I should reread those since it's been ages since i have. I remember not being terribly impressed when I first read them as a teenager. Important bits may have just gone over my head though.
On another note, @TL DR, thanks for suggesting Accelerado in chat. That was pretty awesome.
Have you read his Laundry stories? They're my favourite. Imagine the British Secret Service meets Cthulhu but hampered by the need to provide detailed expense information and attend the requisite DELTA GREEN clearances.
A friend turned me on to them a few months ago, I loved those. (What Jennifer Morgue did still amazes me.) I tried his Family Trade series and it was pretty blah. Like an interesting initial conceit but it didn't go anywhere. Doesn't help that I was comparing it to The Long Earth.
I've been rereading Douglas Adams books. Still good but I get slightly more references now I've spent a lot of time in Islington. Where I guess he must have lived as he always talks about it
I read some of the I, Robot stories recently. They're fun, but so shallow. So I picked up instead a book of stories by Bruce Sterling which are amazing. His space stuff makes me think Reynolds got a lot of inspiration there.
Its actually been a while since I've posted in this thread, lets do a review:
American Psycho: I'm trying, but the never ending stream of brands I've never heard of is really wearing on me, and I'm only like 50 pages in. That and Bates and all his friends are assholes. I suspect this is the point, but it isn't easy.
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire: An introductory history. Quite interesting, and just what I was looking for. It contains some strange errors, grammatical and otherwise (I'm pretty sure Greece is less than 2000 km from Constantinople, editors). It is also pretty wide ranging, covering some stuff I find boring and some I find really cool. Neat intro to the subject, I'm glad I got it.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I should reread those since it's been ages since i have. I remember not being terribly impressed when I first read them as a teenager. Important bits may have just gone over my head though.
On another note, @TL DR, thanks for suggesting Accelerado in chat. That was pretty awesome.
Foundation starts as a kinda fun short-story collection that's sort of like a dime-store mystery novel. "How will The Plan have anticipated this problem? Let's find out!" And it works well as that sort of story.
The initial introduction of the Mule then introduces an interesting idea that you could expand the story around but the way it's resolved is just really bad and then the whole thing makes a beeline of the gutter with every subsequent entry till I stopped reading it.
I should reread those since it's been ages since i have. I remember not being terribly impressed when I first read them as a teenager. Important bits may have just gone over my head though.
On another note, @TL DR, thanks for suggesting Accelerado in chat. That was pretty awesome.
Have you read his Laundry stories? They're my favourite. Imagine the British Secret Service meets Cthulhu but hampered by the need to provide detailed expense information and attend the requisite DELTA GREEN clearances.
A friend turned me on to them a few months ago, I loved those. (What Jennifer Morgue did still amazes me.) I tried his Family Trade series and it was pretty blah. Like an interesting initial conceit but it didn't go anywhere. Doesn't help that I was comparing it to The Long Earth.
Jennifer Morgue taught me Powerpoint is an eldritch being
Finally got into Murikami. I'd tried the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a while back but it didn't hook me. A good friend is a huge fan and had been encouraging me to take another shot at it.
I really enjoyed it this time around. The transition from pretty normal to totally dreamlike was smooth, and (in my experience) takes the reader along as well. I can't remember engaging with a novel in that way before.
1Q84 has been good as well, I'm nearing the end. I'll probably take a break before continuing through his corpus, just because I think the weirdness will become overpowering.
I should reread those since it's been ages since i have. I remember not being terribly impressed when I first read them as a teenager. Important bits may have just gone over my head though.
On another note, @TL DR, thanks for suggesting Accelerado in chat. That was pretty awesome.
Have you read his Laundry stories? They're my favourite. Imagine the British Secret Service meets Cthulhu but hampered by the need to provide detailed expense information and attend the requisite DELTA GREEN clearances.
A friend turned me on to them a few months ago, I loved those. (What Jennifer Morgue did still amazes me.) I tried his Family Trade series and it was pretty blah. Like an interesting initial conceit but it didn't go anywhere. Doesn't help that I was comparing it to The Long Earth.
Jennifer Morgue taught me Powerpoint is an eldritch being
It's more that we kind of knew it already but Stross was the one who just came out and said what we all felt.
