What are you reading right now?

Anonitolia said:
Going through some more sci-fi short stories. Recently read "The Dead Past" and really loved how it dealt with the topic at hand. Foster's descent into anarchy was fun to root for and the way the rug was pulled out from underneath it all made perfect sense while addressing all the questions this kind of research would entail diegetically and with tact. It was also a nice change of pace for the stereotypically antagonistic puppet of the government to turn out to actually have a thought process... which sounds backhanded, but I swear it isn't. I've never seen such a well-done turn of character before, especially not with such a well-trodden trope, and the way it was pulled off outright inspired me when I first read it. Congrats for making me sympathize with a glowie you Russian bastard.

Another thing I loved: the way the world was built around solely what characters said or thought. No set-up was given besides some indeterminate time in the future, made obvious by the opening scene involving a history professor asking an unfamiliar government agency about time travel, with further context coming solely from description of research or characters' casual conversations as opposed to narration or outright exposition dumps. It made the world feel incredibly solid despite the lack of info and really helped not to distract from the main plot.

Really looking forward to more of these. I don't know why I didn't dive deeper into sci-fi sooner. I've really been missing out. :)
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I get the feeling Sci-Fi/Fantacy (Speculative Fiction) is one of those genres that has a lot of flak from literary critics/etc. and goes on to kinda have the connotation of being inferior or "not worth the time".

Because when I mention I enjoy it, sometimes a midwit will scoff at me for picking "meaningless entertainment" lit.

Pulps, adventure, SF, fantasy. These are my big favorite genres. Detective stories are also way up there too. I have been meaning to get into more horror too.
 
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Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case​

by Steven Farber and Marc Green, two film critics who are actively hostile to one of the subjects of their book, John Landis, and display a somewhat softer hostility towards the film industry in this 1988 publication. They cover the incident that occured during the filming of Landis' segment of the Twilight Zone movie that resulted in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two child actors - so many rules and regulations had been thrown aside for the sake of the perfect shot complete with the children being on the set long after the mandated curfew for child actors, the over-rigged special effects mortar charges and the implementation of the insane idea to have a man in his fifties run through waist high water while carrying two children and have a helicopter needlessly hovering over them when the illusion of such could have easily been done with cross-cutting. You get the sense that a lot of miscommunications happened because Landis was a on-set dictator who could explode for the slightest reason.

The following trial, while depicted with all sorts of legal and courtroom minutiae, bogs down a bit but the authors criticize both the defense and the prosecution and the whole media circus that revolved around the case.
 
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just found out that in the 2000s there were a set of Sci Fi Book Club omnibus editions of heinlein's juveniles+future histories+non schizo works published. i'm gonna hunt for all of them this year.

as for asimov, his major works are the foundation trilogy/robot collection/ the gods themselves, right? are there any other works that'd be essentials by him?

and clarke's are 2001, rendevouz with rama, and childhood's end? i found the mid '60s sets of omnibi collections for clarke's works but these were pre 2001/rama.

i'm just looking to collect on the cheap what i can while i have a tiny bit of spare cash while hunting for stuff.
 
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Alexander Thaut said:
just found out that in the 2000s there were a set of Sci Fi Book Club omnibus editions of heinlein's juveniles+future histories+non schizo works published. i'm gonna hunt for all of them this year.

as for asimov, his major works are the foundation trilogy/robot collection/ the gods themselves, right? are there any other works that'd be essentials by him?

and clarke's are 2001, rendevouz with rama, and childhood's end? i found the mid '60s sets of omnibi collections for clarke's works but these were pre 2001/rama.

i'm just looking to collect on the cheap what i can while i have a tiny bit of spare cash while hunting for stuff.
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The SFBC editions might be hard to find, but they're a cost-effective way of getting all the juveniles. Heinlein has several short story collections, but The Past Through Tomorrow collects his Future History stories in one handy volume. The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein is also a really good collection. Although he didn't write a ton of fantasy, his fantasy stories are some of his best work. Heinlein probably peaked in the 50s, although everything up to and including The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is worth reading. After that, his health problems really started affecting his work.

I liked Asimov's Pebble in the Sky and End of Eternity. He was a decent short story until the end of his life, but the Foundation books after the original trilogy were not very good and he starts to tie it into the robot series and it becomes a big mess.

Clarke's books are usually good. The only thing you want to avoid is anything he wrote with a co-author, especially Gentry Lee. They are terrible.
 
