/SFFg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General Anonymous

reminder that webnovels are novels too

what the fuck are webnovels?

think web comics but instead of a new strip each week theres a new paragraph each week.
i personally dont care much for those so i dont get the bickering.

>Quorn nuggets edition
How is this related to /sffg/?
Please at least make something up.
>Why would you use the same permutation as in the previous thread? Either use a new one or the normal lower case.
I assume she isn't in on the plot.

That's good to know. I thought Ubik was bad but liked do androids dream of electric sheep. I wasn't sure if I'd give him another go.

The pro/anti WN bickering is probably just one dude who wants to spread awareness.

Excerpt, The Flower Women.

---

As he went down the knoll into the valley, the enchanter heard an eery, plaintive singing, like that of sirens who bewail some irremediable misfortune. The singing came from a sisterhood of unusual creatures, half woman and half flower, that grew on the valley bottom beside a sleepy stream of purple water. There were several scores of these lovely and charming monsters, whose feminine bodies of pink and pearl reclined amid the vermilion velvet couches of billowing petals to which they were attached. These petals were borne on mattress-like leaves and heavy, short, well-rooted stems. The flowers were disposed in irregular circles, clustering thickly toward the center, and with open intervals in the outer rows.

Maal Dweb approached the flower-women with a certain caution; for he knew that they were vampires. Their arms ended in long tendrils, pale as ivory, swifter and more supple than the coils of darting serpents, with which they were wont to secure the unwary victims drawn by their singing. Of course, knowing in his wisdom the inexorable laws of nature, he felt no disapproval of such vampirism; but, on the other hand, he did not care to be its object.

He circled about the strange family at a little distance, his movements hidden from their observation by their boulders overgrown with tall, luxuriant lichens of red and yellow. Soon he neared the straggling outer plants that were upstream from the knoll on which he had landed; and in confirmation of the vision beheld in the mimic world in his planetarium, he found that the turf was upheaved and broken where five of the blossoms, growing apart from their companions, had been disrooted and removed bodily. He had seen in his vision the rape of the fifth flower, and he knew that the others were now lamenting her.

Suddenly, as if they had forgotten their sorrow, the wailing of the flower-women turned to a wild and sweet and voluptuous singing, like that of the Lorelei. By this token, the enchanter knew that his presence had been detected. Inured though he was to such bewitchments, he found himself far from insensible to the perilous luring of the voices. Contrary to his intention, forgetful of the danger, he emerged from the lee of the lichen-crested rocks. By insidious degrees, the melody fired his blood with a strange intoxication, it sang in his brain like some bewildering wine. Step by step, with a temporary loss of prudence for which, later, he was quite unable to account, he approached the blossoms.

Now, pausing at an interval that he deemed safe in his bemusement, he beheld plainly the half-human features of the vampires, leaning toward him with fantastic invitation. Their weirdly slanted eyes, like oblong opals of dew and venom, the snaky coiling of their bronze-green hair, the bright, baneful scarlet of their lips, that thirsted subtly even as they sang, awoke within him the knowledge of his peril. Too late, he sought to defy the captiously woven spell.

>newfag user fucked up the subject field
>didn't alternate the sffg to trigger lit user
Lurk moar fagget

Is Vox Day a good writer?

>what the fuck are webnovels?
Why don't you lurk more and actually open pics in the general?

what's a novel/series for those moments when someone is rightly angry at you but you're still kind of upset about it

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Clark Ashton Smith is better than H. P. Lovecraft.

Mediocre, his writing style is very similar to 30's pulp like Conan. I've heard from both Veeky Forums and affiliated blogs he's a brilliant editor and extremely easy to work with though.

this doesn't say anything about Quorn nuggs so we're cruising just about fine

Is Smith as racist though?

Well, In some ways he is, but I find think CAS and HPL complement eachother well. Clarke tends to vividly describe his demons, ghouls and monsters with his poet's vocabulary, while Lovecraft interestingly avoids outright descriptions, or skirts around the malevolence by hints, rumors and suggestions, and this allows for some more compelling plots. It's a source of wonder for me they were writing for the same lowly pulp rag in the thirties. As for Robert Howard, he's at least a step below them.

it talks about webnovels
take your redhit ass back over there and stop trying to force your stupid memes in our general

>Is Smith as racist though?
Yes, although it manifests differently.

