I want to read LeGuin, she's a big hole in my experience despite my interest in scifi. I saw that the two books I've always heard about (dispossessed and left hand) are actually later books in a cycle but I hadn't ever known she had written these as a series? is it like the kind of cycle that should be read from start to finish or are the books standalone?
I want to read LeGuin, she's a big hole in my experience despite my interest in scifi. I saw that the two books I've always heard about (dispossessed and left hand) are actually later books in a cycle but I hadn't ever known she had written these as a series? is it like the kind of cycle that should be read from start to finish or are the books standalone?
The books are completely standalone. They take place in the same universe (as in, on different planets in the same universe, as well as I suppose the same literary universe) but it's honestly hard to tell that from reading them.
My personal recommendation is The Dispossessed (my cat's name is Shevek!) It's a very moving, interesting book.
The Left Hand of Darkness is very good but the protagonist is a closed off guy who is a bit hard to read. It does contain some solid truths about gender and society and also a tense snow traversal survival adventure--not really expected for those to be in the same book but hey.
oh just speaking of cold the news yesterday about the vaccine, I think it was BBC, made me go huh, weird, and very inconvenient, at the vaccine needing to be stored at -80C
NRK article today said -78 C and ah, that makes sense, and I should have realized that the BBC journalist was rounding the number
which they shouldn't have, because -78 C is the temperature of dry ice, and recognizable, while -80 is just a specific temperature. Which also makes it make more sense because like, of course they haven't spent a long time figuring out what temperatures ruins it. Just that deep freezer is too warm and that dry ice is cold enough.
real minor thing, but
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I want to read LeGuin, she's a big hole in my experience despite my interest in scifi. I saw that the two books I've always heard about (dispossessed and left hand) are actually later books in a cycle but I hadn't ever known she had written these as a series? is it like the kind of cycle that should be read from start to finish or are the books standalone?
The books are completely standalone. They take place in the same universe (as in, on different planets in the same universe, as well as I suppose the same literary universe) but it's honestly hard to tell that from reading them.
My personal recommendation is The Dispossessed (my cat's name is Shevek!) It's a very moving, interesting book.
The Left Hand of Darkness is very good but the protagonist is a closed off guy who is a bit hard to read. It does contain some solid truths about gender and society and also a tense snow traversal survival adventure--not really expected for those to be in the same book but hey.
I enjoyed Left Hand a lot more, but everything I've read of hers has been great.
I've just started Revelation Space, and boy howdy does it just drop you into its world. Im usually quite the jargon enthusiast, and I've managed so far, but it's certainly a lot to try and keep track off, especially while also trying to figure out the timeline.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I want to read LeGuin, she's a big hole in my experience despite my interest in scifi. I saw that the two books I've always heard about (dispossessed and left hand) are actually later books in a cycle but I hadn't ever known she had written these as a series? is it like the kind of cycle that should be read from start to finish or are the books standalone?
If you read one then I'd point towards The Dispossesed. Credeiki is entirely right that it technically shares a universe with some other stuff you in no way need or even should read that other stuff first. Pretty much everything LeGuin wrote is worth reading, the only caveat I'd give is that the first three Earthsea are written as Young Adult fiction. They still have some hefty themes but until the 4th book don't really dwell on them or let them dominate. I reread them a few years ago and while quick they were still enjoyable as an adult.
Also don't sleep on her short stories as they contain some of her best work. Heck, make like ten minutes right now and google "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".
I'd argue Red Rising is not classic YA nonsense, but well executed YA nonsense that becomes incredibly good after the first book. It also did a few things I didn't expect along the way. The biggest is that a time passes between books, shaking up the status quo in various ways. The first book isn't bad mind you, but it can't measure up to later entries.
But the first book is young adult school. But one that kind of makes sense in the world, unlike most I can recall. There is a point to all the brutality and misery they are forced to endure that makes perfect sense once you get to explore the setting a bit more later on.
