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I finished Phillip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth yesterday. It was great! The last 4 books Pullman wrote were mostly from children's POVs, so it was interesting to see him handle more adult perspectives. His use of language didn't change, but the kinds of thoughts the characters can have about their world aged up with their experiences. The world of His Dark Materials gets explored a lot more, this time only on Lyra's side of the multiverse. The story grapples with the meaning and importance of the fantastic, and Pullman uses a couple of philosopher characters whose works are influencing Lyra as an undergraduate as a way of criticizing the cold and selfish logic of certain virulent strains of thought (the Simon Talbot character seems partially based on Ayn Rand, and a Magisterium official even thinks to himself that such a philosophy is useful to them and that Talbot is a very useful idiot.) In the midst of the ideological concerns are lots of stabbings, brawls, and spycraft. The central plot is an unexpected horticultural discovery that connects to Dust. There's also a dynamic between Lyra and a male antagonist that's like a competent version of the Rey and Kylo relationship in Star Wars. Pullman showed he could finish a satisfying trilogy before, so I'm hoping the next and last book does justice to everything he's presented here.
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Feb 6, 2020 04:34
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freebooter posted:I'm glad somebody enjoyed it, because I found it quite the opposite: bloated and sprawling and unimaginative and I was even falling asleep during some of it. It has its moments (the Prague chapter was genuinely good) but it mostly struck me, like its predecessor, as a book written by a famous author whom editors daren't challenge anymore. It was the bloat that really bugged me. 200 pages into Northern Lights and we're already well into the second act, Lyra meeting Iorek Byrnison for the first time; 200 pages into the Secret Commonwealth and we're still faffing about with tedious amateur spy crap in Oxford and there's another 450 pages to go but they no longer seem like something to anticipate. The refugees did feel shoehorned. Pacing-wise I really liked and it didn’t feel like it dwelled too long on any one scene to bore me. The only thing I took a bit of issue with is how Lyra can be having the kind of doubts she was experiencing given what she saw throughout His Dark Materials. Like, she’s met witches and angels and harpies and dead souls. Believing in a dead universe because of the writings of some philosophers doesn’t seem like it would hold much weight against all that. But it connects with the point Pullman is trying to make about Dust, which has apparently become an aspect of his own belief system, that consciousness is a property of matter. So he needs to create this conflict so Lyra can come to that same realization in the third book.
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Feb 7, 2020 01:16
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freebooter posted:I persevered through the series and never found it outright bad, but it really irritated me how smug Abercrombie was about how meta he was being. Characters commenting every other page about how, well, maybe in the storybooks it's all glamour, but real life is muddy etc. Which is ironic given that a major thread in one of them is about a pompous, cowardly, arrogant military commander who has absolutely no idea what he's doing somehow ending up in charge of running a frontiers campaign, which seems to be drawn more from a Blackadder view of WWI generals than anything that's ever happened in real life. How did this empire become so big and powerful if it's putting pampered princelings in charge of its field armies? The thread in this forum about the Flashman books makes me think Abercrombie was influenced by George Macdonald Fraser. Jezal is a lot like Flashman and Fraser roasts the poo poo out of the British military during their imperial age. The Union military leadership is at least as competent as Britain’s was when they ran half the world.
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Feb 19, 2020 04:46
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quantumfoam posted:Last night read Kat Howard's "An Unkindness Of Magicians", which I guess qualifies as Urban Fantasy (set in modern day NYC). I bought this book on kindle last week hoping for something similar to The Magicians. The setting is fine but I dunno about the writing. This passage almost made me want to quit reading it at chapter 1: “The woman paused at a corner. Her slate-grey eyes flicked up toward some unmarked window in one of the buildings scraping the sky, as if to be sure someone was watching. Her lips, red as blood, quirked up at the corners, and Sydney stepped off the curb and into traffic.“ There’s a lot in that paragraph I dislike but using “buildings scraping the sky” to describe skyscrapers is probably the worst and most uncreative use of language I’ve come across in a while. I also picked up the newest Dyachenko book. It’s good. Same translator as Vita Nostra who isn’t as competent as whoever translated The Scar (their more traditional fantasy novel) but still serviceable. I wish the other books in The Scar series were translated though as that book was incredible.
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Feb 20, 2020 05:56
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So do people generally write in the evenings then while holding down office jobs? Seems tough to finish 4 books on a deadline while doing that, and makes me madder at Rothfuss for having years of idle time that he’s squandered away not writing.
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Mar 2, 2020 01:09
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The newly translated Dyachenko book Daughter from the Dark is pretty good so far. Not as addictive as Vita Nostra but same great style and tone. Still wish the other 3-4 books that The Scar was the second part of would be translated.
