So I am not a big sci fi guy really l, but I got the audiobook version of the Area X trilogy to listen to while commuting.
I don’t really have any brilliant insights into it, but I liked it overall, especially the first book. It actually reminded me a bit of 2001, in that you have these emotionally reserved scientist types encountering this mind-altering situation. I’m also a sucker for weird and mysterious settings that are allowed to stay a bit nebulous.
I was surprised at how negative the reviews were on goodreads and amazon — people really can’t figure out the characters’ personalities?
Anyway, as a palate cleanser that requires less attention while driving i’m now letting down the entire book thread by listening to schlocky tough guy Steven Konoly books.
Meanwhile my pile of nonfiction hard copy books looms ...
If you liked that bit, you should try The City and The City.
Awww yes
Desc you may like that
Hmm I will get the audible
First I have to finish a book where 50% of the dialogue is people saying to each other, “And Rodriguez? Let’s keep this between ourselves for now — we’ll alert the boys at Langley once we’ve gotten what we need.”
So I am not a big sci fi guy really l, but I got the audiobook version of the Area X trilogy to listen to while commuting.
I don’t really have any brilliant insights into it, but I liked it overall, especially the first book. It actually reminded me a bit of 2001, in that you have these emotionally reserved scientist types encountering this mind-altering situation. I’m also a sucker for weird and mysterious settings that are allowed to stay a bit nebulous.
I was surprised at how negative the reviews were on goodreads and amazon — people really can’t figure out the characters’ personalities?
Anyway, as a palate cleanser that requires less attention while driving i’m now letting down the entire book thread by listening to schlocky tough guy Steven Konoly books.
Meanwhile my pile of nonfiction hard copy books looms ...
If you liked that bit, you should try The City and The City.
Awww yes
Desc you may like that
Hmm I will get the audible
First I have to finish a book where 50% of the dialogue is people saying to each other, “And Rodriguez? Let’s keep this between ourselves for now — we’ll alert the boys at Langley once we’ve gotten what we need.”
Rodriguez ought to be genre-savvy enough to immediately tell everyone he can think of, down to his third cousin's cat, and definitely not be on his own in a room with whoever uttered that sentence. Also, started Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky's follow up to Children of Time. So far, so good. Slightly surprised to spot a uni friend in the acknowledgements, too.
Finished Jeff VanderMeer's Bourne. It was a pretty good read. Think it was a bit more approachable than his Southern Reach trilogy but still some weird shit going on.
Just started the Dark Tower series. Interesting that for the movie they took out all the Evangelical references that are in the books.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
The City of Stairs is reminding me a lot of The City and the City. I like it, and that aspect of it as well.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I'm currently plowing through the Black Company series after many years of many people wtfing at me for not having read it, because I generally enjoy Glen Cook's writing (someone on these forums has my old copy of Passage at Arms but I no longer recall who it was - vari or visiblehowl most likely? Or possibly redx)
Anyway
I started amassing the paperbacks over the winter from the church book sale down the street, because a nearly complete collection turned up for a dollar apiece
Finally picked the first one off the shelf a few days ago because I was between books and
... Now I have read eight books in a week because yes, this series is exactly my brand of pulpy horrible people with swords and magic
And now I've finished She is the Darkness and
both of my resident enablers haven't read this far in the series yet so I'm just
alone screaming inchoate into the void I guess?
I'm not sure I'm ready for Water Sleeps yet, aaaaugh
I'm currently plowing through the Black Company series after many years of many people wtfing at me for not having read it, because I generally enjoy Glen Cook's writing (someone on these forums has my old copy of Passage at Arms but I no longer recall who it was - vari or visiblehowl most likely? Or possibly redx)
Anyway
I started amassing the paperbacks over the winter from the church book sale down the street, because a nearly complete collection turned up for a dollar apiece
Finally picked the first one off the shelf a few days ago because I was between books and
... Now I have read eight books in a week because yes, this series is exactly my brand of pulpy horrible people with swords and magic
And now I've finished She is the Darkness and
both of my resident enablers haven't read this far in the series yet so I'm just
alone screaming inchoate into the void I guess?
I'm not sure I'm ready for Water Sleeps yet, aaaaugh
Since its fresh in your brain, what all happens in those books, because I know I've read some of them, but I can't recall if I've read all of them, and everything I've found online isn't particularly helpful.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I'm currently plowing through the Black Company series after many years of many people wtfing at me for not having read it, because I generally enjoy Glen Cook's writing (someone on these forums has my old copy of Passage at Arms but I no longer recall who it was - vari or visiblehowl most likely? Or possibly redx)
Anyway
I started amassing the paperbacks over the winter from the church book sale down the street, because a nearly complete collection turned up for a dollar apiece
Finally picked the first one off the shelf a few days ago because I was between books and
... Now I have read eight books in a week because yes, this series is exactly my brand of pulpy horrible people with swords and magic
And now I've finished She is the Darkness and
both of my resident enablers haven't read this far in the series yet so I'm just
alone screaming inchoate into the void I guess?
