2/10/16 Prologue: And Lo, the Lord Adam wrought a mighty schism amongst the assembled lords... Megan: Into the Nanten: The Record of My Exile - Jay Swanson ++ A book, but really a realtime fantasy blog. About a man who's exiled, who has to find a man he hates in a fictional jungle world filled with steaks and magic and gods and rivers. It's a blog, but it's a book. It's like a potato chip chunk. Might actually be an audio book? It happens in realtime like 24. Megan met the author. Maybe it's actually a podcast. Marcellus is the guy exiled to find the man he hates. Jay Swanson is an author. Marcellus killed his lover, the daughter of his general. Because of demons. Megan is on the second season. I think this is really stretching the charter here. Zero continuity errors present. Zero. Megan is hooked! Very exciting cliffhanger pulp serial biz. (ed: Daddy took away the ice cream) Chris: Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel +++ A motherfucking National Book Award finalist right here. Post apacolyptic cliche but REALLY WELL DONE. Virus kills everyone blahblah. Story goes forward and back in time with George Clooney and a roving cast of characters. Northern midwestern travelers running around. The form makes it literary? Big character study.. not grim. Full of hopey-changey shit, melancholia. Alice Munro of post-apocolyptic scifi. One of the best books Chris has read in years. Better than Ringworld!! He says it's awesome. (ed: now we're talking about the author sleeping with all the NBA judges) Adam & Paul: Half a King - Joe Abercrombie Half a World - Joe Abercrombie Half a War - Joe Abercrombie Adam: +, Paul: meh Classic Abercrombie set in fake Scandinavia, but for kids. The previous humans are the elves. Third person with one character really, which is refreshing for Abercrombie. 14 year old princeling, who goes through many trials and tribulations. Second book builds up the world a bit and they travel down to the Mediterranean and it gets spicy. Not GoT for kids I guess. Third book is about some war with elf weapons (bazookas). That stuff kinda deflates things. Once again the character development sort of redeems the setup. The kid ends up doing surprisingly different stuff. (ed: OH SHIT Adam just spoiled the rest of it for Paul). Paul liked it but didn't love it. Had the tropes but kinda watered down. Plot and characters are thinned out. A lesser Abercrombie perhaps, popcorn. Jason: Expanse Series 1 - James SA Corey + Two authors, production assistants for George RR Martin. Fast quick reads, made for TV. Mini cliffhangers, etc. 100 years in the future, Mars was colonized, and we're colonizing asteriods, and we're calling ourselves belters. Yeah. Earth and Mars are at loggerheads, sort of like in Westwing. In the first book we've discovered a BAD THING. It might cause a war. Chris read this too.. OH FUCK IT'S ALIENS. And we're going for 5 more books. Jason read the second one. They're kinda police procedurals. Jason would recommend it but he says the tv series is pretty good too. Maybe not for the book a month crew. Paul & Adam & Chris: Honor Fucking Harrington - Dave McGreggor *very mixed* Some things he knows how to handle, other things he really has no idea how to write. Farther you go, the worse that ratio gets. Peaks at book 8 and then a rapid downward slide. Book 10 is a particularly dire slog. When it's not a terrible romance, he's bitching about space democrats. Adam doesn't care about the shit with the lances. Adam thinks the tree-cat is pretty awesome. There may be a few books where the tree-cat is the main character. Chris read three. Paul read em all. Chad & Jason: The Vorrh - Brian Catling (aka B. Catling) +++ A professor at Oxford but a true "artist" aka poet, performance artist. Alan Moore raved about it so Viking Press released it. Super dense. Too many characters. Too many subplots. "A Chad book" in other words. Something about a person becoming a bow. Language is awesome and the first of trilogy that is already written. Historical characters make cameos and there are cyclops I guess. The whole thing might be a biblical allegory but who knows really. Not sure how to categorize but people are saying it is fantasy and it is recommended. Honestly, this is the most Chad book I've ever heard discussed. Fuck you Sorokin. (ed: WTF IS THIS SHIT) Josh & Chris & Jason: Seveneves - Neil Stephenson Chris: + Yeah the moon explodes and starts raining down. Split into three parts. First part they're trying to figure out how to get out. Third part jumps ahead 5000 years and they go live on part of the moon. First part he despised. Despised fake Neil Tyson and fake Elon Musk and fake Hillary Clinton. Second part is great. On their own up in orbit on Spacebook all the time. Gene database gets hit by a meteor. Pretty grim. Seven Eves get set up on their mini planet and Stephenson's racial stereotypes come out. In part three there are some twists! He liked it better than Anathem, though it was deeply flawed. There was a cool part where the politicians set up a big ceremony to show how everyone goes to space together and we bring our greatest treasures and then they just dump them. Josh: - Basically shitty after the first third. After they landed on the planet it sucked. Now he wants to talk about the anatomy of the spoon. Liked Anathem way better. This was like a shitty action movie and Anathem was like an important movie. Jason: - Didn't like it very much at all. 500 pages too long. I guess the scientists are all the good guys and the politicians are all the bad guys, so a technocrat's dream. Mark Andreesen's version of the world. Just too long though. Chad & Jason: The Water Knife - Paolo Bacigalupi + Near future post climate change world - same as Windup Girl. States have closed the borders. Texans are the outcasts. California has all the water rights and rules the world. Kinda leftist. A crime mystery drama about the water rights to the Colorado river between Nevada and California. Not as good as Windup Girl. Moves along at a decent page. Entertaining, if preachy and a bit too blunt with its analogies. Characters are ok. Chad and Jason say they like it so I'm giving it a + but I'm not really convinced. Feels very mehish. Certainly better than Seveneves. Adam: The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien + It felt very derivative (ed: mental gymnastics are amazing here). Where to begin? At the beginning. Reading it now he appreciates how it's the launching pad for the rest of the fantasy he loves. Not a lot of nuance to it. He appreciates the detail of the battles, and some of the comedy of the characters. Felt very color by numbers. Loved Treebeard. Put off by Tolkien's conservatism. He did enjoy it. Would have Isaac read it before Sanderson. Loves the worldbuilding and all that shit. Talking about the history of the forests and stuff. Liked The Hobbit better than LOTR honestly. Where did the eagles come from?! Paul: Old Man's War Series - John Scalzi + In contrast to Honor Harrington, it's not just about the military movements. A breath of fresh air - differences in tone and skill were off the charts. Absurdism even. 22nd century with Earth as a ghetto.. you can join the war, fight in the wars, travel in your new body across the galaxy. On balance a lot better than Honor Harrington. Paul: The Android's Dream - John Scalzi ?? Premise leaks (ed:??) you've got to make to get through this one. Adam doesn't even remember that he read it but we refresh his memory. Chad: The Blizzard - Vladamir Sorokin ++ Short, experimental. In the tradition of Tolstoy/Chekov writing blizzard stories. There's mini horses pulling a sled that gets stuck in the snow. Sudden shifts in style throughout the book. There are two main characters, the doctor and the sled driver. There are drugs and pyramids which sound kinda cool. Dream sequences consist of five pages of text without paragraphs. It's weird but Chad and Jason seem pretty enthusiastic, especially when compared to The Water Knife. Kinda like if Jodorowsky wrote magic realism (ed: Jodorowsky is a writer duh). Chad is calling it fantasy but I'm not convinced even with the magic ice hammers (ed: WRONG BOOK ADAM). Nevertheless, highly recommended and sounds interesting like the rest of Sorokin's stuff. Jason: Darth Bane - Drew Karpyshyn Darth Plagueis - James Luceno + Jason is talking about the devlopment of the canon and stuff. Darth Plagueis is maybe a little better written. Pretty pulpy. Maybe better than Honor Harrington. Not gonna challenge anybody's perceptions. Jesus christ now we're talking about "new canon" vs "old canon". Chris can tell us about Timothy Zahn. Not Absolom, Absolom or anything. that's all folks!