/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

What are you reading?
Which books are you patiently waiting to be released in December?

FANTASY
Selected:
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General:
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Flowchart:
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SCIENCE FICTION
Selected:
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General:
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NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books:
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SF&F author listing with ratings and summaries:
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Previous Threads:

Other urls found in this thread:

goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2017
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

First for webnovels are novels too

do u guys kno any novels that are like dark souls
I like patrick rothfuss and george r r martin if it helps

Did you mean /SfFg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General?

Thinking about writing a Alternate Timeline, Alternate History, Fantasy novel. Sounds good.

roadside picnic is the only dark souls of novels.

Some time ago i picked up a copy of Battlefield Earth and i've been enjoying it but my mom thinks i'm weird because it was written by a Scientologist. Am i autistic?

It's a terrible book but I've never met your mam so who knows

Excerpt from The Jewel Of Bas, a golden age planetary romance by Leigh Brackett, Two wandering thieves, who are also lovers, are enjoying a meal on the Martian plains when they are interrupted.

---

Ciaran dragged down an unsteady breath. He was sweating, but where his hands and Mouse's touched, locked together, they were cold as death.

"What was it, Kiri?"

"I don't know." He got up, slinging the harp across his back without thinking about it. He felt naked suddenly, up there on the high ridge. Stripped and unsafe. He pulled Mouse to her feet. Neither of them spoke again. Their eyes had a queer stunned look.

This time it was Ciaran that stopped, with the stewpot in his hands, looking at something behind Mouse. He dropped it and jumped in front of her, pulling the wicked knife he carried from his girdle. The last thing he heard was her wild scream.

But he had time enough to see. To see the creatures climbing up over the crest of the ridge beside them, fast and silent and grinning, to ring them in with wands tipped at the point with opals like tiny sunballs.

They were no taller than Mouse, but thick and muscular, built like men. Gray animal fur grew on them like the body-hair of a hairy man, lengthening into a coarse mane over the skull. Where the skin showed it was gray and wrinkled and tough.

Their faces were flat, with black animal nose-buttons. They had sharp teeth, gray with a bright, healthy grayness. Their eyes were blood-pink, without whites or visible pupils.

The eyes were the worst.

Ciaran yelled and slashed out with his knife. One of the gray brutes danced in on lithe, quick feet and touched him on the neck with its jeweled wand.

Fire exploded in Ciaran's head, and then there was darkness, pierced by Mouse's scream. As he slid down into it he thought:

"They're Kalds. The beasts of legend that served Bas the Immortal and his androids. Kalds, that guarded the Forbidden Plains from man!"

Ciaran came to, on his feet and walking. From the way he felt, he'd been walking a long time, but his memory was vague and confused. He had been relieved of his knife, but his harp was still with him.

Mouse walked beside him. Her black hair hung over her face and her eyes looked out from behind it, sullen and defiant.

The gray beasts walked in a rough circle around them, holding their wands ready. From the way they grinned, Ciaran had an idea they hoped they'd have an excuse for using them.

With a definitely uneasy shock, Ciaran realized that they were far out in the barren waste of the Forbidden Plains.

Looks pulpy as fuck. Adding to my reading list.

It's been so long since I've enjoyed anything.
I don't know how you guys keep doing it.
I finally gave in and attempted to read Sanderson last week and I remembered why I started to hate storytelling in the first place: everything feels so cookie-cutter and fake--even the dialogue is completely unbelievable. And I think that goes for most of the stuff on here, from Wolfe to Erikson and Bakker. Sure, a few of these authors have things that make them stand out, but their worldbuilding remains entirely unbelievable and their characters are utter abominations. Their reactions to events, their interactions with one another, their thinking patterns, everything is just so bad. I almost can't understand it. It's as if robots wrote these novels. People that have never interacted with another human being and have never had thoughts of their own.
And, to make it clear, I'm not whining about a lack of realism. I'm not saying that these books aren't deep enough, or gritty enough, or whatever. I'm just saying it's impossible to get into them when everything that happens is a stab to the brain that reminds you you're reading a work of fiction. It shouldn't have t be that way.
At this point I don't even know what to read anymore. I can still enjoy Tolkien and other older authors because they never even attempted to make their characters behave and speak normally. But all these newer, third-person-limited books are unreadable cancer. I'm sure my dog has a better understanding of human nature than Sanderson does.

