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There are few cleaner joys in fantasy than being on an Ethshar kick. That man was doing cozy thirty years ahead of the curve.
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Aug 10, 2022 18:22
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are few cleaner joys in fantasy than being on an Ethshar kick. I think I read like 6 in a row and then took a break, should get back to that.
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Aug 10, 2022 19:17
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There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a goon in the depths of an Ethshar binge
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Aug 10, 2022 19:30
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StrixNebulosa posted:I've read at least 50 pages of it and how do you feel about reading a doorstopper fantasy epic by the world's most verbose man. I read the whole thing back in the day. I recall the main dude spent an awful lot of pages being lost in the basement.
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Aug 10, 2022 20:47
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Taffy Torpedo posted:Also unrelated question: How does Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams hold up? I gather it was pretty influential but is it worth a read? It's competently executed but vanilla epic fantasy. My favorite book by Williams is still Tailchaser's Song, which is an odd mashup of Tolkien with Watership Down, only feral cats instead of rabbits.
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Aug 10, 2022 20:58
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Groke posted:I read the whole thing back in the day. I recall the main dude spent an awful lot of pages being lost in the basement.
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Aug 10, 2022 20:58
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quantumfoam posted:I read Locklands and the Big U this week. Pretty sure Stephenson has said that no one should read The Big U anymore.
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Aug 10, 2022 22:40
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Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre by Max Brooks - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WQQXSGL/ Knights of Dark Renown by David Gemmell - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052FKD1Y/
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Aug 10, 2022 23:16
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Otherland was my Tad Williams jam back in the day, I wonder if the VR/internet stuff holds up at all.
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Aug 10, 2022 23:29
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mrs. nicholas sarkozy posted:Otherland was my Tad Williams jam back in the day, I wonder if the VR/internet stuff holds up at all.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:02
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Oh drat "Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time." Lol, that series must have aged like spoiled milk.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:55
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ethshar ftw. I read all of them
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Aug 11, 2022 00:58
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ulmont posted:The other problem is that anything older than X years has been visited by some combination of the sexism/racism/homophobia/ciscentrism fairy, making it hard to read in tyol 2022. I couldn’t read Lensman in 2002, for example. I know you alluded to this but it’s a significant issue even for the “good stuff”. Xotl posted:I think you could safely go back to the 1960s and have a reasonable semblance of both modern style and subject matter, though some of the social elements are still going to be painful if you're sensitive to that. The New Wave arriving in the mid to late 60s throws things off a bit, in that you get a lot of very heavy-handed stylistic experiments as people try to shake things up (but also some great stuff), but it gets assimilated into the mainstream by the mid 70s with people on either side of the divide being less conscious about it and SF is the better for it. Yeah this is a thing I am sometimes blind on, some things are easy to spot but others I'd just gloss over. It doesn't help that I've read a bunch of older things and come to accept some of the casual awfulness as just signs of the times, but there is no way a lot of people want to read/deal with that. But I think there is even stuff pre-1960s that would be acceptable, it's just harder to find. I was reading an old Planet Stories and one story had a Korean character as an integral part of the story and not as racial stereotype, I thought maybe the author served in the Korean war but his middle name is "Kim" so maybe he is partially Korean? No idea but that does show those stories exist, though you could argue they show up native Martians by outsmarting a computer and thus it dips colonial, but... (Machine of Klamugra – Allen K. Lang, and I read it years ago so maybe it holds up less now. I think there was one other story in that issue with a minor Korean character but I can't remember which one) A similar discussion happens in film history, for example Birth of a Nation being cited as the source for all this modern cinema techniques (which for the most-part is not true) and also people make excuses that the director had no idea it was controversial (also not true) which also not bringing up the nationwide protests that accompanied the film, nor the fact that several African-American filmmakers made their own films in response to Birth of a Nation (which is based on a book, but thankfully not an SF book except for the fact it is so racist it might as well take place in fantasy land) Leng posted:Hop over to the romance side of the US Kindle store; romance authors are pumping out 15k installments of serials on a weekly basis and selling each one for $2.99-$3.99 That's pretty neat, there is someone in SciFi who keeps pumping out books in the same series with godawful covers, he must be at close to 80+ books now, they used to show up pretty regularly in my recommended tabs but of course as soon as I want to find who it was I can't get them to show up for the life of me (but I did buy like 4 other junk scifi books that were free this week while looking so lol, and The Poppy War was also in the recs so time to go full conspiracy theory about the algorithm) EDIT AFTER I WROTE ALL THAT - okay, it was the Star Force Universe series by Aer-ki Jyr, 86 books so far, and he has now bundled the books in groups of 4 but before that they averaged about 100 pages each which made them the same size as the Sarah K.L. Wilson books
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Aug 11, 2022 01:11
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which is way better than what you'd get on Vella and for 95% of the web serial authors on Royal Road who don't make more than monthly double digits on their Patreons despite cranking out 5x episodes a week.
