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March 28, 2024, 10:29:38 AM

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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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All Surrogate

I've just finished re-reading Peter Watts' Firefall duology, which are great if thoroughly terrifying books. Now I've started reading his Rifters trilogy, which I've not read before, but are already shaping up to be pretty bleak in their own abyssal way.

Famous Mortimer

10 Works of Literary Fantasy You Should Read

Some interesting suggestions? Reminds me I've never read "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", should probably give it a go.

mothman

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Now, I quite like The Martian. A lot, in fact. But I read Artemis but can remember nothing about it. His latest though seems like a step backwards, in that it reverts to his chatty first-person style - Artemis may also have been 1P, but this is explicitly in the same style as TM. And it gets a bit grating after a while. Plus it's all about a resourceful scientist in his own, solving problems. I enjoyed it, it's a whizzing yarn, but it can't help but feel derivative of what he's done before.

touchingcloth

You could tell in Artemis that it had been written with the anticipation of being picked up as a screenplay, but I have no idea what he was going for with Project Hail Mary. The dynamic between him and Rocky was...odd. Was he trying to evoke the same sense as of Watney's struggles to communicate with Earth in The Martian but without the lag in message time? Now that I think of it, the final scene/chapter is a bit of a lift from TM as well.

I do like Weir, but he seems like he's increasingly struggling to stop his background research from landing unaltered in his books. I seem to recall a lot of bits where the protagonist thought things like "OK, what was it we learned from Mr White in high school science? Come on, think! It is vitally important that you remember this in great deal and then write it down in your diary or you may die."

Alberon

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. This one I quite liked, but I wouldn't recommend it.

It's written by an author who has just done fantasy up till now, I've not read any of it so I've no idea how good it is. The story concerns Marca Nbaro, an orphan from a formerly powerful patrician line. Patricians are the rich, basically. In an otherwise fairly socialist world they have privileges beyond normal people. She wants to join the merchant navy, but her path has been wrecked by another patrician.

The story opens as she forges her qualifications and gets on board one of the ten or so greatships that trade through human space before visiting a very alien race with which communication hasn't been possible, but a trade has grown up that swaps gold for Xenoglass upon which a lot of the trading universe depends.

Nbaro starts as a Midshipman pilot and as the long voyage begins shock spreads through human space at the destruction of two other greatships by an unknown agressor.

Despite hints of Star Trek the books owe more to a long line of military SF books going back to sea-going naval fiction. Our hero starts at the lowest rank and the novels follow them to Captain or beyond. The only difference is the greater racial and gender diversity that you simply expect in a novel written in the third decade of the 21st century.

So none of this is particularly new or original and a lot of the first three quarters of the novel has Nbaro worrying about her forged documents being discovered and detecting a series of subtle, and not so subtle, attacks against the greatship making friends and opening up as she goes. But there's not a great deal of real action.

This comes to the heart of why I can't recommend it. Nbaro is a total Mary Sue (probably in the newer sense of being perfect rather than the old description of being an extension of the author). Her only failing is a lack of faith in herself. Apart from that she excels at everything. She's a great pilot, her hand to hand combat skills are magnificent and she proves very adapt at routing out saboteurs when recruited by the intelligence services on the ship. Everyone loves her, up to and including the ship's captain and the highly advanced AI that runs the ship. The few that don't (and this isn't much of a spoiler) turn out to be wrong-uns. She detects each attempt to harm the greatship and is instrumental in almost immediately averting disaster almost each time. I think there's just one attack in the entire book that she is not at least in part responsible for defusing. It's only towards the end that you get any sense of real danger.

So it's not a great book, but something of a comfortable easy read. It's the first of a duology (shocking to see something that isn't a trilogy) but I'd expect to see more novels further on if this and its sequel prove popular enough.

ASFTSN

Finished Animal Money by Michael Cisco this morning. Kind of indescribable. I think I liked it.

Famous Mortimer

Harrow The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I don't think Harrow is that good a central character, and it felt like it leapt into the wider conflict a bit quickly, so perhaps the first book in the series was a fluke. It's not bad, necessarily, but it feels like you've walked into the room while someone is telling a story, but you missed an important bit at the beginning that tells you why you should care.

Zetetic

Quoteit feels like you've walked into the room while someone is telling a story, but you missed an important bit at the beginning
I think that's mostly very deliberate - it's aggressively disorientating plot and tone-wise compared with Gideon the Ninth, in line with Harrow's ongoing experience.

