>Ask /tg/ for space opera literature >/tg/ suggests Honor

>>50396314
>He fell for the /tg/ have good taste meme.

>>50396314
She is pretty much the dictionary definition of a Sue. Personally I enjoy it in a guilty pleasure kind of way and it helps that the focus moves away from her as the series goes on.

>>50396314
Just read Hornblower and pretend its space. That's essentially Honor Harrington but ten times better.

>>50396314
>>50396544

I don't mind Honor herself, it's David Weber's staggeringly AWFUL writing craftsmanship I can't stand. I could actually go on for some length about the various writing fails he's committed...

I did enjoy, I think it was book 6? Mainly due to the Q-ship shenanigans. Those were actually well done. That's about it, though. Maybe Honor would annoy me after all if there wasn't so much worse crap in the series!

>>50396897
>Failure writing. Abort, Retry, Fail?


Please do.

>>50396314
Yeah, it's terribad after the first 4 books.

>>50396314
I think you were pranked

>>50396919
>'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, always choose 'Retry.
> Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft (Accompanies discovery of the "Nanomatter Editation" tech)

>>50396919

Prev commenter here-- Please rant, you mean?

>>50396314
It's popular because it's Horatio Nelson IN SPACE!

But aside from that it's not a good book series at all.

>>50397034

What? I like reading takedowns.

>>50396314
There are reviews online that go through book(s) step by step and detail what went wrong.

They're ... lengthy.

>>50396897
rant por favor

>>50396897
Isn't he the one who just dictates his books, and has them printed practically without editing?

>>50397091

OOOH, where??

>>50397064
>>50397099

Incoming, then! May need to pause and get my thoughts together a few times.

Starting with Book 1. It broke my suspension of disbelief outright, due to the way every character and the narrative reacted to the Medusans. Sapient aliens, people. SAPIENT ALIENS, the thing we've been telling ourselves stories about since we first looked at the surface of Mars.

And everyone acted like there was nothing special or remarkable about them. Weber could've partially justified that! Are aliens common in the universe? Have enough of them been met for standard procedures to be in place? A few sentences is all it would take!

But that still doesn't explain why the system wasn't CRAWLING with academics, and probably activists as well. People exist who aren't involved in military or politics, yet aside from a couple of merchants... Weber doesn't seem to realize that those people still have an impact. Manticore society isn't that different from what we have today; he never, EVER gives an adequate reason for everyone to ignore the Medusans!

>>50397107

Sorry, didn't see you-- I have no idea. It wouldn't surprise me if he did that NOW, it's popular and he's popular, but he started writing in the early nineties, if not earlier.

>>50396314
Sounds hideous. Thanks for the recap, I'll avoid this shitpile. Dodged a bullet there, a friend was recommending this to me.

>>50396478
Sometimes /tg/ can recommend good things. Like Legend of the Galactic Heroes. OP should read Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

>>50397157

And honestly, once you get past the sheer absurdity of his treatment of aliens, possibly his biggest world building issue is ignoring everyone who's not in politics or military. It makes his societies less believable.

On a more technical standpoint-- he recycles descriptions. I don't mean that he brings up the same description every book-- he describes things the same way *from the perspectives of completely different characters*!

For example, Honor's "soprano" voice. It's not a great word choice in general, since not every reader will be able to relate to it, but he has every CHARACTER think of Honor's voice that way. Dude! No! Most of these people are not opera enthusiasts! (Or if they are... give you cast some more diverse interest, please.)

>>50397259

(How do I italicize on this thing, anyway?)

Anyway, Weber's characters don't all sound *identical*, but I don't think he's great at villains-- whathisface, Burgess? in book 5, sounded almost identical to Pavel Young in his perspective intro. (Fortunately he diverged a little afterwards, but with Young finally gone, he should have sounded COMPLETELY different-- meet the NEW villain!)

And I need to rant about my one pet peeve-- Weber CANNOT write visual descriptions. They are TERRIBLE, with the sole, weird exception of Honor's first Grayson dress. I really wonder if he had a reference picture or something. I'm a visually oriented person, so his flat-out *contradictory* factoids about Honor's facial structure drive me NUTS.

>>50397345

Some of the other technical problems are wrapped up in further worldbuilding problems-- basically, Weber just wants to write painfully detailed space combat porn that he's put so much effort into working out scientifically.

He obviously *doesn't* want to deal with the realities of broken bones, and so uses "quick heal compounds" that conveniently-- and, as far as I can tell, *impossibly*-- speed up healing of any and all injuries. Sounds like medigel from Mass Effect, honestly-- and while I've heard good ad bad things about that series, I've never actually heard it praised for *realism*.

It's a handwave, it's an *obvious* hand wave in a series that REFUSES to handwave any aspect of space travel, and it's a just plain bad hand wave given the rest of the setting.

Don't forget how soldiers are always purehearted and wonderful (except one guy) and civilians who aren't veterans or working for the military are idiots.

>>50397451

Now, Book 4 might deserve a post all to itself, the bizarre thing. It has one of the most effective scenes I've read in the series-- the one where Honor comes into the bar targeting the assassin.

Other than that... what the heck was wrong with the PACING? It was bizarrely bad. I got a few pages from the end and started seriously wondering if Weber meant to drag the entire plot out for *another book*.

Aaaaand... leading into the problems with angst and Sympathetic Sues. Now, I just don't *do* angst-- obviously SOME people like it since it sells so darn well, but it bugs the crap outta me!

>>50397497

Huh? How far into the series did you read? 'Cause there've been some VILE military personnel around, or are you not counting Navy?

>>50396314
"Bio of a Space Tyrant"

Go on.

Enjoy the main character. Enjoy his name. "Hope Hubris" . Srsly

>>50397630
Not in latin or some other language for those words, but as is?

>>50397645
Fucking yes. As is. Hope Hubris, the Tyrant of Jupiter. Holy shit.

>>50397546

Sooo, since I don't do angst but was hoping the books would get better, I trained myself to ignore Honor's angst sessions (more on those later). Book 4, something finally happens that DEFINITELY warrants a severe emotional reaction... and I couldn't get into Honor's grief, because it was just a stronger episode of the same stuff she'd done every book.

Now, Honor is Weber's pet, yeah, not arguing there, but as it happens, by the time I'd got to her I'd *already* read a much, MUCH worse Author's Pet/Sympathetic Sue... in a book which seems to be getting universal high praise, but which I found so bad I didn't even get a *quarter of the way in*!

Which book, you ask? "The Way of Kings". Guy in the second chapter whose name starts with K, I don't have my (free) copy on hand to look it up. Sanderson blatantly, BLATANTLY wants you to feel sorry for this guy, everything he touches goes wrong, don't you feel bad for him? NO I DON'T, I WANT HIM TO SHUT UP AND DIE!!! I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT KID YOU BAITED ME WITH AND KILLED OFF, DARN IT!

Seriously. I've read six and a half books of Weber's writing. Sanderson's? I couldn't finish the *third. chapter*. But that's another rant!

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>>50397630
If the absurdity of his name is not addressed by the characters, I will be disappointed.

>>50397741
Be disappointed then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant

>>50397575
I got four or five books in. Aside from Pavel Young and the evil religious zealots, every soldier is portrayed as awesome, loyal, and intelligent.

>>50396314
>actually reading Honor Harrington

You got trolled, anon.

>>50397702

Baaack to Honor now... yeah, the surprise gunslinging was bad. We at least saw her learning some Grayson swordplay.

Aside from that... Honor's self-image issues highlight more worldbuilding problems. Manticoran society is *supposed* to be more equal and enlightened than our own, fine, I'd like that... explain to me *how*, exactly, Honor ended up with such severe self-esteem issues, and explain to me *why*, exactly, she never reported Pavel Young at the academy.

Now, I'm not saying either is impossible! But if society is so much better, neither is *probable*. It could just be Honor-- I'd accept that if it were SHOWN-- but Weber never shows us any such explanation. He just treats both things and their related phenomena like they're normal... which they *wouldn't be*, in the society he TELLS us this is.

*Show, don't tell!* And yanno, given how Honor reacts more aggressively in other people's defense than her own, she should realize that premeditated rape is frequently *serial* behavior. But as far as I recall, she NEVER thinks about the fact that Young just moved on to easier prey. And that's a really bad oversight.

>reading sci-fi not written by a guy named Wolfe, Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein or Burroughs
You dun goofed OP.

>>50397762
>Piers Anthony
Oh, the guy who wrote that series that was just a bunch of shitty puns? The one where seeing a woman's underwear makes you faint? The one where, in every book, one of the characters would have to ride a female centaur and grab her by the tits? Normally in front of their mother?
Please, Hope Hubris is mild for that guy.

>>50397780

Oh, you stopped right before the only (mostly) good one. There's a conspiracy of evil space sailors in Honor's crew in that one who go up to attempted murder.

>>50397863
>Baaack to Honor now... yeah, the surprise gunslinging was bad. We at least saw her learning some Grayson swordplay.
Be fair, they do show her training for two weeks. Two weeks of training vs the guy who's spent decades practicing, but the training is there.

>>50397895

I meant book 6, darn it me.

>>50397897

As much as two weeks? Huh. I think the weird pacing must have thrown me off. Okay, since her kinesthesia *had* been brought up well before that, it's *slightly* less of an asspull.

