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MARSDUDE
Shitposter

Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2005 8:17 pm
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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 5:54 pm 
 

Reading Clive Barker's new one, 'The Scarlet Gospels'. It's excellent so far. More straightforward (Clive described it as 'a short, sharp kick to the gut'), less wordy, very horrific and actually surprisingly funny.

This passage in particular had me laughing last night:

Spoiler: show
The tribe advanced. As they did, another female demon emerged from within the circle. She was old, her breasts hanging completely flat against her body, her dreadlocks long enough to graze the ground.

"Harry D'Amour," said the elderly demon woman. "The witness."

"What?" Harry asked. "Who told you that?"

"The Black Inside," said a male demon, standing toward the back of the company, his voice as clear and confident as the others in the tribe. The creature continued speaking: "He coming before. He having blind woman. He said you did coming after. To witnessing."

"Well, he's wrong," Harry said.

"Two hundred and one and thirty demons you have put down," remarked yet another member of the tribe, a younger creature who for no apparent reason boasted a noteworthy erection, which he casually toyed with as he spoke. "Slaughterer of the demonation, Harry D'Amour."

"I don't keep track of those things," Harry said. "But if you're right, and you keep playing with your dick like that, very soon it'll be two hundred thirty-two."
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TheMizwaOfMuzzyTah
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Joined: Tue Feb 09, 2010 2:18 pm
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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 7:59 pm 
 

^ logged in to see if any one else had been reading that book. Got my copy yesterday but haven't had any time to read it, I'm only on page thirty or so, but it seems promising and I've never not liked something written by Clive Barker. I love his vocal exception to the name 'pinhead' in the book. I'm hoping it's as good as the Damnation Game or Weaveworld but that's expecting a lot.

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MARSDUDE
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Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2005 8:17 pm
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PostPosted: Wed May 20, 2015 8:12 pm 
 

I'm nearly done (just 'Book 4' and the epilogue left), but I think it's possibly my favourite of his I've read, along with 'Sacrament' and 'The Damnation Game'.
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TheMizwaOfMuzzyTah
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PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2015 3:42 pm 
 

Never read Sacrament but it's on my list.

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volutetheswarth
Our Lady of Perpetual Butthurt

Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 8:37 pm
Posts: 3489
Location: Australia
PostPosted: Thu May 21, 2015 11:47 pm 
 

Any good recent autobiographies up for recommendation? I just got done with Corey Feldman's Coreyography which was surprisingly good for a first time writer. Next I wanna pick up "Life After Death" by Damien Echols, "I Am the Central Park Jogger" by Trisha Meili and "Just a Geek" by Wil Wheaton and see if they're any good.

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TheMizwaOfMuzzyTah
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Feb 09, 2010 2:18 pm
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PostPosted: Fri May 22, 2015 12:09 pm 
 

Miles Davis and Malcolm X have two of the best autobiographies I've ever read.

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Necroticism174
Kite String Popper

Joined: Mon Mar 30, 2009 6:46 pm
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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 8:38 pm 
 

I'm currently reading The Scarlet Gospels as well, and it's a lot better than the plot blurbs could have led me to believe. The writing is up there with his books like Mister B. Gone and Weaveworld (though I read that ages ago and it might not be as good as I remember it being). The thing with Barker is that, to me, a lot of his stuff in Books of Blood has aged terribly, so it's good to see he's actually gotten better over the years. Anyways, it's compelling, gory, and funny, and I'm into it.

Also reading Jeremy Robert Johnson's Skullcrack City at the same time and holy shit, this writer. Everything of his I've read I've love, but here he hits the next level. Very funny, bizarro, and brimming with creativity. This book is super convoluted, but never becomes hard to follow.

Read D. Harlan Wilson's They Had Goat Heads. It's really hard to suggest this book to anybody who doesn't like avant-garde, stream of consciousness, flash fiction and very short fiction. But his prose is remarkable, and the creativity at play in his irrealism isn't just randomness for randomness' sake. I had a shitload of fun blasting through this book.
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Turner
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 4:20 am 
 

I'd be interesting in reading Wil Wheaton's autobiography. Love to hear what he has to say about being the most hated character on an entire series, haha. A couple of good autobiographies I've read in the last few years are If Chins Could Kill by Bruce Campbell and Ron Jeremy's (can't remember the name). Both entertaining, well-written, interesting looks at their careers. Ron Jeremy's in particular was cool because I knew nothing about the porn industry; beyond "the end result is videos of people having sex" I had no idea what went on.

