i really really want to write a sci-fi novel, i hope i can find the time in my life sometime in the next couple years.
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, November 19, 2010 5:18 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
I've tried it is hard.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 19 November 2010 18:43 (thirteen years ago) link
any tips
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, 19 November 2010 18:49 (thirteen years ago) link
Er... Know more about science than I do.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 19 November 2010 18:50 (thirteen years ago) link
As a Philip K Dick fan I don't necessarily mind if my SF has some wibbling about psychics, supernatural powers and the living dead instead of any science, but I picked up "The Siege of Eternity" by Frederick Pohl and was disgusted to discover (possible spoilers but I think everything I mention becomes apparent fairly early on):
1. the plot devolved into some arsewater about space aliens reviving the souls of everyone who'd ever lived2. it was the middle of a series with no indication on the outside of the book, and the last page was pretty much just an advert for the next book, which by that point I had no desire to read3. also, a bunch of gratuitous hokey sex scenes - maybe I'm a prude but with some SF authors a female protagonist is such a red flag - "women only exist to be sexy, and the only notable feature of this flimsy caricature is that she is an intergalactic beacon of sexiness, start dreading the embarrassing sex scenes now"
so, Frederick Pohl is on my bad list, unless someone wishes to tell me otherwise (maybe his older work is better?)
― moiré eel (a passing spacecadet), Friday, 19 November 2010 18:52 (thirteen years ago) link
I'm sorry, you said there were embarrassing sex scenes...?
― ali-baba-boob-job-bomb.jpg (DJP), Friday, 19 November 2010 18:52 (thirteen years ago) link
Gateway by Pohl is fantastic. Never read any of the sequels though. Don't think there were any sex scenes, embarrassing or otherwise.
― Number None, Friday, 19 November 2010 19:14 (thirteen years ago) link
Pohl turned into a bit of a hack as the years have worn on but some of 70s/early 80s work is canonical imho - especially Jem, and the Space Merchants and Merchants' War (great satire of "capitalism in space")
― you can sub out "bipartisan solutions" for "some of my dick" (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:16 (thirteen years ago) link
and the Gateway books are uniformly solid
― you can sub out "bipartisan solutions" for "some of my dick" (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:17 (thirteen years ago) link
Gateways are dope
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:22 (thirteen years ago) link
been reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons...shit is bananas
― glengarry glenn danzig (latebloomer), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:31 (thirteen years ago) link
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, November 19, 2010 1:49 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark
just don't forget that There Ain't No Stealth In Space:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth
that whole site's a fun read
― Onigaga (Princess TamTam), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:32 (thirteen years ago) link
dan simmons is bananas overall and pretty inconsistent afaict. read and enjoyed 'the terror', tried to read 'carrion comfort' and wanted to burn the book after 40 pages.
― omar little, Friday, 19 November 2010 19:34 (thirteen years ago) link
Isn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer also a really creepy concept, when you consider how, throughout literary history, the vampire was an anti-semitic caricature? And then all of a sudden you have an hour on TV a week delighting in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil killing racist caricatures of Jews?
― Dom Passantino, Tuesday, 3 June 2008 13:21 (2 years ago)
― nakhchivan, Friday, 19 November 2010 19:37 (thirteen years ago) link
SMG is a jew
― Onigaga (Princess TamTam), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:38 (thirteen years ago) link
guessing he knew that
― nakhchivan, Friday, 19 November 2010 19:40 (thirteen years ago) link
The "bazooka" part is accurate, but not the "hiding" part. If the spacecraft are torchships, their thrust power is several terawatts. This means the exhaust is so intense that it could be detected from Alpha Centauri. By a passive sensor.
SNAAAAAAAAAAP
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, 19 November 2010 19:48 (thirteen years ago) link
Ha I have just this moment read a Reynolds short story where stealth by way of directional radiation plays a part.
― xtc ep, etc (xp) (ledge), Saturday, 20 November 2010 00:12 (thirteen years ago) link
lol @ dom tryna use fancy pants left wing cult-crit theories to rag on nerds. 'cuz the sopranos is totes pc, right?
― ed chilliband (max arrrrrgh), Saturday, 20 November 2010 01:50 (thirteen years ago) link
Dan Simmons is indeed bananas. I like him.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Saturday, 20 November 2010 01:57 (thirteen years ago) link
The first and second Hyperion books are the best things of his I've read by some distance.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Saturday, 20 November 2010 01:59 (thirteen years ago) link
― glengarry glenn danzig (latebloomer)
They're a blast, just stop after The Fall of Hyperion. I've successfully convinced myself the two Endymion books don't exist but it took a decade.
I really liked The Terror and much of the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at). I've had Drood for a while but haven't gone back to it after it failed to grab me. As Omar said, incredibly inconsistant writer but chockfull of ideas.
