/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

Get Your Ass To Mars edition.

>What are your favorite books about the Red Planet?

FANTASY
Selected:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21329.jpg
General:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21328.jpg
Flowchart:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21327.jpg

SCIENCE FICTION
Selected:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21326.jpg
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21331.jpg
General:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21332.jpg
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21330.jpg

NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books:
>imgoat.com/uploads/6d767d2f8e/21333.jpg

SF&F author listing with ratings and summaries:
>greatsfandf.com/authors-full-list.php

Previous Threads:

Other urls found in this thread:

practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
greatsfandf.com/authors-full-list.php
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

first for webnovels are novels too

...

Best served cold got reprint in Russia. It has 7 illustrations. Fuck yeah.

Heroes will be next in february.

War of the Worlds. Get Mars on our arse.

The Old Man and the Martian Sea was alright. And I liked sideplot about the development of Mars in the Poseidons Children trilogy by the same author.

Martian Time-slip is pretty good.

Why didn't you read A Practical Guide to Evil yet?

practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/

The intro/synopsis is like a burning hot iron rod jabbing into my eyes screaming "THIS IS BAD STORY! DO NOT READ!"?

I can see that happening, cause overall the whole "meta awareness" schtick is played out as seven fucks, but in this case the author works well with it. Try like 5 chapters maybe you'll like it.

I got halfway into the prologue before I couldn't stand it anymore. I probably would have read it a few months ago, but I've recently developed a sense of taste after reading through an 1100 chapter xiaxia and realizing that I just spent a whole week reading a giant pile of shit for no reason. My ability to take the bad with the good seems to be gone. Honestly, I've got a mountain of way better things that I can't be bothered to read piled infront of me, no need to bother with anything even mildly distasteful.

What do you do when you realize you'd rather just stare at a wall for 6 hours than even think about reading another book?

>What do you do when you realize you'd rather just stare at a wall for 6 hours than even think about reading another book?

Watch shitty let's plays on Youtube.

>What are your favorite books about the Red Planet?
Red rising

I once read a communist novella called The Red Star that might be of interest to someone. Thoroughly enjoyed it. The communist stuff later on got boring and dragged for a while but the story is excellent, sort of like A Princess of Mars (although it predates it) set during pre-Soviet Russia instead of America.

>Giving a story an african setting based on african myth doesn't make it original, but it gives readers an experience they haven't seen before.
In theory, but what actually happens is there's the same tired fantasy story about an edgy hero who fights the Dark Lord but everyone has blaxploitation-tier names.

What is everyone's opinion on The Man Who Folded Himself?

I'm thinking about getting into it next..

I remember not finishing it in middle school because I found it too degenerate

give me something SHORT (150 pages or less)

your dick

haha

What a shitty book. Terrible dialog, uni-dimensional characters (except maybe the wolf-girl and her mother), bad plot. It's hard to find a single good thing about it.
The races are bland, there is no novelty to it, one is the stuck-up elves who are gods, but not-really, except one of their subspecies are yes-really because they are magicians! And not just magicians, they are literally gods that raise mountains and flood market-places while trying to build statues, but wait, they can't make food or... water? Uh-um makes sense. The others are mostly absent except for the humans, who are stone-age villagers that will fight their mighty overlord for their injustices. I wonder how that will turn out, some humans equipped with stone axes and leather armor, against the super sayajins ultra-fast elves and their superb metalsmithing. Also their all-powerful gods that can make mountais higher than anything else appear beneath their (and their enemies) feet. Boy, I sure love to read some stories about genocides, can't wait for the next book! But wait, the humans found some magic armor conveniently left by the dwarves, with magic runes that block magic!, just outside their village, man, this incompetent humans who can't metalwork while every other race could for millennia sure sound lucky, huh!
Oh, there's also the intra-village politics, fun as hell! I hate reading about reasonable people in positions of power, better they be some dumb stubborn paranoids who think everyone is aiming for their jobs instead, right? After all, who doesn't want the privilege of having to go on hunts against killer-bears, and facing their overlord elves when they come knocking, and knocking down, their gates, right?

do androids dream of electric sheep
don't remember the exact length may, be a little more than 150 pages but it was still a short book

Is all of modern fantasy shit? Why can't any author hurry the fuck up and get to the point instead of wasting time on 73910 characters?

