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Lester Shy posted:Was anybody else frustrated by the Broken Earth trilogy? It's probably It's honestly one of the most consistent magic systems I've read in years.
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Nov 13, 2019 19:35
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to complain about a magic system, and I'm not saying every story has to have strict, Sanderson-style rules, but the magic in Broken Earth piles so many different, weird things on top of one another that the whole thing falls apart under its own weight.
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sebmojo posted:Mary sue just means boringly perfect. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 06:55
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I shouldn't have mentioned Star Wars; please can we not do a loving Rey derail.
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Nov 19, 2019 20:00
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how does it stack up next to Kraken's "retroeschatonaut"?
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Nov 29, 2019 06:02
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In 2018 I set a rule that I'd only read SFF by women and holy poo poo, do it, it was an awesome year where I discovered a ton of awesome and underappreciated writers.
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Dec 24, 2019 09:54
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I'm apparently late to the party I started, but I chose to read only women because I noticed I'd only read men in the previous year. I was working in publishing at the time and I know what the actual author demographics look like (it slants lightly female to very female, genre depending), so it was sorta bizarre that I wasn't reading any women. Not my choice or anything, just by inertia: all the stuff that gets recommended to me is like, the same five dudes over and over again and I wanted to force myself to change things up. I had a great time and discovered a bunch of authors I wouldn't have otherwise, so I call it a win.
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Dec 25, 2019 13:43
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There's an Asimov story that opens with the narrator working on a nuclear typewriter and I love it
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Dec 26, 2019 00:49
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From memory, yes. It's an electric typewriter with a built-in nuclear power source.
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Dec 26, 2019 01:00
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Absurd Alhazred posted:To be fair, real-life ideas for how to use nuclear power were pretty out there around the late '40s to early '60s or so. Read up on Project Orion for a real head-scratcher.
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Dec 26, 2019 01:23
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I've got an ARC of Harrow, I'm about 1/3 of the way through and I don't know how much I'm allowed to say yet, but just holy poo poo this is a lot
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Feb 21, 2020 03:44
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StrixNebulosa posted:Spoil me and I'll stab you All I'll say is: book very good
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Feb 21, 2020 03:47
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I mean if y'all want ARCs it's actually not super hard: 1) set up a book blog 2) run consistently long enough that publishers know you're serious about it 3) set up a NetGalley account 4) all the free ARCs you want I did a stint as a publicist for at Allen & Unwin; we had a newsletter with all our upcoming titles in it that went out monthly to critics and bloggers, and they'd reply with the free poo poo they wanted, and I'd spend just that whole day sending out free books. If you want digital instead of print you're even easier (see: NetGalley). It's a huge part of how the industry runs. If you're known as a person who talks about books, publishers want to give them to you. If you're talking about books in your spare time anyway, it's not a huge stretch to start writing one review a month. If you started now, you'd absolutely be in the position to request Alecto when the ARCs swing around.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:16
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I tend to avoid posting/engaging in discussion about my own book because it feels very Self-Important Writer Online, but if you liked The Dawnhounds please consider nominating me for the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel this year. The SJVs are the annual New Zealand SF/F Awards and they’re normally pretty low-key, but they’re being held at WorldCon 78 this year and voted on by the Hugo Awards voters—anything on the shortlist will be read by a lot of serious writers, editors and agents. This could be my big break. This is apparently the biggest year for nominations in SJV history and there have been … about 500 nominations total, across all 14 categories, I believe of which about 150 are for Best Novel: your nomination really does matter. It’ll take you two minutes, and could change my life.