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are few cleaner joys in fantasy than being on an Ethshar kick. I don't about "cozy." The Misenchanted Sword and Ithanalin's Restoration were, but The Spell of the Black Dagger was kind of hosed up. Tabaea was "the bad guy" who housed the homeless, freed prisoners and ended slavery. That one wizard is married to two women, which, okay. And the heroine of the novel, Lady Sarai, at one point sells another woman into rape slavery.
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Aug 11, 2022 02:17
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ethshar is pretty much all about how hosed up and cruel wizards are
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Aug 11, 2022 02:24
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that seems hosed up even by the standards of sci-fi. like are you supposed to sympathize with said heroine?
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Aug 11, 2022 02:33
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Taffy Torpedo posted:Also unrelated question: How does Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams hold up? I gather it was pretty influential but is it worth a read? Tad Williams is the fantasy author equivalent of that competent but interchangeable replacement player
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Aug 11, 2022 03:00
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VostokProgram posted:that seems hosed up even by the standards of sci-fi. like are you supposed to sympathize with said heroine? Pretty much. Sarai and Tabaea are the main view point characters of the novel. That bit was kind of framed as a "badass gotcha power move." What happened was the woman was a thief who stole a valuable gem and sold it to a jewel merchant. She and the merchant got caught and taken to court with Sarai as the judge. Sarai ordered the jewel merchant to return the jewel to its owner as it was stolen goods. The merchant protested that he'd be out the money he paid the thief in good faith not knowing the jewel was stolen. Sarai told the thief she owed the merchant the "eight bits of gold" which was a lot of money and the thief didn't have it, having already used it to pay her own debts. Sarai said the court would purchase her debt to the merchant and gave him the eight bits, then had the thief sold into slavery to recoup the court's losses. The book later makes a point when it switches back to Tabaea of noting that thief got sold to a nasty pervert brothel that used slaves because free women wouldn't work there. Now, the book doesn't dwell on the matter or give us some kind of up close look at what's happening to the thief slave, but neither is there any kind of redemptive/repentant moment for Sarai about it. The implication seems to be that she thought what she did was fine and she'll do that or something like it again if a similar matter comes up again.
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Aug 11, 2022 04:01
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im pretty sure ethshar is intentionally pretty homey and low stakes and also incredibly dark and full of poo poo like that. like how in the first book almost the entire world dies in a magical holocaust. i think it's kind of trying to be disjointing with it's low stated yet incredibly dark poo poo happening.
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Aug 11, 2022 05:15
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Iirc that was in basically the darkest book as well. The black knife. It felt kinda like he had written all these normal style books and just wanted to have one that was a more traditional "poo poo had gotten real" feeling to it.
