/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Recommendations:
>Fantasy
Selected: i.imgur.com/r688cPe.jpg/
General: i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg/
Flowchart: i.imgur.com/uykqKJn.jpg/
CLANKED edition

What's your favorite book with robots?

Do we see enough automaton-based fantasy?

Are the robots our future?

>Sci-Fi
Selected: i.imgur.com/A96mTQX.jpg/
General: i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/ i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg/

Other urls found in this thread:

i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/
strawpoll.me/11211161
kuldarleement.eu/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I haven't ready any sci fi with cool robots. Any recs?

>i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg/
>Consider Phlebas
>not Player of Games or Use of Weapons
meme chart desu

I've tried reading Jack Vance's Dying Earth and his writing seems pretty bad. Big disappointment since he's been touted as a huge influence on a lot of writers.

>fuckers are thanking others for books that I memed to stardom
Looking at you coldfire user.

>Jack Vance
>bad writing

Lmao wtf

I just opened the ebook, clicked randomly and here it is - "out of all cognizance". It sounds unnatural. And it's wordy, but I don't think that's the main problem. For instance, I read the 1st book of Brust's Khaavren Romances and the wordiness didn't bother me too much.

Nice pic

The Dying Earth was Vance's first novel, written in the 40s and published in 1950. He was still writing significant works (Cadwal) into the 90s.

I would never recommend getting into Vance with Dying Earth for this reason. Put down it down, and read The Dragon Masters (short) or To Live Forever (longer) instead.

>I just opened the ebook, clicked randomly

you're chatting shit. Start from the beginning and read it or don't.

wolfe's prose is fine. if you don't like his style, that's fine too.

It is not bad, but it is stylized. You need to get in sync with it. The good news is that once you've achieved Vance-lock you can read any of his books with the same mindset.

i confused wolfe and vance for obvious reasons. Yeah, vance isn't as good technically, but I like his writing.

Start from the beginning and give it another go. It's short anyway.

Guy who read coldfire here, there's so much shit in your chart that I'd never read something off of your rec

Sorry la

Vance is not that stylised but it does remind me of that invisible style manual that some people who write fanfictions (the non porn kind and especially the shorter ones although sometimes the longer ones have it as well) seem to enjoy. Opulent descriptions of the environment, a greater density of metaphors and similes, a deliberately expanded vocabulary, a more careful consideration of the dialogue and some fiddling of the tenses from time to time.

The only difference between Vance's writing and that fanfiction style is that the fanfiction ones can seem abrupt or forced (although one or two authors seem to make the prose sound effortless with the stylisation toned down a notch - it's a real shame that these ones are not published authors) and the other is like watching an absurdly well choreographed dance performed on roller skates.

>Guy who read coldfire here
I read and enjoyed Coldfire too and hated other bits of the chart. There's some real good shit there and some really bad shit but I've gotten more hits with that chart and people mentioning things in /sffg/ than trawling through the Goodreads hovel.

People on Goodreads somehow manage to have even worse taste than the folks on MyAnimeList, the awful rating scale and the bizarre hateboner people have for some authors is a part of it.

Moreover, whoever thought that a book scale rating out of 5 needs to be shot. It should be 10 minimum or if I had it my way it would either be out of 100 or a percentage to four significant figures. A rating of 3 or 4 means absolutely nothing and I've never seen a single book that is rated under 3.5. All the 'import your amazon purchases' and 'buy a book here' links just make Goodreads seem like a blatant cash grab to sell shitty fiction.

There's a really cool main character that's a robot in Claw of the Conciliator. There's also a robot nun and soldier robots in book of the long sun.

so now that i've gone through the hard-luck hank audiobooks - amazing guy who did those - i've no idea what to read for a more humorous experience. already read lems stuff and asimov /ellison but not really much else that isn't "serious".

check Asimov's I robot, it's a classic also he has a lot of short stories around 20 pages which are also pretty good, i recommend the biggest and most awesome sci fi book series ever - Foundation.

