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MockingQuantum posted:He also wrote the most boomer-brained screed about how Greta Thunberg was a petulant child with not a single shred of real science after she addressed the UN, and how worthless he thought all the left-leaning-adults (lol what an oxymoron!!!!) were for "genuflecting" to her adolescent temper tantrum over how we're destroying the planet. Dude is a full-on rear end in a top hat. Best reacc. https://twitter.com/raw_writing/status/1176968886211743746?s=21
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Feb 9, 2020 19:03
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ToxicFrog posted:Yeah, and I honestly liked it more than any of the ones written by Feist alone, although it's been a while since I read them. Serpentwar had at least one potentially interesting woman (the woman from the Mockers who Erik marries in secret) but the are completely written out in a later book, though probably because Feist forgot they exist, because he did it with another character's sister who's mentioned in 1-2 lines in one book and then the character's an only child in a later one. The first Serpentwar book is good, though it's also a pretty shameless rip-off of The Dirty Dozen which is probably why I liked it. The second one is whatever, the end of the last one screams "I'm out of time and ideas." The first Empire book is the weakest for sure but the 2nd and 3rd get better. The books were also written decades ago so yes there is some outdated stuff in there that you can't really avoid. The real crime of the Riftwar books is that there weren't more Betrayal at Krondor-quality games made out of the series. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 19:26
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Evil Fluffy posted:Serpentwar had at least one potentially interesting woman (the woman from the Mockers who Erik marries in secret) but the are completely written out in a later book, though probably because Feist forgot they exist, because he did it with another character's sister who's mentioned in 1-2 lines in one book and then the character's an only child in a later one. The first Serpentwar book is good, though it's also a pretty shameless rip-off of The Dirty Dozen which is probably why I liked it. The second one is whatever, the end of the last one screams "I'm out of time and ideas." I think I'm getting a bit lost w/ these series. If I haven't read anything by Raymond Feist, what is the first series I should read?
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Feb 9, 2020 20:54
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I'm going to focus on some good stories I saw in Analog in 2019, going by type: Novellas Only three of those this year, two by Adam-Troy Castro, but the one I liked was You Must Remember This, by Jay O'Connell. The protagonist was a victim of a nanobot based calamity which turned significant parts of the Northeast into weird glass-like matter but preserved the consciousness of the people who were killed. An unknown benefactor paid for her to be revived, and she has to face integrating into a very different society while struggling with her past issues, including addiction. It was a compelling take on an oft-retread trope. Novelettes A Civilization Dreams of Absolutely Nothing by Thoraiya Dyer, was more interesting for its depiction of an alien society than for the main "hard" conflict. This society has the ability to come together in groups and share, edit, and sometimes throw away memories, and deciding what to remember and what to forget is a major tension point. Better, by Tom Greene, is masterful, featuring compelling human experiences and a variety of alien encounters: the protagonist is a veteran of a war with a completely xenocidal species, to which other species, like humans, were forcibly conscripted. He returns to a nigh-depopulated earth that is now going to become the home of fugitives from planets were were not so fortunate, his job being to help one particularly difficult species integrate. He reminisces about the traumatic experiences of the war. Not for the feint of heart. A standout from the whole year. A Mate not a Meal, by Sarina Dorie, is told from the point of view of a spider-like intelligence and her struggles with her own life-cycle, as well as how to interpret another, non-spider intelligent being, that becomes her friend. Brutal but lighthearted. At the Fall, by Alec Nevala-Lee, follows an autonomous drone fleet as it makes its way across the ocean, one whale fall to another, desperately scavenging resources, to find out why its supervisors disappeared. Lots of interesting biochemistry, too. Martian Fever, by Julie Novakova, has the first Martian expedition abruptly turned into a colony when a novel disease starts spreading and their trip back is canceled. This is a very sciency story about figuring out what the disease is in hopes of convincing Earth that return is safe, and of course, not succumbing to it. Short Stories Applied Linguistics, by Auston Habershaw, features an alien from a species that originally has not formed any language attempting to communicate its experience of acquiring it from an interaction with a prisoner on a penal colony. A Place to Stand On, by Marie Vibbert, follows the struggles of several astronauts (or maybe aeronauts?) attempting to save a punctured balloon in Venus` atmosphere. The idea of researching or even settling Venus through floating stations in the habitable zone of its atmosphere is the subject of one of 2019's Science Fact columns, and there seems to be a story based on it every year on Analog. It has a lot of potential for science, adventure, and danger, and you can definitely see it in this story. All Tomorrow's Parties, by Phoebe North, is a fun sendup of time travel as a concept, with the protagonist starting to wonder whether anybody they encounter in the past actually started there. A Neighborhood for Someone Else, by Alison Wilgus, tells the story of a human going through the final steps of permanent residency in an alien planet. Filaments of Hopes, by Marissa Lingen, follows a scientist whose original project to find plants to grow on Mars becomes irrelevant due to mission cancellations; she instead finds somewhere else to apply her skills, on Earth, specifically with her family in Finland.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:31