As someone who has been forced to sit through four day seminars filled with multiple 80+ page Powerpoint presentations every day, yeah, let me just confirm that he absolutely understates how diabolic Powerpoint actually is.*
I like Stross' Laundry books - it's exactly the right mix of ironic first person narrator and horrible shit going down, with a subtle shift from book to book - sometimes it's blatantly (and acknowledged) James Bond, and sometimes it's something else. It's mostly well written, and mostly good fun. He does something similar to what Glenn Cook does with his Garrett books (wild shifts from genre to genre), but on a lesser scale (in terms of the genres he visits, not necessarily in quality), which is good fun.
Sometimes it gets a bit same-y, but on a grand scale of "urban fantasy", he's well ahead of the pack.
*I didn't kill a single person during those four days, which I feel is worthy of some kind of celebration. I almost cracked when, on the fourth day of one seminar, someone said "why don't we have a sing along, I know how to play the piano", and things progressed in an unfortunate manner from that point onwards.
This post was sponsored by Tom Cruise.
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Mike Danger"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered Userregular
edited April 2014
I've really enjoyed the first two Laundry books, but the third one kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm currently reading All The King's Men, which I'm about 10 pages into and am already being blown away.
I've just finished reading The Art of Fielding. A pleasant enough book, but what the hell was up with the gushing reviews it got? There's pretty much nothing about it that is exceptional; the writing is middling, the characters pretty shallow, the humour not all that funny, the plot doesn't really do all that much. Does one have to love baseball to love this novel, or was it roundly overrated when it came out?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Crystal Express. I just finished it today, so I'll write a bit about it.
It is indeed very good. Quite diverse as well; the book is split into 3 sections: Shaper/Machinst, Sci-fi, Fantasy. All deal with "future shock" in some way. The phrase is uttered by characters in the book, and usually seems to refer to the rapid advance of technology overthrowing existing cultures. More generally it may refer to cultures and societies changing over time, often into unrecognizable forms.
The Shaper/Machinist section is first, and really drew me in. Alastair Reynolds must have gotten some inspiration here. These (three, I think) stories all take place in the same universe, where space is enormous, empty and dangerous. The people that inhabit the world share these qualities. All take place in space and feature modified humans, and are pretty violent and creepy.
The Sci-fi section is the closest the book gets to cyberpunk, which is where Sterling's reputation was made. These stories take place on Earth in the near future, but after large cultural changes caused by technological advance. One takes place in a place that has tried to reject the cyberpunk world around it, and has gone politically green instead. The other is almost reminisent of Banks' Culture, where AI has advanced to the point that humans spend their time at leisure and art.
The Fantasy section is a bit odd. No high fantasy here, all take place on Earth in the past, with some sort of twist that involves the supernatural or magic. They use these means to talk about changing cultures instead of technology, though the stories are much shorter and bite-sized.
It is a colorful book overall, steeped in culture and imagination. This is the first Sterling I've read, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his stuff in the future.
I went to a sci-fi book sale today. Probably the geekiest place I've ever been, and I'm not exactly geek free. I got a boat load of books for only 5 bucks total, including a couple hard cover books (including The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I've been looking for forever). I got some Larry Niven who is an old favorite of mine. And I randomly picked up several authors that I'd heard of before, include Greg Bear, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, Ann Mccafferty and others. There are few things I love more than a good haul of books!
Just finished No Country for Old Men. One of the first times I've experienced a book and film with the same voice
Freedom for the Northern Isles!
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
edited April 2014
Just finished Sanderson's The Alloy of Law. It was a quick read; went by in only like two or three evenings of a couple hours each. It was also my first Sanderson, and likewise first of his Mistborn trilogy. Also the first modern fantasy I've read outside of Morgan's The Steel Remains. Although I've read like all of Mievelle, but he just doesn't seem to register under that for me, but I suppose he counts.
I...liked it in spite of itself? I don't know. Like, I stayed up last night finishing it, so I must've liked it? The magic system is really overt, which I don't tend to like in my literature, but it's a worldbuilding design choice and I get it, so sure. Still, if allomancy and feruchemicals are Sanderson's fantasy version of sci-fi's mirrorshades and skull-guns, I thought he spilt way more ink than Gibson does on that.