* Is that the only award the book is up for? Our cover artist is up for Best Art, so if you dig the fungus skull please also chuck a nomination to Pepper Curry. * Isn’t Gideon the Ninth just going to kick your rear end? I mean it’s a better book than mine, but Tamsyn removed herself from the running because she’s Australian by bullshit legal technicality, and also I suspect to give us little fish a chance (since she’s probably gonna win the Hugo anyway). We’ve actually got a decent shot at the win. Odds are on The Absolute Book, but The Dawnhounds is a solid outside bet, and even getting on the shortlist would be huge. * Is there anybody else cool and good I should be aware of? Goon and friend of the show Casey Lucas is up for Best Production for Into The Mire and Best Short Fiction for A Shriek Across the Sky, first published in our very own Thunderdome and published professionally here. I know a few of y’all follow her writing, so show her some love. That nomination form is right here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfTIK1YJi6GBXX0lZobwDIsm8ZoB49dJSBgFAwp2hQ_-AaGdw/viewform
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Feb 24, 2020 06:37
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Writer Twitter were all weeping into our glasses a month or two back when we realised the advance in Little Women is basically the same dollar amount she'd get in 2020
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Mar 2, 2020 05:35
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(Tor tend to be pretty generous, fwiw--I've heard of a couple of mid 6-figure joint advances in the last 5 years; publishing is finally recovering from 2007)
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Mar 2, 2020 05:36
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freebooter posted:If I said to you I'd just read a book involving: Hell, it's arguably The Broken Earth, depending on your definition of cybernetic.
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Mar 9, 2020 06:49
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I've put The Dawnhounds up for free for a week, if anybody wanted a quarantine read and/or a plague book with a hopeful ending https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YSBKKGG
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Mar 26, 2020 21:47
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Holy poo poo goons, y'all showed the gently caress up for me today Today's downloads are so high, they broke the graph.
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Mar 27, 2020 04:41
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Genres are mostly marketing bullshit, Amazon's genres doubly so. It's sci-fi with queer characters in it; the shoe fit better than the rest of their lovely options.
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Mar 28, 2020 06:05
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I am doing one last poke, because nominations close tomorrow; after this I  to never self-promote in the thread again. WorldCon is going digital but the awards are still on, and this would still be huge career-wise. If you liked the book, please chuck a nomination my way. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I tend to avoid posting/engaging in discussion about my own book because it feels very Self-Important Writer Online, but if you liked The Dawnhounds please consider nominating me for the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel this year.
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Mar 30, 2020 03:01
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Anyway, how did y'all feel about Blackfish City?
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Mar 30, 2020 03:01
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Broken Earth is absolutely incredible but if she's specifically said she wants swords and sorcery and not stuff like Octavia Butler. Broken Earth is post-post-post apocalypse science-fantasy about a sentient earth trying to throw off humanity, and genetically-engineered stone-wizards. Like, that's much more in line with Octavia Butler (or Gene Wolfe or Usula Le Guin or any of those more experimental 70s/80s SFF writers) than GRRM. Like, Jemisin is a WoC and she's very very good but it doesn't feel like a good recommendation for what's being asked.
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Apr 3, 2020 12:23
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A human heart posted:It's interesting that plenty of award winning literary fiction books are being put out by small presses these days, but the prestigious sci fi awards are absolutely dominated by giant publishers. Seems like something someone should look into in more detail. Especially if you're not American and not able to operate on an American scale. A successful indie title in New Zealand moves 300 units, which is well under the threshold for SFWA acceptance. We moved around 800 and we still don't qualify. I imagine a lot of other countries run into similar problems; the Americans run the big awards and design everything around the American market, but nobody else can really compete on numbers so it's a bit pointless. The common wisdom here in NZ is that you either publish with a big-5 US publisher or don't bother with any of the big awards. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Apr 8, 2020 |
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Apr 8, 2020 10:22
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If you're upset about those membership requirements then join the club, but with the proliferation of self-pub (and the awards scene's attitude towards it), getting them to lower the bar is basically impossible.
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Apr 8, 2020 10:38
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SimonChris posted:http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-faq/#What%20works%20or%20persons%20are%20eligible? Somebody was either wrong or trying to get us to gently caress off.
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Apr 8, 2020 10:44
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Whatever happened, it's a massive pain in the rear end. We never would've got it (we were on the Nebula reading list but afaik never even made the awards longlist; I doubt the Hugos would've gone better) but I dunno, it would've been nice to try. I sorta wrote the Hugos off because there was no way we were breaking the American threshold, based on something we got told over a year ago. I wonder if this happens a lot.
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Apr 8, 2020 10:55
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Nah, it wasn't formal or anything; it came from another writer who I thought had experience with these things.
