/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Its a matter of convenience. I don't want to search though the catalog when I can just ctrl + f

Other than Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon, are there any sci-fi or fantasy stories set in Babylon or featuring it?

Good fantasy about palace intrigue?

I just finished Sins of Empire.

How does a person manage to make a total fucking mess of their own world so quickly? The first two Powder Mage books were fun, entertaining, almost perfectly paced, and I could feel the influences that guided him in making the world. Sins of Empire is an absolute fucking spastic mess.

Tell me more, I couldn't make it past the first edgy duelist man scene.

Great thred, OP

Cheers

>Kellhus
>Consult
>Achamian
>Nonmen
>god cultists

Choose a side.

The plot 'twists' are too frequent, too often, and offer little to no impact. It's nothing that someone who paid even the mildest attention to 'Autumn Republic' wouldn't guess from a mile away. It's like Brian got high as balls, watched a 'Powerstone' Marathon, and thought "My god, this is a great idea! I'll Make it so Gods come out of old rocks, like JoJo Act 2!"

The Michel character 'twist' is one of the most poorly delivered I've ever read. Despite the simplicity of Brian's writing (typically never above 10th grade level if we're going to be honest here) he manages to try and shove so much information onto the reader that it comes out as staccato-vomit. Furthermore, it's as if he's forgotten how individuals interact with each other on some fundamental levels. You will often find yourself wondering why characters aren't wiser than they were a decade prior, or why they aren't asking the sorts of questions or piecing things together in a manner they did during the original trilogy.

It was a very frustrating read. I was expecting a more nuanced, developed story presentation as all the vibes gave off a colonial spy thriller in the Powder Mage universe, and it fails spectacularly in that regard.

>7 Things To Do Before You Die in Talgarth is listed as due in 2016 on the authors website!
When the fuck are these books coming out IT HAS ALMOST BEEN A FUCKING DECADE

>Make it so Gods come out of old rocks, like JoJo Act 2!
That's actually awesome.

I can see the point about applying the Sanderson Formula though.

My biggest problem with it was not enough best girl desu

Shaeönanra did nothing wrong.

Magic systems and his books have endings.

Waiting for book releases is the worst.

>His books have endings
And how.

>Dat conclusion to Hero of Ages
Almost made his three books of cookie-cutter characters worth it.

Almost. Well of Ascension is unforgivable.

First for charts.

Yall really need to motivate me to update this chart. Read some great books since then.

Sanderson's popular with stormlight because he's the only well publicised current author of epic fantasy.

With his other stuff Mistborn was fairly clever (it does subversion of hero tropes way better than Abercrombie), Warbreaker is fun and he got exposure for finishing Wheel of Time.

And let's face it if you liked latter WoT you'll be happy with anything that's close to epic fantasy.

So even though Stormlight is slow as fuck, Rithmatist is awful and two of his other books (Legion and Reckoners) are flat out ripoffs of other works he's always gonna be popular

>bakkerfag can't find thread without the sffg in subject
>no bakkerfag last thread

Does this ever get good or do you need to dream of white knighting for your robot waifu to really appreciate it?

>Reckoners is a flat out ripoff of another work
Which book? It felt like I knew it while I was reading.

WHERE IS KARMA WHEN YOU NEED IT?
FUCK CHINAMAN

Not them but the powers randomly distributed from the sky is very Inhumans/Wild Cards

And I can't recall it right now but something else also does the sudden random powers leads to the powerless being subjagated

>robot waifu
Almost picked up, but I remembered that everything that guy writes is a downer except Ship Breaker.

It never gets much better. I can't remember much of it, but there were parts where I was just like "really nigga, holy shit"

I'd still rec skimming the rest, wherever you are in it; I enjoyed it well enough despite the glaring flaws. But if you really dislike just drop it

It felt very poverty touristy.

If you blink really fast while looking at this image you can see the individual frames clearly

Ka-Poel is as mysterious in book 4 as she is in book 1. I feel this is done intentionally to keep her as a generic plot device. The total lack of affection between Her and Taniel was disgustingly jarring and felt artificial, like they weren't real people. We're reminded multiple times about how mysterious and self-taught she is, but we're never reminded that she's a human being too.

It could have been awesome if the information had been delivered in any other way and if the characters involved didn't respond like the shit I would see on the WB saturday morning cartoons in the 90's.

How do you all feel about The Once and Future King? I looked on the wikipedia page and some of the changes seem really strange for such a widely acclaimed Arthurian story, like Lancelot being ugly, Merlin aging in reverse, etc
Might buy it, I liked the big tome of Le Morte D'Arthur I have

I really liked it. I loved it as a kid, even more as an adult, but other than it I am an Arthur pleb. White seems to be writing from somewhere really personal, and he gets the medieval mindset, the philosophical asides on what Arthur's trying to do are pretty good. His Lancelot is seriously one of my favorite characters in literature, a seriously flawed person who desperately wants to be good, and White doesn't do him the disservice of letting him just be himself.

