/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>I'm going to reread BotNS sometime later next year, should I read Urth before or after for maximum enjoyment and enlightenment?

If you're going to reread BotNS anyway then read Urth afterwards.

Threadly reminder that this is still the best sci-fi and other sci-fi should try harder.

>using John C. Wright
why would you do that?

I didn't even make it past the first chapter. Life's too short to read bad books.

>people disagreeing with me triggers my autism
you really should only read the first two books
which are really one book split in two

Leigh Brackett is the only female writer worth reading apparently.

He's probably the best scifi writer around today that isn't 75+ years old.

Are you triggered?

>who is susanna clarke

Wright is fedora-tier American garbage for internet toughguys. That guy is an embarrassment, his main picture on Google is literally him tipping his Fedora

Read some Ted Chiang

lolwut? Shes good and certainly underrated but there are plenty of good sf&f writers that are female

he's not
he's a rightwing nut and whines about conspiracies being responsible for his poor sales and lack of awards

>t. tumblr

Maybe he wants to read something else during the years Fu Manchu spends perfecting his latest short story.

No wonder you think Wright is a good author if you think your post is an argument, why do you even post

As opposed to you crying about him being a conservative? lol Fuck off, you hypocritical faggot.

Where is anybody crying about conservatives?
I swear, you Americans with your TV-induced persecution complexes.

Look at his writing, here's an excerpt:

scifiwright.com/2012/06/cover-art-for-the-hermetic-millennia-and-excerpt/

Here's another one:

scifiwright.com/2016/10/an-excerpt-from-swan-knights-son/

Both are extremely boring, I don't even know why Wright posted these if they are the best he has to offer.

>The Senior of the Landing Party of the Hermetic expedition, the Nobilissimus Ximen del Azarchel, called Ximen the Black, sat alone in state atop the only throne ever to exist upon the gray and lifeless globe that formed the sole remnant and remainder of his reign.

This is Warhammer 40k fan fiction tier.

>Wright is fedora-tier American garbage for internet toughguys.
Maybe, but he's an amazing writer.

>Read some Ted Chiang
>Ted mothersoiling Chiang
You just voided your reading license, get the fuck out and don't come back.

Just picked up Assassins apprentice and the first four earthsea books. Time to see if those /sffg/ recommendations are worth anything.

Also got a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and holy shit, two thirds of the book is just annotations and shit. The actual text only makes up a small portion of it. What kind of nonsense is that?

>Both are extremely boring
No, your mom was boring when I anally violated her last night.

See:

What is this supposed to mean?
he's not a conservative
he's a radical rightwinger
demanding things conform to his religious views
thats not conservative

t. radical left-winger
Please fuck off.

have you seen any of his purple prose that would make Poe cringe?

so does this mean that the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Orthodox Jewish Settlers are all merely... conservative?

One would like to think of a nice old book shop but let's be honest it will just be his own piss

Hate my life, posted in the wrong thread

>What kind of nonsense is that?
You're reading a 2000 years old text, it's not surprising that it might need heavy editing and many comments to make sense or even be complete.

>he's a radical rightwinger
>demanding things conform to his religious views
And that is bad exactly how?

>have you seen any of his purple prose that would make Poe cringe?
It's intentional stylization, you mongoloid brainlet.

>struggle through the Shadow part
>afterword by the author
>"in the making of this document I used a bunch of made-up words to describe futuristic things you mere mortals can't understand, hope it didn't bother you too much ;^)"
FUCK YOU CUNT

A decent translation and a handful of pages of annotations would do just that. I don't want to read a hundred pages of editor's notes. The amount of additional text in this version seems a bit superfluous to me.

he thinks this makes him smart I suppose

>It's intentional stylization, you mongoloid brainlet.
he writes like this in everyday life

>And that is bad exactly how?
user I know you're trolling, but please stop to consider what happens when you don't share the religious views of someone like Wright who demands to impose his on society

Well, you don't have to read all the additional text. Maybe read the original text and then comments related to passages you found interesting or confusing?

Oh man, that guy is an embarrassment

>he writes like this in everyday life
Which is exactly why he's a great writer. (And by "everyday life" you mean "blogposts". Of course he doesn't write like that when doing day-to-day chores.)

>user I know you're trolling
I'm not. Fuck you and your Oerton Window, soyboy.

> but please stop to consider what happens when you don't share the religious views of someone like Wright who demands to impose his on society
Soyboys like you are made to leave or get the rope.

Again, that is a bad thing exactly how?

It's ok. Shallan's arc is still the worst part but everything else is at least alright.