Is it better than the movie? Cuz I hated that.

Kys you soulless piece of scum

Sounds to me like you are butthurt over elves.

Blade Runner is one of the all time master pieces of cinema while Androids is just a good sci fi novel
the book and the movie are pretty different though and disliking one does not necessarily mean you dislike the other though disliking either makes you a tasteless pleb

Fuck off Elrond you righteous asshole. Should've pushed Isildur in the fire when you had the chance.

Maybe you should just stop reading books with elves in them if you are going to keep getting this upset.

I would actually enjoy it more if it were about the elves having their genocide against the lowly human scum. After all, a single elf lives 3ky, there have been at least 3 elven generations (9ky), and the elves have fought wars in that period, that's almost 10ky of elven supremacy, and during all that time they knew of metallurgy. Meanwhile, humans can't do fucking copper! Who the fuck wrote this shit?? 10ky without being able to produce copper while there are metalwork industries in other parts of the world? And these guys want to fight? Just kill them all already, they've proven themselves inferior. But somehow that won't happen, and that gets me mad.

If you want a challenging story, don't write about america willing to use their atomic arsenal against tribesmen. That's boring.

I'm not even him, just LARPing as an antielf xenophobe. I think he hates the book for reasons other than elfdom tho.

They aren't technically elves. They are Fhrey, nimble tall blonde beings with leaf-shaped ears who are also very quick and can do magic if they shave their heads. Once you get that descriptions you have already downloaded the book and you don't know, maybe they won't be so bad, right?

Out of somewhat contemporary fantasy I've read lately I've liked the first book of Locke Lamora, the Farseer Trilogy and Jonathan Strange. I don't know about you but I don't believe all modern fantasy is shit.

>If something got banned they'd slap a big "NOT FOR SALE IN NEW YORK STATE" label on the next printing and sell another million copies.
Good times. When will this happen again?

Strange and Norrell is such an offbeat thing I completely blanked on it. Yes, it is very good but all the series shilled here sound absolutely awful and I have no energy to read a doorstopper only to come out disappointed. Tell me about Farseer and Lamora tho.

It happened when Al Gore's wife tried to fuck with The Dead Kennedys

I thought it was self-published. Are publishers really willing to touch that crap?

What can you tell me about Gene Wolfe? Should I read Botns or is it a meme? I started reading it, but it was so abstract I gave it a time and forgot to keep going, now I'd have to read it all over again. I don't want to bother reading another "we are all doomed, this is how we suffer" story, is it like that?

The book is about a man who claims to be somewhat obsessed with saving the world from the dying sun. He also says at the beginning that, by the end, he will be ruler. But aside from all that it is, less explicitly but moreso, a story about a man desperate for self-discovery. In that, he is successful. The next set of books in the series, Urth of the New Sun, is more about his quest to fix the whole sun problem. It is generally less recommended because it turns out that characters are usually more interesting than that sort of thing.

Isn't it weird that doing something like this is probably more socially acceptable than spending 6 hours reading a book?

reading? LMAO what are you a fag?

As someone who's read the first two books and hasn't touched the last two for six months, it's not for everyone. In my view, it's just boring. It's VERY GOOD at establishing a particular mood and atmosphere, that of dreams and confusion. If you want that dreamlike, intentionally confusing and nonsensical but somehow just close enough to understandable that it feels like it makes sense feeling, then it's perfect. If you're like me and don't really give a fuck about it, it's a mildly interesting setting written competently. But, a lot like a dream, you'll read it for hours, then find that you don't actually remember anything that happened, and even if you do none of it made sense or had any purpose.
Maybe it gets better if you read the whole thing, but even if it's some sort of amazing revelation at the end and you suddenly think its a masterpiece, you still spent hours and hours forcing yourself to read something you didn't like. Like imagine if eating a hundred pounds of steaming dogshit gave you superpowers. How many people would actually eat it?