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Erosion of Humanity
Destroyer of the Gods

Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 5:12 pm
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Location: over yon hill
PostPosted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 11:13 pm 
 

Started Wayward Pines trilogy this week, finished it tonight, vacation is good for something, not what I was expecting but it turned out alright in the end I suppose. The show obviously fails in comparison but hey don't most film/t.v. adaptations. The writing was ummm decent but hit hard on juvenile when it came to certain points. Anyways some stuff in spoiler just incase anyone cares.

Spoiler: show
-yeah the writing was excruciatingly juvenile when it came to sex, I felt like I was reading a terrible porn script, and a lot of the action. The action scenes were a lot of "hero gets beat so badly he should be dead but keeps on keeping on and killing shit just cause he can't die" type stuff.
-the plot was decently original, different take on the whole post apocalyptic genre but still another version of it
-when they went back in the chambers I did not see that coming, at all. Took me for a bit of a shock so that was cool.
-did not enjoy the epilogue, I hate open endings like that. And I hate even more trolling for a new book audience.
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Opus
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 6:29 am 
 

Just finished I, Robot. What else is readworthy from Asimov?
I've read the Foundation trilogy.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 4:19 pm 
 

Honestly, if you've already read those, you're probably better off reading someone else. Asimov was obviously very influential, but while his concepts were often amazing, the quality of his writing was sub-par, to say the least. If you're dead-set on reading more, he tended to work best in the short story format.
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waiguoren
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 4:34 pm 
 

I tend to enjoy Asimov's novels, then forget what they were about shortly afterwards. Try out The Gods Themselves. He has a nice way of explaining the science stuff, however the story is split into three parts, the second part had good ideas but dragged on a bit. Not too sure about this but I think it's also the first/only time Asimov had sex (or a strong implication of it at least) in one of his novels.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 5:10 pm 
 

Of "The Big Three" sci-fi authors (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), I definitely like Heinlein the most. His politics were dogshit, but his prose was easily the best of the three, and he was also very experimental when it came to subject matter and tried out all sorts of different kinds of plots and characters, while Clarke's and Asimov's characters especially are essentially totally interchangeable. Heinlein got pretty preachy sometimes, but oh well.
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Warlust666
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 13, 2015 8:27 pm 
 

I just finished In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. What an excellent read, I was completely engrossed by this book. I remember watching the film “Capote” and did very little for me, in turn to my remiss reflected on my poor opinion of the book for many years.

I have started on Zodiac by Robert Graysmith. I'm about 70 pages in and has turned out to be pretty good so far. I am deeply intrigued by what kind of messages are contained in the unsolved ciphers.
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waiguoren
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 14, 2015 12:18 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
Of "The Big Three" sci-fi authors (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein), I definitely like Heinlein the most. His politics were dogshit, but his prose was easily the best of the three, and he was also very experimental when it came to subject matter and tried out all sorts of different kinds of plots and characters, while Clarke's and Asimov's characters especially are essentially totally interchangeable. Heinlein got pretty preachy sometimes, but oh well.


Clarke has the child molestation accusations or whatevs that always lingers in the back of my mind when reading his stuff. I thought 2001 complimented the movie well, but some of his other books are just plain bad. He has a startling amount of books out there with similar names, but there is one that sticks out for me called Cradle, he really gets into the sex scenes in that one, comes across as creepy when taking those allegations into account (and it's a shit book, awful unrealistic characters and sloppy writing in general).

I guess Asimov is one of the first (if not the first) sci-fi authors that I read as a kid, so he's my sci-fi comfort zone and I'll always have a soft spot for him. Kind of like some bands you liked in the beginning of the foray into metal that you now know are not that good, yet still think of them fondly. Of course, I remember liking the first Foundation novel and hating the third one, and with the amount of books Asimov has written I suspect there are many, many duds out there. There are like ten Asimov books that are everywhere and easy to find, and a suspiciously large amount of his work that appears to be out of print, guess that's implying something right there.

