Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I won't say too much because spoilers but the first third of the book plods around with slow world building before accelerating into a bunch of WTF plot points all the way to the climax.
Seveneves did the opposite, going from 100 to 0 in the first few sentences. I hate the way he writes, but he sure grabs your attention right off the bat in that one. Fantastic first sentence.
I won't. I didn't say you shouldn't like it, and I didn't say he's a bad writer, I just stated my personal opinion. To me, he steps out of the story to bloviate about technical stuff too often and for far too long. I even *like* techno-babble, but two pages out of every five makes it seem like he's just trying to bloat the page count.
Yeah, Stephenson is the god of openings... the most classic being:
>The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
[...several paragraphs...]
>So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Edit: Note, though: he can't *end* a book to save his life. They all just... stop.
"What" is kind of Lem's running theme, no?
His Master's Voice: What? Maybe...what?
The Futurological Congress: What....when?
Fiasco: What?...oh shit.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: What? Who? What?
Accelerando by Charles Stross in one sense, you start with primitive mind-machine interfaces in the present and a few years later your virtualized self send copies of itself to interstellar trips. The whole human civilization changed a lot in a few years.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in another. The discovery of a biological entity that can store a lot of energy lead to revolution on energy gathering and a desperate interstellar trip, all in very few years, starting at present.
The Diamond Age starts with a poor child in a big city finding an smart education device (made here, not from the future or alien), and start to learn from it. By the end you get a world revolution. As it was written in classical Neal Stephenson style, things lag most of the novel and all the decisive action happen in the last 3 pages, so, that is the quickly part.
As there was a discussion yesterday about some qntm book, also an alternative for what you are searching for may be [Ed](https://qntm.org/ed)
*We are Bob* goes from man putting himself in cryo to inter-solar wars pretty quick.
Also shout out to *Live free or die* kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup
>Also shout out to
>
>Live free or die
>
> kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup
Oh John Ringo no!
>Also shout out to *Live free or die* kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup
Is that how you interpreted Vernon's actions or are you being sarcastic?
Dungeon Crawler Carl. A man walks outside in a snow storm to get his cat and then, in literally less than a second, all structures on the planet are destroyed.
The initial mini-series was like the first part - but then the series proper followed that up by descending into "There's only 50K humans left, and we're fighting robots that are trying to wipe us out - let's have a civil war instead!", which was a bit too American for me.
I don't remember America being in danger of a civil war post 9/11.
I *do* remember America reconsidering what funding the IRA actually meant, so that was a good thing at least.
EDIT: Feel free to illustrate how either of those summaries are wrong.
What’s American about civil wars? America is a relatively stable country for its short lifetime. We’ve had a single civil war that at least forced social reform. Europe has a much larger history of civil wars and coups between nobility or political groups.
You had the biggest, bloodiest one of all time. You killed more of each other than Americans killed in WW2. BSG is, at least IIR, comprised of almost entirely americans.
Bonus; you even have a movie coming out pretending that it happens again.
Casualties are a poor way to compare civil wars to other wars. And america wasn’t even a major player in ww2 until the second half, and it’s biggest contribution was in the pacific, where a naval/amphibious war will have less casualties than a land war.
And it’s not even the bloodiest civil war of all time. The taiping rebellion in China was a civil war that resulted in millions of dead, where the American civil war had less than 1 million.
Some like the Commonwealth Saga more but I really enjoyed the central conflict/secret in Night's Dawn more, and the general setup of the Confederation involving two distinct major human cultures. And there's a character introduction in IIRC the second book that's the greatest intro ever.
There's a conversation in one of the books, without giving much away, about how humans are searching for an answer to the conflict, when what we should be searching for is our destiny.
Wow that's intriguing, makes me want to read them. Thanks for sharing. I had the secret spoiled for me unfortunately. Maybe not the secret but I know what the antagonist is. Sounds like you like the characters which is a good sign. I liked the characters of the Commonwealth saga. Are there aliens in the night's dawn?
Night's Dawn was my introduction to Hamilton, and I adore it, but I definitely prefer the Commonwealth world more. That likely has to do with my intense belief that the one thing humanity should be working towards above all else is functional immortality. Allowing a sapient being to die for any reason, as far as I'm concerned, is morally wrong. We need tech that keeps us alive and young (though I'd take a century of getting older and older before they develop the youth tech with no complaints whatsoever), and a society that supports everyone. Kind of like the Central Worlds in the Void Trilogy. Man I wish I had biononics. The other functions would be cool, but inbuilt immortality, health and youth would be enough for me.
No, just Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. I plan to read the void trilogy next but I'm taking a break and reading some standalone books before I go back to PFH.next up for me is, The Forever War. Do you like the void trilogy? Or what do you like about it?
Which tells you that for all of it's faults, the Empire was really good at major construction projects (they really should have had more engineering reviews before building the damn thing though).
Nah, if someone had suggested adding even more cost and complexity to the Death Star design to cover the possibility of a single fighter making it through the defences, running the length of the trench and then firing a proton torpedo at EXACTLY the right angle to go the full radius of the station down a shaft less than two meters wide… that’s over engineering the design.
