(just a note: Sarah Gailey uses they pronouns and I'm pretty sure they have at least four books, but it's spread between between novels and novellas? American Hippo is the collected pair of novellas iirc but there's also Fisher of Bones which I think was out through Fireside. Magic for Liars is I think classed as a debut because it was their first full length novel sale? Publishing is wild like that)
I had just noticed that pronoun thing over this weekend when looking at their lasagna experiment but forgot I had a post with the wrong ones in them.
Also, if we are mentioning their works I gotta plug STET which is a really short piece but very good. Really strongly emotional but with some of the best bits of science fiction in there as well. The googles should turn up publicly posted copies of it.
(just a note: Sarah Gailey uses they pronouns and I'm pretty sure they have at least four books, but it's spread between between novels and novellas? American Hippo is the collected pair of novellas iirc but there's also Fisher of Bones which I think was out through Fireside. Magic for Liars is I think classed as a debut because it was their first full length novel sale? Publishing is wild like that)
I learned that upon reaching the Acknowledgements on Magic for Liars and have now edited my post, though oddly the publisher's 'about the author' blurb at the end uses she/her
Having now finished the novel I maintain my earlier position. They're a talented writer but need to work some rough edges off their character-writing. Would still recommend it to anyone looking for a less action-oriented take on urban fantasy.
I'm on to Dancer's Lament by Esselmont in audio-book form and Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher in written now. Not far enough in the latter to have formed much of an opinion but Esselmont's writing, while fun enough, is lacking something in the inevitable comparison to Erickson. Maybe it's just the younger characters. Everyone in the Malazan Books of the Fallen seemed to have a century's worth of world-weariness at minimum.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
(just a note: Sarah Gailey uses they pronouns and I'm pretty sure they have at least four books, but it's spread between between novels and novellas? American Hippo is the collected pair of novellas iirc but there's also Fisher of Bones which I think was out through Fireside. Magic for Liars is I think classed as a debut because it was their first full length novel sale? Publishing is wild like that)
I learned that upon reaching the Acknowledgements on Magic for Liars and have now edited my post, though oddly the publisher's 'about the author' blurb at the end uses she/her
Having now finished the novel I maintain my earlier position. They're a talented writer but need to work some rough edges off their character-writing. Would still recommend it to anyone looking for a less action-oriented take on urban fantasy.
I'm on to Dancer's Lament by Esselmont in audio-book form and Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher in written now. Not far enough in the latter to have formed much of an opinion but Esselmont's writing, while fun enough, is lacking something in the inevitable comparison to Erickson. Maybe it's just the younger characters. Everyone in the Malazan Books of the Fallen seemed to have a century's worth of world-weariness at minimum.
Nah, I've found Esselmonts forays into the Malazan universe to all be a little less weighty or something. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe they feel less grounded in the history of the world, which is something that I feel Erikson excels at.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Yeah lots of copy folks don't always get the memo on pronoun corrections, it's actually very stressful.
Just putting it out there as a person who also uses those pronouns, because it's very irritating when someone decides for themselves what your pronouns are!
In any case, their books are great and I'm extremely looking forward to the next project they've got in the pipeline
Interference is ok IMO. Nowhere near as good as Semiosis. It feels like it could have used some better editing since things definitely weren't always clear and a lot of ideas were brought up but hardly touched on.
Also, several of the scientists seemed spectacularly shitty at their jobs, especially the anthropologist.
So I don't actually remember where I got linked to this twitter thread, but I fucking loved these books as a kid. And an article in the link (and the author himself talking about it) makes me wonder if the seeds for my current political outlook were actually planted earlier than I thought.
He came to my elementary school and signed a couple of his books for me. His Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher were some of my favorite books at that time.
Finished Spin and liked it a lot. It spent a bit more on personal relationships for my own liking but they were authentic and the ideas explored were really interesting.
(just a note: Sarah Gailey uses they pronouns and I'm pretty sure they have at least four books, but it's spread between between novels and novellas? American Hippo is the collected pair of novellas iirc but there's also Fisher of Bones which I think was out through Fireside. Magic for Liars is I think classed as a debut because it was their first full length novel sale? Publishing is wild like that)
I learned that upon reaching the Acknowledgements on Magic for Liars and have now edited my post, though oddly the publisher's 'about the author' blurb at the end uses she/her
Having now finished the novel I maintain my earlier position. They're a talented writer but need to work some rough edges off their character-writing. Would still recommend it to anyone looking for a less action-oriented take on urban fantasy.
