/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

Good thing I liked Bleach in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to stomach Words Of Radiance.

I'm sad it's over. No more bullshit plot twists to laugh at with the rest of /a/.

what's TKaG?

The book and movie aren't really that alike.

A bad meme

...

i have a fantasy race that's equal parts gorgon, gargoyle and weeping angel. What do I call it?

To Kill a God.

Don't expect too much connection between them. It's a very loose adaptation. More of an "inspired by".

Riftwar is a funny series/setting

There's like 20 interconnected books yet the best of the lot have the least amount of tie ins

So you copied Jemisin?

Grezendach

Proyas really wants scylvendi cock

Can anyone recommend me more fantasy (or scifi) where the MC starts as a slave and ends up with some ridiculous power

Loved that plot in Magician, Red Rising and whatever Sanderson's book is called

I really liked the Riftwar books when I was 12-14. I think it was the first series I read that mixed a traditional LOTR copy fantasy setting with other planets and an interconnected universe. But on re-reading them almost a decade later I found the prose to be so bad it distracted me from the story. The exception was the Empire series he wrote with Janny Wurts which was still pretty great.

Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy? If monetary power is okay.

Can we all agree than Tolkien, Erickson and Jordan are the best worldbuilders around?

Isn't it some fedora tier book that some user wrote?

I can live with bad prose but the plotting is what kills me

In Magician every single time something interesting happens to a character you switch to 4 chapters of other characters doing fuck all.

And then when you switch back several months have passed and the character has already done the interesting thing

I think Tad Williams is pretty great, but not as many people have read him.

I see I'm not the only one who read Feist in middle/high school. And yeah looking back those books have lots of anticlimaxes. No idea what I found so compelling in them, but I read through like 16 of his books before finally getting sick of the power creep.

I found his writing to be terrible even back when I was 16. Sometimes less is more in this genre. It felt forced and I have no idea how the hell he finished his books.

His books always start slow but build as they go. But what I was talking about was world building, which he does a very good job at.

I never once felt that Jordan's world felt believable, way too many of the locations seemed to exist only to service the plot.

>way too many of the locations seemed to exist only to service the plot.
Examples?

The fucking place with the fireworks factory and insane bureaucracy

That wasn't a remotely convincing location or way of living but it did provide a fun set piece

tomorrow the 6th Expanse Novel, "Babylons' Ashes" is released.

Anyone else excited?
I basically can't wait :)

I honestly have no clue what you're talking about because there were two Illuminators Guilds in two different cities and neither one had an "insane bureaucracy". There are a few cultures with elaborate and obtuse rules though, like the Sea Folk or the Seanchan.

I broke my ereader during reading the first one and never picked it up again

Is the whole series focused on being sort of scifihorror? Because that was what I found least interesting

no, not at all.
It's actually very well paced and a combination of political thriller, intrigue, some little military SF sprinkled in and occasional horror elements in the first and second book. Social Dynamics is also very important.

I persoally burnt through all five currently released books earlier this year ( within 3 or 4 days ), after having watched the television series that had aired around this time last year.

Really enjoyable book.

thematically and descriptively it shares may similarities between the "heavy times" and "hellfire" books from C J Cherryh (I think these are the titles, I read them in german), and "the forever war" by joe haldemann.

I really wholeheartedly do recommend them, especially for the superb pacing. (this is maybe due to it being a duo of authors collaborating on the books)

Cool sounds like it gets closer to Abraham's fantasy stuff as it goes on

Believability goes out the window for me as soon as there's a "warrior woman" culture without an explicit fantasy element to explain it. If the women go out and be effective hand-to-hand fighters, you're not talking about humans anymore. Real-world average women have half the upper-body strength of men, and the difference only grows with training. If they get in a fight with men they get slapped around like children. That's why there have never been any "warrior woman" cultures in the real world. Ever. Just occasional mannish women.

The Aiel in general were one of the worst examples of convenient baffling noble savages. They make no sense and therefore can do anything that makes the plot work.

Also, explicit in-world protagonism is lazy as fuck. The whole world warps around the Ta'gonists to make the plot happen, then characters say, "Oh wow, I did a crazy thing. Must be those Ta'gonist powers."

