/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

>Invites Reddit with open arms
>Complains when threads have turned to shit
You dug your own grave

>been reading the Dune books in the past few weeks
>loved the first, thought Messiah was super mediocre
>pick up the third with lowered expectations
>it's super fucking good so far

Just finished the chapter where Alia reveals herself as being possessed by the Baron, holy shit that was a good chapter! How many more twists and turns am I going to experience, Veeky Forums

And please remember spoilers

I was talking more about unrelated plot wise.
It is not a true sequel and doent really continue the events of Blindsight but rather put's a new spin on them.

The themes of both novels are complementary but Blindsight still works as a standalone novel.

She dies and resurrects as Paul.

>non-autistic, non-power fantasy
List 'em

So I made a mistake /sffg/. I decided I would revisit a YA series I read in the early 00s, Artemis Fowl. It was like being subjected to preachy self insert fan fiction. What's galling is I can't ever remember there being this much heavy handed environmentalism, to the extent that I almost feel like the entire series was written solely as a platform for it.

>I can't ever remember there being this much heavy handed environmentalism
No user, you've just been indoctrinated to believe in alt-right "the liberals are coming" conspiracy theories since then.

You haven't read the books have you?

>Not content with ruining the last couple of threads Reddit returns for more.

Not since I was a kid. I seriously doubt they would hold up now. I'm just taken aback that "environmentalism" is now a bogeyman in this thread, of all places.

I can sort of see where user is coming from, since there's an entire book about rescuing an endangered lemur, but to be fair he needs to harvest its brain fluid rather than just being an eco-crusader or something.

I don't get bakker hate desu
prince of nothing was great

>tfw no nayu bf

Not directly related to the thread, but does anyone else experience weird shit happening with Philip K. Dick books on Kindle Paperwhite? They sometimes disappear entirely, then they all reappear as first ones in queue after you restart or charge the device. This happens to all PKD books I have on mine (they're all non-Amazon "backups") and no other book with one exception of a title whose author is 'Platon'.

Get started on aspect emperor now senpai

>Tfw no skinspy gf

someone's insecure

Maybe you downloaded a bunch of PKD de-DRM'd rips that were all processed in the same way into the same non-standard format. Maybe the other book coincidentally has the same issue. It just makes sense to me that it is more likely there is someone out there who likes PKD and uploads free epubs that cause a bug on your kindle model, than that somehow the kindle bugs out only when the author is named "Dick" or "Platon."

Deleted all the screwed up ones from your device, and try replacing them with some different "backups" to see if the problem persists. Make sure you don't just download the exact same file again--check the filesize and look for one that is different. Many free download sites have copies of the same rips, but they also often have multiple different rips of the same titles.

I got them all from different places, some being scans while others are from retail. It would be quite a coincidence if your hypothesis turned out to be true.

I'll try it anyway, though, and I'll also try making a fake book with PKD as author. Thanks.

Any books with little girl protagonists?

>What's galling is I can't ever remember there being this much heavy handed environmentalism
He kind of piles it on man, even as a kid I noticed it.

Can anyone suggest similar stuff to Cordwainer Smith?

Non-children's? Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age." Madeline Ashby's "vN" had a little girl protag, but I can't remember how far into the story she ages up. NK Jemisin's "The Fifth Season"/"The Obelisk Gate" has a little girl protag for a third of the first book and half of the second.

Children's/YA: Narnia, Django Wexler's "The Forbidden Library," and Catherynne Valente's "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making" all have little girl protagonists as far as I can remember. I feel like I must be missing a Neil Gaiman book, too.

>I feel like I must be missing a Neil Gaiman book, too.
Coraline. And Mieville's Un Lun Dun is another one.

>thought Messiah was super mediocre
Well, seems that you unfortunately have pleb taste, but if you've come this far you should enjoy all six.

I haven't read this Bakker guy, but these skinspies seem to be a rip off of face dancers from Dune
Should I give it a shot? I really liked the face dancers..

>reread the edge chronicles which I started at age 10
>even better the second time around

I feel bad for people who read trash like harry potter as kids.

Bakker's work is heavily inspired by dune.

