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Decius posted:You could probably add Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series to the "what else to read"-section. Very similar to Harry Dresden, in style, tone and setting, except Alex Verus is a Diviner (can tell the future with some limitations) in - where else? - London, he has basically no combat abilities except running away, hiding really well, throwing things very accurately (it helps if you can tell where your throws would land). Ex-Dark Mage, who gave up being dark once he realised what a shitshow it is, but also not very popular with Light Mages... As said, very similar to Harry Dresden. Yeah, I've read these too - it's not as good as Dresden but it is still a pretty fun read. He is so very, very Dresden, though. Everyone but him can throw fireballs and suck the life out of you and freeze things solid and teleport, he can see possible futures seconds-to-minutes ahead, - all several thousands of them at once with nothing but 'probably' on the most likely ones and nothing that involves human choice (people tend to not really make and actually think about decisions constantly and just fall into habit, react to things, and stick to what they have already decided on which is how people can be predictable) and using trinkets other people have made, and that's it. Of course, everyone has to try and push him around because he's on the bottom of the totem pole as a result. Multiple dead giant badasses who underestimate him later, people are only more determined to step on him. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 07:52 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 07:45
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That book was pretty amazing  . I like the fact that Harry pretty much completely outwitted the bad guy for once! He finally smartened up a smidgeon! The whole Knight of the Cross thing turned in a COMPLETELY unexpected and amazing direction, I literally did not predict it until the moment it landed in Butter's hand - when i saw it bounce out of Charity's hand, I was expecting it to like, bounce and hit Nicodemus in the back of the head and cause some chain reaction that saved Butters as one last final hurrah for the sword. Having Valmont helping Michael's family properly sell and invest their millions of dollars of stolen diamonds entertained me immensely for some reason. Grey was an interesting character, and I suspect we'll see him again - sure he's a potential ally of godlike power, but when everything he's dealing with is a godlike power nowadays.. I'm curious what the 'Rent' is. With the dollar bit, it seems like he requires the act of completing a job and recieving payment considerably more than the actual job itself. I almost suspect that he's trying to do some sort of bargain to become less Naagloshi, more whatever the Naagloshi were before they did the native american spirit equivalent of Falling  . Either that or it somehow holds off him turning into a bloodslavering monster, or some other unwanted burden placed upon Naagloshi, which fits more with the 'rent' aspect.
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May 27, 2014 22:40
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Skippy McPants posted:I liked it for the most part, but; Eh, An absolutely massively astronomical number of women are sexually assaulted at some point in their life - it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that if one of them is a teenager who can burn people with their mind she's not going to give a poo poo about the First Law. It seems like a very reasonable way to give you a reason to kill someone with magic in a sympathetic manner, considering that almost the only way that it's really morally justified enough to create the moral dilemma he wanted with her character is to kill self defense or against an abuser. It's considerably more likely (and sympathetic) than her blowing up some random mugger, or something. He needed a character that was a killer and criminal, but a sympathetic one, and one that would be vulnerable to Lasciel's influence, to have a proper vehicle for Lasciel to return. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 00:18 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 00:15
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Fried Chicken posted:So "Genoskwa" apparently translates to "rock man" which explains the earth magic. That sort of reminds me, I wonder what's going to happen in regards to the coins lost in Hades - there's some sort of equilibrium with the Coins, and removing some from the game permanently in a way that they can't be 'recirculated' might allow potentially the Fallen to act in some way to restore that equilibrium.