I'm on to Dancer's Lament by Esselmont in audio-book form and Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher in written now. Not far enough in the latter to have formed much of an opinion but Esselmont's writing, while fun enough, is lacking something in the inevitable comparison to Erickson. Maybe it's just the younger characters. Everyone in the Malazan Books of the Fallen seemed to have a century's worth of world-weariness at minimum.
Nah, I've found Esselmonts forays into the Malazan universe to all be a little less weighty or something. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe they feel less grounded in the history of the world, which is something that I feel Erikson excels at.
I read his first two and it did feel like they were minor compared to the main books. Mostly because the subjects really weren't that important or interesting to the main story
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
(just a note: Sarah Gailey uses they pronouns and I'm pretty sure they have at least four books, but it's spread between between novels and novellas? American Hippo is the collected pair of novellas iirc but there's also Fisher of Bones which I think was out through Fireside. Magic for Liars is I think classed as a debut because it was their first full length novel sale? Publishing is wild like that)
I learned that upon reaching the Acknowledgements on Magic for Liars and have now edited my post, though oddly the publisher's 'about the author' blurb at the end uses she/her
Having now finished the novel I maintain my earlier position. They're a talented writer but need to work some rough edges off their character-writing. Would still recommend it to anyone looking for a less action-oriented take on urban fantasy.
I'm on to Dancer's Lament by Esselmont in audio-book form and Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher in written now. Not far enough in the latter to have formed much of an opinion but Esselmont's writing, while fun enough, is lacking something in the inevitable comparison to Erickson. Maybe it's just the younger characters. Everyone in the Malazan Books of the Fallen seemed to have a century's worth of world-weariness at minimum.
Nah, I've found Esselmonts forays into the Malazan universe to all be a little less weighty or something. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe they feel less grounded in the history of the world, which is something that I feel Erikson excels at.
I read his first two and it did feel like they were minor compared to the main books. Mostly because the subjects really weren't that important or interesting to the main story
Idk, I may go back and try reading it, but I can barely remember anything from the Esslemont books, other than a kind of haze of nothing quite fitting in. Night of Knives was easy enough, its very clear where it is in the series, Crimson Guard was iirc clear enough, but the next couple of novels delve into completely new areas, and although I was excited to see Jacku and Assail, I felt like the books didn't penetrate well, stuff felt very much so less clear.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Adrift on the Sea of Rains, by Ian Sales, the first part of the pleasingly slim Apollo quartet of various alternate history stuff about the space program. In this one WWIII has stranded a group of astronauts on a moonbase and they're trying to use an old Nazi invention to shift to a different reality and find an un-nuked Earth. Very good, and lovely jackets for the set.
So after Three-Body Problem and Ball Lightning, I decided to take a bit of a detour and doing some palate cleaning. I grabbed The Handmaid's Tale from Prime Reading (Hey, free book!) and I can say it was really enjoyable. It's a lot of piecing together in the beginning, but by the last few chapters it goes really fast (in a good way!) I'm kinda intrigued by the newly released sequel, and maybe I'll consider that for later.
Right now I started The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. I needed a bit of different writing to change gears a bit, and this delivers. Clear, concise, and presenting some really interesting points. I'm just in the early chapters but it's greatly enjoyable.
I started Sabriel after seeing @credeiki talk about it and since it was free through Prime. I appreciate how relatively fast it starts off. I'm also thankful for my Kindle's x-ray feature because I would not have remembered what each bell does.
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I'm pretty sure I read it once as a teenager, but I went back and read it again a couple of years ago, and it held up surprisingly well. Bonus points for not having any of that love triangle bullshit.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, the second in Ian Sales’s Apollo Quartet. These are terrific alt-history SF novellas and well worth picking up. This one has a great hard SF mystery at its core about an exo-planet base and why it vanishes just as light from the moment of its foundation reaches Earth.
And have just now finished the third, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above. Again, excellent, subtle stuff, about the female could have/should have been astronauts of the Mercury 13.
