SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

Kestral posted:

What are the standout books in the Xeelee Sequence? Or is it a Dune-like case of, "once you get to here, stop, it's all downhill" ?

On a lark I read Raft because I'd read a random Xeelee Seqeuence spoiler about humanity being enslaved by sentient convection cells and craved that sort of big-ideas fiction. Raft wasn't super impressive, but it worked enough to get me to move on to Timelike Infinity and that's been fascinating so far. Prose is mediocre at best, but boy are those big ideas, and I'm up for more of them, especially if they involve extremely weird aliens. But this series seems huge, and if it drops off at some point I'd rather address other parts of my backlog.

On a related note, at what point can you read the short story collections? I've heard a lot of praise for Vacuum Diagrams in particular.

Vacuum Diagrams was published after Ring, so that's probably the best time to read it. Some of the stories in Vacuum Diagrams, especially Secret History, lay out the cosmology pretty plainly, in a way that I assume was more drip-fed in Ring. Other than maybe Exultant, the later novels don't really tie into what happens in the short story collections.

I haven't actually read the novels, but I've read the short stories collections a few times. I like the Xeelee Sequence and its weirdness a lot, but Baxter's characters are all horrible people, and I'd rather not spend an entire novel with them.

I do want to know why the Xeelee went back in time to try to kill Michael Poole in Vengeance, though. I don't think he had anything to do with the direction humans eventually went in.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 12:49

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:55

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

On the subject of soup ads in Terry Pratchett, someone on Twitter posted a screenshot of the ad in The Light Fantastic in context with the rest of the book.
https://twitter.com/RainerGladys/status/1443552976841412609
My German isn't great, but that looks like the climax. They really interrupted a climactic action scene with some ramble about how it was actually good that Trymon spent all his time reading and neglected his health, but the reader should instead take a quick break to eat some soup.

It comes in many delicious flavours. Bon appetit!

# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 14:42

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

General Battuta posted:

There's a very minor detail in the Hannu Rajaniemi novels about Mielikki activating 'combat autism', a kind of altered cognitive state for fighting. I always wondered what autistic people might think of this. I'm not fishing for condemnation or validation, I would just be interested to hear.

I try to stay in my lane and write characters with combat depression

Combat autism is just asking for a combat autistic meltdown, I think. Combat ADHD hyperfocus might do what I think he was talking about, though.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2021 23:28

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

I think I just liked the boarding school fantasy aspect, and also that video game about his psychological issues that he kept playing. The zero gravity sports stuff was cool, too. The part where he beats up bullies so badly that he accidentally kills them was kind of unpleasant to me, and not why I liked it as a teenager.

I guess there's a few different ways Ender's Game would appeal to younger readers. I remember liking Ender's Shadow as well, even though Bean's personality shift whenever he was in a scene from the original book was very noticeable.

Re: West of Eden, they're not even dinosaurs, they're mosasaurs. And I think only the females are sapient or something? I don't remember, it's been a while since I've read it. And there might have been something about LCDs made out of frogs. (Edit: I looked it up, and the males are sapient; their society is just extremely matriarchal)

Shwoo fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Feb 12, 2022

# ¿ Feb 12, 2022 02:09

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

It's been a couple of years since I read the Orthogonal books, but I think even the biologist plotline in the second book was a lot more interesting than the physicist plotline. I can remember several actual conflicts the biologists are involved with, but all I remember the physicists doing is standing around in their lab going "Suppose..." for the entire book.

The physics were actually pretty cool to me, but more in the effect they have on the characters' biology and society than their exact mechanics. Love reading about some weird aliens.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2022 02:23

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

Behold: the scorching desert outback of Tasmania!

I wonder if the end of the summary is implying that the virus mutates to be deadly to everyone, or if the worse case scenario it mentions is just "kills white people, but MORE".

# ¿ Apr 3, 2022 01:55

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. I borrowed the books from a trans friend who just sort of lifted his hands and said "I know, but I can't help but like them even though JK's awful." My only experience with the books were getting a few chapters into Sorcerer's Stone when it first came out and getting bullied for having it, so I put it down and never engaged with it again, only knowing about two of the major spoilers for the last book that everyone went around screaming when it first released. But it always bothered me that I didn't know anything about the series. Meanwhile, I'll see some neoliberal think tank hosting Quidditch matches between readings of Brett Stephens op-eds on why Tehran should be carpet-bombed, so I just had to know what this pop culture phenomenon was.

I'm most of the way through Goblet of Fire, and I can see how these books were so huge during their run. I'm pretty much always flipping the page, wondering what every teacher/student's motivations are. Most of the time, any non-plot happenings are just sort of cozy character moments as opposed to typical Fantasy lore dumps (though those become more common as the books go on). Even then, most quiet moments can end up having some clever foreshadowing moments, so that I don't always feel bored. The big backstory dumps in Azkaban were the first time I really felt bored with the books, and The World Cup of Quidditch arc in Goblet of Fire was especially dull (to me, at least). The House Elf themes seem kind of heavy-handed, but seems a bit more self-aware and fleshed out than a lot of racism commentary that got aimed at me when I was a kid. I'm told that she kind of doesn't go anywhere with it, bordering on just giving up in a way that feels gross.

Overall, I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying the books, despite that intermittent guilt that hits me when I remember how much of a bigot JK is.

Book four is really when they started to go downhill. I think Rowling got bored of writing whimsical boarding school mysteries after that book, but being whimsical boarding school mysteries is what the books are best at. Also, since they're longer and less edited, problems that were there from the beginning become more obvious.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2022 03:13

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

The Knife of Never Letting Go is YA because the perspective character is a teenager. Or about to be, at the start. Animorphs is middle grade because it's written simply and has a lot of TSSSSEEEEWWWW TSSSSEEEEEEEEWWWW sound effects. If there's a bit where a character excitedly recounts the time she got dismembered in battle and started using her severed arm as a club to her horrified... science fiction different personality clone, it's still middle grade. That's fine. Also I think Scholastic had stopped actually reading the books before they published them at that point.

I've also heard that YA books don't have more than one plotline going on at once, but I'm not sure about that one.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2022 01:48

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

notaspy posted:

What happened to the second spline at the end of Timelike Infinity?

I've only read the short stories, but I flipped through Timelike Infinity just now and I think the one that got shot by black holes was just too wounded to be a threat after that. Its weapons stopped working, anyway.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2022 10:50

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

Zoracle Zed posted:

re: blake crouch's upgrade, i got to the encrypted dna secret message and it just got way too stupid for me to continue. in case anyone's curious:

Is there some context for why encoding a message with only four possible symbols is treated as difficult here, or does the author just not know about binary? Or codons, actually.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2022 12:33

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:55

Shwoo: Jul 21, 2011

MockingQuantum posted:

I'd agree with Going Postal and Guards, Guards for sure. I haven't read the Aching books so I can't speak to those, but Pyramids didn't really do anything for me, I found it kind of flat and forgettable personally.

The accountant character was especially flat. :dadjoke:

To me, Pyramids reads like a set of ideas that never really coalesced into a complete plot, or maybe like a beta version of Small Gods. I think I read somewhere that Pratchett wrote his first drafts before he figured out where the plot was going, and polished them up afterwards, which would explain a lot about this one especially.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2022 04:29

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