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fez_machine posted:It's a self-published series on Google Play from a frequent Rec.Arts.Science.Fiction poster that's heavy on world building, magic systems, and qausi-socialist politics. That doesn’t seem like a fair summary at all. I don’t recall ‘massive caveats’ from the Commonweal Likers and this thread is so small that it only takes a few people interested in a series to get a thread-devouring tide of posts going. I also think the only people seriously proposing Graydon Saunders Infiltration Theory have been named Cardiac and the reason it keeps coming up is that it’s a very funny idea. I haven’t read Commonweal but it sounds possibly neat, it could be my first self published book purchase! E: ah poo poo
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Nov 25, 2021 16:18
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I’m being pressured into reading a Discworld for Christmas. I think I’ll enjoy it?
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Nov 25, 2021 16:23
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StrixNebulosa posted:I’m being pressured into reading a Discworld for Christmas. I think I’ll enjoy it? You should! Is it Hogfather?
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Nov 25, 2021 16:26
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I finished Bleak Season which is book 7 of the Black Company series, and that was an odd one. I can't imagine having waited 6 years from the end of Dreams of Steel for this, it feels like it barely moved things forward instead focusing on whats going on in Dejagore. I do sort of question why its not part of the books of the south aside from publication but maybe that'll get answered as I go further in. Unless it all just counts as a Book of the Glittering Stone entirely because of the daughter of the night finally becoming more of a player?
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Nov 25, 2021 16:31
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StrixNebulosa posted:I’m being pressured into reading a Discworld for Christmas. I think I’ll enjoy it? Pressured?
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Nov 25, 2021 16:32
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Quorum posted:You should! Is it Hogfather? Yup!
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Nov 25, 2021 16:46
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Hell yeah Hogfather owns any time but especially around Christmas.
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Nov 25, 2021 16:49
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silvergoose posted:I've no idea how you can bounce off three books of a series and still read the fourth, haha. I've done that with three KJ Parker books now because people in this thread swear tom Holt writing as KJ Parker is super-good. Instead it's the same drat masturbatory STEM smugness over and over again coupled to worn-out Alexandre Dumas style "well actually" plot twists for me. actual SF&F discussion: I re-read Burrough's A Princess of Mars yesterday after having rewatched John Carter 2012 recently. Many things from the book were there inside the movie but extremely jumbled up or ignored. The Green Martians being 15 ft tall, everyone being naked, most of the dialogue happening via telepathy, the mostly throwaway reference to the 9th beam of energy inside the book versus 9th beam of energy being a load bearing piece of the movie version, etc. Also it's pretty bizarre how most of Pat Frank's stories got live-action adaptations. People I didn't expect to (except for John Ringo, that is obvious in retrospect) really really liked Alas Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas,_Babylon Am just happy nobody optioned the rights for Dean Ing's Quantrill series, that series makes just about everything else post-nuclear SF&F fiction seem tame and well adjusted.
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Nov 25, 2021 16:56
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There's an audio excerpt from the new Hogfather audiobook about halfway down this article. I don't necessarily recommend that Strix listen to it, but it's definitely a good representation of the humour. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/16/bill-nighy-narrate-terry-pratchett-footnotes-new-discworld-recordings In case anyone isn't reading the Pratchett thread: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Carpet People next year there are going to be 40 new Discworld audiobooks released (with Hogfather due any day now to lead the pack). Bill Nighy as the Footnotes - although he doesn't sound enough like Pterry for my taste - and Peter Serafinowicz as Death. Andy Serkis is going to narrate Small Gods.
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Nov 25, 2021 16:57
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General Battuta posted:That doesn’t seem like a fair summary at all. I don’t recall ‘massive caveats’ from the Commonweal Likers I think the caveats referred to (at least for me) are the absolutely massive shift in tone from book 1 to books 2 and 3, and the prose being sometimes needlessly obtuse and/or needing a bit more editing of extraneous things. (Though I’ve waffled on that last part, coming to think some of the detail is intended to make magic seem less magical and more like craft/work, which would fit in with some of the things the series is internally trying to do.)
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Nov 25, 2021 17:04
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Jedit posted:Pressured? My best friend came to me and said "please join our discworld book club please please" and while I've been busy reading other things, well, how can I resist? I haven't read any Discworld in years, and I've only read a handful before then.
