Apparatchik Magnet posted:

(Gideon)


Why does she know Ruth 1:17 if this isn’t a future Earth, he wondered.

Cythereal posted:

Harry Potter would be my pick. I think that was within twenty years.

Cicero posted:

Black Griffon posted:

What's your favorite "scientist sci-fi"? By this I'm talking about sci-fi that takes a scientific, exploratory approach to the plot, in either characters, writing style or both. It would probably involve discovery (see earlier Big Dumb Object discussion), but not necessarily always.

buffalo all day posted:

yes you need not - and in fact should not - read all the dune books. read them until you don’t like one and then quit. You can also just read the first one and be perfectly happy

Happiness Commando posted:

I forget how dragonchat started, but dragons play heavily in The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C Wrede. It's genre- and gender- bending YA that has a strong female protagonist and is in general an excellent piece of YA fantasy

Qwertycoatl posted:

Curse you amazon

feedmegin posted:

Also, if you're actually British and especially a Londoner you will realise that despite claiming to do a lot of research, she really didn't and its jarring. At one point the characters ride on the Jubilee Line . Which is named for the current Queen's Silver Jubilee and thus opened in 1979.

feedmegin posted:

I mean there were...after 1971.

Ornamented Death posted:

You leave the EU, you get no Baru.

Ceebees posted:

Wake., geddit?

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

I wasn't a fan of TGE when I first read it, but that's because I was expecting some sort of fantasy book, and instead I got a lifetime movie set in a fantasyland. It's great for a heartwarming kinda book, but pretty much sweet gently caress all happens in it.

High Warlord Zog posted:

A long awaited (maybe) vaporbook is arriving

Ccs posted:

I enjoyed reading these! For some reason I can't access the entries on Maskerade or Feet of Clay review, it asks me to log in.

freebooter posted:

I'll concede to your knowledge, it's been years since I read LOTR but I recall the vibe of it being Good Old English Hobbits in the pub being like "yeah Dan's grand-uncle says he saw an Ent once but he's full of poo poo"

Not the Messiah posted:

Yeah I'm very hype about finally getting around to reading the series, but I'm irrationally bummed at how...generic the UK version looks. The original cover art is so beautiful and evocative, and the UK ones just look like turbo generic fantasy book covers. Even just missing Baru Cormorant from the titles makes it seem less evocative

I mean not that it really matters because it's the same book at the end of the day, but these are the things I care about!

multijoe posted:

I checked out on Stephenson in Reamde when he spent the first half of the book bombarding you with minutae about the MMO and then made it have absolutely no bearing at all in the second half when it turned into a neverending airport thriller. Did he just get really worked up about 9/11 whilst writing it and just forgot the original premise?

ianmacdo posted:

The whole thing with set-sets never really sat right with me. The people against them are pretty much universally portrayed as bad. Cookie, the ultra karen, creepy guy called Felix Faust, the nuturists in general.

But the whole set-set thing does seem generally horrible. Like for one kind of them the babies are raised in VR rigs so that their brains adapt to 4d space, and then the final step (common to all set-sets) is a chemical/surgical treatment that sets their brains that way and stops all future personality growth/development. These kids are then sold other bashhouses/companies.

None of those steps sounds good to me. There is probably an Epstein Bash House that raises set-sets that can only get aroused by wrinkled billionaires. And there would be no laws against it.

Danhenge posted:

It's not secret that the narrator in Too Like the Lightning did something notably awful in his past.

General Battuta posted:

I don't agree with Blindsight's take on consciousness but I find it both provocative (in that it provokes me to think about what adaptive role consciousness plays in alien beings I write) and super, super effective as a horror story. It attacks one of the central and tacitly unchallenged assumptions we have about ourselves: that we're better than everybody else because we are aware. It's like Ligotti with footnotes.

Khizan posted:

I don't really care for The Goblin Emperor, but I'm not sure how to explain my reasons without being spoilery. "Too cute for its own good" comes close, though.

My problem, really, is that Maia never actually has to do anything. A problem pops up, he's nice, the problem is either resolved by somebody else or is proven to not be an actual problem at all. He never overcomes a problem. He never learns anything new. He's just sort of passively nice and things work out in his favor. Entirely unsatisfying.

Groke posted:

As an aside, translations of Blytonesque stuff used to be a fairly big success in Norway. In fact one of the bigger things in children's fiction (including movies) back in the 1950s and 60s was an adapted translation of Anthony Buckeridge's "Jennings" series, relocated to Norway. Which has basically no boarding school tradition, they just pretended for the sake of the story. These were pretty old-fashioned by the time I was in the target age group in the 80s, and now my kids are in that age range and I don't think anyone reads that poo poo anymore.

TOOT BOOT posted:

I'm reading A Wizard of Earthsea and it's nothing like I thought it would be. I expected something very dated given that it was written 50 years ago...

Kestral posted:

With the Commonweal thread deleted, is discussion about that series going back to this thread, getting a new thread (with or without new rules), or...?

Kestral posted:

This is the first time I've seen someone write about this series in a way that peaked my interest, so now I'm considering checking these out. But I have to ask a potentially spoilerific question: do they eventually come to an answer of, "Maybe religion is Good Actually" and restore world religious practices? Because if so, I'll just pass on that series.