/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

I like grrm even though he's a cuck

r we getting a tuc xcerpt 2day

Wouldn't mind GRRM using it every now and then, tho.

FFXII is the BEST FF, plot- and writing-wise.

So what's your problem with time skips? I assume you just mean telling the story out of order so to speak? Or presenting seemingly unrelated parts of the story one after another?

I just take that shit as it comes and things usually work out.

Recently started sanderson's way of kings. All the first chapters seem barely related and I'm curious as to when, or if, things are going to move toward a more traditional story structure.

Not complaining though, I actually don't mind. The guy obviously has done a lot of world building he wants me to see and im patient enough to let him show me at whatever pace he likes.

The thing is, I get that there are other books I could be reading, but I have attention span issues due to my recovering from addiction. When I find a book that I can finish the first chapter of, I take what I can get.

Everyone meets up by the end of the second book

If you're looking for something fast paced you won't get that with Stormlight

I'm definitely not looking for fast paced, but I appreciate that heads up. I'm fine with reading any amount of "look at this cool stuff I made up" chapters

Hey Veeky Forums ive been reading a lot of sci fi and wanted to get into more fantasy. are there any fantasy books that do not involve several huge volumes so one self contained book, is not some shitty D&D ,tolkien rip off, has enough descriptions that do not involve autistic amount of detail, have an interesting setting.Ive read LOTR and some weird fiction authors like Clark Ashton Smith, a bit of Robert Howard and H.P Lovercraft.

Lud-in-the-Mist
Lions of Al-Rassan
The Buried Giant

But I liek timeskips...

Could anyone recommend some Mech-focused books? Looking into writing a mecha/mech novel and would like some references/inspiration.

Probably will look into some battletech or mechwarrior material, but I just wonder if you friends have read anything that really stuck out to you.

The original Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson is my offer. There's some interesting criticism against him but his original trilogy has great characters, unique magic and decent modern writing.

I just finished reading Hart's Hope, which was pretty disappointing.

Iron Dragon's Daughter.

It's very different from Tolkien
Stand alone
No D&D shit

>has great characters, unique magic and decent modern writing.
It doesn't have any of those. Especially retarded choice to rec when the guy explicitly asks for non-series.

I read Jack Vance's short novel The Miracle Workers which is set on a world 1600 years after being settled by refugees from an intergalactic war. Much knowledge has been lost, and so the current rulers are a mixture of feudal/medieval and ancient tech; castles with crossbowmen on ramparts and mounted salvaged spaceship artillery.

The story follows a warlord's campaign to subjugate a rival warlord, and the reemergence of the planets' cunning and grudge-bearing autochthons. There is an interesting contrast of magical and scientific apparitions which thrash it out in several action set pieces. Overall it's a good genre bending entertainment that deserves a strong four out of five of your preferred units of measurement.

War of the Flowers by Tad Williams is a pretty nice stand alone story.

tss brandon SANDerson, wut does he live in the fukkin desert or sumpthin?

fawkin killin it today Chippah

Something got me reminiscing about Starship Troopers and it made me wonder:

Is there a book about humanity making peace with an alien race so profoundly different from itself? Like... a story where the humans and bugs from Heinlein's story make peace and the difficulty maintaining peace with something so alien drives the plot?

It's happening right now with niggers on earth.

It's nothing more than a good action book but Talion: Revenant stands out as a good one and done book.

Does as much as some entire trilogies in 400 pages.

Is this worth 4 quid lads?

Only if you REALLY like the Ottoman Empire and are not adverse to autistic beta cuck mcs

No.

That's the entire plot to Ender's Game and it's sequels. The sequels in particular.

>it's

Sorry. I'm drunk and a non-native speaker.

What do you think of the novel Spin?

Don't do this here

I'd second Speaker for Dead. I hope you like portuguese and endless philosophy.

What's Wolfe's best work aside from New Sun?

Wizard Knight

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

fug already wasted 4 quid

Finally got around to reading BOTNS, I'm about 200 pages in and it's amazing. Everyone who complains about it is a fucking pleb, the end.

*hits blunt*

what if, like, there was percy jackson. But with gnosticism?

Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe, his writing is simplistic but deep if you have a decent understanding of mythology, religion and other famous fantasy literature

>his writing is simplistic

Why do 95% of sci-fi/fantasy have such awful books covers?

I thought marketing was supposed to entice you to buy something not put you off

It is, it's not particularly challenging nor does it give gratuitous details, it's vague enough to start the mind's imagination but it keeps the story together, portrays the character's feelings well and still carries meaning and depth

It's simplistic

GIVE ME MONEY

because they're marketing to plebs

The Fifth Head of Cerberus or Peace. But that's only counting novels. A lot of his shorter stuff could easily compete.