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Aug 11, 2022 11:15
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General Battuta posted:A friend of mine was trying to explain Riverdale to me and accidentally provided the perfect example of why I like the anti-Sandersonian approach to magic This a better explanation than any 'magic system' put to paper
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Aug 11, 2022 12:21
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mrs. nicholas sarkozy posted:Otherland was my Tad Williams jam back in the day, I wonder if the VR/internet stuff holds up at all. Can't wait to get that neurocannula
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Aug 11, 2022 19:29
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The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #9) by Iain M Banks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081BU42O/ The Fiends of Nightmaria (Malazan) by Steven Erickson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0879HBM3T/
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Aug 11, 2022 22:38
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If The Hydrogen Sonata had been the second or third-to-last Culture book I wouldn't have been left with a bitter taste in my mouth. Not a problem with its quality, just it being something of an emotionally unsatisfying story.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:14
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Larry Parrish posted:im pretty sure ethshar is intentionally pretty homey and low stakes and also incredibly dark and full of poo poo like that. like how in the first book almost the entire world dies in a magical holocaust. i think it's kind of trying to be disjointing with it's low stated yet incredibly dark poo poo happening. The thing for me with Ethshar is that it's more focused on individual characters and/or locations. Like the magical holocaust happened completely "off-screen" and the protagonist heard about at the same time as pretty much everybody else. Like in any other book, the magical holocaust would have been front and center with viewpoint characters involved in it. And if there was a bit of whimsy involved there might be a notation that As a result of this, the general's chief assassin retired and ended up running a very successful inn. In this book the notation is about the magical holocaust and the main plot concerns the person with the inn.
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Aug 12, 2022 02:17
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What is this Ethshar and where should I start? There seem to be an awful lot of books. I’m old and jaded enough know to crave cozy fantasy.
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Aug 12, 2022 11:32
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Beefeater1980 posted:What is this Ethshar and where should I start? There seem to be an awful lot of books. I’m old and jaded enough know to crave cozy fantasy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Lawrence_Watt-Evans Start with the Misenchanted Sword. It's some good stuff.
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Aug 12, 2022 11:43
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Everyone posted:The thing for me with Ethshar is that it's more focused on individual characters and/or locations. Yeah, it's character driven not plot driven. The Spell of the Black Dagger is Watt-Evans trying a book about really dark characters so it goes places the rest of them don't. Ithanalin's Restoration is literally taking place at the same time and it's as cozy as a fantasy novel ever gets. A Proper Uppercut posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Lawrence_Watt-Evans There are a few less-than-stellar entries in the series but yeah Misenchanted Sword and Ithanalin are both gems.
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Aug 12, 2022 12:05
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Beefeater1980 posted:What is this Ethshar and where should I start? There seem to be an awful lot of books. I’m old and jaded enough know to crave cozy fantasy. Almost all of them are standalone and while there's a few reoccurring characters and they're roughly in chronological order, it doesn't matter. I'd read the Misenchanted Sword first, though, since it sets up the world.
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Aug 12, 2022 13:00
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I kickstartered the latest book Farilane by Michael J. Sullivan and I think I'm starting to lose interest in this author. He publishes yearly so his output is a lot more consistent than other authors but I was just really disappointed how he tied up the plot threads at the end of this book in particular - felt lazy. In better news I'm really enjoying In the Shadow of Lightning, the latest from Brian McLellan (powder mage guy). The magic glass thing will probably turn off a lot of people because it's kinda dumb, but his characters are really good, motivations believable.. he's even got "guild families" in this novel that seem to transcend the trope (Game of Thrones, with glass!)
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Aug 12, 2022 19:14
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Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K Le Guin - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083RZ4D2B/ The World Jones Made by Philip K Dick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVR01A/ The Last Emperox (Interdependency #3) by John Scalzi - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QPGW9FS/
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Aug 12, 2022 22:09
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are few cleaner joys in fantasy than being on an Ethshar kick. My biggest problem with those books is there aren’t more of them. Larry Parrish posted:ethshar is pretty much all about how hosed up and cruel wizards are I like how wizardry basically has no limits and they can’t answer how some of their stuff works. Also if you can figure out how to do something you can do it. Maybe. You might destroy the world too instead of creating that dancing chair or whatever.