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May 28, 2014 00:22
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Skippy McPants posted:Don't see how it's possible. We've seen Kincaid laid out by pretty conventional amounts of damage. He can take a beating, but he stays beat for a while after. Grey on the other hand was recovering from lethal gunshots in mere moments. Grey has enough of a different personality from Kincaid too, I think. Grey doesn't seem to be as much of an unneccesarily antagonistic dick as Kincaid is, who somehow tries to turn every conversation into a death threat to posture about how badass he is. While Grey seemed similar at first, it turns out most of the first scene with him was pre-planned ahead of time by Harry, and for most of the rest of the book, despite being an immortal badass probably capable of standing toe to toe with any of the rest of the team (barring Bigfoot), he ends up being suprisingly not unfriendly or unreasonable, despite it not being at all required by his contract. Then the whole deal with asking only a dollar as payment at the end, which isn't very Kincaid at all and is the closest possible equivalent of giving someone a gift with no expectation of something in return for all those magical creatures who make debts a big deal. Sure, they only briefly went into his character, but I'd be interested in seeing more about the maybe-not-evil-after-all Naagloshi. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he showed up again - the whole idea of what's supposed to be a creature supposedly born inherently evil being able to decide to not be ties up pretty well with the themes of the series. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 12:26 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 12:18
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Walh Hara posted:I didn't like it that much to be honest. There's plenty of mysteries left, and now two or three new ones. What exactly is Nemesis, and how exactly does it do what it does? What is a Starborn? What really was the deal with Dresden's mother and Lord Raith that created the circumstances that lead to Harry being born as one? Where is Grandmother Winter's walking stick? What is Mavra planning with the Word of Kemmler? What's the deal with the Formor? What's exactly happened to the original Merlin? Who was the man in the crystal at the beginning of the book? What is 'the Rent'? How do the Denarians, or possibly just Nicodemus and his daughter, plan on 'saving the world'? What was his purpose with those artifacts, and the Holy Grail? I'm sure I missed some, and even between just those i'm sure there's easily several books worth of plot twists and reveals, I'm sure. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 13:46 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 13:44
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Ornamented Death posted:There's enough in Hearne's work to criticize without blowing something that occupied two whole lines in one book out of proportion. I think it's because those two lines were the jarring culmination of Atticus's terribleness - it was always there, but then something just toostupid happens that is the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes you realize that how terrible Atticus is written. I know he's trying to 'fit in' but is in reality a several thousand year old druid, he's not going to think like a mid-20s Redditor.
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Jun 19, 2014 05:10
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ImpAtom posted:Because a lot of his gimmicks and especially the way he is written in Skin Game would make a lot more sense as "this is the author's CoH character." I admit I can kind of see it, having played a Mastermind in CoH.
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Jun 28, 2014 13:41
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Megazver posted:Check out The Breach and American Craftsmen. I tried American Craftsman a couple weeks ago and ehhh. It was a really weird book.
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Jul 13, 2014 12:18
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Khizan posted:As an American who doesn't know London or the UK at all, this didn't bother me at all. This - If you don't know London or the UK then who cares!
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Aug 10, 2014 00:19
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Pfft, Verus and Bobby Dollar are worth reading, though I stopped reading Sandman Slim a long time ago.
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Sep 2, 2014 04:33
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Apoffys posted:"Severed Streets" is a mostly decent sequel; if you liked the first book, you'll probably like the second one too. Not my favourite series, but not a waste of money either. Yeah, I rolled my eyes at the light/dark thing too, but it eventually ends up showing that there really isn't much morality involved at all in the light/dark thing - it's entirely how they go about getting what they want. Light dudes are pretty much evil politicians and Dark dudes are more Sith-like like someone earlier mentioned. In the end though, they're both pretty terrible and the only real difference is the light dudes will stab you in the back instead of just killing you outright.
