/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General Thread

best non-grimdark fiction, romanticised environment descriptions and the such? a la LOTR :^)

The orphans tales is as good as it gets for that. You will want to eat everything, including things that aren't edible

Then maybe you shouldn't write. If you don't love what you do why do it?

As a homo, the best fantasy novel with good gay representation for me was Bakker's Darkness That Comes Before.

What type of fantasy creates does Veeky Forums like? Big fan of werewolves personally but I never see them in anything.

I love creating stories even though I find writing them stressful. I can like writing when I feel I can be proud of it, but lately Ive been made ashamed of it by the people I chose to show it to. Ive dreamed of writing a novel for years and I've begun to care deeply about the characters I've created (though thankfully not deeply enough to protect them from suffering)

Truly alien creatures are a favorite of mine, especially the kind that that almost fail to qualify as life

I just finished the Mistborn books. Are Sanderson's other series worth getting in to? It's looking like I may need to develop an understanding of the Cosmere to fully appreciate the Mistborn books going forward, but it looks like he has a lot of stuff set within the Cosmere and I'm not sure where to start or if his other works are any good.

Warbreaker and Stormlight are good (stormlight would be great if you took out the bad pov characters)
Elantris is decent
Reckoners is bad
Rithmatist is awful

Is it true that Gurm stole a lot of shit from Tad Williams?

Recc me a sci-fi book that's about idealism, utilitarianism and loose morality. Book that gives me something to think about.

interesting stuff user. Any recommendations for books with that type of alien?

What's the most Metal Gear Solid like sci-fi book?

Anything like Sabriel out there?

Sadly nothing Veeky Forums. Stuff like the tardis from doctor who or the life fibers fromm kill la kill are fun exmples, and I remember a sentient shade of blue from either the green lantern or hitchikers guide

some of my favorite examples comes from homestuck. cherubs look like skeletons but the entire species starts life as hermaphrodites with two personalities of opposite sex (they have four sexes) that fight until one personality consumes the other at which point it develops an imouto complex and seeks out a mate that it has to turn into a snake to fuck. The trolls look like demonic humans, but in reality the ones that look female are actually males and the one female in the species looks like a giant moth with a vaguely humanoid face

Neuromancer
maybe some of Nick Land's theory fiction (Meltdown and Hypervirus in particular)

Man, the trolls were a lot more interesting before Hussie literally just started writing them as grey humans who happen to have horns and a weird society. Also it's canon that Damara has a vagina (and erego the other troll girls probably do too) so that last bit is false.

If we're going non Veeky Forums here hitmen.thecomicseries.com/ is the best example of fuckoff alien monstrosities explained in minute detail I've ever seen. There are so many incredibly detailed alien monsters with fully developed ecosystems, evolutionary histories, and exotic biology I can't even begin to list them.

Already read it. I want more futuristic military fiction with espionage/thriller overtones.

Any good books based on the Age of Enlightenment? I feel that there aren't enough authors writing in that time period.

IIRC a lot of MGS2 was inspired by Crossfire by Pollock, tho that's only the plot. I don't think what you're looking for is there.

there's always the Metal Gear Worlds of Power book too

Too Like the Lightning uses both those fancy words every page

...

Remember how Dan Simmons probably turned up angsty romantic music while fapping to Keats? Up that autism three times and you have Too Like the Lightning, it's like one of those waifufags on v/a/lentines day set up one of those autism shrines to all those 18th Century philosophers.

Which Clark Ashton Smith stories do you recommend? The only one I've read is The City of the Singing Flame.

I've only read ASoIaF from GRRM and there wasn't anything "stolen" in there that I could see. GRRM has gone on record saying that Tad Williams greatly influenced him and inspired him to write ASoIaF though. And he clearly respects him since he even put a little homage to Dragonbone Chair in his books. But at best I could only make very general claims on similarity between MST and ASoIaF, nothing really substantial. Like:
>the magical enemy of mankind lives far to the north in a frozen land, and they are described as being pale and ghostly
>the lands of men to the south were once disparate kingdoms who warred endlessly with one another but were united in recent history by a great conqueror whose claim to fame is related to dragons
>though the real threat to mankind is the terrible magic enemies in the north, much of the story is focused on political conflicts between human factions
And that's about as much as I could say is similar, and even then the examples I used aren't really that similar and I had to word them in a very specific way to get that comparison to work. They also have pretty different tones and styles. TW is much more about fairy tales and mythology, while GRRM lives for political intrigue.

