/sffg/- Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Random Oldfag Edition

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>Sci-Fi
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Any obscuremaybenotsogreat authors you'd like to share?

Other urls found in this thread:

goodreads.com/book/show/2480332.The_Gameplayers_of_Zan
tor.com/2009/05/08/alien-immersion-course-ma-fosters-the-gameplayers-of-zan/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

First for Emperor Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, known to the Fremen of Sietch Tabr as Usul.

>Write what you know, man. Don't write women at all. This is how we end up with Brent Weeks.

What do you mean by that, I thought he wrote pretty good women

Just finished pic related. I thought it had some superficial resemblance to Haldeman's Forever War. In this case, a crew of two encounters different versions of the universe after every interstellar transition. Also, sexual mores were brought up every time. Originally written as separate books, it doesn't have the same strength of narrative, but was enjoyable none the less.

>Any obscuremaybenotsogreat authors you'd like to share?

I think anyone who likes SFF should check out Michael Swanwick.

>The Iron Dragon's Daughter/The Dragons Of Babel

A refreshing, non-Tolkenian fantasy setting. More ideas and originality in these two books than in all of Sanderson's ouvre.

>Stations Of The Tide

A surreal SF tale. Heavily influenced by Wolfe's Third Head Of Cerberus.

>Bones Of The Earth

Like Jurassic Park/The Lost World except good.

>Dancing With Bears/Chasing The Phoenix

The adventures of a duo of conmen as they travel through a profoundly changed, post-machines uprising Earth. Pulpy, funny, recommended.

Fifth Head Of Cerberus*

Sorry, brain fart.

Having "read" Dune through an audiobook, i always thought it was Paul Moardib Atreides, and for some reason always found it funny. Also, i didn't thought it was as good as people said, so i'm debating wether or not i should continue with the rest, since the first one was the best, supposedly.

If you didn't like the first one don't bother reading on.

I, like half of the people on this board, am trying to get more into reading
I figured I'd start with something I love, Star Wars, so any recommendations on where to begin with the books?

Darth Plagueis

The Darth Bane (yeah, I know) novels are supposedly good.

anyone else here a fan of Delany's scifi work? specifically Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

I've been a scifi fan all my life but I read Stars... a few times within the past half a year or so and christ it changed my life. Definitely the best scifi text I feel like I've ever read, and a revolutionary use of scifi itself even if you don't buy into the revolutionary politics he puts it to work for

idk, I checked the Veeky Forums wiki and there was zero mention of it despite it being unlike anything I've ever read before, and really damn good at that.

but that might just be because I wrote so damn much about it this semester. But even his other scifi works don't even come close imo

I loved Dune Messiah even though, despite having read it three times really, I couldn't tell you anything about the plot except for what happens at the very end

I couldn't read Children of Dune for years because I expected I'd hate it, but it actually really surprised me. It might be my favorite despite Dune itself

all the other ones have such cool names I wish God Emperor didn't suck ass

>Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
This was a favorite read of mine back in my twenties. I used it as proof that SF wasn't a literary wasteland, that innovative stuff was being done in the field and there were voices that the most exacting style-snob couldn't scruple to include in hifalutin' conversations.

Boy, was I wrong.

It's turgid, it's obfuscatory, and it's mutton dressed up as lamb. "Cut through the galaxy's glitter; slice away all night. What thoughts did I dole out to that world (out of the six thousand, which, according to a rumor that had crept worlds and worlds away, corroborrated only by a certain certified psychotic, may have been) destroyed by the XIv?
Certainly I thought about it.
Yet after a week, after a handful of weeks, now at home, now away, somehow the rational part of my mind had accorded it much the weight one gives to the most insubstantial notion."

What the...? Six thousand worlds, or one, destroyed and the thought is insubstantial. I am reminded of the moment I stopped reading Susan Cheever's work, when she described a moment in a character's life as "soft as loss." Loss, soft? Funny, that isn't how I've experienced it. And this farrago, what is the insubstantial notion that the author gives to the possible destruction of a large number of planets? Too big to understand, too hard to grasp entirely, what? But insubstantial?

