Book Recommendations?

Funnily enough, someone asked Sanderson that in his last signing / podcast thing, and he said much the same. Unless there's a specific important reason why it (food, animals, time, etc.) being different is meaningful for the plot, it can be unnecessary cognitive load. If it's minor (I remember Farscape having arns, minots and things instead of hours and minutes, but they were immediately guessable) then it's fine, but you have to balance between feeling foreign and different and being overwhelmingly confusing. I think that makes sense to me.

In Stormlight Archive there are crab beast equivalents of dogs, oxen, beetles and so on, but it's important for the plot.

trichy wrote:

This may not be the right thread, but I wanted to get some thoughts. How do you feel about fantasy/sci fi authors using common measurements for distance and time? On the one hand, it doesn't make any sense logically for a world wholly separate from earth to refer to minutes or miles, etc. But on the other hand, it feels like an unnecessary burden on the reader to have to keep new methods of measurements in their heads. Obviously, currency and the like are a different matter, but some things are such shorthand in our heads that it feels like it'd be overwhelming to a reader.

Depends on how much it's used and the significance. If it's something I need to ground me, throwing strange words in there is work my brain has to do that takes me away from thinking about the story. But if you want me to feel that the world is alien, maybe that's what you're trying to do as an author.

I think it also depends on the scale. "Day" is one thing that I don't want to figure out every time I hear the substitute word. Having a different number of "month" equivalents and replacing the word? That's easy to adjust to.

This seems to be one of the key indicators of "hard" sci-fi vs. "soft" sci-fi. I wonder if there are similar hard/soft fantasy distinctions--I only recall that old chestnut that says "if your Wizard can raise a jar of water from a well cheaper than a donkey & windlass can, you've broken your medieval economy."

I find that time duration analogs used as we use days, weeks, and months but w/ different names help with immersion w/o making my fun story into a math problem. References to human cycles like puberty or old age can help give a sense of the conversion w/o breaking immersion. I just read something where a characters age was eluded to by mentioning his mother had last visited this temple to make an offering for childbirth 20 years ago. I've also seen things like "twelve-day" used to insert some strangeness in place of months or weeks w/o stretching immersion too far.

The people in that fantasy world are (probably) not speaking English. So everything they say is already being translated for the reader. Why not translate distances too?

I hope to not see units of measurement in my fiction at all.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

The people in that fantasy world are (probably) not speaking English. So everything they say is already being translated for the reader. Why not translate distances too?

When I see "miles" and "feet" in fantasy, it feels fine. Feels like an old-timey, pre-scientific measurement standard, because it is. On the other hand, if wizards and chainmail-wearing gate guards start saying kilometers and kilograms, suddenly we've jumped to a modern notation, and I find this irritating. The illusion is broken.

In sci-fi I'm only thrown when the aliens somehow happen to make everything in a manner which conveniently falls into base10 metric things. "The alien ship was 100km long. A circle 10m in diameter irised open, and we flew our shuttle inside." Just tell me it was 102.14km long and now I have an easy reference in my head without being thrown by an exact match.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

The people in that fantasy world are (probably) not speaking English. So everything they say is already being translated for the reader. Why not translate distances too?

Exactly this, the Tolkien model is the right one. Unless otherwise specified, every fantasy/SF story is putatively a manuscript that the author has discovered and translated.

As such when I read "they traveled for 37 grebs" in a story, sometimes I mentally speculate that author has left the term untranslated because they just have no idea how long a greb is.

trichy wrote:

This may not be the right thread, but I wanted to get some thoughts. How do you feel about fantasy/sci fi authors using common measurements for distance and time? On the one hand, it doesn't make any sense logically for a world wholly separate from earth to refer to minutes or miles, etc. But on the other hand, it feels like an unnecessary burden on the reader to have to keep new methods of measurements in their heads. Obviously, currency and the like are a different matter, but some things are such shorthand in our heads that it feels like it'd be overwhelming to a reader.

I prefer unique units, but with enough exposition to let the reader extrapolate how they match up with real-life measurements. Renaming the existing units can more or less work: Ys 8 (at least, very possibly earlier titles too) has the "melye" measurement, which is never defined, but which appears to be equivalent to a meter.

Or, of course, you can set your world in one that derives from governments that had feet or meters or whatever system you want to use. There's plenty of alternate timelines to pick from. But I think that's done best when, somewhere in the book or series, there's an acknowledgement of where that world split from reality. It doesn't have to be upfront, obvious, or take much space, it's just a pinpoint for the divergence. It probably won't matter to the current plot, so a brief mention in passing is about all that sort of thing merits.

I am just starting "Cary Grant A Brilliant Disguise" by Scott Eyman. Really well researched biography of the actor. So far I highly recommend. I had no idea this was a persona he created. Most of all it's fun to read his quotes and hear his voice in my head.

