/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

Plenty, there is also sci-fi that takes what those guys did 50 years ago and builds on it.

The more I read Ballard the more I see that, like, PKD, he is preoccupied with the way that the constructs of modern life can shift us into different planes of reality; regressive planes, isolated, and with laws of logic unto themselves. Here, acts of the previous world no longer hold their meaning.

JG is a better prose stylist than PKD, though. His prose is so evenly modulated and contemplative that you hardly flinch when something violent, surrealistic, or perverse comes into view - it's kind of insidious, where PKD is more freewheeling and slapdash.

>Plenty
Like what?

>bygone

>like
-actual grimdark setting, everything is blood and guts and horror, and everyone is ultimately fucked
-few or no attempts at cheesy Reddit humor that plagues the rest of the contemporary fantasy genre
-zero attempts at political correctness; all the fictional nations hate and/or make fun of each other; the world is shit for everyone
-seriously explores a fun idea: "what if space aliens crash landed on a fantasy world?"
-rape-powered orcs
-unravels the typical cliche overpowered kvothe fantasy good-at-everything main character by making him the villain and having him literally cuck the protagonist, steal all of his friends, and turn everyone against him

>dislike
-i get that it's supposed to be a grimdark version of Tolkien's world, but i wish it was more different
-not enough glimpses into the alleys and bars of the world; most of the story is told through important and powerful dudes
-the fact that i will never have a qt inchoroi gf

Oh my, I quite enjoyed this one. The horrible ruined world shrouded in darkness. The creeping monstrosities. The grim and hopeless inhabitants. The pointless struggles. The forgotten arcane technology. All tied together by a haphazard yet heroic journey with a fun twist or two and a happy ending. As a connoisseur of mediocre pulp, I highly recommend!

Isn't there a glaring plothole here?

The novo-vacuum expands because it is a more stable vacuum than normal vacuum. However, later we learn that the novo-vacuum is actually a superposition of all possible vaccum states. But if each vacuum state has a definite energy, and they aren't degenerate, how does the novo-vacuum super position have a definite energy? A super position of eigenstates is only an eigenstate if they are degenerate.

What is /sffg/ opinion on Sad Puppies and related drama? Who was in the wrong?

Hippies were wrong.
Also probably some other people.
Lot's of discussion in the archives around the time of the awards. Further discussion of this topic will only aggravate the delicate sensibilities in this thread :(

>drama
About five twats decided to boost their sales by being all edgy and drumming up controversy. Tempest in a teapot desu.

Neither side was 100% right or wrong. Hugo folks really were awarding boring social justice dreck, but the Puppies were trying to beat it with poorly edited self-publishing tier stuff, both sides talking their crap up. Nobody cares about Hugos anymore.

Anyway the Puppies are dead, the Sads (Baen) will probably try something but they were always low-energy, the Rabids got the Dragon Awards and they're satisfied with that, Scalzi got like a million bucks for a big deal with Tor and he'll probably go to Mexico when he can't write the books, everybody's happy.

The new drama is Appendix N. Some rando blogger on Castalia started reading everything in D&D's appendix on works it was inspired by, and a bunch of kids raised on Star Wars are trying to start a new movement from it, while the old Hugo people are adjusting their monocles and pontificating on how of course everyone still reads Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard, how on EARTH could you not have, we just read Atwood instead for, like, a joke, or something like that. Although there's not a lot of cross-blogging on it and there aren't any heavyweights involved, so don't expect any sparks, just a lot more nerds reading Conan than before.

Have you guys read Worm? Some friends were telling me to check it out.

I'm not going to write this, but I need a retardation and fedora check on this novel idea

Its set in renaissance italy and focuses on an inventor/sculptor who after years of toil manages to create an automata of unparalleled beauty and grace and soon becomes the talk of the region. For it he becomes hunted by the church for committing the sin of playing god. Little does he realize, he actually is one

The MC is the half-human son of Prometheus, who later took the names Hephæstus and Vulcan. Unfortunately, Prometheus isn't the only god to take on new names, and there was a time when once the name of The Almighty was none other that Zeus.

Is there still a huge demand for new fantasy? Can I actually write a good fantasy novel and become as great as Tolkien/Eddison/Brooks/Moorcock/Jordan/Rowling/Martin? The place I'm from consists mostly of illiterates or people who stick to the classics and nothing more. Admittedly, I don't go out and read some unknown author unless there's already some hype about them. How do I get into new fantasy writers before they become super successful? Is there some sort of fantasy publication or something that still publishes short stories?

Robert E. Howard lived with his parents in West Texas his entire life and started the fantasy genre by himself.

