/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

...

The Vandermeers, M. John Harrison, maybe Caitlin Kiernan. CM is the big one though.

...

...

Bitch it got delayed

Meh, I can appreciate his work for what it is and enjoy it. His writing certainly isn't perfect, but it certainly isn't bad. I think it's caught a lot of attention because he can tell a fun action/adventure kinda story, not because he's necessarily a good writer by any means.

Someone who works at overlook leak the ebook of The Great Ordeal already.

>shits on his fans
What do you mean? He seems like a nice enough guy, though he certainly sounds a bit pretentious most of the time.

Recommend me a comfy fantasy story. No cynicism allowed.

The Hobbit

>I think it's caught a lot of attention because he can tell a fun action/adventure kinda story, not because he's necessarily a good writer by any means.
It caught a lot of attention because it's a basic fantasy adventure wish-fulfillment thing that was able to disguise it's weird self-congratulatory tone as depth for the most part.
As an straight adventure type story it would suck major dick, but Rothfuss crams in just enough made up platitudes, and pretentious highfalutin jerking off of the protagonist to convince readers it has some sort of literary merit.

Are there any good books about mecha?

>going to college
>walking from bus stop to college
>shit's cold, autumn hasn't been this cold since at least 3 years ago
>suddenly see a ball of hair at about 2 feet from where i was going
>lean to see what it is
>"huh, looks like a baby mouse"
>touch it, it moves
>grab it as carefully as i can, cold doesn't let me have sensibility on my fingertips, so i don't know how hard am i grabbing it
>realize i don't know what to do with it, i can't really take it with me
>put it in the front lawn of the house i was in front of, i don't know what can it do there, but at least it won't die stomped
>hours later, realize that i could've put it in my pocket and carry it to somewhere in my college where it won't die out of cold, like it probably did
>mfw

Is there any sci-fi where the protag or a side character tries to do good, but doesn't fix shit?

Dracula.
It's super comfy

Egan, maybe? Permutation City and Quarantine felt trippy to me.

you're being a great ordeal

Post his goodreads bio. That's where the real comedy gold is

>The earth has believed her own myth. Time to open her up and take a look inside"

looking for
~shortish (< 500 pages) mindfucky sci-fi pls help

Ubik

>Ubik
Looks perfect user, have this sweet Shrike picture I found

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

One thing, as a waggler, that bothers me. Is the lack of disturbance towards the treaty of Versailles in novels. Seriously, it's like nobody considers it. Especially given how little of a choice the germanic people had in having their empire crushed and their unwillingness. It's disheartening fall-of-Constantinople horror shit. It was demeaning, dehumanizing, it fucked up our national identity and perhaps even the world forever. It broke Großgermania in microfractures. It was just, awful through and through.

But I don't like how it isn't explored, a demeaning and dehumanizing slitting of the throat of a century-old legacy is a concept I don't that's ever been handeled well or properly. Maybe it's me, it's a deep seated shame of not defeating the Entente, that men's desires for victory in the past, or just their mindless liberalism in the present, override our own rationality to see that the Allies winning WWI would've made the world a better place, making you feel like you don't see in them what they see in you.

I don't know what I'm saying. I just wish the 2nd reich wasn't constantly written as "Oh yeah WWI was a pretty morally grey conflict but democracy won and so the good guys did XD", and not facing the willy waggling disturbing bullshit dealt with is. Or how we're forced into believing that a world where democracy is so pervasive is more desirable than an alternate world where bloody dictators never rose to power and extinguished the fires of hundreds of millions of souls, and for some people, and for many people, these horrors will become a relic of the past. I just wish we won lads

>>/gsg/
>>/hwg/

>“Burial is barbaric,” Herbert muttered aloud. “Remnant of the primitive origins of our culture.”
>“Yes, sir,” his secretary agreed, at her typewriter.

Magnificent

i don't get it

>Society that has advanced past interring of the dead to more advanced, if efficient methods of corpse disposal
>typewriters are still a thing

Just your average retrofuturism going on. I like it.

thanks

I want to read some more Lovecraft, but I've read a lot of the more famous ones and they're all very much the same.