It had some cool elements (I especially liked the Myrddraal and Black Wind), but for instance, the huge Trollocs are way too easy to kill. At their size, they should be able to deal with adult humans like toddlers, but he mostly ignored their size and treated them as generic goblins. Very few fantasy authors have even a basic understanding of hand-to-hand combat, and Jordan was no exception. The depiction of fighting skill development was absurd (particularly the sword Tinker).

The magic system spiralled out of control quickly, from Gandalf-throwing-pinecones-tier to AD&D-level-20. In light of the powers revealed in later volumes, the fact that the Forsaken didn't win without difficulty in the earlier ones becomes ridiculous.

>thematically and descriptively it shares may similarities between the "heavy times" and "hellfire" books from C J Cherryh (I think these are the titles, I read them in german)
It's Heavy Time and Hellburner.

>almost four years since WOT is finished

Am I the only one that is missing it?

ah, very well :) I'm sorry for the inaccurate translation :D

I did rather enjoy these two, that is, Heavy time and Hellburner, and was rather a little bit disappointed when I read the rest of the alliance union books, only to not even see a mention of the protagonists. (which is bullshit, because they would be serving aboard NORWAY). However, as I later found out, she wrote those two books as prequels basically, after the other stuff had been done.

I really hate C J Cherryh btw. Most of her stuff is really horrible, obtuse and cryptic for no specific reason and frustrating to read, or basically forcing you to have a vocab list at the ready while reading. Horrible!
But some few of her books are rather enjoyable. So weird. Some of her stuff is utter frustrating shit, and some is really good.

>forcing you to have a vocab list at the ready while reading
That's a good thing; it forces you to learn new words and improve your knowledge instead of just being entertained.

>Horrible!
Donald pls

If I borrow (read: steal) a "magical" system from a form of media and file off the names and numbers - yet still keeping it similar in form, but not as grand in scale across my fictional world - would that be considered plagiarism?

Because I'm contemplating using the Bending system from The Last Airbender, but limit the elements to a couple of individuals and let the Main Character be able to learn and master the Four Elements, but without the Avatar/Reincarnation aspect to it. That way, the world doesn't focus around the usage of the elements like they do in the series and are considered unique instead of a norm.

Using the four elements as magic would be fine, it's an old cliche

no it isnt, because she makes up bullshit fantasy words. Essentially, if you for example go into the Dying Suns books, you're thrown into bullshit exchanges and conversation, where barely any vocab is explained.
Honestly, download an epub for the first Dying Sun Novel, read into the first chapter. prepare to throw up.

You'd love Bakker

It's probably the best novel released this year

But that's fun! He doesn't do it randomly, like the infamous portyguls of Dune, he makes words up for things that don't exist in the real world, and then either describes them in detail, or doesn't because this sets the reader's imagination spinning.

We get a pretty good description of a deodand, but what's a grue? What exactly is blue concentrate, and what does it do to people who get sprayed with it? What makes ioun stones so desirable to wizards? Imagining your own answers is part of the appeal.

A more serious problem with Vance is that he sometimes liked to use obscure real words without regard to their actual meaning.

Bleach was good until Kubo became an ass-hole.

Sanderson surpassed all of them Already. He literally built an entire universe.

I've been reading a lot of late and I've realised that almost everything good has been in one of the OP images

However there's one exception
i.imgur.com/fOGNfWK.jpg

That one is fucking useless

>but what's a grue
I honestly didn't know that wasn't created for Zork until now

Yeah it is and it's new in the OP (couple threads back). Not sure why it was put in

yes, but that's not what C J Cherryh does.
She takes words and real world concepts, gives them obtuse and similar made up other names, it's basically like a unnecessary lowlevel cryptographic cypher woven into her conversation.

She also likes being cryptic, in "Cloned", which is Unionside Book 2 or somesuch, it starts with politics alright, but for the first 2 chapters NADA is explained, and you are forced to read cryptic dialogue without any conflict being clear.

In cuckoos egg, the protagonists warden is basically a member of a warrior-caste of Judges in a catpeople society leaning heavily on feudal japan thematically.