Agreed, and the first book is also very different from the rest of the series.
You've got that whole Battle Royale/Hunger Games/Ender's Game thing going on with the school for Golds, but that doesn't play a role later on. Afterward, it's more of a space opera.
Hmm okay this is good to hear. I am enjoying the first book but I wasn't really willing to sign up for multiple books of Hunger Games for boys (mainly because Hunger Games is good itself and I don't want to read another).
Yeah, obviously you have your own time/interest constraints and if you don't like it then you don't like it. Not worth spending too much time on a series when there are so many others you might like.
But if you do decide you want to give it another chance, I'd see about getting at least a bit into the second book. There are a lot of twists and turns and reversals, but you'll get a pretty good feel for how you like the series pretty quickly into Golden Son.
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
The Majestic 311 is a weird fucking book. I'm not done with it yet but every left turn it takes is honestly a surprise. And boy does it take a lot of left turns. I'm listening to the audio book and at one point I thought, "Well, this is probably drawing to a close. That wasn't very long." There were 8 hours left. Man it got so much weirder since then.
Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy. 70’s spy novel, directly following on from Tinker, Tailor. The Circus is disgraced, the country has no money and the last drops of blood and treasure are being wrung out of a rapidly shrinking Empire. An agreeably seedy and cut-price air hangs over the proceedings.
Perhaps less entirely compelling than the one before, but still masterly.
A somewhat slow start that had me thinking it was going to be kind of a Robert Jordan knockoff. It quickly evolved into something a little better and unique in its use of African tribalism. I finished it and immediately bought the follow up because the first ended on such a cliffhanger i wanted to throw my kindle through the window.
Definitely a recommend if you enjoy fantasy and underdog protagonist sacrifices everything to win.
Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy. 70’s spy novel, directly following on from Tinker, Tailor. The Circus is disgraced, the country has no money and the last drops of blood and treasure are being wrung out of a rapidly shrinking Empire. An agreeably seedy and cut-price air hangs over the proceedings.
Perhaps less entirely compelling than the one before, but still masterly.
Have you read the Bernard Samson novels by Len Deighton? (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, et al.) He's a notch less cerebral than Le Carre, but his characters are perhaps two notches more human and sympathetic.
The Harry Palmer stories are excellent also.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy. 70’s spy novel, directly following on from Tinker, Tailor. The Circus is disgraced, the country has no money and the last drops of blood and treasure are being wrung out of a rapidly shrinking Empire. An agreeably seedy and cut-price air hangs over the proceedings.
Perhaps less entirely compelling than the one before, but still masterly.
I really love Le Carre's books when they're done but sometimes struggle with them in the moment. He constructs masterful plots and interesting characters but it feels like the first half or two-thirds of each novel are spent flitting between plot threads seemingly at random and I find it difficult to figure out who and what to focus on until I have enough pieces in hand to start perceiving the whole picture.
One of the things I really love about the 2012 TTSS movie is that I feel it paces out the revelations better, beginning with the hook (there's a traitor), starting with the seemingly innocuous (a low-level agent phoning in from a distant and seemingly unrelated place) and then giving bigger and bigger twists until the supreme moment when you learn who the mole is and why. The book, by contrast, scatters the revelations almost at random, following big developments (that sometimes spoil future proceedings) with small ones. You find out big, important stuff by the halfway point and the last couple of chapters revolve around trivia. And yet I remember the book really fondly.
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I really like The Honourable Schoolboy but LeCarre has suggested that it was perhaps a mistake to make it part of a larger Smiley mythos rather than its own thing and I tend to agree with him.