All That Outer Space Allows is the last in the series, and was possibly the best. It takes a member of the Astronaut Wives Club and makes her a science fiction writer, and the novella is about the abnegation of her ambitions and dreams in the service of her husband's. Heartbreaking stuff that is as well-researched and convincing in its detail as the others.
Next up is The Crew, by Joseph Kessel, about WWI fighter pilots.
Some show/book differences already off the bat that are interesting:
I'm glad they went with blue crystal gross death than full Cronenberg mass of flesh. I wish they had done the Epstein Drive earlier in the show because it does a really good job of setting the tone for the books.
Some show/book differences already off the bat that are interesting:
I'm glad they went with blue crystal gross death than full Cronenberg mass of flesh. I wish they had done the Epstein Drive earlier in the show because it does a really good job of setting the tone for the books.
When they announced a show I was really curious how they were going to depict that stuff from the book.
The structures made of parts of human bodies and stuff were difficult to even imagine. I couldn't see how they'd go about making it look comprehensible on-screen. Avoiding it with glowy crystals and stuff was fairly clever, though it does eliminate a lot of the horror. Holden & Co's attitudes of abject terror at the prospect of it being aboard their ship or getting out somewhere else makes more sense when it's obviously tearing humans apart and turning them into grotesque machinery than when it's basically glowy cancer.
Since this is the book thread I just wanted to share that I just learned the other day from a Facebook group I'm in that there's a diner in Union, CT called "Traveler Restaurant" that I visited yesterday. Food & Books - food was yummy, and each customer can pick 3 books to take for free. They also had a bookstore downstairs.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I finished off Summerland. It's a decent twisty pre world war 2 spy novel... but with ghosts.
It's by Hannu Rajaniemi so thankfully I didn't actually look at the author before starting because I absolutely hated the hyper jargon nonsense of quantum thief. There's still plenty of jargon in this one but it feels mostly consistent and coherent and less like words plucked at random to escape the author writing themselves into a corner.
It has an uneasy relationship with some of the philosophical implications of the setting and subject but the author bends over backwards to avoid exploring them
It exists in an odd place but one that would probably work for a lot of this thread.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
Yeah I love occult spies and also like the Quantum books a lot, so I guess I'll check that out.
Doubt it will unseat the best book about occult spies ever though, which is of course 'Declare' by Tim Powers
I wrapped up The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three-Body Problem. It took a while to gets wheels spinning, but once it has some momentum it’s a... mostly fun read. Propulsive at least. Draws some very dark conclusions, but I think it outshines the first book on the strength of its main character.
I didn’t notice in reading the first book that it has a bit of that old sci-fi problem - fascinating ideas being explored through barely human stand-ins. Dark Forest mostly frames it’s narrative through a guy who’s relatable and kind of a piece of shit to start out, and I think it made for a better book. It’s a little looser about it’s connections to big sci-fi issues, but it spends more time thinking about how humanity might respond to completely alien social pressures, and has a lot of fun with proposing methods to solve apparently unsolvable problems. Pacing can be all over the place, but Liu is good about leaving mysterious hooks to keep you going.
Also, Da Shi is a real exception to the largely interchangeable set of side characters. He’s a bit of an archetype, but he feels real, and is immediately identifiable by his dialogue and actions. Not sure I’m diving in on the third just yet, but hopefully it can pull the ideas and the characters together and really shine.
Edit: There’s also one fantastically horrifying scene late in the book that will stick with me. Real Hitchcock, bomb under the table, oh god when is this going to go off tension that pays off with some magnificent terror.
Ok book thread, I need some recommendations. My sister wants some mystery novels for christmas and I'm wondering if anyone has some good suggestions. She likes sci-fi/fantasy/whatever stuff too so some genre-crossing works are AOK too.
Old school british mystery novel recommendations are not at all unwelcome but I'm also thinking probably something not quite in that style is what she'd prefer.
Children of Ruin is pretty good but it kind of meanders. Feels like the author stretched himself a bit thin with all the different perspectives.
There's some amazingly terrifying body horror halfway through. The epilogue is a beautiful ending too.
I finished Children of Ruin as well. I enjoyed the body horror very much and I enjoyed a lot of the new characters but it was a bit of a dud all in all.
I did not enjoy the sequel to Semiosis very much. It was very chaotic and all over the place.
