/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

what is the general opinion of Brandon Sanderson here? I'm kinda getting back into fantasy and obviously his name is everywhere, all I know is that he seems to write a shit ton of books and supposedly his quality doesn't dip.

Sanderson writes western anime

The Magicians.

I've only read Mistborn, but I thought it was solid. I have a friend who loves Mistborn but thinks all his other stuff his crap, though.

Anything that has a sense of exploration or adventure? I want to write a fantasy about motherfuckers going on an expedition. But I feel as though I need to read more to get a better feel of fantasy. Comfy reads also helps

>"Well," Shallan said to the captain, blushing but still eager to speak, "I was just thinking this: You say that my beauty coaxed the winds to deliver us to Kharbranth with haste. But wouldn't that imply that on other trips, my lack of beauty was to blame for us arriving late?"
>"Well...er..."
>"So in reality," Shallan said, "you're telling me I'm beautiful precisely one-sixth of the time."
>"Nonsense! Young miss, you're like a morning sunrise, you are!"
>"Like a sunrise? By that you mean entirely too crimson"-she pulled at her long red hair-"and prone to making men grouchy when they see me?"
>He laughed, and several of the sailors nearby joined in. "All right then," Captain Tozbek said, "you're like a flower."
>She grimaced. "I'm allergic to flowers."
>He raised an eyebrow.
>"No, really," she admitted. "I think they're quite captivating. But if you were to give me a bouquet, you'd soon find me in a fit so energetic that it would have you searching the walls for stray freckles I might have blown free with the force of my sneezes."
>"Well, be that true, I still say you're as pretty as a flower."
>"If I am, then young men my age must be afflicted with the same allergy-for they keep their distance from me noticeably." She winced. "Now, see, I told you this wasn't polite. Young women should not act in such an irritable way."

>The man pulling the machine was short and dark-skinned, with a wide smile and full lips. He gestured for Shallan to sit, and she did so with the modest grace her nurses had drilled into her. The driver asked her a question in a clipped, terse-sounding language she didn't recognize.
>"What was that?" she asked Yalb.
>"He wants to know if you'd like to be pulled the long way or the short way." Yalb scratched his head.
>"I'm not right sure what the difference is."
>"I suspect one takes longer," Shallan said.
>"Oh, you are a clever one." Yalb said something to the porter in that same clipped language, and the man responded.
>"The long way gives a good view of the city," Yalb said. "The short way goes straight up to the Conclave. Not many good views, he says. I guess he noticed you were new to the city."
>"Do I stand out that much?" Shallan asked, flushing.
>"Eh, no, of course not, Brightness."
>"And by that you mean that I'm as obvious as a wart on a queen's nose."
>Yalb laughed.

can't believe i fell for the meme. two chapters of fighting with no characterization worth a damn, then this autist

fucking DROPPED with the force of a thousand suns

Not much wrong with his output. He writes anime slash not very deep entertainment. His books could use a stricter editor to trim some verbiage.

It doesn't hurt to read him if one likes fantasy. Randomly insightful information like theses from The Wealth of Nations shows up in his work. Again, for the general open minded reader, it shouldn't hurt to read a little.

Wud about space exploration

I wouldn't really mind that it falls under sci fi. I Just want to get a feel for how those kinds of stories go.

hmm what are other contemporary authors worth checking?

I ask because Sanderson seems to be dominating the landscape from 2010 or so onwards and I don't usually read much of the more modern works around.

First for sandersonfags

>He raised an eyebrow.

Wait does Latza still make videos? I thought /tv/ crushed his dreams?

The more that I think about it, the more I realize I haven't read much where the story is focused on exploring uncharted territory and finding new things; generally speaking, journeys tend to go through previously traveled lands, with the focus being on the endgame rather than the moment.

The first Southern Reach book is expedition-y, though the overall focus is moreso on character interactions, and while I enjoyed the second and third books, they kind of tossed all the mystery out the window and focused on big reveals and "whoa" moments.

Bakker
Erikson
JVJones
Cook

Stardust
The Farthest Shore
A Princess of Mars
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Hobbit
The Golden Compass
Sabriel
A Darker Shade of Magic
The Thousand Names
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Colour of Magic
The Magician King
Dark Lord of Derkholm/Tough Guide to Fantasyland

yeah, if it wasn't shit before, it's definitely shit at that point

le over-reactive cardboard character, endlessly fascinated and engaged

Anyone read anything set in a school/academy that they'd actually recommend? Can be sf or fantasy

It's a really interesting setup but in my experience it's almost always either aimed at younger readers or uses the training part of the book to just loredump.

