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anilEhilated posted:How much of it is romance and sex scenes? On this note, I'd love to hear about more genre books without romance or sex, but which still have some emotional core and reasonably good prose. Compelling, loving, but platonic friendships and sibling / parental relationships are quite welcome. Some examples off the top of my head are A Wizard of Earthsea, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Light Brigade, The Black Company, Ender's Game, The Sparrow, and basically everything written by Tolkien.
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Feb 23, 2020 21:20
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Has anyone finished The City in the Middle of the Night? The premise is interesting, but so was the premise for All the Birds in the Sky, and that's the only book I've put down unfinished in a decade. Although, Birds may soon be joined by an unlikely partner: Gormenghast. I loved Titus Groan, but picking up the sequel a year later, I quickly remembered that I hate Steerpike with a violent passion. Spoil something for me, Gormenghast goons: how much screen time does that bastard have this time around, and does he get his just desserts? I cannot endure an 18+ hour audiobook, however beautifully written and well narrated, in which that son of a bitch gets what he wants.
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Apr 8, 2020 02:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:I am one (1) stressful event away from buying another book trilogy I am replying to this post roughly an hour after it was made, in the TYOOL 2020, so I can only assume StrixNebulosa has bought at least twelve books. For content, has anyone N.K. Jemisin's 'The City We Became' ? It's... interesting, so far, about a third of the way through. Modern-day weirdness in which cities that reach a certain level of "greatness" undergo a psychic awakening, embodied in human avatars who are their protectors and caretakers, and whose very first duty is to defend the city at the moment of its birth from extradimensional horrors that prey on vulnerable newborn metropolises. Neat concept, but I'm not sure it's something I can fully appreciate as a Californian. This book fuckin' loves New York, the city undergoing its awakening in the first part of what looks to be a trilogy, and if this degree of adoration were heaped on a country it would feel jingoistic and gross; applied to city I've only visited briefly, it just feels slightly baffling. I'd love to get the reaction of an actual New Yorker to this one. Kestral fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 02:53
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Solitair posted:I read the shorter, earlier version of that story. What I appreciated most about it was the harried, scattered prose emulating the main character's adrenaline-fueled fight or flight mental state. How much of that translates to the full book version? The first (long) chapter is written in a completely different style from the rest of the book, and from your description I'm guessing that it's the short story. After that, the perspective shifts to the people who become the individual boroughs of New York, as they awaken into their power as secondary avatars of the metropolis. I haven't gotten all the way through yet, but as of about halfway through, it hasn't returned to the original narrator, and the style is very different.
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Apr 17, 2020 08:10
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ToxicFrog posted:I really need to play Blue Planet. You really, really do. Anyone who's played FreeSpace needs to play Blue Planet. Bookchat: I've just finished Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and loved it. Went looking at his Wikipedia entry hoping to find other stuff he'd written that I would enjoy, and was dismayed to find that he was apparently a "right-libertarian" who injected those themes into many of his works. Did he write anything else that wasn't tainted by those politics? Particularly, is Three Hearts and Three Lions free of it? I've been meaning to read that one since finishing Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight.
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May 5, 2020 02:09
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If Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana isn't doing much for me, should I bother with any of his other work? I think I was hoping for more out of the concept of a conquering sorcerer stripping away the name and identity of an entire people, but just under half-way through, it doesn't feel like it's leveraging a cool premise into more than you'd get out of an alt-history where Byzantium and Charlemagne invaded Italy from opposite ends. I get that thinly-veiled alt-histories are Kay's thing, so should I steer clear of his other books?
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May 16, 2020 21:04
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Groke posted:Fuckin' rules. Seconding this, probably my favorite book I've read this year.
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May 30, 2020 08:59
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The Clarke Awards shortlist was announced the other day, consisting of: quote:THE CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT - CHARLIE JANE ANDERS The Light Brigade was great so I have my fingers crossed for that one, but it's also the only one of the six I've read. Anyone read the last two? I love the premise of Cage of Souls, but as much as I enjoyed Children of Time / Ruin, Tchaikovsky's prose is kinda lackluster in those and I might just read more Gene Wolfe instead. The Last Astronaut looks like a Big Dumb Object story, which I find myself quite in the mood for if the execution is good.
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Jun 21, 2020 01:42
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"Necromatic queer shonen murder mystery" is hands-down the best description of Gideon the Ninth I've heard.
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Jul 9, 2020 00:53
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Is there anything like Asimov’s Foundation, but… Good? I hate to put it that way since it’s a classic of the genre and I know a lot of people have fond memories of it, but coming to it for the first time as an adult, the only reason I’m making myself struggle through the flat prose and awful dialogue is because I want to experience this, ah, foundational piece of SF. I love generational stories though, and a sci-fi epic spanning a thousand years of history would be extremely my jam if it were well-written and had more characters than “the smug, correct person” and “the obstinate wrong person.”