I'm not sure I'm ready for Water Sleeps yet, aaaaugh
Since its fresh in your brain, what all happens in those books, because I know I've read some of them, but I can't recall if I've read all of them, and everything I've found online isn't particularly helpful.
In terms of what unfolded at the end of the book I just finished, you mean?
so, Soulcatcher just punked Croaker, Lady & Co in the ruins of glittering stone and ran back to Taglios at the end of She is the Darkness
I mean, in terms of endings of Black Company books, after the first three, generally speaking "Soulcatcher just punked Croaker" usually has to be disambiguated with what specific punking Catcher did because she generally swoops in and does something utterly fucked up in the last thirty pages
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - this absolutely ruled. South African noir/SF where, sometime in the 2000s, sinners? start to get marked with unshakeable animal companions? There's a fake academic paper that cites another fake academic paper: "Steering by the Golden Compass: Pullman’s fantasy in the context of the ontological shift (2005)"
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling - SF/horror about spelunking a spooky cave while sealed into an unreliable mech suit. Easy read, very exciting, moderate spooks!
The Night of the Long Knives and Other Works by Fritz Leibner - These are mostly post-apocalyptic or Cold War short stories. Leibner always feels hokey and undercooked to me, but I never quite regret the time spent.
Finders by Melissa Scott - This was just OK too? It was always getting bogged down in empty-feeling stage business, either with ship maneuvering or the color-programming tech magic. A big draw for me was the cozy poly relationship plot, but that also felt kinda like it was checking boxes to get to the ending and skimming over things that deserved more weight. Like,
So the whole thing is that these scavenger types get unwittingly caught up in Vampire: The Space Masquerade With Nanobots, and an area of contention is that one character doesn't want to be infected with live-forever bots, and the one who's already infected really wants him to get a Gift and live semi-forever with her. And then that's just resolved with: he gets hurt, he'll die if she doesn't use her extra-special Gift to infect and heal him, and then he's fine with it, he guesses. Cool
I'm currently plowing through the Black Company series after many years of many people wtfing at me for not having read it, because I generally enjoy Glen Cook's writing (someone on these forums has my old copy of Passage at Arms but I no longer recall who it was - vari or visiblehowl most likely? Or possibly redx)
Anyway
I started amassing the paperbacks over the winter from the church book sale down the street, because a nearly complete collection turned up for a dollar apiece
Finally picked the first one off the shelf a few days ago because I was between books and
... Now I have read eight books in a week because yes, this series is exactly my brand of pulpy horrible people with swords and magic
And now I've finished She is the Darkness and
both of my resident enablers haven't read this far in the series yet so I'm just
alone screaming inchoate into the void I guess?
I'm not sure I'm ready for Water Sleeps yet, aaaaugh
Since its fresh in your brain, what all happens in those books, because I know I've read some of them, but I can't recall if I've read all of them, and everything I've found online isn't particularly helpful.
In terms of what unfolded at the end of the book I just finished, you mean?
so, Soulcatcher just punked Croaker, Lady & Co in the ruins of glittering stone and ran back to Taglios at the end of She is the Darkness
I mean, in terms of endings of Black Company books, after the first three, generally speaking "Soulcatcher just punked Croaker" usually has to be disambiguated with what specific punking Catcher did because she generally swoops in and does something utterly fucked up in the last thirty pages
Yeah, I meant in that book specifically, just because the wiki entry for that book is basically empty, but I just found the Black Company wikipedia, and they look to have done a much better job, and I'm pretty sure I read all of the books.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
It was such a weird place to take things that it threw me out of the series and I gave the next one fifty pages or so but it didn't grab me
the voice shift, plot/situation, and characterization in this one are all definitely not my best faves
but at this point I have endured worse imo
I extremely did not particularly care for Lady's POV in Dreams of Steel but it's easy to dismiss a lot of her narrative as obviously unreliable because it's Her, but I also extremely disliked it because dude does not have a particularly subtle hand with feeeeeeemale characters (the entire plot around her was just. so bad.)
that said I'm also exceedingly biased against Lady because I love the hell out of Soulcatcher so every book from Shadow Games forward has been A Lot of me wringing my hands in nervous glee for the last hundred pages of each book
one of the things I'm not digging this book is that Soulcatcher is ... not very herself at all, I feel like he couldn't bring himself to make her as bad as she would be in the circumstances ?? Like I'm really not buying her sitting around being bored and doing bureaucracy-as-minor-torture of the Taglian locals for fifteen years
I feel like a prominent feature of Cook's writing is that he very rarely can actually bring himself to write things as awful as his characters would do them--which is why the Annals are SUCH a great device because they're so fucking unreliable! but it means that sometimes they don't dig as hard on things that they should.
anyway so yeah I have Opinions let me show you them I guess
Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
I hate the person you like and like the person you're biased against but I still basically agree with you about everything. Very odd behavior for 15 years.
