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Lawrence Watt-Evans is doing a kickstarter to publish his next novel: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/217993880/publish-lawrence-watt-evans-vikas-avenger
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Jun 25, 2013 13:21
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House Louse posted:That's interesting, as in "interesting times". Someone with a backlist the size of that, who can't sell a book that looks rather easy to sell. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but it's interesting the target is so low - he's figuring a print run of 200 copies. It's nice that the reward tiers are named after aspects of the novel, too. WAtt-Evans has a long history of doing alternative publishing -- his publishers have told him they want him to write Epic Trilogies because that's what sells, but most of his stuff is more character driven. I've read most of his books and enjoyed almost all of them (although one or two were outright bad, but that's any author with that many books; even Pratchett has a few missteps) but I can totally see why his books aren't huge sellers. For a while now he's been publishing his Ethshar books serially online under a tip jar model, releasing a chapter each time the jar fills up, basically. So kickstarter is a natural transition for him. He's got a small coterie of devoted fans but isn't a mass market author really.
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Jun 26, 2013 03:50
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House Louse posted:OK, cheers, makes sense. It looks like this is doing really well for him (two days in, he's over $4,200) and it does look like he's getting dedicated support - the mean donation is about $30, which is more than the trade paperback level, i.e. most people are tending to go for the limited-edition, autographed, or whatever book. And that's taking into account that over a third of the pledgers are in the $5 ebook level. Yeah, I'm really tempted by the $75 level actually, because I'd really like a signed hardback of Ithnalin's Restoration. A magical accident spreads a wizard's personality out over all the living room furniture, which all then runs away, and his apprentice has to recollect them all to restore her boss. It's a weird little book that would be a one-line background note in most fantasy series; the hero would just see someone chasing a magically animated couch down the street or whatever in the background while the Important Story was happening, and in fact it takes place at the same time as one of his other Ethshar books and nobody important can help the protagonist because they're all busy dealing with the events of that other book. It's just a nice little slice-of-life-in-high-magic-fantasy-setting-story that you don't very often see. Everybody else writes Epic Problems, Watt-Evans writes about ordinary people who happen to live in magical worlds. It's really refreshing. I mean, don't get me wrong -- Watt-Evans is not the world's best prose stylist or anything. But he is a really solid B-list writer and nobody else bothers writing precisely the same kinds of stories as he does.
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Jun 26, 2013 20:59
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Alec Eiffel posted:I have every intention of starting The Wheel of Time and not finishing (a few reviews suggested stopping around book 5). The problem with this plan is that only the books *in the middle*, from around book 7 to around book 10, are bad. The last few books in the series are as good or better than the first few books in the series. edit: I think the WoT is for people who read really fast. If you can knock out a thousand page book in short order it's worth the time commitment. If each book takes you a month though that's a year of your life for the whole thing. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Jun 29, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2013 15:44
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Geek U.S.A. posted:Did Robert A. Heinlein write anything that wasn't just one giant incoherent rant about incest/whatever the gently caress else he was obsessed with? Not that I am ever going to waste my time reading any more of his works but I am just curious. Even Dan Simmon's crazy loving self can actually tone down and write a good story (The Terror), but when it comes to Heinlein it just seems to me that he wasn't interested in anything other than putting down his opinions in book form and hitting you over the head with it. Yah. A bunch of his juveniles fit this, but a Citizen of the Galaxy is probably his best pure story space romp. It's as good a story as Moon is a Harsh Mistress without any crazy space politics or incest chat or anything. Happy Hedonist posted:Have Spacesuit - Will Travel? It and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress are the only two Heinlein books I really enjoyed. Have Spacesuit is written as a YA novel, but I enjoyed it. All Heinlein is actually YA in one sense or another. His first twelve novels up through Starship Troopers were explicitly YA (the "juveniles"), but really everything he ever wrote shows that early YA bent to his career. His target audience was always the intelligent thirteen year old boy.