The tone shifts from cartoonish to deadly serious all the time, and I can see how that could put someone off, that and the anachronisms, but I think White did a good job of compressing English history into one idealized timeframe. It is very much a fantasy even without the magic, which is used sparsely and mostly just to cause a tragedy.

I'm half way through the eye of the world, is the rest of the wheel of time worth reading?

Dûnyain dindu nuffin

Is Armor the GOAT military sci-fi novel?

That would be All You Need is Kill

I'm on book three and enjoying it so far.

I love Wheel of Time, but it's not a series I recommend to people lightly. It has a very nostalgic feel for me, reading it is like eating comfort food. All that aside, Eye of the World is not really representative of what the rest of the series is like. It's an odd almost one-off book that does a lot of legwork to introduce the main trio and some important concepts, as well as foreshadowing a shitload of stuff, but the actual plot is weirdly disconnected from anything that comes after it and "formula" it uses is pretty much never revisited.

Any good novels out there about a society after a solar flare hits Earth and essentially wipes out all electronics?

I just thought of the concept today and surely there must be something out there

I read Leigh Brackett's 1948 novella The Beast-Jewel Of Mars, in an exotic Martian setting of ancient cities, dead seas, crumbling wharves, bandit kingdoms and bare-breasted princesses.

The tough Earthman protag seeks the secret of 'Shanga,' a process by which men revert back to the primitive state, back to ape and lizard, a process his girlfriend had begun before disappearing.

Brackett is an entertainer and crowd pleaser who writes in a hard boiled style from the likes of Dash Hammett. An iron-willed hero, spear toting Martian heavies, femme fatales and fisticuffs. The reverting properties of the Beast-Jewel allows some primordial Lovecraft and Howard-like spectacles and barbaric/civilised dichotomy. This gets 4/5 dinos, those who liked Bradbury's Martian Chronicles should look up Brackett.

DELETE DÛNYAINS

But catfag user, did it have catgirls?

Speaking of which, did one of you fags ever make a xeno-love recommendation chart?

Still looking for this one book I read over a decade ago where the love interest is a basically a gas cloud.

Did Baen publish all their Heinlein juveniles in the larger format, or just a small number for libraries? My copy of Between Planets is huge.

with a standard trade paperback for scale

Hi T-Rex.

Awake in the Night Land please.

>the guys that only read sci-fi are e/lit/ist in disguise.

>every so often I get optimistic and explain the best method of learning to write to students. I don't believe any of them has ever tried it, but I will explain it to you now. After all, you may be the exception. When I read about this method, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who invented and discovered so much. Certainly I did not invent it. But I did it, and it worked. That is more than can be said for most creative writing classes. Find a very short story by a writer you admire. Read it over and over until you understand everything in it. Then read it over a lot more. Here's the key part. You MUST do this. Put it away where you cannot get at it. You will have to find a way to do it that works for you. Mail the story to a friend and ask him to keep it for you, or whatever. I left the story I had studied in my desk on Friday. Having no weekend access to the building in which I worked, I could not get to it until Monday morning. When you cannot see it again, write it yourself. You know who the characters are. You know what happens. You write it. Make it as good as you can. Compare your story to the original, when you have access to the original again. Is your version longer? Shorter? Why? Read both versions out loud. There will be places where you had trouble. Now you can see how the author handled those problems. If you want to learn to write fiction, and are among those rare people willing to work at it, you might want to use the little story you have just finished as one of your models. It's about the right length.
- Gene Wolfe in his Afterword to 'The Boy Who Hooked the Sun'

Well user? Are you one of those rare people willing to work at it?

I love Wolfe, but don't spam this in all the threads for no reason.

Late to the party but I love TOaFK so much I just have to comment.
I agree with everything
had to say about it and would add that even if it is not the truest to Arthurian legendry it is one of the most enjoyable, accessible, and well written additions to it. Not my favorite depiction of Merlin but the rest of the cast is top notch.
I keep a copy of it right next to my Le Morte D'Arthur. No reason not to have both.

>no reason
These threads are full of faggots who claim to be trying to write but never will. This is the only way anything will get done. And I'd prefer that Veeky Forums posters hate Wolfe rather than forget him.

I only read scifi. Got no problem with fantasy though. Some of my favs are clearly scifi-fantasy mixes like Hyperion. I hate this entire polarisation of the two biggest fiction genres.

>Merlin aging in reverse
Isn't that pretty standard though?

Is this like John Carter rebooted?

It was one of the sections in my chart. Not much to get excited over. If I find enough to read I might attempt a standalone.

forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1293&t=971379&hilit=Awake in the Night Land

Why is no one discussing The Chronicles Of Amber on this board?

Malazan book of the fallen

The Saxon Stories

Which one should I read?

Thank you, my obviously large-penised friend. Used to use that site years ago, but forgot all about it.

There are plenty of Zelazny fans here, but more so for Lord of Light. Still, it comes up on occasion.

Probably the one you want to read.

