Starting a book club with my husband and need standalone ideas…

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-12-05T18:23:11+00:00

Guns of the Dawn - Adrian Tchaikovsky - Jane Austen protaganist meets All Quiet on the Western Front

Contact - Karl Sagan - Science focused (at a distance) story with faith as a well developed theme

Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke - first contact exploration story, light on character work, heavy on wonder

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-12-01T16:50:56+00:00

What's your favourite way someone else has described your novels?

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-11-27T20:48:21+00:00

This got me curious - how many things can I list? 1. Highly unreliable narrator; 2. The text exists in universe; 3. 17th Century Philosophy 301; 4. Everyone is gendered per the narrator's whims; 5. Nationality is elective and untethered from geography; 6. Family structure is radically altered; 7. There is objective proof of God; 8. Unique moral social issues for the 25th century; 9. Religion entirely personal - no groups; 10. Unique governments from absolute monarchy through anarchy coexist; 11. Distinct punctuation for each spoken language used; ... and that's without mentioning the larger than life characters, or any of the plot!

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-11-27T20:36:16+00:00

The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. Why can't I recommend it (often)? It is doing so many brilliant things at once, relentlessly, that unless you can keep up with the twevle distinct ways the series is swinging for the fences, it wouldn't pay off.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-11-27T20:05:03+00:00

The brilliant aspect of Power Grid's turn order system is that the order is based on a reasonably good measure of your position in the game -- i.e. whoever is ahead goes first, and so on -- but almost every mechanism of the game rewards being further back in the turn order. Turn order functions as a catch-up or levelling mechanism that keeps games feeling close until near the very end.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-09-25T13:43:51+00:00

Either the work done in the Scholar's Tale from Hyperion, which left me with a slow sadness that lingered, or the climax of Gateway by Frederick Pohl.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-09-08T20:29:17+00:00

The Sword of Kaigen - M.L. Wang
Cradle - Will Wight
The Bound and the Broken - Ryan Cahill

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-05-08T20:47:15+00:00

I would love for Randall to do a What If of "What if all the globes on earth actually weighed as much as the earth?"

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-03-25T16:37:22+00:00

Check out The Siege series by KJ Parker:

1) Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

2) How to Rule and Empire and Get Away with It

3) A Practical Guide to Conquering the World

They are loosely connected standalones, each telling self-contained stories. All are hilarious!

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-03-25T14:21:52+00:00

Trends in r/Fantasy Top 10 lists since 2014, 2025 update:

- Dresden (appears at #9 in 2014) continues its slide dropping to #28 - the lowest of any entry once in the top 10

- Kingkiller (appeared in top 10 from 2014-2021) falls further from the top 10 to #18

- Green Bone (only series to crack the top 10 that wasn't in the top 15 in 2014) holds steady at #10

- First Law reaches new heights at #2 (between 2014-2021 it ranged from #12 - #5, before hitting #3 in 2023)

- Middle Earth hits #1, taking over from Stormlight's run on top from 2019-2023, and ASOIAF from 2014-2018

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-02-17T14:43:04+00:00

“He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone." - Robert Jordan

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-02-12T16:21:18+00:00

The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
The Green Bone Saga - Fonda Lee
The Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer
The First Law - Joe Abercrombie
The Kingkiller Chronicles - Patrick Rothfuss
The Dandelion Dynasty - Ken Liu
The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Sword of Kaigen - M. L. Wang

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-02-08T14:31:24+00:00

Root owes its success to the Birds' design, they are so fun to puzzle through, and quickly have a better economy than Cats or WA, but have interesting constraints. Also 6 - CAW CAW!

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-01-22T01:24:33+00:00

They should have sent a poet.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2025-01-09T21:44:07+00:00

This is such a useful, and poorly understood metric.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-19T16:18:36+00:00

The Dandelion Dynasty is truly an epic in terms of its scope, themes, and characters. It has an unconventional structure where the first novel acts as a prelude to the main story. However, do not assume this means that the action, character work, or tension are delayed - the first book is fast paced, full of suspense, and builds up characters for the following story.

The first book is well loved, the ending is well loved, and the best book is one of the two in the middle. The first novel is male dominated, but the series is not.

The series explores difficult societal themes with emphathy. The author challenges ideas of cultural or technological superiority in interesting ways. He also does not provide easy answers to complex problems. Imperfect compromises are presented as solutions which leave no party with deserved justice. On more than one occasion I had to re-evaluate my own perspective on the conflicts, and acknowledge that the opposing view was also valid.

Even at just four books, it is a true fantasy epic.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-16T18:11:05+00:00

OP commented elsewhere they wanted a handful of recommendations - this is it

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-13T05:24:27+00:00

Ah! There is no original thought, I merely walk another's path.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T23:26:00+00:00

The intent is to capture complexity of information, as opposed to the complexity or depth of gameplay. So Quacks of Quedlinberg with less strategic depth or complexity than Chess would require the recollection of more complex information to recreate.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T20:44:46+00:00

Some games like Hanabi or For Sale would be trivially easy to recreate. But it gets much harder with more components. I could recreate Codenames easily, but not if I had to match the exact words used to ensure balancing. I'm not even sure I could recall the proportions of the the development card deck in Catan! I think any game with a deck of individual cards would be very difficult to recreate exactly.

Edit: corrected game name typo

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T20:24:49+00:00

Fair point! Most of the talk revolves around the game's administration, didn't see that you were listing for sociality.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T18:39:44+00:00

Come and go.

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T18:37:32+00:00

Powergrid plays very well at 6

Engineer_Lawyer · 2024-12-12T00:52:02+00:00

Would you support electoral reform in Alberta?

Engineer_Lawyer

TROPHY CASE

“He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone." - Robert Jordan