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Jul 7, 2013 19:19
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Dr Scoofles posted:Can somebody recommend me a fantasy series that has decent female characters in? They don't have to be the protagonist but it would be nice if they were. I'm not really interested in fantasy romance books, but romance as a part of a bigger story is cool. I have previously read the Mistborn series and really liked them, and I remember liking Trudi Canavan's Magicians Guild series although I read them ages ago so I forget a fair bit about them. It doesn't have to be magic stuff though, I'm open to anything. I like war, politics, quests, whatever! I've also never read any sci-fi before either so I'm totally up for giving that a try too. The archetypal women's fantasy book is The Mists of Avalon but it's practically sopping with estrogen so be warned. Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites and sequels, Guy Gavriel Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan though it's more of an ensemble cast with female members, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Spirit Ring (her first novel so a little flawed). Elizabeth Moon's stuff isn't bad but it's basically her Dungeons & Dragons paladin as a novel and it shows.
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Jul 8, 2013 21:06
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Oh, what the hell, can we say Wheel of Time for female characters in? I feel like that's too much book to recommend to a new reader to the genre.
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Jul 8, 2013 21:27
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That's the thing. WoT has at least one good female character (Moiraine) and a bunch of horrible ones.
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Jul 8, 2013 23:59
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Jedit posted:The problem with American Gods is that if you've read any other Gaiman, you'll know exactly what's going to happen all the way through. It steals too much from other works. That's a problem that Gaiman is starting to have consistently. His newest novel is extremely similar to Coraline, he's written too many short stories about Grendel, etc. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jul 10, 2013 |
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Jul 10, 2013 13:22
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andrew smash posted:Another reason to read it first then. I just don't think it's that good a book. It's too derivative and predictable and come on don't name your African-American protagonist Shadow. Gaiman didn't do much of anything in American Gods that either he or someone else hasn't done better elsewhere (I almost think of Anansi Boys as the American Gods do-over). I think American Gods was something Gaiman had to write in order to come to terms with living in America but I don't think it's a first-rank work. The place to start with Gaiman is either by diving headfirst into the full run of Sandman, the edition of Stardust with the Charles Vess illustrations, or Neverwhere (any format). He's got other good stuff of course -- Graveyard Book, Coraline, etc. -- but those are his most original, powerful works.
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Jul 10, 2013 16:37
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Is locke lamora a one-off, a finished series, or an unfinished series?
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Jul 12, 2013 18:46
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That's the thing. If it's that good, I'll want to read the whole series right then, and I have enough running series as it is.
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Jul 12, 2013 19:21
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I think you need to warn anyone starting mieville that they're going to find a lot of marxism in the mix.
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Jul 13, 2013 19:34
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muike posted:I liked the story and idea and characters and everything in Iron Council, I just... I just felt like I had to work to read it. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Mieville is a good writer but sometimes he uses fifteen syllables where one would do and sometimes he'd rather preach about Marxist doctrine than get on with telling his story. He's not as bad as john Ringo / David weber mil-sf libertarianism, sure, but it's still there and something new readers should be told about in advance. In some ways he's the Heinlein of marxism (though that may be overstating the problem).
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Jul 13, 2013 20:35
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muike posted:People really really exaggerate how overtly political mieville's work is. Yeah, it's there, because that's the lens he sees the world through. His fiction is not the same as his paper on international law and marxism or whatever. He's a marxist who likes cool rear end monsters and strange fantasy worlds. I disagree. That's probably Mieville's intent, yes, but if you come to his works and aren't familiar with his lens, then it really hits you over the head, because his lens so thoroughly informs his work that it's impossible to read his works without coming to terms with his lens. If you are familiar with his lens but reject it for one or another reason, then reading his books can start to get as annoying as the prolonged anarcho-capitalist digressions in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He's still a good writer overall but some of his books -- Iron Council and King Rat being the ones I'm mostly thinking of here -- he really does hit his readers over the head with a hammer and sickle, even if he isn't intending to. Neurosis posted:I am a bit right of the average SA poster on issues of economics and I didn't find Mieville too objectionable, having read The City & The City, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Embassy Town. The funny thing is I just read The Disposessed for the first time over this past weekend and thought it was amazing. What's wrong with LeGuin? I've only read the first three Earthsea books (was told to stop there and took the advice), The Disposessed, and a few of her short stories ("The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas", etc.) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 14:24