>>50397157
Wasn't the entire reason they ignored the Medusans because of laws and because they were primitive?

>>50397257
No, the translations are awkward.

>>50397907
I read everything up to Oyster Bay and I don't remember this plot at all.

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>>50396314
Read this instead.

Or if you want to see what Weber was like before he was bad, read Empire From the Ashes books 1 and 2.

>>50396556
Horacio Hornblower, #1 nigga in the navy.

Also his name sounds like a gay porn title.

>>50397957

That is NOT what I meant. Sure there were laws to protect them; that's good! But NO ONE was INTERESTED in the Medusans, even out of IDLE CURIOSITY (except for unscrupulous merchants!). As I said, Weber COULD have hand waved it-- if aliens were as common as in Star Trek, *and the narrative made that clear*, I wouldn't have batted an eye.

But he never mentioned any such thing-- the Medusans are the ONLY species well-known to be sapient that are mentioned in that book. There should have been SCIENTISTS there, indeed there should probably have been scientists trying to smuggle themselves in-- and ACTIVISTS. My gosh the activists. At least three different factions of them to boot, some of them genuinely conscientious but some of them forever getting underfoot.

See, you could probably get a lot of story conflict and red herrings out of this! But noooo.

Man, this bitch session is cringey as fuck.

>>50397991

It was a sideplot in the book with the Q-ships. The conspirators wanted to desert and figured they could disappear better in Silesian space. They might even have gotten away with it if the ringleader hadn't been a single-minded scumbag of a bully who couldn't let the *slightest* perceived slight go by.

... Weber went a little overboard with the sideplot of the bully's main target getting revenge. Like a sort of mini-Sue.

Lost fleet has the worst characterizations and mary sue's you will ever read. Seriosly, that shit was painful. World building is pretty flat too. I still read quite a few of them. Why? Why the hell did i do that you ask? Because in my opinion it had just about the best space combat of any book i have ever read. Sure some of it was a bit sketch, but rather than just hand waving physics out of existence entirely the author actually made a good stab at accommodating it. I'm warning you now it isnt a very good book series. You probably shouldn't read it. I'm being honest. But there are some things in it that are quite good. Also, as a rule trust nothing on 4chan. it's not even /tg/ specifically, its just 90 percent of what is on 4 chan is trolls and shit posters.

>>50396314
Trilogies are generally bad. Series that are more than trilogies are 99,9% bad.

If the first book is bad, the following ones are always worse.

Remember these rules of genre fiction.

I used to defend Weber.
Not as great, but as passable, and the stuff in his world cowritten by Eric Flint (better writter) is enjoyable.
But the most recent book made me stop.
Because I figured after the catching us up on the very complex backstory he'd move on to new stuff.
But he doesn't, until the very last chapter.
Hundreds of pages, and basically no new information except for extreme abouts of detail about shitty planets that we don't need to know anything more about.
I had to read more damn Russian names than I did in the Brothers Karamazov, all about a planet whose only damn purpose is to have the one space battle over.

I didn't even need to know about the planets politics, because the ships that show up have orders to engages any Soli ships they find, no matter why they were there.

I might read the next Eric Flint cowrite, because again he is a much better author, but Weber is done.

>>50397702
>Which book, you ask? "The Way of Kings". Guy in the second chapter whose name starts with K, I don't have my (free) copy on hand to look it up. Sanderson blatantly, BLATANTLY wants you to feel sorry for this guy, everything he touches goes wrong, don't you feel bad for him? NO I DON'T, I WANT HIM TO SHUT UP AND DIE!!! I WANTED TO READ ABOUT THAT KID YOU BAITED ME WITH AND KILLED OFF, DARN IT!

>Judging the quality of an entire writer based on the equivalent of episode one
Not gonna defend Honor Harrington, but you sound like a pretty awful reader OP

>>50397863
>>50398059

Oh yeah, that's where I was going-- now, one thing I DO like is the treecats. A sapient species that deliberately plays cute animal rather than making official contact-- and not out of malice-- is an intriguing concept. Throw in the telepathy and its effects on their cultural values, and I'd LOVE to see the treecats and all the implications of their behavior fully explored.

By a better, and more interested, writer than David Weber.

At least you didn't read the Northworld trilogy by David Drake. I was so mad by the end of it that I wanted to nuke Seattle.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with David Weber's writing: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=635193

How David Weber orders a Pizza

>>50398176

Uh, sorry? Are you addressing the OP, or me who wrote this? And I don't understand what you mean by awful *reader*-- please elaborate?

I am going to BOLD WORDS so that YOU KNOW how I really FEEL about THINGS

>>50397864

Niven? Stephenson?

>>50398204

I'm sorry! I don't know how to italicize on this site! I normally just lurk!

... and that's capitals, not bold./pedantic

>>50398176
You can judge the quality of a writer by their first paragraph, sometimes even by their first sentence. Because if you don't manage the hook, the most important part of your entire novel, how the fuck will you make everything else good?

>>50396314
>is just so irritatingly perfect at everything and all of the interesting things happen when she's not around
It's the Harry Potter/StarWars problem. Huh.

>>50398203
different guy, but you're supposed to hate the guys self pity.
Things go bad for him, but every time he's whining about himself your supposed to think he's fucking up.
I know this, because multiple characters TELL him his self pity and self hatred are getting him nowhere and annoying as hell.

That's his flaw, it's an actual real flaw (because you want to slap the guy for it), and why he's not a Gary Sue. Because of his self pity and self hatred.

Your taking his internal narrative as being an honest and direct representation of the authors perspective and intent. That's not always the case.

>>50398223
I never got this. How can you judge a book by the very first sentence or paragraph? (coming from a guy who judges what books to buy by their cover art)

>>50398220
>I don't know how to italicize on this site
You don't, you fucking newfag.

Legend of Galactic Heroes anon, the first and last space opera

>>50396897
I tried reading the honor harrington books as part of my free time while on jury duty, partly to get away from dealing with a sexual assault and child rape case and I can handily say that it was an awful novel and I was better off when I just blanked out putting puzzles together in the library game room.

>>50397864
Asimove can't write dialogue that's not exposition very well, and he can't write female characters outside of the short story Liar (i forgive Asimov many things because of that story).

Burroughs has really cool descriptions, but he's writting fantasy. Space fantasy, but it's Conan in space.

Herbert could drag like a motherfucker. I can deal with it because I don't mind extremely slow pacing, but his pacing is slow to "i need to skim the next 50 pages to have something fucking happen"

Heinlein writes good military fiction, but he's got a very restricted range. The best part about him is he recognizes his restrictions and works withing them.

Btw, I like all of them. They just have serious flaws.
Also, Arthur C Clarke. Philip K Dick.

>>50398203
Mixed you up with OP. Sorry about that, just general lingo to say "shit [x] OP"

Based on the way you're ranting, let me guess, you frequent SB/SV?

>>50398223
If we put this into TV terms, that's like judging the quality of Star Trek TNG by the first season, even though it didn't get better until after season 3. Or in literature terms, dropping Malazan Book of the Fallen because of the first novel, even though it is deliberately written to be obtuse until the second book.

>>50398244

>multiple characters TELL him his self pity and self hatred are getting him nowhere and annoying as hell.

Really? Huh. Then I guess Sanderson must've made an annoying character a little *too* annoying.

And I was hardly taking K's opinion of himself at face value-- I was going off how I *thought* the narrative was treating him. Maybe if someone had told him off at the end of that section it would've been clearer.

>>50398251

It's a style thing. Old school sci fi and fantasy was often serialized in magazines, was competing for space, and hammered out by the ton. If you wanted to be a success, you needed to grab first the editor, then the reader on the first page. This lead to a sort of convention among genre fiction the first line is where you present an image or an idea or even just a sparkling phrase that serves as a hook.

>>50398266

Okay, I could've sworn I'd seen it done, sorry.

>>50398350

Nope! Never SB and only very sporadically on SV.
I do, however, lurk at Das Sporking... bet you don't see many of us around here.

And Star Trek had multiple writers; that's hardly the same as a novel.

>>50398312

There's no such thing as a flawless story. The secret is to make a story so good people don't care about the flaws.

I've often thought this particularly applies to sci-fi movies. You make the movie entertaining enough and the same people who would rip it to shreds over continuity and plausibility will bend over backwards trying to justify all the flaws in it.

>>50398203
>>50398244

Yeah. That's actually the whole point of the character. He is an exceptionally capable person, who is smart, a decent fighter, a good leader, with magical bullshit powers only a few others get, and yet he is utterly wrapped up in how things in his life always go wrong.

The point of his character development is for him to finally figure out, and only after a bunch of people shout it directly at him, that he actually has the power to change everything going wrong with his life, has always had the capacity to make the things that go wrong not go wrong (or at least not so badly), most of what goes wrong does so because he expects the worst and so refuses to really try and prevent it, and that if he actually got his shit together he could actually turn his life around.

I get your point; and I'm not going to tell you to like the book if an annoying character feels like annoying writing; I've dumped books for less. I just wanted to point out that the things that annoy you about him are actually the point of him.

>>50398098
Sounds like Webber.

