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  1. #1041
    Sea Torques
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    Quote Originally Posted by Souj View Post
    So, I started up on Malazan after finishing up Dresden Files, since it has been talked about in passing on this thread lately and I'm 6% in, just started chapter 3, and my question is;
    How long until I know what the hell is going on?


    I know there's a really sharp knowledge curve in a lot of fantasy/scifi, but all that I've been able to pick up so far is that there was an Emperor, he died and now there's an Empress. There's this little girl who was taken from her village and is now some super crazy powerful thingy, there was a battle? with magic? people died, there was a demon for a few seconds and now there's a doll possessed by some guy's soul and a girl who feels that fate(or some god type deal) is on her side. and the big boss of the mages want these bridgeburner dudes dead for some reason. and also that the majority of people are given oddly selected names for some reason

    That about sum up chapter 1 and 2?
    Yep. Just hang in there. The scale of the story is bigger than usual, so the spread of plot points is too. Just know that the author knows you don't know, and go with it for now. Also don't be tempted to skim- it's a bad habit of mine, but I had to slow down for the Malazan books. Erikson isn't big on fluff descriptions, and he'll often impart something useful about a character with just a single well picked word in a sentence.

    The names are a military crew sort of thing. When you join up your squad inevitably picks your new name, and whatever sticks is it. This is definitely one of the things that Erikson inherited from Glen Cook's Black Company.

  2. #1042
    The Shitlord
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    ah, yes, the X-Wing series is really good. I read most of those as well. Forgot about them.


    I should really re-read the whole EU...

  3. #1043

    Quote Originally Posted by Eticket View Post
    Finished off This Book is Full of Spiders. Awesome book. If you're a fan of horror/comedy you should pick up John Dies at the End and then This Book is Full of Spiders.

    Picked up Hank Haney's book on Tiger Woods today called The Big Miss.
    Finally getting around to John Dies at the End. Just about 6% in but damned if it isn't great. His 'does not fucking care' attitude and general sarcastic tone is just so great. It also lends for some really great quotes that would make sense to no one.

  4. #1044
    Formerly BGTemp // TERA Fan
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    Just finished up Dragons of Winter Night: Chronicles, Volume Two: 2 (Dragonlance: Chronicles). It's a decent series so far and brings back some fond memories of when I played D&D, though I never did anything in the Dragonlance gameworld. Starting Vol 3 tonight or tomorrow, reviews say to stop after this one because Vol 4 is garbage.

  5. #1045
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    Finished Cold Days. Yep. Awesome. Wasn't as soul crushing as I had feared, but, yeah. Probably one of my favorite Dresden books, definitely better than Ghost Story.

    Quote Originally Posted by Souj View Post
    @Cold Days
    it get's progressively less hilarious as it goes on.
    Goes from hilarious to badass to epic to soul crushing sad.(well, last part could depend on your outlook.)

    as far as something that happens at the end that I need clarification on;
    Spoiler: show
    So Murphy and Dresden still aren't going to be dating or anything like that, but they agreed to be fuck buddies? Or are they still, "we can't change our relationship at all" still.
    I think that:
    Spoiler: show
    all of the sex talk was just in the context of "if we did get together, we would totally have awesome sex." Harry was like, "I'll have you screaming" and Murphy was like "maybe it'll be you screaming." But with them more or less agreeing that things were still too screwed up right now to really make a go of it.

    In the positive realm, I liked that Odin implied that the Winter Lady/Knight situation was not necessarily permanent. He off-handedly kind of threw in that mantles and masks can be discarded on Halloween. If Harry still has a broken spine under the mantle though, I'm not sure that would work out for him... I guess we'll see next book (or so).


  6. #1046

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    Quote Originally Posted by Rulke View Post
    Just finished up Dragons of Winter Night: Chronicles, Volume Two: 2 (Dragonlance: Chronicles). It's a decent series so far and brings back some fond memories of when I played D&D, though I never did anything in the Dragonlance gameworld. Starting Vol 3 tonight or tomorrow, reviews say to stop after this one because Vol 4 is garbage.
    Yeah. After Chronicles do the Legends Trilogy. and then after that, ymmv on each book.

  7. #1047
    Bring on the Revolution
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    just started the name of the wind.


    prettay prettay prettay good

  8. #1048
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    20% through Malazan and finally reached a point where I'm not just forcing myself to read through.
    Hopefully now I'll start getting through this book in a timely fashion instead of just reading on my work breaks and on the shitter

  9. #1049

    Haven't found anything new that really interests me lately. Checked out the zero sight series, it was ok.

