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Mr. Nemo posted:The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky He publishes 3 or 4 books a year and they do vary a bit, maybe try some of his novella work, ironclads or the expert ssystem's brother? There's also the d&d campaign but with insects Shadows of the apt that I really liked most of but it's a real commitment
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Jun 17, 2021 12:33
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My 2c High fantasy was traditionally a very conservative good guys/bad guys; royalty; magic; things were good once and maybe can be again. Things have certainly changed in fantasy over the past 10-15 years. I've always been a mostly scifi guy but I've been reading genre for almost 30 years.
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Jun 17, 2021 12:40
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high fantasy: elves and magic low fantasy: daggers and horseshit
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Jun 17, 2021 14:01
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thotsky posted:high fantasy: elves and magic High fantasy: Aerothas Lightwing, Lord of the Dragonriders Low fantasy: The Murder Bastards
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Jun 17, 2021 14:10
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high fantasy wizards walk up to your tower, call you a fool and give you a chance to repent low fantasy wizards get a bunch of mercs to ambush you with crossbows in the woods
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Jun 17, 2021 14:36
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Mr. Nemo posted:The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky Children of Ruin is good too. Shame to hear that he other stuff they've done isn't any good and that it sounds like a reaction to the financial success of RPO/RPT. freebooter posted:I always thought low fantasy = magic and monsters exist but are rarely spoken of or encountered by most people living in this world, whereas high fantasy = magic and fantastical elements are incorporated into the everyday lives of the people. Monsters aren't rarely spoken of or encountered in LOTR though, it's the exact opposite. The Shire borders a forest that is known to be extremely dangerous, Rivendell is protected by magic but they still have to deal with orcs in the area with some regularity (Lothlorien too). Gondor is in a forever war with Mordor and Rohan regularly had orc causing problems in it even before Saruman starts his machinations. Every living person in Erebor knows full well that monsters and magic exist because of the events of the Hobbit, though I could see younger people thinking Beorn was actually some guy with a pet grizzly fighting along side him rather than a shapeshifter. Magic's less common for men/hobbits but LOTR is 100% high fantasy. IIRC, someone in Fellowship mentions how there are horrible things within a day of Bree too and I'm not sure if any area of Middle Earth is really 'safe' from monsters aside from maybe the Gray Havens.
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Jun 17, 2021 15:21
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I'll concede to your knowledge, it's been years since I read LOTR but I recall the vibe of it being Good Old English Hobbits in the pub being like "yeah Dan's grand-uncle says he saw an Ent once but he's full of poo poo"
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Jun 17, 2021 15:53
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High fantasy: has dragons Low fantasy: has no dragons Hard sci fi: the dragons are aliens Soft sci fi: the dragons are aliens and also your friends
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Jun 17, 2021 16:00
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freebooter posted:I'll concede to your knowledge, it's been years since I read LOTR but I recall the vibe of it being Good Old English Hobbits in the pub being like "yeah Dan's grand-uncle says he saw an Ent once but he's full of poo poo" Yeah the hobbits are being deliberately sheltered
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Jun 17, 2021 16:38
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Evil Fluffy posted:Children of Ruin is good too. Shame to hear that he other stuff they've done isn't any good and that it sounds like a reaction to the financial success of RPO/RPT. I thought that by "monsters" freebooter meant things like dragons and beholders, not elves and orcs. And "magic" is also a blurry category - Galadriel makes it sound like "magic" isn't a very meaningful category in Middle-Earth. (You could interpret her as just emphasizing the moral difference between her powers and Sauron's, but I feel like the distinction between magic and non-magic is sort of ambiguous for both the good and evil kinds, and magic-like effects are often fairly subtle. I don't remember it being entirely clear whether Wormtongue was just good at persuading Theoden or if he was acting as some kind of conduit for a spell Saruman was casting on Theoden, for example.) In any case, there's very little Jack Vance/D&D-style magic in LotR. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jun 17, 2021 |
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Jun 17, 2021 18:27
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90s Cringe Rock posted:high fantasy wizards walk up to your tower, call you a fool and give you a chance to repent So Malazan is both, since both of these things happen on a regular basis in the series?