The other thing is it takes ages for the plot to get going. Westerby spends a large part of the first act moping about in some random house in Tuscany.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
holy fucking shit
one of the biggest pieces of vaporware in literary history is actually happening
J. Michael Straczinski, the creator of Babylon 5 who is now the literary executor of the late SF giant Harlan Ellison (who he befriended late in life, a bit like Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi), just announced that Ellison's infamously delayed project, the third installment in the Dangerous Visions trilogy of anthologies by top SF writers, is being finished and will actually come out next year
It's hard to emphasize what a big deal this is to science fiction. The original two Dangerous Visions anthologies from the late 60s and early 70s (Dangerous Visions, 1967, and Again, Dangerous Visions from 1975) kind of chronicled, and also popularized, the New Wave in science fiction. They featured super hardcore experimental cutting-edge science fiction by authors that were either red hot at the time or were about to become famous and basically marked the start of the New Wave, the moment when science fiction broke out of the pulp magazine action-stories-for-men ghetto.
folks like Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, George RR Martin, Dan Simmons, Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin etc etc were all influenced by the New Wave and by these authors
so the anthologies were a big deal. But the third one, due out in the mid-1970s, just...never came out
Harlan always told people that he was "working on it" and that it was "almost done." It became one of the longest-running bad jokes in SF. Nobody knew where it was or why it wasn't happening. It wasn't even like a Game of Thrones situation, it was a book mostly made up of other people's work! A lot of the authors involved got furious with him and sued to get the rights to their stories back. Various incomplete lists of the featured stories have floated around the internet for basically as long as the internet has existed. Harlan Ellison himself basically stopped writing original fiction almost entirely after the mid-70s.
And now it's...done?
Apparently one of the stories, according to JMS, is by Harlan himself and will justify/explain the decades of delay. i am putting money on either a coming out story or a for-real confession of murder.
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lwt1973King of ThievesSyndicationRegistered Userregular
I was looking around io9 and came upon this bit of news:
What is Out of the Dark? I thought I remembered reading this and after a bit of searching found my post on it.
Out of the Dark by David Weber starts off really well but the ending is so so bad.
The earth is invaded by aliens and who saves us in the last couple of pages? Vampires. Dracula comes out of retirement and creates a couple of other vampires and they kill all the aliens in the bio-weapon plant and then hijack the shuttles up to the alien fleet. They then take over the entire alien warfleet. The end. It's like Weber couldn't think of how the earth could win against all that so just tossed in the Vampires to give us the edge.
I laughed.
@Jacobkosh put it so succinctly back in October of 2010:
what the fuck
Now they decided to do a sequel because it's 2020 so why not carry over the suck to 2021 but announce it in 2020.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
What is Out of the Dark? I thought I remembered reading this and after a bit of searching found my post on it.
Out of the Dark by David Weber starts off really well but the ending is so so bad.
The earth is invaded by aliens and who saves us in the last couple of pages? Vampires. Dracula comes out of retirement and creates a couple of other vampires and they kill all the aliens in the bio-weapon plant and then hijack the shuttles up to the alien fleet. They then take over the entire alien warfleet. The end. It's like Weber couldn't think of how the earth could win against all that so just tossed in the Vampires to give us the edge.
I laughed.
Jacobkosh put it so succinctly back in October of 2010:
what the fuck
Now they decided to do a sequel because it's 2020 so why not carry over the suck to 2021 but announce it in 2020.
Holy shit, I honestly thought I had imagined this book. I started reading it in sweden while waiting in line at a bookstore for dance with dragons to be released, and I could never remember the title.
I read through all of Rhythm of War yesterday, finishing at just before 10pm last night.
It was pretty good, mostly. The Cosmere connections are piling up pretty fast now though, and I had to keep going and searching on the Coppermind for “who the heck is this?”
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Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I'd argue Red Rising is not classic YA nonsense, but well executed YA nonsense that becomes incredibly good after the first book. It also did a few things I didn't expect along the way. The biggest is that a time passes between books, shaking up the status quo in various ways. The first book isn't bad mind you, but it can't measure up to later entries.
But the first book is young adult school. But one that kind of makes sense in the world, unlike most I can recall. There is a point to all the brutality and misery they are forced to endure that makes perfect sense once you get to explore the setting a bit more later on.