That's the beginning of chapter four. It's one example of a repeating problem that I see at fifty that I didn't at twenty-five: write lots of words, no one will notice that you're not saying much.

I haven't re-read Dhalgren, Delany's claim-to-fame book, and now I don't think I will. This re-read wasn't a success at all. It's a book I think is second rate, about ideas I think are unoriginal and pretty uninteresting. And that makes me sad.

This one is fairly decent. Starts on pre-spaceflight earth. Protagonist and other earthpeople abducted by lobstermen.
Lengthy imprisonment, epic escape. Returns with hostages, spacecraft, and potentially friendly alien contact.

Humans reverse engineer ship. Build improved copies of same. Form alliance with other alien race.

Discover the lobster's secret

one answer to the question he poses
'where do you stand to see a world destroyed' or whatever

I think that's a terrifying notion. Especially for an industrial diplomat who sees so many worlds just to leave them again? it seems like the discussion of Fugue just prior on Nepiy sets up Marq as a character who would feel just such a way

There's even a little girl secondary character for pedo-kun.
She's a lobster.

The Dark Lord Trilogy

I like(d) Delany but he truly descended into his obsessions. Through the valley of the nest of spiders or whatever his last was ... i tried. Gay sex wasnt the deal breaker, but sucking off dogs, eating snot, swallowing pee, pedophilia, every gay guy super well endowed but with a hunger for smegma .... genuinely vomit inducing. I don't know if I can re-read dhalgren or stars in my pockets anymore without having flashbacks of smelly snot eating and piss drinking

Just finished the first two books of the Stormlight Archive. It was pretty good but makes one wonder how he can possibly draw it out to 10 books with thousand pages each. I guess they'll fail at stopping the Desolation in the first 5 book story arc and stop it in the other?
also
Why the fuck did Shallan not remain in Dalinar's camp? Makes no logical sense from the character's standpoint. One of his biggest mistakes in book two
Sadeas was clearly not in Urithiru so what did Adolin kill?
and can't he let the characters he kills stay dead?

It's two different sagas akin to Mistborn. First 5 books is one, the next 5 are another.

>Any obscuremaybenotsogreat authors you'd like to share?
I've mentioned this once or twice, but no one ever says anything in response, so I'm gonna toss out Kieran Shea's Koko series (two books in right now, don't know if there's a third coming.) for some fun

Also, Brett Patton's Mecha Rogue is giant robot anime: the book if that's how you get your sick kicks. It's far from good and in fact, I think the series died after the second book due to poor sales, but there you go.

>Any obscuremaybenotsogreat authors you'd like to share?

'The Gameplayers of Zan' by M.A. Foster

goodreads.com/book/show/2480332.The_Gameplayers_of_Zan

The Gameplayers of Zan (1977) is one of those books where I find myself wondering however anyone could have started from a blank piece of paper and come up with the idea. It’s weird, and it’s alien, and it is a very odd book indeed.

The Ler are an artificially created race, made from human DNA but at the next stable point along the evolutionary chain. (Handwave, handwave.) They have five fingers and two thumbs on each hand, they have a very different reproductive cycle, and they have developed their own initially artificial but very distinct culture. At the time of the novel, 2550, there have been fourteen generations of Ler living on their reservation, reproducing in their own natural way, a hundred thousand of them surrounded by twenty billion humans. Human culture is itself very different from anything we might expect. This is one of the things that makes the book so odd. The Ler are not held up in contrast to humanity as we know it, these humans are harder to identify with than the Ler are, and the Ler are pretty strange. The effect of the book is like taking an immersion course in the alien.

The book plunges us into the Ler from the beginning. There are, oddly, footnotes. It’s like reading a translation. We’re given Ler words and concepts, translated once and then used untranslated. We begin with a Ler girl who knows something (we don’t know what, and it’s one of the central mysteries of the book) who is in a sensory deprivation environment and who chooses to “autoforget” to delete her memories, which Ler can. Then we jump to Fellirian and Morlenden of the Deren braid, the real protagonists, who are asked to search for the missing girl. The question of who she is and what she knew are the hook that lead us through Ler society and Ler interaction with the human world.

tor.com/2009/05/08/alien-immersion-course-ma-fosters-the-gameplayers-of-zan/

I do like footnotes

I did like it, it just didn't struck me as this masterpiece that everyone hyped it as.