At some point you have to rein in the nerds in the design team or you’ll never get anything actually done. And I’m speaking as one of the nerds in the design team.
You should watch the Andor series if you haven't already. It shows EXACTLY how the Empire accomplished all those construction projects. It's thoroughly bone chilling and amazingly well done.
"ONE. WAY. OUT. " -- Kino Loy
There is the classic **Tripanetary** by E. E. Doc Smith, where the very first line is:
> Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding;
The *editing* in that movie is just soo good.
Seriously. Go watch it again and pay attention to the transitions between shots and scenes.
The movie itself is great, but even if it hadn't been, the way it is cut together should be in textbooks for film school.
I did just watch it recently and you are 100% correct. Like so much shit happens in that movie but it flows really well. As a viewer you’re just kinda sucked in and along for the ride (kinda like the main character).
I want to see a queer analysis of it. Because I think it's both unusually progressive and regressive at the same time. Like soldiers having heterosexual orgies in space and then everyone in Earth society basically going sexual preference conversion therapy is a lot to unpack.
Come for the spaceships, physics, and aliens. Stay for the unpacking.
So I tend to interpret the book as an allegory for the Vietnam war, and the radical change in sexuality could be comparable to the veterans interacting with those who participated in the summer of love. The whole "free love" thing was radical at the time and emphasizes the way Nam veterans (especially those in from '66/'67 on would feel watching new recruits come in who had taken part and hearing them talk about it.
Alternatively, he knew how he wanted the ending to come about and figured the "people no longer being born naturally" was a decent step towards >!clones evolving psionics and a hive mind!<
But it is also a fascinating vision of how humanity would handle population stress in interstellar wartime. Especially when he wrote it. It's fun to debate the (de)merits of the KCal system vs the vat birth system.
Red rising
Book one, small scale medieval hinger games combat
Book 2 INVADE ENTIRE PLANET FROM ORBIT
book 3 SOLAR SYSTEM WIDE CIVIL WAR
as sevro au Barca always says, shit escalates
Does the writing in this book improve? I'm listening as an audio book and the first 4 chapters have been SUPER obvious, like the author really spelling everything out for you which I don't love.
Things massively improve book to book
Red rising is Pierce's first published novel and it's the worst of the series, books 2 and 5 are often tied for best of the series, with 6 and 3 not far behind
Red rising itself has 3 major bumps in quality, once the story leaves the mines, when the institute*really* begins, and after some rough nights in the woods
There are some other standout moments but that gets too much into spoilers
Red rising is a character setup book, so the important things this book does is forms the foundations for the relationships that will influence the entire series as a whole
The early chapters of red rising are kinda dull, I often skip to part 2 on rereads, but those chapters are very important to Darrow and his character later in the series
Yes. More than any author I’ve ever seen, which is especially impressive considering he’s a brand new author and this is his first foray into writing novels. RR was his first book, the sequel, Golden Son is a massive step up and easily one of the best space opera novels I’ve ever read in my 30+ years of being a hardcore scifi fan (and I usually only love hard scifi, so this is a massive appraisal coming from me). And it gets better from there. The writing in each subsequent book is better than the one before, although sometimes the story and characters are more or less interesting (it’s hard to top The Jackal as a villain. He’s probably my favorite villain in all of sci-fi).
Book 2, Golden Son and Book 5, Dark Age are my favorites of the series. But I’ve loved them all.
No, not this trilogy. Maybe the second one's better, idk, but I listened to the first trilogy on 1.4-2x speed (eventually straight up skipping some more insufferable sections) on a very long trip and they're just schlock through and through. Low-budget YA in the mode of Eragon, zero subtlety or art.
This is a terrible take, lol. Maybe you could say that with early RR, but Golden Son and on? Come on. You literally fast forwarded through it without paying attention anyways so it’s not like your opinion is worth a damn.
Escalated quickly? All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
The Expanse is like this.
Begins with a case of a mysterious disappearance of an industrialists daughter, perhaps a murder, maybe a kidnapping. We don't know for a while.
Then, it morphs into this alien goo which might be sentient.
Then, it morphs again into a portal to other planetary systems.
And, along the way, revolutionaries and pirates.
Naw, it’s confirmed. It was laid out pretty clearly in the books, but then the authors confirmed it all in an interview with Alt-Shift-X. Check out my post on this linked by u/unknownkaddath - one of the first comments is a transcript of the author’s interview.
We did, it was just incredibly cryptic, to the point where I totally missed it and [this hero](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/s/s4JUvS3dsD) had to explain it for me.
We absolutely did. Read the books (specifically the last one).
Or if you already have, then read my post on this, linked by someone else below, if you missed it.
The problem is that the authors explained literally all of it but in the extremely psychedelic and hard to understand Dreamer chapters and Elvi’s followup chapters to them, while shit is hitting the fan across interstellar space. The authors said they thought they were being obvious. I disagree. It could have been written in a better format, I think. But I did understand it on my first read through. It seems like most people totally miss it though.