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General Battuta posted:But if you disagree with its very explicit, very didactic politics, it's probably going to be an obnoxious read; it will seem naive and superficial, because it comes from a very different worldview. Well, I came into The Dispossessed relatively blind: someone on here posted about there being a "Hainish Cycle" by LeGuin and that being the first one chronologically, and it was the only Hainish Cycle novel with an ebook edition, so I grabbed it for lunch hour reading. So I didn't know it was going to be a political book going in. Reading it I didn't really have that experience; her portrayals of the various societies in the book actually seemed relatively realistic to me, especially the massive social pressure, the way that every character seemed to subvert their respective societies' vaunted ideals in one way or another. I was half-expecting one or other other society to collapse the entire time and was mildly surprised when that didn't really conclusively happen, though I guess the ending is ambiguous enough that you could read whatever collapse you'd prefer onto the text. Basically, it felt like a book that a capitalist could read and go "see, that's why a communist society would fail" or a communist could read and say "see, that's how a communist society could succeed." It doesn't require you to accept the premises of either society in order to enjoy the story. Conversely, with King Rat and Iron Council, I feel like you basically have to accept Marxism to enjoy the story, or at least suspend disbelief in Marxism; to one extent or another, accepting a Marxist lens / Marxist ideology seems necessary to enjoy the story. They're Marxist anthems. I don't mean that as a negative critique -- there's nothing wrong with writing an anthem! But I think it's worth warning people when they start Mieville -- especially if they start the Bas-Lag books and will likely then end up reading Iron Council -- that he can get pretty anthemic about Marxism. To be fair, it's been a long time since I read Iron Council and I should probably go back and give it another read-through; last time I read it was when it first came out. It may be looming larger and more Marxist in my memory than it actually is. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jul 15, 2013 |
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Jul 15, 2013 16:53
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mystes posted:I think it's mostly just that nothing she's written other than The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and the original Earthsea trilogy has been that notable, and these were all written like 40 years ago. With that bibliography she doesn't really need anything else. That said she also has some great shorts, though they may also be a bit long in the tooth.
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Jul 16, 2013 01:07
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Hey, I got eight books into Malazan and I a'g'ree w'th h'm. :P Narrowing it down to just long series without first person is surprisingly difficult. It depends on how EPIC you want things to be. Since you don't mind pulpiness, I'd recommend a few things: 1) The Deryni Chronicles books; the first three are good in a very sort of 1980's-fantasy-the-author-does-SCAD kinda way, and after that they went way downhill but you may not mind. 2) Maybe the Shannara books. They start out as obvious Tolkien ripoffs but get better book by book. The same author has another series that's worth reading, the first book is titled Magic Kingdom for Sale, SOLD! and that really tells you everything you need about the series right there. Again, not high literature, but not horrible. 3) Mary Stewart's King Arthur / Merlin books. 4) Terry Pratchett. He's got four or five running series set in the same universe and the characters overlap. Start with Guards, Guards (opinions may vary on best starting place). Again, more comic than high epic fantasy, but still quite good.
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Jul 17, 2013 17:10
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GrandpaPants posted:
The thing to remember about Zelazny is that he was constantly experimenting, and a lot of his short stories are experiments. Sometimes they're brilliantly successful and sometimes they aren't; reading each one is kindof a gamble. His single best short is probably "A Rose for Ecclesiastes", with "Museum Piece" also a personal favorite of mine, but I'd also recommend the short story collection I Am Legend (a bit of a four-part novel, with each "chapter" an independent short story featuring the same protagonist) for his sci-fi and the Dilvish, the Damned collection for his fantasy (same deal, nine short stories in sequence featuring the same protagonist). Really though Zelazny was strongest in his novels. Isle of the Dead, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, that's where you want to be with Zelazny.
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Jul 23, 2013 19:05
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The Deed of Paksenarrion series isn't bad but it's very, very much D&D Campaign Fiction, her paladin even gets his horse at fourth level. For fantasy by women I'd also suggest Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley and (as a somewhat guilty pleasure) the first three Deryni books only by Kathyrn Kurtz. The Chalion books by Bujold are also really, really good. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Jul 24, 2013 |
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Jul 24, 2013 13:10
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Wolpertinger posted:I've never read Paksenarrion, but I've read a thing by the author about why she wrote the series,and if I recall correctly, it's not because she ever played D&D, but because she watched a group play it once and one of the people in the group was a paladin - and she was like 'man, that's a really stupid way for a divinely-blessed warrior to act, I'm going to go write a story that uses the idea of a paladin in a less moronic fashion'. Hrm, maybe I should give it another chance and re-read it assuming it's a deconstruction. It just uses a lot of stuff that's very clearly drawing on the 1st Edition D&D manual, but I hadn't considered the possibility she was trying to deconstruct the idea.