There are fantasy publications doing short stories right on the other side of a search engine, but the real stuff will be self-published on Amazon, the diamonds in the ocean of crap. I'm hearing a lot of buzz about Schuyler Hernstrom but I don't really like what I've read of him.

>For it he becomes hunted by the church for committing the sin of playing god.
Tell me, is "playing god" venal or cardinal?

Zeus being the Christian God is a pretty neat idea, it's been done before but not enough, and syncretizing the Greek pantheon with Renaissance religion is so good of an idea I want you to start writing right now. Just make sure you don't make every religious person a Galileo-burning straw priest, actually read some books on what made Renaissance folks tick and how they thought.

I'm looking for a urban fantasy book without a "secret magic government" or "secret magic organization" - like in Dresden Files or the Secret Histories books.

And since a legitimate retard managed to fumble his way onto Veeky Forums, I'd like to add that the mechanisms of using magic within the story are irrelevant. Don't even reply, you dumb cunt.

The Magicians trilogy by Lev

thank you, user

How can you have magic without magical laws

that has a magic school, though. which implies a magic government

No it doesn't, it doesn't rule anything, and you can get magic without going to that school

good point brandon

okay, but I don't want any kind of institution, then. What I mean is, is that I enjoy... people fucking up? I like reading about people discovering things on their own. If there's a class on it, or it's all regulated then I just lose interest. Yeah, that's it.

>magic must only be mysterious and incomprehensible
>anything that is not a mystery is not magic
>even if the person who we are following is the magic user, thus we would understand magic how he understands it

Those are pretty terrible, like most of the "minimalist" covers I see.

Just finished reading the Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang (part of Stories of Your Life and Others -- in the /sffg/ recommended Science Fiction). Though it is not Sci-fi at all, it's hardly fantasy either, but I have to say it's one of the best novellas I have ever read.

Did any of you fags read it?

I have had a hard time understanding the structure of the world after the plot twist revelation. Can someone explain it to me?

Yea, I did read it and found it interesting.
The world seems to be a cylinder without a top or a bottom, when you would climb a ladder in only one direction, you would reach your point of departure eventually. The sky is actually topped by stone, that is the bottom of the same ground people live on. Pretty easy stuff, a derivative of the flat-earth model.

>become as great as Tolkien/Eddison/Brooks/Moorcock/Jordan/Rowling/Martin?
>how can I become a multi-millionaire and get tv shows, movies and merchandise deals all from books
>help me guys I want to be rich but I don't know to write

>thought I burned this guy a few threads ago
>he is back for seconds
>calls me retard

I told you already, it's not urban fantasy unless the magic is hidden. Try Kim Harrison's "the hollow" series they are pretty out in the open after the near genocide of the human race

If you are the womameme user you are out of luck and will have to read traditional fantasy. Only women do urban fantasy that is integrated with the public. Men always have it hidden where only a select few know (iron druid, dresden files, felix castor, joe pit casebooks, the magician trilogy, night watch, etc), men usually integrate fully with fantasy worlds.

>thinks he burned me
>implying I didn't just leave cuz I got sick of his shit

also see:
But anyway, thanks for the recommendations. I do appreciate it, even if you're a cockslap.

It was one recommendation: the Hallows.

That list I gave you was examples of what you don't want aka hidden consulate. If you want fantasy where everyone knows, and isn't urban fantasy ask.

>I like reading about people discovering things on their own.
Then it's not gonna be urban fantasy. Or it would be urban fantasy , but there is a council and hidden world and they want the protagonist dead because he is a rogue(even if he didn't know others like him existed).

I like the Realms of: series, they're like an anthology of short stories based around a certain topic such as Realms of Mystery (the best one), Realms of Magic, etc. They tend to be a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality but that's D&D for you. Worth reading if you're into it.

Is The Swords Trilogy a good place to start with Moorcock?

...

>It's been 2 years
>I still haven't finished it because the knowledge that it's the last one is too much

It has cool magic. Like actual cool fucking magic that is actually magic, like REAL FUCKING MAGIC, not some magnetism shit or whatever other shit. It's actual magic and it goes into the metaphysics and the philosophy of it, and this magic is particularly powerful. Like a mage alone can really mess things up, but at the same time they are incredibly vulnerable to those balls and can't do anything against it.
I really don't like how every character is important or becomes important or is tied to someone important, and I also don't like all the gay stuff in it. BEFORE you say anything, I enjoy a grimdark realistic setting but the people in Bakker's universe seem unreasonably gay and addicted to rape and anal. Maybe because she fashioned it by the ancient grece / sumer or something like that, fuck knows.

