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Post by Nemonus on Jul 12, 2010 17:12:46 GMT 1
Yesss. He actually managed to make Padme's portion of the story make sense. I loved how he got into the heads of the characters, as well as how he described things. He really could make lightsabers and starships feel real, feel like you were walking in the same area as them. His dying star metaphor tied the whole thing together so well.
Ah, it's okay about Mindor. Everybody's got opinions. And the rock men were weird. XD
Currently reading "I Am The Messenger" by Marcus Zusak. I don't think that man can do any wrong. "The Book Thief" should be required reading for life, and this one is less my genre (not that Book Thief was really fantasy...) but still excellent.
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Post by Tillian Panthesis on Jul 13, 2010 7:17:24 GMT 1
Aww... thanks guys. I'll sure to keep that title in the final stages.
Now, I haven't read any of the SW books (too busy reading other books.) but I've heard that Karen Travass were one of the worse SW authors, according to TV tropes.
So... any of you have heard of her?
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Post by Nemonus on Jul 13, 2010 16:32:46 GMT 1
A can of worms has just been opened. Karen Traviss has a fierce fan base, probably none of whom are present here. There are people who consider her work the most important part of the expanded universe--because she writes almost solely about and basically created the Mandalorian culture (Boba Fett's). While I am not sure if other people would agree, a lot of the hate that gets pushed on her might be an antithesis to that.
I've read a couple of her books, thought the writing itself was good but the characters just didn't grab me, so I'm not on either extreme.
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 13, 2010 20:01:45 GMT 1
Yay, I love where this is all going!
Stover is my favorite author, I must say. His Star Wars books are not only some of the best works in the SW Universe, but some of the best SF I've read. Mindor especially. He managed to celebrate just about everything that made the movies great, his predecessors, and additionally took a few shots at some of the SW authors who only care about one thing: Glorifying the Jedi and Sith until they're something closer to gods than men. Mindor seemed to be Stover's way of saying, "Yeah, the Jedi are great, but they can never be more than human on a personal level."
And as for the rock men, I liked how they were implemented. It was just another curtain that was pulled back in the story. You have this idea of Shadowspawn in the beginning, and how he's the ultimate SF villain who can control everything on the planet. And then by the end, he was much less than such. The rock men were a means by which to tear away this illusion, and didn't really stand out very much to me in a universe where a giant worm can be a crime lord.
So far, I really like Zahn's book. At the very least, he's an author who knows where his strengths lie and sticks close to them. Stover, bless the man, often tries things in his books that he's just not good at; he's magnificent at character development and action, but he is not good at exposition and large scale battles. The battle at the end of Shatterpoint was one of the most boring things I've read, which was weird since it was occupying one of the best books I've ever read. Though, it seems like he scaled back on that in Mindor, which was another plus.
I think Mindor might be my favorite book. Still thinking it over. Traitor was amazing, too, though...hurm.
As for Traviss...you could definitely do a lot worse than her works. I've only read a portion of her first Republic Commando book, Hard Contact, and it was pretty good. It's short, too. I've probably not given her the chance she deserves. From what I hear, her work on the Gears of War books was so good that she's now the lead writer of the upcoming Gears of War 3. There's no denying that she's talented, but I dunno.
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Post by Nemonus on Jul 14, 2010 6:00:15 GMT 1
*jawdrop* Can I have her career path please? Go from writing your own military SF to writing tie-in novels to writing the thing the tie-ins are talking about....talk about power.
Good point about Stover playing to his strengths. He keeps everything very human, which may be exactly why he skimmed over the spaceship combat in RotS. I don't remember the end of Shatterpoint enough to comment...which might be a comment in and of itself, although I have only read the book once. (The second time, I stopped around the brain-rotting parasites bit.)
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 14, 2010 13:48:18 GMT 1
But remember, Mindor had the enormous space battle going on for the whole damn book. That was the other thing I didn't like as much. I rather liked the brain parasites in Shatterpoint! that was when I got into it.
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 14, 2010 23:41:05 GMT 1
Yeah, the brain parasites is the part where I started going: =O
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Post by Nemonus on Jul 17, 2010 5:32:35 GMT 1
Oh, I liked the brain parasites. He really pulled out all the stops and made Star Wars a monster movie again. It was coincidence that's where I stopped the second time...I think.
My bad about Mindor. It's on my lengthy list of things to read again.
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Post by Mister Buch on Jul 23, 2010 0:05:40 GMT 1
I have such a long list of things to re-read. And a list of things to read a first time.
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Post by Knightfall on Jul 30, 2010 20:15:16 GMT 1
I finally finished HEIR TO THE EMPIRE last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved the scope of it, all the new locations and how well everyone was characterized.
I ordered the second book, DARK FORCE RISING, from the Book Depository the other day, but it hasn't arrived yet, so I'm going to try and breeze through the Episode II novelization by R. A. Salvatore. Pretty neat so far. I like how we actually see how Shmi Skywalker was kidnapped, and how the rescue efforts failed in a spectacular way. Really brutal stuff, actually. Didn't see it coming. =O
After the Thrawn Trilogy, I was thinking of checking out the X-Wing series based on some reviews I read on Amazon. Anyone read any of those?
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Post by Battlechantress on Jul 30, 2010 23:16:09 GMT 1
Octavia Butler is a very underrated sci-fi writer. So even though I finished reading both of these books recently, I'm going to throw out the titles "Parable of the Sower" and "Bloodchild and Other Stories" while I'm here. I have gone so far as to demand anybody who suggests "mutant babies with Garrus" on the Calibrations thread (BW boards) to read "Bloodchild" in its entirety a couple of times now. Sadly, nobody has taken me up on that yet....
Currently reading: "Alone Against Tomorrow" by Harlan Ellison (it's an old, old collection of short stories, like "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"). There's this lovely gem from "Bright Eyes":
"The dead were everywhere, sighing soundlessly with milk-white eyes at a tomorrow that had never come."
Hey, Meyers, let's see you top THAT in your next crapfest vampire book!
I'm also picking my way through "Wonder- Makers: An Anthology of Classic Science Fiction". It has stories by the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Ambrose Bierce, and H.G. Wells, but also includes stories by Rudyard Kipling and Jack London (who wrote a surprising and disturbing piece about biological warfare against China that was supposed to happen around 1976, but he wrote it in 1914!). You can definitely tell the age of some of the stories, but I still like reading classics like these because their writing tended to be much better than many modern writers.
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Post by Mr. Glow on Aug 3, 2010 2:11:32 GMT 1
They say if you're writing something, you should always be reading something as well. So I've ordered Raymond Chandler's 'The Big Sleep' and Stephen King's first dark tower book off Amazon. I've always been curious about both books and I can't wait for them to arrive.
Also. I had no idea Kipling wrote Sci-Fi! Considering he gave us cherry bakewells as well, he must have been a real class act, if you ignore the racism (joke)
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Post by Knightfall on Aug 3, 2010 3:22:36 GMT 1
I've been sorta-kinda reading The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger lately, and lemme tell ya, it's weird. Like...I'm really not sure what to make of it so far. It's really short though, so it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Let me know how that turns out for you. xD
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Post by jklinders on Aug 3, 2010 3:50:13 GMT 1
The Dark Tower Books are seriously messed up. They are also pretty cool. They kind of percolated in Stephen King's brain over a very long time. It gets lots better.
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Post by Battlechantress on Aug 3, 2010 4:02:03 GMT 1
I actually liked "Wizard and Glass" from the Gunslinger series, but I seem to be in the minority. Overall, it's a good series, and it's certainly much better than most of his recent works.
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