The system, too, is a little frustrating in execution - the main character and his partner are invincible fighters, but so is the big bad. His power, though, is kind of muddily explained and doesn't follow the rules set up in the book itself or in the glossary appended to the back of it, with just a throwaway line about how his combination of talents is "strange".
Otherwise, it's a fun Western-style yarn. "Waxillum" is trying a bit hard, too, but then again I'm not published, so hey.
EDIT: I guess I would've liked it better if it was set in Bas-Lag and Mievelle wrote it.
SummaryJudgment on
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
I can't think of two authors further apart then Mieville and Sanderson.
Well, they both write sci-fi/ fantasy fiction involving alternate universe London analogues with a focus on steam punk esque technologies or magic.
That's not just the same sport, that's the same ballpark too. I don't think it's unwieldy to compare them.
It really, really is. They write nothing alike in style, tone or even setting. Allow of Law's setting is not much of a London (it's more America during the Wild West period) and it's Sanderson's only book written in anything like that kind of setting.
Mieville's focus is not on steam-punk-esque technology/magic either, but much more on political philosophy and general weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Sanderson is simplistic, fast-based action with really indepth focus on mechanical magic systems.
And I could go on but there's no point really. Allow of Law and Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are about as close as the two get and they are still nothing alike.
I am reading hardwired. I hope it is good and not a necromancer ripoff @Jacobkosh
@Dynagrip "necromancer"? you have brought shame on your house.
(no it is not really like Neuromancer at all. its world is a bit bleaker and grayer and it has a slightly more military feel, lots of gadgets and tanks and airplanes and stuff.)
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
The next short story collection of his you should read is Globalhead.
Yep. Globalhead is pretty terrific and has a few more traditionally "cyberpunk"y stories (although Sterling was always kind of on the fringes of that movement; he helped Gibson coin the term and then promptly moved on to writing the Shaper/Mechanist stuff, which we would now call transhumanist fiction although the term didn't exist back then.)
Sterling mostly lacks Gibson's sense of romance and adventure (although I think "Green Days in Brunei," one of the stories Tycho? refers to, is probably his best and comes closest to that). Like a lot of more traditional sci-fi authors, his strength is in his ideas and the rigor he puts into them, which is why I definitely enjoy him most in the short form.
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
I can't think of two authors further apart then Mieville and Sanderson.
Well, they both write sci-fi/ fantasy fiction involving alternate universe London analogues with a focus on steam punk esque technologies or magic.
That's not just the same sport, that's the same ballpark too. I don't think it's unwieldy to compare them.
It really, really is. They write nothing alike in style, tone or even setting. Allow of Law's setting is not much of a London (it's more America during the Wild West period) and it's Sanderson's only book written in anything like that kind of setting.
Mieville's focus is not on steam-punk-esque technology/magic either, but much more on political philosophy and general weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Sanderson is simplistic, fast-based action with really indepth focus on mechanical magic systems.
And I could go on but there's no point really. Allow of Law and Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are about as close as the two get and they are still nothing alike.
Sure thing, mate.
I agree with all that, even, but Sanderson and Mieville are still contemporaries writing in the same niche genre; two authors further apart would be like Sanderson/Mieville and Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking.
EDIT: And the bolded....really? Are you taking personal offense at my mentioning these two authors in the same breath, or (and) we just got off to a bad start in the surveillance thread and this is how it's going to be from here on out, then?
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Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I too struggle to see how Sanderson and Mieville are similar. One bangs out schlock fantasy with more effort than usual in the "making sure the magic makes sense" column, the other loves London so much he's petitioning for cities to be recognised as people so he can marry it.
They both write things that generally end up in the sci fi and fantasy section I suppose.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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SummaryJudgmentGrab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front doorRegistered Userregular
I too struggle to see how Sanderson and Mieville are similar. One bangs out schlock fantasy with more effort than usual in the "making sure the magic makes sense" column, the other loves London so much he's petitioning for cities to be recognised as people so he can marry it.
