/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

>Selected
>i.imgur.com/qkz73sR.jpg
Jesus christ the faggot shill manipulated the OP and you guys didn't even notice. Replace in the next OP with this i.imgur.com/r688cPe.jpg

Star Wars Heir to the empire vs Star Wars Bloodline

Which do I read first?

...

They're sci-fi books you turd.

Give us something to work with you tease

Tough question.

What's the best christmas /sff/ novel?

Ratings for comfy, winter snow, and heartwarming emotions.

Is Prince of Nothing denser than Malazan? I gave up on the latter after a few pages because it was tiring but part of that might have been because I was kind of in a rump at the time. Anyhow would you consider PoN more or less dense, prose and story wise?

>another Dune adaptation in the works

Why can't filmmakers move on to actual good books?

Read:
BS
Rev Space
3 Body Prob

What's next you say?

Because Dune is well known.
Scifi films just picking up recently, let it get some traction with popular work before we throw in some good shit
chasm city would bang as an HBO style series

Hogfather

Have you seen the complete list of sff adaptations?

tor.com/2016/12/01/sci-fi-fantasy-adaptations-movies-tv/

The idea at hand is something that I've mentioned here more than a few times. It's about this guy named Will who, after his mom dies, moves to a very weird city in search of his dad. The city in question is a depression-era alternate new york if they hired JK Rowling and MC Escher to do the urban planning. Speakeasies and hidden streets, parks and tunnels are everywhere, some of which seem to follow laws of geometry not approved of by euclid

Pretty quickly, will gets wrapped up in a series of mysterious and mystical herculean labours along with a girl who is some kind of mad scientist trying to understand the oddities of this city. He's obstructed by a psychotic magician who may or may not be the antichrist, and interfered with by a cabal of ancient gods worshiped by the urban fauna.

ultimately these quests will end up transforming the city. Also, there may be a major plot involving a puzzlebox-like book containing the sum total of all human knowledge and the quest to unlock every page. that's kind of an idea I only just had today. Things are coming together weirdly

>adaptations

Nothing has and ever will be shot for most of those.

Dresden Files are terrible.

Millenial detected.

>Warbreaker sequel still has no ETA
>miiiight start getting Elantris sequels after Stormlight 4
Fucking Sanderson and his twelve gorillion YA stories.

Malazan is dense throughout, whereas PoN clears up after the first 150 pages

don't call me a 35 year old

yes

I like Alcatraz and The Rithmatist

But he's created a new Reckoners-tier YA series that nobody asked for

creating* oops

yeah, writing it out didn't organize my thoughts really

well, I still like them

not everyone likes dune. It's deep and defining, and it handles religion better than almost any other scifi story, but it also inherits some of the worst traits of space opera and epic fantasy. The big issue is it has a slow start and doesn't do a good job at hooking people in from the get-go.

It's more a hanukkah story than christmas but the Golem and The Jinni meets all the qualifications. Most of it is

>giving a shit about B-tier sanderson
just bring out stormlight archive 3 already

Fall next year, baka. Oathbreaker is done btw, about to go to revision 3.

Okay, looking over my own explanation it seems the two real difficulties in telling this story are

>how do I introduce the quests and what are they?
>how do I get the villain involved and how is he connected to the other characters?

I've got big ideas, but they don't fit together easily

why is sanderson the only writer this thread cares about? seriously, every other post is a sanderson post

Yeah that is annoying

>why is sanderson the only writer this thread cares about? seriously, every other post is a sanderson post
I don't know man, I've got no interest in him but it seems like there's some real love for the Cosmere books. (Maybe because they come out so frequently?) Prefer something a bit weirder myself, like Purser-Hallard or Charles De Lint. What do you like?

The real crime is that Jodorowsky's Dune will never get made. I mean maybe there's a chance that HBO could do it, there's also a chance there could be a Libertarian president in the US.