Finished FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven. Loved the hell out of it.
Set in an alternate 2019 at FantasticLand fun park, a Disney competitor built in Daytona. A record breaking hurricane strands the emergency park crew the in the park for a month. Things immediately go to hell in a branded souvenir tote.
Written as a collection of interviews, the story grows, warps and shifts to reveal information as we progress. The steady drip of info, corrections, assumptions and povs is fantastically done.
Suspension of disbelief is required to buy in for how quickly things happen but it's well worth it.
Ok book thread, I need some recommendations. My sister wants some mystery novels for christmas and I'm wondering if anyone has some good suggestions. She likes sci-fi/fantasy/whatever stuff too so some genre-crossing works are AOK too.
Old school british mystery novel recommendations are not at all unwelcome but I'm also thinking probably something not quite in that style is what she'd prefer.
The City & The City. She'll spend the entire novel wondering if its sci-fi or not. I loved it.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Ok book thread, I need some recommendations. My sister wants some mystery novels for christmas and I'm wondering if anyone has some good suggestions. She likes sci-fi/fantasy/whatever stuff too so some genre-crossing works are AOK too.
Old school british mystery novel recommendations are not at all unwelcome but I'm also thinking probably something not quite in that style is what she'd prefer.
They description fits Summerland quite well
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
Ok book thread, I need some recommendations. My sister wants some mystery novels for christmas and I'm wondering if anyone has some good suggestions. She likes sci-fi/fantasy/whatever stuff too so some genre-crossing works are AOK too.
Old school british mystery novel recommendations are not at all unwelcome but I'm also thinking probably something not quite in that style is what she'd prefer.
Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells: Sherlock Holmes caper crossed with high-fantasy shenanigans?
Children of Ruin is pretty good but it kind of meanders. Feels like the author stretched himself a bit thin with all the different perspectives.
There's some amazingly terrifying body horror halfway through. The epilogue is a beautiful ending too.
I finished Children of Ruin as well. I enjoyed the body horror very much and I enjoyed a lot of the new characters but it was a bit of a dud all in all.
I did not enjoy the sequel to Semiosis very much. It was very chaotic and all over the place.
I wish both books had been just standalone.
It definitely feels like both authors have really good ideas but lost focus. Semiosis especially.
I thought the DMV woman would be central to the story. It was a great setup for a technology superior morally inferior group clashing with a technologically inferior but morally superior group but... nope. It was just a bunch of different concepts thrown at the wall surrounding basically the same story as last time. They also brought along the world's shittiest anthropologist which keeps irking me for some reason.
Quid on
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
Hm, apparently the Danish library system only has Rajaniemi's Summerland in Russian
I mean, I do still have several dictionaries and grammars lying around
Been a long ass time since those lessons though and I was never at 'reading novels' level anyway
Just finished reading This is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone. Its been sitting on my shelf for awhile, since I got it on a lark when I was ordering something else from amazon.
Its really a good, quick sci-fi romance novel. Not sure what I expected when I got it, but was entertaining and emotional, so I'd recommend it if thats what you're looking for. I'm not sure if its gonna stick with me for a long time, but it was a fun read to give me a break from the holiday weekend.
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
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I had just noticed that pronoun thing over this weekend when looking at their lasagna experiment but forgot I had a post with the wrong ones in them.
Also, if we are mentioning their works I gotta plug STET which is a really short piece but very good. Really strongly emotional but with some of the best bits of science fiction in there as well. The googles should turn up publicly posted copies of it.
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I learned that upon reaching the Acknowledgements on Magic for Liars and have now edited my post, though oddly the publisher's 'about the author' blurb at the end uses she/her
Having now finished the novel I maintain my earlier position. They're a talented writer but need to work some rough edges off their character-writing. Would still recommend it to anyone looking for a less action-oriented take on urban fantasy.
I'm on to Dancer's Lament by Esselmont in audio-book form and Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher in written now. Not far enough in the latter to have formed much of an opinion but Esselmont's writing, while fun enough, is lacking something in the inevitable comparison to Erickson. Maybe it's just the younger characters. Everyone in the Malazan Books of the Fallen seemed to have a century's worth of world-weariness at minimum.