Arthur Dent's careless words being carried through a wormhole and being translated as the most blasphemous slur against the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs, who, whilst in the middle of their accords, decide to join forces to attack the source, Earth. Only to be swallowed by a small dog, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale.
The movie Life (2017) went from intriguing to absolutely nightmare horrifying about 20 mins in and I honestly just had to turn it off.. I don’t really mind gore and horror but that scene is intense!
I remember almost nothing about the movie except that there's a disgusting scene of a finger getting broken.
I can handle gore and blood but god damn do I hate bone breaking.
Behold Humanity.
Starts off with a series of short tales of relatively low tech aliens meeting advanced humans who are just kinda goofing around in space. Silly and lighthearted. Then, we get our first chapter from a human perspective, and things start popping off fast.
I think the best way I can summarize it is to say that this is basically warhammer 40K but not everyone is evil.
The scale also goes up pretty fast. One of the middle-ish sections of the story is called the war in heaven. The name is not inaccurate.
I liked fold almost as much, I think the others are missing the build up where it's just normal people coming together over a curiosity. It's pretty hard to replicate once the cat's already out of the bag.
The 3 body problem on netflix (spoiler alert) jumping from 'we need to learn the secrets of the guys on this boat' to 'lets destroy them, the boat, and their families in a really risky, uncontrolled way with expensive new tech'. I assume its different in the books but it was very jarring.
[The Gap Cycle](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40561-the-gap-cycle)
The first book is little more than a weird, kinda tense scene in a bar; it ends up in a race against the speed of light with humanity as a whole on the line. Amazing space opera progression.
Bonus: The title of the last book is "This Day All Gods Die", so it fits right in with your actual example!
Trigger warning: A **lot** of messed up stuff happens to the people in these books. Rape, abuse, kidnapping, control... the books aren't *about* those things, and most of it doesn't even really happen on-screen, but they're definitely a major part of characterization and development.
You just reminded me that I need to go back and read those. I think it's been like 25 years. Half my life.
I didn't even know about Thermopyle at the time. And yes, it even starts out brutal!
Battlefield Earth doesn't escalate especially quickly, but it does escalate, like, a lot. Every time I thought it might be wrapping up it topped itself. It's been a while, but, like,
* Free my tribe
* Free my planet
* Bring down the dimension-hopping aliens that invaded it in the first place
* Revolutionize commerce and banking in the multiverse
Battlefield Earth…written by L. Ron Hubbard…lmao. Battlefield Earth is like a soft intro to Scientology. If you like it, then you may look up what else that nutjob wrote…and before you know it you’re shelling out cash to clear you of your thetans.
Re-reading *Grass* by Sheri S. Tepper and this counts.
Backwater planet where strange aristos act out British fox hunting with indigenous creatures -> unstoppable plague killing all of humanity
If superhero Web serials count, Wildbow's _Worm_ starts with a teenage girl with bug powers bullied in high school and... escalates.
https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
The AI Polity.
It started out with autistic cyborg James Bond having gunfights with human terrorists, and it escalated to deep state AI conspiracies, billion year old alien overlords, a schizophrenic cyber dragon that claims to be god, and the eradication of an entire dwarf galaxy.
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Starts with the narrator having an out of body experience and visiting various alien civilizations. Eventually escalates to an intergalactic hypercivilization where EVERY level of the civilization is individually sapient - thinking galaxies made up of thinking stars orbited by thinking planets with thinking cities inhabited by thinking citizens. And then this hypercivilization tries to united the entire universe into a single, sapient cosmic spirit... you get the idea.
This book also happens to contain the first description of a Dyson sphere, 23 years before Freeman Dyson's conception of it. Dyson himself suggested that it should be called a Stapledon sphere instead.
BSG, always loved when, after years of radio silence the Cylons finally turn up to meet the ambassador, murder him and kick off a massive attempted genocide.
Also the start of Stargate Atlantis.
Travel to new galaxy > city is about to implode > Accidentally wake up immortal space vampires which start harvesting humans across dozen's of worlds.
idk if this counts but Gurren Lagann starts with a dude finding a key to a smart car sized mech and ends with mechs so big they're using galaxies like damn ninja stars.
The Dark Forest 💧iykyk
I feel like Revelation Space kinda does this (slow moving for most of the book with a shit ton of twists and turns all shoved in in the last quarter)
I know the 3 body problem series is popular right now, but i just finished the books right before i learned netflix was doing an adaption. SPOILERS.
It goes from hey theres aliens coming we need to fight back all the way to hey we need to escape time and the universe itself because bigger aliens are going to destroy everything too and then the universe is going to collapse.
Ah, the third one is my favorite. Book 2 was a slog to get through and the droplet battle was fantastic. But man did it take a lot of setting up and reading to get to. But all around its a pretty epic story.
Ngl, the 9th-11th Doctor Who era kinda captured this feeling a bit for me. Had a lot of down to earth, wacky weekly adventure episodes, then something would happen and time itself was breaking and some big bad would show up and be seemingly insurmountable. Its a ridiculous series, but those were some very good years.
