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Doctor Jeep posted:boy - very good I haven't read any of those yet, but I did like his Felix Castor series quite a lot.
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Oct 4, 2019 01:41
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Munin posted:Any good non-bleak and/or uplifting scifi or fantasy? given my excessive news consumption I need a palate cleanser. I'll add my voice to the throng recommending The Misenchanted Sword. Also, though it's also older, there's Archform: Beauty by L. E. Modesitt. It's a story conveyed through five different first person narrators and I really liked it.
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Oct 13, 2019 16:17
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pseudanonymous posted:Uh no, obviously if you woke up in a female body the very first thing you would do is start playing with your own breasts then lasciviously describe their shape, firmness, texture, color, aureola color, nipple color, nipple sensitivity, nipple size, nipple length, and you'd obviously want to invest some time playing with them to see how responsive they, how that makes you feel etc.. I might eventually do stuff like that, but figure one of my first thoughts would be "gently caress! Pissing is going to be way less convenient now! No more playing Lumberjack either."
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Oct 15, 2019 00:20
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Well thread, in the complete opposite direction, any uplifting or optimistic or fun Sci-fi to recommend, given the state of everything? It's more fantasy but with some Sci-Fi elements but I'd recommend something I'm currently rereading - the Coramonde duology. Yes, duology. Instead of 3 or 5 and 10+ massive tomes, it's a two book series, The Doomfarers of Coramonde followed by The Starfollwers of Coramonde. Both are by Brian Daley who wrote these before writing the original Han Solo trilogy. So yeah, these books are very much blasts from the past. Doomfarers was published in 1977 with Starfollowers coming out in 1979.
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Feb 25, 2022 03:05
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RDM posted:Personally, this is what I can't stand about every piece of fiction that tries to tackle evopsych. Evolution of complex systems with emergent properties is mind-bending and often wildly counterintuitive. Exploring the implications just ends up sounding like a toddler trying to explain how airplanes work. It might. I might check it out to see what choices the kids have to make to keep that scary space vampire from eating them.
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Feb 25, 2022 05:19
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Jedit posted:He also wrote the novelization of TRON. I didn't realize that he was a Foster rather than a Garry Douglas. Even after Googling I don't get that reference even a little bit.
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Feb 25, 2022 22:32
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pradmer posted:Sworn to the Night (Wisdom's Grave #1) by Craig Schaefer - $0.99 The Coramonde novels aren't like either of these works as far as I can tell. Earth is basically our real world Earth at the time of the Vietnam war. It's not an "urban fantasy" place full of witches, werewolves and vampires. The sole deviation from "normality" is the (very secret) existence of a device which allows travel between dimensions. As for Coramonde, magic definitely exists there, but it's a little limited in some ways. Magic is mostly a thing of rituals. Wizards/sorcerers don't generally cast fireballs or lightning bolts, they use a ritual to summon and bind some scary demon/spirit/etc to do that. Gil MacDonald, his "Nine-Mob" crew and their Armored Personal Carrier are summoned out of the Vietnam War to act as a counter to an actual dragon, which has been summoned by the bad guys. One thing that really struck me was how three-dimensional the characters were, especially the women, who had goals and agency. Doomfarers was published back in 1977. I also liked that even the people working for the bad guys were often presented as being brave. competent and somewhat heroic at times. AngusPodgorny posted:I remember having Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Alien, so I assumed that Garry Douglas was famously against novelizations as contrast. But then I looked it up and Douglas did the novelization of Highlander, so now I don't know. Yep, completely missed that. The Garry Douglas Google gave me is some kind of motivational speaker. That said, Tron aside, the Han Solo novels were just novels set in the Star Wars universe (published between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back) and the Coramonde books were original works by Daley. Everyone fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 00:35
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I recommend the Sten series which is fun, action-packed and also at least cautiously optimistic. It reads like "What if the Empire in Star Wars wasn't cartoonishly evil and incompetent" meets "What if Warhammer 40K wasn't depressingly fascist as balls?"
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Feb 26, 2022 02:51
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quantumfoam posted:Have two more fun and light scifi story recommendations plus a uplifting scifi story rec. What massively draconian laws led to that book's massive COVID outbreak? Did they finally pass the "the opinions of willfully stupid people shall be given greater weight than those of medical experts" law?
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Feb 27, 2022 02:58
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Lawrence watt-evans. I used to reread that book every couple years or so but it got lost/given away in my Great Book Purge of last year. I need to buy that thing again.
