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I don't read as much SF/F in books as I do from Analog, is this the right thread for that or is there a separate SF/F magazine thread?
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Oct 8, 2019 03:56
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StrixNebulosa posted:Tell me about these sci-fi/fantasy short stories please, maybe they'll get me to read short stories. Well, I only know Analog well, as I've been subscribed for more than a year now: it's got science fiction, mostly "hard" stuff, although what that means varies. I like that they will often have really interesting depictions of aliens, either from first- or third-person perspective. There was one recently called Better, about a soldier in some war nobody understands that Earth was conscripted into, who is brought back to a highly depopulated Earth by the weird creatures running the show to help yet another weird species integrate. They also have weird alt-history stories, like Bone Hunters by Harry Turtledove, where lizard people roam the Earth, which made an uncomfortable recreation of the Old West with a different subspecies as a Native American analog. Asimov's is a bit more open about doing "softer" science fiction and science fantasy, but I haven't read as much of it. Analog also has interesting science fact articles, about biology, cosmology, etc.
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Oct 8, 2019 13:19
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I just got the Nov/Dec 2019 Analog, will try and remember to post which stories I like.
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Oct 16, 2019 02:11
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I have other reading obligations, so I've only read one story from Analog so far. An Eye for an Eye, a first contact story between humans and an alien species with a very peculiar form of initial greeting. Continues from the same author's earlier story, published in 2018, about the events leading up to the human landing from that species` perspective.
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Oct 17, 2019 13:36
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ToxicFrog posted:Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage is entertaining as hell. Seconding this, it's so good. For fiction, I feel dumb even saying it, but The Hunt for Red October is pretty good, it's Clancy before he became too Clancy, if that makes sense.
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Oct 23, 2019 01:26
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If you read Hyperion, there's a hint as to how Simmons might have preferred to write it, vs. what the publisher forced him into, in Martin Silenus` story. What I liked about the first one was how each person's story was a different genre. From Paul Duré's Lovecraftian horror to Brawne Lamia's cyberpunk noir. Fall of Hyperion didn't really have the same tone, and felt a bit overextended.
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Oct 24, 2019 03:36
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Reverse werewolf is a swearwolf, obvs That's a supersymmetric werewolf counterpart, but that theory is bunk. So we're safe from sdraculas and szombies, thankfully.
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Oct 24, 2019 13:57
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Ben Nevis posted:Just a reminder that there's plenty of time to (re)read A Night In the Lonesome October before Halloween. This is my third time and second year in a row I've managed to read it day-by-day
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Oct 25, 2019 15:08
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Ben Nevis posted:I wanted to but it was checked out. Clearly I just need my own copy. Just do it, it's so worth it. Such a cute little horror.
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Oct 25, 2019 15:24
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General Battuta posted:Have you read any sci fi published in the last 20 years? I can think of 20 writers off the top of my head who are vocally anti-concentration camp and most of them would be common sights in bookstores these days. Yeah, most of the authors I've found on Twitter after liking their stories on Analog are left wing if not at least liberal.
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Oct 26, 2019 04:54
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What about the Southern Vampire Mysteries? The first came out in 2001, are they the ones that started the urban fantasy romance where all the Hollywood horror monsters come to life starting with vampires? I guess the Anne Rice books predate it, but those aren't really written as romance novels.
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Oct 31, 2019 14:11
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I've finished reading the last Analog of the year. I will probably be going over all six issues again to be prepared for the AnLab awards, so I might do a little write-up at some point if people are interested.
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Nov 15, 2019 01:49
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:There's an Asimov story that opens with the narrator working on a nuclear typewriter and I love it Multivac, a sometimes intelligent computer or series of computers in some of his stories, is using punch cards.
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Dec 26, 2019 00:53
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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 01:03
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pseudanonymous posted:What’s wrong with project Orion? What's wrong with using nuclear explosions in the atmosphere to kick payload into orbit?
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Dec 26, 2019 04:24
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Gnoman posted:Orion's would be wasted as a simple orbital launcher. Where it would be really useful would be as an interplanetary or potentially interstellar vehicle - an Orion drive could theoretically provide enough impulse to get to a high percentage of lightspeed and decelerate again, which would make traveling to nearby stars within a few decades possible (although probably not practical). That sounds more like Project Daedalus, but you still need to get nukes into orbit, good luck with convincing anyone you're doing that for peaceful purposes, or even if you did, safeguarding them from being used for non-peaceful purposes.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:33
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Considering we worked with other countries to land a rover on mars, and we landed it IN mars cause we were not using metric and they were, any group project involving nuclear bombs is gonna be a horrible idea. Na, I'm sure if we move the goalposts enough it'll work out great.
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Dec 26, 2019 05:35
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Kesper North posted:For some reason the age-inappropriate thing I ran into as a kid was Illuminatus! Libertarian propaganda is not appropriate for any age.
