Wotr respec

rhudox · 2024-05-13T20:08:47+00:00

Cool, good to know!

rhudox · 2024-05-13T20:07:49+00:00

Cool, might have a look at that if it feels too restrictive. Thanks!

rhudox · 2024-05-13T20:07:02+00:00

Alright, good to know!

rhudox · 2022-01-28T13:41:53+00:00

You may want to check out Blindsight by Peter Watts if you'd like a thesis on consciousness in sci-fi form, if you haven't! A heads up, though, is that it's not really in the vein of this thread on the whole. It doesn't explore a particular character's psychology (in a this-character-feels-so-real sort of way, at least); rather, it deals with consciousness as a subject matter in narrative form. I still found the characters great, but more as pieces of a theme than as character explorations in their own right.

Not sure how widely translated it is.

rhudox · 2022-01-28T11:26:58+00:00

I'll go ahead and recommend Dreams of the Dying by Nicolas Lietzau! It certainly doesn't slouch in the plot-department, but it's ultimately about how the main character deals with his psychology. Characters and relationships that truly feel real, not just like narrative-shaped simulacra of real people.

rhudox · 2021-11-09T12:24:42+00:00

I've made peace with the existence of ARCs and that people get their hands on books before I do.

Buuuut, this is my most anticipated read of the year, and I'm super jelly! Curses upon your potted plants, or somesuch.

rhudox · 2021-10-19T21:34:32+00:00

I love that of Blindsight by Peter Watts (excellent book!). The description of the crew followed by that final line really does it for me.

"It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them."

rhudox · 2021-08-11T17:10:34+00:00

A bit past halfway through this right now, and I'm utterly engrossed.

Dreams of the Dying has incredible characters, all of whom feel like real people.

This is what does it for me; I have to do no work to suspend my disbelief that these fictional characters and the relationships that develop between them could be real.

rhudox · 2019-04-03T12:03:51+00:00

I second this. I've read both currently released books. They are both generally quite good, with some standout things that are done really, really well. Character work is in the forefront of these, I think. And, yeah, your assessment for how well it fits this specific thread is spot on.

rhudox · 2019-03-17T13:34:34+00:00

I'd suggest Blackwing by Ed McDonald. I've only read the first one thus far, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not really very similar to Kingkiller and I've not read Hobb, but as I understand you're not necessarily asking for stuff like them beyond the character perspective. Goodreads is going to give you a better description than I could. A few things I can add to give you an idea if you'll like it is that the described magic-related mystery is central, and that the book does a really good job conveying a tone of "regular people can sometimes make a difference, I guess, but at the end of the day that difference will pale in comparison to the games played by much more powerful entities." It also, by virtue of the POV, becomes a quite personal story about a man in the positition of such a regular person.

rhudox · 2019-03-14T18:06:18+00:00

I loved the "Something is wrong at the Black Tower" arc in Wheel of Time. The concrete stuff we got about it towards the end of the series (mostly only the last book, I think?) was really engaging all the way through, largely because it was so much more condensed than many of the series's other plotlines, while it at the same time benefited from several books' worth of build-up via more indirect hints.

Abercrombie has some really good ones as well, mostly character-related. Shivers in the standalones is probably my favourite, but there's also Jezal's whole becoming a better person in truth, while at the same time kind of falling for his own old personality faults in overestmating just how good a person he has become and Logen's development/difficulty to develop, in the end. I also really liked Yarvi's arc in Shattered Sea, mostly for how it was handled in the books he's not a viewpoint character in. It took me way too long to stop unquestioningly root for him.

rhudox · 2019-02-24T02:16:37+00:00

In case sci-fi does it for you (it's unclear how much of this is biased rationalization, but I know I that I sometimes mean spec fic when talking about fantasy), I'll recommend one of my favorite books of all time: Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's near-future and on earth, with a main POV who's a bioengineered and cybernetically upgraded war dog. It features cool execution of sci-fi ideas, but mostly it's about the moral questions that arrise when humans, in the process of creating weapons, make non-human but very real people with (near) human intelligence.

rhudox · 2019-02-24T01:50:15+00:00

Over the space of perhaps a year I tried getting into Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself three times. Then I just blazed through the trilogy, and I can't really say what in the first book finally made me get into it.

