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I always kind of respected Harlan Ellison because he seemed like the last and most famous fiction author to be completely and publicly out of his mind without having anyone feel sorry for him.Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Well, tell him some random dude on the internet said he can't wait to read it cause it sounds neat. It me. Thank you for saying nice things. I'm working very hard on it. Penn sold me on getting an account like twenty years after I used to read front page articles and old Let's Plays. I'm really interested in the Creative Convention forum. It looks like a good place for advice and feedback.
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Feb 9, 2021 17:04
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Ccs posted:I'm 60 % through Between Two Fires and it continues to be great. There's a nice variety in the range of supernatural horrors the protagonists come across in plague stricken France, and the way those horrors are used to flesh out the character's own backstories is very inventive and elevate them from "oh it's a monster" to "drat it's a cool monster that's also giving me insight into who the people facing the monster are." I also started this based on your recommendation. I really, really like it so far. I've been going through high fantasy stories lately and have become exhausted with excessive and self-congratulatory world building. Two Fires really feels like if someone took the best parts of something like the Witcher books and used them to build a good, character-centric story. I really appreciate you sharing it.
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Feb 9, 2021 18:34
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Ccs posted:Awesome! The series he has coming out in May will be his first secondary world fantasy, but this quote from Robin Hobb's ARC review mentions that the prose isn't laden with description. Personally I don't have much patience for the kind of world building many of the giants of fantasy put into their work. The books I used to read were full of characters studying maps, characters receiving lectures from mentors about details of their own country’s history and the philosophy behind invented gods, chapters beginning with quotes from fake texts and ending with diagrams or sketches with their own notes. Now an author can and maybe should have that level of detail about their world in their mind, but I don't need them to show their work. If the worldbuilding doesn't give me some greater sense of the characters who are interacting with the worldbuilding, I don't want or need to hear about it. I'm there with you as far as world-building goes. When a book interrupts interesting character moments with lore dumps like "Tadith'kier looked out upon the Hakto-Carbi Mountains where 1,000 years ago, Emperor Ascotobirio was handed the hammer and crown of Heaven Blood and swore on the eighteen Gods' names which were..." I start to get the feeling that an author doesn't trust me. It also sort of gives me the same exhausted feeling that I get from those crafting games on Steam where I have no idea what to do unless I'm constantly just looking up Wiki pages to figure out how to do basic tasks. I think too many Sci Fi/Fantasy writers get very proud of their worlds and systems to the point where they think they're too good for an outsider character who can just be ignorant of the foreign land they're in so they can learn about the world at the same pace as the reader. But even with Two Fires, while Thomas has information about the world they're in, the reader is still introduced to events through the limited purview of both Thomas and the characters he encounters along the way, and even those other characters know what they know from mostly questionable second- and third-hand information. I really like when sometimes I'm questioning what I know alongside a book's characters.
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Feb 9, 2021 20:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:I wonder if r/fantasy readers aren't used to reading that kind of grimdark by someone who, well, actually writes literature and can convey it in a way that GRRM/etc can't. About 70% of r/fantasy is more into YA fantasy or want to post about Stormlight in my experience. I only still read the sub because it's a good place to find a post where someone will blurt out the name of surprisingly good novel that has only sold like eighty copies. Also in my experience if you're trying to get Redditors to critique a story you're working on, exactly 1 out of 7 will try to doxx you.
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Feb 10, 2021 16:43
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anilEhilated posted:e: nvm, someone already beat me to it. Still, good historical fantasy is rare to find so I will be getting Between Two Fires. Trust this thread to always push my backlog. Science Fiction & Fantasy: Desperately Trying to Push Out My Backlog.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:10
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ToxicFrog posted:DWJ's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland posits that what fantasy literature calls "horses" are, in fact, a form of motile plant: Yeah, this always bugged me a little. A character will be stranded with their horse, but for some reason the character would rather starve than eat whatever the horse is eating that makes it somehow survive the journey. I really like how in Between Two Fires, it mentions that the characters are willing to just eat weeds and grass in an effort to stay alive between more substantial meals. One of the other things that always bugged me is when industry and labor tend to be absent from a world. I love Brandon Sanderson, but it seems like he'll spend ten chapters on his magic system but surprises himself when it comes to things like basic economy and just decides that houses are built with magic. I think the same goes for a lot of Fantasy writers that never really held a labor job irl or have never read any kind of deep-dive history/culture books. In lots of fantasy, all blacksmiths are specially trained to make single Great Blades, even in wartime. You rarely see these blacksmiths worked half to death from making horseshoes, tools, studs, nails, basic equipment, etc. For whatever it does well or poorly (I'm new and I'm kind of trying to tune into SA's frequency on GRRM's works), Ice and Fire is the only fantasy work I've ever really read (so far) that has addressed really well what the life for the average Joe Lunchpail is like and how it relates back the world and the main characters. Really want to read The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, now.
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May 10, 2021 19:38
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Pennsylvanian posted:Finish your book. You do all of these things so well. I smelled your battle scenes while reading them. Don't blame my Google Doc for your gross bedroom, dork. Right now the whole book looks like a Star Destroyer lego set, an erector set, and a disassembled AR had a three-way and collapsed on the floor. I'm aiming for the end of August with my next draft.
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May 10, 2021 23:43
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I'm always jealous of people who said they got to read classic or even good literature in high school. I remember having a breakdown in the middle of class after having to read countless awful novels and novelizations of theater plays.
