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VagueRant posted:Help me, thread! I am desperate for a new fantasy novel to get into. It's been so long since I enjoyed reading (and I really like swords). Have you considered Roger Zelazny's Amber series, or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series? Amber series: likeable main character, humorous, swordplay & swashbuckling heavy. Leiber F & GM series: defined the "swords & sorcery genre". Likeable main characters, humorous, extremely swordy. Tons of fanastical adventures.
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Jan 4, 2017 15:57
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Rocksicles posted:What's jack Campbell's Lost Fleet like? It's the 1st book re-done 8x times.
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Jan 7, 2017 06:02
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Rocksicles posted:loving Sci-Fi can't get it right. Hamilton? The dreaded Ringo? Resnick? A methdream?
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Jan 7, 2017 18:05
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Scent of Worf posted:Are there any fantasy books, aside from Book of the New Sun, with a focus on prose? Would really love something that's as enjoyable to read as that. There's something similar but old. The Gods of Pegana.
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Jan 9, 2017 21:55
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People need to chill for a bit. And read some Clark Ashton Smith, who helped define the whole fantasy genre. He tended to re-edit stories for publication, however he had a consistent writing style & did not suck.
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Jan 11, 2017 17:50
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I just read "Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe" by Robert Asprin & George Takei. Definitely a FTL space opera book that tried being a series, but was a one-off book. The main character, Hosato, is "of Japanese descent" & a dueling master with a robot sidekick/sparring partner. But wait, the dueling master career is just a cover story & the main character is secretly a ninja! And comes from a long line of ninjas from a space colony full of ninja clans And now Hosata on a ninja contract to sabotage a interstellar robotics manufacturing company. Things go unexpectedly wrong when someone finds a hack to override Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and...etc. There was one or two vaguely interesting ideas in the book (fiber optic ninja "invisiblity suits, ninja deniability, armourer to assasins as a career).
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Jan 12, 2017 23:13
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His Divine Shadow posted:Re-reading Redemption Ark, but it's been many years and other revelation space novels since I read the earlier book but I can't find the info online and i don't have the book so I can re-read the end, but what happened to Calvin's beta level simulation in the end, anyone remember? The beta sims: nothing The alpha sim: haggled away for sweet mind imprints of the shrouders.
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Jan 29, 2017 15:57
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His Divine Shadow posted:Nothing? It didn't go into cerebus with Dan sylveste or remain in some computer, or got destroyed? It was a dropped plot point in the followup books, never brought up after that reveal. So.....nothing happened,. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Jan 29, 2017 |
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Jan 29, 2017 22:56
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Jack2142 posted:Just like the Mass Effect Trilogy, the end of the Revelation Space is a disappointing mess of dropped plot points hasty resolutions and oddly introduced characters no one cares about compared to the previous books. Agreed. Relevation Space series got way too up it's own rear end.
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Jan 30, 2017 03:56
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fritz posted:This month I've read his collections 'Galactic North' and 'Beyond the Aquila Rift' and after a while you start noticing and looking for Reynolds-isms like Skip Pushing Ice. Trust me on this.
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Jan 30, 2017 18:35
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Hellstrom's Hive -secret origin of the Tleilaxu in Frank Herbert's Dune universe?
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Feb 11, 2017 05:50
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mllaneza posted:Similar concepts. Hive came out in 1972, after Dune Messiah but four years before God Emperor. It was probably a test bed (ahem) for those concepts. Herbert wrote ALOT of hosed up stuff. Only Herbert dying pre-internet takeoff and the whole "Christopher Tolkien-esque" legacy-mining by Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson.... (What's that?.........more Dune universe draft notes & another unpublished story has been discovered by Brian Herbert....how utterly shocking ) .. keeps people from remembering the really creepy hosed up books like Saratoga Experiment, White Plague, Eyes of Heisenberg, Green Brain, Destination Void & followup books. The best non Frank Herbert Dune universe book was the Dune Encyclopedia. ConSentiency universe: I agree with you, there should have been more stories. Luckily that means that the ConSentiency universe is extremely unlikely to be stripmined by Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson Pan-Spechi is the ultimate form of face culture.
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Feb 11, 2017 17:30
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Rename thread to Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread v2: DONT READ JOHN RINGO
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Feb 12, 2017 00:44
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That seems like more of a potential forum subtitle than a subtitle for this thread, i mean he's not really SF is he? Ringo is a Man of all seasons(genres) avoid author. Most of his books could be shelved under the SF banner. my vote: Make it a forum subtitle & the title of the recommendations thread, and maybe this thread too. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 02:37
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Nippashish posted:I really like Lem's take on first contact. His writes about how humans deal with aliens showing up, but with the caveat that aliens are really weird. Absurdly, unknowably weird. Cavitation of the alien moon was bad rear end.
