Return of the Book Thread

[Margalis]

Lists that just rank SF have the problem of looking like they were compiled by people who have been in a bunker for the past 30 years and recently emerged.  Sooo much 50s to 70s.  And holy shit, the SF classics could be clunky.  Great ideas, but the writing ability was mediocre at best for some of the "greats". 

A list of the 50 best Western movies might have maybe 5 or so entries from the past 25 years. That's not because western movie watchers live in bunkers, it's because genres wax and wane and most of the best westerns are from certain periods.

There's nothing wrong with certain periods dominating lists unless that domination is unfair. In the case of SF it's not IMO.

[Johny Cee]

Yay more lists!

Based on the recommendation of that NPR list, I picked up Nine Princes in Amber by Zelazny. It was very good. So good, that I bought the 10 book mega book which is the size of a small child. I was forced to, since the other 9 books aren't out for Kindle yet. Guess I won't be taking it on the plane with me.  

Zelazny is fantastic.  There is some kind of issue with his estate/copyrights, and the publisher that bought his rights having issues before reissuing his back catalog, so not all of his stuff is in print.  

The first five Amber novels are a series and fantastic, with the next five being a sequel series and not as good.  Lord of Light is a classic and also regularly on "best of" lists.  The Dream Master, Creatures of Light and Darkness, This Immortal, and Dilvish the Damned are all also great.  He has a ton of great short fiction as well.

If you can find it, A Night in Lonesome October is also great.  Lovecraft + Classic Literature/Gothic Horror monsters + Sherlock Holmes + Jack the Ripper, involved in a game to determine if the world ends.  The cheapest thing I could find was the audio book, so listened to it on CD a few years ago.  

Your post made me take a look if more Zelazny was now available on Kindle, and I picked up something.  

[Ard]

The biggest problem with the second Amber cycle is that it was supposed to lead into a third, before he up and died.  Probably the one author I regret the most dying before he could finish his story.  His back catalog is really hit and miss due to how prolific he was and the era he was writing in, but his hits are some of my favorite books.  Most of those are still in print or easily found.

[WayAbvPar]

The 2nd set definitely went off the rails a bit, but the setting is fantastic, and the first 5 books are amazing. I was just telling my son about them the other day. He is only 6 and thus didn't quite grasp the whole thing, but he liked the idea of creating places with your imagination (which is how it came up). I need to re-read those, but I will wait until they are electronic. Although I probably have the books somewhere.

[Viin]

If you pay the $35 in shipping you can have this brick when I'm done reading it in 6 months.

[lamaros]

Put me in the recent SF is just as good as/better than older SF basket.

Lots of good older SF. But lots of poorly written drek that was a 'classic' at the time too.

[Khaldun]

Zelanzy is interesting to re-read.

Lord of Light still holds up beautifully.
Doorways in the Sand still holds up beautifully and is tons of fun.

The first Amber series I think holds up quite well.

Some of his other work that was highly regarded at the time I think is less impressive on a re-read. Creatures of Light and Darkness, Changeling, My Name is Legion are not very good. Jack of Shadows is a weird book that has its moments. (Feels very Jack Vance to me in some ways.)

The second Amber series is really pretty crap, to be honest. I don't feel like he actually had it plotted out when he started writing it. It doesn't lead anywhere consistent--unlike Corwin learning more and more about the secrets of his universe and the history of his family in each volume, the different plot threads and ideas never gel.  The stuff about Ghostwheel never really seems to go anywhere, Julia/Mask never makes much sense, the nature of Chaos isn't thought through very fully, much of what the first book established about Shadows doesn't seem to hold any more without any world-building to replace that and the gun-on-the-mantlepiece of Corwin's separate reality is never really engaged.

[Margalis]

A lot of older authors were very prolific, so even the some of the best have produced a fair number of forgettable or downright bad books.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. You can see their roots in a pulp/serial publishing economy going all the way back to Dickens: you make your living by writing a lot all the time, not by writing one big book that scores. Even the people who wrote a book that eventually sold gazillions didn't tend to sell that gazillion all at once, like Martin. So yeah, Asimov and Clarke and Silverberg and Heinlein etc., all of them published some turds as well as gems, just because they needed to keep writing. (Asimov was a bit more intense in his output, though.)

[WayAbvPar]

Writers keep writing whether anyone cares or not, I would think. Which is how I know I am not a writer. I always thought I would be when I was a kid, but I don't have the driving urge to keep at it.

