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Violanthe
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ecgordon
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Posted: Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:58 pm |
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In fantasy, most anything that appears to be a Tolkien clone. Yet another quest for a magic talisman, sword, or whatever.
In science fiction, anything that appears to be nothing but military/future war based, although if it has other elements I could be persuaded.
I don't have a list of authors I refuse to read, although there are quite a few that seem to produce nothing but one or the other mentioned above. That doesn't mean I think they are bad authors, just that their stuff doesn't interest me. |
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Violanthe
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ecgordon
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Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 8:25 pm |
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| Violanthe wrote: | | How do you assess a book to determine whether it meets such criteria? Reviews? Cover? Synopsis? Friends' recommendations? |
All of the above. |
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Violanthe
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ecgordon
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Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2010 9:03 pm |
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| In the past I subscribed to quite a few magazines, Analog, Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, along with Galaxy and Cosmos before they folded. All had very good book reviews. These days it's mostly online, at Locus, SFSite.com or SFReader.com. SciFi.com used to have some good book reviewers (John Clute, Paul di Fillipo, Michael Cassutt, etc) but they have eliminated those. |
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Violanthe
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ecgordon
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Posted: Tue Mar 02, 2010 12:43 pm |
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Not any particular magazine in general, since reviewers come and go quite frequently at most periodicals.
The most consistently reliable and readable reviewer for me was the late Algis Budrys, who had the review column for F&SF for more than ten years, and he was with Galaxy before that, and the Chicago Sun-Times concurrent with his F&SF stint.
I like John Clute for his passionate defense of the more literary works in the genre, however he sometimes seems to want his reviews to be more of a showcase for his vocabulary skills than a dissection of the book in question. His reviews are now free-lanced to quite a few online and print publications, including The Guardian in the UK and strangehorizons.com.
Paul Di Filippo is also a reliable source. He has infrequent reviews at barnesandnoble.com and probably other places too.
One other I didn't mention before is Jeff VanderMeer, who submits reviews to the LA Times as well as amazon.com.
It's basically the same as with movie reviewers. It shouldn't take you too long to find someone who has the same general interests in books. Once you sample a few of their suggestions and you like them you will be more likely to trust their judgment in the future. |
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Violanthe
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