|
Borne is so fuckin good. I love Vandermeer.
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 00:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 05:41 |
|
|
packetmantis posted:Borne is so fuckin good. I love Vandermeer. Read The Strange Bird!!!!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 00:30
|
|
|
I did and I cried a lot!!! Very relatable!!!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 00:38
|
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:I really enjoyed this The Broken Sword is an underappreciated masterpiece, highly recommended. At $1.99 it's a steal. Also has a great audiobook version if that's your thing!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 02:31
|
|
|
Has anyone found a good plot summary/recap of a memory called empire? It has been a minute and I really don’t remember more than broad strokes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 03:24
|
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:I really enjoyed this It owns. Fine example of the fantasy genre as it was before everyone started trying to be Tolkien.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 08:29
|
|
|
tildes posted:Has anyone found a good plot summary/recap of a memory called empire? It has been a minute and I really don’t remember more than broad strokes. If you're asking because you're concerned you'll be lost in Desolation, I'd suggest just jumping in. I barely remember Memory (hah), but Desolation's exposition quickly got me back up to speed. Now if only some editor had reminded Arkady Martine that italics for emphasis loses its punch when used multiple times in every paragraph.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 17:10
|
|
|
I was a bit lukewarm on The Broken Sword when I started it but ended up really liking it. Honestly I wish there was more fantasy that felt influenced by Norse mythology directly, rather than the general Northern Europe-flavored mythology lite filtered through Tolkien. For all I know there is a bunch and I've just never come across it, though.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:05
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:I was a bit lukewarm on The Broken Sword when I started it but ended up really liking it. Honestly I wish there was more fantasy that felt influenced by Norse mythology directly, rather than the general Northern Europe-flavored mythology lite filtered through Tolkien. For all I know there is a bunch and I've just never come across it, though. You might be interested in Northworld by David Drake.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:10
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:You might be interested in Northworld by David Drake. Hard to say no when the Kindle version is free, thanks for the rec!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:13
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:Hard to say no when the Kindle version is free, thanks for the rec!  Here's a neat excerpt from Drake's notes on the trilogy: https://david-drake.com/2000/northworld/ quote:I made what I thought was a pointless change from my normal procedure by adding a short afterward to Northworld. For years my friends Jim Baen and Mark Van Name had been urging me to do that, telling people the literary and historical background of the work. I regarded this as silly: the story was the story, good or bad; and no better or worse because it had a background in history, classical literature, or (here) Norse myth. But I did it anyway, because Jim and Mark are very smart and unquestionably have my best interests at heart.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:17
|
|
|
I really like Northworld. There’s at least one very brutal rape scene in Vengeance, be warned. Also a bunch of goofy sex stuff. But it’s great anyway.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:27
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:I was a bit lukewarm on The Broken Sword when I started it but ended up really liking it. Honestly I wish there was more fantasy that felt influenced by Norse mythology directly, rather than the general Northern Europe-flavored mythology lite filtered through Tolkien. For all I know there is a bunch and I've just never come across it, though. Elizabeth Boyer wrote a good number of Norse influenced fantasy books.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:37
|
|
|
coathat posted:Elizabeth Boyer wrote a good number of Norse influenced fantasy books. Yes -- her four book "Wizard's War" series, starting with "The Troll's Grindstone" is great, although sad to say it doesn't appear to be available as an ebook anywhere. I suspect this would fit the bill for anyone looking for Norse-influenced fantasy that's not really in the Tolkien tree. Looks like the paperbacks may be hard to find, at least on Amazon, although I feel like I've bought and rebought them several times since first reading the books in high school. I wish there would ebook versions -- my paperback copies are pretty old and ratty.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 18:41
|
|
|
I just finished (stopped listening to) Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. The first half inside the space station was a fun, interesting romp. Enough Sci-fi stuff to be interesting and feel real, while still providing an engaging story and plot. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator does a fine job and it's great to listen to. Then the book ends, and we get a weird 5000 year time skip and it drops into lengthy descriptions of hard to imagine space constructs and living situations/aftermath of the Seveneves. The plot was moving along, but I felt like I listened to another hour or two and the new character traveled from one location to another, without anything significant happening. The whole 7 races thing felt really weird and unbelievable to me as well, I could see the 'evil' girl's offspring secluding themselves and becoming entrenched in their ways, but the other 6 co-mingled for thousands of years and the bloodlines seem just as strong as day 1. I might hop back in some other time, but I have set it aside for the moment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 20:19
