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Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wr
by jl6 3y ago
Oh man, this makes me sad.
I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel.
He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission.
A true name in sci-fi.
- emmelaich 3y ago'true name'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names THE cyberpunk book. Also, his later books are great but the "Across Realtime" trilogy has a special place in my heart. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844
- homefree 3y agoI’m pretty sure Yudkowsky read true names and it’s what caused him to focus his life on the alignment problem. That novella is basically an illustrated warning of misaligned super intelligence (it’s also really good!)
- hinkley 3y agoI still want augmented Chess to be a sport. You get a computer not weighing more than X pounds.
- TimSchumann 3y agoI'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again. Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book. Agree about the expert omission part.
- komaromy 3y agoDeepness was well worth it. Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.
- joshstrange 3y agoI think WoT is worth pushing through, you got stuck in the same spot a number of people do. There is definitely a lull there. Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the parts in my re-reads of the series. I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have to get past the way women are written in the series (and I understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).
- hinkley 3y agoBook eight may have been about when I gave up and sold the set. The dull bit in the middle of each book is when I would practice my speed reading. About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a single thing. Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the series and the samples sound much better than the old one. But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I don’t think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one series.
- bolasanibk 3y agoAah! The infamous ‘slog’ for the WOT series. Book 10 is where things pick up again my opinion.
- lll-o-lll 3y agoYes, the self indulgence reached record heights by timing death before completion. Just so we could have infinite fields of boring politics. In the paperbacks, each chapter with the “bad guys” had a special symbol on it, so I just skipped through the middle books reading only those. Fortunately the Dark One was still trying to progress the plot, and I don’t think I missed much.
- angiosperm 3y agoLet us not neglect The Peace War and Across Realtime. The former introduced memorable tragic figures, besides its singular vision.
- dwaltrip 3y agoJust finished this series literally an hour ago. Very fun reads! The second book was quite the page turner.
- moomin 3y agoBizarrely, there's a second sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, but it's never been digitised.
- SECProto 3y agoChildren Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.
- throw1234651234 3y agoIt's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIt's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep tier finale.
- stormking 3y agoPeople wanted to read how Pham Nuwen defeated the Emergents, learn more about the Zones of Thought or see the Blight finally destroyed once and for all. No one wanted more Game of Dogs.
- 3y ago
- throw1234651234 3y agoVV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson. I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.
- bosquefrio 3y agoVinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.
- throw1234651234 3y agoI don't know Brin at all, my first thought was "Sergey?!" - will check out his books and appreciate the recommendation.
- selimthegrim 3y agoBrin has a post on his FB wall mourning Vinge.
- bosquefrio 3y agoI believe they were friends. Brin mentioned that he hung out with Vinge a few weeks ago.
- webmaven 3y ago"The Heart of the Comet" was co-authored with Gregory Benford. It is one of my favorite books, and I wish they would collaborate again. Incidentally, Brin and Benford along with Greg Bear, are collectively known as the "Killer Bs". Practically everything written by any of the three is likely to be a great read.
- FromOmelas 3y agonot quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.