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Hobnob posted:It's more biased towards engineering than pure science, but George O. Smiths The Complete Venus Equilateral is a collection of stories mostly about exploring new technologies, and really goes places considering it was written in the 40s. There is some pure science in Venus Equilateral to go along with all the engineering stories. Smith actually did a really good job on exploring the changes in society forced by the invention of a true replicator. They're a little dated, but they still hold up. I've had a machine named Venus Equilateral on my home network since 1991; they come highly recommended by me.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:48
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tildes posted:I think I'm getting a bit lost w/ these series. If I haven't read anything by Raymond Feist, what is the first series I should read? The Riftwar series is: 1. Magician: Apprentice 2. Magician: Master (these two published as one in the UK) 3. Silverthorn 4. A Darkness at Sethanon
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Feb 9, 2020 22:11
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tildes posted:I think I'm getting a bit lost w/ these series. If I haven't read anything by Raymond Feist, what is the first series I should read? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riftwar_Cycle Riftwar saga, Empire trilogy, maybe some of the Riftwar legacy/legends stuff. Krondor: the Betrayal is based on Betrayal at Krondor (which is a good game). The two Krondor's Sons books aren't bad and give a little background for the Serpentwar books (and a few callbacks in later books). The Darkwar books are alright, Demonwar gets kinda dumb and Chaoswar shows clear signs that Feist really wants to be done with the Riftwar stuff forever. e: Imo, the deeper Feist gets in to the cosmos the worse he gets as a writer while if he keeps closers to 'worldly' magic stuff he's fine. Usually. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 22:54
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Aaronovitch is an actual marxist I believe. That said i think the series is deliberately set like 2014 to 16 or so now. It's interesting to hear that about his politics, because I feel like over the course of the series there's a definite shift from the books being tributes to the energy and diversity of 2000s-era London to merely being books that are set in London, which coincides with the country's ever-accelerating slide into misery. There's a lot less to celebrate now, and there's a conspicuous bit in the last book where the villain rants about how poo poo London is and how it impoverishes the rest of the country, and our hero doesn't get a satisfactory answer.
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Feb 9, 2020 23:26
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Mr. Peepers posted:Exhalation by Ted Chiang is a remarkable short story about a scientist trying to understand the inner workings of their own brain. A lot of Chiang's stories will fit the bill to some extent, really.
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Feb 10, 2020 03:44
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Black Griffon posted:What's your favorite "scientist sci-fi"? hmmm i didn't realize that i seem to really enjoy this type of scifi so thanks for asking because now i have a lot of good books to read! some books i think may fit what your looking for: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu Eon by Greg Bear Titan by John Varley
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Feb 10, 2020 05:36
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Black Griffon posted:What's your favorite "scientist sci-fi"? Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward. Life develops on a neutron star and it's gravitational time dilation means a human ship can observe generations passing. Forward was a physicist who worked on gravitational wave detection amongst other things, but also wrote a not so interesting sequel, Starquake, that made the ending of the first book less cool.
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Feb 10, 2020 11:06
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Poopelyse posted:Titan by John Varley I hope you like as many excuses to have horse-loving in a book as there can be. EDIT: Also rape and badly written lesbian sex. I mean, the whole series is hilarious (follow-up books Wizard and Demon). Explaining why it's so funny is hard to do without spoiling it, though.
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Feb 10, 2020 11:58
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biracial bear for uncut posted:I hope you like as many excuses to have horse-loving in a book as there can be. EDIT: Also rape and badly written lesbian sex. I read it maybe 10 years ago but always find myself thinking about the drawings in it. I remember thinking about 3/4s of the book was really cool then it's just weird and funny like you said. Definitely a product of the 70s.
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Feb 10, 2020 16:55
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Poopelyse posted:I read it maybe 10 years ago but always find myself thinking about the drawings in it. I remember thinking about 3/4s of the book was really cool then it's just weird and funny like you said. Definitely a product of the 70s. I do like how Varley would use excuses to discuss alien genetic genealogies with every new character that showed up and said "wait, how does that even work?" and pad the word count by rehashing it over and over in each book. The time one of the characters was all "Wait a minute, I have to get super drunk before I explain this" was particularly good. EDIT: Also the big bad creating bioweapons/creatures that would push bombs out of literal buttholes and cracking up about her minions making GBS threads napalm and warheads on the protagonists.
