My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine.

I'm into SF and Fantasy. In the past, I would read the reviews featured in Locus magazine by the various reviewers. Nowadays, I occasionally read Locus but also reviews from other places like tor<dot>com, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Interzone magazine.

> My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine.

I wish there were a website where I could put in all of my favorite video games, books, movies, anime, etc. And it would recommend me things based on what people with similar tastes liked. Then, I could try out the recommendation and then either like or dislike it.

I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

That's FilmAffinity, for movies. It's pretty popular in the Spanish speaking world.

You vote movies, it calculates what it calls your "soulmates" (people who voted similarly) and then you get recommendations Of movies based on what those people loved, which you can filter by genre, era, etc. You can recalculate your soulmates anytime, and there are some options to tweak the algorithm.

You can also organise movies into lists (kinda like music playlists) and those are public, so if my preferences match user X and they happen to have a list titled "movies I enjoyed this past year" I can just check that.

That's essentially what https://www.senscritique.com/ does in the french speaking world. You rate movies, books, comics, series, music, then it will suggest "éclaireurs" (scouts/recon) to follow, finally you will be advised to see/read/listen what they love and you do not know.

>I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

But I don't want recommendations from people like me. I want recommendations from people with good taste.

This used to be what Last.fm did before they turned into a MySpace-like mess. Reviews are great but in a world of access to a monumental volume of content, a way to discover obscure things is still difficult to find, and apparently, to monetize. When Netflix started streaming, they tried the long tail approach, but soon changed to only licensing a few things and then serving them up in endless configurations, which must be far more business-friendly for them.

There's https://tastedive.com/ which does this pretty well?

https://www.anime-planet.com/ does recommendations like that on a per-show basis (if you liked [this] then you may like [this], [this], [this]...), the relationship recommended, voted, and commented on by other viewers.

This somewhat reminds me of GameInformer, which had a table of each reviewer's overall preferences so you could find the reviewers you agreed with.

I think Steam is working on something similar, with recommendation based on what you're playing (https://store.steampowered.com/recommender). Well it recommends only games on the store, so that's a lot of games off the table right from the start.

RateYourMusic can do exactly this; find some users with similar tastes (you can see who rates an album as what score), and add them as friends (privately, i.e they won't be notified when you add them). Then you can make lists of how your friends collectively rated music. You can also find site-wide charts for specific genres.

makes sense. I've been reading Gaitskill's "little hammer" - it's a collection of essays, but... like half of them are book reviews, so now I'm pausing to read some mailer. For that matter, it is pretty common for me to read books because they are mentioned in the front matter of other books.

Because we don't always like awarded books. I read "The Three Body Problem" a couple of years ago which had won a Nebula award and found it to be mediocre at best and much overhyped. Last year I read the "Neuromancer" which had won both a Nebula and a Hugo and was for me one of the worst SF books I've ever read. And then there are books which are brilliant, but have never won an award, like "The Martian".

A book like the "Neuromancer" really needs to be understood in it's time. If you read it now, it will look very clichéd. But that's because it introduced and popularized those very clichés!

A lot of really significant cultural works have become so absorbed in our common culture, and sometimes improved upon, that the original starts to look cliché and even naive. Is there a name for this effect?

I read Neuromancer in the early 90’s and thought it was very cliched at the time. Granted that’s ~10 years after publication, but it barrows heavily from earlier works.

I suspect people like it for the same reason they liked their first Anime, it’s an unusual style that seems very original unless you have been reading other stuff written in the same vein by say Philip K. Dick.

I'm curious as to what aspects seemed cliched. What earlier works are you talking about? I thought I'd read them all...

It’s been a while but ...

The focus on cyborgs a year after The Six Million Dollar Man TV show kind if shows how much a product of the times it was. But, that’s the surface.

The way it portrayed both hacking and brain machine interfaces was wildly off base and basically copied from other science fiction. Virtual reality for example goes back to 1933. Main character being a druggy is fairly common in that time period, again not a big deal. As is copping tone from other works etc.

All the big stuff is forgivable, but he also copies little things like replacing liver and kidneys to better filter the blood and thus prevent someone from getting high / poisoned etc. Sounds good, but blood takes around a minute to circulate and most of it does not hit either on the way. It might reduce how long someone stays high or improve their chances when poisoned, but it’s really not enough to prevent it.

Granted I prefer hard sci-fi, but the novel’s focus is really on style over science fiction. It’s IMO somewhere between space opera and fantasy.

>Granted I prefer hard sci-fi, but the novel’s focus is really on style over science fiction. It’s IMO somewhere between space opera and fantasy.

How I looked at Gibson's work changed completely after I read "pattern recognition" when it came out in my early '20s - It was very explicitly about style, and I went back and re-read the older stuff which I read as a child, and yeah, you could also say that neuromancer is about style and fashion. It was interesting just how much reading the later book changed how I thought about the earlier books.

(Note, I still really enjoy Gibson.)

Any recommendations for good hard sci-fi in the last generation or so? I'm asking because your comment strongly suggests I'd like what you like. I'm one of the very few who think that "Science Fiction and Fantasy" as a genre makes about as much sense as "Math Textbooks and Romance Novels".

I promise not to blame anyone for a recommendation that's flawed. They're all flawed. Anything where the story is based on the implications of known (well, currently accepted) science without any bogus magic is as hard as trying to figure out what will really happen in a large software project that hasn't begun yet. But what have you liked despite its flaws?

Regarding “hard” science fiction from the past 25 years, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Baxter.

I read the first two books (Voyager and Titan) from his NASA trilogy [1]. These books are set in a near future or alternative time-line and cover inter-planetary journeys (Mars and Titan), involving the use NASA technology. Both books seem very well-researched and true-to-life.