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Mar 4, 2022 00:05
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Lex Talionis posted:It's an oversimplificiation but I think of authors as having varying strengths at (and interest in!) plot, character, prose, setting, and ideas. Readers are likewise often very focused on only some of those. Setting ("worldbuilding") used to be a big deal in fantasy but seems like it's gone out of style; I think people who really appreciate setting often read historical fiction. People who appreciate prose above all else probably read literary fiction (this is why literary critics are always complaining that "spoiler warnings" shouldn't be needed...they just don't care about plot). Even as someone who backed his Kickstarter I'll say that Sanderson isn't really my favorite author. I don't think he sucks. I did enjoy the Mistborn trilogy (though I never really got into the follow-ups). But I never got into his finishing the Wheel of Time because that series just loving exhausted me even back when Robert Jordan was still alive. The first couple of books of the Oath of Kings were pretty cool, but I think that thing's going to exhaust me as well. Favorite author status kind of fluctuates over time with me. Based on sheer quantity of stuff I own, it's probably Jim Butcher (own all 17 of his Dresden novel, all six Codex Alera and The Aeronaut’s Windlass), but it terms of personal preference I really like Ben Aaronovitch way more (and I likely hope in vain that he'll transition the Peter Grant series into becoming the Abigail Kamara series because I think there's a lot more story space to explore beyond staying with "police procedural with magic and also I just loving love the Abigail Kamara character).
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Mar 5, 2022 19:10
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Leng posted:That's Modesitt's style in general. He has certain ticks in his prose that I really hate (like how every character uses the same turns of phrase...just count up how many times people use "most": "he was most unpleasant"; "you are most welcome"; "it is most unusual", etc etc etc). The only Modesitt book I ever read all the way through was Archform: Beauty. I remember liking it quite a lot. I'm not sure why I never sought out more of his stuff. Possibly the sheer amount of the Recluse stuff gave me pause or something.
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Mar 9, 2022 05:12
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but I really enjoyed it as a musician. All of the same prose issues are still there, particularly bad in the dialogue exchanges between the main POV character in the 4th and 5th book and her love interest, but it didn't have the same repetitive feel as Recluce.
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moonmazed posted:drat butcher is still just crankin em out huh. i gave up like ten books ago I don't know that "crakin' 'em out" is the best description. In 2020 he released Peace Talks and Battle Ground - which were basically two books made from splitting one really large book in two. That was after a five year drought due to remodeling-caused divorce or something. When will book 18 come out? gently caress knows but probably not this year. Meanwhile Jonathan Maberry's Kagen the Damned comes out May 10. As a huge fan of his Joe Ledger series, I'm looking to seeing what he'll do in a fantasy novel.
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Mar 10, 2022 02:19
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pradmer posted:The Darwath Series: The Time of the Dark, The Walls of Air, and The Armies of Daylight by Barbara Hambly - $2.99 Jesus-gently caress I remember those. I remember reading those books in high school (and am 53 years old). They kind of rocked, truth be told.
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Mar 11, 2022 00:22
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Kalman posted:Crown of Stars was… okay? After a while I just set the series down and never went back. It felt like there was something good there but it was buried in a lot of boring things. Probably not something similar, but you might consider Thomas Harlan's Time of the Sixth Sun series which starts with Wasteland of Flint. Sixth Sun is set in an alternate history future where Japan made early contact with the Azteks and formed an alliance that eventually came to rule the rest of the world and then go out into space. Wasteland of Flint has a unique setting and is also a "WTF is happening here" exploration puzzler more than a space opera, so it was very much my jam.
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Mar 11, 2022 03:10
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Copernic posted:Kate Elliott wrote about how many letters she got from readers on this. Basically readers were shocked that instead of writing an abuser into a Heathcliff/Twilight/50 Shades brooding romantic reclamation project he's just an unadorned piece of poo poo, full stop. And the solution is to get the gently caress out not try and Change Him. They just hadn't seen that in fiction before. I'd drink a belt or two after a few of those letters. This makes me want to pick up Crown of Stars. I am so loving sick of "The guy that does lovely things to you? You need to be worthy of him and heal him because the lovely things he does to you are basically your fault for having a vagina." I want books where the solution is the real-life solution of get away from him/put him in prison or just kill his rear end. You don't "heal" an abusive piece of poo poo. You flush him down the loving toilet.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:47
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AARD VARKMAN posted:Yup. I'm guessing it evolves in to a Space Revenge Thriller after the point I quit but the 1980s are way too recent for me to stomach and get past the main character getting with a 15 year old in the first few chapters of the book. Kind of, but the Sten series isn't so much a series as a really large novel/story told in eight books. Also I don't remember a 15 year old in terms of specific age, but it's been a long while since I read that specific book. From what I recall Sten and the girl in question were around the same general age/maturity level. IIRC Sten is a teenager 14-17 when his family is killed and he "gets" to take over their company debt.
