Drunkard's Walk Forums

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust.
A wondeful story of a post-crisis world, where the only threats the heroes really have left is their own neuroses.
Most of the heroes are blatant Pastiches and Parodies of DC/Marvel heroes (mostly DC) but still, it's a damn fine and thought-provoking read.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

Seconded.
--Sam
"Sanity, you're a madman!"

To toss in my $.02 American, I have to reccomend the Honor Harrington books, for some damn fine politically driven space naval action, and then the Horatio Hornblower books, for the same thing, only.. not in space.

If everbody is recommending books then I'll go with:
The Wild Cards shared world anthology edited by George R.R. Martin. 17 books, 2 GURPS RPG supplements, a 4 issue comic book miniseries, several comic book stories as part of an anthology, and a new book trilogy and comic book miniseries on the way.
The Garret P.I. novels by Glen Cook. A stereotypical Private Investigator in a fantasy setting.
The Wiz series by Rick Cook. Five books about a programmer thrust into a fantasy setting who discovers that his computer skills make him one of the most powerful wizards of all time.
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"Anyone can be a winner if their definition of victory is flexible enough." - The DM of the Rings XXXV

....5 books in the wiz series?
I'm missing two. must fix that.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

Re: The Wiz books -- yeah, Wiz Zumwalt learns how to hack reality itself as if he were living inside the Matrix... but he also gets to learn what a divide-by-zero error looks like from the *inside.* Then there's a ALife experiment that gets a little out of control....
My recs? Oh, how to pick from so many....
Well, the 1632 series is good -- a middlin' sized West Virginia coal-mining town gets slung back in time to central Germany in 1632. Some of the best parts of this series aren't even *in* the series -- instead, Flint created a sort of side-series for officially sanctioned fanfic *and* serious fact articles on how people in this situation would have to go about re-inventing some very basic technologies. I swear the "Grantville Gazette" is like a texbook on the evolution of technology, but entertaining. For example, do you have any *idea* what it takes to create an run a basic, Old West style telegraph line? My respect for previous generations has gone up whole notches -- this stuff ain't nearly as easy as it seems from our current-day perspective.
Charlie Stross has some good ones that a very different from each other: Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise take place in a rather Balkanized post-Singularity universe with a lot of pre-Singularity societies. The books cover the experiences of two sort-of secret agents trying to prevent the equivalent of WMD proliferation (time travel -- the post-Singularity being called the Eschaton tends to nova the stars of people who dabble in it). Lots of high-concept stuff.
The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, OTOH, combine computer geeks (sysadmins save the world!), James Bond, and Lovecraft. The central conceit is that sufficiently advanced mathematics of certain types actually create communications links, or open doors, to stuff that Lovecraft hinted at. Folklore magic was based on cases where people stumbled into just the right combinations by accident. But by the late 90s, the British agency in charge of suppressing this knowledge (The Laundry), is being stretched, b/c it's getting to the point where pimply-faced hackers can almost derive the underlying math from scratch before anyone notices. The 'hero,' Bob, is a sysadmin for the Laundry, who ends up getting 'promoted' to Field Agent (as a side job -- he still has to keep the network running). TAA is a collection of connected shorts -- TJM is a full-size novel where Bob gets shoehorned into a honest-to-gosh attempt to force... well, I better not say. Lots of interesting play on the intersection between Lovecraftion Mythos and Weird mathematics, also lots of computer jokes and problems with British beauracracy (Bob saves London, but gets in trouble for not properly filing his expense report for same).
I've been enjoying the Harry Dresden series lately -- it's a lot different than the TV series on SciFi. Starts out a tad slow, but by book 3 or 4 it's really rolling. I'm behind, got a whole stack yet to read at home.
Lee&Miller's Liaden books. Before writing the "next book," they're putting out a side story that's necessary to set up the next novel. The interesting thing is, they're doing it on the net, on a donation basis -- they stated they would post a new chapter every time the tip jar hit $100, and anyone who donated more than $20 would receive a print copy once the book was complete and sent to the printers. Well, they got so much money the first couple weeks they can't stretch the story far enough to cover that many chapters. So instead they're posting one a week (barring RL events), and the money will go into getting the book professionally edited and printed once it's complete.
Lawrence Watt-Evans has done something similar with his latest two Ethshar books.
Oh, yes! Patricia Hodgell's "Jaime" series -- Baen just re-published the whole lot as Ebooks, plus the newest one, and I E-consumed the whole series in tiny bites between tasks at work over about two weeks or so. It's hard to describe these books, but I love 'em to death. The series starts with "God Stalk," where an partially-amnesiac young woman named Jaime staggers into a large, rather wild and unpredictable city at exactly the *wrong* time, gets taken in by a generous hotelier, ends up apprenticed to the city's greatest master thief, and (oh yes!) has to figure out how to get on with a mission she can't entirely remember, except that she has to find her brother and deliver some special items to him. B/c Jaime and her brother are both part of the Kencyrath, a people who have been mounting a fighting retreat across the multiverse, fleeing from world to world as an ancient all-consuming force devours each world they try to defend. On the last world, things went VERY bad, and the Kencyrath are fractured, factionalized, and in danger of collapse. Jaime, meanwhile, just wants to find her brother and get a chance to live a semi-regular life, but it looks like she's been chosen to save the Kencryrath... or destroy them. Fortunately for Jaime, she's *lousy* at doing what she's supposed to. These books are a lot of fun -- the Big Serious Stuff is mostly seen by the way it keeps intruding into the small human affairs of Jaime and her circle of friends, who tend to suffer from her unending Chaos Magnet effect, but stick by her anyway. Hodgell has a very deeply-realized world built here, and manages to get it across without resorting to infodumps. Strongly recommended -- at least check out the first one.

