What did you just read?

slippery said:

Sci fi is a wasteland imo. Lots of mediocre with little exceptional. It's also really broad so it helps if you have something more specific in mind. Peter Hamilton is pretty great for the commonwealth stuff. I like the solar clipper tales a lot but it's not for everyone

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Have your read "The Quantum Thief"? I thought it was original and very cool.

Luthair said:

I suddenly remembered the book Spin which is a pretty interesting concept.

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This was a very good book in my opinion, none of the sequels lived up to it or even got close.

Livres audio et plus | Votre premier livre est gratuit! | Audible.ca


currently, 50% done and its good.

https://www.amazon.com/12-Rules-Life-Antidote-Chaos/dp/B0797Y87JC/
Finally finished it. Enjoyed almost every second of it.

Always liked Nightbreed, decided the check the novel out because usually it's better. This time it wasn't, which I guess just means they did an awesome job with the adaption (Barker was heavily involved iirc, so I guess he still deserves credit).

The novel did fill in some stuff that the movie rushed through, but it lacks a lot of the atmosphere of the movie, so it kinda balances out, or swings things slightly in favour of the movie. Maybe it's just because I saw the movie first and they did such a great job with visuals and soundtrack, but the book's description of Midian and it's inhabitants felt really bland by comparison (in fact you barely get a POV glimpse of them at all until the last few chapters). Definitely felt like Barker's prose wasn't quite up to describing what he was imagining, which was disappointing. Will probably pass on any of Barker's other novels and just stick to the movie adaptions.

I finally checked out Ubik by Philip K Dick. That man liked him some drugs, holy fuck dudes. It was good, not exactly a satisfactory ending but I think that was his intent.

Azrayne said:

Always liked Nightbreed, decided the check the novel out because usually it's better. This time it wasn't, which I guess just means they did an awesome job with the adaption (Barker was heavily involved iirc, so I guess he still deserves credit).

The novel did fill in some stuff that the movie rushed through, but it lacks a lot of the atmosphere of the movie, so it kinda balances out, or swings things slightly in favour of the movie. Maybe it's just because I saw the movie first and they did such a great job with visuals and soundtrack, but the book's description of Midian and it's inhabitants felt really bland by comparison (in fact you barely get a POV glimpse of them at all until the last few chapters). Definitely felt like Barker's prose wasn't quite up to describing what he was imagining, which was disappointing. Will probably pass on any of Barker's other novels and just stick to the movie adaptions.

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I love The Thief of Always, such a great book, definitely aimed at a younger crowd though. But every time I've tried to get into his other stuff, I'm just not into it. I love the Hellraiser movies (Well, the first 2...) and Nightbreed but his writing just doesn't click with me.

Clive Barker's best were the Books of Blood. That was some visceral shit back in the mid 90's for a teenager. These days it isn't anything incredibly out there, but those stories still stand up.

I'm trying to find a book I read in the 90s my Google fu is failing me, all I really remember is that it was about a young guy in a town where there was some sort of research facility, and they opened a door to another dimension maybe hell and people started mutating, he had an enhanced super smart dog, the priest had a crab claw and they took an elevator that I think went sideways to hell. Since you guys can find any porn just based on the door in a scene I am hoping someone knows what this is.

Time of Contempt by Andrzej Saprowski. This is the second Witcher-universe book that I've read, and I have to say that it is far better than the other one, The Last Wish. This one has a single plot - opposed to being a collection of short stories - that is interesting and easy to follow. Geralt and Ciri feel like old friends coming to visit. The tone is crisp, mixing humor and action together into a blend that flows so easily that before you realize it you've read fifty pages. I read the book in about four days. 8/10

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin. While I read Martin's more famous work - A Song of Ice and Fire - when I was in highschool, I have no intention of going back to them. To be honest, when I tried to read the most recent one I couldn't get through the writing. It was almost as if I could tell the author no longer loved the story. Good lord, that thinking does not apply when it comes to this standalone novel. Set about 100 years before the events of ASOIF, this novel follows a poor knight as he gets mixed up in the political intrigues of a kingdom on the verge of rebellion. You can just tell that Martin had fun writing this. That he loved exploring the little corners of Westeros that were inaccessible to him in his other stories. The tone of the story is much, much lighter than ASOIF but I did not mind that. If anything, I liked it more. It's not for children, though. There's plenty of bloody swordfights! 8/10

I had read the Shattered Earth series by NK Jemisons last year and it was awesome. She has an earlier series, just two books, called the Dreamblood series. It's really god fantasy. Like a mixture of egyptian and native americcan and other shit I probably don't recognize. I was into it, I think she's a really good writer.

chaos said:

I had read the Shattered Earth series by NK Jemisons last year and it was awesome. She has an earlier series, just two books, called the Dreamblood series. It's really god fantasy. Like a mixture of egyptian and native americcan and other shit I probably don't recognize. I was into it, I think she's a really good writer.