Nowhere near Robert Howard (Lovecraft gets a lot of flack, but Howard is full of African caricatures) or Lovecraft's questionably named pets and 'nautical looking negroids'. The most off-colour remark I vaguely recall being about the Abhramahic religion of a penny pinching curio shop owner.

Beale is a hack who writes like a upper-middle class housewife from the 1800s attempting to write in the most purplest of prose, who is only really notable because he's been cyberstalking John Scalzi and yelling at people about how they're putting chemicals in the hugos to turn the books gay.

I feel a craving for nationalistic or religious zeal manifested in a war against a fundamental ideological or theological enemy. Something like World War series by Turtledove, but instead of fighting aliens a fight for example of humanity against the creatures that go bump in the night.
Please help I want monster genocide.

>they're putting chemicals in the hugos to turn the books gay.
OK smart guy, why are the books turning gay then?

>who is only really notable because he's been cyberstalking
His publishing house is actually really successful especially considering the current state of Sci-fi.

His publishing house mainly exists to launder money that his father stole in a fraud scheme.

This Tweet is potential one of the worst I've ever seen.

>purplest of prose
Are you retarded, do you even know what that means or are just using it as a buzzword?

I only read his arts of light and dark series and there isn't a hint of purple prose there, doubt he used it much in anything else either.

>Fighting Trump's America one tweet at a time

Is Scalzi still having a mental breakdown? he looked on the serve of heroing last time I checked in on him.

Wildbow's work is the best example.

You can find his 1.68 million word work Worm, a grimdark superhero webnovel, here:
parahumans.wordpress.com/

Floornight. hard sci-fi by nostalgebraist, is also good and is located here:
archiveofourown.org/works/2372021/chapters/5238359

Cordyceps, soft sci-fi by Benedict_SC, is here:
archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868

Does she get better? I'm halfway through the second book, and I can't stand her.

I can smell the shittiness of these from here

impossible to write in Trumps AMERICA
#RESIST

How does that work?

>hard sci-fi
got my interested, what's it about?

these fucking fags must have had a meltdown when trump recognized jerusalem as israel capitol

26. I started reading light novels as well and found them to be a million times better than most fantasy novels, especially since light novels aren't written by faggots and dykes, nor are they pushing that agenda.

>what is yaoi/yuri/shotacon/lolicon
you can't escape degeneracy

Clearly defined degeneracy that sticks to its own category and doesn't demand representation in the others.

Japan is the most degenerate of all countries.

any good fantasy book where the protag faces terrible situations, bonus if he gets a bit mad, like in wot

And yet it's more enjoyable to read than shit here in the west.

of course anime is enjoyable
why do you think it makes such mad bank?

Finished Hyperion and wow are there a lot of loose ends. Good thing the book I have is Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion all in one, so I can just keep going on! Should I start reading the Foundation trilogy along with Fall, or should I focus on finishing the Hyperion works?

Some really good long stories that could be considered books I guess on the forum (alternatehistory.com). Some people there are literally retarded but there are some that really know what they're doing.

>Does she get better?
Nice bait

After I heard so much about recently I've finally red Ready Player One last night and I can't really see why it's so popular.
>Plot
It's kinda thin, it has some decent elements here and there but it quickly then rushes to: "he has no money but he has a lot of money to hide and build a bunker with a top tier PC and VR-rig" The ending also feels kinda.. eh. Basically going out on: "oh and the bad guy got arrested btw which feels anti-climatic as shit.
But for me, the worst is the VR world itself. basically an MMO that is so popular and widely used, people care more about their virtual lives than their real lifes. This I could buy, but SO MANY THINGS that are described are fucking terrible:
>P2Win up the ass
Getting credits in this game is basically as good as any real world currency, They have auctions where you can buy super powerful items and you also need a lot of money to get around as virtual vehicles need virtual repair and fuel.and even teleporters cost decent money fees.
Basically: Once you're on a planet that doesn't allow for grinding gold (like the school planet, I bet there are more without any income opportunities) and you're broke you're fucking stranded there.
>Permadeath
Have I mentioned you can buy super strong weapons for money and just flat out kill anybody you like in a lot of zones? And guess what, if you die you can't come back and get the guy. You get reset to level 1, you lose all your items (which if you're poor you might have saved or farmed for years to get) and are basically fucked. Hell, they can even just steal those very expensive vehicles you bought.
Fucking nobody would enjoy that game. Certainly not on such a global scale.

