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General Battuta posted:Not because of this, which is just generally Wattsy: I guess it just didn't bother me that much. I don't remember chapter after chapter of sexual violence, but I sometimes tune stuff out in books when I'm reading when I get the point. I also didn't find that character that sympathetic, and frankly, I was like yeah the consequences of your own actions suck. But I also have personal experience of people who need to be severely medicated or they are dangerous and have been personally physically attacked by those people, so to me it's like uh yeah don't just take away their drugs. but it's also possible I'm misremembering plot points, I was so blown away by Blindsight that I found the Rifter's trilogy a bit disappointing and didn't fully engage. But like Heller said when someone asked why he hadn't written anything else as good as Catch-22 "who has?" (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 16, 2020 19:39
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I don't see how (cw sexual violence) being kidnapped by an authority figure you trusted and then locked up in their basement for sex torture and your eventual murder can possibly be considered a consequence of your own actions? I don't think you're remembering this book fully.
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May 16, 2020 19:44
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On the cyberpunk point, Bruce Bethke’s Headcrash is a worthwhile satire of the genre.
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May 16, 2020 20:06
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Iron Lung posted:Also, I would like to delve deeper into cyberpunk - any recs or thread favorites? Neuromancer is one of my favorite books (i know, how original), i've read snow crash and a few others along the way, but would love some recs for other stuff to check out! As Khizan said, read the sequels to Neuromancer. You'll probably also enjoy Gibson's second trilogy: Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties. He really refined his style with those books. StrixNebulosa posted:Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams is weird 80s cyberpunk by a really fascinating author (that I want to read) Sadly, I found this to just be schlocky and bland scifi action. I'd only recommend it if you wanna dig into the origins of CP2020 and CP2077's setting. Lunsku posted:George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails from 1987 has its cyberpunk set in middle eastern, islamic future, and I remember enjoying it a lot when reading the translation in 90s. Really should try to pick it up again, plus the follow up novels. I think he establishes a great setting in this, and the trans positive aspects are really nice, but I also feel it spends too much time establishing that setting to have a strong narrative. The sequels really benefit from not having the burden of so much exposition. I'd highly recommend them if you liked WGF. I'll also add: Rudy Rucker's Hardware is a farcical cyberpunk novel about becoming robots. It has three followups, but I haven't read them. Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net is a great novel from the perspective of a "normal person" in a cyberpunk world. Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is sorta proto-cyberpunk, a lot of the ideas, but not quite the aesthetic or vibe yet. In a way, it's the other ingredient along with PKD that gave us the foundations of cyberpunk. More recently, Annalee Newitz's Autonomous is a fun novel about pirating pharmaceuticals and falling in love with a robot.
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May 16, 2020 20:15
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The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NRQRWAA/
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May 16, 2020 20:51
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If Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana isn't doing much for me, should I bother with any of his other work? I think I was hoping for more out of the concept of a conquering sorcerer stripping away the name and identity of an entire people, but just under half-way through, it doesn't feel like it's leveraging a cool premise into more than you'd get out of an alt-history where Byzantium and Charlemagne invaded Italy from opposite ends. I get that thinly-veiled alt-histories are Kay's thing, so should I steer clear of his other books?
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May 16, 2020 21:04
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PeterWeller posted:Sadly, I found this to just be schlocky and bland scifi action. I'd only recommend it if you wanna dig into the origins of CP2020 and CP2077's setting. No way. Hardwired is great.
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May 16, 2020 21:05
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StrixNebulosa posted:Trouble and her Friends by Melissa scott is weird 90s lesbian cyberpunk that I want to read I like Melissa Scott but Trouble isn't one of her best, imo. But probably the cyberpunkest. Hardwired on the other hand is well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining but conventional, probably the closest to a stock cyberpunk setting you'll find in the '80s. If you're like "I just wanna read some cyberpunk" it's where I'd go first. Closer to post-cyberpunk but worth checking out are Linda Nagata's The Bohr Maker and Chris Moriarty's Spin State.
