/sffg/-Science Fiction and fantasy general

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>8065920
>Fantasy
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General: i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg/
Flowchart: i.imgur.com/uykqKJn.jpg/
>Sci-Fi
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General: i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/ / i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg/
Talk about whatever you want

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wired.com/2007/07/the-core-canon/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>Talk about whatever you want
Do you feel personally responsible for the furry fandom?

Wheel Of Time, yay or nay?

It's basically fine, but really long, generic, and got ended by Sanderson.

I generally agree with this.
a good read, maybe a tad generic if you've read lots of fantasy, and it gets somewhat bogged down near the midpoint, but otherwise well worth the time investment.

No, I had nothing to do with it.

Dinosaurs are awesome and so is old fantasy.

Deal with it, kids.

>day off tomorrow
>just got copy of Way of Kings
>going to spend all day reading it

I'm being a pleb and fucking NOBODY can stop me.

Is Malazan in any way comparable to The Second Apocalypse? Currently reading The White Luck Warrior, and I need a new series for when I'm finished. The Prince of Nothing trilogy are some of the best fantasy books I've ever read

I don't disagree - had no idea Canticle was that old, actually, it's aged really well - but I still want to make a better "the last 20 years" chart as an alternative to that one with all the Xs.

Stormlight archive is a lot better than Mistborn and a fun read

It was written before the second Vatican council so umm yeah

>moorcock
fag.

You're someone else, right? If so go ahead. The guy who made the initial chart has pretty pleb taste.

>Talk about whatever you want
Fifth Head of Cerberus is really good.
I also like A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Has anybody read St Leibowitz and the Wild Horsewoman? Does it live up to the first? Also, what do people think of Urth of the New Sun? I loved BotNS, but am hesitating over Urth for some reason.

Yeah, thinking of doing 8 fantasy recs, 8 SF, and a handful of horror and hard-to-categorize. Part of the problem was just too much stuff on there.

I'm in the middle of reading of Dangerous Visions with all the "New Wave" authors from the 60s/70s. Very good book overall, PKD has the best story so far.

Maybe an overall imaginative fiction chart, can also include surrealism, magic realism, other works that deal with something that can't happen in real-life but not really considered sci-fi/fantasy.

Looking forward to it. When are you making it?

Think it should still be thread related. What works did you think of? Something like John Crowleys Little, Big would fit I guess, but I don't know of much more like it. Magical realism could also include Murakami and Marquez but then we are drifting pretty heavily away from SFF.

Not even a little? It was spawned from places much like this. I just think that SFF has a lot to answer for.

Any high quality shit with transcendental themes?

I'd like deep lore, but more Dark Souls rather than OTT world building.

If it's influenced by the classics then even better.

>Magical realism could also include Murakami and Marquez but then we are drifting pretty heavily away from SFF.

Perhaps some entries from the "slipstream" subgenre (rather than "magic realism"). Here's the "Core Canon of Slipstream":

1. Collected Fictions (coll 1998), Jorge Luis Borges
2. Invisible Cities (1972, trans 1974), Italo Calvino
3. Little, Big (1981), John Crowley
4. Magic for Beginners (coll 2005), Kelly Link
5. Dhalgren (1974), Samuel R. Delany
6. Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Fiction (coll, 1995), Angela Carter
7. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, trans 1970), Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. The Ægypt Cycle (1987-2007), John Crowley
9. Feeling Very Strange (anth 2006), John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly (eds.)
10. The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (coll 2001)
11. Stranger Things Happen (coll 2001), Kelly Link
12. The Lottery and Other Stories (coll 1949), Shirley Jackson
13. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
14. Conjunctions 39 (anth 2002), Peter Straub (ed.)
15. The Metamorphosis (1915), Franz Kafka
16. The Trial (1925), Franz Kafka
17. Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf
18. The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
19. The complete works of Franz Kafka
20. V; (1963), Thomas Pynchon
21. Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter
22. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (anth 2007), Kelly Link and Gavin Grant (eds.)
23. The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories [UK title Busy About the Tree of Life] (coll 1988), Pamela Zoline
24. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988, trans 1989), Umberto Eco
25. Sarah Canary (1991), Karen Joy Fowler
26. City of Saints and Madmen (coll 2002), Jeff VanderMeer
27. Interfictions (anth 2007), Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds.)

wired.com/2007/07/the-core-canon/

Eh, I dunno. I really don't think we should have things like Pynchon, Eco or Kafka on SFF charts.