The Cassandra Kresnov series by Joel Shepherd is about a android soldier who runs away because she wants to be human. The author's other series, The Spiral Wars, introduces a Berserker AI as a character in the second book and is seems to be angling towards a big confrontation between two fractions of Berserkers that everybody thought were long dead and gone.

I had The Machine Dynasty series by Madeline Ashby recommended last time I asked about robot characters. Haven't started it yet though.

Any thoughts on Peter Hamilton's books? Been thinking of picking up The Reality Dysfunction for a thick timefiller.

Reality dysfunction is definitely bretty gud. Takes a while to get going but it's pretty fucking fun as a whole.

His other series, the Commonwealth saga is fucking awesome, one of the best Sci Fi series I have read.

wew my fucking ereader broke

Not looking forward to trying to work out exactly where I am in multiple books when I replace it

As a spinoff of the question about robot characters, does anybody know of any books where there are no "organic" characters at all? ie, everything is artificial life?

The Bionicle novelizations.

But those are meant for children and I haven't read them since I was ten or something so I don't know how well they hold up.

I love Jack Vance but "The Dying Earth" is not even his best fantasy: the Lyonesse series is. As notes, he wrote these stories in the Forties. They were notable in their time for the uniqueness of the setting and Vance's system of magic where the caster can only memorize a handful of spells that are single-use. Only later (late Fifties) does Vance develop the dialogue that is the compelling reason to read him today.

If you are intimidated by obscure words, you are likely not going to enjoy Vance. If you are allergic to dictionaries, you should take a look at recent fiction, especially fantasy Sanderson?, as it is geared to a far, far more limited vocabulary. Reading Vance is equal parts instructive and entertaining: that's why so many writers cite his work as influential.

I have read "The Reality Dysfunction". It features a lot of gore--GRRM in space--but the worldbuilding was okay. The protagonist is a Mary Sue who sleeps with every female he encounters, which may or may not interest you as entertainment. The antagonist is probably the most interesting part of the book.

>6/10 space opera

Hyperion does the "God-like" intellects of robots well, although they are the antogonists kind of

People are not thanking you, and rightfully so, because the disparate quality of the books listed makes the chart all but useless. But by all means, keep spamming it. Watching you grouse about how people don't give you enough kudos is entertaining, in a slightly sad way.

Not him but if you don't like it then edit it or make your own. I was annoyed at some of the OP charts and wanted to make my own, but realised I hadn't read enough and decided to hit the books again.

You could try GRRM's "Tuf Voyaging" stories, they're kind of funny and better than ASoIaF

I've already made a chart, it's one of the ones in the OP. When I find a couple more works worth adding I'm planning to post an updated version, though I expect that won't be for a while.

Have any of you guys read Durdane? I picked it up for like 40c at a book fair one time, and it's sitting on my shelf, gonna get around to it soon but it'll be my first book of his.

pete is pretty divisive, for good reason. even if you end up loving his books (like many do, me included), you'll still be able to point out stuff you dislike or even hate.

his books, then, all follow the same rough patterns of his weaknesses and strengths, which he has barely improved since he started writing. his strengths are things such as:

his biggest strength is probably mind blowingly awesome world building. he makes worlds that are not only interesting and unique, but that actually make logical sense, are completely believable, and are described with believable characters inside those worlds. to go a step further, the Commonwealth universe is for me easily in the top 5 fictional universes ever, out of any genre or even medium. the way he describes it initially, and then bamboozles you by setting another trilogy in the same universe, but 1000+ years later, and it still makes complete sense how everything evolved, blew my mind so hard the book covers are still sticky cuz of cum.

he is mediocre at characters. very good at presenting characters you can relate to, and characters that have their place in the story. there will probably always be that one or two characters you just have to know more about because they remain interesting and somewhat mysterious even though they've been POV characters for a long while.

but they always end up being pretty static, i.e. they don't evolve over the course of any books and they are relatively lacking in nuance.