I have a horror novel by Heinlein here somewhere, or it's meant to be near-horror, but he's hit-or-miss for me too. I don't care about his politics too much, just remember finding some of his lengthier books to not have much of a pay-out in the end for all that text. So I guess out of the big three I'd be more inclined to read Asimov, but out of the classic sci-fi guys I'd go with Dick over these three.
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Evil_Johnny_666
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Joined: Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:54 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 14, 2015 7:24 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
That's not to say good authors never win, and in general the winners do tend to be good, but there have been plenty of terrible winners (Ringworld, Ender's Game), and plenty of great books that either didn't win or weren't even nominated.

I'm curious to hear your opinion on Ringworld. Personally, I liked the idea behind the book and thought that early on Niven wasn't bad at all at making grow a certain sense of wonder, but as soon as the crash happens things got a bit awry. Well, the beginning wasn't even that good I suppose as I think I just wanted to like the story because the concept was so appealing to me (a twist of the Dyson sphere concept). His prose definitely lacks quite a bit and some passages were very tedious to read. The characters were mostly interchangeable to a certain extent and women aren't really portrayed in an appropriate light... There was quite a bit of wish-fulfillment too with the main character. There were interesting bits on the Ringworld but most of it was boring. I suppose there's a certain nostalgic part of me which doesn't want me to dislike the book.

It feels to me that most sci-fi writers are nerds first, rather than ''real'' writers. Well, to be honest I haven't read that much sci-fi books but that's a feeling I've got. What would you recommend would be the best books of the genre to start with? I don't feel like risking reading sub-par stuff, particularly after reading Ringworld Engineers as it was such a terrible wreck of a book. That, and I already have so many books on my to-read list. I'm also much more of a "fantastique" reader.


Otherwise, I'm reading for the first time Homer's Odyssey. Much more readable than I thought it would be. Well, considering this is pretty much the basis of western literature, it's not all that surprising that it's as accessible and recognizable. Pretty enjoyable so far, it does really feel mythic and legendary. Reminds me of why I like so much to read old books, they are really a window unto other worlds that are our pasts.

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hots_towel
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Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2013 2:19 am
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 14, 2015 8:33 pm 
 

Evil_Johnny_666 wrote:
Otherwise, I'm reading for the first time Homer's Odyssey. Much more readable than I thought it would be. Well, considering this is pretty much the basis of western literature, it's not all that surprising that it's as accessible and recognizable. Pretty enjoyable so far, it does really feel mythic and legendary. Reminds me of why I like so much to read old books, they are really a window unto other worlds that are our pasts.
i can more or less agree with this. i havent read the odyssey yet, but im reading Tacitus and the nibelungenleid and they are both brutal trudges. im sure my short attention span has a lot to do with it, but ive read older prose before without much issue. im sure whtats where translation come into play, but i dont want a version that so watered down either that it looses it's timely charm. oh well, cant have it all i suppose

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theposega
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 12:15 am 
 

Been a while since I've posted. Also been doing a lot of reading lately since I graduated a month ago and am currently being a bum.

Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas was fairly cool, enjoyable space opera. Biggest gripe is that the first half felt more like loosely connected short stories than a novel, but that's kinda splitting hairs.

Glen Cook's The White Rose was dope. Had been way too long since I read a Black Company novel. Not quite as good as the first two but still a good read with a really great ending.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep was life-affirming. Probably the best sci-fi I've read so far.

Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns was cool. Some fairly questionable moments, but that's kind of the point of the series.

Joe Abercrombie's [/i]The Blade Itself[/i] was really good. Not sure it lived up to the mountains of hype but there's still two books left. First book in a while I found myself reading compulsively.
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Nochielo
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 12:27 am 
 

Evil_Johnny_666 wrote:
Otherwise, I'm reading for the first time Homer's Odyssey. Much more readable than I thought it would be. Well, considering this is pretty much the basis of western literature, it's not all that surprising that it's as accessible and recognizable. Pretty enjoyable so far, it does really feel mythic and legendary. Reminds me of why I like so much to read old books, they are really a window unto other worlds that are our pasts.

The Odyssey is so, so good. First time I read it, it made me want to run off to the forest with a machete, imagine going on an adventure and fight pretend monsters and stuff. I was eighteen.
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waiguoren
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:56 am 
 

theposega wrote:
Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns was cool. Some fairly questionable moments, but that's kind of the point of the series.

Joe Abercrombie's [/i]The Blade Itself[/i] was really good. Not sure it lived up to the mountains of hype but there's still two books left. First book in a while I found myself reading compulsively.


