Naraya
Arcane
Do you have English version in mind? I'm asking since Polish audiobook is a masterpiece.
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The Invincible - first-person retro future sci-fi thriller based on Stanislaw Lem
- Thread starter toro
- Start date
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Yesum.
Nifft Batuff
Prophet
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2018
- Messages
- 3,556
Demo out.
Beowulf
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2015
- Messages
- 2,023
So I gave the demo a try.
No surprise here, it's a rather linear walking sim reframing the book's storyline, so we can experience roughly similar events (from what it looks so far).
It has all the staples of the genre, like
- slow walking speed (you can sprint for 2 seconds before losing your breath)
- objects are intractable only after you pass a certain narrative treshold,
- inablity to go back through some level checkpoints, etc.
It looks nice and runs well, but it desperately needs a FOV slider.
The demo ends when you discover one of the lost crewmates, but, surprisingly, there are two of them, that you can find, so you can reload it and walk a little more around to find the second one.
The designers decided to hold the players hand as well.
I think that it will be a short, and very on-the-rails walking sim, with nice visuals and a decent storyline.
I might buy it, once it finds its way to the bargain bin eventually.
Is Pirxard the best they could come up with as a fanservice? Really?
No surprise here, it's a rather linear walking sim reframing the book's storyline, so we can experience roughly similar events (from what it looks so far).
It has all the staples of the genre, like
- slow walking speed (you can sprint for 2 seconds before losing your breath)
- objects are intractable only after you pass a certain narrative treshold,
- inablity to go back through some level checkpoints, etc.
It looks nice and runs well, but it desperately needs a FOV slider.
The demo ends when you discover one of the lost crewmates, but, surprisingly, there are two of them, that you can find, so you can reload it and walk a little more around to find the second one.
The designers decided to hold the players hand as well.
I think that it will be a short, and very on-the-rails walking sim, with nice visuals and a decent storyline.
I might buy it, once it finds its way to the bargain bin eventually.
Is Pirxard the best they could come up with as a fanservice? Really?
Last edited:
into the trash it goes
i kid, it was always in the trash
Eh, so it's a re-telling of the story for people who don't want to read... I'm actually kind of afraid to play it when it's out; it would take away from the mystery of the story. No CGI can match your imagination.
Like that terrible, horrible thing the Americans did to Solaris.
Like that terrible, horrible thing the Americans did to Solaris.
luj1
You're all shills
Of course it had to be a cinematic (decline) walking sim (decline) where you play as a woman (decline)
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
I lasted 10- maybe 15 minutes with that George Clooney version. Ironically, he directed a rather bad SF film a couple of years ago or so starring himself where he plays the last man in the solar system (you could see that twist ending a'comin from a mile away). Even that I was able to get through to the end; but of course, I find almost any movie where humanity decimates itself off the face of the universe watchable, so...
Most sci-fi movies are insufferable low-brow garbage... Nothing to do with actual sci-fi literature.
LarryTyphoid
Scholar
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2021
- Messages
- 2,233
What, sci-fi literature isn't also low-brow? I haven't read any. I figured it wasn't much different from the movies.
You're joking, right?
LarryTyphoid
Scholar
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2021
- Messages
- 2,233
Nope. No experience with the genre at all, but...
...it doesn't look particularly high-brow to me. Got any recommendations?
Well yeah, there's lots of pulpy sci-fi, no doubt. In case you're not trolling, these are some of my absolute favourites:
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness
Philip K. Dick — Ubik
Philip K. Dick — The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Alfred Bester — The Stars My Destination
Stanisław Lem — The Invincible
Stanisław Lem — Solaris
Frank Herbert — Dune
Clifford D. Simak — The City
Orson Scott Card — Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card — Speaker of the Dead
Roger Zelazny — The Lord of Light
J. G. Ballards — The Drowned World
Dan Simmons — Hyperion
William Gibson — Neuromancer
Arthur C. Clarke — Childhood's End
Isaac Asimov — The Naked Sun
John Wyndham — The Day of the Triffids
Greg Bear — Blood Music
Iain M. Banks — Consider Phlebas
That should be enough.
Otherwise, you can't go wrong by going through the whole SF Masterworks series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
Btw, start with Stanisław Lem — The Invincible. It's short, tightly paced, and if you don't fall in love with it, you're simply not compatible with good sci-fi. It's the best of the best. I couldn't put it down when I read it as a kid.
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Haha, first cover is from a Harlan Ellison story written in the 1950s during his pulp output, though he'd sometimes attempt more ambitious short work in that period that nevertheless tended to be more memorable and transgressive than his teenage buddy Bob Silverberg was producing at the time. Some of those stories were quite violent and shocking to my teenage self, like one of his sociological tales that starts off with a unwed mother nonchalantly dumping her newborn in the trashcan then walking off to start the story proper.Nope. No experience with the genre at all, but...
...it doesn't look particularly high-brow to me. Got any recommendations?