Read it if you want Tolkien meets dune

>serving of sanderson not optional
>bring your own little girl protagonist
>gri welcomed
What is that shit by his leg?
>IJ
This general is nothing but memes

>be kaladin
>19 years old in the prime of his youth
>been abstinent for over a year
>spren appears to him in the form of a young girl
>doesn't immediately strip her down and start rubbing her on his dick

explain

Spren are not for sexualization

>What is that shit by his leg?
Spaghetti

>Straylian author
>Every five pages is someone getting tortured or murdered in a 'ritual' of getting power
>Every chapter of the book one particular character gets tortured, abused and he never actually gets any chance to heal if you read carefully because he gets fucked with so often. In the latter part, he ends up getting tortured to figure out why the other mages were torturing him
>I GET MY POWER FROM THE PAIN OF OTHERS
>protag pisses people off by acting as an anaesthetic
>protag also pisses people off by accidentally acting setting shit on fire and bringing down lightning
>The main villain doesn't appear but he does appear mentally and expresses how fucking done he is with his subvillain
>For some reason, the main villain is turbofaggot gay and rapes the subvillain and everyone else in the ass while the subvillain prefers women
>The ideal world of a good subsection of characters is a gigantic palace where you can fuck anyone who likes it and eat good food
>The subvillain is all 'she'll be right mate' (and seems perfectly fine despite the fact that his entire back is basically flayed open all he really experiences is the pain of a bad sunburn)
>they get attacked by bogans who have slaves and whose most defining feature is that they don't know how to torture people properly

>conclusion of the book
>the faggot with the magical books actually just puts them in stone to prevent people from photocopying them
>subvillain has achieved shit all and the villain hasn't appeared at all in 99999 pages and the subvillain and the protagonist both can't overthrow him
>protagonist spends the entire fucking book running away from the subvillain who essentially does shit all except counsel her crippled boyfriend on his life choices on the fact that euthanasia/suicide is immoral
>also subvillain isn't i-in love with the protagonist b-baka
>protagonist does a repeat of the bali-9 drug smuggles except with a communication devie

that pic looks magical af , I'm considering starting the series

I'm confused, are there multiple subvillians or is the main villain gay for raping a female in the ass?

oh hey me too. except I'm doing the audiobooks. so far it's pretty good but I would've enjoyed an entire book from the perspective of Kellhus. I think the strongest part so far was the beginning of book one where he's out wandering in the forest.

What's beyond the deep woods?

A big library full of cp

which author?

New to Veeky Forums
Currently writing a scifi time travel story
What do you anons like in scifi? In time travel? In stories in general?

>Dancers Lament
Fucking incredible. It only took this hack seven books to make something worth a damn.

Anybody read this? Worth reading?

What books are similar in world to Perdido Street Station?
That sort of grimy, and weird world.

Subvillain is a straight male
The villain behind everything is gay

Check last thread.
The book which I complained was edgy shit.

His Dark Material has a pre-teen main character.

I'm not reading the whole previous thread to satisfy an idle curiosity

not sure why you couldn't just say

The first book was intended for quite young children so it focusses on weird creatures and doesnt have much of a plot, but still a fun read. After that the books improve in quality massively with every release and have a very strong sense of history and continuity.

I read the first one in early grade school and kept up with them until just before high school, then reread them and read the ones I hadn't after entering uni. I was seriously blown away by them after all that time, even discounting the nostalgia factor. The authors are clearly deeply in love with what they've made and want others to fall in love with it too. I could reccomend it for the drawings alone but the writing is just as fun.

Was anyone else really happy as a dog when they were reading The Dracula by Bram Stoker?

No, I was quite sad as a bat when I was reading it

I kinda was, yeah. Expected it to be boring due to the journal format and all, but was pleasantly surprised.

What did you like about Cordwainer Smith?

If you're chasing the dragon of "Scanners Live In Vain" then sorry, it's one of a kind.

If you liked "Crazy Adventures Around the Universe" try The Demon Princes by Jack Vance.

If you liked the "biopunk" aspects maybe Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling but I'd read a longer description first.

"Christianity Among The Alien" try CS Lewis' Space Trilogy.

If you're a furry maybe look into CJ Cherryh's Pride of Chanur.

>Esselmont books worth reading

Since when

Did Abercrombie copy GRRM here?

docs.google.com/document/d/14S6gu2EWJKK85f9jRq9yjYvhHEfKgbJzcJoHUgtQCBo/edit?pref=2&pli=1

Did you write that document?

I doubt it. While GRRM does portray a lot of fantasy tropes through a unique frame, it is still just a collection of common tropes. Young girls wanting to become knights/warriors/heroes is super common. As is having her learn to use a sword (shields are for no name extras) in a style of fighting that emphasizes speed since that implies skill and avoids the problem of explaining why she doesn't have a broken nose yet. Also allows her to be cute and petite while still being dangerous in a fight.

