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williamjm

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Posts posted by williamjm

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Another fairly dull race when it came to the front, with Verstappen looking untroubled and Perez also looked comfortable once he got into second while Le Clerc was best of the rest. Bearman followed-up on his qualifying with a strong race considering his inexperience.

  6. 5 hours ago, Pellert said:

    Can anyone pitch in if The Shattered Sea is worth a read? 

    The First Law books (+ the standalones and Age of Madness) are one of my favourite reads, but I have so far been steering away from the Shattered Sea as it seems to be a bit YA. 
     

    But planning my next read soon and thinking of giving it a go, but if it is very “young YA” I may be looking elsewhere, but if it’s something that also fits quiet well for “old YA” I would probably give it a go, a decent JA series is probably better than 99% of everything else.. :) 

    I liked the series, I don't think it's quite as good as the First Law books but still definitely worth reading if you like Abercombie's work. I agree with BFC that it doesn't feel very YA.

  7. Away from the off-track drama it was a predictable front row but behind there was an impressive performance by Oliver Bearman to take 11th having had only one practice session to learn the car. There were some mistakes in there, but he's showing plenty of potential.

  8. 2 hours ago, Ran said:

    (Fun fact, Fawlty Towers was quite popular in Spain, but Manuel the Spaniard is instead Paolo the Italian.)

    I remember a former colleague who was from Spain and called Manuel saying that he was confused when he first moved to the UK about why so many British people asked him if he was from Barcelona when they found out his name. Then he saw the original language version of Fawlty Towers (having only seen the Spanish dub before) and he realised why.

  9. 16 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

    She said that the odds were so long as to be virtually impossible. But when you add the fact that this phenomenon occurs on a planet where there are people alive to witness it, for me it becomes truly wild.

    I remember in Iain Banks' Transition he suggested that alien tourists might come to Earth to experience our eclipses. What's particularly rare about the Earth/Moon/Sun combination is that the Sun is approximately 400 times further away than the Moon and also about 400 times larger so the Sun and Moon appear to be about the same size from Earth so during a total eclipse the Moon will appear to neatly cover the Sun.

  10. 30 minutes ago, kissdbyfire said:

    Finished all 3 seasons of Fortitude. Loved s1. S2 was more of a mixed bag… it dragged a lot at times and felt rushed at other times. I thought the cast was excellent except for Dormer. Whatever he was going for there didn’t work for me at all. I thought his performance was silly and over the top; instead of creepy I thought it was quite funny for the most part. And then s3. What can I say? Thank Bowie it was only 4 episodes, and that’s the best thing I can say about it. Dormer was even worse and more unintentionally funny, and the show overall became a parody of itself. 

    I watched the first season when it came out but not the others. I remember the Svalbard setting being fascinating (such as the law about having to have a rifle when leaving the town in case of encountering a polar bear) and the mystery was intriguing, although it did get a bit wild by the end.

  11. 2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

    Whatever the result, it looks like the rookies from both sides have done really well tough.

    Having a couple of young spinners emerge who have performed well is definitely a plus for England given how hard they've generally found it to find Test spinners.

  12. 1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

    Currently stuck on what to read and open to trying something new/classic in sci-fi as I'm much less well read there. 

    Basically looking for something that holds up to the Expanse.  I've read the Salvation Trilogy and enjoyed it (but had to skim read large parts tbh).  I downloaded some samples of genre classics (Consider Phlebas, Revelation Space, Exordia) but nothing seemed to click. I've looked at the recommendations threads too.  Suggestions please?

    I think that Consider Phlebas is one of the weaker Culture books, since there's not really any order to most of the books in the series I think The Player of Games can be a better place to start.

    Some other books to consider might be Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire or Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Children of Time.

  13. On 2/13/2024 at 5:05 PM, horangi said:

    I also wrapped up Mr & Mrs Smith and agree with the rest that Glover and Erskine played characters with real depth. The episode plots were just as ludicrous as Reacher, but they were able to sell it far better.  A couple quibbles for an overall good show- the later episodes got a tad tedious as they started bickering constantly and the missions were boiled down into like 20 seconds of flashbacks.
     

      Reveal hidden contents

    I was expecting some sort of reveal with Hihi- all the missions seemed to target uber-rich folks and between Hihi responding nearly instantly to their texts and the he's 'god' comment by the other Mr and Ms Smith, I thought there would be a twist.

    Between the psychologist and the unclear ending, it seemed to borrow pretty heavily from the Sopranos

    Finally, how can you kill the cat! 

     

    I also finished watched it and thought it was a good series. I would have happily watched more of it, I think the final few episodes do make a strong ending but I think there was some potential for some more missions to be put in the middle of the season. Glover and Erskine were both great in it, and the guest actors were fun (particularly Ron Perlmann).

    Spoiler

    The bit in the finale with Hihi being referred to as 'God' and their apparent omniscience did make me think of Person of Interest.