[Khaldun]

Eh, there are writers who had one huge book inside of them scratching to get out who wrote that book and basically that was enough for them. There are also people who have written in waves. I think though for some of these older SF guys it was less that model of driving impulse and more a living. They wrote like some of us go to the office--it was what you had to do to make the bills, not necessarily what you were compelled to do by some inner drive.

Zelanzy was very clear on that himself--he liked the career he had as a writer more than the career he had as a civil servant, but it was a career.

[lamaros]

Asimov wrote 9 to 5, even if he didn't use it.

[Ironwood]

The Dolly Parton movie ?

[WayAbvPar]

Dabney Coleman, that rascal.

[Shannow]

Lionsgate announce they are making a TV show, movie and video game
based on Rothfuss's Kingkiller chronicles.

[Khaldun]

Unlike Game of Thrones, that's hard to pull off unless Rothfuss finishes the fucking thing because we still don't really know how much of an unreliable narrator Kvothe actually is. Which is absolutely critical to knowing how to portray the whole thing.

[Shannow]

Well I believe it's a trilogy and he's writing the last book (Door of Stone?), I gotta think (hope?) he's getting fairly close to finishing that.

See how easy it is to write fantasy? 

[Teleku]

Unlike Game of Thrones, that's hard to pull off unless Rothfuss finishes the fucking thing because we still don't really know how much of an unreliable narrator Kvothe actually is. Which is absolutely critical to knowing how to portray the whole thing.

...wait.  There is actually a line of thought that everything he's saying throughout the story is misleading, lies, or made up?  I've taken the series  at face value, as nothing but a straight on fantasy story with a slightly different twist on how its presented.

[Mazakiel]

There's at least a small degree of unreliable narrator going on in the story, it's just a matter as to what degree we can or cannot trust Kvothe.  It could just be his memories are glorified a bit in his recollection as compared to how things actually happened.  Or it could be a Keyser Soze style obfuscation.  It's probably somewhere in between, though. 

For example, while I don't recall any exact lines off the top of my head, I believe that when he's describing Denna, he describes her as being beautiful and perfect, and the other two people there, who had both encountered her, didn't really agree with his opinion.  From there, a lot of other stuff he says about her, upon reflection, probably isn't correct either. 

That Kvothe is someone embellishing his exploits for a better story would also explain some aspects of the story that are a bit outlandish, especially in Book 2. 

It's not an uncommon line of thought at all, and one I believe Rothfuss himself has indicated as being a correct way to look at things.  As a counterpoint, I've read some critiques of Rothfuss and the books who think the unreliable narrator thing is just his attempt to explain away a Mary Sue plot. 

That being said, I'm a fan of the books and believe that we're not getting a completely honest version of events from Kvothe.  I've also heard that Rothfuss has talked about doing more books that take place after Kvothe is done talking about the past, but at the rate Rothfuss is going, I'm not sure if that'll actually happen.  Much like Martin, I think he's gotten a bit caught up in all of the other stuff that's come his way since hitting it big.  He does good work with his charity, but I'd like to see where the story is going next.  Unfortunately, if he's as heavily involved in the TV and movie process that the stuff I've read indicates he will be, I don't expect his pace of writing to improve. 

[Khaldun]

I also have a suspicion that he wrote himself into a Mary Sue and now he's trying to write himself out of it, without making Kvothe so unreliable that it just turns out that he killed some guy in a bar whose name was "King" and that he was really just the guy who dished out food in the University cafeteria. Which may be contributing to the slow pace of completion of the current book. (Much as I think one of Martin's problems is writing himself into a number of holes.)

[NowhereMan]

Following my trend of semi-trashy urban fantasy, I've just gone through the Rivers of London series (PC Peter Grant seems to be series title on Amazon, even though apparently the real title is Rivers of London) and it's quite good. I think being a Londoner helps with it but it seems to be doing a much better job with things like power creep and knowledge. I think there is some apocalyptic meta-plot but 4 or 5 books in and it's only just been confirmed that that's a thing. I'm not sure how long it's slated to be, kind of hoping it'll conclude with the main character still firmly out of his depth and at heart a policeman.

The Laundry Files is starting to lose me as it becomes apparent it's moving away from lowly civil servant stuck battling the forces of evil and bureaucracy into magical superspies type stuff. More or less the same power creep got into Dresden but I didn't mind. I think I just liked the Civil Service setting a lot more.