Read Vurt.

Just read older authors then. That's a perfectly valid choice given the amount of material available.

Anyone would want to read my fanfic?

Doesn't the book come with a glossary explaining all those?

just read dumai wells and jesus christ the audiobook is amazing, compared to reading the narrator in the audiobook has a pretty good voice and entonation, shame he voices the females as well

What's your opinion of Brackett's work so far?

Read Knut Hamsun.

Brackett is very pulpy, she is what happens when a tomboy grows up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Howard and Dashiell Hamett.

I read that Gene Wolfe's trick is to put something interesting on each page. In this brief excerpt alone there are the forbidden plains, , beasts servitors, android overseers, and a legendary immortal overlord. A dynamic writer but more taut than Howard and Burroughs.

Brandon Sanderson talks a lot about establishing 'promises' to the reader earlier on and then fulfilling them, in his writing classes. Look at what Brackett is promising here: romance, action and adventure. She was working in a competitive writing market and had to grab discerning editors as well as the wider reader.

She's top tier pulp adventure fiction. I had already read some of her longer books like The Sword Of Rhiannon (a great introduction) as well as a handful of other Martian stories and the first Skaith book (not as good as the early stuff.) I think she takes elements of her influences and improves them, she is far more enjoyable than Burroughs and Robert Howard. There is still the bulk of her Martian and Venus stuff for me to read.

In what order should I read Tolkien?
I've seen people say you should read The Silmarillion LAST, is that true?

Children of Hurin is his best story

The scene reminded me of Burroughs but I like his 'aww shucks' character perspective better--too many Westerns as a kid, I expect. Come to think of it, that might be the market he was enticing from.

Are you writing, CASbro? I can't help but notice a tendency to analyze constituent elements in your excerpt commentary.

hobbit, lotr, silmarillion

You sound pretty pretentious my dude

Read Tolkien.

Great. I'm probably too much of a brainlet to start with the Silmarillion but I understand The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are easier to get into.

I intend to read this too.
Where exactly does it fit?

The Goodreads community have thrown a vote to decide what this years best Fantasy book is. Proving once again the age old knowledge that if you bring enough people together you end up with a bunch of retards they selected a movie script (that did not even make a good movie) as the best book. Amazing.

goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-fantasy-books-2017

Now, are there any actually readworthy books among the nominees? No need to mention Oathbringer as everyone already know about that one.

lol

PANCAKES

>ada palmer only got 689 votes
lol

No. I'm a person that went into Tolkien having seen the Lord of the Rings, and let me tell you, everything other than the Silmarillion was a shitshow. I guess the Hobbit is fun, but the way the Lord of the Rings is told doesn't fit Tolkien's style at all. The Silmarillion does. Maybe this is because I watched the movies first, but I just can't stand LotR as a book.

You could add some more information.
Yeah, but they don't give me what I want.
>pretentious
>while posting on /sffg/
Yeah, I'm absolutely patrician, my man.

No, right now I haven't the creative impulse or staying power for writing, so I'm not actively doing that. But I do like to take notice of what writers are doing and it's possible that I'll work on a pulp fantasy short story collection or novella in the future - novel length writing sounds like hell, and science fiction wouldn't be my strong suit. I would give a right nut to have Clark Ashton's poetics and vocabulary, Lovecraft's narrative thrust, C.L. Moore's sensuousness, Howard and Leiber's exuberance. Maybe if their fiction percolates in me a little longer, then I could have a go.