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Aug 12, 2022 22:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are few cleaner joys in fantasy than being on an Ethshar kick. Okay. So. I'm a little over a couple weeks away from turning 54, so I'm not really up on the ironic uses of words. I'm about 2/3 of the way through Taking Flight and have just read past the bit where we learn that Irith is and will always be a 15 year old girl, physically, mentally and emotionally. Also, there's a dude who's in his 50s-60s who has the magically enforced hots for Irith. The conventional meanings of "clean" and "cozy" do not accurately describe my mental state. There hasn't been anything I'd call graphic. But I still didn't expect to stumble over that particular idea. And I feel kind of dumb because I've pretty much ordered all of the Ethshar novel, which should reach my house by tomorrow evening.
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Aug 12, 2022 23:08
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Everyone posted:Okay. So. I'm a little over a couple weeks away from turning 54, so I'm not really up on the ironic uses of words. Yeah, sorry, Taking Flight is probably the outright worst book in the entire series, and so I haven't read it in probably twenty years, and I couldn' tell you what happens in it at all off the top of my head apart from "that's the bad one with the bird person." I think every time I've re-read the series I skipped it. Sorry, that's my bad and I should've warned you, hope you didn't start with that one. The ones I genuinely strongly recommend are Misenchanted Sword and Ithanalin's Restoration. The rest of the series has a wide variation in quality. Overall ethshar novel rankings (imho) A: Misenchanted Sword, Ithanalin's Restoration -- character driven cozy masterpieces B: Unwilling Warlord, Night of Madness, Vondish Ambassador, Unwelcome Warlock (basically the whole chain of warlock stories -- solid character driven fantasy stories exploring a novel premise) C: With a Single Spell, The Blood of a Dragon -- kinda dumb farmboy fantasy from what I recall Spriggan Mirror I genuinely don't remember anything about it at all. Taking Flight I remember thinking 'the bad one." Spell of the Black Dagger is "ok, he's going dark with this one." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Aug 12, 2022 |
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Aug 12, 2022 23:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, sorry, Taking Flight is probably the outright worst book in the entire series, and so I haven't read it in probably twenty years, and I couldn' tell you what happens in it at all off the top of my head apart from "that's the bad one with the bird person." I think every time I've re-read the series I skipped it. Sorry, that's my bad and I should've warned you, hope you didn't start with that one. I would rank The Spriggan Mirror above Taking Flight on the grounds that I actually finished it, while Taking Flight I DNFed about a third of the way through, but I also don't remember anything about it. Agree with those rankings overall, though.
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Aug 13, 2022 00:05
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Should I read any other Dune books besides the original?
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Aug 13, 2022 00:21
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VostokProgram posted:Should I read any other Dune books besides the original? Every book declines in quality, so if you want more then start with the second one, and just quit whenever you have had enough.
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Aug 13, 2022 00:26
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VostokProgram posted:Should I read any other Dune books besides the original? Read until you don’t want to keep going or until you’ve finished Chapterhouse. Under no circumstances read anything Dune that wasn’t written by Frank.
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Aug 13, 2022 00:43
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VostokProgram posted:Should I read any other Dune books besides the original? I’d suggest reading the next one at least, as it has quite a bit to say about the aftermath of a successful jihad, and if you don’t feel done yet move on to the next until you do. I personally loved God Emperor of Dune for just going full weird after the original trilogy
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Aug 13, 2022 00:46
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Just reading the Taking Flight synopsis when I was doing some digging inspired by this thread set off a bunch of red flags. I don't think there's ever been a truly good man/boy discovers magical creature (mermaid, e.t., Selkie, whatever) girl and protects her from oppression story.
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Aug 13, 2022 01:18
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