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Jul 24, 2013 13:49
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Clarke's The City and the Stars is a legitimately brilliant novel but even there you can make an argument it's a short story that just happened to have a novella's worth of implications.
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Jul 29, 2013 04:47
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Ferret posted:Rachel Aaron is today's Kindle Daily Deal, and I really enjoyed the Eli Monpress stories - they're a bit similar to the Gentlemen Bastards in that the main character is a charming thief. Thanks! I'll read almost anything with a sword in it if it's under a dollar a book. I really appreciate it when people highlight the daily deals in this thread.
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Aug 5, 2013 15:04
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Ferret posted:Rachel Aaron is today's Kindle Daily Deal, and I really enjoyed the Eli Monpress stories - they're a bit similar to the Gentlemen Bastards in that the main character is a charming thief. I gave these a shot and the first three at least are fun little books. They remind me a lot of the early Asprin MYTH books -- fun enough that you don't mind they're a little formulaic. Definitely in the popcorn fantasy category but original enough to be interesting, quick-paced, relatively lighthearted. You can tell the author probably wrote a lot of fan fiction at some point, there are brief flurries of Mary Sue-ism and power creep here and there, but she does a good job of keeping that kind of thing under control and maintaining narrative tension. Sort of thing where you think you're reading pure pulp then every fifty pages or so there's a flash that surprises and reminds you "Hey! This is actually a pretty good book!"
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Aug 9, 2013 19:44
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Joramun posted:Just temporarily switch over to Amazon UK and grab it from there. The Kindle version is even on sale (about half off) there right now. There have been cases of people having their Amazon accounts closed for doing that, it's not something that's really adviseable. quote:Technology writer Cory Doctorow suggested "the policy violation that Linn stands accused of is using a friend's UK address to buy Amazon UK English Kindle books from Norway". Under Amazon's rules, this type of action is barred, as the publisher seeks to control what content is read in which territory of the world. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account
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Aug 12, 2013 13:08
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There's always Heinlein's By His Bootstraps and/or All You Zombies.
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Aug 15, 2013 19:13
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Copernic posted:
Any advance reviews out? I think three solid entries is my threshold for starting a new series.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:06
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buildmorefarms posted:Thanks to you both! Johnathan Strange is probably what you want, it's basically a fantasy novel written as if written by a contemporary of Jane Austen. Completely kid-safe. Lies of Locke Lamora is well-written and *awesome* but the language is mostly modern and it does contain some graphic torture scenes.
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Aug 21, 2013 12:44
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Datasmurf posted:So I am looking for some new fantasy to read. Pratchett's Lords and Ladies has evil elves. It's part of the witches cycle.
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Aug 25, 2013 08:47
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Phoon posted:The new Shadows of the Apt came out a few weeks ago. The series is insane and I love it. At the beginning of the series they have airships and a few pseudo-rifles. Nine books in they are firing railguns at giant mechanical centipedes. Thanks for the head's up on this. I really enjoy this series and for some reason even the author's website hasn't mentioned that this book has come out! The lack of easily available US kindle edition is very annoying though >_<
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Aug 27, 2013 13:20
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I don't think there's ever been a good book about winning a video game.
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Aug 27, 2013 14:17
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John Charity Spring posted:Only You Can Save Mankind, one of Terry Pratchett's Young Adult things. As an artefact of early 90s gaming culture it's a total nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers that, and it has a much more mature attitude to the whole thing too. There's also The Last Starfighter, technically a movie but there was an Alan Dean Foster novelization. It's "good" in the way that, say, D&D novels are "good" when you're 13. But also not really about the video game, that's just the hook.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:31
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Fallom posted:Scalzi seems to be much better at publicizing himself than he is at writing. I enjoyed reading the first book of the Old Man's War series, but he hasn't seemed to have grown as a writer since then. He did in The Android's Dream. It's his best work by far. Still kindof a mashup of Vernor Vinge and Douglas Adams, but sharp, fast-moving, and hilarious. Unfortunately the market seems to want more and more and more retreads of the Old Man's War universe, not comic SF. Scalzi's at his best writing humor. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Sep 2, 2013 |
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Sep 2, 2013 17:46
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Oh lord, there's a complete Merchant Princes rewrite? I don't want to buy like twelve more books!
