|
wizzardstaff posted:The Blending by Sharon Green. Do it! Give in to your hate and it will make you stronger!
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 01:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 02:42 |
|
|
wizzardstaff posted:I've never read the sequel series but it's why I reread the first five so many times. I'd think, "Man, I'm really curious how those sequels went but I should refresh myself on the originals first. It's light reading, it should go fast." And then by the time I'm done I just want to throw the books in a fire. I would be entertained by this, yes. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2019 04:12
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:Anybody have strong opinions on Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series? A very light sci-fi/fantasy book club that I might be joining is doing it for their next book and I'm trying to decide if I'll join or tell them I'll wait until the new year (which I might do anyway, given my schedule). I like space opera but have always kind of given "big space battles, also some story" kind of books a pass, I can't tell if this falls in that category or not though. There's some mildly innovative stuff in the way they fight space battles in The Lost Fleet books, which is kind of neat, but the main hero is a serious Marty Stu. The author even says in his notes at one point that he designed Geary to be "the perfect naval officer" and that's borne out throughout the series where he's essentially infallible. His only "flaw" is that he's worried that he's so adored that it'll go to his head and he'll be tempted to become a military dictator.  But at least he isn't Honor Harrington. He's perfect in his field, but never turns out to be a master swordsman, perfect shot with a pistol, or win the love of a telepathic treecat who gives him psychic powers. He's "just" a perfect space admiral. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2019 03:11
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:If this isn't utterly berzerk then it will be a failure, elric is a fuckin fever dream Yeah, you gotta lean into the crazy or not even bother. It's like the mess they made of the adaptation of The Rook. If you didn't want crazy superpowers vs. Belgian fleshcrafters, why did you want to adapt The Rook in the first place?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2019 19:21
|
|
|
Tommu posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for zombie/post apocalyptic? ToxicFrog posted:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is old enough and well-known enough that you've probably already read it, but I'll list it here for completeness. To expand on this, get the audiobook version, and indeed, get the expanded audiobook version. It's put together like an in-universe documentary, with a unique voice actor for every character. It's awesome and well worth a listen even if you've read the book already. The expanded version is unabridged and twice as long as the original release and is, in my opinion, the definitive version of the book.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2020 21:20
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Was the expanded version ever turned back into a book? I hate audiobooks but would like to read it. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2020 23:47
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:uh what? Given that he posted a similarly themed fart story on the Wheel of Time thread, I can only assume he's going around farting all over the book barn, possibly all over SA in general.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2020 07:02
|
|
|
buffalo all day posted:it basically judges popularity of a book among people who take SF seriously, which is at least interesting to know That's the theory, but the practical was shown to be something different by the Puppies fiasco. In practice, it's decided by however many people decide to lay out the cash (what is it, $25 I think?) for the membership. There's no way to test for "people who take SF seriously". Pay your money, get your vote, and if you can get together enough people to pay and vote the way you want, you can buy one or more awards. Paying the membership fee doesn't make your anymore serious about SF than paying for an account here on SA makes you serious about posting.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2020 18:23
|
|
|
GreenBuckanneer posted:I realize this is the book thread but how are the Expanse books vs the TV show? It looks interesting. anilEhilated posted:The TV show is better in basically every way. For one thing, I don't hate the TV version of the main character like I do in the books!