    I then watched Rebel Moon on Netflix, which I did not have high expectations for but was still worse than I thought it would be. Snyder's films are often flawed but I don't think any of them have been as dull as this, there are usually some good bits in them. It did almost feel like an extended prologue since most of the film is about recruiting the rebels, most of whom then fail to do much in this film. The robot was probably the most interesting character, although they disappeared for 90% of the film.

  14. 19 hours ago, LugaJetboyGirl said:

    I'm really confused by the hotel situation. The conference rates are more expensive than the normal rates for these hotels.

    I'll be attending the con, by the way.

    They did have some rates that were cheaper than the prices on other sites but I think those probably got snapped up quickly.

    1 hour ago, LugaJetboyGirl said:

    Ugh, I knew those AirBnB rates were too good to be true. The system had posted the availability wrong.

    That is annoying, I hope you can find somewhere else that isn't too extortionately priced.

  15. I finished Lois McMaster Bujold's latest Penric and Desdemona novella, Demon Daughter. I thought it was another good story in the series, with some good character development for Penric and his family and also for the new character Otta, although sometimes I felt she was maybe a bit too perceptive for a six year-old.

    I also read Lost Sols, a bonus chapter that Andy Weir recently published to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Martian, available on his website: galactanet.com/lostsols.pdf

  16. 16 minutes ago, Ran said:

    I watched The Black Cauldron in the movie theater as a kid. I have no idea why exactly my parents decided to go to that one, but anyways, my memories of it are rather fond but I have not seen it since... well, approachin 40 years ago now.

    That said, the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander are actually quite wonderful YA, steeped in Welsh myth and folklore with Alexander's particular style. The Black Cauldron was a Newbery Honor book, and the last in the series (The High King) actually won the Newbery Medal. For whatever reason, of the books I rememberTaran Wanderer best.

    They were some of my favourite books as a child. I remember the Cauldron Born being terrifying. Taran Wanderer was definitely different to any of the other fantasy books I read as a child, it definitely didn't follow the standard epic fantasy template.

    I never watched the film. I wonder if someone might try a new adaptation of the series at some point, given all the other fantasy series being made.

  17. I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's House of Open Wounds. I liked City of Last Chances a lot, which this is a loose sequel to, and I think this book might be even better. There are a lot of fantasy stories which focus on wars and battles (such as Tchaikovsky's own Guns of the Dawn), this is a bit different to most of them because while it is set in an army during a war we see very little of the fighting and often the characters have only a vague idea about how the war is progressing. The setting is an experimental field hospital where a motley bunch of outcasts, magicians and priests are applying their varied talents to saving the lives of wounded soldiers who might not survive with conventional medicine. Their existence is complicated because the country whose army they are serving is has very strict rules against outcasts, magicians and priests and would normally be hanging most of them rather than employing them. This is particularly true of their newest recruit Yasnic (previously seen in City of Last Chances) whose speciality is divine healing which can cure any wound as long as the person being cured commits to a life of pacifism, which is not a good fit for someone healing soldiers. It features a last cast of characters, many of them get chapters told from their own perspective, and I thought they were all interesting and the way their backstories are gradually revealed is very effective. The tension builds as the story goes along and the hospital's continued existence gets increasingly tenuous and the story has a great ending. There's also a good amount of (often dark) comedy to lighten the mood a bit, particularly in the interactions between Yasnic and his irritable God who is continuing to have trouble adjusting to only having a single follower.

  18. On 2/9/2024 at 1:09 AM, horangi said:

    I finally wrapped up Three Body (the Chinese version) and was generally impressed.  They stuck very close to the book from what I can remember, but reordered some of the flashbacks to really focus on the crime detective story before the big reveal.  This worked well for the first half of the series but had the impact of dragging down a few episodes about 3/4 into it when it went back and filled in some of the parts of the book that would have interrupted the detective story at that time:

      Reveal hidden contents

    After the revelation of alien interference, they spend a couple dull episodes recounting Professor Ye's hard childhood and the murder of her husband.  You are being invaded by aliens and the global military command decides to put that aside for a while to solve a murder from 30 years ago? I used the 10 second skip a lot for those couple of episodes to get past the boring interpersonal drama, which works well since that's about the length of time a set of subtitles are up on screen. 

    The special effects were competent enough given the needs of the story and I liked the main cast.  They also toned down the pretty blatant misogyny that is rife through the written series.

    I am curious just how much will be cut from the Netflix version.  This one is 30 episodes of about 45 minutes each.  While they could have cut it down by getting rid of the musical montages and the reoccurring scenes were people spend a couple minutes espousing their fears and sadness over booze, the book does have a lot of ground to cover if Netflix is going to try and do it in 8 episodes.  My guess is the Cultural Revolution stuff will get the axe due to the lack of historical connection to the average westerner. 

    I think it would be a shame if they lost the Cultural Revolution plotline, since I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the story and something that did make it feel different from English-language SF.

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