The Reading Room

Damien said:
DEFINITELY. Tau is treated like an actual grown-up with a brain, who also happens to be somewhat unbalanced. But he recognizes other people are, in fact, people, and treats them accordingly. Winter does a great job at writing Tau as someone with drive and rage issues, without him being just a douchebag to everyone around him all the time.
Click to expand...
Yeah, there's multiple moments where he says something dickish to one key character and IMMEDIATELY apologizes. A great portrayal of the "no time for nonsense" driven part of his persona while also making him smart enough to recognize when he's being cruel and fixing it rather than letting it fester.
 
JakeEkiss said:
As a random aside, I assume you've read Tim Powers's stuff yeah? Declare and Anubis Gates etc? Feels like it might be up your alley if not.
Click to expand...
I've actually only ever read On Stranger Tides. Anubis Gates has been on my short list forever, but somehow always manages to get pushed back by something my ADHD brain is more interested in at the moment.
 
Now THAT sounds familiar. I have stacks of books sitting around, and somehow whenever I finish one, the first thing I grab is the newest thing off the top of the pile.
 
Damien said:
I've actually only ever read On Stranger Tides. Anubis Gates has been on my short list forever, but somehow always manages to get pushed back by something my ADHD brain is more interested in at the moment.
Click to expand...
I've read Anubis Gates and Declare and enjoyed them both. Declare is more my bag because it's all the Cold War spy vs spy shit mixed with all his supernatural stuff. It's good though, and if you like the stories weaving supernatural things into real history there's plenty of that.
 
JakeEkiss said:
I've read Anubis Gates and Declare and enjoyed them both. Declare is more my bag because it's all the Cold War spy vs spy shit mixed with all his supernatural stuff. It's good though, and if you like the stories weaving supernatural things into real history there's plenty of that.
Click to expand...
Definitely will have to read both of them eventually. I just need like... 37 hours more in a day, none of which require me to be at work, so I can start making a dent in the backlog. On Stranger Tides was quite good. Definitely a very readable author, which isn't always the case for sure.


cmoney said:
Now THAT sounds familiar. I have stacks of books sitting around, and somehow whenever I finish one, the first thing I grab is the newest thing off the top of the pile.
Click to expand...
Mine's even weirder. I will go to the store and buy four new books, and then come home and start on a book I've had for 2 years and never got around to, and the four new ones will sit on the shelf for two years before I pick them up. Why do I do this? Who can say.
 
I only let myself do library rentals/eBooks on a first read. My bookshelf is basically a favorites shelf. Half my house would be books otherwise.

I just finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. It's a Firefly-ish sci-fi book about a tunneling crew (they literally drill wormholes across the galaxy). I loved the first half of it and merely liked the latter half. (This is a common problem for me when I anticipate where a book is going and it heads in a different direction instead.) I'd recommend it if you like lighter sci-fi. I like the genre, but I can't do hard science fiction. It makes my eyes glaze over.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I only let myself do library rentals/eBooks on a first read. My bookshelf is basically a favorites shelf. Half my house would be books otherwise.
Click to expand...
Every few years I do a purge, just like I do with my action figures, and get rid of stuff that I know I'm not going to read again. Anything I don't like gets donated or sold or tossed right away, pretty much, to avoid cluttering up the shelves unnecessarily. But yeah... our entire living room is books, even so.

Even letting it become a collection of just favorites is getting out of hand because I have a lot of favorite books. Plus, I have a lot of books I use as reference material (history, philosophy, etc) that I don't necessarily need to read all the time, but want to have on hand for specific things. That takes up a lot of room, too. I probably have basically an entire bookcase just for history and philosophy.


TheSameIdiot said:
I just finished Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.
Click to expand...
Threw this one on my list for the next time I want sci-fi.


TheSameIdiot said:
I like the genre, but I can't do hard science fiction. It makes my eyes glaze over.
Click to expand...
Hard sci-fi is VERY difficult to make interesting, in my opinion, to your average horror/fantasy/fiction reader. So far the only hard sci-fi I can think of that I've really enjoyed is Children of Time. Although I haven't gone on to read the follow up books just yet (but I want to, the first one was very good).
 
An old author friend who wrote hard sci-fi always used to get mad at me because "you can just *waves hand* magic shit away in superhero/fantasy work and I have to come up with facts and make them interesting," which was definitely an oversimplification and a bit of a dig, but also not entirely wrong. There's a reason I have little desire to write hard sci-fi. Cyberpunk is a jam that pulls me in but cyberpunk also has become nigh impossible to write because we keep crawling up the genre's bunghole with technology IRL that's worse than any writer can come up with.
 
docsilence said:
An old author friend who wrote hard sci-fi always used to get mad at me because "you can just *waves hand* magic shit away in superhero/fantasy work and I have to come up with facts and make them interesting," which was definitely an oversimplification and a bit of a dig, but also not entirely wrong. There's a reason I have little desire to write hard sci-fi. Cyberpunk is a jam that pulls me in but cyberpunk also has become nigh impossible to write because we keep crawling up the genre's bunghole with technology IRL that's worse than any writer can come up with.
Click to expand...
That's why I liked Gibson's pivot to the Blue Ant trilogy. It's like he acknowledged what was happening and just reframed with that contemporary tomorrow setting.
 
altcunningham said:
That's why I liked Gibson's pivot to the Blue Ant trilogy. It's like he acknowledged what was happening and just reframed with that contemporary tomorrow setting.
Click to expand...
Oh, he openly acknowledged that was happening. When he made the shift away from cyberpunk/sci-fi he often talked about how the future was moving too fast for the way he'd incorporate research into his sci-fi so he went with "what's happening tomorrow" instead of what's happening in fifty years.

I love that man. He's one of the few famous people I hope against hope never lets me down. Legitimately a hero of mine.
 
Man, I love hard sci-fi. Seldom come across anyone else who does though. Currently reading Robert Reed's Greatship novels and they're great.
 
docsilence said:
but cyberpunk also has become nigh impossible to write because we keep crawling up the genre's bunghole with technology IRL that's worse than any writer can come up with
Click to expand...
"I've created this technology that is so bad for humanity, is somehow offensively bad for the environment AND has no actual upsides for regular people, that I'm not sure it's even believable that anyone would create and/or use it."
"Have you heard about this piece of technology that's actually worse than what you described and came out two years ago?"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top