Agreed, and the first book is also very different from the rest of the series.
You've got that whole Battle Royale/Hunger Games/Ender's Game thing going on with the school for Golds, but that doesn't play a role later on. Afterward, it's more of a space opera.
Hmm okay this is good to hear. I am enjoying the first book but I wasn't really willing to sign up for multiple books of Hunger Games for boys (mainly because Hunger Games is good itself and I don't want to read another).
The Red Rising series is absolutely not YA. That series fucking goes places, and then goes more places, and then keeps fucking going.
What is Out of the Dark? I thought I remembered reading this and after a bit of searching found my post on it.
Out of the Dark by David Weber starts off really well but the ending is so so bad.
The earth is invaded by aliens and who saves us in the last couple of pages? Vampires. Dracula comes out of retirement and creates a couple of other vampires and they kill all the aliens in the bio-weapon plant and then hijack the shuttles up to the alien fleet. They then take over the entire alien warfleet. The end. It's like Weber couldn't think of how the earth could win against all that so just tossed in the Vampires to give us the edge.
I laughed.
Jacobkosh put it so succinctly back in October of 2010:
what the fuck
Now they decided to do a sequel because it's 2020 so why not carry over the suck to 2021 but announce it in 2020.
Holy shit, I honestly thought I had imagined this book. I started reading it in sweden while waiting in line at a bookstore for dance with dragons to be released, and I could never remember the title.
Did you finish it? And if so, did you have the same reaction of WTF just happened.
"He's sulking in his tent like Achilles! It's the Iliad?...from Homer?! READ A BOOK!!" -Handy
Been reading Rhythm of War and the design for one of their magical science inventions bugged the hell out of me until I finally sat down and improved upon it.
I'm not crazy. You're crazy!
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Okay, thinking about the Three Body Problem series again, and remembering how in the third book Death's End
There's a terminally ill guy whose brain is sent in a sort of ad hoc Orion-esque drive in a wild scheme to directly contact the Trisolarians. It's thought to be lost, but the Trisolarians somehow find it and revive him. He lives with them, and constructs a series of "fairy tales for children" specifically so he can encode three warnings into one of them in the hopes that one day, he might be able to get that back to Earth, sneaking it past the Trisolarian censors, so to speak.
Which I think, despite Liu's insistence that no, these are totally just alien stories about aliens in space, definitely nothing to do with Earth, is him also saying that yes of course these books are him trying to speak out in the only medium he can. Yes of course these are parables about how he views humanity's self-destructiveness, but if he directly said anything he'd be tortured in a reeducation camp until there was nothing left but parroting phrases and and slavishly making electronics.
And again, it basically ends on the bleakest of notes that it's probably all hopeless.
I'm sorry if I'm annoying about continuing to bring it up, but there's just a lot in the books.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
And that's the Tawny Man trilogy finished. The overarching plot of that trilogy is spotty compared to the other two which had a bit more focus.
There's a bit more nuance going on in those latter books but the bulk of events in the outland isles just aren't interesting for some reason. The epilogue is quite nice though with more personal events getting tidied up.
That said, I distinctly remember a scene from my first read of one of those nine books which doesn't actually exist.
Fitz and the Fool are in some old ruins and find some old something or other that shows the interplay between all the various types of magic including some neither of them recognise. There's similar setting content that Fitz finds in a scroll but I'm positive it was some ruins and the Fool was there
. Maybe Robin Hobb wrote some short stories and it was in one of those.
And onto the Rain Wilds series now, which a few chapters in isn't doing a great job of drawing me in as it's mostly events that were explained during The Tawny Man series. I'm sure it'll pick up, but it could have used some heavier editing.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
I'd argue Red Rising is not classic YA nonsense, but well executed YA nonsense that becomes incredibly good after the first book. It also did a few things I didn't expect along the way. The biggest is that a time passes between books, shaking up the status quo in various ways. The first book isn't bad mind you, but it can't measure up to later entries.