I hate the person you like and like the person you're biased against but I still basically agree with you about everything. Very odd behavior for 15 years.
From kina as well?!?
YES, WTF
especially with lil miss and her kidnapper still running around in the dark out there
oh I agree Soulcatcher is extremely hateable, but I fell in love with the character in the first book and was BIG MAD at the pivot in THAT book
so, like I said, bias lmao
But I still love her and I was so utterly pleased when she turned up in the middle of Shadow Games--from the first encounter in the woods I had a feeling it would be Catcher but I still screamed, screamed, at the arrow
I also had some like... Big Weird Trans Feels about pre-reveal Soulcatcher (the canon insistence on the "he" pronoun with the voices described as openly feminine etc--that was SO COOL and frankly, done right!)
so she captured my heart bigtime for reasons that are largely very personal and weird and inexplicable--and Glen Cook was SO CLOSE to getting this right for a trans identity which is like... really complicated because of course we shouldn't be villains in everything but like... for a book written the year I was born he did it SO RIGHT for so much of the first book and then WHAM it's... bad, actually, because "real" gender as a plot point is just UGH, but from that point forth he does insist on calling her she so I just ride with it, le shrug
the tl:dr; of those trans feels is "do you have a masculine-but-femme, usually genderweird, trickster/schemer/plotter chaotic menacing character? I WILL LOVE THEM FOREVER"
see also: MCU Loki, Lotor in VLD (13-year-old me was real stressed out that 30-year-old me liked that character so much), etc, etc
Black Company just goes steadily downhill somewhere during the Books of the South and never recovers.
It's also got that problem where the more he decides to reveal/retcon about the origins of the company, the less interesting the answers become.
I had a real hard time
settling into Murgen's POV, and I feel strongly like the device it is meant to be wears a bit thin; I also find the race stuff in p much everything from Shadow Games forward I have to like... really ignore, so I am maybe not reading the text as closely as I otherwise might
because the thing that really caught my interest from the jump with this series was the ancient battle-of-wits stuff with Lady and Dominator and the Taken so as that stuff has faded off and the Shadow stuff has mostly dissipated I'm definitely skimming slightly more than close-reading.
that said I am still like, loving the shit out of it? for as much as I don't think I would recommend it as heavily as it was recommended to me, it was heavily recommended to me by people who know that antihero sagas are my jam
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I feel like its an interesting series, and I read all the books, but I definitely felt like it all got a little out of hand. But then again, I used to be a huge Malazan fan back in HS, so...
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Hm I read all of Black Company about 10 years ago and I remember *nothing* about these books at all, except that I liked them all, the earlier ones more than the later ones. But I couldn't tell you anything about any of the characters or plot points, and don't recognize many of the names here.
I have done my damnedest to avoid both Malazan and ASoIaF, ask nexuscrawler
I like tomes and tomes of antiheroes, especially like, huge pulpy short piles of books! but I also like them very zoomed in and personal so I'm way more interested in Zelazny, Brust, Moorcock than I am in Robert Jordan, Erikson, Sanderson, etc
(I like GRRM's writing (especially shorter fiction!) but I still remember saying, "oh my god I am so glad I will never have to read these" when they announced the TV show, I am that much of an asshole, I will lord it over my partner that I don't have to read the giant book bricks on our shelf 8-))
(Erikson's writing I don't particularly care for; I gave it a quick pass and meh'd at it)
@credeiki it helps that all the names are terrible short weird things, that should, generally speaking, not be names
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I've read the Malazan series a couple of times, but the last time I went to reread it I just didn't have the energy for it, and I'm much less "EVERYONE READ THIS ITS AMAZING" now that I used to be. Which is weird, because I still love the idea and the metaplot he developed, I just don't have the energy to deal with the characters that I never cared for, and on the second or third time through they just feel like even more of an obstacle.
GRRM's books lost me because there were just too many characters I didn't care about, and then half the book ended up being their viewpoint. And a lot of the character deaths just made me mad, whereas when Erikson did it I was either happy some asshole died, or super sad about the characters deaths.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
oh I agree Soulcatcher is extremely hateable, but I fell in love with the character in the first book and was BIG MAD at the pivot in THAT book
so, like I said, bias lmao
But I still love her and I was so utterly pleased when she turned up in the middle of Shadow Games--from the first encounter in the woods I had a feeling it would be Catcher but I still screamed, screamed, at the arrow
I also had some like... Big Weird Trans Feels about pre-reveal Soulcatcher (the canon insistence on the "he" pronoun with the voices described as openly feminine etc--that was SO COOL and frankly, done right!)