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Read the Inheritance trilogy as well. She is probably one of the better up and coming writers...Although she does lay it on thick at times.

She is great at building plausible, understandable, yet totally alien worlds. I feel like there were some character issues in Dreamblood but it was such an original premise that it was easy to let go. Shattered Earth was just badass, there were a couple of times when I thought it was going south but I feel like it finished strong. Interestingly, to me anywau, she wasn't writing full time until this most recent trilogy apparently. I will have to pick up the Inheritance books and see what's up.

So lately I've been listening to Ernest Cline books on audible while driving for work. Ready player one was great, I enjoy his writing style. And I'm about 50% of the way through Armada, and I think he is quickly becoming one of my new favorite authors.

Someone mentioned the knight book by George rr. That was a great book too.

I'll actually be looking for some recommendations here soon. I loved the enders game series (and bean series), the dune books, read plenty of star trek and star wars.

At the risk of repeating myself, if you're looking for a recommendation I'd go for the Dreamblood stuff at some point based on your list there. It really reminded me of Dune in that it just mercilessly dropped you into this alien culture and you had to just figure it out.

Man, I really need to get on the rest of the Dune series but there's too much to read. I've been doin a lot of audio books, enabling me to tear through them at a pace I wouldn't normally be able to, but it looks like Jemison's Inheritance Trilogy doesn't have an audiobook version for the last one so I may go back to Dune instead while I figure out what I'm going to do.

chaos said:

At the risk of repeating myself, if you're looking for a recommendation I'd go for the Dreamblood stuff at some point based on your list there. It really reminded me of Dune in that it just mercilessly dropped you into this alien culture and you had to just figure it out.

Man, I really need to get on the rest of the Dune series but there's too much to read. I've been doin a lot of audio books, enabling me to tear through them at a pace I wouldn't normally be able to, but it looks like Jemison's Inheritance Trilogy doesn't have an audiobook version for the last one so I may go back to Dune instead while I figure out what I'm going to do.

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I'l check out the first book after armada finishes, have banked a few tokens since I haven't been diving as much. Thanks for the recommendation. Some of the dune audio books are good, music, multiple readers etc.

A big list for this time round - I got partway through writing it up a couple of months ago but then windows update ninja-restarted my pc and I lost it, along with the motivation to finish at the time ;p


"Cold-Forged Flame" - Marie Brennan
Woman awakens to find she has no memory, but has been bound by a group of apologetic people who claim they have wiped her memory to protect her, and sorry, but they need her to go fetch them some blood from a cauldron on a remote island. Unsurpisingly, this seems to her a lot like a setup.
I thought this one was good, but crazy short. I'd read more of the series, but I'd check if they are all that short first I think.

"Paradox Bound" - Peter Clines
Guy who has a childhood encounter with a mysterious woman wearing revolutionary-war clothing and driving a very unusual car obsess over her for years and then chases afer her the next time he runs into her, becoming tangled in very unusual quest. This one was an entertainingly different take on time travel, not amazing but an enjoyable read.

"Provenance" - Ann Leckie
Sheltered young woman tries to impress her mother by coming up with a half-baked plan to break the disgraced son of one of her mother's political rivals out of prison. Implausibly, this plan actually works, which would be suspicious if she was less of an idiot ;p This is set in the same universe as Ancillary Justice, but isn't really related, although some of the events from that book are visible in the background. I liked this one quite a bit - the main character seemed very human and very out of her depth.

"A Natural History of Dragons" - Marie Brennan
Alternate history victorian age with assorted fantastical animals, like dragons. This relates the story of how a woman became one of the leading natural philosophers of the age. I thought it was decent, might follow up on sequels.