New Becky Chambers book out today y'all!

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within: A Novel (Wayfarers Book 4)

I finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It was evidently all the rage in 2016, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Naturally I missed it then.

The book follows the story of a Vietnamese mole working for the North in the military structure of the South. It straddles the end of the war, from the late days, to the fall of Saigon, to his experiences after the war. It's affecting in a lot of ways and really touches on what it means to be a refugee, on the politics and experience of that war, and on life as an outsider.

At any rate, I was ready to be done about 80% of the way through, and it has some dark moments that don't always make it an easy read, but I'm glad I read it. It's very well written, so long as you can get comfortable with the first person perspective, which I know throws some people off.

Ugh, I love Becky Chambers. I read the third book in that series a few months ago and it was so fantastic. She does such a wonderful job of telling stories that feel important and engaging without ever being like "and the bad guys are trying to destroy the entire universe, these heroes are humanity's last hope!" The plots are like "this teenager isn't sure if he wants to go to college" or "this young mom is thinking about moving" or whatever, and yet I am still emotionally invested in them. I feel like I should wait to get book 4 for when I deserve a treat

For the opposite of treats, I just finished House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas. It was...not good. It was selected by my book club, so it was not something I would have picked for myself, and I probably would have put it down 50 pages (of 800!) in if not for my book club (though I suspect our meeting will mostly be roasting the book). It's a world full of fairies and vampires and demons and angels and stuff where the world otherwise feels a lot like ours--people have cell phones and computers and live in a city that feels like a modern city and have boring office jobs and stuff like that. There are two mysteries set up fairly early on and the protagonist is a tough and sexy and hard-partying half-fairy who works as an art dealer and yet somehow ends up being tasked with solving a series of murders while also looking for a lost ancient artifact. She meets up with an angel who is a slave of an important person and who is famous for viciously killing thousands or tens of thousands of people/creatures, but, wouldn't ya know it, he has a softer side, especially for sexy take-no-sh*t art dealers-turned-investigators.

The first thing that struck me about the book was that it is extremely horny. I don't think there's a character we are introduced to who is not described as being sexually attractive, at least not anyone we're supposed to care about. Emblematic of all this is an early suspect in the murders who offers their alibi as having been at a three day orgy, which of course they have on tape and eagerly offer to the investigators. I was able to just kind of take that for what it is, lots of unnecessary sexual details plus an occasional extremely graphic discussion of a sexual fantasy (actual sex acts are, somewhat strangely given that context, almost non-existent in the book), but I was willing to meet the book on its terms. And the writing is not good, but it's not offensively bad, so 600 or so pages in, I was mostly enjoying the world and the characters and the mystery, even if all of it felt a bit silly. It's kind of what I imagine it would be like for me to watch a show like Gossip Girl--I think I am not the target audience for this, but I generally like mysteries and twisty plots and can appreciate some amount of campy melodrama and overheated romance, so I bet I would get some enjoyment out of it even if it might not be my thing. But the wheels really fall off by the end of the book. There are basically two climaxes in the book (insert pun jokes here), first of which is basically an episode of Murder She Wrote set inside a museum of Deus Ex Machinas, and the second of which relies on something like 3 different revelations about our main character that suddenly make her the most important person in the universe. And these three revelations are largely unrelated, making them even more ridiculous.

The funniest thing to think about this book, though, is that its selection by our book club was recommended by our oldest member, a retired Scottish guy in his early 70s who said he had just finished it and loved it. Even having a decent idea of his tastes at this point, not the kind of thing I would have expected to be up his alley!

firesloth wrote:

I finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It was evidently all the rage in 2016, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Naturally I missed it then.

The book follows the story of a Vietnamese mole working for the North in the military structure of the South. It straddles the end of the war, from the late days, to the fall of Saigon, to his experiences after the war. It's affecting in a lot of ways and really touches on what it means to be a refugee, on the politics and experience of that war, and on life as an outsider.

At any rate, I was ready to be done about 80% of the way through, and it has some dark moments that don't always make it an easy read, but I'm glad I read it. It's very well written, so long as you can get comfortable with the first person perspective, which I know throws some people off.