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Apr 8, 2020 11:49
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Quick update: y'all did it, The Dawnhounds is going to WorldCon http://www.sffanz.org.nz/sjv/sjvFinalists-2020.html you're all amazing, thank you so much
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May 1, 2020 23:26
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I finally got around to Nevernight and almost immediately noped out of it. I absolutely loved The Monster of Elendhaven, I gently caress with Joe Abercrombie sometimes, but I bounced off Nevernight hard and it's making me start to question what Dark Fantasy's whole deal is. It felt smug, pretentious and overwritten, but it's also massively popular and I'm starting to wonder whether I'm not just out of touch with the zeitgeist. Did anybody have a different experience with it?
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May 21, 2020 09:42
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Has anybody got any recommendations for gothy SFF in that sorta Gideon mood? Particularly audiobooks: I've finally caved, and I've found it a really good way to read while I work. I've tried browsing Audible but there's just ... so much porn. Like, a shocking amount of porn that it's apparently impossible to filter out. The Monster of Elendhaven was super good, and that sorta dark/weird/bittersweet is definitely what I'm going for.
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May 31, 2020 05:36
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Ninurta posted:Theological first contact you say? Try Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. The book is about the first-contactee, a Jesuit priest with obvious PTSD, going through one big long therapy session that leads to the relevation he was mutilated by aliens to be a better sex slave. It's a book fascinated with faith, and part of that involves going through the meticulous destruction of one man's faith and it hurts to read. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Jun 7, 2020 |
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Jun 7, 2020 08:50
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Of all of the stupid SFF community poo poo to come up this week, Benjanun Sriduangkaew coming back and trying to pretend that she's nice now somehow manages to still be Top 3. She's trying to write off her past like she was a bit snarky when she went on months-long harassment campaigns where her sockpuppets would tell other authors to get raped to death by dogs. One of her targets killed themselves, ffs. "I've been lovely in my past" is such a colossal understatement and not even close to the apology the community deserves.
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Jun 28, 2020 15:41
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StrixNebulosa posted:Everyone look at my giant book from New Zealand!! Personally I thought it was super ambitious and didn't always hit what it was going for, but I couldn't help but admire that ambition and cheer when it pulled some ridiculous poo poo off.
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Jun 29, 2020 04:22
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StrixNebulosa posted:Will do, but it'll be a while. Also fair warning: Black Oxen by Elizabeth Knox was one of the best books I've ever read. I'm going into this one super biased.
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Jun 29, 2020 05:26
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Elizabeth Knox also wrote a romance novel about angels but used such gorgeous language that the literary establishment decreed it Literature and they made a very serious movie out of it. The sheer balsiness of taking a romance novel to lit festivals in the goddam 90s and coming away with a movie deal is just ... yeah she's something else.
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Jun 29, 2020 05:33
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That's just sorta how NZ publishing works—a lot of releases never go much further abroad than Australia, particularly literary fiction. She's a literary author who loves SFF tropes, who publishes almost exclusively through the same university press. I'm not sure she's been a "big deal" before The Absolute Book got that writeup in Slate and suddenly she was signing big US publishing deals, but she's been a consistently extremely high-quality author for three decades and the international sales have only recently started to reflect that.
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Jun 29, 2020 06:53
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Premeditated, one could say. I just assumed it was live, that makes it much shittier.
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Aug 3, 2020 06:39
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Hey so remember how two goons were up for Best Novel and Best Short Story at the little side awards at WorldCon? We both won. And also both got super hosed over by coNZealand, who did everything they could to bury the ceremony and make sure nobody ever saw it.
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Aug 5, 2020 10:44
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I think Casey's right, and I talked about it a bit on social media: there's this NZ cultural cringe that seems to be responsible for this. They were embarassed of us, and they thought we'd make the country look bad if we accepted our awards alongside the Authors From Real Countries. Which is even more humiliating, you know? We write world-class work and the only reason anybody even paid attention to this thing is because we talked to a bunch of Hugo winners about it—they were pissed on our behalf and helped signal-boost us. We needed to get people they considered Real Authors to start shouting about it to get taken seriously. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 11:00
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"New Zealand SF/F writers aren't good enough to play with the big kids" was particularly galling the week before Harrow the Ninth came out, I mean drat
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Aug 5, 2020 11:10
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