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[Book]: Rhymes With

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Posts

  • nexuscrawlernexuscrawler Registered User regular
    The other thing to remember is
    Gideon is written to not be terribly smart.

  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    Ya, I liked Gideon the Ninth a lot. The world building drip was just right for me and the anime-esque contest plot hummed along nicely. I did check out somewhat in the final act
    when it devolved into a long action sequence

    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • VanguardVanguard But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    I have finished The Citadel of the Autarch, and thus, the tetralogy.

    This is the kind of Science Fantasy I'm looking for - meticulously detailed while never losing momentum, a text that assumes the reader's intelligence, and a sprawling knot of plots that is fundamentally concerned with the human experience.

    I'm definitely going to re-read this as I have questions but now that I know the general shape of the story I want to go back and look more closely at everything.

    @Bogart @Jacobkosh

  • Mojo_JojoMojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular
    Vanguard wrote: »
    I have finished The Citadel of the Autarch, and thus, the tetralogy.

    This is the kind of Science Fantasy I'm looking for - meticulously detailed while never losing momentum, a text that assumes the reader's intelligence, and a sprawling knot of plots that is fundamentally concerned with the human experience.

    I'm definitely going to re-read this as I have questions but now that I know the general shape of the story I want to go back and look more closely at everything.

    Bogart Jacobkosh

    It's possible and probable that I missed a lot of what was happening in book 4 but I just found it didn't fit with the previous trilogy and was super weirdly paced.

    Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
  • VanguardVanguard But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    Mojo_Jojo wrote: »
    Vanguard wrote: »
    I have finished The Citadel of the Autarch, and thus, the tetralogy.

    This is the kind of Science Fantasy I'm looking for - meticulously detailed while never losing momentum, a text that assumes the reader's intelligence, and a sprawling knot of plots that is fundamentally concerned with the human experience.

    I'm definitely going to re-read this as I have questions but now that I know the general shape of the story I want to go back and look more closely at everything.

    Bogart Jacobkosh

    It's possible and probable that I missed a lot of what was happening in book 4 but I just found it didn't fit with the previous trilogy and was super weirdly paced.

    The pacing of the whole series is weird as there really isn’t any kind of central plot as there is in say, LOTR, where everything kinda points to destroying the ring. You have a multitude of plot points, none of them central but all important for rounding out the world, solving one enigma, introducing another, etc. You also have gaps - like what happens between the first and second book?

  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    Just finished Look to Windward, it was quite an enjoyable Culture novel. I really like how most of the novels provide a look at different parts of the Culture.

    Next up is How to Lose the Time War.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • DrovekDrovek Registered User regular
    Last week I finished The Three Body Problem.

    I really enjoyed it. You can really tell that it's coming from a different culture, and in a way it's why it felt so fresh to me. I kinda want to finish the whole trilogy, but in a weird twist of fate, Ball Lightning was heavily discounted so I picked that up.

    I'm like a third of the way through and I can tell it's my kinda thing now.

    steam_sig.png( < . . .
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    While true, I feel it pretty clearly sign posts that in like the first chapter of the first book when it declares what the initial issue is.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    While true, I feel it pretty clearly sign posts that in like the first chapter of the first book when it declares what the initial issue is.

    Oh definitely. I'm not saying it was a gatcha thing, just the whole thing, followed by reading a couple of other "dark forest" type books, and I was just really done with sci-fi for a bit. And who knows, it may be an accurate assessment, it was just really depressing when I've spent so long dreaming that we will finally run into The Culture, or something similar, and everything will be sunshine and happiness.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    Brody wrote: »
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    While true, I feel it pretty clearly sign posts that in like the first chapter of the first book when it declares what the initial issue is.

    Oh definitely. I'm not saying it was a gatcha thing, just the whole thing, followed by reading a couple of other "dark forest" type books, and I was just really done with sci-fi for a bit. And who knows, it may be an accurate assessment, it was just really depressing when I've spent so long dreaming that we will finally run into The Culture, or something similar, and everything will be sunshine and happiness.