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Nov 25, 2021 17:23
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Cerepol posted:I finished Bleak Season which is book 7 of the Black Company series, and that was an odd one. I can't imagine having waited 6 years from the end of Dreams of Steel for this, it feels like it barely moved things forward instead focusing on whats going on in Dejagore. Bleak Seasons was not at all what I expected from the next Black Company book. For a few years there I wasn't expecting it to ever happen. And then it did ! It has the downsides of the annalist being hosed in the head and stuck in one place, so there isn't much going on besides Murgen's bullshit. Croaker calls him out on that and threatens to take the books back. You've got She is the Darkness next, and a ton of plot happens (finally). It's probably my favorite in the series. Oh, and stop at Soldiers Live; PoS lives up to its initialism and is generally considered to be an un-book. Do not attempt, if you want more Glen Cook, switch over to Dread Empire instead.
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Nov 25, 2021 17:32
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Kalman posted:I think the caveats referred to (at least for me) are the absolutely massive shift in tone from book 1 to books 2 and 3, and the prose being sometimes needlessly obtuse and/or needing a bit more editing of extraneous things. (Though I’ve waffled on that last part, coming to think some of the detail is intended to make magic seem less magical and more like craft/work, which would fit in with some of the things the series is internally trying to do.) Please don't describe my trilogy perfectly 
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Nov 25, 2021 20:21
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For anyone in the UK, The Blacktongue Thief is a kindle daily deal until midnight. I picked it up because you all have talked about Buehlman's work enough that I want to read it. e: For that matter, Goblin Emperor follow-up Witness For The Dead is also 99p right now The Sweet Hereafter fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Nov 25, 2021 |
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Nov 25, 2021 22:42
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StrixNebulosa posted:My best friend came to me and said "please join our discworld book club please please" and while I've been busy reading other things, well, how can I resist? I haven't read any Discworld in years, and I've only read a handful before then. Did you read any of the Tiffany Aching books? I think you’ll like those in particular.
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Nov 25, 2021 23:38
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Kalman posted:I think the caveats referred to (at least for me) are the absolutely massive shift in tone from book 1 to books 2 and 3, and the prose being sometimes needlessly obtuse and/or needing a bit more editing of extraneous things. (Though I’ve waffled on that last part, coming to think some of the detail is intended to make magic seem less magical and more like craft/work, which would fit in with some of the things the series is internally trying to do.) I would say that a big focus is the idea that magic and power can be another form of labor that's just as valuable to the workers as anything else
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Nov 26, 2021 00:39
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bovis posted:Read through the first 4 Malazan books over the past month. I had first attempted the series 5 or so years ago and for some reason gave up 3/4 of the way through the 4th on so I'm finally ahead of my last attempt! The Chain of Dogs was so loving good
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Nov 26, 2021 02:24
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Yeah the Chain of Dogs was great and still really enthralling the second time around when I knew what was going to happen. I can really see how the books work really well on subsequent reads with the foreshadowing and understanding of characters and their intentions. Just feel it's really well put together in total.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:04
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I bounced hard off of Malazon book #2 my first time around, because I wanted to see more of Quick Ben and Whiskeyjack and the rest of the Bridgeburners, so I skipped ahead to book #3 and liked it, then went back to #2 and loved it. Deadhouse Gates is still my favorite of the series, I think.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:43
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The chain of dogs was probably the only part of Malazan I really liked. Definitely the only thing that actually conjured up something resembling emotions.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:51
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Just finished the new Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space entry: Inhibitor Phase. Wow that was a powerfully lovely novel, wherein formerly complex characters are reduced to comical relief, all characters have zero independent voice and blend together blandly, several characters who were given excellent send-offs in previous novels are dragged out of the grave extremely nonsensically to be killed again, and more than one straight magical Deus Ex Machina MacGuffin is tossed around without much consideration. All of these issues showed up very similarly in the last Revenger novel, to the point where a good chunk of this book reads as if he just re-wrote Bone Silence to be a Revelation Space novel. Like, there are identical plot points ripped pretty much verbatim and recycled at the same places in the narrative. I can't tell of Reynolds has farmed his poo poo out to a ghost writer while he collects residuals, or if he's just fallen very very far from where he was as an author two decades ago. Super weird and disappointing, overall. Rime fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Nov 26, 2021 |
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Nov 26, 2021 04:04
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Rime posted:Just finished the new Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space entry: Inhibitor Phase. This matches my experience with it. I re-read the three preceding novels in prep, and that made it stand out even worse. I was excited to see how the ongoing fight against the inhibitors was going, and how humans could have survived and it was just disappointment after disappointment. Felt like so much missed potential.
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Nov 26, 2021 04:17
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So I finished Perhaps the Stars tonight and I’m incredibly impressed with how well Palmer brought the story to a close. Yes, it’s definitely written by a prof with serious interest in Renaissance literature and all that, but after (what I felt was a somewhat weak) Will to Battle I wasn’t convinced she had an end in mind. She definitely did, and it’s satisfying closure and incredibly well written.