>cont.

imo all his books contain some characters that are superfluous and serve as kind of walking cameras to show you some minor aspects of the story that could've been incorporated in a more interesting matter by better authors.

one of his biggest weaknesses, imo, is his terrible pacing and verbosity, which together create long stretches of his books that could undoubtedly be packed into a dozen pages without losing any information (in the mathematical sense) whatsoever, and you'll often skip through paragraphs only glancing at the words to get on with it, because you know you won't lose much by doing so. he really couldnt be concise if his life depended on it.

also his endings tend to fall flat. you're really in it for the journey and getting to know the world, vs. the revelation of some all meaningful ending to the story.

>cont

also, it's worth pointing out that his Night's Dawn trilogy vs. commwealth are pretty different, it's common to hear people liking one and hating the other. if you don't like one book you should def. give the other a shot.

also, skip misspent youth, it has almost no relevance to any of the commonwealth series and isn't recommended reading for any reason.

I can't get into e readers. maybe I've only used terrible ones (got the cheapest kindle one), but there's just something uncomfortable about holding that rigid pad vs. holding maleable books in your hand.

also it's kind of satisfying to see the pile of books growing on my night stand, until I store it somewhere else at the end of the year. it's like a tangible representation of what I've experienced. no doubt there's a bit of elitism involved, too, I wouldn't mind strangers walking into my room and seeing how much I read.

Shit, I might get back into those, fucking dug Bionicles as a kid. The universe Greg Farshtey created was pretty alright as far as stuff that got posted on the OG Bionicle site, might get my hands on a few of the old books and see how quality they are.

>The hardest thing for me is to pick a book to read

Does any one else feel this?

You mean out of your backlog? Or find one at all?

I find it very hard to find something I want to truly read, most stuff I feel pretty lukewarm about

Finding a new one. I wish I had a backlog ;..;

It's the same old story with me:
>Don't ever judge a book by its cover

The problem is that I almost always do that when it's fantasy and it never works out. The books either surpass or come bellow my expectations.

It's funny that I'm the one who upped your chart to the OP.. and mine is hated on, and you turn your nose up on mine.

I tend to have a very good feel whether I will enjoy a book or not before I start it. I just don't know *how much* I will enjoy or hate it. I have a couple books lined up that I'm sure I will like but I also know that they won't blow me away so I'm stalling them for something "better". It's an eternal struggle.

I want more unique books like Shades of Grey...

Thank you Veeky Forums for actual conversations and not just dubs, trips, quints and all that jazz.

...

Bought all the New Sun serie.


Fuck you /sffg/!

Haha another one fell for the meme.

I have not. I believe it's the only series of Vance's that I haven't read.

post your fave sci fi pics

...

not fiction but

How the fuck do that boat and skyscraper not collapse under their own weight?

Here a better version.

(Stephen Baxter wrote about these large-scale structures)

SCIENCE!

spess

I don't have that in my sky

space confirmed for not real

illoominaughty

Oddly enough the unlayered version is too big to post

so heres a screenshot of it

faggots

...

Moon-watcher is my nigga

I've already got two full bookshelves and extra boxes full

I don't have the space
Plus even though I break an ereader every year an a half it's still cheaper than buying books because of how much I read.
Even secondhand there's postage costs and the local libraries are getting worse every year

Instead of listening to chart user, you listen to the pseudo elitist that try to make themselves out to be more read and world weary.

Got what you deserve, listen to the minority (but very boisterous) section of sffg that says there is nothing good in modern books at all, and that you should only read 1980 or before fantasy and sci-fi books.

Get fucked.

Bakker is the same mate, and he's modern.

...

What's your thoughts on this? What books do you guys think I'm "trolling" you with?

I know a lot of the sffg regular users are lawyers, professors, teachers, bio technicians and are married with kids and a mortgage.

A lot of the books might not mesh with you because you read WoT and Book of the new sun when it first came out.

I see how you few are slowly conditioning this general to be a safe place for you to discuss old books of your teenage years. Books, which your modern counterparts don't like as much as you did.

You berate anyone who doesn't share your nostalgic trip in time, and you belittle any book you haven't read yourself as "YA" or "edgy".

You then try to only discuss Vance, Wolfe or Lem.
This shit needs to stop, you are bringing down the general into an infinite loop of the 3 same shit that affects outer lit

But chart user has Gene Wolfe too.

so chart user was a hack all along?

