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SF and Fantasy wot I ave been reeding

Started by Alberon, April 19, 2020, 12:05:14 AM

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Zetetic

I don't think it's a particular person that Muir is thanking, but the set of people that medicated her at times. I think yes, she is writing from experiences of psychosis.

Edit:
Spoiler alert
"Harrowhark Nonagesimus did not have anyone to put soluble banana-flavoured antipsychotics under her tongue for her condition. I do, and therefore I would like to thank every key worker in my past who had to administer me medication, because they were always nice about it and often I was not."
[close]

Alberon

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Cara is employed as a traveller between parallel universes. Her main qualification is that most of her alternate selves are dead in the 380 or so universes they can reach and you can't travel somewhere your other self still lives.

She isn't a citizen of the city she lives in, but comes from a shanty town outside the walls. Her existence is therefore precarious as if she loses her job she will lose her right to reside. She also has a deep secret - she's not Cara, but an alternate who found her corpse in her world.

The main character finds herself alienated from both the comfortable, advanced Wiley City as well as the shanty town, Ashtown, where she came from in this world and in her own. As Cara tries to find her place in the world(s) the novel explores privilege. For all it being a novel about the multiverse it's a very personal story and a good one too.

Famous Mortimer

This sounds like my cup of tea, I'll give it a go. Cheers Alberon.

Alberon

Been through some rather inconsequential books lately.

Tales From The Folly by Ben Aaronovitch is a collection of very short pieces (short stories would be mostly too grand a description) related to his very successful Rivers of London series. It's a very short book in total so just one for fans and completists.

Network Effect by Martha Wells is the first novel in the Murderbot series following four novellas. Unfortunately, expanding the series to novel length doesn't really work. It has good action scenes at the start and end of the novel but it sags badly in the middle.

As an aside, the novella seems to be making a big resurgence. There's the Murderbot ones, both Charles Stross and Ben Aaronovitch are producing novellas set in their long running series. While they're called novellas now they are close in length to the old novel lengths of the 70s and earlier. I'm generally for them as some stories work better at this length. One bugbear I have is they often are not cheaper than novels with a double or triple page count (not that you should judge a book by its length).

Finally is Lockdown Tales by Neal Asher. Not the best author by a long shot, but fine for an action potboiler most of the time. These stories are all set in his Polity universe, but one interesting wrinkle is that some are set much further in the future in a time after the Polity has gone.

Alberon

Dinner at Deviant's Palace by Tim Powers. I've never read anything by him before and this has been sat in my 'to read' pile for at least a decade and a half.

Set in the remains of Los Angeles a century after the apocalypse it follows Greg Rivas who is a retired 'redeemer'. That involves snatching specific new recruits away from a religious cult. The difference being that this cult's leader seems to have real powers.

Rivas was sucked into the cult himself for some years before breaking free. Reluctantly pressed back into service he heads out to find the girl he loved before he joined the cult.

It's not a bad book, but it is very eighties and the world of fantasy has moved on. The post-apocalypse setting doesn't convince and feels more like the world of the Fallout games rather than anything approaching realism. Using the everyday name for pre-apocalypse items rather than just describing seems the wrong approach, though a fortune teller using an old phone with a bee or wasp in it to simulate ringing while reciting scientific words with no understanding strikes the right note.

The ending seems abrupt and more than a little pat, but the book is okay. I am tempted to check out Powers' better known novel The Anubis Gates.

Also tried House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas but didn't get on with it. Too many infodumps setting up the modern tech planet stuffed with fantasy races and systems, but mainly just didn't get into the style of the book. Just not for me.

Currently, reading an Alastair Reynolds novella, but still hunting around for a good new SF book to read.

Famous Mortimer

Quote from: Alberon on April 05, 2021, 06:18:38 PM
Also tried House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas but didn't get on with it. Too many infodumps setting up the modern tech planet stuffed with fantasy races and systems, but mainly just didn't get into the style of the book. Just not for me.
Hope you got it from the library rather than spending cash on it (as the "recommendation" was from me). Sarah Maas has gone back to her other series, which seems more standard horny YA stuff, so I doubt we'll see a sequel to it for at least a year or two, if at all. It feels perhaps better suited to TV than to a gigantic book.

You make a good point about how some fantasy has aged. Perhaps it's just as the world gets shitter, even dystopias written in the 80s seem quite pleasant.

Alberon

Quote from: Famous Mortimer on April 08, 2021, 02:51:54 PM
Hope you got it from the library rather than spending cash on it (as the "recommendation" was from me). Sarah Maas has gone back to her other series, which seems more standard horny YA stuff, so I doubt we'll see a sequel to it for at least a year or two, if at all. It feels perhaps better suited to TV than to a gigantic book.

