Your Favourite SF & Fantasy Series

[dharh]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Promised Land, but progress is occurring.

Yeah. In the meantime I'm fixing the badly edited e-books myself (had an e-book that had zero spacing between paragraphs, all bunched up, it was a horror to read) and I thank my lucky stars I didn't go crazy and sell all my paper trade books.

Honestly if PDF were a better format or if e-pub had some forced formatting id say stick with one or the other for both print and e-books.

[afa]

I haven't read a ton of Fantasy series, being a relatively new fan of the genre, but my favourite series so far is The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. He's a terrific writer, and the series has a great cast of characters. Glokta, in particular, is one of the best characters I've come across in any series.

Other series I've read include:

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan - Good series, but far too long and has way too much filler
The Dark Tower by Stephen King - Books 5 & 6 were boring, but otherwise a good series
Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling - Not exactly an 'adult' series, and fairly predictable, but fun and interesting
Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson - I just finished #2. A pretty good series, so far

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by dharh

Yeah. In the meantime I'm fixing the badly edited e-books myself (had an e-book that had zero spacing between paragraphs, all bunched up, it was a horror to read) and I thank my lucky stars I didn't go crazy and sell all my paper trade books.

For me, ebooks are an additional format, not a replacement for paper, and I have some stuff in both formats. I still buy paper books, too.

I'm in the same position on ebooks that I'm in with music. I own about 1,500 old vinyl LPs. Replacing them with CDs would be a considerable expense, and many are obscure enough that I'm the only one I know who has even heard of them, and a CD probably doesn't exist. There are tools out there to let me digitize them, then create a CD, but there's an enormous amount of work in adding all the metadata I'd want, not to mention the loss of the (often gorgeous) cover art. Bottom line, I still have a turntable, and don't plan to get rid of the vinyl.

So it is with ebooks. I have thousands of paper volumes that may not have electronic editions, and I have better things to do with the money than buy ebook versions if they do exist. The paper books stay, too.

Honestly if PDF were a better format or if e-pub had some forced formatting id say stick with one or the other for both print and e-books.

PDF is a fine format for its intended purpose. If you need to have the electronic version look just like it will in print, on any device you view it on. PDF is your format. But most PDFs aren't created with the tagging to let them reflow on a screen size different than the one intended, and many are files where you wouldn't want them to reflow, as it would destroy needed formatting. If you have a device that can display PDFs with a reasonable sized screen, they're fine. If not...

(My usual reader device is a Palm OS PDA. I have a very good PDF viewer on it, but it's a small screen, and many PDFs require painful side scrolling to read. PDF is the last format I get if I have a choice. If I used something like a tablet, my view might differ.)

ePub is a container. While we haven't seen much of it yet, what an ePub file may contain doesn't have to be text. Aside from images, it can contain audio and video. I'm not sure how you could force formatting, and I'm not sure it would be a good idea if you could.

Everyone is still wrapping their minds, tools, and editing skills around ebooks. I expect electronic editions to improve as the producers hone their skills. It's a little surprising when an ebook from a major publisher is the sort of horror you mention, but only a little surprising. Major publishers still have a lot to learn, and in efforts to cut costs, things we think of as standard editing are increasingly not being done. (In your cited case, someone actually looking at the ebook on the target device before it was released for sale to catch such things seems to have been a "not done to save money" operation.)
______
Dennis

[warrend405]

Just a few in the Science Fiction Catagory:

Worldwar Series by Turtledove -- A alien invasion in the middle of World War 2

1632 Series by Eric Flint and others -- A small WVa town sent back to the middle of the 30 year war in Germany. Lots of follow up stories in the Grantville Gazette published by Baen

[dworth]

Some of the Warhammer 40,000 novels produced by Games Workshop/Black Library are worth a look. For the unitiated, Warhammer 40,000 began life as a tabletop science fiction wargame with a rich and often disturbingly dark universe to back it up and has since spread itself across more than twenty years of books, computer games and a forthcoming film.

The quality of the books is a bit patchy. Nevertheless, the ones written by Dan Abnett are exceptionally good. His Gaunt's Ghosts series deserves particular mention and is some of the best military sci-fi I've ever read. He's also written a few for the Horus Heresy series including the opening novel Horus Rising which stand head and shoulders above most of the others in the series.

