This is how I feel about playing Outer Wilds.
I need to play this. I get the same feelings with RPGs or really good open world games. Would love to add another to the list
Did you play with a mouse and keyboard? I started it on my PC and it said it needed a controller. So instead I switched to my Steam Deck, but I felt like the small screen wasn’t doing it justice, so I stopped.
Been meaning to pick it back up again.
GNU Terry Pratchett
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=tanith+lee
Tanith Lee. British writer of the same time and mindset. The first book listed “Night’s Master” is set in the time when the world was still flat. A mighty demon prince spends the daylight hours in his underworld kingdom, and spends his nights tormenting and/or seducing humans.
I’m a Stephen king fan, so by the time I finish one of his books he’s written 3 more
The Epstein list. He basically said it was fake. He’s always been an asshole as far as I’m concerned, but I’ve usually agreed with his political tweets (or whatever he uses that people post). I have no loyalty to him, and find it strange that he would claim it was made up.
Dungeon Crawler Carl for all you video game nerds. Listen to the audiobook…
I’m lying. I’ve reread it multiple times and picked up new things each run.
I’ve been loving the series, just working my way through the last book now, and already getting the feeling in the OP from seeing that there’s not that much book left anymore :(
I somehow at the same time feel that it has no right being this good, but also enjoy it a ton. It’s a weird feeling but I’ll take it - it really appeals to my taste.
Any interesting sci Fi or magic/fantasy books that did this to you? I’m looking for something new!
Definitely The Expanse series if you haven’t read it yet. I loved so many of the charcters, a bit sad to not be reading about them anymore.
May I present to you the next series James S. A. Corey are writing? The Captive’s War!
I’ve enjoyed the book and novella published so far, and definitely sated that itch I had after finishing the Expanse. :)
I have this a lot, but the most it has happend was about 10 years ago with the webserial worm ( https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ ), I read it so much. I read it before work, I read it during lunch, I read it when I got home, I went to sleep late etc. etc.
When it was done I had forgotten what to do with my time, I wound up re-reading it again but slower at a few chapters a day rather than turning myself into a gremlin for maximal reading efficiency.
If you want a summary, it’s a superhero story, which usually really isn’t for me, but something about the tone of the writing and the way the world worked in this one made it work.
Powers are incredibly varied, but the strongest characters are the ones who know how to use their powers well, the protagonist exemplifies this, where she doesn’t get a cool flashy power but she figures out how to use it so well and adapt to each situation that she becomes terrifying.
I also liked the charactersation of the heroes and the villains, where the heroes are somewhat vain and egotistical which means they do good things when the cameras are rolling rather than being “morally good”. the villains are mostly just people on the edges of society for a mix of reasons which means they do what they want, but I think since then “The Boys” has also done something similar so the effect may be lessened.
Curious if anyone else on Lemmy has wound up reading it.
Worm was definitely like that for me. I was reading it at work (we monitored stuff and responded if needed, so I had a lot of free time if things weren’t happening), and it really sucked me in. I didn’t get into his later work, maybe because of burnout.
I think the characterizations of the superpowered folks were great, but they did suffer a little bit from flanderization. It’s to be expected when the author is literally handling hundreds of different characters. The plot overall was just so good though. Maybe some individual points weren’t as great, like super spoilers ahead
spoiler
the naked invulnerable chick and how they defeated her, or the existence of the three super enemies (leviathan, tyrant? and whatever the bird/smart thing was), and how once the protagonist figured out her plan for the ultimate win, it happened so quickly.
Same here! I stumbled onto Worm a few years ago and read it way too quickly. I taught myself some (very basic) editing skills, corrected a few typos and paid ~300 bucks to get the whole story printed out on paper so my wife would read it as well.
I would add that despite being a story with superpowers, it is very much a story about people, and not about powers. You progressively discover the rules of a world that make perfect sense in retrospect, the stakes scale up really well and I found the ending to be a culmination unlike anything I have read.
