http://www.sagaofsoul.com/ for all your “magical girls who wonder why their attacks are much less powerful than the mass-energy of the matter they can apparently create, who teleport to space so they can look at the Earth, and who synthesize unbihexium so scientists can get a look at it” needs.
Qualia the Purple was quite the curious read. I started it after being linked it as possibly the only example of manga discussing ‘philosophical zombies’, then I noted the second main character had purple eyes and began reading it to see if she’d be a hafu for my essay (the art is not great and the story was not compelling enough to keep me reading), then I kept reading because it seemed like it was improving into a light fluffy Haruhi Suzumiya-style manga with some superficial science, then it veered hard into Higurashi-level horror, then it did some shallow quantum mechanics, then it veered into really good hard SF on an almost Greg Egan level with a remarkable take on Lagrangians & Fermat’s Principle of Least Action (the closest I can think of are Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and Egan’s “The Infinite Assassin”), and then impressed me even more by observing that quantum indeterminacy seems like it should apply to the past as well, so by the end of chapter 12 I’m a little stunned at how this quirky yet mediocre manga has leveled up into relatively hard SF and I’m really wondering how the rest of the story is going to play out.
(Reading the MAL forums for it, I get the impression a fair number of readers are just glossing over the QM & scientific parts and not appreciating them, but oh well.)
Murasakiiro no Qualia: Qualia of Purple, a manga about a young girl who sees everyone else in the world as robots, and can apparently predict and act thereby. Then things start to get odd, though still with a rationale behind it. If 60% of Greg Egan wrote a manga, it would be like this.
Started reading The Name of the Wind. The main character behaves a lot like HPMoR!Harry in many ways (although maybe the causation is in the other direction), I like the magic system, and there’s a decent amount of lampshade-hanging. And the dialogue is surprisingly funny. Generally recommend.
I concur with the recommendation, though it does tax my suspension of disbelief quite a bit on occasion, more so in the second book, as far as the characters’ decision making is concerned.
My pet theory is that something like at least 30 percent of these books, which are written as the main character dictating his life to someone, are lies and exaggerations.
Certainly all of the references to things not happening the way they would in stories, in addition to all of the exaggerated stories other characters tell about Kvothe, would lend support to this interpretation.
although maybe the causation is in the other direction
You mean the causation is from wish-fulfillment → thoughts and plans and nigh-magical abilities, making it a mite Mary-Sue-ish? :P Though, to be fair, tempered with “but it was all for nothing, because everyone I loved died” at regular intervals..
Tooth and Claw) by Jo Walton. Briefly summarized as, “Maybe I would be able tolerate reading Jane Austen and the like if all of her characters had been dragons.”
Embassytown by China Mievelle. This a book that is primarily idea-driven and secondarily milieu-driven, with plot and character far behind. The pacing is a little slow to start, but it picks up. I guess I would says it’s a work of speculative fiction about philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, which is unusual, and I thought it was quite well-executed. I’m now reading Kraken), which is ok, but not awesome, so based on my sample so far, definitely go with Embassytown if you’re only going to pick one of his books.
Also working my way through all of Pratchett, but I assume I don’t need to recommend that here.
Antirecommendation:
The Rapture of the Nerds It’s transhumanist literature, so it should appeal thematically. Unfortunately, I think they made a conscious choice to convey the sense of an accelerating future by having the plot jump around frenetically and semi-randomly, and I hated this conceit. The parts taking place while the protagonist is an upload are pretty good, but you have to get through a lot of awfulness to get there.
What did you like about Consider Phlebas? I found it deeply unsatisfying. It just seemed like a lot of stuff happened and there was very little thematic or conceptual cohesion behind what was happening. I couldn’t finish it. (A few friends I’ve talked to about Culture novels recommended Player of Games over it, so I’ll try reading that at some point.)
I have read somewhere that Consider Phlebas tends to get a very bimodal love-it-or-hate-it reaction. Certain parts of it I could have done without (the whole chase-through-the-GSV thing seemed the like the equivalent of summer blockbuster fluff), but overall I still found it more gripping than anything else. Possibly this is because, while I ultimately come down on the Culture’s side, I understand Horza’s objection, so the book strikes me as philosophically deeper than some of the others.