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May 16, 2020 21:25
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Iron Lung posted:Also, I would like to delve deeper into cyberpunk - any recs or thread favorites? Neuromancer is one of my favorite books (i know, how original), i've read snow crash and a few others along the way, but would love some recs for other stuff to check out! You absolutely cannot go wrong reading any of the 35 Year's Best Scifi Anthologies curated by Gardner Dozois. Obligatory RIP to Gardner Dozois. Don't think anyone recommended Greg Egan, which while I can't stand Egan's writing personally, I do have to admit that Egan's stories generally roam around the cyberpunk solid-state loading zone. A non-fiction book circa 1997, bots: the origin of new species is a good slice in time recap of the 1970's-1980's-1990's computer culture which inspired cyberpunk as a genre, and I vaguely remember a interview-discussion with William Gibson inside it. Ironically I can't recommend any later William Gibson books older than All Tomorrow's Parties(1999), Gibson aged out hard while technology + advances in social media passed him by at 378/km per hour. There is guaranteed to be at least one high quality cyberpunk story in each Year's Best ScFi collection(usually two), plus a wide range of other stories. The year-in-recap summaries in the Year's Best Scifi anthologies are pretty useful too, for getting yourself into what was pop-culture current then, and what was happening in the world scifi related.
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May 16, 2020 21:29
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Kestral posted:If Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana isn't doing much for me, should I bother with any of his other work? I think I was hoping for more out of the concept of a conquering sorcerer stripping away the name and identity of an entire people, but just under half-way through, it doesn't feel like it's leveraging a cool premise into more than you'd get out of an alt-history where Byzantium and Charlemagne invaded Italy from opposite ends. I get that thinly-veiled alt-histories are Kay's thing, so should I steer clear of his other books? Nah, if Tigana isn't doing it for you, I don't think the rest will either. Personally I really liked it back in the day but it definitely is very typical of how the Kay I've read is structured and inspired.
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May 16, 2020 21:31
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quantumfoam posted:Ironically I can't recommend any later William Gibson books older than All Tomorrow's Parties(1999), Gibson aged out hard while technology + advances in social media passed him by at 378/km per hour. Some good recs in this post but this line is wrong, Pattern Recognition is one of the best books Gibson's written. It's a fascinating look at the internet of 2000 and how that affects culture and it's not sci-fi but it's really really good.
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May 16, 2020 21:49
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General Battuta posted:I don't see how (cw sexual violence) being kidnapped by an authority figure you trusted and then locked up in their basement for sex torture and your eventual murder can possibly be considered a consequence of your own actions? I don't think you're remembering this book fully. What I recall is that the character who gets kidnapped etc.. is the one who gives the serial killer the antidote to the treatment that is keeping him from being a serial killer. But that could be wrong, as I alluded to, if I'm wrong then it's grosser than I remember it being.
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May 16, 2020 21:57
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Yes, you're confusing two characters.
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May 16, 2020 22:01
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StrixNebulosa posted:Some good recs in this post but this line is wrong, Pattern Recognition is one of the best books Gibson's written. It's a fascinating look at the internet of 2000 and how that affects culture and it's not sci-fi but it's really really good. And this is drat true, the Blue Ant trilogy is probably Gibson's best.
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May 16, 2020 22:02
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Kestral posted:If Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana isn't doing much for me, should I bother with any of his other work? I think I was hoping for more out of the concept of a conquering sorcerer stripping away the name and identity of an entire people, but just under half-way through, it doesn't feel like it's leveraging a cool premise into more than you'd get out of an alt-history where Byzantium and Charlemagne invaded Italy from opposite ends. I get that thinly-veiled alt-histories are Kay's thing, so should I steer clear of his other books? His Fionavar Tapestry might be worth a look as they are the oldest books he wrote and are a lot different. His take on Arthurian Legend, Narnia and Middle Earth but with college students from our world visiting a Fantasy world. I would normally love that but I didn't like it as much as I wanted to. I went on to Lions of Al-Rassan, the Sarantine Mosaic and Last Light of the Sun and liked those a lot better but they were just solid reads and nothing exciting. I don't think I've read Tigana, that doesn't sound familiar. pradmer posted:The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins - $1.99 I liked this one a lot but its definitely weird and morbidly violent.
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May 16, 2020 22:11
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Speaking of Gibson, I read Agency this week and wow that book is bad. A lot of time spent where nothing of consequence happens, the actually interesting part of the story is completely unexplored and in the end Hillary Clinton saves the day And Then Everybody Clapped.