so she captured my heart bigtime for reasons that are largely very personal and weird and inexplicable--and Glen Cook was SO CLOSE to getting this right for a trans identity which is like... really complicated because of course we shouldn't be villains in everything but like... for a book written the year I was born he did it SO RIGHT for so much of the first book and then WHAM it's... bad, actually, because "real" gender as a plot point is just UGH, but from that point forth he does insist on calling her she so I just ride with it, le shrug
the tl:dr; of those trans feels is "do you have a masculine-but-femme, usually genderweird, trickster/schemer/plotter chaotic menacing character? I WILL LOVE THEM FOREVER"
see also: MCU Loki, Lotor in VLD (13-year-old me was real stressed out that 30-year-old me liked that character so much), etc, etc
Yeah, from my vague recollections anyway, I'm pretty sure he was just going for a very basic "you made bad assumptions because how could a woman ever do stuff like that" thing.
Malazan I used to like more but as the series went on all his worst tendencies became more pronounced and he didn't really improve on a lot of his strengths. Rambly, too much navel-gazing, too little coherence to basically anything, samey characters, lots of retcons, etc, etc. Toll the Hounds is when I tapped out.
oh I agree Soulcatcher is extremely hateable, but I fell in love with the character in the first book and was BIG MAD at the pivot in THAT book
so, like I said, bias lmao
But I still love her and I was so utterly pleased when she turned up in the middle of Shadow Games--from the first encounter in the woods I had a feeling it would be Catcher but I still screamed, screamed, at the arrow
I also had some like... Big Weird Trans Feels about pre-reveal Soulcatcher (the canon insistence on the "he" pronoun with the voices described as openly feminine etc--that was SO COOL and frankly, done right!)
so she captured my heart bigtime for reasons that are largely very personal and weird and inexplicable--and Glen Cook was SO CLOSE to getting this right for a trans identity which is like... really complicated because of course we shouldn't be villains in everything but like... for a book written the year I was born he did it SO RIGHT for so much of the first book and then WHAM it's... bad, actually, because "real" gender as a plot point is just UGH, but from that point forth he does insist on calling her she so I just ride with it, le shrug
the tl:dr; of those trans feels is "do you have a masculine-but-femme, usually genderweird, trickster/schemer/plotter chaotic menacing character? I WILL LOVE THEM FOREVER"
see also: MCU Loki, Lotor in VLD (13-year-old me was real stressed out that 30-year-old me liked that character so much), etc, etc
Yeah, from my vague recollections anyway, I'm pretty sure he was just going for a very basic "you made bad assumptions because how could a woman ever do stuff like that" thing.
oh yes absolutely
like, I can see how it would be like... groundbreaking stuff in a grimdark swordybook from 1984 tbh based on some of the other vintage dreck I read
I've read the Malazan series a couple of times, but the last time I went to reread it I just didn't have the energy for it, and I'm much less "EVERYONE READ THIS ITS AMAZING" now that I used to be. Which is weird, because I still love the idea and the metaplot he developed, I just don't have the energy to deal with the characters that I never cared for, and on the second or third time through they just feel like even more of an obstacle.
GRRM's books lost me because there were just too many characters I didn't care about, and then half the book ended up being their viewpoint. And a lot of the character deaths just made me mad, whereas when Erikson did it I was either happy some asshole died, or super sad about the characters deaths.
Some day I'd like to reread Malazan because I did love them, but I also can't remember much of them, and I know there were entire plotlines that I couldn't follow because they were too confusing and sprawling and there were just too many names involved, and a lot of really portentious stuff about being witnessed but man, I didn't really get it, honestly...
I very rarely recommend them though, because I know most people are not going to like them. Which is fine! They are definitely a niche product.
Steam, LoL: credeiki
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I think the witnessing thing was really more of a, "You will be remembered" type thing than anything else. Just an acknowledgement that a sacrifice was being made, and that these people were going to be remembered.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Just started A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. It's the story of an ambassador for a hinterlands space station assuming her new job at the capital planet of the empire of Space Aztecs. Urbane Space Aztecs, in fact, who are more into poetry than human sacrifice. Promising so far. Anything with Space Ambassadors awakens my hunger for CJ Cherryh-esque close third-person cultural collision psychodrama.
I have finished this now and recommend it. It is extremely Cherryh-esque in terms of plot, setting, and psychodrama, but not so much in writing style.
I've also finished Rosewater and its sequel, Rosewater Insurrection. They are, roughly, the story of a man with psychic powers who lives in a Nigerian city built around an alien mega-artifact, in a world where the USA has mysteriously vanished. Also recommended. The Nigerian setting is refreshing, and Thompson's world-building is excellent.
I think the witnessing thing was really more of a, "You will be remembered" type thing than anything else. Just an acknowledgement that a sacrifice was being made, and that these people were going to be remembered.
Yeah, there's basically two different ways that term gets used - one of them is "I'm about to do something ridiculous, you better watch so you can believe it" and the other is the narrative equivalent of "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen?"