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Mar 3, 2020 00:40
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Are there any fantasy books that are also spy novels? Like wizards having to infiltrate a rival kingdom or something? Also The Collapsing Empire is free this month from Tor. Is it any good? Ccs fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Apr 1, 2020 |
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Apr 1, 2020 15:27
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Ah already own both of those. Any others?
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Apr 1, 2020 15:29
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I downloaded a sample of The City of Stairs and it seems interesting, I’ll probably buy it. The one thing putting me off is the tense it’s written in. I really cringe when authors write in present tense or second person.
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Apr 2, 2020 02:48
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General Battuta posted:I just checked out an ARC for an upcoming Tor debut called THE BLACKTONGUE THIEF. It wasn't really my speed, but if you like Abercrombie-style low fantasy with a bit more fun and a lot less bleak it might be your thing! No idea if it's going to get a big PR push but it's from the same editor who acquired THE BAND by Nicholas Eames, which I think did pretty well for Orbit. This sounds interesting but it doesn't come out until May of 2021 unfortunately. Unless you know how I can get an ARC. I just finished rereading Abercrombie's A Little Hatred. Still good! My favorite part is the wizards buzzing around on the sidelines, exercising so much influence while the protagonists hardly pay them attention and think they're annoying, and can't seem to get while everyone from the previous generation is so afraid of them.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:52
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I picked up some of those discounted books. Harrow the Ninth was fun. It didn't blow me away as I felt the pacing dragged as the characters milled around the house trying to figure out the mystery for a long time before there was any real sense of dread or danger. But it had its good points. I'm reading Ash now. It's an immense book and the alt history sneaks up on your. First characters saying Green Christ, which sounds sorta odd, but then there's a settlement at Carthage and its invading, and then golems and machines talking in people's heads. The framing story is funny as the historian appears to be losing the plot in terms of what is real and fake history, as archeological evidence starts turning up that verifies the fantastical elements of the documents he's translating. Im wondering how much wackier things are going to get.
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May 4, 2020 19:41
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I'm nearly done with Ash: A Secret History. This author describes armor like GRRM describes food. Good story, though strange. I wish there had a been a bit more setup that priests could do minor miracles in the previous history, that doesn't come up until the point that the author needs it to so that right after it can disappear when they enter Burgundy.
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May 12, 2020 22:36
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I thought the Tor email that gave away the first book said the third is the conclusion? Or was that another typo?
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May 14, 2020 17:30
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StrixNebulosa posted:Baru is a book series I respect a lot but cannot read because it's too drat dark. Depicting colonialism as well as you do... well, it's awful and difficult to read. Good luck with the final volume, and I hope you have many sales. It seemed like very light imperialism to me. Like, the way Falcrest takes over Baru's homeland seems so much more modern-day technocratic and less bloody than historical imperialism.
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May 15, 2020 20:38
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I remember getting to read Pattern Recognition in high school for a contemporary literature course. The teacher had recently got her masters from Harvard and was really good at controlling the class, whereas the normal sophomore literature class I had the period after was a "holocaust/war atrocities literature all year" course where the teacher could not get any of the students to take the subject matter seriously. Going from a bunch of students having a serious discussion about brand allergies in Gibson to a bunch of people not taking All Quiet on the Western Front or genocide seriously an hour later was real whiplash.
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May 16, 2020 22:51
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Hand Row posted:Oh sweet the third book of Mark Alders fantasy historical series came out in April and I did not realize it. Thanks for whomever recommended it here because it seems like you are the only person who read it, besides me now. If you like demon bargaining as well as medieval history it is a must read. It’s oddly fun looking up some of the crazy minor characters in the book and reading their real history. I searched "Mark Alders" and came across a very different sort of author... https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3050099.Mark_Alders
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May 27, 2020 15:12
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I own The Gone Away World by Harkaway but could never get through it. Something about the prose grated on me, like someone trying to do an impression of Douglass Adams and failing.
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Jun 8, 2020 17:47
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Ack I just bought Wizard of Earthsea for full price a few days ago. Already finished it. Good book! I could see where other authors lifted from. I’ve been on the hunt for new books about wizards that aren’t urban fantasy and have been pretty disappointed with the offerings.
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Jun 9, 2020 02:22
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pradmer posted:His Dark Materials (Golden Compass #1) by Philip Pullman - $1.99 Wow. I’d pick up Berserk for my kindle if they were all that cheap. Too bad the first few volumes are quite bad.
