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What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...


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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Changes by Jim Butcher

 

He DID WHAT ?????!!!!!!!!!

 

Now I can finish Side Jobs and borrow Ghost Story

 

Ghost Story is well done... but (IMO) not as good as several of the novels that came before. That said, I can't wait to see what happens in the next volume. Things just keep getting more and more interesting.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Read The Road to Danger by Drake. Captain Leary and his crew are tasked with finding a legendary rebel and bringing him in while trying to prevent open war.

 

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez. Take one hardboiled robot, a missing family, a secret alien invasion, and a town of a future that never was. Mix together until you have a mystery, a comedy, and weirdness for ten books.

CES

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Read Infinity by Sherrilynne Kenyon. Kenyon is famous for her paranormal romance books (which I admit I don't read) and this book is set in that setting. It follows Nick Gautier, a poor kid in New Orleans, who is the son of a monstrous living god and is the center of a struggle to control his emerging power.

 

There is a lot of things going on as the factions battle it out over who is going to turn Nick into a monster.

CES

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Read Infinity by Sherrilynne Kenyon. Kenyon is famous for her paranormal romance books (which I admit I don't read) and this book is set in that setting. It follows Nick Gautier, a poor kid in New Orleans, who is the son of a monstrous living god and is the center of a struggle to control his emerging power.

 

There is a lot of things going on as the factions battle it out over who is going to turn Nick into a monster.

CES

 

I've read a few of them :) I like her dialog and pacing quite a bit; thought the setting might be cool for an urban fantasy campaign, but she has contradictions that I could easily ignore as characters being hypocrites. The only problem is her tendency to escalate each of her characters to god-mode in their books

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

It was interesting enough to make me want to check the other two books out. I don't know if I want to branch out into the bigger setting.

CES

 

Well her world is chock full of gods, monsters, weres, vampiers, demons, etc. A lot of it is over the top bordering on silly; there's power creep like you wouldn't believe every time someone gets their own novel; and finally, there are some serious Romance novel face-palming.

 

That said, the principals are generally written engagingly and though the action (good vs evil) takes a back seat to the budding relationships and sexin', it flows pretty good and I find myself often reading through to the end in one or two sittings.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Well her world is chock full of gods, monsters, weres, vampiers, demons, etc. A lot of it is over the top bordering on silly; there's power creep like you wouldn't believe every time someone gets their own novel; and finally, there are some serious Romance novel face-palming.

 

That said, the principals are generally written engagingly and though the action (good vs evil) takes a back seat to the budding relationships and sexin', it flows pretty good and I find myself often reading through to the end in one or two sittings.

Sounds like I could find literally thousands like it in fanfiction.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Just finished Mastermind of Mars. Been reading the series while soaking, so I've also recently finished A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and The Chessmen of Mars.

 

Fun stuff. That said, I'd hate to read a modern editor's (many of whom espouse their Gernsbackian sensibilities) comments on one of these stories submitted today. It'd be pretty painful, I'm sure. "Show, don't tell," "engage all five senses," a long list of comments on the characters, I'm sure, along with the huge number of coincidences, and certainly comments on word economy.

 

However, take some of the floridness out of the writing, and they're just basically fun, light reading*. We could probably do with more of that nowadays. Too bad the pulp boom is long over.

 

 

 

*The still are fun, light, reading, but the writing gets in the way of itself at times.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Just finished Mastermind of Mars. Been reading the series while soaking' date=' so I've also recently finished [i']A Princess of Mars[/i], The Gods of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and The Chessmen of Mars.

 

Fun stuff. That said, I'd hate to read a modern editor's (many of whom espouse their Gernsbackian sensibilities) comments on one of these stories submitted today. It'd be pretty painful, I'm sure. "Show, don't tell," "engage all five senses," a long list of comments on the characters, I'm sure, along with the huge number of coincidences, and certainly comments on word economy.

 

However, take some of the floridness out of the writing, and they're just basically fun, light reading*. We could probably do with more of that nowadays. Too bad the pulp boom is long over.

