Black Griffon posted:Ooh, have they finally dropped the "rule" that novel-length 40k books shan't be written from the alien POV? They've had a bunch of eldar and dark eldar, a handful of tau, and even a few necron short stories with a full length novel coming soon. Everyone but the tyranids as far as I know. I think this is the first ork pov besides the Deff Skwadron comic book. bagrada fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:06 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:05 |
Yeah there's always been a bunch of short stories, but full length novels are way more sparse, and from what I've heard it's because GW has had a policy about alien POV.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:18 |
Black Griffon posted:Yeah there's always been a bunch of short stories, but full length novels are way more sparse, and from what I've heard it's because GW has had a policy about alien POV. I remember that from when I first got into the hobby. Fire Warrior in 2003 was an exception since it was a video game tie in. After that I think the Eldar and Dark Eldar 'Path of the X' novel trilogies started featuring full length xenos books in 2010. Nowadays anything goes as they've found emo elves sell books. There's a Ynnari series going about the new eldar, and Peter Fehervari has tau characters in his Dark Coil novels. Same reason they took the necrons from ancient mysterious unknowable terminators to egomaniacal Space Egyptians featuring Don Quixote. They lost a few people who preferred the mystery or didn't have their idea of the alien match up to the fiction, but gained the readers hungry for any fiction about their armies.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:38 |
Yeah, there's plenty of god emperor awful novels about space marines which make the universe even dumber if you force yourself to consider them canon, so they've really got nothing to lose letting writers write from whatever perspective they want.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:44 |
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I just finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant and I continue to love this series. I'd pre-ordered it and I ended up reading it back-to-back with Monster which I think was a good approach since the two are so closely entwined (and it made the part where Tau starts telling Baru the Story of Ash that had been going through both books all along a neat little reveal/beat for me, especially since I might not have caught it if I'd read the books farther apart). Really looking forward to reading the next one whenever it comes out, General.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:48 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:Ya know I think this goes in here too: Is this tweet implying that Orks speak with a cockney accent?
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:51 |
XBenedict posted:Is this tweet implying that Orks speak with a cockney accent? Look, dwarves are Scottish, orks are cockney, everyone knows that.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 18:56 |
XBenedict posted:Is this tweet implying that Orks speak with a cockney accent?
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 19:00 |
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XBenedict posted:Is this tweet implying that Orks speak with a cockney accent? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0vDQWMJNbE Yes.
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# ? Sep 11, 2020 19:41 |
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A new SFL Archives read-through summary is up on the off-site blog. Feel free to post and share the bits you like, have questions about or just flat out disagree with slash hate. Going forward, all further SFL Archives read-through summaries getting re-posted here will have zero vbulletin/somethingawful forums formatting. Welcome to the world of pure ASCII text friends. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Sep 12, 2020 |
# ? Sep 12, 2020 00:15 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Anyone have some recommendations for SF novels following Generation Ships? I had a recent thought about a premise where a Generation ship sets off for a new solar system but in the proceeding centuries faster travel methods have allowed ships to make it there before the initial ship so they send someone to pick up the original colony mission and get them there hundreds of years ahead of schedule. I figure someone must have done a story like that already and I'd be interested to see how it played out. This is on my to-read pile so dunno if it is good but The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany quote:A dozen slow, multi-generation ships were sent to a distant star system called the Leffer System. Soon afterwards, mankind developed a star drive, so that by the time the ships reached their destination, mankind had been traveling around the galaxy for a hundred years. Of the dozen ships, two arrived empty, and two others never arrived at all. The ships were simply parked in orbit, and abandoned. Beta-2, one of the ships, even has its own ballad. Years later, as a college assignment, Joneny, a young researcher, is sent to find out just what happened. you might have to hunt in used books stores or get lucky at Goodwill like I did
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 01:42 |
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SFL Archives posted:The SF-LOVERS t-shirt project gets relaunched with a cluttered seeming graphic design (two interstellar aliens reading SF-LOVERS on a terminal with a scarier interstellar alien creeping up behind the reader aliens) Extremely on board for whatever this looks like, I truly hope an image has survived somewhere. Also putting in a vote for adding the blog to the OP under the archives link; I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd probably never be up for properly investigating the archives but v much appreciates the summaries.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 03:02 |
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SFL Archives posted:CODEX SERAPHINIANUS gets brought up a few times. Knowing nothing about it and refusing to google it, the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS sounds alot like the Voynich Manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript It's pretty close to the Voynich Manuscript (weird illustrations, unreadable fake language) but much newer and a lot less mysterious. It was written and illustrated by an Italian artist named Luigi Serafini and was published in 1981. It goes for a pretty penny these days since it basically never gets reprinted, and I'm still kicking myself that I didn't pick one up from my local used bookstore when they had a copy for about $90.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 03:57 |
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They had an "official" reprint a few years back. It's a pretty neat book. The only downside is on the reprint, for some reason they made this GIANT sticker that takes up like 40% of the back cover of the book to have all the pricing info and random poo poo, instead of just including it in the sealed book packaging (it was sealed like a DVD anyway).