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Sep 5, 2014 05:19
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So. Japanese covers for the Rivers of London series. http://zenoagency.com/news/peter-grants-conquest-of-japan-continues/ 
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Sep 29, 2014 16:33
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Skippy McPants posted:No, it really, really, really, really doesn't. It really does, though - When it hits the point where you're dealing with gods on a regular basis, there comes a point when no matter how clever you are, you can't do jack poo poo to them without some sort of an edge, and assuming that a deus ex machina will fall into your lap that could let you kill gods and outsiders every single time, when you're an ordinary human, is pretty silly. At this point, combat relevance IS a matter of characterization. Harry, being Harry, is in constant conflict with ludicrously powerful enemies, and there comes a point when bringing along his completely powerless friends to go slay eldritch abominations doesn't actually help him in the slightest and just gets them killed pointlessly. Presumably Harry would never want this to happen. He's fully aware how dangerous the poo poo he gets in is, The characters themselves do not know they have plot armor. The characters themselves don't walk into every situation assuming they can kill any horrific monster even without Harry's help with enough grit and gumption and some cleverness. How powerful something is DOES matter. Being clever doesn't do jack poo poo against something immune to bullets and knives and heavy objects and fire, and if you don't have some sort of magical trinket to help you, or know some secret weakness that they may well not have, well, I guess you're hosed. It may be a theme that even the lowliest of the low can take down the mighty and arrogant, but it doesn't go so far as to make it a given or to consider a random muggle and a Denarian on an equal playing field. Butters at least had Bob, which is honestly enough of an edge that you can see him taking on a lot of low and middle weight monsters, but it would have seriously been pushing it if he had started to kill outsiders/demons on a regular basis without becoming a Knight. It just seems silly to act like a character's characterization and their ability to fight are completely and totally unrelated in a book series with nonstop fighting. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Oct 30, 2014 |
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Oct 30, 2014 12:01
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Maybe I'm missing something here, but I can't remember the last time Butters or Murphy were involved in one of these Dresden Vs God plots. They've both mainly been doing their small time street work gig with the remnants of the alphas since Dresden died that one time. Yeah, that's sort of the point in a way - they're getting shelved because because they can't really do diddly other than provide moral support. A lot of things can't even be hurt by a gun - when you're dealing with the nastiest supernatural monsters you kinda want at least a magical weapon of some sort. Not every situation's gunna have a big rock available to fall on them, especially if it didn't go exactly as you planned and you're attacked unexpectedly. Essentially it's more that Murphy is going to need some sort of magical powerup to stay relevant, especially since (as others have said) she's getting older now and she had trouble with poo poo much weaker than this in her prime.
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Oct 30, 2014 19:35
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The third of M.L. Brennan's Generation V book came out a couple days ago, and I just finished it. I've been enjoying the series pretty well, and it started off decently strong and has gotten better. The main character's a young 20something vampire, and the vampires here are born instead of made, starting off mostly human and becoming less and less human as they get older, with a family of very old, powerful vampires who rule over something of a supernatural feudal state within the northeastern United States, and are all hundreds of years old and are all creepy, alien, inhuman sociopathic monsters. He wasn't raised among them for a large part of his childhood as a sort of social experiment by his mother to produce a vampire that can blend in with humans better, and is scared shitless he's going to grow up into some sociopathic monster that views people as food, so he's gone out of his way to try and be a rebel and drink the bare minimum amount of blood and never eat meat and move out and avoid any contact he can with his family, while they bemusedly tolerate this as something of a childish fit since 20-something is still considered child to them and he's pretty much hitting vampire puberty and still is mostly human. She does a good job at writing his family - she tricks you into sympathising with some of them, only to nail in the fact that they're killing people to stay alive and they don't care in the slightest, while simultaneously making them allies of the main character because they're still his family. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 11:38
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AllTerrineVehicle posted:Just as a reminder, Foxglove Summer (Rivers of London 5) comes out on the 13th As far as Amazon is concerned I live wherever the book I want is coming out first.
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Nov 7, 2014 08:04
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Robzilla posted:Well gently caress, I just burnt through all 5 books of the Alex Versus series within a span of 3 days and now I got nothing to read. Here's a couple other decent urban fantasy series if you're desperate, I'm always digging through Amazon to find decent-to-good offerings.. The ones that I can think of offhand are M.L Brennan's Generation V (which i just toss a review up just a little back), Craig Schaefer's Daniel Faust series, K.A. Stewart's A Devil in the Details, Mike Carey's The Devil You Know, Stephen Blackmoore's Dead Things, Alex Hughes' Clean, Elliot James' Charming, Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces, Seth Skorkowsky's Damoren, Daniel O'Malley's The Rook, Rachel Aaron's Nice Dragons Finish Last, Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, Paul Cornell's London Falling.. and probably more I can't think of at the moment. It's not until I actually list them like this do I realize just how much decent urban fantasy is getting made compared to, say, five years ago, when Dresden Files was practically the only option. I can't find anything decent to read right now though, unfortunately - anyone found any good or at least decent recent offerings in the meantime? There's so many completely godawful ones on Amazon that it's a ton of work to find the good ones. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 06:25
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Khizan posted:Mike Carey's Felix Castor books were decent, I think. I didn't really get too into Sandman Slim myself, I think I read the first book and was just too eh to pick up the second. It came off like he was trying too hard to make the main character TOTALLY BADASS AND HARDCORE. I can definitely see where you'd get turned off Dead Things seeming a bit too edgy and grimdark, though. But, it's practically a genre staple to make the urban fantasy protagonist suffer like hell, even if it did go a bit far . The next book scaled it back a bit, though.
