/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Yes with caveats. It's very interesting, but has a different writing style. The author is a professional historian who specializes in the Renaissance and the book seems to very heavily draw from thematic elements of the period. (and might account for the writing style, but I'm not personally familiar with how people wrote back then)

It also took me close to 2 months to get through the middle of the first book because a lot of it is setting up and introducing a bunch of rich assholes (including literal nobility), I'd read 10 pages and go "UGH THESE ARE RICH ASSHOLES I HATE THEM" and then not read the book for a while.

sweet, danke

Thought y'all would appreciate this one: whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/

Why would you think that?
>scalzi
>theory of racism
Not even going to open it.

>TRIGGERED

Well everybody knows that Scalzi's clumsy ripoff of Star Trek makes him the most celebrated sci-fi author since the death of Isaac Asimov.

...

Why does pollies always try to start shit?
Every. Single. Thread.
People ignore them and they try harder next time.
Why don't you fooks stay in ya echo chamber?

Rothfuss seems so crazy to me. I've never seen so many people universally praise such bad writing.

I mean, I've seen people praise bad writing, but people talk about Rothfuss like he's Tolkien come to walk amongst mortal men once more.

no problem, kumpel

>I've never seen so many people universally praise such bad writing.

Never met H.P. Lovecraft fans I take it?

>but lovecraft/rothypoo is so ~poetic~

I've read Lovecraft. I like some of the things in his works: the sense of dread, the unknowable, eldritch horrors, people going insane, and whatnot. But the man was not a good writer.

Surprised that there are people who praise his writing.

ive never seen a single person praise lovecraft's writing. people praise his worldbuilding and mythos most of all.

>Surprised that there are people who praise his writing.
There aren't.

The cool thing is that you can talk about outright socialist writers and they won't even notice since it's just liberals who they're obsessed with

Lovevraft's prose is superior to 90% of the contemporary authors talked about in this thread.

Outright socialists like John Barnes and China Mieville tend to be decent writers instead of permablocked attention whores.

Even with liberals, it's just the e-celebs, nobody comes in here trying to start things with Aliette de Bodard.

Lovecraft usually writes characters who are frantically recounting their horrifying experiences and his prose works with that. I admit I've not read a ton of classics beyond the basics but I think he gets across a tone of fear and panic in the narrators telling.

Kind of like how 1984 was so fucking boring

You know, this IS Veeky Forums. Why would anyone think users of this site would want to read rumblings of a notorious SJW on racism? Perhaps reddit would appreciate it.

>triggered baby demands safe space on Veeky Forums

What's some good fantasy set mostly in big cities/urban settings? And I don't mean urban fantasy.

What's some good high fantasy with a mundane setting and scope?

I think it's pretty good but it's a lot more like science fantasy than advertised.

Is The Forever War a good entry point for a newfag to reading Sci Fi? About two 3rds through, enjoying it so far

Most of the Discworld books set around Ankh Morpork if you haven't already read them. The Watch ones especially, though some of the later ones are stuff like "Vimes goes to Uberwald on a dipolomatic mission."

Garrett PI by Glen Cook is about a ex-marine private investigator in a fantasy city. Film noir in style.

Goblin Moon by Teresa Edgerton is sort of a novel set in a fantasy city during the fantasy world's version of the Regency period.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett. Very good story about a government investigator being sent to investigate stuff happening in a conquered city. Sequels are great too but less urban IIRC.

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.

Would also suggest the Thief video game series. For the most part the games take place in and around a large city known as, obviously, The City, and concern a thief getting involved in various things.

You could do worse. I'd suggest David Drake's Hammer's Slammers stuff, Drake was a military intelligence guy in Vietnam with a tank unit.

If you decide to read Honor Harrington I would suggest giving it the "Dune sequel" treatment, only read until you can't take it any more, because the writing quality goes down over time and Harrington becomes more and more of a mary sue.

goodreads.com/book/show/17332272-something-more-than-night

What does "too meme the lightmeme" mean?

