williamjm

8 hours ago, Maithanet said:

Does Dune Messiah get better?  I loved the first book and I am shocked at how much less interesting this book is.  I'm 70 pages in and we've had:

 - A meeting of conspirators to kill Paul

 - Paul and Chani having a discussion about whether he should impregnate Irulan

 - A second meeting of conspirators, this time on Arrakis

 - A meeting of Paul's inner circle in which...nothing much is decided.  I haven't finished this chapter, so maybe they actually do something later.  

I can slog on for a bit longer, but WTF?  I was really impressed with how tight Dune was, almost every scene had a bunch of worldbuilding, character development and plot movement woven together.  Thus far everything is stagnant and dull. 

My main memory of Dune Messiah is that there are a lot of people having meetings, I think it gets a bit less dull towards the end but it's still nowhere close to the original book. Children of Dune was better than Messiah but still not at the same level as Dune.

8 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Sad news, Laurence Fox loses libel trial and has to pay 180 grand in damages.  

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

20 hours ago, Werthead said:

Checked out Ford vs. Ferrari and very solid, great performances from Christian Bale and Matt Damon. Unlike some other recent-ish racing movies (like the otherwise solid Rush), the blending of real racing and CGI is faultless.

I liked it, even if it felt slightly odd to have an underdog story where the underdog is the Ford Motor Company.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Apparently the US military and Ukraine have been working behind the deal on what weapons and ammunition would be covered by the initial deal and this will be in Ukraine within days, not even weeks.

Presumably even before that arrives the Ukrainians might be able to use more of what they already have since they will know that there's less need to ration it if replacements are about to arrive.

10 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

kier can be pretty dry sometimes, at PMQ's 

Sir Keir raised the subject of Ms Truss and her book at Prime Minister's Questions, joking that he was the "proud owner" of a "rare unsigned copy".

I saw an article saying that Truss' advance for the book was £1500, which somehow seems both embarrassingly low and also unreasonably high.

10 hours ago, Veltigar said:

I'll be the lone dissenter then. Didn't like BSC when I read it and The Heroes is still my favourite Abercrombie!

I think The Heroes is probably my favourite, although I did like Best Served Cold.

I watched Suzume, which I thought was very good. There are parts of the premise which are sometimes a bit reminiscent of Makoto Shinkai's previous films, but while there are certain themes he's obviously keen on there's also a lot of new ideas here. The thing that happens to one of the two protagonists early in the film is definitely unusual and memorable. It also did a good job of hiding some twists about some of the characters until near the end of the story. I thought Suzume and Souta were both good characters, but felt that some of the supporting characters' actions felt a bit implausible at times. I also thought it was effective in tying together the fantastical parts of the plot with more mundane concerns about Japan's propensity for natural disasters. As ever with his films the animation was gorgeous.

I just finished Blade of Dream. I've been reading through the posts in this thread about it and I saw Karsen being brought up several times as a character who is still quite mysterious. I agree that he seems an obvious choice for one of the viewpoint characters in the third book. One theory I had when reading Blade of Dream about him was...

Do we know whether there's a confirmed date for book 3 yet?

I finished Daniel Abraham's Blade of Dream, the second book in his Kithamar trilogy. I think that the trilogy's unusual structure, where each book is telling the story of the same year in the city of Kithamar, does have some strengths and some drawbacks. It does mean that for the first part of the book we know more than the characters do about some of the city's secrets, so some of the things they discover that are revelations to them are anticlimactic to the reader. On the other hand, seeing the events from a different perspective does add extra depth as we find out more about some of the events and also some things that were unknown in the first book. Seeing some of the conversations again from a different perspective also makes it clear that sometimes characters can take completely different conclusions from a conversation. The conclusion of the book is particularly strong, partly because the characters in the first book were ignorant about what happens at the end of this one.

While I thought the first book was interesting, I did struggle a bit with some of the characters, particularly Ash's storyline where it was hard to care too much about whether she succeeded or not since what she was trying to do was clearly a bad idea. I did like the characters more in this one, while Elaine and Garreth can be naive or foolish at times they can also be a lot more determined and capable than they appeared in their brief appearances in the first book. I thought there were also a number of good minor characters in this.

I've now started Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which I am enjoying so far and I definitely already feel sorry for Fat Charles.

7 hours ago, sifth said:

Truth be told, I think Sci-Fi does better on tv. I just worry we'll never see something like DS9, Babylon 5 or Farscape ever again. Don't get me wrong, I loved The Expanse, like many others here, I just don't think it compares to the 3 shows I listed before.