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May 16, 2020 22:11
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General Battuta posted:I don't see how (cw sexual violence) being kidnapped by an authority figure you trusted and then locked up in their basement for sex torture and your eventual murder can possibly be considered a consequence of your own actions? I don't think you're remembering this book fully. I think he is mixing up victims. The serial killer was a corporate employee that had been drugged/brainwashed to perfect company obedience. And the company didn't want him to indulge his sick fetishes, so he couldn't. The first victim was the idealist who broke he controls so he didn't have to do what the company wanted, and whoops first thing he wants to do is some torture rape.
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May 16, 2020 22:19
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I remember getting to read Pattern Recognition in high school for a contemporary literature course. The teacher had recently got her masters from Harvard and was really good at controlling the class, whereas the normal sophomore literature class I had the period after was a "holocaust/war atrocities literature all year" course where the teacher could not get any of the students to take the subject matter seriously. Going from a bunch of students having a serious discussion about brand allergies in Gibson to a bunch of people not taking All Quiet on the Western Front or genocide seriously an hour later was real whiplash.
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May 16, 2020 22:51
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StrixNebulosa posted:Some good recs in this post but this line is wrong, Pattern Recognition is one of the best books Gibson's written. It's a fascinating look at the internet of 2000 and how that affects culture and it's not sci-fi but it's really really good. Yeah, Pattern Recognition is excellent, though Cayce is very much a rehash of Marly from Count Zero, so if you're bingeing Gibson, you might find that annoying. Spook Country and Zero History are also interesting and fun novels, but Gibson really ping-pongs between his story threads in those and they feel half-baked at times. And then you get to The Peripheral, which is really a return to form for Gibson. pseudorandom name posted:Speaking of Gibson, I read Agency this week and wow that book is bad. A lot of time spent where nothing of consequence happens, the actually interesting part of the story is completely unexplored and in the end Hillary Clinton saves the day And Then Everybody Clapped. The emergent AI and techbro save the day at the end as I recall Agency has two interesting ideas, one of them held over from The Peripheral. Eunice together with the Server do set up intriguing possibilities for the third novel, but giving Gibson's penchant for rehashing older ideas, I suspect that will have much the same end result as All Tomorrow's Parties. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 19:48 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 16, 2020 23:25
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dreamless posted:I like Melissa Scott but Trouble isn't one of her best, imo. But probably the cyberpunkest. It's not one of her best, but Melissa Scott not at her best is still pretty good, IMO.
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May 16, 2020 23:38
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ToxicFrog posted:It's not one of her best, but Melissa Scott not at her best is still pretty good, IMO. Out of curiosity, what is her best?
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May 16, 2020 23:50
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StrixNebulosa posted:Some good recs in this post but this line is wrong, Pattern Recognition is one of the best books Gibson's written. It's a fascinating look at the internet of 2000 and how that affects culture and it's not sci-fi but it's really really good. General Battuta posted:And this is drat true, the Blue Ant trilogy is probably Gibson's best. I'm glad other people think this because I really enjoyed the blue ant trilogy, pattern recognition in particular. I thought the general opinion was that Gibson didn't write anything worthwhile past neuromancer (maybe it still is in literary circles)
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May 17, 2020 00:06
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PeterWeller posted:The emergent AI and techbro save the day at the end as I recall. Agency has two interesting ideas, one of them held over from The Peripheral. Eunice together with the Server do set up intriguing possibilities for the third novel, but giving Gibson's penchant for rehashing older ideas, I suspect that will have much the same end result as All Tomorrow's Parties. Nope, Eunice and the Good Billionaire do jack poo poo. The supposed conflict in the future was also overhyped, Ainsley just kills some dudes and that's the end of it.
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May 17, 2020 00:08
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pseudorandom name posted:Nope, Eunice and the Good Billionaire do jack poo poo. Yeah. They made a big deal about these billionaires, but then she just kills them with no problem. Seems like more Billionaire killing could solve a lot of their problems.
