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Orv posted:I like Garrett a lot but the books are aggressively formulaic in terms of how they shake out the exact same every time, the twist is always in the same portion of the book, Garrett always figures it out at the exact same time, the threat is almost always the same, the damsel is always not a damsel at all. Which is sort of extra funny coming from the guy who wrote The Black Company, but I still thoroughly recommend reading at least a couple if you like pulpy fantasy detective book as a concept. Don't forget the part where Gerrett is at a dead end so he wanders around town until the bad guys send thugs to knock him on the head.
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Oct 4, 2019 07:30
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:Does anyone have suggestions of books similar to The Lies of Locke Lamora? I'm not sure what about it, maybe it's just the heist aspect because I also liked the Great Train Robbery. The Thief series by Looking Glass Studios/Ion Storm. A goon did a good completionist LP of the series a few years back, along with some of the better levels for the community-made Dark Mod sequel, which should be on the LP Archive.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:21
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WRT Simmons and OSC and so on, I gather that Liu Cixin has been defending the Chinese concentration camps in recent interviews, so I figure I can cut a few books off my backlog.
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Oct 25, 2019 04:32
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I'm somewhere between a third/half through Gideon the Ninth so far, and for western fiction it seems to have a pretty strong Tsutomu Nihei feel.
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Nov 7, 2019 04:12
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branedotorg posted:There's a stupid ad on tv for blinkist that does this for audiobooks. I presume some SV techbros saw the first point this tweet and decided to make it into a app. https://twitter.com/erocdrahs/status/1127132182789742592
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Nov 8, 2019 09:24
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I read Gardens of the Moon recently and it took me like 2-3 tries to actually finish it. IMO the main problem is that you have multiple prequel sections/opening acts introducing everybody before the story actually gets moving. It felt like the book didn't really "start" until after Crokus and company show up.
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Nov 13, 2019 08:15
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Cythereal posted:and oh my God aren't Britons special? I've been tentatively reading a bit of mystery/detective stuff over the past few years (mainly by just picking books at random at the library based on whatever looks interesting and isn't blatant contemporary author self-insert stuff) and I felt the same about this one series about a Roman surgeon/physician who ended up in Londonium and promptly frees and marries a Celtic slave girl while they solve mysteries. I think for a couple of the books they actually went back to Italy/Gaul proper (his wife converts after meeting some Christian slaves, of course) but for the most part it's some Hollywood Romans with overly modern attitudes running around Provincia Britannia solving the sort of mysteries you'd expect.
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Dec 12, 2019 09:39
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I mean it's not like the signs of him being a idiot weren't already there, from when he was going around yelling "THE SEX I WRITE IS THE SEX I HAVE" and "YOU CAN'T HANDLE MY DEPICTION OF A BLACK ALPHA MALE" at random review bloggers.
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Dec 20, 2019 07:53
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General Battuta posted:Cherryh is really loving good but all the Cherryh I’ve read is stuff people say not to start with. Cyteen maybe? I've read some of the Chanur books and the first two Foreigner trilogies recently. Foreigner is probably more immediately accessible and better for light reading, but I'm finding Chanur to be more interesting. I think I would suggest Foreigner to somebody who likes stuff like the Vorkosigan books, and Chanur to somebody who likes more sciencey stuff.
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Dec 25, 2019 08:31
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Mr. Peepers posted:Should I start with Shards of Honor? I'd prefer self-contained books or shorter series to a sprawling dozen-book narrative but if I can just read the first few and get a satisfying experience then I'm down. I read the series in omnibus order last year and found it entirely followable enough. The only viewpoint shifts are to Cordelia in the two prequel books, and back to her and a couple former supporting characters (Ivan Vorpatril, Armsman Roic, Ekaterin Vorkosigan) in the more recent books. Also as I've said previously it took me like 3 tries over the years to get through Shards of Honor, the start is meh but it picks up when Cordelia gets back to Beta and then leaves Beta.
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Dec 25, 2019 20:38
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Groke posted:SLAM/Project Pluto, arguably the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. Where we can truthfully say, thank the gods for ICBMs being invented in time to make this look inefficient. Bad news, the Russians are building them now.