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Sep 2, 2013 17:54
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Jedit posted:They won't be so keen when you ask for an essay comparing it with Oliver Twist. There's definitely some influences and allusions there but I think it's more complex than a strict 1 on 1 comparison. Even the clearest of those (Fagin=Thiefmaker) is somewhat complicated because Father Chains does the same job just more positively. The interesting comparison to write there would be a comparison of the two work's attitude towards social class and thieving. Oliver Twist represents thieving as an evil and the upper class as nearly synonymous with virtue; Locke Lamora makes that a fair bit more complicated. What'll make that kind of comparison really interesting is if we ever find out any information about Locke's parents (is his father still alive?) and family.
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Sep 3, 2013 14:43
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Jedit posted:The plot is pretty much obvious if you've read any kind of myth or The Sandman. I don't regret reading American Gods, but I have no urge to read it again. Yeah, this, I found American Gods painfully predictable. It's not horrible or anything but it's not one of Gaiman's first-rank works. Sandman, Stardust, Neverwhere are all far superior.
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Sep 5, 2013 12:28
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In what I've read of Sanderson's stuff he came across as a very workmanlike writer -- everything's professional, but there didn't seem to be much originality to it. Not bad at all, far from it, but no amazing flashes either, just solid genre fantasy.
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Sep 10, 2013 18:22
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BananaNutkins posted:I highly recommend Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series as the best fantasy series ever written. Scott Lynch agrees with me. Jo Walton has a theory that the extra years are because Padeen is a sidhe and when he's on ship they voyage out of time.
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Sep 11, 2013 19:17
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General Battuta posted:You don't have to do this! Find the authors who can write good SF and good capital-L literature. They do exist. You don't need to settle for one or the other. I think it's a mistake to talk about "Real Literature" in that sense.For one thing, even when one author is objectively "better" or "more Literary" that doesn't mean I stop enjoying all "lesser" authors. I didn't stop liking the first few of Robert Asprin's Myth books the minute I read my first Terry Pratchett novel. They both write comic fantasy, and Pratchett is, well, let's face it, a better writer, but the first few Myth books are still plenty charming and I still re-read them every so often. Past that, different writers are usually trying different things with their talents -- writing a truly good space opera is harder than you might think. It's perfectly possible for the same reader to enjoy Borges for what Borges can do and also enjoy, say, Glen Cook's Black Company series for what it is. One of my favorite writers is Roger Zelazny precisely because each one of his books is something completely different -- sometimes he's writing thematically complex experimental works (say, Creatures of Light and Darkness, where one chapter is a play, one chapter is a lyrical poem, one is an epic poem, etc.) and sometimes he's writing comic pastiche fiction like A Night in the Lonesome October, sometimes he's writing pure pulp pageturners (Amber series), etc. Hell even in his probably greatest work, the Hugo-winning Lord of Light, there's like a five-page sequence that's almost entirely setup for one gloriously horrible pun. I'll admit there's a certain amount of truth to what you say but I think the field of authors people truly "grow out of" is comparatively small -- mostly the guys writing licensed star wars / AD&D fiction and Piers Anthony. Once you're over a certain minimum threshold, it's all "good," it's just what you're in the mood for. Some days I want to read Borges, some days I want to read about spaceships. edit: "small" isn't the right word. Lord knows there are enough authors like Dan Brown etc. who are just objectively bad. If a given author is technically solid though I'll probably enjoy his work whether he's writing pulp or High Literature. Enjoying Faulkner doesn't mean I have to stop enjoying Robert E. Howard. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Sep 12, 2013 |
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Sep 12, 2013 14:47
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General Battuta posted:I'd put any of Connie Willis's books up there as great literature about the human condition. I've never been able to get more than a page or two into To Say Nothing of the Dog because every time I start reading it I'm like "Ok, I see what you're doing here, but I've read Three Men in a Boat, and this is no Three Men in a Boat." And then I go read Three Men in a Boat. I probably need to give it yet another go.
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Sep 12, 2013 15:09
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