the writer chops for trying to go for the most alien possible post-post-apocalyptic future he could manage even if it felt like it was stretching the boundaries of plausibility with how /weird/ it was. It wasn't perfect, and the characterization was relatively weak, but i really enjoyed it just for the sheer creativity the author had going with the setting, though i was getting some serious mecha anime vibes at times.


The setting is that 99.9% of earth is covered in a deliberately released terraforming nanomachine? grey goo? plague? organism? that's rebuilding the biosphere from scratch since it had essentially totally collapsed - megacorporations run the world after violently stopping a world war that was about to drive the planet to extinction with apocalyptic bioweaponry, as apparently technology had hit the point where technology is just as much grown as built, as growing computers is how you got past the limitations of silicon, and why stop there? You can just grow the whole tank and save on manufacturing. And if you're growing the tank, why not skip the whole 'pilot' bit?

They killed off all the governments involved and erased the idea of a 'nation' or 'country', and made having any sort of strong national or regional or cultural or ethnic group identity illegal to forcefully suppress future conflict, put everyone in enclaves, and released their terraforming agent, so the majority of the world is some sort of constantly-changing environment with extremely rapidly evolving and growing animal, plant, bacterial, and fungal life that's too chaotic and hostile for humans to live in until it's 'done' at some indeterminate point in the future. The problem is, the terraforming agent can't reliably distinguish between native earth life and the horrific biological weapons from the last world war, so random pieces of old biological weaponry keeps getting incorporated into the biosphere and goes back to what it was designed to do - kill humans, with any sort of limitations or controls placed on it removed by the terraforming process. So, the world is effectively at war with its own biosphere, trying to exterminate all the 'remorts' so that the terraforming can go back to normal.

Problem is, some of them are so nasty that there's no human weapon that can get rid of them short of pulling out the old banned apocalyptic weapons, so when the worst comes to worst they have to use.. i'd say mechas, but they aren't humanoid, or even animal-shaped, more like.. squid? designed by post-singularity AI that were completely incomprehensible and alien to humans - and were murdered for it. Thing is, since nobody really gets how they work, they have a 97% fatality rate for pilots (the machines are so durable and self-regenerating they just keep replacing the disposable pilots.), and they interface with the human brain, being totally unable to pilot remotely without a human inside it - and nobody can reverse engineer it because nobody has even the foggiest idea how they work.

So, being a 'cry pilot' is signing up to be available for this suicide mission - either for volunteers with a death wish or as a way to be totally and completely pardoned of past crimes if you somehow survive. The main character, who was a child soldier and the grandson of the leader of a 'patriot' terrorist group (because they still subscribed to the idea of a 'nation') that rebelled against megacorporate rule and got essentially nuked off the earth after resorting to genetically engineered plagues and has PTSD over it, ends up becoming one via the latter method.

Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Dec 1, 2019

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.
But most of all, you cheated BABA

Yeah okay, Cry Pilot's been on my wishlist since before it came out. If they'd put the bit about terraforming monsters and using AI-made squid mechs against them on the back cover I would've bought it a lot sooner. Gimme gimme gimme!

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









Sounds like the origin story for Edge of Tomorrow

Wolpertinger
Feb 16, 2011

StrixNebulosa posted:

Yeah okay, Cry Pilot's been on my wishlist since before it came out. If they'd put the bit about terraforming monsters and using AI-made squid mechs against them on the back cover I would've bought it a lot sooner. Gimme gimme gimme!

They really do undersell the weirdness of the setting, possibly because the setting is so weird it's hard to describe in a concise way without giving the wrong impression of the book, or without going off on long tangents to give context. The plot itself is relatively straightforward, so it's not like super high concept sci-fi, it's just set in a very novel setting.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
That’s a really cool setting. I wonder how to elevator pitch it effectively. “The world is overrun by monstrous bioweapons and the only way to fight them is to pilot AI-designed squid mechs so monstrous and alien that they devour their own pilots. Protagonist blah blah has only once chance for forgiveness for XYZ, and it’s to become a pilot.”

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C7BCB88

My backlog has exploded with sale books since I got a kindle.

branedotorg
Jun 19, 2009

General Battuta posted:

That’s a really cool setting. I wonder how to elevator pitch it effectively. “The world is overrun by monstrous bioweapons and the only way to fight them is to pilot AI-designed squid mechs so monstrous and alien that they devour their own pilots. Protagonist blah blah has only once chance for forgiveness for XYZ, and it’s to become a pilot.”

but wait, then we'll just make 75% of it a generic SFF school setting like Starship Troopers, Harry Potter and Name of the Wind.

(FWIW i liked it when it came out and preordered both the sequels)

fritz
Jul 26, 2003

So what I'm hearing is it's Evangelion.

Wolpertinger
Feb 16, 2011

branedotorg posted:

but wait, then we'll just make 75% of it a generic SFF school setting like Starship Troopers, Harry Potter and Name of the Wind.

(FWIW i liked it when it came out and preordered both the sequels)

Yeah like i said the plot itself is relatively mundane if enjoyable, but the setting was so interesting i wanted to see more.

Koburn
Oct 8, 2004

FIND THE JUDGE CHILD OR YOUR CITY DIES
Grimey Drawer
Has there been any discussion of the new(ish) Blake Crouch novel, Recursion? I tried searching the forums with no results. I read the Wayward Pines series when the TV series was announced and found it pretty lacking, but Dark Matter was a big improvement and Recursion is another large step forward in quality. Highly recommended, both to read and to go in blind without knowing the main plot.

pmchem
Jan 22, 2010


Koburn posted:

Has there been any discussion of the new(ish) Blake Crouch novel, Recursion? I tried searching the forums with no results.