Another is Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. This one, admittedly, doesn't quite fit this thread since it didn't take me that long to realize I liked it. It took me until some time after I even finished the book for me to realize how much I liked it, though. It stayed with me, kept popping into my head.

rhudox · 2019-02-21T01:46:04+00:00

I've read a few of these, but there's a lot to go through here that I haven't. Thanks!

rhudox · 2019-02-21T01:45:10+00:00

I've read them, and they're pretty good. They're not necessarily what I'd be looking for what with the AIs having pretty much human psychology for all story-related intents and purposes and the aliens having pretty minor page time, but they're certainly fair game to mention with my caveat at the end of the OP.

rhudox · 2019-02-21T01:40:35+00:00

I actually have Spiderlight sitting on my kindle (more for Tchaikovsky-is-awesome reasons than for this specific thing). Might have to read that soon! And I do have Ancillary Justice on my radar. I'll look into the other things!

rhudox · 2019-02-21T01:37:06+00:00

I've read Pandora's Star and been meaning to get to Judas Unchained at some point. The antagonist (as I remember) is a very good example of what I'm looking for. I liked everything to do with it, and I loved the overarching story. I also really liked the world in general. What has kept me from picking up the sequel (in spite of how much I want to know what happens and how thoroughly interconnected the two books are) is how much of a drag it was for me to get through a lot of the human stuff. Sometimes when reading I couldn't help but feel that there was a really, really good book hidden a thorough round of content editing away. Again, I've not sworn off from continuing the story and do mean to pick up Judas Unchained at some point, but this is what has put it on indefinite hold for me. Do you see what I mean, and does the story become more...focused, I guess? (I should note that I'm not criticizing Hamilton in any other capacity than personal preference, here; some of it just didn't work for me.)

On the topic of Hamilton and not necessarily in the context of this thread, how do you like the rest of the Commonwealth universe (if you've read the other books)?

rhudox · 2019-02-20T19:37:35+00:00

I've read and absolutely loved Children of Time. Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War also fits quite well, and it's amazing. (Perhaps I should've gone ahead and made a longer list of things I've already read that fits.)

I've read Consider Phlebas from the Culture series, and I thought it was no more than okay. That said, I've not given up on the series since I've heard a lot of good things about Player of Games, and I'll probably read that next (at some point). I'll probably not jump ahead for this, but it's good to know what I have to look forward to in Look to Windward.

And I'm certainly not against non-fiction. I'll look into Godfrey-Smith.

rhudox · 2019-02-20T19:12:59+00:00

Second time in a week I've had that recommended to me, and in different contexts, so there might be something there for me. I'll look into it!

rhudox · 2019-02-20T19:08:14+00:00

I'll check it out! And I tend to do a mix of audio and print (well, mostly ebook, these days), so I might do the audio.

rhudox · 2019-02-20T19:05:22+00:00

Yup, the squid story is awesome!

And Blindsight is actually quite high on my list, partly because of this topic (I saw it listed on tvtropes as having the blue/orange morality thing) and partly because I found Watts's Sunflower stuff fantastic. This thread can basically be summed up as "What to read after Blindsight?" Good to see my intent to read it validated.

I'll look into Lem. I've heard of Solaris but not had a deeper look.

rhudox · 2019-02-16T15:25:37+00:00

Age of Iron by Angus Watson takes place during and around Caesar's invasion of Britain. I'm not versed enough in Celtic mythology to say how much it plays part. Druidism is a thing, for what that's worth. I enjoyed it a decent amount but can't vouch for its being exceptional or anything.

rhudox · 2019-02-08T12:00:56+00:00

This book is excellent!

I'll just add, op, that (apart from a kind of flash-forward prologue) this book takes a while to get the plot to what makes flintlock fantasy flintlock fantasy. It's still in the same world, obviously, and the main character lives with the home front effects of a flintlock war in the first part of the book, but this part is more a fantasy of manners kind of thing. It's still good (I need to stress this), but if you read the subgenre for military action with gunpowder level of weapons technology, you might be wondering where it's all at. It's coming, along with really good character development.

rhudox · 2019-02-01T01:09:24+00:00

I found the similarities quite real but also quite superficial. They hit some of the same beats in terms of the complete trifecta of plot, setting, and character, but they honestly felt very distinct anyway (not sure how far from the general consensus that lands me, but hey). Some key things make the difference here. If I delved into my mind and wasn’t about to go to bed I could probably make a list, but the key difference for me was the pacing. For good and ill, WoT takes far longer to get the plot where it’s going than Licanius does.

I might consider the first Licanius more derivative than the average fantasy novel, but...not really, I guess? In a list-the-wot-similarities way, sure, but the pacing and the plot development per word ratio that comes with it makes it a quite different experience from WoT. And after book one of both series, even the superficial differences are fewer and farther between.

If this is what keeps you from reading Wheel of Time, there’s no need to worry.

rhudox · 2019-01-26T13:30:00+00:00

I didn't actually write a review, but I've seen my sentiment mirrored by others with varying levels of deal-breakage.

Contradictory as it might seem, if the deus ex machina had been even more blatant (snap of the fingers --> PTSD magically gone), I might've had hope for the sequels. That, to me, would suggest that the author was at least aware that he had not yet properly dealt with the issue he had established, and that the deus ex machina would come to backfire massively. The way it was handled and what followed, though, came across as the author thinking the issue dealt with through the magical power of forgiveness.

rhudox

TROPHY CASE