Out of recent shows I think Andor definitely stands up to those three.

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Jupiter Ascending?  Which I liked a lot, actually, though nobody else did iirc.  Just as I liked a lot about John Carter of Mars.

I don't know if I'd say Jupiter Ascending was a good film necessarily, but at least it had some imagination and I'd rather than watch it than something turgid like Rebel Moon. If you're going to make a daft space opera why not do crazy things like have Sean Bean play a bee?

I thought John Carter did manage to capture some of the spirit of pulp science fiction. It's also a bit silly, but if your pulp science fiction about travelling to Mars isn't a bit silly then you're not doing it right.

20 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

An event I look forward to. We should be absorbed by Andromeda. 

Because our galaxy’s name is stupid. Milky Way. 
 

What do you call a resident of the Milky Way?

Milky Waytian?

It is a bit lacking in gravitas.

We do have a few billion years to come up with a good name for the merged galaxy, hopefully we can manage something better than Milkdromeda or Andromeway.

On 4/5/2024 at 8:45 AM, Loge said:

Our Galaxy is about 30 kpc or 100,000 light years in diameter, so distance definitely is an issue as the universe is now. On the other hand, if by some magic we could travel across the galaxy in a reasonable time, we could also reach our neighbor galaxies. They don't move away from us either, because of gravity. Of course, that's just our backyard.

The Andromeda Galaxy is heading towards us at about 300 km/s and the prediction is that it will collide with the Milky Way in about 5 Billion years.

2 hours ago, mormont said:

Translation State  is the only one of those named above I've read, and it's Hugo-worthy IMO even if it's not Leckie's very best work. Even not-her-best is very good.

I liked it. I think saying that Ancillary Justice is still her best book is accurate, but I thought Translation State was the best book she'd written since the Ancillary trilogy.

I think it's perhaps inevitable for an award like the Hugos that the nominations won't necessarily represent the full breadth of the genre because most of the nominators probably only read a limited number of new releases in a year and they are likely to prioritise books by authors they are already fans of.

2 hours ago, Spockydog said:

The Right. What a bunch of intellectual titans and visionaries. I am so jealous of the quality of these people. 

Seriously though, who the fuck thinks Truss is anything more than a punctured whoopee cushion.

 

10 years would be enough time for Liz Truss to be Prime Minister 81 times.

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It seems Mr. McCarty is moving to the “find out” side of the famous equation.  It seems he showed up last minute at Eastercon in the UK (where the Hugo Finalists were announced) and was declined a memebership then had to be escorted out by security when he made a stink and refused to leave.

https://file770.com/person-refused-membership-by-uk-eastercon-and-escorted-out-by-security/comment-page-1/#comments

Flying across the Atlantic to a convention without already having a membership for it is definitely suggesting he was more interested in making a scene that actually taking part.

I read Josiah Bancroft's An Empyreal Retinue, a short story collection set in the world of his Babel series, although some of the stories are more like 'deleted scenes' from the series rather than stories in their own right. One of the fascinating things about the series was discovering new part of the titular tower and I think Into the Misanthropolis, which explores a dystopian ringdom of bureaucrats, was one of the highlights. The title story, which is the only one to be set after the events of the series, probably has the most interesting narrative. I think fans of the series should find this collection interesting, but it's not really essential.

I've now started Daniel Abraham's Blade of Dreams, the second book in his Kithimar trilogy. The biggest issue I had with the first book was that I didn't really like the characters that much, I think so far that this one might work better for me.

4 hours ago, Isis said:

ANYWAY

That guy from Stranger Things was the weak link here. In a big cast he stood out like a sore thumb as someone who was distracting to watch from a performance perspective. Everyone else did a good job with what they were given. Phoebe clearly channeling Beetlejuice Winona, which is fine, if derivative. Overall, low hanging fruit (with the OG Ghostbusters) slathered in cheese. The family stuff was (in the words of Tim Messenger) too cutesy pie. was it just me, it did it feel kind of rushed in the end? It was ok as a nostalgia trip, but if it didn't have all those callbacks, would it be any good?

I did see it suggested online that Trevor could have been away at college during the events and the film wouldn't really have lost anything.

I watched Ghostbusters : Frozen Empire. I enjoyed the film, although it did have some flaws. I do like the new generation cast introduced in Afterlife, but the size of the cast did seem to be getting a bit unwieldy because many of the characters from the original film are given more to do in this one and there are also some new characters introduced. The number of nostalgic callbacks does threaten to distract from the plot at times, I think they could have cut back on a lot of that. Dan Aykroyd has an important role in the plot but I don't think Bill Murray's scenes were adding much.