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Jun 17, 2021 20:19
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https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1405614503358877702?s=20
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Jun 17, 2021 20:56
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Mr. Nemo posted:The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky The way you've written this makes it sound like you might have missed the fact that there's a direct sequel to Children of Time; Children of Ruin: This Time With Octopuses. It's good.
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Jun 17, 2021 21:35
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High fantasy: only the king and his heirs matter. Low fantasy: who is the king this year?
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Jun 17, 2021 21:54
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Silver2195 posted:I thought that by "monsters" freebooter meant things like dragons and beholders, not elves and orcs. And "magic" is also a blurry category - Galadriel makes it sound like "magic" isn't a very meaningful category in Middle-Earth. (You could interpret her as just emphasizing the moral difference between her powers and Sauron's, but I feel like the distinction between magic and non-magic is sort of ambiguous for both the good and evil kinds, and magic-like effects are often fairly subtle. I don't remember it being entirely clear whether Wormtongue was just good at persuading Theoden or if he was acting as some kind of conduit for a spell Saruman was casting on Theoden, for example.) In any case, there's very little Jack Vance/D&D-style magic in LotR. Off the top of my head, the only characters in LOTR (and the Hobbit) who could be said to use magic and aren't directly tied to the Divine in some way are Beorn and maybe the Witch King before they became a Nazgul. The Witch King had a ring of power though.  The people we see use magic in LOTR are pretty much the wizards, Galadriel (lived in Valinor), the Witch King, Sauron, and then some artifacts like the rings of power and relics from the First Age like Sting.
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Jun 17, 2021 22:24
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The Heroes (First Law) by Joe Abercrombie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480O978/ The Uplift Storm Trilogy: Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Heaven's Reach by David Brin - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B091YFWFZK/
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Jun 17, 2021 22:32
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Evil Fluffy posted:Off the top of my head, the only characters in LOTR (and the Hobbit) who could be said to use magic and aren't directly tied to the Divine in some way are Beorn and maybe the Witch King before they became a Nazgul. The Witch King had a ring of power though. I think Aragorn does some things in the gray area where you can argue whether it should be considered "magic" (e.g., obscure herblore), and some minor elven characters, like Glorfindel, are also vaguely magical.
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Jun 17, 2021 22:37
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Silver2195 posted:I think Aragorn does some things in the gray area where you can argue whether it should be considered "magic" (e.g., obscure herblore), and some minor elven characters, like Glorfindel, are also vaguely magical. J. R. R. Tolkien posted:...the blade seemed to melt, and vanished like a smoke in the air, leaving only the hilt in Strider's hand. 'Alas!' he cried. 'It was this accursed knife that gave the wound. Few now have the skill in healing to match such evil weapons. But I will do what I can.' Healing aside, it's hard to argue that this bolded bit isn't some kind of magic that the Hobbits just aren't worldly enough to recognize as such.
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Jun 17, 2021 22:54
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I like to think he was just going "what the gently caress what the gently caress what the fffuuucccckkkk" in elvish to himself, and then leaned over to frodo and whispered "please don't die, we are hosed if you die".
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Jun 18, 2021 01:03
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I like to think he was just going "what the gently caress what the gently caress what the fffuuucccckkkk" in elvish to himself, and then leaned over to frodo and whispered "please don't die, we are hosed if you die". This is now my new headcanon!
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Jun 18, 2021 13:35
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Aragon, the witch king, and (maybe?) Beorn are all kings or of royal lineage and thus also divine.
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Jun 18, 2021 14:06
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I always thought the line between "did magic" and "used a firework/herblore" was deliberately vague in some places. And iirc that song didn't do much and he had to have surgery later to deal with the little murder splinter.