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 15:50
|
|
|
To be fair, the first Pern story was published in 1967. Things have changed a bit. For one thing, most of us here were born since then. As a product of their time the original three (or six if you include the Harper books) novels really aren't that bad.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2020 21:21
|
|
|
Huxley posted:I have a Dune question. I'm about 1/3 into the first book. Pretty much. Shaddam IV fears Duke Leto's popularity in the Landsraad and is helping the Harkonnens so he can eliminate a potential rival. The Harkonnens and Atreides have had a blood feud going back for generations, so any chance the Harkonnens have to take out the Atreides they're going to go for. The Atreides aren't completely unaware of the dangers involved, but control of Arakkis is so valuable that they're willing to take the gamble regardless.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2020 01:02
|
|
|
Elderbean posted:Any reccomendations for some good old fashioned adventure fantasy? Nothing complicated, just a good adventure with some likeable characters, preferably with exploring weird places? You ever read The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams? Very old fashioned, quite a good example of it's type, got some decent characters that I didn't hate, and did do some interesting exploration. I think it checks all your boxes if you haven't read it already. The previously mentioned Lord of Light and Wizard of Earthsea are pro picks too, of course.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 17, 2020 05:18
|
|
|
I once read an analysis someone wrote of one of the later Gor books...I think maybe book 23? Anyway, the ratio of Plot to Kinky Sex was like 1:10 at that point. That said, all I've ever heard of Norman in his regular life is that he's been happily married for decades, so presumably he just used the Gor books as an outlet for his personal sexual demons. That and to get paid, since those books were surprisingly popular for a decade or two.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2020 01:47
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:-If you thought Roger Zelazny's original content do-not-steal AMBER series sucked and was derivative....you are correct! AMBER series was apparently a direct ripoff of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. But since PJF ripped off everyone else constantly, no lawsuits happened. That's a pretty harsh mischaracterization of what went on. I'm holding a third printing of Sign of the Unicorn and it's dedication is "For Jadawin and his Demiurge, not to forget Kickaha." Those being the main characters of "The World of Tiers," of course. You don't dedicate your book to the characters of a novel series you're homaging if you're worried they're going to sue you. For that matter, outside the barest of story beats of "dude on Earth encounters people of great power and then discovers he's one of those people afflicted with amnesia", the stories diverge pretty quickly. And it's not like you can sue over general story points anyhow, or else there'd be no end to the lawsuits between "guy with gun shoots a lot of bad guys" authors. Fer gently caress's sake, Paolini's Inheritance Cycle is just Star Wars with Dragons, with the movie for Eragon being even more so, and no one ever sued about that poo poo, and those are multi-billion dollar corporations with lawyers on staff whose job is to sue over poo poo like that. Perhaps most importantly we should remember that "good authors borrow, great authors steal." Whether you think Amber "sucked and was derivative" or not, the books were very popular and most people here know what you're talking about when you mention them, and a good percentage of us have read them. Far fewer have so much as heard of "The World of Tiers", much less seen a copy to read. Taking an existing story and transforming it and improving it such that no one remembers the original is the mark of a great writer. Unless you think Shakespeare adapting the lives of an obscure Danish prince and a thane of Scotland into two of the greatest tragedies in the English language was "derivative".
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:MZB/Darkover chat mostly died off at the 48% mark, while Zelazny's AMBER series only got mentioned majorly by the guy that triggered jng2058. My back-burnered theory that Philip Jose Farmer was the Neil Gaiman of his era keeps getting fueled up whenever PJF stories come up. It was a garbage opinion in 1980, and it's a garbage opinion now. 
