/sffg/ - SciFi and Fantasy General

Who do you consider good action flicks in book form?

Shit like The Raid: Redemption or some of the better kung fu movies, but as fantasy?

I don't understand why it has all the meme books but Wolfe. Wolfe definitely needs to be on this.

Not that guy, but i'm not entirely sure you can translate the fight coreographies to book form without losing impact or something.

Maybe the creator actually likes Wolfe, or maybe hasn't read him. Either way, I don't think the person who made it was trolling.

Please no. The squashed covers hurt me so.

I don't think there is any good ones focused on it. Action is better in other media.

Isn't sword & sorcery stuff like Conan, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, etc., pretty action-oriented?

This the perfect bait chart
Much less than what you'd expect. Adventue and intrigue much more than strait out violence.

>Adventue and intrigue much more than strait out violence.
True, but the action is generally pretty exciting, too. It feels very cinematic.

It's good because it's impressionist, it doesn't go for exact descriptions and there is always something you invest in so that makes it come alive.

>start Shadow of the Torturer
>Severian mentions something about an amschaspand
>the fuck is that
>google
>nothing
>turns out is a way of saying Amesha Spenta, a holy immortal

I'm guessing i'll have to google like this a lot more times, right?

Just finished Swords and Deviltry.

;_; Poor Ivrian and Vlana.

Yes
I think the first volume is one of the best, 4th being the winner where they have to defeat a rat army

Just finished the caves of steel and I can't quite decide if Asimov's point was that the greater good outweighs individual good or the opposite.

On the one hand, the commissioner pretty much gets a slap on the wrist for murder. The spacers don't care since it brought earth closer to wanting to immigrate even though he has a wife and kids. The robots, despite being very close to sentient, are treated as slaves and this is in a positive ligh though the three laws never sat well with me anyway And the medievalists are portrayed as backwards thinking regressivists for wanting to put personal freedom over societal good. And then there's the whole borderline mind control thing that Lije doesn't seem to mind.

On the other hand, Lije is portrayed incredibly sympathetically even as he grand stands, takes huge risks, and bends the rules under the guise of justice, which is really just an excuse for rising in the ranks. At the end, he sees the robot as more of a friend than a machine. The only reason he has to bend the rules to bring the commissioner to justice is that he considers that the greater good still has limits, so the whole ending really made it seem like Asimov was saying that you have to fight for individuality even though the greater good or society at large minimizes you and what you do.

It seems like if it was supposed to be society>individual, the commissioner would have been given a job with the spacers or be forced to immigrate as 'punishment' instead of giving him an actual punishment.

Whomever recommended Retribution Falls, fuck you.

Whoever recommended this, fuck you. This book should come with a fedora accessory and a how-to guide on being a cuckold.

Really? I was thinking of reading that sometime

....couldn't you tell by the cover?

Do you like your culture? Do you think that your history isn't completely horrible? Do you not want to read 600 pages of an India analog country killing and ruling over Western Civilization? Do you not completely hate religion?

If the answer is no to any above, skip it. The book literally has a gay Indian guy saying that he's sucked a hundred pricks and wants to shit in the mouth of a god.

How many stairs did the story actually have? Relevant to the plot?

They mention the stairs the city has about three times in the entire book.

anything similar to bakker? i need some philosophy,rape and incest

Sounds hilarious. Thanks for the recommendation.

Read Camus with Game of Thrones on in the background.

>The book literally has a gay Indian guy saying that he's sucked a hundred pricks and wants to shit in the mouth of a god.

To be fair, he had run out of designated shitting streets.

How should I publish my sword and sorcery? The stories range from damn near flash fiction to novellas, and follow a group of friends as they travel the world, bump into each other, adventure together a while, split off, and so on. Basically it's a bunch of overlapping stories about individuals who can't or won't fit into regular medieval society stealing relics and killing wizards and shit.

I was thinking of publishing it online as pay what you want, with print-on-demand books that collect the stories, and maybe some kind of patreon or something.

Why not shit on the stairs?

Have you considered a collection of short stories and novellas?

I'd publish it on a web fiction website, If you build up enough popularity you can then switch to publishing it on your own self-hosted blog.

Don't judge a book by its cover, user.

well memed,but i care about sff books

Start off on a blog or find a website that accepts self-made literature. If you garner sufficient interest then you can start expanding into money.

>similarity between Arelon and an Elantrian, and a Knights Radiant and his/her spren
dat Selish Initiation

It's a method which can in 95% of cases tell you if it's complete garbage.

Go on then, what does a good book ""look like"" as opposed to a bad one?

Bad books usually have photographs of actual people on it.

There is no good book look, except if we include editions which published classics. Hence it's a detector of bad, not good books.
What do they look like? The urban fantasy guide basically.

Would you read a book about kindhearted, dumbass punks with superpowers trying to expand their territory against other superpower gangs?

Which is better, arbitrary powers or powers that come from some aspect of the person (ex. guy who really likes baseball gets baseball powers, guy who has control issues gets magic hands)?

>(ex. guy who really likes baseball gets baseball powers, guy who has control issues gets magic hands)?
Please don't write anything if this is the extent of your creativity.

>Would you read a book about kindhearted, dumbass punks with superpowers trying to expand their territory against other superpower gangs?
No. Other people might. It's not a promising premise, but hypocritically you could pull it out.
>Which is better, arbitrary powers or powers that come from some aspect of the person (ex. guy who really likes baseball gets baseball powers, guy who has control issues gets magic hands)?
JoJo

>that part of nearly every JoJo where the Stands begin having powers over concepts
Every time.