    Oh, I get it. The series is a huge downer. It is filled with interesting and thought provoking ideas but it doesn't seem to get too far away from that bleakness. It is nice to have some Sci-Fi that is less that shiny happy perfect world that isn't because humans are colossal assholes who war all the time. Even the latter tends towards making us pretty awesome in a kinda horrible way.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    Yeah, I was thinking about it this morning, and the idea that galactic society isn't some big welcoming love fest isn't new territory, but most media tends to portray it as "aliens are assholes trying to kill us for no good reason, but humans are scrappy, and we are going to fight them with vastly inferior technology and win", and so the premise that no, we'll just get wrecked, is so novel, and probably accurate, and depressing.

    It reminds me of Into the Black, which is a kind of campy military sci-fi that the author found more popular than expected and it just grew way past what I feel like they were good at writing, but its very much a "small, underpowered human ship fights off aliens through shear tenacity and a willingness to do crazy shit". And at first it was a little interesting, but it got real boring real fast, especially coming after such an aggressive explanation of just how doomed we are as a race.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • BlackDragon480BlackDragon480 Bluster Kerfuffle Master of Windy ImportRegistered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    Welcome to Eastern philosophical thought, cultivate serenity following Dharmic principles...or don't, the universe will give less than a shit.

    No matter where you go...there you are.
    ~ Buckaroo Banzai
  • Mojo_JojoMojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular
    edited October 2019
    Vanguard wrote: »
    Mojo_Jojo wrote: »
    Vanguard wrote: »
    I have finished The Citadel of the Autarch, and thus, the tetralogy.

    This is the kind of Science Fantasy I'm looking for - meticulously detailed while never losing momentum, a text that assumes the reader's intelligence, and a sprawling knot of plots that is fundamentally concerned with the human experience.

    I'm definitely going to re-read this as I have questions but now that I know the general shape of the story I want to go back and look more closely at everything.

    Bogart Jacobkosh

    It's possible and probable that I missed a lot of what was happening in book 4 but I just found it didn't fit with the previous trilogy and was super weirdly paced.

    The pacing of the whole series is weird as there really isn’t any kind of central plot as there is in say, LOTR, where everything kinda points to destroying the ring. You have a multitude of plot points, none of them central but all important for rounding out the world, solving one enigma, introducing another, etc. You also have gaps - like what happens between the first and second book?

    Yeah, I just found book 4 book 5 a step further along that which I found jarring after it had reached a really natural ending
    The book has three broad sections:
    Spaceship hijinks
    Securing approval to bring the new sun
    Time travel vignettes

    I don't think the vignettes achieved a great deal as the main narrative had firmly ended by that point and they didn't seem to provide much

    After that I went in for a bit of easy reading and I'm going through the Dark Eden* sequels. Book two, Mother of Eden, has a bit of an awkward start that sort of suggests the author really wanted to write a bridging book but didn't get approval from his publisher. The original managed to straddle some interesting space with some good examples of linguistic evolution and rituals even if the ending didn't seem to fully acknowledge that the protagonist wasn't necessarily a good person. Mother of Eden doesn't quite have the same punch, and I think a lot of that comes from the author not quite having deep enough knowledge of incest, ecology, linguistics and so on. The third book, Daughter of Eden, is a very direct sequel to the second, which in some ways is a shame. I would have enjoyed another time skip a little more.

    We'll see how it goes.

    *For those that don't know. Dark Eden was a novel about a society living in a circular valley on a sunless planet that had an ecosystem built around "trees" that tap into the heat of the core. The society are the heavily inbred descendants of two stranded travellers from Earth that have settled into a very ritualised, constrained life nominally about waiting for rescue.

    Mojo_Jojo on
    Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
  • BogartBogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod
    Mojo, that's book 5, and Vanguard hasn't read that (yet).

  • Mojo_JojoMojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular
    Bogart wrote: »
    Mojo, that's book 5, and Vanguard hasn't read that (yet).

    I've edited!

    In that case all my criticism of book 4 should be updated to book 5.

    Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
  • BogartBogart Streetwise Hercules Registered User, Moderator mod
    On the topic of Wolfe, his last novel will apparently be published posthumously next June. It's a sequel to A Borrowed Man, called Interlibrary Loan.

