/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy

>SFFG

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:
>greatsfandf.com/authors-full-list.php

Previous Threads:

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Other urls found in this thread:

b-ok.org/s/?q=Childhood's End
uncannymagazine.com/article/seasons-glass-iron/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

What's the consensus on this?

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No Audiobooks.

What are your favourite books, sffg?

Probably last thread before deadline, get hype.

Downloads: b-ok.org/s/?q=Childhood's End

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library at mount char

Is the Fifth Season actually good?

Some things about it sound really interesting but others sound like Hugo bait (not that I fully align with the Sad or Rabid Puppies), but have you read the Short story 2017 winner!

uncannymagazine.com/article/seasons-glass-iron/

Its awful.

Sanderfriend a best

"The glass throne cracks. There is a sound like hard rain, a roar of whispers as the glass hill shivers into sand. It swallows fur and shoes; it swallows Amira and Tabitha together; it settles into a dome–shaped dune with a final hiss.

Hands still clasped, Amira and Tabitha tumble out of it together, coughing, laughing, shaking sand from their hair and skin. They stand, and wait, and no golden apple appears to part their hands from each other.

“Where should we go?” whispers one to the other.

“Away,” she replies, and holding on to each other, they stumble into the spring, the wide world rising to meet them with the dawn."

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Mediocre, reads like a gay Sanderson.

webnovels are novels too

Xanxia pill collecting shit.

But with fun prose and and MC who isnt a soulless killing machine like in most chink power fiction.

The arm of the Sphinx audiobook is available from my usual supplier. Sequel to the wonderful Senlin Ascends. Nice. Looking forward to reading it.

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The Demon Princes

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11 fucking years

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it's not even in the top 100 fantasy books

>absolute masterpiece

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And 7 more years till trump is out of Office so he can continue writing his next book

I just finished The Demon Cycle and The Black Prism, what should I read next?

any non-bad epic fantasy recs? just finished the first powder mage book and it blew

What have you read in the past? The two I mentioned in the post above yours are good as well as anything by David Eddings or Brandon Sanderson.

im almost finished. its really fucking good.

Clarke is a kiddie diddler. Read Azimov if you want quality '40s and '50s scifi.

favorites are thomas covenant, earthsea, and the worm ouroboros

recently i've been reading first books in series to scope them out and haven't liked them much: stormlight, song of ice and fire, wheel of time dagger and coin, and now powder mage. maybe i just don't like modern fantasy, but they're not clicking. was thinking of doing memory, sorrow & thorn but it looks sort of generic

Stormlight is fantastic, but you have to suffer for the first half of the first book. RR Martin sucks, it's a book about a show. Wheel of time is tedious, I read the first few books, which were good but had to read unpleasant ones for closure. Don't know about powder mage, but I for the most part enjoyed everything else you posted, so I might check it out. Have you read the Belgariad and Mallorean? 10 books, a day a piece really, but a cute and fun story.

Time to get busy.

This is my first time posting on lit, but I've been scifi for many years. Arthur C. Clarke is pretty weak. Heinlein and Azimov win every time against him.

>reading asimov over clarke

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This, this is my favorite revenge story of all time. The concepts in it are vivid and fantastic, Jack Vance is a master of world building, and it just honestly has a great setup for each book where he takes down the Demon Prince using their unique weaknesses.

What is protocol after we've read it? I read it last week and can't remember any of my better discussion points. I'm gonna look up some trannys now.

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Blindsight, which I just finished re-reading for the nth time
Bloody good book. As much as Echopraxia has been knawing itself into my heart through it's vague ending, Blindsight is a lot more concise and arguably a much better reading experience.

>wow man these autistic vampires in space are soooo cool

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Yeah, I need to die and come back as less of a brainlet because some of those themes went way over my head. I'm not sure if it was so much my understanding of the subjects referenced or the subtleties getting buried in his writing style. I still have been turning them over in my head all this time.

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The Wizard Knight

Just finished reading KJ Parker's Shadow trilogy and Fencer Trilogy.

It was good and interesting to read, really liked the prose, and now I want to work on a farm.

Depressed after all the "bad ending" though. Recommend me something a little happier, fantasy w/ hero gets the girl in the end or something.

The stars my destination.
The moon is a harsh mistress.
Hyperion
a canticle for leibowitz
Come to mind.
Any other sci fi that deals with religion, instead of compleatly disregarding it ?

The Sparrow

>demon cycle
How did you manage to refrain from putting s bullet between your teeth?