  10. #1050
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    Any hard sci-fi fans in here? I'd love to hear some recommendations.

    My recommendation: Blindsight by Peter Watts. It has been released under a Creative Commons license, so if you don't want to put down the cash for the paperback you can find free digital copies on the author's website (links to the various formats at the top of the page).

    Using the filters of the nearly post-human and contact with a truly alien lifeform, the novel asks, "What if conciousness, that which we value most about ourselves and believe to set us apart from everything else, is actually our Achilles' Heel?"

    Review by Elisabeth Bear:
    Spoiler: show

    It’s my opinion that Peter Watts’s Blindsight is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of this millennium—and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of all the ramifications of its central argument. Watts is one of the crown princes of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre: his work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. But he’s also a poet—a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description. His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit.

    Blindsight is the story of Siri Keaton, a man with half a brain, who is one member of the crew of the research vessel Theseus. The Theseus is crewed by a carefully selected group of technologically engineered superhumans, which—quite by accident—encounters alien life in a vessel they name Rorschach. An alien life that cannot even be described as malevolent, for it is as indifferent to humanity as everything else in the universe, except for humanity itself. An alien life form that is better than us in all imaginable ways, because it is not handicapped with this thing we call consciousness—self-awareness, the I, the ability to observe and question our own actions.

    Watts’s universe is capricious, agencyless, and coldly mechanical. He takes a rigorously behaviorist stance on human neurology. His people are ticking clockworks—beautiful, strong, wounded, heroic ticking clockworks, with that perception familiar to so many of us of being trapped outside the course of our lives.

    I keep returning to those words—Lovecraftian, indifferent—but Blindsight is also a brilliant argument for the inevitability of that indifference. There’s an icy, logical nihilism at this book’s core that Watts never shies away from, that—in fact—he ruthlessly exploits. Horrible things happen for no reason, because he universe is like that, and Watts doesn’t give us the pretense of some higher meaning as a comfort.

    In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is the place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing, it’s soothing to have an excuse.

    The funny thing is, that quibble does not detract from my assessment of this book as among the best of its kind. The fact that I find Watts’s argument insufficiently nuanced doesn’t actually change the fact that he makes it brilliantly, that his ideas are horrible and fascinating and glitter like a swarm of darkly jeweled beetle carapaces, that he’s got a hard-biology explanation for vampirism and that his thematic freight—that all we see when we look out at the universe is our own selves reflected, because that is what we are programmed to see, and that our conscious minds may very well be bad for us—is gorgeously developed.

    Blindsight is one of those rare books that alters the reader’s perception of the world and of himself, if the reader is brave enough to tackle it head-on. The idea that consciousness is self-destructive is a heady one. I can think of exactly one other novel that even has the guts to take that one on: it’s Kurt Vonnegut’s much-maligned Galapagos. But where Galapagos is a farce, Blindsight is a tour de force, a science fiction novel that should be able to make any alert reader question not only what just happened in the pages, but exactly who is reading them.
    Spoiler: show
    Yes, there's a vampire (no, not that kind of vampire [ugh, I feel icky typing that]), but don't skip it because of that!


    It's probably the book I've most enjoyed reading in the last few years.

  11. #1051
    The Shitlord
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    Quote Originally Posted by Clash Perez View Post
    Any hard sci-fi fans in here?
    Not sure what exactly you mean by hard, but I'm certainly a sci-fi fan.

    As for recommendations, let me list a few series from authors I've got bookmarked and therefore handy... the Star Wars Expanded Universe has a TON of material, most of it good imo. See the last few pages for more details; we just talked about them. Huge variety of authors, so if you don't like one, don't write off the whole EU. The Saga of the Seven Suns is a nice 7 book series by Kevin J. Anderson. Humanity expands, meets aliens, accidentally starts a war. I liked it a lot. There's the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, who is probably my all-time favorite author. Colonization ship's FTL malfunctions, end up way off target unable to recognize any stars, eventually colonizes a nearby habitable world.... which is already owned by a pre-industrial race of large humanoids, with brain/behavioral patterns that do not include love or friendship as we know it. Another accidental war. This has all been the prologue, and the series now begins to follow the single human on the alien continent: an ambassador/interpreter appointed to help smooth relations between the two races and slowly feed human technology into the alien civ without disrupting it. SHIT GETS REAL. My favorite series from my favorite author.