>In 1973, film producer Arthur P. Jacobs optioned the film rights to Dune but died before a film could be developed. The option was then taken over two years later by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who proceeded to approach, among others, Virgin Records, with the prog rock groups Tangerine Dream, Gong and Mike Oldfield before settling on Pink Floyd and Magma for some of the music; artists H. R. Giger, Chris Foss, and Jean Giraud for set and character design; Dan O'Bannon for special effects; and Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Amanda Lear, and others for the cast.[3]

>Herbert traveled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour film ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship.

How much fantastical element is there to this book? I gather there's a section about witches, and Goodreads seems to categorize it as fantasy, but it also seems like more of an "outer Veeky Forums" type thing. Without spoilers if possible, is there actual magic in it, or just Moore's ambiguous "using your imagination is magical, storytellers are like wizards" motif?

Ken Liu and Catherynne Valente when they write fantasy, Tregillis when he blurs the lines between the two. I swear by Butcher for urban stuff, and still mourn the loss of Andrew Hussie

>stormlight archive 3

Dalinar gets all contemplative and shit and worries about the future to come

Shalan is an annoying cunt and remains so for all her chapters

life shits all over kaladin and more people he cares about die violent deaths but he gets a new shiny power up in the process

syl remains cute and adorable.

there, i covered everything of importance that will happen and now you don't have to read it when it comes out.

> Three Body Problem
> What's next you say?

obvious answer:
Dark Forest
Death's End

I churned through Liu Cixins Trilogy literally in the span of last friday night ( when I became aware of the german translation of book 1, which had just come out ) and saturday morning ( by which time I had gotten the second and third book in english, since they aren't translated yet ).

It's brilliant,
It's depressing,
his perspective on things, culture, society etc is unique ( most likely this is due to him being a fucking chinese growing up in a weird quasi communist society ) and grand.

I loved it, but I was honestly exhausted after I got through those three: Usually I enjoy Science Fiction, but after that I couldn't ( though I did re-read "Light" on Sunday ), but read a couple of fantasy books during the week.

You could also read:
" Uprooted " by Naomi Novik, which I was critical of at first but got into quite well ( though the magic in there is rather cringey in it's description, but you'll notice that fast )

The two bibles are still around and kept safe, so even if it's never getting made as it was envisioned there's the possibility that an animated film based on Moebius's art could get made or copies of the books could be open for the market or get in a museum. Maybe if it gets memed enough something will happen.

/sffg/ does this series of events seem contrived?

>guy arrives in a new city
>immediately gets robbed by a guy pretending to help him with his bags
>takes the subway going who knows where
>it's just him and a girl in the car
>third rail powers down in the middle of the tunnel
>the two end up prying the doors open and going on a mini-adventure in the subway tunnels
>finally the head back to a bar she knows
>the guy who robbed mc is there
>girl flips a shit at him because he was robbing a dirt-broke rube instead of picking her up from the ferry
>turns out he's a mobster, she's the boss's daughter and the whole place is a front
>after things calm down she learns mc has no job but knows how to cook and offers to set him up working in the kitchen of the front
>he agrees, because he's not sure if he'll be fitted for some new concrete sneakers if he says no

>only two people in a subway car

Suspension of disbelief ruined

i'd read it

I live in the non-fictional version of the city it's set in and I see that happen all the time. it depends on the stop, the time of day and the day of the week, and the weather. He's on the train at around 8 at a place that doesn't get a lot of traffic

Man, fuck this guy. The guy must realize his book is complete and utter shit, otherwise he wouldn't continually spam it instead of spamming it a couple times and letting word of mouth do its thing. Utterly pathetic.

Didn't seem too contrived until running into the guy that robbed him, who the girl knew. Can't set it in a city but have all the characters know each other, it makes the world seem too small and underpopulated.

Nobody reads the OP links. I made one of the linked charts, occasionally I post it separately in the thread and everyone acts like they've never seen it before (because they haven't).

Still, good catch, thanks.

What did you like or hate about those books?

that was the part I was worried about. Honestly the weak part isn't that they ran into the guy since he was at a place she'd expect him to be: it's that she ended up traveling with the guy who got robbed

what if – hear me out – the girl saw the thief rob the mc and followed him onto the subway car to make sure he didn't get himself mugged or gang-raped. Then, after the ordeal with the train she brought him to the bar because she knew that's where the theif would go.