[Quinton]

I like the Rivers of London series a lot.  I don't think having any special knowledge of or affinity for London is necessary to enjoy it (certainly does not apply in my case).  It definitely feels much more like somebody writing about a real place they know about than say the "Chicago" of the Dresden Files.

And yeah, not too much power creep, I like the way the backstory is evolving, and the slow reveals about Nightingale (and just how much of a badass he really is) are a lot of fun.

[shiznitz]

If you like military fiction, try Daniel Suarez's Kill Decision. It is about drones in the hands of the wrong people.

Forgive me if I got the book from this thread. I can never remember.

[Ironwood]

The Darkwar Saga is utter pish and clearly written post 9/11 when torture was all about fighting the good fight.

Sigh.  This trilogy may get flung into a corner before the last book, frankly.

[jakonovski]

The Hugo Award winner, Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is actually really good. Might be because it's kinda fresh reading from a Chinese perspective.

[Chimpy]

The Darkwar Saga is utter pish and clearly written post 9/11 when torture was all about fighting the good fight.

Sigh.  This trilogy may get flung into a corner before the last book, frankly.

Is that the Feist trilogy? You think that is terrible, the books after it are even worse. He obviously had some kind of "you need to write x many books in this world" contract with his publisher.

You are better off just not reading them and forgetting they even exist.

[shiznitz]

Is Darkwar before or after Riftwar? I think I read some of both. I swear I read some of these best selling trilogies and believe I could write for a living.

[HaemishM]

You could probably write. The "for a living" part is where it gets tricky. 

[Chimpy]

Is Darkwar before or after Riftwar? I think I read some of both. I swear I read some of these best selling trilogies and believe I could write for a living.

Much after. Like 5 generations.

[PalmTrees]

I like the Rivers of London series a lot.  I don't think having any special knowledge of or affinity for London is necessary to enjoy it (certainly does not apply in my case).  It definitely feels much more like somebody writing about a real place they know about than say the "Chicago" of the Dresden Files.

And yeah, not too much power creep, I like the way the backstory is evolving, and the slow reveals about Nightingale (and just how much of a badass he really is) are a lot of fun.

If you took out the architectural critiques the books would be about five pages long. I've been finding those parts a bit tedious but otherwise they've been okay.

[K9]

I just finished the Amber Series based on how much some of y'all seemed to love it. Personaly, eeeeeeh, it wasn't particularly great. Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I'm just reading it at the wrong point in my life, but nothing in the story ever really gripped me. Books two and three were decent I thought, and had a decent if not spectacular arc, but books 1 and 4 were weak, and book 5 was just complete rubbish.

Few more specific gripes in spoiler tags:

[Khaldun]

Those are all pretty fair complaints. You definitely get the sense that Zelanzy was making a lot of it up as he went along. There are a ton of guns-on-the-mantlepiece that never get fired. Of the family, only Random, Benedict and Eric seem to have mildly consistent personalities. I also am struck that we get almost no sense of Amber's residents--is there something special about being a person who lives in the "one, true realm"? Some of this is a consequence of the brilliant set-up of the first book, e.g., that the main character starts with amnesia and recovers his memories suddenly. Meaning, we get to know some of the characters and situations from the perspective of a stranger who suddenly becomes an insider again and when he switches over stops having a reason to explain everything as if he didn't know it. It might have worked better if there were things that happened in the time he was lost on Earth that he knows he needs to know and so sets about methodically looking into them rather than kind of stumbling into it all.

Also yes on the dangling plot threads. Zelanzy amusingly tries to address one or two of those in the sequel series but every single time he tries he spews out another ten dangling plot threads that are even worse. (The sequel series is a hot mess, I wouldn't recommend it.)

He was really better with single books: Lord of Light and Doorways in the Sand don't have these issues at all.

[Salamok]

Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand, This Immortal and Eye of Cat are my favorite Zelazny's out of the 20 or so of his books that I have read.  Chronicles of Amber is good but I think he is just better at writing short stories and novella's.

[Furiously]

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/1-1/ If you have like a month free, its a massive read.

[shiznitz]

Finished Correia's Hard Magic over the holidays. If you liked the Monster Hunter books, you will undoubtedly enjoy this one. It is set in an alternate 1940s world where a small percentage of the population have emergent magical powers and one faction wants to rule the "normals" who are defended by another faction.  Good characters, good fight scenes. I saw the ending coming earlier than the author might have intended but still liked it.