Poldarn posted:

Brutal twist and an arts and crafts project you can make with your kid!

Khizan posted:

darkgray posted:

This conversation reminds me of a Photoshop edit I made years and years and years ago for some old SA thread, but nobody seemed to get it back then. Maybe its time has finally come...

Black Griffon posted:

Not seeing anything like that on my end. Which amazon are you using/from which country?

Black Griffon posted:

Revenger 1-3 is less technical hard science (but still technically hard sci-fi) but has a lot of weird, fun characters and crazy tech like HoS, Pushing Ice is way more grounded, and reading HoS after that made me like him way more because I think he writes far-future characters way better than current era characters (but also I loved Pushing Ice, so I'm pretty sure I'm just a fan).

Revelation Space is next, I suspect I'll enjoy it, but we'll see.

Black Griffon posted:

oh yeah I see it on .co.uk. very curious.

Jedit posted:

Am I missing something here?

Lemniscate Blue posted:

You may not enjoy the way the trilogy ends, I didn't.

MeerkatHero posted:

There's a new K.J. Parker novel out as of yesterday: How to Rule an Empire & Get Away with It. It's sort of a sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City.

Sadly, there is almost no way to read anything about it, even the slightest blurb, without spoilers. Then again, if you like K.J. Parker, you already pretty much know what you're getting. Here's what Publisher's Weekly thought.

I do happen to like K.J. Parker, a lot, and have wondered why I don't see his stuff promoted often or in many places.

DigitalRaven posted:

Some sort of dodgy copy, since the UK release was just branded "The Traitor" and had a different cover to that one (which appears to be the US one)?

Jedit posted:

Am I missing something here?

Jedit posted:

People do import US books to the UK, for some reason. In this case it's justifiable as they have better covers and the correct title.

Poldarn posted:

giving me the impression that the world is incredibly old, history is caught in cycles, and things just repeat.

Doctor Jeep posted:

it is, that's the thing with parker's main world, the various series and standalone novels happen in different eras

quantumfoam posted:

SFL Archives Volume 10 (1985) update 4

-book publisher fuckery pt 47: Diane Duane's (who I had never heard of before or totally forgotten about (I really didn't read YA fiction growing up)) book 2 of a existing series comes out, which leads into a digression about book publishers (Dell) cancelling entire print runs, Ballantine Books dying, books being stuff in publishing limbo, Bluejay Press taking up the copyrights, and Bluejay Press as usual utterly loving up the release dates of books.

jng2058 posted:

Oh hey, I remember Diane Duane! She wrote some of the better Star Trek novels in the `80s. Her Rihannsu novels were arguably as influential at the time towards defining the Romulans as John Ford's books were for the Klingons. Very little of their versions lasted past TNG, of course, but for a stretch in the `80s they were a big hit in Trek fandom.

Sjonkel posted:

Hey guys, I read the first two books of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series a while ago, but couldn't really get into it. To me they felt like they where 300 pages too long, so it didn't really hook me. Recently I decided to pick up House of Suns for whatever reason, and I found that I really liked it. How are his other books/series? Are any of them more like House of Suns and less like Revelation Space?

ToxicFrog posted:

Feline Wizards

jng2058 posted:

Oh hey, I remember Diane Duane! She wrote some of the better Star Trek novels in the `80s. Her Rihannsu novels were arguably as influential at the time towards defining the Romulans as John Ford's books were for the Klingons. Very little of their versions lasted past TNG, of course, but for a stretch in the `80s they were a big hit in Trek fandom.

tildes posted:

Ok I was extremely skeptical about The Steerswoman based on its very amateur looking cover art, but bought it anyway based on the continuous recommendations ITT. And it’s great so far!

It turns out it was published a few decades ago, but the author bought back the rights and rereleased it?
So the reason it looks self published is because she redid the covers herself for the new release.


E: really tho she should have spent even a tiny amount of additional money on a better looking cover imo.

Captain Monkey posted:

Vague rumor is she might write another. But I wouldn't hold my breath or anything. Great books though.

Marshal Radisic posted:

You know, something I think about a lot but never plan on doing is writing up a comparison of Tom Holt's early works with Terry Pratchett's. They both started getting published in the 1980s and both made comedic fantasy their wheelhouse, but they veered in wildly different directions afterwards.

quote:

In 1966 I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (the 24th annual), the Tricon, with somewhat over 3,000 attendees, held over Labor Day weekend in Cleveland. All the talk among the professional writers that year was of one New York editor at a major publishing house who had just upped his company’s output of hardcover science fiction from two novels a year, which it had been for the last ten years, to twenty-four(!) novels a year1 (which, incidentally, it has been for the last twelve years). All we pros, young and old, talked of this man in reverent tones as a great gentleman, practically a scholar, seriously committed to the field and deeply concerned with the development of the genre. That weekend Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal tied with Frank Herbert’s Dune for the Hugo. Indeed, that weekend was the first time I met Zelazny in person. (Back then, because our last names shared five letters, we were frequently mistaken for one another by readers.) Over dinner with Roger and his wife in the hotel’s rather ornate restaurant—it had a transparent plastic bridge over a luminous fishpond—he mentioned that This Immortal had, months ago, been submitted to this fabled editor, who’d bounced it. Well, certainly there was nothing remarkable there. But back in New York, a week later, the will of the gods conspired so that this very editor called up and invited me to lunch! And that is how it came to pass, during a lull in the conversation after the first very dry martini and before the fillet of sole, that I casually remarked: “I was just in Cleveland last week, when Zelazny’s This Immortal tied with Dune for the Hugo. You may have missed out on something there: Zelazny tells me he submitted it to you and you bounced it.” And the great man, shining hope of the genre, committed to and concerned about the development of the field, looked at me across the rim of his martini glass and, with a slight frown, inquired: “The Hugo Award? Now what’s that?”

This was my first encounter with that complete dissociation with what I had taken to be the real world: the SF editor of a major publishing house, who himself edited twenty-four SF novels a year, did not in 1966 know what the Hugo award was!

quote:

In 1951 some 15 SF novels were published. In 1971 there were closer to 300—most of them paperbacks. In 1979 there were approximately 700 new SF books published.

Jedit posted:

Suggesting that Tom Holt veered in any direction is so outlandish as to qualify as F/SF in its own right. The man's written the same book twenty times. I was absolutely floored when I learned that he was KJ Parker.

Jedit posted:

Suggesting that Tom Holt veered in any direction is so outlandish as to qualify as F/SF in its own right. The man's written the same book twenty times. I was absolutely floored when I learned that he was KJ Parker.

mllaneza posted:

Really, really good books. Interesting worldbuilding, nifty magic, compelling plots, and solid characters. I'm so very sorry there were only three of these.