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Happiness Commando
Feb 1, 2002
$$ joy at gunpoint $$

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

I finally got around to Nevernight and almost immediately noped out of it. I absolutely loved The Monster of Elendhaven, I gently caress with Joe Abercrombie sometimes, but I bounced off Nevernight hard and it's making me start to question what Dark Fantasy's whole deal is.

Did anybody have a different experience with it?

I liked it a lot, more than his Japanese eco-steampunk series. I didn't and don't think of it as guilty fun, just light (in the sense of engagement) and enjoyable. :shrug:

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pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Stories of Your Life and Other by Ted Chiang -$2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0048EKOP0/

Cradle, Foundation (Unsouled, Soulsmith, Blackflame) by Will Wight - Free
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076G8DVN6

foutre
Sep 4, 2011

:toot: RIP ZEEZ :toot:
More positively, Uprooted by Naomi Novik is 2.99 right now and is p good:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KUQIU7O/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_nYxYEbG45AGFZ

pradmer posted:

The Warded Man (Demon Cycle #1) by Peter V Brett - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001NLL6QW/
Might actually be bad.

It also has a really bad treatment of sexual assault.

Basically (tw for real hosed up stuff re sexual assault) A character is gang raped, then has to travel with another character for a week who tries to assault her every night but is only stopped because she drugs him. Later she considers that maybe her making him feel impotent by stopping him from raping her was just as bad as what he was trying to do, and considers having a child with him.

It was honestly one of the worst sequences I've read in a book and was peak "do bad stuff to women to try and make my setting seem gritty" as well as just some incredibly hosed up "" "character development" "".

It's otherwise just serviceable but really hard to want to keep reading after that.

foutre fucked around with this message at 20:43 on May 23, 2020

buffalo all day
Mar 13, 2019

pradmer posted:

Stories of Your Life and Other by Ted Chiang -$2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0048EKOP0/


Absolute must buy. Immortal (even if Exhalation was better)

iospace
Jan 19, 2038


Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

sebmojo
Oct 23, 2010


Legit Cyberpunk









iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Dawnhounds is by a goon and it's very nicely written

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Try C. J. Cherryh, David Gerrold, Charles Stross, or Arthur C. Clarke for something harder, and Samuel R. Delany or Joanna Russ for less hard but also good stuff.

ToxicFrog
Apr 26, 2008


iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Safety Biscuits posted:

Try C. J. Cherryh, David Gerrold, Charles Stross, or Arthur C. Clarke for something harder, and Samuel R. Delany or Joanna Russ for less hard but also good stuff.

I read a lot of Clarke in my youth and I don't remember him writing anything remotely queer. And while I love Cherryh to bits and will never stop recommending her, most of her work is completely cishet; the only exception that comes to mind is Ariane Beta's relationship with the two azi in Cyteen.

For positive recommendations...Melissa Scott's work tends to be overtly queer; most of it is pretty soft but some of it might count as "semi-hard", like Burning Bright or The Kindly Ones. A Matter of Oaths by Helen S. Wright has a bi man as the protagonist but is very soft SF.

Honestly, the "harder the better, at least semi-hard" requirement is ruling out most of the stuff I'd recommend. :/ I've got lots of queer SF in my journal, and it's disproportionately lesbians, but most of it is also really squishy.

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

ToxicFrog posted:

I read a lot of Clarke in my youth and I don't remember him writing anything remotely queer.

Imperial Earth from the mid-70s and The Songs of Distant Earth from the mid-80s both show future societies where cheerful bisexuality is normal and exclusively hetero or gay people are considered a bit eccentric. But yeah, Clarke being Clarke, he doesn't exactly spend a lot of words on sexuality.

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

ToxicFrog posted:

I read a lot of Clarke in my youth and I don't remember him writing anything remotely queer. And while I love Cherryh to bits and will never stop recommending her, most of her work is completely cishet; the only exception that comes to mind is Ariane Beta's relationship with the two azi in Cyteen.

