Re: So, What Games Are You Looking Forward To? (2025 Ed)

On Fri, 07 Feb 2025 18:42:23 -0500, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
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On Sat, 25 Jan 2025 18:47:22 -0500, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:
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Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

On Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:30:21 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:
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On 1/23/2025 9:00 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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I don't even know if I can rouse myself to play PC games much anymore.
I got hooked on reading sci-fi/fantasy again and have been blowing
through books like crazy.

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Heh. Oddly enough, me too. I mean, I tend to go through books fairly
regularly anyway, but recently I've been hitting the pages a lot more
often. It's definitely cutting into my video-game time!
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I'm working my way through Ian Bank's "Culture" series again.Well,
most of them. A couple of his books are written in first-person, and
that's just not a format I enjoy. But all the rest.  They aren't
/great/, but they're imaginative and passably well written (even if
every book does seem like he just ran out of ideas and just decided to
end it at some random point).

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Consider Phlebas and that execution method?

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Or "Matter", where the heroes are all (mostly) killed off and the
story ends. "Excession" is similar too.
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I don't actually think it's the author running out of ideas; it's part
of his style and messaging. But given the pacing and tone of the rest
of his books, the sudden end leaving so many things unresolved (the
latter of which, I think is the whole point) is incredibly jarring.
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It's as if Star Wars ended right when the X-wings start attacking the
Death Star. Because of how the rest of the story goes, you know the
heroes --armed with mystical powers and knowledge of the planet's
secret weakness-- are likely to win... but you sort of want that
resolution. And I think that's an apt comparison, because in many ways
the Culture books are very space-opera sci-fi, and that genre
typically gets its heroic end. Banks is obviously writing in a way
that purposefully subverts those expectations, which is an interesting
experiment but overall not to my liking.

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I did not get a space opera vibe from the culture novels, but then I am
a fan of the original space opera author, E.E. "Doc" Smith.

Galaxy-destroying levels of power are hardly necessary for it to be
space opera. I mean, Star Wars still largely limits itself to
destroying mere planets, and it is definitely space opera. And The
Culture universe is definitely within that range (in fact, far above,
since they not only destroy planets, but build them at times)

By definition, space opera is a genre more focused on melodrama and
adventure, and tends to be fairly loose on the actual science (and, as
such, pretty much all mass-media sci-fi, from modern Star Trek to The
Expanse, to Battlestar Galactica, qualifies as space opera rather than
'proper' true-Scottsman sci-fi). Bank's novels, which often focus on
rather introvert characters, lack some of the more obvious melodrama,
but otherwise qualify quite well.

Which isn't to dismiss the novels; they're fun, imaginative, sometimes
thought provoking and I love his take on an AI-run post-scarcity
universe. For all its wars and shenanigins (which often have death
tolls counted in the TRILLIONS) it's a lot more hopeful take on the
far-future than the hell-hole futures of many sci-fi franchises.

But it's space-opera, through and through.