For folks who want to dig into some Malazan stuff without all the major prose, I'd look into ICE's newest trilogy. It's about the founding of the Empire, effectively. They're pretty easily ICE's best, the first one is just straight pulpy goodness, and the next two - while not as good for me because they were less focused - are also good. It's both better and worse knowing some of the details of how all that went down, though.
honestly once I got past some of the bogglingly unbelievable character decision problems in the first ~~100 pages or so I was really hooked; the Book of Sleepy is p legit, probably the best sense of humor of the bunch, while also going through some of the wildest shit. I'm a big sucker for "splitting the party through a time rift" stories tho so it all kinda wrapped around into something kinda carved into my own preferences, especially when you pack in all the old-gods shit around it, all that stuff is my jam
I like the full-circle of coming back to cranky old Croaker in Soldiers Live, it's kind of charming ? We'll see if that holds. It's weird when his voice feels trustworthy because he's not addled by fixation on some other person or goal.
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Today on my epic train adventure I read Luna New Moon by Ian McDonald and it's fairly good
It was billed as the intersection of the Mars Trilogy and Game of Thrones and maybe that's not a terrible description
That said, it's only probably the last third that is actually good. The rest is just scene setting in a turbo capitalist lunar society which is fine but hardly gripping.
I will give the next one a read to see if it falls in the same pattern or keeps up momentum
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Today on my epic train adventure I read Luna New Moon by Ian McDonald and it's fairly good
It was billed as the intersection of the Mars Trilogy and Game of Thrones and maybe that's not a terrible description
That said, it's only probably the last third that is actually good. The rest is just scene setting in a turbo capitalist lunar society which is fine but hardly gripping.
I will give the next one a read to see if it falls in the same pattern or keeps up momentum
I’m inclined to say the latter, though it keeps the libertarian capitalist politic/theme.
Today on my epic train adventure I read Luna New Moon by Ian McDonald and it's fairly good
It was billed as the intersection of the Mars Trilogy and Game of Thrones and maybe that's not a terrible description
That said, it's only probably the last third that is actually good. The rest is just scene setting in a turbo capitalist lunar society which is fine but hardly gripping.
I will give the next one a read to see if it falls in the same pattern or keeps up momentum
I’m inclined to say the latter, though it keeps the libertarian capitalist politic/theme.
The sequel’s sequel is out soon (now?) , too.
Excellent. I quite liked the theme. It actually felt like an interesting take on libertarianism and capitalism and so on
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
this is gene wolfe doing the dying earth, and it has the same problem the dying earth had where you can't make your hero a vicious misogynist and expect me to care what happens to him
which is a pity because i want to like it, in a lot of ways. all the world building and stuff is good. and the whole torturer thing is theoretically interesting, but severian spends all his time doing horrible things to women and it's getting to be a bit too fucking much
I'm on vacation and brought three books, well really four. Nearing 800 pages in 3 days, which is exactly what I think about when I hear the word vacation (books, a nice place to sit and lose myself in them, and enough decent booze is everything I need to escape)
Got through about half of Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning on the flight. I love his way with prose, his deft hand at characterization even in short stories, his cleverness that doesn't overwhelm. Until you've read like nine clever twists in as many stories in a row, one of which is actually twelve micro stories, and then even an ardent Gaiman fan starts to roll his eyes. Highly recommended, just limit yourself to small bites.
Read LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, only my second book of hers, in a single sitting and it's instantly recognizable as a stone cold classic. Gently subversive for 1968 in myriad ways, utterly traditional mythic fantasy in others, expertly threading the needle of never dumbed down but never obtuse. Far more approachable than Left Hand of Darkness which I perhaps enjoyed more for its complexity, but I'd recommend this to any reader, even those generally averse to genre fiction.
Halfway through the first book of N. K. Jemisin's Dreamblood duology. I liked The Fifth Season so much that I felt compelled to finish its increasingly lesser sequels (which are still good, just sort of stretched out) and I'm enjoying this about as much. As with the Broken Earth books this is as much about the world as it is the people, and her skill at developing a culture that's immediately distinct and unique, with concise imagery and the right balance of showing versus telling, is unparalleled - this is where I thought The Stone Sky fell disappointingly short. Read this if you're bored with traditional fantasy and looking for an example of the genre that sparks your imagination like Tolkein or Moorcock or Alexander might have done for you as a young reader.