>start reading a series (Poor Man's War) for the pulpy spacefights against pirates
>second book is actually about a subprime lending market crash
Well I wasn't expecting this but it's fun

The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
goodreads.com/book/show/18143067-the-dark-eidolon-and-other-fantasies

The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith
goodreads.com/series/74972-the-collected-fantasies-of-clark-ashton-smith

Fagget

...

Thanks. I'll take a look at those.

tugs braid

Tuon is white.

Need a cool name for a secret society in my book. They are associated with a sleeping underground army of robots and are spread all across the world.

Can someone help me remember a book?
Science fiction I think. I remember some battle involving humans who had evolved to have these delicate wings and were really tall and thin that allowed them to fly in space and ride radiation from their star. I think it was part of a human colony that was lost and evolved to survive on asteroids surrounding a sun. Other humans had other specialized evolutionary traits.

Hidden Cache
Northbridge idle
Logic phishing
Bruteforced Mem

Untersyncro
Kevlemekar
Trobolito
Vectech

Sorry I realize I made that sound like a sci fi book but its actually fantasy. And this type of society is called a blood pact in the book.

Everything isn't supposed to feel good all the time.

It does for me, I love what I do.
Feels good man

Ungrateful Cretins

>a blood pact
schrodinger cat
Circuits of the logichood
Perpetual energy
Void tap
Iron hearts
Eldritch compact
300psi heart
Hollow center
Grounded flight
Order of metal flesh
Eldritch hivemind
Grounded drones
Drone potis

Try "The Red" by Linda Nagata. Near future US Army power armor soldiers go rogue and fight defense contractors after a AI goes rampant and starts messing with stuff.

I'm reading this book... my my, it's so bloody boring and verbose.

Hey /sffg/, not sure where to go for this, but I'm looking for a book/collection of stories about humans a thousand (or more) years into the future. I can't remember for the life of me where I got it from (seems like from a russian archive website, last I remember it).

The tl;dr is that humans learned how to space travel, martians are actually humans, just spindly, and further on an alien race makes us into their genomic bitch and splices and remakes humans into their experimental lab pet.

Just wish I remembered the name of it, fuck.

I'm sorry if I memes you into it in the last thread. It's got several pretty good short stories stitched together by a ridiculous self-indulgent power fantasy.

I haven't been as enthusiastic about reading fantasy since I read the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire. What are some more books that are as exciting as the first three books of ASOIAF? I've also read The Lord of the Rings but other than those two, assume I'm a newbie to fantasy.

Has anyone read Leviathan Wakes? Just finished it and thought it was prosodic, unoriginal and longer than it needed to be. Haven't seen the show is it any good?

Prosaic *

>Witchwood Crown is much faster paced than Dragonbone Chair, and as a bonus you don't actually need to have read MST to follow the story.
Would you suggest starting with the old series or just skipping ahead?

I thought the show was less engaging than the books tbqh and I ended up dropping the books during the third one

The Terracotta men.

Make it so secret it doesn't even have a name.

Only good response desu, no offense to the rest of you. But I dont' like referencing specific stuff from Earth since it's fantasy

>but lately Ive been made ashamed of it by the people I chose to show it to
Elaborate.

Any good books about Dwarves? I read that Dwarves book by that European author, any others?

Anonymouse.

Tad Williams himself says in the forward of WWC you don't need to have read MST to follow his new book, he wrote it so that new readers can jump in there if they want. MST is definitely worth a read if you enjoy the setting though, but it's definitely gonna take some time to get through. Also if you want some context that's faster to read, he wrote a novella set between MST and WWC called The Heart of What Was Lost. It's set immediately after the end of MST and 30 years before the events of WWC.