I also haven’t yet met a Culture novel I didn’t like; but I’m astonished by your ranking of them, which is nearly the opposite of my own. (I also preferred Consider Phlebas over Look to Windward). The books I’ve read but you haven’t yet gotten to (Excession, Inversions, Surface Detail) are my favorites (in increasing order of preference); I would be very curious to know if they turn out to be your least favorites, in decreasing order...
I went through most of the Heinlein’s Future history series and some other writings. It’s very very uneven, even within a single novel. The dialog is often gripping and witty, at other times long and boring. Technical and scientific descriptions tend to ramble on as if it were a textbook or a manual. At his best, Heinlein has several quotable sentences on every page, it his worst, you can skip whole chapters. He generally sucks bad at writing endings, even to otherwise excellent novels.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (not generally considered a part of the series) is one of those I liked most. Stranger in a Strange Land was great at tmes, but spoiled by the occult parts and the meaningless (to me) ending. Time Enough for Love is probably the most uniformly well written, if you excise the genetics babbling, though the ending, again, could have been better. Whoever were his editors, they never did a good job. Still, as sci-fi goes, it aged well, except for computer-related references and plot twists.
His rather anarchist and libertarian political ideas did not grate on me. This was a welcome contrast with Ayn Rand, whose novels I found impossible to get through.
He generally sucks bad at writing endings, even to otherwise excellent novels.
A review that I read of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls said that it was two thirds of a good novel, followed by one third of a good novel, but not the same novel. That seems apt to me, and I’d apply it to at least a few of his others (Friday and The Number of the Beast come to mind).
Less to Friday, though. What you’ve got to get about Friday is that it’s about someone peripheral to events, who will stay peripheral to events even if important things sometimes happen through her. If you accept that, then the book is a lot more satisfying. Waiting for something that’s not going to happen made it worse. I think it still has some issues around her opinions of the guy who pops up again at the end not really being adequately justified.
Time Enough for Love is probably the most uniformly well written, if you excise the genetics babbling, though the ending, again, could have been better.
Time Enough for Love is my favorite Heinlein story, and even I agree the genetics babbling in the second act was ridiculous.
Brandon Sanderson continues to be impressive. He’s started a new series with The Stormlight Archive, and it looks great so far. Warbreaker was also really good.
Just finished reading K.J. Parker’s Devices and Desires. What struck me at first was “Eh, no, medieval people didn’t think like that,” but after mentally shifting gears to thinking of it as an author tract like HPMOR, with modern characters in a quasi-historical setting, it was much more enjoyable.
I first read Metagame by Sam Landstrom around 2008. At the time, I was an effectively broke high school student who had decided that I liked AIVAS from the Pern series and wanted more of that, which got me pointed to science fiction, despite the school library making it impossible to tell science fiction from the literary kind by shelving them in the same place. Which meant that, by default, I ended up wandering the Internet looking for long science fiction. Metagame was, at the time, available on the author’s website as full text, and I came out the other end of the novel most of a day later with my mind blown. And then I reread it...
The short version of the premise is that some sort of almost-Friendly AI has taken over the world, attached everything a human can do to a point system, and offers immortality (by brain transplant; there’s no uploading, apparently) to the people who “win” the game by amassing massive point totals (keep in mind this is 2008, well before “gamification” hit mainstream thought) - but the Game also has zones and rules about how to kill people, and thus “losing” and “dying” are the same concept. Also, there are clones that are morally equivalent to “expensive pieces of furniture” and with ~95% human genetics but are clearly sentient and sapient at human-like levels. These concepts collide (sometimes awkwardly); plot ensues.
Metagame is very clearly a book written in service of its worldbuilding, rather than the other way around, and this shows as occasionally excessively “tellish” prose, occasional protagonist idiot-balls, and a general sense that the book does not actually pick up until Act/Part II (did I mention it was divided up into parts that exactly match modern interpretations of Greek three-act structure?) It is also an interesting read when interpreted as a almost-FAI weirdtopia where the original AI seed value programmers still retained the idea that human meat was special and privileged, thus preventing a) uploading and b) nonhumans with human-level intelligence from being recognized as moral agents.