But the first book is young adult school. But one that kind of makes sense in the world, unlike most I can recall. There is a point to all the brutality and misery they are forced to endure that makes perfect sense once you get to explore the setting a bit more later on.
Agreed, and the first book is also very different from the rest of the series.
You've got that whole Battle Royale/Hunger Games/Ender's Game thing going on with the school for Golds, but that doesn't play a role later on. Afterward, it's more of a space opera.
Hmm okay this is good to hear. I am enjoying the first book but I wasn't really willing to sign up for multiple books of Hunger Games for boys (mainly because Hunger Games is good itself and I don't want to read another).
The Red Rising series is absolutely not YA. That series fucking goes places, and then goes more places, and then keeps fucking going.
God that series is so fucking good.
Darren is boy Katniss and the first book which I just finished is 100% YA. It has houses. Menacing adults pulling the strings. A chosen one. There is nothing about it that couldn't be more extremely YA. Coming of age by being thrust into an apocalyptic/politically tenuous murder apparatus.
I won't be going back to the next books because I really got annoyed by the use of Pixie as a surrogate for them calling each other faggots all the time and there was such an extreme amount of rape as plot that I found it pretty bad TBH. If they were going to have an actual Roman-esque culture there would be a lot more celebrating of homosex or at least acknowledging it.
That being said I enjoyed the first book up to the end which did not at ALL stick the landing. I would need to hear that the central themes change in some way for me to really try the next books.
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pyromaniac221this just might bean interestin YTRegistered Userregular
The first book is fairly classified as YA because of the premise and structure, even if some of it gets lurid enough that it sometimes gets a bit too lurid for the Y. The second and third books break out of the death-game setting and age up the protagonist and burden him with political/philosophical concerns that I think buck the label. There’s still plenty that someone drawn to the YA elements of the first book would enjoy about them, though.
Alright, let's do this. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)
A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears.
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road.
When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
I'm trying to get into The City in the Middle of the Night, but I'm just not quite connecting, and it feels a little too YA for me (which I got over pretty quickly with All The Birds in the Sky) It's not so much that it is YA as much as it just reads like it. I will press on and hopefully be wrong.
I'm trying to get into The City in the Middle of the Night, but I'm just not quite connecting, and it feels a little too YA for me (which I got over pretty quickly with All The Birds in the Sky) It's not so much that it is YA as much as it just reads like it. I will press on and hopefully be wrong.
It felt like a weird book in a different way that All the Birds in the Sky. It has a bunch of interesting ideas in it it but also kind of left me nonplussed at the end.
I'd argue Red Rising is not classic YA nonsense, but well executed YA nonsense that becomes incredibly good after the first book. It also did a few things I didn't expect along the way. The biggest is that a time passes between books, shaking up the status quo in various ways. The first book isn't bad mind you, but it can't measure up to later entries.
But the first book is young adult school. But one that kind of makes sense in the world, unlike most I can recall. There is a point to all the brutality and misery they are forced to endure that makes perfect sense once you get to explore the setting a bit more later on.
Agreed, and the first book is also very different from the rest of the series.
You've got that whole Battle Royale/Hunger Games/Ender's Game thing going on with the school for Golds, but that doesn't play a role later on. Afterward, it's more of a space opera.
Hmm okay this is good to hear. I am enjoying the first book but I wasn't really willing to sign up for multiple books of Hunger Games for boys (mainly because Hunger Games is good itself and I don't want to read another).
The Red Rising series is absolutely not YA. That series fucking goes places, and then goes more places, and then keeps fucking going.
God that series is so fucking good.
Darren is boy Katniss and the first book which I just finished is 100% YA. It has houses. Menacing adults pulling the strings. A chosen one. There is nothing about it that couldn't be more extremely YA. Coming of age by being thrust into an apocalyptic/politically tenuous murder apparatus.
