/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

N O T R E A L L I T E R A T U R E

What books/TV series?

The Secret Circle

Darrow going back home a proper tearjerker lads.

What's a good fantasy novel for someone who liked The Road?

The Stand by Stephen King

What aspect of it in particular?

I'll recommend it. Thanks.
I think the fact that it depicts human frailty in a well-written way that isn't gleeful or sadistic (i.e., it isn't Hostel or Saw or something; you aren't supposed to be into seeing people suffer).

what the fuck am I in for?

What's your favourite 'hard' sci fi? Is pic related any good?

>get bored
>watch YouTube reviews of The Magicians since I just finished it
>this one reviewer says "I can't like a book if I don't like any of the characters, and the characters in this book were just too despicable for me to like them"
Are... are you fucking with me? How many books have you read? Because, yes, the characters do fuck up, but Jesus, they're not generally malevolent or anything. They're just flawed people.

I can vouch for Poul Anderson's skill as a writer, but I haven't read Tau Zero.

I think maybe a disproportionate amount of normie harry potter fags got burnt by it

this is on my list.

Quantum Thief. So hard it's magic.

I actually don't hate Harry Potter. The Magicians is so much fucking better, though.

Quentin is like a less self-aware (and thus more prone to accidentally hurting people he cares about) version of me. He reminds me of my past self, but more studious.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

I liked the exploration of magic or being a magician not being inherently meaningful in of itself and the general dysfunctionality of the central characters.

Always bothered me in potterverse what these cunts actually occupy themselves with or how their society derives any cohesion or purpose when they've not got a Voldemort on the loose.

Agreed. I also like how being dysfunctional doesn't mean "horrible evil person with no redeeming qualities."

I genuinely don't understand why most people hate Quentin so much. Not that I don't see his bad sides, but I don't think he should be condemned outright for them.

Same goes for Eliot, Janet, Alice, and Penny, for that matter.

I haven't read the sequels yet, but I hear Quentin becomes a much better, more mature person in them, which makes the hate even weirder.

I want a fantasy where I can fall in love with the characters and their struggles again ;_;

>i.imgur.com/qkz73sR.jpg
>idiot op didn't change the to kill a god chart

If anything the guy who made that chart should be tripping right now that someone posted shit on his recommendations.

FUCK OFF STEVIAN WITH YOUR SHITTY TO KILL A GOD

GIMME A TUC ARC ALREADY FUCK

Post yours guys.

I fucking HATE how everyone is like, "Oh, Quentin's life was great even before he went to Brakebills and he was bitching then, and then he continued to complain after he got into wizard school, and he's fucking lazy."

What?! His parents neglect him, he probably has a psychiatric disorder, his ONLY two friends are a girl he's in love with and her boyfriend, and he studies his ass off pretty much constantly. He also basically never complains out loud.

>Always bothered me in potterverse what these cunts actually occupy themselves with or how their society derives any cohesion or purpose when they've not got a Voldemort on the loose.
Not to mention they have literal slavery, and when Hermione points this out all they do is make "spew" jokes.

>What's your favourite 'hard' sci fi?
The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem. Classic space story from the time spaceflights were cool. From the relatively recent A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.

Politics and trade

Nah it was pants

Magicians is just "dude magic won't cure depression", that's it for thematic writing.

I like Vox Day's Arts of Dark and Light novels, what are some other fantasy books like those?

>tfw you want Voldemort and the Deatheaters to burn their shit to the ground.

Was reading control point although I might not finish it now that the protag is doing something transparently stupid.

I can't stand that shit, when an author sets something up as "this will ruin everything" and then has their character do it anyway

excuse the occasional meme manga and comic. It's more a diary than anything else.

I think the point was more about the ways that fiction leads us to expect the world to be different than it is. So obviously "magic won't cure depression" is a part of that, but I don't think it's the entirety. Especially in the context of the trilogy.

Voldemort is objectively the good guy in Harry Potter. If the Dumbledore faction has its way there won't even BE any wizards left after another hundred years or so. Genetics obviously do matter since muggles almost never have magic children and wizards almost always do. Race-mixing would be outlawed by any sane government.

b-but muh hermione

I need to do one this year

I read like 150 books last year (admittedly most were 120 page long Parker novels) but didn't track it at all

But muggles and wizards almost always have magic children

"Race mixing" outright doubles the wizard population each generation if you have the average 2.3 kids per couple

>Are... are you fucking with me?
Yeah, what the fuck. Flawed characters is the best part of the Magicians. It was so fresh approach comparing to stamped 'good' and 'bad' characters inhabiting every other fantasy book. Too bad only first part of trilogy was good, everything went downhill with too much of power ups.

good that's up my alley

I liked Alan Moore's weird "school shooting, except at Hogwarts, and totally-not-Harry is both the antichrist and the bastardization of human culture, and he jizzes lightning bolts" story desu.

The wizarding allele is probably dominant, but that only works for a few generations though. If the mixed kids keep breeding with other muggles eventually fewer and fewer of the offspring will get at least one copy of the wizarding allele, and there's no way to de-racemix the population. Mixing with muggles would lead to a false renaissance before final decline and fall.

does have a way with the words though

>The air was thick with the smell of burning metal and the sweat of tired magicians. She could sense it in the room with them now, the land itself: an angry, hungry, thirsty infant thing demanding life, ready to take it from them if it had to. It cried out with an almost human voice. A spray of golden light erupted from between one of Quentin’s fingers: that must have been one of Mayakovsky’s coins going. Scenery raced past the windows, all of them now, too blurred to make out.

