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Re: Books

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 11:36 pm
by Kugelfisch
If it's hard SciFi, throw that shit my way. I'll go grab some free examples from amazon to keep them in mind to check out.

Edit: I've added the Reed suggestions and Blindsight to my list. Those Reed books cost next to nothing at 3€ a pop.

Re: Books

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 12:03 am
by rabidtictac
Blindsight is available for free as a PDF with the blessing of the author, but I did eventually buy it because I liked it so much.

Neal Asher's best trilogy is this one: https://www.goodreads.com/series/49126-spatterjay

Re: Books

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 1:48 am
by Kugelfisch
Yeah, I'm happy to pay the few bucks for a proper e-book format because pdfs are fucking garbage on an e-reader and fuck ever going back to paper or radiating screens.
Thank you for the recommendation, good sir. I'll check that shit out eventually.

Re: Books

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 5:51 am
by Guest
I just get epubs off libgen whenever I can. Scanned documents a shit. I need to figger out how to OCR shit one of these days.
Whut e-reader you got Kugelman?

Re: Books

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 6:11 am
by rabidtictac
I think I've mentioned them in the past, but one thing I like to do is get big collections of "the year's best science fiction" from whatever random year or edition. Then I read through. You can use the table of contents to find stuff from specific authors and a lot of times this is the only way to get specific short stories or novellas that haven't been reprinted. Obviously some of the stories are shitty and some are good. I would say the average ratio is probably about 5 good stories per book. Which seems low but the collections are very inexpensive and you can even get them for free from the library if you live in the USA.

I've tried this with "year's best fantasy" equivalents and I don't recommend it. They were all fucking terrible. I've tried the warhammer fantasy novels and collections too and those were awful as well. The ONLY way I've found good fantasy writing is to specifically search up authors I know about who don't suck. But the science fiction collections are broad enough that you can probably find something. You can use any SF collection series really. This includes cyberpunk collections and space opera collections. Because it might say "space opera collection" and have a hard-SF short story in there. There's a fair bit of crossover on how people classify particular authors. "Spirey and the Queen" could be counted as Space Opera, hard SF or cyberpunk depending who you ask.

Neal Asher's Polity universe is really fun. It has that survival horror feel to it. I think the best stories of his are "The Other Gun" and "Alien Archeology." I have a collection of short stories each from Neal Asher and Peter Watts. The Watts stories are largely mediocre and disposable (Blindsight is still fucking amazing though!) But the Asher stuff is nearly all top quality. Some of his novels are kinda whatever but the short stories are bomb as fuck. And Vrell is fucking sick.

When you talk about science fiction books son, you're speaking my language. I've been reading these shits since as soon as I could read at all. :lol: My old man had about 2,000 paperbacks of random SF in the basement.

Re: Books

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2018 12:09 pm
by Kugelfisch
I've got a Kindle Oasis.

I've read a single good Warhammer Fantasy novel in my life but I don't remember it's name right now.
Besides that, I don't even like good fantasy for the most part.
Edit: I've looked it up. It's the Konrad Trilogy that I read. It's alright but not a must-read.

Re: Books

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:23 pm
by Kugelfisch
I'm currently reading Revelation Space and so far I really like it. It's an interesting world that's being set up. While it's so futuristic that it's completely different from the current time, nothing so far is of the technological level that it'd seem like magic. One could see stuff like that existing in a couple of hundreds of years.
Society is also interesting. The fashion seems to be baroque for the most part with some 1950s fashion and it's much closer to cyber punk than Mass Effect style clean futurism, without being full on Blade-Runner-esque. I like that a lot.

Re: Books

Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 3:35 pm
by Kugelfisch
I finished Revelation Space. I can recommend it. All you really need to know about it is the premise. I found it well worth the read.

Re: Books

Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2018 2:36 pm
by Kugelfisch
I've read Blindsight.
Pretty good but also confusing at parts. I certainly didn't expect vampires. Worth a read, despite a very odd beginning.

Re: Books

Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2018 1:30 pm
by Rushy
That moment when you realise that literally all of Bram Stoker's Dracula is letters and diary entries.

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