>You then try to only discuss Vance, Wolfe or Lem.
>This shit needs to stop, you are bringing down the general into an infinite loop of the 3 same shit that affects outer lit
Please don't try to chase those anons away. They are at least capable of interesting discussion. Yes they do indulge in the occasional shitpost (don't we all?), but I've read far more in the way of analysis from them than those that prefer newer books. Wolfe appears to be a meme because there are multiple anons here who have read his work and are willing to waste time engaging in discussion and composing long posts. Perhaps those who dislike this need to step up? Shitposts will not help your case, but a lively forum could push those 3 authors out of the limelight. You just need to build critical mass somehow, by convincing enough debate minded anons to read the books you like. I'd try this myself, but I mostly like reading what others have to say :3

Informal strawpoll.

strawpoll.me/11211161

What's the book version of "The Fountain"?

What's the best Sci-Fi Novella?

You're a retard

How would people classify the original Foundation trilogy on the sci-fi scale?

while it certainly portrays a space opera vibe, especially the sections on or involving Trantor, I think it covers much more ground. Is there a word for books involving political intrigue and large scale conflicts? Potentially even post-apoc, in the sections where the galaxy is in decline. I had the idea it might be "hard-social science", given its themes of society's and civilisations collapse and rebirth. Most hard science novels obviously cover physics or biology, but could Foundation be to political/social science what Tau Zero is to physics?

Just finished it on the train home and my heads buzzing.

>You then try to only discuss Vance, Wolfe or Lem.
I'm part of the newer gen, from the 90s and 2000s. That said, Lem, Wolfe, and Vance, are leagues ahead in terms of quality, than the vast majority of major popular contemporary authors of science fiction.

Readers of Lem and Wolfe also tend to provide better analysis than the fans of modern works can provide themselves, as noted. I don't think that's elitism, but the truth is, they provide better results.

If you don't like Wolfe, that's fine. If you value this board even a little, try to avoid being overly negative about things.

Couldn't possibly name just one, but try Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon

Sociopolitical or psychohistorical science fiction. Other than that, I think space opera covers it fine. Why reinvent the wheel?

I'll rate it.

Characterization and emotional response--even if limited to the wonder of the sense of time scale, gets a 6.

Writing is a 6.5. Concise and clear, but dry.

Themes touched on, and sheer imagination gets an 8.

Overall a high 7.

more of his sci-fi stuff here: kuldarleement.eu/

For a novel about magical dolls House of Blades is really fun

It's a Sanderson style action novel with everyone having magic ripped from anime but the author actually knows how to pace a book

And it's in glorious single POV

...

Love how the hero of prophecy is such a naive twat in that

I love it how people still think I'm responsible for all elitism and Wolfe/Lem/Vance posting after not posting in here for over a month.
I also find it funny how I'm still accused of being 60 years old (I'm 22) and how I never discussed newer sff as something good (which is almost true because I only liked Golden Age, out of a small amount of new sff I've read).
Enjoy it. It's absolutely fantastic. If you will have questions, feel free to ask, but try making a specific thread, those are always higher quality discussion.
As for something I only realized relatively recently, read an article or two on Aquinas on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New Sun is very thomistic, in fact, I don't think I'd have an understanding of it without it as far as the 'feel' goes. Wolfe did an outstanding job at weaving a plot around the very specific philosophy which is hard to comprehend to the modern reader.

I,robot and Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov are the shit. Basically required reading if you want to read sci-fi with robots.

I don't browse lit a whole lot, but is there a reason why I'm not seeing Wheel of Time here? Is it hated by this general for some reason?

Nigga it's like the most read fantasy series outside of lotor/asoiaf, it's not very good and it's way too long for a generic heroes tale.

