261–270 of 317 posts
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>I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature Which is weird, because they do.
My initial reaction to this was, only in approximation. But the cross would also only approximately be a right angle. So good point.
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My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up
iirc all the books you mentioned have action throughout and most of Stephenson is the same
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I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way. Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room f…
As someone who hated The City and The City to the point of never reading Mieville again, I appreciate the warning for Embassytown. I sometimes consider reading his stuff again but I was genuinely offended by the trick in City. Like... I paid money for this? No. It felt like contempt for his audience.
If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book. https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html
Do you know any other hard sci-fi books like this? I loved the Delta-V series, and have been looking for hard sci-fi like it ever since.
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It is. One of the sequels was one of the times that a scene in a book actually made me cry. If you don't like depressing novels, also stay away from Stephen Baxter; I love his novels, but most of them are wildly depressing.
> Stephen Baxter Oh. I don't remember those being depressing though it's been years since I read any. Which ones do you remember being that way?
Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then? Gene Wolfe. Book of t…
I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.) I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals. I greatly enjoyed Ze…
It's rather hard to believe it's the same author as Amber sometimes, those books took me like 12 seconds to get hooked on, LoL is great it's just _quite_ different in feel.
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Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.
I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.
One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then? Gene Wolfe. Book of t…
I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.) I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals. I greatly enjoyed Ze…