Its not really "bizzaro"

>a homage is a ripoff

But "SJW" is how channers characterise anything that disagrees with their preconceived notions and positions of authority

>I want a fantasy set in an urban setting
>but I don't want urban fantasy
Um...
I understand if you don't want the lowbrow genre that's come to be called 'urban fantasy' but you need to be a bit more specific
Now with that out of the way try some very early examples of this sort of work: Fritz Leibers books Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness
Yes its good
And if you're 2/3 through and enjoying it then its a bit late to ask if its good

>You could do worse. I'd suggest David Drake's Hammer's Slammers stuff, Drake was a military intelligence guy in Vietnam with a tank unit.
>If you decide to read Honor Harrington I would suggest giving it the "Dune sequel" treatment, only read until you can't take it any more, because the writing quality goes down over time and Harrington becomes more and more of a mary sue.

He asked for entry point for a newfag
He did not ask for Baen-tier Military SF
You're already mostly done and you like it so its a moot point
But yes it's a good entry point
Something else to try would be Alfred Besters The Demolished Man

Exactly, why would we want to read that? Was that your point? Were you agreeing with me but mistakenly used the word "but"?

So, whats /sffg/ consensus on Stormlight Archives?

Are you honestly trying to argue that Scalzi isn't a SJW???

I enjoyed it a lot.

Good fantasy: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Comfy fantasy: pic related, seconding the Watch line and then Going Postal
youtube.com/watch?v=UKSfel7Bj_E

>cities are mundane
Calvino would like a word

>thief
Exactly the vibe I'm looking for, Ankh-morpork isn't too far off either

>missing the joke
user was asking for a city fantasy that wasn't urban fantasy. That's like asking for a high fantasy that isn't fancy.

gormenghast
book of the new sun. the first one at least.

Trash like all long fantasy series

It's the book "too like the meme" in ops pic.

the book cover for op's image is for a book called "too like the lightning". which is an absolute meme of a book title

>the man was not a good writer
he had his moments
his style worked for shorter stories
it sucked in longer stories but he had to write those for money and most pros only really want to write one way

>book of the new sun
i love the book more than the next guy but come on

it's a line from romeo and juliet, kiddo.

a city so big it's got it's own hallucinatory gardens

That's the memest Shakespeare play though.

Recommend some really bleak/terrifying sci-fi, preferably with a reasonable dose of violence.

>After his audience with Stalin, Wells said that he had “never met a man
more candid, fair and honest,” attributes accounting for “his remarkable
ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everybody
trusts him”
>In the course of an earlier (1920) visit, Wells came to the conclusion
that the Red Terror, although “fanatical,” was “honest” and “apart from
individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to an end”
>H.G. Wells, like Shaw, was attracted to both the Soviet Union and Fascist
Italy, although he had some reservations about the latter. He appreciated the
fascist preoccupation with “discipline and public service” and “a consider-
able boldness in handling education and private property for the public
benef i t. Fascism indeed was not an altogether bad thing … and Mussolini
left his mark on history.”

Any good fantasy with a plot like Twin Peaks? Like a detective focused on a mystery surrounding the actions of some Satan-like magician or entity/demon that nobody understands the nature of. I'm tired of, oh yeah, those are the Fantasyname demons, they've been around and we have stories about them, here's a textbook of all their types or abilities. I want the population of the story to be reasonably confused by some supernatural stuff. Prefer high fantasy (goblins and shit) to modern, but I'll take either.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

and its still a bad line

blindsight

Metro 2033 and its sequels.

Average writing, way to long for it to be good and the only reasons it get so much praise are muh anime, Sandersonfags and muh worldbuilding.

>not dropping metric shottons of turns on your enemies to discourage them and disable entire armies at once.

What's some good erotic fantasy with sex scenes?

Holy shit Arkady is a based motherfucker

BASED
A
S
E
D

this is simply a false projection

It's to bad those visits and statements came later than the story we're reading, otherwise it'd be interesting to see if there are any fascist/stalinist influence on the story.