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Dec 26, 2019 10:24
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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 "fragile, prone to failure, and easily shot down?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85MDZfZr1ag
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Jan 3, 2020 10:30
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Best wishes Battuta, I hope everything will get better for you soon.
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Jan 13, 2020 10:20
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As a contrast I'll say that I couldn't read more than a few chapters of the first Riyria book. It suffered way too much from "bad medieval pastiche" syndrome, much like the Greatcoats series.
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Jan 28, 2020 09:42
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cptn_dr posted:Is Greatcoats any good? I had someone passionately trying to convince me that once I read it I'd realise my previous love for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was all wrong and I'd see that I should be loving Greatcoats instead. He also tried to explain that Strange & Norrell is bad because it doesn't have a well defined magic system. Like I said it's a bad medieval pastiche. Dialogue was mainly Whedonesque quipping as I remember it. I dropped it shortly after the opening act, where the protagonist's wife is raped to death like 3 pages after she's introduced to provide motivation. To make sure I wasn't misremembering this and unfairly accusing the author, I looked up some reviews and aside from that apparently later there's also a magic sex nun (hello Rothfuss) who rapes the protagonist to heal him and then becomes the love interest. Probably just go read The Three Musketeers or watch a Errol Flynn movie instead I guess?
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Jan 28, 2020 23:32
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ptkfvk posted:been burning through elliot kay's poor man books. i love em for space pirate stuff. i wish we got more with the alien races but im only in book 3 now The fourth and fifth books have more alien stuff in them. (the fifth book felt like a Stargate SG-1 homage to some extent) Like I said in the military scifi thread they're decent, not high art and they certainly hit all the stereotypical milSF cliches but they're entertaining and readable regardless. (And better than I expected from a self-published author who's other stuff is a UF brorotica series.) The reviews mad at the author and accusing them of being a "Existentialist Pelosi aide" for writing "corporations bad" were a bit of extra added value too:     
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Feb 15, 2020 06:23
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I liked City of Stairs and the sequels a lot. Anybody got words on the Darwath series by Barbara Hambly? I've been thinking of reading something fantasy lately and I saved it on my local library account's list feature a while back.
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Feb 18, 2020 10:00
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freebooter posted:I persevered through the series and never found it outright bad, but it really irritated me how smug Abercrombie was about how meta he was being. Characters commenting every other page about how, well, maybe in the storybooks it's all glamour, but real life is muddy etc. Which is ironic given that a major thread in one of them is about a pompous, cowardly, arrogant military commander who has absolutely no idea what he's doing somehow ending up in charge of running a frontiers campaign, which seems to be drawn more from a Blackadder view of WWI generals than anything that's ever happened in real life. How did this empire become so big and powerful if it's putting pampered princelings in charge of its field armies? A good opportunity to post this again: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/385334385?book_show_action=true
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Feb 19, 2020 00:11
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I read I think 2 or 3 books of Daniel Abraham's Dragon and Coin series after finishing what was out of The Expanse at the time, and can't think of much to recommend it. It had a interesting premise but I didn't really care about anything that actually happened with the characters, even the interesting ones.
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Mar 2, 2020 00:18
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According to David Drake he was also getting 10k back in 1980, which adjusts for 31k in today's dollars. http://david-drake.com/2011/voyage-across-the-stars/ quote:In 1980, I quit lawyering and was driving a bus for the Town of Chapel Hill. While sitting in the bus garage between runs, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I commented that the Odyssey could be rewritten as a Western, though of course I didn’t write Westerns. As the words came off my pen, it struck me that I did write SF; what was true for a horse opera would probably work for a space opera as well.
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Mar 2, 2020 10:25
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I'm about 2/3rds through the first Darwath book and I'm liking it so far, I'm digging the more horror theme to things than you'd expect from the "a wizard abducts a historian and a biker from California to save the kingdom" setup.