>Space distorted grotesquely, and for an instant the room looked stretched out of all proportion, fish-eyed, as if a bulbous blister had formed on the surface of reality itself. Plum was scared of what would happen if it burst.

gonna have to take this on the chin sometime this year

Not bad guise, here's mine.
>Memefuss is rated higher than Wilde, Eco, Borges, Blake and Melville
Their userbase makes we want to throw up sometimes.

What'd you think of Altered Carbon then?

So what, The Scar and Iron Council next? Still rate the Bas-Lag trio higher than anything else he's done but I may be in the minority on that one.

meant for

Objectively, a few of those are okay, but you read a lot of horrible garbage.

Yep. I'm looking forward to Iron Council in particular, since from what I can tell it's basically the Russian Revolution with golem train engineers.

How'd you rate the the Baxter/Pratchett series?

wasn't too bad of a problem for the whimsical children's book tone of the early Potter books but the paper thin worldbuilding was glaring by the end.

This too, so easy to not appreciate good things but bitch about bad. Obvious comparison with Harry potter, tried to read books and i felt like i am trying to eat bucket of sawdust. *insert HP franchise joke* Magicians writing was tasty.

These food analogies... Martin's flavor... halp.

First book's excellent, but after that it starts to feel like diminishing returns on the same basic concept (probably because Pratchett's contributions got less and less as he neared the end ;--;). Lobsang's the best character, very clearly a Pratchett character, and he's mainly in the first one.

I like how they can all be reduced to the one simple...

>that three headed dog was sitting on a trapdoor. Guarding something.
>2nd story girls' bathroom. Guarding something.
>Whomping Willow. Guarding something.
>Hedge maze. Guarding something.
>Department of Mysteries. Guarding something.
>Cave by the sea. Guarding something.
>Pool in the Forest, Gringott's, Room of Requirement. Guarding something.

The High House.

Gimme a good fantasy with some good romance.

Does it bother you guys at all that the rest of Veeky Forums sees this as a containment thread?

>stamped 'good' and 'bad' characters inhabiting every other fantasy book.
this is the era of the grey friendo, what books are you talking about?

Nah.

Not really. It means we get less pretentious "literary" anons acting like anything genre is totally worthless.
Most of it is, but Veeky Forums culture prevents proper discussion of good sffg outside of here

No. Ivory towers don't end well.

How is that Guns of Empire series?

They're all set up as whodunits as well.

Outer Veeky Forums is a containment board.

So many of these would be twice as good with a simple crop. I fixed the levitating Outer Veeky Forums Edgelord but I couldn't save his fedora.

>"We're not contained away from them... they're contained away from us."

ronch ronch ronch

>have only ever lurked /sffg/
>try to lurk Veeky Forums
>barely any of it is about actual book/novels/stories, mostly about obscure philosophy or /blog posting

Honestly the rest of Veeky Forums is a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who probably arrange their books (which they got from BooksByTheYard.com) by color.

I like it here :3

What are you guys talking about?

I will say that their snobbishness made me feel guilty about not reading more classics, probably improving my habits in the long run. But yeah there's a lot of bullshit.

The person that made that painting doesn't know much about the layout of Seattle.

That "Stevian Heartbound" guy keeps putting his (presumably) shitty selfpub in the OP charts

Oh, is the book really bad or something? Or is he just shilling?

Definitely the latter, probably the former - it's ten bucks on Amazon, so no one's actually read it to find out, but the odds seem poor (plus no one wants to reward his shilling).

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no book and the Kindle file just reads "kek, I meme'd you" or something.

There is a book, and the free sample is available. It's pretty bad.

If Stevian came here in the first place he's not coming now; around that time there were several anons that came forward with self-published books, mostly self-indulgent philosophy stuff, but "To Kill a God" was just too hilarious a title to pass up. Stevian's probably just a dude that figured since he could impress his peers with his theorizing he could write a pretty sweet book. Unfortunately, all he's read is Animorphs and Pokemon or something like that. You can look him up, he did an interview-style questionnaire for some self-publishing website where he admits it.

He's just a meme perfect storm is all.
>pretentious pseudonym
>pretentious title
>wanky omphaloskeptic story
>terrible prose style
>ten whole dollars for a self-pub
>looks like pic related
I didn't put him on the chart but I bet an user did. He's a funnier Boku no Pico than Orphans of Chaos, I'd say.

That's post-apocalypse Seattle so everything's different.

lel

But the Space Needle is at the base of Queen Anne Hill, which is elevated but sloping toward the Sound southwestward. How could a marsh form there? There's no place for water to collect.

Is that our boy Stevian?

Post.
Apocalypse.

...

>I didn't appreciate their actions

...

>not an apostrophe in sight

What is this?

I like you ;)

Yes there are?

>"I released the mans arms and let my elbow find its way into the mans gut"

>expert spiral of death and destruction

lost

Oh, he did use it for
>didn't

This fucking guy