"The Zero Blessing" - Christopher Nuttall
Schoolgirl from a prominent family of magicians struggles with her inability to do any magic and subsequent abuse and bullying. To noone's surprise, things turn out to be not quite that simple. This series seems aimed at a younger audience than his other 'Schooled in Magic' series, but it's still pretty entertaining. I read all three of the ones currently available.

"Lusam: The Dragon Mage Wars" - Dean Cadman
I can't actually remember what this one was about, but I remember it being decent, if not interesting enough for me to read the sequels - part of this was all four books having the same name, which is kind of confusing even to calibre - looking at the description for it, I'm pretty sure it's for one of the books I didn't read.

"An Unkindness of Magicians" - Kat Howard
The setting for this one is a bit like Fate/Stay Night, in that it's modern times and there's a pretty much organised and lethal battle royale going on among mages. It's complicated this time around because the usual source of magic is becoming unstable and unreliable. The previously expected outcome of the contest is thrown in doubt when one of the minor houses hires an unknown mage with unprecedented power as their champion.
The magicians in this one are an impressive bunch of assholes, but I quite liked this book - it also is standalone and wraps stuff up nicely, which is appreciated in the age of everything being a series.


"The Shard of Fire (Chronicles of Gilgamesh Row 1)" - K.J. Parker
The greatest entertainment of a small village is the yearly contest where people from all over the world come and attempt to take the fabled shard of fire out of the magical pool it rests in. Much money changes hands over how long it will take candidates to fail, and it's all good fun. Until one of the village boys succeeds in removing it, and things get very ugly, very quickly.
This one was unexpected given Parker's previous works - it's written more in a fairy tale style rather than directly literal. It was also dark, but still relatively optimistic, rather than the soul crushing nihilism he's more known for. I liked it, and will read sequels.


"Ward against Death (Chronicles of a Reluctant Necromancer)" - Melanie Card
This had some amusing world building - the main character, Ward, has fallen back to working as a necromancer after having been caught and branded for pursuing his life's ambition in the illegal art of surgery. Necromancy being generally socially acceptable as a means of saying farewell to dead loved ones, or finding out what happened to them. A simple job to raise a rich man's daughter becomes complicated when she, unconvinced of her death, runs off to try and find out who attacked her, dragging the hapless Ward in her wake.
I liked this one enough to read the other 3 in the series. Ward's moping about it being disgusting and illegal to bang your hot zombie woman is pretty funny.


"Artemis" - Andy Weir
Lowlife criminal gets recruited into an unbelievably stupid and dangerous plan to take over major resources in the first independent moon base. I thought this one was ok, but kind of dissapointing in comparison to the Martian. The main character, Jazz, should really be the bad guy here, people taking her lunatic antics in stride just seemed really implausible. The world building was really good though.


"Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep 1)" - Mira Grant
I was a bit confused for a while thinking I had read this, but realised the synopsis was similar enough that I had it confused with a short story from much earlier. In this one the cable tv company that sent the original ill-fated mermaid finding expedition ( the subject of the short story ), desperate to prove that the events from the recovered recordings were not a hoax, sends a well armed and armored ship to the same location to try and recover a live mermaid. Or at least, what a TV company thinks a well armed and armored ship consists of - a more objective observer might suggest that the security is somewhat more photogenic than you'd expect from a professional outfit, and notoriously hated big-game hunters are probably not the best suited for protection tactics.
This was good, will read more.

"The Queen of the Tearling" - Erika Johansen
Heir to the throne, raised in isolated seclusion, reaches her age of majority and returns to try claim her throne, against the very lethal objections of the current regent. She also finds her illusions shattered, as the kingdom is not all that it's cracked up to be, being filled with poor illiterate peasants and being crushed under the thumb or a much more powerful neighboring kingdom run by an ancient witch.
This wasn't bad, although I was confused by the background history - apparently Tear was founded by a moral crusader from America who set out with a fleet of ships to settle there. It wasn't entirely clear whether this was actual ocean ships, or space ships from context - ocean ships seemed more likely but the timeline was weird, with electricity, gunpowder and cannons being known in the 'old world' but lost in the crossing somehow. It may become clear in later books - I will probably read more once I get through some more of the backlog.