No one ever suggested we should.

I don't see why not honestly. The difference between Dick and Pynchon is minimal in many works.

Currently reading The Colour of magic, and I dont know if I missed something, but I dont get how the day/night cicle works, does the sun orbit around the rims of the disc or does it go all the way circling the turtle like it would do if the world where round?

besides that, I like the humor, the same way I appreciated the humor in the hitchkhiker series, I like it, but I never found anything that I considered laugh-out-loud funny, maybe im just dead inside.

just to clarify, I read some of the other books in the series, but out of order

The sun orbits the entire turtle-elephants-disc system (I'm not sure how the orbit differes over seasons though) but light travels much more slowly in the high magic field of cori celesti, so the light sticks around a bit longer than you'd expect.

I'm sure they have more detailed notes in one of the companions, or maybe one of the science books, but I've neglected those for some reason.

Pynchon almost had a story in Dangerous Visions.

I don't really like the term "slipstream", I think that imaginative fiction is a good umbrella term for any fiction that deals with something that can't happen in reality.

I still say we should just rename these threads Imaginative Fiction general.

People aren't really here for non-SFF 'Imaginative Fiction' though. Or at least that's only a very little percentage of what people here read.

What about The Master and Margerita?

i posted this in the old thread not realising it was going down with all hands...

This series is the one that kicked off my love of genre fiction when i was about 12-13

i re-read it recently and although i could see the ropeyness of some of the writing and storylines, i still loved the shit out of it. partially because of nostaligia and partially because yiddish knights, centaur injuns and weird universes created by half mad hippie arseholes and connected by a series of portals is a pretty kickass concept.

TV i loved as a kid looks ropey as shit now, but books i loved as a kid stand the test of time, more often than not. weird.

You can also consider Infinite Jest a sci-fi novel. A film that makes people addicting to watching it and nothing else until they die is definitely a sci-fi concept.

True, but it could prevent people from arguing that something isn't sci-fi/fantasy. Everyone would still mostly talk about Sci-Fi/Fantasy since their the most popular forms of Imaginative Fiction.

I think that there are at least a few anti-Dinosaur anons. Looks like there's a Dune guy too.

>croatian tales
Burek here, link or actual title please? Tesko je naci ista dobro osnovnjeno u nasu staru mitologiju.

While you're on Bulgakov, why not Heart of a Dog as well?

ALL
DONE

>perdido street station
dropped

Scifi part looks ok, though something went wrong with your Fantasy selection. Gaiman over Guy Gavriel Kay, really? And I feel like Perdido / Pratchett shouldn't be on there either. Dunno about the three of them, so no opinions on those.

Not too shabby. My personal suggestions:

- Consider swapping Egan's 'Teranesia' for Egan's 'Diaspora'
- Consider swapping Miéville's 'Perdido Street Station' for Miéville's 'Embassytown'
- Consider adding Vinge's 'A Deepness in the Sky'
- Consider adding Wilson's 'Spin'

Under fantasy, add Guy Gavriel Kay's "The Sarantine Mosaic" duology ("Sailing to Sarantium" (1998), "Lord of Emperors" (2000))

Nisi čitao priče iz davnine? Jer to je to. Nemoguće da nisi.

I'm guessing you read a lot more SF than you do fantasy huh.

Not really familiar with GGK actually, otherwise he probably would've taken one of the Pratchett/Gaiman slots.

>Consider swapping Egan's 'Teranesia' for Egan's 'Diaspora'
My thought with Teranesia was I'd already got JCW and Morgam in posthuman, so adding another one from Egan might be overkill (and I didn't want to have the same author twice).

>Consider swapping Miéville's 'Perdido Street Station' for Miéville's 'Embassytown'
Haven't actually read that one yet, is it that much better? In general I'd stand by PSS, it's not the most disciplined book but there's some brilliant ideas in.

Of course everything there's subjective, so feel free to substitute, rearrange and X out.

>John C. Fedora
>Chuck Tingle

Theodore go home.

The problem with PSS is that it does too much world building for its own good, so other parts suffer. But Embassytown is more scifi. I think Railsea would be better than both there

Mm, probably a bit, but more specifically RECENT fantasy was a bit of a blind spot.