Blood Song's the closest fit I can think of but mainly just because the series starts to go to shit after the training school section

To whoever the one guy who keeps recommending Red Rising is I read the series and it was pretty fun.

Although the author cannot handle the transition between books at all. He ends book 1 with something intriguing happening and then book 2 starts with a timeskip to the end of that period, with the protagonist being weak and dumb because the plot requires it.

Also the third book suffers because by like halfway through you know roughly how everything is going to end

I don't really like edgy stuff but IMO a story about a cunty gold rising to power would be more interesting use of the setting than the noble rebellion stuff that RR does

>le

>l'epic

Inda's your best bet for something actually good

Question.

I've been pretty selective in my fantasy novels since I read a few with decent character development/interaction.

Tried that Guardians of the Moon in the Malazan and it was absolute shit. None of the characters mattered and I didn't care if they lived or died in these DBZ-esque super power battles. I also made it to book 6 of the wheel of time but the women's chapters made me *tug my braid angrily* and I couldn't handle it anymore.

How do I ensure that the series is somewhat decent? Le reddit recommended Malazan/WoT so i've been avoiding them

I couldn't put these books down while I was reading them, but I got to the end and felt like the author hadn't done anything meaningful with his premise.

It doesn't examine the ethics or morality of genetic engineering as hyperbolized by the color system. It doesn't have anything interesting to say about human classes or castes as hyperbolized in the color system. Neither the MC nor Bean-knockoff-wolf-kid really even bridge the gap between the colors, they just become the better color as the result of massive surgeries. There wasn't even a sense of "genetically modified superhumans, cool!" because most of the relevant caste was superhuman, so any coolness of Bob throwing a 5x stronger punch was useless in the face of Joe being 5x more able to take a punch.

The color system stuff was a shiny distraction that never went anything meaningful, and if he wasn't going to express anything meaningful about the human condition through his color system premise, he should have just thrown out the color system and written Space Hunger Games. I don't even mean that dismissively, because I don't need deep social commentary from all my pulp fiction, and the Space Hunger Games stuff was decent completely independent of the color stuff.

Ask here desu or find some forums you trust

Reddit fantasy isn't bad but you have to use it as a tool for gathering up a list of potential titles to read rather than as a source of surefire recommendations.

Malazan's popular because people see it as this epic fantasy that they've been hankering for but it's so fucking clear that it was a boardgame campaign first*

And WoT is a popular recommendation because it's by far the most popular modern fantasy, it was the first one to really take off.

*slight disclaimer Feist's stuff was also based on a D&D campaign and a lot of that is pretty good. So it's more down to Malazan having a shitty writer than a shitty origin.

Yeah, the colors actually work against him because you can't really buy any rebellion working with something that entrenched.

And the main character doesn't prove eugenics wrong, he just proves that the wrong people used eugenics.

I wouldn't mind more hunger games ripoffs desu, the idea of violent competition is a good one even if it's often badly executed.

Space Romans is still a really neat setting though

Holy fucking shit KJ Parker absolutely cannot write the third book of a trilogy to save his life

Two different series and both of them utterly fuck the landing with books 3. The Engineer trilogy is especially bad, at the end the character has basically done all of his epic ruses for no real reason as everything could've been solved in a much easier way

Gentleman Bastards by Scott Lynch is fun. It's about a group of thieves in Not Renaissance Venice. The fourth book in the series is due out in a little less than a month, actually, so it's not a bad time to get into the series. If you like stylish heist films odds are good you'll like the GB books. If you're looking for something a little more aggressive, give Joe Abercrombie a try.

>reddit recommended Malazan/WoT

I haven't read either but I have a hard time believing anyone could put out a 10+ series without it slogging or getting down right bad for a couple of books. Also I don't know if any story really needs 10+ books to be told, at some point the author is probably just filling space.

I'm mainly a reader of short story collections or stand alone books so it might just be my bias showing and my relative inexperience with large series.

Discworld's 45 or so books and the bad ones are mainly from after Pratchett started to literally forget who he was

yeah but it's not like it's 40 books of the same continuous story and one absolute ending, it's more like 40 stories that sometimes happen to share characters.