Prince of Thorns is one of the few books I gave up on, not because the main character thinks rape is cool (although partly, I mean how hard must the author try to constantly convince us the main character is evil?) but because the writing was so cheesy that every page became an ordeal. How old was that character in any case, 12? 14? And smart enough to lead a troop of these bad-ass dudes? Uh, no.

As for Abercrombie, another one-trick pony who always writes the same characters and covers up his shitty storylines with a lot "realistc" (aka boring as hell) violence. He's one of those writers that seem to get worse with time, common enough actually in fantasy where a writer starts off strong then tapers off, although Abercrombie did not start off strong but still manages to progressively suck with each book.

I thought A Fire Upon The Deep was mostly a fun read, pretty funny too how it's not that old a novel yet he managed to make it very outdated, ha. I can't remember The White Rose too much, I think in that initial three book series the part I liked the most were the collectors/buyers of the dead up that hill. Had an annoying manager at the time and boy you better believe you me that when I was reading that I sure was imagining taking his dead body up a hill to sell to form part of a castle or whatevs.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 11:23 am 
 

waiguoren wrote:
I have a horror novel by Heinlein here somewhere, or it's meant to be near-horror, but he's hit-or-miss for me too. I don't care about his politics too much, just remember finding some of his lengthier books to not have much of a pay-out in the end for all that text.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is easily his best novel, with Starship Troopers being decent as well. Both have shitty politics that ought to be ignored, but are exciting stories with interesting concepts and well-written characters.

waiguoren wrote:
So I guess out of the big three I'd be more inclined to read Asimov, but out of the classic sci-fi guys I'd go with Dick over these three.

Oh, Dick is easily superior, I love me some Dick. I've been reading some of his short stories though, and whoa boy are they rough. He had improved exponentially by the time he started seriously writing sci-fi novels. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is the one I've read most recently, with a concept that no one but Dick could think of - cosmic horror messiah attempts to take over the universe with alien LSD.

Evil_Johnny_666 wrote:
failsafeman wrote:
That's not to say good authors never win, and in general the winners do tend to be good, but there have been plenty of terrible winners (Ringworld, Ender's Game), and plenty of great books that either didn't win or weren't even nominated.

I'm curious to hear your opinion on Ringworld. Personally, I liked the idea behind the book and thought that early on Niven wasn't bad at all at making grow a certain sense of wonder, but as soon as the crash happens things got a bit awry. Well, the beginning wasn't even that good I suppose as I think I just wanted to like the story because the concept was so appealing to me (a twist of the Dyson sphere concept). His prose definitely lacks quite a bit and some passages were very tedious to read. The characters were mostly interchangeable to a certain extent and women aren't really portrayed in an appropriate light... There was quite a bit of wish-fulfillment too with the main character. There were interesting bits on the Ringworld but most of it was boring. I suppose there's a certain nostalgic part of me which doesn't want me to dislike the book.

You basically nailed my main problems - the setting and concept are really cool, and I really liked the concept of the puppeteers - a race that evolved not from apex pack predators like we did, but from antelope-style herd herbivores, who view safety and "cowardice" as virtues and bravery as insanity. However, the plot ended up just being a bog-simple exploration/adventure plot, and the characters were fucking dull as dishwater. Also, the explanation for what happened to Ringworld was super boring as well. A mutant mold ate up their circuitry and they couldn't fix it, Jesus Christ. If you imagine the Ringworld setting paired up with Hyperion's interesting cast of characters, and with an added dose of mystery in the setting a la Rendezvous with Rama, it could have been a great book, but as it stood it was just a bunch of wasted potential.

Evil_Johnny_666 wrote:
It feels to me that most sci-fi writers are nerds first, rather than ''real'' writers. Well, to be honest I haven't read that much sci-fi books but that's a feeling I've got. What would you recommend would be the best books of the genre to start with? I don't feel like risking reading sub-par stuff, particularly after reading Ringworld Engineers as it was such a terrible wreck of a book. That, and I already have so many books on my to-read list. I'm also much more of a "fantastique" reader.