  • BlackDragon480BlackDragon480 Bluster Kerfuffle Master of Windy ImportRegistered User regular
    With a title like that it has to be either Wolfe or Umberto Eco.

    No matter where you go...there you are.
    ~ Buckaroo Banzai
  • tapeslingertapeslinger Space Unicorn Slush Ranger Social Justice Rebel ScumRegistered User regular
    The other thing to remember is
    Gideon is written to not be terribly smart.

    This is quite honestly one of my favorite things about her

  • Jealous DevaJealous Deva Registered User regular
    edited October 2019
    Brody wrote: »
    I found the Three Body Problem series to be fairly depressing overall, not in a necessarily bad way, just the overarching premise.

    Welcome to Eastern philosophical thought, cultivate serenity following Dharmic principles...or don't, the universe will give less than a shit.

    Well, yeah, there’s a big thing element of “the universe doesn’t give a shit and nothing you care about really matters that much” in Dharmic thought, and I am sure that’s a big influence, but I also think there’s a big historical cold war influence as well as a colonial era influence and even a modern era (climate change, etc) influence on the books.

    Like I don’t want to get too much into examples, because they all sort of blur together for me and I don’t want to spoil things for people in the middle of the series, but there’s definitely a lot of reflection on the concepts of cold war game theory and collective action problems.


    Like the dark forest problem itself is an application of the idea that technological explosion and leapfrogging occurs and is dangerous (which may not be an immediately intuitive idea to western readers but is certainly familiar to anyone who has studied colonial history from the point of view of the colonized) to cold war game theory.

    Jealous Deva on
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    This is How You Lose the Time War is really good.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • chrono_travellerchrono_traveller Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    This is How You Lose the Time War is really good.

    I bought it a few weeks ago on a whim because of some good reviews, but haven't gotten around to reading it. Good to hear its good!

    The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
  • KanaKana Registered User regular
    lwt1973 wrote: »
    I finished two books of The Witcher series, The Last Wish and the Blood of Elves. I wanted to read through them so that I'm caught up when the series comes out on Netflix.

    I've been doing this too, currently most of the way through book 3. I was gonna write something longer but short version is that I'm consistently pleased and surprised by the writing. Obv this is true of the witcher 3 as well, but it's just so consistently better and more ambitious in its storytelling than you would expect from just knowing its elevator pitch.

    A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
  • SummaryJudgmentSummaryJudgment Grab the hottest iron you can find, stride in the Tower’s front door Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    This is How You Lose the Time War is really good.

    it really is

    Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    It's full of gorgeous imagery and it respects your time and it tugs out your heartstrings.

    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • FrozenzenFrozenzen Registered User regular
    Just started Joe Abercrombies new book, A Little Hatred. Just a few chapters in and already loving it.

    Abercrombies mix of dark humour and gritty world is perfect for a society about to explode due to old structures not coping with new realities.

  • A Dabble Of TheloniusA Dabble Of Thelonius It has been a doozy of a dayRegistered User regular
    Frozenzen wrote: »
    Just started Joe Abercrombies new book, A Little Hatred. Just a few chapters in and already loving it.

    Abercrombies mix of dark humour and gritty world is perfect for a society about to explode due to old structures not coping with new realities.

    Just finished it! So very good.

    vm8gvf5p7gqi.jpg
    Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
  • QuidQuid Definitely not a banana Registered User regular
    edited October 2019
    Spinning Silver is excellent.

    It's a greatly extended take on Rumplestilskin following three women. A Slavic Jewish merchant as the main character, a peasant girl, and a young duchess. All three experience very similar problems in very different ways. Despite there being a good amount of powerful magic, the bulk of conflict is handled through clever negotiation, leveraging relationships, and subversion. Violence is almost always portrayed negatively and even when it's not it isn't what actually solves the problem.

    Also listened to A Gutter Prayer and it was... Okay. The world it creates is interesting but the ending just sort of happens. It feels entirely like a setup for the next book.

    Moving on to Children of Ruin and Gideon the 9th now.