2 hours ago, Ormond said:

Is the "Best Game or Interactive Work" a new category? I don't remember that one from the past, but as I am seriously old and not the best at paying attention to the Hugos, maybe my memory is faulty.

I think it is a recent addition.

The 2024 Hugo nominations have been released:

https://glasgow2024.org/hugo-awards/2024-hugo-award-finalists/

Two of the books I nominated are on the best novel list (The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi and Translation State), I haven't read any of the others yet.

I see that Xiran Jay Zhao got included on the Best New Writer list after being one of the people removed from last year's nominations, it seems that they sensibly decided to waive the normal rule about eligibility expiring after two years.

On 2/22/2024 at 1:25 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It seems that Mr. Tchaikovsky is rather disappointed by this situation… and the taint it puts on his Hugo.

https://adriantchaikovsky.com/?fbclid=IwAR1KZrUVrtU7qlUJuTz-zLnNLG6xDwwIErLMSL7CZBo2g6SH6gbyqEK0PmE_aem_AVLubmbi_xd4W0u2hR0aXCBzPHLtE6RfG25WsObvpjpw4ZVraV5HQVoQ5_-qQPxynAQ

Tchaikovsky has been nominated for Best Series again this year for a different work, his Final Architecture series, so does have an opportunity to get an untainted Hugo.

I read Morgan Stang's Murder on the Lamplight Express, the second in her series about a monster hunter employed to deal with supernatural threats who finds her hunts sometimes interrupted by having to solve a mundane murder mystery. As the name suggests this time the murder is aboard a luxurious sleeper train where, inevitably, all the travellers seem to have their own secrets and possible motives for murder. It's a fun pastiche of mystery novels with a fast pace which manages to cover a large number of subplots. I also like the way the world-building gradually reveals how different this world is to our world.

Then the sad news of Vernor Vinge's death reminded me that although I've read most of his work I hadn't read one of his most famous stories. True Names is often cited as inventing the cyberpunk genre and it is remarkably prescient for a story written in 1981. Many parts of it still feel very topical, particularly with recent developments in AI. Although some details are dated (such as its idea of how much computing power would be unusually large) I think the basic premise still works well today and there are a few unexpected twists along the way.

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

So I found Locklands a bit of a strange read. It's a very imaginative and well thought out setting and the story's good but elements of it didn't really click with me.

  Hide contents

Basically the Givan society (a hive mind essentially) that's presented as the way forward for humanity and is ultimately victorious at the end of the book sounds fucking awful to me. That's personal preference though rather than any issue with how good the book is.

I think the events are a logical extrapolation of things introduced in the first two books but I definitely enjoyed it less than the earlier books in the series.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Everyone at Ferrari and all the Tifosi: "Wheeeellllp." Major case of sellers' remorse going on there, I think.

Sainz definitely couldn't be doing any more to advertise his abilities. Of course, he benefited from Red Bull's reliability problems but he still looked in control throughout.

It would have been interesting to see whether they could have been competitive with Verstappen during the race, I suspect Max still comes out on top but it might have been closer than the other races this year.

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

What a great campaign for Italy. 

They really dominated Wales today. It's a young team as well so they've got a lot of potential for the future.

7 hours ago, ljkeane said:

George North has announced his retirement after the end of the Six Nations. Wales really are having to rebuild almost their entire side.

North must have quite a high percentage of the total caps in the current Welsh side.

I read R.F. Kuang's alternate history/fantasy Babel, or the Necessity of Violence. I thought it had an interesting premise and I think it is at its strongest when showing how the Oxford Translation Institute where most of the book takes place can both be a place of wonder for the protagonists and also something built on deeply rotten foundations that they are increasingly unable to ignore. I thought that the plot was sometimes not as good as the premise, the plot developments in the first half of the book did often feel predictable, although there are some more surprising events later on. I think the characters also get more interesting in the later sections when there is some exploration of what is really motivating them, they can be a bit frustrating when they come up with some spectacularly stupid plans but it does make sense that a bunch of sheltered academics can be naive about how the world works. The final section could have been the most interesting but it felt a bit rushed, after all the build-up it felt as if it was in a hurry to get to the heavily foreshadowed conclusion.

I found some of the footnotes annoying, the notes on translations and etymology are fine but some of them seem to only exist to make explicit things about characters that were already clear.