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Feb 13, 2017 22:15
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I just finished Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. It was a book series about famous people reincarnated in the future in perfect un-aging bodies alongside a giant world spanning river. The series was extremely bad overall, with a literal author self-insert in the finest tradition of Stephen King & Robert Heinlein. One of the worse things in the Riverworld books was the author rehabilitating Hermann Goring as a super-impressionable guy who wasn't evil, he just took on the character & ideas of anyone he hung around with for longer than 3 days. wtf. WTF? I give the series bonus awful points for the giant reveal about the Riverworld reincarnation mechanic being something close to but just different enough to not be sued by the church of scientology for theft.
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Aug 17, 2017 15:01
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A human heart posted:that sounds really funny It's not worth reading the series, trust me & Stuporstar about that. I was duped into reading Farmer by a really cool 1970s commentary book named "Robots Robots Robots" that was about robots/mechanical simulacra from ancient pre-history myths to modern era stories & devices. It really went into depth regarding all the various simulacra that were created pre-industrial age. My favorites were Edgar Allen Poe's guesstimate essay on how the chess-playing Mechanical Turk worked (totally wrong btw), and Vaucanson's mechanical duck. Other than the Farmer recommendation, it was a solid book.
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Aug 17, 2017 23:52
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Ulio posted:Ya that cover is sooo rad. You fools are falling into the BAEN cover trap. Baens Law: The shinier the cover & the bigger the author name; the more you should avoid the book at all cost. edit: actual content post. I got a few James Blish & Frederic Brown paperbacks when I got Farmer riverworld books. So far James Blish is incredibly readable & lightyears beyond Farmer talentwise. Even Blish's weirdest book so far (catholic faith crisis caused by evolved dinosaur planet) is 15x better than farmer's attempt at theology in riverworld series. Brown books should be good too, after all one of Brown's short stories was directly ripped off into a classic Star Trek OST episode. A really iconic one too the gorn one, the Star Trek OST bought the rights to the short story after producing the episode. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 20, 2017 |
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Aug 20, 2017 03:18
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That christian faith crisis on evolved-dino planet book I mentioned. It was goofy and weird and futurologist all at the same time. There was a evolved dino that was raised on Earth as a goodwill gesture from dino-planet. Earth raised evolved dino was puny (by dino-planet standards, 9 feet tall in human standards), extremely mentally unstable, and.......a massively popular Youtube star that incited riots, hate mail against it's sponsors & counter-counter-counter-counter protests. It's Youtube fan base: kids & bored adults on the internet. Given the book was written in 1958!....yeah, the futurologist bit makes sense now, doesn't it.
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Aug 21, 2017 15:11
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Harrow posted:Anyone have recommendations for other SF/F writers who also happen to be good at writing prose? My man. Have you read David Weber? The man has two million ways to describe spaceship battledamage, and ONLY spaceship battledamage, it truly is a gift. Why is there no IRONY tags?
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Aug 21, 2017 15:36
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ToxicFrog posted:That's one of the things I love about reading old SF. Computers, data storage, and communications in particular seem to be common blind spots; we have superluminal drives, but the computer to operate them fills half the ship and use magnetic tape... Another fun thing is that old SF authors were unafraid to hide their fetishes, and mother of god their fetishes got WEIRD. Example:Cordwainer Smith aka Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, whose favorite dinner party trick ant was chugging hydrochloric acid. Cordwainer Smith loved cats. I mean he LOVED cats so much I think he bribed his veterinarian to not report him to the police. Cats appeared in 3/4 of his scifi stories. Cats, cats saving the day, cat-human hybrids, cat aliens, cats being perfect interstellar meteor response systems, dudes failing in love with cat-computer interfaces, etc. Cordwainer Smith is probably the patron saint of furries. Offtopic: Just finished reading Alfred Bester's "The Deceivers", published @1981 and it was bad. Not as lovely weird as Bester's computer connection or golem100, but the Deceiver's was poorly written, dated, racist, gaybashing and dumb. There was a Mary Sue lead character, a all knowing narrator, a perfect shapeshifting love interest, a closeted gay villain that .... wasn't villainous. The villain of the book was captured & mentally broken by being pegged by animatronic robots for six straight days in a kid friendly circus act broadcast to the entire solar system. Alfred Bester cracked hard after his 3rd book, and morphed into proto-John Ringo. My advice for people interested in Alfred Bester is to read his first three books (Demolished Man, The Rat Race, The Stars My Destination) and pretend Bester either died after his 3rd book or Ludlum style ghostwriters took over.
