NPR 100 SF/F Books meme

Aug. 14th, 2011 06:54 pm
NPR 100 SF/F Books meme: bold the ones you've read, italics the ones you intend to read, underline series/books you've read part of, and strike the ones you never intend to read.

Things in parentheses are my commentary, including P if I read it in Print format or A for Audio format. P/A indicates I started the series in Print and finished in Audio, or A/P for the other way. P+A indicates I first read it in Print format, and later reread in Audio.

For 62 out of 100, I have either read all or some of the series.

( The list )

Originally posted on Dreamwidth. comments there. Comment here or there.
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If you've read Dune... conversations?

Oct. 20th, 2010 08:29 pm
I am currently listening to an unabridged audiobook1 of Frank Herbert's Dune with a full cast doing the different characters. I am wondering about the editorial/production choice to have a full cast, and about the claim of unabridged.

The conversations as read have very little "Paul said," "Jessica replied" sort of commentary. They tend to be only what the individual people actually said. For example, if Jessica were and Paul were talking about his homework over breakfast, and Leto walked in in the middle of it...

"So did you finish your homework last night?"
"Very quickly, it was just algebra."
"And what did you learn from it?"
"If you drop a book from the top of a building, its motion is governed by a quadratic equation."
"That isn't what I was taught, since you also have to take air friction into account."
"But you can simplify the equations if you make the assumption that there isn't any air friction."
"And we haven't gotten up to air friction yet."2


In the audio book, since there are three different readers for the lines said by Paul, Jessica, and Leto, it is obvious who said what, but there aren't any "Leto walked into the conversation and commented that..." that in a print version of the book would indicate who said what in a long exchange, or if three people are involved in the conversation. Is this lack of "Paul said" actually in the original text, or was there an editorial decision to remove those? If the original text did not include any "Paul said"s, that would explain the production choice to have a cast.

And while I'm asking, is there a name for doing "Paul said"s, or for not doing them?

1The production is copyright 2007 Audio Renaissance, and narrated by a cast listed on Audible.com as Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Morton,and Simon Vance, but possibly including more.
2In case you're curious, my intent here was for the speakers to be JPJPLJP, though the last L and J could be swapped and still have it make sense.
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(no subject)

Sep. 14th, 2010 07:35 pm
I just started the audiobook of "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, and I'm nearly done, it's a short and enthralling read. It's aimed at young adult readers, but it's really secretly hard Sci-Fi / speculative fiction in the grand style of old: it proposes a future setting and explores how people (in this case an 11-year-old boy) would react within that setting. [livejournal.com profile] calzephyr77 I think it was you that liked YA and wanted to read more SF; this one is definitely worth the (short) read. The audiobook production tries to enhance things by adding ambience music; I recommend the print version instead.

Edit: I didn't realize that this book had been out forever, so it didn't occur to me that there might be spoilers in the comments. There are, though not horrible ones as of yet. Just don't read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled.
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Disability in Sci Fi

Jul. 26th, 2010 09:05 pm
I was recently talking with [livejournal.com profile] calzephyr77 about how so few SF pieces include people with disabilities. The only book/series I could come up with, The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey has the same problem with disability as her other novels have with feminism, in that although she puts the disenfranchised individuals in the limelight, she does nothing to challenge the discriminatory nature of either present day or her fictional society. The only movie I could come up with while thinking then was Avatar, though Daredevil could also do.

I'm currently rereading Heinlein's "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls," my intent being to examine his treatment of women with my current understanding of feminism, rather than how I thought about the issue when younger. I have been pleasantly surprised when ever half hour or so something reminds me that the main character uses a prosthetic leg. It's an unavoidable part of the narrator's life and affects fro the little things like his walking speed to his choice to live in a low gravity environment, but it's not something that permeates every moment of his (or the reader's) thinking.

Can anyone make any other recommendations of SF books with characters with disabilities for me to read? The overall read needs to be good, but I'm curious about both good and bad treatments of disabilities.
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Book review: "Freedom's Choice" has no freedom or choice for women

Jun. 8th, 2009 05:21 pm
asterroc: (xkcd - Fuck the Cosine)
I used to think when I was younger that Anne McCaffrey was a feminist writer. This might have been partially due to the fact that I viewed my mother as a feminist and she was the one who started me on the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was still in elementary school. It was probably due more to my early notions of what feminism entailed: McCaffrey was a woman, and her books contained a lot of strong women characters who bucked the norm. What I failed to see that the time was that while they bucked aspects of the norm, they did not fight against the gender stratification of their societies, and all of McCaffrey's societies were gender stratified.

And "Freedom's Choice" fits neatly into this trend of hers. "Choice" is the second in the 4-novel Catteni series - I've only read the first two so far, but I'm a glutton for punishment and do intend to read the rest. The main character Kris Bjornsen is a strong woman fighting against the slavery of mankind by an alien race. She takes on a role advising the first leader of the involuntary colonists dropped onto an unknown planet by the enslaving race, and then continues to serve the colony as a scout.

Where the series takes its sharp turn from feminism is when Kris is informed that the leadership has decided (while she was out scouting) to start pregnancy rosters whereby all women in the colony would take turns bearing children. Kris's response is a petulant whine that she doesn't want to have children, or at least to put off childbearing for years (her friend implies this is selfish, and tells her Kris's name was put at the bottom of the list because of her value to the colony), or concern that she will not be a good mother (this problem too has been solved, with creches where unwilling incubators can drop off the babies after birth and never have anything else to do with them, though it's never indicated that anyone actually does this). McCaffrey blows off Kris's concerns as being childish and irresponsible; nobody ever takes them seriously, not even Kris's alien lover (who because of being a different species could never be the father of a child of Kris).