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Nov 26, 2021 06:52
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General Battuta posted:That doesn’t seem like a fair summary at all. I don’t recall ‘massive caveats’ from the Commonweal Likers and this thread is so small that it only takes a few people interested in a series to get a thread-devouring tide of posts going. I also think the only people seriously proposing Graydon Saunders Infiltration Theory have been named Cardiac and the reason it keeps coming up is that it’s a very funny idea. Says the official thread infiltrating author.  I am going to have to eat this for some time right?
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Nov 26, 2021 06:53
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Rime posted:Just finished the new Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space entry: Inhibitor Phase. Alastair Reynolds is rewalking the same exact SF&F author career arc/declining writing quality arc of James P Hogan. The best way to describe both authors careers/declining writing quality arc is the typical death cycle of stars, as currently understood by astronomy and astrophysics. This is doubly, no triply, ironic since Alastair Reynolds was a astrophysicist before becoming a fulltime SF&F author and that the ending of Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space and the ending of James P Hogan's Inherit the Stars both required literal changes to the origin and development of the universe billions of years ago in their stories that were so WTF out-of-nowhere it burned up the all hydrogen and arguably the helium in their literary stars, and every new story and novel burned up elements more and more until supernovas of all writing talent/ideas gone. Right now Alastair Reynolds, and James P Hogan decades before he died, morphed into neutron stars of terribly bad cliched characters nuanceless writing and suck forever until the heat death of the universe but don't quite suck enough to be classic SF&F author black holes of terribleness for their first books or for their earlier stories to not be occasionally recommended to new people in SF&F fandom. The triple irony thing is, uh, as per current cosmological theory transmuting matter into iron is where literal stars implode/explode into novas and supernovas, hence irony part three. Actual positive thing about SF&F: damnit, I've got nothing. Is it true that paper shortages have boned over book publishers in the European Union in a World War 2 rationing way?
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Nov 26, 2021 17:03
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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECE9OD4/ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKQX0/ Shards of Earth (Final Architects #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HLPZY6X/ Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1) by Nicholas Eames - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTXW/ Foundation by Isaac Asimov - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1PWA/ The Pariah (Covenant of Steel #1) by Anthony Ryan - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PV49R1G/ Anyone have an opinion on this? Totally new to me. Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077FC55Y/
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Nov 26, 2021 19:15
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quantumfoam posted:actual SF&F discussion: I re-read Burrough's A Princess of Mars yesterday after having rewatched John Carter 2012 recently. Many things from the book were there inside the movie but extremely jumbled up or ignored. The Green Martians being 15 ft tall, everyone being naked, most of the dialogue happening via telepathy, the mostly throwaway reference to the 9th beam of energy inside the book versus 9th beam of energy being a load bearing piece of the movie version, etc. I really liked the movie as an adaptation; Chabon knows his pulp. And recasting the Therns as a hidden race of warmongering manipulators was an evilly hilarious in-joke. I'm sorry we never got to see where he was planning to go with that.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:35
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John Carter was a great movie that died in marketing.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:49
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I find John Carter interesting as series that was, at the time, incredibly progressive (religion is used by the ruling class to hold people down, all races have good people despite cultural differences, with the exception of the White Martians, all of which was DEFINITELY intentional, etc.), but has aged like dog poo poo.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:58
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pradmer posted:The Pariah (Covenant of Steel #1) by Anthony Ryan - $2.99 I just bought it for full price and I enjoyed it. It’s well trodden ground but it seemed done pretty well. of course I also liked the Commonweal series, so I may be a Graydon alt
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Nov 26, 2021 21:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:John Carter was a great movie that died in marketing. Simply adding "..of Mars" to the title would have done so much more versus what happened in reality. Really would enjoy seeing a non-fiction book about the making of that John Carter 2012 movie, there is so much a book like that could cover. SFL Archives for example, first mentioned that Disney had optioned the rights for A Princess of Mars way back in 1991. My guess why the marketing for John Carter 2012 was so bad is because A) most of the marketing budget was eaten away by 20 yrs of previous marketing deals to firms long-since-dead, or B) that Disney owned the Burroughs literary estate a massive 20 yrs-in-the-works loving payout once it finally hit movie screens and or C) active malice by Disney executives
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Nov 26, 2021 21:26
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I find John Carter interesting as series that was, at the time, incredibly progressive Among the other things that Edgar Rice Burroughs [1] wrote, apart from Tarzan and sword-and-planet pulp, was a little poem called "The Black Man's Burden" [2], as a response to Kipling. In which he basically tore Kipling as well as the whole ideology of colonialism a goatse-sized new rear end in a top hat. You can read it here for example: https://powerpoetry.org/content/black-mans-burden IN conclusion, land of contrasts, etc. [1] Nearly wrote William S. Burroughs instead. That would have been an interesting mash-up. [2] There's a number of different poems by that title, from various authors. An obvious title to come up with independently.