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Jun 18, 2021 14:37
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Maybe he was singing a Placebo song!
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Jun 18, 2021 14:47
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Harold Fjord posted:I always thought the line between "did magic" and "used a firework/herblore" was deliberately vague in some places. And iirc that song didn't do much and he had to have surgery later to deal with the little murder splinter. I agree with all this, bit the fact that the Morgûl-knife's magic was stronger than Aragorn's doesn't mean that Aragorn wasn't trying to solve (or at least diagnose) the problem with magic. From which we can infer that he has ability of that sort.
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Jun 18, 2021 14:50
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pradmer posted:The Uplift Storm Trilogy: Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Heaven's Reach by David Brin - $3.99 I really enjoyed this one. The Uplift setting is a grand scale multigalactic saga with eons of history. Most of it for most species pretty hosed until they become the oppressor class in turn. It's mostly set on a small, illegal multi-species colony and follows a group of "teenagers" doing Mad Scientist Club stuff who stumble onto something bigger than galaxies. It's a good cross between a coming of age story and some grand space opera.
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Jun 18, 2021 15:18
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i liked it because it had these very different species, some of whom are big enemies in the rest of the universe, living together and actually being a community most of the time in sf the species are very segregated, which is logical since they have their own planets etc. so this was a nice change of pace
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Jun 18, 2021 15:23
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I liked a lot of things about the Uplift Storm trilogy (like the previous posters above), but I found the books as a whole less than enjoyable, about middling. I liked Startide Rising and The Uplift War much more overall.
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Jun 18, 2021 16:18
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Brin's SFF writing is kind of weird. All the positivity in it is anathema to what Brin says & truly believes IRL, and there is alot of weird-skeevy sex stuff that gets a pass or got a pass when originally written because it was hyperChimps or hyperDolphins doing the weird skeevy sex stuff. All the speaking male hyperChimps in Brin's Uplift universe are barely disguised bigName SFF authors in full blown BigEgo "what happens in If you could somehow edit out all the chimp stuff, Uplift War would suddenly be the length of a MurderBot novella. Doing the same to Brin's other Uplift stories including purging all the sexual assault hyperDolphins would result in massively condensed stories; but then also be something I wouldn't feel ashamed at recommending other people interested in SFF checking out.
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Jun 18, 2021 16:27
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quantumfoam posted:Brin's SFF writing is kind of weird. All the positivity in it is anathema to what Brin says & truly believes IRL, and there is alot of weird-skeevy sex stuff that gets a pass or got a pass when originally written because it was hyperChimps or hyperDolphins doing the weird skeevy sex stuff. I thought about editing in "horny neo-dolphin/chimp stuff aside" after I posted that but didn't, and and probably should have. Do you have more information about the sff author expy chimp thing from TUW? I'd be car-crash-interested in more detail.
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Jun 18, 2021 16:39
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Do you have more information about the sff author expy chimp thing from TUW? I'd be car-crash-interested in more detail. Main character quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jun 19, 2021 |
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Jun 18, 2021 16:57
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The Black Prism (Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JTHY76/
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Jun 18, 2021 17:27
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I thought about editing in "horny neo-dolphin/chimp stuff aside" after I posted that but didn't, and and probably should have. There's no shame in retroactively adding it to your post because that skeevy neo-dolphin & neo-chimp sex stuff needs to be mentioned in giant blinkers up front to anyone new to the David Brin Uplift universe books. off-topic: Decided to read Colin Wilson's SPACE VAMPIRES, the book the 1985 movie LIFEFORCE is based on. Space Vampires the novel is utterly insane, and despite there being a heavy focus on orgone lifeforce sexual studies and a "good" kind of vampirism taught by a neutral-horny Count Dracula 2.0 that is totally skipped by the movie, the movie actually reuses lots of the characters and locations and the step-by-step plot events in the book. Book version of Patrick Stewart doesn't explode into a blood-fountain hologram of the naked lady however the book does end with the implication that Carlsen, the astronaut lead character in the movie & book orgonic-ly devoured the 3 space vampires on Earth and that Carlsen is slowly turning into Count Dracula 3.0...