Exactly! find it so hard to describe though, over the course of reading the thing Taylor changes so much, the world changes so much and your understanding of the world gets so much deeper.
This makes it very hard to explain the later acts or why they were good though.
Have you read anything else that hooked you in a similar way?
Sanderson’s big fantasy series right now, the stormlight archive. Oh my god, each book is just made to make you get drawn deeper, and deeper until you hit the end. The gap between the first and second book was so freaking long to wait. I think we’re up to book five now, so you don’t have to have that feeling for a while.
Alternatively, if you like blue fantasy (talking animals and wise spirit guides that help sometimes hapless humans), mercedes lackey did great things with her heralds of valdemar series. I’d actually recommend jumping into it at a later point because her writing greatly improved from the first trilogy. You could start with magic’s pawn/promise/price, which has one of the earliest depictions of lgbt protagonists I ever read.
If you like more ‘earthy’ fantasy, the wit’chfire series (actual series name, banned and the banished) by james clemens (who I just found out is a pseudonym for a sci-fi author who didn’t want to be ‘smeared’ as a fantasy author and has some other good books when i googled for the name) is really good. Don’t start his other series, because even though it was fantastic, it’s never going to be finished. I think we’re at like 30 years now and never gotten the third book.
And then there’s the big one, the bold one, the ‘start you off so small and build you into a great, grand sweeping epic’ jim butcher series: the codex alera. The first book was riveting from start to finish. I actually think it was the best one, because the worldbuilding was just so sublime. I loved the characters more and more with each added book, but the magic of the beginning was just amazing.
Oooh, I love talking animal series, a guilty pleasure of mine. I read and loved A Fire Upon the Deep and was devastated to learn the author passed away before finishing the series.
That series is genuinely through provoking sci-fi, though some elements do require a bit of suspension of disbelief. Honestly though, some characters are so interesting, it’s worth a read.
Just a note of caution: the series ends unexpectedly and was never finished, though some points can be inferred at the end.
Nearly all of the culture books! The very first scene of the very first book, Consider Phlebas, just sets the bar so high (and is only one scene). It outdoes entire other works of horror in just half a chapter… and then the actual action starts.
I read a stupid amount of SF and fantasy (up to 60 books so far this year), and I keep notes, so if there’s a particular kind of thing you enjoy I might be able to make a more focused recommendation.
I believe I’ve read everything recommended in reply to you, and most are excellent. Some books I’ve read recently that really pulled me in, and that I didn’t see mentioned elsewhere, are:
- Sleeping Giants, Neuvel
- Ammonite, Griffith
- Spin, Wilson
- The Space Between Worlds, Johnson
- Service Model, Tchaikovsky
- The Tainted Cup, Bennett
Lots of others of I go further back. I hope you find something you love.
The Red Rising trilogy left me with this feeling. I loved the terraformation zones descriptions and how the technology is described and implemented.
The story takes lots of twists and turns, kept me glued to the books.
N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (beginning with The Fifth Season).
Also, Brandon Sanderson’s various Cosmere works, especially The Stormlight Archive (beginning with The Way of Kings) and the original Mistborn trilogy (beginning with The Final Empire).
For me it was His Dark Materials. I read it when I was 14 and it completely changed me. My mind was aware that it was a book, but my soul knew that reality is what you experience and I just experienced a lifetime.
I read it again ten years later and I recognized so much of myself in those books, I was actually surprised by the impact it made on me, even though I already knew back then that I would never be the same.
Saving for later when I forget all about this. Why is there no remindme function on Lemmy?
Also, do you like space operas? Bobiverse series Lost Fleet series Expeditionary Force (ExForce) Series Odyssie One series (Into the Black) Murderbot diaries
You can use this mastodon Remind me bot, works with Lemmy. Or use piefed
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis is the first book I’ve read since Hitchhiker’s Guide that actually made me laugh out loud repeatedly. It’s about a time-travelling historian who takes a vacation to Victorian England, and nearly ends the universe while trying to return a missing cat. The book’s part of a series, but this is definitely the most fun entry.