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2020 18:24
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:The tone of the dedications and Zelazny's intro seems to indicate that Can't be plagiarism if you have permission. Your point is invalid.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2020 16:44
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:Started reading SFL Vol 05 and right now everyone has opinions on the Dean Machine Drive/Analog magazine fiasco, which I am currently 3% clued in about (and climbing) just from reading the ongoing not-Mad posts from BigName people on the subject. The who the what now? What was that all about?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2020 00:29
|
|
|
freebooter posted:This is the correct take on Foundation. It's a great book if you want to listen to pompous old farts lecture people. Nah. You're forgetting that Asimov's best works are his short stories. He was really good at taking one idea, spinning it around, and coming up with a neat angle on it. The short story was the perfect length for that kind of examination, and that's where Asimov excelled. Nothing of Heinlein's or Clark's that I read ever affected me the way "The Last Question" did, or made me think the way "The Dead Past" did. There's a reason that Asimov's Science Fiction is a magazine dedicated to science fiction short fiction and not, say, a novel publishing house.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2020 16:50
|
|
|
quantumfoam posted:SFL Archives Volume 10 (1985) update 4 Oh hey, I remember Diane Duane! She wrote some of the better Star Trek novels in the `80s. Her Rihannsu novels were arguably as influential at the time towards defining the Romulans as John Ford's books were for the Klingons. Very little of their versions lasted past TNG, of course, but for a stretch in the `80s they were a big hit in Trek fandom.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 03:25
|
|
|
StrixNebulosa posted:Strange question time: are there any other writing projects as ambitious/huge in scope as Warhammer 40k's Horus Heresy? If you don't know, that's a 54 book long series written by multiple authors that covers a mostly coherent narrative / piece of history in the 40k 'verse. It's in its final series now, the Siege of Terra thing, and I'm just... in awe of how huge it is, and how successful. And, more importantly to this thread, I cannot think of any other sci-fi/fantasy series that goes as big. Am I missing something? Please say yes. I mean kinda? In English, there's the Star Wars Extended Universe (now mostly Legends) which broadly covers the history of the Star Wars universe from the end of Jedi like thirty or forty years into the future. It's not dominated by a single event like the Heresy, but it does have continuing characters, events that lead into other events, consequences of earlier decisions coming back to affect the current stories. It's also a hot mess, not really designed to be a single unified story until fairly late in the day, kinda screwed the pooch once they decided to move from single novels and trilogies written by a single author to Horus Heresy style multiple writers on one long story. Yuzan Vong? Yuzan WRONG! There are individual books and trilogies within the SWEU that I'd recommend, but reading the whole thing? Especially since they were published out of chronological order and trying to figure out what to read when would be a challenge? It sounds like a lot of work for not all that much payoff, really. There's also all the Star Trek novels, but those are even less connected than the Star Wars ones, with multiple different versions of what the Romulans and Klingons are like, which then got run over by the later series from TNG on. That's even less worthwhile to read all of, but there are a handful of decent books hiding in there too. Other than that, all I can think of are a couple of other collaborative story worlds like Thieves' World and Wild Cards, but those are far shorter than the Heresy and usually collections of short stories in the same world rather than anything approaching a continuing narrative, though I guess they did occasionally have different angles on the same event style books. The problem is that only a big franchise has the cash to burn to bring in enough writers to do a Horus Heresy, so your possible candidates are few and far between. Trek, Star Wars, and 40k are the only ones that come to mind within the English SF/Fantasy realm, and those all have their hearts elsewhere.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 23:08
|
|
|
muscles like this! posted:Yeah, I gave up on Cry Pilot when it became clear that it would never/take forever to get back to the actually interesting part and that the majority of the book was just going to be a bland milsf boot camp. I don't know why so many milsf authors are obsessed with boot camp stories when they almost all play out exactly the same. Because everybody else does it? Ground based MilSF just does that. Probably the Starship Troopers influence, I guess. I suppose it's also the MilSF version of the coming of age story. You start as a naïve civilian, go to boot, come out a hardened soldier ready to kick rear end, etc. etc. Wouldn't be so bad if they all didn't hit the same story beats, though. Boot bully becomes your buddy, weak recruit needs encouragement/protection from the protagonist, bastard drill sergeant turns out to have a heart of gold, and so on and so forth. Maybe that's why everyone does it, because its so well known that every MilSF writer can write in in his/her sleep. At least naval MilSF doesn't usually boot camp, though those have their own set of clichés they like to roll through. 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2020 15:42