I agree that most sci-fi writers, especially in the early days, were really crap writers. However there were a lot of good ones mixed in there too - definitely check out Jack Vance's Demon Princes series and his Alastor trilogy. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness won a bunch of awards, and definitely deserved them. While he's not known for sci-fi these days, I really enjoyed Michael Moorcock's The Black Corridor.
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hakarl
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 12:57 pm 
 

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is definitely scifi with brilliant prose. The atmosphere of the novel is very idiosyncratic and difficult to describe, but it's the absolute opposite of those dry, uninteresting scifi writers who mainly wanted to express their amazing inventions and conceptions in the form of fiction. Even so, the ideas are wonderfully inventive, and even a little mind-boggling.

Don't bother if you're not a very attentive reader, though. There's hardly any explanation for anything, and at first there are many technologies, concepts and things you don't yet understand that are only demonstrated later. It's not a long novel, though, so if you can bear with it for the first third or so, you'll probably enjoy it immensely.
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Azmodes
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 2:12 pm 
 

Not sure I'd call it "brilliant prose". It's definitely something else, almost totally alien post-singularity weirdness and insanity woven into something poetic and elegant that sometimes reads more like fantasy than sci-fi, but the writing wasn't anything special or beautiful in itself IMO. Was pretty cool and blazing, though, and some really nifty ideas. As was the sequel The Fractal Prince, even though the ending rushed by a bit too fast and confusingly for me. I definitely agree on that it's not something you read casually, getting bombarded with all sorts of peculiar terminology and concepts without much background. Not to mention that the storyline(s) require(s) a keen reader. I might pick up the third one at some point, but for now the following novels are further up my reading queue:

Alastair Reynolds - Slow Bullets
The new The Expanse (!!!!!)
M. John Harrison - Light
Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
Jeremy Robert Johnson - Skullcrack City
Linda Nagata - Vast
After Tranquility (anthology of stories set in the cool Orion's Arm universe)

Anyone read Neal Stephenson's new book Seveneves? I devoured the first half, his usual trademark wit, sense of humour and intelligence combined with a great concept, but when the second half arrived, some of the descriptions started to drag on for too long while I was thirsting for some actual story developments. Overall, still pretty good, but I remember Anathem was better paced. Stephenson also has this somewhat irksome tendency to casually introduce stuff that's actually huge for the story and only "properly" address it a few paragraphs later. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it creates a sort of... whiplash during reading, followed by you having to backtrack and read it all again to make sense of what just happened. It seems part of his idiosyncratic sense of humour.

Ilwhyan, coming back to Rajaniemi, if you dig that sort of fantastical hyper-sci-fi, you might wanna check out Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams or Accelerando by Charles Stross. Or maybe Reynold's House of Suns, by far his most "soft science fiction" novel and an awing far far far future delight through and through.
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Morrigan
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 5:55 pm 
 

waiguoren wrote:
As for Abercrombie, another one-trick pony who always writes the same characters and covers up his shitty storylines with a lot "realistc" (aka boring as hell) violence. He's one of those writers that seem to get worse with time, common enough actually in fantasy where a writer starts off strong then tapers off, although Abercrombie did not start off strong but still manages to progressively suck with each book.

What a bunch of horseshit. Every Abercrombie book has been gold, and Half a King is no exception.
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Nahsil
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 7:26 pm 
 

I'm gonna give Quantum Thief a go, sounds like a fiction version of some Deleuze & Guattari philosophy.
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 7:46 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
M. John Harrison - Light

Have you read anything else by M John Harrison? Light is good, but far from his best, and definitely not his most "M-John-Harrisoniest". In fact it reminds me a lot of early Samuel R Delany, a freak-out space opera with colorful characters and a gonzo setting. However, it's also not very adventurous by his standards - which means it's still far more adventurous than 99% of sci-fi out there, but the Viriconium series and Signs of Life are much better. Even "lesser" M John Harrison is still excellent though, he's easily in my top 10 authors.
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theposega
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 8:58 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
Not sure I'd call it "brilliant prose". It's definitely something else, almost totally alien post-singularity weirdness and insanity woven into something poetic and elegant that sometimes reads more like fantasy than sci-fi, but the writing wasn't anything special or beautiful in itself IMO. Was pretty cool and blazing, though, and some really nifty ideas. As was the sequel The Fractal Prince, even though the ending rushed by a bit too fast and confusingly for me. I definitely agree on that it's not something you read casually, getting bombarded with all sorts of peculiar terminology and concepts without much background. Not to mention that the storyline(s) require a keen reader. I might pick up the third one at some point, but for now the following novels are further up my reading queue:

