Science Fiction : search and destroy

eeph the manfred macx stuff is the first third and i agree its pretty bad. when they get to his daughter and it becomes a space opera set in a VR sim of elizabethan england hosted on a spaceship the size of a can of beans it becomes kinda cool. then it just gets bad again

some funny paralells w Miles Davis - both took the latter half of the 70s off, and both returned in the 80s with much more popular/mainstream work. I read a bunch of his 80s stuff in hs but have no interest in revisiting it now and it all looks pretty boring/pedestrian afaict. Not that all of his 60s/70s books are masterpieces, but in general he was much more wide-ranging conceptually. Was good at just going with the times, I guess.

xp

just a guy wandering through a constantly shifting, phantasmagoric landscape)
Have you read Robert Sheckley's Mindswap or Options?

haven't read any Sheckley

waddaya waiting for?

dunno! Options sounds pretty fun/Malzbergian.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/04/april-fool-not-so-much-dangerous-as-unconvinging-harlan-ellisons-lemgthe-last-dangerous-visionslemg

"What is the cutoff date with Silverberg? Thought "Sailing to Byzantium" was ultimately a snooze."

Basically it was he retired and got burned out. But from 1967-1976 he was amazing. Don't sleep on short story collections from that period either.

Speaking of April 1 announcements,

Bacigalupi and Watts to Collaborate on Depressing Dystopian Shared World Anthology

Paolo Bacigalupi hasn't been mentioned this thread, but he's a nearish-future worldbuilder focused on climate issues, with a dark appraisal of humanity. The collection Pump Six and Other Stories and novel The Windup Girl are recommended, thereafter its diminishing returns. Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities are the young adult novellas for the IPCC report reading teen in your life.

Yeah the Windup Girl is amazing. Rest is okay.

To be honest I also like Mieville and find him very entertaining, but I get the complaints too. City and the City and Embassytown are probably better if you've never read the other stuff though.

“Peter and I got talking about how much we loved shared-world anthologies, like Thieves World or Wild Cards,” said Bacigalupi, “but were put off by the unreasonable optimism of their settings. We think science fiction is ready for a pessimistic future of bleak, uncompromising wretchedness."

I think I need to delve into this guy's work IMMEDIATELY.

Thieves' World was unreasonably optimistic?

We think science fiction is ready for a pessimistic future of bleak, uncompromising wretchedness

uh sci-fi has been mired in this for the last 30 years more or less, I don't really see this as a new or necessary advancement

im super down with the mieville thoughts on this thread. some of his world building is astonishingly good tho. the city and the city is great, particularly if you pretend it's about montreal (it isnt).

dig silverberg's dying inside.

does anyone fuck with hyperion? i think its tremendous.

(the series doesnt quite resolve itself but that first book is amazing)

hyperion is pretty amazing

would make a great miniseries

Dan Simmons?

I like, just finished fall of hyperion after what I guess was 8 months? I still don' tknow how I felt about it. It seems like those two books could have been half as long and still gotten their point across, kind of. I dunno, I was disappointed in the end. Not sure whether to embark on empyrion, since it took me forever and two attempts to do the hyperion books. maybe I should read something else.

recommend me something.

book or movie

oh book please.

fantasy okay too.

i have a trip to the lake coming up.

Inverted World. But maybe you already

Or better yet, The Adjacent

i already inverted. what's the adjacent? same author?

Yes, his latest and greatest

oh that looks cool.

Jon Armstrong's "Thread" and "Grey" are my go-to recommendations for recent quality sci-fi.

maybe obv but the tiptree collectin "her smoke rose up" is unbelievably good

the new vandermeer books are great beach reads too though very "written to be turned into a tv show"

oh man and ann leckie's ANCILLARY JUSTICE, which is so good

*takes notes*

this plot description is hilarious

For Michael Rivers, life is perfect. He is tall, handsome and worshipped by billions of fans around the globe. He is wealthy beyond measure, the heir apparent to one of the high-tech corporations that controls the world. He is fashionable, setting trends with his wardrobe of immaculate designer suits. And Michael is in love with Nora, his beautiful, witty and equally perfect fiancée. When an assassin's bullets pierce Michael's body before the cameras at a press junket, everything changes. Forcibly separated from Nora, his illusions shattered, Michael seeks to uncover the reasons behind the attempted assassination. Michael delves deep into his past, finding that all paths lead to a time when he was the golden boy, dancing furiously to the beat of notorious all-night Rage parties thrown by his father.

i finally got around to 'accelerando' too and ended up liking it a lot, or at least the middle third

People on this borad loving them some Ancillary Justice. Tempted to give it a try but afraid it will turn out to be some Album of the Decade Big and Rich stuff.

this is not sci fi, quite, or maybe it is, but its really great

http://www.amazon.com/The-Revolutions-Felix-Gilman/dp/0765337177

ancillary justice on kindle sale for $1.99 so that's tight

can't remember if i read accelerando, i did read a bunch of his other stuff

yeah idk, im not sure id unreservedly recommend it but its got a lot of cool ideas

being able to get sample chapters on kindle owns so hard

An oldie I like to push on anyone who hasn't read it is Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter. Kind of a science-debased fantasy, IDK, fucking amazing.

I wish I could combine Priest's plots & ideas with Vandermeer's prose. 'The Adjacent' is great though (just so happens I read it sandwiched in between the Southern Reach books).

xp

have gilman on my todo list already, he was on sale in the Nook store one day.

this plot description is hilarious

the books are v funny

thanks for all the great recs dudes

gilman's two half-made world books are also great

swanwick owns

Jordan didn't you just the other day recommend some relevant stuff on other thread?

OK, went for the $1.99 AJ