However, what he is and what he does is not explained, instead we have people constantly referring to him as "duun hatani" or some fuck, and initially you might think he's some kind of royalty - but that's not right. there's not even a relevant twist or anything - she just uses vocabulary to confuse you, and then in the very last chapter she reveals: HAHA you didn't know and couldnt know, but HERE is the reason for why people acted the way they acted He's a Warrior Monk Judge Catperson Space Commander who cloned a human boy for some bullshit reason. I didn't tell you any of the motivations or any of the conflicts propelling the story... but NOW I have, HAHA

It's like a bad storyteller in an RPG, who's just missing a page in his notes and fails to communicate some core concept to his players to make sure they will get on a track to understand the problem he designed for them - and then he makes fun of them for not understandig what he wanted them to do.

Sad! Low Energy!

Of course it's useless, it doesn't have TKaG in it...

Vance invented a metric assload of stuff that people have heard of without ever having read anything he wrote.

Think of what a fucking weird idea it is for magic spells to erase themselves from wizards' memories when cast, so they have to go back to the same books and memorize them all over again.

>Womameme
>Being able to be cryptic
>Being able to use analytical skills
>Being able to generalize experiences and turn them around

I didn't realize this was a "you laugh you lose" thread

I'll make it even better, I'll go get the epub for that one book, and i'll show you exactly what she does. I'll make a vocab list even

YLYL
>> shon'ai (( the species of presumably Cat People ))
>> Kel (( Warrior ))
>> As'ei (( Honoarble way of war ))
>> Kel'en (( a Warrior ))
>> Kel'ein (( test for a Warrior? ))
>> Sen (( Advisors, Scholars ))
>> ...'anth (( suffixed to mean so and so ' Person ))
>> Mri (( "the People", Name of their ow kind ))
>> tsi'mri (( tsi is like "other" or "not", so otherkind or not-people ))
>> A'ani
>> Yin'ein (( the traditional weapons, static arsenal ))
>> Zahen'ein (( modern weapons, exchangeable fluctuating meaning ))
>> Kesrith
>> Niun (( the king / queen ))

I'm not an idiot,
but if you're not an idiot either,
you need to be able to see how it's no fun to be constantly translating gibberish while reading.

my example above
>" for they are tsi'mri and we are mri the Kel will do as Ruul demand. Remember this Kel'en, for Kel'ein, and she is skilled As'ei Zahen'ein "
" the not-People are not People like as, and the Warrior Caste will do as the Regul-not-People demand. this is a test for every warrior, be he skilled with the traditional weapons or those which are modern. "
>and quite naturally the other one responds
>" Se'anth tried many times doing his duty to Ruul, but Niun is Reasonable Mri A'ani "
" Our Advisors tried showing them the proper Solutions to our Problem, but the Ruul-not-People would not liste, ad now the Niun-Queen in her Wisdom has declared that we do such and such "

there, this is what this bitch does.
I can't belive I even made it through the first chapter. (this is btw copypasted, I originally posted it on Veeky Forums about two weeks ago when we were discussing books)

Is the trying to make her books seem deep or some shit when all she's doing is fucking obfuscating shit?

She's a woma.
Who knows what she's trying to achieve.

the crazy thing is, some of her stuff is good:
She writes low-Fantasy, like "the Paladin", and it's honestly quite good, she writes "Heavy time" and "Hellfire" and "Pells Star" and "Merchanters Luck" and they are quite good.

But then, about half of everything she writes, is this cryptic bullshit.

>She's a woma.
Stop making up your own words.

:D
sorry, honestly am sorry, my "n" key broke today! :)

Are there any Fantasy books with Mage-Knights (or anything similar of the sort) that are more liking to Jedi Knights with plate armor?

I do believe that the "Witcher" Games are based on a series of novels (which I have not read), which would possibly be what you search.

Aren't Jedis just paladins?

There's loads of paladin stuff

Actually I think The Demon Cycle does this as well, but it's a different language and you almost always get translations and there's not too many words that are used in that way.
It's annoying but after a point it won't bother you.
Though at least in that series it's fitting since it's literally 2 very different cultures battling each other and the demons

Already read those though.