|
|
|
TheAardvark posted:just found out that Ready Player Two comes out in 3 weeks Kinda feel that RP1's moment came and went with the movie. Everyone who needed the nostalgia fill up got it done and moved on. And besides pure undiluted nostalgia there really wasn't anything else to RP1.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 2, 2020 18:20
|
|
|
So....Sanderson. Personally, I'm mixed on his writing. I think he did as well as anyone could have with the nearly impossible task of finishing Wheel of Time, and almost certainly better than the other candidate for the job, George R.R. Martin, would have. For one thing, he actually got the books written, which is more than we can say for George in the last several years. There are things I quibble with in his WoT writing choices, and he's admitted that he had trouble getting some of the characters right, especially in The Gathering Storm, but on the whole he did a good job and gave us a satisfying ending. Certainly better than if WoT had just stopped at Knife of Dreams! It's his writing on his own projects that gives me trouble. I bounced off The Way of Kings hard the first time I tried to read it years ago, and when I picked up the audiobook this year, I got farther into it but still stalled and ended up listening to other things. It's still there on my phone, taunting me every time I open Audible. But for all that, I don't see any reason to dislike the man himself. Have you seen his YouTube channel? He's giving away an entire college class in writing fantasy and science fiction for free to anyone who wants to watch it. Sure beats paying a couple hundred bucks to Masterclass for that kind of education! So yeah, he seems like a chill dude who works hard and is generous with his time. That I'm having trouble with some of his work doesn't mean I should dislike the guy.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2020 18:59
|
|
|
Kinda old school, and technically not novels, but I liked the first two or three Wild Cards books edited by Martin. Like all the big short story shared universes, this one went off the rails after awhile and just got weird, but the first three books more or less hold up.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2020 06:14
|
|
|
Khizan posted:It's like Dune in that you read until you hit a book that makes you say "gently caress it, I'm out", whichever book that happens to be. But really, isn't every series like that? If the series ends before you say gently caress It, that's a victory.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2020 10:39
|
|
|
Happiness Commando posted:You take that back. Baru is a traitor and a monster And a tyrant! 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2020 16:24
|
|
|
fritz posted:I will never read this book but why is the 80s nostalgia guy suddenly into an anime from the 90s. Because, like the movie, he's expanding his nostalgia era to sell more books.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2020 14:26
|
|
|
Carrier posted:His best book by some distance IMO, if you haven't read it and like big scale long time scifi then you should get this and read it! Agreed. It was his first book that I read, and it was disappointing to discover that nothing else of his I wrote measured up to it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2020 22:37
|
|
|
Cardiac posted:You mean he copy pasted/translated Scandinavian Viking literature. There is zero original content in that one. I literally grew up reading the exact same stories as they are a part of what constitutes basic Swedish literature. He wanted to bring those classic stories to an English speaking audience that largely had not, in fact, grown up with them. At no point did he claim that it was anything besides that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2020 00:06
|
|
|
DACK FAYDEN posted:I mean, I read that when I was like nine. Is that not the typical age for being able to stomach Asimov's cardboard characters because you're hooked on the worldbuilding? That tracks. My grandmother got me a collected edition of Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation as a birthday present when I was ten.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2020 20:19
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:I have no idea what it was called or who it was by, but it was a story of humanity making first contact with the galactic community, being given access to the galactic library, not getting told about the galactic library's licensing fees so that we rack up a lot of debt in order to bankrupt and enslave us and just as things are looking grim, a rat-like species comes along and offers to sell us their debt which makes no sense at all until humanity looks up the rat people's history and realizes that every species the rat species has owed money too has rapidly gone extinct and then humanity joins with their good rat friends in subtly killing off their money lenders. That's Chess With a Dragon by David Gerrold. It has a human playing chess with a dragon on the cover. Pretty decent if short paperback.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2020 03:39
|
|
|
