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StrixNebulosa posted:You're all describing Garrett PI and making me hungry for Nero Wolfe so thanks! Yeah, every time I start reading Garrett I end up just reading Wolfe instead. So that works out.
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Oct 4, 2019 12:26
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Munin posted:Any good non-bleak and/or uplifting scifi or fantasy? given my excessive news consumption I need a palate cleanser. Anyone who likes Becky Chambers should read Lawrence Watt-Evan's stuff, starting with The Misenchanted Sword. He was doing Cozy in the eighties.
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Oct 7, 2019 03:33
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orange sky posted:So, I finally got around to reading Bridge of Birds and oh man, after reading semi serious stuff for years it was hard for me to grasp the tone of the book, I kept falling into the trap of trying to seriously understand it all, instead of just... Enjoying the crazy stuff? I can't really explain it, I think until the end I never got the way to read it right, I'll probably need a reread. It's so different to everything I'm used to. Yeah. Just let it unfold in your mind like a flower.
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Oct 8, 2019 20:41
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ToxicFrog posted:I'd recommend Children of Ruin if you liked CoT; I didn't like it as much but it's still a fun sequel. I also enjoyed Spiderlight (Shelob-style giant intelligent spider gets transformed into a human and forced to join a generic D&D adventuring party) and Cage of Souls (a Dying Earth novel about an exiled revolutionary). SotA is fun if you like weird bug themed fantasy. Bugs are his thing.
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Oct 14, 2019 12:43
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quantumfoam posted:Everyone chill out and move on or this thread gets timed-out for a day. I know I haven't been around as much lately -- I've gone from working about 35 hours a week to working about 90 -- but please do not lock threads, it'll create a giant headache when everyone freaks out. Just use the report button. Also, this should not need repeating, but to everyone in this thread and every other thread in this subforum: before each post, please consider: "is this post about a book, or about something that is not a book, such as another poster on the forum?" Only one of those categories is on topic! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 23:33
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Reverse werewolf is a swearwolf, obvs
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Oct 24, 2019 13:13
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Philistines https://youtu.be/rF9Z6Hvmf5M
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Oct 24, 2019 17:16
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genericnick posted:I think Steven Brust is also a trot? He is but it isn't obvious in his fiction the same way it is with Mieville. Good twitter follow though.
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Oct 26, 2019 14:10
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Philthy posted:It's going a bit off topic Let's all please stay on topic, that topic being books, and in this thread specifically, books with wizards and/or spaceships and/or the marketing thereof. A  chat is just going to fill up this thread with reports and piss everyone off, so let's not do that any more. Thanks everyone!
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Oct 30, 2019 12:33
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Is it just me, or does it seem like all the really interesting new books are being written in SF, not fantasy? The last new-release (non-urban) fantasy novel I can remember being genuinely excited by was either Lies of Locke Lamora or Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and both of those are like fifteen years old now. It feels like since Gaiman went commercial and Pratchett got formulaic there's just not much new happening in the genre. In contrast with SF every few years something I hadn't expected seems to take me by surprise, like Murderbot.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:14
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Khizan posted:For me it was probably Baru Cormorant. For some reason that's in my head as SF. I can't put any particular finger on why.
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Oct 31, 2019 00:26
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freebooter posted:Someone on Twitter the other day was spitballing the most influential fantasy novel of the last 20 years. My kneerjerk response was J Strange & Norrell, but that's "best" rather than "influential," because it's really just an Austenian fairytale. The fantasy novel which did something new and seminal, most people seemed to agree on, was Perdido Street Station. And that really is right at the limit of 20 years ago. Probably Storm Front honestly. Maybe whatever the first big paranormal romance novel was.
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Oct 31, 2019 02:56
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anilEhilated posted:Oh hey, so everyone should put their trust into the Benevolent Master Race. Much better. This is konda the inherent issue with Jemisin' flip: if you 1) make your fantasy novel about racism 2) make your protagonists an oppressed minority 3) have them go Galt and take over Then, nevertheless, you have 4) see #1 See Iron Dream, etc.
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Nov 14, 2019 18:31
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General Battuta posted:Yes, this is the point. He’s ‘obnoxiously perfect at everything,’ invincible, wins every fight, people come beg him for help even when he’s being a child, the most special, best at racing, kings need to grovel for his approval. People would blithely call him a Mary Sue because the term is hopelessly nonspecific, a thoughtless Television Trope, a replacement for real thought. I see where you're coming from and the term is overblown and overused but I think it has some remaining merit if used intelligently. When I hear "mary sue" I think of a character like Honor Harrington who is *narratively perfect* -- a character who may have "flaws" but never has actual flaws because all of those "flaws" work out to their benefit. E.g., Honor Harrington may be *too badass of a killer*, and may kill people everyone thinks she shouldn't, oh no she's a "war criminal" but by the end it turns out those people she massacred were secret space criminals so she was right to kill them all along. Achilles isn't a Mary Sue because he suffers consequea for his flaws. Ditto, say, Miles Vorkosigan. It's that quantum perfection that sets the true Mary Sue apart, IMHO, and makes it a term distinct from "protagonist". A true Marty Stu may *appear* to have flaws, but will never suffer consequences.