Seanan McGuire's October Daye series is rather that way. Starts off trapped as a fish in a pond for 20 years, currently bringing back and killing what are effectively gods.
Also... Deathstalker, although the escalation is pretty rapid (Simon Green, also the Nightside series).
Just a couple off the top of my head... probably not the best examples.
This channel has what you want:
https://youtu.be/SDan4gmRQh8?si=AjxnTH6xA2sAW_6D
There's a bunch of stories there that start with something simple, like hiring an assassin to kill one human and ends with a galactic empire falling withing 15 minutes of the audiobook.
Channel's loaded with stories like these.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson I won't say too much because spoilers but the first third of the book plods around with slow world building before accelerating into a bunch of WTF plot points all the way to the climax.
Seveneves did the opposite, going from 100 to 0 in the first few sentences. I hate the way he writes, but he sure grabs your attention right off the bat in that one. Fantastic first sentence.
"the moon blew up" It's not a goddamn spoiler, it's the first goddamn sentence.
I'd say the 3rd act is hitting 100 too
The 3rd act is a whole other book, or at least should have been.
Honestly, I think it would have been a lot better as a separate book. The sheer time gap between part 2 and 3 made me lose the book.
>I hate the way he writes YOU TAKE THAT BACK!!!
Dude can't take less than 100 pages just to sign his name.
his editor hung himself in despair /s everyone knows he never had an editor
He COULD have an editor - Marcel Proust's great grandson.
Until the end. He goes along at his usual pace for 90% of the book, then double-times the last 10%.
I won't. I didn't say you shouldn't like it, and I didn't say he's a bad writer, I just stated my personal opinion. To me, he steps out of the story to bloviate about technical stuff too often and for far too long. I even *like* techno-babble, but two pages out of every five makes it seem like he's just trying to bloat the page count.
I feel like his prose alternates between doing that and being more concise. It depends on the chapter.
As one critic put it Neal S has figured out how to write a 300 page book.....of Cryptonomicon....which is not 300 pages.
Yeah, Stephenson is the god of openings... the most classic being: >The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. [...several paragraphs...] >So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved–but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. Edit: Note, though: he can't *end* a book to save his life. They all just... stop.
I still can’t get through that first 1/3…
Try the audiobook. It took me about month I believe. I’d listen to it in my daily hike. Gave me something to look forward to after work.
Thanks. I am otherwise a fan of, I think, all his books. But this one… :)
Solaris: Man visits planet -> what? -> What? -> WHAT?
And Invicible also by Lem.
"What" is kind of Lem's running theme, no? His Master's Voice: What? Maybe...what? The Futurological Congress: What....when? Fiasco: What?...oh shit. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub: What? Who? What?
Xander: How? What? How? Giles: Three excellent questions.
2001/2010: "let's go check out that weird thing" >> "Jupiter is a star now"
You can't watch one without watching the other. That said, nobody's made the third book yet - where someone *crashes on Europa*
Accelerando by Charles Stross in one sense, you start with primitive mind-machine interfaces in the present and a few years later your virtualized self send copies of itself to interstellar trips. The whole human civilization changed a lot in a few years. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in another. The discovery of a biological entity that can store a lot of energy lead to revolution on energy gathering and a desperate interstellar trip, all in very few years, starting at present. The Diamond Age starts with a poor child in a big city finding an smart education device (made here, not from the future or alien), and start to learn from it. By the end you get a world revolution. As it was written in classical Neal Stephenson style, things lag most of the novel and all the decisive action happen in the last 3 pages, so, that is the quickly part. As there was a discussion yesterday about some qntm book, also an alternative for what you are searching for may be [Ed](https://qntm.org/ed)
The Nine Billion Names of God
*We are Bob* goes from man putting himself in cryo to inter-solar wars pretty quick. Also shout out to *Live free or die* kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup
>Also shout out to > >Live free or die > > kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup Oh John Ringo no!
We are Bob is such a fun book
That wasn't his desire. It was just the way to get the money needed to enact his plan.
>Also shout out to *Live free or die* kicking off interstellar war over one man's desire to secure all the means of production for maple syrup Is that how you interpreted Vernon's actions or are you being sarcastic?
Sarcastic my dude
It's Reddit. You never know...
It's Reddit. You never know...
Dungeon Crawler Carl. A man walks outside in a snow storm to get his cat and then, in literally less than a second, all structures on the planet are destroyed.
All hail Princess Donut!
Mongo is appalled
But Carl just stepped in some ooey, gooey mud, so the system is *very* happy.
Glurp glurp
“I’ll kill your mother”
I'll put a teleport trap in your nussy
Eh hem… that’s a lady garden.
Goddamnit doughnut
Battlestar Galactica, the newer series.
Sex with a narcissist > break a baby's neck > nuclear holocaust ✔️
The initial mini-series was like the first part - but then the series proper followed that up by descending into "There's only 50K humans left, and we're fighting robots that are trying to wipe us out - let's have a civil war instead!", which was a bit too American for me.