>Yeah, but they don't give me what I want.
Have you perhaps considered that characters "behaving and speaking normally" (in your conception of it) is what makes newer books cancerous in the first place? This is said in all seriousness, for 'tis the reason I dislike much of what is currently popular.

Let me know when he finishes the series.

What're some good epic fantasy series of about 3-5 books in length? Enough to lose myself in the world for a while but not fuckhuge.

I've read LOTR and most of ASOIAF.

The most important element to me is characters I can give a shit about, followed by a decent plot. Political intrigue is cool too but not vital.

Not in the mood for sci-fantasy like Dune.

:3

People are going to recommend you shit, but imo, just don't bother. Nothing compares to LotR and ASoIaF. You're better off watching actual anime than reading Sanderson.

supposedly its going to be 5 books in total.
book 2 was released 3 days ago but im waiting for the audiobook which should take about a month or so if the previous is anything to go by.

Yeah, why bother reading, it's all terrible. Slip now into the wombish depths of darkness' all accepting embrace.

>the way something written by Tolkien is told doesn't fit Tolkien's style at all.

Walk me through your thought process, please.

Not at all. I dig the idea of putting aside some of the trappings of traditional fantasy, but I don't see why that would produce such utter nonsense. Settings where people are supposedly part of a strict hierarchy, but they all joke with one another and talk as if they're high school pals, and the story acknowledges no unwritten rules of those societies. Meanwhile the only limits the characters have are always grounded in rational, solvable obstacles rather than insecurities, phobias, or any kind of spiraling anxiety. I'm not even saying we should focus on existential dread or anything like that, just that not everything can be so cut and dry and mechanistic.

But that's exactly how they think about it. I remember hearing from Sanderson either in one of his classes or that podcast he's on that "characters should always be consistent" because "fiction isn't real life, and readers will think you're pulling a fast one on them if a character does something unexpected." Basically, characters have certain traits that are immovable, and everything is on rails from that point on.

Ironically some of the best stuff I've read recently comes from the Horus Heresy series. The lore for that was written with so little in mind initially, that a lot of the actions the characters take seem... retarded. And that's great. The authors actually have to think about how these people could have all those godlike traits but also commit some of the dumbest, most tragic acts. And despite it being edgy bullshit, the interactions between the characters are a thousand times more lifelike than you'd find in most popular fantasy, in which the motivations of the characters are laid out straight and leave no room for debate.

I actually agree wtf. Its totally crazy how there are two completely satisfying fantasy novel series that give you *that* feel and those are LOTR and Asoiaf. I can't count how many times since the early 00s I've been recommended likes of Sanderson and whatever else and it simply doesn't do it, it doesn't have a soul or characters and the world you give a damn about. Fantasy is extremely sensitive to world building, characters, relationships between them and how their world reflects on them. Most other fantasies remind me of classical RPG wannabees, d&d influenced fan autism and cliches that make me drop it relatively fast. Sci-fi on the other hand is much more 'serious' genre, it has hidden gems and well known near masterpieces in abundance. Last month I've read Hyperion, completely mindblown

What are some science fiction and fantasy awards that are worth following through to the current day? I think it would be cool to pick an award and read the winner from every year.

The Magicians trilogy is actually about young adults going to wizard college, graduating, and being like, "fuck... now what?" and struggling with the fact that life can still dick you over even if Hogwarts and Narnia are real, and you still have to find yourself and figure out what you want, or being able to magically manifest it means nothing. I loved it. Your mileage may vary.

Absolutely. Malazan was quite literally a D&D setting at the start if I'm not mistaken. Point is, it's all garbage. And the other okay fantasy stuff is just sci-fi in disguise, like New Sun and PoN.

Children of Hurin should probably be read just before or just after the Silmarillion. In the latter case, just skip the Turin chapter in the Silm, since CoH is the same thing but more developed.

I semi-enjoy urban fantasy, as some guilty pleasure. Especially if romances and pairings appeal to me. Not the great literary kind, but not bad either. The Mortal Instruments and Magicians aren't so bad.