Same thing with the blacksmith shit. The word choice itself is also pretty common to fantasy works in general, especially to works about young girls breaking the mold and blacksmiths.

Does Abercombie have any runaway magical princesses who must return to her homeland to reclaim her throne from the evil incestuous family of blondes and save her people from the encroaching armies of the dead who come from the frozen northern lands? It's just the same shit, different book. It's the details that matter, not the overarching ideas.

How long have these /sffg/ threads been going? I know there has always been threads on sci-fi and fantasy, but I didn't notice there being generals much in the past.

Coincidentally I've been buying a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books, before I noticed the generals. Bought 9 books and I'm slowly progressing through 2 of them right now (I'm a slow reader).

Theyve been going pretty consistently for quite a while

He has multiple dark materials, not just one.

>Bought 9 books and I'm slowly progressing through 2 of them right now
What are they? Any good?

Mostly well known books...

Dune
Ringworld
The Forever War
Shadow & Claw
Destination: Void by Frank Herbert
Starhammer by Christopher B. Rowley
Children of the Dragon by Frank S. Robinson
Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer
Daystar and Shadow by James B. Johnson

Started with Destination: Void and Starhammer. So far, the premise is losing me in Destination and I've been consistently engaged in Starhammer, even though Starhammer's intro has some rough spots.

Drop Ringworld and pick up Rendezvouz with Rama instead

Appreciate it man. I'm willing to check out both. I'm pretty new to sci-fi and just want to read all kinds of books at this point.

>writing is just as fun.

Glad to hear it's a fun kind of series since I'm not the grimdark kind of guy for my fantasy, and yeah those drawings look amazing so I might pick it up. Question, would you recommend to read them in publication or chronological order?

I can't remember what it's called of the top of my head and also I'd feel bad spoiling the plot (either spoiler the whole thing or refer to it vaguely)

Found it on Joe's twitter

What are the best short stories by Harlan Ellison other than I Have No Mouth?

Get the particular Harlan book in pic related, it has multiple stories.(his best)

I enjoy extremely complicated closed time loops, paradoxes, Blinovitch, alternate universe and Abusing the Kardashev Scale for Fun and Profit.

The most obvious examples of this are drawn from the Hyperion Cantos (Sol's story is excellent + the overarching plot) and Doctor Who (which has numerous examples, but I'll list my favourite stories here.

Audio plays: The Chimes of Midnight [mystery/horror], Night Thoughts [mystery/horror], Peri and Piscon Paradox [humour/tragedy], The Natural History of Fear [dystopian/mystery], The Tub Full of Cats [tragedy], The Holy Terror [dystopian/tragedy], Master [tragedy], Forty-Five (only the Word Lord), A Death in the Family [tragedy])

Books: (new books are awful compared to the old ones) Interference 1+2 (Miles Lawrence), Of the City of the Saved (Philip Purser-Hallard) - spinoff doesn't require knowledge of franchise, Alien Bodies (Lawrence Miles), Human Nature (Paul Cornell), The Ancestor Cell (Stephen Cole and Peter Anghelides), Father Time (Lance Parkins), Fear Itself (Nick Wallace)

TV: Heaven Sent, Blink, Father's Day, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Midnight

Between them you've probably got a huge number of possible time travel plot points covered.

>tfw no 43 year old murderous milf origin whose pussy is flowing something fierce for a good pumping
>tfw you will never make her bed rock and feel her shake the bedrock with orgasms
Why live?

What

...

>Purser-Hallard
His Arthurian thing was surprisingly solid, didn't know he came from the tv spinoff ghetto.

>ywn have a fan knit life-size versions of your monsters

If it's Arthurian that's probably not Doctor Who based.

But a whole bunch of random authors have written for the show at one point or the other.

For example, Douglas Adams. 'Shada' contains characters he later reuses in other books, like Professor Chronotis gets put into Dirk Gently and he writes a character suspiciously like the Doctor in Hitchikers.

Anyway, most of the best work was produced during the 'wilderness years' where the show was cancelled and fans essentially wrote whatever they want which ended up with some excellent stories, some experimental stories and some awful stories. After the series returned to television, the BBC put its foot down and the quality of the books became shit thereafter with very poor prose seemingly written with an OCD YA audience in mind.

Yeah, I meant the Pendragon book(s) - picked them up randomly from chart related expecting just your standard "Round Table + enemies in modern day" pulp, but he goes deep into all sorts of symbology/meme theory stuff with the various Knights' sigils. Time travel from him sounds neat.