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Aug 25, 2017 02:35
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Megapacks are good, SFWA Masterwork collections are good too. Some classic pulp authors are readable, others are unreadable, and you are never sure which category a given author will fail into from story to story. My advice for reading Cordwainer Smith is to take extended breaks after each story. Otherwise Cordwainer Smith's cat-fixation fetish is really apparent and offputting. Definitely try to track down non-Star Trek James Blish stories, Blish managed to coin themes & phrases that are still being used in science & scifi to this day. One of the the best ways to sample old pulp scifi authors is to search your local public library systems for old Hugo award book collections. Theodore Sturgeon curated Russian sci-fi authors are pretty good, if Sturgeon did a Introduction to the English editions, the stories are readable.
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Aug 26, 2017 07:21
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andrew smash posted:Cordwainer Smith is great. I read his collected short stories straight through on a long weekend of airports and air travel a few years ago and the cat thing isn't THAT bad. I have norstrilia sitting on a shelf waiting for a good time to binge. Norstrilia is where the cat loving fetish becomes overt. I made the mistake of reading Norstrilla first, THEN the Best of Cordwainer Smith collection. Save your Norstrilia readthrough for another long weekend of air travel jetlag. In a desperate effort to avoid talking more about that guy..... Karl Capek's "War with the Newts" is definitely worth tracking down. It goes from funny to dark quickly. Finding a paperback copy for $1 is one of my greatest used bookstore scifi finds.
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Aug 26, 2017 19:40
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Stars my Destination is a pretty solid book with some troubling bits. It definitely rips off Count of Monte Cristo, given that Stars My Destination was published in 1956/57, I am willing to forgive the homage. For something written in the past 20 years(age of the internet) that rips off Monte Cristo, I am way less forgiving. I enjoyed it's self-teleportation gimmick, and guess where Neal Stephenson ripped off the "everything is a incorporated franchise" from Snow Crash...that would be Stars my Destination. Demolished Man is strong. and definitely deserved to win the 1st ever Hugo award. Stuporstar posted:This is so disappointing. I still have his later books on my to-read pile and Bester's later books have fragments of interesting ideas floating in sky galaxies of stupidity. Nobody ever replicated Bester's tricks with type-setting to demonstrate sensory input or in-the-moment actions. Because it's a massive pain in the rear end to get right. That style of type setting would be amazing for action writing in modern day scifi. Here's a half -assed homage to that style code:
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Aug 27, 2017 03:37
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I vaguely remember the Jerry Cornelius series. Always pictured Jerry as a thinly novelized adventures of David Bowie constantly morphing into different album cover looks. Moorcock books got weird and focused on recreating 1940's radio serials the last time I read something recent by Moorcock.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:28
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I spent the weekend reading the Isaac Asimov edited Hugo short-stories & novellas collections Volumes 1, 2 & 3. Most of the stories in the collections were good, other stories were bad or insane gibberish, and a certain few authors I completely skipped reading. Volume 1 Poul Anderson's 1961 Hugo winner "The Longest Voyage" didn't click for me because a)wooden ship sailing b)crafty british empire traders out-think natives c)wise old sea captain d)but on an alien planet combined bore the hell out of me. Volume 2 Jack Vance's stories were extremely readable, had previously read the Larry Niven & Harlan Ellison winning stories, and skipped Anne McCaffrey's 1968 Weyr Search(because I hate the Pern series), and found both Samuel Delany's 1970 & Philip Jose Farmer's 1968 stories to be unreadable gibberish garbage. and skipped them after 2 pages. Volume 3 Like before, I had already read the Niven & Ellison winning stories, Fritz Leiber's winning stories were good, Poul Anderson's 1973 winner was a scifi retelling of the Orpheus myth, Jame's Tiptree Jr's 1974 winner was basically a love story mixed with Instagram product whoring 2045, and I refused to read George RR Martin's 1975 winner.
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Aug 28, 2017 15:27
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Koburn posted:I'm craving some Dick but I've already read all the hits (except VALIS) and 3 of his short story collections. Any recommendations? The question is: How insane or depressing do you prefer your Dick stories? Russian classic lit captures the depressing & trapped Dick feel quite well. Read the Dick collection that deep dives into Dick's Gnostic visions. Or maybe read some extemely dated and awkward discordian fiction by robert a wilson & robert shea.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:44
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Illuminatus trilogy is entertaining, especially the appendix'es in the collected edition. The follow-up sequels & prequels by Robert A Wilson are skippable. Even the real world stuff involving discordian co-creator Kerry Thornley is bizzare as hell.