    Quid on
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    Song of Achilles was as good as everyone's been saying -- dunno why I put off reading it so long.

    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    I recently realized that I hadn't read the newest of the three Mistborn novels, I just remembered having gotten a box set some years ago, read them all, and assumed the series was done (I mean, that was a fair assessment considering the end of Hero of Ages). Anyways, reading Alloy of Law, and its been pretty fucking good. I feel like Sanderson is probably one of my favorite authors currently. Erikson will probably always hold top spot in my mind, just because of how much I loved those books in HS/College, but man Sanderson has such a pleasant style.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • skippydumptruckskippydumptruck begin again Registered User regular
    Mahnmut wrote: »
    Song of Achilles was as good as everyone's been saying -- dunno why I put off reading it so long.

    I’m going to try to pick it up soon

    I just finished _circe_ by the same author (madeline miller) and it was excellent

  • CptHamiltonCptHamilton Registered User regular
    Vanguard wrote: »
    Anyone read Senlin Ascends/Books of Babel? I am intrigued by the author but this seems like it could be great or incredibly underwhelming.

    Finally got around to reading that. It was pretty good! One of the least cliche-ridden books I've read that could be accurately described as 'steampunk'. The writing is decent and the characters are at least well-drawn if not terribly believable. The plot is a bit...neat? Things happen and it's usually fairly predictable how they're going to turn out once you get a hold of the author's thematic intentions. He fits a lot of story into a relatively short book by way of things tending to wrap themselves up rather more quickly and easily than seems likely. If someone were looking for some new fantasy to read and had covered all the typical bases then I wouldn't hesitate to recommend giving it a try.

    That said, I bought the second novel in the series but have slotted it a ways down my to-read list so it didn't exactly leave me desperate for more.

    Unrelated to Senlin Ascends, I recently read King's new The Institute, which was clearly inspired by him watching Stranger Things but was still really good. There was a period there after his van incident that King's writing really went downhill but I feel like his recent stuff is some of the best he's written.

    Currently reading The Hike by Magary and while I'm sort of enjoying it I think it's just not for me. I've always found the whole dream-logic, sliding-from-one-vignette-to-the-next style of narrative kind of boring and off-putting.

    PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    The forced scarcity of limited "copies" of e-books that libraries can lend is thoroughly aggravating.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • credeikicredeiki Registered User regular
    edited October 2019
    I am rereading Sabriel for the Nth time and it remains one of the coolest and most suspenseful (thrilling? Lots of action and forward drive and a sense that the protagonist is never safe) fantasy books.

    I suppose, if I look at the book with a critical eye, Sabriel herself does not have much of an inner life. She is an extremely competent and collected person, and you’re told yeah she had friends at boarding school and was thinking about going to university after, but that’s basically all the detail you get, and she just no question sets off into the old kingdom for the first time since childhood at the beginning of the book. She has never pressed about why she was sent into ancelstierre as a child, never was sad or uneasy about her absentee dad or being a weirdo from abroad and similarly isn’t worried about not fitting in when she returns.

    In the sequel, Lirael has all sorts of internal life, and the book is also much longer and still good but a bit less exciting. And it is true that (especially compared to Lirael heh) Sabriel is just a person with a lot of confidence and not a lot of anxiety so perhaps there’s not all that much to dwell on as she fights the dead and walks around the best old house and wears embroidered surcoats.

    I love this book!

    credeiki on
    Steam, LoL: credeiki
  • MahnmutMahnmut Registered User regular
    credeiki wrote: »
    I am rereading Sabriel for the Nth time and it remains one of the coolest and most suspenseful (thrilling? Lots of action and forward drive and a sense that the protagonist is never safe) fantasy books.

    I suppose, if I look at the book with a critical eye, Sabriel herself does not have much of an inner life. She is an extremely competent and collected person, and you’re told yeah she had friends at boarding school and was thinking about going to university after, but that’s basically all the detail you get, and she just no question sets off into the old kingdom for the first time since childhood at the beginning of the book. She has never pressed about why she was sent into ancelstierre as a child, never was sad or uneasy about her absentee dad or being a weirdo from abroad and similarly isn’t worried about not fitting in when she returns.