Yeah, best longish series I can think of is black company but even there the nine books are divided into three separate story arcs

I couldn't stand Wheel of Time because from what I read it was one fairly simple plot being stretched over a whole series

It sometimes surprises me how there are series out there each consisting of 5 or more books and each book being 800+ pages long. I can't imagine just what sort of stuff is happening that it demands such length, I figure the writer just becomes too in love with his world and just starts wanking for a few hundred pages.

Wheel of Time is like an abusive relationship. There will be two or three moments in each book that makes you go holy shit, I need more of that! What happens next? But to find out means reading another 300-700 pages of awful shit. The worst transition of all is Path of Daggers into Winter's Heart, where the tremendous ending of PoD is immediately thrown down the shitter with an impossibly dull beginning in WH. There's never a sense of appreciable segue between each book, always some disjointed heartbreak that goes from focusing on cool shit you care about to boring shit you don't. One book is almost entirely characters that were not present at a certain event reacting to that event. It's a serious slog. Is it worth it in the end? Honestly, no. If you're already 5 books into the shit you might as well Churchill it up and keep going, but if you haven't started yet I'd stay away from it. There are cool ideas and worthwhile moments, but they are diamonds buried beneath two tons of semi-solid turds.

>Book 2
Boy I sure hope Rand stops being a retard about this mysterious woman who clearly has ulterior motives
>plot carries on for 11 fucking books
...

There should be a horror general.

Dead genre

it's hilarious just how unanimous it seems to be the opinion that WoT goes to crap after the first books and never truly recovers. Definitely a series that hasn't aged well and it finished fairly recently

I would love that but it would most likely die after a few posts.

I'm gonna say Anathem turned this concept on its head and made it good. It's more "magic grad student fantasy" than "harry potter" though.

brent weeks
>lightbringer was lame as fuck
>night angel contains IMMEDIATE gay rape for shock value

wew kobe
he just can't pick a happy medium between the two ends of the edge scale

Anything that's obviously sci-fi or fantasy-ish, yet gets grouped into the general fiction section at a library: Joe Hill and some of Stephen King, Lev Grossman, the John Connolly books he cowrites with his live-in girlfriend, Max Brooks, those sorts. They're science fiction-y and fantastic without necessarily alienating newbies the way hard-line sf and GRRM textbooks otherwise would.

IMO we got the best of both worlds, with Darrow almost forgetting that he's red most of the time and just falling into his role.

>And the main character doesn't prove eugenics wrong, he just proves that the wrong people used eugenics.
That's the beauty of it. The author wasn't setting out to honor our current status quo, he wasn't trying to say that the caste system is wrong. He just told a story about the solar system's most massive case of Stockholm syndrome.

The Etched City by K. J. Bishop is a good read. The setting is fantastical, but the characters themselves and the way they interact with their world feels grounded in a way that keeps it from feeling like a genre piece. It isn't overly long, around 400 pages, and I found every aspect of it interesting.

Western
Mystery
Thriller
Detective
Romance
True Romance
Regency Romance
Gay Romance
Vampire Romance

Generals for all of these should push some DFW threads off the cliff.

Just give each book its own title and use some alternate, subtitle as the series headline. "A Game of Thrones" is the first book in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, "The Lies of Locke Lamora" is the first book in the "Gentleman Bastards" series, etc etc. What your idea of overwrought is probably differs from mine, though, user. I'd say use your best judgment and let others take a look at it.

Culture is

It's presented as
PLAYER OF GAMES
A Culture Novel

Just call it "dime rack paperback" and cover all of them in one thread.

Yo /sffg/, I'm trying to name some characters in my fantasy novel.

I'm terribly indecisive but I would like your input on the names I have.

Kind, naive, and aristocratic young man - Marche

Passionate, slightly hot-headed warrior, wants to rule - Faris Blackmore

Reserved and stern female military commander -Arya Aquilla

Most of the fantasy name generators are shit.

>And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct; there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

>But, here’s the thing. He was causing harm to himself every time he delivered a sermon railing about “sodomite marriage.” Because he was gay. The legitimate studies all have the same conclusions. (1) Gay men stay gay. (2) Out gay men are much happier.

HUGO
AWARD
WINNING
PROSE

There's a thread here that could work
But dreaming

>Tila Tequila

Pretty gud except "Arya", that name's been overused between GoT and Eragon

Yeah, I'm not terribly satisfied with her first name.