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Jun 10, 2020 03:29
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Okay I have a weird question for Baru's author if he reads this. I'm re-reading Baru Cormorant book 1 and most of the action takes place in Aurdwynn. People live there, but they're never once referred to as "Aurdwynnian", only as the sub-groups (like Maia) that live inside the country. Was that because "Aurdwynnian" sounds awkward and so was consciously avoided, or no sentence was ever constructed that required the term "Aurdwynnian"?
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Jun 15, 2020 18:40
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I tried to read stuff on the Tor website but it's just such fluff. Might as well be reading press releases. Some places like Strange Horizons have meaty reviews, even if they sometimes go down strange paths like suggesting every book set in a medieval time period should be written in a medieval voice. I think that would be realistic and would also do a lot to alienate most readers. I'm also not convinced that people in the past thought as different to modern humans as a reviewer like this supposes: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/the-name-of-the-wind-by-patrick-rothfuss-and-the-children-of-hurin-by-j-r-r-tolkien/
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Jun 16, 2020 21:27
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quantumfoam posted:
I don't understand this mindset list site. It is just cataloguing the preconceived notions of a matriculating class by year? What does that have to do with the mentality of the medieval period? Or are you saying mentalities change too quickly to be represented accurately by an author writing about the distant past?
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Jun 16, 2020 22:41
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Haha what’s that passage comparing dialogue from? I want to read what else the author has to say about writing. Ah I found it, an essay by Le Guin. I feel she’s making a separate point from Roberts though. He’s talking about the mindset of people in the medieval era, she’s talking about the elevation of language in heroic fantasy, where lords wouldn’t talk like politicians because their lordship symbolize “true inward greatness.” I feel most fantasy has dispensed with that kind of characterization though. And clearly medieval lords did not lack any of the morally grey politicking of our modern politicians. So an exchange like that might be true to the mindset of medieval lords even if it doesn’t measure up to the heroic registry of what Le Guin says fantasy fiction should. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 00:47
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Like in that essay Le Guin says "But in fantasy, instead of imitating the perceived confusion and complexity of existence, tries to hint at an order and clarity underlying existence," which may have been true when she was writing it. But every author since Martin has been consciously writing morally grey characters in highly political situations without any hint of order or clarity. And real history of course has none of that order or clarity, so one could write a modern fantasy story written as truthfully to the medieval mindset as possible and still be writing about a world with confusion and complexity of existence. Unless the medieval mindset brings with it certain religious ideas about the way the universe is ordered that hints and an intrinsic order. I don't know much about the medieval mindset to know if that's true. I definitely agree that modern fantasy strives to make things ordinary. Magic as a resource, or a tool of political gain, or a stop-gap before the wizard can perfect their banking systems and cannons. Or worse, a set of video game instructions with a lot of capitalized words denoting which button is being pressed. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Jun 17, 2020 01:11
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Lol the wikipedia article on GOR: "While not officially connected to John Norman's work, Fencer of Minerva is a Japanese animated series containing many of the elements and ideas discussed in Gorean philosophy.[13] During the mid-1990s, an attempt was made to publish an authorized graphic novel adaptation of the Gor series under Vision Entertainment. The project collapsed under a combination of financial issues and the nature of the imagery, which violated Canadian law, where the printer was located.[14] " Dude got a borderline pornographic anime made from his work, probably without even knowing what anime was. How many fantasy authors today would love an anime adaption of their works? That must've been some horrible stuff in the comics for it to not be able to be printed. Manga like Berserk gets sold in Canada, I have a hard time seeing how they could beat that imagery...
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Jun 17, 2020 15:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
Yeah, Clarke is so good. I finished re-reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell a week or so ago and now I'm reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu. I picked up a more typical fantasy book recently called "Cold Iron" and every so often I have to switch back to Grace Adieu to remember what someone who really understands prose writes like. Clarke totally mastered making her "magic system" for Strange and Norrell both mysterious and comprehensible. We understand that magic is something that can be studied and appears to have rules, and her characters run through some of the logic of their spells as they do them, but its all just vague enough and with the intimation that there are far greater depths than they have begun to stumble upon.
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Jun 17, 2020 20:34
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I don't like how streaming services are going backwards in time from Martin for their adaptions. Wheel of Time, another LotR, another Ghormenghast. I don't want to see any of that.
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Jun 18, 2020 16:49
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mllaneza posted:The Black Company project isn't officially dead yet. There's still hope. But that's still older than Martin, his first book was published in 1996, Black Company is from the 80s. Like you'd think with the success of Game of Thrones they'd be going for projects that were directly inspired by it, as opposed to the stuff Martin was kind of deconstructing with his project.
