|
From the previous thread:Strix Nebulosa posted:
This sounded quite interesting and so I looked into it and it's maybe not published in the US yet? Which is super weird and she should maybe kick her publisher pretty hard. It's just the first time in a long time I've looked at a new book and not seen a Kindle version available at all. They're willing to sell me the German version of her previous trilogy but not much else--somebody needs to get on those distribution rights discussions. Decided to make an ILS request for it just to see what happens. Those people are like magic book elves who find that which is hidden. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Oct 3, 2019 |
#
¿
Oct 3, 2019 16:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:09 |
|
|
Also everything by Becky Chambers and The Goblin Emperor
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2019 03:23
|
|
|
I read a few Modesitt books and mostly I remember he talked a lot about food and whatever craft the characters were working on and kept hypothesizing about law/chaos/good/evil being basically a zero sum game with physical properties affecting the world. One time the World Fantasy Convention was held in my city so I went, and I went to a panel that happened right after his, and he apparently A) devoted the entire panel timeslot to a reading, no questions or anything and B) ran ten minutes over and was really fussy when informed he needed to wrap it up.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 30, 2019 03:21
|
|
|
Weirdly, in the US at least, it's available on Kindle Unlimited at the moment--normally that's not a sign of great faith in a new author but if you were wavering on it, that's a way to try it freely/cheaply without having to wait on ILS or something. I haven't read it yet but I thank the thread for bringing it to my attention, it sounds cool. I also just finished Priory of the Orange Tree which is a perfectly competently executed fantasy with lesbians in. It's huge--clocks in at 800 pages--but it's a complete story in one volume which is jawdroppingly rare these days in fantasy. If it had come out when I was 15-16 it would have been my favorite book for a few years, but I'm old so I simply enjoyed reading it once and now I have to lug it back to the library so Columbia University can have its book back. The three checkout notations (handwritten no less!) in the back are all ILS borrows.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2019 23:06
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:I'm just going to say that giving your oppressed minority mass murdering superpowers is a completely idiotic idea no matter what statement you are trying to make. Do you think mass murder of a people is justified because of their military capabilities? At any point? Because that is what the big empire in Broken Earth did. And continued, after the incident. The point is that treating minorities wrongly because you fear them is wrong, no matter what, and you seem to have missed that lesson.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2019 03:42
|
|
|
The_White_Crane posted:I think there's a difference between "military capabilities" and "children can accidentally level a city if they lose their temper" which undermines the metaphor. You're overstating the power of the orogenes a bit--Syenite and Alabaster are specifically the most powerful orogenes in living memory and they didn't have that level of power until adulthood and also required assistance from Hoa and his kin. Most of the others are much weaker, and thus able to be overpowered by ordinary people and put into their position of enslavement. Are orogenes dangerous? Yes. But I already live in a world where random people, whom I can't necessarily spot by eye, can shoot me for cutting them off in traffic. They might face consequences for doing so, as would an orogene who abused their powers in an orderly society such as that of the minority massacred by the empire. I mean if we're objecting to some people in a fantasy novel being born with powerful magical talents...is Rand al'Thor acceptable as a hero just because he only uses his world-ending power for "good?"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2019 20:41
|
|
|
The_White_Crane posted:Yes, and that's a really valuable point to make when it comes to (for example) real world discrimination against Muslims post 9/11, because in the real world what we mean by "potentially dangerous" is "some people who looked like these people did a crime once", which absolutely doesn't justify treating those people differently. So I don't want a gun rights derail at all but we do have societies that manage to have random people with machine guns and they...survive okay. Nuclear weapons exist and some of the people who possess them are pretty frightening indeed, but we don't find it necessary to hunt them down and enslave them. Why is it acceptable to oppress people with power just because that power is inherent to them rather than being external? Why are any fantasy heroes with fantastic magical talents acceptable?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2019 21:05
|
|
|