Let's see... I ought to come up with something that I don't see mentioned very often...
How about "The Damned", a trilogy by Alan Dean Foster?
A scout ship from a group of allied species called The Weave discovers Earth, and are shocked by what they find. Most species known to them are psychologically incapable of acting violently; at least one gets very sick even contemplating the idea. By their standards, even the most mild-mannered of humans are incredibly dangerous. This turns out to be a very useful discovery, as they are currently in the middle of an interestellar war... But what happens when the war is over?

I'll second pretty much everything SkyFire said, although I haven't read any of Stross' stuff yet - must now seek it out, if our tastes are that similar.
Lee&Miller's stuff is flat-out the BEST space opera ever written. Period.
C J Cherryh wrote an amazing number of great books. Downbelw Station is the center of it all - the Earth Company sent out STL ships to explore the galaxy and establish colonies, mostly huge space stations, and things were good, for a while... until the colonists discovered ways they could be independent of Earth. Then the War began, and politics happened, and now Earth is isolationist, Union - a strange and alien society based on mass slavery of genetically engineered human clones - is advancing, station by station. And Earth has abandoned her Fleet to fight and die on their own...
There's also The Pride of Chanur, set in the future of that same universe - a small tradership takes in an alien refugee who's wanted by every faction in their part of space... because he represents a vital new world that could tip the delicate balance of power in their Compact: Earth.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Non-fiction
From Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion
The Blind Watchmaker
The Ancestor's Tale
All well worth the read - Dawkin's delightful, insightful prose makes a highly complex field of study highly accessible for the layman while still remaining useful for the enthusiast.
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.
I don't know how the print book fairs, but the audio-book, read by the author, is a joy.
The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan.
Read it. Period.
Fiction
I will cautiously second the Honour Harrington series - though I have found that the later books far more a slog than a pleasure - the technology creep has put the author in a difficult position to continue. The early books are a joy.
Likewise, Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake series - Enjoy the early ones; avoid the later ones.
Bernard Cornwell - From Sharpe to Arthur and beyond You can pretty much guarantee the Cornwell will keep you turning pages with enjoyment. One of the few authors I will pick up and read with no reservation.
Simon Green's Nightside books: Another love hate relationship - the world is fascinating; the execution is so-so; but the high fantasy film noir feeling is worth it.
David Wishart's Corvinus Mysteries: Combining Phillip Marlowe and Pontinus Pilate's Gweat Fwiend Biggus Dickus of Wome seems like an odd combination at first glance. It isn't. These are hard-core hard-boiled detective stories, with a hero every bit as smart and tough as anything Chandler ever wrote. Well worth reading.
Shayne

