Hacker News Reader

Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

The one that caught me off guard was Old Man's War by John Scalzi as best series.

> The Hugo Award for Best Series is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award is available for series of science fiction or fantasy stories consisting of at least 3 published works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. A losing finalist becomes eligible again with the publication of at least two new works totaling at least 240,000 words.

And now, checking on it... The Shattering Peace was released in September of 2025.

I guess I've got another item for my reading list (currently going through the classics of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser... I wonder if that will ever be eligible for a retro Hugo Award for series).

View on HN

Color me surprised. The first book was the only one I got through. Scalzi's characterizations in that one are singular, in that all of his characters think and talk like exactly the same snark-spewing geeky dude. Even the very few women.

I should look into the sequel, I'd be happy for him if he stretched himself after the first one.

The first one was very much written in an homage to Starship Troopers and it was an early work of his. His very first one was Agent to the Stars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_to_the_Stars#Publication... - available online at https://scalzi.com/agent/ ) which was a book that he didn't want to write in that he wanted to make sure he could write as a career before writing the book he'd been thinking about for a long time... it's ok, maybe better than ok, but not great. He didn't want to find out that he didn't have the stuff to be a professional writer with the book that he really wanted to write.

That book that he really wanted to write was Old Man's War. I would put it as a good one, but not a great one. A young man inspired by Heinlein and Haldeman writing military science fiction as his first real book.

His later books get better as he became a more mature writer writing new ideas rather than the story he had in the back of his mind for the past decade. The Ghost Brigades (I believe) is better than the previous (it deals with the special forces). The Human Division and The End of All Things were written as serialized chapters that kind of stand on their own and I believe that format worked quite well with him.

I will note that... he likes snark. I don't recall much in his later Old Man's War books... I think he got it out in The Interdependency (a fun series but you have to be ok with snark and casual vulgarity - the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone) who is able to read and handle the snark and casual vulgarity quite well). I will recommend it if one is ok with a very snarky character - it's a political intrigue series.

  ..the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone)

Include me on that list. Man has no range, and a terrible falsetto he uses for women. He managed to get short-listed for the geeky novels I usually enjoy, and for a time, it seemed like I had a 1/3 chance of getting a Wheaton narration.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Collapsing-Empire-Audiobook/B...

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Consuming-Fire-Audiobook/B07H...

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Emperox-Audiobook/B084RP...

While I recognize it in other of his audio books... there are a few examples of women in the previews. I don't recall him using a falsetto in those books at all.

No, he doesn't have a lot of range... but I don't feel that's necessarily a show stopper for audible books in that I've more than occasionally experienced a reader who did have a lot of range... that sometimes went past the range of the speaker. He reads like an actor where everything it goes from a stage whisper to a slightly increased volume with a drop in pitch... and that often works (for me) compared to readers who its telling Alexa "pause, louder, back 1 minute" to get things that are read in a more hushed whisper.

I'm surprised you're willing to look into the sequel. After reading Old Man's War I've been unwilling to read any more of John Scalzi's work in the decade+ since then. It read like a teenage boy's wish-fulfillment fantasy, and since I've never been a part of that demographic, it was extremely frustrating to get through that book. With my youthful energy at the time, I slogged through to the end of the book somehow.

Have you ever read "Travel by Wire!"? It was the first story that Arthur C. Clarke published. It's... youthful in its writing.

Or how about Pebble in the Sky?

> Boucher and McComas were disappointed by the novel, saying that despite Asimov's good ideas, "his heavy treatment and routine plot are disappointing.

Try to find a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ("When Stephenson's Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.")

Or Sundiver being a much weaker book than the rest of the Uplift series.

Or A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card (which was even worse when I reread it as an adult).

Old Man's War was Scalzi's first "real" story... one that he had in the back of his mind to write in his college years.

He has matured as a writer since then.

Where do you find reasonably priced copies of those Fritz Lieber works? My library only has stuff that fits into short story collections and omnibuses. I fondly remember reading a couple of these obtained from Half Price Books way back when and never getting to the end of series due to demise of local used book stores.

Old books... are a "find a copy in used book stores." They're fairly out of print now. The problem being "reasonably priced". If you're driving through the midwest, divert to Forsyth, IL and stop at the Old Book Barn.

I've also converted a lot of my book archive to ebooks. Sometimes I've been disappointed that the old books aren't ebook... but Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are all on Kindle and for better or worse... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C23YVND?binding=kindle_edition

Otherwise, it's https://www.abebooks.com/author/b000apw3ua/fritz-leiber?ref_... because good used book stores with a appreciable science fiction collection are few and far between. I bought a lot of books at Book Buyers on Castro in Mountain View back in the day. There are some that are in the lower price bands.

Also, his works prior to 1978 are starting to fall out of copyright. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/25421 - for example, The Green Millennium was published in 1954 and fell into the 28+28 and so that became public domain in 2010. The first six of the "Swords" series were published between 1970 and 1977... and should be entering public domain... this year?

Holy crap, I haven't thought of Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser in well north of 50 years... thanks for the nostalgiagasm.

On YouTube, I stumbled across the channel "Daddy rolled a 1" which does long form (often an hour long and sometimes closing in on two hours long) deep dives into the early D&D "why was it done that way?"

I forget which one it was that reminded me first of it... Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was brought up recently in "Was Early D&D Really as Dark as We Remember?" pointing out that while the world was grim, people in Lankhmar were often enjoying life and it wasn't and the grimdark of some modern fantasy.

From the intro to the Audible version of The Swords of Lankhmar (and the text version of Return to Lankhmar)

https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/24/art-of-the-genre-lookin...

While it doesn't have the full essay in there, it continues with that Lankmar is a place you can return to. (I think https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Swords-of-Lankhmar-Audiobook/... will link into that essay with the preview in the opening credits).

The Audible version is my evening wind down listening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com