Yeah, the first few chapters of Three-Body Problem are great, set as they are mostly in the 60s and 70s, but as soon as it got to the current day I lost interest because the alien stuff was so crazy in comparison to the stuff that came before.
Seconding Jade City by Fonda Lee. One of my selections for the Hugo this year, along with N.K. Jemisin and Yoon Ha Lee. This is the first volume of a wuxia-meets-mafia-opera sort of subgenre. Wise guys having family conflicts using magical-jade-powered super-martial-arts.
Just finished the first book We Are Legion. I gotta admit that I just flew through it. It wasn’t an especially long book admittedly, but mainly I just couldn’t put it down! I agree that there are some downfalls. There are hardly any female characters and even worse, there are hardly any characters other than ever so slight variations of the main guy. I have to admit that by the end of the book I had trouble remembering who so and so was and what system he was in and what he was supposed to be doing. I also wasn’t a fan of the anthropomorphism of the newly discovered species. And yes, the main character is just slightly too perfect. But with all that said I still enjoyed it. I will give the second book a shot and see what happens.
This is the second book in The Farseer Trilogy. While I think it is too long and probably suffers from the curse of being the second book in a trilogy I do have to say I enjoyed it and the new things it brings to the table. The continued education and adventures of FitzChivalry are fun to read.
I wonder if Rothfuss read these before writing the Name of the Wind. Those books seem to be influenced by what Hobbs has done with the Farseer Trilogy.
Anyway, I already own book three, and while it won’t be my next read I figure to read it before the year is out.
I really should read the Farseer Trilogy one day. I really like Robin Hobb’s writing. I initially started reading her because GRR Martin recommended Fool’s Errand. That’s part of the Tawny Man Trilogy I think, which is a sequel to the Farseer Trilogy and Liveship Trilogy. I ended up finishing those three books (just the Tawny Man trilogy, I mean).
Wow, it looks like she’s been writing even more in that universe, with that same character even. She just finished the “Fitz and the Fool trilogy” in 2017.
Yes, and there’s a four book Rain Wilds series that more directly follows the Liveship books as well. I believe Fitz and the Fool is scheduled to be the last with those particular characters though.
I’ve read them all except the Rain Wilds books. I’d say that you should read the Liveship books. They’re kind of vital to understanding events in the world she’s created. The final trilogy is really pretty good, and many of the Liveship characters do actually show up in it.
I’m just finishing up on the Liveship Traders trilogy (so I’m up to I guess 6 Robin Hobb books now) and while it’s a bit jarring to start with a whole new cast of characters, I ended up liking the trilogy a whole lot. So I recommend reading them.
I should have been checking out these book threads before. From this thread I read Blindsight/Echopraxia. I read The Jemisin Broken Earth (oregenes). I like them! So I picked the Farseer one. I managed to read half of Assassin’s Apprentice last night. I really like it.
One random thought that occurred to me. In Assassin’s, they just casually mention “the Skill”. In Broken Earth, orogeny. The narrator’s point of view assumes you know what they refer to. It’s just stated as a fact of life, and we as readers adjust and play along. This is fun. But I was wondering are there any other alternatives to doing it? The only other way I can think of is a narrator that takes us out of the world by acknowledging we don’t understand what it is and then explaining what it is. I guess that works if it’s a letter to someone from a place far away or long ago.
Yes, unrelated to these books, Robin Hobb also wrote the Soldier Son trilogy, which I would recommend. I’d especially recommend Book 1 to anyone who is a fan of the whole “young person goes to school to learn with his fellow students” sub-genre. I personally love that genre. Book 2 and 3 are not in that genre though, but they do finish off the story in a semi-satisfying way. But Book 1 is my favorite in that trilogy. Book 2 is really trippy. And Book 3 is, like most Book 3s, adequate in that it finishes the story, but nothing too unexpected happens.
Well yes, you can use a naive protagonist–someone who is young or has amnesia or is a visitor from another place–and the reader learns along with the protag. That’s the typical way to do it. You can also just include an appendix with everything spelled out, ala Brandon Sanderson or the Death Gate Cycle. Some authors just do raw exposition via an introduction or extra-textual sources, like journals or something. Anne McCaffery did this with the Pern books–an introduction that explained the source of the threads, which was unknown to the characters.
For really good examples of the “drop the reader into the novel’s milieu and let them figure it out from context”, try Hannu Rajaneimi’s The Quantum Thief or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
The Red Knight did indeed pick up steam as it went along. I’m a sucker for an interesting magic system, and it delivered on that, as well as some entertaining large-scale battles. On the other hand, there was just a bit too much in-your-face obfuscation of the world and characters (presumably to set up surprises for the sequels), several plotlines seemed to go nowhere or fizzle out anticlimactically (including the main conflict), and a bunch of secondary characters and battle sequences kind of blurred together with one another. I though it also suffered a bit by comparison to Kings of the Wyld, which has a fairly similar premise and which I had read a few months earlier. Overall enjoyable enough that I don’t regret reading it, but I probably won’t continue with the series. 3.5/5.
I’ve been trying to alternate fiction and non-fiction, so I moved on to Unbroken. This is the story of Louis Zamperini, who was an Olympic runner in 1936 and expected to have a real shot at recording the first 4-minute mile, before going through an incredible ordeal during WWII, first adrift on a liferaft and then as a POW in Japan. I don’t know if “like” is the right word for this kind of book, but I blitzed through it in five days, and found it to do a great job balancing informative historical details, well-drawn people, and enjoyable prose. 4.5/5.
Currently, I decided I should make up my own mind about Ready Player One, but the first couple chapters have been primarily cringey. I’ll give it a bit longer, but will probably bail soon if it doesn’t improve.
