/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Tor's Best Books of 2016 Edition
>tor.com/2016/12/12/some-of-the-best-books-we-got-a-chance-to-read-in-2016/
>tor.com/2016/12/05/tor-com-reviewers-choice-the-best-books-of-2016/

Fantasy
>Selected:
>i.imgur.com/qkz73sR.jpg
>General:
>i.imgur.com/igBYngL.jpg
>Flowchart:
>i.imgur.com/uykqKJn.jpg
>Beginner's Guide to Fantasy:
>i.imgur.com/fOGNfWK.jpg

Science Fiction
>Selected:
>i.imgur.com/A96mTQX.jpg
>i.imgur.com/IBs9KE8.jpg
>General:
>i.imgur.com/r55ODlL.jpg
>i.imgur.com/gNTrDmc.jpg
>NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books:
>i.imgur.com/IJxTQBL.jpg

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I think Steve is a really great guy and a good author

Here is the reviewers’ choice books

I dropped The Long Way off my reading list because somebody on another site mentioned there's a character who basically exists to be mean to everybody, and the ship's captain does nothing about this or the other crew don't just give him a blanket party ("it's just a bad dream fatboy") for causing trouble, which really just breaks one's suspension of disbelief.

Good fantasy recommendation for my friend? He likes classics, the bronte sisters, anime, edge chronicles, and xenoblade chronicles.

Sandman
Breeks

Breeks? google isn't helping.

>trusting tor reviewers

Tor pushes out some pretty tumblr-tier shit. Not that they don't publish a lot of good books but I'll be fucked if I'm going to trust their reviewers not to be agenda driven. I read for funsies, not to be beaten over the head with gender politics.

Brent Weeks, though that user is memeing you, he's shit.

Oh okay. I didn't recognize the name.

>being this triggered

He's not shit you're shit

I think you meant to say

>I only like politics in my books if they conform to my present worldview

Thanks

Orphans of Chaos worth a read?

Rec. some classic outer space sci-fi, thanks.

I'm now 10000 words in and I want to raze my story to the ground and re-make it from the ashes as a generic potterclone where instead of it being a school, it's a city full of hidden passages and speakeasies

I bet you jelly you never had tight pussy

So lev grossman but city big?

Ah storm it.

Zizek is a modern fantasy character, you can tell by how much he sniffs.

Any recommendations for someone who likes dark fantasy like Berserk and Dark Souls?

Suicide

>Dark Souls

twitter.com/PVBrett/status/809279810165948419

Sweet

Why don't you add Bakker to that

That's pretty normal for the 10,000 word mark. You'll get more out of it if you can actually finish it instead of restarting a dozen times.

6/10 Final verdict

Hard to rate this one, the beginning is really weak and the end is much stronger but it kind of felt like luck that it got better at the end because /something else/ happened about half a dozen times as though the author was just throwing things at the wall hoping some would stick.

The end result of a few of the characters is pretty satisfying, like the main villain turning out to be chaotic lawful instead of actually a bad person, and the main character himself might be interesting if he had any internal consistency.

Idn. Wouldn't recommend.

Besides, it has airships and I struggle with airships because I instinctively lump them with the much loathed steampunk even when the book isn't actually steampunk.

Just finished this. I enjoyed it but why does everyone act like it's so confusing? You can figure out what almost everything is just by context in which it's referenced.

Warrens were a bit confusing at first but that's it.

Has anyone ever answered that question? I've only ever seen it met by memes.

There's still a lot of stuff you have no clue about yet, but you have the right mindset for reading it which is to just take it as it comes and trust that things will be explained eventually. If you obsess too much over working out details in MBotF you'll never get very far because it takes several books before you have enough information to really piece the mythos together.

This. Tor isn't accepting novellas in their new contest or whatever that are based on European culture. Medieval/High fantasy is inherently white. If someone who isn't white wants to write about African wizards, then power to them, but banning Eurocentric fantasy is like hosting a white-only RnB festival

We literally answer Dying Earth and New Sun every single time. Feeling of loneliness and isolation in a vibrant, overgrown world where most of what's going on can't possibly be understood; New Sun additionally has a near-hopeless mission to reignite a fire source.

To be a devil's advocate, a lot of slush-pile writers use European fantasy as a crutch, and Imaro is pretty baller. That said, the best fantasy isn't world-built around African myths, it's world-built around the Angolan civil war and Rhodesian bush war.
Not that I know of any aside from what I'm writing

I went through my steampunk fetish phase, and I think the problem with the genre is that people completely forget that it's supposed to be retro science fiction. Instead of thinking of something new that asks questions, they regurgitate aesthetics that they will grow out of. The vast majority of Steampunk lacks originality

So the answer is that there really isn't anything like Dark Souls, then. Those thematic similarities aside, BotNS doesn't even have a slightly similar feel or aesthetic to it.

