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Which were your favorites?
I’m curious if Witch King will be standalone or not. That might change my answer. The Ile Rien ones were good, the Emilie ones would make good YA fare. The Raksura books are told by a nonhuman culture, but things get very dark at some points. I’d say that one of the main characters in that series is a bit of a prototype for Murderbot, and another the prototype for Ship.
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If it's a masterclass in anything, it's proven to be a low-risk, revenue-generating productization formula with options that I've noticed Tor has leaned heavily into for roughly the past decade, e.g. Seanan McGuire, Becky Chambers, Ursula Vernon, Nghi Vo.
Do they have any male authors you describe that way?
I'd put e.g. James A Corey in the same bucket (though I can't remember what proportion of them is actually male?) but I honestly can't think of any new male authors from Tor over that period. (They're Cixin Liu's US publisher so you might count him, but he's bad in so many different ways that I don't know I'd put him in the same category). And even beyond publishers, few of the authors being pushed by newspapers/Goodreads/etc. seem to be male.
re: Murderbot -- I read the first novella when it was on sale for $1.99 or something like it. I liked it, but the rest of the novellas were something like $4.99 each, and I'm not paying that much for novellas.
Holy crap, they're $12 each now!? Authors gotta eat, but c'mon!
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I have found recommendations of (especially) genre novels from people I don't personally know to be nearly useless. The usual problem is that the work is just OK but gets talked up like it's great. Sometimes, it's outright bad. I've got enough past actually-greats—genre and otherwise—to catch up on, I don't need 100 "OMG it's so good!" comments from a dozen sites steering me toward a newer book that turns out to be p…
I agree. When I first used to go to bookstores, the "highly recommended!" books tended to be star wars type books. Even author recommendations are hit or miss. I loved well's murderbot series. I tried her other books (Raksura) but it wasn't as fun. I found American Gods to be highly praised, and though it was hard to get through. Gaiman's short story "How to talk to girls at parties" was fun though. https://neilgaima…
The version that's sold today is the "author's preferred text" which is not the version that was praised and won awards etc.. I think that's pretty dishonest marketing, and wish they'd sell the original edition, which is like 200 pages shorter.
I'm a bit mystified by the hype for murderbot. I read it and thought it was OK but a lot of people rave about it. Still not every book is for every person, it didn't connect with me but it very obviously has its fans.
I enjoyed the novella but also didn't feel like it did anything particularly new or interesting. I think a lot of people just relate to a snarky unwilling protagonist who would rather be watching TV.
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Murderbot is indeed somewhere between OK and good—personally I’m leaning towards good, but I wouldn’t compare it to a masterclass in short-form writing (like anything by Sheckley) or a longer piece you could debate for hours afterwards (like A Memory Called Empire , to give a recent example). It doesn’t try to be mind-numbingly flashy, it doesn’t proselytize, it just brings you to alien vistas to meditate on the natu…
A Memory Called Empire is probably the best book I’ve ever read
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I echo this. If you liked murderbot, you might also like the Battleship Chronicles series by L. Claire (1), and ofcourse, the Imperial Radh series by Ann Leickie (2), and bobiverse, mentioned below, by Dennis Taylor (3), among others.. (1) https://www.goodreads.com/series/391892-the-battleship-chron... (2) https://www.goodreads.com/series/113751-imperial-radch (3) https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse
I read the first three books of the Imperial Radh (Ancillary Justice) series and for all of the love they get online I found them rather dull. There's this fairly dramatic collapse of a galaxy spanning empire happening in the background while the protagonist frets over the level of offense she might cause at the tea party if she chooses to wear the more scandalous gloves. The last book gets a bit more into the fractu…
I get why the author did it but and it was a good payoff on realizing and stressing inherent societal biases, like any good scifi should break your brain a bit and point out where you are being intellectually lazy. It just didn't need to be so long. And also the story just wasn't all that interesting if I recall. Kinda someone wandering in the wilderness iirc.
I actually liked the latter parts of the series once I got past that. Got more into a detective novel and some political intrigue. The gender bending/fluditity came into it's own at the end as you had many characters against current gender norms that you hear described through actions and then "meet" much later in the book, realizing all the assumptions you were implicitly making being wrong. along with all of the drones who wouldn't really have a gender anyway or might switch gender constantly, so why are we forcing our mental model of gender on them (fair enough).
If you like challenging your brain a bit power through the first book, but it's definitely not the traditional science only sci-fi. I see why a lot of people like the book and I see why a lot of people hate it because it's not a deathstalker novel. It's kinda like when my dad was really pissed when we watched the live version of Cats because "it wasn't what I expected". I was 8, and was like "what did you expect?" "I don't know, but not this" to which my 6 year old brother said "It's definitely about cats".
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If it's a masterclass in anything, it's proven to be a low-risk, revenue-generating productization formula with options that I've noticed Tor has leaned heavily into for roughly the past decade, e.g. Seanan McGuire, Becky Chambers, Ursula Vernon, Nghi Vo.
Do they have any male authors you describe that way?
I poke at this specifically because Hugo shortlist authors---with the lesser Novella Award serving as gateway---tend to generate exceptional sales figures relative to their peers, and Tor authors have had a statistically overwhelming shortlist presence over the past decade.
Filtering on non-female authors:
- Dexter Gabriel (P. Djeli Clark) wrote three unrelated novellas, all of which were shortlisted. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 was a warmup to his Nebula-winning novel A Master of Djinn. Arguably the most notable example, but doesn't quite fit the implicit business strategy I was alluding to...more like take random novella shots and further develop the thing that sticks, as opposed to committing two novellas to a strategic theme while reserving the option to follow up.
- Victor LaValle got a lot of attention across the board with his novella nomination, but jumped ship to a Penguin Random House imprint for his breakout novel The Changeling that was produced into a television series for Apple TV+.
- Kai Ashante Wilson wrote two related LGBT romantasy novellas; one was shortlisted. Sales clearly just wasn't there.
- Daniel Polansky...doesn't have a wiki page. Nomination was for a single standalone fantasy novella.
- Neon Yang and Nino Cipri identify as "they". Both were nominated for LGBT fantasy novellas; the former's Tensorate appears to have hit better sales metrics relative to the latter's LitenVerse.
- Adrian Tchaikovsky was already a reputable science fiction author riding on laurels, so doesn't fit the implicit business strategy; his nomination struck me as more "traditional".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novella#Wi...
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I agree. Letterboxd makes this easy to accomplish with movies, and there's enough people covering videogames out there that you can usually find someone to dial-in on your taste (or find a Steam curator that lists a lot of stuff you love). TV is a bit harder, but you may be able to find a critic with a consistent voice that matches your own through Rotten Tomatoes (not the aggregate score alone) or maybe a podcast ab…
the answer is to use goodreads, follow people who you really like/agree with the reviews of, and then only read their reviews of any book you might want to read
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I read the first three books of the Imperial Radh (Ancillary Justice) series and for all of the love they get online I found them rather dull. There's this fairly dramatic collapse of a galaxy spanning empire happening in the background while the protagonist frets over the level of offense she might cause at the tea party if she chooses to wear the more scandalous gloves. The last book gets a bit more into the fractu…
The first bit of Ancillary Justice story is a slog like the first 80 pages of anathem and as purposefully confusing, but 3x longer. I get why the author did it but and it was a good payoff on realizing and stressing inherent societal biases, like any good scifi should break your brain a bit and point out where you are being intellectually lazy. It just didn't need to be so long. And also the story just wasn't all tha…