[J.M. Pierce]

I would have to say (if we're talking strictly a series) that Tolkien's Hobbit/Lord of the Rings stands out big time!

Take care all!

J.M.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kcmay

For SF, I really loved David Brin's Uplift series.
For fantasy, I'm going to have to go with Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy.

I tried Brin's Uplift series. I found the first book not bad. But the second that featured the dolphins was just so bad that I could not finish it.

As for Robin Hobb, she is quite good.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I tried Brin's Uplift series. I found the first book not bad. But the second that featured the dolphins was just so bad that I could not finish it.

Perhaps you mean that you didn't enjoy it, rather than it being "so bad"? Many people (myself included) would say that "Startide Rising" is a pretty good book. The fact that it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (which makes it a member of a rather exclusive club), would tend to indicate that this is a widely held viewpoint.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps you mean that you didn't enjoy it, rather than it being "so bad"? Many people (myself included) would say that "Startide Rising" is a pretty good book. The fact that it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards (which makes it a member of a rather exclusive club), would tend to indicate that this is a widely held viewpoint.

In the internal chronology of the series, _Sundiver_ is the first book. I deeply enjoyed both _Startide Rising_ and the _Uplift War_. I think _Startide Rising_ is the one he's referring to as the first, and _The Uplift War_ is the one he couldn't finish. I recommend reading them back to back, and am mystified at liking one but not the other.

For Jon, I think "I didn't enjoy it" = "bad". But given what he has mentioned elsewhere as stuff he likes and stuff he doesn't like, I've spent the odd moment trying to figure out what his standards are and why he finds books enjoyable or not, since I can't discern a pattern. (I've no doubt there is one. It's simply not obvious from his selections.)
______
Dennis

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

In the internal chronology of the series, _Sundiver_ is the first book. I deeply enjoyed both _Startide Rising_ and the _Uplift War_. I think _Startide Rising_ is the one he's referring to as the first, and _The Uplift War_ is the one he couldn't finish. I recommend reading them back to back, and am mystified at liking one but not the other.

I'm pretty sure that Jon is talking about "Startide Rising" because he says it's the one about dolphins, and that's a pretty good way to summarise that book. "The Uplift War" isn't about dolphins.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm pretty sure that Jon is talking about "Startide Rising" because he says it's the one about dolphins, and that's a pretty good way to summarise that book. "The Uplift War" isn't about dolphins.

Hmmm, right. The Uplift War is largely about the chimps. I guess Jon read Sundiver first.
______
Dennis

[JSWolf]

I'm not the only one I know who didn't care for the dolphins. It just seemed like a different book. Not all that interesting. The Dolphins were just dull overall.

Sundiver was the one that was not bad. Startide Rising was the one I didn't care for. I did not find the dolphins all that interesting. And to me they seemed like a bunch of children vying for who could be king of the playground.

[HarryT]

I think personally that "The Uplift War" is the best book in the series, but I enjoyed them all.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm not the only one I know who didn't care for the dolphins. It just seemed like a different book. Not all that interesting. The Dolphins were just dull overall.

I didn't assume you were the only one. What I didn't understand was why.

Sundiver was the one that was not bad. Startide Rising was the one I didn't care for. I did not find the dolphins all that interesting. And to me they seemed like a bunch of children vying for who could be king of the playground.

In some respects, they were. The Stenmos strain were the equivalent of schoolyard bullies, using the fact that they were bigger, stronger, and more aggressive to assert dominance. They were behaving after Uplift the same way they do in the wild.

The Dolphins were Uplifted, and part of the book was about bumps in that particular road.

But establishing dominance and a pecking order is something that happens in any animal species, and for that matter, any human society. A fair number of books in any fiction genre will have that process as an underlying theme, including, I suspect, some you like.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I think personally that "The Uplift War" is the best book in the series, but I enjoyed them all.

I consider _Startide Rising_ and _The Uplift War_ as the best of the bunch, but all are worth reading.

I'm tickled by Brin's "take an idea and run with it" approach. Like, if there's a way to go FTL at all, there's more than one way, and different galactic clans have adopted different preferred methods. I also liked the concept in a later book of a plane of hyperspace where thoughts exist independent of minds to think them.

The last time I saw David he had mentioned a new Uplift novel in the pipeline, but it was a few years back, so I don't know what the current status is.
______
Dennis