Neurosis posted:A long shot here but are there any fantasy books with much in common with the setting for King of Dragon Pass and Runequest, ie Glorantha? I'm not even going to try to explain it to those not familiar with it because it's too hard to do so without writing a thousand words. It might not be large enough in scope for what you're looking for but Earthsea has a similar kind of tone and LeGuin approached her work from an anthropological background. Glorantha is such a unique case of wolrdbuilding though--the authors basically skipped the 'writing novels' part and just (continually) wrote the world. Still are writing it from time to time.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2019 17:19
|
|
|
Riot Carol Danvers posted:Definitely agree with this about Justice. The whole Justice of Toren One Esk caring for lieutenant Awn and learning about human interaction from her was really interesting. I am pretty certain that Awn was actually male, Breq just didn't care and Raach language didn't either. The fact that it really doesn't matter to the story is part of the point of it, that rear end in a top hat behavior and also caring behavior can go past gender. I also enjoyed Provenance a lot more than others in this thread--the lead was kind of a spoiled brat, but she was also raised in and acting in accordance with very much upper class prerogatives, in a way that a lot of us may not have experienced. She wasn't an antifa revolutionary. The line about her trembling in fear was when she was literally being held hostage at gunpoint by enemies of her state, so I don't know why her expression of extreme fear is considered wrong or bad unless one dines solely on action hero narratives.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2019 05:22
|
|
|
dreamless posted:It's been a while but I thought it was the other way around: the Radch was happily conquering until the treaty with inscrutable aliens made them stop. Imperial expansion had been papering over various tensions in society and when it stopped things started to break down, resulting in the events of book one? I think it's more this--the Raadch expansion kind of ground to a halt as Anaander lost their drat mind over meeting a power that casually eclipsed their own.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2019 02:10
|
|
|
team overhead smash posted:Imagine that you could release a magic virus that destroyed racism and caused people to judge each other on the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Would that be sinister and count as people not accepting each other of their own free will? This is an interesting question and there is evidence that some brain structures are more prone to racist/fearful behavior, to the point that certain brain diseases or injuries can change those attitudes so I wonder if we can be considered to always be 'choosing' acceptance or not of free will now. Of course changing someone's biology without their consent is also pretty uncool and I think it's a fair debate.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2019 22:00
|
|
|
My mom likes reading cozy mysteries so I gave her A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and she's digging it pretty hard, though she says all the 'physics stuff' (the explanation of the warp drive) was hard to follow. She digs things where the characters just kind of chill and interact and maybe there's a murder or something but it's not a long torturous exploration of interlocking war crimes and cycles of abuse or whatever. This is a victory because I had to argue with her for years to admit that SF/F could even be a legit genre aside from Tolkien.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2019 04:53
|
|
|
The current Storybundle has some pretty interesting stuff in it--a lot of big authors but often lesser-known titles or essays and things like that. Basically an exploration of authors speaking out in one way or another.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2019 16:45
|
|
|
The Ancillary series sheds the arrogance of many SF books in not assuming that its singular protagonist can alter the fate of the entire human race, let alone the galaxy. "tea room politik" makes change happen, but without guns blazing so I guess no events actually occurred, characters just sat in stasis unmoving and unspeaking until weapons came out. Like, I can understand people wanting a faster pace, but Breq was trying to actually work within a complicated social structure, and trying to do it without violence as much as possible--and in the process reformed exploitative labor practices, exposed massive corruption, worked on damage control and rescue after said corruption caused a huge disaster, managed relations with an alien species, freed a slave, and challenged the most powerful person in the galaxy personally, more than once. Oh, and taught a dumbass rich kid to be nicer. But what Breq tells us and other characters more than once is that she does not expect to go on an epic crusade to End Injustice Forever which might be the plot for a David Weber book, or similar, but is not how the Ancillary universe works. It's more like the real world in that way, where merely shooting the right bad guy will not end tyranny, as satisfying as it may be. Breq even sought out the one gun that could do it, a little, but was smart enough not to waste that. It's not your standard action hero fantasy in any way. No, they're not like a lot of books. It's more like Aubrey-Maturin in some respects than more conventional SF, in that it focuses on its details and stays there until you see why they're relevant. Or not, I guess.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2019 04:52
|
|
|