― EZ Snappin, Saturday, 20 November 2010 02:04 (thirteen years ago) link
the Ilium/Olympos pair (though some of the racial/ethnic stuff is a huge mess I had to SMH at)
Yeah, there's some right weird stuff about Israel iirc. Still, lots of dazzling things going on in those books. I loved the Proust-loving robot probe thing.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Saturday, 20 November 2010 13:00 (thirteen years ago) link
John Crowley's "Great Work of Time" blew my head up this week
― Raage Saga (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 20 November 2010 13:03 (thirteen years ago) link
Just been to Tate Britain, saw a piece by Gerard Byrne with Dutch amateur actors re-enacting a 1963 Playboy interview with the great and the good of scifi - Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlen, Pohl, Sturgeon, etc, about the state of the world in 1984 and beyond. Very optimistic, albeit lightheartedly, sometimes even satirically, about automation and leisure, longevity, medicine and recreational narcotics, and especially the space race - space travel cheaper than air travel; the moon by the 70s and Mars and Venus by the 80s. Aside from video calls and conferencing, nothing about the information revolution. Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years.
― xtc ep, etc (xp) (ledge), Sunday, 21 November 2010 16:57 (thirteen years ago) link
lasers
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Sunday, 21 November 2010 17:04 (thirteen years ago) link
cool i can't hardly wait!
― xtc ep, etc (xp) (ledge), Sunday, 21 November 2010 17:06 (thirteen years ago) link
they are coming very soon iirc!
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Sunday, 21 November 2010 17:06 (thirteen years ago) link
Makes you wonder what unforeseen transformations await us in the next 50 years
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_jOTDyAXEFv8/SwrkgAOVMRI/AAAAAAAAABo/4B4mXqVaRzE/s1600/waterworld-spotlight.jpg
― a ticker tape of "must not fuck up" (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 21 November 2010 17:39 (thirteen years ago) link
Oh, that is a lovely, lovely story. So good!
― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Sunday, 21 November 2010 22:45 (thirteen years ago) link
Anyone read "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi? Read some froth about it being the SF debut of the year. Amazon reviews look intriguing but make it sound kind of daunting.
― moiré eel (a passing spacecadet), Friday, 26 November 2010 13:31 (thirteen years ago) link
That sounds right up my street.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 26 November 2010 14:01 (thirteen years ago) link
whenever I hear the word quantum, i reach for my revolver
― e.g. delegates at a set age (ledge), Friday, 26 November 2010 14:01 (thirteen years ago) link
...and end unwittingly causing a typhoon in South East Asia.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 26 November 2010 14:03 (thirteen years ago) link
weird, i was looking at the reviews of Quantam Thief earlier as well! anyone?
― zappi, Friday, 26 November 2010 15:27 (thirteen years ago) link
I've bought a copy, and it seems genuinely interesting but I've only read one chapter so far.
― treefell, Friday, 26 November 2010 15:29 (thirteen years ago) link
I've been reading some Adam Roberts, he's pretty good. Not at all hard. Some real oddball concepts and fairly literary.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 26 November 2010 16:15 (thirteen years ago) link
Also often very funny. He moonlights writing Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter spoofs, presumably for ££.
― A brownish area with points (chap), Friday, 26 November 2010 16:17 (thirteen years ago) link
reading the new culture, am pretty into it
― shirley summistake (s1ocki), Friday, 26 November 2010 20:39 (thirteen years ago) link
The Quantum Thief is pretty cool. It doesn't take any prisoners though. Rajaniemi is a String Theorist by trade; the weird, cutting-edge science stuff is laid on pretty thick and with no quarter given to those who might have no idea as to what on earth he might be talking about...
― Stone Monkey, Friday, 26 November 2010 21:45 (thirteen years ago) link
just finished the quantum thief - it was great. a lot left unexplained but it had enough of a 'human' (or post-human even) story underpinning the crazy stuff to keep me reading. the stuff abt the exomemory + 'gevulot' was particularly cool
― whitney from mtv's the city (tpp), Thursday, 13 January 2011 19:20 (thirteen years ago) link
i'm currently reading 'stories of your life and others' by ted chiang....wow
― whitney from mtv's the city (tpp), Thursday, 13 January 2011 19:25 (thirteen years ago) link
so are there any good SF novels of the endgame of climate change? I could google, but that's no fun.
― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 26 July 2012 18:43 (eleven years ago) link
the bacigalupi(?) thing, The Wind-up Girl touches on this. it's not about that, but is set in a post climate change, post GM crop disaster world. (i didn't like it tbh)
(wow, i spelt bacigalupi right!)
― koogs, Thursday, 26 July 2012 19:33 (eleven years ago) link
John Brunner "The Sheep Look Up"
― Dunn O)))))))) (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:37 (eleven years ago) link
I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example), but that's the only one springing to mind that uses it as the central focus
― Dunn O)))))))) (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:38 (eleven years ago) link
baccy-go-loopy is more about the exhaustion of resources than climate change maybe? but i did read ship-breaker first. i got the feeling that that was one of the coming areas in the genre, that and the neurological basis of consciousness
― thomp, Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:43 (eleven years ago) link
I can think of a bunch of books that touch on it or use it as background (Robinson's Mars Trilogy, for example
― Like Monk Never Happened (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:44 (eleven years ago) link
hm forgot Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" uses some serious climate change/weather disruptions as its backdrop. it's not very good though.
haven't read KSR's latest but I wouldn't be surprised
― Dunn O)))))))) (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:44 (eleven years ago) link
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Late_the_Sweet_Birds_Sang
― thomp, Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:46 (eleven years ago) link
Early Ballard disaster novels? The Drowned World, The Burning World...I haven't read The Crystal World so I can't speak to that one.
― Neil Jung (WmC), Thursday, 26 July 2012 21:47 (eleven years ago) link