I've had a hold on this from the library for a couple months now (with still a long way to go). I'm looking forward to it (weird as it is to say that about a pretty dark book).

mrlogical wrote:

For the opposite of treats, I just finished House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas. It was...not good. It was selected by my book club, so it was not something I would have picked for myself, and I probably would have put it down 50 pages (of 800!) in if not for my book club (though I suspect our meeting will mostly be roasting the book). It's a world full of fairies and vampires and demons and angels and stuff where the world otherwise feels a lot like ours--people have cell phones and computers and live in a city that feels like a modern city and have boring office jobs and stuff like that. There are two mysteries set up fairly early on and the protagonist is a tough and sexy and hard-partying half-fairy who works as an art dealer and yet somehow ends up being tasked with solving a series of murders while also looking for a lost ancient artifact. She meets up with an angel who is a slave of an important person and who is famous for viciously killing thousands or tens of thousands of people/creatures, but, wouldn't ya know it, he has a softer side, especially for sexy take-no-sh*t art dealers-turned-investigators.

The first thing that struck me about the book was that it is extremely horny. I don't think there's a character we are introduced to who is not described as being sexually attractive, at least not anyone we're supposed to care about. Emblematic of all this is an early suspect in the murders who offers their alibi as having been at a three day orgy, which of course they have on tape and eagerly offer to the investigators. I was able to just kind of take that for what it is, lots of unnecessary sexual details plus an occasional extremely graphic discussion of a sexual fantasy (actual sex acts are, somewhat strangely given that context, almost non-existent in the book), but I was willing to meet the book on its terms. And the writing is not good, but it's not offensively bad, so 600 or so pages in, I was mostly enjoying the world and the characters and the mystery, even if all of it felt a bit silly. It's kind of what I imagine it would be like for me to watch a show like Gossip Girl--I think I am not the target audience for this, but I generally like mysteries and twisty plots and can appreciate some amount of campy melodrama and overheated romance, so I bet I would get some enjoyment out of it even if it might not be my thing. But the wheels really fall off by the end of the book. There are basically two climaxes in the book (insert pun jokes here), first of which is basically an episode of Murder She Wrote set inside a museum of Deus Ex Machinas, and the second of which relies on something like 3 different revelations about our main character that suddenly make her the most important person in the universe. And these three revelations are largely unrelated, making them even more ridiculous.

The funniest thing to think about this book, though, is that its selection by our book club was recommended by our oldest member, a retired Scottish guy in his early 70s who said he had just finished it and loved it. Even having a decent idea of his tastes at this point, not the kind of thing I would have expected to be up his alley!

Somewhat related, I was doing a post-Stardust dive into Faerie, and read the first few chapters of The Cruel Prince by Holly Black. I didn't get very far, but the two books ostensibly seem a bit similar. I was reading it for the politics and the faerie lore (if any) but

Spoiler:

it became clear that three human girls, kidnapped by a faerie prince who slaughters their parents in front of them, are several years later solely obsessed about faerie balls and the list of attendees. It felt very high school and my interest quickly waned. YMMV.

Roke wrote:
firesloth wrote:

I finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It was evidently all the rage in 2016, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Naturally I missed it then.

The book follows the story of a Vietnamese mole working for the North in the military structure of the South. It straddles the end of the war, from the late days, to the fall of Saigon, to his experiences after the war. It's affecting in a lot of ways and really touches on what it means to be a refugee, on the politics and experience of that war, and on life as an outsider.

At any rate, I was ready to be done about 80% of the way through, and it has some dark moments that don't always make it an easy read, but I'm glad I read it. It's very well written, so long as you can get comfortable with the first person perspective, which I know throws some people off.

I've had a hold on this from the library for a couple months now (with still a long way to go). I'm looking forward to it (weird as it is to say that about a pretty dark book).

It's funny: some of it isn't that dark at all, but almost trite. Part of the story is his living a moderately mundane life, getting a job, going on dates (in the 70s...free love!). But, yeah, it's definitely not rosy.

The theme throughout is to examine a character who lives in two different worlds at once. The "worlds" can have many contexts, right down to his being a "bastard" straddling two ethnicities.

mrlogical wrote:

Ugh, I love Becky Chambers. I read the third book in that series a few months ago and it was so fantastic. She does such a wonderful job of telling stories that feel important and engaging without ever being like "and the bad guys are trying to destroy the entire universe, these heroes are humanity's last hope!" The plots are like "this teenager isn't sure if he wants to go to college" or "this young mom is thinking about moving" or whatever, and yet I am still emotionally invested in them. I feel like I should wait to get book 4 for when I deserve a treat :)

This, so much this. I read plenty of epic fantasy/sci-fi stuff where the fate of humanity or the world or whatever is in the hands of this chosen one or chosen few but her stuff is a refreshing break from all that. It is just like slice-of-life in space. Any epicness that happens is merely done from the perspective of these people who basically just caught in the middle of it and are just trying to survive it. Sci-fi needs more stuff like this.

Serengeti wrote:

New Becky Chambers book out today y'all!

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within: A Novel (Wayfarers Book 4)

And now I'm done reading it and am sad the series is done. But she's got a new book/series dropping in July, so now I'm happy again!