Finished Soldiers Live yesterday and I'm still extremely heart-weary, it's a master class in a certain kind of pulp that is very dear to me and I'm impressed tbh with how a series I was reading very cynically managed to jump up and grab me by the throat in the last three books
But now I really understand why so many people have badgered me about this series and I'm glad I read it now, and I think I was in a particularly good place for what it had to teach me about my own work
The last fifty pages were just, very sad but also inevitable but also still surprising
I was surprised how sad I was about losing Sahra and Murgen, they really messed me up way more than I expected
Likewise Sleepy, I think aside from the return to Croaker in the last book, her voice was my favorite in the Annals because she had just... Such heart in the face of so many impossible things and kept a surprising level of humor like the earlier books
good grief, the bit with Goblin and One-Eye's hat, ugh, I sobbed, what a clever cool thing. It was a nice way to reflect on how fucked up their friendship was in life
And the bit where Shukrat says, they never learned how to say I love you, about Lady and Catcher, and that is a MOOD
I liked where it ended; very uncertain and uncomfortable but hopeful at the same time; I love how the character of the Company itself grew and changed - and persisted, it was really heartening and drew a lot of meaning out of a lot of grief.
A friend of mine has passed me her ARC of Gideon the 9th, so I am p sure I'm reading that next, as soon as I'm ready for another book to grab me by the face, I've been excited about it for a while now
I did order Port of Shadows now that I'm through the original series; a lot of reviews didn't like it but a lot of them also seemed very concerned about things that are not my focus as a reader so whooo knooows
Finished Soldiers Live yesterday and I'm still extremely heart-weary, it's a master class in a certain kind of pulp that is very dear to me and I'm impressed tbh with how a series I was reading very cynically managed to jump up and grab me by the throat in the last three books
But now I really understand why so many people have badgered me about this series and I'm glad I read it now, and I think I was in a particularly good place for what it had to teach me about my own work
The last fifty pages were just, very sad but also inevitable but also still surprising
I was surprised how sad I was about losing Sahra and Murgen, they really messed me up way more than I expected
Likewise Sleepy, I think aside from the return to Croaker in the last book, her voice was my favorite in the Annals because she had just... Such heart in the face of so many impossible things and kept a surprising level of humor like the earlier books
good grief, the bit with Goblin and One-Eye's hat, ugh, I sobbed, what a clever cool thing. It was a nice way to reflect on how fucked up their friendship was in life
And the bit where Shukrat says, they never learned how to say I love you, about Lady and Catcher, and that is a MOOD
I liked where it ended; very uncertain and uncomfortable but hopeful at the same time; I love how the character of the Company itself grew and changed - and persisted, it was really heartening and drew a lot of meaning out of a lot of grief.
A friend of mine has passed me her ARC of Gideon the 9th, so I am p sure I'm reading that next, as soon as I'm ready for another book to grab me by the face, I've been excited about it for a while now
I did order Port of Shadows now that I'm through the original series; a lot of reviews didn't like it but a lot of them also seemed very concerned about things that are not my focus as a reader so whooo knooows
There's a few Black Company short stories kicking around too, if you're in the mood.
One in "Swords and Dark Magic" one in "Fearsome Journeys", and several others in anthologies I've not heard of before....!
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Hmm I will get the audible
First I have to finish a book where 50% of the dialogue is people saying to each other, “And Rodriguez? Let’s keep this between ourselves for now — we’ll alert the boys at Langley once we’ve gotten what we need.”
Rodriguez ought to be genre-savvy enough to immediately tell everyone he can think of, down to his third cousin's cat, and definitely not be on his own in a room with whoever uttered that sentence.
Also, started Children of Ruin, Tchaikovsky's follow up to Children of Time. So far, so good. Slightly surprised to spot a uni friend in the acknowledgements, too.
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Just started the Dark Tower series. Interesting that for the movie they took out all the Evangelical references that are in the books.
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Anyway
I started amassing the paperbacks over the winter from the church book sale down the street, because a nearly complete collection turned up for a dollar apiece
Finally picked the first one off the shelf a few days ago because I was between books and
... Now I have read eight books in a week because yes, this series is exactly my brand of pulpy horrible people with swords and magic
And now I've finished She is the Darkness and
both of my resident enablers haven't read this far in the series yet so I'm just
alone screaming inchoate into the void I guess?
I'm not sure I'm ready for Water Sleeps yet, aaaaugh
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Since its fresh in your brain, what all happens in those books, because I know I've read some of them, but I can't recall if I've read all of them, and everything I've found online isn't particularly helpful.
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In terms of what unfolded at the end of the book I just finished, you mean?
I mean, in terms of endings of Black Company books, after the first three, generally speaking "Soulcatcher just punked Croaker" usually has to be disambiguated with what specific punking Catcher did because she generally swoops in and does something utterly fucked up in the last thirty pages
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I find this comparison very unlikely. The main similarity is that they both share the word city in the title
Also, if you liked the first book, there’s a lot of it’s heritage in the second; lots of science, communications, big questions, fun tech.
And also a lot of intriguing New Stuff!
It’s good, is what I’m saying. Worth buying if you see it in the store.