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Nov 9, 2014 08:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'm not sure even that's possible, it appears to be print-only. Someone would have to physically scan the Waterstone's editions of the books that have the shorts. For a long while, ebook pirates did just that - you'd have been surprised just how comprehensive the scanned book collection on pirate sites were, before ebooks were standard for every single release. They even had huge numbers of people actually take this scanned input, put it through programs designed to turned scanned pages into text, proofread the countless errors this inevitably produced, and then formatted the goods to not look too terrible on a ebook reader. . You could expect most of the popular releases in most genres, along with every single romance novel ever released in the history of mankind, in a somewhat readable form a week or two after release.I would be surprised if anyone bothers doing that nowadays for anything short of old classics or something, though, yet alone an ultra limited edition short story for some small series.
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Dec 13, 2014 14:55
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daggerdragon posted:Then you need to educate yourself about sites like Project Gutenberg and its associated Distributed Proofreaders. Well yeah of course - I mostly meant pirates in particular probably don't want to put that effort forward any more. At the time it was often the only eBook form of many books and in some cases the only way to find a book without buying it used off eBay for 100$ so there was more motivation. Now ebooks are a dime a dozen so the groups that did this disbanded, as far as I know.
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Dec 14, 2014 06:41
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I just finished Unbound, and I liked it a lot. I admit, though, even though it was a really good read, that the biggest thing it did was actually get me really interested in what's going to happen in Book 4. The fallout and consequences of the book are practically more interesting than the book itself, it's a shame it ended so quickly instead of having more time to wrap up. I admit, I never actually suspected the series would go in that direction, and I hope that book 4 focuses fully on the fallout of magic being revealed to the world, and definitely goes into what happens in regards to that letter from his brother, instead of pulling out some new monster or focusing on the Ghost Army. I know that he was pushing the whole idea of freedom of speech and all that for writing, but libriomancers are scary, and the idea that anyone could pull a nuclear bomb, or a super-virus from the worst sci-fi hell, or god knows what else out of a book makes me sort of sympathize with the whole reactionary backlash from governments proposing restrictions on what sort of horrible doomsday weapon you write into your fiction. Honestly, it'd kind of suck - every time anyone writes a book they have to consider that they could be creating the next nuclear bomb if their book becomes a bestseller. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 10:13
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Found a pretty strong urban fantasy debut, David B. Coe's Spell Blind, where people who inherit the ability to use magic succumb to a sort of creeping madness, the strength of their magic waxes and wanes with the moon, and for the 3 nights when the moon is full enough they go completely insane. Obviously, having monthly psychotic breaks is not good for your mental health, so most magicians who don't completely surpress their magic entirely 24/7 with certain drugs, which is apparently the norm for the vast majority of them, usually end up going permanently insane by their late 40s. Anyway, the main character was a cop for many years, secretly using magic to help his investigations despite the risks, but eventually his increasingly powerful monthly episodes became too difficult to conceal and he was fired for what everyone had assumed to be drug or alcohol abuse, so he took the stereotypical route and became a private investigator. He ends up getting pulled in by his old partner, who was the only one who he ever told about the whole 'magic' thing, to an old serial killing case he worked on when he was a cop, a guy who burns out his victims eyes, and had left traces of magic on all of his victims corpses, and who was never caught and continues to kill every month, and ended up killing the daughter of a powerful politician. It's sort of interesting how he dealt with the whole 'magic is a secret' thing. Instead of it being a true secret, most people are aware, vaguely that it exists, but very few people actually admit to having it, because it's inexoriably tied to the stigma of serious mental illness, and because most magic isn't exactly flashy or even visible, a lot of the people who do admit it are brushed off as a loon who thinks he has magic powers. Also, the main character isn't a massive goon like Dresden, which is a nice plus. I don't think he ogles a woman in the entire book. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 21:01