They both write things that generally end up in the sci fi and fantasy section I suppose.
The last part there is the only thing I'm getting at, and it's that generalized level of similarity that makes it possible to compare them at all (and in doing so, separate the good stuff from the schlock) - otherwise they'd either be identical, or would be essentially incomparable (fiction versus cookbooks).
Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
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DynagripBreak me a million heartsHoustonRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I am reading hardwired. I hope it is good and not a necromancer ripoff @Jacobkosh
@Dynagrip "necromancer"? you have brought shame on your house.
(no it is not really like Neuromancer at all. its world is a bit bleaker and grayer and it has a slightly more military feel, lots of gadgets and tanks and airplanes and stuff.)
I'm usually posting from my tablet these days. Autocorrect is a fickle mistress
The next short story collection of his you should read is Globalhead.
Yep. Globalhead is pretty terrific and has a few more traditionally "cyberpunk"y stories (although Sterling was always kind of on the fringes of that movement; he helped Gibson coin the term and then promptly moved on to writing the Shaper/Mechanist stuff, which we would now call transhumanist fiction although the term didn't exist back then.)
Sterling mostly lacks Gibson's sense of romance and adventure (although I think "Green Days in Brunei," one of the stories Tycho? refers to, is probably his best and comes closest to that). Like a lot of more traditional sci-fi authors, his strength is in his ideas and the rigor he puts into them, which is why I definitely enjoy him most in the short form.
I like his novels more than his short stories, although those are very readable. If you want "romance and adventure" then you could read The Artifical Kid or Islands In the Stream but really if Schizmatrix doesn't have enough romance or adventure for you then I don't even know what to say. If Abelard Lindsay's bildungsroman doesn't draw a little emotion from you then I don't have enough in common with you to discuss the subject. To this day, I count that book as one of the most influential of my life.
Sanderson is the Transformers cartoon.
Mieville is a (good) Cronemberg movie.
Even if some of the superficial trappings are similar, the meat of the matter is nothing like.
I am reading hardwired. I hope it is good and not a necromancer ripoff @Jacobkosh
@Dynagrip "necromancer"? you have brought shame on your house.
(no it is not really like Neuromancer at all. its world is a bit bleaker and grayer and it has a slightly more military feel, lots of gadgets and tanks and airplanes and stuff.)
finished it, decent read and wasn't dated. but did not feel revolutionary/resonant like Neuromancer and Schismatrix Plus
I am reading hardwired. I hope it is good and not a necromancer ripoff @Jacobkosh
@Dynagrip "necromancer"? you have brought shame on your house.
(no it is not really like Neuromancer at all. its world is a bit bleaker and grayer and it has a slightly more military feel, lots of gadgets and tanks and airplanes and stuff.)
finished it, decent read and wasn't dated. but did not feel revolutionary/resonant like Neuromancer and Schismatrix Plus
it didn't have the romance of Neuromancer but the idea of a shitty, run-down world where corps are systematically extracting all the wealth and sending it to where you can't even see it or get to it feels if anything more resonant to me in the here and now. I felt like there was a sense of hard-scrabble desperation on every page.
That said, you can definitely see the influence of traditional sci-fi narratives in that the problems are ultimately solved by a bunch of Hard Men With Guns doing some cool alpha foxtrot tango military shit. there's also a ton of stuff going on and not all of it felt equally developed. on balance, though, I really dig it.
WJW is kind of a sci-fi jack of all trades, master of none. I don't know if any of his books are ever my favorites but I also really like how willing he is to try new things with every book and how what he writes often has an interesting, more global perspective that you don't get from the guys who write only space opera or only cyberpunk or whatever.
one forgotten cyberpunk thing that I storngly recommend tracking down next if you're still in the mood is Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird. you will probably have to get it used (it's cheap) but it is worth the effort. It's cyberpunk that is very very heavy on the punk - narrated by a slum girl in a poly arrangement with her two roommates, a gigolo and a sculptor, and through Circumstances the three of them are invited to participate in a kind of Running Man reality show. It's really gritty and sleazy and heavy on the sex and drugs, which is more amazing given that Wilhelmina Baird is apparently a pseudonym for another established sci=fi and fantasy author who was a 60-year-old Scottish woman at the time it came out.
