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ArisKatsaris comments on September 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Fiction Books Thread
Read the City Watch series and I highly recommend.
I’ve seen people here repeatedly mention the city watch books, but I’m surprised the witches books are almost never mentioned. Seriously, am I the only one who thought Granny Weatherwax and her team are basically the most useful people on the disc?
Also Vetinari is basically the best thing ever.
Yeah, but I think he was mentioned before (and he shows up in most of the guards books). Vetinari is awesome in kind of an obvious way, but he’s not very relevant outside the city. (Well, except for a few treaties with dwarves and the like.)
In contrast, Granny (and sometimes the other witches) arguably saved the entire world several times. There are other characters who do that, but it’s more... luck I guess. The witches actually know what they’re doing, and work hard to achieve their goals.
(For example, though it’s never explicitly said, I got a very strong suspicion that Granny remained a life-long virgin specifically because she expected that it might be useful against unicorns.)
I love love love the Granny books. And if you only read one of them, I'd make it Witches Abroad. When I started my blog and wasn't sure what to write about, I did a sequence of posts on Granny.
Equal Rites is pretty bad and I like to get people to start from the starts of sequences. So Guards Guards
I love these, but only up through Thud! After that V gubhtug Ivzrf jnf birecbjrerq sbe gur ceboyrzf ur snprq
Agreed. Uvf fhcrecbjref tebj nybat jvgu uvf gvgyrf.
Gung'f jul uvf wbo yngryl unf cerggl zhpu orra uvtu-cbjrerq qvcybzng. Gubhtu vg jnf whfg fvyyl va "Fahss".
If you liked George Orwell's 1984, I strongly recommend reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, which inspired it. According to Wikipedia, it was the first book banned in Soviet Union. Unlike 1984 it is less directly political; it describes a dystopian society based on "straw-Vulcan" rationality. (Also, Pet Shop Boys made a song about it.)
I just read Saturn's Children by Stross. Its set in a future where humanity proper has gone extinct and been replaced by robots that have fundamentally neuromorphic brains with approximations of Asimov's laws and some other safeguards hacked in. The main character and several aspects of the plot are heavily inspired by Heinlein's Friday. I strongly recommend it if and only if you like Heinlein and/or Stross'es other books.
Charlie Stross' Laundry series, all of it. It's great. Rollicking spy novels about the world where Lovecraft is true. Very readable and enjoyable.
I really liked The Atrocity Archives, but the problem is that a lot of the punch probably came from introducing the setting that's unique but also bit of an one-off joke. The rest of the series seems to increasingly be Another Book with the Characters from That One Book You Liked Doing Stuff.
Stross did say in his blog ur'f tbaan znxr vg cbfg-ncbpnylcgvp, so I'll probably keep reading because I want to see fbzrbar znxr heona snagnfl cbfg-ncbpnylcgvp.
I see what you mean, though I think he develops the scenario a bit. The problem is that the characters aren't well-developed IMO (though my favourite is Angleton).