Kris goes along with the program in the end, never outright objecting to the leadership at all. In the end though, the reason she goes along with the program is even worse (IMO) than the program itself. After rebuffing dozens of men trying to get in her pants with the excuse that it's for breeding purposes, Kris is date-raped while drunk. She excuses it to herself as "oh, I was just drunk," and yet she never tells anyone else (not even her lover), when she learns she is pregnant she is embarrassed and then enraged that one of her "friends" reveals it to everyone (and even tries to attack the "friend" and has to be held back), and moreover Kris doesn't even reveal to her rapist that he is the father - if that isn't a clear sign that the sex was NOT a good thing, I don't know what is. And to make it clear that Kris's rape was a good thing and her distaste for it a bad thing, at the end of the book McCaffrey has an omnipotent race appear and reveal to Kris's rapist that the child is his, and he offers to help care for the child when she has to go on another scouting mission. Kris is filled with a benevolent glow and realizes the childishness of her past actions.

Because we all know that a woman doing anything other than meekly submitting to a culture that promotes women as vessels for men's seed is just childish.

How did I *ever* think McCaffrey a feminist? I kinda want to reread the Pern series now, but am afraid to do so (what with the dragons' rape flights and all).
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Sense and Sensibility started

Jan. 12th, 2009 10:42 pm
[livejournal.com profile] seekingferret will be interested to know that, as predicted, I don't actually much mind "Sense and Sensibility" (that is, the writing style) in audiobook format. I'm on Chapter 9 right now, and while I will admit that the first two chapters with their plethora of characters were a bit confusing, but when I've done Jane Austen books in the past I found them ridiculously dry and boring. While some of the change may come from increasing maturity on my part, I really do think most of the difference is the audiobook format. If an audiobook is slightly dry, I can tune out and listen with half an ear, doing something else like washing dishes or knitting, and come back in when it gets more interesting.

This particular production (the male Libravox narrator) leaves a bit to be desired, in that it's distributed as a podcast (so my iPod stops at the end of each installation, which is a chapter, around every 10-15 minutes), each "episode" starts with a 30-second boilerplate, and the narrator's voice is relatively toneless, but it is not bad - in fact I would call it a couple small steps above tolerable.

So, I don't much mind the writing style (though I probably would not choose a repeat of this author, I can definitely get through this book), but I have to say the content is somewhat boring. It's a pre-women's lib. soap opera. Maybe it'll get better, we'll see.
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SF booklist memeage

Dec. 16th, 2008 07:35 pm
Yoinked from [livejournal.com profile] kadath

According to the Science Fiction Book Club, these are the 50 most significant SF & Fantasy Books of the last 50 Years, 1953-2002. Bold the ones you've read, strike the ones you hated, italicize the ones you couldn't get through, asterisks for the ones you loved (more asterisks, more love), exclamation points for the ones you own.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
3. Dune by Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin! (previously owned, don't know where it is now)
6. Neuromancer by William Gibson
7. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (hm, I might have read it, I forget)
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (I need to read this one)
9. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury*
11. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (I might have read)
13. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (might have read?)
14. Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight by James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett (I don't think I've read anything by him, strangely)
17. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey! (enjoyed it, but wouldn't say I loved it)
22. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card*! (still one of my faves, though the rest of the series I'm mixed on)
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway by Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (the main thing I liked about this was that it gets kids reading)
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams*!
28. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson*! (just recently, on audiobook)
29. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (I think my mom owned it)
30. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (I think I disliked? I forget)
31. Little, Big by John Crowley
32. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
35. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke* (I can't remember much of it, but I liked it then)
39. Ringworld by Larry Niven* (OMG yes! I love anything Niven)
40. Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (way too tedious)
42. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson*! (own abridged audio, afterwards read full version in print)
44. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (much better than the movie)
47. Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks (the only way I got through this was I accidentally read the Elfstones first, and yet I have recently wanted to get back into the series.)
49. Timescape by Gregory Benford (read it for a class. science good, characters are 2-D cardboard cutouts)
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer

Just so you know, the Science Fiction Book Club is the one that keeps sending you unsolicited catalogs entirely full of Honor Harrington paperbacks, Star Wars hardcovers, and Stephen King, with half-naked women sprawled over dragons on the cover and an offer of a free pewter wizard figurine with club membership (see order form for details.)
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Book trade services?

Apr. 30th, 2008 09:56 pm
Anyone use online book trading services? Frugal Reader is one I just came across (you ship books to other members in exchange for books from others, paperbacks are 1 point, hardcovers 2 points, you pay shipping), and I've heard of another though I forget the name now (you get a monetary credit to your account each time you send in a book, each book is worth a different amount, I forget if you send directly to other members or to the webpage owners). Any of these any good? My questions include:

* Is it free?
* Can it print shipping labels?
* How fast is turnover of a book you list?
* How reliable is the shipping?
* How/when does it release your address to the shipper (if another human)?
* Does it do audiobooks?
* How does it value books?
* Can you unlist a book you own?
* What if you don't get the book?
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