Also, after a while the plot and point of it all seems blurred. I think it suffers from the thing that every LONG AS FUCK fantasy series suffers, that every detail and little nonsese is explored and in the end you just wonder, what's the fucking point of it?
Idk man, I took a LONG ass break halfway through Thousandfold Thought because the first half of it was so god damn fucking boring. I don't remember anything important happening.

So if I understand you, Appendix N seeks to emphasis and promote unabashed genre fiction and a certain very narrow sub-sect of sword and sorcery?

Well, that's not a sin, but I think people will always read the Conan stories because they intuitively know, after the Schwarzenegger movie, to go to Howard/Jordan for straight-forward muscles, fights, and escapism.

But if they want to resurrect minor, forgotten, and out of print works, I suppose that is interesting to enthusiasts, who must pine for the days of lurid looking paperbacks on wire racks - which will never return, even mass-market is being crushed by e-books.)

But I can never read that kind of stuff for very long before I have to reach for something else.

>I suppose that is interesting to enthusiasts, who must pine for the days of lurid looking paperbacks on wire racks - which will never return
I did not ask for this feel.

The Demon Cycle series is a bit shit

Every book is worse than the last

A shame, since the first book was promising

The first part of the first book was good, it got immediately shit when it just jumped to Arlen discovering how to kill demons just like that. 300 years and no one thought to have a look? The second book was a chore and I'm debating whether to get the 3rd now.

What is objectively the best Fantasy book?

Muh religion suppressing knowledge

The Silmarillion.

>So if I understand you, Appendix N seeks to emphasis and promote unabashed genre fiction and a certain very narrow sub-sect of sword and sorcery?
Unabashed genre, yes, but that stuff is far, far more than a narrow subset of S&S. That's the point of it, that there's this huge variety in genre, romance and detective stories and swordplay and spaceships all mixed together, or rather just not separated yet. Characters are heroic and often flawed, with far more complexity than the stereotype. Imagine watching the Star Wars prequels and TFA and thinking the original trilogy is wooden, stilted, and forced, then watching that and realizing how charismatic everyone is and how smooth the plots flow.

>straight-forward muscles, fights, and escapism.
That's not all Conan is, though. Conan wins many of his battles through wits, more of them through luck, and Howard's prose is simply beautiful.

>lurid looking paperbacks on wire racks - which will never return, even mass-market is being crushed by e-books.)
The goal is to put lurid looking ebooks on Amazon, to bring back select parts of the pulp environment without quixotically trying to resurrect it. A whole bunch of nerds self-publishing random pulp-inspired stuff, hopefully with a few diamonds rising out of it, but everyone having a lot of fun.

Yay.
Thank you.

That sounds a lot better than all the autistic screeching over the Hugos, desu - creating something rather than trying to tear something down. But is anyone actually onboard apart from that blogger and his readers?

That guy who prints Cirsova, as that was his intention from the beginning, is big on it, as is Daddy Warpig, who I guess is some kind of GamerGate figure with a lot of followers. For some reason Vox Day isn't involved despite most of it going on on his publishing house's blog. John C. Wright's sort of a godfather to it but he's more of a John the Baptist, telling everyone to read Null-A and Night Land again, and he isn't mentioned much.

Oh, and Brian Niemeier, who's probably got the prettiest book covers in selfpub right now. A lot of people like Nethereal, I could never get into it. He blusters a lot which I'm not a fan of.

There's already been a couple of fanfic-tier novellas published already, which I'm not looking forward to reviewing because I'm bad at constructive criticism and I really want everyone to keep trying.

Muh dominating women

I like the idea. There is definitely a lot of potential there but also a lot of room to fail. I could see this being a bit like an almost Renaissance American Gods depending on how it's written. But at the same time I feel like it would be really easy to just write Percy Jackson again, if even on accident.

Is Children of Earth and Sky good? goodreads.com/book/show/25938417-children-of-earth-and-sky

Read Lions of Al Rassan instead.

Byzantine Mosaic was his best
>tfw qt villainess died

It's shit but I like it

>the most beautiful woman in the world
hate this trope

Admittedly, this is the only reason I haven't read it yet. Because it means that once I have, its over.

the female characters ruined it

>Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.
>“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.
>“It’s important.”
>“Trust me, so is this.”
>“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”

Are you ready?

Well, it makes for a series of interesting blog posts on Castalia which I wasn't aware of.

Despite my apparent coolness towards Howard, I do enjoy what I have read of him. This includes 2 Conan tales (The Tower Of The Elephant, The God In The Bowl) and more of his weird fiction, the most memorable of which was The Black Stone. He's a good visual writer, adept at setting a scene, and he writes vivid action sequences. I consider him a red-blooded genre writer but to call his prose beautiful is over-egging it.

