/sffg/ Science Fiction and Fantasy Genera

Why do "I surrender" fags think that everyone speaks their language?

its basically English-lite

I'm from Zürich, Switzerland, I'm not French.

>Your pic lacks Arthur C Clarke, pic related
Clarke is not a meme, my much older friend with a mortgage and 2.1 kids.
He is talked about, but not bakker or Sanderson levels.

Don't change the fact that you speak fluent "i surrender".

HON HON HON

>Don't change the fact that you speak fluent "i surrender".
Yes, because I'm educated in letters.

It's easy for me to pick up this kind of thing locally, so I try to branch out.

Along with Emphyrio , what are some other books featuring stultifying bureaucracy? Systems of government in place for so long that the organically arising and onerous restrictions are taken for granted, with noncompliance unthinkable. Another good example would be Asimov's Galactic Empire, particularly the bit regarding Standard Technology (came up in Prelude to Foundation?).

GRI meme is the goat and changed sffg forever

Can someone link me a good epub or mobi of The book of the new sun?

It should be on tpb

Clarke being good is a meme.

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.

>my country is so culturally fractured you can't travel across it without learning a new language
>this makes me superior

>tfw GRRM does go to middle-earth when he dies
>tfw he's drafted by the haradrim
>tfw they're everything he wrote about
>tfw he feels what he made his characters feel
>tfw getting dispatched by Faramir is a blessing

My frond

>If fantasy is ever studied seriously, it will be Gene Wolfe first, before Tolkein.
There are already university courses dedicated to studying Tolkien.

> tfw you read a sci-fi book and get all this amazing but ephemeral imagery in your head so you look up artists interpretations for an attempt at grounding and get one or two decent, but far less so than your imagination, pieces and pages upon pages of sterile CG imagery and amateur deviantart pencil drawings and the fucking hacks who pretend like the 3D fractal landscape scene they just found is a spacecraft loading bay or an asymmetriad instead of the totally senseless arrangement of blobs and edges that you see before you

solaris was a cool book though
How are the movie adaptations

Sanderson is the next Tolkien, at least mainstream wise.

As good as a writer as wolfe is, his sales and popularity isn't nowhere close as Sanderson.

In 2016 I'm seeing more and more people imitate Sanderson.. wolfe, not so much. The only thing stopping full Sandersonmania is his prudish ways.

In 30 years when Sanderson supposedly finishes his love child, he would have grown and developed as an author. I see he is slowly falling into the degeneracy meme as his books continue he is getting more and more daring.

I'm not sure if book 10 of stormlight will have Jaznah taking hot anal from kaladin or if wax's wife will ask him to plough her backdoor in mistborn, but I'm sure he will not continue this writing which is basically YA.

As his audience grows, his gri has to grow, from non-existent, to at least slightly moderate.

Sanderson may not be studied, but oh how he will be imitated.

Nah, GRRM is the closest thing to a "next Tolkien", normies don't know Sanderson/Rothfuss/Wolfe/anything without a movie or show adaptation

>What meme did sffg get you to believe?
That the first law trilogy is worth my time.

>What sffg memes should be added to pic related?
That Rothfuss copypasta.

>What sffg memes changed your life or your view of life?
The one that got me to read gene wolfe.

>Which genre has the habit of creating the most memes?
Urban Fantasy is a mean genre, if that's what you mean.

I took 2 of them in college over 4 years ago.

Is there an official GRI list?

so i'm 5 chapters into pandora's star and having a hard time continuing. does anything actually happen in this book?

Late but,

Okay user senpai! I'll be your friend. You seem cool and I didn't really mean what I said

I think I quoted the wrong posts, this was directed to chart/26 year old user.

S-so you won't be my friend?

I dont get it

>What meme did sffg get you to believe?
Rothfuss being shit and Sanderson being anime

>What sffg memes should be added to pic related?
Probably something about dinosaurs

>What sffg memes changed your life or your view of life?
None, I'm afraid, you guys aren't THAT influential ;--;

>Which genre has the habit of creating the most memes?
Books with self-insert protagonists

You're my friend too senpai.

What does "imitating Sanderson" mean exactly? Who is doing it?

Nah, I tried last year but couldn't be arsed.

That I know of? Powder mage author, and Anthony Ryan.
There are others but I don't read blatant fanfiction.

The magic system in the Lightbringer stories is pretty "Sandersonian".

I think Sanderson picked those up from his mentor Dave Wolverton, but he really fixated on them and made that popular.