>>50398351
>>50398351
it's the next section where they introduce the first character who starts telling him off.
She's trying to help him, and takes a while to develop into a character. Like literally in the narrative, not because of the writing.
I can see you getting tired with him, but their introducing a lot and there isn't a non-asshole character who interacts with him in a way where they can tell him off until she comes in.

He slips, because in good fiction people's flaws aren't instantly fixed, but she keeps talking him out of that.

Now it's book 2 where he actually gets directly told of for that entire mode of behavior. By not telling him of, but having a character clearly tell him that she gets exactly what he's been going through, but she doesn't let herself fall into pity.

She's got her own flaws, but it's a good contrast to him, because she so totally evades his flaws.

>>50396556
You know, they made a show about Horatio Hornblower in space. It's called Star Trek.

It's breddy good.

>>50398421
true,
but those 4 he listed aren't in some special pantheon of being the only ones capable of doing that. He just refuses to see their flaws, and lets himself obsess over the flaws of all others.

It's treating his bias as fact. So I point out where his biases has blinded him to the flaws.

Like I said, I like all of those authors he mentioned. But they aren't gods.

>>50398437
>>50398474

Huh, OK, kind of interesting really. Still, he was hardly the only reason I stopped reading. Though I liked the assassin.

>>50398576

The assassin's one of my favourites; he's a surprisingly subtle take on the classic Edgelord Murderkiller. He gets an interesting arc, even if it is four books long because he only shows up every ten or so chapters and then briefly.

Actually now I think of it the main theme for most character thus far in the books is 'stop bitching about your serious problems; they are largely your fault and could actually fix your real problems if you tried hard enough'. It's cool, but it requires the major characters to be annoying to start.

But really, if you enjoy your books mostly for characters Sanderson probably won't help much. He is fantastic for worldbuilding; every book of his I've read has a world and way wildly divergent from the norm, and this series has probably the coolest. His plots are decent enough, although they mostly serve the narrative. His characters are a weak point, especially because they can be one-note until they develop into being better characters. If you aren't interested in worlds and you want character you'd be better served with someone else in the genre.

>>50398540
Not enough floggings or homosexual tension in Star Trek.

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>>50396314
I read one short story set in the Honorverse. Not very well written, but I enjoyed how it started off as the sort of SF military school genre, and then got into the horrors of war a bit with descriptions of how awful it is when the bridge takes a direct hit. Iirc, one of her fellow cadets was flash-fused into his command console.
Anyway, the thing I was most disappointed in was Haven. The idea of a socialist dystopia that becomes inherently predatory due to its inability to provide for its people is kind of cool, and I would have enjoyed it if there were a few more "True Believers" in the cast who genuinely believed in the Haven dream and felt horrible that they had to do such terrible things to protect and provide for the common good. It'd be kind of a nice inversion of Star Trek's Federation.
Instead they seemed to all just be piratical jerks.

If you want to enjoy the positives of Honor Harrington with less of the bullshit Legend of the Galactic Heroes provides.

Not none of the bullshit; it still has lots. But less.

>>50398812
That's Weber's politics seeping through. He's not quite John Ring, but they're on the same wavelength.

>>50396314
The only book I liked the is first one because she's up against the wall and "Wins". Virtually everyone on her crew dies except for her, her ship is more slag than starcraft, and she walks out of the whole ordeal badly shaken by the casualties she suffered.

Unfortunately all of that gets chucked out the window in the next book.

>>50398812
The horrors of space warfare were interesting. People drowning in their own vomit because they can't open their helmets without explosively decompressing, having to scrap sections of the ship because people's shadows in their last moments had been flashed onto the walls and corridors making sections of the ship too disturbing to walk through etc

>>50398850
Yang Wen-li died for our sins.

>>50398098
Oh yeah. I barely remember it now. That was an interesting book but not one of my favorites.

Honestly? I would've loved it if the entire series could gut about 50% of the Manticore and Honor stuff and give a few more victories to Haven. Robespierre and St. Just and the Haven military were my favorite characters. It hurt so badly every time they lost to Manticore because God made it so.

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>Thread about Mary Sues in writing
>ctrl+f "Anita Blake
>0 hits

Truly I cannot be the only who has suffered reading this series.

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>>50397998
>Japanese science fiction
>ever
That's not even really a space opera. Half the book is space battles and fighting aliens, the other half is fighting aliens THROUGH TIME in all kinds of eras and alternate histories. It doesn't count.

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Ancillary Justice is great.

Ancillary Mercy and Ancillary Sword become progressively less good until it ends up being mediiocre and predictable. Even when Sword introduced the idea that the true Radch are still around, it doesn't fucking go anywhere with it and instead focuses on... I dunno, mysteries about space stations and abusive teenage girls?

>>50398967

He is a good comparison, because he is ludicrously overpowered to the point it makes it hard to take the series seriously. Having a super-best commander is fine, but having one who is so much better than he easily beats the other best-of-all-history generals with inferior forces and against their explicit plans to bet him - particularly annoyingly, often completely offscreen. He only ever loses when politics makes him have to choose to lose. Compared to that, being a useless piece of shit in every other field still doesn't really do that much to make him tolerable.

I only tolerate him because it makes it cool when in a small battle he wins easily he happens to lose the logistics officer who, despite, never being mentioned, was actually the only man who made his bullshit possible and in the very next fight he is hopelessly outfought and dies weakly.

Also, Julian is worse.

>>50399075
I knew I saved this for a reason.

>The Ancillary series should have been called ‘Fascism Can’t Possibly Be This Cute.’ The whole trilogy is adorable.

>In the Radch everyone is referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ The AIs that run the ships can control multiple human bodies, and when they get upset they have the bodies hug one another to feel better. The ships also give relationship advice to their human crewmembers, such as when it’s appropriate to sleep with your subordinates, or how to apologize properly for hurting your girlfriend’s feelings. The soldiers are constantly fussing over their officers, dressing them, bathing them, making them tea, tucking them into bed, and crying or panicking when they get separated on missions. On ships living space is cramped, so it’s also normal for the soldiers to sleep bunched up together in big heaps. Giving and receiving gifts holds vital importance, meaning everyone is constantly obsessing over tea sets, memorial pins, jewelry and clothing. Everyone wears gloves all the time, so getting to touch someone’s bare hand (or god forbid, hold it) is a huge deal.

>It creates the impression that the feudal space empire is run by anxious, insecure, perpetually feuding anime schoolgirls. On one page they say something about exterminating solar systems or putting whole planets in storage to thaw the population out as slave labor, and on the next one of the lieutenants interrupts a dinner party to give the captain news, when in reality it’s because she’s 17 years old and wanted to see if she could get any leftovers. Later she cries because she had a crush on the horticulturalist and the Fleet Captain forbid her from speaking to her. The protagonist is able to win partially because she’s a legendary badass, and partially because most of the time she seems like one of a few adults in a room full of squabbling, loveable children.

>10/10 series, would recommend

>>50398810
>Not enough homosexual tension in Star Trek

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>>50399075
>>50399122

Awww! I'm happy to see TG recommending this. I figured the whole gender thing would make it a hard sell. Good to see you cats have taste.
Anyway, I think the author was saving up the more interesting, setting-shattering stuff for a later series. She seemed to really want to finish settle One Esk's personal story, and was more focused on that than the political situation in the latter books.
I did like the description of the Presger as humanity's predators, rather than them being simply a non-human empire, and I hope future books explore that.
I also really, really hope they aren't basically Doctor Who-bait like their human translators are.

>>50396478
FPBP. Anon beat me to it

>>50396314
And the first three are generally considered the BEST of the series.
I gave it up after book 2 as well.

>>50399010
How could you not tell it was trash from jacket summary?

>>50396314
You should try the Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell.
Some of the best space combat I've ever read.
Granted the romance bits are sorta ham-handed and at times forced, and that accounts for about 1/3 of the series as a whole, but the rest of it is pretty damn good.

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>>50397257
I've watched the entire 110 ep OVA, the movies, and the two additional OVAs and loved every second of it (except for that one movie).I really enjoyed the books when they were focused about the history of setting, when they actually get to the beginning of the real story it just felt so dry.

They aren't really bad per say, but I guess the series set the bar a bit high for me.

>>50399521
The first book was fine. WoD-esque crime drama that just so happens to have modern fantasy elements. I didn't even drop it when it started to pick up telltale romantic quirks involving vampires/werewolves. Its horribleness sneaked up on me and I didn't even open my eyes until the series protagonists turns into a literal semen demon and has to rape people to start her day like most people need their cup of coffee before work. At one point Blake straight up rapes an underage boy because of her empty semen tank making her flip out and she not only uses that as justification, everybody else just goes along with it and lets it slide.

>>50399010
>Anita Blake
I've always thought that Hamiltons should be a standard measure unit of lewdness in genre fiction. Like, "On a scale from 1 to Merry Gentry, just how explicit does this get?"

>>50399226

Well, they did have George Takei, so I think they might have had quite enough homosexual tension already.

>>50399748
Hot. Might need to read these books.

>>50396314
>>50396478
>Ask /tg/ for space opera literature
>/tg/ suggests Honor Harrington
You got trolled.

As for actual recommendations I can second the Lost Fleet series.

>>50399753
Merry Gentry was tolerable at least because it presented itself from the get go as a harlequin romance series. Anita Blake went from horror mystery to turbo-lewd almost overnight and all because Hamilton couldn't separate Anita Blake from herself and turned the series into a sort of sad passive-aggressive hate letter to her ex with a dash of Freudian wish-fulfillment.