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Mar 13, 2022 02:17
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AARD VARKMAN posted:I very well could have misinterpreted his age, it was very specific with hers though. The real nail in the coffin of my interest there was the scene (immediately after the sex?) discussing how she was the only one in her age group not on sexual development blockers, I figured between those two things the book wasn't going in a direction I liked lol I think you should take another whack at it. It's again been a long time since I read that book, but it's not going in the direction of "pedophilia is fun" so much as "this mining set-up is an incredibly hosed-up capitalist horror scene that needs to be destroyed." Sten is ultimately kind of a working-class space opera James Bond without quite so much of Bond's misogyny. There's a lot of it that's like Star Wars meets Leverage. But yeah, it was written in the 80s, so there's certainly going to be stuff in the series that's kind of off to our more modern sensibilities.
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Mar 14, 2022 04:47
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calandryll posted:drat it, I really liked the Nightwatch series. Well Vita Nostra is a much better novel anyway. goodness posted:Don't tell me this. Three Body Problem is so good. I really enjoyed J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. And Kevin Spacey as Mel Profitt in Wiseguy. And Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. And after thinking about it, I still do. There are plenty of good people who aren't great (or even good) artists. And there are also great/good artists who aren't good people. You can enjoy those people's art while recognizing that they are lovely, awful people who have lovely, awful opinions. Thomas Edison was apparently a horrible, controlling person, but I still use light bulbs. Like that.
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Mar 18, 2022 05:18
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HopperUK posted:It's been talked about a lot but ultimately this comes down to each individual and how much knowing about someone's assholery affects you as you read/watch/play. If it's going to bug you as you read, or have you thinking 'ugh there sure aren't a lot of gay people in this book written by a notorious homophobe and now I can't stop thinking about it' then it's legit to just avoid the work. It's legit anyway, of course but like - just telling people to ignore that stuff makes it too simple, I reckon. I think if somebody's awfulness keeps you from enjoying the work, then yeah, don't consume. On the other hand, just because your enjoy somebody's art does not mean you approve of their actions as a person. I remember reading Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It was pretty good, even though I didn't like it enough to seek out other books in the series. But Orson Scott Card is still a homophobic puddle of infected diarrhea as far as I'm concerned.
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Mar 18, 2022 06:05
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Evil Fluffy posted:I don't recall Spacey or Whedon injecting their sexpest behavior into those examples but Harry Potter oozes Rowling's lovely beliefs. This is the series where the 'chosen one' was a mediocre trust fund kid who grew up to become a magic cop and pretty much fought to keep the wizard world status-quo and the writing itself is full of racist, supremacist nonsense. I admit that it's been a while but weren't the racists/supremacists Voldemort's followers who got their asses handed to them?
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Mar 18, 2022 16:10
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90s Cringe Rock posted:racism and prejudice are bad but the hero joins the met and everything's sorted Well, that worked out pretty well for Peter Grant.
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Mar 18, 2022 16:56
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Queer Salutations posted:Here's a YouTuber who did a deep read of the Harry Potter books in the modern context if you want a refresh. I had been mildly regretting dumping my HP books in my big book purge. That regret is gone now. Hearkening back to the Dread Empire discussion, here's another Dread Empire that's completely different: https://www.amazon.com/Praxis-Dread...oks%2C85&sr=1-4 Basically this is set in a future were humanity, along with a bunch of non-human species, have long since been conquered and absorbed to become part of the Shaa empire. Now the very last Shaa is dying and at that point leadership of the empire will be up for grabs. The thing I remember most about this series is that the Empire had a near-total monopoly on force. If an area revolted the Shaa would send ships to "rain down bombs on helpless populations." Yep that phrase shows up a lot. The point being that nobody in the Shaa empire really knows how to do ship to ship fighting in space anymore, so they all have to try to figure it out from scratch.