Still, the man only died at 30 in 1936. It's interesting to speculate on what he might have produced in a life twenty years longer or more, writing into the fifties and sixties.

What's going on with Vox Day's latest book, why's he only released half of it? Should I just wait for the rest or what?

>try to remember where I've read it recently
Shadow of the Torturer and Name of the Wind

>Name of the Wind
One of my mates told me this was the greatest, couldn't read past a quarter of it, absolutely awful.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels like this about the demon cycle. The first and second third of the book was building the demons and the world steadily. The last third just threw suspense and tension out the window. How can you write both of your main characters out of themselves in the same book unintentionally?
Read the second book and I was done.

>tfw reading Smoke Ring and Ringworld, both by Larry Niven
I love the settings so much. Does anyone know good stories set on or involving megastructures?

You might as well, I have one more hour of work.

Sanderson a shit

I've just finished the second book, working up the courage to get the 3rd, it's a shame because I really loved the first 2 thirds of the first book. But then Corlings go from unkillable monsters to slayed in their hundreds in a single chapter.

Anyone not in GMT is subhuman

Definitive megastructure is Blame. Stephen Baxter's Raft is sort of like Integral Trees setting but he's not that good of a writer. John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton has megastructures but doesn't really love them, they're background settings, same with Brin's second Uplift trilogy. Pushing Ice has them but makes them boring.

Oh, the Culture novels are all about megastructures. I don't personally like Iain M. Banks but maybe you will. Start with Player of Games I'm told, I started with Consider Phlebas and got turned off entirely.

Actually, one more thing you most likely won't hear recommended, when Terry Pratchett was just getting started he wrote a couple of novels parodying Niven, Strata and Dark Side of the Sun. Strata's one of my favorites, haven't read the other.

amazon.com/Collapsing-Empire-John-Scalzi-ebook/dp/B01F20E7CO/
$3,400,000 book deal doesn't mean you can read the rest for free, son.

I ain't even argue whats true, m8.
I might check it then. I thought user was storytiming.

Agreed, plus what other user said before. Woman are writtten to hinder the story. I mean, it sounds pretentious as fuck but... come on, book 2 proves it. The best character was the grandma, can't remember her name. Also young Arlen and before damage control Leesha.

My upcoming book.
Also the deathgate cycle
Pratchett also did a megastructure concept in his main work you know...

Character dynamics are so good though

I suggest you read it and then finish with a stronger one, there's no way you've read everything by Pratchett in his golden days. Did you read the Last Hero? I finished with that one, it was perfect.

>Deathgate
I hope you are aware that you are my nigga.

Also I wouldn't count Discworld as a megastructure. It's just a planet, that happens to be flat.

>The best character was the grandma
Leesha's mentor or the Duchess?

I've got every single main Discworld book, the Tiffany series, Good Omens, A Blink Of The Screen, and Turtle Recall in paperback, thinking of shelling out a few hundred for the Collector's Library hardback editions.

I don't remember the duchess. I'll have to assume those come after book 2.

No the Duchess was in book 2 (I haven't read past that yet), she had a chat with Leesha where it's revealed she hates her sons and basically rules the land behind the scenes. Leesha's mentor dies in the first book I think.

>she had a chat with Leesha where it's revealed she hates her sons and basically rules the land behind the scenes
Ah, I remember. I meant the old lady from her hometown, yes.
I won't encourage you to stop reading, so i'll hold on spoilers. When I started to like Leesha in book 1, I came in here and some user spoiled me what happens at the end with her in book 2. That might made me stop liking the saga altogheter, but is widely regarded as book 1 start strong and then going downhill.

>I won't encourage you to stop reading
I'm debating with myself whether I should continue, as I said I liked the start of the first book, but ever since it's been disapointing, I've found Leesha very annoying alond with almost every female character in the series. But at two books in I also feel like I'm too far in to just drop it.

More like this? I'd read more of Tiptree when I'll be able to find other works of her to download, but at any rate I'd like to read more sci fi fiction thats deals with materialism and pop culture in slightly dark and amusing way.

it was pretty good. That and stories of your life was good. all his others are kind of dumb or just bad.

Valerie was not reanimated you R2Dtard. She went into vampire sleep mode, which all vampires have.

Who's your sffg waifu/husbando?
Pic related, it's mine.

He did nothing wrong.

My waifu is without a doubt Styliane Daleina from Sarantine Mosaic.

>muh sapir-whorf hypothesis

Scalzi is a numale faggot and Martin is a fat fuck dickhead, but don't pull that holier-than-thou bullshit and throw Tolkien in there because the movies were popular you fucking cunt.

So any sanderson love here .... Stormlight Chronicles/ Mistborn trilogy warbreaker elantris