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Dec 28, 2019 01:30
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my bony fealty posted:When I read Illuminatus I recall Hagbard Celine coming off as a "not someone to emulate" type but maybe I was just projecting my own beliefs 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.
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Dec 28, 2019 02:50
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General Battuta posted:Lmbo someone finally decided to play the “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” meme completely straight, and in Clarkesworld no less 
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Jan 1, 2020 21:36
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Larry Parrish posted:i have slowly realized that nearly every genre fiction I have ever read is one of these, with the exception of the outright power fantasies where someone whips out an previously unmentioned secret power or whatever. I don't think most of Le Guin's work is like that. I've just read her The Word for World is Forest and it is very much not competence porn. Maybe incompetence porn.
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Jan 1, 2020 23:30
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PST posted:With regard to the Attack Heliocopter short story in Clarksworld, the last few days have seen a lot of trans twitter and sf editors/writers side-eying it a lot. I was going to try and form my own opinion by reading it, but it starts off being such dull milfic that I ended up just closing the tab about a week later, most of it unread.
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Jan 12, 2020 17:31
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I'm starting to work on my review of last years` Analogs (to the level of deciding which I'm voting for in the AnLabs, and like I promised, maybe I'll talk about them here, too), and I'm also reading this year's Jan/Feb, which features "What if a 90s internet atheist updated her vocab for 2020 and wrote a book about schools?". One thing I will say about the AnLabs is that they need to unify Novellas and Novelettes because they barely have any novellas and two out of the three this year were Adam-Troy Castro's, and both of them were really meh. I think they had a similar problem last year. Meanwhile Probability Zeros get nothing.
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Jan 18, 2020 02:48
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Turtledove's now started publishing a series of unconnected stories in Analog, set in a world where intelligent life on Earth developed from dinosaurs rather than from mammals. The first one, Bonehunters, is a take on the Fossil Wars in the American West. It's interesting but having the Native American parallels be an actual different intelligent dinosaur-descendant species than the colonials was a bit... questionable. The second one, The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy, is a take on Moby Dick, and thankfully doesn't delve too deeply into these more dubious aspects of his worldbuilding.
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Jan 23, 2020 05:59
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Gnoman posted:As with all Turtledove works, they were really bad sex scenes. Even Tom Clancy did a better job when trying. At least the Turtledino tales don't have sex. Yet.
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Jan 23, 2020 06:10
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fritz posted:Not the first time he's done something like that, he had a book in the 80s where the Americas had been settled only by Neanderthals.  Quite. Funny what you can get away with when you're an established white cis-man who is just liberal enough.
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Jan 24, 2020 03:08
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I'm hoping to be done with my short overview for myself of the 2019 Analog stories etc, just in time to vote for the AnLabs on Friday. Then I will see if I can give you a rundown of notable works this year. There were so many short stories.... so many.
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Jan 29, 2020 02:08
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Yeah, the LP of the game I watched.... on someone's channel was better than the story, in my opinion.
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Feb 2, 2020 19:51
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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. I'd say a lot of Analog stories are like that. Explore a new planet and investigate what's there. Something goes wrong in a Mars colony, scientists go over it until they figure it out. Someone's been kicked out of academia but gets a leg in through having a novel hypothesis. You might be looking for hard sci-fi. Cardiac posted:Given that science is extremely tedious and repetitive, none. Also, the grant application process is amiss so no immersion for me. Strangely enough, quite a few Analog stories deal with the fundraising aspects of science and/or space exploration. I know I promised a big summary of the 2019 Analog output after I summarized it to vote for the AnLabs. Kind of got burned out last week after finishing up the short summaries and putting in my vote just under the wire. I'll see if I can do it later today or tomorrow.
