Anyone read this Tim Powers book? It's one of my favorites. It's just a great story with tight plotting, all kinds of twists and turns, and just a wonderful and very believable depiction of early 19th century London.

Powers is one of my favorite fantasy writers. Besides this I'd also recommend On Stranger Tides (pirates and magic) and his contemporary fantasies, like Last Call. He always tells a good story.

I am starving for a good Space Opera. After having read Donaldsson's and Peter F. Hamiltons works it feels very empty :(.

What else is there similar to these? (new or upcoming books that is)

Marcus

Yeah, I would like a good space opera too. I remember reading juvenile sci-fi as a kid and some of my favorite books would be about the up and coming kid at the space academy who would ship out and end up being the hero and piloting the ship. One thing I remember from some of these books is that to compute the hyperspace jumps they would have to do the math by hand! They'd have tests where these recruits would perform the calculations using sliderules! Man, those were books written a long time ago.

Science fiction writers completely missed the concept of the personal computer. They always wrote about a giant supercomputer that controlled a massive network.

I'd like a good sci fi novel with a lot of fleet combat. I know David Gerrold (Trouble with Tribbles) wrote a few really hardcore space combat books. He might be worth looking into. (I exchanged email with him via CServe years ago when Starcraft came out. He loved that game and said something in it reminded him of something he needed to do in one of his books he's working on, that Chtorr series.)

Heh, The Anubis Gates is a bizarre book. But a good read. :-)

If you haven't read David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, I highly recommend them. They will satisfy your space opera and fleet combat needs simultaneously. ;-)

Oh, yes... and if Gerrold ever finishes his Chtorr series, I will EAT MY HAT!

;-)

...but I wish he would finish it... :-(

Heh -- no kidding about the Chtorr series. When last I looked, we humans were in pretty bad shape.

That is a series that took some weird turns too, what with the hero ending up having consensual sex with a teenage boy, then getting married to a woman but spending his wedding night wearing her nightgown. Gerrold deserves credit for being daring.

Damnit, I wan't to know what happens, though! And I want to know if the whole Chtorran invasion was purposeful or just part of their random seeding of the galaxy.

Another big series that I like but regret starting because I have to wait forever for it to get done is George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Great stuff, but it will be years before he winds it up.

I'm coming to grips with the fact that when I picked up A Matter for Men, I was still in university! That was the original book, which I read in 1983 (not the revised edition, which I also have.)

I feel old...

I wonder if Gerrold isn't just tired of doing the Chtorr novels? Also, the market for sci-fi has tailed off from what I've read. Fantasy is the big seller these days.

At the very least, if he's not going to finish the series, he should publish a synopsis for how it would have turned out.

About George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice & Fire (the Game of Thrones series) I recently met him at a signing of Clash of Kings and, being the first in line and not wanting to waste his or my time, asked THE question that needed to be asked...

"How many books in the series?"

To which Mr. Martin replied,

"Seven"

or was it Six... arg... now I'm having doubts. The nice thing is that it's not going to be a 20 volume epic (a la Robert Jordan), but after I read one book, I'm jonesing for the next...

He does seem to be getting a little fast of the release of them now. From first book to second, it was about a 3 year wait... it was only a year from 2nd to 3rd.

Hopefully he'll reach Stephen King release frequency shortly :)

Re: space opera

Iain Banks's Culture books are the some of the best SF i've read, and they're often listed as Space Opera. Galaxy-spanning wars, sentient ships, orbitals, ringworlds, etc.

Heh... yeah, I suppose. I'm not sure I consider Banks to be Space Opera, but it's good stuff.

Banks' books seem to be hard to find in the US, though. I picked up most of them when I was overseas.

Amazon has been OK for his last few, but they don't have his older (and i think better) stuff in stock.

i want a new Culture story...

Anyone read Hyperion by Dan Simmons? I thought that was a great book, and the Fall of Hyperion was good too. Then I read Endymion and the series really took a downturn.

It reminds me of Frank Herbert's Dune series. Each successive book is a little less interesting.

I stuck through the end of the Hyperion series. I agree; the first was incredible, and then they went downhill. But the first had such wild ideas i had to see how things got resolved.

Since the original stories stuck with me, but not the resolution, its clear what my brain thought was better written.

As for Dune, are the new books, written by his son, worth trying? Or just the usual junk these things tend to be?

I gave up on Dune a long time ago. I have no idea if the new books are any good.

Hyperion was clearly inspired by The Canterbury Tales. Simmons could have let the original book stand by itself and left us with a nice sense of mystery and wonder about the ultimate fate of the pilgrims. Instead he explained it all away in subsequent books with a convoluted plot that attempted to tie it all together.

Hyperion probably sold well so he saw a chance to make some money with more books. I can't blame him, but the resulting novels cheapen the first.