Why do you post pointless maps?

it was clearly a spur of the moment example

>clearly

Pointless to the current discussion? Sure. However, maps are fun.

What's fun about them exactly and if they are what's the point of posting them?

>in /sffg/
>doesn't like maps
Holy fuck dude, go to a DFW or philosophy thread

Superior city coming through.

Maps are always interesting.

But can it beat superior order and symmetry?

I was just posting Lankhmar because I fucking love Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

I don't actually know this setting.

That's fine. Maps are worthy to be saved despite familiarity with them.

I like the Lyonesse map

You mean me?

Post your last year captures guys.

...

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Wolfe, Dick and Clarke sure look lonely amongst all that genre trash shit.

>Sanderson
>Patterson
>Riordan
>Hearne
How old are you? You have to be 18 to post on this site.

Isn't that Bat Metal? Mermaider?

>mom do I fit in yet

That's not really a map though.

Anyone?

...

Well. I should start to assign dates to the books I've read.

I did that function and my account stated that I read two books in 2015.

Am I the only one that can't get into audiobooks at all? I just can't focus or keep track of what's happening

Anyone here read City of Stairs?

Just finished it, trying to think of a rating. Im sorta torn, the plot/story was actually pretty good or at least interesting but the heavy SJW influence on the writing made me roll my eyes and groan multiple times

That's because you're trying to multitask, try actually sitting down like you would a book and listen.

sjws ruin everything they touch.

It was pretty bad in stairs, but thankfully the sjw overtones are tuned down a lot in the next book.

Was it the beliefs themselves, or did the author come across as preaching about it? The former is just you not agreeing with the author; the latter is a flaw in the writing.

It's funny, a bunch of bearded men with access to an important resource with cities ending with 'stan' made me think of the Middle East. Didn't see it as a saw book at all. I thought India vs magic Muslims was a cool idea.

The new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is out: "Children of Earth and Sky"

The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new novel, Children of Earth and Sky, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands—where empires and faiths collide.

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world…

goodreads.com/book/show/25332566-children-of-earth-and-sky

Definitely preachy, or at least it felt that way to me. Everyone in a position of power was a female, the men are largely incompetent, lazy, weak-willed, etc. The only men with prominent roles throughout are a servant/bodyguard (who is allowed to be competent since it directly helps MC be brilliant and awesome), the gay best friend, and the villain who's a deluded religious fanatic nutjob. One of the scenes literally had the gay dude telling a god (who's supposed to be a extreme representation of the patriarchy or something, idk) how much he loves sucking dick and going on one of those moral monologues that every tumblr SJW seems to dream about. There's more but I guess it'd be quite spoilerish

Eh, I don't think I'll read any of the rest. I just can't really stand this sort of stuff at all. Probably makes me sound like one of those gamergate retards we had to see around here on Veeky Forums but I'm not, I just hate the hypocrisy of it all. They complain that the books are sexist so their fix is to...make the exact same shit, just the other way around?

There's a scene where a huge, muscled man strips naked and a female of power watches with delight saying how much she loves her job and making lewd comments about wanting to help rub him down. If it was a female character being ogled by men they'd scream about how it's sexist but because its the other way around it's okay? I dont get it

I was reading reviews of Swords and Deviltry since I just finished it. There are people claiming there were no sympathetic female characters and therefore Leiber is clearly sexist. First, how are Vlana and Ivrian not sympathetic? Maybe you're sexist because you don't feel for a character whose whole life has been surviving by the skin of her teeth, or another who was abused by her father.

And then someone else comes along and claims he was feeling charitable toward the author until the end, when Ivrian and Vlana are killed.

Okay, but Fafhrd literally murdered a ten year-old boy, and if you don't count the dead-before-the-story-started father figures of Fafhrd and the Mouser, basically literally every male character who isn't Fafhrd or the Gray Mouser is their enemy before it's over.

This isn't to say that there aren't some unfortunate implications to the whole "ice witch" thing at the beginning, but that's the culture Fafhrd is from, and I don't think it's meant to suggest anything about actual women in the real world.

Interesting fact: On goodreads, the first review you see on the page for Swords and Deviltry is a woman with nuanced thoughts about how Leiber writes women, and a few posts down you see men shitting on it for being sexist. I'm not saying it ISN'T sexist, at least to some degree, but I think it's clearly in "relic of its time" territory and not "sexist by its own time's standards" territory.

I mean, shit, Leiber handles women better than Bakker.

Can someone make the 'What books do you want made into animes' thread on /a/?

Do it yourself?

Sanderson's everything cosmere related

Not that user, but I'm bored in an airport, so I did it.

Start it with one of those alternative anime-style Japan covers

Too late.

The other user already did it.

Why did Severian disband the torturers guild?

?

Why did I read a book based on reddit cat memes? I was thinking about reading Dresden Files but now I know not to even bother.

>Author approved cosplay

I hate cats now. Seriously, fuck you to everyone who suggested this.

Which order is better though?

Publication.

The publishing order. The author did a shitty job on writing their origin story in the Crown Tower. I would not have continued reading the books if it was my first exposure to the series.

Swords and Deviltry is the first one, yes. It doesn't really skip around. It tells Fafhrd's backstory, then the Gray Mouser's backstory, then tells the story of their meeting.

It goes like this:

>Swords and Deviltry
>Swords Against Death
>Swords in the Mist
>Swords Against Wizardry
>The Swords of Lankhmar
>Swords and Ice Magic
>The Knight and Knave of Swords

>Death of Dulgath cover
Its better than the rest but it fucks up the theme. Why did it happen?