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I'll be starting Princep's Fury tonight.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
That's such a weird little series that gets so close to groan worthy tropes but then...just slightly sidesteps them most of the time to keep things fresh. There's also so many good side characters that really stand out.
I think Seth Dickinson has ruined me for fantasy, though. That dude's prose and just overall style is so much better than anything else I've read in a long long time.
The only thing I don't really like is the use of second person for one of the PoVs.
:P
Other things that won Hugos: The Calculating Stars. Just finished reading it and I really enjoyed it. Mostly about alt-history where we actually included women in the space program early on, for reasons. Wait, no, that's the sci-fi dressing to get people to read a book about feelings. The heart of the book is a woman who has desperately wanted to become an astronaut and the path she takes to try and get there along the prices she is (and isn't) willing to pay.
It is a little bit of a recasting of present day morals onto the 1940s-50s which feels a little optimistic, but then again DC is vaporized in like the first five pages so maybe....
Casting our present day morals onto people of different time-periods/cultures/realities/etc is like the cornerstone of speculative fiction.
People actually tend to react badly to trying to make people more of their time or place in my experience.
I'm also re-reading all the Far Side collections, which remain glorious.
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The protagonist would be perfectly at home on these boards. Which strikes me as wildly implausible for somebody born in the 1920's and who didn't have the 80 years of change since the 40's. It isn't a big deal, as you say it is common in fiction, but it jarred me a bit. She does fuck up here and there but mostly so she can demonstrate how to admit she messed up. Which is actually something that is uncommon in fiction and we should have more of.
Do you have the big all in one collection? Apparently they got his editor or something to explain some of the more obscure jokes.
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I added that to my to-read list last night after stumbling across them on Amazon somehow or other. If nobody else in the thread responds to convince me otherwise I'll probably read it sometime in the next month and report back.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Hey I met him at worldcon he was a pretty affable dude
I read the first one. The writing is dryer than I like, kinda Jane Austinish if that makes sense, but the world building is incredible. If I hit another book drought I wouldn't be opposed to trying the second.
It's amazing the mileage Butcher got out of a message board pissing contest centered on Pokemon and the Lost Legion.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Just wanted to stop by, I'm on my honeymoon in Portland, so of course we went to Powell's... I grabbed not a few suggestions from the thread and also where did all my money go?
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Steam | XBL
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
A few minutes later I had bought the thing and now, 10 days later, I got done with it.
It was one awesome ride and i really recommended it. I really want there to be more of it, but at the same time the mystery is part of the charm.
After some indecisiveness, I just got started on "The three body problem."
@Aioua I see a couple in there that I was stanning for so that's fun, enjoy!
I really enjoyed the Three Body Problem trilogy, but it is definitely not a product of Western media, and so I've had a lot of people tell me it has some huge deficiencies which I think are more a product of the society that produced it having a different cultural focus than any failing by the author.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I feel like most of the criticism is missing a lot of the point... I felt like there’s a whole lot of allegory in there for human relations now and in recent history (especially the cold war, current international relations and colonial era interactions between the west and China) that just sails over people's heads, especially if you aren’t considering the fact that the author is from a country where you can’t just say some things outright.
read this book. It is about very cool space necromancers
Just finished up To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers new book. I'm very ambivalent on it. I definitely enjoyed it and the vision of an ethos of exploration and discovery it presented. I did find the climax of the book unsatisfying and I'm unsure of exactly why.
I also just finished it.
The age of every character was laughable but pretty easy to handwave, and the slow parts really slowed me down, but once the main action started to get rolling both were a good ride full of twists and turns. At the end of the day it's a pretty dang good set of heist books and I would also recommend them.
I loved
There are a few bits that are likely to cause eye rolling for some folks (and I would’ve thought myself one of them, but it worked for me), but overall it’s just a damn good Stephen King book. I think of Firestarter and Under The Dome as books that start with a lit fuse and race towards the explosion, and I’d put this in roughly the same territory of pacing.
For those who don’t mind getting a sense of the urgency that comes early on (spoiler that isn’t very revealing, comes in the first 70-80 pages and I’m sanitizing):
Just a real good ticking clock, and the story doesn’t sag.
I may not be the best source here given that I genuinely love the ending for the Dark Tower, but I know what you mean - it’s an actual good ending, even without applying the King curve. Earned and satisfying.
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I'll have to have a look at that.
That's something I really liked about Jack Yeovil's (actually Kim Newman's) Warhammer books from back in the day, the subversion of how these things typically go. For example, in his first one, Drachenfels (very minor story structure spoilers for a thirty year old book):
They remain some of my favourite books ever, not even just favourite fantasy books. Worth checking out (easiest way is just grab The Vampire Genevieve omnibus off eBay since it's now OOP).
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1. The narrator's voice feels very shaped by internet culture and sort of incongruous with the setting. I love her snarky sick-of-everything attitude, but it kind of shatters my immersion a little bit when I'm tripping over phrases like "stop being so salty" and "permanent case of resting-bitch-face syndrome"
2. My girlfriend couldn't get past the first chapter because not a whole lot of words are spent on worldbuilding or describing the setting, it just kind of throws you into Gideon's head and stays there for awhile, so she was having trouble picturing the story and it bugged her.
3. Not going to name names or specific plot events, but this one is sort of spoilery and if you're gonna read the book maybe just don't click:
So these below are real full blooded spoilers as I also just read that:
I am very curious how the author is going to handle the narrator shift. Gideon has a super strong voice and while Harrow firmly had a style I'm not sure how much of it she'll keep as a Lector. They seemed to squash the concept of Gideon hanging out in her head as a secondary narrator pretty hard in the epilogue chapters.
Also HUGE QUESTION: Who is the Necro Empire fighting/conquering?