Fiction Books Thread
http://www.sagaofsoul.com/ for all your “magical girls who wonder why their attacks are much less powerful than the mass-energy of the matter they can apparently create, who teleport to space so they can look at the Earth, and who synthesize unbihexium so scientists can get a look at it” needs.
Descending order:
Radiance (re-reading for my annotated transcription)
Shigurui (review)
Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (review)
Spice and Wolf, Book 1 (review)
Qualia the Purple; copying over my interim review from MAL:
The Wallet of Kai Lung (review)
Vader’s Little Princess
I also read through Glenn Cook’s Black Company-verse, so I’ll rank them separately to keep things clear (descending order):
#2, Shadows Linger (review)
#1, The Black Company (review)
#6, Dreams of Steel (review)
#7, Bleak Seasons (review)
#9, Water Sleeps
#5, Shadow Games (review)
#4, The Silver Spike
#8, She is the Darkness
#3, The White Rose (review)
#10, Soldiers Live (review)
Qualia the Purple—read on this recommendation and now seconded.
Copying over from your MoR notes:
Hafu link is broken, though trivially so.
Having read through it all in one sitting today, I can’t second Purple Qualia strongly enough. My god...
The chapter 12 ending worries me, I must say.
Started reading The Name of the Wind. The main character behaves a lot like HPMoR!Harry in many ways (although maybe the causation is in the other direction), I like the magic system, and there’s a decent amount of lampshade-hanging. And the dialogue is surprisingly funny. Generally recommend.
I concur with the recommendation, though it does tax my suspension of disbelief quite a bit on occasion, more so in the second book, as far as the characters’ decision making is concerned.
My pet theory is that something like at least 30 percent of these books, which are written as the main character dictating his life to someone, are lies and exaggerations.
I’m hoping so. If it’s meant to be played straight, the main character is the biggest Mary Sue I’ve come across in published fiction.
Certainly all of the references to things not happening the way they would in stories, in addition to all of the exaggerated stories other characters tell about Kvothe, would lend support to this interpretation.
Nope. Couldn’t seem to get into that one myself.
You mean the causation is from wish-fulfillment → thoughts and plans and nigh-magical abilities, making it a mite Mary-Sue-ish? :P Though, to be fair, tempered with “but it was all for nothing, because everyone I loved died” at regular intervals..
I mean the causation might have been from Kvothe to Harry, although Eliezer said in another comment that this isn’t the case.
Recommendations
Tooth and Claw) by Jo Walton. Briefly summarized as, “Maybe I would be able tolerate reading Jane Austen and the like if all of her characters had been dragons.”
Embassytown by China Mievelle. This a book that is primarily idea-driven and secondarily milieu-driven, with plot and character far behind. The pacing is a little slow to start, but it picks up. I guess I would says it’s a work of speculative fiction about philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, which is unusual, and I thought it was quite well-executed. I’m now reading Kraken), which is ok, but not awesome, so based on my sample so far, definitely go with Embassytown if you’re only going to pick one of his books.
I have been making my way through all of Iain M. Banks work. The Algebraist (not a Culture novel) was quite good. All of the Culture novels I’ve read have been good, but if I had to rank them (best to… least best), it would go Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward, The Player of Games, Matter), Use of Weapons
Also working my way through all of Pratchett, but I assume I don’t need to recommend that here.
Antirecommendation:
The Rapture of the Nerds It’s transhumanist literature, so it should appeal thematically. Unfortunately, I think they made a conscious choice to convey the sense of an accelerating future by having the plot jump around frenetically and semi-randomly, and I hated this conceit. The parts taking place while the protagonist is an upload are pretty good, but you have to get through a lot of awfulness to get there.
What did you like about Consider Phlebas? I found it deeply unsatisfying. It just seemed like a lot of stuff happened and there was very little thematic or conceptual cohesion behind what was happening. I couldn’t finish it. (A few friends I’ve talked to about Culture novels recommended Player of Games over it, so I’ll try reading that at some point.)
I have read somewhere that Consider Phlebas tends to get a very bimodal love-it-or-hate-it reaction. Certain parts of it I could have done without (the whole chase-through-the-GSV thing seemed the like the equivalent of summer blockbuster fluff), but overall I still found it more gripping than anything else. Possibly this is because, while I ultimately come down on the Culture’s side, I understand Horza’s objection, so the book strikes me as philosophically deeper than some of the others.