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Quote:

As for Dune, are the new books, written by his son, worth trying? Or just the usual junk these things tend to be?

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"It's nice to have the Dune universe fleshed out, I just wish the books weren't so dull."

Is it being treated like the Trek books, with different authors getting assigned different books? I think those books are very much hit or miss, with some being terrible and some being pretty good. I've read 2-3 of the Trek books just to see what they're like.

"It's nice to have the Dune universe fleshed out, I just wish the books weren't so dull."

The problem with this, and it's the same problem with the bulk of the Trek and Star Wars licensed stuff, is that the entire purpose of the book is to flesh stuff out for the obsessives out there.

Instead of approaching a new Dune or Trek novel with the idea of telling a good story, they focus on: "lets talk about where Darth Maul was born!"
"In Episode 16 Spock had a fanged teddy bear, let's tell that teddy bears story!"

Ugh.
The good books are the novels that dare to show a little originality. Forge ahead rather than exploit.

btw, I do recommend Mike Ely's Alpha Centauri book heartily to fans of that game. Don't expect literature. Expect decent pulp. But do expect a SMAC game come to life. It's good airplane reading.

--Andrew

Oh, some really good/intense sci-fi can be found in Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap series. Starting with "The Real Story".

It's painful squirmy sci-fi to read, Donaldson seems to revel in anguish, but the Amnion are by far the most frightening *alien* race ever conceived. Nothing like a little gene-rape to make you shudder.

Anyway, it's got intersteller cops, cut-throat politics, pirates and aliens. Plus, that and Ender's Game were two series that Brian Reynolds says most influenced Alpha Centauri.

Andrew

To steer back to this thread's topic, the Anubis Gates is one of my all time favorites. Powers somehow manages to take wildly disparate elements and weld them into a story without any seams showing. After all, how many books have killer clowns, werewolves, time travel, ancient dark magic, the Knights Templar and an expert on Coleridge? It's like a literary acid trip at times, full of energy and imagery. His other books I'd recommend are On Stranger Tides, Last Call and the Drawing of the Dark. I've tried a few others but they didn't have the same magic for me,unfortunately.
Finally, if you like Superheroes check out the Wild Card series, edited by George RR Martin. A bunch of SF writers got together and cobbled up the setting. The books are out of print but I understand that may change soon. There are currently 15 books in the series, though you don't need to read them all. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 12th books are the best to me, with the 6th being my favorite. Anyway, enjoy!

"His other books I'd recommend are On Stranger Tides, Last Call and the Drawing of the Dark."

Last Call is the Vegas, book, right? Yeah, that's an excellent one. So is On Stranger Tides. I haven't read the Drawing of the Dark -- is that the one about Byron and the others?

Anubis Gates is a hugely entertaining book. Like you say, it's seamless. It was really neat watching him stitch all the plot threads together.

Yeah, Last Call is the Vegas book. His next two books, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, are continuations of what happened in Last Call. I couldn't get into Expiration Date though, it was too dry for me. Drawing of the Dark is about the mystical properties of beer with Arthurian legend thrown in for good measure. The Stress of Her Regard is the book with Byron. I found it too slow, his normal jam-packed energetic style wasn't present for some reason. Hopefully he'll get it back with his next book, it's a spy-caper set in the 60s.

I loved Powers' newest book, Declare. It was one of the most original and finely written books I've read in a good long time. I personally preferred it to Anubis Gates, though the style is much different.

I loved Powers' newest book, Declare. It was one of the most original and finely written books I've read in a good long time. I personally preferred it to Anubis Gates, though the style is much different.

On Stranger Tides was about pirates, BlackBeard in particular. Loved it.

Anyone read Dinner at Deviant Palace? Truly weird.

Dinner at Deviant Palace? Was that one of his earliest works? I think I did, but I can't remember what it was about.

It was post Drawing of the Dark, but yes, defintely an early one. It was set in a post-nuclear apocalypse LA.

Hey Mark,

I just picked up Tim Powers' latest book from Half-Price Books. It's titled Declare and his a spy story set in the 40s and 60s and deals with a mystery on Mt. Ararat in Turkey. It's pretty entertaining so far, much easier to get into than Expiration Date which I couldn't finish, though I'll probably give it another shot sometime soon.

Chris/Psychotrain

Thanks for the heads up. Maybe I'll have my kids get it for me for Xmas.

I don't think Expiration Date is one of his better novels.

I haven't picked it up, but I heard good stuff about Declare, particularly in its portrayal of double-agents and their recruitment.

If you want some real "Horatio Hornblower in space" type books, David Feintuch's Hope series is pretty good (also known as The Seafort Saga). It also has a healthy dollop of self-loathing and guilt. All but one of these books is told in first-person, and the hero never even sees his own successes, only the price that has to be paid for whatever he does.

They're good reading, and follow the hero from his teen years through to his old age. The first one is Midshipman's Hope.