It would establish that the girl, who would initially come off ditzy and reckless during the subway tunnel adventure is quite shrewd

Let's be real : it would have been an ungodly clusterfuck and would have had little to nothing to do with the actual Dune.

What drives a lot of fiction discussion is novelty and speculation, so when you have an author with tons of in-progress series with books being released frequently it means they get mentioned a lot. I'd like to talk about Malazan Book of the Fallen but I get very few responses when I bring it up, I figure cause people who like it already read it and anything I say is old news to them.

>mfw I prompted Dino user to make a picture making fun of Long Sun because I wasn't enjoying it at first but now that it became good I feel bad for having caused this

What can you tell me about Weird West stuff? As a burger it's pretty much my native mythology, but I don't know any actual titles and it seems like a lot of the books are RPG-novelization tier. Is Joe R. Lansdale good?

So for the fantasy novel I'm (trying) to write, I had an idea for synesthesia to involve the magic of the world. The idea is that synesthesia is a sign that someone has magical abilities, and obviously the main character would be one of these people. Would it get annoying to have her narration casually describe colors having tastes, sounds having smells, etc., every so often, because it's being told from her perspective?

>annoying
depends on how you and the character seem to be dealing with it.

>"And there it is again," thought to herself, "that strange metallic taste that I get every time i look at the color brown. I wonder if i will ever stop getting these."
>But she had no time to ponder over her strange association of colors and taste as just then she heard a loud crash outside the room.
>"Are they here?" she gasped.
>She had been dreading this day would come sooner rather than later.
>"I guess I don't get to get married," she quipped in a low whisper to herself, "and have a normal family life after all. Alana and Denny would have to find a new womb to come to this earth apparently."
>She unsheathed her katana, which made her mouth taste like old paper. She was almost tired of her peculiarity. Only if it tasted like a starbucks mocha latte.
>But she didn't have any time to be day dreaming about quality coffee; it was time to get ready for the inevitable barrage of swooshes and clanking of the all-to-familiar "honor-reclaiming" sword fights her city had become so infamous about.

just cooked something right now. have fun.

I just finished Cugel's Saga and it was good. Does anybody in these gay threads like Jack Vance?

Wouldn't the Dark Tower series be considered Weird West? If so, that would have to be the most well known example.

Try the comic series Preacher, it's a modern setting but it uses a lot of tropes from westerns and has a good deal of weird shit and americana
Or try The Dark Tower like suggested

The latter.

Great book.

user, he's not asking for something worse than RPG novelizations.

We all do, except for anti-dino-user who hyperventilates. I lost my place in Cugel the Clever but Dragon Masters is my all-time favorite.

>the chart under selected fantasy still has buried giant
When are you going to put back the original one? If people think we are shilling so some blogger can get a quick 10 bucks they will not take us seriously. They will stop listening to our recommendation.

Fix it

Is that how the city looked? When I heard walls I didn't expect that .

I like gene wolfe user, so this is a friendly jab at him. Have you even seen I said I hate him? His books are in my charts, and I used to recommend him years before this general became a thing.

>another warbreaker, shades of grey, Lightbringer.
You better do it justice desu.

>all 60+ regular posters like Jack Vance except one guy
Hey dino user, what you getting yourself for Christmas?

Uprooted is a fine novel, but the Dragon is exceedingly tsundere.

Dino user will buy himself a copy of a book published on the same day that he looked for it and woman hater user will masturbate to the most recent Vox Day work.

Then the two anons will engage in premarital coitus, marry and finally leave this threads whilst we gingerly witness their departure into the fires of perdition.

Consequently we would breathe a sigh of relief.

Is Malazan as good as it is set out to be? As far as I can see it exceeds most people's expectations, but I'm fence-sitting super hard.