 

 

 

*The still are fun, light, reading, but the writing gets in the way of itself at times.

 

While a fun read, I found the series to get progressively worse with each book, to the point I found the last few virtually collapsing under the weight of their own absurdities (many of which you point out.) Also, if you know when each book is written, you can see ERB desperately working to keep Martian flyers moving faster than Earth aircraft.

 

Personally, I knocked off the Hunger Games in two days. Not a bad read, reminding me of Battle Royale and The Long Walk. I'm now interested in reading the next two books in the series.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

I think it went uphill a bit with Thuvia, Maid of Mars and Chessmen. I think both of those had more editorial input than the prior books. Mastermind varied a little bit from the standard formula, and showed some creativity, though a little limited I think.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Personally, I knocked off the Hunger Games in two days. Not a bad read, reminding me of Battle Royale and The Long Walk. I'm now interested in reading the next two books in the series.

 

Series takes a bit of a turn in overall tone in the last book, but I think they're worth reading. They don't take long to read anyway, so not much time lost if you don't like the finale.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

I think it went uphill a bit with Thuvia' date=' Maid of Mars[/i'] and Chessmen. I think both of those had more editorial input than the prior books. Mastermind varied a little bit from the standard formula, and showed some creativity, though a little limited I think.

 

True. I think it was the last three that really (IMO) dragged the rest down. Especially when John Carter goes to Jupiter.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

you probably could. So?

 

I think he's trying to suggest that there's something wrong with fanfiction. Like my fifteen page description of a girl-dinosaur-Valak-the-World-Ravager-Takofanes threesome is somehow not literature.

 

Presumably that's because he quite reading before the Engineer, Charm Girl, and those sexy, sexy rage zombies joined in. And with the diapers and the kittens.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Sometimes, though official sequels can be just as bad- I couldn't get past page 2 of Dracula the Undead, and I must be the one person on Earth who hated both Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and that awful film purporting to be an adaptation of the series.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

I think he's trying to suggest that there's something wrong with fanfiction. Like my fifteen page description of a girl-dinosaur-Valak-the-World-Ravager-Takofanes threesome is somehow not literature.

 

Presumably that's because he quite reading before the Engineer, Charm Girl, and those sexy, sexy rage zombies joined in. And with the diapers and the kittens.

I'd say someone has written that, but Takofanes is too obscure, sorry.

 

[/parodyforanyonenotpayingattention]

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  • 2 weeks later...

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

I've finished reading Dancing with Werewolves, the first book in the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator series by Carole Nelson Douglas (famous for her Irene Adler and Midnight Louie novels). The books are set on an alternate Earth where supernatural beings of all sorts revealed themselves in 2000 AD. The heroine is a former paranormal investigator, who after several tragedies, moves to Las Vegas, gets a new job and lover, and adopts an Irish wolfhound to replace her beloved Lhasa Apso. As well as fighting against the werewolf criminal underground, and discovering her magical abilities. And yes, there is dancing with werewolves.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Re-read two books in the "Bolos" series (1 and 4), the compiled my multiple authors books, not the Laumer originals. As with most collections, some stories were hit or miss, but overall worth spending a rainy day on the recliner with.

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Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

 

Death's Daughter by Amber Benson (rep to the first person to post what supernatural TV series she was in. Not a hard question I know but I'm in a giving mood today) Not too bad. A sem-different spin on urban fantasy that read quickly and didn't devolve into a supernatural romance. I'd give a more complete description but I suck at writing them. There's this from Amazon's description:

Calliope Reaper-Jones so just wanted a normal life: buying designer shoes on sale, dating guys from Craig’s List, web-surfing for organic dim-sum for her boss... But when her father—who happens to be Death himself—is kidnapped, and the Devil’s Protege embarks on a hostile takeover of the family business, Death, Inc., Callie returns home to assume the CEO mantle— only to discover she must complete three nearly impossible tasks in the realm of the afterlife first.
I give it an 8 out of 10 and I'll certainly read the next one.
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