Fair points. I wasn't sure if iospace meant "books with queer themes or characters" or "by queer writers" and went for the latter, because a) it's less ambiguous and b) I'd assume that this would imply the former, anyway. Apologies if you felt misled, iospace.

quote:

Honestly, the "harder the better, at least semi-hard" requirement is ruling out most of the stuff I'd recommend. :/ I've got lots of queer SF in my journal, and it's disproportionately lesbians, but most of it is also really squishy.

And just agreeing with this; hard sf is notorious for not caring about characters at all :v:

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

Wait wait wait Clarke was queer?

e:

quote:

However, Michael Moorcock wrote:

Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s I'd go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his protégés, western and eastern, and their families, people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.[50]

Holy poo poo, I didn't know this about him. Wow. I kept lumping him with Heinlein and Asimov who were both uh,,,, "sterling" examples of heterosexuality

StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 12:53 on May 24, 2020

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.

iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee is pretty awesome. It's not 'hard' at all but it's still pretty awesome!

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
I take it nobody's mentioning Gideon the 9th because it's just people who happen to be lesbians in space, not erotic in any way?

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer
I thought about it but it didn't really seem like hard sci fi.

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
Yeah I don't know if "hard" in this context means "hard sf" or "hard" erotically

Stupid_Sexy_Flander
Mar 14, 2007

Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?
Grimey Drawer
I was wondering the same. I'm pretty sure Chuck tingle would have a few lesbians in space books available if that's the case though. Hard Trots Amongst The Stars maybe?

Decided to err on the side of caution (and hope someone want asking us for porn recommendations).

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
Oh I won't kinkshame I just have no idea, the few times people have asked for erotica recommendations I just point them at Tom O'Finland but that won't apply here

StrixNebulosa
Feb 14, 2012

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

I mean even if they were asking for good sci-fi queer porn the only way I can answer that is by pointing you to ao3, as I haven't found any actually good published stuff. :sigh:

Anyways, someone make me hurry up and reading Barbary Station - it's sci-fi and about lesbian space pirates, but I don't know yet if it's any good.

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



the becky chambers novels are all very queer, but largely not "hard" scifi since they care a lot more about sociology than technology.

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.

iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Actually try this lol Morrigan in the Sunglare and Morrigan in Shadow

pradmer
Mar 31, 2009

Follow me for more books on special!
Red Country by Joe Abercrombie - $3.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076DEJMO/

The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHY76/

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




eke out posted:

the becky chambers novels are all very queer, but largely not "hard" scifi since they care a lot more about sociology than technology.

They should be hard enough, challenges and obstacles are resolved within the framework of what the author has already established about the setting. They're harder than Star Trek by a considerable margin.

wizzardstaff
Apr 6, 2018

Zorch! Splat! Pow!

mllaneza posted:

They should be hard enough, challenges and obstacles are resolved within the framework of what the author has already established about the setting. They're harder than Star Trek by a considerable margin.

That's not a very high bar to set though, it's like saying "less world building than Sanderson".

Gideon and Becky Chambers are great and I would recommend them to anyone looking for lesbian sci-fi (or character-driven sci fi in general) but not if they had specified they want the hard stuff.

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

mllaneza posted:

They should be hard enough, challenges and obstacles are resolved within the framework of what the author has already established about the setting. They're harder than Star Trek by a considerable margin.

Star Trek's magic-rock powered space ships are more realistic than Becky Chambers' push pedal powered space ships or self-winding robots.

HopperUK
Apr 29, 2007

Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

pseudorandom name posted:

Star Trek's magic-rock powered space ships are more realistic than Becky Chambers' push pedal powered space ships or self-winding robots.

Not really? I mean the bar of 'believable' is subjective I suppose.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

I thought about it but it didn't really seem like hard sci fi.
🦴 hard.

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



wizzardstaff posted:

That's not a very high bar to set though, it's like saying "less world building than Sanderson".

Gideon and Becky Chambers are great and I would recommend them to anyone looking for lesbian sci-fi (or character-driven sci fi in general) but not if they had specified they want the hard stuff.

imo gideon, while great, is more a fantasy series that happens in space sometimes (though not much at all in that novel) -- it's a locked-door mystery that's pretty much about learning how to do magic.

mllaneza posted:

They should be hard enough, challenges and obstacles are resolved within the framework of what the author has already established about the setting. They're harder than Star Trek by a considerable margin.

yeah i agree with you, it's just if i was talking to someone that really loves like, grognardy older stuff where people constantly talk about physics, or really wants a detailed explanation for how they get around the problem of lightspeed, well, they're definitely not that

eke out fucked around with this message at 20:59 on May 24, 2020

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

HopperUK posted:

Not really? I mean the bar of 'believable' is subjective I suppose.