>But I dont' like referencing specific stuff from Earth since it's fantasy
>uses a word that has terra in it, which means earth
I'm starting to believe that wordart fag is right in ignoring /chasing you fucks we help you and this is the thankx we get kys

I fucking threw up on my flaccid dick

youtube.com/watch?v=Z-vGWwRF_Qc

Reading Neuromancer for the first time. Does anyone feel as though prose is obtuse and somewhat impenetrable? There's a lot of sci-fi vocabulary but even the simpler sentences are difficult to understand.

The rich scifi vocabulary is what I liked about that book. In what way do you find the sentences difficult to understand?

oh yeah, man.
Gibso pretty much created the entire Cyberpunk aesthetic entirely through prose, which was intentional, as the man was very much influenced by William S. Burroughs.

When it gets to the scenes in cyberspace it gets particularly confusing, because Gibson goes almost full stream-of-consciousness and tech jargon and 1) Gibson was a prose writer, not a tech nerd, so it can be hard to understand what the fuck he's talking about and 2) it can also be hard to get it today because of how much cyberculture, technology and the internet have changed since 1984.

That said, you get used to it, and by page 200 you realize what an immensely rewarding reading it is, there's a real sort of beauty to the prose in that book.

I don't know, I just find it hard to comprehend it on spatial and temporal level. For example in one paragraph he's in one place talking to one character and in next few paragraphs the prose is describing something completely different.

I was referring to "The Terracotta men" when I said that. Hence the "but".

Maybe learn to read first before you try to help out a writer.

>The problem is that souls simply cannot remember indefinitely, there is a limit, necessitating that something be forgotten to remember as a certain point. What renders this problem tragic is the way memories of trauma and shame find themselves chiseled, as opposed to simply inked, into the Nonman soul. This mean that the longer a Nonman lives, the more their soul becomes a repository of anguish and pain. The Dolour proper is thought to happen when only painful experiences remain, robbing the sufferer of the ability to remember anything beyond several heartbeats (lest that memory be tragic).

That's pretty fucking brutal.

hehe hella epic edge bro

Bakker rulez!!!!!

What does Veeky Forums think about Book of New Sun?

so i finished off robin hobb's liveship trilogy, i liked it. im glad about malta in the end oh my god did i hate her.
im interested in more interesting magic systems, yes ive read sanderson and weeks

you mean how he switches between reality, cyberspace and sometimes molly's view every few sentences?
That's what makes this book so engaging and unique. You have to keep track of what's going on on 2-3 different levels.

maybe I'm a Nonman after all

Am I the only one who imagines Nonmen as Engineers?

>im glad about malta in the end oh my god did i hate her
felt the same way

on magic systems, maybe garth nix, peter v brett or jonathan stroud

It's exactly how I picture them especially during the gay sex scenes.

So was Andrevon never translated? Guess I gotta go brush up my french..

I want a fantasy or science fiction story with strong femdom and BDSM elements. Is there such a thing? The nastier the better.

This user is a list and a cheat. Everything Sanderson writes is pure gold except for his Alcatraz YA books.

Sword of Truth user

Its also the worst fantasy series ever written

there's Gor for maledom, which is up there with for the worst fantasy series ever written.

>Its also the worst fantasy series ever written
That's quite a claim. So it is worse than Eragon? Worse than The Name of the Wind?

Apparently there's some translations to German, which I'm a bit better at than French
horrorundthriller.de/index.php/Thread/404-Jean-Pierre-Andrevon/

not that user but it's way worse than Eragon (and boy is that bad). Haven't read TNotW tho, so i can't comment on that.

Recommend me something that's kind of like the real life story of William Adams. Sci-Fi or Fantasy.

wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adams_(sailor)

The X Brotherhood/Fellowship or the Brotherhood/Fellowship of X where X is either the name of their founder or the name of the underground robot kingdom

I haven't read it yet, but the description of The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie seems like it fits these parameters

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

:^)

>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21329.jpg
Where the fuck is the Fritz Liber?

Forget I posted that.

hah, my mom loves this book.

I've only read Pattern Recognition by Gibson but ages ago and don't remember it well, but I've read some Stross (Accelerando) which was also dense with technical language and had slightly obtuse prose

Is Neuromancer similar in style to Stross or is it a different kind of obtuse? I bought Neuromancer recently and mean to have a stab at it soon.

Hobb's novels are awesome. Liveship books are pretty magical desu.