I can't think of two authors further apart then Mieville and Sanderson.
Well, they both write sci-fi/ fantasy fiction involving alternate universe London analogues with a focus on steam punk esque technologies or magic.
That's not just the same sport, that's the same ballpark too. I don't think it's unwieldy to compare them.
It really, really is. They write nothing alike in style, tone or even setting. Allow of Law's setting is not much of a London (it's more America during the Wild West period) and it's Sanderson's only book written in anything like that kind of setting.
Mieville's focus is not on steam-punk-esque technology/magic either, but much more on political philosophy and general weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Sanderson is simplistic, fast-based action with really indepth focus on mechanical magic systems.
And I could go on but there's no point really. Allow of Law and Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are about as close as the two get and they are still nothing alike.
Sure thing, mate.
I agree with all that, even, but Sanderson and Mieville are still contemporaries writing in the same niche genre; two authors further apart would be like Sanderson/Mieville and Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking.
I wouldn't call fantasy defined that broadly a "niche genre". This is basically like comparing a chick lit writer and someone writing mimetic fiction because hey, both set in modern times.
I mean, you could do it, but it's a really odd comparison because there's little to nothing in common. Which was my point.
EDIT: And the bolded....really? Are you taking personal offense at my mentioning these two authors in the same breath, or (and) we just got off to a bad start in the surveillance thread and this is how it's going to be from here on out, then?
I have no idea what the heck you are reading in to me saying "I'm tired of listing off ways they have nothing in common and the point is already made" but you are like miles off base in crazytown here.
WJW is kind of a sci-fi jack of all trades, master of none. I don't know if any of his books are ever my favorites but I also really like how willing he is to try new things with every book and how what he writes often has an interesting, more global perspective that you don't get from the guys who write only space opera or only cyberpunk or whatever.
Disagreement. Aristoi and Metropolitan are both gorgeously original and extremely entertaining to read. If that's not A-list stuff, I don't know what would be.
Hardwired was one of his earliest novels, and yeah he does unironically employ quite a few schlock-SF tropes; he developed as a writer subsequently.
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A friend turned me on to them a few months ago, I loved those. (What Jennifer Morgue did still amazes me.) I tried his Family Trade series and it was pretty blah. Like an interesting initial conceit but it didn't go anywhere. Doesn't help that I was comparing it to The Long Earth.
I read some of the I, Robot stories recently. They're fun, but so shallow. So I picked up instead a book of stories by Bruce Sterling which are amazing. His space stuff makes me think Reynolds got a lot of inspiration there.
Its actually been a while since I've posted in this thread, lets do a review:
American Psycho: I'm trying, but the never ending stream of brands I've never heard of is really wearing on me, and I'm only like 50 pages in. That and Bates and all his friends are assholes. I suspect this is the point, but it isn't easy.
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire: An introductory history. Quite interesting, and just what I was looking for. It contains some strange errors, grammatical and otherwise (I'm pretty sure Greece is less than 2000 km from Constantinople, editors). It is also pretty wide ranging, covering some stuff I find boring and some I find really cool. Neat intro to the subject, I'm glad I got it.
Foundation starts as a kinda fun short-story collection that's sort of like a dime-store mystery novel. "How will The Plan have anticipated this problem? Let's find out!" And it works well as that sort of story.
The initial introduction of the Mule then introduces an interesting idea that you could expand the story around but the way it's resolved is just really bad and then the whole thing makes a beeline of the gutter with every subsequent entry till I stopped reading it.
Jennifer Morgue taught me Powerpoint is an eldritch being
I really enjoyed it this time around. The transition from pretty normal to totally dreamlike was smooth, and (in my experience) takes the reader along as well. I can't remember engaging with a novel in that way before.
1Q84 has been good as well, I'm nearing the end. I'll probably take a break before continuing through his corpus, just because I think the weirdness will become overpowering.
It's more that we kind of knew it already but Stross was the one who just came out and said what we all felt.
