At the recent WorldCon in Glasgow, I had the pleasure of briefly speaking with both Scott Lynch and his editor at Gollancz. This coincided with Scott publishing a comprehensive update on his website.
The salient points from both these sources:
Reading Malazan these days and its such a breath of fresh air that characters treats each other with a tone of dignity and respect mostly. Sure there are some footsoldiers and mercenaries-types that are of that stereotype, but not everyone, all the time. It just gets so old and dull really fast when all the characters try to zing eachother every single time they speak.
You know when you open a book and feel “home”. I literally don’t know how else to explain this feeling, also because english is not my language. But twenty years later nothing has been able to make me feel like that, and this makes me immensely sad… any recs?
Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon, nephew of King Aurelius Ambrosius, who was in turn the son of a long list of people who weren’t kings and thus don’t matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass.
… Diana Murtaugh, Baltimore, MD
Scifi’s winner was:
With the long-awaited legalization of human cloning and the availability of goodly amounts of the DNA of its founding fathers, America in 2035 found itself entering a new golden age—one in which Nathan Hale at last had more than one life to give for his country, Benjamin Franklin was on hand to get the freaking Post Office back on the rails, and Alexander Hamilton could finally play himself on Broadway eight shows a week.
…. G. Andrew Lundberg
Other and overall winners available: https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2024
I don’t get why people feel the need to do this. It’s become way more prevalent, and comments in the Prince of Thorns thread finally got to me lol. People in there are going “the main character is an edgelord and the people who follow him shouldn’t but I’ve only read the first chapter and stopped cause I couldn’t handle the ridiculousness of it.”
I’ve reviewed books I haven’t finished before, but I at least get that out of the way BEFORE I say my feelings. It’s exhausting to come on this sub, which is fucking amazing and has boosted my TBR by like hundreds, and try to read peoples thoughts and then get to the end and* see “well I stopped after chapter 4, the book was a 1 star.” Half of the complaints about Prince of Thorns are about plotlines that get resolved THROUGHOUT the book! Why bother even going into a thread to go “this made no sense, and this was fucking stupid, and it wasn’t explained at all …
I’ve been reading shittily written books for years now, simply due to their concept or world. I want to know what fantasy/sci-fi you’ve read, be it scalzi, asimov, Mark Lawrence or someone else entirely; what is the fiction that gripped you, stunned you, or otherwise was just so great you remember it to this day… for its writing?
I was 32 when I read the book and then did some quick math. 20,000 leagues is 60,000 miles…and the earth is only 7,918 miles in diameter. So I was just an idiot for 32 years. I still am an idiot but just not regarding this book.
What have y’all expected from a book and then realized how dumb you were once you read it?
Ahaha edited for the actual title and math
I was looking for an audiobook to listen to during a long drive. A review from the New York Times Book Review caught my eye. ”Imagine The Life of Pi, The Alchemist, and The Midnight Library rolled into one fantastical fable.” I laughed out loud and thought there is no flipping way someone hit that on a debut novel. When I went into Story Graph, their synopsis started with ”The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue meets Life of Pi in this dazzlingly epic debut…..” Needless to say, I downloaded the book.
I finished the book yesterday and I’ve got to say NY Times and Story Graph were right. There were elements of all four books without being a copy job. It can definitely stand up with all of them. I would put the writing style closer to Invisible Life with flashes of The Alchemist from time to time. I was very happy to be proven wrong. I gave it 5 stars.
I was proofreading this and almost hit send before realizing I never told you the name of the book. Oops! It’s A Short Walk Through a Wide …
I’m obsessed with Science Fiction. It’s almost all I read. I used to run a Sci-Fi Book Club here in Vancouver (you can see a few posts from it like our short story contest and some of our reviews)
About every six years or so (it seems) I put together a list of what I think the best science fiction books are. You can see 2017’s list here and 2011’s list here.
The criteria for being on this list is that I have to absolutely love the book. Most of the books on this list I’ve re-read many times. I’ve gifted most of these books to people (“You HAVE to read this!”).
Most of the books on this list also aren’t for everyone. I like slow-moving books. I like subtle world-building. I like “big concept” sci-fi. I like big, depressing spaceships. I like stories about robots and Artificial Intelligence that make us question what it means to be human. I like series, as opposed to short stories, because they let me spend more time diving deeply into a new world.
I like sci-fi that asks “What …
I’ll start. Rendezvous with Rama. I just think its prose and characters are extremely lacking, and its story not all that great, its ideas underwhelming.
There are far better first contact books, even from the same age or earlier like Solaris. And far far better contemporary ones.
Let the carnage begin.
Edit: wow that was a lot of carnage.
There must be examples of this in sci fi but I’m drawing a blank.
I have only read a few SF books, and was looking for some recommendations.
By far the best thing I’ve read so far is Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I was completely blown away by both books. Things that appealed to me:
1 - Great prose. Descriptive but not overly ornate. Sophisticated but also highly readable. It just sort of propelled one along.
2 - Lots of great ideas and interesting characters.
3 - Loved the occasional subtle humor in the book, and the genre bending.
I thought it was a much better book than Dune, though I did like Dune too.
I also enjoyed “Left Hand of Darkness”. Ursula has a great prose style as well.
So, my ranking of some recent books I’ve read would be (If I finish a book, that is already an endorsement from me, cause I DNF a lot of books):
1 - Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion
2 - Ted Chiang … squeezing him in here (a reply reminded me of him).
2 - Left Hand
3 - Dune
3 - Beautiful Shining People
4 - Starship Troopers …
“Always read” meaning that if you see the name you will give it shot, even if you haven’t entirely loved everything they’ve ever written. “Never read again” meaning you have tried several different things, or hundreds of pages, and decided that that author will never do it for you.
I just finished Hyperion, and I was blown away. Now I know a lot of people are disappointed in the ending (and although I know there are other books, I haven’t read them), but to me that wasn’t the point.
The book was essentially a collection of short stories centered around the strangeness of the world Hyperion and the mysterious lord of pain, and boy did it deliver. My imagination hasn’t been so enthralled in a book in a long time.
Did the ending leave a lot to the imagination? Absolutely. Who was Cassad’s lover? What is the purpose of the labyrinths and the cruciforms? What was the true purpose of the shrike? Etc and etc. But that’s okay to me. The purpose of the book was to introduce a genuinely strange and alien world that captures the imagination without feeling the need to explain everything.
It was awesome.
I didn’t grow up with Disney animated films and it left a big cultural gap in my knowledge so I dedicated a few months to sitting down and watching my way through Disney’s core history of films. For whatever it might be worth, I’m a black South African man who’s in his early 30s. I wanted to see what it’s like to watch all of these films with virgin adult eyes and without the gloss of childhood nostalgia. I grew up mostly with horror films and documentaries but I am genre agnostic - if it’s good, it’s good. I had only seen the Lion King as a child. I limited this to animated originals and their sequels and remakes. I created a list on my Letterboxd recently and looked at the stats.
Total films watched: 72 (100+ hours) Animated: 57 Live-action remakes: 15
Summary impressions
My top 5 highest rated: 1. The Lion King (1994) - 4.5 stars 2. Frozen II (2019) (yes, seriously) 4.5 stars 3. Lilo & Stitch (2002) 4 stars 4. Tangled (2010) 4 stars …