Dammit user, stop posting cute Mievilles at 3am

That's interesting.

No.

Best arms in SFF

>tfw Mieville is finished as a writer unable to write anything above 200 pages
What happened between 2012 and 2016 to end his career?

>little girl protagonists
Most of those are going to skew heavily towards early teen YA or older kids books, but let me think for a second.

Black and White by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge is a superhero/supervillain dual protagonist book, with some of the chapters being set during their hero academy days.

A couple of the Demonata books by Darren Shan star a younger girl with magical abilities who fights the demonic forces plaguing the land

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn is about a reverse trap who disguises herself as a boy to become a dragon trainer

Anything else, you'd have to delve into manga or start reading Vladmir Nabokov AU fanfiction

Not the user you were talking to, but I read the Edge Chronicles when I was younger (up to 8 or 9, however many were out at that time), and can say that it's your best bet to start with book 1 and proceed onward based on publication order.

Each book is set... well, a few of them are ordered chronologically back-to-back, like book 2 being directly set after book 1, but others jump forward or backward in time to flesh out backstory of given characters or the ultimate fates of previous protagonists, and the various plot elements and locales build on each other in different books. If you read in internal chronological order, there'd be precious little sense to most of the happenings, like "what the fuck? why are these rocks floating? who is THIS twat in the overcoat?" and most often "what the fuck is THAT?!"

It's an excellent series, man, just give it time and you'll be hooked. If you like that one and want a more adult-oriented yet similar feel, with the illustrations and exploration of a foreign, magical, faintly sinister land, try Clive Barker's "Abarat" series

There's an idea I want to try next. Tell me your opinion /sffg/

>in this world, war is everything. It solves everything, is settles all scores, resolves all disputes. Warfare is the greatest virtue, the greatest achievement of man, the holiest or actions. The whole world's definition is war and war defines everything, even geography.
>the main religion is war, people believe that war is what is spilled from the heaven onto world as war itself is a different world and to die in war is the ultimate honour
>just a side note though, to keep in mind
>in thus world of war craft (unironically) there are many types of unique magics and almost every society is magocratic. Thing is, every single type of magic has a hard counter, something that completely renders that type of magic useless, even counterproductive.
>for example A completely counters B, so if in a war a side has A and another side has B, A will always win.
>but throw C in the mix, which counters A itself
>in this case, side A must bring magic D to improve magic A and make it immune to C's influence.
>and when you add a hundred more types of magic, each buffing, countering and improving each other, you have a unique type of warfare that us ENTIRELY based on careful planning.
>war itself takes months, years to plan and set in motion, like a large-scale game of chess, info gathering, game of spies and influence, and when all is ready, it's all over in a matter of minutes when all magic and power gathered gets unleashed in an instant.

What do you guys think? I want to make this EXTREMELY complicated with entangled politics, warfare, tactics and unique magics.

The premise sounds really implausible
>every single type of magic has a hard counter
Magical rock paper scissors?

Warhammer 40k?

It isn't the 90's any more senpai.

Yes but not exactly.
Ok say magic A creates barriers that makes everyone immune to everything. It literally makes you invincible. But magic B summons otherworldly beasts that can pass through barriers like they don't even exist.
So now team A has to find a way to combat B's demons. A hires C that can enchant weapons to they cut through demons like butter. Now B is in disadvantage, and they hire D that can curse enemies with weakness so they won't be able to battle. But team A hires E that turns flesh into magically animated stone so the soldiers never tire and never get wounded, and so on for ever and ever.
War takes years, if particularly important, decades to prepare for.
There's combinations of magic too, and combinations that are not even known and discovered. A side wins or loses if they make even the slightest miscalculation possible.
After thousands of magics, counter-magics, curses, enchantments, spells, if even one man is left standing on a side, and with enough magic in him, that one man can literally destroy the whole fucking world.
Magic is overpowered nukes that's why every possibility imaginable must be taken into consideration.
Some armies take certain niche mages to fulfill one single apparently unimportant role that can eventually win the whole war. Like fucking, a mage summons a stone, nobody gives a fuck but that one stone can pass through barriers and a random soldier throws it and kills a key mage on the enemy side, the while war us won in that instant.

Literally JUST FUCK MY SHIT UP the series

Every generation skip between trilogies was depressing as fuck

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Insufferable unless you really like femdom.

This is the last reaction I expected to The Broken Earth.