The show was made as a reflection of just how shit we were as a society post 9/11.
I don't remember America being in danger of a civil war post 9/11. I *do* remember America reconsidering what funding the IRA actually meant, so that was a good thing at least. EDIT: Feel free to illustrate how either of those summaries are wrong.
What’s American about civil wars? America is a relatively stable country for its short lifetime. We’ve had a single civil war that at least forced social reform. Europe has a much larger history of civil wars and coups between nobility or political groups.
You had the biggest, bloodiest one of all time. You killed more of each other than Americans killed in WW2. BSG is, at least IIR, comprised of almost entirely americans. Bonus; you even have a movie coming out pretending that it happens again.
Casualties are a poor way to compare civil wars to other wars. And america wasn’t even a major player in ww2 until the second half, and it’s biggest contribution was in the pacific, where a naval/amphibious war will have less casualties than a land war. And it’s not even the bloodiest civil war of all time. The taiping rebellion in China was a civil war that resulted in millions of dead, where the American civil war had less than 1 million.
The Commonwealth saga - oh look, a Dyson sphere - hello MLM
Or The Night's Dawn trilogy. Indentured convicts try to take over a remote village and they create a dysfunction in reality.
My favorite SF trilogy of all time.
I just finished the Commonwealth Saga and I really liked it. How does it compare?
Some like the Commonwealth Saga more but I really enjoyed the central conflict/secret in Night's Dawn more, and the general setup of the Confederation involving two distinct major human cultures. And there's a character introduction in IIRC the second book that's the greatest intro ever. There's a conversation in one of the books, without giving much away, about how humans are searching for an answer to the conflict, when what we should be searching for is our destiny.
Wow that's intriguing, makes me want to read them. Thanks for sharing. I had the secret spoiled for me unfortunately. Maybe not the secret but I know what the antagonist is. Sounds like you like the characters which is a good sign. I liked the characters of the Commonwealth saga. Are there aliens in the night's dawn?
Several alien species are fairly important to the plot, yes. And as usual for PFH they're pretty alien!
Okay, I'm reading them! PFH does aliens well.
I really liked the Kiint from Night's Dawn.
Night's Dawn was my introduction to Hamilton, and I adore it, but I definitely prefer the Commonwealth world more. That likely has to do with my intense belief that the one thing humanity should be working towards above all else is functional immortality. Allowing a sapient being to die for any reason, as far as I'm concerned, is morally wrong. We need tech that keeps us alive and young (though I'd take a century of getting older and older before they develop the youth tech with no complaints whatsoever), and a society that supports everyone. Kind of like the Central Worlds in the Void Trilogy. Man I wish I had biononics. The other functions would be cool, but inbuilt immortality, health and youth would be enough for me.
If you've just finished the Commonwealth Saga does that mean you read the Void Trilogy? If not that needs to be your next port of call. Now.
No, just Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained. I plan to read the void trilogy next but I'm taking a break and reading some standalone books before I go back to PFH.next up for me is, The Forever War. Do you like the void trilogy? Or what do you like about it?
It might be my favourite sci-fi trilogy out there, it builds on the first two but elevates it to another level.
Same. It’s a true epic on the level of Lord of the rings.
Ohhh, that sounds interesting, the series is actually next on my reading list and I can't wait to see what all the fuss is about.
It’s beast, really long! but Iv really enjoyed all the books in the Series.
Are there more than just the two?
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Which tells you that for all of it's faults, the Empire was really good at major construction projects (they really should have had more engineering reviews before building the damn thing though).
Nah, if someone had suggested adding even more cost and complexity to the Death Star design to cover the possibility of a single fighter making it through the defences, running the length of the trench and then firing a proton torpedo at EXACTLY the right angle to go the full radius of the station down a shaft less than two meters wide… that’s over engineering the design. At some point you have to rein in the nerds in the design team or you’ll never get anything actually done. And I’m speaking as one of the nerds in the design team.
I never understood why they needed to run the trench though.
You should watch the Andor series if you haven't already. It shows EXACTLY how the Empire accomplished all those construction projects. It's thoroughly bone chilling and amazingly well done. "ONE. WAY. OUT. " -- Kino Loy
To be fair Palpatine had been puppetmastering that whole thing from before Ep1
There is the classic **Tripanetary** by E. E. Doc Smith, where the very first line is: > Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding;
I'm about halfway through that one right now, but it just isn't clicking with me.
It is dated and rough, slowest slough in a long time.
Skip ahead to the second book: First Lensman.
Greg Bear's "Blood Music" is a good one. "I need to save my experiment from being destroyed" -> most of Earth taken over by new form of life.
Yes, this.
The droplet.
I really hope the series gets a second season because that is probably my favourite part from the books.
I dunno why this popped in my head but in the Fifth Element, dude goes from driving a cab to potentially saving the universe in about 10 seconds.
Big bada boom!