>>50399803
Do yourself a favor and don't. It's only "hot" of you're a teenage girl or an honest to god basement dweller
(Of course, this is 4chan, so there's about a 91% chance of one of those being true...)

>>50399278
>I figured the whole gender thing would make it a hard sell.
Just because I worship kek doesn't mean I can't appreciate good writing.

But seriously, the second and third book just do not have that space opera feeling that the first one does. Especially when Sphene is around talking about how they're all unclean filth and yet it never explores just what it means to be Radch and really Radch.

The Presger are interesting, in theory. If they keep ending up as deus ex machinas though...

I enjoyed the Ark Royal trilogy by Christopher Nutall.

The early Honor books were fun enough by military sci-fi standards, to be honest. Obviously they're not Shakespeare, but they're readable. Things take a massive dive later on, though.

Weber's complete inability to divorce his ardent conservatism from his writing is probably the single most irritating thing about reading his works. For how much he loves to sprinkle WWII references throughout his works despite them being set 500 years in the future, you'd think he'd remember that WWII was won on the fucking Democrats' watch.

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The Deathstalker series is pretty good. It's a parody of standard space operas. Fairly humorous and great.

>>50397876
Please elaborate.

>>50396314
Okay, you want space opera? Read Dune.

I can't believe we're 100+ posts in and no one's mentioned Dune yet.

And before you start any shit about Paul being a mary sue - that's the point. The entire book is a deconstruction of the chosen one supreme being prophecy shit and the real consequences of having godlike power in a world of mortal men.

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>>50396314
>>Look it up, premise of space british empire fighting space north korea d
AAAAAAAAAAAGH


AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAGH

please suck on an exhaust pipe

>>50398959
>People drowning in their own vomit because they can't open their helmets without explosively decompressing
Break seal, let vomit boil off, reseal. Is it really that hard? Explosive decompression isn't a thing.

>>50399075
>Ancillary Justice is great.
>Ancillary Justice
>is great

nigga u wot

>>50398059
The thing with Medusans is that though sapient aliens aren't common - they're rare as fuck - they do exist scattered around the galaxy, as "discoveries" the universe at large has been there and done that, and in pure terms they're worth fuck all

Though one of the scientists from the Medusa project becomes like C-grade relevant in some of the later books - Nimitz gets injured, and part of his psychic communication between cats doesn't work any more, so Honor (being oh so fucking rich at this point) just snags the project's communications/alien language expert and solves a 200~ year old problem just like that, in a subplot

>>50398812
>I would have enjoyed it if there were a few more True Believers
Haven in the main books is much more interesting - but there's 2 big shocks that make part of their armed forces splinter and some guys fuck off to piracy - by definition those guys aren't believers

A few true guys do exist for each of the Republic's incarnations do exist though

>>50398859
That happens every couple of books. To the point that even the characters comment on it

>>50401007
Eh, it's bad, it's not THAT bad - he's got worse writing sins, and other authors that work with him (Ringo) can be even worse

>>50397940
Yeah, backed up a bit as the series goes with "Honor is basically a super-soldier that's only very slightly been bred back down into normal humanity" which is handled pretty poorly, but covers most of her physical shit - comparing her to a Grayson, basically any Grayson, and she has an advantage: she didn't have hundreds of generations on a shitty poisonous world, and then she's got all her super-soldier shit

>>50397863
>Manticoran society is supposed to be more equal and enlightened than our own
They have a hereditary nobility - it's equal between sexes and races, but social class is "muh 18th Britain" - Young is pretty damn high up there merely by his theoretical position, never mind the extra power he has

The self-esteem is kinda BS tho

>>50401007
The Democrats of the 40s would think the Republicans of today are dangerously progressive.

>>50398209
>Niven? Stephenson?

James S.A. Corey, the expanse Novels
Joe Haldeman, the Forever War
GRRM, a thousand worlds or whatever the universe is called, has some quite ice storys, though they're not properly Space Opera - they're post-Space Opera.

Scalzis first couple of books, something with clone soldiers, are pretty good space opera

>>50401090
ONLY read dune!
do not read any of the following novels
do not read any of the sons prequel shit

ONLY dune!

>>50396897
>David Weber's staggeringly AWFUL writing craftsmanship
Fucking THIS. War of Honor is the worst thing I have ever read hands down. James Corey's Expanse has its own problems but it's a thousand times better than this shit.

In the hands of someone like Corey, Charlie Stross or Dan Abnett the Honor Harrington series would be top tier.

If you're looking for some actually good competence porn space opera I highly recommend the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.

>>50401823
>War of Honor
Christ yes - the others all have some bad bits, but that's the only one that I'd call 100% crap

>>50401838
It even has a GURPS supplement.

>>50398120
Genre fiction is a bitch fit trilogies or series though.


Seriously, go to a charity shop or library, you will certainly find "volume X of the X series" taking up most of the shelf space under sci-fi or fantasy

You rarely see vol 1 of course, so even if it sounds good your screwed.

>>50396975
Objects once measured in meters have become so small that they cannot be seen by the naked eye, with revolutionary applications across the board. Gentlemen, forget what your courtesans have told you: size does matter!
— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morgan Industries Annual Report (Accompanies discovery of the "Nanominiaturization" tech)

>>50401071

Weird series, that. Not sure if I really like it or not. I really liked how the eldritch abomination that shows up was described/presented, though.

>>50396314
How you people read this shit is beyond me. I give works of literature 50 pages to hook me. No more. How many books of this faecal dump has the guy written and you just lap it up?

>/tg/ confirmed for terrible taste in writing

>>50401823
No else except Weber can make a 4 page incredibly boring flashback thrown into a dialogue that consists of maybe 3-5 lines.

>>50401878
>The 2 sentence blurb from alpha centauri is better than nearly all best selling sci-fi.


Why live?

>>50401915
I read it for space battles skimming through everything else.

Personally, I like the Travis Taylor sci-fi stuff...but we live in the same town and he did an entire book that was basically "Huntsville Saves Earth!"

He also did a couple of books that had a little Macross in them. Those were fun.

>>50401924
A brave little theory, and actually quite coherent for a system of five or seven dimensions — if only we lived in one.
— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Now We Are Alone" (Accompanies discovery of the "Superstring Theory" tech)

>>50401597
>ONLY read dune!
>do not read any of the following novels
>do not read any of the sons prequel shit
>ONLY dune!
qft

>>50398169
Yeah, I loved the whole story arc that From the Highlands had, and then Crown of Slaves is probably my favorite novel set in this godawful setting.

Of course, I read it while I was reading all the others, so it could have just been the stockholm syndrome setting in at that point.

>>50397998

>The Lord Sands of the Of Time

Weird translation.

>>50401203
These were written back when it was assumed to be a fact. Science marches on, and all.

>>50400307
i encountered merry gentry for the first time in about 14 years recently, when i last ran across her she was single and vaguely fey, in this one she was giving preggo handjobs to multiple individuals and then literally fucked a tentacle monster. I was not expecting that.

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>>50401071
Owen Deathstalker is A GOD AMONG MEN.

>>50401071
I'm assuming this is not related to the Deathstalker movie series.

>>50396314
I'm pretty sure this is pasta. I swear I've seen this exact thread before

Also vis-a-vis Honor Harrington, I would argue that Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series is Honor Harrington done right, it has occasional dips in quality but you never feel like Kris is the author's waifu.

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>>50399226
>>50399792

>>50401007
I honestly think that Weber's personal politics have flipped a fair bit.

Like, by the time the SUPER EVILLL space liberal billionaire becomes a regular member of the good guys club and they replace the head of the liberals or progressives, I can't remember which, with the Queen's best friend (who is also one of the few people shown as competent and non-military), while the conservatives end up being 100% evil jackasses.......

I found the Honor series to be somewhat so-bad-it's-okay.

Like, the gallons of exposition, the fact that honor turns more and more into a mary sue, and the fact that the pacing was uniformly awful in every way was balanced with some well thought out space combat scenes and a shockingly detailed history and science side. Of course, these things tended to pop up mid-battle scene, I remember a book with about 3 to 5 pages of exposition on solar sails happening between one ship launching missiles and the other side responding.

Overall, if you can enjoy bad fiction, the series is fun. If you're looking for serious writing and quality sci fi..... look elsewhere.

>>50397157
>OOOH, where??
Here's one that goes through one of them in minute detail: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/full-slow-ahead-ralson-reads-honor-harrington-a-rising-thunder.9340/
It's quiet amusing, if a little long,

>>50402216
Don't mind the forum it's in, that Let's Read is amazing.

Just when you think the stupid has hit critical mass, keep reading. It gets worse.

>>50400307
>main character became her self-insert

Literally every female author

>>50402338
No, not really

>>50402338
Yawn

>>50398350
>in literature terms, dropping Malazan Book of the Fallen because of the first novel, even though it is deliberately written to be obtuse until the second book.
Obtuse is different from badly written. Unless it's Joyce levels and you don't have the time to work on your fuccboi powers, an obtuse book can still have good writing. If it doesn't, why the fuck would I read this rather than Cordwainer Smith, Lem, and other wordsmiths?