The Folio Society has published a deluxe new version of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and the illustrator discusses the project:

I'm half way through These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong and I'm losing interest. Has anyone else read it? Is there a good pay off in the second half?

A couple of weeks ago in the Podcast thread, I recommended the fantasy/sci-fi podcast Imaginary Worlds. In the latest episode, he interviews Becky Chambers. Might be of interest to some of you, since she apparently has fans on here.

Link to episode.

Cool, thanks Tasty Pudding, I'm going to listen. I'm sad to see she's ending the Wayfarers series, though I wonder what that even means. It was never really a series as much as a world, so, not having read book 4 of course, my hope is things are left such that if she changes her mind she can write a new book in that world later. I think her universe desperately needs to be a setting for video games or a tv show or movie or something...it's so well thought out and so much stuff could happen in it. It feels like an even better version of the parts of Mass Effect I love (the individual character stories and world stuff) without the parts of it that I think held that series back (the overarching story about the end of the world crap).

I'm finally finishing up Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years tonight, I'm on the final chapter.

It's been a bit of a slog. It doesn't get bogged down anywhere (the Thirty Years War got all of 2 pages), the narrative is well organized and moves along nicely. I guess these days I'm just used to reading 300-600 page books instead of 1200+ page monsters.

I have enjoyed it though.

Roke wrote:

I'm finally finishing up Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years tonight, I'm on the final chapter.

It's been a bit of a slog. It doesn't get bogged down anywhere (the Thirty Years War got all of 2 pages), the narrative is well organized and moves along nicely. I guess these days I'm just used to reading 300-600 page books instead of 1200+ page monsters.

I have enjoyed it though.

That was one of the first audiobooks I ever got from Audible, like a decade ago, and I thought it was excellent

Fugitive Telemetry, the new Murderbot novella, released today.

On a recommendation from this thread, I’ve just finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. It ended pretty abruptly, but what a great book. Managed to portray a really dismal setting while still maintaining a sense of hopefulness.

I immediately started the sequel, Parable of the Talents (both are able to be read on Kindle for free if you’re a Prime member). I was sort of blown away when a politician is introduced at the beginning, as to my ear he sounded just like Trump...and then I get to his main argument that he would “make America great again.” Wow. Published in 1995, the description of this presidential candidate sounds just like Trump, right down to the fascism!

firesloth wrote:

On a recommendation from this thread, I’ve just finished Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. It ended pretty abruptly, but what a great book. Managed to portray a really dismal setting while still maintaining a sense of hopefulness.

I immediately started the sequel, Parable of the Talents (both are able to be read on Kindle for free if you’re a Prime member). I was sort of blown away when a politician is introduced at the beginning, as to my ear he sounded just like Trump...and then I get to his main argument that he would “make America great again.” Wow. Published in 1995, the description of this presidential candidate sounds just like Trump, right down to the fascism!

Our book club just read Butler's Mind of My Mind, which I really liked. My wife is reading that now after reading Kindred.

Finished Look To Windward by Iain M. Banks. I really love his Culture books (I've probably read a half dozen at this point) just for the sheer imagination on display; hard sci-fi it is not! Unfortunately, I think the books have a general tendency toward weak conclusions (Windward in particular has a bad deus-ex-machina ending) and largely forgettable characters.

Given the setting, I'd say Deus Ex Machina is a possibility in most of the Culture novels. It's kind of a wonder that it does not get used more often. Still, I thought the book was a lot of fun and the revenge at the end is impressively Gothic.

Look to Windward is one of my favorite Culture novels. I agree the ending is somewhat abrupt, but that is pretty much Banks in general. However, it is one of my favorites because it is the only one where we get to spend a significant amount of time just being on a Culture habitat, seeing how the people act, how things are done, etc. The other books take place out on the fringes, mostly.

Robear wrote:

Given the setting, I'd say Deus Ex Machina is a possibility in most of the Culture novels. It's kind of a wonder that it does not get used more often. Still, I thought the book was a lot of fun and the revenge at the end is impressively Gothic.

True enough, deus ex machina is justified in the setting (as it was in plays when literal gods were coming up from below the stage, for that matter), but still doesn't make for a very satisfying end. And yeah, that bit of the end was a fun read.

tboon wrote:

Look to Windward is one of my favorite Culture novels. I agree the ending is somewhat abrupt, but that is pretty much Banks in general. However, it is one of my favorites because it is the only one where we get to spend a significant amount of time just being on a Culture habitat, seeing how the people act, how things are done, etc. The other books take place out on the fringes, mostly.

My favorite so far has been Surface Detail because it mixed small-and large-stakes more than most Culture books I've read, and because the Culture warship in it is hilariously psychotic.