>Imaro is pretty baller
Isn't it just melanin-enriched Conan?

So what?

I'm not opposed to real world politics in my books up until they stop being entertaining and start being preachy. I would happily read a novel about a black disabled trans woman if her race/gender/physical abilities played no role in what was happening, but those kinds of characters tend to signal a certain kind of agenda that's just not fun to read about.

For fuck's sake I come from the generation that invented this shit and I am as tolerant as they come so why do I have to read books that are actively attempting to make me feel guilty about behaviours that I don't participate in.

>setting aside those things that are similar
>there isn't anything similar

Is that a problem?

Just sounds done desu.

Lots of works have broadly similar themes, but feel extremely different, therefore not necessarily appealing to a mutually inclusive audience. I can see why the memes took over.

I'm generally going to prefer European-style fantasy because it's the culture I'm familiar with, but I'd definitely give foreign fantasy a shot if it was well written. What I am absolutely not interested in is the kind of affirmative action that Tor is practicing.

Also, fantasy based on the Rhodesian bush war could be cool. What are you working on, user?

Any good Lovecraftian-like fantasy?

What are some good fantasy with lesbians doing lesbian things?

Robert E. Howard's work was also pretty racist. You might enjoy it.

S L A V F A N T A S Y
L
A
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F
A
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Y

I haven't checked but, are there any pagan inspired fantasy out there?

>inb4 witcher books

Anything else?

ooh, I like slav things, what's that?

->
Wolfhound

I read that as Slave fantasy. Some Veeky Forumserate I am. Seriously, recommend me some good Slav fantasy, preferably stuff on audible

Any coming of age romance magic/fantasy recommendations?

Best English Jules Verne translations?

Very little of them got translated. And even even fewer are published published in english, Germany and Poland are more lucky. I suppose that's just because of you angloes are not very fond of publishing foreign literature. But those who are close to the request are Goodsdoom and Chasers of the Wind

Reminder that you just read the best book in the Malazan series.

As an Estonian I would really prefer if you never posted anything russian here ever again.
Thank you.

Who gave a word to a halfing?

>Estonians

>a people that think Madara is an acceptable girl name

>naming your daughters after Naruto villains

So what would happen if you Slicked yourself with Stormlight, reducing friction to zero, but then get hit with a sword?

Would it slide off your body, do reduced damage, what?

I have never seen a girl named Madara in my life

dont be a fool

I've mentioned it before, it's about an expedition made by this little country in the middle of nowhere to follow their river to the ocean, as their old records say that's where rivers terminate and they want to know where they are on the map. It turns out the planet is huge, so they just take their cool trucks across a different adventure every week. It's gone through a lot of iterations but right now I'm doing good work on a trilogy of short stories about when the expedition joins a motorized caravan crossing about five thousand miles of rugged terrain, and the bandits with small air forces, giant ice monsters in the mountains, god-like creature in the plains beyond them, that they encounter.

It's fantasy even though everyone has 1970s-era tech because science isn't the focus, it's on a secondary world with no mention of Earth, the planet's bigger than Jupiter but has one standard gravity, and there might be magic, but at this point I'm debating if I even need it.

But the character archetypes are a lot more like you'd find in, say, Gods Must Be Crazy 2 than Shannara. Grizzled mercs, ideological refugees, clueless city folk out for adventure.

Sanderson would probably think long and hard about that, then say it depends on exactly what you're slicking and how, and how if you do it wrong you might actually make it easier for it to cut you. He probably won't go down the route of careless edgedancers making their limbs slick off, but he might make it easier for swords to glance away.

Can someone point me in the direction of where I could get Roadside Picnic in Russian/cyrillic? I'm trying to learn the language and I also want to read it in its original prose. I can't find it for download either, so I guess I'll have to buy it.

We're not asking the important questions here. Did Dalinar storm Navani or not?

Shallan's spren all but implies he did, but we have to be sure.

A more important question is the existence of shitspren.

That's actually briefly touched upon in WoK, I think in one of the Kaladin flashbacks he askes his mother if even "dung" has sprens and she answer that it probably does.

And while we're on it, if you get horny while in a social situation and consequently attract some sexspren, wouldn't that be awkward as all fuck?

>TFW I send in a submission about how great it is to kill gays and Jews and how it improves the world
>Write it under a sandnigger penname
>It's arabic culture so it's all right and not problematic at all

I can tolerate the first part but
>request submissions from writers from underrepresented populations

Is the sci-fi sjw aids spreading to fantasy now, these people need to be put in ovens.