I like Stross' Laundry books - it's exactly the right mix of ironic first person narrator and horrible shit going down, with a subtle shift from book to book - sometimes it's blatantly (and acknowledged) James Bond, and sometimes it's something else. It's mostly well written, and mostly good fun. He does something similar to what Glenn Cook does with his Garrett books (wild shifts from genre to genre), but on a lesser scale (in terms of the genres he visits, not necessarily in quality), which is good fun.
Sometimes it gets a bit same-y, but on a grand scale of "urban fantasy", he's well ahead of the pack.
*I didn't kill a single person during those four days, which I feel is worthy of some kind of celebration. I almost cracked when, on the fourth day of one seminar, someone said "why don't we have a sing along, I know how to play the piano", and things progressed in an unfortunate manner from that point onwards.
I'm currently reading All The King's Men, which I'm about 10 pages into and am already being blown away.
Equiod
Down on the Farm
Overtime
Then a post about reading order.
I quite like Equiod.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Crystal Express. I just finished it today, so I'll write a bit about it.
It is indeed very good. Quite diverse as well; the book is split into 3 sections: Shaper/Machinst, Sci-fi, Fantasy. All deal with "future shock" in some way. The phrase is uttered by characters in the book, and usually seems to refer to the rapid advance of technology overthrowing existing cultures. More generally it may refer to cultures and societies changing over time, often into unrecognizable forms.
The Shaper/Machinist section is first, and really drew me in. Alastair Reynolds must have gotten some inspiration here. These (three, I think) stories all take place in the same universe, where space is enormous, empty and dangerous. The people that inhabit the world share these qualities. All take place in space and feature modified humans, and are pretty violent and creepy.
The Sci-fi section is the closest the book gets to cyberpunk, which is where Sterling's reputation was made. These stories take place on Earth in the near future, but after large cultural changes caused by technological advance. One takes place in a place that has tried to reject the cyberpunk world around it, and has gone politically green instead. The other is almost reminisent of Banks' Culture, where AI has advanced to the point that humans spend their time at leisure and art.
The Fantasy section is a bit odd. No high fantasy here, all take place on Earth in the past, with some sort of twist that involves the supernatural or magic. They use these means to talk about changing cultures instead of technology, though the stories are much shorter and bite-sized.
It is a colorful book overall, steeped in culture and imagination. This is the first Sterling I've read, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his stuff in the future.
next 2 on their way
brb in a few weeks
I loved reading One Hundred Years of Solitude last year. A truly beautiful, mesmerizing novel.
I...liked it in spite of itself? I don't know. Like, I stayed up last night finishing it, so I must've liked it? The magic system is really overt, which I don't tend to like in my literature, but it's a worldbuilding design choice and I get it, so sure. Still, if allomancy and feruchemicals are Sanderson's fantasy version of sci-fi's mirrorshades and skull-guns, I thought he spilt way more ink than Gibson does on that.
The system, too, is a little frustrating in execution - the main character and his partner are invincible fighters, but so is the big bad. His power, though, is kind of muddily explained and doesn't follow the rules set up in the book itself or in the glossary appended to the back of it, with just a throwaway line about how his combination of talents is "strange".
Otherwise, it's a fun Western-style yarn. "Waxillum" is trying a bit hard, too, but then again I'm not published, so hey.
EDIT: I guess I would've liked it better if it was set in Bas-Lag and Mievelle wrote it.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Well, they both write sci-fi/ fantasy fiction involving alternate universe London analogues with a focus on steam punk esque technologies or magic.
That's not just the same sport, that's the same ballpark too. I don't think it's unwieldy to compare them.
It really, really is. They write nothing alike in style, tone or even setting. Allow of Law's setting is not much of a London (it's more America during the Wild West period) and it's Sanderson's only book written in anything like that kind of setting.
Mieville's focus is not on steam-punk-esque technology/magic either, but much more on political philosophy and general weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Sanderson is simplistic, fast-based action with really indepth focus on mechanical magic systems.
And I could go on but there's no point really. Allow of Law and Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are about as close as the two get and they are still nothing alike.
I said two authors.
@Jacobkosh
@Dynagrip "necromancer"? you have brought shame on your house.