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May 17, 2020 00:54
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StrixNebulosa posted:Synners by Pat Cadigan is weird 90s cyberpunk that I want to read It's definitely interesting. Also check out Cadigan's short story collection Patterns, there's a lot of great stuff in there. The Power and The Passion is one of my favourite short stories.
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May 17, 2020 01:21
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pseudorandom name posted:Nope, Eunice and the Good Billionaire do jack poo poo. Huh, I thought Eunice's reveal is what brings the crisis to its end. Shows how well it stuck with me. I wasn't bothered by the pat resolution to the other conflict because the point is that Ainsley and Eunice are similar in their near omnipotent capabilities. Of course, having two supremely capable protagonists means there's little sense of tension. ianmacdo posted:Yeah. They made a big deal about these billionaires, but then she just kills them with no problem. Seems like more Billionaire killing could solve a lot of their problems. Well yeah, the issue is never her ability to kill him; it's whether or not the rest of the billionaires will let her. The thing is the people in future London don't really have problems aside from banal domestic issues and the ennui that comes from living in a post scarcity society that rose in the aftermath of the deaths of billions. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 01:33
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Cyberpunk recommendations: try Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers, which is about a woman with different personalities for different functions, like the Gang in Blindsight. I think one of Pat Cadigan's novels has a similar premise. Something of a disrecommend, Mirrorshades is quite uneven and has a lot of not-at-all-cyberpunk stuff in it.
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May 17, 2020 04:24
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I guess Richard Morgan also goes as cyberpunk. Besides altered carbon, you also get market forces, black man/thirteen (thanks US) thin air. Ian McDonald can’t be recommended enough since before what is essentially GoT on the moon, his main body of work is cyberpunk in non English cultural settings.
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May 17, 2020 05:24
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I liked Raven Stratagem more than Ninefox Gambit, and Revenant Gun more than either of them. 
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May 17, 2020 09:00
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Kestral posted:If Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana isn't doing much for me, should I bother with any of his other work? I think I was hoping for more out of the concept of a conquering sorcerer stripping away the name and identity of an entire people, but just under half-way through, it doesn't feel like it's leveraging a cool premise into more than you'd get out of an alt-history where Byzantium and Charlemagne invaded Italy from opposite ends. I get that thinly-veiled alt-histories are Kay's thing, so should I steer clear of his other books? Tigana is like peak GGK. If that ain't doing it for you, then he's not for you.
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May 17, 2020 10:21
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dreamless posted:I like Melissa Scott but Trouble isn't one of her best, imo. But probably the cyberpunkest. Hardwired on the other hand is well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining but conventional, probably the closest to a stock cyberpunk setting you'll find in the '80s. If you're like "I just wanna read some cyberpunk" it's where I'd go first. Linda also writes excellent near future mil sci-fi. WJW is brilliant, his Dagmar books are some underrated techno thrillers about an augmented reality game designer who gets into some dark politics.(not cyberpunk) Just start with Mirror Shades, then work your way through the 80s and early 90s catalogue of the author's you like. https://www.amazon.com/Mirrorshades-Cyberpunk-Anthology-Greg-Bear/dp/0441533825 Some hasn't aged that well, I didn't enjoy Rudy Rucker's wetwear series recently, as seminal as it was. As for Bruce Sterling, his best book imo is Schimatrix Plus, a solar system limited cyberpunk/space opera
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May 17, 2020 10:45
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pseudorandom name posted:Speaking of Gibson, I read Agency this week and wow that book is bad. A lot of time spent where nothing of consequence happens, the actually interesting part of the story is completely unexplored and in the end Hillary Clinton saves the day And Then Everybody Clapped. I'm tempted to read this more now, out of morbid fascination, because Gibson is a writer I genuinely admire but also somebody I eventually had to unfollow on Twitter because he was constantly tweeting and retweeting extremely tedious blue-tick Resistance and I'm With Her crap. Like, I'm fine with somebody having different politics to me, but please don't be boring about it, especially when you wrote loving Neuromancer.
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May 17, 2020 13:56
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To add to the cyberpunk genre books: Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird, and the 2-3 sequels. It's been a while since I read them, but back when they got published, i definitely enjoyed them. Eclipse by John Shirley, and the two other books in the trilogy, Eclipse Penumbra and Eclipse Corona. Also, wtf is up with the non-spoiler postings about the ending of Gibson's Agency? It's only been out a couple of months. Is that the new limit for when it's fine to talk about the ending of a book without posting with spoiler tags, or just if you personally didn't like the book?
