/sffg/ - science fiction and fantasy general

>female warrior
DROPPED

If you think female warriors are bad, what about "strong female characters" in urban fantasy? I can't tell you how many times I've had to stop a show because some blond floozie in a leather jacket wheelies in on a street bike.

I'll take female warriors any day, thank you very much.

>thank you very much
everyone who says this sounds like an absolute cunt

well I only am sometimes.
nice get.

I hate when the only way for a female to be tough is to take on men twice her size and make shitty emasculating quips. Especially when these women taking on men are skinny little twigs. Give me some muscle girls damn it.

yes, exactly! I want women with more of a personality than "zingers about fighting like a girl dispenser"

>in urban fantasy
Don't read lol
>thank you very much
everyone who says this sounds like an absolute cunt

Any recommendations for near-future military sci fi?

man just go on the archie and search "near future military sci-fi"

people give tons of great reccs

What old pulp books are you reading Vince?

I get that they're popular, but how are the Malazan books? I'm looking to get into a good, deep fantasy series.

If you haven't read Lord of the Rings, please don't post in this thread until you read it.

I don't read bad books.

How many fantasy books should I read before writing one?

10000

Two
lord of the rings
malthazan

more than you ever will

don't read any.

I've posted about this before but it's really autistic how genre authors always take "strong female character" to mean "literally strong and tough" rather than "strongly written".

Yeah. It's ruined a lot of books for me. In fact, I flat out refused to read books with females mcs for nearly two decades because of it.

Except, oddly enough, YA. For some reason, YA fantasy is the only genre that consistently has good female characters. Don't ask me why.

Who?

honestly you lot would probably like it

It's female author/female mc but the author is an ex-military no mosque on ground zero type and the book has a pretty blatant christian message.

The first book anyways. The second and third are:
>paks repeatedly gets owned by the badguys

I read the R. A. Salvatore novelizations of the movies, do those count?

bestfantasybooks.com/top25-fantasy-books.php

how legit is this site?

It must be true. I've never seen someone use hyperbole on the internet and get away with it before.

Utter garbage, just like when it was brought up a few threads back.

So I'm reading Leviathan Wakes and I just got to the part where Miller and Holden meet up. Is it just me or has the writing just completely dropped off a cliff. It wasn't the best before, but it's starting to read like fan fiction tier now.

Really considering dropping the book because of it, which is a shame because 100 pages ago I was really enjoying it.

Nah it's 1 book military fantasy 1 book of job/heroic struggle and then a magic fantasy conclusion

HOLY SHIT GET OFF THAT FUCKING ASTEROID ASAP

But seriously just give it some more time. Only the last parts are bad/strange for lack of a better word but rather for story reasons and not the actual writing.

it's all downhill from there, both as a single novel and a series

What happened to Mateja Kežman?

Was he the Depay of a decade back?

Then maybe you'll like malazan.The first book might not be the best to get an idea,so I would suggest you to read at least at books 2 (or 3 'cause it will give you a lots of answers) .

Haha made me chuckle, duder. That was one solid post!

>mfw people said Sanderson writes good fight scenes
fuckin memes

I like it. Powered through all six books in the last few weeks. Solid writing, well structured universe and the weirdness would only be off putting to someone with end stage autism.

The "weirdness" is most definitely in reference to alien technology that is eluded to but not yet explained... It is all just interesting side notes at the moment and I have no doubt that the writers are going to pull through.

Why all the hate to Sanderson?
I can't tell by his another works (i didn't read it yet), but at least the way of kings is pretty good in my opinion (i'm going to start with WoR).
And yes, the fight scenes are pretty good too...

Jerek from grim company is goat

By law, none. But I reckon working authors will be familiar with the most well known works by Tolkein, Dunsany, Howard, Leiber, Wolfe, Le Guin, Gavriel Kay, GRRM. That's as well as a working knowledge of what contemporary authors (competitors) are doing.

Somebody like Brandon Sanderson knows them all and more. You just have to hear him talk to know that. And I don't think his Tarantino-esque appreciation of the genre is unusual among his profession either.

I've never read Sanderson (and I have a lot on my pile before then) but he did mention he liked Jackie Chan movies so I presume there's a little of that in his books?

>>Somebody like Brandon Sanderson knows them all and more.
Not really. He's firmly rooted in post-1980 fantasy, I wouldn't give him familiarity with the Dunsany school of dreamlike descriptive fantasy or the Leiber school of adventure, and that's based on his work - if he has read them, they didn't leave an impression.

Now, Swanwick has read them. What he's done with them is something else but you can tell he has read them.

You don't read fantasy to write fantasy.

>do you know who I am
>some cunt

Bretty good

I read Frederik Pohl's 1954 satirical short story The Midas Plague. Cheap energy and robotic industry means an overabundance of goods, and so every citizen must fulfill a consumption quota. By fulfilling their quota, people progress into a higher class of society where the amount of compulsory consumption is less. By this, the poor live in large mansions full of trinkets and grow fat while the rich live in simpler houses. The story follows a couple of newlyweds of a lower class as they negotiate and overcome the rules.

Overall this is a buoyant piece of satire which humorously explores explores a single idea. Domestic troubles, boozy antics, robotic shenanigans and group therapists; a bit like crossing Mad Men with I, Robot and Philip K Dick. It's a brisk piece of fun which deserves four out of five dinosaurs.

