/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>>last book read
Book of Strange new things by Faber
>>tell us what it was about
Christian missionary on alien planet
>>try to shill it if good
It was not good.

Worst thing is it reminded me of a short story I can't place the name of, can anyone help?

It had these short ?mostly teeth? super smart aliens that were christians. There was a dude on their planet but then they get attacked by the cannibalistic ?newly hatched? young of the aliens. One of the aliens laments that it is so easy for humans to be good, his people have to struggle against their cannibalistic violent instincts.

sound familiar?

>last (SFF) book read
Words of Radiance
>tell us what it was about
getting ready for getting your shit fucked up and getting to know yourself in the process. With magic, fighting and lots of lorebuilding.
>try to shill it if good
Oh it has some amazing parts but also some questionable ones and of course it's long as shit. I'm an audiobook pleb, and graphic audio filth at that and the experience went amazing for me but I'm not sure I wouldn't have skipped a ton if it was the primary thing that I was doing.

Does anybody else feels like some stuff was retconned to shit from the first to second book? Or more like some answers to ambiguous questions didn't fully fit the questions themselves. I can't name specifics right now but i distinctly remember some instances of just that. Also characters feel like they move on with their lives to quickly from stuff. While it's understandable because there is a lot going on they still seem to move on to their neutral disposition with ease. Like the prince guy was totally unphased by his relative's death or how dalanar would deal and care about 10 things simultaneously, from one of his soldiers making outrageous claims to the world ending to being betrayed to planning a full fledged attack and not get overwhelmed.

Is the Shaido sub plot finally getting resolved once and for all the turning point for the boring section of WoT? Cause it feels like it

Nope

Is wheel of time's portrayal of women as bad as i've heard it is? I keep wanting to pick it up, but the things I hear about the way relationships are handled just sounds so bad I'm not sure if I could get into it.

The Prefect (book will be renamed into Aurora Rising once the sequel hits early next year) has the main character visit several spin habitats, different kinds of them.

The book suggested by is more of a generation ship colonization voyage story than a spin colony one.
The second half was the part that I didn't like. The statement the author made and the way he used the plot points to illustrate it was something that I really disagreed with. Left me with a bad aftertaste after finishing the book. I didn't like it and prefer my generation ship stories by Alastair Reynolds, but that's just my opinion.

Brandon Sanderson.

I wouldn't say there's no more boring stuff after that, it depends on how much you like Egwene chapters though.

Depends on what you mean by bad. One thing I will say is the women in WoT tend to have a lot more agency than men on average due to the circumstances of the world's magic system, so as a result the women in WoT can seem very overbearing in their manner and in asserting their personal ambitions. Also a lot of them are just super arrogant and cunty, but that tends to vary by culture. The cultures in WoT are very distinct from one another, but there's more than a few where women wield a disproportionate amount of influence over men due to various reasons, and they are not really any more generous with their power than men have been historically.

So, personally, I don't really see anything that bad about women in WoT, I think Jordan did a fair enough job in making them seem like real people and not idealized waifus, in that the majority of them are scum.

>[MUH SCHOLARSHIP intensifies]

It's complicated.
It feels like every relationship has a bit of a struggle to see who will come out on "top" in more than one sense.
At one point you have one of the main character's mother in law insisting that he needs to dominate her daughter or she won't be happy.
All over other women say things like having to "house break" a man and not always as a joke.
You have two people in love where the man forces the woman to be his personal maid, and she in turn keeps trying to knock him down a peg, a queen who loves a bodyguard who treats her disrespectfully in private, it's full of shit like that.
So yeah relationships are a power struggle, Foucault would be proud.

For the portrayal of women the worst example are the Aes Sedai, but though early on everyone respects and idolizes them they end up being an example of "female authority gone wrong", especially compared with what they were during the last age.
Also the time the story happens is one where women are more "privileged" than men, though not too drastically and that varies from place to place according to Aes Sedai influence.

Trying to write a jaded character, who's not an asshole, but simply fatalistic. WIll people be able to tell the difference?

Does this look like fucking writing tips 101 to you?

not unless you portray him as deeply moral despite his pessimism, or you give him a horrifically tragic backstory

>deeply moral despite his pessimism
This is what I planned on writing him. A moral person who's past experience made him fatalistic.

webnovels are novels too

Easily, if you write well.

Thoughts on L Ron Hubbard?
Has he written something worthwhile outside of brainwashing space operas?

Could someone explain to me what a "safehand" is exactly?