Are there any reviewers in the fantasy genre worth trusting? Most of the ones I see are blindly positive about everything they read, even if it's got Sanderson-tier dialogue. I want a reviewer who cares more about plot and characters and prose than a "cool" "magic system" and "interesting" and "creative" "worldbuilding."

>Tell me about Farseer and Lamora tho
They're no masterpieces. For me their main virtues are being decently written, not to long and more contained, if you get my meaning. They're about the adventures of a couple of characters, not about the fate of the world.

Farseer kinda feels like what Kingkiller is trying to be. A coming of age story with an orphan, an array of good/bad mentors, training interlaced with adventures in the country and some hints at romance. However it's way shorter, not pretentious and does not try to be something it's not which makes it work for me.

Locke Lamora is a thieving adventure in a big city with some magic and mysteries. It's mainly known for extensive swearing, starts out horrible but is surprisingly exciting and likeable. From what I've heard the sequels are shit but that does not matter as the book work fine as a standalone.

> The Lies of Locke Lamora
> Baru Cormorant
> The Blade Itself
> The Darkness That Comes Before (do not read past that!)
> Narrenturm

Thanks for the rec, I'm up for some soviet fiction.

This is Gene turf, you take those faggotous beliefs and shove them up your urethra cocksuck.

the premise of blade runner that we'd be fine with slavery of biological beings nearly identical to us that match us in intelligence just because we created them is quite absurd to me.

Wolfe down my cock you fagger than fag motherfucker!

Since were all shitting on modern fantasy this might be a bad place to ask but since its less stuck up then outer lit what are good suggestions for a book club for scifi and fantasy. Each book should take a normal person only a month to read.

in the novel they are less human and more synthetic than in the movie though

WE

I was in exactly your position, actually. Book 3 starts off really, really slow. But after the first 5% or so of it (according to my Kindle,) once he stops talking about the fucking city itself, it very quickly becomes the most exciting and concrete book in the series so far. The action tapers off in Book 4, but it remains concrete. I'm not sure why the first two books are so vague in comparison, but I highly recommend going through with the rest of it. If the first two books were Mulholland Dr., the next two are the original run of Twin Peaks - and David Lynch really is the best comparison I can think of for BotNS.

What's a normal person? I'm serious, I have no idea how fast people read. For me a month is like one of those 27 book series, or those 11 million word webnovels. I can't think of an actual physical book that's ever taken me more than a day to read.

slow down or read shit worth thinking about
you cannot convince me you'd read something like Infinite Jest in a month and comprehend much of it

Why would I read Infinite Jest at all?

You might have a small penis

it's a good book
do you just stick to stuff you can absorb fully in skimming? i guess that kind of makes sense in this thread since a lot of sff is popcorn tier bullshit but don't you want to read to learn from the author sometimes?

Literally in the OP.
>greatsfandf.com/authors-full-list.php

Because I might read Infinite Jest? Or because I won't? Or just in general?

I don't skim, I just read in very long blocks. When I say a book a day, I mean the WHOLE DAY. When I read I start the moment I wake up and keep going until I finish, 16, 18, 24 hours at a time. If there are more books or it's longer I keep going. I've read for 48 hours straight, and I've read in 20 days for a week straight. I'm guessing most people don't sped NEARLY as much time a day, maybe an hour or two at most, but I just don't work lie that.

*20 hour days

i changed my mind you definitely have a small penis

Need good contemporary SF recs.

Rude tebehe lad.

What should i read next?
Distress
or
Schild's Ladder
or
Teranesia
or
Diaspora ?

>contemporary
y tho?

Just finished Replay by Ken Grimmwood
It enjoyed it a lot
Anything similar to it?

For most of history people have been fine with the enslavement of biological beings nearly or entirely identical to them, that match them in intelligence, and without even having created those beings.

cool
link?

Three Body Problem.