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Zoo City by Lauren Beukes - this absolutely ruled. South African noir/SF where, sometime in the 2000s, sinners? start to get marked with unshakeable animal companions? There's a fake academic paper that cites another fake academic paper: "Steering by the Golden Compass: Pullman’s fantasy in the context of the ontological shift (2005)"
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling - SF/horror about spelunking a spooky cave while sealed into an unreliable mech suit. Easy read, very exciting, moderate spooks!
The Night of the Long Knives and Other Works by Fritz Leibner - These are mostly post-apocalyptic or Cold War short stories. Leibner always feels hokey and undercooked to me, but I never quite regret the time spent.
Finders by Melissa Scott - This was just OK too? It was always getting bogged down in empty-feeling stage business, either with ship maneuvering or the color-programming tech magic. A big draw for me was the cozy poly relationship plot, but that also felt kinda like it was checking boxes to get to the ending and skimming over things that deserved more weight. Like,
(setting it down because I got other things to do today but ooofda)
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Yeah, I meant in that book specifically, just because the wiki entry for that book is basically empty, but I just found the Black Company wikipedia, and they look to have done a much better job, and I'm pretty sure I read all of the books.
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It was such a weird place to take things that it threw me out of the series and I gave the next one fifty pages or so but it didn't grab me
the voice shift, plot/situation, and characterization in this one are all definitely not my best faves
but at this point I have endured worse imo
one of the things I'm not digging this book is that Soulcatcher is ... not very herself at all, I feel like he couldn't bring himself to make her as bad as she would be in the circumstances ?? Like I'm really not buying her sitting around being bored and doing bureaucracy-as-minor-torture of the Taglian locals for fifteen years
I feel like a prominent feature of Cook's writing is that he very rarely can actually bring himself to write things as awful as his characters would do them--which is why the Annals are SUCH a great device because they're so fucking unreliable! but it means that sometimes they don't dig as hard on things that they should.
anyway so yeah I have Opinions let me show you them I guess
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especially with lil miss and her kidnapper still running around in the dark out there
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It's also got that problem where the more he decides to reveal/retcon about the origins of the company, the less interesting the answers become.
so, like I said, bias lmao
But I still love her and I was so utterly pleased when she turned up in the middle of Shadow Games--from the first encounter in the woods I had a feeling it would be Catcher but I still screamed, screamed, at the arrow
so she captured my heart bigtime for reasons that are largely very personal and weird and inexplicable--and Glen Cook was SO CLOSE to getting this right for a trans identity which is like... really complicated because of course we shouldn't be villains in everything but like... for a book written the year I was born he did it SO RIGHT for so much of the first book and then WHAM it's... bad, actually, because "real" gender as a plot point is just UGH, but from that point forth he does insist on calling her she so I just ride with it, le shrug
the tl:dr; of those trans feels is "do you have a masculine-but-femme, usually genderweird, trickster/schemer/plotter chaotic menacing character? I WILL LOVE THEM FOREVER"
see also: MCU Loki, Lotor in VLD (13-year-old me was real stressed out that 30-year-old me liked that character so much), etc, etc
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I had a real hard time
because the thing that really caught my interest from the jump with this series was the ancient battle-of-wits stuff with Lady and Dominator and the Taken so as that stuff has faded off and the Shadow stuff has mostly dissipated I'm definitely skimming slightly more than close-reading.
that said I am still like, loving the shit out of it? for as much as I don't think I would recommend it as heavily as it was recommended to me, it was heavily recommended to me by people who know that antihero sagas are my jam
(Let Me Tell You About Elric dot Jpeg)
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Guess I should reread, huh...
I like tomes and tomes of antiheroes, especially like, huge pulpy short piles of books! but I also like them very zoomed in and personal so I'm way more interested in Zelazny, Brust, Moorcock than I am in Robert Jordan, Erikson, Sanderson, etc
(I like GRRM's writing (especially shorter fiction!) but I still remember saying, "oh my god I am so glad I will never have to read these" when they announced the TV show, I am that much of an asshole, I will lord it over my partner that I don't have to read the giant book bricks on our shelf 8-))
(Erikson's writing I don't particularly care for; I gave it a quick pass and meh'd at it)
@credeiki it helps that all the names are terrible short weird things, that should, generally speaking, not be names
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GRRM's books lost me because there were just too many characters I didn't care about, and then half the book ended up being their viewpoint. And a lot of the character deaths just made me mad, whereas when Erikson did it I was either happy some asshole died, or super sad about the characters deaths.
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Yeah, from my vague recollections anyway, I'm pretty sure he was just going for a very basic "you made bad assumptions because how could a woman ever do stuff like that" thing.
oh yes absolutely
like, I can see how it would be like... groundbreaking stuff in a grimdark swordybook from 1984 tbh based on some of the other vintage dreck I read
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Some day I'd like to reread Malazan because I did love them, but I also can't remember much of them, and I know there were entire plotlines that I couldn't follow because they were too confusing and sprawling and there were just too many names involved, and a lot of really portentious stuff about being witnessed but man, I didn't really get it, honestly...