Ah, nice. I'll get that in presently.

Yeah, I know, but JCW was actually good once upon a time, and writer name of Chuck has been trolling Voxman and his devilman agenda something fierce.

I'd like to see The Buried Giant by Ishiguro on this. It's a single stand alone book and "literary" fantasy which is scarce in recent times, probably over Pratchett or something.

Also I second the other guy with Railsea over Street Station. I really think one of the slots should be Prince of Nothing series too.

Diaspora ovdje ;( Samo imam "Mrav i Azdaha" i "Zlatokosa Djevojka (kratke price)". A te su za djece.

The Great Ordeal comes out on July 6

Get hyped

I Ivana Brlić Mažuranić je za djecu, ali je fantastična.

Late reply.

Urth of the New Sun is truly wonderful and complements BOTNS in a fantastic way. It makes a lot of stuff that is only vaguely alluded to in BOTNS explicit, but not in a crappy "last episode of LOST" way, it's more like you read it and maybe get a small tear in your eye, and then a few days later you'll still be thinking about what you read, and you'll realise something, and you'll be like "WOW".

Yes, it's good.

Kicking myself for forgetting Buried Giant, probably happened exactly because it's more "outer /lit" than the rest.

Railsea by popular demand, then - weirdly, I'm actually in the middle of it right now. Can't tell yet which I prefer, but it's definitely more fun than Perdido which felt a bit grimdark at times. Probably an early-career thing, from what I've heard King Rat takes itself a bit too seriously also.

Prince of Nothing has too much gay, rape, and incest for me, hence Malazan instead.

Kek. That man's twitter is gold.

Looks good now.

What's Mirror Kingdoms / City of Saints and Witches of Lyford like? I've never heard of them.

I have dropped into this thread to recommend my top 5 science fiction books, in no particular order:

1. Book of the Short Sun (all 3 books - On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl). By Gene Wolfe. Make sure you read this last. I stopped reading science fiction after this series because this is as good as it gets, everything afterward is a disappointment.

2. The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. There is something about this book, it is perfunctorily written and set in a not particularly interesting universe, but somehow, I keep coming back to it, and have re-read it dozens of times, it's just a cool, fascinating story.

3. Cities in Flight, James Blish.This is just pure fucking magic.

>book is called "Cities in Flight"
>it's about cities, in flight

4. Whipping Star. Frank Herbert. One of just a couple of novels set in the "Consentiency". It's just a perfect and tremendously intelligent novel with lots of aliens.

Mirror Kingdoms is a best-of for Peter S Beagle, the Last Unicorn guy - short stories and novellas, he's got a really solid prose game (occasionally dipping into poetry).

City of Saints and Madmen comes from the same Weird school as Mieville, but it's presented as a collection of letters and reports. Kind of like a Dracula-style epistolary novel, but broader scope.

Witches of Lychford was one of the only good things to come out of the Tor Novellas line - the others felt like short stories that'd been stretched out or novels that'd been boiled down, this one fits novella length just right. Cornell cracked the female protagonist problem too, by going with a middle-aged woman as the lead rather than your typical "badass chick".

>Cornell cracked the female protagonist problem too, by going with a middle-aged woman as the lead rather than your typical "badass chick".

So solving that problem is just being a writer worth a damn?

I'm getting into Lovecraft and I'm curious about something. I know that Cats of Uthar worship Bast. Does she have a Cthulhu-mythos name, is she just herself, or does is she a fake god in the canon?

What are some sci-fi novels that explore political and economic systems other than liberal-capitalism-but-in-the-future?

Thoughts on Mythago Wood (and Holdstock in general)?

It's fucking annoying.

Dune

Already read it senpai.

Iain M. Banks' Culture books are about a bunch of post-scarcity anarchists if that helps

Mistborn has more action going on, at least. SA is so slow, especially tWoK with its pacing issues.

Honestly, I'd say Mistborn Era 2 is better than Stormlight thus far.

Mistborn era 2 is pretty bad, full of feminist bullshit

...

what?

>full of feminist bullshit
>one character who continues to have nothing right go for her
Era 2 is great.

WTF

Durzo is ALIVE???

What the fuck do I think about this?
Do I like this?
Do I want to read the final book?