In Alethi society a woman's left hand is considered private, so they cover it up whenever they go in public, Lighteyed(Noble) woman have long sleeves on that side that button up, while Darkeyed(commoners) wear gloves

it's basically like cultures were they consider body parts like the hair or ankles or shit we consider weird to be taboo in public

>tfw Jasnah will never give you a tugjob with her safehand
Why live, brothers?

Maybe the one called the sparrow?

>The statement the author made and the way he used the plot points to illustrate it was something that I really disagreed with.
Yeah, it seems interesting and I've liked exactly one other KSR book, and I wouldn't think I'd be the kind of person to shy away from a book because of the message, but I guess I am.

Brandon Sanderson.

>last book read
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
>tell us what it was about
An undercover narcotics officer's brain and splits in two due to drug use. The two halves of his brain become independent; one half acts as Fred, the narc; the other as Bob Arctor, the drug addict.

>try to shill it if good
It ain't. Why do people like this book so much?

Someone tell me a fun book to read. I particularly like futurism and crazy technologies, especially if it involves large distance space traveling.

Ringworld or Forever War y'all. Which do I read next?

A Fire Upon the Deep

Count to a Trillion, at least if you'd like your protagonist to inject himself with a transhumanism drug before a journey to an alien artifact around an antimatter star, go nuts, and come to his senses when they've returned to Earth to find himself in an opulent bedroom lined with tapestries showing the other crew members conquering the world.

This is all in the first few chapters too.

I actually literally started that last night and am a bit frustrated because I genuinely don't understand some stuff, like physiology of whoever lives on the planet the MC(?) crashed on, and their various cultures.

Ringworld, get some positivity in you before you get blackpilled with Haldeman.

They are sentient wolfpacks that coordinate cognition through ultrasound emitters/receptors on their faces. This happens automatically when they're close enough.

Flenser is wolf Hitler.

each individual is a small pack of snake-necked dogs. then those tree people lol. i liked it enough to finish it, but didn't live up to expectations.

Can you give me a link or something about it? Wiki shows nothing for that title.

>coordinate cognition
That's actually very interesting. Probably not enough to make me actually read it although I do really like that concept of different rules in different sections of space.

recommend me some comfy scifi adventure lit. dont want any pleb shit either

amazon.com/Count-Trillion-Book-Eschaton-Sequence-ebook/dp/B005CRY3Z4/
It's by le catholic fedora man but the religious themes aren't as strong in this one.

Worthing Saga.

Why is sci-fi so riddled with shitty message fiction and forced diversity? Every single author they talk about is some sort of minority and/or left wing activist.

>theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/30/the-best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-of-2017

>A year ago, Amitav Ghosh usefully stirred things up with his rebuke to “realist” modes of writing. Where, he asked, is all the fiction about climate change? Well, it turns out that the answer is science fiction. Genre writing has been exploring the possible futures of climate change for many years, and 2017’s three best novels engage in powerful and varied ways with precisely that subject.

are science fiction and fantasy books that are under "young adult" generally a red flag for you guys?

I was at barnes and noble with a friend yesterday and was looking at some random shit and i noticed some books that looked kinda interesting but they were under young adult. can they be good just for a quick read? or should i just not bother?

It gets even better.
archive.is/o8qnx
>card-carrying knob-polisher of twenty years reviews a novella
>fantasy world where kids are genderless and choose one when they grow up
>he mentions that it might be jarring to have "they" used as a singular pronoun all the time
>he no longer has a career
>he no longer has a hugo nom
>he is an enemy of all trans people and non-nazis everywhere
Underground SF is where it's at now.

They CAN be just as good or better. Pick up a random YA book and it won't be.

thanks senpai

Sabriel is YA and it's head and shoulders above most "normal" fantasy. Use your own judgment just like any other book.

I keep seeing The Shadow of The Tortuerer brought up everywhere. What's good about it? Same goes for The Blade Itself and The Red Knight.

Book of the Long Sun

Oathbringer was really bad.

The Expanse series.

>The Shadow of The Tortuerer
It's an very well written book with incredible depth and truly fantastic setting. It get's better every time you read it.

>The Blade Itself
It's shit. Literally an information dump.

>The Red Knight
Duno, have not read.

This user doesn't know what he's talking about. Give Joe a try

New non-YA books when?

How fast per page? At 1 page per minute, that's still 200 minutes, which is 3 hours 20 minutes. That isn't trivial at all.

Different user here. I gave Joe a try. Twice.
I simply don't like it. It's trash and not the sort of trash I can enjoy. It's not my sort of EDGY.

Sounds exactly like Kaladin....and also Batman.