Peggy and I just finished Eric Flint's 1632, and we're now both hooked on this world. A cosmic accident sends a small chunk of 20th-century West Virginia -- including a town, numerous industries, mines and a whole lot of people -- to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The Americans, once they figure out what the hell happened to them, do not just hunker down -- they decide that the best way to make sure they stay safe is to help settle that part of Europe down to a manageable level, and the hell with changing history.
This is a popular world, with several sequels and a couple of anthologies filled with stories by other SF writers who are fans of it. Peg and I seem to be doomed to buy all of them.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

uhm, I can prevent a goodly chunk of that expenditure.
www.anonib.com/bookchan
Those pictures you're seeing aren't _just_ images of the covers. load the image, save it as xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_by_xxxx.jpg.rar , then open it.
keep your virusscan updated, don't open any exe, blah blah blah.
Microsoft Reader or ABClit for .lit files, there's a million and one viewers for other file types. Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979

The "Ciaphas Cain" series by Sandy Mitchell. Humor in the W40K universe.
Cain is a commissar attached to the Imperial Guard and, mostly by accident, he's acquired a reputation as one of the greatest heroes the Imperium has. He's trying to find someplace quiet to stay until the shooting stops, but tends to find out he's tried to hide in the enemy's headquarters. Then he either captures or kills that enemy, and his reputation for selfless courage goes up another notch. "Inspiring leadership", too -- soldiers talking about him use that one a lot, but for the most part, the stories are narrated by Cain, so we know what he was really thinking. Despite him being a commissar, the troops and officers are glad to have him around, because they all believe he's such a hero. He is very smart and resourceful, and very, very good in a fight.
The first three books (For the Emperor, Caves of Ice, and The Traitor's Hand) were recently collected, together with three short stories, in the omnibus Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium. The other two books are a prequel, Death or Glory, and the most recent, Duty Calls, which actually occurs between Caves of Ice and The Traitor's Hand.
The author throws in lots of in-jokes, such as a reference to a Captain (later Fleet Admiral) Horatio Bugler, movie quotes which the characters obviously don't know are quotes, or a reference to "Arbitrator Foreboding, a popular holo character of the time, who battled criminals, heretics, and mutants with relish and a very big gun." One of my favorites is a pessimistic quotation attributed to "Eyor Dedonki."
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

I picked Dr. Brain up last night and am sawing through it.
Enjoyable so far, though some of the 'voices' makes for difficult reading. More to come once I finish it off.
Shayne

My recommendations:
Doc Sidhe and Sidhe-Devil by Aaron Allston. In the fine tradition of Lester Dent (to whom the first book is dedicated), Allston brings us the adventures of Desmond MacQwree, better known as "Doc." One of the last Daoine Sidhe alive in his world, he leads a band of adventurers that right wrongs, do good, and solve the mystery of a man named Harrison Greene, who claims to be from another world and shows an unusual immunity to iron poisoning. Pulp fantasy with all the required airships, mysterious monsters, and doomsday devices.
The Adventures of Gottrek and Felix by William King. Starting with Trollslayer, these are a collection of books about a Warhammer Fantasy Trollslayer (a dwarf berserker) named Gottrek Gurnisson and his chronicler, a hapless human named Felix Jaeger. Felix unwittingly swears an oath to chronicle Gottrek's "good death" and gets dragged across the Empire and beyond.Ebony the Black Dragon
Senior Editor, Living Room Games
http://www.lrgames.com
Ebony the Black Dragon
http://ebony14.livejournal.com

"Good night, and may the Good Lord take a Viking to you."

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Enjoyable so far, though some of the 'voices' makes for difficult reading. More to come once I finish it off.

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Rev, when you finish it, I'd be very interested to hear your reaction to the ending.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

If your of a mind for the subject matter (and you can find a copy), I highly recommend Nicholas Monsarrat's "The Cruel Sea." While it's a fictional account of the officers and crew of one of the Royal Navy's convoy escorts (small ships, such as corvettes and frigates) during the Battle of the Atlantic during WWII, the author was an officer assigned to just this duty at that time.
While the film version (starring Jack Hawkins) was good, I think the book was better.

