NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books: >imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21333.jpg SF&F author listing with ratings and summaries (incomplete, mostly pre-Millenium): >greatsfandf.com/authors-full-list.php
>half the books are flashbacks WHAT WAS HE THINKING These books would be so much better without these never-ending boring pieces of crap
Michael Cruz
And which SF?
Liam Lee
Currently reading A Scanner Darkly. I've got about 100 pages left.
I'm hoping to pick up a copy of Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said sometime soon. What's the best PKD short story collection?
Henry Powell
which books sir?
Samuel Hughes
stormlight archives, duh
Jaxson Smith
I Read Myth I am Reading Oath I will read Stone sky Wouldn't vote for either of them.
Tyler Miller
>that scene when elayne declares to rand my heart gone dokidoki there are any others anime-book of fantasy?
Charles Morales
Brian McClellan was taught the art of ANIME by Sanderson himself. He's still a little rough, but hopefully he'll get there some day.
Gavin Robinson
Sanderson filled this book with memes. >skeptical kid thinking shallan wants his boipucci >sweaty kaladin saying "trust me i am not an impostor"
Brody Lee
Oh boy, What a nice book! This story gave me a lot of feelings and I recommend you this post-apocalyptic book. If you like introspective sci-fi, well, "Earth Abides" is for you. I've liked very much the slow process of deindustrialization of the little society and returning to nature. And I was very impressed by the inner growth of the main character.
After all the story in this book is simple, but full of emotions. For me, the it is definitely better than "The Road" by McCarthy.
Grayson Jackson
any fiction or Sci-fi book related to the Greek and Roman Empire? I want to learn latin and I need to get in the mood reading some fiction. Any recommendation will be thanked
Logan Roberts
What did you like about Oathbringer?
Xavier Jackson
Borne or Thrawn desu
Chase Russell
It was a fun and engaging book that did a good job keeping tings relatively tight while massively expanding the scope of the story. Also lots of cute girls
William Stewart
Have you read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank? Might be right up your alley.
Ryder Price
Babylon's ashes.
Anthony Harris
Thank you, user!
Leo Torres
Szeth and nightblood. lift not being as annoying Shadesmar adventure, wish it had gone on a bit longer human sized delicious brown girl syl. that entire last battle scene was pretty nice.
Matthew James
No Scifi, but go for Soldier of the Mist
>reading star wars fanfic garbage
Neck yourself
Alexander Lee
Can't think of any sci-fi like that off the top of my head but if you want some fantasy:
Lion of Macedon by David Gemmell (Greek) The Misplaced Legion by Harry Turtledove (Roman) Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher (Roman)
Redwall. It's one of the two reasons why I love that series.
Grayson Adams
Is Perrin going to continue being Faile's bitch? I honestly feel like skiping his chapters. He's even moodier than Rand who has a good reason for it unlike wolf boy l. Oh.and Mat's okay except he's always with the Aes Sedai whom I can do without.
Anthony Butler
WoT is trash, no idea why it gets any praise aside from the fact that it's long.
Jaxson White
>Is Perrin going to continue being Faile's bitch?
Yep, for the rest of the series.
Cooper Kelly
Non, I've only read Norse Mythology so I don't think it's fair for me to vote. Any of the others good?
Isaac Diaz
In a way, yes. In the final three books he becomes a lot more self assured.
Mat becomes a fucking comedy god by the end of the books.
Keep reading, the final three books make up for a lot of the boring politics.
And if you're at the aes sedai camping infront of the white tower, just skip like 75% of that book.
Elijah Price
i liked dalinar's arc
Brody Jenkins
ty for your comments
Mason Reed
i voted for red sister but it's been knocked out. Changed to oathbringer.
Jacob Davis
Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy but set in the last years of the republic. Robert Graves' I Claudius other obvious shit.
Steven Pressfield Gates of Fire, Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy.
Can't really think of any overtly classical/ancient world themed sci-fi fantasy, bit of a dearth. Red Rising or Ilium at a push.
Liam Lee
cool phishing link.
Landon Evans
halfway through shadow rising and boy i am loving it, it's always nice to see egwene thinking she is a badass just to be shut uped by rand
Brody Reed
I think I will make some anti-WoT marcos. Suggestions everyone.
Nathan Clark
How far along are you guys?
Ryder Jackson
fuck you kill yerself nerd lol have you no life >1 years 70 books lolololol go get a pussy your sissy
Ryan Young
56, but some of them were pretty short poetry books
Caleb Long
Give Egwene a chance man. She doesn't deserve it, but you'll enjoy the books more that way.
Julian Martinez
>tfw /co/
Robert Robinson
>i don't even read
Adam Cruz
Honestly not doing that. Why would I spend 3 years writing a book just to phish for email addresses? For what reason?
Christopher Turner
If you are concerned you could try signing out of google. It might help bypass any phishing aspect of the site.
Ryder Mitchell
I read Red Shadows (1928), the first of the Solomon Kane short stories written by Robert E Howard, who is better known for Conan. Solomon Kane is a gaunt, gloomy, rapier and pistol wielding 16th Puritan wanderer, a religious fanatic who believes he is God's appointed instrument of vengeance against evil men.
