Okay, I’m convinced.
I just ordered Children of Time on Amazon…
One interesting thing is the author was a medium level fantasy guy ten years ago, then went into sci Fi and really blossomed. One of his earlier fantasy novels is heavily related to Children of Time, he’s obviously got a soft spot for one of the character types.
I finished the Malazan stuff earlier this year, well, the main books, the two volumes so far of the Tiste prequels, and the Esselmont prequels. I don’t have that much interest in the spinoff stories about the necromancers, and I haven’t started the I guess next new thing with the giant people barbarian folks or whatever. Really loved the main series, though it took me years to finally get back to it and power through. I actually find Erickson’s wordiness ok, as he can actually write. I saw a video where some critic pointed out that reading the books as if you are reading short stories sort of helps because in a lot of ways the novels are many short stories strung together to varying degrees within a meta framework.
The main series though sort of leaves a lot of unanswered questions, which may well be the intent.
I second the recommendation for the J. S. Dewes stuff. Good scifi. And Tchaikovsky’s books are solid too, though I find they vary a lot over the course of his writing.
The Rivers of London books I really do like, a lot, but then, I have a soft spot for that sort of Night Stalker blending of real-world with fantasy elements in a police procedural sort of way.
That is good to hear. I am 1/3 in and wondering ‘can this guy keep this up?’
So I just finished the first of the J.S. Dewes books (The Last Watch) and am about 1/4 through the second & have some pretty mixed feeling to share.
The space opera keeps the book moving (particularly the second half) & you definitely want to keep reading to find out what happens. The basic drama is interesting and the world-building is adequate. But also the characterizations are terrible IMO. Like fanfic stereotype awful. I have little empathy for any of these paper cut-out people and only barely care what happens to them despite that we’ve been stuck more / less in their heads for hundreds of pages. The major plot points are also wildly obvious and heavily telegraphed. Every twist (other that the central shrinking-universe drama) will likely be painfully obvious to everyone. The writing is barely adequate amateur level stuff too. How many times can the author describe multiple characters pinching the bridge of their nose in frustration, for example? So many times in a row, it turns out. It’s as though the characters are in a game we’re watching the author play and there are only a handful of emotes to use for all of them.
So why am I reading the second book? Mostly because the big picture drama is interesting and I’m curious to see how the author handles things after it becomes obvious that the humans have been the real monsters all along.
I’m hoping that there will be a payoff & that I’ll change my mind after book two, but right now I can’t really give the series much of a recommendation. Maybe read it if the descriptions grab you and you have patience for mediocre writing.
Oh no! Sorry it’s not working for you as well, though I love that you’re reading the second book :-)
Maybe we have obverse tastes. Have you read Six Wakes, by Muir Lafferty? I didn’t love that, though some others here really did.
Commonweatlh, by Ann Patchett, was pretty good. This summary gives a pretty good sense of the kind of book it is:
I guess I’d describe as kind of like one of those family epics that make up a lot of Latin American realismo magico, except a lot more concise, both in terms of scope (only two generations of the family) and language. (And of course there are no supernatural elements.) And it’s very American (as in US-ian) in setting and perspective.
It’s very well written, as far as I can tell, and even though Patchett mostly seems to be describing mundane life, it never feels like a mundane book and I always wanted to keep reading. She definitely has the gift of being able to tell a small, personal story in a compelling way, which I think makes her a great author, in the sense that great authors make the personal, universal and the universal, personal.
I recommend it, though to be clear, it’s rather far afield from most of the books discussed in this thread. ;)
Quite good! Never stopped, even when it was adding tons of characters it really held together and for the most part never forgot them, and it delivered on what I always want, a disaster book with a good chunk of disaster. I’m always disappointed where it’s unicorns and rainbows before, then Dr. Evil steals a nuke, but Bond stops it and it stays unicorns.
He did, however, very much dodge one massive foreshadowing that I’m a little ticked about . . .