This guy probably shits himself when we talk about Sanderson, and it's something that the poster has personally done.

Reading The Martian, good lord it's painful, I'm at page 100 and want to put it down. But I never try to drop books, I'll persevere. This book version of Mark Watney is waaaaaay more annoying than Matt Damon's.

If you don't like it, drop it.

I preferred the book because everyone was a little spergier than in the movie but there's no reason for you to waste your time if you don't like it.

Usually there's always redeeming parts of a book that make going through it all at least worth doing. If anything I've found it was Mindy Park's character that's keeping me going, she's more interesting than the actual Mars situation in where Mark shows a complete lack of introspectiveness to deepen the idea of what's happening to him.

Sanderson didn't create color-based magick and I highly doubt he made it popular seeing as Warbreaker is one of his lesser-known works.

It's not the color-based aspect you autist

/sffg/, I've been wracking my brain for months for a way to turn this setting in my head into a bunch of short fairytales.

The issue is that there are only six humanoid characters, and most of them are more walking plot-points than characters in their own right though maybe a fairy-tale from the perspective of the fortune-teller would be interesting. At most I can make maybe three stories from the lot of them

I can add two more human characters max due to what they're supposed to embody, maybe a third but that's really pushing it.

what do I do?

>What meme did sffg get you to believe?

That Bakker was readable.

Some of us warned you.

So after reading Gibson's Neuromancer years ago, I figure I'd give his second book a shot. Umm... It's pretty cliche, and even going back and re-reading bits of Neuromancer, it's a good book, but now with time and having read other cyberpunk, it's sort of 'been there done that'. Respect should be given I suppose since it was the first sort of it's time, but re-reading it and reading Count Zero seems like the cliches are just slapping you around... I'll stick with it, but Count Zero is not doing much for me...

>GRI
Rape is at least mentioned in several of his works.
Also I thought for certain breeze was going to be gay, but nope, I guess not.

Most of the elements should be familiar. Count Zero seems to be a recycling of components of cyberpunk that Gibson couldn't fit into Neuromancer. The CPU of the plot is the recycling of art that prompts the disparate characters, to form a strange team, parallel to the assorted art boxes. In Neuromancer, two AIs merge to form a God, by Count Zero's time, it had splintered into several spooky gods across the matrix.

It's not as intense as Neuromancer, but the extended inversions and scenes, tied by a unifying narrative, help round out Gibson's vision more than a flurry of disjointed short stories would. It's somewhere in between the format of a novel and a short story collection.

Is the third book in the Sprawl series, Mona Lisa Overdrive, of the same ilk as Count Zero? I mean I don't want to bitch too much, it's entertaining, but just a bit disappointing considering all of the hype around Gibson...

Gibson is insanely overhyped and easily the worst of the big-name cyberpunk authors.

I should clarify that I like Count Zero. MLO is also cyberpunk chop suey like CZ. I did not feel attached to most of Gibson's characters, but some like le action girl Molly. If you want to see how her story turned, read it. If not, skip it.

Neuromancer covers a machine becoming God, and CZ is about a God that became gods. Without spoilers, MLO is in part about man using machine to simulate godhood.

One of the failing conventions of the cyberpunk genre is that it focuses too much on negative aspects of society, without attempting to offer contrapunctus. There's not enough joy, and when there is, it's frequently offset by something, like a snide observation about masturbation concerning cheerleaders.

Who is the best in your opinion?

And who are the other "big-name" cyberpunk authors?

So I can avoid them

Am I the only one who wants to see Ruby as Finn and Handy as TR-8R?

What is the best of the big-name cyberpunk authors? I've only ever read Gibson but I've definitely felt a "this is it?" with him. I love his world building but his storytelling is rushed and bland.

Please don't say Stephenson.

That's why Stephenson was able to break the genre in 1995 with Diamond Age.

I would say Stephenson, but he was mocking it from the beginning with Snow Crash. People call PKD cyberpunk but he really wasn't in the movement, he just predicted it. Sterling I guess, Islands in the Net was pretty good. Shirow if you want to go a little wild.

Although I view cyberpunk as an inherently flawed genre for the same reasons mentioned, especially this doom-and-gloom future of oppressive megacorps and ReaganThatcher fascism that was sillier in its day than any wagon train to the stars Golden Age rocketpunk future. The best "cyberpunk" is either making fun of it or mining it for nostalgia.

Maybe a true fan can answer you better.