>The Wheel of Time contains barrels of conceptual Lego, swiped or stolen or recycled from every great story-cycle known to Western man: which, I believe, was the author’s intention. But it has precious little originality. When you take it apart to play with the pieces, you find that all the pieces are somebody else’s. From Dune, you have the secret magic sisterhood that controls the fates of families and nations, the Bene Gesserit (renamed Aes Sedai); and the shockingly male creature that sets the world on its ear by having access to the magic and ignoring the sisterhood, the Kwisatz Haderach (renamed Dragon Reborn); and the wild desert-dwelling people who have a hard-won lore of their own, with whom nobody can tangle and not regret it – the Fremen (renamed Aiel). From Tolkien – well, the very first page of Jordan’s interminable saga mentions ‘the Third Age’ and ‘the Mountains of Mist’, and if that isn’t straight-up theft with the serial numbers left in blatant sight, I don’t know what it is. Nobody writes Wheel of Time fan fiction – at least none worth speaking of – for The Wheel of Time is itself fan fiction, in which all the fandoms collide together.

Do publishers automatically throw cthulhu mythos stuff in the trash unless there's a big name or a twist attached

It ducks between the elephants' legs.

>non-imaginative fiction
>married bachelor
>square circle

This is delightful. Who wrote it?

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Paean to anarcho-syndicalism.

Adam Roberts' Salt. Pure anarchists vs democratic fascists.

John C. Wright's Golden Age. AI-guided libertarianism with captains of industry igniting Jupiter and building a particle accelerator around the Sun's equator.

John Barnes' Jak Jinnaka trilogy. Monarchy's back in the far future, with a state religion explicitly based around being a self-serving douchebag. Parody of Heinlein juveniles.

Hannu Rajeniemi's Quantum Thief trilogy. Grey goo gods vs the descendants of MMO guilds.

Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space. Instant nanotech democracy.

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Reputation-based economic system.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Galactic empire rebuilt around an encyclopedia foundation.

Orson Scott Card's Worthing Saga. Universal pacifism enforced by psychics.

Tom Simon over at bondwine.com. I found him through JCW's blog but he writes these awesome Tolkien essays, like one about how the Council of Elrond is a classic example of a bad meeting, or another about how medieval vaunts and honor currency are used in Lord of the Rings.

He also hates Wheel of Time and Thomas Covenant.

Publishers automatically throw fan fiction in the trash.

Just make it cthulhuesque.

>descendants of MMO guilds

>tfw you realize all the Amazon reviews are from the author's family and friends and you have no real gauge of quality

They hold LAN parties as an ancient ritual, downloading themselves into physical bodies and printing off cheap beer and Cheetos.
>weaponized memes
>combat autism

Does the author post here or something?

He's a Finn. He doesn't need to.

I think it's safe to say they don't

Ehh, it's better to be more influneced by Lovecraft then outright using his characters.

Tbh thats why I don't read newer fantasy/sci-fi unless it has mainstream attention.

Someone in the last thread was asking for sword and sorcery, and I thought of Alan Dean Foster's Carnivores of Light and Darkness trilogy. It's sort of S&S, sort of fairy-tale, static characters exploring strange new locations in self-contained adventures.

>Magic negro shepherd gets a dying request from a shipwrecked sailor
>Travels across the world with a vulgar swordsman and a talking panther
>Discover strange new danger
>Shepherd pulls something cool from his backpack and saves them
>Denies he is anything special magicwise
>Repeat

It was really chill, just some cool adventures strung together.

Many of those stories in those anthologies are really just Lovecraft influenced, not using his creations.

Black Wings I've read, the only good stories were by Laird Barron and Caitlin Kiernan.

Are there any sci fi books that have epic massive scopes like the Mass Effect video game series? Like the antagonists constantly destroy planets or entire fleets and the heroes barely pull a win out from their ass?

You need to read E. E. "Doc" Smith, young man. But to answer literally: yes, there are many.

Revelation Space is basically what Mass Effect took the idea from.

Hmm you took some of my recs and placed your own.

>not posting the smaller sized version

How would you have improved Red Rising or it's subsequent novels?

>The Way of Shadows

I remembered reading this years ago, is it really being recommended?

Yes, there seems to be a Brent Weeks meme going around (much like stomach flu).

Your answers from last thread still apply. And yes you want to read the last book.