"The Bear and the Nightingale (The Winternight Trilogy 1) - Katherine Arden
Sort of fairytale from Russian folklore, with a young girl being used as a pawn in a battle between two old gods. This was interesting, in what seemed like a well researched setting, where it's pretty clear that historically a 'rich man' is a very relative term and can lead a pretty shitty life ;p I thought this one was ok, but I probably won't read the followups.

"Stillhouse Lake" - Rachel Caine
The ex-wife of a serial killer on death row is on the run with her kids, travelling under false identities to avoid the threats, abuse and publicity. They finally think they've found a nice plan to settle down and rebuild their lives, when they get tangled in a suspiciously familiar murder investigation.
This one was from goodreads best of the 2017 list, but I wasn't expecting a lot from the synopsis, but I really liked this one way more than I expected.

"Flame in the Dark (Soulwood 3)" - Faith Hunter
Spin-off series from Faith Hunter's Jane Yellowrock series, this one is about Nell Ingram, an ex-religious cultist, turned probationary FBI agent ( it's effectively a diversity hire ). I don't think I've said anything about this series, so for a quick runup, Nell is of unknown non-human origin, but she's somewhat similar to a dryad, with an affinity to plants and soil, but a darker turn in that when blood touches land that she owns, she can make the land eat the soul of blood's owner, nurturing it and making it and her more powerful.
In this book, her FBI unit is assigned to investigate the attempted assassination of a U.S. senator, on the grounds that the assassin may have been non-human.
This was another strong entry in this series, one of the better urban fantasies around.

"Persepolis Rising" - (The Expanse 7)" - James S.A. Corey
After decades, the missing martian fleet that broke off during the war makes a reappearance in unusual ships of a seemingly alien design, and then, in a seemingly insane move, declare war on everyone. The Rocinante is caught in one of the initial attacks, and the crew become part of the resistance movement.
This one was pretty good, although the existence of the TV series makes me wonder how they'd handle a 30 year time skip - I'm guessing they aren't expecting 7 seasons out of the show ;p

"Graduation Day (Schooled in Magic 14)" - Christopher Nuttall
I don't think I've done this series previously - it had an ok start, 'Harry Potter with tits', would be an unkind but not unfair comparison. A human teenager gets summoned from Earth to a magical realm as part of a practical joke played on a powerful necromancer. ( If he didn't want the only daughter of an alcoholic stripper, he should have been more specific about what Child of Destiny he was after ).
Where it veered off from the expected path is when the main character got busy engaging in wanton cross-cultural contamination, making lots of money through the introduction of novel concepts from her school, such as double entry bookkeeping and riding stirrups. It's funny that probably the most unbelievable thing in this story is that everyone didn't gang up and have the main characer killed on general principle after the vast amount of mayhem that she caused.
I found the series got better as it went along, and it's kind of amazing looking back on having read 14 of them. In this one, in particular, Emily finally makes it to the end of school, overshadowed by the criminal trial of her friend, which has somehow ended up being overseen by the woman that had her mind-controlled into attacking people in the first place.

"Barbary Station (Shieldrunner Pirates 1 )" - R. E. Steans
Two women who decide to join a famous pirate outfit, hijack a colony ship to hand in as a prize. The plan goes well up to the point where they find the fearsome reputation of the pirate crew is mostly bullshit, with the pirates living like rats in Barbary Station, while the insane station AI tries to kill them. This was interesting in a few ways - one of them was the world-building where there was a large interplanetary war that pretty much everyone lost, with the human crewed fleets getting smashed to pieces by each side's fixed automatic defenses, one of which was Barbary Station, which was subsequently abandoned. On the whole though, for a book about lesbian space pirates, this was kind of boring. I don't think I'll read followups.

"The Human Familiar" - Honor Raconteur
The young man Bannen, setting out in search of excitement and adventure, is unexpectedly summoned to the other side of the world, in what's apparently a botched attempt by an apprentice mage to summon her familiar. This, like most things, doesn't bother him much so he just kind of rolls with it, besides the apprentice mage is kind of cute.
This one was ok, but Bannen never really felt like a real person, too much what a teenage girl would think was the perfect boyfriend. I don't think I'll read any followups.