Echopraxia

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Do i continue past fall of hyperion? People are saying that it's different but not horrible but i've read that it "answers all the questions" and I do believe that poetic nature of first two books does mask a lot of possible inconsistencies. So basically a)are remaining two books good enough on their own and b)won't they retrospectively ruin some of the more interesting parts of hyperions?

Blindsight

What do you guys think of the Themis Files series? I read Sleeping Giants recently on a whim and was drawn in by the concept despite some shallow characters.

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I usually try to come up with a couple of somewhat interesting questions and then we discuss the book and nominate new ones.

pros: It has based De Soya who is a fucking amazing character. Worldbuilding is also top notch, Mare Infinitus is one of the comfiest and most scenic places in scifi. The Archangel class ships are fucking awesome and high concept.
cons: De Soya is a fantastic character stuck in a shit fanfic tier plot who gets sidelined. The new original characters Raul and Aenea are shit tier and it's like Simmons is jacking off to the idea of his new OCs having a tour of the world, meeting his older characters and retrospectively shitting it up with cheesy all your powers combined trope and nothing is scary anymore. Plus two of his characters is out of character as a fuck which ruins the mood quite a bit. Aenea is the stock animu messiah loli type, the plot unfolds as expected.

Good compared to other books by other authors, but Simmons should be ashamed of how much retarded characterwank he shoved into those two atrocious characters. That hack Simmons turned the fucking Shrike into a taxi, jesus on a pogostick

----

I'm currently finishing up Emerald Eyes by Daniel Keys Moran. It's very enjoyable in a weirdly pseudo-pulpy way because there are a huge amount of scifantastical things that happen, even though the centre of the story is around telepaths, a staple of scifi (I'm looking at you, Gundam, Star Wars, Foundation, Hyperion ... and a fuggtonne of other stories). Lots of things happen. I think it could have used more description, like PKD's stuff the page count is ridiculously tiny.

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*are

I just finished first law triology. Is it as bad as I think it is?

you're the one who just finished it, negro

Anything. If you like trash like Brent weeks, literally anything will entertain you.

It has shallow characters, but its an easy read. I call it a toilet book cos you can easily get through it whilst taking a shit.

Most agree that it is, yes.

It's certainly a book which rewards re-reading.
I feel Watt's core strengths and weaknesses as an author overlap; he's a scientist. This gives him an expert mastery of visualising his future on an accute micro- to macro- scale in the context of engaging hard sci-fi, but equally retarding his ability to construct a narrative or cast to match his ideas.
By no means does Blindsight fall flat in these areas, but it's sad the novel's 10/10 substance are let down but7/10 style, though I would argue the lesser publisher involvement in Echopraxia is obvious by how that novel seems to be 12/10 for substance (in a bad way) and a mere 5/10 for style.

Irregardless, I would really like to take us all back a few months and shamelessly shill the fuck out of Blindsight. Any contempory scif-i fan, even if you don't enjoy the intricacies of harder sci-fi, should recognise this is required reading for the alien invasion genre. Even one small chapter of Blindsight has more riviting ideas packed into it than most novels manage in their entire length. A fucking tour de force indeed.

If you want a novel which manages to the reverse of Echopraxia, with a whopping 13/10 for style but mediocre 5/10 for substances, I suggest you read Too Like the Lightning, a novel so far but its own arse that it's actually incredibly enjoyable.

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Does anyone know where to find the latest Undying Mercenaries book, Dark World? Having a hard time finding it.

What didn't you like?
It's only good for some of the action and characterization.

Is Hyperion any good?

Entry level pleb here

better question, should I use the flowchart instead?

Vin Venture is not dead

Roothfuss is a really unlikable person and I hope people forget about this fag. His Goodreads account is beyond obnoxious.

Hyperion is great. Fall of Hyperion is pretty bad. Skip the later 2 volumes of the series.

Any examples of Rothfuss being unlikable? Love that sort of stuff

>Fall of Hyperion is pretty bad
Citation need, it's tonally different but wraps up the rather open ending of Hyperion well.

Read the The Wise Man's Fear

It's not that they're only tonally different. I couldn't care less about android fucking Keats. He's just a crappy device reeking of pretentiousness that allows Simmons to advance the plot and explore his boring universe.
There was more emotion in any narrative of the first book than in the entire shallow inner struggle of Sterne.

can sfgf explain this book to me?

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>wraps up the rather open ending of Hyperion well

That's the problem

Any fantasy set in a Greek or Persian like world?

It's on mobilism.