>another mainstream author turns out to be a complete idiot
Geez what a surprise

people who say it's shit are fags

Go to bed, Sanderson. You're drunk.

No one who have read anything by Gabriel García Márquez can possibly have drawn the conclusion that he's sane. On the other hand, he's probably the biggest advocate for GRI (+ pedophilia, necrophilia and basically every other philia known to man) making him literally our guy.

Why the homophobia?

Shut up, faggot.

>the biggest advocate
Posted to fast, meant to specify that I meant in the mainstream canon.

Fags are gay.

t. literally gay

Kill yourself, FAGGOT.

>You’re Mendelssohn aping Mozart
David Mitchell should kill himself. Mendelssohn is ten times the musician that memezart will ever be.

I walked into a bookstore yesterday and felt overwhelmingly bored with all of their SF&F stock. I've just started working on a novel of my own, but the experience of going in and finding nothing that grabbed me and realizing my work would just get lost among them has really impacted me.

What can aspiring authors do to stand out from the crowd?

They can't, your entering the most oversaturated market ever to exist. Half the popular authors in these threads have secondary jobs, that's how bad it is.

Just be yourself, bro.

>Sanderson lovers make bad posts
News at 11 boys

I have a job, not trying to make my living off writing, just feel an urge to create something but I can't hold a tune and my drawings are shit.

...

>Good fantasy: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Just watch the series, the book was garbage.

>watch youtube.com/watch?v=SxtyM9mFMQQ
>"should I just, turn her up?"
>"no"
>instead send the whole beach out to tackle the ship
Impressive display on how to use CGI and a stupid script to totally butcher a scene desu

so the director thinks you solve a beached ship by just righting it up straight?
why did the sails just fall down

wtf

Still better than the fucking snorefest that is the book.

I can't stress enough what a waster of time and ink the book is. Volume I could just as well be three chapters, Volume II could also be cut down a fair bit. Volume III is where virtually everything interesting happens, and even then it's lengthy.

It also doesn't help that one of the main characters and the one you spend most of the book reading about is an unlikeable fucking moron. It should just be Jonathan Strange Does Wizard Shit, fuck Norrell.

>Clarke spent the next ten years working on the novel in her spare time
>Rather than writing the novel from beginning to end, she wrote in fragments and attempted to stitch them together.

Both of these facts are incredibly fucking evident. It's ironic that a lady who's an editor for a living writes one of the books that most badly needs editing I've ever read.

>Mieville: swooned over by Reddit, won multiple awards, constantly shilled by the press
>On social benefits, prostitutes himself to for-profit institutions, receives a salary from a destitute political party funded by a racist
>Publisher scared of ordering reprints because of the lack of sales
>Vox Day: hated by everybody on the internet
>After independently publishing several successful sellers he purchases a villa in the most expensive part of Italy
>On a whim he decides to start a comic book imprint simply to prove a point
>Jesus Fucking Christ he's already outselling John Byrne

I do agree that the book is to long and more of the content could and should have been cut or released as short stories. I also agree that Norrell is quite unlikable, my main complaint against the book is his lack of development.

However, I still really enjoyed the book. It's take on both magic and faeries is superiour to more or less all contemporary fantasy, the historical parts are great and so is the dialogue.

>Still better than the fucking snorefest that is the book
While I do not agree I understand why you dislike the book but I can't fathom what you see in the series.

I was just passing by, but stopped just to tell you to save your faggotry for the plebs.

I know a guy who knows Vox Day personally, and Vox apparently has a day job that makes quite a lot of money. He does his publishing house and such as a hobby.

>While I do not agree I understand why you dislike the book but I can't fathom what you see in the series.

It's the best stuff in the book without the rest of the time sink. It's only ok, but it's still a lot better than the source.

end the containment! free sffg!

Check here

is this a good read?

Holy fucking BASED.

Yeah it bangs. Make sure you read Fall of Hyperion too, but avoid the Endymion