I guess what's the writing and characters like? I don't really give a shit about the scene and plot, but rather how it interacts with characters. All I care about is 'human' feeling characters (even if they're aliens or whatever the fuck). Bonus points if the authors a poetic masterpiece, and put together with a genius plot or whatever.

I'm getting old so maybe the big epic series is getting past me... I loved Wheel of Time as a teenager / adult, I wouldn't feel the same for it now I think.

Any other suggestions is appreciated. Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang looked interesting and worth a read...

why don't you just read it and find out
there's a million reviews on it already

Dino user is the guy that likes old books. Antidino user is the one that screams new books.

Which one of you fags suggested the godspeaker trilogy?
I'm a few chapters in and all I'm seeing is
>tuggs his/her braids
>wasted water
It's like dune and wot mixed together, and not in a nice way.

Shit improves after the first book.

Malazan's thing is the epic scale of things.
The rest is not that great.

Wolfe is probably more to your liking.
Also Dorian Gray from Wilde is really good, some fantastical elements but the prose is just fantastic.

That could work.

Winter Warriors by David Gemmell

>Preacher
*unholsters revolver*
heh...nothin personnel...pardner

Bakker is the best writer of this decade. an anyone beat him ?

You haven't even read enough writers this decade to say that.

>Bakker is the best writer of this decade.

You're not even the best writer in this thread, Scott.

SH has him beat easy I'd say

I hope you get cancer and see your family die in a car crash in front of you.

>Bakker
get Bakker, you suck.

3 dubs in a row shitting on Bakker.

well, scott, time to leave this board forever.

I know this place is for memeers...but I have read pretty much popular SFF book. Go to any top lists there's a good chance I have read everything. I read about 300-350 books/series. I'm at a point when I don't know when to read( been here for a long time)

Bakker is not the best ever, but he is the best writer of this decade as far as SFF goes. Nothing is as ambitious as this series...

I hope you prove me wrong because I don't know what else to read. Do it.

Who is SH ?

Is he that bad?

Being "ambitious" has nothing to do with the actual quality of the work itself. How you have managed to NOT grasp this very simple concept after allegedly having read hundreds of SFF books is completely beyond me.

Yes, Bakker's work is "ambitious". What you don't mention is that it completely fails to live up to its own hype and falls flat on its face. The prose is incredibly purple and pretentious, the "philosophy" is high school stoner tier, the dialogue varies from cringe to simply ok. Kellhus is no different than Kvothe, and yet Rothfuss gets shit on for having a Gary Stu character and Bakker doesn't, because Bakker had the shrewd intuition of covering it up with a pretense of deepness.

Having a great scope doesn't mean much when you aren't up to the task.

Name of the wind

>i.imgur.com/qkz73sR.jpg

Hah, fucking hell, it took you guys a month to figure out that I had change dit

Comrades, help! What are useful textbook repositories besides gen lib and bookzz?

Yes. Helps to visualize it.

Kellhus is no different than Kvothe
Stop talking out of your ass

Well, we agree that it is ambitious...however I don't think it fails to live up it's own hype.

Everything you said comes from not understanding the series. It's simply a matter of layers. I first read the book about 10 years ago and I thought it's utter shit.

I changed, I became a more mature person and I learned a lot. When I read it again I understood the book on a deeper level. Every criticism ( except the prose, I agree it is bad in some places) is aimed at the surface level.

Everything, including what you said. The philosophy is stupid if you don't use your imagination and try to understand it more. The dialog is also cringe if you can't accept that this is a different world and people talk in different ways ( for different reason)...As for Kellhus, if you understand that he is but a puppet of the gods all this Mary stue nonsense becomes logical...

I mean, the guy thinks he is a genius but he to is "deceived". The first thing he does is almost die in the wilderness, without dumb luck he would have failed.

And so on...there's many more things to say, however you need to look deeper...Those who hate Bakker are not willing or able to do it because not once have I seen proper criticism.

Someone mentioned it in an earlier thread, but it was quickly forgotten.

Anyone got more of these?

Spurdo or Wolfe memes?

Good urban fantasy?

Wolfe.