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 05:29 |
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foutre posted:Extremely on board for whatever this looks like, I truly hope an image has survived somewhere. This would be exceptionally easy to do. . My clever idea for a SF-LOVERS t-shirt if the SF-LOVERS Mailing List was still running would be: I <heart symbol in black> SF-L <club symbol in red>
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 06:17 |
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Blimey.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 07:03 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Look, dwarves are Scottish, orks are cockney, everyone knows that. If I remember the Peter Jackson films correctly, dwarves speak as though they were educated at RADA
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 10:42 |
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DurianGray posted:It's pretty close to the Voynich Manuscript (weird illustrations, unreadable fake language) but much newer and a lot less mysterious. It was written and illustrated by an Italian artist named Luigi Serafini and was published in 1981. It goes for a pretty penny these days since it basically never gets reprinted, and I'm still kicking myself that I didn't pick one up from my local used bookstore when they had a copy for about $90. I was able to get a copy of the recent reprint a couple years ago for my friend's birthday for about 50 quid or so. It's gorgeous.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 11:30 |
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HopperUK posted:I was able to get a copy of the recent reprint a couple years ago for my friend's birthday for about 50 quid or so. It's gorgeous.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 12:43 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Anyone have some recommendations for SF novels following Generation Ships? I had a recent thought about a premise where a Generation ship sets off for a new solar system but in the proceeding centuries faster travel methods have allowed ships to make it there before the initial ship so they send someone to pick up the original colony mission and get them there hundreds of years ahead of schedule. I figure someone must have done a story like that already and I'd be interested to see how it played out. Time for the Stars by Heinlein does this. Warning: because its Heinlein the protagonist ends up marrying his own great grand niece.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 13:14 |
Pushing Ice is a bit of a twist on the GS concept, but I still think it counts, also it's great stuff.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 13:15 |
Neat interview with Susannah Clarke about her new book: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ooks_b-gdnbooks Apparently after JS&N she got knocked down by chronic fatigue syndrome and hadn't been able to write for a decade. New book is not a sequel to JS&N but still sounds really interesting.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 14:35 |
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Leng posted:In the latest GRRM news, his attempts to build a castle are foiled again: The article includes a photo of GRRM's (non-castle, though it has a castle mailbox) house. With what I must assume is his car in the driveway. I'm not sure what I expected, but now that I've seen it, I can't imagine any detail differently.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 16:10 |
FuturePastNow posted:The article includes a photo of GRRM's (non-castle, though it has a castle mailbox) house. With what I must assume is his car in the driveway. I'm not sure what I expected, but now that I've seen it, I can't imagine any detail differently.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 16:25 |
While we're on the topic,
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 16:40 |
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I think Ernest Cline might be a straight up moron. I just came across this section in Armada where he tries to explain to the reader what "gallows humor" is:quote:“Stay frosty, everyone,” my father said. “And may the Force be with you.”
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 17:01 |
I loving hate Ernest Cline so much. God I loving despise that man. Reading that small section ruined my week.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 17:13 |
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Happy to share the misery, comrade
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 17:27 |
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is there a good list somewhere of the best space opera or sci-fi books published in 2020?
