/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Wheres a good place to look for audiobook downloads?

does Veeky Forums like American gods by neil gaiman? first time here and i'm curious

if yes, any recommendations with similar setting?

Tangentially related, but thoughts on the newish Clipping album? It's a sci-fi concept album that I think is pretty neat.
youtube.com/watch?v=VpXiEb2KVoY

I get mine from usenet, but I need to use a pay service. Also downpour.com, but their selection is limited.

Hello Scott

I would smoke pot with Scott-senpai desu

You should have been aborted

I have to say I was surprised by how much I liked this book. I've recently been disappointed by other SF feminist books by Le Guin and Atwood so I wasn't expecting much but it turned out to to be really good.

It isn't a watered-down feminism -- a couple stories feature complete androcide as a solution to social ills -- but she just seems more human than the other two. Their work felt like dogma clumsily translated to story, hers feels organic and personal.

Do avoid if the mere concept triggers you, but otherwise worth checking out.

Same honestly.

>Best treason/betrayal moment in a work of Science Fiction? In a work of Fantasy?
Reminder to use spoilers

>Best treason/betrayal moment in a work of Science Fiction?
Traitor Baru Cormorant
1984
Pic unrelated.

>write my own shit
>its literally just biggirl and smallguy going through adventures in a lanhkmar ripoff
>use anime personalities because I'm lazy, literally used a d6 drop table to design the protagonists
>biggirl is unsure of herself despite being iron tough
>smallguy is an ambitious little shit despite being worthless in any situation that isnt lying through their fucking teeth at everyone around him including himself
>people tell me it's really good and I should send it in for publication when I literally wrote it out of boredom and hate it and wish I was fucking dead for writing it

So basically Veeky Forums I don't really come here seeking praise, I just want some feedback from people that aren't my friends but aren't from that shitty fucking feedback thread. "Oh this is fantasy, it's shit. Thread 404 now."

Is this an ok place for that? I'm not looking for backpats, I'm looking for, "You suck here, there, that, this, and there. You can improve with x, y, and z."

I just want to be good at writing.

Just finished white luck warrior and found it to be a bit of a slog of slogs. Great ordeal any better?

Yes I liked it.

This is one of my favorite collections of short stories. Dark and brutal as fuck for sci fi.

yo, my nigga, post an excerpt on pastebin or something and I'll read it and try to write something useful in response

>The Unholy Consult manuscript done

How do I get Bakker to give me a copy

>highest likelyhood of satisfaction
>Dune

The prose is totally fine. Distant, impersonal, yet omniscient and penetrating. We know everyone's thoughts as if they were spoken aloud. Just the tone the book wants to set.

What is lits opinion on david zindell?

except for the interjection this is all pretty great stuff.

No, it's horrible. Like Dune for other reasons, but this is awful.

sure brah, whatever floats your boat

if this is "pretty great stuff" for you, real literature is gonna blow your mind.
maybe you will even stumble upon something called "show dont tell", a technique herbert didnt achieve to grasp in his lifetime

what's there to like except for "the worldbuilding is pretty great, innnit?"

>maybe you will even stumble upon something called "show dont tell", a technique herbert didnt achieve to grasp in his lifetime
Yes, if only he had taken the same high school creative writing class as you he would have learned the Iron Law of Show Don't Tell.

>tugs braid instead of adverb

>he passes a short mention to "show don't tell" off as reasoning behind his claim.

Yes guys, you're right.

>Jessica said "It's a maker -"
>"Eighte-e-e-e-e-e- [...]"
>The key word was . . . maker
>Maker? Maker.

How couldnt I see the magnificence of this prose. This and The Martian are both on the same level of genius, and I was wrong to not see that.

Neverness was a bit wild (how many books would have communing with space god as a middle event rather than an ultimate climax!?), but I really enjoyed it. It could be described as sprawling (in need of an editor) as well as dated, but I think it wins points for sheer audacity.

Many of the scenes and segments of the story really stuck with me. If a novel could ever be called ambitious, this is the one. I think fans of Gene Wolfe would feel right at home.

I haven't read any of the sequels or any of his fantasy stuff, so I can't speak to that.

>the one interjection
>"Word repetition, Susan. That's a minus point!"
>Hah, it's like [Popular Book]

>y-yes but only that part is shit
>the rest of the book is suuuuuuurely much better
lol

God Emperor is better
>“The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.”
>“Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.”
>“Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.”
>“It is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”
>“My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!”