In 'Red Shadows' Kane encounters a dying young woman, and swears to avenge her killer, the leader of a brigand gang. The story follows a solo manhunt from the caves of France to an African jungle and has a high body count and some memorably grisly tribal spectacles. On this evidence Kane is a gloomier and more conflicted character than Conan, but there is much for Conan readers to enjoy in the action and exotic scenery. Solid pulp fare, 3/5 dinosaurs.
Samuel Ross
Minority Report: Volume Four Of The Collected Stories
Julian Taylor
so why was Oathbringer so fucking bad?
Oliver Howard
I thought that was a plasma pistol, got my damn hopes up.
Jose Taylor
Just picked up Excession at random from a charity shop - could I start with Banks here, or is there stuff I'd need to know from previous books? Got the impression the Culture series was sort of loosely connected, if at all.
Jonathan Long
You can start anywhere. IIRC the only ones that have recurring characters or plot continuation are Consider Phlebas -> Look to Windward and Use of Weapons -> Surface Detail and even in those it's not central to anything. Excession could be a bit dense without prior knowledge about Culture, though.
Angel Turner
Robert Howard wrote across a lot of genres: mystery, horror, westerns, boxing stories, whatever market would pay. I think If he lived through the 1940s, when he would still be in his late 30s/early 40s, he would have tried space opera/sci-fi - probably something like John Carter.
Jonathan Jones
I think WoT really improved after book 3, Shadow Rising to the end of Lord of Chaos is the best part of the series.
Connor Rogers
i am a bit of mad just finished reading the part where mat and rand go to rhuiedain(?) and it just slips to perrin, and i know after perrin it will go to egwene and then to nynaeve and elayne, i will only read about rand and mat at the end of the book.
Brayden Williams
What fantasy book has good romance? I want the feels.
Jack Johnson
The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan
Nicholas Kelly
How he constantly used literally to make me remember I was reading something by the same author who used "awesomeness" in his fantasy magnum opus
Adam Sanders
The Lions of Al-Rassan
kek
Hudson Wright
I'm about 20% through. A lot of leftist propaganda so far. Don't know if I can finish it.
Ian Baker
I LOVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEE WOT would i like oath bringer?
Nathaniel Ross
Did you like the scenes in the last couple of WoT books where Mat acted ridiculously out of character for poorly written jokes that did not make sense in universe? If yes, you'll love Sanderson's other works.
Angel Cooper
Sanderson is to fantasy literature what Whedon is to capeshit.
>Their study, detailed in the paper The Genre Effect, saw the academics work with around 150 participants who were given a text of 1,000 words to read. In each version of the text, a character enters a public eating area and interacts with the people there, after his negative opinion of the community has been made public. In the “literary” version of the text, the character enters a diner after his letter to the editor has been published in the town newspaper. In the science fiction version, he enters a galley in a space station inhabited by aliens and androids as well as humans.
>After they read the text, participants were asked how much they agreed with statements such as “I felt like I could put myself in the shoes of the character in the story”, and how much effort they spent trying to work out what characters were feeling.
>Gavaler and Johnson write that the texts are identical apart from “setting-creating” words such as “door” and “airlock”: they say this should have meant that readers were equally good at inferring the feelings of characters, an ability known as theory of mind.
>This was not the case. “Converting the text’s world to science fiction dramatically reduced perceptions of literary quality, despite the fact participants were reading the same story in terms of plot and character relationships,” they write. “In comparison to narrative realism readers, science fiction readers reported lower transportation, experience taking, and empathy. Science fiction readers also reported exerting greater effort to understand the world of the story, but less effort to understand the minds of the characters. Science fiction readers scored lower in comprehension, generally, and in the subcategories of theory of mind, world, and plot.”
>Readers of the science fiction story “appear to have expected an overall simpler story to comprehend, an expectation that overrode the actual qualities of the story itself”, so “the science fiction setting triggered poorer overall reading”.
>The science fiction setting “appears to predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading – or what we might term non-literary reading – regardless of the actual intrinsic difficulty of the text”, they write.
hmm looks like there needs to be more "literary science fiction" about balding old white English professors having affairs with their students and being miserable.
Grayson Watson
Sanderson didn't improve at all over the years. In fact he's even worse because he thinks it's okay t have characters like Lift in a series
Joseph Gray
Shadow Rising is 3 separate stories, you can read all the Rand/Mat chapters, all Perrin chapters or all Nynaeve/Elayne chapters independently. Just switch around as you get bored.
Noah Adams
>spren have 4 genders
Wyatt Flores
>Aes Sedai In most fantasy prejudice against magic is usually portrayed as ignorant but man the people of Randland have good reason to be wary of magic and to stay away from those fucking witches
Jeremiah Butler
Androl was worse.
Ryder Brown
>The Guardian >“Literary snobs read SF stupidly”
Tyler Foster
Sanderson turned Mat into a character who only quips even though before he had a lot of nuance.