"The City of Brass (Daevabad Trilogy 1)" S.A. Chakraborty
A con-woman in 18th century Cairo gets more than she bargains for when one of her fake ceremonies she conducts for suckers ends up summoning a seemingly malevolent Djinn. With the situation getting increasingly complicated, the Djinn drags her to Daevabad, the fabled Djinn city of brass, which she finds to be a powder keg of factions, hatreds and politics.
This was really different from stuff that I've read recently - part of it is probably unfamiliarty with middle-eastern mythology but I found it refresingly original and entertaining. The Djinn in this were once basically extremely powerful fire elementals, but after their relentless messing with humanity got too much, they were ganged up on by the other spirits, who gave King Solomon the power to bind them to mostly human form, making them mortal, in the hope that their descendants could learn more tolerance. In a master stroke though, Solomon also split them up into different tribes with their own languages, and they've basically spent ever since bickering and fighting each other, enough so that most of humanity doesn't believe they exist anymore.
I found this one to be excellent overall, and will definitely read the sequels.

"All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault" James Alan Gardner
An interesting setup for this one - an ongoing conflict between the forces of light and darkness has been turning humans into champions for one side or the other - the dark to monstrous creatues like vampires, ghosts, werewolves and the like, the light to super heroes and super villains ( it's more about the super powers than what people do with them afterwards ). In this case though, the dark has pretty much won, using a relative obvious but novel from a story approach - they just started focusing on rich old men and offering them immortality for money. This proved unsurprisingly quite popular, and after a few decades of this, the dark pretty much control most of the economy and government. Superheroes are generally referred to as "Sparks", mostly due to the dark ( after buying up the relevant IP ) filing trademark infringement suits against anyone publicly using the term "Superhero".
The story is about a bunch of canadian university students who accidentally gain superpowers from a botched experiment by the dark at getting both light and dark powers.
It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but was pretty fun.

"Panacea (The ICE Sequence 1)" - F Paul Wilson
A medical examiner who autopsies some bodies that seem to have recently undergone miraculous cures gets caught up in a conflict between two mysterious secret societies, one of which seems to have somehow gotten their hands on a cure that works on any wound or illness.
This is a solid action/adventurey follow the mystery around the world type deal, it was a fun read. I will probably read the sequel at some point.

"The Infernal Battlion (The Shadow Campaigns 5)" - Django Wexler
This was a pretty satisfying wrap-up of the series, although it leaves a weak hook for potential sequels, the storyline is complete. I don't remember if I've gone over this series before - it's roughly a fantasy version of the napoleonic wars where a lot of motivations for background stuff is coming from supernatural sources. Good stuff all round, happy to finish this one up.

"Dungeon Born (The Divine Dungeon)" - Dakota Krout
While this one is generally average for a self-published work on a technical front ( word substitution errors, awkward phrasing and sentence structure, I'm pretty sure the author has hoard and horde confused, etc ), I found it to be pretty original and definitely good fun. I will deduct points for a new low in self-publishing though, as the one of the characters 'accidentally' calls the main human character by the author's name, just in case you were wondering who the author insert in the story was. This was Stephen King level facepalm worthy ;p
The main character is a cheerfully sociopathic sentient dungeon and his sidekick wisp. In this world, dungeons are alive and gain power from people dying inside them, so they attempt to lure people inside with shiny treasures and then kill them with traps and monsters. People generally put up with this because from their point of view, the dungeon is making free treasure out of nothing, which is basically a useful public utility, and if a few people die on the way, well can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs right ?
A lot of it kind of reads like a computer game, and I can tell you, I would play the hell out of that game ;p
I liked it enough to read all three of the books available at the moment.

"The City and the Dungeon" - Matthew Schmidt
This one was pretty solid technically for self-published, and the story flowed pretty well. It's an interesting setting in that it's post-apocalyptic, but where the apocalypse was the opening of an extra-dimensional dungeon, where thousands of high level creatures rampaged across civilization, crushing normal humans underfoot. They've been fought back due to the discovery of a mystical keystone near the dungeon, which grants people touching it immortality and the ability to gain RPG like abilities, at the cost of requiring ongoing use to mana crystals from the dungeon to survive. Basically using the keystone effectively turns you into an MMO character, and levelled up heroes were able to push stuff back into the dungeon. In the story, the son of an impoverished family, heads to the city to use the keystone and attempt to gain money to send back to his family.
I liked this one quite a bit, although the degree of nonsense inherent in the suggested economy bugged me a lot. I think it's probably better not to think at all about that system is supposed to work and the glaring problems.