Fantasy/Sci-fi Book recommendations revisited

I dunno about the show Altered Carbon. 5 or 6 episodes in and I'll read the book just because of some of the ideas.

The show is fairly generic but provides an interesting atmosphere/environment.

So far every episode there's an indistinguishable and generic fight scene, a philosophic training flashback and generic romantic tension. The other half to third of the episodes are okay. Some parts are just blatant filler. Episode 4 (I think) could have been a 6 minute episode for all it introduced. I guess VR is the new sci-fi time travel shtick to get characters into every possible situation?

It's seems like they have 3 minutes of inner struggle scene and they try to work out how to stretch it. Lets intermix 3 minutes of flashback and turn it into 6.5 -7 minutes of episode. Transitions are filler++.

The indistinguishable and generic angry black man character has gone nowhere. Takeshi has so many potential side stories with his list of suspects but he only tried one and seems to have quit investigating those avenues. Maybe his credit limit for favor payback has been reached and he can't afford to help the kids of every potential suspect.

Really surprised Takeshi never tried to look into who his sleeve was after the first several times someone called him by the wrong name.

Gotta look into who wrote the tv series. They seem to be post 2008(?) writer strike types.

I'm sure the book offers a lot more. I'll read them or maybe Audible them if they are unabridged. Show so far is 6-8/10.
 
I'm not reading the above post b/c I'm pretty sure it's going to spoil the book somehow.

I'm about 10 chapters in and it's pretty decent so far.
 
what are ur guys opinion on:

Her compensation for a sixteen-hour workday was learning the ropes in the trenches with a seasoned politician.
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is it bad prose/writing? only criticism i can see is that it reads clunky, needs a comma or break somewhere. there are some prominent journo/articles and social media stuff about the sentence & its author, dan brown
 
mangaboy said:
Just came to say - when you get into a book not expecting much and you get to really like it - this series is it. Thanks for recommending this.
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Cool! So glad you liked it! It's one of my favorite series of all time next to LOTR, and is on a pretty similar epic scale.

I always thought it would have made an awesome trilogy and/or TV series, especially nowadays.
 
SuperSniperX said:
Destiny's Crucible series by Olan Thorensen.

Really well done, basic premise is a chemical engineer survives mid air collision, aliens give him choice of termination or to be dropped on a different planet previously seeded with humans. Planet is at the tech level of around the 17th century. Guy decides to help his new island nation home by slowly introducing new ideas/medical/tech/banking/etc but has to balance being labeled a witch or demon for dumping too much too fast. His new home is also a target for an imperialistic nation bent on taking over their lands by using similar tactics to how the brits took control over india.
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4th and sounds like last book in this series came out last week. Pretty good series so far.
 
Apparently Yahtzee writes books and his latest is a well reviewed sci fi satire.

I got through three pages and deleted it immediately.

If you want to read something that sounds like it was written by a fifteen year old fanboy with no literary talent whatsoever, highly recommend.
 
Holy shit it's the Obibun himself

Did you finish uni yet?

I rly hope u can bring some content (shitposting) to this carcass to liven it up again
 
"Amazon confirms they will be adapting Ian M Banks' Culture series for TV"

dang

first Altered Carbon and now this

seems almost impossible to do those books justice in a TV show to me...but I'm not gonna complain that they are trying :d
 
When not fighting Chinese and North Korean time travelers, even I have time to write a 900-page fantasy novel.

A War of Stones. Howard Norfolk

The problem with that sentence is that it has a lot of soft, rhythmic sounds. There's a rhyming term for this and you hear it used in Bruce Springsteen songs. Like in born to run, "in suicide machines." It has a lot of slang, or jargon in it also, and that bogs down immediately once it is used 2 or 3 times in one sentence. You have to think of 14 hour work day, then imagine what "learning the ropes means," then what "in the trenches" means, which seems vague in this usage.

I think the secret to writing a novel is to find a niche and polish the hell out of the story, even if it's tropy, and not that good. You've got to have a pugnacious pretty vampire princess dating a where wolf who is also the captain of the football squad, in a sudden love triangle that endangers the world.
 
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hmm

My friends that are scifi / fantasy writers seem to think the secret to being a successful writer is being on any panel at any con that will have them.
 
Yeah I joked with a friend about that, that I could go to conventions and argue points with George Martin.

But I'm pretty sure now that it's being ranked under 5000 for "paid in Kindle store."

And producing a readable book without many errors in it that tries to put a twist in what there is out there already to work with.
 
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Obibun said:
Altered Carbon sucks
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I wouldn't go that far, it isn't too bad on the whole.


One thing that makes it good is also what makes it bad.

Namely, being written in 2002 he has managed to avoid writing like some internet fanboy/blogger which seems to be the norm these days - big plus.

But, being written in 2002 before the advent of smartphones makes a lot of his tech appear clunky & outdated. Using discs for storage, hailing a cab with a special paging device, actually having drivers to pilot the vehicles. With some modernisation it could be very good, I imagine they would do this for the TV series.

I'll read the rest of the series anyway, it's good lunchtime stuff.
 
I just finished Artemis, into the water, and my absolute darling

Each one lies a top goodreads genre rankings from last year

Artemis was a fun read but ultimately forgettable. Kinda feels like a YA book looking back at it (from the guy who wrote the Martian)

I thought into the water and my absolute darling were incredible tho. The writing of into the water was so swift and absorbing, the central mystery and characters played off each other as good as anything I've read or seen. Felt like it had no fat, no line or action wasted

My absolute darling blew me away. The central character dynamic was captivating to the extreme, and I've never read writing that was so dense (had to go back on a section 2-3 times more than i could count) that still flowed so well and was so evocative

I totally disagree that u need to find a niche to write. I mean sure if you're trying to pay the bills that would make sense, but good writing, good story, good characters trumps all
 
into the water and my absolute darling only 3.5 stars on amazon
have you read rothfuss' name of the wind? is the writing comparable?
I hardly read anymore but your descriptions sound interesting
 
Yeah I saw that and glanced over some of the negative reviews. One that stuck out for me is a guy criticizing the way the two teenage boys talk and the way the protagonist thinks. What he thought was unbelievable and unrealistic, I thought was world building and exciting. It gave the story a fantasy/Alice in wonderland feel. An amazing child of a girl, subjected to countless horrors, tromping through the forest where she befriends some whimsical, enchanting characters.

I think absolute darling felt close to name of the wind, every scene and line is wrapped in an intense love. In the name of the wind everything unfolds from a perspective and context of kvothes loss of family and his longing for denna, while absolute darling has a mega spotlight on this completely twisted yet utterly absorbing love between father and daughter.

Amazon also has like 4.5 on 2k reviews for pretty little fires, which I think got book of the year on good reads, and while I thought it had some strong aspects I found the book as a whole fairly middling.
 
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