We are literally powering our cities right now with magic rocks.

Meanwhile Becky Chambers has spaceships that grow algae to produce fuel to power the spaceship that runs the lights that grows the algae that powers the spaceship and robots that can walk around because their movements spin motors that generates the power that allows them to walk around and other spaceships that are powered by people stepping on spring loaded plates that generates the power that heats the ships and grows the food that keeps the people alive so they can step on the plates.

Jeremiah Flintwick
Jan 14, 2010

King of Kings Ozysandwich am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.



iospace posted:

Ok, so I'm looking for, admittedly, a pretty niche request here: looking for some queer, preferably lesbian, science fiction, the harder the better, but I'm fine with semi hard. Any recs?

Try Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


pseudorandom name posted:

Star Trek's magic-rock powered space ships are more realistic than Becky Chambers' push pedal powered space ships or self-winding robots.

Yeah, it's super unrealistic to the point of being space magic, but she's consistent with it.

There are no situations with some brand new form of one-episode-only space magic. There's no gravitational anomalies resulting in time travel scenarios, godlike aliens of Q-like power, no holodeck shenanigans resulting in Professor Moriarty taking control of the ship, etc.

I think I'd feel comfortable calling her semi-hard because of that. There's not a lot of attention paid to the technology or the science and the problems are always character-driven, but she's always consistent within the limits she's set and space magic is never the cause of or solution to the problems at hand.

Khizan fucked around with this message at 21:33 on May 24, 2020

Jedit
Dec 10, 2011

Proudly supporting vanilla legends 1994-2014

pseudorandom name posted:

We are literally powering our cities right now with magic rocks.

Meanwhile Becky Chambers has spaceships that grow algae to produce fuel to power the spaceship that runs the lights that grows the algae that powers the spaceship and robots that can walk around because their movements spin motors that generates the power that allows them to walk around and other spaceships that are powered by people stepping on spring loaded plates that generates the power that heats the ships and grows the food that keeps the people alive so they can step on the plates.

Does she also have a girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the ring that drives the rod that turns the knob that works the thingummybob?

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



pseudorandom name posted:

We are literally powering our cities right now with magic rocks.

Meanwhile Becky Chambers has spaceships that grow algae to produce fuel to power the spaceship that runs the lights that grows the algae that powers the spaceship and robots that can walk around because their movements spin motors that generates the power that allows them to walk around and other spaceships that are powered by people stepping on spring loaded plates that generates the power that heats the ships and grows the food that keeps the people alive so they can step on the plates.

to me it's pretty easy to distinguish hand-wavey space magic that deals with the impossibility of travel, or lack of gravity, or lack of available energy sources, because dealing with those things is a basic precondition to telling stories in space, and not everyone really cares to bother. i barely even remember the things you seem annoyed at, which goes to show how little the narrative is really concerned with them -- they mostly exist to make the narrative of space travel through a giant universe by lots of people possible

contrast that with "this week, we meet a literal god and he teleports us to medieval england where we do Robin Hood"

eke out fucked around with this message at 22:03 on May 24, 2020

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

Khizan posted:

Yeah, it's super unrealistic to the point of being space magic, but she's consistent with it.

There are no situations with some brand new form of one-episode-only space magic. There's no gravitational anomalies resulting in time travel scenarios, godlike aliens of Q-like power, no holodeck shenanigans resulting in Professor Moriarty taking control of the ship, etc.

I think I'd feel comfortable calling her semi-hard because of that. There's not a lot of attention paid to the technology or the science and the problems are always character-driven, but she's always consistent within the limits she's set and space magic is never the cause of or solution to the problems at hand.