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Mars4523 posted:I'm just going off of a blog post by the author here, but is it just a coincidence that Justis (which is a dumb name) is a private investigator who is brought in by a female police detective with whom he is familiar with to investigate crimes involving magic, begins a relationship with a beautiful reporter, and also has a spirit that provides him with information? All of those people have such a completely different personality and relationship and role in the plot that it doesn't really resemble Storm Front when you've actually read it, without going into extremely broad strokes like that. For one, the female police detective and him are best friends and in fact former partners on the police force, with no stupid secrets kept between them causing drama (he shares 100% of what's going on with her throughout the entire book), and no romance involved between them. She's also considerably more competent, reasonable, and important to the plot than Murphy ever was in the early Dresden books. It's definitely in the Dresden files vein of noir-ish urban fantasy (which is why I posted it here) but I've read way more derivative UF than this. (The first Alex Verus, for one) Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Jan 18, 2015 |
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Jan 18, 2015 22:06
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Barbe Rouge posted:Are Coe's other series good? I've checked him out on goodreads and all 3 of them (Tobyn, Forelands and the third one) sound like generic fantasy. I think I tried the Lon Tobyn and the Blood of the Southlands series ages ago, and Lon Tobyn was boring and bog standard as it sounds, but I think I recall liking Blood of the Southlands. It was quite some time ago, and I don't remember it being anything spectacular, but it was pretty good. I never got around to reading Forelands.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:40
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Mygna posted:That, and the fact that all the stuff a Libriomancer pulls out actually produces its intended effect via magic spells. You can't pull out a tricorder and use it to reverse engineer Federation tech, because its just an inert replica if you strip away the magic. Which means every threat is susceptible to a sufficiently powerful 'rod of dispelling', or whatever techniques for manipulating spells are available to Gutenberg and the other non-libriomantic mages. It seems like stuff like grey goo and superviruses wouldn't be too difficult to bring through, however - it's the fact that they make more of themselves once they exist that makes them dangerous. Pretty much like the whole vampire virus business, or Lena's acorn. The whole cost of libriomancy seems to be spent on pulling out the initial item, and items that grow or replicate or change seem to be a bit of a loophole.
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Jan 19, 2015 18:39
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KellHound posted:That reminds me just picked up Seanan McGuire's Rosemary Rue and need to get around to listen to it. But I haven't heard of Alex Hughes' stuff, what's it like tonally and how would you rate it? Alex Hughes Mindspace series is pretty good, it's set in a sort of post-singularity/apocalyptic future where they've already rebuilt to a society similar enough to how we are now, only the vast majority of technology that has even the tiniest sliver of computing power is heavily regulated or banned, after the disastrously powerful weapons used in world war 3 nearly wiped out civilization. So, instead, genetic modification/breeding ended up creating people who are telepathic, precognitive, telekinetic, and so on, who formed the 'Telepath's Guild' that's due to various international treaties is practically a sovereign nation in that it has the final say over the lives of telepaths, to the point where if you arrest a member you have to turn them over to the Guild instead of being able to be tried in a normal court. Anyway, the main character is a dude who used to be pretty much a big shot professor in the Guild due to his ludicrously powerful telepathy that had him capable of teaching multiple students telepathically at once (since the only way to teach telepathic techniques is with a strong mental link with someone, it's not something that you can really explain verbally). He participated in a drug trial that was supposed to enhance telepathic ability, but got addicted to it and hid it, and ended up burning out the mind of one of his students, seriously damaging his own ability, losing his job, and becoming a homeless addict, eventually turning it around and joining AA, and now he essentially is a freelance telepath that is sometimes hired by the police and ends up getting drawn into poo poo way over his head, like you'd expect. It has some amusing Dresden parallels though. The Guild is very early book White Council, the police detective he works with is very Murphy (though not quite as angry), and he's practically a telepath PI instead of a wizard PI, though beyond this they do have a very different feel. There's no real romance, though by several books in the main character and the female detective are a couple, and there's no smouldering glances or passionate vampire sex.