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May 12, 2021 04:53
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No. No more dancing! posted:Nothing beats the joy of spending a month of classes listening to classmates sound out their way through "Julius Caesar" and "Romeo and Juliet" one. wo-wo-word. at. a. time. I didn't touch a novel for fun for 7 or 8 years after high school. Yeah, I threw kind of a hissy fit when we had to do that for a novel called Tears of a Tiger. The school thought that after three of our classmates were killed by a drunk driver that we needed to read it. It was a pretty bad book. I got a detention for my outburst, but my teacher agreed that it wasn't good and with the help of my mother, they got the school to change its reading curriculum (which didn't go into effect until I graduated). In the meantime, my mom and my teacher recommended Vonnegut to me and he remains my favorite writer to this day.
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May 12, 2021 22:05
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I remember the Reign of Fire video game being a shockingly fun rental.
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Jul 27, 2021 02:11
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darkgray posted:I read and loved that translation as a 12-year-old kid, then reread it in English at age 20 and was massively disappointed. Not sure if it's because the translation made the original writing better, or if it was just an age and nostalgia thing. https://twitter.com/Zhinna/status/1443810399569293325
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Oct 1, 2021 21:14
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EDIT: Didn't like my post.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:17
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I'm a fair-weather fantasy fan and one of the authors people have been telling me I'd like is Michael Moorcock. The series that seems to be the most popular is his Elric series so I looked for it on Audible at work and found out some of the books are getting released as part of a collection tomorrow. Odd coincidence. https://www.audible.com/pd/Elric-of...JX1Q16S23QP5S8P
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Feb 14, 2022 23:21
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quantumfoam posted:Whoever is doing the Michael Moorcock readthrough or plans on re-reading some of Moorcock's work, let us know how often Moorcock stuck to the Michael Moorcock guide to writing a 60000 word fantasy novel. Okay, this is actually making me excited to read his stuff. While it's nice that fantasy doesn't seem bound by the rules of a lot of literature, I cannot for the life of me deal with their penchant of just spinning their wheels for a hundred pages without so much as an interesting dialogue here or there.
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Feb 16, 2022 03:56
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I love Eastern European sci-fi/fantasy. There's always a 'tangibility' to it that a lot of Western sci-fi/fantasy lacks.
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Feb 28, 2022 22:18
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So I started reading the Harry Potter books a while ago because I finally just... had to know, I guess. I borrowed the books from a trans friend who just sort of lifted his hands and said "I know, but I can't help but like them even though JK's awful." My only experience with the books were getting a few chapters into Sorcerer's Stone when it first came out and getting bullied for having it, so I put it down and never engaged with it again, only knowing about two of the major spoilers for the last book that everyone went around screaming when it first released. But it always bothered me that I didn't know anything about the series. Meanwhile, I'll see some neoliberal think tank hosting Quidditch matches between readings of Brett Stephens op-eds on why Tehran should be carpet-bombed, so I just had to know what this pop culture phenomenon was. I'm most of the way through Goblet of Fire, and I can see how these books were so huge during their run. I'm pretty much always flipping the page, wondering what every teacher/student's motivations are. Most of the time, any non-plot happenings are just sort of cozy character moments as opposed to typical Fantasy lore dumps (though those become more common as the books go on). Even then, most quiet moments can end up having some clever foreshadowing moments, so that I don't always feel bored. The big backstory dumps in Azkaban were the first time I really felt bored with the books, and The World Cup of Quidditch arc in Goblet of Fire was especially dull (to me, at least). The House Elf themes seem kind of heavy-handed, but seems a bit more self-aware and fleshed out than a lot of racism commentary that got aimed at me when I was a kid. I'm told that she kind of doesn't go anywhere with it, bordering on just giving up in a way that feels gross. Overall, I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying the books, despite that intermittent guilt that hits me when I remember how much of a bigot JK is.
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Apr 5, 2022 16:28
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The "too big for her editor" remark is a really succinct way of putting my feelings on fantasy books that I've been reading lately.
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Apr 5, 2022 19:10
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Deptfordx posted:I've always called the whole author becomes massively popular = massive page count bloat. "Tom Clancy Syndrome". Yeah. I've seen it get especially bad in Fantasy. As series go on, there tend to be less chapters where characters do or say interesting things, and more chapters with characters walking around castles feeling anxious. The latter will of course always be ten times as long as the former. freebooter posted:I also thought this as a kid and wonder whether it's because for English-speakers outside of Britain we just don't "get" the hype and excitement British kids have for the FIFA World Cup. I think an issue was that most of the books had the opening beats of Harry dealing with the Dursleys, Harry getting away from the Dursleys, Harry having a quick pre-semester breather with Hagrid/Ron, then Harry going to Hogwart's. Goblet of Fire goes from the part where he stays at the Weasleys, then before he goes to Hogwart's, he goes to a sporting match that lasts just as long as all of the previous story beats combined. It also introduces a large amount of characters and ideas, so it takes twice as long to even start the school year in Goblet as in the previous three books. But, you can even see problems in Azkaban. During the requisite "Harry puts on the invisibility cloak so he can listen to adults do an exposition dump," section of the book, Harry listens in on a really, really clunky dialogue between all of the teachers where they give backstory on Sirius and the Potters. It goes on for yonks and just reads like a plot summary with quotation marks placed around it.
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Apr 6, 2022 04:14
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I feel like Harry Potter works because it's not just "fantasy." The HP books have equal measures of mystery, drama, horror, a little romance, and of course some action. They also sprinkle the worldbuilding. As opposed to the worst offenders of lore bloat, Harry Potter books will just introduce something like, say, a magical invention or candy, say what it does, show someone use it, and move on. It doesn't linger on the magical candy, telling you when it was invented, who invented it, what the inventor's whole life story was, etc. The first three books don't really waste your time all that much, which is great for kids and people who can't really get into heavier fantasy.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:45
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Well, that's Goblet of Fire down. That book currently sets the Harry Potter record for "Most separate monologues explaining off-camera mysteries" for any book in the series yet.
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Apr 9, 2022 01:51
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