>>50402383
>>50402420
A+ response lads. Keep it up and I'm sure you'll get your junk felt up eventually

>>50399042
If a nation is capable of producing works like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, or Emanon on comic book form, I really want to read their written fiction.

The time I was closest taking the plunge learning Japanese was when I first realized that. Not for the manga, nor the animu, but for Japanese SF. They have to have pearls. And it's the one nation that got struck by atomic bombs.

>>50396314
Wait, didn't this thread exist a few montsh ago? With exact same replies? Did you exploit a time anomaly?

>>50398437
That arc made me relate to Kaladin a lot. He's a textbook case of a bright guy with depression. And, he doesn't get it right the first time. It takes him learning the same lesson enough times for him to change himself. I really feel that. I get it, intrinsically. I deal with clinical depression all the time, and it's taken me learning that I'm a capable human being who can operate a normal life multiple times before I started changing my own behavior. I get that other people aren't going to have that connection to The Way of Kings, but that plot has been one of the few that have made me emotional and reflect on my own life.

>>50402469
Alrighty, Ursula K. Le Guin. Please make more stupidly easy to refute statements in the future.

>inb4 you move the goalposts

>>50402489
Shin Sekai Yori is somewhat science fiction, since it's set in a thousand years in the future. It's very good, but not space or alien-related, just that people started to be born with magic powers and now everyone lives in small communities away from each other to avoid conflict. There are some magitech creations from the time they thought maybe things could work out, and a good amount of genetic engineering going on, though.

It also has anime and manga adaptations, but one guy managed to translate the original novel (which is actually a novel for once, not a light novel): http://shinsekai.cadet-nine.org/

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Opinions on this?

>>50396314
>space north korea
It's space revolutionary France, anon.
Robert Pierre didn't ring a single bell?

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>>50402597
>>50399042
If you want decent Japanese space opera, Crest/Banner/Battleflag of the Stars (Seikai No Senki/Monshuu) are pretty fun. The anime is quite good as well. The writing itself isn't exactly amazing and the way the author plays around with language can be somewhat distracting, but there is actually a lot of good world-building and genuinely fun characters.

>>50401850
MY GOD!
YOU JUST MADE MY DAY!

>>50397864
>forgetting Peter Watts

Opinion discarded

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>>50401103
Oh look. A person with actual good taste. How did you end down here friend?

>>50402664
Yep. I second this. Though translations that I was able to hunt down were in dire need of a good editor.

>>50401272
They'd be right.

>>50402704
>>Forgetting John C Wright
Vindication of Man just came out.
It's better than a nazi killing robot that prepares you pancakes and sucks your dick all at the same time. All at the same time.

>>50402722
>Though translations that I was able to hunt down were in dire need of a good editor.
That is kinda the problem though, isn't it? I never managed to get a hold of all the translated books in the first place, just the first three.

Also, a lot of people seem to have issues with Abhs, though personally, I always found them pretty damn entertaining.

>>50402704
My man. Blindsight is free and extremely interesting, though the Vampires will really strain your suspension of disbelief. Here's a link for those interested.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

>>50402743
>Also, a lot of people seem to have issues with Abhs
I think it is much better than what Weber done with Manticora. There is enough bad parts about Abhs that you sometimes genuinely wonder who is in the right. There is also some really shitty aristocrats that make Young look passable.

>>50402767
I've never read Weber, so I can't really compare.
But the things I enjoyed about Abhs is the consistent ballance between "they are really cool and admirable and super awesome" and "wow, this is actually kinda fucked up" that seems to be purposefully not resolved. And I like how neither the books nor the show actually showed it in your face - like there is just a brief, fleeting mention of Abhs using incredibly fucked up torturing devices routinely on those who really piss them off in the third series, just casually mentioned during an unimportant debate that will make you pause the damn thing, replay it to see if you heard right and suddenly really wonder if you aren't supposed to actually hate them.
And plus, and this is generally a good thing about the whole series: they are fun. The actual characters have a sense of humor and surprisingly human faults, especially for a race that was literally designed to be "perfect space machines". They are idealized, but there is complexity to them.

Plus, their backstory is pretty interesting too, with a palpable sense of tragedy to it.

I've actually enjoyed Abhs most about the IP, well at least outside of the really surprisingly well written dialogues (for a soft novel) and some really interesting world building. But a LOT of people take issue with them so big they can't enjoy the thing at all. Which I find kinda sad.

>>50396314
Isn't this pasta?

>>50401086
Piers Anthony wrote, among many many other series, the Xanth novels, which were YA fantasy before that was it's own genre. There's an absolute shit tonne of them and the basic premise is as follows:

There is a magical peninsula/archipelago called Xanth that floats around Earth (which they call Mundania), attaching itself to various other landmasses at sporadic intervals. It currently overlaps Florida. Inside it, magic is real, and frequently based around terrible puns. Lots of typical fantasy creatures live there, and they are all (with the exception of demons, possibly) descended from regular animals that wandered into Xanth then got altered by magic. More often than not, love springs. Regular humans born there get a magical talent, ranging from the pretty lame (making a coloured spot appear on a wall at will) to the super-powered (transmogrification, necromancy etc).

As previous anon said, Piers Anthony has a thing about how being flashed a girls panties can stun those caught looking - it's a plot device in many of the books. He also has a bit of a thing against age of consent laws - the books often express the opinion that kids are old enough to know about adult things (The Adult Conspiracy)when they're old enough to be curious about them.

Oh and in one book, there's a winged centaur girl who can't work out why she can't fly, even though she's been doing exercises and her chest muscles have gotten huge <spoiler>It's actually her tits</spoiler>

>>50402459
>Cordweiner Smith
So much this. Everyone should go and read this guy, the books are really, REALLY good.

>>50402913
he wrote... I read it in german
" Was aus dem Menschen wurde ",
which I would translate as
" What became of Man ",

and it was a disjointed mess
but a phantastically brilliant and enjoyable disjointed mess

" ... because she was a girly girl and he was a Lord of the Instrumentality "

>>50396314
>Ask /tg/ for space opera literature

You have been taken on the /tg/ ruse cruise.

The denizens of the board did a similar thing to me with The Sword of Truth series. I may never forgive them.

>>50403196
Nice writing, I never managed to get his style down.
Really, not only the universe he built, but also the way he shaped the sentences.
Good stuff.
Also, his psychological warfare books.

>>50402489
I dunno, I hear the Japanese have a pretty stagnant market for most genre fiction stuff, outside of anime/manga/lns. In fact I hear that aside from a few breakout writers in general the Japanese market is dominated by romance/dramas/emotional fiction. So I wouldn't bother learning the language for Sci-fi stuff, if you like traditional Asian literature and some pretty interesting modern and post modern stuff though you would be good to learn it.

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>>50403250
Ahh, Sword of Truth. Yes. Yes. Let the hate flow through you.

>>50403368
Japanese genre fiction and japanese genre fiction market simply work very differently from ours, to a point where trying to understand them through the lenses of our pre-conceptions is going to end up with a major misunderstanding.
Plus, the japanese book market (and genre fiction market in general) are so god-damn fucking huge that whatever you hear does not really matter that much in face of the sheer volumes of the works.

By the way, the most dominant and prevailent genre in Japanese light reading market is STILL magical realism of lighter variety, which is quite interesting. I don't think I know of any other culture that turn magical realism into main-stay mainstream genre, but apparently, here we go.

>>50403359
Some of his stuff really is fucking bizarre. The Dead Lady of Clown Town is obviously going for a sad martyrdom vibe but it comes off as a jarring technicolor massacre that's more awkward and vaguely unsettling than entertaining.

If anybody's going to start reading his stuff, start with Scanners Live In Vain and The Crime And The Glory of Commander Suzdal.

>>50397864
> No Dick
My god, your taste is awful

>>50403495
>Japanese genre fiction and japanese genre fiction market simply work very differently from ours, to a point where trying to understand them through the lenses of our pre-conceptions is going to end up with a major misunderstanding.
Do you have the time to explain, I am quite curious.

>Plus, the japanese book market (and genre fiction market in general) are so god-damn fucking huge
Really, I thought the market was relatively (to the size of the country) small, traditional books only being a minority of the income/sales of the publishing industry, much more going to magazines (including manga) and serialized stuff.

>I don't think I know of any other culture that turn magical realism into main-stay mainstream genre,
Latin American cultures? That was their thing wasn't it? Borges, and that guy who died a few years back who wrote that really famous one. I think it was, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

>>50396314
Mate Haven is pretty much France, not North Korea.

>>50402626
Read it feget.
Really, it's great.

>>50397107
He had like a stroke or an accident or something that fucked up his fine motor skills

>>50403652
>Do you have the time to explain, I am quite curious.
It's a pretty difficult subject. But in general, Japs have much greater pronounciation of the divide between genre and classic fiction, but at the same time it's much less formally distinguished. Genre fiction in Japan is less about formal elements of the story (e.g. time periods, use of fantastic elements etc...) and much more about the depth of characters and general "profundity" of the stories. In other words: a book being "sci-fi" or "fantasy" is less indicative of it's status as either genre or classic fiction than we are used to it be. BUT once a book is labeled as either genre, or classic work, the distinction and it's treatment will be much more dramatic.