Flaming Carrot said:
The SFBC editions might be hard to find, but they're a cost-effective way of getting all the juveniles. Heinlein has several short story collections, but The Past Through Tomorrow collects his Future History stories in one handy volume. The Fantasies of Robert Heinlein is also a really good collection. Although he didn't write a ton of fantasy, his fantasy stories are some of his best work. Heinlein probably peaked in the 50s, although everything up to and including The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is worth reading. After that, his health problems really started affecting his work.
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I've got Double Star and Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I'm figuring that the SFBC Omnibus volumes are the best way to go and I'll just wait until Thriftbooks has them all in stock (with DJs). I saw them in stock earlier this year for around 10 bucks a pop, so I'm figuring it'd probably be a worthwhile cost-effective way to grab them all. The Future History stories volume is something I'm gonna need to carefully search for too. Fantasies seems to pop up for reasonable prices too.

Is Stranger in a Strange Land worth reading? I figure I'll get to it someday, but it seems to be one of those things I'd read out of curiosity.
Flaming Carrot said:
I liked Asimov's Pebble in the Sky and End of Eternity. He was a decent short story until the end of his life, but the Foundation books after the original trilogy were not very good and he starts to tie it into the robot series and it becomes a big mess.
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Foundation-Robots-The Gods Themselves appear to be the big novels he did, with all his short stories seeming to be collected here and there. I'll probably try to grab one of the "Best of Asimov" books if I see it in the wild. I did grow up with Fantastic Voyage and its sequel, and would probably like to find a copy of the former. The movie was good fun too.

How's the Asimov-Silverberg novel extension of Nightfall? And Nemesis? I see those books in the wild on occasion.
Flaming Carrot said:
Clarke's books are usually good. The only thing you want to avoid is anything he wrote with a co-author, especially Gentry Lee. They are terrible.
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I'm probably just gonna grab the 3 SFBC omnibus volumes from the '60s and then decide if I wanna grab Rama 1/2001. I think that covers everything one would really be interested in.

as for Ray Bradbury, I'm figuring I should just grab Martian Chronicles- Illustrated Man if I see them in the wild. I hear he's just generally a good writer and I do have fond memories of Farenheit 457 as a young reader.

Anyways, I always see certain authors in the wild that seem to be from the '60s-80s era of SF/F paperbacks. le Modesitt/Salvatore/Marion Zimmer Bradley/etc. Not sure if anything they have is worth reading, so I stick to the old guard of golden-new age sf/f regulars. Gibson's Neuromancer is probably the one '80s SF book I'm keeping an eye out for.

Another SF writer from the 50s-70s I see is Fred Hoyle. . . the astronomer? Fred Hoyle seems interesting but the dozen times I've seen the books on sale at a thrift store, they're always like 20 bucks and I don't feel comfy with that price.

I've become fond of anthologies. Thinking of grabbing any that I see on the very cheap. I'm aware of the billion Orbit/Analog/etc. volumes and Year's Best ones. The SFWA Grandmasters appear to be an easy to acquire set too.

Any good horror anthologies? Thinking of Dark Descent.
 
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Taking a break from Dune because Jesus fucking Christ my brain cannot take 4 fucking Dune books in a row holy shit what the FUCK

Anyways:

A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, China Mieville
 
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Finished The Time Machine, onto some cheap paperback thrillers I picked up awhile back. Tami Hoag's "The Boy" has been sitting on my shelf for a bit. Same with Mary Higgins Clark's "Daddy's Little Girl." Pretty sure they're both generic thriller slop but couldn't beat a 2 dollar price tag.
 
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I just picked up the Everyman's Ray Bradbury collection, so I'm guessing I'll never need to pick up another Bradbury book since I also have Farenheit.

Thumbing through Simak's City and it's just so damned comfy. seriously, it's just well written, comfy, and the ideas are just never bad.

I've never gotten into pastoral literature before but Simak makes me a little intrigued by it.
 
I just finished The Postman, the one the Kevin Costner movie from 1997 is based on.

Gotta be honest, disappointed with it. Might be one of the rare times a Hollywood movie is superior to the book it is based on. (As a side note, the movie is plenty good and I find the critical backlash to it puzzling. Yet more proof film critics tend to be joyless fuckwads)

The book has a strong start and setting. The first 1/5th of it goes by without any real issues. The writer made a believable post-apocalypse and the setting is vague but enough detail is given to form a picture of how it happened and why things are the way it are. But then things go downhill.

The Cyclops plotline was interesting, seeing as the movie didn't have it. I can see however why Costner dropped it as it didn't really match well with the post apocalypse and in a movie format wouldn't work well. But it feels underexplored and explained. We are also introduced to Dana, the main protagonist love interest who is a feminist with some weird but interesting takes on the pre-Apocalypse from her post-Apocalypse education and life (she thinks men cause it because women failed to properly raise and vet them for society). I would have a problem with this but it isn't developed enough for me to actually get a good grasp on the thing.