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Mar 6, 2020 01:03
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TheAardvark posted:Question about Foreigner: Doctor Jeep posted:iirc the conservatives who ilsidi is grouped with at the time got spooked by what you find out at the end (dunno if you've finished the book so i won't spoil it) and sent an asassin to merk him I don't recall that they're ever named either, just some assassin who's luck came up short that day. Sadly the series doesn't seem to have Vorkosigan-grade obsessed fans that write detailed wiki articles about everything mentioned in the books. Something really stupid that just jumped into mind: 
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Mar 7, 2020 10:46
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I posted a couple of the Japanese edition Honor Harrington covers in the MilSF thread and decided to go look up other western SFF:       The Space Dandy style suits it, from what I remember of reading it back as a teenager.   Malazan! Doesn't appear to have found a niche since it looks like only the first four books were translated with the last in 2011. There doesn't appear to be a Japanese edition of the Black Company books, a search just shows up stuff about actual black companies and a isekai manga about a black company in fantasyland.    The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, the same cover as the English edition but a different execution.  Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray, a YA book.  Ancillary Justice, looking about the same.  Starship Troopers, still using the same power suit design for the first Japanese edition of the book.     Looks like the Bobiverse books also got translated for some reason, don't you have enough lovely light novels already, Japan? And as an aside, the novels mentioned as influences by Tsutomu Nihei in the Blame! and so on artbook: quote:Great Sky River by Gregory Albert Benford (Cibo)
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Mar 16, 2020 10:48
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a foolish pianist posted:PKD also had some thoughts about Stanislaw Lem. From Lem's wiki page: IIRC part of this was because Lem had done a unauthorized (?) translation of Ubik to Polish and due to geopolitical stuff PKD was only paid royalties in Polish Zlotys, which from what I can find were worth 0.0003 of a dollar in 1975. And at the time Lem was also getting himself thrown out of the SFWA for subjecting western authors to literary criticism/saying they wrote bad.
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Mar 17, 2020 23:16
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shrike82 posted:Are there any good virus/pandemic/apocalypse books people would recommend? The Hot Zone. Alibek's book on the Soviet bioweapons program.
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Mar 19, 2020 02:25
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I was able to grab some books the weekend before my county's library system closed but uh, I didn't expect I'd read through the third Foreigner trilogy in the first week, and the other stuff I've picked has mostly turned out less engaging than I expected. The Raymond Chandler short story collection I got is cool though. I can certainly see where he was coming from with "They pay brisk money for this crap?" when comparing it to contemporary SF prose like Asimov and company.
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Apr 2, 2020 06:20
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Jedit posted:I admire your optimism. What would more probably happen is that whoever developed Captain Trips would keep it and try to develop a vaccine. Yeah Russia kept both their research and manufacturing programs going secretly long after everybody got together in the late 60s and agreed that bioweapons were bad and should be done away with. There was the 1971 Aral smallpox leak, a 1977 flu pandemic in Russia where a 1950s H1N1 strain mysteriously showed back up again, the 1979 anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk, and research into weaponizing Marburg/Ebola continued into at least the 90s. And since the Aral sea is going away, all the poo poo they disposed of by dumping it into the lake is blowing around in the wind now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGwMEXYQE7E https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2017/10/global-helse/vanishing-aral-sea-health-consequences-environmental-disaster?PageSpeed=noscript quote:Living in the Aral Sea area has detrimental consequences for fertility, both in people growing up in the area and for adult immigrants (23, 24). Furthermore, in the late 1990s infant mortality was between 60 – 110/1000, a figure far higher than in Uzbekistan (48/1000) and Russia (24/1000) (25). At the same time, body mass index (BMI) was inversely correlated with blood concentration of PCBs, DDTs and DDEs in children between 7 and 17 years, advocated as an effect of malabsorption. Values of insulin-like growth factor type 1 (IGF-1) tended to correlate with a reduction in body mass index (26). It is known that low IGF-1 values may be associated with high concentrations of DDT or DDT metabolites in the body (27).
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Apr 17, 2020 10:19
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ulmont posted:Instrumentalities got an IIRC what happened with Instrumentalities was while he was writing the penultimate book the publisher said they were canceling the series after the next book, so finish it up. StrixNebulosa posted:That's...frustrating, but thank you for the info. I wish authors didn't get old like that. Dread Empire is rougher but more epic fantasy in feel than Black Company if that helps any.
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Apr 23, 2020 09:43
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ending that could have been picked up later if interested had ever piqued.
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Just finished the new Murderbot book and now I want something else fun to read. I just finished the Penric & Desdemona short stories and they are pretty great and lightweight.