It was slow but I liked it. Hated how the Martians spent 20,000 years not colonizing the solar system before they got spin'd too, and the atheist vs christian argument actually happens the other way around, but at least he gave religion more credit than most modern SF authors.

Couldn't get into the sequel.

Not to be picky but... anything else?

I've given up on Speaker for the Dead twice now in the early pages... I loved Ender's game but Speaker's preable reads like a brutally extra long back-cover blurb.

just get past that to the actual story with ender deciding to fuck off to lusitania or whatever it was called.

Hate is a strong word. Hate how? Hate as in personally hate like "you jerks" or hate as in "that doesn't make sense"?

I'm reading the second book from Gaskun's space opera series.

It's...it's.. not bad.

ok but are you a pleb? what are your favorite books?

It is a slog, but matches what you needed. Personally, I've never been much of a fan of space jesus allegory series. But he can write.
You can try Cherryh never-ending series starting with Foreigner. Advanced Terran trapped on a foreign planet. Forced to coexist.

Ubik by PKD, dune by Herbert, Neromancer by Gibson

Gaskun knows how to write action sequences. It's the same tropes we all know bit he's got his own voice.

What you reading?

I didn't like how it didn't make sense that the Martians never picked up asteroid mining when Phobos and Deimos were right there, and that the story had a hole in it based on the idea that humans can only live on planets. I guess I'm judging it harshly, as that conceit is necessary for the story.

The red heifer storyline was actually pretty cool looking back.

Anyone here read this yet? It's really good, and really comfy.

I see "His Dark Materials" trilogy get recommended a lot. Is it still enjoyable as an adult or is it people with nostalgia goggles looking back?

I've considered it, but I'm bored to death of traditional european fairy tales and am worried that being russian it's all too familiar and done to death

Is it at least set in some time in the past two centuries?

> I guess I'm judging it harshly, as that conceit is necessary for the story.
If I remember correctly the reason Martians resorted to extreme biological engineering was because Mars itself was very resource poor. They could barely afford to launch the one rocket to Earth, to say nothing of the time it took to establish a global civilization on a world humans didn't evolve for or acknowledge the threat of the aliens that covered Earth in that sheath rather than just forgetting about Earth and focussing on their own problems.

>The red heifer storyline was actually pretty cool looking back.
I don't recall what you are talking about.

Jonathan strange and Mr Norrell

Bv Larson. Enjoy.

>but I'm bored to death of traditional european fairy tales
May I ask what you've been reading? I didn't get the impression that they're common, at all. Anyhow the book is very unique and well written so I'd strongly recommend giving it a shot at least!

Plz. Plz. Learn your history before you spout alternative facts. Blacks were here first.

That's the point, Mars is resource poor but the moons aren't, you'd think they'd invest a lot more resources into making themselves not resource poor anymore.

The red heifer storyline was where the sister's cult was trying to fulfill Biblical prophecy by getting a cow with pure red hair to sacrifice. The main guy has to help the cult deliver a calf, I think somebody gets shot, and in the end it's stillborn, like their hope, right? Because Earth is just going to spin off and die in everyone's lifetimes? But then the aliens set up the bridges and take down the barrier, it's like God really does care about us, or the aliens, or God through the aliens, because it's an actual complex picture of faith.

Just finished Time Enough for Love, my first foray into science fiction. Enjoyed it. Wanna read more Heinlein. Which next; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, or something else?

It's trash.

IT'S SHIT STAY AWAY
RRRRRRREEEEEEEE

It's not that I read a lot of it so much as it's the only think most people are exposed to. Even if you avoid reading them like the plague you're exposed to them almost to the point of exclusivity through local and popular culture, and even if you seek out exceptions for long enough they still feel like exceptions

>That's the point, Mars is resource poor but the moons aren't, you'd think they'd invest a lot more resources into making themselves not resource poor anymore.
That's the scary thing about the exploration, exploitation, and colonization of space though. It's not just something that happens. It's a very costly long term investment that a lot of people won't necessarily care to make. They'd rather make things better for themselves and their kids than their great grand kids and beyond. That's why we aren't on Mars and why Martians didn't do much beyond engineer bacteria that turn comets into computers.

And I'm not seeing the god parallel. They were aliens. Aliens that humans like us created and were using us to evolve.

>And I'm not seeing the god parallel. They were aliens. Aliens that humans like us created and were using us to evolve.
They came in with salvation when we thought all hope was lost. You're thinking in terms of what God is instead of what God does.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is good.

They caused the situation in the first place.

And god doesn't save so much as he creates, and the kuiper belt AIs were created by sapient species like us. I'm just not really buying into this supposed religious subtext.

that particular book is told from the viewpoint of a boy, so it's stylistically simple. if you want to read some more florid wolfe stuff, check out Peace.

anyone read Cordwainer Smith besides me?

About 20 pages of clever scifi.
The rest was all religious drama.