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 18:01 |
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pmchem posted:is there a good list somewhere of the best space opera or sci-fi books published in 2020? I'd say next year's Dragon Awards, but it turns out even when you invent an award just so you and your buddies can win it people will still vote for stuff they actually like.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 18:12 |
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mewse posted:I think Ernest Cline might be a straight up moron. I just came across this section in Armada where he tries to explain to the reader what "gallows humor" is: The other thing that's stupid here is that he's hosed up the Chinese in at least three different ways, and I can't tell how he did it so badly; just throwing the English into Google Translate would have been better. Only one word has a tone marker; that "tzai" at the end isn't possible in pinyin (which the rest of the text is) - it should be "zai"; he's dividing the text up by character, not words; and he's missed the "May" from "May the Force..." (although it's possible he's just being slangy, to be fair.)
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 18:19 |
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Black Griffon posted:Yeah, there's plenty of god emperor awful novels about space marines which make the universe even dumber if you force yourself to consider them canon, so they've really got nothing to lose letting writers write from whatever perspective they want. Its why I prefer Ian Watson's novels where the only space marine character is a barely functioning pile of neuroses whenever he's not in combat.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 18:56 |
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That's not even an example of gallows humour, Ernest, unless you consider even the slightest hint of physical violence to be super dark black comedy.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 19:13 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:That's not even an example of gallows humour, Ernest, unless you consider even the slightest hint of physical violence to be super dark black comedy. Yeah that's what struck me about it. The bubblegum line from They Live is not gallows humour, even if it's in Chinese and before a major battle. He comes back to the gallows humour thing twice including this gem, when the main char is on hold with the most famous scientists in the world: quote:That was when Cruz caught a glimpse of my QComm screen, which was now divided into over half a dozen windows, each with a different person’s face, just like the opening of The Brady Bunch—so he decided to belt out an impromptu parody of the opening line of the show’s theme song: “This is the story, of an alien invasion, by some fuckheads from Europa who are—” That's not gallows humour either, Ernest Cline you loving idiot
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 19:37 |
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I'm sorry I reported you friend but I find your posts of Ernest Cline's material to be literal violence.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 20:17 |
mewse posted:He comes back to the gallows humour thing twice including this gem, when the main char is on hold with the most famous scientists in the world: Jesus loving Christ.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 20:36 |
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I had no idea how bad it could be, mother of God that is some atrocious writing.
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 20:38 |
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==re-posted from off-site SFL Archive readthrough blog== SFL Archives Vol 11 readthrough update 03 25% completion, 78 bookmarks (more than a few bookmarks were redundant and got cleaned up) 25 items of interest ==re-posted from off-site SFL Archive readthrough blog== quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Aug 29, 2021 |
# ? Sep 12, 2020 21:28 |
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mewse posted:I think Ernest Cline might be a straight up moron. I just came across this section in Armada where he tries to explain to the reader what "gallows humor" is: lmao this is terrible
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 21:35 |
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:05 |
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quantumfoam posted:-One shot SF&F authors of the 1980's get discussed and a few of them/their stories sound interesting (Hilbert Schenck, Barrington Bayley, Denis Johnson, John Sladek, etc) Sladek was more than a one-shot author -- I've read several of his books. Not really to my taste, however. They're very broad social satire that hasn't aged particularly well. quote:-Funny SF stories requests. Henry Kuttner gets recommended a bunch, especially Kuttner's "drunk inventor-genius" stories. Spider Robinson's work gets recommended too (2020 take: Spider Robinson is a trap. Do Not Read. DO NOT READ.) Bill the Galactic Hero gets recommended (2020 take: Bill the Galactic Hero IS NOT a trap read.) Speaking of stuff that hasn't aged well! Kuttner's "Gallegher" stories feature a protagonist who's a super-genius inventor -- but only when he's blackout drunk. So he'll wake up from a bender and then have to figure out why, for instance, he built a giant machine that's digging up his front lawn while singing "St. James Infirmary." More amusing than hilariously funny, but at least better than Reginald Bretnor's Papa Schimmelhorn stories...
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# ? Sep 12, 2020 21:42 |