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General Battuta posted:Like the issue is not you disliking the book, it’s that you made it clear you disliked the book because you don’t like women. When is your military sci-fi book coming out?! Also why is it so hard to find information about books and authors in this era of information overload?
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Jan 11, 2020 20:40
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anilEhilated posted:Yeah, I'd honestly feel iffy recommending any Donaldson. Okay, sure, Thomas Covenant has rape in the first book, and the Gap series has rape in the first book, but the Mordant’s Need books just have coercion, manipulation, and lack of consent. poo poo, and off-screen rape in the sequel. Never mind. I do actually quite like the Mordant’s Need books, but they’re really rape-adjacent.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:40
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pradmer posted:Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman - $1.99 The Peace War might be Vinge’s least good book, but it’s still enjoyable. It’s a prequel to Marooned in Real-time which is one of my favorites, a very creative murder mystery in a crazy setting. They’re both a lot shorter and less dense than A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky, but very enjoyable.
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Mar 23, 2020 23:29
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Lies of Locke Lamora is really good. If the sequels don’t live up to it it’s partly because it’s a hard act to follow.
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Apr 5, 2020 22:04
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mllaneza posted:Grunts by Mary Gentle is exactly this, played for humor. With liberal amounts of USMC hijinx. Hooah! I like that book, but it does drop off in the second act.
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Apr 12, 2020 22:32
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Looks like Tor is giving away the chronically overpriced Murderbot books this week. Day by day, and I have books 1 and 2 already, so I’ll need to remember to check Wednesday and Thursday. https://ebookclub.tor.com/?utm_sour...b328eeee5c3f2c6
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Apr 20, 2020 14:07
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Might be Vernor Vinge. Published his first story in 1966. Vinge hasn’t published anything since Children of the Sky though, going on ten years now. 
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Apr 20, 2020 19:43
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FYI Harrow the Ninth’a whole first act is available on Amazon for free. Note that at the halfway point it is not very happy and has invited way more questions than I will have answered until it’s out in the fall.
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Apr 23, 2020 05:05
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I guess you can say Hamilton is consistent about sex? Everyone has it in his books, and I can’t remember him sex shaming anyone. I think he’d like to be similar to Banks about it, but it’s too male-gaze-y.
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May 5, 2020 15:45
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Cardiac posted:Broken dragon. Fallen Dragon. And uh, do you remember how it ends? That book is Hamilton’s creepiest from the standpoint of sex stuff. Spoilers, obviously, but the main character is a chubby virgin teenager at the start, falls in love with a ringer his dad hires to shape him up, breaks up with her when he finds out and joins the private space marines. Decades of real time later he figures out how to travel back in time, and does so to pretend to still be 17 and apologize and win back the girl he fell in love with because he slept with her a few times as a kid.
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Jun 12, 2020 15:10
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Hedrigall posted:Wtf is that Praxis by Walter Jon Williams? I have that and was looking forward to reading it I don’t remember creepy sex in Praxis. I will warn you that those books are completely devoid of tension. It’s weird because it’s got really good ideas, and the characters are flawed and well realized; I think I was just really disappointed the setting seemed almost self-sabotaging.
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Jun 16, 2020 03:36
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a foolish pianist posted:The Gor thing became an SA meme (at least in LF) in like 2007 when someone found some Gorean website audio file that said something like "Welcome... to the world of Gor!" *whipcrack noise*. I can’t think about Gor without thinking of Outlaw of Gor, which had Jack Palance in it and was hysterical when it got the MST3k treatment. Truly a special movie.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:10
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General Battuta posted:The second book is a direct sequel to the first one, eventually. They connect. I hated Absolution Gap. I’d strongly recommend ending with Redemption Ark and reading Chasm City.
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Jul 6, 2020 20:40
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anilEhilated posted:Yeah, I never got the whole "Garrett gets bad after books 3-4" thing because I'm fairly sure Old Tin Sorrows is one of those and it's easily the best in the series and only one I'd recommend reading as standalone. Old Tins Sorrows was indeed really good. My Garrett experience is odd though, because I read the first couple, Tin Sorrows, then a couple random ones before the last three due to hard copy unavailability. So I never experienced a downward trend, just the pretty jarring change the last few books had from the Noir trappings to an actual somewhat happy ending. And some surprisingly emotional turns along the way. I enjoyed Gilded Latten Bones and Wicked Bronze Ambition a lot.
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Jul 15, 2020 15:37
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Neal Asher is good but he seems to have lost his mind in the same way as Dan Simmons. I’m not sure if the Polity novels go that way, but he has some other books (“The Owner”) series I believe. Its full of straw men leftists who can’t beat John Galt, Superman and super Genius who also seduces all the women and tortures and murders all the reds. Read the polity books until they get too crazy would be my recommendation.