    In the sequel, Lirael has all sorts of internal life, and the book is also much longer and still good but a bit less exciting. And it is true that (especially compared to Lirael heh) Sabriel is just a person with a lot of confidence and not a lot of anxiety so perhaps there’s not all that much to dwell on as she fights the dead and walks around the best old house and wears embroidered surcoats.

    I love this book!

    You had me at embroidered surcoats! Tossing this onto my list.

    Steam/LoL: Jericho89
  • nexuscrawlernexuscrawler Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    The forced scarcity of limited "copies" of e-books that libraries can lend is thoroughly aggravating.

    Why? Because writers want to make money on their books?

  • PhillisherePhillishere Registered User regular
    Brody wrote: »
    The forced scarcity of limited "copies" of e-books that libraries can lend is thoroughly aggravating.

    Why? Because writers want to make money on their books?

    Because the way to ensure that happens is not via a self-evidently silly way of enforcing the past on the present.

    Figuring out a reasonable “per book” royalty for popular books for library loans makes sense and could be tracked by the library or a contracted service is possible and sensible. Creating an artificial scarcity of digital copies is an incredibly poor solution to this.

  • VanguardVanguard But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    edited October 2019
    Brody wrote: »
    The forced scarcity of limited "copies" of e-books that libraries can lend is thoroughly aggravating.

    Why? Because writers want to make money on their books?

    Because the way to ensure that happens is not via a self-evidently silly way of enforcing the past on the present.

    Figuring out a reasonable “per book” royalty for popular books for library loans makes sense and could be tracked by the library or a contracted service is possible and sensible. Creating an artificial scarcity of digital copies is an incredibly poor solution to this.

    That’s not really how this works. The library’s deals are made with platforms and those platforms negotiate with publishers/rights holders on terms of access. Creating a royalty system would likely just immediately bankrupt libraries since they would bear that cost either directly or through some agreement with the platform (tiered pricing or upon renewal ending to pay for those extra licenses). Library budgets are small and aren’t equipped to deal with the variability of demand like that.

    Scarcity of digital copies isn’t a silly concept; people have no problem understanding why Microsoft doesn’t give away copies of windows for free, for example.

    As an aside, if it’s a book I feel I need to read and it will be difficult to get a copy/finish in a loan period, I’ll just buy it. Totally understand not everyone is in a financial position to do so, but it is the alternative to not getting immediate, no-cost access.

    Vanguard on
  • PhillisherePhillishere Registered User regular
    Vanguard wrote: »
    Brody wrote: »
    The forced scarcity of limited "copies" of e-books that libraries can lend is thoroughly aggravating.

    Why? Because writers want to make money on their books?

    Because the way to ensure that happens is not via a self-evidently silly way of enforcing the past on the present.

    Figuring out a reasonable “per book” royalty for popular books for library loans makes sense and could be tracked by the library or a contracted service is possible and sensible. Creating an artificial scarcity of digital copies is an incredibly poor solution to this.

    That’s not really how this works. The library’s deals are made with platforms and those platforms negotiate with publishers/rights holders on terms of access. Creating a royalty system would likely just immediately bankrupt libraries since they would bear that cost either directly or through some agreement with the platform (tiered pricing or upon renewal ending to pay for those extra licenses). Library budgets are small and aren’t equipped to deal with the variability of demand like that.

    Scarcity of digital copies isn’t a silly concept; people have no problem understanding why Microsoft doesn’t give away copies of windows for free, for example.

    As an aside, if it’s a book I feel I need to read and it will be difficult to get a copy/finish in a loan period, I’ll just buy it. Totally understand not everyone is in a financial position to do so, but it is the alternative to not getting immediate, no-cost access.

    I was thinking of more of a model akin to commercial streaming services for libraries. Dealing with the market issues by artificially limiting access to customers is the worst solution.

  • Mojo_JojoMojo_Jojo We are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse Registered User regular
    Yes, the analogy here is that Spotify only has n licenses per song so you have to compete to listen to what you want.

    That would be terrible.

    Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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