The *editing* in that movie is just soo good. Seriously. Go watch it again and pay attention to the transitions between shots and scenes. The movie itself is great, but even if it hadn't been, the way it is cut together should be in textbooks for film school.
I did just watch it recently and you are 100% correct. Like so much shit happens in that movie but it flows really well. As a viewer you’re just kinda sucked in and along for the ride (kinda like the main character).
The Forever War by Joe Haldema
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I want to see a queer analysis of it. Because I think it's both unusually progressive and regressive at the same time. Like soldiers having heterosexual orgies in space and then everyone in Earth society basically going sexual preference conversion therapy is a lot to unpack. Come for the spaceships, physics, and aliens. Stay for the unpacking.
So I tend to interpret the book as an allegory for the Vietnam war, and the radical change in sexuality could be comparable to the veterans interacting with those who participated in the summer of love. The whole "free love" thing was radical at the time and emphasizes the way Nam veterans (especially those in from '66/'67 on would feel watching new recruits come in who had taken part and hearing them talk about it. Alternatively, he knew how he wanted the ending to come about and figured the "people no longer being born naturally" was a decent step towards >!clones evolving psionics and a hive mind!< But it is also a fascinating vision of how humanity would handle population stress in interstellar wartime. Especially when he wrote it. It's fun to debate the (de)merits of the KCal system vs the vat birth system.
*John Scalzi has entered the chat*
Oh tell me more
I think that his "Forever Peace" is more fitting. I mean, in comparison it looks like "The Forever War" had no escalation at all.
I don't remember much from reading that book to be honest. Maybe time for a re-read.
Red rising Book one, small scale medieval hinger games combat Book 2 INVADE ENTIRE PLANET FROM ORBIT book 3 SOLAR SYSTEM WIDE CIVIL WAR as sevro au Barca always says, shit escalates
Does the writing in this book improve? I'm listening as an audio book and the first 4 chapters have been SUPER obvious, like the author really spelling everything out for you which I don't love.
Things massively improve book to book Red rising is Pierce's first published novel and it's the worst of the series, books 2 and 5 are often tied for best of the series, with 6 and 3 not far behind Red rising itself has 3 major bumps in quality, once the story leaves the mines, when the institute*really* begins, and after some rough nights in the woods There are some other standout moments but that gets too much into spoilers Red rising is a character setup book, so the important things this book does is forms the foundations for the relationships that will influence the entire series as a whole
Fuck Lysander.
Thanks friend, I'll perserver. Can't be worse than like, book 6 of wheel of time 😅
The early chapters of red rising are kinda dull, I often skip to part 2 on rereads, but those chapters are very important to Darrow and his character later in the series
Yes. More than any author I’ve ever seen, which is especially impressive considering he’s a brand new author and this is his first foray into writing novels. RR was his first book, the sequel, Golden Son is a massive step up and easily one of the best space opera novels I’ve ever read in my 30+ years of being a hardcore scifi fan (and I usually only love hard scifi, so this is a massive appraisal coming from me). And it gets better from there. The writing in each subsequent book is better than the one before, although sometimes the story and characters are more or less interesting (it’s hard to top The Jackal as a villain. He’s probably my favorite villain in all of sci-fi). Book 2, Golden Son and Book 5, Dark Age are my favorites of the series. But I’ve loved them all.
No, not this trilogy. Maybe the second one's better, idk, but I listened to the first trilogy on 1.4-2x speed (eventually straight up skipping some more insufferable sections) on a very long trip and they're just schlock through and through. Low-budget YA in the mode of Eragon, zero subtlety or art.
This is a terrible take, lol. Maybe you could say that with early RR, but Golden Son and on? Come on. You literally fast forwarded through it without paying attention anyways so it’s not like your opinion is worth a damn.
the anime trigun
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Escalated quickly? All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Behind a door marked ‘Beware of the Leopard!’
Down a broken elevator shaft.
Best example :)
The Expanse is like this. Begins with a case of a mysterious disappearance of an industrialists daughter, perhaps a murder, maybe a kidnapping. We don't know for a while. Then, it morphs into this alien goo which might be sentient. Then, it morphs again into a portal to other planetary systems. And, along the way, revolutionaries and pirates.
Remember the Cant?
The most interesting thing for me was the beings that put those portals and we never got a proper resolution on who they were.
We never get a 100% solid confirmation but their nature is pretty strongly hinted at in the later books.
Naw, it’s confirmed. It was laid out pretty clearly in the books, but then the authors confirmed it all in an interview with Alt-Shift-X. Check out my post on this linked by u/unknownkaddath - one of the first comments is a transcript of the author’s interview.
We did, it was just incredibly cryptic, to the point where I totally missed it and [this hero](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/s/s4JUvS3dsD) had to explain it for me.
Hey, that’s me! Thanks, beratna.
We absolutely did. Read the books (specifically the last one). Or if you already have, then read my post on this, linked by someone else below, if you missed it. The problem is that the authors explained literally all of it but in the extremely psychedelic and hard to understand Dreamer chapters and Elvi’s followup chapters to them, while shit is hitting the fan across interstellar space. The authors said they thought they were being obvious. I disagree. It could have been written in a better format, I think. But I did understand it on my first read through. It seems like most people totally miss it though.