A lot of my books I get from... shall we say less than legal sources, but I do make a point of buying a new copy (usual a physical one) of every book I finish (or get close to finishing) so as to not screw authors out of a sale.

The latest I've read is a novella, a real growth area in SF and close in size to the old novel size of the 70s and earlier. This latest one is Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds, an author who has recovered in recent years, but isn't at the level of his earliest novels. This one could have done with being longer, it's a time travel story where desparate operatives from the future skip back a few decades to take over the minds of people in the past to recover seed samples so they can save humanity from dying out. At the length it is the story gets dominated by the mechanics of the time travel system Reynolds has dreamed up. It's okay, but it's something that could have done with being double the length.

Then without any obvious good SF novels to read I decided to finally try The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie the first novel in his First Law series and the first book he got published fifteen years ago. In many ways it's very traditional fantasy material - Western Europe style empire, Northern barbarians, powerful magicians, magic itself slowly fading and it's the first of a trilogy. It uses the familiar format of following several characters with each chapter from a particular viewpoint, though in certain places it will dance between several people in a particular scene. It really doesn't go into the sort of indepth worldbuilding you see in many fantasy epics but it seems to work zipping along quite well. The general tone is a lot lighter than I was expecting, but this is interspersed with acts of quite brutal violence and one of the character's jobs of torturing people doesn't skip the nasty bits. Being a first book there is some rough edges, one supporting character was forever smiling with his eyes for example, but it was an enjoyable read.

The second volume seems to promise to spread out more from the capital city where most of the action in the first book takes place with war in the north and in the south and with a bunch of the characters heading west on a mission.

Famous Mortimer

I keep meaning to get into the Malazan Book Of The Fallen series, but I go through periods of barely reading anything, and now is one of those times. I've heard nothing but good things about Joe Abercrombie, though (and am a huge fan of Reynolds' earlier work).

sprocket

I've read and enjoyed both, I'd recommend starting with Abercrombie though, I found them much easier to jump back into than the Malazan books where the plot tends to sprawl across volumes.

mothman

I should really be all over this thread but I'm not. I guess I'm struggling right now to summon enthusiasm for any of the SF I have to read. I'm currently on A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine, the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire. It's OK, it's fun, it's more of the cod-Oriental Future Empire trope that drove me absolutely fucking mad when I was reading Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy. Yes, yes, we get it, everyone's inscrutable and drinks tea a lot. Change the fucking record already.

I've noted the books above recommended - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Micaiah Johnson, Simon Jimenez. First up though, Alastair Reynolds, that novella was only a couple of quid on Amazon.

Zetetic

A Memory Called Empire was cod-future-Aztec, I thought? Poetry and a history of ritual sacrifice.

Alberon

Barrelled on through Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, the second part of the trilogy. It carries on much as before zipping along. Some of the supporting characters are a bit thinly drawn - the foppish Crown Prince is a total stereotype - and there is a bit of the usual problem with a middle book of a trilogy sagging a little. All in all though a good read and the battles and fights mostly being desperate scrambles to survive comes across well.

I'm into the third book now, but before that I read the SF novella Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It continues the long tradition of the Big Dumb Object in SF following Arthur C Clarke's Rama, Larry Niven's Ringworld and many others.

Beyond the orbit of Pluto a large artefact is discovered which turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg as the inside links through corridors and caverns to other similar artefacts dotted throughout the entire universe. It is theoretically possible therefore to literally walk from one star system to another.

Beyond the setting the story is a bit thin, which is maybe why this is just 80 or so pages long rather than a proper novel. It feels like a long short story rather than a shortened novel. A decent read, but ultimately a bit disappointing.

mothman

Quote from: Alberon on October 30, 2020, 06:18:31 PM
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

At last something interesting! This is a first novel and features various characters and their stories of life and lost loves. The opening chapter starts with a secondary character who spends his whole life waiting for a starship captain who comes back every fifteen years as he experiences it, but every few months as she does thanks to temporal effects of faster than light travel. Later chapters shift to the captain herself and a woman who escaped a dying Earth and lives into the future through extended bouts of cryosleep.

It's different and not everyone's cup of tea, but it is well worth trying.

I'm on this now and I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying it. It's a bit Paul McAuley, a bit Becky Chambers, a bit Gareth L. Powell. Which is a rubbish way of describing a book, it's certainly its own thing. In many ways the first chapter isn't really representative of the book at all.

Alberon

Carried right on to the third book of Joe Abercrombie's trilogy Last Argument of Kings.

I was sort of regretting the decision by the middle of the book as two huge battles loomed in different parts of the world and my interest was waning. But when the second battle finished and the dust settled in the aftermath it really regained my attention.