Jack Of Owls
Arcane
Robert Sheckley's short story collections from the 1950s like Untouched by Human Hands were pretty out there. Some of my fondest memories reading SF as a late teen. Even Philip K. Dick seemed to be "borrowing" ideas from some of his works.
potatojohn
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2012
- Messages
- 2,646
Try short stories first before getting into books.
I really recommend this collection
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Greg-Egan-S-F-MASTERWORKS/dp/1473232295/
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2015
- Messages
- 13,011
It's more difficult to create a comprehensive list of SF suggestions than for fantasy literature, since the latter is dominated more by novels, with notable short stories generally consisting of a series about one character, while the former must include many disparate stories and a smaller portion of novels. Here's an attempt:
- Jules Verne- 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, etc.
- H.G. Wells- The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds
- E.M. Forster- “The Machine Stops”
- Karel Čapek- R.U.R.
- Yevgeny Zamyatin- We
- Aldous Huxley- Brave New World
- Olaf Stapledon- First and Last Men, The Star Maker
- Jorge Luis Borges- “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius”, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, “The Lottery at Babylon”, “The Library of Babel”
- H.P. Lovecraft- “The Colour out of Space”, “The Temple”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “Cool Air”, “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Shadow out of Time”
- Stephen Vincent Benet- “By the Waters of Babylon”
- Ayn Rand- “Anthem”
- L. Sprague de Camp- Lest Darkness Fall
- John Campbell- “Who Goes There?”
- Robert Heinlein- “Universe”, “All You Zombies”
- A.E. van Vogt- “Black Destroyer”
- Isaac Asimov- “Nightfall”, Foundation, Foundation & Empire
- George Orwell- 1984
- Fredric Brown- “Arena”
- Ray Bradbury- The Martian Chronicles, “All Summer in a Day”, “There Will Come Soft Rains”
- C.M. Kornbluth- “The Marching Morons”, “That Share of Glory”
- Fritz Leiber- “The Big Time”, “No Great Magic”
- Jack Vance- “The Moon Moth”, “The Dragon Masters”, “The Last Castle”
- Poul Anderson- “Flight to Forever”, “Call Me Joe”, “The Queen of Air and Darkness”, “Uncleftish Beholding”, “The Saturn Game”
- James Blish- “Surface Tension”
- Damon Knight- “The Handler”
- Arthur C. Clarke- “The Nine Billion Names of God”
- Jerome Bixby- “It’s a Good Life”
- Stanislaw Lem- Cyberiad stories (The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines), Pirx the Pilot stories (Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot), Ijon Tichy stories (The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a Space Traveler, and Mortal Engines), “The Mask” (Mortal Engines), “Non Serviam” (A Perfect Vacuum), Solaris, His Master’s Voice, The Futurological Congress, Fiasco
- Daniel Keyes- “Flowers for Algernon”
- Cordwainer Smith- “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”
- Philip K. Dick- The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”
- Harlan Ellison- ““Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman”, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, “A Boy and His Dog”, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, “Shatterday”, “Strange Wine”, “Jeffty Is Five”, “Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage”
- Frank Herbert- Dune
- Roger Zelazny- Lord of Light, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes”, “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth”, “For a Breath I Tarry”, “Divine Madness”, “The Man Who Loved the Faoli”, “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai”
- David Bunch- “Incident in Moderan”
- Strugatsky brothers- Roadside Picnic, The Doomed City
- Michael Moorcock- The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy
- Gene Wolfe- Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun
- James Patrick Kelly- “Think Like a Dinosaur”
- Ted Chiang- “The Tower of Babylon”, “Story of Your Life”, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, “Exhalation”, “The Great Silence”
toughasnails
Guest
Rincewind
Care to elaborate on the Solaris remake? Now I saw it only once way way back, before I even saw the Tarkovsky one, and I recall next to nothing from it. But I did see some folks claiming how it is alright as a remake.
The 70s one is my least favorite Tarkovsky film to WATCH due to visually lacking much of his usual magic, what with most of it being set in few drab or disheveled rooms and coridors on the station. But it is one of a kind movie for sure.
Care to elaborate on the Solaris remake? Now I saw it only once way way back, before I even saw the Tarkovsky one, and I recall next to nothing from it. But I did see some folks claiming how it is alright as a remake.
The 70s one is my least favorite Tarkovsky film to WATCH due to visually lacking much of his usual magic, what with most of it being set in few drab or disheveled rooms and coridors on the station. But it is one of a kind movie for sure.
Yes. It's shit. Read the novel, then re-watch the American movie, and you'll see why.
So many good books, so little time... I admit, I've only read about 10% of the titles from this list (but ~50% are already on my TODO).
Clifford D. Simak — The City is also recommended; it's really a collection of related short stories.Try short stories first before getting into books.
I really recommend this collection
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Greg-Egan-S-F-MASTERWORKS/dp/1473232295/
Or you could start with a Philip K. Dick short story collection:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_of_Philip_K._Dick
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