Jeanne Hedge
www.jhedge.com

"Believe me, if I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem."
-- Gabrielle of Potadeia

Haruhi Sama:

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To toss in my $.02 American, I have to reccomend the Honor Harrington books, for some damn fine politically driven space naval action, and then the Horatio Hornblower books, for the same thing, only.. not in space.

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Has anyone else been expecting something like this, or am I just weird? Ever since the second book, I keep thinking someone, with weapon in hand, is going to come face-to-face with HH at a time when she's alone, get the drop on her, and say something like: "My name is Juan Santos. You killed my sister. Prepare to die."

Jeanne Hedge
www.jhedge.com

"Believe me, if I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem."
-- Gabrielle of Potadeia

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Oh, yes! Patricia Hodgell's "Jaime" series --

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I just picked this series up after deciding not to, purely on the strength of this recommendation.
Very, very glad I did so!
Excellent stories, exquisitely well done.
Id actually go so far as to say that they are much better than Robert Jordan's books.

Hodgell's writing is as far above Robert Jordan's as Albert Einstein's science is above, well, mine.
I CANNOT recommend her work highly enough. (Put it this way: I own her entire series in paperback, trade, hardcover, and two different electronic sets, one from Embiid before they went out of business, the other just recently bought from Baen...)--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series, the first trilogy comprised of Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen, Kushiel's Avatar. It's like a mix of alt. history/fantasy. It's not really alt. history, it's just the geography is the same as Europe and many of the nations draw from history, myths, and so on. For example, Germany is Skaldia, British isles are Alba and Eire, Spain is Aragonia, etc. The first book is set in Terre d'Ange (where France would be in our world).
The main character, Phedre no Delaunay, is a courtesan-spy, but to focus on this would give you a skewed view of what it's about. The book is fairly epic and as the books progress, Phedre matures and the world view expands (book 2 introduces the Caerdicca Unitas - Italy - and book 3 goes even farther). Phedre has a very distinct voice - books are first person - and I think you'll find her a very sympathetic and engaging character. Carey creates a very detailed and rich world, and it only gets better.
The only warning - well, two - I would give is that Terre d'Ange was founded by Elua and his motto is love as thou wilt. So, all bisexuals there. Another is that Phedre derives pleasure from pain. This unique ability enables her to get into places that her fellow spy cannot, but there are some scenes.
I highly recommend this series, though.

several comments to get out of the way first:
1) I've enjoyed pretty much all the David Weber novels I've read, and he has quite a few besides the Harrington series. 'Empire From the Ashes', the omnibus collection of the Dahak trilogy, is pretty good for example.
2) I'll second the rec for Alan Dean Foster's 'The Damned' trilogy. I also enjoy the various books in his Commonweath universe (the Pip&Flinx novels and various trilogies and one shots)
3) seconding/thirding/ect for the 1632 series, The Wildcards series, the Wiz books (hmm, I think I only have 4 of them...), and The Dresden books (just finished the first one the other day)
4) I don't mind Jordan's writing, but I stopped reading him cause I got tired of trying to keep track of 200 characters spread across an entire continent and more, each with so much happening and so many scene changes back and forth that after 1000 pages, the storyline has only progressed a week. :roll:
Now (finally) on to a new recommendation. "Villains By Necessity' by Eve Forward. The war is over and Good has won. Now, a ragtag group of minor villains join forces to restore the balance and save the world.
Another author I enjoy is L. E. Modesitt, jr. His biggest series is the Saga of Recluse, where the Order Mages wear Black, the Chaos Wizards wear White and the protagonist tries to find his own path between them.__________________
I bet that if you cooked an elephant, you'd have a lot of leftovers.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