|
|
|
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/supermassive-scifi-fantasy-horror-tachyon-books Surprisingly great spread in this, especially the Kiernan!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 20:29
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/supermassive-scifi-fantasy-horror-tachyon-books Also contains a number of authors from my big rear end prose stylists list, including the lady who started it off Patricia A. McKillip.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 20:42
|
|
|
Kestral posted:The Broken Sword is an underappreciated masterpiece, highly recommended. At $1.99 it's a steal. Also has a great audiobook version if that's your thing! What minimum age would you suggest this for? It looks right up my street and potentially my children's, too. For reference they are currently madly into Tolkien - I'm finding that with me reading it and explaining some of the more complex ideas, it's not too advanced. Is this similar? (I notice it was published in the same year as Fellowship)
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 21:10
|
|
|
Varsity posted:Seveneves Second half spoiler I never finished but as I understand it he was literally trying to justify a star trek style setting with too-human species
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 21:16
|
|
|
Harold Fjord posted:I never finished but as I understand it he was literally trying to justify a star trek style setting with too-human species also nobody in this drat thread will admit to actually finishing it and having coherent memories of it, lol
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 21:34
|
|
|
crazyvanman posted:What minimum age would you suggest this for? It looks right up my street and potentially my children's, too. For reference they are currently madly into Tolkien - I'm finding that with me reading it and explaining some of the more complex ideas, it's not too advanced. Is this similar? (I notice it was published in the same year as Fellowship) That's a tough one, and it's going to depend on what kind of maturity the kids have developed, and the sorts of fantasy they've been exposed to so far. I've met (and probably was) precocious well-read ten year olds who could handle it, because the mythic adventure story would cloak the weirder, darker threads of what's going on, particularly later in the book, but kids obviously vary a lot among their cohort. The Broken Sword is very much trying to be part of the strains of Norse and Celtic myth that inspired it, which means that on the one hand it's a heroic coming-of-age story, and on the other hand, the moral laws underpinning it are those of Iron Age myth. The plot is driven - no spoilers yet, this is the first few pages - by a spiteful curse that causes two infants to be swapped, and dooms both of them. If you're conversant in stories like this, you know right from the get-go that these people are going to meet bad ends, and bring a lot of grief to those around them basically just by existing. The most egregious, potentially least-kid-friendly example involves violence against family members, specifically one of the changeling children, who is a berserker, murdering his brother in a jealous rage over a woman, concealing the murder, and eventually being dragged down by his web of lies until he winds up murdering nearly his entire family. The descriptions of the violence is about on par with what I recall from Tolkien and Beowulf, where people are getting impaled by hurled spears and their heads lopped off by swords, but it's described in a way that isn't... upsetting? It's the emotional context of violence against family that may unsettle some younger readers. On a related note, the protagonist - the child who gets swapped into the court of an elf-lord and his faerie court - is a trickster and mischief-maker as much as a valiant warrior. He's super hot, and elves are extremely in to him, and vice versa. All of which is to say, Skafloc Fucks: we're given to understand he loses his virginity early to elf maidens, and that as a youth he roams the countryside charming humans. Spoilers that the book also heavily foreshadows: All of which eventually ties into his doom, when he meets a girl from his birth-family, and they fall in love and commit the unforgivable sin of incest. This is eventually revealed to his sister, a converted Christian, and much suffering is engendered thereby. All of this is handled in high, mythic language, so we don't get any scenes of Skafloc writhing with a bunch of elves, but the content is impossible to overlook or misinterpret. Long story short, if your kids love Tolkien and can handle some moral complexity of the kind seen in, say, Arthurian or Greek myth that hasn't been overly sugar-coated, and if they know what sex is and that people might do it for reasons other than making babies, they can probably give The Broken Sword a shot. Worst case, they end up putting it down because they're not ready for it, and picking it up again when they are. I'd suggest reading it yourself first though: it's relatively short, and there's enough going on in it that you might want to know what sorts of conversations are coming if they read it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 22:06