Best to read it without knowing so Spoilers!
Spoiler alert
Bayaz - the magi helping the main characters basically turns out to be the worst villain of the lot. Yes the magician he's fighting has assembled a small army of magic users who gain their powers by eating human flesh, but Bayaz's amoral win at all costs attitude devastates part of the capital, incidentally killing one of the main characters with a slow radiation style sickness and he doesn't care.

None of the other main characters have a happy ending. The 'best' is the torturer Glokta, whose everyday existence is a living hell after suffering brutal torture himself years before. He becomes Bayaz's right hand man running the kingdom and one of his final scenes is forcing the queen to have sex with the king she loathes by holding her lesbian lover hostage under threat of mutilation and eventually death.
[close]

It really makes me want to head into the three stand-alone that follow and the new trilogy that follows that, but I'll space them out a bit. Not the deepest or most intricate series, but in general I really rate these three books.

MoreauVasz

I read the first Abercrombie trilogy and can't remember any of those things happening. I can remember a few of the characters (Barbarian who sees red,  torturer,  sinister gandalf) but other than a few scenes the books passed through me like a pint of diuretic lager.

earl_sleek

The Blade Itself didn't grab me, but I think I got it from the library at the same time I got The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson which I found almost unputdownable, so it probably suffered in comparison. Been meaning to give Abercrombie another try at some point.

Alberon

This is becoming the Adrian and Joe show, but they're good authors so I won't apologise.

After the trilogy by Joe Abercrombie I read two pieces by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The first, Firewalkers, was another novella. Set on the Earth's equator where it has been rendered almost uninhabitable by climate change it follows a small team of expendable workers sent out to repair some solar panels. The only reason there are people there at all is to service an orbital elevator the super-rich are using to evacuate Earth.

This one could have done with being longer and the end is rushed. It's okay but for completists only.

The next was his new book Shards of Earth which is, of course, the first of a trilogy. In it humanity has fought a very one sided war with moon sized alien artifacts which only stopped when the aliens withdrew. Every planet they attacked was warped into strange new shapes (killing all life on them) leading to the aliens being called the Architects. Their first target was Earth itself.

A few decades later the book follows the ragtag crew of a salvage ship which gets in increasing difficult situations. The book repeatedly has them jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Humanity's continued existence is far from guaranteed but there is quite a different atmosphere to Tchaikovsky's other deep space books. This is more action orientated and is far more colourful and less bleak despite the high stakes. The aliens are weird (as always with this author) and the action barely lets up. The only criticism is that the infodumps are just there in the book. It just stops the story to explain an important plot point, not even dressing it up as an online encyclopaedia entry or a character musing on history.

Despite that it's fun. Balls to the wall action Space Opera. I really enjoyed it.

mothman

I'm at a bit of a loss how I come to have it on my Kindle, but I did so gave Replay by (the late) Ken Grimwood. It's a time loop novel, possibly one of the earliest - it turns out it was published in 1987. It's a fantasy novel, I guess, about a man who dies in 1988 and suddenly finds himself reliving his youth starting in what seems to have become ground zero for American nostalgia, 1963. A lot of the things he does - the betting, the stock market speculation, the (naturally) attempt to stop the Kennedy assassination, a spot of sexual and narcotic hedonism and so on, they seem the natural, even cliched choices. Only it seems I was actually reading potentially the first time they were ever proposed.

An article about the novel is here.

MoreauVasz

I liked Replay when I read it.

One of the things I liked about it was the absolute mundanity of the stuff they did? Most contemporary SFF seems to be about epically battling space nazis but Replay has this extended section where they try to get George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick to collaborate on a sci-fi film that would teach the world the sing. As someone who doesn't really like either space opera or epic fantasy, I really appreciated being reminded of that kind of SF.

There's a similar series of novels that starts with a book called the cybernetic walrus by Jack L. Chalker. Starts off with a bloke working for a company that develops hyper-realistic VR environments but then it turns out that reality is a simulation and some people are being born and reborn as different people, living different lives but being the same person underneath it all. I really enjoyed the bits that focus upon the different lives, the cosmic conspiracy thread left me cold but I enjoyed the mundane speculation.

I actually came upon it browsing TV Tropes. I find SFF reviews and awards useless as they tend to be a) too close to the professional networks of SFF and b) limited to a very narrow range of talking points that seem to be the sole ways of looking or thinking about those kinds of genre books. TV Tropes, on the other hand, is great for 'oh, you liked this weird book in which x happened? Well there's book y in which there is a subtle variation in the theme'

mothman

Yes, I liked the TVTropes page on alternate histories, any others I should check out?

MoreauVasz

I started with their occult detective page as I wanted something a bit like Angel Heart and it sent me spiralling down a rabbit hole of old paranormal investigation stories.