1-3 are a trilogy, I haven’t read the follow up stories yet. I enjoyed them, and the world would be great for an RPG or video game. Murderbot is hands down better but I’ve enjoyed her work for many years. Autocorrect thinks Murderbots is correct but not the singular.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2019 00:33
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Yeah, when I read it as a teen the libertarian stuff went over my head so I was mostly taken aback by the sex stuff. I read the Shroedinger’s Cat trilogy and I recall it being wildly leftist rather than libertarian, with stuff like UBI and dismantling the military-industrial complex and yes weird sex stuff and conspiracy ranting. It was very strange and I have no idea why our small town library had it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2019 04:04
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:I was just linked to a short story anthology themed about robots and it drops in March and the author list is real interesting: Well this has the potential for some serious tone whiplash. Is an interesting list though.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2020 23:52
|
|
|
gently caress FYAD and good riddance. Bennett improved even in the space from American Elsewhere to the Divine Cities trilogy, he's still in the 'buy on sale or trade for' level for me but definitely readable. Meanwhile I've been reading a weird one, Yarn by Jon Armstrong. It's about an elite tailor in a surreal dystopian fashion-dominated hypercommercial future dominated by corporate warfare. But it's not about that in the usual--it is mostly, constantly, about clothes and how they make you and how they are made. The author manages to create a lot of jargon and slang that's comprehensible but still sounds exotic, and it travels at a pretty brisk pace. It's a world that's hypersexualized and commercialized, where people talk in brand-coded riddles. I don't know if I'm going to keep it when I'm done but it's been an interesting ride so far.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2020 18:10
|
|
|
So I'm a bit late to this party, but re: end of Harrow the person with Camilla is Gideon the First and Wake's actual kid, while Gideon the Ninth was obviously something else. This comes from the very brief side comment made by Gideon the First while fighting Wake-in-Cytherea, just asking "Why did you bring the ba-" and then later him tilting the whole plan because he thought his kid was there. Also in the description at the end the kid's eyes are mentioned as grey. I assume that means Alecto is up to no good in some other way, while Harrow is chilling in the mental drawer she had built herself for Gideon I liked Harrow pretty much all the way through, but I enjoyed the dialogue style a lot and just working through how weird all these people were, and trying to crack the mystery of what were obviously wrong re-tellings of the first story. The story structure as a whole was nicely complex, I felt, and I don't mind books that are often just a lot of people talking. Edited for unrelated topic: I was just sending a non-Amazon .mobi document to my Kindle and received a verification request in email. That's new to me, are Kindle viruses a thing now, that you wouldn't want weird attachments? occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 08:40 on Aug 17, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2020 08:37
|
|
|
mewse posted:Fair enough. I have seen interactions with authors that were basically "you shouldn't have killed that character!!" "well, that was the story, I'm sorry you didn't like the story" I mean there's always fanfiction if one needs a different headcanon that much.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
pradmer posted:The Fall of Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells - $4.99/$4.99/$3.99 These are pretty good Regency-era fantasy with lots of ancient mystery and sword fighting and such. They aren't funny in the way that Murderbot is but there's still a dry wit that Wells has always had here and there.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2020 01:49
|
|
|
fritz posted:Isn't it more Edwardian? The initial chapters had a very WWI feeling. You may be right, though I feel like it wasn't quite WWI. Definitely later historical inspiration era than a lot of fantasy without being the kind of techno-dystopia that Steampunk usually goes for, it was a nice feel.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2020 04:03
|
|
|
pradmer posted:The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon - $1.99 I'm not going to say that Orange Tree was great, but it was solid enough that I finished it and enjoyed the experience. Most importantly, it's a fantasy novel that finishes its story in one (fat) volume. Also it has lesbians in.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 21:50
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Finished another book and I'm gonna gush, here's my goodreads review: I know this was some pages back but I picked it up and read through it and yes, it is very much a first novel--but I still finished it and enjoyed the romantic bits. The second one is much stronger IMO, showing a lot of improvement and characterization. Anyway if you want light fantasy romance, it is pretty good stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2020 05:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:09 |
|
|
I'd recommend doing so, the second is a massive improvement IMO.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2020 07:40
|
|