My favourite is the Dunwich Horror. I've read Call of Cthulhu, Colour Out of Space, Statement of Randolph Carter, Doom that Came to Sarnath, Cats of Ulthar, Nameless City. I think I also read Mountains of Madness and Shadow Over Innsmouth, though it was ages ago so I'd be happy to reread if there was a recommendation.

Can you recommend a good Lovecraft story that's not the same as every other story?

All of his stories are the same, sorry.

>Can you recommend a good Lovecraft story that's not the same as every other story?
Dream-Quest, Polaris, House in the Mist and The Tree? They're not really the same tho.

The Outsider.

>What's some good reality-bending or psychedelic SFF?
Try The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan.

Felix Gilman is another one worth reading.

The Last Unicorn
The Princess Bride

First Law trilogy

>autumn

Straya cunt

>sci-fi

Das Kapital

damn

I'll try some of these, thanks.

My bad

Are we ever going to fix the recommendation charts?

Just ignore them.

Like the Pregnant Housewife Tumblrina I can't do that, it triggers me.

Read Clark Ashton Smith.

Are there any SFF novels where the setting is culturally like modern earth, and technologically like modern earth or at least near future, but takes place on a wholly imagined world? The only example of something like this I can think of is Pokemon.

I'm only reading Lovecraft because I have a huge anthology of his works and I finished my book last night and I'm not getting my next book until tomorrow.

That said, money is also a factor. I hate reading off a screen so I actually have to buy the books.

I get you. All CAS's stuff is online on eldritchdark. I had to print it out before reading.

It doesn't help modern fantasy readers associate length with quality, I wouldn't be surprised if "The Name of the Wind" received literally zero proofing or editing, it certainly didn't receiving any copy-editing, they're entire pages of unnecessary text that are in a completely different style from the rest of the book.

It's 10c a page at Officeworks or 11c a page at uni (18c for doublesided though, so really 9c) so it's really just cheaper to buy the book.

You've listed all his best stuff in my opinion. Try Rats in the Walls though, a personal favourite.

I don't have proper internet, I can't do it atm

>A vidya based on science-fiction is more refreshing to fantasy genre than the genre's most popular contemporary authors

What went wrong lads

>reddit.com/r/fantasywriters/comments/3hmcdc/what_would_you_like_to_see_in_the_fantasy_genre/

>Something where I can't read the list of characters and divvy them into good guys and bad guys. Something where I don't fear the hero dying, but falling. Something where the villain might be convinced otherwise, instead of being killed. Something where "good" and "evil" are functions of time, knowledge and interest; where you aren't good because you're from this country, or of this blood, or in this company, or fate's own, but because you make good decisions. I'm not that interested in personified good vs. evil, or grimdark evil vs. bastard either.

>Progress isn't evil, nature isn't gentle and good, the golden age isn't in the past, the ancients weren't wiser or stronger than us, the prophecies are not true, there is no guiding hand and the wise old sage has unfortunate blind spots re foreigners; the Dark Lord is defensible, and the young courageous heir of the kingdom set on fighting the Black God is an immature racist martinet.

>Make something new the fantastical element --- say a medieval-ish world with gender equality, or gays, or transsexuals. Take the people that we can assume have always been there, and give them a part. And maybe wings and green skin too.

>Take the old assumptions of fantasy and shake them up. They come from medieval literature, written by religious men who liked songs dedicated to hereditary tyrants, where Good God's partisans were destined to perfectly prevail and the evil hordes and their families would all perish in a fire. Meanwhile, outside the palace there was an undescribed historical cesspit of oppression, disease and ignorance. Don't take the old aesthetics, the old ideals, but think things again; don't write "all orcs are evil brutes" without thinking what that sounds like in the real world, today --- you could say that of plenty of nations and continents decades ago, but now we know that's an awful lie, and easily a very unfortunate fantasy to explore. (Being a race fantasist isn't bad like being a "race realist" is, but if you're careless the distance gets short.)

>Write a medieval democracy, and don't have the monarchist slur that it can't work because commoners are subhuman morons.

>Write lady knights (social justice warriors?), and don't have the muttering of gender muscle averages to muddle your individuals.

>Write weird love, strange marriages, societies informed by today's dreams and wishes, instead of ancient fears. Write something which scares and distresses you.