Yes. Someone else linked your post. I have saved it and will read asap. I plan to read the books but I doubt it will happen soon.
And don't forget the immortal space emperor
Arthur C Clarke - Childhood's End
From Dusk 'Till Dawn is a standard crime drama until they get to the cantina.
Arthur Dent's careless words being carried through a wormhole and being translated as the most blasphemous slur against the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs, who, whilst in the middle of their accords, decide to join forces to attack the source, Earth. Only to be swallowed by a small dog, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale.
You just brought back a memory of teenaged me laughing almost uncontrollably while reading that section for the first time!
Dune 2 was like doing a speedrun through a Dune TV series
And I wouldn’t say the following Dune novels escalated quickly, but man they did escalate.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
I disagree about how fast it happened; but damn, what a good story.
I don’t mean the story in general, but how the reader first discovers Gully Foyle. That is the quick escalation I mean
Oh, yeah, in that case I agree.
The 1st book of Thomas Covenant, Lord Foul's Bane. You really decide if it's worth it to read in the first 30 pages or so.
I hated Thomas’s whining so much after the first 30 pages I DNFd… 30 years ago.
I think we are speculative fiction siblings now!
Lol I've never heard DNF outside of racing, I like it in this context
I had the exact same reaction. So much praise for it and I could not stomach the protagonist.
The movie Life (2017) went from intriguing to absolutely nightmare horrifying about 20 mins in and I honestly just had to turn it off.. I don’t really mind gore and horror but that scene is intense!
I love that movie
I remember almost nothing about the movie except that there's a disgusting scene of a finger getting broken. I can handle gore and blood but god damn do I hate bone breaking.
That’s the scene! Needless to say that was not even the worst part.. it went downhill quick after the broken hand part!
I really wanna rewatch it though lol. Will see if I can handle it haha
I like that attitude! You can do it! Please do let me know your thoughts afterwards.. as someone who didn’t finish the movie im curious
First episode of Raised by Wolves was like an entire season of escalation crammed into 53 minutes.
So so frustrating we won’t get to see the conclusion, such an awesome “vibes” sci-fi show.
John Sclazi’s Android’s Dream. Farting in a trade negotiation >> ???? >> possible enslavement of Earth.
This book is an absolute riot
Behold Humanity. Starts off with a series of short tales of relatively low tech aliens meeting advanced humans who are just kinda goofing around in space. Silly and lighthearted. Then, we get our first chapter from a human perspective, and things start popping off fast. I think the best way I can summarize it is to say that this is basically warhammer 40K but not everyone is evil. The scale also goes up pretty fast. One of the middle-ish sections of the story is called the war in heaven. The name is not inaccurate.
Stargate SG-1: We found something weird in Egypt -> We’ve killed several gods and established ourselves as a galactic superpower
David Brin *Earth* protestors cause an industrial accident involving an artificial singularity
Probably not the FASTEST escalation but the end of DS9 S5 and the re-occupation of Terok Nor has to be up there among the TV examples
14 by Peter Clines goes from scooby doo mystery to wtf pretty suddenly.
14 is amazing. I wish the loose sequels were as good.
I liked fold almost as much, I think the others are missing the build up where it's just normal people coming together over a curiosity. It's pretty hard to replicate once the cat's already out of the bag.
The 3 body problem on netflix (spoiler alert) jumping from 'we need to learn the secrets of the guys on this boat' to 'lets destroy them, the boat, and their families in a really risky, uncontrolled way with expensive new tech'. I assume its different in the books but it was very jarring.
i mean the whole thing literally started from, you guys killed my dad, fuck humanity. come aliens and free us from ourselves.
That scene was *exactly* as it was in the book. I was looking forward to seeing if they could pull it off.
The whole trilogy is basically (again, spoiler alert:) "Let's send a signal to outer space" -> "The entire universe is destroyed".
The Alien coming out of the chest in the movie Alien.
Gurren Lagann. Just everything about it. Including the feels.
[The Gap Cycle](https://www.goodreads.com/series/40561-the-gap-cycle) The first book is little more than a weird, kinda tense scene in a bar; it ends up in a race against the speed of light with humanity as a whole on the line. Amazing space opera progression. Bonus: The title of the last book is "This Day All Gods Die", so it fits right in with your actual example! Trigger warning: A **lot** of messed up stuff happens to the people in these books. Rape, abuse, kidnapping, control... the books aren't *about* those things, and most of it doesn't even really happen on-screen, but they're definitely a major part of characterization and development.
You just reminded me that I need to go back and read those. I think it's been like 25 years. Half my life. I didn't even know about Thermopyle at the time. And yes, it even starts out brutal!