    Then there's the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, which aren't really a series, but do share a few common characters, and are all set in the same galaxy, with a lot of the same civilizations showing up. Very fun. And the Expanse series, which is relatively new, by Daniel Abraham (As James S.A. Corey). It's a space opera, apparently, but it's cooler than that makes it seem. Some of the characters remind me a lot of Firefly, which is probably not a coincidence. Finally, there's Harry Turtledove. A lot of what he does doesn't really qualify as Science Fiction, but one series does: World War. He writes a lot of alternate history, and this falls into that category as well, but its divergence point is very much sci-fi: WW2 is heating up, the U.S. has just begun research on nukes, and aliens invade. The aliens came expecting knights in shining armor with swords and maybe, MAYBE crossbows. So it's definitely not a push-over. If you try this series and like it, he's got a few others that are also very very good. I'm current re-reading his Southern Victory (South wins the U.S. civil war, becomes independent nation) series.

    And then there's various video-game novels, like EVE, Halo, etc.

  12. #1052
    Ridill
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    Ender's Game? Though I'm assuming you've already read it.

  13. #1053
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    "Hard" science fiction is sci-fi with attention to or emphasis on scientific detail and accuracy. Counter-examples would be movies with thunderous space explosions, or aliens that look like humans with funny foreheads, or in the recent remake of Total Recall where seemingly switch-controlled weightlessness turns off and on during the 17-minute ride through the Earth. Kind of a pet-peeve of mine, if you can't tell.

    Souj: I've read Ender's Game a few times, and it's definitely one of the first sci-fi books I recommend to anyone. Great book.

    Bane: I came across Cherryh and Banks while looking around other sites; I may have to give 'em a try. Thanks.

  14. #1054
    The Shitlord
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    Hmm. I've read a fair amount of that sort of sci-fi in the past, though the only specific examples i can recall off hand are the Expanse novels. Although... it does have a couple instances of things defying physics as we know them. But they're not human creations. At this point, I don't know what the hell they are. They're pretty mysterious.

    The Foreigner series is close, too. The only physics-breaking thing is the FTL, though the aliens do look like humans. Large, black-skinned humans. With different psyches and a higher tolerance for alkaloids. And an aversion to even numbers, especially two. Foreigner is more about the politics and interactions and the alien psyche than it is the flashy space stuff, though. Cherryh's written a few series, and while I haven't read them all, the ones I have read are usually like that.

  15. #1055
    Sea Torques
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    re: hard sci fi. I just read through the Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series and it was.... okay. It's got the scale for a big space story, if that's your sort of thing. I don't feel like I got much closure out of it, for all my time investment. I reeaaaally liked Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky." Very interesting takes on alien (actually alien, not cat headed blue people) societies. And good characters, too.

    And wiki says that there is a sequel, so now I know what I want to read next! <3

    I'll make a note to check out Blindsight, though. Elizabeth Bear is a very classy lady who knows a thing or two about interesting scifi books, so I'll take her rec.

  16. #1056
    Ridill
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    Googlicious
    http://www.technologyreview.com/view...s-of-all-time/

    also; Starship Troopers

  17. #1057
    Ridill
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    Wheel of Time related;
    from Brandon Sanderson's twitter;
    " People ask me a lot about RJ's notes. Harriet has said they are longer than the series combined. I decided to try adding them up. "
    " I put all of the files into one document. MS Word crashed when the doc reached 32,000 PAGES and counting. So...lots of notes. "

  18. #1058
    29 in magical dog years
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  19. #1059

    Quote Originally Posted by Jakson View Post
    Just spent $83 at Powell's, I can't walk out of that place without spending at least $30.
    I have to stay away from that place or I will flat out empty my wallet every single time. The Technical store is just as bad... if not worse.

  20. #1060
    Ridill
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    Oh, randomly downloaded E-Books.
    I was wondering why it was taking me so long to finish the book when wiki said it was only about 800 pages. Turns out Gardens of the Moon ended at 40% and the file also contained Deadhouse Gates.

    Still not sure if I really like the book. Parts of it were interesting enough, but the book goes all over the place. So I guess I'll start on Deadhouse Gates now.



    Also, you know what's lame? Dresden Files books costing more than Wheel of Time books when they're like a 4th the size!


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