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Aug 29, 2017 03:23
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The first two Discworld books were straight up parodies of the sword & sorcery genre, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories in particular. The Discworld series changed from a funny loose fantasy stories series to stories about Guards, Death, Witches, Wizards, and the rebirth of Anhk-Morpork civil institutions around the time
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Aug 29, 2017 15:45
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I have a possible corollary to Sturgeon's Law If you ever get frustrated about not being able to read all the fantasy fiction out in the world, roughly 70% of them can be successfully replicated with custom game modes in Crusader Kings 2 or Europa Universalis series. It is way more interactive too. Savescumming allows you to read different chapters or books. Mary-Sue protagonist power can be replicated by setting game difficulty to Moron. For the scifi genre (and subgenre milfiction) replace Crusader King 2 with Stellaris + Galactic Civilization 2(for the ultra-detailed ship building) & maybe Hearts of Iron. Baen Books is an outlier though. About 94% of the Baen Books catalog can be replicated.
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Aug 31, 2017 03:17
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PupsOfWar posted:Serious Sam, stealth john ringo adaptation + Custers Revenge + steam anime games Make that Baen Books 97% replicated by computer games. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Aug 31, 2017 |
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Aug 31, 2017 04:13
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C.M. Kruger posted:"Andrzej Sapkowski does not exist and The Witcher was created by a committee of communist party members for the purposes of disseminating propaganda." DACK FAYDEN posted:This is a deep cut and also an amazing post. Amazing. And pretty close to what Dick claimed about Stanislaw Lem. Something something communist agent trying to recruit me something something reported to the FBI multiple times.
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Aug 31, 2017 13:03
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You forgot Kruppe and Kruppe doing what Kruppe does best.
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Sep 5, 2017 03:58
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I'm going to be sad when James Gunn dies, he's 94. Kampus will live forever though.
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Sep 9, 2017 14:08
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Replace hippos with camels & replace bayou with the mojave desert, and that sorta happened for a few years.
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Sep 9, 2017 17:22
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Sounds like you need to read James Blish's " theSeedling stars". It is pretty old, but sounds way better than that bobiverse series. Seedling Stars takes the concept that humanity is vastly unsuited for living in 99.99999^4 of the universe, so why not MODIFY the human body instead of the environment.
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Sep 17, 2017 00:51
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Jim Butcher somehow makes Kevin Siembieda seem subtle & nuanced. I repeat, Kevin Siembieda, master of "power_creep.txt". At least I know where Butcher gets his non-Christian mythos ideas from now on.
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Sep 22, 2017 05:44
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A Proper Uppercut posted:So I've been kind of in the mood for some of the type of fantasy I read growing up. Specifically, country bumpkin or servant or something like that gets involved with "Big Things" or finds out they can do some crazy magic poo poo. You know, generic fantasy stuff, authors like Raymond Feist, L E Modesitt Jr, Robin Hobb, the Earthsea books, stuff like that. David Eddings has done .... A Proper Uppercut posted:country bumpkin or servant or something like that gets involved with "Big Things" or finds out they can do some crazy magic poo poo. Eddings is the author you want to read to fill that fantasy hole.
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Sep 24, 2017 03:48
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Finally read Charles Stoss's "Delirium Brief" out of morbid curiosity thanks to a library. I stopped caring about the characters around the time Bob got promoted to Mahogany Row/External assets Thoughts on Delirium Brief: It was interesting to read Stross's feeling about UK government services privatization, and the FYGM mentality of UK politicians; really could have gone without Stross novelizing his fetishes...again. One annoying note: Has that Laundry ritual of "Execute Sitrep One" check for tampering" EVER come back with "Yes, COMPROMISED. gently caress YOU". ? Because that would get me interested in the Laundry series again.
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Oct 14, 2017 04:51
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For Stross, that was subtle. And no, I'm not joking. Stross tends to echo back to that creepy Heinlein-Niven "novelize your fetish-fantasies to make them mainstream" school of writing. Anyway. something got me re-reading A.E. Van Vogt's "Voyage of the Space Beagle" @1950, a short story collection about a human interstellar exploration ship encountering weirdness in space. The humans aren't the draw in the book (except for the last story), instead it's the exponentially more dangerous alien encounters that are the real draw. The first story is about an alien panther-thing being picked up on a dying alien planet by the exploration ship + then things go badly(or super-right depending on your viewpoint). Gary Gygax borrowed the physical description + some of it's powers when designing the "displacer beast" monster in Dungeons & Dragons. Another story in is about an alien encounter in deep deep space. Which really feels like a super-rough draft of the alien Xenomorph from the Aliens movie franchise. No lie, 20th century fox settled a lawsuit over the crazy amount of similarities in the movie versus the short story. There is also encounters with a hive-mind alien race inhabiting a cluster of star systems, then finally a uh, the term 'encounter' seems so limiting when its the exploration vessel versus a entire galactic consciousness evolved from bacteria.
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Oct 16, 2017 04:26
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