Well it seems like he's back in his comfort zone kinda, so i expect it to be decent
― Number None, Tuesday, 15 November 2011 12:58 (twelve years ago) link
a few chapters into Sanderson's new Mistborn book, which basically reads just as you would expect; breezy, engaging, fun, with expected unexpected dark twists here and there
― sex-poodle Al Gore (DJP), Tuesday, 15 November 2011 14:51 (twelve years ago) link
Maureen McHugh's short-story collection, 'After the Apocalypse', is really good. Skip story 1 if you're over zombies, though.
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, 15 November 2011 22:28 (twelve years ago) link
I love China Mountain Zhang, I think of that book all the time!!!! I don't think I've read anything else of hers, though you could hook me into the short stories without trying too hard.
― It means why you gotta be a montague? (Laurel), Tuesday, 15 November 2011 22:34 (twelve years ago) link
Al Reynolds> (the first part of his Poisedon's Children decology is out in jan called Blue Remembered Earth)
12th or 19th or something. i have pre-ordered it
― koogs, Sunday, 8 January 2012 09:42 (twelve years ago) link
I just finished Carol Berg's Lighthouse Duet - Flesh And Spirit and Breath And Bone. I hadn't read any of her work before but these won't be the last. Well written, with several twists and turns I didn't see coming and a few you can't miss for the foreshadowing.
It started out a bit bog-standard medieval fantasy, but didn't stay there too long. And I must say that her version of a Faerie world is one of the best I've ever come across.
― EZ Snappin, Sunday, 8 January 2012 14:03 (twelve years ago) link
gone back to 'blood of elves', which i wasn't enjoying enough to bother bringing with me while i went and visited ppl for christmas new year etc. it seems to have gotten a lot better in the interim. i wondered if he'd read 'the tombs of atuan'.
― thomp, Sunday, 8 January 2012 14:12 (twelve years ago) link
short alrel review here, sounds like it'll have more of his exciting petty politics and ultra long standing family grudges :/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/06/fantasy-science-fiction-roundup-reviews
― ledge, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:50 (twelve years ago) link
blood of elves is racing towards its thrilling conclusion rn
― thomp, Monday, 9 January 2012 10:52 (twelve years ago) link
that book was weird
the stories in 'the last wish' are so entirely centric on geralt being a bad-ass that i thought that was going to be the point of the novels, too, but he's hardly in the first one; only the focal character for around fifty pages, and only briefly allowed to do any action type things, and the book ends with him bleeding out. it's way less men being manly and having sex with ladies than i expected; this is largely a good thing
ends v undramatically, with fifty pages on the adolescent girl who is more often than not the focus doing fifty pages of wizard training stuff that feels more like pages fifty to one hundred of some other novel. as far as writing adolescent girls go it's not carson mccullers but not embarrassing either, i guess
the politics/economics i am abstaining from remarking on for now
― thomp, Monday, 9 January 2012 17:29 (twelve years ago) link
i think i liked or half liked or at least read and enjoyed and then quickly forgot those books, the way he coated the traditional medieval d&d campaign setting in this thin layer of grime and despair and mood of postsoviet decline was the best thing abt it. well that and the way it was like a video game i guess
― 404 (Lamp), Thursday, 12 January 2012 07:01 (twelve years ago) link
ha i think i'd have liked them more if there were more post-sovietness about them
i thought there were more of them translated, i was actually briefly disappointed that i wasn't going to be able to go straight to the next one. otoh having looked at summaries of them all on the witcher wiki ( /: ) it doesn't look like they really continue to accentuate the elements that are interesting all that much
maybe i should just play the videogame
― thomp, Thursday, 12 January 2012 10:55 (twelve years ago) link
I have just started Hyperion by Dan Simmons for SF Book Club. I am liking it so far.
― The New Dirty Vicar, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 17:22 (twelve years ago) link
Am reading Joe Haldeman's lastest trilogy, Marsbound/Starbound/Earthbound (halfway through book 2)--not bad. As long as it doesn't have the awful, AWFUL copout-style ending of Forever Peace, I'll be happy.
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Wednesday, 18 January 2012 23:19 (twelve years ago) link
Could someone remind me what that legit paid-for ebook site for classic SF was? Thanks!
(sorry, my search-fu is weak tonight)
― Schleimpilz im Labyrinth (a passing spacecadet), Friday, 3 February 2012 18:51 (twelve years ago) link
This one? http://sfgateway.com/
― treefell, Friday, 3 February 2012 18:53 (twelve years ago) link
That one looks like I remember, yes! Thanks very much. And within 2 minutes of me asking, too.
― Schleimpilz im Labyrinth (a passing spacecadet), Friday, 3 February 2012 18:57 (twelve years ago) link
25% of way thru AlReynolds book and it feels more like gibson than his usual space opera stuff. this is probably due to language, setting and the big macguffin.
― koogs, Sunday, 5 February 2012 19:27 (twelve years ago) link
enjoyed a reynolds novella I just read, 'Troika', about cosmonauts investigating Big Dumb Object
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Monday, 6 February 2012 03:08 (twelve years ago) link
re-read Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium recently. then i stumbled across this essay which is great:
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/
― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 7 February 2012 08:19 (twelve years ago) link
i found an 80s collection of those two a while ago (i read all of them in the gollancz fantasy masterworks collection, including the two earlier ones, a somewhat longer while ago) and they've now been, in that book, in a reread pile for what. four years? oy
― junior dada (thomp), Thursday, 9 February 2012 02:01 (twelve years ago) link
those gollancz masterworks have included 'the female man' and 'dhalgren' this year, incidentally. which is awesome. to a very small group of people, including me.