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Feb 1, 2015 13:39
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Wow, I just finally caught up and finished A Plain-Dealing Villain in the Daniel Faust series and this series is getting really, genuinely good, easily the best book in the series by far. But.. that cliffhanger, goddamn, when is the next book coming out?  You'd think it'd take a breather after the major plot of the first three books was resolved, but nope, it just kicked it into even higher gear. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 08:36
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Benny the Snake posted:How good is the series? Because I can only find it in print thru Amazon Daniel Faust? Well, I like it a lot, and I found out about it because all the positive reviews much earlier in this thread, so it's definitely worth reading. The books keep getting stronger with each book, and the first one in itself was already pretty good, so. I saw a couple of negative-ish discussion on the SF/F thread from people who fixated on the mere /idea/ that one of the main characters is a succubus, but considering that she's more 'utterly terrifying badass' instead of 'male fantasy' and the book never gets creepy about her (or about anyone), I never really saw the problem. And do you mean you can't find a kindle edition or you only want to read it in print? Because the kindle version's right there on Amazon. I'm an ebook guy and am much happier being able to get my cheaper books, quickly. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 10:02
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:As a dissenting voice, I couldn't even make it through 20% of the first book, everything felt really disjointed, the main character's 'voice' was irritating and the writing as a whole sounded incredibly amateur. I'm kind of the minority in the thread though. The first book wasn't amazing or anything but I feel like the series as a whole is enjoyable enough to be worth giving it a book or two. After all, this is the Dresden Files thread, which nearly nobody would read entirely off of the quality of the first book, and I liked Long Way Down more than Storm Front.
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Feb 10, 2015 00:34
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Yeah that's true, maybe I'll give it another shot at some point. Is there a 'Zombie Dinosaur' moment for the Faust series that marks when the good bits begin? I feel like there isn't a sudden obvious moment when it's suddenly considerably better, it's more of a noticeable improvement with each book. It's very possible that the end of book 4 is the point when the series starts majorly ramping up, as it has a rather surprising plot twist/cliffhanger, but there's no way of knowing until the next book how much things will change. He's been a fast writer so far (I think the first book was released in mid 2014) so I'm hoping book 5 will be out soon.
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Feb 10, 2015 05:00
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Benny the Snake posted:I just got "The Long Way Down" and it hooked me from the first page. I guess it's in how Craig Schafer's style reminds me so much of Raymond Chandler in a good way, and I loves me some Raymond Chandler. In other words, Daniel Faust is an old-school hardboiled pulp detective and I like the book so far. It's everything that I would've wanted in Harry Dresden. I've seen some reviews actually complaining at how little magic firepower he has with it being mostly his card trick - funnily enough I think it almost works better this way. He pretty much comes out on top every time by outsmarting everyone instead of by knocking down the house with a fireball. His magic seems to be more useful for just general sensing/awareness and against people without any magic, which is an interesting contrast to the powerhouse Dresden is. I like how he's actually smart in a way that a lot of urban fantasy protagonists aren't - he studies, he makes plans, that often even work, he relies on and for the most part trusts his allies instead of trying to do everything alone, it's sort of refreshing compared to the typical 'stumble around and get beaten up a lot and win through sheer determination' style of character.
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Feb 15, 2015 15:13
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darthbob88 posted:He does set her free, and they do start working together later, although occasionally at cross-purposes. They actually start dating a bit later in the book, although it doesn't get too absurdly sexualized. It's mostly dealing with the trust issues implicit in a demon from hell connecting with a mere mortal, there's only one sex scene, and that's still less absurdly male-gazey than Dresden gets. The whole Craft Sequence series is really great, yeah - I really like his bizarre worldbuilding.