Philip K Dick didn't even like this book, neither Harlan Ellison. That's enough to put me off.

>android fucking Keats
Hmm that actually summarises my point rather well. Hyperion was a collection of varied short stories, each deeply personal to each character. Fall kind of substitutes that for one bland narrator, android fucking Keats, who tells a much more formulaic space opera story. I enjoyed both equally, but I can see why the shirt was jarring

I suppose if Fall of Hyperion was never written I could have walked away from Hyperion a little confused but satisfied, but I loved so many elements introduced in Fall that I can't help but love it. Ummon + the AIs, the war, all the shit at the end when all the planets get fucked

Ultimately I guess Hyperion alone would be a bit more Veeky Forums, but I enjoyed the cliche bombastics of Fall.

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Latro in the Mist.

Right, made a pretty crappy Dick chart.
If anyone's got suggestions go ahead, I've only included shit I've read so it's not that extensive but there you are.

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>Explicit obvious physical, mental, genetic, behavioral differences between races
>Still pushes the "wow don't be a bigot" marxist trash
>Bad guys are religious nazi's

Contemporary fantasy is fucking atrocious

Ubik is epic
More like ubik pls

Any fantasy set in a Greek or Persian like world not written by Gene Wolfe?

Palmer and Watts are both actually good modern scifi authors, tho.

Watts' concepts are fascinating, but his prose is smarmy and irritating on a certain level. It's like I can feel how he thinks he's so damn smart.

The Thief is greek-ish but probably not what you're looking for.

Lion of Macedon and The Misplaced Legion

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>absolute masterpiece
>can't even finish his debut book series after writing only 2 books
I actually enjoyed the first book a lot. If the second one had a problem it's that it didn't accomplish nearly as much as it could have. And then he just refuses to write anything else like he's in some kind of game of writer's chicken with GRRM.

It's a sad day when all of E William Brown's audiobooks sold more than Will Wight, and that is why will doesn't put out audiobooks anymore.

i am reading all of greg egan now, his first two books were interesting if you ignore his leaps of faith in world building and expanding his idea from science into fantasy.

Furies of Calderon

I've read Ubiq, VALIS, and DADoES, watched A Scanner Darkly. I'm actually reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch right now and have four other PKD books in my backlog for afterward. I am excited for my wild ride of my boy PKD and his psychedelic adventures.
This post doesn't answer your theoretical question but this is now my blog and you'll have to DEAL WITH IT mister!!!

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I'm reading through his short story collections right now, they're pretty good.

Just finished the first book.. I like it. I keep finding myself looking forward to the shenanigens of dogman, threetrees, black dow, and tul.

So who is best girl, Mimara or Serwa?

Can someone send me a link to the Veeky Forums Discord server?

Shit, didn’t mean to reply to

>harem story turns into cuckoldry and homosexuality

welp

I mean really what did you expect, willingly stepping on poop like that.

>want to buy the six Dune books in hardcover
so my best bet are the Ace hardcovers published in 2008-2009 but I can only find the first book online. The rest are available by chance off ebay or some used book seller, and I don't want to be stuck waiting for one missing book to be available. I don't want the Turtleback school binding set since it's tiny as fuck in comparison.

What gives? I'd have thought the more popular SF books would be easy to find in hardcover. Am I just meant to get a papercover nowadays and rebind it myself when the cover/spine eventually wears out?

>If the second one had a problem it's that it didn't accomplish nearly as much as it could have.
i will never not be disappointed after having to read through a snorefest of a fae orgy followed by a fucking training arc. I came into the series in love with the magic school/university shenanigans so I was really disappointed by the 2nd book.

Over halfway through Superluminary by John C. Wright and it's the most sciency sci-fi I've read so far. Really enjoying it though. Space Opera on a HUGE scale (instead of battleships in space you get battleplanets and battleSUNS). It also works as a fantasy since the protags use that super science to basically be Greek gods. The dialogue can feel a bit cheesy at times, but it fits within the context of the story.

>space opera
>sciency

okay.

>Space Opera on a HUGE scale (instead of battleships in space you get battleplanets and battleSUNS).

the Lensman series will blow your mind.

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>the Lensman series will blow your mind.
I have that on my list to read, but Superluminary has been described like Lensman on a bigger scale.

Yea cuz people are building giant ocean going cities for combat now huh? Oh irght there are fucking physical reasons about how well things scale

What are you sperging on about?

battleplanets ??? What happens when they fucking drop an anti-matter bomb right up your ass??

Read the book and find out, goober.

>The Excangeneis