My wife got into Chalker at one point, I tried Rissa Kilgallen or whatever the hell her name was, just couldn’t get into it. There are a lot of good writers I don’t like, however.
Sampled Three Parts Dead, it was a fun ride. A nice startling beginning and the plot rolled briskly along from there. Intriguing treatment of magic, not enough yet to know if it’ll be interesting throughout, but it’ll be on my list for sure.
Hell YES, I sampled the book and I thought it was a great read. The Shoal is a great alien species, the human society was fun and interesting, and there’s clearly going to be some interesting conflicts. On the list for sure.
Checked out “Singulairity Sky.” I did not like the 1984ish planet it is set on, but I liked the Festival and the sense that a bunch of fascists are about to get thoroughly fucked over. On my list, but prolly not with the frontrunners.
Checked out the first book in Glen Cook’s Black Company series, found it good solid fantasy with, as stated, some non-standard approaches to fantasy tropes implied. I like the characters and I’m interested enough to want to see how the fantasy tropes are played with.
Checked out House of Blades, another solid fantasy novel. Not sure how original the take on standard fantasy tropes will be, but like the Black Company there is enough there to make me want to check it out. My holidays are gonna involve a lot of reading, I believe.
BTW, “checked out” means I just read the Amazon preview, money’s tight and won’t be buying any books for another couple of weeks. But it’s kind of fun. I wonder if this is why women enjoy shopping. Nah, they never shop for interesting things …
Cool. I think you’ll like the uplifted Chimps in “Uplift War” as well - it also has quite a bit of story seen from an alien race’s perspective.
Hellz yes. The Thursday Next books are pretty damn clever (the two Nursery Crime ones are probably the worst of the Bookworld series) but Shades of Grey is a whole other prospect. It’s not as funny as the TN books but there’s definitely a streak of whimsy in it, and it takes a long time to figure out what the hell is going on and how the world works. My reactions were thus:
First read through: “What the hell was that all about?”
Second read through: “Ohhhhhh. I get it now.”
Third read through: “This is brilliant! Where’s the damn sequel?”
Note that **SoG **is the first of what I believe is going to be a trilogy, so even by the end of the book there’s still a lot of story to be told. However, I suspect the author is focusing more of his attention on the TN books which are more popular and accessible, hence the delay in getting the other series written.
Naw, nothing supernatural about it at all. Like Simmons’s Endymion, it posits a universe where souls are real, but there’s nothing supernatural about it (in the RD universe, that is.)
Nothing supernatural about souls? Really? Or do you mean that in the books souls are not treated as a supernatural phenomenon? I regard souls as a purely supernatural phenomenon.
They’re not treated as a supernatural phenomenon, i.e., it’s posited that in the RD universe that they are, in fact, a physical object (more like an energistic phenomenon) which can be manipulated.
I don’t know, it’s no more difficult believing in that than it is to believe in FTL or superluminal communications or uplifting or whatever else we take for granted in order for our space operas to work. 
Actually, it IS more difficult to suspend my belief over supernatural elements than over things like FTL drives. Granted, we now know of no technology that allows FTL travel: that does not mean we won’t discover one in the future, though the chances of doing so look extremely low at present. Accepting supernatural elements however, brings SF right into the realm of fantasy. Even if treated as a non-supernatural element, it’s part of that whole culture of “woo” that includes ghosts, goblins and flying spaghetti monsters, and which generally does not go with science fiction. There are just too many people who blindly accept that whole culture of woo as a real thing to make me at all happy to find any of it in SF. Poisoning the wellsprings, indeed!
No big deal. Just don’t read the Hyperion sequels then, because you’ll be presented with a Universe where souls are the very fabric of space-time. 
I bailed from that book as well. However, I strongly recommend Fallen Dragon. If you like that, you’ll also likely enjoy Pandora’s Star / Judas Unchained. His latest “Great North Road” is also quite good.
I read his books in that order (plus the Void trilogy, which I didn’t think held up as well), enjoyed all of them and then tried Reality Dysfunction and spit it out like bad milk.
Hyperion had a lot of good reviews, so I tried it, thinking I would read it as fantasy. But I just didn’t like it.
Ok, I’ll give the non-woo books a try.
For fantasy have you read Kushiel’s Dartby Jacqueline Carey? It’s an alternate history sort with a lot of court intrigue. The protagonist is a high class call girl. I found it pretty entertaining.
I have a copy sitting on my bookshelf right behind me. I gave it a hard run because I had heard it was kinky sexy as well as well-written. But they got to this REALLY long description of a royal party that struck me as really boring, the sort of event that’s dull to read about, not just attend, and I bogged down there. Did not seem to be my cuppa, despite all the good stuff.
There are limits to the tech, and to the people who use the tech. The book actually takes a fairly long time to develop the plot; it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the plot of the trilogy isn’t actually engaged until early in the 2nd book.
Still, I totally understand that the writing style and the subject matter may not appeal to most people. Goon on you for giving it a shot, tho!
Now, how about those Takeshi Kovacs stories?