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Jul 16, 2020 03:11
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I mean, look at modern American politics. That dichotomy may be a lot more realistic than we'd like to think Hah, too real. But in Foundation it's like Asimov has only two character archetypes he can work with, and they're just writing style templates that he applies to whoever happens to be objectively right or wrong in that section of the story. Captain Pritcher's portrayal between Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation, for example. Edit: fez_machine posted:Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer (Translated by Ursula Le Guin)  I am intrigued by this one. Thanks! Would love recommendations for more generational stories in SF or fantasy. I saw Centennial early in life and for all its faults, I have never stopped being fascinated by that sort of story. Kestral fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 07:35
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quantumfoam posted:Other SFL Vol 06 events were: a solid 9 weeks of posts about scifi/fantasy music albums/songs/bands As an unironic lover of filk, this intrigues me. I may have to read SFL Vol 06.
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Jul 24, 2020 03:01
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Clark Nova posted:I read this based on a recommendation itt a couple of years ago and it’s real good. Also a good recommendation for the next time someone asks for a low-stakes/cozy book When you say low-stakes, are we talking low stakes in the "it's not about a star exploding or saving the galaxy" kind of way, or low stakes in the To Be Taught if Fortunate / general Becky Chambers mode, where it's essentially about following people through their pretty okay lives and nothing really happens?
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Jul 27, 2020 18:30
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Clark Nova posted:Definitely the former. The characters are having an adventure but it's still pretty clear that the planet isn't going to blow up and no one is going to be turned into a chair or have their dick ripped off by an alien crab Fantastic, I'm sold. Thanks!
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Jul 28, 2020 01:33
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Harrow is out?! drat, and I just started Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr after not quite being in the mood for it for years, too. I suppose that'll be the litmus test for how well I like Ka, seeing if it can keep me from immediately devouring Harrow the Ninth.
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Aug 4, 2020 18:19
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I've only read Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and that cover got a solid laugh from me, good lord.
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Aug 22, 2020 18:23
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Is there a good re-read or chapter summary of The Monster Baru Cormorant? I'm about to start Tyrant but my memory is in desperate need of a refresher, and rereading the prior book isn't in the cards at the moment.
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Aug 30, 2020 00:31
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tildes posted:Here you go: https://www.tor.com/2020/08/11/what-you-need-to-know-before-reading-seth-dickinsons-the-tyrant-baru-cormorant/ Wow, thank you! This is even more exactly what I needed than I could have possibly known, because I experienced Traitor and Monster via audiobook, and so had no idea about this: Tor posted:Within that empty space she imagines Tain Hu, her would-be hostage, occasionally speaking to her in right-justified text and reminding her of their plan. That's, uh, kind of a big deal and now I wonder if I might have to put off book three until I can read it in text format.
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Aug 30, 2020 08:59
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Ceebees posted:On kindle, at least, the spoilers-via-text-justification all worked completely fine. I'm not sure they even bothered with them in the audiobook version, which wouldn't surprise me since they also apparently got the pronunciation of every single name wrong. Xate Yawa is "Ex-ate Yah-wah" to me for all time. Actually, now I'm curious. Would someone mind posting a chapter where it happens? I'd like to see if the audiobook managed it and I just didn't pick up on it somehow.
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Aug 30, 2020 23:25
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NmareBfly posted:Bottom of page 74, 3/4 through chapter 5 (note: don't click on this if you haven't read book 1). Most of them aren't that long, just a stray line on the side. Doooooochy. God help me, that was painful. But yeah, great narrator other than that and the names. Thanks for the link! I went back to my audiobook version just now and, wonder of wonders, it is there! It's read in a voice that's veeeeery slightly different, quieter and flatter, and so out-of-left-field that I suspect I just blanked out on. Nowhere near the same effect as it has on the written page, for sure, but it's nice to see that they put it in there.
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Aug 31, 2020 02:24
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Tyrant Baru Cormorant question: Does Baru ever get and use some real agency as a cryptarch again? I'm on Act 2, Chapter 16, where she's down with meningitis, and it feels like I'm just watching a woman be battered around by the winds of fate while dithering over the fate of Yet Another Island that is not Taranoke, which is what I was hoping we were done with after Monster. Her right side having a mysterious plan is interesting, but I dearly miss the Baru from Traitor who was constantly doing interesting things to further her goals, even if they frequently backfired. It's halfway through book 3 at this point and no signs of Tyranny are evident, just a mostly-defeated woman blindly trusting in her broken brain to do what she is incapable of doing, while more capable or more violent people abuse her again and again.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:35
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Ben Nevis posted:So I'm almost done with Baru 3: Too Many Cormorants and while there's a lot going on my two favorite and least consequential items are the beginning of chapter 20, which I assume is taking a shot at audio book pronunciation issues and also imagining GB trying to research circumstances in which might sunburn their balls. I'm listening to it on audio, and absolutely lost my poo poo at the pronunciation one. "No one would pronounce my name that way," she said, as the narrator pronounced the name in precisely that way.