And again: the interesting thing is: while genre and classic (or maybe we should use the terms "low and high") fiction are more dramatically distinguished, at the same time there is less insecurity about enjoying low or "genre" fiction. Much like J-pop, genre ("low, pop") literature is viewed as functional aspect of culture, existing to accompany and coexist with higher literature: people don't pretend it's comparable, but also enjoy it with much less guilt associated.

99% of genre (low, pop, whatever) fiction exists within the LIGHT NOVEL medium, something that we hardly even have a market equivalent to. And that is where the notion of
>traditional books only being a minority of the income/sales of the publishing industry, much more going to magazines (including manga) and serialized stuff.
Shows our misunderstanding of the market working. TRADITIONAL books are a small part of the market.
LIGHT NOVELS are actually larger than magazines and manga market combined. If you enter a Japanese bookshop, 80% of everything on display are light novels. The volumes of those are insane, as is the formal and genre variety in them: this is the form that gave us Melancholy of Suzumia Haruhi, All You Need is Kill (the Edge of Tomorrow story) etc (cont.)

ITT /tg/ has really bad taste in literature. I mean, Scalzi? Leckie? Seriously?

>>50403652
Others famous examples of light novel fiction stories you may or may not heard about are the Crest of Stars series somebody mentioned, original Legend of Galactic heroes, most works by Haruki Murakami (who has only been "upgraded" from light novel category AFTER his major success in the west), or those rather famous Banana Yoshimoto stories.
So it really is all about the light novel format and the specifics of it. And we really don't have an actual proper equivalent of it.

Within the light novel genre, there are insane amounts of sci-fi, fantasy, high-school dramas, weird alt history fiction, horror stories, terrible sappy romances, everything: usually combined together is some really weird way. Like the last time I was in Japan was when the Okami no Kodomo was breaking national sale records, and that is a story of a contemporary girl that fucks a god-wolf who then gets run-over by a truck, while she is raising two half-wolf-half-human children. And it's incredibly melodramatic and sappy as fuck, but it's pretty clearly a magical story at root.

>Latin American cultures? Borges
Well, while it's great that you know names like Borges, Marquez and Cortazar, they are everything BUT mainstream and popular fiction. In fact, I'd say they are the embodiment of "high", classic fiction that gets sold in hard-covers and debated by intelectuals wearing barrets and sipping red wine. In Japan, magical realism serves the same role as crime drama serves in my country, or superhero movies serve in say, America. It's like the go-to, most common, most popular schlock fiction. Just look at Murakami again. He is basically the Japanese equivalent of Dan Brown for fuck sake.

>>50403494
Should become known as the "50 shades of gray" of fantasy, so no1 else gets rused.

>>50397864
>not including Stanislaw Lem
kurwa

>>50403548
Can we all just agree that dick just wasn't that good?
I mean yeah, when we were younger dick was great, but dick just doesn't hold up as well anymore.
Dick is sexist and pulpy and falls flat and can't keep the enthusiasm up like when we were young and experiencing it for the first time.
It's time to put our dick phase behind us.

>>50403845
>once a book is labeled as either genre, or classic work, the distinction and it's treatment will be much more dramatic.
Ah I see, seems a rather interesting way of classifying them, and I can't say I dislike it.

>99% of genre (low, pop, whatever) fiction exists within the LIGHT NOVEL medium,
That was rather my original point. In response to the other anon talking about how he wanted to read the written fiction, I was trying to point out that he wouldn't find the same sort of genre fiction, which also attempts to be what we think of as literature. I apologize since I seem to have made this point rather poorly.

As an aside, I personally have never found LNs to be all that good in English, but I'm never able to tell if it's because Japanese is a difficult language to translate well and there is much nuance lost, or if it's just the inherent short form style I dislike.

I do appreciate you taking the time to explain anon.

>>50403935
>And we really don't have an actual proper equivalent of it.
We kind of did at one point, but it never became a cultural phenomenon like it did in japan. Many of the most famous sci-fi and fantasy we have from the golden ages was serialized in a manner akin to light novels, but it never seemed to get popular enough and as print media is dying in the west, I doubt that kind of publication will ever become popular again.

>In Japan, magical realism serves the same role as crime drama serves in my country, or superhero movies serve in say, America. It's like the go-to, most common, most popular schlock fiction.
Ah, I see. My mistake again, I thought you were talking of it as a mainstay of the more critically acclaimed artists. My apologies once again.

>>50403996
>Stanislaw Lem

Blatant communist propaganda anon.

>>50402704
>>50402761
Blindsight is good but Peter Watts can only write one type of story and once you figure out what it is his stuff becomes awfully predictable.

>>50396314
>Premise of british empire vs north korea is abandoned
>north korea

What? North Korea? Haven are supposed to be France, it's buggeringly obvious, it's British naval history in space.

Also the fighting is boring, the ships are boring, the weapons are boring, the politics are mildly interesting, the characters are good except the protagonist. If it was about Lester Fucking Tourville rather than Honor Harrington the books would instantly be ten times better.

Oh and you forgot the swords are katanas, for reasons.

>>50404047
There is literally nothing wrong with communism.

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>>50399122
>so getting to touch someone’s bare hand (or god forbid, hold it) is a huge deal.

>>50397157
>SAPIENT ALIENS, the thing we've been telling ourselves stories about since we first looked at the surface of Mars.
>And everyone acted like there was nothing special or remarkable about them. Weber could've partially justified that!

Fair's fair, he actually did. There are three reasons no one's interested in them, some are spelled out obviously, some are subtext.

1. No one's allowed to meet them without a damn good reason
2. By this stage we've known about them for a long time
3. They're basically niggers on stilts, they're not very interesting.

>>50404081
There is literally nothing wrong with communism the idea. There is everything wrong with communism the political system.

>>50403996
You can also risk adding Efremov for some Soviet sci-fi. Though get ready to have some really alien social concepts. Even though he wrote about the world where communism won even other communists were not keen on the picture he was showing.

Kir Bulychev has much more simple societal concepts and has nice children books.

>>50399010
I unironically enjoy the Anita Blake novels. Yes, they're awful, but I am the absolute target market for them.

>>50404047
Read Efremov and try to say that Lem is communist propaganda after that.

>>50404129
It was Dick that said it not me.

>>50404102
I agree completely. Glad we could get that settled so easily.

>>50404029
>Actually saying you don't like Dick
What are you, some kind of faggot?

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>>50401086

>>50402489
I don't think that's a good idea. Most of Japan's genre fiction is either anime/manga or light novels, and you do not want to read light novels. They're shit.

>>50402626

Just read it myself. I was hooked within 5 pages. Read it.

>>50404267
>Japan is killing countless innocent trees so that they can read utter shit that they acknowledge as shit but read anyway

We should've finished the job in WW2. Japan is a cancer.

>>50404319
If they actually killed enough to put a dent in their fuckhuge cypress forests they might not suffer from giant hayfever outbreaks every year.

>>50404267
>They're shit.
A lot of them are actually not. It's just that very little of them get translated, the selection process if iffy at best, and the translations tend to be god-awful.

>>50404319
Don't kid yourself anon, if a tree ever got the chance it would kill you and everyone care about.

>>50404267
>genre fiction
Calm your autistic buzzwords anon, you don't get to pretend to be a connoisseur of thespian masterpieces on /tg/.

>>50404385
To be fair, if trees went about culling our numbers so that they could process our flesh into tablets and write things of no real value on them, I might feel some resentment as well. And that's not even getting into the ramifications of artificially breeding humans to keep the population sustainable, or installing us in forests for aesthetic value.

>>50396939
This. The first book is OK, the second one too, it drops off at the third and starts plummeting for the fourth and later.

Here's the first Cordwainer's short story I ever read. I was instantly hooked.
http://www.vb-tech.co.za/ebooks/Smith%20Cordwainer%20-%20Mother%20Hittons%20Littul%20Kittons%20-%20SF.html

>>50396314
Try giving Vatta's War a try maybe?

>>50404577
brilliant!
that one was also in "was aus dem menschen wurde"

>>50404679
I like how it both givws you insight into the Instrumentality universe history and presents a nice combination of sf, spy story and horror, all wrapped in a really well written 20 page story.

>>50404577
>>50404724
Oh, and the name is "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons"
How do you not wonder what that means?

>>50404577
Those are about the Norstralia defense system, right?

Hmm
What hasn't been mentioned yet?

Nobody mentione Foundation? Seriously?

Gap cycle is great too and I like the way it treats space travel. Also, the aliens are somewhat alien which is a plus

As for above-average quality writefaggotry, The Last Angel and The Last Angel: Ascencion are really enjoyable

>>50397257
You should read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, etc, you weeb.

>>50404788
Though now that I think about it, they are not really space opera

>>50404767
Yup. The 21 sided moon and all.

>>50404797
Which translation?

Also any other must read classic Asian literature for /tg/? (besides journey to the west)

>>50401071
I dunno, Green's Drood series was getting really old, and hate how he HAS to cross over with EVERY ONE of his series with all his others.
It's really disjointing to me when he comes out with a new book series and OH THESE PEOPLE ARE SO IMPORTANT! SO SO IMPORTANT! But they've never been mentioned, or even hinted at before in any of your other books. BUT THEY'RE SUPER IMPORTANT GUYS!