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Nov 19, 2019 19:49
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I read some of the short stories after I played the games. From what I recall, the stories were . . . B+/ A- grade fantasy. Comparable with something like Black Company maybe but it was hard to adjust for 1) translation problems and 2) video game afterglow and figure out where the books were "on their own." The main virtue is that they're drawing on non-English traditions and folklore so they're more "original" than Yet Another Lord of the Rings Clone etc. Cultural differences in the writing style etc. too. Probably worth reading if you're looking for fantasy that's different from most Western, english-language-tradition fantasy, less worth reading if you're not at the point where you're seeking out the different just because it's different.
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Nov 20, 2019 00:22
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Sure! And Bertie does suffer, usually at the hands of aunts, sometimes from the absence of Jeevesian light. Jeeves has no flaws but he's not the protagonist. He's the benevolent antagonist. Man vs. A Beneficent Deity.
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Nov 20, 2019 03:23
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Fake edit to above post; Also, Bertie Wooster is always clearly *proven wrong* by the text. A true Mary Sue protagonist is never, ever *wrong*. By the end of the story, all their actions will have been justified.
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Nov 20, 2019 14:06
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A Proper Uppercut posted:A while ago I was looking for some, eh, comfortable fantasy? Someone recommended Misenchanted Sword and it was perfect. Are the other books in that series good? Most of them are yeah but they vary a bit up and down. MS is clearly the best thing in the series but there are a couple others that are about as good (my favorite is Ithanalin's Restoration but read Spell of the Black Dagger first).
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Nov 30, 2019 14:22
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A Proper Uppercut posted:Nice, I will continue on then. I think the ones everyone acknowledges as weakest are "With a Single Spell," "Blood of a Dragon," and "Taking Flight." WaSS is still worth reading though because the characters pop up again frequently in the later ones. Valder has a couple minor cameos later on but he doesn't show up much.
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Nov 30, 2019 14:31
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Larry Parrish posted:Look beggars cant be choosers in the insanely small field of 18th century military fantasy. The first Temeraire novel was not horrible and I got so excited Hoo booy black diamond downhill slope there
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Dec 3, 2019 16:28
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90s Cringe Rock posted:That's science fiction, not fantasy. Padeen is a sidhe. That's why time turns funny in the later books. https://www.tor.com/2011/01/31/the-chief-argosy-of-your-command-patrick-obrians-the-commodore/ Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 18:18
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MockingQuantum posted:
This will probably get an eye roll but I honestly think Robert Jordan writes *battle* scenes very well, with a veteran's eye. You believe his characters have seen real combat. For small individual scale fight scenes, probably Robert E. Howard. Say what you will about Conan, a Conan fight scene grips the reader. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Dec 20, 2019 |
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Dec 20, 2019 23:00
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Kefahuchi_son!!! posted:Hi all!! I haven't really followed fantasy ouside the more famous stuff these past few years but i was looking for recommendations on books/series. While i normally like smaller scale and/or weirdeir stuff i'm in the mood for something epic. You've read China Mieville? If not, he's probably your next jam.
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Dec 23, 2019 02:03
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Don't post transphobia. Everyone else, Please let's keep the conversation about books and not about other posters, no matter how satisfying it might be to slap at them. If you see badposts, use the report button. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jan 1, 2020 |
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Dec 31, 2019 19:16
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Yeah, Charles Stross and Gibson have both talked about how doing near-future SF is functionally impossible now because everything is accelerating so rapidly.
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Jan 12, 2020 01:51
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PST posted:With regard to the Attack Heliocopter short story in Clarksworld, the last few days have seen a lot of trans twitter and sf editors/writers side-eying it a lot. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on with that. Besides it's mega-dumb and unoriginal, science fiction has had "what if person became vehicle" stories going back like eighty years: 1941 – Solar Plexus by James Blish. 1961 – The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey. The brainship was popularized in this short story about the brainship Helva. However, McCaffrey cited as her inspiration an earlier story. She says, I remember reading a story about a woman searching for her son's brain, it had been used for an autopilot on an ore ship and she wanted to find it and give it surcease. And I thought what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships? So that's how The Ship Who Sang was born. — Anne McCaffrey, Anne McCaffrey: Heirs to Pern, Locus Magazine [1] 1965 – "Becalmed in Hell", by Larry Niven. This short story was about Eric, an injured man who became a brainship, and his mobile partner Howie. Eric could not take off from the hazardous surface of Venus because he "felt" something wrong with his "wings". Howie had to find a solution before they both died.[2]
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Jan 12, 2020 14:45
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cptn_dr posted:Take care, General B. Hope things look up soon.