Christopher Garcia
Lets make a list of all Aes Sedai who aren't completely irredeemable cunts:
>Verin >Pevara
End of list
Adam Adams
>Lift became awesome This shit is so jarring
Jack Torres
Hey /sffg/ how many plot threads is too many?
I've got >4 main characters with arcs to complete >4 secondaries who need to be killed off >6 gods – including a sleeping god, an imprisoned god and a false god replacing the imprisoned one – each of which have their own apocalypses to cause (though 5 of them can have already done it) >3 important secondary villains with their own shit going on >a whole host of tertiary villains >and only four books to deal with all of it.
soldier in the mist is one. butcher's Furies series is another
Fantastic beasts since it's the only one I experienced. Definitely the best episode of Doctor Who I ever saw
Cameron Thompson
Reminder that it was the female branch of Aes Sedai responsible for nearly every bad thing that happened. The men went out and fought and managed to seal the Dark One and became cursed while the females stayed behind because they thought they could play god by building giant amplifiers. In the future these amplifiers broke after using them on one particular curse so in the end the Lewis Therin was proven right. In Rand's time most of the Darkfriends come from the Aes Sedai. They're so arrogant even though they haven't accomplished anything
Alexander Thompson
>In Rand's time most of the Darkfriends come from the Aes Sedai.
Just to elaborate on this: It's mentioned there are about a thousand Aes Sedai. When Egwene is conducting her purge of the white tower, somebody mentions that they found at least 200 black ajah, "so far". That means at LEAST one in every five Aes Sedai is a darkfriend, a rate literally hundreds of times higher than any other faction. Whitecloaks were right the whole time.
Jonathan Phillips
I should have dropped it right there.
William Young
Black Ajah can channel which makes them worth more than the normal darkfriend
William Nguyen
>They're so arrogant even though they haven't accomplished anything Egwene thought Rand would only be a little stronger her at most. She wasn't even a full Aes Sedai yet she thought she was more special than the Dragon Reborn
Caleb Gomez
b-but edgedancer
Elijah Gutierrez
because it just completely falls apart structurally - scenes that have no business existing are in the book instead of scenes that are jarringly missing (Shallan admits that Kaladin killed her brother just before they are to fly to that island to open the gate? lul timeskip) which results in the reader feeling like he didn't really read a 1300 page tome
Tyler Johnson
>1300 page tome That's longer than all of BotNS and yet it feels like nothing happened.
Justin Edwards
Eshonai's death pissed me off. I expected fucking something significant to happen with her after being a part of the last 2 books, instead i got LOL she drowned off screen, lets follow her sister instead and fucking teft suddenly having a roshar heroin problem and saying about 50 radiant oaths off screen, the fuck?
nah, lets focus on shallan being a super sneaky spy again for several hundred pages.
Samuel Evans
>teft suddenly having a roshar heroin problem and saying about 50 radiant oaths off screen, the fuck?
obviously you can't develop side characters without giving them POVs that clog the book - GRRM has already proven that it is the the most efficient way to write books
Evan Wood
I started reading Book of the New Sun. I'm enjoying the prose a lot but to be honest I am having a hard time following the plot, let alone understanding the underlying meaning of it. I realize this question is pleb as fuck but are any of his other works a bit more accessible?
Christian Nguyen
All you need to know is the Culture is a hippie-communist utopia with ultra-high technology, unlimited resources, run by anarchist AIs, with a huge boner for influencing weaker civilizations to be more like themselves.
Basically the federation on roids, but without the military structure or the prime directive.
Evan Howard
On average yes. Peace is probably harder though. His Latro/Soldier books are great.
Cameron Price
>scifi readers struggle to understand why anyone would write PSY101 experiment in space >scifi readers don't bother inferring character feelings because the characters are aliens and they haven't been described other than passively enduring this rather than massacring the slope-shouldered apefolk who wrote this >"scifi readers r dum" Yeah, that's a valuable social science you have there.
Justin Smith
Kys if you even need to ask about that fucking mess.
Leo Russell
All I get is "people can't into imagination" out of this.
Brandon Nelson
That's not what it says. It says that the general population is inclined to treat science fiction as insubstantial and as sole entertainment as opposed to something of literary value.
Jordan Smith
my mind just came up with too much lore on this one, and I can't figure out what to do to break it up while still having some of the key things I want in there.
The way I see it, I can get rid of or push into the background most of the gods and tertiary villains, but there's still so much I want to do that's impossible to fit in
Joseph Collins
Because people are stupid and if you take them out of a familiar environment they lose focus or interest.
Kill your darlings.
Carter Martin
I can kill them in a story, but to erase their very memory is something I cannot
Sebastian Young
>leftist propaganda >author doesn't believe in gay marriage
nigger W H A T
Cameron Robinson
Homosexuality is a symptom of capitalism and doesn't exist in the USSR.
Jason Thomas
Why take such obvious bait muh man?
Gabriel Rivera
He's a mormon you dumbass.
Jack Jones
There's literally a gay marriage in the book along with a few paragraphs of Sanderson jerking off over why there's nothing wrong with it.