>>50402069

That's not an excuse.

I'll throw something in there,
which you will find in the archives,
and which I enjoyed greatly while it lasted:

> Voidquest

>>50398371
I miss those days of cent a word Science fiction.

If I ever become wealthy that might be a fun to operate one of those magazines.

And yes, Honor is bad science fiction.

>>50398350
>>If we put this into TV terms, that's like judging the quality of Star Trek TNG by the first season, even though it didn't get better until after season 3.
>watching three entire seasons of shit to get to the good part
How much time do you have, you madman? Life is only so long.

>>50401203
Just because you won't explode doesn't mean it's a good idea to expose your lungs and other squishy/liquidy parts to hard vacuum.

Anyone else unironicly love C.J. Cherryh books?

(I love the Alliance-Union universe stuff)

>>50404988
Yeah boi. How about that Chanur saga?

>>50404988
Never read em myself, but I hear good things.

>>50404988
>>50405018
Good stuff, although I never read the last two books. Plan on finishing one day.

>>50404931
So you'd rather drown in vomit?

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Simon Green anyone? His books are not complex but they fun.

>>50404995
Not read them yet. About 90% the way though Cyteen at the moment.

>>50396314

I knew I should have just stuck to admiring the cover art. Thanks for the warning OP

>>50405050
Rather have my lungs inverted and get a case of the turbo bends as the gasses in my blood and joints suddenly expand, I guess so.

>>50405138
you can take off a helmet for a short amount of time to clear the vomit.

Close eyes, breath out, reseal helmet.

>>50404988
I can't stand most her stuff,
do enjoy her Fantasy stories,
also liked cuckoos child,

but honestly, I don't care to read 10 pages of made up words, understanding nothing, without anything happening.

Case in point I tried reading the first of the "Dying Suns" Books yesterday, where there's these warriors who talk amongst each other (the people paying them had just surrendered to humanity),

and it was just horrible. ten thousand made up titles, descriptions etc, it's different for difference sake.

She can't write of "Warriorcaste," no!
they have to talk to each other as "mkrin" or "comin" or whatever made up title,

so you slogg through two pages of this, until it becomes clear what some word means,

and she just keeps piling fucking on,

as with cuckoos child, ( or cuckoos egg? ), where it takes for half the fucking novel until it is finally stated, that " Hatani " is some kind of Warrior Judges,

while for the entire beginning of the book, " Hatani " appears to denote some kind of royalty

that I utterly fucking hate,

don't make up new words and then withhold their meaning or make it intentionally obtuse and hard to decipher what they mean

fuck that woma is a bitch of an author

>>50398810
>Not enough floggings
>Not enough homosexual tension
Confirmed for never watching star trek:TOS

>>50405158
Read downbelow station or Cyteen.

All you need to know is
>There is a life extension drug, turns your hair silver, can't have kids after taken it.
>you take drugs to deal with jumping.
>Azo's are clones that are owned.

also Ariane Emory is evil

>>50405032
>>50405018
>>50404988
>>50405077
you guys

>>50405158
>I can't stand most her stuff,
> makes up new words
> intentionally retardedly cryptic and obtuse

quoted for truth

>>50405207
>Alliance-Union universe
Is free of almost all of that.

>>50405050
>>50405155
>>50405138
Give some credit to human biology, even baloons don't explode that easy.

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>>50405262
Human organs were not adapted to negative pressures.

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>>50403981
Pretty sure it should be 50 Shades of Rand

>>50405197
I don't want to, here's a list of obtuse vocab from the first dying suns book, just to underline my point
> shon'ai
> Kel
> As'ei
> Kel'en
> Kel'ein
> Sen
> ...'anth
> Mri
> tsi'mri
> A'ani
> Yin'ein
> Zahen'ein
> Kesrith
> Niun

now, most of these words have their meaning explained the first time they come at,
I'll give you this, but after the very first one and only explanation, Dialogue switches to shit like this, I kid you no:
" for they are tsi'mri and we are mri the Kel will do as Ruul demand. Remember this Kel'en, for Kel'ein, and she is skilled As'ei Zahen'ein "
and quite naturally the other one responds
" Se'anth tried many times doing his duty to Ruul, but Niun is Reasonable Mri A'ani "

what the fuck is this shit?! Am I supposed to have a dictionary open at this point?!

>>50405295
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/survival-in-space-unprotected-possible/

>>50405229
I'll take your word for that and give it a chance.
but see >>50405303
for just how sick I got of her writing last night

>>50405303
>most of these words have their meaning explained the first time they come at,
So, you're upset you can't remember anything?

>>50405303
That more faded sun then Cherryh. Read Downbelow Station It won a Hugo award and it has none of the issues you mentioned.

>>50405313
>Article confirms what I've been saying about damage to tissue and organs, and decompression sickness
>Also indicates that you'd go unconscious/be paralyzed pretty fast after entering hard vaccum

Uh, thanks I guess?

>>50405367
If you are drowning by vomit, you can still clear the helmet and reseal it.

>>50405313
Yeah, this. Vacuum in space is not lethal right away. And if it does kill you, you die while unconcious.

>>50405367
Um, you get enough time to empty your helmet.

If puking in your helmet was this much of a hugely common problem, you'd think the people who design space helmets would have come up with a way around it.

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>>50405376
>Being able to take off your helmet, expose yourself to hard vacuum, clean the helmet (without sustaining debilitating organ damage, or gas formation /gas embolisms), and then put on your helmet and repressurize all in the less than 12 seconds you have before losing consciousness

>>50402052
What are you talking about? The title is The Lords of the Sands of Time. It's a space opera that's also a time travel epic, about how aliens from outer space invade the solar system and conquer the Earth, wiping out mankind until the last bastion of humanity lives on Pluto and fights alongside armies of androids. They finally start getting the upper hand thanks to their superior robots and the aliens decide to travel back in time to wipe out humanity before they build the robots, and an army of androids and spaceships follows them back once they realize that they're losing people because they're being wiped from the timeline, including the main character's lover.

>>50405430
They still have to figure out how to keep astronauts from losing their fingernails to the shitty gloves they have to wear.

>>50405435
Just taking it off would eject 90% of the vomit.

>>50405430
I think it's more of a trope shitty sf writers use to make a point about a nuber of things ranging from, the space is not a game, across, war is hell, all the way to grimdark.
Of course there would be a safety measure, but that wouldn't show a gruesome death, now would it?

>>50405430
One NASA actually almost drowned in space because of a leakage in the suit's water coolent layer. The water just stuck to his face and started crawling up it (adheasive forces and all that) So even with only a tiny bit of water in his suit it was in his eyes and nose and he was breathing it.

I think their solution to that was just to fix the coolent layer so it wouldn't leak, I don't think they actually came up with a way to expel liquids.

>>50405466
This discussion started by talking about the Honorverse, so I was meaning more sci-fi helmet tech than current.

>>50405435
>>50405467
Also, there wouldn't be any organ damage.

>>50405351
it's just exhausting,
it's tasking to memorize something after reading it once, and then have to translate back a textblock of jibberish. I can eve give you most of the definitios right here:

>>50405303
>> shon'ai (( the species of presumably Cat People ))
>> Kel (( Warrior ))
>> As'ei (( Honoarble way of war ))
>> Kel'en (( a Warrior ))
>> Kel'ein (( test for a Warrior? ))
>> Sen (( Advisors, Scholars ))
>> ...'anth (( suffixed to mean so and so ' Person ))
>> Mri (( "the People", Name of their ow kind ))
>> tsi'mri (( tsi is like "other" or "not", so otherkind or not-people ))
>> A'ani
>> Yin'ein (( the traditional weapons, static arsenal ))
>> Zahen'ein (( modern weapons, exchangeable fluctuating meaning ))
>> Kesrith
>> Niun (( the king / queen ))

I'm not an idiot,
but if you're not an idiot either,
you need to be able to see how it's no fun to be constantly translating gibberish while reading.

my example above
>" for they are tsi'mri and we are mri the Kel will do as Ruul demand. Remember this Kel'en, for Kel'ein, and she is skilled As'ei Zahen'ein "
" the not-People are not People like as, and the Warrior Caste will do as the Regul-not-People demand. this is a test for every warrior, be he skilled with the traditional weapons or those which are modern. "
>and quite naturally the other one responds
>" Se'anth tried many times doing his duty to Ruul, but Niun is Reasonable Mri A'ani "
" Our Advisors tried showing them the proper Solutions to our Problem, but the Ruul-not-People would not liste, ad now the Niun-Queen in her Wisdom has declared that we do such and such "

Is there anywhere to publish short stories anymore?

>>50405510
As the person who liked Cherryh, I do not like those novels for the same reason. too much of a chore to be enjoyable books, and not deep enough to be a deep read.

>>50400185
>The Lost Fleet

Everyone in the fleet is the archetypal sailor or marine, the politicians are archetypal politicians, the engineers are archetypal engineers, etcetera. The strategy and tactics used are laughably simple. The religion is conservative politics made into spirituality. Geary is the author's power fantasy and Duellos is who the author thinks he actually is, but he isn't Duellos because Duellos is obviously more relaxed and socially adept than the author. The author completely failed to write any arcs that would endear the reader to Victoria and the main character is almost in love with her, despite her being the most unlikable bitch in a fleet of thousands of people. The aliens are comically simplistic. Geary's eventual marriage to Tanya is fucking stupid.

tl;dr Everything about the book is so simplistic that I'm damn sure the author is rather stupid IRL.