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Jun 19, 2020 14:29
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Sorry I meant first book in ASoIaF. I've read his earlier stuff, like the one about the band, the one about the 1800's vampires and steamships, and both his big short story collections. Haviland Tuf is fun character, and I always saw Varys as an extension of that character but working with much less power at his disposal.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:08
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Has anyone read Ninth House? It was at the top of Goodreads list of fantasy books for 2019 but some of the reviews look pretty mixed. Premise sounds interesting enough though. https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2019
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Jun 21, 2020 16:32
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There's a sale on a fair bunch of kindle books going on until the 28th: https://www.amazon.com/s?bbn=211897...9716011_nr_n_19 I'm probably going to pick up Magic for Liars.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:31
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Joined Discord. I would be very sad if this site collapses but Book Barn is my main haunt these days so if it goes down I’ll still have some way to read what you guys have to say. I wish there was a way to save all the BotL critiques, maybe I’ll screenshot them all before the ship sinks.
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Jun 24, 2020 17:29
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quantumfoam posted:Basically any long existing static forum with some moderation will do. Could someone create a forum using a site like this have it be the new SA, or are there limitations on amount of allowed users and hosting size? They say there's no size limit and unlimited bandwidth. https://www.proboards.com/create-free-forum
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Jun 25, 2020 16:01
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General Battuta posted:I hate that this is my professional sphere, I want to turn into a burnished metal orb and roll down the nearest hill into a compost heap Pretty much every field is going through this right now. A bunch of illustrators and animators also got named and shamed on twitter
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Jun 27, 2020 00:33
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Of all of the stupid SFF community poo poo to come up this week, Benjanun Sriduangkaew coming back and trying to pretend that she's nice now somehow manages to still be Top 3. She's trying to write off her past like she was a bit snarky when she went on months-long harassment campaigns where her sockpuppets would tell other authors to get raped to death by dogs. One of her targets killed themselves, ffs. "I've been lovely in my past" is such a colossal understatement and not even close to the apology the community deserves. Oh yeah I forgot all about this. Man, that was some crazy drama, she apparently is the heir of some obscenely rich Thai hotel magnates and her parents covered up a bunch of chemical poisonings of workers at the hotel she was managing. In additional to all the telling people to die online. Her reviews were kinda funny in that way that really bad reviews are, but crossed the line in actually wanting physical harm to come to the authors.
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Jun 28, 2020 21:50
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Safety Biscuits posted:Have you got a link to this? Are ebooks factored into today’s numbers? Or people are just reading a lot less? Also if Elizabeth Knox is a pretty big deal why can’t I buy that book anywhere but Australia? No ebook option either? Ccs fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 06:36
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Bakshi is definitely a product of his time. The movie is not supposed to be racist, to quote this article it was a "film was written and directed by Ralph Bakshi to serve the dual purpose of pushing adult-minded experimental animation as far as possible, and to tackle America’s history of race and segregation head-on, using a narrative that blends folklore with Blaxploitation films the imagery of horrific racial stereotypes." https://cinapse.co/bakshis-coonskin-1975-is-a-must-watch-racial-satire-a5923ba596c
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Jul 2, 2020 21:44
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It's kind of like a cartoon version of Bamboozled.
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Jul 2, 2020 22:03
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Fuckin who wrote this blurb for that Fortress book?quote:Deep in an abandoned, shattered castle, an old man of the Old Magic muttered almost forgotten words. His purpose -- to create out of the insubstance of the air, from a shimmering of light and a fluttering of shadows. that most wonderous of spells, a Shaping. A Shaping in the form of a, young man who will be sent east on the road the old was to old to travel. To right the wrongs of a long-forgotten wizard war, and call new wars into being. Here is the long-awaited major new novel from one of the brightest stars in the fantasy and science fiction firmament.C.J.Cherryh's haunting story of the wizard Mauryl, kingmaker for a thousand years of Men, and Tristen, fated to sow distrust between a prince and his father being. A tale as deep as legend and a intimate as love, it tells of a battle beyond Time, in which all Destiny turns on the wheel of an old man's ambition, a young man's innocence, and the unkept promised of a king to come. Hey publisher, you guys gonna bother to edit your own blurb?
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Jul 3, 2020 20:08
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The reviews on Goodreads for ARCs of The Tyrant Baru Cormorant seem really good. I enjoyed the second book a lot, especially the flashback sections, but people who didn't seem pleased with the new one, and it pays off a lot that's been built up. Looking forward to August.
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Jul 6, 2020 21:13
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