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Sep 15, 2020 18:19
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Harold Fjord posted:I was thinking about this as a read it. Did she really? JFC. She did indeed. It was beat-for-beat exactly what happened when they changed readers for the Takeshi Kovacs audiobooks, a series where every single book has a scene where someone mispronounces the protagonist's name and he has to correct them (for the benefit of the reader). The new narrator read Kovacs's correction to the mispronunciation (KO-vach, not KO-vacks), then blithely returned to calling him Ko-vacks for the rest of the book. I've always wondered why the narrators of audiobooks with living authors don't bother to contact said authors and get a pronunciation guide.
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Sep 15, 2020 20:57
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Jedit posted:Windmill slam buy if you're in the right country. The Book of Koli looks like it's extremely my thing, having run a lengthy tabletop RPG campaign in what sounds very much like that setting. I'm concerned by a review on Audible though - spoiler tagged just in case: quote:Story was well constructed and well conceived for the first half or so, and then it seemed to me the author started taking short cuts and getting cute, and the story just fell apart into a Lifetime TV feel good mode. None of the grit of the first half. I had to go back to the Audible site to see the book category to see if I had fallen into that familiar YA trap. It was obviously, at least to me, a rickety bridge to the second book of the trilogy. Or worse, the publisher forced a deadline. No more flesh eating plants or nasty animals, just a vulnerable bratty girl with daddy issues. Emphasis mine, because the "shove a romance into a story that was perfectly interesting without it" thing is my biggest pet peeve in literature. Can anyone who's read this series comment on it?
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Sep 24, 2020 16:04
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HawaiinYeti posted:I've read the 2 books that are currently out and enjoyed them a lot. The bit they're complaining about isn't explicitly a shoehorned romance angle and didn't bother me while reading it, but I can see how that character could be annoying in an audio book depending on how they voiced them. That review makes me think they never finished the first book though, as the "grit" never goes away in my opinion and I'm not sure what they're talking about with daddy issues Excellent, I'm down to give it a try. Now I just have to decide if I'm listening to it or reading it. People seem to love the narrator, but I'm not sold on him yet based on the Audible preview. How old is Koli supposed to be? If he's supposed to be a young kid this reading might get grating. Mr. Nemo posted:I'm reading Baru 2 and boy is it dragging. 1 was a very quick read, the plot always progressing, twists and plans coming into being. But around the 60% mark of this and it's like come on get on with it. Flashbacks, different POV chapters, never mentioned before family members, all stuff that wasn't present in book 1 that I'm not really enjoying. I hope the second half goes back to political ploys. Everyone was REALLY happy with Baru 3 from what i could see on this thread, so I'm hopeful. Baru 3 is quite a good book, but it was not the book I expected or was looking for, and if I’d known that at the start of the series, I might have set it down after Traitor. Mr. Nemo, below are spoilers about the general shape of things in Monster and Tyrant which might help you decide if you should keep going. The pattern of these books is that whatever is in the title is Baru’s state after the end of the book. Baru never gets to actually Be A Cryptarch and make her moves in Falcrest until the last couple chapters of Book 3, which sets up a fourth book that sounds amazing but has a decent chance of never materializing because the author is, understandably, burned out. Baru does get a lot more proactive in Tyrant after spending all of Monster being abused and deprotagonized, but the focus does shift heavily toward the “stuff that wasn’t present in book 1” and never really shifts back.
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Sep 26, 2020 01:33
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DACK FAYDEN posted:That's a name I haven't thought of in at least a decade, I loved those books when I was young. Strongly recommend as small child/YA lit. At firs glance I interpreted this as a recommendation to give small children Michael Moorcock books. Someone do this and perform a longitudinal study of the effects. For science.
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Sep 29, 2020 21:26
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cptn_dr posted:I'm still in the middle of my re-read, but the "Baru ruins the Llosydanes' day" segment is one of my favourite bits in any fantasy novel. That is hands-down the best part of the book IMO, because we get to see Baru doing the thing we - or at least I - expected and wanted from her in books 2 and 3, but get precious little of. Which I suppose means my expectations for the series were unrealistic, or intentionally subverted. They're very good books, I just still wonder what the series would look like if everything after book 1 took place in Falcrest instead of the extended seagoing field trip.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:52
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The only Parker I've read are Sixteen Ways and the first half of How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, but his writing style is pretty consistent between those two, for what it's worth. Empire in particular feels like a bit like Pratchett writing the more serious Watch books, but with the cynicism turned way, way up. This is definitely a person who should be writing about making deals with devils and I'm looking forward to getting to Prosper's Demon, especially if it ever comes out on audio.