Also: the whole 80s thing didn't do it for me. I felt like it wasn't really something that worked well into the story and felt more like just a listing of extreme 80s trivia, with people CONSTANTLY just quoting the release year.
>Real people:
A: Hey what about frogger?
B: That game where you hop across a street and avoid cars and falling into water?
>RPO people:
A: Hey what about frogger?
B: The 1981 classic Sega game developed by [Name of dev] from Konami?

Where do you fit on the autism spectrum?

I think so

So a family member got me a copy of an N. K. Jemisin book as a gift, is she actually good or is she one of the diversity awards that people were complaining about with the Hugos?

There is a good representation of an MMO in a Philip K Dick short story, The Days of Perky Pat. It's more about its effect on adults, who become apathetic to their surroundings, rather than the game itself, which is a Barbie and Ken-esque role play game (or whatever the modern equivalent of Habbo Hotel is). But for a 1963 story it feel it anticipates the thrall of such games on normal people in an eery way - just like in Brave New World, the things that we partake in to escape our humdrum lives numbs us with apathy, and prevent us from being proactively good in our physical environments.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if you don't mind whiny, self-pitying protagonists. It's actually really good.

Why is it that Dune draws me in that nothing else and is one of my favorite books of all time but LOTR puts me to sleep?

I've tried reading LOTR 3 times, once in 5th grade, one in 9th, and once in highschool and I every time I stopped around Shelob or before then. Am I just a brainlet?

That is really strange because most people who make it through Fellowship have no problem with everything else.

I never got tested but honestly it's hard to buy the whole premise of this super successful VR universe when every time he describes actual gameplay aspects of it you go: "that sounds fucking horrible".

I can forgive a lot in these old stories because, they had to make up a whole lot more than we do these days. Like how in androids dream, they have flying cars but TV are still big clunky retro style TV sets with antenna on top of it.
But Ready Player One was what? 2011? He did all this retro game research but couldn't be bothered to take a bit to find out what makes a good MMO or VR game?
>the things that we partake in to escape our humdrum lives numbs us with apathy, and prevent us from being proactively good in our physical environments.
This pissed me off occasionally too in RPO. Most of the time it was described as this wonderful virtual utopia of escapism and no addiction, yet every now and then he'll drop the "it's not real life" and "true love and true anything can only be found in the real world" and the story ends on him for the first time not wanting to log in like that's a good thing.
And it doesn't come across as a philosophical "Do you think love can bloom, even on a b̶a̶t̶t̶l̶e̶f̶i̶e̶l̶d virtual reality?" or "If this VR causes you to reject your real life to life in it, but ultimately it makes you happy, is it still a good thing or just another opium of the people?" It doesn't make you think about the implications of such a world, but rather comes across like your preachy mom or aunt going: "user get of dat computah, it's bad fer ya!"

Starship troopers for nationalistic militaristic zeal if you haven't read it already.

I skipped Tom Bombadil on the second and third run through if that adds anything.

Why is that part even in the book?

There are two main ways. You use the place like a traditional laundromat or car wash or "that one Mexican/Italian place in town where nobody ever goes to it but it's been open for a decade."

Or you use it to take advantage of tax loopholes. Back in the 70s there was a thing called "tax scam records" where a record company would be able to set up a subsidiary which did nothing but lose money. The records they made, if they existed at all, were typically nothing but the bottom of the barrel: unfinished tracks, demos, random crap they'd already released, and so on. The records would be left to rot in a warehouse and then dumped in a landfill after being listed as unsold, and the owners would be able to write off a big portion of the parent company's operations as a tax loss so they could keep their profits up.

Why shouldn't it be?

>I thought I could build, Lews Therin murmured in his head. I was wrong. We are not builders, not you, or I, or the other one. We are destroyers. Destroyers.
Who is the other one?
isnt lews the only one in rand's mind?

No, how does Castalia House launder money? They publish a lot of books, and they don't seem to be running at a loss, and they're not even based in the US.

And exploiting tax loopholes isn't even money laundering.

>muh stizzile trwupers nationalism may-mays

>If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—'older and wiser heads,' as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.

Is your post supposed to refute my post or something? It's pretty much completely unrelated to my post

Is blindsight good or am I being memed on?