Nah, I've found Esselmonts forays into the Malazan universe to all be a little less weighty or something. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Maybe they feel less grounded in the history of the world, which is something that I feel Erikson excels at.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Just putting it out there as a person who also uses those pronouns, because it's very irritating when someone decides for themselves what your pronouns are!
In any case, their books are great and I'm extremely looking forward to the next project they've got in the pipeline
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
Also, several of the scientists seemed spectacularly shitty at their jobs, especially the anthropologist.
I read his first two and it did feel like they were minor compared to the main books. Mostly because the subjects really weren't that important or interesting to the main story
Idk, I may go back and try reading it, but I can barely remember anything from the Esslemont books, other than a kind of haze of nothing quite fitting in. Night of Knives was easy enough, its very clear where it is in the series, Crimson Guard was iirc clear enough, but the next couple of novels delve into completely new areas, and although I was excited to see Jacku and Assail, I felt like the books didn't penetrate well, stuff felt very much so less clear.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Right now I started The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. I needed a bit of different writing to change gears a bit, and this delivers. Clear, concise, and presenting some really interesting points. I'm just in the early chapters but it's greatly enjoyable.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Next up is The Crew, by Joseph Kessel, about WWI fighter pilots.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
It's okay so far but the jargon is laid on a bit too thick and it's all a bit obvious that most of it means nothing at all.
Some show/book differences already off the bat that are interesting:
When they announced a show I was really curious how they were going to depict that stuff from the book.
It's by Hannu Rajaniemi so thankfully I didn't actually look at the author before starting because I absolutely hated the hyper jargon nonsense of quantum thief. There's still plenty of jargon in this one but it feels mostly consistent and coherent and less like words plucked at random to escape the author writing themselves into a corner.
It has an uneasy relationship with some of the philosophical implications of the setting and subject but the author bends over backwards to avoid exploring them
It exists in an odd place but one that would probably work for a lot of this thread.
Doubt it will unseat the best book about occult spies ever though, which is of course 'Declare' by Tim Powers
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I didn’t notice in reading the first book that it has a bit of that old sci-fi problem - fascinating ideas being explored through barely human stand-ins. Dark Forest mostly frames it’s narrative through a guy who’s relatable and kind of a piece of shit to start out, and I think it made for a better book. It’s a little looser about it’s connections to big sci-fi issues, but it spends more time thinking about how humanity might respond to completely alien social pressures, and has a lot of fun with proposing methods to solve apparently unsolvable problems. Pacing can be all over the place, but Liu is good about leaving mysterious hooks to keep you going.
Also, Da Shi is a real exception to the largely interchangeable set of side characters. He’s a bit of an archetype, but he feels real, and is immediately identifiable by his dialogue and actions. Not sure I’m diving in on the third just yet, but hopefully it can pull the ideas and the characters together and really shine.
Edit: There’s also one fantastically horrifying scene late in the book that will stick with me. Real Hitchcock, bomb under the table, oh god when is this going to go off tension that pays off with some magnificent terror.
Old school british mystery novel recommendations are not at all unwelcome but I'm also thinking probably something not quite in that style is what she'd prefer.
I did not enjoy the sequel to Semiosis very much. It was very chaotic and all over the place.
I wish both books had been just standalone.
Set in an alternate 2019 at FantasticLand fun park, a Disney competitor built in Daytona. A record breaking hurricane strands the emergency park crew the in the park for a month. Things immediately go to hell in a branded souvenir tote.
Written as a collection of interviews, the story grows, warps and shifts to reveal information as we progress. The steady drip of info, corrections, assumptions and povs is fantastically done.
Suspension of disbelief is required to buy in for how quickly things happen but it's well worth it.
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The City & The City. She'll spend the entire novel wondering if its sci-fi or not. I loved it.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
They description fits Summerland quite well
Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells: Sherlock Holmes caper crossed with high-fantasy shenanigans?
It definitely feels like both authors have really good ideas but lost focus. Semiosis especially.
I mean, I do still have several dictionaries and grammars lying around
Been a long ass time since those lessons though and I was never at 'reading novels' level anyway
Its really a good, quick sci-fi romance novel. Not sure what I expected when I got it, but was entertaining and emotional, so I'd recommend it if thats what you're looking for. I'm not sure if its gonna stick with me for a long time, but it was a fun read to give me a break from the holiday weekend.