Oh yeah, there’s also a new series by the two writers of The Expanse series, if anyone is interested in more sci-fi (but also hoping to start with a more clean slate).
I just finished the first book, I liked it!
Yeah, meanwhile, I just got the first book of The Expanse and the newest novel in their other series (that is, The Mercy of Gods).
Haven’t started either… yet.
You’re in for a treat. :)
I think I am. It’ll be good to read something on par with A Song of Ice and Fire again.
Far as I can tell, Alastair Reynolds is still writing books into the 2020s.
I might want to check out his recent work or whatever else is coming up from him.
Yeah, he’s pretty prolific. I find he’s a bit of a hit and miss, but his good stuff is really good.
Also:
While Revelation Space’s influence on Mass Effect is fairly obvious, I’m not accusing BioWare of plagiarism–like all stories, Mass Effect is a pastiche of a lot of things that came before. It’s got as much Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Starship Troopers in its DNA as it does Revelation Space, and Mass Effect is not truly hard sci-fi the way that Revelation Space is. BioWare may have borrowed some concepts from Revelation Space, but it took them all in very different directions. And none of those other directions, in this writer’s humble opinion, can hold a candle to Reynolds’s vision.
Frankly, that sounds just like BioWare.
BioWare supposedly based (or was “inspired” by) the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George Martin for their fantasy video game series Dragon Age (note that Game of Thrones adapts A Song of Ice and Fire and I do recommend the books over the show). But you can tell by the Dragon Age series that it… kinda isn’t that inspired by it. I feel like BioWare does this a lot where they sort-of pay homage or mention these works by other series, but don’t really seem to understand it. Hell, Mass Effect is supposed to be like “eighties sci-fi” but it doesn’t really strike me as anything really like that.
I really liked the first Mass Effect, and I think it had one of the best sci-fi stories I’ve seen in a game. The reapers were these godlike beings that were an existential threat to the whole galaxy. Everybody came together to take the one reaper out, and then they destroy the relay network so more can’t come on. To me that felt like a good story with a clean ending. The rest of the series just became increasingly absurd in my opinion.
Yeah, the reapers seemed to become less of a threat as time wore on.
Yup, in the first game a single reaper was a threat that everybody had to come together to defeat, and then they just throw them at you like regular enemies. I feel like they didn’t really plan out the story past the first game, but since it got popular they decided to cash in on that.
Yeah, I only watched others play the games, but they had to use a deus ex machina at the end to save everyone, in I guess what was an acknowledgement of the reapers being super powerful, it seems.
The ending really didn’t make too much sense to me. I really felt the series just kept getting worse with every game.
It’s a great book series. Especially the last book. What a buildup
Oh yeah, I really enjoyed it overall. I also really liked the the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies spin off series.