C.M. Kruger posted:Isekai fiction has some distinct differences from portal fantasy though. Primarily portal fantasy generally uses a framing of at least some sort of two-way travel between the worlds, even if it's just a "get back to earth" end goal. Isekai almost always have the protagonist die and be reincarnated in that world, with no real hope of return, and often no desire to do so because it's some power fantasy for teenagers/depressed otaku where they're the hero now despite being a loser in their previous life or slavery is legal or whatever. That's a fairly recent development, though. In the '90s, the early isekai shows like Inuyasha and El-Hazard still had back and forth travel without the death and reincarnation angle. For that matter, one of the most popular recent versions Sword Art Online goes back and forth as well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2021 08:22
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:*heavy sigh* The discount baru cormorant (it's $2.99) Are we to take it, then, that the authors aren't consulted on these Amazon sales?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2021 19:56
|
|
|
pseudorandom name posted:Don't read Altered Carbon, nothing about its society makes any sense given the technology. I mean Altered Carbon itself relies on randomly discovered alien technology that lets humanity do a whole ton of really impossible things. It's hard to call it "near future tech". The society doesn't make sense because Morgan is using it to make a super exaggerated noir setting, highlighting in even more stark contrast the lives of the elite versus the commonfolk that's a pretty standard element of a lot of old school noir. And as science fiction noir, it works great.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2021 07:00
|
|
|
Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Amortals by Matt Forbeck is a nifty take on Altered Carbon. ...which is apparently free with that new Audible Plus thing. So added to the library. Thanks!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2021 07:44
|
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:Altered Carbon was fun but really hard to shake the discomfort that, despite the human body and gender allegedly becoming meaningless, it's fundamentally about Cool Special Forces Detective Man fighting sexual violence against women and the big baddie is a billionaire who kills prostitutes. Eh, because it's noir. Your typical noir detective is a World War II veteran who was a bad rear end hero in the war but doesn't like to talk about it, uses the skills he learned in the war and contacts he made with old war buddies to make a living as a PI, has a hard and cynical exterior but is secretly outraged when the weak, especially women, are victimized. He's also usually badly handling PTSD through alcoholism though the writers at the time probably weren't putting that aspect in intentionally, though maybe I'm underestimating them. And yes, he's a chick magnet that all the girls want to bone. Even so, it's a genre that's as much a reaction to the seemingly perfect "white picket fences" world of the 1950s by shining a light on the seedy underbelly, on the corruption and abuse going on behind the scenes as cyberpunk is a reaction to the rise of commercialism and corporate power in the 1980s. Or how novels even now being started that we'll see come out in the next few years will be a reaction to the MAGA insurrection. Could Morgan have done more with his concept? Definitely. Could he have done more with it and still kept it recognizably noir? Probably not. I mean a better writer could have, but Morgan's kind of a hack as the rest of the Kovacs novels show. But if you happen to enjoy noir and want to read a science fiction noir story that does Science Fiction Noir as literally as Firefly did Science Fiction Western, then Altered Carbon fits the bill. If you want something MORE than Science Fiction Noir, then forget it, you're not going to get it here. Not for everyone, by any means, and not all the time, but if you're in the mood for it, then it can scratch a very specific itch. buffalo all day posted:Ive seen some of the terrible things he's written recently on twitter/his blog but don't recall how they informed altered carbon (probably read it last about 10 years ago and recall it being a fun detective noir)... Yeah, I haven't enjoyed anything else he's written. Read Altered Carbon for exactly that....a fun science fiction noir story...and ignore him otherwise.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2021 16:31
|
|
|
Collateral posted:More licensed fanfic like Star Wars EU. Zahn's still truckin'.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2021 07:46
|
|
|
Rothfuss strikes as the kind of guy who enjoys being a Writer more than he does actually writing. I keep seeing him on YouTube and at cons (back when cons were still a thing) and the like, but very rarely doing anything besides being a nominally famous writer. For all that, I actually enjoyed The Name of the Wind as setup for presumably a greater story yet to come, but then Wise Man's Fear came out and it....wasn't. And now it's been so long that even if the fabled third book ever does come out, I don't think I'll care. I've moved on.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2021 21:00
|
|
|
darkgray posted:I vaguely remember thinking (part of) this was great, many many years ago. It's kind of the anti-Starship Troopers, with the premise being "yeah, war is still horrible, even if you have power armor and are fighting space bugs". As opposed to Heinlein's "well sure, I spent the war as a civilian aeronautical engineer in Philadelphia, but I'm sure that combat is the crucible that makes a man a real man" take from Starship.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 02:42 |
|
|
Come to think of it, I haven't had those Swedish meatballs in years.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2021 19:12
|
|