What don't you like about Chiang? I happen to like both him and Wright; they're completely different.

so it's the exact same thing as the first two, got it

Holy fuck why do leftshits hate prose now? You faggots should stick to GRRM then.

As opposed to you commie faggot leftshits who want to impose your horrid politics on society? Also you have no idea what you're talking about with Wright. He said himself he hates when writers preach in their books. Of course you'd know that if you had actually read any of his works instead of just had a hissy fit over him being Catholic.

>What don't you like about Chiang?
Chiang's a two-dimensional idiot, unlike Wright. (Wright is sorely lacking in everything related to history and theology, but I can give him a pass on that due to his literary talent.)

Pretty much. But if you want to be asbolutely sure, yes, you can skip pages whenever it's a Shallan chapter and you will miss nothing of real importance.

...

Wright is a fucktier shit prose stylist. If you want good prose, read Burroughs or Wolfe.

That's probably what I'll do. just struck me ass odd at first glance. Unexpected at least.

*
or Vance

History I can see but I'd really like to know what SF writer who doesn't look like a walrus has it over Wright on theology.

Wolfe and Wright are both very good prose stylists. Vance is not a prose stylist at all, just a very competent writer. (There's a difference.) Burroughs is shit-tier bilge.

Wright is cringeworthy as far as theology goes. (Makes basic mistakes and mixes the unmixable together.) Doesn't matter much, however, since he's going after an immediate emotional effect and not authenticity.

Mummy bought me this

This is shit, isn't it?

>Vance is not a prose stylist at all, just a very competent writer. (There's a difference.)

Explain. I think Vance's prose style blows Wright out of the water and he averages better than Wolfe.

The vidya was cool when I was 13 years old.

>What were your favorite books last year?
Best of 2017
1. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
2. Ubik
3. The Time Wanderers. Beetle in the Anthill. Doomed City.
3.5 Foundation series
4. Terra Ignota series
5. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
6. The Martian Chronicles
Others that were great: Slaughterhouse V, A Man in a High Castle, Martian Time-slip (well basically all of PKD's stuff is great), Hard to be a God, Lord of Light, Cat's Cradle to name a few
Best of 2016
Nightfall, Roadside Picnic, Solaris, Traitor Baru Comorant, Tigana, Coldfire Trilogy, Hyperion Cantos, Blindopraxia

Books that were somewhat overrated: The Lathe of Heaven, The Master and the Margarita, Kafka on the Shore
Best debut book this year: An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors -- too bad the author went full actual retard at the end.

Most memorable quote of the year award: "Memento, Domine Gomnium famulorum tuorum," the abbot whispered in response, adding: "And may he finally win the Poet's eyeball at mumbly-peg.

I think I got it. It seems like a book that's mostly about the cyclical nature of storytelling and myth. I'm not sure about everything - like I got that there are cloning technologies somewhere in the commonwealth and some degree of time travel, but I'm not sure which Sev, the child, or Thecla (or Jonas, or Vodalus, or He Who Laughs...) owes their origins to. But I feel like I got it in the sense that I can get a Lynch film without knowing exactly what the dirty man behind the diner is. It felt pretty complete, which is why I'm hesitant to bother with a sequel.

Urth of the New Sun was written specifically to demystify certain aspects of BotNS, of which the time travel is probably the major one. Like I said, it's the weakest entry in the Solar Cycle. If you are pretty satisfied with BotNS, I'd actually recommend you skip it and work your way through Long Sun/Short Sun. I'd warn you that they're quite different tonally from New Sun though, with Long Sun being markedly inferior to BotNS in general but required reading for Short Sun.

They're not made-up. He literally never made up any word. Someone checked. The words he used are rooted in real languages and are in general supposed to be evocative rather than literal. It really doesn't matter if you don't fully understand them, anyways. It contributes to the dreamlike feel of the whole thing.

>consider what happens when you don't share the religious views of someone like Wright
Not very much.

Tolkien and Miller of course. Lewis too, if you don't consider protestantism a severe mental retardation.

I'm surprised you put Martian Chronicles below I Have No Mouth.

If you want some recs: Permutation City. Tonally it's nothing like Dick, but it uses a certain SF concept to bait you into accepting the premises of a strange and rather disturbing philosophical argument that you shouldn't spoil by looking up.

For Terra Ignota: The Golden Age and The Quantum Thief. I think the former is better but either will probably give you something similar to Palmer at a higher tech level.