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Jun 19, 2021 08:25
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Started reading Red Mars - are the weirdly focused paragraphs about Arabs a thing that continues through the book? I can't tell yet if it's meant to be weird because it's from the characters PoV or if KSR is just explaining his thoughts.
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Jun 19, 2021 10:21
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What's weird about them? I haven't read it since I was a teenager and don't remember KSR being particularly Orientalist (certainly not racist) but it may have just gone over my head. edit - actually I do remember that chapter being Frank's POV and I do remember Frank generally being portrayed as racist or at least very Western-centric.
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Jun 19, 2021 10:51
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minema posted:Started reading Red Mars - are the weirdly focused paragraphs about Arabs a thing that continues through the book? I can't tell yet if it's meant to be weird because it's from the characters PoV or if KSR is just explaining his thoughts. I think the assumption is that a lot of people migrated over to Mars in groups and due to the relatively low population their cultures didn't dramatically shift or merge a lot and there's friction between all the different arrivals. The first chapter is a little odd because it's just setting up a major event that now you know is going to happen but without knowing more about the situation then and more about Frank he's an rear end in a top hat, I can see it coming off strange. My memories of the books are that there's fairly large periods of them where it's either covering Mars geology (far off past and whatever is currently going on) and the characters doing stuff that's basically a tour for the reader through the current state of Mars and some group of people currently living in some place, and then bursts of the larger plot and things dramatically shifting with time jumps in between. There are some more insert-culture-here colonists on Mars doing their own thing periods in the book, but I don't recall any that would come off potentially as strange as the starting point. I do think it goes in to a lot of detail over time about all the various motivations for different people to migrate to Mars and how it plays in to whatever current situation is going on. The books did feel like a marathon, much more so than anything I've read since, but one I really wanted to finish.
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Jun 19, 2021 15:36
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Pervis posted:I think the assumption is that a lot of people migrated over to Mars in groups and due to the relatively low population their cultures didn't dramatically shift or merge a lot and there's friction between all the different arrivals. The first chapter is a little odd because it's just setting up a major event that now you know is going to happen but without knowing more about the situation then and more about Frank he's an rear end in a top hat, I can see it coming off strange. I was playing Surviving Mars which made me really want to try reading them again, and the more political side of things appeals to me. Glad it's more a character viewpoint than the authors, I'm just so suspicious in older sci-fi now of any author based opinions sneaking in.
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Jun 19, 2021 16:05
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Stealth thread favorite David Mace holds up pretty well politically. About the only strongly dated part of his writing is that he uses 'negro' and occasionally 'colored' which would definitely not fly today, but I guess those were the terms of the time. He's white, but his books are full of black people, often black women protagonists, to the point where I'd say the casts are split almost 50/50. I'd be curious what a modern black reader thinks of his work; for obvious reasons I don't feel qualified to judge.
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Jun 19, 2021 16:18
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Yah; I just recently read Fire Lance and the only thing that felt a bit dated was how he'd describe a character as e.g. "a Chicago black". Not "a black man" but just "a black". Mind you he'd also just say "a white" about a white character so at least there is symmetry.
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Jun 19, 2021 16:49
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Also I have to say, out of all the near-future WW3 books from the 80s I've read, it's one of the very best. Those were basically a genre unto themselves back then, and as a precociuos kid I went through a poo poo-ton of them. (Terrified as I was of nuclear war, like anyone with half a brain, I'm glad I didn't read this when it was new.)
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Jun 19, 2021 17:07
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I recently read Mammoth by John Varley and starting the first chapter from the pov of a non-major character who’s a racist gently caress about Inuit, even granting this is to characterize him as a non-sympathetic rear end in a top hat, sure was a choice The rest of the book was ok. Just ok
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Jun 19, 2021 17:51
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