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:also nobody in this drat thread will admit to actually finishing it and having coherent memories of it, lol I finished it and enjoyed it a lot.  I love Stephenson's books.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 22:12
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:I finished it and enjoyed it a lot. Same here. He's got his idiosyncrasies, but he's written some of my absolutely most favorite books. I do wish Seveneves had been two books so he could have taken his time and really spread his nerdy wings on the distant future parts instead of shotgunning them so vigorously, but I still had a fun time and a lot of the wacky orbital infrastructure stuck in my brain.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 22:40
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:I did and I cried a lot!!! Very relatable!!! yeah, dang gut puncher, that one.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 22:41
|
|
|
The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081BU42O/
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2021 23:55
|
|
|
pradmer posted:The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain M Banks - $2.99  God I miss his stuff.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 00:23
|
|
|
Varsity posted:I just finished (stopped listening to) Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. i wouldn't bother, the end 1/3 or so was pointless and silly
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 01:56
|
|
|
All novels are "pointless." The point is enjoyment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 01:58
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:All novels are "pointless." The point is enjoyment. I agree with the idea that a book enjoyed is a book that was worthwhile but I do not agree with this in general.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:05
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:All novels are "pointless." The point is enjoyment. This is reductionary. Is all art enjoyment? Can videogames be art, as most of them are purely for enjoyment? C'mon.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:07
|
|
|
It wasn't a hard and fast rule, I just really disagree with the idea that a story being "pointless" has any meaning.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:23
|
|
|
packetmantis posted:All novels are "pointless." The point is enjoyment. Seveneves: Part 3 wasn't enjoyable, either.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:26
|
|
|
I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. My understanding is that Star Trek books are hot garbage but I guess I'd be open to having my mind changed.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:27
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. The best Star Trek novel is Q Squared by Peter David, followed by Wounded Sky by Diane Duane. They capture very different and very awesome things about TNG and TOS respectively. Be warned that Duane is a controversial Star Trek author as she basically made her own headcanon for the Romulans and went hard with it (and I think it was good, but it was deemed officially not canon). The more important warning is that Duane likes to kill off one significant minor character every single book at the climax, so don't get attached to that. She has actually cool aliens in her books though! Peter David meanwhile is just consistently good and fun with Star Trek, and he writes the best Q.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:30
|
|
|
I'll take a look at Peter David and Diane Duane. I am also looking to expand my sci fi horizons beyond just Star Trek so if you have recommendations beyond that I would appreciate it as well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 02:33
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'll take a look at Peter David and Diane Duane. I am also looking to expand my sci fi horizons beyond just Star Trek so if you have recommendations beyond that I would appreciate it as well. Becky Chambers is your next stop!
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 03:06
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:Seveneves: Part 3 wasn't enjoyable, either. I enjoyed it. This kind of bullshit is not helpful to anyone.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 03:20
|
|
|
Can one of you explain why Seveneves part 3 was bad instead of going straight for the "it sucked forever" / "it was good" debate?
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 03:21
|
|
|
A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. Check out Red Shirts by John Scalzi. It's a fun romp, fully aware of its own silliness as it riffs on Star Trek. It's narrated by some random child actor you've probably never heard of, but he does a good job.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 03:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 05:41 |
|
|
Bad news: Only one of Diane Duane's Star Trek books is on Audible. Good news: It's Dark Mirror narrated by John De Lancie, https://www.audible.com/pd/Star-Trek-The-Next-Generation-The-Dark-Mirror-Adapted-Audiobook/B00E0R1L9S Also by Diane Duane but in the Modern Fantasy category is the Cat Wizards series. These are set in the same world as her YA Young Wizards books, but are by no means YA books. Absolutely solid novels, highly recommended. Maybe not for the OP, https://www.audible.com/series/Cat-Wizards-Audiobooks/B01N8XA5CN Please use her web store for DD ebooks, https://www.dianeduane.com/ebook-store/ And Peter David has a bunch of books on Audible, including several Star Trek, https://www.audible.com/author/Peter-David/B000APYOHU?ref=a_pd_Star-T_c1_author_1
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2021 03:41
|
|