I'm a pretty slow reader so I never really intended to read Short/Long Sun, at least not right away. Maybe later when I've read BotNS a few times. Might read Urth soon though - depends on whether I can find anything else to catch my interest. I started maybe five books this year and only finished BotNS and Lord of Light. (Though I did listen to the audiobooks of the first couple ASOIAF novels since I was driving a lot.) So much other shit is trash and just makes me want to write something better, those were really the only ones I tried that made me fell like I was encountering something new and made me want to read.

I suspect few actually take the next step along the cycle of Briah, and BotNS is a perfectly complete story in itself so you're really not missing anything. That being said, take your time. I didn't pick up Long Sun for well over a year after finishing BotNS. The other Solar Cycle books are certainly not trash so if you're looking for something reliably good you might want to consider it.

>he used a word that was used once in some latin document by some nameless monk 500 years ago so its totally real
Yeah suck my dick

The Short Sun is arguably better than the New Sun, but the problem is having to read the Long Sun, which is not even in his top 10 works.

I know a bit of latin from mass and having taken it in high school for 2 years, it's always on point in how evocative the choices are. Being a philistine is no excuse.

"alzabo" was the only word that set off my bullshit detector. Maybe "cacogen" as well but its etymology is immediately obvious. Most of the names of animals are scientific names of extinct species, and this was explicitly stated in one of the appendices. The rest are archaic but as someone amateurishly familiar with pre-modern military history they were almost always easily recognizable.

Also as pointed out Wolfe's word choices are not only not made up but display significant erudition in their precision of meaning. Git gud.

>council of evil Spanish moon Nazis deciding what stupid direction they each want to bend mankind in
>boring
That scene was top /sffg/ kino.

why is sanderson a hack?
cause instead of making nice words like wheel of time(ta'varen etc) he just makes inserthereform
hes a fag

Because he's CWC in reverse drag,

I think that's probably got something to do with the fact that the existence of the alzabo as a real thing in that world is questionable at best, based on my reading of BotNS (only BotNS, to be fair.) It's something that Sev conveniently uses to explain all the things that make him the weird amalgamation he becomes - including him coming into parentage of the boy who may or may not have been him. That might also have been a result of the cloning stuff that gets hinted at, but Sev does not seem like he wants to divulge any information about that, for some reason.

>implying Stormlight would have been better if Sanderson had called Warform Samma N'Sei

worrying absence of apostrophe abuse in the stormlight series

Hey guys can you recommend me some books with the following

>a party of different characters going on a journey D&D style. An adventure though many different settings and scenarios.
>any romance present in the book isnt degenerate/no lefty SJW bullshit forced in
>larger wars playing out as the story unfolds
>powerful gods/entities influencing the Human world
>religious themes, preferably pagan mythologies instead of generic Christian stuff

pic related, something that would evoke a similar feeling.

Is the anti hero or villain protagonist being overdone lately? I've been writing drafts here and there, but the whole grimdark fantasy genre is starting to feel worn out to me.

>grimdark
you can have an antihero in a non-grimdark setting, go back to the drawing board

What's some good sci-fi with simple prose? I've been listening to audiobooks of stuff like Star Wars novels when I go running because anything too complex makes me zone out.

Since we were talking about it, BotNS fits most of these points really well, though the "adventuring party" isn't a stable one throughout the series and the story definitely follows Sev.

Do you have anything that is mostly about adventuring parties with little degeneracy? I dont want to read BotNS just yet

>generic Christian stuff
i'm disappointed in you user

I'm not really the person to go to about a lack of degeneracy. It kinda sounds like you wouldn't mind a YA book so maybe try Drizzt or something? I haven't read them but it's the closest thing I can think of that I've heard about.

I have not read it myself and never intend to but it sounds like you should read Malazan.

Grimdark and edgy for the sake of it felt worn out the minute it was invented.

Anyone read Anathem, Red Sister, Red Rising, Too Like Lightning, or Three Body Problem? Can anyone tell me about these books if so

Too Like the Lightning and Three Body Problem are both great, I have not read any of the others.

black company?

Complementary thread
>

>War of the Worlds, page one
>The planet Mars, I scarcely need to remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles...
I feel like Wells had a somewhat exaggerated opinion on the average readers knowledge in astronomy related facts.

Anathem bored me an hour into reading it and I put it down. Later I read the first two thirds of Seveneves and by the time I put it down I was glad I had not bothered with more of Anathem.

Most books of the time had shit like that inserted. It was both a stylistic choice and condescension meant to spur you into learning shit.

That's the pre-Google humanity for you. Believe it or not, they actually remembered stuff like that.