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The City & The City is really good and also the only Mieville novel I've read. I strongly recommend Ice by Anna Kavan. It's a devastating look at masculinity and global warming.
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Aug 3, 2020 21:12
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| # ¿ Sep 15, 2024 12:12 |
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Dark Matter was a fun little romp.
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Aug 5, 2020 05:03
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I think more people should read Ann Leckie's space opera trilogy, Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy. Core premise is that humanity has been space faring and fractious for a while, and one polity has gotten really into "ancillaries," a tech where an AI's intelligence is distributed over a bunch of lobotomized humans, which makes them both exceptionally good at ship-crew integration and very good at infantry combat, both of which turn out to be huge military advantages, plus some advantages in general comms/organization. This has unsurprisingly enabled a genuine interstellar empire. The books are from the perspective of one of these ship AIs and focus on how this imperialism requires classes of non-citizen, the regular traumatization of all levels of citizen, and how the empire creates mechanisms of distinction (fashions, ceremonies, gender norms, etc.) to justify themselves as "civilized" as opposed to the people they've been subduing. e: It's also still ultimately a book about spaceships and lasers. Tulip fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Sep 18, 2020 |
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Sep 18, 2020 15:36
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Sir DonkeyPunch posted:Put your gloves on You think I'd be posting without gloves, like a pervert? Anyway, I also strongly recommend Heroes Die by Matt Stover. It's very pulpy and probably the most blunt "fantasy AND scifi" book - people in a scifi future figure out a way to Sliders their way into a fantasy universe, and they use this technology to get people from Earth to act like DND esque murderhobos to make snuff films with dragons. It's a good story about punching people, how hosed up capitalism is, and different strains/paths of fascism.
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Sep 18, 2020 16:42
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Lemniscate Blue posted:This sounds interesting. Matt Stover (and also Aaron Allston) wrote some of the only non-terrible Star Wars books (notably the novelization of Episode 3 which is so much better than the movie it's startling) so I'm curious to see what he can do when he's not playing in someone else's sandbox. it's really fun. It's the first in a series that is nearly all bangers (the third is the shortest and least good but the 2nd and 4th are maybe my favorite pulpy scifi books)
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Sep 24, 2020 21:34
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| # ¿ Sep 15, 2024 12:12 |
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frogge posted:I've been mainlining big books series for a long time, starting pre-covid, and I kinda think once I wrap up the Dune series I need to read a barrage of one-offs. The short story "Emergency Skin" by NK Jemisin is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read in a while. And I'll reiterate my love for Anna Kavan's Ice, which apparently the movie "i'm thinking of ending things" is at least somewhat based on, and her short story anthology I Am Lazarus may be my favorite fiction in general. Temporary by Hilary Leichter is just plain fun and that's pretty recent. I feel like it's pretty easy to recommend most of Neon Yang's work, of the stuff I've read Waiting on a Bright Moon is a good one-off, but the tensorate series is quite good and they're pretty short, like the combined length of the whole thing is a slightly long novel.
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Feb 8, 2021 05:15
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