Velius fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jul 25, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 23:37
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Cardiac posted:Have you read the owner series, cause it sounds more like you are repeating what someone else have said? I read the first one, yes. I do think you’re right about losing faith in humanity. Looking over the book there’s a complete absence of ideology attributed to “The Committee” beyond it being a totalitarian world government, to the extent words like “capitalism” and “socialism” never occur in the book. I suspect there was some editing involved to make it less obvious. There is, however, a lot of text about how governments use fear to get people to abridge their own freedoms which is ideologically neutral and reasonable. But then the actual dialogue of the villains is all red scare language about how xxx isn’t benefiting the collective good of society”. Re: cloning extinct species: “How, precisely,” Coran began, “can you justify the expenditure of millions of Euros just to save such a species? Where, exactly, will such an alpha predator fit into the society we’re building?” Re: Nationalized health care: “Even after national health services across the world turned into a lethal joke for the recipients of treatment, the Committee insisted upon amalgamating them to establish a worldwide service, free to every user. However, with status classification being established in parallel, what free treatment you received from All Health depended on how useful you were to society.” Great pain is taken to omit any real world leftist language, in that everything is about “The Committee”, or “society”, or “all health”. But the villains are all about evil government taking over society despite being inefficient and bad. It’s strange, because of course you could say the same about 1984, or various other dystopia where government justifies tyranny by using trappings of socialism, but the Owner series makes it less about the evils of government and more about how government is keeping the few, good people down. It has chapter titles like “The People Rule”, and “I’m killing you for your freedom” which suggest it’s trying to be tongue in cheek, but it’s utterly humorless. It’s just the main character murdering various strawman officials oppressing the world, then moving somewhere else to repeat the process. I’ve read a fair amount of military sci-fi, so I’m used to government straw men, but something about this series just really grossed me out.
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Jul 25, 2020 14:00
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ringu0 posted:I consider A Deepness in the Sky a better one out of two. The third book does not exist. Deepness is a hell of a book, and probably my favorite sci-fi book of all time. Children of the Sky is a trifle that doesn’t look like will ever pay off with an ending.
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Aug 8, 2020 01:55
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13 is also called Black Man I believe. It’s okay. More Morgan super manly men doing manly things.
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Aug 12, 2020 01:22
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Ah, that's what it was. The "We genetically engineered the most violent, meanest, most badass people to ever live, and oh btw they are black" was definitely a weird way to go. There’s also a semi-sequel in the same universe, Thin Air, about another genetically engineered badass forced to investigate stuff on Mars. But this time it’s a different type of genetically engineered badass.
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Aug 13, 2020 01:32
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I also finished Tyrant. I loved it. It makes the awfulness of Monster more worthwhile in retrospect. Thinking about it a bit more, There's that running theme in the books about how the Masquerade uses conditioning to convince prisoners they can't ever escape by repeatedly showing them freedom, only to snatch it away. Monster, in many ways, seems similar, with the various cryptarchs constantly undermining each other and betraying one-another, which ensures they can't actually reject or work against the empire, which ends up perpetuating the system. In Tyrant it feels like we're seeing Baru, by being unfettered by these holds, freeing the other cryptarchs by not pursuing her self-interest, and allowing for cooperation between people we suddenly realize are actually human. It was astonishing to see characters like Tain Shir, and Yawa, turned from absolutely monstrous figures into people in their own ways trying to make a positive difference in the world. I need to re-read all the chapters set 23 years ago. I think there's a bunch of interesting backstory on Farrier and Cosgrove and why they ended up eternal foes after going to the Mbo, whereas the three cryptarchs in the present, despite being forced into conflict by much more real threats to things they held dear were able to persevere and break out from control. I'm also not sure what the hint about Stargazer at the end was alluding to. Or who or what on earth Renascent is. For her to know Farrier and Cosgrove's collateral would imply a similar era, and I don't know who that would be.
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Aug 13, 2020 20:22
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Gor didn’t just get one movie, there are at least two! The second was “featured” on Mystery Science Theater as “Outlaw” (of Gor), and it had Jack Palance in it. It’s amazing.
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Sep 2, 2020 12:54
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anilEhilated posted:How does this compare to his other stuff? Loved Divine Cities, was kinda meh on The Company Man - thought that was a decent novella buried under a landslide of description. I read it his The Company Man a bit ago. It’s got some really weird editing mistakes that, given it’s a mystery, really took me off track. Like in the course of one page a character jumps from first person to second to and back a couple times. It ended up being of no consequence at all, and it seems like the sort of thing even a cursory read through would find. Hopefully Foundryside is better edited, the story was actually fine.
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Sep 7, 2020 21:17
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Kestral posted:Tyrant Baru Cormorant question: Keep going. I found Monster really hard to get through, and the early parts of Tyrant similarly hard. It pays off. But don’t pay too much attention to the names, I would assume they’re publisher dictated.
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Sep 9, 2020 18:43
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a foolish pianist posted:It's frequently not even the fridging thing - Erikson just uses rape as a shorthand to indicate that some people are bad. Another example that I didn't describe in detail when I made that earlier post: I suspect Erikson was going for some sort of deconstruction of the Noble Savage myth with some of the more awful stuff, but it was unnecessary and terrible.