If anyone here is interested, I've made a horror general:

>

Make it Horror & Mystery at least, like this thread is Fantasy & Scifi.

I really want somewhere to talk about pulp crime novels desu

...

I've always thought sffg should include horror.

I've really been craving some good locked room mysteries myself.

Read Library at mount char, Sabriel, City of Stairs, The Thousand Names, Black Jewel Trilogy.

All female Mcs all good. Enjoy.

Read that last year in Pohl's Midas World compilation. I also thought it was pretty good.

That line inspired the comment desu

>finally get home and decide to sit down and write
>sit there with writer's block for a full hour staring at a blank page
>finally my mind clears and I get started
>the door slams open and my dad comes in
>turns on the tv full blast then immediately walks away from it into my room and won't shut up while taking off his work clothes and walking around noisily

welp, there goes my night. God I can't wait to move out

Don't care

You fucking autist. Horror falls under fantasy and scifi. They falls under the fantastical.
They are all fiction, but horror falls under fantasy and scifi depending on what mechanics the author uses.

>Some magical shit making people immortal, turning them inside out and multiplying their nerve endings sensitivity a thousand fold so they can experience never ending pain?
Fantasy.

>Some organic symbiosis machine that attaches to a person's pain centre in the brain to be used as a form of punishment?
Scifi.

Fantasy and Scifi covers all the headings of fiction. Even history fiction is fantasy because it didn't happen. I don't know what it is with you people and semantics.

You know there's horror without fantastical elements, right?

Hell, there's even horror non fiction.

Once it's a fantasy aka didn't happen. It falls under fantasy. It doesn't have to have fantastical elements.

Non fiction horror would probably be all the Nazi and american human experiments, war trench stories etc. History. meaning it has no dealing in a fiction general. But all the shit that didn't happen or is speculated to happen if so and so condition is met is fantasy.

>finally get home after long day earning money for my son's tendie and reading habits.
>walk in the door and turn on my favorite show I've been waiting to watch all day.
>take off my work clothes, and ask my son how his day was and if he did any writing today. I see him staring at a blank page like every other time I come home. I mention that I'm watching a good show and he should come join me. He never wants to spend time with me.
>he mumbles something angrily under his breath so I walk off.

God I can't wait for him to move out

So should we discuss Nabokov's fiction books in sffg because all those stories were made up?

>walking around your son naked
pls be my mommy or daddy

>Even history fiction is fantasy because it didn't happen.
What

Horror and fantasy/science fiction are not the same.
This is like the argument in which Biology and Physiology needs to be a field in the General Physics because all the life beyond of being constituid by cells it's constituid in molecules and atoms.
There's fantasy and scifi works who use a little bit of horror by creating a better and realistic world, but the horror it's not a part in the general plot.
There's horror works which are set in a fantasy or science fiction world. The horror conforms the plot and the intention of the author for handle the story according to it's point of view to present his/her perspective to scare (generally) and sink the reader.
The objective are differents in the three genres for obvious reasons.

>tfw promotional quotes printed inside book compare it to Cherryh
I highly doubt it.
>author is a woman
Oh, of course...

Does Stranger in a Strange Land hold up?

A fantasy novel about fucking banking (Dagger and Coin) has a promo quote on the first book comparing it to game of thrones just because it's what people know

not imo

author was already a bit off the rails by then

Not at all. Read anything of his from before and nothing after.

Harsh Mistress came after and is considered his best tho

vampire novel that isn't faggy or overly degenerate?

Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin

my diary desu

Fevre Dream

Hey /sffg/ what are some novels that immersed you in so much that you wanted to go to the places in the novels? Or maybe even made you desperately want to meet one of the chraracters

>A fantasy novel about fucking banking (Dagger and Coin
>Dagger and Coin
Rrrrrrrrrreeeeeee

I enjoyed the fuck out of it. Although I didn't read his other works, so I don't know if it's better or worse than the others. I give it 4 modern out of 5.

Did it? OK, Harsh Mistress is pretty good. I don't consider it his best, he was already trying too hard, it's no Door into Summer, but it's pretty good.

Guy who posted here. Can someone help me out?

DONATE

>cheese ball in his beard
kek

>standing in space on a spaceship

It's a mic

how long has it been since a readable sff book last came out?

certainly nothing since 2017 started, and we're almost a quarter of the way through

It's a station, not a ship, and he's not standing on it.

The ending just killed that book for me.
I just love AI's too much.

>asking for recommendations, but in a cunt way so you can avoid having to actually read anything

I'm not asking for recs, I'm complaining about how shitty sff has gotten

Anyone else notice that the majority of Philip K. Dick's characters are very unlikable? They're all self-centered, arrogant and anti-social. They're all smart as fuck, and conniving too. What does this reflect on Dick's part? As far as I know he generally wasn't very similar to his characters in the asshole department (except to women, to an extent). What gives?

Sff has always been looking for diamonds in a shit pile

The Erstwhile came out like a week ago, if it's anything close to Vorrh it'll be well worth a read

Jan and Feb are months in every industry where only unwanted crap gets pushed out

Grim company spin off when

Could anyone recommend some good mecha content? I'm specifically looking for books primarily focused on walker 'mechs.

The bibel