True, but most Paladins either have no magic or they have anything but the kind of Telekinetic magic I want from a Paladin.

Is Richard Morgan's fantasy worth reading?

I've seen lots of praise for Altered Carbon but little mention of his fantasy

I was going to put him too, but when he dedicates 5 decades of his life, I will put him in the same realm as Tolkien.

No, I mean literally using the Chakra points and Chi channels too.

Going for a feeling that the world used to be full of Elemental users, but now it's rare to see one and people have converted to using iron and steel. Could even have old technological wonders/ruins dotting the continent that can only be used/accessed through the usage of elements.

Trouble with stealing bending in particular is that it relied very heavily on the visual aspect. I mean you could nick an elemental system and no one would really care because they're everywhere, but if it was more specifically going to be martial arts based you'd probably have real trouble conveying that elegantly in text format.

Codex alera did a decent job of conveying the elemental magic through text.

>but if it was more specifically going to be martial arts based you'd probably have real trouble conveying that elegantly in text format.
Hmm, alright. I'll just work on it and do some research. If it doesn't come out good, I'll fall back on other plans. Thanks

I leave for 10 minutes and this happens?
>you need to be able to see how it's no fun to be constantly translating gibberish while reading.
Are you some kind of ninny? It's a technique to make them seem more alien when read in english. She includes an appendix in these kind of books for a reason.

Yo should I give The Painted Man another go

I kinda liked the world but hated the characters and gave up before the plot kicked into any sort of gear

You mean the warded man?

yeah, it's great.

Yeah that Painted Man is the UK (and wikipedia) name

I'm presuming the issues I had with the father being annoying as shit will have to lead somewhere

He didn't become an asshole. He just stopped planning ahead. Ever since the first Soul Society arc he was just making it up as he went along. That's why we got fights that went on for the better part of a year and insane plot twists to escape the holes he dug himself into.
But Bleach was always at its best when Kubo's insane plot twists accidentally made sense.

>Full Bring Arc
>No ending
>No Aizen Bankai
>The 69 guy was completely neglected
>Zero division was a disappointment
>Ichigos father didn't even show his bankai
I could go on and on

Completely unnecessary filler arc as you've seen.
Kubo is an ass-hole because of the "literally nothing happened" chapters. He dragged the story so fucking much, he couldn't even finish it.

She did something like that?

Does anybody have a link to that "If Lord of the Rings was written in the style of a Japanese light novel" parody?

Rate my warrior women:
>world is a hell dimension, very high death rate to monsters, disease, war
>human birth rate is up to Sierra Leone levels in response
>not always enough resources to support growth or enough death to allow it
>armies form units of sworn virgins to act as scouts, messengers, archers, very rarely spearmen
>ofc you could form units of comfort women too but they don't die so good
>trained to only go after male soldiers when they outnumber them, especially when they can surround them, and also trained for stealth

Why is Sanderson able to shit out book after book while GRRM and Rothfuss can barely put down a sentence?

Just use East Asian elements nigga, or make fire and lightning two separate elements or have bending only work on two elements at once so like earth+fire=glassbenders and water+air=stormbenders or something.

Because they are too busy shitting out what little life they have left and stuffing themselves with food.

As far as I know he got really sick, consumption or whatever, Japs have a few taboo diseases, and that's when the quality started dropping. It felt like an axed ending though.

Because GURM eats by his swimming pool waiting for inspiration to strike while Sanderson spends ten hours a day at his standing desk writing.

Sanderson just writes, his process has always been to write more rather than revise what he has. Hence the dogshit dialogue

If I love Mieville and Lovecraft, will I like VanderMeer?

He's better than either of them at crafting an actual story so you should

I remember an early interview with him where he was asked how he comes up with ideas and gets through writer's block. He said everytime he doesn't know what to do next he just introduces new characters. Which is fucking hilarious.
By the end there were so many half developed characters.

Just imagine how popular he would be if he was a writer.

What video game based books are any good?

Witcher series was written by a literal cuck for your information