Another book I really enjoyed was Coalescent [2]. It’s a blend of historical and science fiction: the historical part tallies with my own understanding of the late Roman Empire in Western Europe while the science part is more speculative – a human society that gradually evolves to become eusocial.

On a very different scale is, Space [3] which explores the Fermi paradox, communication between different sentient species, and the long-term survival prospects for civilisations of sentient species. Unlike the other books which have more straight-forward scientific concepts, I found some of the ideas in this book to be mind-expanding and really pushed my imagination to its limits.

From a story-telling perspective, his books are well-plotted with well-drawn, compelling characters (you really empathise with the protagonists and want to find out what happens next). I learned about a lot of diverse topics, e.g., the theories of Giordano Bruno, history of NASA projects (e.g., NERVA), the tyranny of the rocket equation, explanations of the slingshot effect, the economics of the Roman Empire, eusocial organisation and behaviour, lunar geology, Titanic meteorology, how humans could survive in a micro-gravity environment (and space in general), consequences of gamma-ray bursts, and much more.

Looking at Baxter’s Wikipedia page[3], I can see that I’ve only scratched the surface as he’s written many more books. Unfortunately, over the past decade, I’ve got out of the habit of reading novels but I really should make more of an effort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Trilogy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold:_Space

Thanks, Anthony. I'll take a look at these.

Honestly, I have mostly given up on recent science fiction so any recommendations are welcome.

Anyway, it feels like a cop out but The Martian by Andy Weir is worth the read. The most obvious issue is the opening storm would not have done much because the atmosphere is so thin, but it is generally ok on the science side.

Agreed (unfortunately). I gave up on SF decades ago, and The Martian is the only SF book I think I've liked this century. I liked it a lot and occasionally search for others like it. In vain, it seems. I think it is an ill omen that popular culture no longer seems as excited about real science and technology, the exploration and discovery, as was the case way back in the "Space Age".

I enjoy a lot of books from Alastair Reynolds. His fiction is so and so but the science in his book is hardcore. I also liked Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (this one is two volumes).

"Style over substance" is kind of cyberpunk's motto, and they don't deny it :)

> Is there a name for this effect?

"Seinfeld" is Unfunny[1]

[1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

I recently read, and enjoyed, Dune. But I wonder how much more I would have loved it if it weren't for this effect.

If you don't like William Gibson... you and I have very different tastes; Neuromancer is a particularly perfect example of the sort of thing I like.

There is a certain amount of calibrating for the awards group; for my taste? the nebula is... not 100%; much like how I enjoy '80s action films rather more than Ebert. like I've never read a Pulitzer for fiction book that I didn't think was incredible, while some of the nebula books I've read were only pretty good. (I haven't read anything by Liu Cixin yet, but it sounds like my thing? I mean, it was hyped, to me at least, as genre sci-fi written from a very different cultural perspective, which is totally my thing.)

So, name five other books which are like Neuromancer and you liked them. I'll try one or two of them, if I haven't read them already. Incidentally I've read a lot of Gibson's books and Neuromancer was the one I liked the least. Probably because it was his first and not as polished as the rest. Or perhaps because by today's standards the cyber warfare he's describing sounds ludicrous. I do like his cyberpunk atmosphere though.

I've never actually read Neuromancer, but Alexander Jablokov wrote some novels similar to what I imagine Neuromancer is like. For example, Nimbus and A Deeper Sea. Near future written in the early 90s.

Huh. It wouldn't occur to me, really, to connect the two, but I also am a huge fan of Jablokov.

The writing in the English translation of The Three Body Problem is stilted and dull. Maybe it's better in Chinese? Some languages must be more expensive than others to translate well. Gave up half way through the first book; when I eventually read the synopsis on Wikipedia it sounded exciting.

I'll have to read Neuromancer again. At the time I read it I was skeptical that hacking decks and exploits would ever exist, but that was before JavaScript, internet connected critical systems, rop gadgets and nation state 0day exploit chains. The need to do scene setting for these concepts perhaps weighs on the story.

Likewise, I was pretty disappointed with The Three Body Problem after all the hype about it. Maybe it was because it was a translated work but it felt super flat for me.

You didn't like neuromancer...?

I had a very hard time finding things to like in Neuromancer. It was a long time ago, but iirc the prose is pretty clunky, the characters are made of cardboard, and the plot has all the depth of a Ridley Scott movie. The world building was on point, but there's only so much 80's zeitgeist ("everything is awful, you'll be replaced piecemeal by machines, faceless megacorps rule over vast slums of pleasure junkies bathed in acid rain") that a person can channel with a straight face. Like I love me some weird dystopian cyberpunk universes, but I want that to be the starting point, not the ending point.

(Conversely, by way of making a positive contrast with something in a similar genre that , I really enjoyed A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick).

To be totally clear, I think Neuromancer is probably a thoroughly enjoyable read and I'd recommend it to someone looking for what it is without hesitation. It's just pretty easy to take umbrage with.

Lol as opposed to 2019? An idiotic narcissist grifter as President, the planet on fire (southern hemisphere burning in winter), epic climate change storms, megacorp Vicodin, bikies selling crystal meth, block chain powered dark money drug markets, middle east savagery hitting new lows, internment camps in Europe and the US? China govt deploying ios 0day against their Muslim ethnic minority, and millions in camps already?

The only disappointing part is that we don't have vat grown assassins, if you want a transplant you have to go to China or Iran.

> I... personally don't understand why people even try to automate making better recommendation engines

There is a long tail of long tails: niches within niches within niches. Some of these don't have a single proven trustworthy reviewer, let alone enough that the rough edges of their opinions get sanded off by aggregation. For these ultra-niche interests, it'd still be nice to have a guide. ML can do that.

i like travel writing/travelogues , but the results of using awards to select books havent been great frankly ,and goodreads isnt much better