(no it is not really like Neuromancer at all. its world is a bit bleaker and grayer and it has a slightly more military feel, lots of gadgets and tanks and airplanes and stuff.)
Yep. Globalhead is pretty terrific and has a few more traditionally "cyberpunk"y stories (although Sterling was always kind of on the fringes of that movement; he helped Gibson coin the term and then promptly moved on to writing the Shaper/Mechanist stuff, which we would now call transhumanist fiction although the term didn't exist back then.)
Sterling mostly lacks Gibson's sense of romance and adventure (although I think "Green Days in Brunei," one of the stories Tycho? refers to, is probably his best and comes closest to that). Like a lot of more traditional sci-fi authors, his strength is in his ideas and the rigor he puts into them, which is why I definitely enjoy him most in the short form.
Sure thing, mate.
I agree with all that, even, but Sanderson and Mieville are still contemporaries writing in the same niche genre; two authors further apart would be like Sanderson/Mieville and Irma Rombauer of The Joy of Cooking.
EDIT: And the bolded....really? Are you taking personal offense at my mentioning these two authors in the same breath, or (and) we just got off to a bad start in the surveillance thread and this is how it's going to be from here on out, then?
They both write things that generally end up in the sci fi and fantasy section I suppose.
The last part there is the only thing I'm getting at, and it's that generalized level of similarity that makes it possible to compare them at all (and in doing so, separate the good stuff from the schlock) - otherwise they'd either be identical, or would be essentially incomparable (fiction versus cookbooks).
I'm usually posting from my tablet these days. Autocorrect is a fickle mistress
I like his novels more than his short stories, although those are very readable. If you want "romance and adventure" then you could read The Artifical Kid or Islands In the Stream but really if Schizmatrix doesn't have enough romance or adventure for you then I don't even know what to say. If Abelard Lindsay's bildungsroman doesn't draw a little emotion from you then I don't have enough in common with you to discuss the subject. To this day, I count that book as one of the most influential of my life.
Mieville is a (good) Cronemberg movie.
Even if some of the superficial trappings are similar, the meat of the matter is nothing like.
it didn't have the romance of Neuromancer but the idea of a shitty, run-down world where corps are systematically extracting all the wealth and sending it to where you can't even see it or get to it feels if anything more resonant to me in the here and now. I felt like there was a sense of hard-scrabble desperation on every page.
That said, you can definitely see the influence of traditional sci-fi narratives in that the problems are ultimately solved by a bunch of Hard Men With Guns doing some cool alpha foxtrot tango military shit. there's also a ton of stuff going on and not all of it felt equally developed. on balance, though, I really dig it.
WJW is kind of a sci-fi jack of all trades, master of none. I don't know if any of his books are ever my favorites but I also really like how willing he is to try new things with every book and how what he writes often has an interesting, more global perspective that you don't get from the guys who write only space opera or only cyberpunk or whatever.
one forgotten cyberpunk thing that I storngly recommend tracking down next if you're still in the mood is Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird. you will probably have to get it used (it's cheap) but it is worth the effort. It's cyberpunk that is very very heavy on the punk - narrated by a slum girl in a poly arrangement with her two roommates, a gigolo and a sculptor, and through Circumstances the three of them are invited to participate in a kind of Running Man reality show. It's really gritty and sleazy and heavy on the sex and drugs, which is more amazing given that Wilhelmina Baird is apparently a pseudonym for another established sci=fi and fantasy author who was a 60-year-old Scottish woman at the time it came out.
I wouldn't call fantasy defined that broadly a "niche genre". This is basically like comparing a chick lit writer and someone writing mimetic fiction because hey, both set in modern times.
I mean, you could do it, but it's a really odd comparison because there's little to nothing in common. Which was my point.
I have no idea what the heck you are reading in to me saying "I'm tired of listing off ways they have nothing in common and the point is already made" but you are like miles off base in crazytown here.
Disagreement. Aristoi and Metropolitan are both gorgeously original and extremely entertaining to read. If that's not A-list stuff, I don't know what would be.
Hardwired was one of his earliest novels, and yeah he does unironically employ quite a few schlock-SF tropes; he developed as a writer subsequently.