To be fair, The Magicians is like a less-trippy PKD story in that it's really what you get if literary fiction has a baby with pulp adventure stories, and that's part of why its audience seems to consist only of people who like both.

I could never get into urban fantasy. Even at its finest like the oWoD stuff, I couldn't help but feel it's been written for punk chicks. There's just something off-putting about most of it. Maybe I've not read enough.

Is there any fantasy slice of life? Like stories about a guy becoming a master at smithing, or dwarves going mining deep in the mountains. Not some monster hunting shit either.

>rand stills 3 aes sedai when he breaks free from the shield
Please tell me aes sedai will continue to suffer, they really deserve.

>oWoD
what? kek

So, after reading and loving Vurt I decided to just read all the books that have ever won the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

once the quartet is complete, the true praise shall begin

Anyone actually read Artemis?

I like Quicksilver, but would only recommend it if you are already familiar with Stephenson's style. Handmaid's Tale was boring and preachy.
Looks like I need to read more books.

>if you are already familiar with Stephenson's style
I've read Snow Crash. Is that enough?
>Handmaid's Tale was boring and preachy.
I'll start it and if I lose interest just switch to the TV show and see if I enjoy that.

>Please tell me aes sedai will continue to suffer
Yes

Its funny how the "evil" slaver nation comes out as 100% in the right for how they leash Aes Sedai.
Women fuck everything up

Old World of Darkness?

>I've read Snow Crash. Is that enough?
Not really. Snow Crash is pretty accessible and short. The only reason I brought up his style is because of the large time commitment for Quicksilver's series.
>Handmaid's Tale
I think you'd get more out of reading about the Iranian revolution honestly.

To be fair, those holding certain political views seem to find it prophetic. My bias may color any assessment.

>What are you reading?
Read behind the throne which was suprisingly fun. What was fairly interesting was that it was pretty much a courtly intrigue fantasy novel but with starships in the background.
Interested to see if the rest of the trilogy follow this or branch out.

Also started reading Seventh Decimate which isn't as gripping. The problem is that Donaldson sets up three big reveals (where is the mysterious book, what does it do, why didn't the protagonist die in the prologue) and then spends all of the book I've read so far slowly walking toward them.
Also there's a twist on the horizon that's so obvious it's gonna annoy me when it happens.
Gonna power through to see if it all pays off or if it's just a tease.

Also occasionally reading Worm which is suprisingly alright

Give me the most degenerate books you read so I can put together a gri chart.

The Scwab is good, th Hobb is good, Jemisin is great, Mark Lawrence is drastically better than his first two trilogies, the Tad Williams is excellent and McClellan and Michael J. Sullivan are fun if not great.

As for scifi waking gods, binti, Provenance, Seven Surrenders and Punch Escrow are good.
All Our Wrong Todays, the Expanse book and the Ninefox sequel are fun enough.
I like Marko Kloos a lot but I'm not up to that book yet
Really the only thing on there that isn't good is the Scalzi, it's a weak effort from him and other stuff that came out this year is much more interesting and fun (I'm surprised Luna: Wolf Moon didn't make it)

Coldfire Trilogy

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is good for this and only a few books but they're all tomes and glacially paced

What I have so far.

not gonna lie the underlying premise of good intentions was actually quite interesting. if you remove all the degeneracy and focus on the premise of the MC going through horrible deaths in his previous lives all because some angel wanted to make him a hero.
it could have been good. they could have even left the sex scenes in just not make it full blown erotica.

What anime is this webm guys?
I'm being told Macross Frontier and Kyoukai no Rinne 2, when I search the stills.

I'd genuinely read an epic fantasy series set in the world of Pokémon like 500 years in the past.

>I'd genuinely read an epic fantasy series set in the world of Pokémon like 500 years in the past.
Oh you mean pic related?

>C.L. Moore's sensuousness
Hmm. Your taste in waifu is unassailable.
>pulp fantasy short story collection
I think you're onto something there. A good Dying Earth-ish semi-connected collection of stories might go over pretty well.