― junior dada (thomp), Thursday, 9 February 2012 02:02 (twelve years ago) link
Ted Chiang? Ted Chiang!
OMG. Ted. Chiang.
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/
― s.clover, Wednesday, 29 February 2012 01:59 (twelve years ago) link
Such a good story!
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Wednesday, 29 February 2012 02:24 (twelve years ago) link
I wish he was more prolific, but at least when he does put something out, it kicks 17 varieties of arse.
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Wednesday, 29 February 2012 02:25 (twelve years ago) link
finally wrapped up "urth of the new sun"
would anyone like to do a "shadow and claw" reading club?
― the late great, Wednesday, 29 February 2012 20:13 (twelve years ago) link
wow, thanks s.clover for that story. really great, possibly gonna ruin my day since i stayed up far later than i should reading it. i am now on my way to look for more ted chiang stuff !
― Jibe, Thursday, 1 March 2012 17:32 (twelve years ago) link
The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate is the one I know from a couple of anthologies. Only awards nominee I've ever heard of to turn down nomination, here's his bio in brief from goodreads:Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American speculative fiction writer. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York and graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).Although not a prolific author, having published only eleven short stories as of 2009, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990), the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998), a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002), a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007), and a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009).Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted. [1]Chiang's first eight stories are collected in Stories of Your Life, and Others (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X; 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8). His novelette The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
― dow, Thursday, 1 March 2012 19:28 (twelve years ago) link
I have just finished "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Attwood, an enjoyable piece of apocalyptic-dystopian SF.
― The New Dirty Vicar, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 17:32 (twelve years ago) link
Not SF! /attwood
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:12 (twelve years ago) link
"Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that"
― ledge, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:13 (twelve years ago) link
see also Jeanette Winterson, who wrote a book about androids and clones and other planets set in the far future, but it wasn't sci-fi, you see, it was a FABLE
― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:52 (twelve years ago) link
You gonna read the sequel?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Flood
― an elk hunt (Ówen P.), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:01 (twelve years ago) link
o canada
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 19:02 (twelve years ago) link
so much to answer for
tbf, we just write the stuff, you're the ones that buy it
― an elk hunt (Ówen P.), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 19:25 (twelve years ago) link
morelike year of the butt amirite???
currently reading kameron hurley's 'god's war'/'infidel' which are p good but not great, i guess. there arent very many ideas but lots of exciting things happen
― peebutt fartbottom (Lamp), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 20:07 (twelve years ago) link
atwood is OK with the term speculative fiction. seems like a silly distinction to me.
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Thursday, 8 March 2012 04:18 (twelve years ago) link
finished this yesterday
http://farm1.staticflickr.com/130/317774979_a9a7abd30f_z.jpg?zz=1
― flopson, Thursday, 8 March 2012 15:04 (twelve years ago) link
What did you make of it? I thought it a bit... arbitrary. I suppose the second section could be an attempt to portray a form of life completely alien to ourselves, but it doesn't touch Lem in that regard.
― ledge, Thursday, 8 March 2012 15:08 (twelve years ago) link
thought it was a really fun read, i like how the second third takes so long to get back to electron/positron pump from the alien marital drama stuff but when it does it's so perfect
― flopson, Thursday, 8 March 2012 15:20 (twelve years ago) link
i read that when i was ... immediately preadolescent? it seemed very peculiar
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Thursday, 8 March 2012 15:48 (twelve years ago) link
what wouldn't
― dow, Friday, 9 March 2012 20:07 (twelve years ago) link
found used a copy of m. john harrison's 'the pastel city' and read it in the break between papers. better than i remember! under less pressure to be Importantly About The Genre to me than it was when i was 17
had one or two moments that bugged me like when grrm called something 'stygian', there was something 'cochineal' and i thought what do they make food dye out of insect-bugs in fantasyland
turns out the poems tegeus-Cromis writes are a riff on pound's cathay; this was unexpected
― thomp, Monday, 19 March 2012 23:14 (twelve years ago) link
Glad you've finally got that sorted
― Radio Boradman (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 20 March 2012 00:00 (twelve years ago) link
Yes. Probably.
I liked Oryx and Crake while I was reading it, but my SF book club pals mostly did not - so now I am wondering if it is actually not that great.
― The New Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, 21 March 2012 17:18 (twelve years ago) link
was a semi-decent slashdot sci-fi reading thread recently...
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/03/07/0056225/ask-slashdot-good-forgotten-fantasy-science-fiction-novels
― koogs, Wednesday, 21 March 2012 17:26 (twelve years ago) link
what do ppl think of theodore sturgeon
― thomp, Friday, 23 March 2012 16:47 (twelve years ago) link
he had the worst story in dangerous visions; otherwise i have not read him
― the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of (abanana), Saturday, 24 March 2012 02:42 (twelve years ago) link
I love almost everything I've read by him. (Godbody was an exception.)
― any major prude will tell you (WmC), Saturday, 24 March 2012 02:57 (twelve years ago) link