>now
Fantasy has been a vehicle for political correctness for a while now.

Not so much the mainstream and popular stuff from what I can tell. And no the lack of GRI doesn't count, I mean obvious agenda like this shit. One could argue for the kingkiller chronicle but I think that one hilariously fails at it by being a male power fantasy but for white knight orbiter nerds.

>I can tolerate the first part
Why though? What's wrong with European culture? It's actually not very well represented in the fantasy genre at all, a modern kitsch version of faux medievalism sprinkled with puddle deep Tolkien conventions is the most common setting. I understand that an ignorant American might think that the fantasy genre is very European but we the literati know that that this is not true at all.

Authentic European medieval culture is just as unexplored and foreign as any other culture in the modern post-Tolkien fantasy genre. I find it just as offensive for it to be the subject of Jewish discrimination as such done on the basis of race. Especially since I doubt that they truly embrace other cultures and that they really just want western liberalism (which is corrupted Christianity) with a light Oriental flavour.

It always struck me as super funny how /pol/ types hate the fuck out of radical Islamism while also having more or less the same ideals : kill the gays, jews, enslave women, one God et cetera.

Maybe they just don't like the competition.

It's understandable in a sense that you can set this as a theme then something else next time etc. and I wouldn't jump at it as some example of sjwism immediately out of context. But the second part just makes it abundantly clear.

And if you go in-depth in individual European medieval cultures wouldn't that be more like historic fantasy not just inspired by whatever fantasy? I do think we could use more of that but you need actual knowledge of history to do that right so most people aren't going to find the effort.

They're different breeds. Both bears and wolves are predators, they both hunt and they both eat the lesser animals. Yet the wolf does not get along with the bear, can you imagine why? It's a silly question, so I assume that you are a rabbit or a deer.

I don't see /pol/ going over to other countries and raising hell while the media portray them as poor, helpless refugees that are being discriminated against.

>anything less than full degendered anomie is enslaving women

bahahaha
that's because they never leave their mommys basement

>I am a wolf, if you will. An apex predator.

This is possibly the most fedora post I've seen in here and that includes the Rothfuss excerpts.

I'm actually
Havinga lot of fun

Spoken like a true rabbit.

Indeed, my good Sir. Soon we shall purge the Earth of these vermin and take all the wenches for ourselves, at long last we will have revenge on those who wedgied our underpants in school. *tips*

hard to take anything but the top covers even slightly seriously

i don't remember this dialogue in zootopia.
may be some other form?

Notice how the sjw will not even try to defend the point that started the whole discussion and just try to derail into shitposting, possibly by typing something stupid while pretending to be the opposition then jerking themselves off, or just picking out some random shitpost to reply to. Because as we all know sjws always lie.

Don't be mean. Each of them has its own charm in my opinion.

>discussion
>sjw
bahahahaha
Holy shizt, keep em coming. You're making my day.

The is meant to be , wrong quote.

The people talking about it before they came along, I agree that you obviously can't discuss anything with them.

Your point doesn't change what he said about the two having similar ideals. In fact, it reinforces it:

"What would /pol/ do if they had the size and influence of Islam?"

Whichever ones dont censor his blatant racism.

I was talking about ideologies and social organization, not people. I'm also not identifying with either group myself. The allegory might put you off but I don't think that makes it inaccurate, the survivalist values of Muslims, Christians, /pol/acks and what have you are in stark contrast to the reversals of liberals, neo-marxists and so forth. If you cannot understand why they don't get along then you are likely to belong to the other camp because you do not know the fundamentals of what they are.
>What would /pol/ do if they had the size and influence of Islam?
Stop the white genocide. Remove Jewish influence from society. Create monoethnic states. They wouldn't flood the east with welfare sucking parasites in the hopes of winning a long term demographic war.

>What would /pol/ do if they had the size and influence of Islam

The inverse of how things are now, which is trading shit for shit. The human race should be done away with all together in retrospect of that. Preach that one group is objectively inferior to another and then go about how life is carved by your own hands. Shitty species that thinks it's intelligent, only in comparison to the other retarded life on the planet. The equivalent to an average kid being in a special ed class and being proud of being the top student.

meant for

You should write to Sanderson and tell him you've discovered something sharper than the Shardblades : your edge.

I was mocking you, /pol/tard.

Theres no discussion to be had with the likes of you.

What do we have here in this thread?

I do not browse /pol/, too close to /b/ for my taste. But keep on lying, we all know it's what you do best.

I said what I said, and I meant what I meant. My view stays the same until shown otherwise.

But all of this is digressing. Is Edgedancer worth reading?