What did you just read?

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
32,600
94,816
The novelization of the video game Alien Isolation

I never played the game. This ignores everything but the original film and has Amanda Ripley, Ellen's daughter, as the main character. Right away we're with a salvage crew that finds the flight recorder of the Nostromo and heads off to LV-426. It goes as expected and Weyland Yutani hires Amanda as a consultant and flies her out to the station where the salvagers ended up after some facehugger action.

If we were just doing Alien stuff it would have been fine. That part of the book is okie dokie. I've read a mixed bag of novelizations and my expectations for them are pretty low. Unfortunately this one spend almost half of it's pages going through all the hardships Amanda faced involving her deadbeat drunk stepfather and general Dickensian squalor. She's smart and great at engineering stuff but wouldn't you know it she just can't catch a break as the universe seems to hate her personally. Did I mention how useless her stepfather is? The book won't stop telling you.

It's not too terribly long and it moves along but it's like a D+/C-. I've had a much harder time finishing books better than this. That does count for something.
 
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Ritley

Bronze Baron of the Realm
16,393
36,605
My Kindle advertised a new Larry Correia book so I'm checking it out. In case that name isn't familiar, he did the Monster Hunter Internation books, and the Grimnoir series. MHI was really good at the beginning and was ok at the end, and Grimnoir was pretty good. This one is supposed to be in a magical world where there are different realms connect to a main hub sort of and wizards are the ruling class, and our intrepid hero wants to become a wizard. It sounded decent enough, and the reviews are sky high, but reviews on Goodreads are usually skewed so high as to be straight retarded.

I'm not quite halfway yet, and it just isn't grabbing me like MHI did. It isn't bad or hard to read or anything like that, but I'm just not excited about it like I was right from the get-go with MHI. So much so, that I'm tempted to just do a re-read of MHI anyway.

Anyway, so far I'm pretty disappointed with something from a guy I really like, but I can't say there is anything actually bad about it. It's just not attention grabbing.

This book felt like he wrote a detailed prompt for an AI and then lightly edited the result. It’s not terrible or anything, just weirdly bland. Grimnoir was one of my favorite series
 

INTHEMIDSTOFLIONS

Lord Nagafen Raider
711
928
This book felt like he wrote a detailed prompt for an AI and then lightly edited the result. It’s not terrible or anything, just weirdly bland. Grimnoir was one of my favorite series
As an author, I have been asked “did you use AI to write your book?” Or my BIL assumed I did what you said because they really enjoyed it.

people who mean well but don’t realize how bad ai content is.

but AI makes the most uninspired generic slip. It’s EXTREMELY obvious whenever a piece of text or even dialogue in a movie is written by AI. I’m 90% sure the dialogue in the script for the Materialists (2025) was almost entirely written by AI.