That chart's not the best anyway but I couldn't earnestly recommend wheel of time to anyone. Plus anyone looking for fantasy recs should already at least know about the biggest series in the genre

I think I sound a bit too harsh with "not very good"

WoT is good enough, if you can tolerate Jordan's females and repetitive descriptions then it's fun. But the issue is recommending something longer than sodding Proust when it doesn't really have any standout qualities besides being a really long adventure

It's 10 times the size of say Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, but has half the content. It's thousands of pages that can be simply ripped out and nothing is lost.
Sadly, there isn't an abridged version, of say 4 volumes.

I'm only on book 2, but sofar I'm having fun, my mom has been recommending it for a while, and she already has all the books so I really don't have an excuse not to I guess.

I heard Sanderson is a good place to start after I finish this series. It's pretty cool Veeky Forums has a decent literature board, desu

>Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser
Hibernating long? :3

What have you read most recently that was at least mildly enjoyable?

Gulag Archipelago, parts I, II
Endgame
Waiting for Godot
The Quiet American was disappointing after End of the Affair, but not bad.

>I'm having fun
>reading for fun
You're doing it wrong. You're on /sffg/ you have to read to feel superior

No, you read literature to feel superior. You read quality pulp to have fun. You read bad pulp because you have shit taste and for some reason actually enjoy reading thousands of pages of dull, lifeless novels about world building autism.

Sanderson's a pretty fun author,

He actually writes the last couple of WoT books so if you're okay with them you might as well give him a go.
desu I automatically feel superior to people being smug over what type of sff they read because I read other genres as well

>Gulag Archipelago, parts I, II
This actually looks very interesting, and is available on archive.org. I might just read it, thanks.
>Endgame
>has no legs and lives in a dustbin

I guess I should have been more specific. What sff have you read recently that wasn't terrible?

Not much really. In fact nothing in three weeks. The Vanishing Tower by Moorcock. It's nice if that's what you want. The prose is repetitive and mediocre compared to other great pulp authors, but it's entertaining ironically because of how edgy and melancholic it is. The only actual character is Elric and the series as a whole grows less and less interesting with each installment, because it's more of the same. I've read The Land Across by Wolfe and it was not bad, pulpy and fun, but also incredibly disappointing because you always want more out of him. Before that I've read 2 Le Guin novels, The Dispossessed and The Word for World is Forest. The first was too political and hence at times incredibly annoying and also needlessly long (similar to Left Hand of Darkness) as it explored the themes in say 200 pages but goes on for 300. Also read Dying Earth volume one and was pleasantly surprised by how well it reads and how emotional it was.

Blindsight is fucking weird.

And I can't belief I get stressed out and annoyed about my prose being readable while I'm lying here with this mess of published words in my hand. Watts has done nothing but wow me with the plot and ideas so far, and he makes up his own vocabulary fairly well (Although it has shortfalls, "inlays"?) but gosh he cannot write.

He's Canadian he should know at least how to structure paragraphs, although I'll admit he writes good speech so maybe he's not all bad.

It's fucking good though. Once I got past the vampires thing.

Shit prose and great ideas is the core of hard sf

Amen

It's discussed pretty often. The consensus is that it's way too long, and that an initially entrancing 1-2 books bog down into a multi-thousand-page slog that most feel compelled to grind through out of sunk-cost reasoning.

The people that bought into WoT in the early 90s at least could tell themselves that maybe Jordan would finish the series and blow everyone away, but we now know that isn't true.

Also, WoT arguably damaged the whole genre by demonstrating the potential profitability of authors spending decades writing interminable "epics" padded with technically unremarkable writing.

>Once I got past the vampires thing.
If it had just been "a hidden subspecies that has secretly been preying on other humans for centuries" no one would've raised an eyebrow. Contextualizing it by saying "yeah, those legendary creatures you have heard about were actually based in reality" should've made it more interesting, but since it happens to be vampires, it sets people off. Twilight and all that fetishistic shit ruined a perfectly good bit of folklore for everyone else, basically.

What is the Veeky Forums consensus on The Great Ordeal?

I know Bakker is pretty divisive. I have read the first trilogy and started the second, but dropped it in the beginning, it was different and I didn't like it.

Curious what people think of the later one, is it as great as the first trilogy?

Little summary on the importance of thomism for understanding New Sun?