(It's comment on comments time!)
Coincidentally, a friend on IRC recently recommended the Kushiel series. I've seen them in the library and thought about checking them out, but they set off enough little warning bells to not get ahead of all the other things I'm interested in. (For a while it seemed like I'd *read* everything in the SF section I was interested in, but they've expanded it a lot in the last couple years.)
I've read some of the Pip & Flinx novels (well, at least two, I think), but the library's selection here is so scattershot that I'm not sure it's worth seeking out more. ... Oh, and there's also the "Icerigger" trilogy. I've only read the last book (got it at a book sale somewhere or other), but it seems to be quite a story.
Jordan... personally, I'd *like* to see Wheel of Time finished, because I found the story interesting, particularly in the later books. (Or what was later at the time.) The problem I found when a new book in the series came out was that if I hadn't just finished reading the previous books, I couldn't really figure out who was who and what was going on. And as the early books are some of the slowest reading I've ever managed to make it through, I'm not inclined to reread the entire series every time a new book comes out.
(Oh, have I mentioned that I'm very happy that Stephen King finally finished The Dark Tower? '.' )
I seem to remember having a similar problem with the Recluse novels. I liked them, I just kind of ended up giving up on trying to read them.
Okay, new recommendation time. How about... the "Dream Park" novels by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes? ("Dream Park", "The Barsoom Project", and "The California Voodoo Game".)
Dream Park is basically the amusement park of the future. Holograms, virtual reality, roller coasters, and pretty much everything else is there. They also sometimes put on highly advanced live action role playing games, which are a major thing in this setting, with paid actors, movie rights, major gambling on the outcomes... and the occaisional crime. The problem becomes figuring out who the criminal is (and sometimes what the *crime* is) without disrupting the Game...
Unfortunately, the copies of this series at the library here seem to have disappeared, and so far I've had no luck finding it locally. I should probably look into ordering online from someplace...
(There's also a p&p rpg based on Dream Park. I have a copy. It's... somewhat dubiously designed, IMO. But some interesting ideas on how to handle games where the same characters move between scenarios with radically different settings...)
-Morgan."Mikuru-chan molested me! I'm... so happy!"
-Haruhi, "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
---(Not really)

Stolen from a recent posting on rasfw. I seriously thought about putting this in the FenSpace board, b/c I'm sure SOMEBODY will use it eventually:

Quote:

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Alastair Reynolds' short story "Galactic North", in the collection by
the same name, page 322. An ex-pirate is dying on a relativistic
starship:
"Keep my body aboard until we are almost touching light, and then
fire me ahead of the ship."
"Is that really what you want?"
"It's an old pirate tradition. Burial at C."

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For the followers and fans of Miller & Lee's 'Korval' stories, Baen has just released a big collection of their short stories and novellas that tie into that series as an e-book set....--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Just awful. Heh heh.
I've noticed that a lot of these books aren't that new (which isn't a bad thing, by the way. Older books are sometimes easier to find, particularly in libraries).
But here are some newer books that I think that people here would enjoy.
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey. Freelance excorcist in London gets back into the game while dragging along a prophecy of death. Great first novel by the writer of Lucifer, Crossing Midnight, and My Faith in Frankie. It's been published for a while in Britain but just came out stateside.
Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. Not quite out yet. Hard-boiled magical realist gonzo fiction? Not sure how to classify it from the first chapter, available for free . . . somewhere. Probably expect all the non-fiction essays that Mr. Ellis wrote over the years to come up.
No Dominion by Charlie Huston. Second in the Joe Pitt series in which down-on-his luck vampire troubleshooter Joe Pitt tries to discover the source of a new drug for vampires. Hard-boiled quasi urban fantasy.
I also second the recommendation of The Jennifer Morgue. While the first book, the Atrocity Archives, was very much HP Lovecraft meets The Ipcress Files, this is very much Lovecraft meets Broccoli's Bond. Funny, scary stuff.
The Thousandfold Thought by R. Scott Baker. This too has been out for a little while. Third in the Prince of Nothing series. Religious crusades and philosophical discussions in a manichean world. Part of the trend towards Arab-tinged fantasy, which also saw Glen Cook's Lord of the Silent Kingdom, the second book of The Instrumentalities of Night series.
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kaye. A rarity for Kay in many ways. It's set in the present and connects with his Fionovar series. But it's Guy Gavriel Kay so it's good almost automatically.
-Murmur
Huh, looking over this list, it's mostly from the fantasy genre. Strange.