I very rarely recommend them though, because I know most people are not going to like them. Which is fine! They are definitely a niche product.
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I have finished this now and recommend it. It is extremely Cherryh-esque in terms of plot, setting, and psychodrama, but not so much in writing style.
I've also finished Rosewater and its sequel, Rosewater Insurrection. They are, roughly, the story of a man with psychic powers who lives in a Nigerian city built around an alien mega-artifact, in a world where the USA has mysteriously vanished. Also recommended. The Nigerian setting is refreshing, and Thompson's world-building is excellent.
Yeah, there's basically two different ways that term gets used - one of them is "I'm about to do something ridiculous, you better watch so you can believe it" and the other is the narrative equivalent of "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen?"
For folks who want to dig into some Malazan stuff without all the major prose, I'd look into ICE's newest trilogy. It's about the founding of the Empire, effectively. They're pretty easily ICE's best, the first one is just straight pulpy goodness, and the next two - while not as good for me because they were less focused - are also good. It's both better and worse knowing some of the details of how all that went down, though.
I like the full-circle of coming back to cranky old Croaker in Soldiers Live, it's kind of charming ? We'll see if that holds. It's weird when his voice feels trustworthy because he's not addled by fixation on some other person or goal.
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It was billed as the intersection of the Mars Trilogy and Game of Thrones and maybe that's not a terrible description
That said, it's only probably the last third that is actually good. The rest is just scene setting in a turbo capitalist lunar society which is fine but hardly gripping.
I will give the next one a read to see if it falls in the same pattern or keeps up momentum
I’m inclined to say the latter, though it keeps the libertarian capitalist politic/theme.
The sequel’s sequel is out soon (now?) , too.
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Excellent. I quite liked the theme. It actually felt like an interesting take on libertarianism and capitalism and so on
this is gene wolfe doing the dying earth, and it has the same problem the dying earth had where you can't make your hero a vicious misogynist and expect me to care what happens to him
which is a pity because i want to like it, in a lot of ways. all the world building and stuff is good. and the whole torturer thing is theoretically interesting, but severian spends all his time doing horrible things to women and it's getting to be a bit too fucking much
Got through about half of Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning on the flight. I love his way with prose, his deft hand at characterization even in short stories, his cleverness that doesn't overwhelm. Until you've read like nine clever twists in as many stories in a row, one of which is actually twelve micro stories, and then even an ardent Gaiman fan starts to roll his eyes. Highly recommended, just limit yourself to small bites.
Read LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, only my second book of hers, in a single sitting and it's instantly recognizable as a stone cold classic. Gently subversive for 1968 in myriad ways, utterly traditional mythic fantasy in others, expertly threading the needle of never dumbed down but never obtuse. Far more approachable than Left Hand of Darkness which I perhaps enjoyed more for its complexity, but I'd recommend this to any reader, even those generally averse to genre fiction.
Halfway through the first book of N. K. Jemisin's Dreamblood duology. I liked The Fifth Season so much that I felt compelled to finish its increasingly lesser sequels (which are still good, just sort of stretched out) and I'm enjoying this about as much. As with the Broken Earth books this is as much about the world as it is the people, and her skill at developing a culture that's immediately distinct and unique, with concise imagery and the right balance of showing versus telling, is unparalleled - this is where I thought The Stone Sky fell disappointingly short. Read this if you're bored with traditional fantasy and looking for an example of the genre that sparks your imagination like Tolkein or Moorcock or Alexander might have done for you as a young reader.
But now I really understand why so many people have badgered me about this series and I'm glad I read it now, and I think I was in a particularly good place for what it had to teach me about my own work
The last fifty pages were just, very sad but also inevitable but also still surprising
Likewise Sleepy, I think aside from the return to Croaker in the last book, her voice was my favorite in the Annals because she had just... Such heart in the face of so many impossible things and kept a surprising level of humor like the earlier books
good grief, the bit with Goblin and One-Eye's hat, ugh, I sobbed, what a clever cool thing. It was a nice way to reflect on how fucked up their friendship was in life
And the bit where Shukrat says, they never learned how to say I love you, about Lady and Catcher, and that is a MOOD
I liked where it ended; very uncertain and uncomfortable but hopeful at the same time; I love how the character of the Company itself grew and changed - and persisted, it was really heartening and drew a lot of meaning out of a lot of grief.
A friend of mine has passed me her ARC of Gideon the 9th, so I am p sure I'm reading that next, as soon as I'm ready for another book to grab me by the face, I've been excited about it for a while now
I did order Port of Shadows now that I'm through the original series; a lot of reviews didn't like it but a lot of them also seemed very concerned about things that are not my focus as a reader so whooo knooows
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There's a few Black Company short stories kicking around too, if you're in the mood.
One in "Swords and Dark Magic" one in "Fearsome Journeys", and several others in anthologies I've not heard of before....!
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