The actual "Postman" scenes then sorta disappear as the MC moves to try and stop the bandit horde that is gonna come and destroy his little slice of Oregon that is rebuilding. This opens another issue, as the entire dynamic of him working to establish a postal service and the bluffs gets sidetracked. They find a guy who runs a community who once stopped the bandits, but he doesn't wanna join up because he likes his home and won't leave.

And this is where the book kinda lost me, as the bandits capture the MC and part of his party and try and make them join their Survivalist army. There is some exposition and such but the fact is that by this point it is clear the book is going too fast plotwise while being a bit too weak lore wise compared to the start. We get some background on Nathan Holn who gets blamed with causing the collapse of the USA and again, it feels rushed and badly explained and somewhat reminds me of political strawmanning. The slow but steady construction of the setting is gone, and things quickly escalate towards a final fight that feels less rewarding and interesting than the one in the movie. Also another sci-fi aspect is added in the form of augments which were a thing pre-war and how they survived which feels out of place.

A entire story arc of the love interest happens off-screen and we are literally told about it in a exposition dump by her. It feels like a important piece of the setting and the feminist message which is just tacked on as if the writer forgot about it and decided to rush to make sure it got in. Again, it feels underdeveloped and I can't even criticise it properly because it doesn't feel done.

A real shame. We could have had a really cosy book about rebuilding after the fall but we got a messy mash of plots.
 
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General Emílio Médici said:
Gotta be honest, disappointed with it. Might be one of the rare times a Hollywood movie is superior to the book it is based on. (As a side note, the movie is plenty good and I find the critical backlash to it puzzling. Yet more proof film critics tend to be joyless fuckwads)
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Agreed, the movie was actually pretty good. There was just some period when these idiot critics went from worshipping the ground Costner walked on (seriously giving Dances With White Saviors the Best Picture over Goodfellas wtf man) to just relentlessly trashing everything he did, even good things like A Perfect World, or even (crucify me for this if I'm wrong) Waterworld.

Also A Canticle for Leibowitz is the single best post-apocalyptic novel ever. Fite me irl if you disagree.
 
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AnOminous said:
Agreed, the movie was actually pretty good. There was just some period when these idiot critics went from worshipping the ground Costner walked on (seriously giving Dances With White Saviors the Best Picture over Goodfellas wtf man) to just relentlessly trashing everything he did, even good things like A Perfect World, or even (crucify me for this if I'm wrong) Waterworld.

Also A Canticle for Leibowitz is the single best post-apocalyptic novel ever. Fite me irl if you disagree.
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Canticle for Leibowitz was a recent pickup in a place for a dollar. It's the edition that's out now.

It's on this year's to be read list. I hear the author didn't do a ton of writing and passed before he could finish the sequel.
 
When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi

It's an autobiographical book about his life, his work as neurosurgeon, and his (unfortunately terminal) stage IV metastatic lung cancer diagnosis.
Upsetting to read as it's the story of an exceptionally intelligent and hard-working young man having his life cut short by cancer.
Wish I'd read it earlier as it has given me some perspective on a family members struggles. I am feeling very grateful that I have been fortunate with my health.
 
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Girahira said:
His writing is beautiful if only he wasn’t such a ballistic shitlib. Read the first two of the Bad-Lag trilogy and can definitely recommend them to anyone wanting to dabble into New Weird
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I hear Jeff Vandermeer's also a New Weird writer.

Maybe I'll keep an eye out for both.
 
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Girahira said:
His writing is beautiful if only he wasn’t such a ballistic shitlib. Read the first two of the Bad-Lag trilogy and can definitely recommend them to anyone wanting to dabble into New Weird
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Been into the guy for a while. Picked up Kraken in a used book store as squid cults sound like a riot. Read a fair bit of his stuff.
 
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I finished The Gunslinger and now I'm reading The Mist. I like what I'm reading so far, but its a fairly short story for what I'd expect from King.
 
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Alexander Thaut said:
I hear Jeff Vandermeer's also a New Weird writer.

Maybe I'll keep an eye out for both.
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Yep! recommended also for the stellar writing.
The Southern Reach trilogy’s a great start, 2nd book is just filler though; first book‘s eons better than the adaptation even if it got the ‘eeriness’ well
 
I recently started on The Jewish Warby Josephus. It provides a lot of interesting background on the mess of the second temple era and the history there is like ASOIAF in terms of the betrayal and paranoia of the time.
 
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