>isnt lews the only one in rand's mind?
Until the last few books yes

The difference is the Japanese do not expect everybody to love them for being degenerate. They are self aware enough to realize they are a niche, not mainstream, and so only focus on catering to their niche and do not have pretensions of mainstream appeal.

Western degenerates however seem to believe they are owed a spot on the main stage with normal people. This delusion makes them difficult to get along with, because you get the sense that everything they do is about pushing their agenda of acceptance rather than just being honest about their niche appeal and reveling in that.

Why do you expect this author to conceive and describe a perfect abomination?

It seems akin to saying "Fahrenheit 451" isn't believable because Bradbury didn't include an exact script for an episode of Kardashian TV.

>No, how does Castalia House launder money? They publish a lot of books, and they don't seem to be running at a loss, and they're not even based in the US.

I couldn't positively say without being able to look at their books but it's probably just the old "most of the profit is actually drug money and most of the expenses go to Johnny Kingpin" style of laundering. Basically a good portion of the sales are probably non-existent books being bought with his dad's stolen money. And now with electronic publishing you don't even need to pay for physical books before shredding/donating them to charities.

These are some harsh accusations, user. Is there any evidence anywhere? If this is true it's your responsibility to help put Vox Day behind bars.

>namefag
>in charge of understanding.
Not at all surprising.

planning on writing a run on the mill YA MC but not a cliche story. Would it work?

>The pallid sun was descending, its ineffective rays no longer sufficient to hold it up in the sky or to penetrate the northern winds that gathered strength with the whispered promises of the incipient dark.

"but that's not REAL communism!"

Still in the beggining of knife of dreams but...
Does the dragon reincarnates like ordinary souls or only to make his duty in closing the bore and then rebirthing in tarmon gaidon?
Also, is lews therin and rand the same person? or they are different people?

you're saying that like most LNs don't have token characters for at least lolicon. Though you are correct in that LNs are not exactly mainstream. However we are discussing LNs, and lolicon has a very high representation in them.

The Dragon only pops up when the world needs him to battle the Dark One. A lot of people say it's the same person, but when you ask them they have different ideas about what that means.
Good editing and partial rewrites could have lifted that series from a 6 to an 8.

oh i understand
it's a bit philophic to debate wether the soul makes you the same person or the memories make you diferent
so it means the dragon spends 3000 years in the world of dreams? or just talking with the creator?

That's a tripfag. Lurk more and stop posting, newfag trash.

So guys I was remembering a book I read about five years ago that was set in a fantasy world (or the near future?) about a society where this one MMO basically determines your standing, income, etc. Dying is heavily avoided because you start off at square one and when it happens to the main character he make a character in-game that's full of charisma points instead of any battle-useful stats, and that helps the plot develop. Anybody recognize something like that?

It was YA, I think, if that helps. Googling "novels based on video games" or "novels about video games" is completely unhelpful.

>hurr muh YA litrpg books xd

embarrassing post

feel free to say that it's shitty without knowing anything about it, but I think it's all quality. Wildbow's following works, Pact and Twig, though, I did *not* like.

He gets paid $4,000 a month by his audience to keep writing.

patreon.com/Wildbow

Why does editing suck so much? I just want to be done with this stupid novel. It's not even good and its not going to be good for a long-ass time

Do light novels get turned into audiobooks? Recommend me some cool shit, and some degenerate shit. In that order please.

The Broken Earth/Fifth Season were pretty good. Solid and worth a read, at worst.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is abysmal.

light novels? nah mostly they re turned into mangas and sometimes anime.
however. theres fan readings of lightovels.
some of them can be quite professional actually. though its mostly for really obscure shit and hard to find.

FUCK, I have nothing to listen to tonight. AGAIN. God damn it why can't I find fun shit to listen to?

debofnight.andcuriouser.com/
be careful not to fall in love user.

>tfw not even at the editing stage

>debofnight.andcuriouser.com/
Lel is this the radio of the vamp rpg? I need to play that game, never gave it a chance

Can't be bothered to save the image
i.ytimg.com/vi/z-33xndJvL0/maxresdefault.jpg

>i.ytimg.com/vi/z-33xndJvL0/maxresdefault.jpg
Put the link as the file name next time and you'll have the pic

it is and its fantastic.
its like 45 minutes total of unique audio just for the radio.

>48k a year

That's decent just for writing web fiction, though on the other hand you've got no 401k, medical/dental, etc.