I’ve finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s two (so far) books in the Children of Time series, and I agree with the general consensus that they are excellent grand-scope SF. I found both books interesting reading throughout, without much in the way of slowdown, which is saying something for a pair of 600+ page novels. I’d rank the first one a bit higher, but that’s largely just my preference for the civilization-building aspect of it. The second is more exploration/adventure. I think of it as the difference between dramatizing a game of Civilization versus Mass Effect. In any event, highly recommended if you have any interest at all in the genre, and I see a third book is due out next year.
In my view, Children of Time is one of the best 10 sci-novels of its decade and highly recommended to sci-fi readers. Children of Ruin, IMO is “merely good” but still recommended. I also enjoyed Tchaikovsky’s Door Into Eden novel, which deals with evolution and alternate history. Not as great as Children of Time, but still quite good IMO. His most recent sci-fi series, Eyes of the Void, I have found interesting but uneven. Overall I consider him a sci-fi writer to watch, albeit a slightly inconsistent talent. But when he’s on, he’s really ON.
I recently signed up for a 2 month trial of Amazon Kindle Unlimited and have been ripping through the Deathlands series - I enjoyed a dozen or so of the series in highschool but lost track of it.
They are short, pulpy, postapoc fiction set in the US 100 years after a nuclear war. Principled gunmen, evil raiders, mutants, small glimpses of future tech, etc etc etc.
It’s very much massmarket fiction - not winning any prestigious awards - but it is good, easy, comfort reading for anyone that’s a fan of that setting. Comparable in tone to Fallout 1.
All totally legit critiques. I think it’s the general plot and the basic competence of the writing that does it for me. It’s comfort food, one or two steps up from pulp, but also not imposing the sort of cognitive load that much better scifi like Banks’ stuff does.
I haven’t (yet), but I’ve added it to my list, thanks!
Just finished Moonfall based on @DoomMunky’s recommendation. I went in blind. It’s one of those epic stories that focuses more on the science and the spectacle. I found out it was written in 1998 and somehow it feels like a novel from that era. And I don’t even completely know what I mean from that, except that I recall this style of epic sci-fi novel was a thing back then. Liked it (but didn’t love it).
One more: The Trespasser by Tana French was phenomenally good. I’m not usually a mystery / detective novel person, but hot damn this was a good book. First off, it’s set in Dublin, so I had some lovely accents rolling through my head the entire time. The book is set pretty deeply in the viewpoint of a (female) detective, and yet still manages to give you a solid entry into the minds of the many other characters. The actual story of what happened becomes secondary, in a way, to the story that each of the characters is telling themselves about their own lives. It’s amazing, and it kept me up way too late for the last several nights.
It’s so good I nearly wrote it up in here before I finished it, which would have been a crime (har har), because the ending blew me away. It manages to pull off an impressive twist, of a sort, in that you’ve figured out “what happened,” in the murder mystery sense, but the way it is resolved is both unexpected yet clearly foreshadowed, in retrospect, and it dovetails beautifully with the resolution of the personal struggles of the detective. Strong recommendation to anyone who likes mysteries.
I really, really hope it is made into an awesome Irish detective TV series.
The next Cradle book by Will Wight is up for pre-order, releases in two weeks.
I have some time to re-read the latest one to freshen up the cobwebs in my mind.
Meanwhile rereading the Wheel of Time with lots of skipping of entire chapters and soon I’ll be skipping the entirety of book 9. Took a pause and currently I’m reading another LITRPG series I found on amazon.
Oooo, thanks for the heads up. I knew vaguely the pre-orders would be around late this month but I might have forgotten without the reminder. Really looking forward to this one after how Reaper ended.
Thanks, Cradle’s always an easy buy. I’ve still not read Reaper, I keep trying to find time to go back to an earlier point (Uncrowned? Wintersteel?) and read forward to freshen up.
I’ve got a pretty long flight coming up, so looks like I should be taking a copy of Children of Time with me! For some reason I’ve had this for a while but never got around to reading it.
Thanks. Bought. I haven’t read a mystery book that lived up to Agatha Christie since I read all the Agatha Christie books I could find in the 80s. Nothing else has compared to her when it comes to characters and how she sets up the whole thing. Of course, when I read your post, I realized, wait, I haven’t actually tried reading any mystery books since the 90s, so let’s give this one a try, it sounds perfect.