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Mar 18, 2022 20:27
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freebooter posted:The Harry Potter books are basically a fantasy version of the English boarding school stories like the Greyfriars pulp stuff from the early 20th century, which is itself a deeply conservative genre in a particularly British kind of way. There was simply no way that a Brit of Rowling's generation - even a working class woman - was going to write about any sort of challenge to the status quo. Mocking Hermione for her SPEW activism is a good encapsulated example of that: she may be morally right, Rowling may be sympathetic to her beliefs in general, but all this running around and protesting is rather unseemly and we should actually just trust the grown-ups to make slow and incremental change without upsetting anybody. Pure Blairite. I think George Orwell would have greatly appreciated Another Brick in the Wall
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Mar 19, 2022 00:59
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Sham bam bamina! posted:"Liberal" seems to be the go-to. Unfortunately, the main opposition to "liberal" is "conservative" AKA the ones who that the bugs in the system are features.
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Mar 19, 2022 17:41
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Nomnom Cookie posted:I 100% believe that jkr thought she was being provocative and philosophically daring by putting the house elves in. What if slaves, but they wanted it? Hmm? Is that good, or bad, or something else? What do you think, class? Maybe some. On the other hand, we do have Harry freeing Dobby from from the Malfoys by arranging for Lord Malfoy to "give" Dobby a sock (I know that's in the movie and I think it's in the book as well). We also have Harry interacting with Kreecher and feeling skeeved out by himself being the "cruel master." Still, overall, it tracks with the idea that Dowling is saying, "You need to be good slave-masters to the house elves" instead of grasping that, y'know, slavery of anything is bad.
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Mar 19, 2022 21:02
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HopperUK posted:Depends a bit on what era of King, but overall, JKR. Stephen King at least has learned and grown over his career and shored up the bits where he was really weird or bigoted or racist. And what did he think of the child orgy in that book as an 11 year old?
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Mar 20, 2022 15:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:I mean, all I need to do is look at politics to know that you can't trust adults with literally anything BUT I like to be an optimist and if I start down that road I get into censorship and no thank you Still, there's a big difference between actual censorship and you yourself looking at the house elf slave book and going "Nah, that's not for me or my kids."
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Mar 20, 2022 16:29
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HopperUK posted:I recently got a history book from the charity shop that was printed in 1910 and someone has written an angry note in the front about how it leaves out some admiral or other. I love that stuff. Not underlining/ highlighting, that's boring, but little notes and comments are awesome. Which admiral because now you've got me curious?
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Mar 21, 2022 02:07
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Kalman posted:Zodiac is Stephenson’s best book. I will not be taking any questions. I haven't read all of Stephenson's books, but I did enjoy Zodiac the most of the ones I did read - which included Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.
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Mar 22, 2022 01:45
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MockingQuantum posted:Though from the books I've read, there's a varying scale of how competent the Well Actually guy is (or isn't), and how much comeuppance they face for being a tool, at least. A ways upthread I was pushing the Coramonde series. One of the characters in that series is Gil MacDonald, a young former sergeant in the Vietnam War who ends up in the land of a magic and medieval warfare. An enemy sorcerer has access to a magical airship. MacDonald gets his allies to build false campfires mixed with illusory troops. The key here is that MacDonald is from the 1970s and understands aerial reconnaissance - including the limits of it. The trick works, but it's treated as a one-time thing because the sorcerer with the airship is also smart and competent. It seems like this Parker person failed to understand that other people will also be smart and they'll figure out Well, Actually guy pretty quickly.
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Mar 25, 2022 00:18
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Kesper North posted:Max Gladstone's latest has some strong Americana-horror vibes For Americana-horror I really like Robert Jackson Bennet's American Elsewhere.