I won't be going back to the next books because I really got annoyed by the use of Pixie as a surrogate for them calling each other faggots all the time and there was such an extreme amount of rape as plot that I found it pretty bad TBH. If they were going to have an actual Roman-esque culture there would be a lot more celebrating of homosex or at least acknowledging it.
That being said I enjoyed the first book up to the end which did not at ALL stick the landing. I would need to hear that the central themes change in some way for me to really try the next books.
Re: sexuality
They have gay characters. "Pixie" doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. The Golds distinguish between "Iron Golds" who become soldiers and leaders vs the "Pixies" who don't.
In the later books, they talk about how sexuality is perceived by the different castes. The underground Red society that Darrow is from was designed to be very conservative. They're explicitly homophobic, presumably because they usually die young and are supposed to have a lot of kids early on. The above ground society (which you don't really see much of in the first book) doesn't really care about individuals' sexuality, and gay relationships and marriages are mentioned casually.
Alright, let's do this. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)
A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears.
Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road.
When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness.
The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity.
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.
It really just confirms libertarian philosophy - a bunch of bears had a problem with a bunch of humans randomly showing up, but also an opportunity in that those humans were exploitable for resources. The bears didn’t need a government to tell them what to do - the invisible claw of the market took care of their human problem.
So I'm 3/4 of the way through Rhythm of War and I have a question for those that have read it.
Does Shallan ever stop absolutely sucking shit?
Update : 80% in and she has not.
I like Shallan but I feel like the entire Stormlight Archive exhibits this bizarre inverse competence curve where all of the characters become less competent as they become more capable. "Gained super powers, access to functionally-limitless resources, and effective training in an array of skill sets? Welp, time for your mental issues to become suddenly debilitating!"
Which, sure, that's an interesting tack to take in a generally traditional doorstop fantasy escapism thing for one character, but when it's all the characters... it's a little weird.
The one exception being Adolin, who was hyper-competent at fighting and leadership and shit in the first novel but has become increasing socially capable and personable as he gives up on using any of those skills on the regular.
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The books are completely standalone. They take place in the same universe (as in, on different planets in the same universe, as well as I suppose the same literary universe) but it's honestly hard to tell that from reading them.
My personal recommendation is The Dispossessed (my cat's name is Shevek!) It's a very moving, interesting book.
The Left Hand of Darkness is very good but the protagonist is a closed off guy who is a bit hard to read. It does contain some solid truths about gender and society and also a tense snow traversal survival adventure--not really expected for those to be in the same book but hey.
NRK article today said -78 C and ah, that makes sense, and I should have realized that the BBC journalist was rounding the number
which they shouldn't have, because -78 C is the temperature of dry ice, and recognizable, while -80 is just a specific temperature. Which also makes it make more sense because like, of course they haven't spent a long time figuring out what temperatures ruins it. Just that deep freezer is too warm and that dry ice is cold enough.
real minor thing, but
I enjoyed Left Hand a lot more, but everything I've read of hers has been great.
I've just started Revelation Space, and boy howdy does it just drop you into its world. Im usually quite the jargon enthusiast, and I've managed so far, but it's certainly a lot to try and keep track off, especially while also trying to figure out the timeline.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
If you read one then I'd point towards The Dispossesed. Credeiki is entirely right that it technically shares a universe with some other stuff you in no way need or even should read that other stuff first. Pretty much everything LeGuin wrote is worth reading, the only caveat I'd give is that the first three Earthsea are written as Young Adult fiction. They still have some hefty themes but until the 4th book don't really dwell on them or let them dominate. I reread them a few years ago and while quick they were still enjoyable as an adult.
Also don't sleep on her short stories as they contain some of her best work. Heck, make like ten minutes right now and google "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas".