Maybe the results simply suggested searching for Recursion.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Artemis Invaded by Jane Linskold is the sequel to Artemis Awakening, a book I wanted to like but didn't quite get to more than okay. Artemis Invaded on the one hand presents a real plot starting up, and on the other hand... Linskold really, really loves rape as a way to establish that bad guys are bad guys, and if anything that tendency only gets worse here. The first LGBT character in either of these books also proves to be a sadistic serial rapist. Oh, and a powerful telepath takes over the body of a little boy but assures everyone that he 'had very few thoughts anyway' and no one questions or comments on it a few lines later. It's a shame that Linskold is proving so problematic, because I like the general plot happening aside from those things, I like Adara as a neat female protagonist, and I like how the love triangle in these books has everyone acting like mature adults who respect each other.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin is more or less "Game of Thrones on Hinduism" - the Hinduism is according to the author in an interview at the back, I personally would have guessed Zoroastrianism, and either way it's interpreted by an African-American woman who's only really familiar with Christianity. Unfortunately, Jemisin is much more interested in setting up and exploring the mythology of her setting, and in gushing over how dark and mysterious and hot and dangerous and tender and vulnerable and etc the love interest is, than she is in developing any of the characters in this book or having a plot. It's an interesting enough mythology, and this book's protagonist is a black woman in a fantasy setting from a distinctly African-inspired nation, but on the whole the book left me cold. It's Jemisin's first book she's ever written, and she's a pretty clear-cut victim of a new author more interested in writing about their world than they are in telling a story set in that world.

Silly Newbie
Jul 25, 2007
How do I?
I just spent November reading apparently everything Brent Weeks ever wrote, finishing with the 5th liightbringer book which felt like about a thousand pages. I can't tell if I need more political fantasy with a poo poo ton of bonkers magic or a palate cleanser.

nessin
Feb 7, 2010
Is it worth finishing John Gwynne's Faithful and the Fallen series? I knew going into it that it was a sort of stereotypical heroic epic fantasy series but after reading the first book I didn't expect it to be that stereotypical and by the numbers. I feel like I'm getting a subpar Memory Sorrow and Thorn and was hoping for more of a The Dagger and The Coin series, something that wasn't expected to deviate from the path but at least had some interesting curves and views along the way. I just don't want to deal with another three books of ridiculous and stupid protagonist decisions as the catalyst to move the story forward but requiring plot armor saves all the while having to chug through the clueless bad guy who think he's a good guy chapters with his sidekick who realizes the problem but resolves the conflict of staying/going with a "just because it isn't done". I'm wondering if it gets better and I just need to give it the chance to break out in the second book or just drop it now because it doesn't get better?

tokenbrownguy
Apr 1, 2010

Finished the first powder mage book.

Good
- Powder magic is pretty cool.
- Chef guy is slick.
- I thought the noir-detective story in the midst of upheaval was too much, but Adamant is pretty cool and low key compared to the rest of the protagonists.
- Reasonable portrayals of addiction.

Bad
- Male gaziest book I’ve read in a while
- Seriously. Every woman is either a whore, a virgin, or a mother. Or a conniving spinster-magician.
- Token smoking hot teenager who is we swearsy is old enough to bang. And oh boy, “no one could mistake her for a girl, she’s a real woman.”
- Pretty standard hard men making hard decisions bullshit.
- Super colonial, lots of racist stereotypes. And not even like... in a interesting or exploratory way.


I’d give it a 1/5. Get it on audiobook so you can do something else while you listen.

tildes
Nov 16, 2018

tokenbrownguy posted:

Finished the first powder mage book.

Good
- Powder magic is pretty cool.
- Chef guy is slick.
- I thought the noir-detective story in the midst of upheaval was too much, but Adamant is pretty cool and low key compared to the rest of the protagonists.
- Reasonable portrayals of addiction.

Bad
- Male gaziest book I’ve read in a while
- Seriously. Every woman is either a whore, a virgin, or a mother. Or a conniving spinster-magician.
- Token smoking hot teenager who is we swearsy is old enough to bang. And oh boy, “no one could mistake her for a girl, she’s a real woman.”
- Pretty standard hard men making hard decisions bullshit.
- Super colonial, lots of racist stereotypes. And not even like... in a interesting or exploratory way.


I’d give it a 1/5. Get it on audiobook so you can do something else while you listen.

My favorite part was where they fondly reminisced about bonding while sneaking around the sewers so they could watch women in the bathrooms

Larry Parrish
Jul 9, 2012

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Although, to be fair, all of that is 100% what I'd expect out of Napleonic French guys who also have magic powers.

Orv
May 4, 2011

tokenbrownguy posted:

Finished the first powder mage book.

...

I’d give it a 1/5. Get it on audiobook so you can do something else while you listen.

Yeaaaaaah. I started rereading it and while powder magic is extremely cool and the end where the protag 360 no scope headshots god is extremely fun-dumb, yeaaaaaaah.

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FuzzySlippers
Feb 6, 2009

I don't recall the male gaze stuff being that dreadful, but it is entirely possible I glazed over the bad stuff in the powder mage books because I just liked the idea so much. When I'm light reading I'll skim over bits where the author is going down tangents I'd rather avoid, but then later I forget that I skipped stuff when I think about the book.

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