Is this attitude what is killing fantasy?

Is this pregnancy anonette?

Apparently he actually wrote the entire trilogy years ago and all he's doing now is autismally rewriting over and over again. He's probably also lazy as hell.

Iron Dragon's Daughter, the dragons are basically mechs. Hell the horses are mechs too.

>Iron Dragon's Daughter

Trying to write a robot character.

Is using "we're so advanced we're trying to emulate humanity" a poor excuse for writing a robot like a human? (And therefore, make him a lot easier to write)

Would you believe a hyper-advanced machine intelligence merely wants to imitate its creators, to such a degree it will crack puns, laugh, and get "robot-drunk" off organic oils? Too much?

Psssttt

This is a troll chart. Like usual, newfriends, you can ignore it safely.

If the robots have something akin to feelings then I could understand them wanting to be like humans

I'm confused, all of that has been done a thousand times over and it fucking sucks, a better question would've been how to write a novel with theses concepts that doesn't suck.

Is the painted man an okay series, though? I've seen it sitting on the shelf of a store I know for a while and the premise sounds rapting enough.

>redshit
I wish mootwo would reinstate the auto ban when you post about redshit.

>This is a troll chart
fuck off retard

Most of the people who are into are that progressive shit only believe it because they have been told that it's morally right (right side of history etc). They are usually historically and philosophically illiterate, so they fail to explore the consequences of their "utopia" in any meaningful way, and so you end up with shitty message fiction.

Is there any place I can reliably find definitions for some of the words in The Book of the New Sun. I'm just over 150 pages into the Shadow of the Torturer and there are quite a few words I don't understand and can't find good definitions on with some preliminary searching.

That's because they're made up. Read the afterword, it doesn't spoil anything.

The series is The Demon Cycle and The Painted Man (original title is The Warded Man, no idea why it was changed) is the first of 4 books.

The Warded Man
The Desert Spear
The Daylight War
The Skull Throne

They aren't made up.
Lexicon Urthus covers a lot of the language I believe.

I know it's a series, I was just using the name of the first book for convenience's sake.

Nevertheless, is the series good?

Are they also literacy illiterate? I refuse to believe you can be a fantasy writer and not be well-read.

Not read it yet, it is on my to read list after I get through the ASoFaI books.

They are though, and he literally admits it in the afterword. He takes similar 'real' words and makes new ones that resemble those.

Which is different than making up words in what's meant by it.
He also doesn't even modify a lot of the words at all.

>meme
It's the dinosaur user, I'm not the dragon shill.

I'm enjoying it so far.
I thought it would be a goodie two shoes book, but it has cussing, people using drugs, threats of rape, innuendos of rape, women talking about their hemorrhoids acting up so they are afraid of getting buggered again, genital mutilation, losing your virginity, suicide. All the good stuff.

GRI APPROVED

Rothfuss has a goodreads. He's never read a classic in his life, and God it shows.

They are literally literarily illiterate. Probably haven't even read the Bible or Homer.

>but it has cussing, people using drugs, threats of rape, innuendos of rape, women talking about their hemorrhoids acting up so they are afraid of getting buggered again, genital mutilation, losing your virginity, suicide

Does it have any artistic merit outside of that or is it just another ASoIaF?

I had heard that most of the words were lifted from different languages, but nothing was completely made up. I don't really have the funds to spend on a dictionary to use whilst reading this book. Should I stop reading it and wait, or press on through and everything will be okay?

He doesn't read, I don't know wtf he is doing in the General in the first place.

I mean you can get everything from the context.

That's true. I feel I'm not getting the whole picture though.

Why does Rothfuss rate everything 1 or 5 stars?

That's not because of a couple of words.

It's meant to be illusive, but it comes together later on.

not him but,

>Does it have any artistic merit outside of that
Yes
>is it just another ASoIaF
No.
Not even close. It may be called "Iron dragons daughter" but it is not in any way standard fantasy or anything you would imagine under that name.

I don't remember. I only remember being amazed at the absolute lack of any classics.

It's there for a purpose, I'm just condensing.
About halfway through and enjoying it, would recommend.

I heard people say it goes to shit in the latter half / ending so wait on that rec.