Handmaid's Tale is not that long and good enough. While not revolutionary by any means it's a nice and believable description of ordinary life in an authoritarian theocracy.

>reading about the Iranian revolution
You have any recommendations? Because that sound like an interesting subject.

It's the first one.

pretty sure it's boku no pico

How Anime is Malazan?
Not that I dislike some Anime in my books btw, just asking.

...

>Investiture on First of the Sun is associated with a Shard?
Yes, it is. That one is even closer associated with a Shard, the actual Investiture of the magic. Remember when I say Investiture, I mean matter, energy and magic. Sometimes the word Investiture just to the magic such as the Aviar and in that it is directly associated with one of the Shards
>Which one?
Patji is a Shard of Adonalsium
>*Stunned silence*
>Sorry, can you say that again?
Patji is a Shard of Adonalsium
>Is that one of the Aviar?
No that is the island
>Island or islands?
The island but Patji is one of the islands.
>It's a Shard?!
Yes, big asterisk! But yes.
>Shard as in equal or Shard as in a mass of Investiture?
As in one of the 16 Shards of Adonalsium is represented and involved in First of the Sun. In fact, one of the letters references First of the Sun in this *Indicates to Oathbringer". Sorry, I probably killed some theories on that one.

that fucking feelio dealio when no new Sixth of the Dusk novellas any time soon

Which one of George RRRR Martin's short stories is the one about bloodraven again?

I wish it were 2047 when the cosmere is finished

Remind her that top gun was made by a scientologist.

Then blast dangerzone while violently hip thrusting her skull.

Just finished Gardens of the Moon. Little bit of a slog in the beginning, but got good towards the end.

We Deadhouse now.

>PoN
What's that?

Weird, I thought First of the Sun's shtick was that it had no shards but still had a perpendicularity.

>see this thread
>start reading Neuromancer, worried it won't live up to the hype
>literally 15 pages in and it's already oozing style like no other book I've read

>that feel when

Yeah but I reckon there is more going on now. Strange that he has taken so long to talk about it. Ah well.

Probably thought that people would figure it out anyway with Oathbringer.

Have fun user. I wish you the best of luck.

So, how does the Cosmere compare/contrast with Moorcock's Eternal Champion multiverse?

>You have any recommendations? Because that sound like an interesting subject.
Not particularly good ones, no. There is a somewhat controversial film called Not Without My Daughter that covers some of the same ground, though it occurs a few years after the revolution. It purports to describe the experiences of an American woman married to an Iranian doctor. A visit to her Iranian relatives turns dire when her husband slowly reverts to their cultural norms and refuses to let her leave.
It upset a lot of people, but I found it emotionally powerful. I often thought back to it while reading Handmaid's Tale.

>Wolfe is an abomination
>Horus Heresy is rly good tho

Needs The Man Who Folded Himself.

Yeah, from the movie though.

So far it doesn't seem to be a washed-up author's attempt to tie in all the books he wrote for drug money when he was younger into a cohesive universe because Alan Moore stole all his thunder and multiverses seem to be what the kids are into these days.

>ditch human species
Tangentially that's one of the fun parts of Zelazny's Night in the Lonesome October; you never forget your protagonist is a dog. The way he makes friends, the way he's rock-bottom fixated on protecting his master, the way he has a problem climbing down stairs. That's a non-human protagonist.

read titus groan and book of the new sun.

Thanks dude.

I just finished it too. I enjoyed it all the way through honestly. Not seeing why people had trouble getting through it. I hope that means that Deadhouse will blow my mind.

Hey guys, can anyone recommend me some quality Christmas fiction? Anything is fine but preferably something comfy that evokes the holiday feeling.

Har har. I mean internally, not in terms of why the author made it. Is the Cosmere a multiverse or just one setting with a long history and names of things changing? Are there characters who universe-hop and/or reincarnations of the same figures?

Also, the multiverse thing doesn't seem to have come all that late in Moorcock's work.