Alastair Reynolds - Slow Bullets
The new The Expanse (!!!!!)
M. John Harrison - Light
Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
Jeremy Robert Johnson - Skullcrack City
Linda Nagata - Vast
After Tranquility (anthology of stories set in the cool Orion's Arm universe)

Anyone read Neal Stephenson's new book Seveneves? I devoured the first half, his usual trademark wit, sense of humour and intelligence combined with a great concept, but when the second half arrived, some of the descriptions started to drag on for too long while I was thirsting for some actual story developments. Overall, still pretty good, but I remember Anathem was better paced. Stephenson also has this somewhat irksome tendency to casually introduce stuff that's actually huge for the story and only "properly" address it a few paragraphs later. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it creates a sort of... whiplash during reading, followed by you having to backtrack and read it all again to make sense of what just happened. It seems part of his idiosyncratic sense of humour.

Ilwhyan, coming back to Rajaniemi, if you dig that sort of fantastical hyper-sci-fi, you might wanna check out Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams or Accelerando by Charles Stross. Or maybe Reynold's House of Suns, by far his most "soft science fiction" novel and an awing far far far future delight through and through.



Since you seem somewhat familiar with his work, how would you say Pushing Ice sits in Alastair Reynolds's body of work? I didn't care for it much until the ending, but I've probably thought about that book and its take on the Fermi paradox at least once a week since I read it last August.
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Azmodes
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:49 am 
 

failsafeman wrote:
Azmodes wrote:
M. John Harrison - Light

Have you read anything else by M John Harrison? Light is good, but far from his best, and definitely not his most "M-John-Harrisoniest". In fact it reminds me a lot of early Samuel R Delany, a freak-out space opera with colorful characters and a gonzo setting. However, it's also not very adventurous by his standards - which means it's still far more adventurous than 99% of sci-fi out there, but the Viriconium series and Signs of Life are much better. Even "lesser" M John Harrison is still excellent though, he's easily in my top 10 authors.

Nope, that'll be my first. I actually don't remember how I noticed the book, but I do remember that the synopsis intrigued me and so I picked up a cheap used copy on Amazon. Samuel R Delany, you say? hm, the only thing by him I've tried was Nova and I gave up after the first third or so. That must've been back in 2011, but from memory something about it was just... clunky and boring. Bad omen for M. John Harrison? We'll see.

theposega wrote:
Since you seem somewhat familiar with his work, how would you say Pushing Ice sits in Alastair Reynolds's body of work? I didn't care for it much until the ending, but I've probably thought about that book and its take on the Fermi paradox at least once a week since I read it last August.

Reynolds is one of my absolute favourite science fiction writers and I've read almost everything by him, except that one Doctor Who novel and a couple of short stories/novellas. Actually, I'd easily rank Pushing Ice among my top five novels of his, might even be a contender for number one. The whole concept was beautifully done and constructed into such an effortlessly, naturally unfolding story, just such a friggin' page turner. Also, while I won't usually recommend him for his characters, this one had some of the best-developed (and developing) of his works so far, from what I remember. So I pretty much thought that it was a masterful combination of the necessary big ideas and adept writing in general. I think he wrote about the possibility of a sequel on his blog once (or was that House of Suns? or both?) which would be interesting, considering where things were left off, but it works just a well as a stand-alone.
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BloodMoonRising
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 8:33 am 
 

Now reading Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

"In contact with the flux of cosmic consciousness all religions known and named to-day will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. It's life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse. Sin will no longer exist nor will salvations be desired. Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all it's good and with all it's beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self consciousness"

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hakarl
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 10:41 am 
 

Azmodes wrote:
Not sure I'd call it "brilliant prose". It's definitely something else, almost totally alien post-singularity weirdness and insanity woven into something poetic and elegant that sometimes reads more like fantasy than sci-fi, but the writing wasn't anything special or beautiful in itself IMO. Was pretty cool and blazing, though, and some really nifty ideas. As was the sequel The Fractal Prince, even though the ending rushed by a bit too fast and confusingly for me. I definitely agree on that it's not something you read casually, getting bombarded with all sorts of peculiar terminology and concepts without much background. Not to mention that the storyline(s) require(s) a keen reader. I might pick up the third one at some point, but for now the following novels are further up my reading queue: [...]