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Mar 27, 2022 11:01
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SimonChris posted:Speaking of white supremacy, I don't know how many people here are familiar with M.A.R. Barker, the creator of the classic Tékumel - Empire of the Petal Throne fantasy setting. Tékumel was the first detailed setting published for Dungeons & Dragons, as well as the focus of multiple independent RPG systems. Barker also published several novels set in the empire. While it never achieved mainstream popularity, Tékumel had a dedicated cult following for being much less eurocentric than the typical western fantasy setting. There might be a little more to all that than at first glance. From Dave Morris's Fabled Land Blog Scroll down to March 24, 2022. Part of an excerpt to a letter sent to a British publisher by Barker prior to its eventual publication: quote:“I do have a novel that is unsold and unwanted by anybody. This is what I call my ‘Nazi novel’. I did not show it to the Wollheims both because they don't do this sort of book and also because they are Jewish and would be terribly offended -- and they are nice people. I started out to write a ‘near-future’ thriller: young mercenary is hired to steal cannisters of germ warfare from an American stockpile in the 2040 A.D. period. This is used by a fearful Israeli government and various cronies to destroy the Soviet Union; the Soviets get in a retaliatory strike with germ warfare of their own, however, and take out many US, British, etc. cities. Out in India, where the young mercenary is employed, the descendants of the Nazi SS and other ‘refugees’ are quietly biding their time, building up economic resources for a come-back. With the presidency and vice-presidency of the United States open after the deaths of their incumbents, the Secretary of State takes over -- an old, reconstructed racist. He invites the Nazi movement to help in running the US. The mercenary hero, who is not a Nazi, is an employee of the Indian chemical company ‘front’ for the Nazis and gets into the situation as a sort of military expert for them. The Nazis manage to gain access to a giant computer with independent ideas, and they use this machine to rewrite Mein Kampf using every sales pitch and advertising trick in the book. The hero initially loves and marries an Indian girl, but later falls for a Nazi girl who is helping with publicity. The plot thickens, and various major events occur. The book ends with the Nazis taking over much of Western civilisation, and with our hero being chosen ‘Second Führer’ and riding into the stadium to the ‘Sieg Heils!’ of the masses.
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Apr 4, 2022 02:02
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freebooter posted:I read the Morris post and all the commentary below it and it seems like a perplexingly complicated situation about a weird, weird guy. Based on the letter the Nazi novel comes off a little bit half-satire, half-prophecy with the Nazis winning through good PR/advertising.
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Apr 4, 2022 14:41
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The nazi propaganda novel is available online. I'll take your word for it and not seek it out. I think the only "Nazis win" novel I ever read was Harry Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies
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Apr 4, 2022 15:11
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Shitshow posted:Does The Man in the High Castle count as a “Nazi win” novel? Probably it's more of a "Fascists win" thing, but I'll happily call it "Nazis win" because I'm pretty sure that "Fascists Win" includes our current actual real world and I don't want to think too much about that for fear of puking and crying on my laptop.
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Apr 5, 2022 00:29
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Lex Talionis posted:Interesting juxtaposition here. Whatever else happens (short of his own death or an extinction level asteroid strike) Brandson Sanderson will loving finish his books and those endings won't suck.
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Apr 5, 2022 01:25
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Blastedhellscape posted:Whew. I started at the bottom of the chain of posts talking about some author named Barker being into holocaust denial and nazi poo poo and was glad it turned to be some author I'd never heard of and not Clive Barker. As I understand it, Clive Barker is gay and the Nazis put gay people into camps along with Jews and Romani, so figure Clive Barker is not going to be a Nazi, secret or otherwise. Although granted you just never loving know sometimes. For my part I have pretty much zero dogs in the M.A.R. Barker business. I never got into Tekumel. I do consider Dave Morris to be a friend even if we've never met in actual physical life. I think something similar occurred with Morris and Barker. I recall a story about Winston Moseley, the person who brutally murdered Kitty Genovese. Later that same night he found a man sleeping in a car and woke him. He told the man to be careful that this wasn't a nice/safe neighborhood. This wasn't done from sarcasm but from actual concern for the guy's welfare. People are not of a piece. I can understand how the person Morris knew might not have shown himself to be the full person that he was.
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Apr 5, 2022 03:45
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General Battuta posted:Let me tell you about the magical man named Ernst Rohm, the original problematic gay I Wikipedied him so no need. Interesting (and deeply hosed up) that Hitler knew the guy was gay and was pretty much fine with it but also fine shipping other gays to the camps. OTOH, Roy Cohn was also a thing so again, you never know. Sexual orientation is not a guide to moral/ethical decency. Gay people are also people and people can often be deeply, horrifically lovely.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:43
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Opopanax posted:Good thing the accident didn’t significantly affect the last three books in any way I don't know if this is sarcasm (it probably is) but the main affect on the last four* books was that it lit kind of an "Oh poo poo, I could die!" fire under King to go ahead and get them done. * Yes, four, after book seven he went back to wrote an eighth book that basically slots in between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla called The Wind Through the Keyhole. If you weren't happy with Wizard and Glass and the mostly flashback structure, you'll probably hate Wind because you have a flashback story within a flashback story.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:19
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