Going to sound odd....but would you consider Huroki Muryikami as Cyberpunk? Or maybe alternative cyberpunk?

Murakami, you mean? Not really. He uses the trappings of the genre sometimes to tell his own stories, but he doesn't actually engage with the effects of technology on humanity like cyberpunk tries to.

Yaa I figured, the only book I read of his was 1Q84, and it had very very subtle ..futuristic tones in it. or atleast dystopian tones, wasn't sure what his other books were like.

You're gonna have to feed us more than that. Are there only six characters or are there more, but they aren't humanoids? What do you mean by fairy tales? Fantastical stories with a moral at the end? Myths explaining specific parts of the observed world? Why is there a limit on human characters? What do you mean by "embody?"

Do you have overarching goals for the kinds of stories you want to write? They don't have to be specific, but if what you want to write doesn't require many human characters you would be better off with less rather than more.

Got a sample story to share? If not that's cool, don't feel compelled to jot something down here and now. Maybe an outline of a story you might write could be helpful. Something to help guide our thoughts in the right direction so we can actually give helpful advice.

>you can't travel across it without learning a new language
>Implying this is a bad thing

The best cyberpunk is in anime, not literature.

>As good as a writer as wolfe is, his sales and popularity isn't nowhere close as Sanderson.

Wolfe has been doing this shit since the 80s, he nothing to prove to these new fucks

What are your favorite sci-fi and fantasy novels of the past 5 years?

The only modern sci-fi/fantasy book I've read it KJ Parker's The Hammer. It was pretty good. I tend not to read the modern stuff because from the little samples I've flicked through in the shops, they don't interest me.

I'm usually put off by series, it seems every modern SFF book is part of an epic series.

Pssstt

Look up Gerry Canavan at Marquette University if you want to see some syllabi for English Literature classes he has taught using science fiction and fantasy.

It's fairly legit and goes beyond the "undergrads can practice writing about anything, including the hunger games" shit you occasionally see offered.

Yeah I've read a lot of his stuff, that's why I said modern SFF.

I know exactly what you mean. They really toned down the obnoxious reddit-level humor in the screenplay, thank god.

Sadly, I think that anime, film, and video games do probably have the best examples of cyberpunk (though film essentially invented the genre, so it's not a huge surprise that visual media does the genre best). I'm hard-pressed to think of any really good cyberpunk books, I'm afraid that Snowcrash comes closest despite being as much a parody of the genre as it is an example of it.

I have a unexplainable loathing for books that explain or point out their own puns in brackets.

Only if you mean Bubblegum Crisis

But Wolfe is a modern SF writer. He's just been a modern SF writer for a really long time.

I meant the modern SFF novels from the past 5 years, that the other poster I replied to was talking about. Unless Wolfe has released a recent book then hit me up f@m I'll read that shit pronto

He published a book last year, 'A Borrowed Man'

Your shitty meme is a dinosaur.

Dino user you're the best

Never change

41 fucking times in one book. This is driving me insane.

*tips knit cap*

>1,687 pages

The actual book is like 1250 pages, this shitty pdf is just what I use for reference.

I'd papercut the tip of my peepee before I'd read 1250 pages of Sanderson

[tugs braid]

At least he altered the verb tense and made it exclusive to one character and set of emotions.

It's almost as if Sanderson has asperger's and copied the technique but didn't understand what it was meant for

>It's almost as if Sanderson has asperger's
But that's why we love him. He has a half-pound of creativity and a metric ton of focus. He's probably one of the most hard-working authors in the genre, and he does take criticism. In ten years he'll be a monster, in twenty he will have left this plane of existence, returning only once a nanosecond later to drop off a shipping crate of finished manuscripts at his publisher.

Sanderson only has clout in fantasy circles, if anybody can lay claim to being Tolkien 2.0 it's GRRM. He's got the mainstream exposure and appeal to stick around in the public consciousness for a while yet. If he actually manages to finish ASoIaF (which I doubt he will) then he could cement his legacy for the next 100 years probably.

More likely he will die before book 7 is even near done.

>half-pound of creativity and a metric ton of focus
That sounds like a terrible combination. Especially when you consider that he doesn't have even an ounce of writing talent.

It's a great combination for making steady income and building a readership base. Just look at John Grisham. The guy has put out like a book a year since 1989 despite being both a lawyer and a politician.

He's the Rock Lee of fantasy authors.

A nurutu reference, how befitting Sanderson

Altered Carbon

I think that one's better than most in the genre, but falls far short of being really good. And the sequel is garbage.