Yeah, obviously you have your own time/interest constraints and if you don't like it then you don't like it. Not worth spending too much time on a series when there are so many others you might like.
But if you do decide you want to give it another chance, I'd see about getting at least a bit into the second book. There are a lot of twists and turns and reversals, but you'll get a pretty good feel for how you like the series pretty quickly into Golden Son.
And also better than most of the non-fiction I've read to be honest
Perhaps less entirely compelling than the one before, but still masterly.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
A somewhat slow start that had me thinking it was going to be kind of a Robert Jordan knockoff. It quickly evolved into something a little better and unique in its use of African tribalism. I finished it and immediately bought the follow up because the first ended on such a cliffhanger i wanted to throw my kindle through the window.
Definitely a recommend if you enjoy fantasy and underdog protagonist sacrifices everything to win.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Have you read the Bernard Samson novels by Len Deighton? (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, et al.) He's a notch less cerebral than Le Carre, but his characters are perhaps two notches more human and sympathetic.
The Harry Palmer stories are excellent also.
I really love Le Carre's books when they're done but sometimes struggle with them in the moment. He constructs masterful plots and interesting characters but it feels like the first half or two-thirds of each novel are spent flitting between plot threads seemingly at random and I find it difficult to figure out who and what to focus on until I have enough pieces in hand to start perceiving the whole picture.
One of the things I really love about the 2012 TTSS movie is that I feel it paces out the revelations better, beginning with the hook (there's a traitor), starting with the seemingly innocuous (a low-level agent phoning in from a distant and seemingly unrelated place) and then giving bigger and bigger twists until the supreme moment when you learn who the mole is and why. The book, by contrast, scatters the revelations almost at random, following big developments (that sometimes spoil future proceedings) with small ones. You find out big, important stuff by the halfway point and the last couple of chapters revolve around trivia. And yet I remember the book really fondly.
The other thing is it takes ages for the plot to get going. Westerby spends a large part of the first act moping about in some random house in Tuscany.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
one of the biggest pieces of vaporware in literary history is actually happening
J. Michael Straczinski, the creator of Babylon 5 who is now the literary executor of the late SF giant Harlan Ellison (who he befriended late in life, a bit like Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi), just announced that Ellison's infamously delayed project, the third installment in the Dangerous Visions trilogy of anthologies by top SF writers, is being finished and will actually come out next year
It's hard to emphasize what a big deal this is to science fiction. The original two Dangerous Visions anthologies from the late 60s and early 70s (Dangerous Visions, 1967, and Again, Dangerous Visions from 1975) kind of chronicled, and also popularized, the New Wave in science fiction. They featured super hardcore experimental cutting-edge science fiction by authors that were either red hot at the time or were about to become famous and basically marked the start of the New Wave, the moment when science fiction broke out of the pulp magazine action-stories-for-men ghetto.
folks like Gene Wolfe, William Gibson, George RR Martin, Dan Simmons, Octavia Butler, NK Jemisin etc etc were all influenced by the New Wave and by these authors
so the anthologies were a big deal. But the third one, due out in the mid-1970s, just...never came out
Harlan always told people that he was "working on it" and that it was "almost done." It became one of the longest-running bad jokes in SF. Nobody knew where it was or why it wasn't happening. It wasn't even like a Game of Thrones situation, it was a book mostly made up of other people's work! A lot of the authors involved got furious with him and sued to get the rights to their stories back. Various incomplete lists of the featured stories have floated around the internet for basically as long as the internet has existed. Harlan Ellison himself basically stopped writing original fiction almost entirely after the mid-70s.
And now it's...done?
Apparently one of the stories, according to JMS, is by Harlan himself and will justify/explain the decades of delay. i am putting money on either a coming out story or a for-real confession of murder.
The sequel to Out of the Dark which is Into the Light is going to be released next year after 10 years.
What is Out of the Dark? I thought I remembered reading this and after a bit of searching found my post on it.