Elegantly insane describes it well, and that I find brilliant. :) It's not high-quality prose in the traditional sense at all, I realise that, but the poetic, even abstract quality in it - executed as well as effectively as it was - makes Rajaniemi a sort of a genius, I think.

I agree it feels like reading fantasy more than scifi, at times.

Thanks for the recommendations! I'm a very slow (or sporadical) reader, though, and I have a great list of things I should read. So the list grows again. :)
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 3:59 pm 
 

Azmodes wrote:
Nope, that'll be my first. I actually don't remember how I noticed the book, but I do remember that the synopsis intrigued me and so I picked up a cheap used copy on Amazon. Samuel R Delany, you say? hm, the only thing by him I've tried was Nova and I gave up after the first third or so. That must've been back in 2011, but from memory something about it was just... clunky and boring. Bad omen for M. John Harrison? We'll see.

:lol: I actually just read Nova a few months ago, and loved it. Great characters, colorful world, exciting plot - the pacing was a bit slow, I suppose, but that didn't bother me at all. Your mileage may vary, I guess.
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Azmodes
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 7:34 am 
 

Ilwhyan/Rajaniemi: Ah yeah, I gotcha.

fsm: It might have been the pacing, yeah. But frankly, I don't even remember the particulars of the plot, just... that there was a ship with a motley crew and they were headed somewhere? Some sort of backstory side plot for a younger character? It's all a blur. I'm not really in a position to criticise it, heh. I suspect another book came along and I got sidetracked.
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theposega
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:05 am 
 

Might have to give another one of his books a shot next time I'm feeling some sci-fi. Cause, like I said, while I may not have cared much for it at the time, I probably think fondly about Pushing Ice at least once a week.

Just finished Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man and it was dope as hell. The world itself was really interesting, but it's probably the most emotionally involved I've ever gotten in a book. The characters designed to frustrate the protagonists were infuriating in ways Cersei could only dream of. It's not without its faults, however, as there was a particularly head-scratching moment towards the end and apparently the series takes a serious nosedive from here on. God's body, I hope that's not the case.
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Brainded Binky
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 3:00 am 
 

Anybody on here familiar with Tim O'Brien? He's a Minnesota native who's written dozens of books based on his experience in the Vietnam War. His best known works are Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried, and both of those are good reads. I met the guy personally, and he signed my copies of those books!

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Opus
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 6:48 am 
 

Brainded Binky wrote:
The Things They Carried

That was compulsory reading when I went to university. Good book, should read again.
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Evil_Johnny_666
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:57 pm 
 

failsafeman wrote:
I agree that most sci-fi writers, especially in the early days, were really crap writers. However there were a lot of good ones mixed in there too - definitely check out Jack Vance's Demon Princes series and his Alastor trilogy. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness won a bunch of awards, and definitely deserved them. While he's not known for sci-fi these days, I really enjoyed Michael Moorcock's The Black Corridor.


Thanks for the recs! Gonna try to read them soon enough, hopefully I can find them in english at the library.


Ilwhyan wrote:
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is definitely scifi with brilliant prose. The atmosphere of the novel is very idiosyncratic and difficult to describe, but it's the absolute opposite of those dry, uninteresting scifi writers who mainly wanted to express their amazing inventions and conceptions in the form of fiction. Even so, the ideas are wonderfully inventive, and even a little mind-boggling.

Don't bother if you're not a very attentive reader, though. There's hardly any explanation for anything, and at first there are many technologies, concepts and things you don't yet understand that are only demonstrated later. It's not a long novel, though, so if you can bear with it for the first third or so, you'll probably enjoy it immensely.

You got me interested, I'm not necessarily looking for fast paced action and that kind of stuff, I usually enjoy slow reads. But it always depend a bit on my mood of course.

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Brainded Binky
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 2:23 am 
 

Opus wrote:
Brainded Binky wrote:
The Things They Carried

That was compulsory reading when I went to university. Good book, should read again.

Then I think you're gonna like Going After Cacciato and In the Lake of the Woods. The latter was required reading during my senior year in high school. Really keeps you guessing.