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Feb 10, 2020 17:48
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Moonseed by Stephen Baxter is an odd novel, half disaster story, half Big Dumb Object. The premise of the book is: taking the hypothesis that the Moon was created in the primordial solar system by a massive object striking the still-molten earth and carving off a chunk into orbit... what if that object wasn't just a newborn planet or big asteroid? What if it was something... else? And what if the Apollo missions unwittingly brought a tiny piece of it to Earth, thinking it just an ordinary Moon rock that promptly got filed away never to be examined? I do not like disaster stories as a general rule for one of the same reasons I do not like horror stories in general: they often indulge in misery porn, delighting in showcasing death and destruction and suffering. But Moonseed worked for me, because the disaster story in the book goes hand-in-hand with the sci-fi story of trying to figure out what the Moonseed is and what's really going on. The characters of Moonseed are standard fare for both genres, but I enjoyed the book on the whole. If there is a weakness to the Big Dumb Object part of the story, I'd say it's that Baxter clearly didn't know how he wanted to end the story, leaping straight from a relatively grounded Tomorrow AD story to more fantastical science fiction in the last dozen pages or so.
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Feb 10, 2020 18:30
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I enjoyed Eon somewhat until everyone started to have sex with everyone else at the same time or something. It's been a few years. Edit: there's tons of good suggestions here though I'm cataloguing everything. Black Griffon fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 20:16
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Fumblemouse posted:Dragon's Egg by Robert L Forward. Life develops on a neutron star and it's gravitational time dilation means a human ship can observe generations passing. Forward was a physicist who worked on gravitational wave detection amongst other things, but also wrote a not so interesting sequel, Starquake, that made the ending of the first book less cool. It wasn't time dilation. It was just that the cheela's hyper-compressed brains worked way faster than human brains did, and they had movement speeds to match, which made a day for us a lifetime for them. Gravitational time dilation would have made more sense, but it isn't the explanation he used.
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Feb 10, 2020 21:28
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It also would’ve doomed the cheela who left the surface to go heal the scientist lady .
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Feb 10, 2020 22:10
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The weirdest thing to me about moonseed is that it's a sequel but the preceding book had sweet gently caress all to do with it. Made for a VERY confusing read when I got Titan in, cause I was positive I was going to be reading about some cool moon poo poo. Nope. loving Republicans and weird and kinda boring space poo poo for 90% of the book. China dooming the earth feels kinda prescient though 
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Feb 10, 2020 22:15
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Black Griffon posted:I enjoyed Eon somewhat until everyone started to have sex with everyone else at the same time or something. It's been a few years. "Sorry I really need to gently caress someone now would you mind?" "Sure." (They gently caress)
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Feb 10, 2020 23:33
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:The weirdest thing to me about moonseed is that it's a sequel but the preceding book had sweet gently caress all to do with it. Goodreads straight up mentioned that it's a trilogy only in the sense that they're about space and involve a NASA that's still doing poo poo.
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Feb 11, 2020 00:47
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Would have been helpful had I read Goodreads before buying the paperback off half com in the old days.
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Feb 11, 2020 09:30
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Captain Monkey posted:It also would’ve doomed the cheela who left the surface to go heal the scientist lady . They did take a miniature black hole with them, although they complained that the gravity was kind of weak.
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Feb 11, 2020 09:41
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Black Griffon posted:I enjoyed Eon somewhat until everyone started to have sex with everyone else at the same time or something. It's been a few years. I read that when I was a hormonal teenager and I can only recall one sex scene. Sure, it was superfluous and awkward as hell (like 99%+ of sex scenes in SF) but it was like one paragraph. As far as I can remember.
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Feb 11, 2020 09:45
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Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic?
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Feb 11, 2020 12:13
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Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic?
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Feb 11, 2020 12:21
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90s Cringe Rock posted:NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series is post-apocalyptic. It's also apocalyptic, a new apocalypse just kicked off, but it's post- as well. It's post a large number of apocalypses, of various severity, across many many centuries. Like, civilization is shaped around communities arranged for survivability.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:25
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90s Cringe Rock posted:NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series is post-apocalyptic. It's also apocalyptic, a new apocalypse just kicked off, but it's post- as well. It's also worth reading on it's own because it loving rules.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:27
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biracial bear for uncut posted:It's also worth reading on it's own because it loving rules. It's also got one of the few really good and justified instances of extended sections told in the second person. Because large bits of it are actually one of the supporting characters narrating back the story of the main character's own life to her, for good reasons.