@Jacobkosh put it so succinctly back in October of 2010:
Now they decided to do a sequel because it's 2020 so why not carry over the suck to 2021 but announce it in 2020.
Holy shit, I honestly thought I had imagined this book. I started reading it in sweden while waiting in line at a bookstore for dance with dragons to be released, and I could never remember the title.
It was pretty good, mostly. The Cosmere connections are piling up pretty fast now though, and I had to keep going and searching on the Coppermind for “who the heck is this?”
The Red Rising series is absolutely not YA. That series fucking goes places, and then goes more places, and then keeps fucking going.
God that series is so fucking good.
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Did you finish it? And if so, did you have the same reaction of WTF just happened.
I'm not crazy. You're crazy!
Which I think, despite Liu's insistence that no, these are totally just alien stories about aliens in space, definitely nothing to do with Earth, is him also saying that yes of course these books are him trying to speak out in the only medium he can. Yes of course these are parables about how he views humanity's self-destructiveness, but if he directly said anything he'd be tortured in a reeducation camp until there was nothing left but parroting phrases and and slavishly making electronics.
And again, it basically ends on the bleakest of notes that it's probably all hopeless.
I'm sorry if I'm annoying about continuing to bring it up, but there's just a lot in the books.
There's a bit more nuance going on in those latter books but the bulk of events in the outland isles just aren't interesting for some reason. The epilogue is quite nice though with more personal events getting tidied up.
That said, I distinctly remember a scene from my first read of one of those nine books which doesn't actually exist.
And onto the Rain Wilds series now, which a few chapters in isn't doing a great job of drawing me in as it's mostly events that were explained during The Tawny Man series. I'm sure it'll pick up, but it could have used some heavier editing.
I won't be going back to the next books because I really got annoyed by the use of Pixie as a surrogate for them calling each other faggots all the time and there was such an extreme amount of rape as plot that I found it pretty bad TBH. If they were going to have an actual Roman-esque culture there would be a lot more celebrating of homosex or at least acknowledging it.
That being said I enjoyed the first book up to the end which did not at ALL stick the landing. I would need to hear that the central themes change in some way for me to really try the next books.
It felt like a weird book in a different way that All the Birds in the Sky. It has a bunch of interesting ideas in it it but also kind of left me nonplussed at the end.
...Yeah, you know what, maybe I will skip Ready Player Two.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Re: sexuality
They have gay characters. "Pixie" doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. The Golds distinguish between "Iron Golds" who become soldiers and leaders vs the "Pixies" who don't.
In the later books, they talk about how sexuality is perceived by the different castes. The underground Red society that Darrow is from was designed to be very conservative. They're explicitly homophobic, presumably because they usually die young and are supposed to have a lot of kids early on. The above ground society (which you don't really see much of in the first book) doesn't really care about individuals' sexuality, and gay relationships and marriages are mentioned casually.
It really just confirms libertarian philosophy - a bunch of bears had a problem with a bunch of humans randomly showing up, but also an opportunity in that those humans were exploitable for resources. The bears didn’t need a government to tell them what to do - the invisible claw of the market took care of their human problem.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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how dreadily on brand is it for ernest cline to get the wrong team and the wrong sport because lol sportsball
Does Shallan ever stop absolutely sucking shit?
Update : 80% in and she has not.
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I like Shallan but I feel like the entire Stormlight Archive exhibits this bizarre inverse competence curve where all of the characters become less competent as they become more capable. "Gained super powers, access to functionally-limitless resources, and effective training in an array of skill sets? Welp, time for your mental issues to become suddenly debilitating!"
Which, sure, that's an interesting tack to take in a generally traditional doorstop fantasy escapism thing for one character, but when it's all the characters... it's a little weird.
The one exception being Adolin, who was hyper-competent at fighting and leadership and shit in the first novel but has become increasing socially capable and personable as he gives up on using any of those skills on the regular.
Glorious, glorious Lopen.