I’m currently listening to the poppy war series and halfway through book 2. I am struggling with this series after hearing good things about it.
My main issue is the protagonist feels so inconsistent from moment to moment. What horrifies them one minute is fair game the next and they go from being a ruthless tactician to naively trusting without any clear reason.
Has anyone read this? Am I being unfairly harsh/is it worth persevering with?
I just finished the third book of the Poppy War series. I overall enjoyed it. The protagonist is a bit of a wild card. It helped me to keep in mind the real history being riffed on. She is based on Mao so some things have to happen to fit the analogy but there’s other things that are unique to the story or from different parts of history. It doesn’t always all come together but I admire the attempt.
I haven’t read it but a friend, copying his opinions from Discord here:
Well, I finished the Poppy War trilogy last night… that might be the most underwhelming book series I’ve ever read
The first book was pretty interesting, I gave it like a 6.5-7/10. The two that followed were… not great
I made a post on r/fantasy reviewing it in a very rambly way just now: basically the characters don’t feel like they have any personality at all, plotlines built up to be these huge deals suddenly cut off, convenient solutions show up out of nowhere, etc
I was about 50 pages from the end last night and the plot was still FULLY in swing, and I had the distinct thought “You don’t have enough time to finish this up satisfyingly.” and it didn’t.
It’s a really good concept! (Take the Second Sino-Japanese War, including the Rape of Nanking, and transplant it into a fantasy setting with gods) I feel like it would have been much better if
It was written just a bit better, but these are the author’s first books and she wrote them from ages 19-23
It had been 4-5 books instead of 3. There’s a lot of time jumps to get things to happen in less pages that I would have liked to see.
So, I’ve read a lot of books over the past month or so, but I need to talk about Dhalgren. It’s nominally in the “science fiction” gentre, but that’s a bit like calling an orgy a “group activity”–technically true, but a recommendation without a lengthy disclaimer is going to lead to some awkwardness. Because Dhalgren is strange, and fascinating, and otherwordly; it’s an exploration of race, sexuality, language, art, intimacy, mental health, memory, and perspective; it’s brutal in its intelligence and wit, piercing in its incomprehensibility and obfuscation of truth. But it is not a particularly fun or thrilling time, which is what I was hoping for when I first started. It’s long, meandering, and borderline pornographic in places, and I kept waiting for the “twist” that would turn it into a classic sci-fi romp… but the twist never came. Which isn’t a criticism, but boy was I not prepared for what the book actually is.
That said, I still really enjoyed it, and might have loved it if I came in with more realistic expectations. It’s not for everyone, but I can honestly say I haven’t read anything like it.
Dhalgren was the point, along with The Tides of Lust, where Delany had established himself as a SF writer and started to expand out of the limits of the genre. It’s an important experience, but not always fun.
I loved it, but my copy was discarded by a friend who thought Gordon R. Dickson was the best SF writer of the seventies. Some people are trapped by the limits of genre.
I’m in awe of Delany, but Dhalgren is definitely one readers will either love or hate. Harlan Ellison made it 361 pages in and threw it at a wall. I remember Nova being amazing though.
A great book if you want to know about 1415, not so great if you want to know about 1414 unless of course you then proceed to 1415. 1416 is right out!
But seriously a good read. I enjoyed Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s guides quite a bit and this is a heavier work but worth the effort.
It’s a few years old and has probably been overtaken by more recent scholarship, but on a similar basis I enjoyed Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror (The Calamitous 14th Century). Recommendation from @Agemegos .
Dancing with myself, the autobiography of Billy Idol. He likes to portray himself as a Blakean mystic and Jim Morrison style hedonist while pushing the self-destruct button on his life repeatedly.
I have finished Foundation 2: Psychohistory Boogaloo. I have been immersed by the first one and this one reads better. Maybe because I like that the stories are longer. Yes. I know that the appeal is that the story of Foundation goes on through generations, which is something that writers don’t do. But the longer stories allows me to be more emotionally embedded to the characters who inhabit these stories.
Last week Andy’s nerve pain was bad enough that we had to go to the ER, and since Ontario has elected Conservative governments for years now, I knew that meant a lot of waiting.
Upside: nothing to do but read!
I started and finished Westmark by Lloyd Alexander. It was… good? A touch too deus ex machina for my tastes, but still good. I’m not positive I’ll read the rest of the trilogy, though… but it was an enjoyable enough way to spend almost 5 hours (we arrived at 9, and left around 1:30).
I’m currently reading the Battlemech Manual at work over my lunch break, and there was a lovely bit in there about the scale of the game: “Each hex represents 30m of terrain. And we know there are readers who will point out that Machineguns therefore have a range of 90m, which is frankly ridiculous since modern machineguns have a range of over 2000m. The reason for this is simple: this is a game. In order to properly represent the range of Battlemechs, you would need approximately 17 regular-sized hex maps, and that’s simply not feasible unless you regularly rent entire tennis courts for game night.”
Oh, and I read Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice on Andy’s recommendation. It was good! The ending was very abrupt, but the leadup was pretty good, even if I have sociological issues with it. Basically a post-apocalypse through the perspective of an Anishanaabe reservation in Northern Ontario. A neat read, no question.
@Marx : Yeah, Battletech so much mecha goodness, so much rule badness. I could also complain equally about SJG’s Ogre too, for the same reasons.
But, not to derail a thread about reading with complaints about games, I’m currently re-reading Crysis Legion by Peter Watts (yes a novelization of a video game, which is a clever bridge) that blew me away by simply going full gonzo with the biology; Watts’ signature trademark.
I think the point about Battletech’s ranges is specifically so that moving in and out of weapon range is an important part of the tactical game (as distinct from moving in and out of cover which is much more of a consideration in the real world). Evil Dr Ganymede has done calculations based on real-world walking dynamics to work out how fast 'Mechs could move, but I strongly suspect his game with effectively much lower movement rates would be less fun to play because more of it would come down to dice luck.
A lot of the stupid in battle tech (or the bits I remember, not having played in yrars) could be hand waved away if they just used new names. It’s not a machine gun it’s a “woogitydoo projector “. Who knows what the range of that would be?