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Sep 16, 2020 16:50
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Mr. Nemo posted:Yeah, it leaves some interesting questions hanging, but they don't really need answers. ANd even though I get it's not the point I would've loved a travelogue of different rooms. Book 2 is hard. You’re going in expecting the sacrifices she made in book one to lead to power, and instead you get a boat ride and a lot of new characters and conflict. It took me a couple tries to finish but I’m glad I did, and book three is really good and part of that payoff comes from the struggles in book 2.
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Sep 25, 2020 23:24
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ulmont posted:I loved Armor as a teen, but I’ve been scared to reread it as an adult. Armor isn’t bad. There’s some kind of weird treatment of  but I don’t remember it being super gross or anything.
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Sep 28, 2020 16:18
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Cushioned on the butt by the gay recliner?
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Dec 20, 2020 00:10
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General Battuta posted:Let's put it this way, if you said "the Stephen Donaldson book with all the rape" then Thomas Covenant would not be the first one I pointed at. This, for certain. I tried to read the gap series and dropped it almost immediately. I’ve read all the covenant books including the new quadrilogy, and while the first books are upsetting only one truly heinous thing is done by the main character that I recall. The rest of the books struggle with that, so it’s never treated as acceptable but it’s still bad.
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Jan 4, 2021 05:24
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anilEhilated posted:What actually made me quit Thomas Covenant wasn't the rape scene, it was all the loving Proper Nouns. But what about puissance, suzerainty and attar and other fun words you won’t ever encounter in the wild outside of Covenant? Doesn’t that make them worth reading?
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Jan 4, 2021 18:36
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Altered Carbon has problems, Morgan bei a bizarro-Terf not withstanding, but it was still enjoyable to read. But Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds manages to do the noir mystery thing without the bad gender stuff. I don’t see it mentioned here too often, but I enjoyed it. It’s part of his larger Revelation Space setting, but not in ways that require to you have read them before if I’m remembering right.
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Jan 15, 2021 19:09
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They made a novelization of The Final Sacrifice? What a great day for Canada, although it’s a bit late.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:28
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh yeah it's decently well executed but you can tell when she hits 4th level because her magic steed shows up Paksenarrion is great, but it’s a gritty setting with lots of sexual violence. It’s no Ash, but it’s not a super fun adventure for a happy go lucky girl. That said, there’s something really compelling about the characterization and her willingness to do the right things that never seems sappy or Mary-Sue esque.
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Feb 17, 2021 04:34
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Sinatrapod posted:This was my feel, too. Some fun concepts presented with absolute C-grade prose and entirely forgettable characters. This book and his other pre-City of Stairs book have significant editorial issues. I had issues with the plot in one of the books because it randomly switched to a different mood for a character’s inner dialog, and I thought it was implying something about the larger plot. But it wasn’t, it was just really badly edited in a misleading way. They’re not bad from a plot standpoint, just kind of flat in affect otherwise.
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Feb 22, 2021 13:58
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Creating realistic descriptions of characters using a third person viewpoint is really turgid, he thinks, as he gazes at his slightly protruding “dad bod” in the mirror. A few days in the gym and he could be a few steps up on the competition at the night club scene, he smirks, as he flexes his abs, and turns sideways, squinting critically. Maybe do some squats and work on that rear end more, he reflects, as he gives himself a quick slap to check for firmness.
Velius fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Mar 23, 2021 |
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Mar 23, 2021 15:33
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General Battuta posted:We had more seductive GPU box elves in 1998 Someone played Everquest...
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Mar 30, 2021 01:42
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The Culture is pretty cool with whatever, but part of that is that LGBT stuff isn’t really a focus so much as just being chill and having a good time. Or bristling with penises.
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Apr 11, 2021 19:19
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:
I was about to ask the same thing. I don’t remember liking Tower Lord or whatever much but never got the last one for that reason.
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Apr 28, 2021 01:05
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It’s been a few months, I was wondering what was up.
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May 20, 2021 22:40
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multijoe posted:The narrative definitely goes places and the fantastic elements become more prominent as the series goes on and the much higher fantasy ancient history of the world is explored, but it never stops being a very languidly paced series either. If Fitz spending 150+ pages treking across the country getting into richly described misadventures to go on an even longer and more richly described trek into lands forgotten by time sounds like a dealbreaker to you then you probably won't get much out of the Fitz series. The Liveship Traders is a snappier series, but it greatly benefits from being read alongside the Fitz novels as they all brush up against each other in their characters and world-building How much do you enjoy misery, and in particular repeated misery being inflicted on the protagonist? I wouldn’t recommend those books to anyone with even a modicum of depressive tendencies.
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Jun 3, 2021 16:51
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That’s really good news GB! To celebrate have a link to a really detailed criticism of Tyrant with some pretty interesting asides and dives into things like Euler’s theorem and imaginary numbers and the like. https://canmom.github.io/crit/baru/ Velius fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 13:08
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