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Nov 26, 2021 21:47
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Missed one. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4) by Becky Chambers - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088RDCLQ4/
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Nov 26, 2021 22:11
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:For anyone in the UK, The Blacktongue Thief is a kindle daily deal until midnight. I picked it up because you all have talked about Buehlman's work enough that I want to read it. Spent an hour or so with this last night, it's really fun. Hits a similar irreverent-swashbuckler vibe to Locke Lamora. It sometimes overdoes the gratuitous info-dumps though, with the main character constantly explaining "I called him [X] which in my country means "jackass" because of this thing about....". The authors trying to make the world feel varied and have everyone gossiping about neighbouring countries and the like, but a lot of the time it feels like he's just showing off all the vernacular he's come up with.
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Nov 26, 2021 22:26
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ulmont posted:I just bought it for full price and I enjoyed it. It’s well trodden ground but it seemed done pretty well. I liked it too, have posted about it previously in here. I think it's at 3:1 enjoyment goon ratio so far.
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Nov 26, 2021 22:35
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pradmer posted:Missed one. this might have been my favorite wayfarer book in the end, even over the first one
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Nov 27, 2021 02:34
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pradmer posted:The Pariah (Covenant of Steel #1) by Anthony Ryan - $2.99 I also liked it. Not as much as Blood Song (which is probably Ryan's high watermark for me) but more than his trilogy with the dragons. It didn't really seem to so anything new but it was an enjoyable enough read and I'm looking forward to the next book. Which it being Ryan I'm reasonably confident we'll see next year. If you've liked other books by him, I'd say it's well worth $3.
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Nov 27, 2021 05:06
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General Battuta posted:[sigh] The graydon saunders baru cormorant Holy poo poo 
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Nov 27, 2021 09:09
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On Alistair Reynolds I just went through a phase of reading nearly all his books (after bouncing off Redemption Space years ago then finding and really enjoying House of Suns) and frankly I think he’s always been a bit scattershot, both between and within his novels. I thought Inhibitor Space started out strong and ended up disappointing. But on the flip side I enjoyed his recent Prefect two books and parts of the Revenger ones. The biggest issue I have with his books is people acting cartoonishly stupidly over some obsessive/compulsive cause or point of ostensible principle, which ruined Pushing Ice for me and almost made me ditch the third Revenger book. But it’s scattered all over his work and I had thought he’d moved mostly past it with the Prefect ones - until inhibitor space.
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Nov 27, 2021 09:41
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I'm obviously biased in that I love the Princess of Mars books and sword and planet books in general, the Barsoom books became the standard that so many things that came later "borrowed" from for a reason, it was just that much more creative and fun, and Burroughs was not shy about sticking it to things he did not like. His racial politics is not conventional, his Barsoom books feature all sorts of races and they are full of honorable people (except the white martians, f those losers!) but they also have lots of jerks, most of which end up dead. The Tarzan books are less blurry to the views of the time, with plenty of descriptions of African natives that would not be put to paper today. Those stories also had good tribes and bad tribes so he followed the same themes. He also believed in inherited nobility, i.e. there was a ruling class of people who were just better, and it was mostly due to being related to other, better people. That's probably the most annoying thing about reading his work, the heroes aren't just heroes who go above and beyond, they are all secret princes or scions of noble families and that's why they are better. (To be fair, he has plenty of terrible rulers too) And like a lot of people at the time, he was pro-eugenics, which creeps into a bit of his work. I read a lot of older pulp now thanks to the various places online that are preserving them and you'll see a lot of older work with the same problems, but a lot of older stuff that is way worse. And some that is way better. The worst part of reading the old stories is you'll be in the middle of something awesome and then something horribly racist happens for two paragraphs then it goes right back to being awesome, but now you are mad. But then in the same issue you'll run into a story that throws in Asian characters that are written like everyone else. I'm currently working through the first Dray Prescott book (a sword and planet series with over 50 entries!) and it is not even close to ERB's quality of writing or creativity. If it doesn't pick up I might not even bother continuing, it's not like I don't have a bunch of ebooks in queue just waiting. ERB isn't even my favorite sword and planet writer anymore, that's Leigh Brackett (who has her own problems but less than ERB) Also the movie was mostly good, had a few things that were too convoluted or simplified, but was marketed terribly and should have been called John Carter of Mars, dammit!
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Nov 27, 2021 11:15
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