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Feb 8, 2020 23:40
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I'm going to focus on some good stories I saw in Analog in 2019, going by type: Novellas Only three of those this year, two by Adam-Troy Castro, but the one I liked was You Must Remember This, by Jay O'Connell. The protagonist was a victim of a nanobot based calamity which turned significant parts of the Northeast into weird glass-like matter but preserved the consciousness of the people who were killed. An unknown benefactor paid for her to be revived, and she has to face integrating into a very different society while struggling with her past issues, including addiction. It was a compelling take on an oft-retread trope. Novelettes A Civilization Dreams of Absolutely Nothing by Thoraiya Dyer, was more interesting for its depiction of an alien society than for the main "hard" conflict. This society has the ability to come together in groups and share, edit, and sometimes throw away memories, and deciding what to remember and what to forget is a major tension point. Better, by Tom Greene, is masterful, featuring compelling human experiences and a variety of alien encounters: the protagonist is a veteran of a war with a completely xenocidal species, to which other species, like humans, were forcibly conscripted. He returns to a nigh-depopulated earth that is now going to become the home of fugitives from planets were were not so fortunate, his job being to help one particularly difficult species integrate. He reminisces about the traumatic experiences of the war. Not for the feint of heart. A standout from the whole year. A Mate not a Meal, by Sarina Dorie, is told from the point of view of a spider-like intelligence and her struggles with her own life-cycle, as well as how to interpret another, non-spider intelligent being, that becomes her friend. Brutal but lighthearted. At the Fall, by Alec Nevala-Lee, follows an autonomous drone fleet as it makes its way across the ocean, one whale fall to another, desperately scavenging resources, to find out why its supervisors disappeared. Lots of interesting biochemistry, too. Martian Fever, by Julie Novakova, has the first Martian expedition abruptly turned into a colony when a novel disease starts spreading and their trip back is canceled. This is a very sciency story about figuring out what the disease is in hopes of convincing Earth that return is safe, and of course, not succumbing to it. Short Stories Applied Linguistics, by Auston Habershaw, features an alien from a species that originally has not formed any language attempting to communicate its experience of acquiring it from an interaction with a prisoner on a penal colony. A Place to Stand On, by Marie Vibbert, follows the struggles of several astronauts (or maybe aeronauts?) attempting to save a punctured balloon in Venus` atmosphere. The idea of researching or even settling Venus through floating stations in the habitable zone of its atmosphere is the subject of one of 2019's Science Fact columns, and there seems to be a story based on it every year on Analog. It has a lot of potential for science, adventure, and danger, and you can definitely see it in this story. All Tomorrow's Parties, by Phoebe North, is a fun sendup of time travel as a concept, with the protagonist starting to wonder whether anybody they encounter in the past actually started there. A Neighborhood for Someone Else, by Alison Wilgus, tells the story of a human going through the final steps of permanent residency in an alien planet. Filaments of Hopes, by Marissa Lingen, follows a scientist whose original project to find plants to grow on Mars becomes irrelevant due to mission cancellations; she instead finds somewhere else to apply her skills, on Earth, specifically with her family in Finland.
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Feb 9, 2020 21:31
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I've got the three Saga Press omnibuses. The first one was good enough, the second one was just a slog, I barely made it past The Revenge of the Rose, and I just took a break somewhere in the middle of The Bane of the Black Sword a few months ago, not sure when I'll go back to it.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:22
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Kestral posted:I’ve spent the last half hour trying to reconstruct the publication order out of the material presented in the Gollancz volumes, and yeah, this is ridiculous. I’ve never seen any body of fiction chopped up and reorganized to quite this extent before. Publication Order Elric is actually something I think I’d like to do, but I was looking at this for my audiobook slot, not my physical-book slot, and the amount of jumping around within and between audiobooks that publication order would entail is, uh, prohibitive. The first volume of the new collection has pages of bibliography going over the various publications and republications of the Elric stories. It's wild!
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Jan 18, 2023 03:35
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sebmojo posted:Just read it in the order of whichever dogeared lurid-covered paperback you've managed to find in a second hand bookshop for $2 as is traditional 
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Jan 18, 2023 04:11
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Oh, that's another thing about one of the newer Elric novellas? Novels? The Revenge of the Rose. Anyway, some sections there just switch between past and present tense, I could find neither rhyme nor reason for why. Very distracting.
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Jan 20, 2023 05:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:Well, what is literature? A miserable pile of conventions and their subversion.
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Jan 30, 2023 03:24
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I just thought Catcher was bland, but to be fair at the time I resented being told to read anything so I'd skim assigned books the minimum amount to sort of answer the questions about them. Also it was in Hebrew translation, who knows how good that was.
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Feb 1, 2023 02:06
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Folks, back off from the Holden fan! You don't want to end up like Lennon, right?
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Feb 1, 2023 05:03
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VostokProgram posted:Not being facetious - what else are you supposed to do with these kinds of books (Gatsby, catcher, etc) if not look for symbolism and themes and all that analytic stuff? Just read them and enjoy them? I don't know, sometimes I'll see patterns and themes when I'm reading fiction generally, but it's not like I feel like I've flunked a test if I don't. It's not some deep moral failing not to see below the surface. Good novels have a surface that's appealing.
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Feb 1, 2023 18:36
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Everyone posted:In 9th grade (1984) we got to see the unedited 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, even getting a caution from our English teacher that at one one point we would be watching a "bed room scene" AKA Olivia Hussey's then 17ish year old breasts. The one the actors are suing over, mind. quantumfoam posted:Maybe stop giving the troll trolling this thread attention or ignore list them. I guess we'll see if Colbert's attempt pans out, then.
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Feb 1, 2023 19:40
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Gaius Marius posted:I said that people who still hated Catcher never got -4
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Feb 1, 2023 20:17
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