I never read God Emperor, so I can't and won't comment on its prose.

I am just a bit irritated how books with mediocre prose get shat on Veeky Forums but Dune doesnt. Maybe its just this general being accustomed to shitty prose, that Dune doesnt stick out. Maybe its just me and I have some kind of allergy against that book and I jus try to rationalize my hatred. Who knows.

I'll try to re-read it and try to find more cringey and low-level prose, just for sanity's sake.

It's partly that it isn't bad prose, partly that Dune is insanely fun to meme, and partly that we don't actually talk about it that much.

you're terrible at this

>Piter frowned, then: "But I don’t think he’ll be able to carry it off."
>Paul thought about this, then: "Yes. I tell the girl you came and put a stamp of strangeness on me."
>The old woman stared at Paul, then: "Young man, as a Proctor of the Bene Gesserit, I seek the Kwisatz Haderach
>Paul stared at his father, unable to speak for a moment, then: "A Mentat? Me? But I . . . "
>- the two deep breaths, the ritual thought, then: "When I assign rooms, is there anything special I should reserve for you?"
>"Soo-soo-Sook!" Then: "Ikhut-eigh! Ikhut-eigh!" And again: "Soo-soo- Sook!
>And then: Great Mother! They planted that one here! This must be a hideous place!
>Then: "They . . . " The words would not come out.
>A yellow sun? she asked herself. Then: Filter glass!
>The man stared at the Duke, then: "No, Sire. You couldn’t turn and I could do nought but follow you

Everything above was taken from the first 15% of the book.

Im trying to match Herbert's prose.

Reads like someone not steeped in Hemingway imitators. It's fine.

That sounds fun. I'd try that out.

This. We're the heretical thread anyway.

>mfw the world building in Way of Kings finally kicks in and gets super interesting
Haven't read continuously for hours like that since I was in college. Thanks for memeing Sanderson into my life /sffg/ even though you probably didn't mean to contribute positively to anyone's existence.

>Prose

lol

go read joyce if you want good sentences

Shallan was so bad that I couldn't get through WoR. Sanderson also was stumped on how to continue Kaladin's character so he repeated his arc from WoK

I'd love to see story where the author deals with that by having the character just get abducted by a flying saucer and disappear for a few books.

I ended up skimming a lot of Shallan's chapters after it became clear what direction she was going. Disappointing to see that Kaladin has to go through all this angst again but not really surprising. As far as I am into WoK I've got him pegged as a manic depressive type. He alternates between strong highs and despondent lows, seems like he has done that since his childhood. Found most of his flashback chapters tedious to read through cause I really just wanted the details of how he got enslaved, took 90% of the book to get that tidbit. Guess it kept me reading though so good on Sanderson for dangling that carrot in front of me I guess, and now I'm sufficiently hooked on all this Radiants and Heralds stuff from being teased with it via Shallan and Dalinar that I want to continue for reasons aside from character arcs.

Dalinar is the only good POV in WoR. What really sucks is that Sanderson is shilling his awful child edgedancer who says awesomeness way to much. She has her own novella and is confirmed to be one of the ten flashback characters

Any scifi fan who hasn't read blindsight is a fucking stupid pussy cunt and I will punch your mother in the throat until she can't pronounced your name due to tharanyx and Laranyx damage

A lot of that went over my head, I've still got like 100 pages of WoK to finish and it's literally my first Sanderson book. I've also got Warbreaker lined up to read after this, and I got warned off from jumping straight into Mistborn so I think I might move to WoR after Warbreaker.

Word

As bad as this sounds I loved how he referenced real scientific articles at the end. How many books do that? It's nuts

That was bad advice. Sanderson was at his best when he wrote WoK so his characters in his older works are really bad. Mistborn has like 6 more books planned too

Echophraxia is even better.

Rifters is also really fucking good.

Not him but Ive heard echopraxia was lacking a bit. I really enjoyed the scientific ideas and theories stipulated in blindsight, as well as the more philosophical sections. Are these condition in the sequel?

Continued, rather

Blindsight was perfectly structured, just as long as it needed to be, nothing out of place. I'm a little leery of Echopraxia because it doesn't seem like it could be as good. Bad reason I know.