Star Trek didn't really overexplain anything, though. The technobabble was unintelligible, it gave the appearance of substance while conveying no information until somebody like Scotty came along to explain to the audience that they were souring the mother's milk. Becky Chambers' problem is that she attempts to explain her thing where absolutely no explanation is needed, and she doesn't have the science background necessary to avoid stomping on rakes every single time.

Also, to be clear, I don't think that Stark Trek is hard scifi, I just think that the idea that Beck Chambers is writing hard scifi is absurd. She doesn't even have any appendices full of mathematical proofs.

Jedit posted:

Does she also have a girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the ring that drives the rod that turns the knob that works the thingummybob?

Yes, and that girl is kept alive in that closed system by the thingummybob.

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

Technobabble is basically that narrative shortcut that plagues modern movies where one character explains to another character why the plot makes sense and the other character agrees that the plot does in fact make sense despite the explanation completely failing to persuade the audience, except Star Trek gets away with it because the stories focused on the social issues involved, not the technical. A thing is happening, it doesn't matter why the thing is happening or how the happening is resolved because we don't care about the thing, we care about Starfleet and the Federation and the non-Federation allies and enemies and the unaligned third-parties and their peoples and their philosophies and gently caress it, this white-black guy and that black-white guy hate each other and their hatred has destroyed their society and they're still fighting in the ruined wasteland, AND BOY IT WOULD SURE BE STUPID IF WE LET POINTLESS LITTLE THINGS LIKE SKIN COLOR RUIN EVERYTHING, WOULDN'T IT? WOULDN'T IT??? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS SIMPLE MESSAGE?

pseudorandom name
May 6, 2007

spoilers: The audience did not understand this simple message.

wizzardstaff
Apr 6, 2018

Zorch! Splat! Pow!

pseudorandom name posted:

spoilers: The audience did not understand this simple message.

Yeah, it’s a shame how political and preachy the new Star Trek shows have been, compared to the early stuff like TNG and DS9.

Evil Fluffy
Jul 13, 2009

Scholars are some of the most pompous and pedantic people I've ever had the joy of meeting.

wizzardstaff posted:

Yeah, it’s a shame how political and preachy the new Star Trek shows have been, compared to the early stuff like TNG and DS9.

:wtc:

I'm not sure you ever actually watched DS9.

quantumfoam
Dec 25, 2003

Never expected the technology stuff in Becky Chambers scifi stories to cause a multi-post meltdown about "no energy loss closed systems" and Star Trek technobabble in this thread, but we live in interesting dangerous times. And now it's really impossible to tell pseudorandom name & pseudanonymous apart when reading this thread.

"No energy loss closed systems" are a staple of science-fiction, even for hard-scifi series like Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series where disembodied Conjoiner brains chilling in the engine housing thinking really really really to 15th power hard about math are what drives Conjoiner spacedrive-engines.

eke out
Feb 24, 2013



quantumfoam posted:

"No energy loss closed systems" are a staple of science-fiction, even for hard-scifi series like Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series where disembodied Conjoiner brains chilling in the engine housing thinking really really really to 15th power hard about math are what drives Conjoiner spacedrive-engines.

lol yeah, Reynolds is exactly who I always think of about how useless the hard/soft distinction is, because that series in particular is full of pseudo-"hard" stuff that's really just space magic

(to be clear: i love space magic)

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foutre
Sep 4, 2011

:toot: RIP ZEEZ :toot:
I don't have particularly hard sci fi reccs, but Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear has a queer woman as the protagonist and fun space magic.

An Unkindness of Ghosts does deal with the science of how the generation ship it's set in works, albeit in not the hardest way, but it did have a pretty consistent system for stuff that happens within it - particularly since it was from the PoV of characters denied an understanding of the science - and it's good if kind of heavy (also just about every major character is queer or nb or what have you). I do think it goes way deeper into the sociological/anthropological aspects of how generation ship society would develop, in a much more convincing/thought out way than a lot of otherwise 'harder' books.

I know this probably is neither here nor there re: what people want from hard sci fi, but I always thought Octavia Butler's note on Kindred, where she said she thought of it as science fiction, just with the science being biology not physics, was a good reframing. A lot of sci fi that has internally consistent explanations of space travel doesn't necessarily do as good of a job keeping the social science stuff solid.

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