Having said that, I've no idea if the following sequels are going to be any good.

All Surrogate

Quote from: All Surrogate on December 01, 2021, 05:03:57 PMI've just finished re-reading Peter Watts' Firefall duology, which are great if thoroughly terrifying books. Now I've started reading his Rifters trilogy, which I've not read before, but are already shaping up to be pretty bleak in their own abyssal way.

Well, I've finished the trilogy. I definitely prefer the Firefall books; the Rifters books are just so bleak and occasionally downright unpleasant to read, with most characters steeped in horribleness, though the premise and settings are interesting.

surreal

Just finished the final book of The Expanse - "Leviathan Falls".  Overall I've really enjoyed them, they have helped me to get back into reading during lockdown so that is something.  Mostly I found they were each a little slow to start but by about 150-200 pages in they really pick up.  I think the series ended pretty well, which is all you can ask of something 9 books long really.  Looking forward to the collected novellas in March now, I know they are available separately but I think I'll wait for the set.

I think the last 3 books could make 2 good movies, would be a bit much to squeeze into 1 I think.  Here's hoping.

Now, do I go back to reading Bosch or stay with SF and into the Culture novels...?

touchingcloth

I've started on Never Let Me Go having recently polished off Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day in a couple of days and enjoying it a lot.

I'm not too far in, but I read a lot of Atwood's speculative/dystopian SF in 2021, and it reminds me a lot of Oryx and Crake so far, which is no bad thing at all. Both authors seem to enjoy starting their books very vaguely and take the "show, don't tell" maxim to its extremes so that the full horror of the characters' situations only reveal themselves slowly.

surreal

I moved on to The Three Body Problem in the end.  Then I saw the reviews of it on here, oh dear... I'm actually enjoying it so far, I find it pretty easy to read once getting past the Chinese names, so hopefully I'll be able to burn through all 3.

touchingcloth

I can't remember if I reviewed it here, but I enjoyed it a lot. You should race through!

Alberon

Didn't read too much over the Christmas break. Having said that, I've just finished a novella and a book.

First up is Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's set on an alien world where the fourth daughter of a Queen seeks aid from a terrifying wizard. Except the wizard is an anthropologist from Earth sent to study a colony that slipped back into feudalism. The novella alternates chapters from the viewpoint of the Queen's daughter and the stranded anthropologist. Earth has fallen silent and he's slept in suspended animation for centuries in the vain hope that he'll hear from them again. The Queen's daughter (IIRC the term princess isn't used) asks him for help against a demon. The anthopologist is certain it's just another old colony machine or device that has gone haywire or is being misued, but he may be wrong.

That's main point of the story is the scientist struggling with the fact that he could be the last of his civilisation. Interesting, but not fantastic.

Following that was The Etched City by K. J. Bishop, a first, and so far only, novel published back in 2004. Set in an alternate world at about Victorian levels of technology it tells the story of two people who escape to Ashamoil after leading a failed revolution back home. One drifts into the service of a local crimelord and the other a doctor at a hospital for the poor.

At this point the narrative thrust of the novel dies away and we're left with a series of vignettes into their lives in the city. As the novel progresses one character gets sidelined as the other takes centre stage and fantastical elements creep towards the front. Though it is possible to read the latter quarter of a book as a drug induced hallucination. It is very rich in describing the city and the life of the people in it and has been compared to China Mieville's Bas-Lag stories, but it is very much its own thing.

I can't say I fully understood it but I did enjoy this one.

Currently re-reading the collected version of Jack Vance's Tales Of The Dying Earth stories. Vance is one of those authors who was incredibly influential on the genre as a whole yet rarely gets name-checked, and it's interesting to see how many modern fantasy tropes first appeared when he started writing these back in the forties.

The earliest tales in particular have a delightfully weird, pulpy quality with a macabre edge that I find really appealing, although the later stories that make up Cudjel's Saga are at times properly laugh out loud funny. His influence on Terry Pratchett is very clear in certain places.

This old Guardian review sums it incredibly well:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/05/fantasy-tales-dying-earth-jack-vance

mothman

Quantum of Nightmares, by Charles Stross. The second of The Laundry Files, a spin-off from his Laundry series.

Now, I've no preconceptions about where this saga is going; there have been enough indications along the way that CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is unlikely to have a happy ending.