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Oct 27, 2020 01:40
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Light Brigade has the best milsf boot camp segment because it is also every other part of the war, simultaneously.
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Oct 31, 2020 03:16
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Just finished the audiobook of Piranesi. It's read by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and he did an amazing job. Seconding this in a big way. I'm nearing the end of the audiobook as well and it's been fantastic. Also, weirdly, a good companion to Cultist Simulator if anyone else enjoyed that game's take on dreamlike otherworldly spaces.
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Nov 17, 2020 03:39
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General Battuta posted:My space opera was supposed to be out this year You wrote a space opera?! My god, just the other day I was watching the Blue Planet developer commentary and wondering if you'd return to sci-fi any time soon. Great to hear it already happened!
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Nov 18, 2020 19:55
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I don't think it's gonna hit shelves until 2022.
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Drakyn posted:There was a very cool novella about sci-fi far-future salmon ecological restoration here I did not know until this moment how much I wanted to read a novel about far-future ecological investigation / restoration. Salmon optional, but not unwelcome.
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Nov 29, 2020 01:27
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Well, it's entertaining, but good is going to be a matter of some debate.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:06
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Sextro posted:Potential spoilers I might be misremembering regarding these books: I vaguely recall something about the protagonist and the hot nun (who becomes a major character if not protagonist in her own right later) basically fell into an instant-we-have-magic-powers-and-share-a-link-attraction/lust/love *thing* and neither actually realized it at the time and just thought they were horny. Chalk up another on the list of "creators who read ElfQuest and steal bits of it for the rest of their career." (No one tell my D&D players that the Big Bad of their campaign's first arc is Literally Just Madcoil From ElfQuest.) On topic, how much time does Traitor Son spend on the romance angle? That part sounds dire, but I'm a sucker for fantasy logistics.
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Jan 16, 2021 10:12
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Ccs posted:I’d pick up that Rights of Magicians book if it came on sale. There’s no way it’ll be as good as Strange and Norrell though, as much as I wish anything could measure up If you're looking for something that feels like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, check out Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. It has a similar vibe, and the prose is just astonishing. If you enjoy audiobooks I can highly recommend that version, too, as it has an excellent narrator.
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Jan 20, 2021 03:15
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Ccs posted:So I'm now reading what might be one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read? Still too early to say but scene-wise, this has had passages that haven't been equaled in other work I've encountered. The book is Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. If it holds up by the end, you just picked my next book for me, this sounds great. Let us know how you feel about it once you've reached the conclusion, please!
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Feb 8, 2021 19:51
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Ccs posted:I'm going to start the author's next book, "The Necromancer's House", today. It's set in modern times where a wizard who stole a cache of grimoire from the USSR when it fell is being hunted by Baba Yaga. Should be good! So in addition to being John M. Ford, he's also Tim Powers?
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Feb 10, 2021 19:55
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anilEhilated posted:I enjoyed it a lot; the "real lit writer" label might have turned off some people from what is genuinely a very accessible and powerful book. Out of curiosity I went to the Amazon page to see what the Real Lit Reviews would say about this, and was not disappointed: quote:“Defiantly unclassifiable. . . . The Book of Strange New Things squeezes its genre ingredients to yield a meditation on suffering, love and the origins of religious faith. . . . Faber reminds us there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness, and brevity of life on Earth.” —Marcel Theroux, The New York Times Book Review (cover review) I can't recall the last time I saw someone work so hard to justify why enjoying a genre book shouldn't result in having their Real Lit Critic License revoked, as if a fair number of English's timeless masterworks weren't genre pieces written by, say, Le Guin. What a pretentious blinkered jackass.
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Feb 12, 2021 19:45
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fashionly snort posted:(that said, there are some really great prose stylists in sf and fantasy) Who are the great prose stylists in genre fiction, in the thread's opinion? It'd be nice to have a list of people to check out whose writing is a cut above. Le Guin is the one that comes immediately to my mind, and Susanna Clarke. Tolkien as well, although I realize that's contentious.
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Feb 13, 2021 07:33
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StrixNebulosa posted:Not gonna lie, it's been.... interesting being both extremely left politically and someone who enjoys reading military porn, especially sci-fi military porn. The trappings of a functioning military with all the hardware and training is cool, but the function of it in real life is not, and it's an ongoing struggle to find media that has the fun of that that isn't slanted too far to the right. David Drake is about the closest I've gotten - him and Glen Cook. You might enjoy Kameron Hurley's Light Brigade, in that case.
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Feb 15, 2021 19:51
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