I never read it, come at me.

When will this trend of
>character is investigating [x] murders/deaths and gets tangled in something much bigger
end?

audiobookbay.me

>gritty city
>morally grey characters
>the words "spiraling" or "descent" are used to refer to the main character's progress through the story
>it's all based on half-remembered noir plots from movies the author hasn't actually seen

>character's girlfriend/boyfriend is constantly getting kidnapped/or gets killed (possibly in the MC's tortured past?)
>if they get killed or leave the plot, there's a constant stream of babes/hunks flocking to the MC to ~teach them to love again~ and they probably get killed to advance the plot

>MC abuses substances and sleeps in office
>narrates

>a reference to the lack of quality of a cup of coffee is made

>magic use as substance abuse

Whodunnit murder mysteries are some of the easiest plots to setup and you can basically just make shit up as you go from there. I mean even with real life murder cases you have people making up wild stories about what "really happened" so just imagine what it's like when you have free reign to do whatever.

I have a question dealing with fantasy

I did not like it. The writing was a little bit too obvious, and Shadow was far too passive as a protagonist to hold my interest. The set-dressing was nice enough, though.

Took getting cucked with a straight face.

>BRACKETT: The whole thing is confusing; the novel is confusing. I was down at the set one day and Bogart asked me who killed Owen Taylor, the chauffeur, and I said I didn't know, and they asked Bogart and he didn't know, and Hawks said let's send Chandler a wire and find out, and his answer came back, “I don't know.” It's a very confusing plot and one of my favorite novels because the forward momentum is so tremendous and the characters are so interesting that you really don't care.

I just finished Toro's and Hogan's The Strain. Really good thriller with mixed fantasy-science elements thrown in.

Too bad Hogan mainly writes crime novells and not sffg.

Did you like the ending?

So I just finished the first 2 books in the mistborn series and have lost all drive to even start the third, so is it just me?

The tv show is not bad. The German guy, Van Pelt from Jumanji, the Ukrainian guy and David Bradley are all three kinds of based.

Are there any good science fantasy stories out there like Flash Gordon and Barsoom?

Doc Smith Lensman series

Yes?

No mistborn is shit

It's so god damn passable, just talking with conviction doesn't make an argument.

Just got in the mail Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" but I didn't realize it was an illustrated edition. Will this be missing anything from the original publication? What I mean is are the illustrations substituting any of the text?

Fuck. This is literally how Bakker writes. The style is exactly the same. I knew that his books were heavily inspired by Dune, but I never thought Bakker was aping Herbert's prose as well as plot elements.

I'd argue that Bakker is worse because Herbert had at least something to say thematically that wasn't just Philosophy 101.

I never realized how much Jordan drew from the Bene Gesserit when he characterized the Aes Sedai, but once you see it...

I just started reading Dune and this sand-language is tripping me up. Do I have to read the little dictionary at the end of the book, first?

Dune is dry, but it isn't actively trying to make itself into a joke.

This man needs Eric John Stark in his life.

Everyone rips off the Bene Gesserit at least once.

>in a work of Science Fiction? In a work of Fantasy?
Respectively the Dune sequels, and the Borges re-translations.

I know Rothfuss isn't well liked here but I'm 2/3rds of the way through TNOTW, what the hell do you think is behind the door Kvothe explored in the library when he entered with a candle? Also a little theory on Abenthy, what if he isn't even real? Everyone who knew him or of his existence is basically dead ,except for Kvothe, he could've been a charade concocted by the Chandrian or one of their personas to infiltrate traveling groups who make up songs to stop them from writing songs about them?

Also thoughts on the The Bartimaeus Sequence? I never read them as teenager but it seems like a nice little trilogy. Where does /sffg/ hold it, YA garbage or on the same levels as His Dark Materials?

Reminder Fela best girl.

At what point does fantasy stop being fantasy

REMOVE DUNYAN REMOV DUNIYAN YOU ARE WORST HAHA NO EMOTION FUCKING FRAUD

DUNYAN GENOCIDE BEST DAY OF MY LIFGE

t. not akka

Anyone read the Manifold series? I'd order it but I don't know how good it is and I can't seem to find it in my local store

>Well first off, you should know that I don’t write fantasy – only hacks write fantasy. My books are about the triumph of the human spirit which just happen to have everything you would find in The Wheel of Time

moar please.