I also haven’t yet met a Culture novel I didn’t like; but I’m astonished by your ranking of them, which is nearly the opposite of my own. (I also preferred Consider Phlebas over Look to Windward). The books I’ve read but you haven’t yet gotten to (Excession, Inversions, Surface Detail) are my favorites (in increasing order of preference); I would be very curious to know if they turn out to be your least favorites, in decreasing order...
I went through most of the Heinlein’s Future history series and some other writings. It’s very very uneven, even within a single novel. The dialog is often gripping and witty, at other times long and boring. Technical and scientific descriptions tend to ramble on as if it were a textbook or a manual. At his best, Heinlein has several quotable sentences on every page, it his worst, you can skip whole chapters. He generally sucks bad at writing endings, even to otherwise excellent novels.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (not generally considered a part of the series) is one of those I liked most. Stranger in a Strange Land was great at tmes, but spoiled by the occult parts and the meaningless (to me) ending. Time Enough for Love is probably the most uniformly well written, if you excise the genetics babbling, though the ending, again, could have been better. Whoever were his editors, they never did a good job. Still, as sci-fi goes, it aged well, except for computer-related references and plot twists.
His rather anarchist and libertarian political ideas did not grate on me. This was a welcome contrast with Ayn Rand, whose novels I found impossible to get through.
A review that I read of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls said that it was two thirds of a good novel, followed by one third of a good novel, but not the same novel. That seems apt to me, and I’d apply it to at least a few of his others (Friday and The Number of the Beast come to mind).
The same applies to The Door Into Summer.
Less to Friday, though. What you’ve got to get about Friday is that it’s about someone peripheral to events, who will stay peripheral to events even if important things sometimes happen through her. If you accept that, then the book is a lot more satisfying. Waiting for something that’s not going to happen made it worse. I think it still has some issues around her opinions of the guy who pops up again at the end not really being adequately justified.
Time Enough for Love is my favorite Heinlein story, and even I agree the genetics babbling in the second act was ridiculous.
Brandon Sanderson continues to be impressive. He’s started a new series with The Stormlight Archive, and it looks great so far. Warbreaker was also really good.
It’s not a book, but it doesn’t really fit in the other categories either...
Shadow Unit is quite good, though I wish more of it was available in e-reader format. Think Criminal Minds meets The X-Files.
Just finished reading K.J. Parker’s Devices and Desires. What struck me at first was “Eh, no, medieval people didn’t think like that,” but after mentally shifting gears to thinking of it as an author tract like HPMOR, with modern characters in a quasi-historical setting, it was much more enjoyable.
I first read Metagame by Sam Landstrom around 2008. At the time, I was an effectively broke high school student who had decided that I liked AIVAS from the Pern series and wanted more of that, which got me pointed to science fiction, despite the school library making it impossible to tell science fiction from the literary kind by shelving them in the same place. Which meant that, by default, I ended up wandering the Internet looking for long science fiction. Metagame was, at the time, available on the author’s website as full text, and I came out the other end of the novel most of a day later with my mind blown. And then I reread it...
The short version of the premise is that some sort of almost-Friendly AI has taken over the world, attached everything a human can do to a point system, and offers immortality (by brain transplant; there’s no uploading, apparently) to the people who “win” the game by amassing massive point totals (keep in mind this is 2008, well before “gamification” hit mainstream thought) - but the Game also has zones and rules about how to kill people, and thus “losing” and “dying” are the same concept. Also, there are clones that are morally equivalent to “expensive pieces of furniture” and with ~95% human genetics but are clearly sentient and sapient at human-like levels. These concepts collide (sometimes awkwardly); plot ensues.
Metagame is very clearly a book written in service of its worldbuilding, rather than the other way around, and this shows as occasionally excessively “tellish” prose, occasional protagonist idiot-balls, and a general sense that the book does not actually pick up until Act/Part II (did I mention it was divided up into parts that exactly match modern interpretations of Greek three-act structure?) It is also an interesting read when interpreted as a almost-FAI weirdtopia where the original AI seed value programmers still retained the idea that human meat was special and privileged, thus preventing a) uploading and b) nonhumans with human-level intelligence from being recognized as moral agents.