Am a grill.
Search strat w/ no private trackers (PTs)
Fiction
Mobilism → Libgen → Irchighway #ebooks → Undernet → TPB → VK

Nonfic
Libgen → TPB

Audiobooks
Audiobooksbay

w/ PTs
Myanonamouse → Bibliotik (hard to source invite) → Mobilism → Libgen → Irchighway #ebooks → Undernet → TPB → VK
(Also ripping w/ Overdrive and other libraries you have access to)

w/ a mobilism account PM'ing an uploader who has deadlinks will usually get you a PM within about 24 hours with a reupload.

Covers 99% of bases.

Discussed it once (an example of a book that goes from shit to fairly GOAT).

=============================

State of the Art by Banks. Other than 'Descendant' and to an extent 'A Gift from the Culture' it was largely forgettable. Sentient weapons/ships are an interesting concept but seems overly helpful for the setting and the prose is quite expansive but not particularly tightly written which is slightly unhelpful for the format.

=============================

Will probably start on Slaughterhouse Five by Vonneghut next. His Cat's Cradle was insidiously clever and an excellent recommendation by user.

This is your daily reminder that, despite how much you hate it, this man wrote a book better than anything you will ever create.

*Vonnegut

I make sandwiches every day. They're breddy gud.

Why is Cugel such an asshole. I feel bad for Twango desu

Anyone read Dukaj?

Really want to give Ice a try, but I have heard, it's a really hard read.

Science fiction.

Only a few works of science fiction qualify as "real" works of literature. That is to say, they can be held in a similar regard to greater pieces.

For example, Brave New World, 1984 and Slaughterhouse Five, all considered reputable works of fiction and yet also science fiction. (Arguably 1984 less so, but follow me on this). There's a lot of others, such as some works by Asimov, Dick and potentially Clarke.

However, these are all undeniably rather old. My question is what pieces of modern science fiction could be considered true literature? I'm not trying to get into and elitist argument about pretentiousness of art or anything, but asking what modern sci-fi is of such quality that it elevates itself from genre fiction to literature.

To define modern, let's say published after 2000. I'm also no expert on literature itself, so if anyone wants to argue that no modern books are true literature that go ahead.

So you want sci-fi not for manchildren? Try this

The City and the City, maybe? It has a lot of Kafka/PKD influence going on, and touches on divided societies etc. in a way that goes beyond the obvious mystery story. I also hear good things about The Vorrh.

>tfw i spent ten minutes working out the exact rate to blink at so it looks like a still
Why do you toy with my autism so, /sffg/?

I did not enjoy Brave New World at all but greatly enjoyed 1984, Asimov and Dick and Clarke's shorts but seemingly not his longs.

And I fucking hated Mieville and Wright.

I think that modern scifi is just not as good as the old stuff. I seem to enjoy older scifi much more than modern scifi and I seem to enjoy modern fantasy much more than the older fantasy.

Paradoxical.

Was talking about your Tolstoy

I am a kissless 27 year old virgin. Please make a man out of me.

Fuck off

There was a recent survey of about 200 students inside a lecture of our year level (average age approximately 22 or more) and 25% were virgins.

So virgins are the new in? How many of those 25% were male? Because I will bet you any females in that 25% are no longer virgins.

Yeah, Brackett is in that tradition of exotic Martians, she did stuff about Venus too. A writer with an interesting bibliography, of genre fiction and screenplays (John Wayne and an early draft of Empire Strikes Back)

Results were anonymised but the ratio of M:F is approximately 2:1.

As in M:F for the entire cohort of which 40% were represented for the survey not for that particularly result.

You would be surprised how many attractive females are virgins in college

I paradoxically hated 1984 but loved BNW. Apples and oranges.

I agree a lot of modern scifi isn't great, but I'll keep trying.

Thanks I'll check them out.

>reddit spacing

If you haven't already tried Hyperion/don't count that one as a classic it's fantastic.

Obviously this is hard because a lot of it will be subjective and we don't have a whole lot of iconic Sci-fi/literature landmarks to work from.

But as I mentioned last thread I truly feel that a good, successful sci-fi is more about people's and society's reaction to new technology than the technology itself.

"Real literature" is kind of the same. Regardless of the time or place a truly transcendent piece touches on themes and concepts which are universal to the human experience. Deep philosophical concepts are certainly one way to fill the criteria but there are other more personal and less complex universal experiences that can work just as well if handled properly. Coming of age stories, tragedies, search for meaning, love and loss, and many far more novel archetypes work just as well in and out of genre fiction. If it takes a tired cliche of a character or story arc and can give it some extra meaning in the exotic context of the work, even better.

Now what actually reaches these lofty aspirations is another matter.

Any novels about the main protag or deuteragonist getting more and more schizophrenic as the book goes on and eventually destroying the world or something else that causes drama?

Wheel of Time.

Two Philip K Dick novels fit exactly. Dr Bloodmoney and Martian Time Slip.

>making your posts legible is reddit

When you type out several long lines of text about book.
And either don't separate them or only use a single press of the enter key
They clump together and are way less readable, it's not a reddit thing it's the reality of posting on an imageboard