Aight, maybe i should keep going.

what do you fags think of chia meiville?

May be a dumb question.

I'm pretty new to reading and enjoy fantasy, are there any books/series I should not read till I am better versed in the genre? Or does something like this matter at all?

Do post-apocalyptic books like Metro 2033 count as sci-fi?

meh

I like him.
Yes and no. There are three different reasons you might want to hold off on a specific work:
>1. If you don't read a lot in general, certain works may be denser and harder to follow, and that includes but isn't limited to fantasy books.
>2. Some works reference common fantasy conventions in order to subvert expectations, so waiting to read them until later may mean you enjoy them more.
>3. If you don't already know for sure that you like fantasy, reading something shitty or just more cryptic may put you off the genre. This doesn't seem likely to be an issue for you.

I might recommend holding off on Wolfe a bit, given that you're kind of new to reading. That's about it, though.

If you want something fun/easy to get into, I recommend the Amber series for fantasy, and the Stainless Steel Rat for sci-fi.

General rules for exploring SW legends novels

1. Aside from Shadows of the Empire, books that focus on movie characters are usually bad. This is ESPECIALLY true of the massive 20-30 book saga that focus on the space orc/zerg hybrids.

2. Short story anthologies are all pretty quality, authors were allowed to be a lot more experimental with them and you don't get as annoyed by the incredibly mediocre prose that characterizes SW novels if you take it in short bursts.

3. Evil characters are generally more interesting than good ones mostly because the books are forced to go a little deeper than the movies in explaining why bad guys are bad to get the reader to believe it. Novels focusing on evil characters, like the Bane trilogy and Plagueis novel are among the best that the universe has to offer.

4. Books set during the Prequel era, and books set during the post-ROTJ era are generally worse than books set before the prequels or during the OT.

First for bookchan

Thanks for the advice

Ignore him, he is the one complaining in the last 3 threads about Brent Weeks having a rape fetish, and there is too much rape in Brent Weeks books. I bet he is a feminist.

>I bet he is a feminist.

You say that like it's a bad thing

This looks interesting. Thanks.

>She took off her gown and spread her legs
>YOUR DUTY AWAITS MY LORD

Bravo, Weeks

There are lots of things going on at Roshar, and to tldr the post, there's a fifteen-year 'timeskip' between SA5 and SA6. The back half will also have main characters who are side characters now (Jasnah, Lift, the guy who thinks he is Talenel, etc.)

Legend of Korra season 3 end right in the fucking feels

Hmm I see. I'm most interested in the guy with tattoos all over his body, collecting information about the spren.

>I've been a scifi fan all my life but I read Stars... a few times within the past half a year or so and christ it changed my life.

>the wee little babby can't enjoy any books that aren't the Diarrhea Revelations
Point and laugh, everybody.

Why do you keep making charts without Wolfe? He's far more memey than Peake.

Maybe because he thinks Book of the New Sun is actually good?

All his "old charts" are missing wolfe.

Maybe because Wolfe isn't exactly a really old author, compared to many of the rest.

Fair enough user.

If this is true, then what's with this? And why do you freak the fuck out whenever anyone says they like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? I love the Lankhmar books, and I'm currently reading The Fifth Season, which came out nine months ago.

Oh no what, Kylar Stern died? WTF

Didn't someone plagiarize that map for some other fantasy series? I remember seeing some other maps with the same geography.

oh nvm resurrected again lmao
just like in lightbringer with kip

I want to write something that will become incredibly popular, stop it half-way, throw the dogs a few filler novellas every three years or so and live off the series for the rest of my diabetes shortened life

Any ideas as to how I can do this?

what?

gods resurrecting characters after they die

what does that have to do with the map?

i quoted the wrong post

.... did you by chance get an ARC of Blood Mirror?

What?

F I R S T
I
R
S
T

First is the worst, second is the best.