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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 8:50 pm 
 

Just finished Redshirts by John Scalzi, which won the Hugo for best novel a couple of years ago. For those who don't know, it's about a group of people on a starship who discover they are actually characters in a Star Trek-like show, except they are the "redshirts" who tend to get killed off every time there's an away mission. So, they start figuring out ways to escape their inevitable fate.

It starts out decent enough, but Scalzi has this annoyingly "TV" way of writing characters - and not in a Star Trek way, which might be acceptable, but in a "snappy", back-and-forth-one-liner sort of way that seems like it belongs more in a Big Bang Theory type show, or on a blog. Characterization is light, cheap jokes abound, and for all its supposed metafictional sophistication, he really doesn't do much with the premise. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but the explanation for the events is disappointing, and the resolution is meh. The thing about Star Trek: TOS is that, for all its faults (which Redshirts points out), at its best it had some great strengths too - iconic characters, weighty premises, strong messages - which Redshirts almost entirely lacks.

Within the book, the show it's based on is like Star Trek but not exactly, and given the details it's really hard to tell whether it was aimed at Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek in general, or sci-fi shows in general - the bulk of the evidence suggests it's meant to be primarily about TOS, but it gets a lot of significant details about the show wrong, and also seems to imply that it was nothing but shlock, which is also quite false. Given that those kinds of shows simply aren't being made anymore, it's hard to figure out what the hell it was trying to say, and to whom - I get the strong feeling that it was meant to inspire nostalgia in people who remember Star Trek: TOS, but actually aren't that familiar with it, and who want the quasi-sophistication of metafiction, without actually wanting to go into all the hard thinking it might require.

Basically, Redshirts fuckin' sucked.
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darkeningday
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 9:04 pm 
 

I thought it was brisk, light and fairly funny when I reddit, but my meta phase was in full swing then so that could be why. It's being turned into a TV series for FX by some of The Shield peeps, iirc.

John Scalzi abso-fucking-lutely knows his Star Trek though, I promise you ;). He also transformed Stargate: Universe from being a way way way sub-par BSG rip-off to a pretty decent show, so he can't be all bad. And he's a decent human being, of course, etc (not that that has anything to do with anything really).
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failsafeman
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 21, 2015 9:20 pm 
 

He might know Star Trek, but it reads like it was written for people who absolutely don't. For example, the show he wrote about had one head writer with a staff, whereas the original Star Trek was written by many, many different people, without too much input from the staff. Also, the main characters on the Intrepid ("Main Cast" characters, I mean) weren't memorable AT ALL, and neither were the main characters of the book - they fuckin' sucked. If there's one thing Star Trek has always been good at, it's memorable characters (even Voyager has more than Redshirts did).

Also, there was just tons of nonsense in the plot - there were a million possible explanations for why things were working like a TV show - Truman Show-esque reality TV, a training simulation, being controlled by a godlike alien (of which there were many in TOS), whatever - but the explanation they go with is it's somehow being caused by a TV show in the modern day, and it turns out to be immediately right? And then there's absolutely no explanation of any sort as to WHY it's happening. None - except maybe that it's all in the lead writer's head as a sort of symbol for writer's block - but then why do the other two codas spend so much time with the other real-world people who were directly influenced by the fictional reality being real?

It was brisk and light, true, but Christ, the writing was bad. Also, he fuckin' attributes nearly EVERY line of dialog.
"I have to fart," Dahl said.
"Me too," Duval said.
You first," Dahl said.
"OK," Duval said.
"Now me," Dahl said.

It was literally that bad. Plus (and I know this is getting a bit nuts-and-bolts), he has the really bad habit of needlessly explaining things that are clear through the context. I can't remember the exact line, but there was one part of dialog that goes like this:

"Bla bla bla, *changes the subject of the conversation a bit* bla bla bla," said Dahl, changing the subject slightly.

Unless the reader is completely braindead, it was completely obvious from the line that the character was changing the subject - but he feels the need to tell the reader that a change in subject has occurred! That may seem inconsequential, but when spread out across a whole book it just invites braindead, unengaged reading - instead of the reader being expected to notice the change in subject, and wonder why the subject was changed, Scalzi just spells it out.

Compare to M John Harrison, who wrote probably the most important meta-fictional sci-fi there is (the Viriconium series). The dialog and characters are so utterly without handholding that it can be very difficult to get at what's going on, but at the same time it makes that dialog and those characters much more complex and layered with meaning.

Which Redshirts was not.
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