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Feb 17, 2015 10:35
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ImpAtom posted:No, Alex takes actual satisfaction in killing people. That is part of what scares him about even himself. Sonder even calls him on it and he's basically unable to argue it. On top of that he's incredibly self-centered and selfish. He cares a lot about his friends far less so for anyone who doesn't fall into that category. He is a bad person. He doesn't want to be but the depth to which he is a bad person isn't clear even to himself until it is forced out. He was trained by a nasty horrific person and despite rejecting him he took a lot of what he said and internalized it. The books unambigiously state that he may be a bad influence on the people around him and might be teaching them the wrong things without realizing it. I wouldn't go that far. He's done some nasty things but in a lot of cases he didn't really have any other option. He may not be a good person but I wouldn't call him a bad person either. He goes out of his way to avoid conflict, it's just that he's utterly ruthless when someone forces him into it.
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Mar 10, 2015 03:20
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Oookay we really need to drop the subject.
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Mar 13, 2015 08:14
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anilEhilated posted:That, along with the constantly recycled villains is pretty much my problem with it too. It's not bad by any means, it just doesn't hold interest very well (and Kitai is awful). Butcher is much better at doing twists on existing mythologies and folk tales than making up his own (barbarian hordes, check. Beastmen, check. Giant bugs, check.). Even the whole fury magic thing feels weak and half-assed. I like the whole 'everyone has innate magic and it's used for anything and everything including mundane everyday tasks' idea with the furies, and how lacking this basic ability makes it hard to function, though he doesn't do too much interesting with it outside of some fun battles. I honestly think he could have done a more interesting story if he never got his furies, or just stuck with the crippled internal-only version he had for a while, instead of becoming a demigod. Most of the best stuff was when he was powerless or mostly powerless
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May 4, 2015 10:26
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I actually liked the politics stuff, it was way more interesting than the zerg. Politics/spy stuff/military stuff with the powerless underdog everyone underestimates due to his powerlessness is more interesting than living god exploding millions of bugs.
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May 5, 2015 00:03
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mistaya posted:I know everyone loves Sanderson but I really just can't get into him because it's like reading glorified Player's Handbook fluff. I got about two chapters into Way of Kings and he takes this actually interesting fight scene between a dude with gravity bending powers and a dude in magic armor and makes it completely soul-less. It's like reading an Ikea manual. Step one, tether yourself the ceiling. Step two, tether Enemy A to the ceiling. Step three, untether yourself and chop Enemy A from step 2 in half as you descend from Step one. Step four, repeat as necessary. Yeah like everybody said, the first scene of Way of Kings is terrible even to people who like his books. He shakes it off fast though, the rest of the book is actually good (for people who actually like any Sanderson) and from there the second book is even better than the (already good) first. A lot of people who found Shallan's plot boring/irritating in the first book ended up liking her the most by the end of the second, for example. Out of curiosity, did you read the whole WoK book or stop there? If you didn't, it might be worth giving the rest of the book a fair shot before deciding not to read the series, since something like that prologue never happens again. Emperor's Soul and his other short stories are definitely some of his best works though. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 04:59 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 04:55
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tentacles posted:Holding up WoT as an example of great writing is a good way to make the other side's point for them I'd say they're a little better than that. Dragon Ball Z is like the David Eddings or Mercedes Lackey level fantasy authors. I mean sure yeah WoT isn't 'great writing' but it's not pure shlock either.
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May 23, 2015 05:47
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Just finished reading Seth Skorkowsky's second book in his demon-hunting Valducan series, Hounacier after last year's Damoren, about demon hunters with almost-sentient weapons that feed on demons. Demons in this case being the whole plethora of supernatural monsters that can both possess humans and twist their bodies into a monstrous form, and mark them for later possession (think werewolf bite) if their first body dies, with the aforementioned weapons being the only thing to actually kill a demon for good so it can't just hop bodies. I really enjoyed the first one a yearish ago, and the second book is just as solid. He's got an intriguing world with some interesting and creepy monsters, and writes well enough that i'd easily consider it one of the better UF series i've read (I read so much bad UF trying to find good ones). He seems to be doing a somewhat novel thing with the series too in that it looks like each book will focus on a different main character and their weapon, and the blurb for book 3 looks like it'll continue the trend.
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Jul 9, 2015 15:31
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