But recent books in the main sequence have left me increasingly bemused...

Spoiler alert
First you have the emergence of superheroes in the Laundryverse, culminating in some sort of necromantic bloodbath during the last night of the Proms. Then an extradimensional invasion of Leeds by elves. Then the wholesale takeover of the US Government by Cthulhu cultists. And finally, those same cultists making inroads into the British Government, leading to the Laundry choosing the lesser of two evils, and helping install Nyarlathotep as prime minister in the guise of Fabian Everyman, an administration that comes to be known as the New Management.

In theory, all is not lost; the Laundry (our heroes) are working as a fifth column within the New Management, presumably to reinstate proper rule once NIGHTMARE GREEN passes, the stars are no longer aligned etc.

But. Stross has said these new stories are set AFTER the main sequence has concluded. Therefore whatever the Laundry hoped to do may not have worked. And I'm finding that thought a bit of a downer.

As I say, I have no preconceptions. This feeling may represent a slight dissatisfaction with how the series has changed. I think I enjoyed it more when it was about a world that could be our own, with a secret underworld and history.

And it's also telling that the books I cited above marked the point when it moved away from a single narrator, oft-hapless field officer and IT guru "Bob Howard" and instead uses different viewpoints - his wife Mo, his ex who's now a vampire, etc. It felt like too jarring a transition, even if I have continued to enjoy the books.
[close]

Anyway, all of the above spoiled section plays into how I feel about these new side stories. They feel like some overly-heavy-handed Brexit metaphor. New Management Britain is a shithole, where people can lose their rights, the death penalty is applied to almost any crime, and people just accept it.

The point about the death penalty makes me think of Larry Niven's Known Space books, where the death penalty is used to feed the organ banks which keep people alive. Niven's frequent collaborator Jerry Pournelle was on record and not buying into the sociology of Known Space, and that's kind of how I feel about these New Management Laundry spin-offs. It just feels childishly over-pessimistic about human nature - even to me!

I guess... I want escapism. I know what is going on in the world right now. I don't need a fantastical grin dark allegory to educate me about it (I'm looking at you, too, Star Trek: Picard).

touchingcloth

To Be Taught, if Fortunate or Mortal Engines are next for me. Anyone read either?

willbo

if mortal engines is the Philip Reeve series, they're great...kind of a simpler Gormenghast feeling IMO and very dark and grim

touchingcloth

Quote from: willbo on January 17, 2022, 12:16:21 PMif mortal engines is the Philip Reeve series, they're great...kind of a simpler Gormenghast feeling IMO and very dark and grim

It's the first book in the series, aye. I've gone with To Be Taught... just cos it's shorter, but I'll move onto that next!

willbo


Alberon

The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie is the second of his Age of Madness trilogy and the eighth First Law book overall. While it's a series with two trilogies and three standalone books it feels more and more like a proper nine book series. A series that seems to be heading to a proper conclusion.

The Union is in trouble. Threatened in the west by a resurgent Old Empire, a united Styria in the east and the usual convulsions in the war-torn north. The book mainly follows our characters as they get dragged into two sides of a civil war.

As usual, long running characters are no more likely to survive than new ones. I've been through pretty much the entire series in under a year, and that's with trying to space them out. I strongly recommend the whole series.

The first trilogy ends on a
Spoiler alert
very downbeat note.
[close]
It'll be interesting to see where the second trilogy (and end of the series?) finishes and I plan to start the next book as soon as I can.

phosphoresce

I picked up some classic Sci Fi books in a charity shop the other week, I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson. I love speculative fiction where you have an out there scenario described so vividly you can imagine what it would really be like. Like being a man slowly shrinking away –

Spoiler alert
it would be shit
[close]

It's clever how he depicts the anxieties of a 1950's American male, as his place in the world is, err, diminishing.

notjosh

Quote from: phosphoresce on January 21, 2022, 06:43:51 PMThe Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson. I love speculative fiction where you have an out there scenario described so vividly you can imagine what it would really be like.

A brilliant book and film! As you say, the emasculating nature of the initial shrinkage1 has a great tragicomic quality to it. Then as he shrinks further it becomes an offbeat, but still pretty brutal, survival story, before finally ending up with something pretty cosmic and philosophical.