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May 17, 2020 14:07
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Deptfordx posted:Tigana is like peak GGK. If that ain't doing it for you, then he's not for you. I think Tigana is only great in the last 10%, so disappointment halfway through isn’t necessarily surprising.
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May 17, 2020 15:18
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Holy moly, thanks y'all! I've read a few other Gibson books but it's been a long time, and it looks like I had probably picked random books in the middle of a series to read since it's what the library had at the time. Looks like I've got some to re-read and a bunch more other stuff to check out! Really appreciate all the recs from the last pages.
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May 17, 2020 15:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:Out of curiosity, what is her best? That's a good question! The Silence Leah trilogy is definitely my favourite, but I'm not sure if it's her best or just the one that's most to my taste. She has a really wide range -- The Kindly Ones is the one that feels most like it could be a C.J. Cherryh book, while Mighty Good Road and the Order of the Air series are breezy reads that have a more swashbuckling, Zahn-esque style. And if you're feeling cyberpunky, Dreamships and Dreaming Metal (in addition to the aforementioned Trouble) have you covered, although I liked Trouble more. And I haven't even read the Astreiant books yet.
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May 17, 2020 16:02
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ToxicFrog posted:That's a good question! The Silence Leah trilogy is definitely my favourite, but I'm not sure if it's her best or just the one that's most to my taste. She has a really wide range -- The Kindly Ones is the one that feels most like it could be a C.J. Cherryh book, while Mighty Good Road and the Order of the Air series are breezy reads that have a more swashbuckling, Zahn-esque style. And if you're feeling cyberpunky, Dreamships and Dreaming Metal (in addition to the aforementioned Trouble) have you covered, although I liked Trouble more. And I haven't even read the Astreiant books yet. She's written so much and it all sounds good - ! Yeah I have a big book order of Scott books in the mail currently.  That said, reading her Astereiant books is going to be bittersweet - she wrote the first two with her partner, and then her partner passed to cancer and it took a while before she could resume them.
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May 17, 2020 16:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:Halting State by Charles Stross is a wild second person pov cyberpunk about an MMO being hacked. It presents a very optimistic view of the future, which is funny as Stross is usually cited as an accurate prophet Uhhh I really hope he isn't! 
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May 17, 2020 17:31
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I read Pattern Recognition back in 2006, and it came across as hellishly stupid for me back then, with each new reveal adding to the pain. These are just the things I remember causing me the most pain/hilarity from Pattern Recognition. -The main character being a "trend forecaster" who was also allergic to brand names/brand name labeling, character wise was having your cake and eating it too. -Thought the brand name allergies/brand name labeling allergy was Gibson was doing a spin on people who claim to be overly sensitive to electromagnetic frequency radiation ala Chuck McGill from Better Call Saul. This is a real thing (inset air quotes) and most people who claim to have it that haven't moved to literal radio silence zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone are probably full of poo poo -To my best recollection the brand name allergy never came up again in a major way in the book, especially when loving everything the main character ran across during her travels would have set it off -Unlike the total fuckups-in-life adults and literal teenagers/teenage runaways main characters in Gibson's early stories, Pattern Recognition had a highly educated main character with tons of options and money who......proceeded to do the exact same stupid poo poo as the the total fuckups-in-life adults and literal teenagers/teenager runaways main characters in Gibson's earlier stories. -The mailing list dedicated to frame by frame Zapruder-style analysis of the mysterious anonymous videos came across as an hilariously dated USENET reference rather than a clever precursor to the various crowd-sourced internet research groups that exist today, if someone was to read Pattern Recognition in the past 5 years.
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May 17, 2020 18:17
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quantumfoam posted:This is a real thing (inset air quotes) and most people who claim to have it that haven't moved to literal radio silence zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone are probably full of poo poo I don't want to argue about the book because you seem determined to hate it, but this bothers me a lot. You haven't experienced what they experience, and you can't judge them, yet you are. Please don't do this.
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May 17, 2020 18:22
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