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Jan 13, 2020 13:08
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I'd say he's got a hell of a lot of good Middle Earth stuff published that could easily have been forgotten, but then I'm the kind of idiot who giggles at /r/SilmarillionMemes and shitposts about Fëanor. Also most.of LotR was originally written in the form of letters to Christopher. He was an active participant in the creation.
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Jan 16, 2020 20:53
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Not to go all C-SPAM in here, but the Dems ran a bad candidate with a poo poo campaign. Trump brilliantly harnessed the hatred white America has against minorities and poor people. Russian meddling did happen, All of this is also true quote:but it did not influence the outcome. This is, at this point, unproven at best. For just one example, we know that the Georgia election was very likely hacked, because the whole election routed through one server and there's a federal lawsuit over the server records being hacked. quote:Lamb also said he determined that computer logs — which would have been critical to understanding what might have been altered on or stolen from the server — only go back to Nov. 10, 2016 — two days after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president. Two years later, Brian Kemp won the Georgia governor’s race by a narrow margin over Democrat Stacey Abrams. https://apnews.com/39dad9d39a7533efe06e0774615a6d05 We also have at least some evidence that that server was targeted by Russian interference: quote:This changed on Friday, however, when the Justice Department unsealed the indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers who oversaw an operation that, the department says, included targeting county websites in Georgia. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/18/mueller-indictments-georgia-voting-infrastructure-219018 The best you can argue is that Russian interference in the election did not provably alter the results. It has not, at this point, been affirmatively proven that Russian interference either did or did not sway the election. All the other factors you mention did sway the election, sure, but Hillary's defeat had more than one single cause. The election was close enough that anything that shifted the results a hundredth of a percentage point could arguably be a "cause," so all sorts of small effects arguably mattered in a way they normally wouldn't. edit: That said, whoops, we're in Book Barn not D&D. I apologize for the derail! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 13:13
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cptn_dr posted:Is Greatcoats any good? I had someone passionately trying to convince me that once I read it I'd realise my previous love for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was all wrong and I'd see that I should be loving Greatcoats instead. He also tried to explain that Strange & Norrell is bad because it doesn't have a well defined magic system. I don't *regret* reading Greatcoats but I ain't gonna read it twice. From what I recall it started out as basically a . . . fine . . .Three Musketeers re-skin and then kinda goes off the rails in the later books because it obviously wasn't conceived as a series of that length. JS&N was one of the best books of it's decade though
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Jan 28, 2020 10:42
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C.M. Kruger posted:
Curse of Capistrano is in the public domain so a free download
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Jan 29, 2020 01:10
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There's some fantasy in the same vein. EVeryone should read Ithanalin's Restoration by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
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Feb 3, 2020 04:39
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quantumfoam posted:Of course it's Apparatchik Magnet blindly recommending Donaldson's Gap series to people. Of course. Aaronovitch is an actual marxist I believe. That said i think the series is deliberately set like 2014 to 16 or so now.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:25
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scary ghost dog posted:has anyone read the witcher books....i just finished them and i thjnk the last one is the best fantasy book ive ever read. I just read through them. They're not bad at all. Their main strength is probably that they're drawing so heavily on slavic folklore rather than western european folklore. biracial bear for uncut posted:Hey guys, has anybody read any of the Elder Scrolls books? Or Warhammer 40k tie-ins? You're being mega-dumb here. The witcher novels were written before, and independently of, the video game. The game is the spinoff, not the novels. I'm getting really sick of this reflexive poo poo on everything pose people are taking, especially when it's done in ignorance. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Feb 18, 2020 |
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Feb 18, 2020 13:02
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Jesus christ people I go away for one (1) work day and this thread gets more reports than the whole forum has gotten in the past month
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Feb 19, 2020 |
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Feb 19, 2020 02:38
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https://twitter.com/sfwa/status/1230535668302041090
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Feb 21, 2020 13:19
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PawParole posted:give me a book about either first contact, or generation ships. Novella, Murray Leinster, "First Contact"
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Feb 25, 2020 12:53
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Ccs posted:Are there any fantasy books that are also spy novels? Like wizards having to infiltrate a rival kingdom or something? Tim Power's Declare
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Apr 1, 2020 18:28
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Any time I read a book in second person I keep expecting to see "if you do ___, turn to page ___" at the bottom of the page.
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Apr 2, 2020 20:34
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Punkin Spunkin posted:Yeah this makes sense, it's almost a counter intuitive quest i put yall on though i appreciate all the good tips...it'd be easy if there was like, a non white george rr martin type who wrote less rapey and less hosed up clearly-written-by-a-dude type poo poo. Yeah, this is a rough call. Wheel of Time is very clearly written by a white dude but it at least has female and non-white characters who pass the Bechdel test. There's spanking and leashes at various points but it's definitely the "Game of Thrones, but less rapey and hosed up" option. One option is probably LeGuin's Earthsea series if she hasn't read it. LeGuin was white but her characters are pretty consistently not so.
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Apr 3, 2020 14:16
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