I'm always on the look-out for great Earth-bound speculative fiction if anyone has any recommendations, besides the obvious Wyndham, Wells etc. I recently read Jack (Body Snatchers) Finney's Time and Again about a bloke travelling back in time to 1870s New York. It's pretty light on science, or any particular discussion of the rules/consequences of the time travel, but it's great at really vividly describing how it would feel to find yourself in a completely different time. I found it quite moving in the end.

1"it shrinks?"

touchingcloth

Quote from: notjosh on January 24, 2022, 10:18:55 PMI'm always on the look-out for great Earth-bound speculative fiction if anyone has any recommendations, besides the obvious Wyndham, Wells etc.

Have you read any Margaret Atwood? The Handmaid's Tale is excellent, and her MaddAddam is great as well. The Handmaid's Tale in particular is depressing as fuck because she tries to limit herself to writing about possible futures, and to only imagining events which analogues in history so it's hard not to read her fiction more as warnings than as entertainment.

notjosh

Quote from: touchingcloth on January 25, 2022, 01:25:50 PMHave you read any Margaret Atwood? The Handmaid's Tale is excellent

No, I've (pathetically) been a bit put off by its recent popularity so kind of assumed it was shit. But I'll look out for it next time I'm in a book shop.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: notjosh on January 24, 2022, 10:18:55 PMI'm always on the look-out for great Earth-bound speculative fiction if anyone has any recommendations, besides the obvious Wyndham, Wells etc. I recently read Jack (Body Snatchers) Finney's Time and Again about a bloke travelling back in time to 1870s New York. It's pretty light on science, or any particular discussion of the rules/consequences of the time travel, but it's great at really vividly describing how it would feel to find yourself in a completely different time. I found it quite moving in the end.

Well your mention of the latter (which I've not read) has reminded me of the slightly similar-sounding The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which I read back in 1990 and thoroughly enjoyed.  I wasn't the only one: it won the 1983 Philip K. Dick Award and 1984 Science Fiction Chronicle Award.

Here's the beginning of the Wiki plot synopsis, will hopefully give you a flavour of the theme without being spoilery (but I've put it in spoiler tags just in case):

Spoiler alert
In 1801 the British have risen to power in Egypt and suppress the worship of the old Egyptian gods. A cabal of magicians plan to drive the British out of Egypt by bringing the gods forward in time from an age when they were still powerful and unleashing them on London, thereby destroying the British Empire.

In 1802, a failed attempt by the magicians to summon Anubis opens magical gates in a predictable pattern across time and space.

In 1983, ailing millionaire J. Cochran Darrow has discovered the gates and found that they make time travel possible. Darrow organizes a trip to the past for fellow millionaires to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810...
[close]

Like the book you mention, it's great at really vividly describing how it would feel to find yourself in a completely different time.

In fact, if I had one criticism of it, it's that it spends too MUCH time fucking about in 1800s London rather than further exploring the SF time gates concept.

Still, sounds like that won't be an issue for you, so highly recommended.

JesusAndYourBush

I've been reading a book of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (a paperback, published 1978, copyright 1977), and I wonder if anyone knows what the deal is with books like this?  It's clearly an earlier version of the story compared to to the film as some scenes have enough differences where you can see that they've been changed or improved when it came to the film version.  Steven Spielberg is listed as the writer (because he wrote it) but he's not a book writer.  I've also got a book of ET that's the same dealio - book published around the same time as the film release but is clearly an earlier version of the story.

So what's the deal here.  Do they want to get a book out ASAP to tie in with the film release so an early draft of the screenplay is given to a ghost writer to turn into a book??

Alberon

Yeah, basically. It's the easiest way to get the book in the shops when the film is released.

And it also often seemed to be the case that the director would get credited as the writer. George Lucas was credited as the writer of Star Wars (episode 4 but before it was labelled as such) and Gene Roddenberry was credited with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I believe both were actually written by Alan Dean Foster.

touchingcloth

Must be a piece of piss gig for ghostwriters, especially compared to the "auto"-biographies which get hurried into the shops about people like Nazi Tom and the guy who found a big chip given that they have the plot of the screenplay to follow.

notjosh

I've had Asimov's Fantastic Voyage novelisation sitting on my shelf for ages, which is apparently pretty good and ended up being released before the movie so that many people assumed the latter was based on the former.

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on January 26, 2022, 05:41:51 PMThe Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

Sounds interesting, cheers.