Why read contemporary tho?

wtf i want cyberpunk with niggers now

>The thing is, people who read genre fiction seem to not mind a lack of originality. In fact you could even say that lack of originality is what makes genre fiction what it is. After all, what is a genre if not a semi-formalized set of cliches? Don't people in this very thread complain bitterly if you deviate too heavily from established norms in their favorite genres? The fact is these unoriginal novels that come out year after year manage to sell many, many copies. How do you explain Brandon Sanderson's success? Sure his "magic systems" and "world building" is original on the surface (in that nobody ever thought of that exact configuration of descriptions before), but the underlying structure is the same old epic fantasy song and dance we've seen for the last 40 years and people lap it up.

>And if you think it's an age thing, that it's just the older readers set in their ways and the youth crave new things, then you've forgotten what it's like to be young. The youth don't have taste and don't know what they like. The first series a young person reads is indelibly imprinted onto their psyche as a favorite, no matter how shitty it is. There are people in this thread who feel nostalgia for Eragon simply because it was one of if not the first fantasy book they ever read. There's no other way to explain that except young people simply have no taste and will read anything you put in front of them.

what about pic related?

The Northern Caves was great. Anyone here read Floornight?

Because I've already read through most of the good 60s, 70s and 80s SF, and I want to catch up on the current trends and ideas of the SF world.

It's kind of the 19th/early 20th century version of YA but I liked John Carter, certainly better than the only other series about Mars that I've ever read

laughed

I was honestly intrigued but page one thoughtfully revealed a strong independent womyn so I instadropped

>10ky without being able to produce copper while there are metalwork industries in other parts of the world? And these guys want to fight?

The Aztecs would like a word

>multiple POVs
Enough of this meme.

I am Legend

160 pages and well worth a read

have you read all 11 books?

I read the synopsis and holy shit does it sound bad. It's like fucking Divergent levels of shitty YA-ness, not to mention the cripplingly blunt and obvious """social commentary""". HURR DURR THIS COLOUR OF PEOPLE ARE OPPRESSING THIS COLOUR OF PEOPLE.

Come on lad, get some better taste than that.

>Maybe it gets better if you read the whole thing

It's basically one book in four parts, so yeah some "random occurrences" in book one only become relevant in book four, some appear to serve no purpose other than revealing things about the world, setting tone, or foreshadowing. It's genre fiction for Veeky Forumserati, and requires a modicum of literary familiarity to appreciate fully. I am perhaps lucky both to have studied medieval literature at university and European history as a hobby, because there are a lot of things in it that I doubt anyone will really get without that background knowledge.

There was no part of it that I felt was a slog, I got impatient with the first framed narrative until I realized what was going on and by the time you get to the canterbury tales section of book 4 you should be used to it already. Book 1 is maybe the slowest-paced but only in the sense that he doesn't even leave the city but even that serves a narrative purpose and the prose itself is never a chore to work through.

Rightfully ded. But it's not the same in the slightest. They were completely isolated, unlike the book, where they knew these things existed and didn't try to figure out how.

This. I can tolerate about 5, if I have to stretch. The less the better, though.

No, I don't remember how many I read but the only one I felt warranted a reread was the first. Actually now that you mention it I bought a hardcover compilation after finishing however many paperbacks which I never got around to reading, I wonder if it was the whole series...

Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy is probably the gold standard.
Stephen Baxters Mars is all good, and the first proper sf novel I read.
but to tell you truth I still enjoy the Old Mars of C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett.

I need a new time travel book to read!
Help.

What does /lit think of this?

I can't be the only one reading this

I read it while eating mom's pancakes

Singularity's Ring by Melko

tldr please? Cover looks like normie popular book

Future Times Three (French: Le Voyageur imprudent)

Ballard is always a bit disturbing
I mostly liked The Drowned World tho
and Supercannes is on my to read list

Had a read about it online. Not sure about it desu. The premise seems interesting, but the premise of the premise seems cliche as fuck. A dystopian Britain where the state spies on you? Please, it's been done to death so much that we're doing it for real now.

I finished BotNS recently. Should I start Malzahan, or would I be disappointed?

Get into Sleator. Marco's Millions and Singularity are the best ones.

you're not going to like it

Overlords of War by Gerard Klein
What's with the French and time travel?