They have an insane amount of obscure stuff on there. The way to navigate it is to find a book, film,  or series you like and then follow the individual tropes that comprise it. It's a lovely way of discovering unfashionable currents and styles of story.

jimboslice

Quote from: Alberon on June 05, 2021, 08:58:44 PM
Carried right on to the third book of Joe Abercrombie's trilogy Last Argument of Kings.

I was sort of regretting the decision by the middle of the book as two huge battles loomed in different parts of the world and my interest was waning. But when the second battle finished and the dust settled in the aftermath it really regained my attention.


I've been reading these books too. Enjoyed the first trilogy, but tit a massive wall with "The Heroes" which is just endless battles. Feels harsh to say it, but it's put me off reading in general, as I haven't really picked up another proper book since.

MoreauVasz

Quote from: Alberon on June 16, 2021, 11:12:03 PM
The next was his new book Shards of Earth which is, of course, the first of a trilogy. In it humanity has fought a very one sided war with moon sized alien artifacts which only stopped when the aliens withdrew. Every planet they attacked was warped into strange new shapes (killing all life on them) leading to the aliens being called the Architects. Their first target was Earth itself.

I gave this a try and am about to give up on it.

I like the setting quite a bit. I particularly like the way that the book's version of Subspace (the stuff you travel through when going FTL) is presented as weird, terrifying and the only way humans can make sense of it is by literally cutting and mangling their own brains. I also like the low-key Lovecraftian Architects who just show up and use gravity beams to turn attack ships into art installations and planets into constituent atoms for no apparent reason. I also like that there's a space empire run by sentient clams who dominate entire planets in return for a technology that allows them to hide planets from the Architects.

I am going to bin it as the characters are thin, generic and more than a little grating. The captain of the salvage ship has two personality traits: He yells, and he refers to his crew as his children. There's also a romantic thing between square jawed post-human warrior woman and uwu vulnerable human navigator type and it's just too generic to stick in my mind.

The action scenes are also quite shit. Weightless cartoon nonsense with people bouncing off the walls in every direction. No tension, no sense of danger, no real reason for any of the action scenes to happen beyond it being that kind of book and it having been x pages since the last poorly visualised punch-up.

mothman

I'm on it too and I'm finding I'm reading really very little at a time before stopping and doing something else.

Alberon

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie is the first standalone novel following his First Law trilogy and while it has a new setting and a brand new protagonist it is a continuation of the story of that world. In Styria, east of The Union around which most of the trilogy was centred, endless small wars between the various city states is nearing an end.

A mercenary general, Monza Murcatto, is betrayed, maimed and almost killed by her employer while her brother is murdered. She seeks revenge on the seven men she holds responsible and assembles a small band of oddballs to carry it out. As before Abercrombie is subverting an old staple (in the trilogy it was the epic quest for the magical object). Monza finds the revenge she is getting to have a great deal of collateral damage and not as satisfying as she hoped. A good few supporting characters from the trilogy make an appearance, and there is mentions of and one cameo from the main characters of the first three books.

This book is much the same as the trilogy before it, but it is tighter, being just a single novel, and darker, which might be becuase it starts with the main character being garrotted, stabbed, her hand smashed to a bag of jelly and then her near dead body slung down a cliff.

I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to reading the next few books, but I'll detour into something else for the next couple or three.

poloniusmonk

Easily the best of the Abercrombie books I have read was Red Country, which I think is the second or third of those follow ons from the original trilogy. I read that first though without any prior knowledge of the earlier books so that probably coloured m y experience. In any case, it's pretty much a gritty western, and a lot of fun.

Mr Trumpet

I went on holiday and read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Quite unlike her other novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - shorter, more focused, strange but lacking the whimsy. I really enjoyed it but it's one of those books that's best if you know as little as possible going in, as it's structured around the protagonist slowly realising where he is and what's happening. Contained elements of The House of Asterion, my favourite Borges story.

Famous Mortimer

I just started "The Inheritance Trilogy" by NK Jemisin, somewhere in the region of 1500 pages. I immediately warmed to it because the stuff that would normally take up a big chunk of the first volume of these things - hero learns of their birthright, goes off to seize their rightful throne or whatever - is dealt with in the first 20 pages here. I like her style, so I think this is going to be a fun read.


Alberon

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch is the latest novella in his long running Rivers of London urban fantasy. Like the previous novella, and the next one coming later this year, it moves away from Peter Grant and follows different characters.

In this case it's Peter's thirteen year old neighbour who wants to follow him down the path of learning magic. Aaronovitch is around my age so I've no idea how well he does in writing in the first person as Abigail, but it is distinctive to Peter's voice.

The story revolves around local kids going missing for just a couple days at times. Abigail ropes in the local foxes, who can talk, to help. The book is a lot more grounded than any of that sounds though. It's not got the substance of a full novel, but it's still not a bad entry in the series.

Alberon

I did enjoy Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. I've got a short story collection of hers I need to get back to working through.