>>But, here’s the thing. He was causing harm to himself every time he delivered a sermon railing about “sodomite marriage.” Because he was gay. The legitimate studies all have the same conclusions. (1) Gay men stay gay. (2) Out gay men are much happier.

>Politicizing the Hugos? Nobody's politicizing the Hugos, you're just paranoid
>What do you mean boring sermons? I'M excited.

Oh whoops, I meant to put "Anya."

I can't decide on a surname for Marche. I wanted Montresor but I don't want to alliterate too much.

The Half Made World by Felix Gilman

>the character has basically done all of his epic ruses for no real reason as everything could've been solved in a much easier way
True.

I did actually like the ending of the Engineer trilogy but I can understand the complaints.

>Kind, naive, and aristocratic young man - Marche
Does he disapprove of escapism?

Hey guys, what's the deal with Robert J. Sawyer and Stephen Baxter putting inexplicable sudden timeskips to the end of civilization in all their books? Every book I've read by either author has it, and it sticks out in my brain. Like, the book trilogy about the sentient internet by Sawyer was cool and all, but it goes straight from the little girl saving the internet-creature from death in the present day straight into the sun destroys the earth and kills the internet creature while others live out on the earth colonies. It's fine in one, but in every book?

The theme you've got of the fantastic, yet grounded names (with the neat last names) seems solid enough to me! One caveat, though: please change Arya Aquilla's first name to something else to avoid the inevitable comparisons to ASOIAF and Eragon. It'll come up, trust me.

Do the standalone thing for the first installment, then when the next book comes out list it as "from the author of" such-and-such. Once you've gotten three or more books out, the fans and community gossip will eventually pick out a few names for you to choose from when you eventually get them reprinted in omnibus forme

Haha, no but I did get his name from that. He's a different character but I decided on Marche due to him not being the hero despite being the protagonist.

Are there any necromancer books apart from Johannes Cabal?

Marche Aipryl

...

Why does everyone I ask say that?

It's pronounced like Marsh anyway.

Marche Bogg

i will find you

What are some good Warhammer books?

Jesus H. Christ, It took me two rereads to parse that correctly.

>Necromancer books
Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen by Garth Nix
the first couple of Anita Blake novels before they turned into porn
The Summoning/The Awakening/The Reckoning by Kelley Armstrong is a trilogy about a genetically enhanced experiment necromancer whose powers start flaring out of control
uh... Pet Sematary, kinda?

Marche Steppe?

It's a really good short story desu

Ciaphas Cain
Red Fury
Fulgrim
Grey Knight series
Storm of Iron
Space Wolf series

The people politicizing the Hugos are Vox and his gang of NRx faggots who are appalled that their Sharia-tier views are socially unacceptable.

>The winners this year were generally fantastic and point to the health and quality of the field. Some of the best SF/F ever is here now.
>13% year-over-year decline
>point to the health of the field

Has Scalzi lost it?

Frankenstein :D

...

Just join ISIS already.

40k or fantasy

For 40k Abnett's your best bet for Fantasy Gotrek and Felix or Ambassador

Starting Mistborn. Is it any good?

Is the complaining just down to Jemisin being a black woman?

The Hugo noms are always mainstream as fuck safe picks

Its fun.

Don't expect anything more than that.

more like Stillborn lol

No, It's popular, so you should probably read it anyway.

Could you adopt a trip so I can filter you? Thanks.

1st books decent, probably the only recent "deconstructionist" fantasy that actually fits the label assigned to it, 2nd's eh
Second trilogy is more fun overall

Did he ever have it?

>The Hugo noms are always mainstream as fuck safe picks
They aren't, barely anybody had heard of Jemisin before now. She doesn't even sell enough copies to write full-time and is entirely dependent on charity.

Alright going for it. Thanks.

>Could you adopt a trip so I can filter you? Thanks.
Peace be upon you, Mujahideen.

>Based Aram gets no-awarded because he touched icky Vox Day
Yeah, no other reason than because we're 1960s racists, that's the only reason we don't like the Hugos, because if we weren't bigots we would actually like Jemisin MORE because she's black.

>first book won Locus got neb and hugo noms amongst others
>even Goodreads, the home of mainstream plebs
>"nobody had heard of her until now"
Nah

If you follow scifantasy so little that you've never heard of someone whose been talked about since their debut then you really have no business commenting on awards

You've got a strange concept of mainstream senpai.