Did you get an ARC(advanced readers copy) of Blood Mirror(the next kip )

You're not the improved user, you're an impostor trying to shill up trolls

NDA.

What? Don't you get a copy with the requirement that you give a fair review?

Yeah, to the author.

You're thinking of a review copy, and ARC is about getting feedback from readers during the editing process.

Have you tried a pen and paper?

Why is the general dead? Is it finals or something?

Glad I finished school.

I'm a grad student. Finals here were three weeks ago.

appeal to the masses or be brilliant.
protip: appealing to the masses isn't as easy as you think it is.

Quarter schools have finals in a month

I have an exam in a few hours

Not only is Legend of Korra not a book, it's not even the best fantasy cartoon.

Shrek 2 is the funniest movie I have ever seen. Literally one of the funniest comedies of all time. It has incredible pacing and dialogue. The reference jokes are actually funny. The surreal world was so modern fantasy it actually worked. The bar of villains. The rocking score. And don't even get me started on the scene set to "I need a hero" being sung by the villain unironically and completely played straight. Shrek 2 has just overall one of the best concepts ever and is, in my book, the single greatest animated feature of our generation.

In the book of the new sun audiobooks, the guy pronounces "triskele" like "tricycle

There are two versions of BoTNS audiobooks, the tape recorder one, and the digital one.

The dated user probably scared away the elitist anons, since I noticed his post, the threads have been getting more shitty.

It's after midnight on a weeknight throughout part of the western hemisphere and the entire eastern one. Some people have jobs.

Shrek 2 is a pile of shit.

I too have a job.

Not an argument.

That's no excuse, you lazy sod. Pour another cup of coffee and keep posting. You can sleep when you're dead.

This was quite good, I kept thinking it felt like a 21st century version of 70s anthropological sf

>coffee
Enjoy hypertension you addict faggot.

Is this based on that video game?

No joke here guys, but what is it with people who speak only English not knowing how to pronounce normal sounding words and names for shit? Everybody I know who knows a different language is fine pronouncing everything except words with "th" in them.

I went through all of Legend of Korra except the final 5 episodes yesterday, so didn't read anything or found anything to talk about.

Yes, but the YA romance makes me feel less lonely.
And generally I didn't enjoy a series in a while like this.
Also I haven't seen Shrek in ages, but it is still a pretty dank meme.

>Keeping Malazan
>Crossing out Black company

You atleast could have tried

Stockholme syndrome.

Yeah this happened to me while reading wheel of time, I started with what the fuck is this shit and then after three thousand pages it was either start to like it or go insane so i started to like it.

Except Malazan is way better than WoT.

Wouldn't know, haven't read it. And after learning that it spawned from a D&D campaign I'm not really inclined to do so, much as I like D&D I like my fantasy to be atypical.

Plus they tell me it's edgy as fuck which is another no-no.

So it is like listening to Swans?

Yes, actually. Pic related.

Your pic related is unfunny shit

Speaking of, Cusicesh is above normal spren but below 'god'spren (like Nightwatcher and Stormfather.)

No? Why do you keep asking this after being told no once already? It's based off of a Julia set, user.

Finished Altered Carbon. Started Land Firt for Heroes. Here's my impression so far:

>meet a new character, let's have sex
>meet an old friend, let's have sex
>thanks for the briefing, have sex with my slave
>I need to speak with my god, better have sex
>our clan leader is bad because sex
>I should investigate that, let's pose as sex fiends
>ah, a demon, better have sex with it

I don't mind the occasional sex scene, but this is starting to read like a gay version of Twilight. Is there an actual story in here somewhere?

I've only read neurancer, but I see the pattern

You're speaking nonsense. If you mean Neuromancer, that was written by Gibson not Morgan.

Must have mixed up titles and authors then.

>Why do you keep asking this after being told no once already
I asked it once?
>It's based off of a Julia set, user
What does that have to do with plagiarism?

If both and the one you posted are legit, why do they have areas that are called different things? And what is up with this one?

What is everyone reading and what do you think of it?

I'm reading Book 3 of The Wheel Of Time

It's been good so far but I struggle to imagine how he can possibly stretch this story for another ELEVEN books. It's mind boggling.