>>50405510
I think the pint is just to relax and wnjoy the ride. Everything becomes clear if you just keep reading.
But if it bothers you, and i know all those '''s bother me, just disregard other anons and go read something else. Time is precious, after all.

>>50405521
There are still sf magazines. Short story is still a pretty popular format.

>>50405521
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Hard Science fiction
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - less hard science fiction.

Or amazon. There already been one self published SF writer who had his novel become a best seller and hit movie from that route.

>>50405499
Right, your lungs and eyes would be fine being exposed to hard vacuum while you take your helmet off. and clean it. Air embolisms don't do anything either.

>>50405521
The internet?

>>50405571
Yep
>>50405572
Are the big too, but there are dozens of magazines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_magazine#Digest-sized_magazines

>>50405538
I agree with everything you said, but for some reason I still read that carcrash of a series.

>>50405510
>>50405549
>>50405533
times like these
I remember how fa/tg/uys made a name for themselves
as they guy with whom shi/tg/ets done,
and as the most productive and diverse board

Keep it up brahs, good thread. We should sometime compile an extensive list of /tg/ approved scifi literature

>>50405582
who said anything about cleaning, you are just trying to remove enough vomit so do you not drown.

>>50405582
For fucks sake, did you even read the linked article? Go ahead, drown in your own vomit, it is natural selection by reading comprehension at this point.

>>50405617
Let's wait for the article of anon drowned in his own vomit while wearing a helmet. It's bound to happen now.

>>50396314
I recognize this pasta

>>50405598
Even a bit of liquid is a danger in 0-G As this guy pointed out >>50405486


>>50405617
Yes I did, but you apparently didn't because in the fourth fucking paragraph it says
>under extremely low pressure air trapped in the lungs expands, tearing the tender gas-exchange tissues.
>Water in the soft tissues of your body vaporizes, causing gross swelling
>Your eyes, likewise, would refrain from exploding, but continued escape of gas and water vapor leads to rapid cooling

>>50405642
I bet he will do it while in Florida, too.

>>50405677
Exhale, motherfucker. It's that simple.
Everything else will function long enough.

>>50405677
Oh right, lets not forget
>Water and dissolved gas in the blood forms bubbles in the major veins, which travel throughout the circulatory system and block blood flow. After about one minute circulation effectively stops. The lack of oxygen to the brain renders you unconscious in less than 15 seconds, eventually killing you

So what exactly are you complaining about again? That your eyes, lungs, and circulatory system would be fine because you say so even though your own article says otherwise?

>>50405704
You don't get it do you, even when you fucking exhale you do not fucking breathe off all the gasses that are in your lungs at an atmosphere of pressure. Even if you could manage to do so, the dissolved gasses would still push their way out of the exchange membrane you dumbass.

>>50405677
if you exhale, you'll be fine for a short while,
not even minutes,
but up to 50s you'll be fine, conscious, and won't get lasting damage.

Just open the helmet, exhale so theres no (or not much) air in your lungs, have the vomit sucked out, close the visor again and repressurize,

there, no problem, no reaso to drown in vomit,

sure you'll probably feel like shit and have some ruptured capillarys in your lung, but you'll be breathing, you'll be living, you won't have lasting damage.

>>50405718
What the anons are pointing out that if you follow specific rules, you can take off your helmet for about 8-12 seconds. THat would be enough to eject a of the fluid into the void due to air pressure

>>50402459
Yeah, minus the whole fact that Gardens of the Moon explains literally nothing about the setting, it's still a super fun book with great characters and awesome plot twists.

It just takes like three books for them to explain things like the various Tiste are elves, most of the T'lan Imass are sentient undead, what the fuck ascendants are even, and how the crazy as shit pantheon actually works.

>>50405718
man, just do your fucking research.
this has been tested,
on Dogs,
on Apes,
and ( via accident ) also on humans.

A vacuum will not outright in under a minute incapacitate you,
A vacuum will not inflict lasting damage in under a minute

>>50405744
Okay, fine, let's say that that's doable. The whole point was all of this bullshit was going on during a combat situation. It's a risky maneuver during the best of circumstances, and you'd wanna do it while shit is blowing up.

>>50402626
I loved all four books, but Hyperion is a masterpiece of twisty plots, great characters, and building an amazing setting.

>>50405718
You would last LONG ENOUGH. Not forever, not for a long time, but -long- -enough-. Now go on playing with that power socket and don't forget to wet your fingers.

>>50405786
If you are literally dying from drowning in your vomit, you will have people trying.

>>50396314

Ey!
I remember this pasta!

>>50405816
This.

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>>50405771
>Oh my god you are so stupid I already posted an article, I bet you didn't even read it stupid
>actually here's figures from the article you posted
>Nuh uh, do your own research, none of those numbers from the articles count, a minute is nothing

>>50405786
> open visor for literally 5 seconds
> to suck out vomit
> EXPLOSIONS
> nope, guess I'll not open my visor
> not for five seconds quickly
> nope
> I'd rather suffocate
ishiggdiyggy famalam

>>50405786
If you can either:
A) Drown in your own vomit.
OR B) Do something risky.

Most people are going to opt for option B.

>>50398302

Maybe stop raping kids then

>>50404833
I'm trying to remember the name, but there's this fairly old book about the hundred plus rebels who overthrew a corrupt king at one point in china's moderately distant past, and the book basically tells all of their stories. If you don't mind tons of characters, and I mean tons, it's actually not that bad of a read.

>>50405931
Water Margin. It's where the 108 thing comes from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin

>>50405931
>>50405971
Huh, that was recommended in another thread just a day ago, any of the translations notably better than the others? I'm just a poor EOP, so I wouldn't know quality if it bit me in the ass.

>>50405931
Uh, Wild Swans?

>>50402626
Patrician sci-fi.

>>50405931
>>50405971
While we're at it, any wuxia anyone could recommend? I'we always wanted to get into it, but I'd like to start with something decent.

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Anyone read this? Read it recently and really liked it, had a lot of interesting ideas about how a transhuman future could look like.

>>50405997
honestly? Most of them are all a bit rough. See if you can find one that wasn't censored or abridged, I think there was a 1914 translation that I remember being pretty good.

>>50406112
Well it's a start, thanks a bunch anon.

>>50402518
Now that you mention it, the OP does seem familiar...

>>50406042
If you haven't already seen it Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a good place to start. It follows a lot of wuxia conventions very closely (so closely that it was seen as quiet stale when it was released in China) but is made in a way that's a lot more palatable to Western audiences unfamiliar with the genre.
Kung Fu Panda is also a pretty good comic take on the whole genre.
Hero is a personal favorite of mine.

>>50404860
Yes, it fucking is, you dipshit. He's a bad author, but going along with what is accepted as scientific fact at the time, and putting it in the book is 100% an excuse.

>>50406125
OKAY! I went looking around and most likely the best you'll find is the 1980 Outlaws of the Marsh translation.

the 1933 one is crap, and the 1937 one is drier than the sahara. The most recent translation, The Marshes of Mount Liang, is supposed to be good, but it's super long.

>>50406512
Saw all of that, I'm afraid. Good stuff, nut I was wondering about written stuff. Of course, more film recomendations are always welcome!

>>50397966
>>50399728

They're coming out with actually good translations of the books soon

>>50406806
Oh really? By who?

>>50406090
There's a lot of really good transhumanist fiction post 2000. Glasshouse was pretty good at horror for example.

>>50401924
I hope Fireaxis continues to support the awesome sequel!

>>50407440
>Glasshouse
>Charles Stross
I have a strange love-hate connection with that guy.

>>50402489
Unfortunately they gave up 10 years ago and now it's only moeshit, porn and commercial shounen.

>>50401597
Dune Messah and Children are dune are good, not great novels.

The prequals need to be burned.

>>50407570
Dune Messiah is a decent book in its own right, but it in no way lives up to Dune, and I feel it detracts from it a bit in retrospect. Children of Dune is schlock.

>>50407613
>Children of Dune is schlock.
those are fighting words. Ghanima is my literary waifu.

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>God I hate this book, let's talk about it
>Here try this
>Your taste is shit
>NO, YOU ARE TASTE IS SHIT
>Debate over how not to drown in your own vomit while spacewalking
I'm really glad this thread didn't peter out overnight.

>>50408155
Now that you are here, this has the potential to become not only the best, but the best-best thread!

>>50406112
I'm reading the revised Jackson translation. The text is pretty good.

However, I hate the story because all the bandits are unlikeable cunts (except Lu Da).

>>50407570
>The prequals need to be burned.
Weren't they only written so his son could cash in on dad's legacy?

Has Brian ever tried writing anything of his own?

>>50409220
They are not even written by Brian really, they have Anderson (who wrote star wars books) writing them.

The worse thing is that the Dune books, even the lesser ones, the bad guys are not dumb. Part of the charm of the book is that the bad guys do the smart thing and still get swept away by fundamental forces.

In the prequals the bad guys are dumber then a ton of rocks.

>>50403250
You poor, poor bastard

>>50403250
Damn that cruel.

justify why this belongs on /tg/ and not lit