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Feb 11, 2020 12:36
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Ex heroes is pretty awesome. Combines a zombie apocalypse with superheroes. Definitely unique. First activation was pretty good as well. Weird take on the zombie apocalypse, but interesting. Outpost is the start of a good series. By Adam Baker iirc. Sort of zombie, sort of "what the gently caress?". Amazing series though.
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Feb 11, 2020 13:14
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Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic? World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is old enough and well-known enough that you've probably already read it, but I'll list it here for completeness. The Girl With All The Gifts was fantastic. I think I got the recommendation from this very thread. It has a sequel now (The Boy on the Bridge) but I haven't read it, and Gifts works fine on its own. Newsflesh by "Mira Grant" (Seanan McGuire; first book Feed) is post-zombie but not post-apocalypse; it's a political thriller in a US that has changed due to the ever-present zombie threat, but not collapsed. Blood tests to get into crowded buildings, mandatory firearms training for professions at risk of zombie encounters, pets large enough to go zombie are illegal, etc. The first book is about a team of journalists following a presidential candidate who someone seems to be trying to assassinate. Parasitology, also by Mira Grant, is more post-apocalyptic but less zombie. I didn't like it nearly as much, largely due to how passive the protagonist is and how much time she spends waiting for other people to rescue her, but it's in the same wheelhouse as what you're looking for.
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Feb 11, 2020 13:48
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Groke posted:I read that when I was a hormonal teenager and I can only recall one sex scene. Sure, it was superfluous and awkward as hell (like 99%+ of sex scenes in SF) but it was like one paragraph. As far as I can remember. It wasn't just the sex scene though, it was also the way Bear went "oh and now these people are loving too!". It just killed the momentum because of how lame it was.
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Feb 11, 2020 13:55
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Black Griffon posted:What's your favorite "scientist sci-fi"? By this I'm talking about sci-fi that takes a scientific, exploratory approach to the plot, in either characters, writing style or both. It would probably involve discovery (see earlier Big Dumb Object discussion), but not necessarily always. Becky Chambers's new novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate is outstanding (as is basically everything she's written) in this vein. Her mother is a practicing scientist, she clearly influenced her daughter and also consulted closely on the content of the book, and it was a joy to read.
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Feb 11, 2020 14:18
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Borachon posted:Becky Chambers's new novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate is outstanding (as is basically everything she's written) in this vein. Her mother is a practicing scientist, she clearly influenced her daughter and also consulted closely on the content of the book, and it was a joy to read. I keep meaning to read this but I hate the feeling when I've read everything an author has done so far and it's like "That's it? Now I have to find something else to read.  "
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Feb 11, 2020 15:23
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Maggie Shen King’s excellent An Excess Male is $.99 on Amazon.
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Feb 11, 2020 15:34
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biracial bear for uncut posted:I keep meaning to read this but I hate the feeling when I've read everything an author has done so far and it's like "That's it? Now I have to find something else to read. Read iiiiiiiiiiit, it's goooooooooood.
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Feb 11, 2020 15:47
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Groke posted:I read that when I was a hormonal teenager and I can only recall one sex scene. Sure, it was superfluous and awkward as hell (like 99%+ of sex scenes in SF) but it was like one paragraph. As far as I can remember. Has there ever been a sex scene in sci fi that wasn't awkward and superfluous? Asking for a friend.
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Feb 11, 2020 15:59
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FuturePastNow posted:Has there ever been a sex scene in sci fi that wasn't awkward and superfluous? Asking for a friend. The Gods Themselves?
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Feb 11, 2020 16:18
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I'm really enjoying Pushing Ice. The dialogue is a bit stilted, but also I read a lot of good dialogue in January, so it's more that I'm back to ordinary prose. The sci-fi elements are fantastic though. I'm enjoying the intrigue and the mystery, and it's a book that lets you come up with theories of your own and isn't afraid to use terms and jargon without explanation.
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Feb 11, 2020 16:42
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Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic? None of the following have zombies. All of the following are seminal post apocalyptic novels. The Postman is about conflicting narratives and values in the post apocalyptic world. A Canticle for Liebowitz is about preserving knowledge and faith. Earth Abides is about rebuilding some kind of society in the wake of a super plague. On the Beach is about coming to terms with the end of humanity. Alas, Babylon is about how real men like legs.
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Feb 11, 2020 16:54
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