I read The Hungry Tide by Ghosh. It's pretty cool because the story takes place in this really unique ecosystem in India and Bangladesh where the tide sweeps into this huge delta, covering and uncovering entire islands, recreating the geography every single day. Plus there's lots of Marine Biology.

Branson Sanderder.

This makes me mad.

I just read NEUROMANCER and I don't like how many niggers there were in it

what'cha doin rabbi

>maelcum does a double front flip, the muscular brown ropes of his back twisting sweatily
>ey case mon I toke da ganja mon sacred plant ya no

space rastas mon

niggers dont go to space.

TRK is also bad. It's just an uninspired grimdark Martin clone.

It's not the 80s anime edge, it's the 12 year old boy writing his fan fiction edge indeed.

So what do I do now that I have a 12k words short story
What the hell do you even do with that

>it's in first person
Not bad enough to drop a book but it constantly harms it. Is there anything more annoying?

I disagree with this.

He disagrees with this. See? So much better. We should just get rid of all second and first person pronouns.

I remember a publisher saying that first person books were the ones which were less likely to pass.

Frankly, the first person narrator needs to be by far the most interesting character to make it work.

twitter.com/GreatDismal

He's a massive fucking liberal
lol
Never read anything by him

I was thinking around 2 hours.

Mat in WoT was fatalistic, and not at all an asshole. The difference is that is the former doesn't treat other people like shit

Mat was the best in the WoT

Planning on starting Gardens of the Moon, first thing in the Malazan universe I'll read. What should I expect, will I really not understand half of the things happening?

It's a Pen and Paper RPG in book form and absolutely nothing is explained about pretty much anything. Quality varies wildly depending on the plto line you're following.

It's a book you enjoy more if you read a lot into the wacky shit occuring in Dick's life at the time, it's kind of an intro into the VALIS trilogy then his Exegesis

It reminded of Children of Time, in that the sort of medieval-alien chapters were tres naughty then the human chapters were A R S E

The Mortal Instruments books are so good.

I had the feeling it was somewhat autobiographical while reading it. In the author's note at the end he writes that everything in the book was based around events in his life.
I guess I expected a trippy, cozy book like Ubik or VALIS. I'm just disappointed because the cool ideas he had got thrown on the backburner in favor of a portrait of the drug culture he experienced.

>Does anybody else feels like some stuff was retconned to shit from the first to second book?
No, not really. If an example comes to mind please write it.

Your idea will never get published

>Your ideas are bad

Has anybody read Hellblazer or The Invisibles? They're comics, not novels, but they're kind of weird, postmodern horror/modern fantasy with a literary bent. Can you recommend any books like this?

China Melville's "Kraken" comes close but is one of his weaker works. The Magicians almost qualifies up until the part of the first book where it becomes portal fantasy.

I'd say Illuminatus! has some similarities with The Invisibles, I imagine it was part of the inspiration for it. Hellblazer is completely unlike it though, as is Kraken so your entire post seems nonsensical. What does gore porn have to do with psychedelia to do with urban fantasy?

Are you saying Hellblazer is just gore porn? Because you're missing a lot of what it is if so. I did say Hellblazer, not Hellraiser, to be clear.

Anyway, they're all urban fantasy with significant horror elements and sympathetic portrayals of very damaged people who manage nonetheless to have moments of real heroism.

Speaking of retcon, Kaladin killing Szeth at the end of WoR was retconned.

Jasnah is so goddamn hot.

Oh yeah, wasn't it that originally Szeth commited suicide by not even bothering to parry or something?

Oh yes my mistake, I misread blazer as raiser.
I think you're on the right track with Mieville for similar things, but you're right that Kraken was a failed experiment. Have you read The City & The City? You could also try some of Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels; as far as I know there's no fantasy involved but the same sort of gritty detective stuff as Hellblazer, he even wrote a one-off strip for it at one point. Jeff Noon's A Man of Shadows fits the description you just gave to a T while being far more cohesive a work than Kraken but to be honest I was pretty unmoved by it. Try Vurt. Yes, I think you'll like Vurt.

>Oh yeah, wasn't it that originally Szeth commited suicide by not even bothering to parry or something?

Yes, once Szeth realizes the radiants are back and he was right all along he doesn't even bother blocking Kaladin's attacks, choosing to die as atonement. I can't believe Sanderson changed it, it's a way better ending.

Of course it won't, who publishes ideas instead of finished works?

Thanks! I'm really into this kind of vibe, and I think I want to write something in the same vein but I want to know what's already been done with it first.