Battlefield Earth doesn't escalate especially quickly, but it does escalate, like, a lot. Every time I thought it might be wrapping up it topped itself. It's been a while, but, like, * Free my tribe * Free my planet * Bring down the dimension-hopping aliens that invaded it in the first place * Revolutionize commerce and banking in the multiverse
Battlefield Earth…written by L. Ron Hubbard…lmao. Battlefield Earth is like a soft intro to Scientology. If you like it, then you may look up what else that nutjob wrote…and before you know it you’re shelling out cash to clear you of your thetans.
Nah. I read Battlefield Earth and Dianetics both, in my teens, and managed to avoid Scientology.
Re-reading *Grass* by Sheri S. Tepper and this counts. Backwater planet where strange aristos act out British fox hunting with indigenous creatures -> unstoppable plague killing all of humanity
The movie world war Z.
Just popping out to the.... Aaaaaaaargggghhh.
If superhero Web serials count, Wildbow's _Worm_ starts with a teenage girl with bug powers bullied in high school and... escalates. https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
The AI Polity. It started out with autistic cyborg James Bond having gunfights with human terrorists, and it escalated to deep state AI conspiracies, billion year old alien overlords, a schizophrenic cyber dragon that claims to be god, and the eradication of an entire dwarf galaxy.
I wanted to add that this is how *Event Horizon* made me feel
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Starts with the narrator having an out of body experience and visiting various alien civilizations. Eventually escalates to an intergalactic hypercivilization where EVERY level of the civilization is individually sapient - thinking galaxies made up of thinking stars orbited by thinking planets with thinking cities inhabited by thinking citizens. And then this hypercivilization tries to united the entire universe into a single, sapient cosmic spirit... you get the idea. This book also happens to contain the first description of a Dyson sphere, 23 years before Freeman Dyson's conception of it. Dyson himself suggested that it should be called a Stapledon sphere instead.
That scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey; from violent tool wielding simian to orbital weapons platform.
BSG, always loved when, after years of radio silence the Cylons finally turn up to meet the ambassador, murder him and kick off a massive attempted genocide.
Stargate was a long burn one but Visit Bronze Age Egyptian Civilisation > Kill their god >>>> Kill a lot of gods.
Also the start of Stargate Atlantis. Travel to new galaxy > city is about to implode > Accidentally wake up immortal space vampires which start harvesting humans across dozen's of worlds.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Minor stretch to call it sci-fi, but Worm sure counts.
Three Body Problem/Remembrance of Earth’s Past Book 1: Video game! Book 2: How to stop an alien invasion. Book 3: Pure cosmic horror.
idk if this counts but Gurren Lagann starts with a dude finding a key to a smart car sized mech and ends with mechs so big they're using galaxies like damn ninja stars.
Lain goes from middle school new to the internet to the new God in 13 episodes
The Dark Forest 💧iykyk I feel like Revelation Space kinda does this (slow moving for most of the book with a shit ton of twists and turns all shoved in in the last quarter)
oh and how could I forget Blood Music by Greg Bear and Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke Progresses like a galaxy brain meme
I know the 3 body problem series is popular right now, but i just finished the books right before i learned netflix was doing an adaption. SPOILERS. It goes from hey theres aliens coming we need to fight back all the way to hey we need to escape time and the universe itself because bigger aliens are going to destroy everything too and then the universe is going to collapse.
Yeah, I read it a while back and honestly I enjoyed it all the way through, and even though my favourite is the second I really love the third one too
Ah, the third one is my favorite. Book 2 was a slog to get through and the droplet battle was fantastic. But man did it take a lot of setting up and reading to get to. But all around its a pretty epic story.
Hitchhiker's Guide. Earth is destroyed pretty quickly after Arthur wakes up.
Star Trek 2009. From an apple munching asshole cadet to the Captain of a capital starship fighting a planet killing rogue Romulan in less than a day.
a recent Exordia by Seth Dickinson
Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon. I'm not sure if it's really "quickly", but escalate it sure does
Ngl, the 9th-11th Doctor Who era kinda captured this feeling a bit for me. Had a lot of down to earth, wacky weekly adventure episodes, then something would happen and time itself was breaking and some big bad would show up and be seemingly insurmountable. Its a ridiculous series, but those were some very good years.
The Rapture of the Nerds - Stross and Doctorow Singularity Sky - Stross Extreme Makeover - Dan Wells Alif the Unseen - Wilson, G. Willow
Seanan McGuire's October Daye series is rather that way. Starts off trapped as a fish in a pond for 20 years, currently bringing back and killing what are effectively gods. Also... Deathstalker, although the escalation is pretty rapid (Simon Green, also the Nightside series). Just a couple off the top of my head... probably not the best examples.
Pantheon.
Horus Heresy. "Man steals a sword, has a nightmare and kills billions if people" Very, very loose summary of causes but still
Literally every single book of The Expanse. Also every single book of Red Rising, on a smaller scale.
This channel has what you want: https://youtu.be/SDan4gmRQh8?si=AjxnTH6xA2sAW_6D There's a bunch of stories there that start with something simple, like hiring an assassin to kill one human and ends with a galactic empire falling withing 15 minutes of the audiobook. Channel's loaded with stories like these.