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May 7, 2020 20:51
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mllaneza posted:The Penric & Desdemona novellas are some of Bujold's best work. Basically, it's the Chalion setting, a temple sorcerer dies unexpectedly, so her demon goes to the nearest available host - a younger son of a poor local noble. They The only thing I would say against starting them without reading the books first would be that A) the books are really good too and I say this as somebody who's not a fan of Fantasy in general, and B) you're gonna lose out on some of the theological details and so on. Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you like Garrett, be sure to read the Nero Wolfe stories that Cook based Garrett on. Raymond Chandler is good too.
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May 8, 2020 05:30
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Back when I read the first story a couple years ago I tended towards a female voice for Murdebot, partially because I'd read the last Ancillary book like 6 months before reading it IIRC.
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May 9, 2020 08:48
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted: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. I haven't read it but I did read the author's other YA series, the steampunk fantasy Japan one, and found it to be hilariously overwrought and edgelordy, so I think that's just what he writes, and what teenagers think is cool.
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May 21, 2020 11:00
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If anyone is in the mood for some stupid-but-entertaining space opera, I've been reading the first Deathstalker book by Simon R. Greene and would suggest trying it. It seems to revel in it's own 40k-grade story and going all-in on "oh yes of course the masked swordsman is secretly the dandy nobleman and of course he's secretly in love with a woman from a rival noble house" style stuff. The writing is, at least, somewhat better than the usual self-published stuff.buffalo all day posted:He wrote a narrative account (I guess you’d call it historical fiction?) of the absolutely batshit crazy Dreyfus Affair a few years back. It’s really entertaining, called An Officer and a Spy I read this a while back and recall thinking it was pretty good.
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Jun 1, 2020 08:52
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ulmont posted:Timothy Zahn's Blackcollar series. Some humans are enhanced. A bit on the pulp side of things though since it's about how humanity's last hope are badass ninjas who are being hunted by not-Javert.  It's great fun though.
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Jun 6, 2020 10:59
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Quoting myself from a while back since it's somewhat relevant:C.M. Kruger posted:According to David Drake he was also getting 10k back in 1980, which adjusts for 31k in today's dollars.
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Jun 29, 2020 09:11
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Legend of Galactic Heroes. Though I've heard the novel translations range from fine to barely acceptable because the publisher kept changing the translator, but there's always the 110 episodes of the original OVA series!
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Jul 16, 2020 09:29
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Kevin Mitnick's autobiography was fairly good as I recall. Turns out a lot of hacking is just calling somebody and going "Hi this is Bob from the County Password Inspection Department" or (now) sending them a fake Linkdin email. Probably should have gone through the compsci program at my college instead of the CNC machining one, then maybe I'd have a job/prospects for the future.
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Jul 24, 2020 06:03
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freebooter posted:Recommend me some apocalyptic fiction - not post-apocalyptic, but apocalyptic, i.e. the characters begin in the ordinary world and live (or don't live) through the end of civilisation as we know it. (Either that or survivors down the track have flashbacks; basically I want to see the event.) I'm particularly interested in 1940s-1990s, particularly interested in nuclear war, but I'll take all comers. I was just reading the wiki page for John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" the other day and it sounds like something you'd want.
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Aug 25, 2020 20:19
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coathat posted:It was by Bruce Sterling and some others. You can read it here https://fanac.org/fanzines/Cheap_Truth/  (the opening to issue 13)
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Sep 22, 2020 01:41
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Haven't been reading much lately, but I finally got around to reading Glen Cook's Darkwar series this week and found it entertaining. Cat-person becomes a evil sorceress and goes to space. Last month I read Harrow the Ninth and The Monster Baru Cormorant. Enjoyed them quite a lot. Otherwise I'm mostly stalled out on other stuff, got 50 pages into the second Malazan book and haven't touched it again, tried reading more of Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series and Chris Bunch's Sten series but wasn't feeling it, same for more Patrick O'Brian, feels like looking for work and all the other poo poo going on just saps my will to live as much as my old job. loving ridiculous, I've barely watched any anime since I finished college and now I can't even finish some crummy pulp novels.
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Oct 8, 2020 10:37
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