They caused the situation to save biological life from inevitable destruction.

>the kuiper belt AIs were created by sapient species like us.
That's speculated but not confirmed.

>I'm just not really buying into this supposed religious subtext.
Subtext? Half the novel is about sister's faith journey. It's openly drenched in religion.

>That's speculated but not confirmed.
As opposed to what? We saw the act of their creation recreated through humanity launching self replicating kuiper belt nanomachines.

The novel explores the insanity humans go through when dealing with the end of the world. I especially liked the short bit about how some people were getting violent while others were getting out of their cars to direct traffic. But unless you have something more that more explicitly relates the aliens to religion then I'm just not buying it. Not everything has to be "drenched in religion".

>Not everything has to be "drenched in religion".
You're right, Spin didn't have to be, but Wilson spent a huge part of the story following the girl the narrator likes through a series of cults as she tries to find God. She gets roasted in a theological debate with her brother, joins the sex cult, becomes a janitor, on and on, there were more exciting ways to show humanity dealing with the end of the world. The only physical action in the story aside from the quasi-chase in the framing story is the altercation with a cult.

Dealing with the end of the world is a small, small part of Spin. It's background noise. The brother is an atheist, but he finds a kind of being that he can believe in that is acting like a friendly but distant God, and dies for it, his body unable to handle the glory. The Von Neumann life are literally seeking the salvation of all beings. And if Wilson hadn't made that plain enough for you, he had the sister and the red heifer cult try to find salvation through another means and fail, paralleling the brother's discovery of real salvation when he wasn't really looking for it.

>Wilson spent a huge part of the story following the girl
The entire character arc was just padding to meat whatever page number the publisher wanted from him. Her joining the cult and being all touchy feely beyond merely padding the page count was the author trying to flex his writing muscles by wriginging not simply writing a dry story with nothing but autistic intellectuals debating the course of humanity (which we can all agree would have been a better book because the concepts are what we were reading Spin for).

Hey, if it allows you to enjoy the story more than I certainly won't tell you to do otherwise. However not every instance of X saves Y has to be a religious allegory, let alone one only rationalized by the mere presence of religious people in the story itself.

I mean, I'd get it if there was a few lines of some character supposing that the machines at the poles were created by God, but I don't remember a single character referring to the aliens as deities. I saw aliens, I saw humans being humans, and that's it.

>character is looking for God and doesn't find him
>other character isn't looking for God but finds alien machines that want to save us
it's not even hidden, that's right there if you look any depth at all.

As I said, that's one reading, but necessarily a prominent theme or even intended? I mean, even if the main story wasn't a contrivance to both contrast the brother's personality with an irrational bible thumping princess for the main character to save, the theme could just as easily be that "sister looks for god and finds nothing, brother looks for actual answers and find them". Not everything within a story has to be directly related to religion.

People force readings like that almost as much as they see phallic imagery for anything that is remotely elongated.

Holy shit boys we need more fucking discussion like this on this general
Jesus Christ the amount of civil argument this books raised is making me want to read it, gg

Anyone want to talk about Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers, or the Mars trilogy? :3

What's steampunk supposed to be about thematically? Like why does it exist as a genre.

I've seen a couple of books using it to explore pollution/consumption themes but everything else just seems to be fantasy but with airships

Like, why was it concieved in the first place?

I would say it's simply the following of a technological trend that in reality shifted in a different direction, towards electronics and internal combustion engines. Take away internal combustion and electronics and presume something as useful was developed for steam power instead. Also pretend that Victorian fashion doesn't change much because people love Victorian fashion.

it's a fashion statement

I honestly think Arcanum is one of the only fictional works to get steampunk "right."

Tolkien wrote fantasy books that idealized nature and rural life and resisted industrialization.

Arcanum had a setting where a traditional, magical fantasy world had to deal with the emergence of a science fiction/Victorian/industrial society and gets to explore both sides of the issue.

Basically, I think the best use of steampunk is to explore the dichotomies of traditionalism vs. modernism and fantasy vs. science fiction.

Of course, 99.99999999% of all steampunk stories in any medium are terrible. China Mieville's Bas Lag trilogy, Arcanum, and Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle are about the only worthwhile things in the genre.

It's fantasy without the walking and with "cool" stuff

>female MC/heroine becomes a immoral turboslut over the course of the work
>parallel universe from the pov of her husband makes her a pure saint with the depth of a piss puddle

Stranger in a Strange land is OK but overrated imo, and thematically has a lot in common with Time Enough.

Starship Troopers is a faster read, and more different in tone from Time Enough than Mistress. I say read that.

If you actually liked Time Enough for Love though, you'll probably like most things Heinlein wrote.

>main story
>a contrivance
Sure, you can ignore the entire book except for the cool tech parts, that's a valid reading I guess. They are pretty cool. And you can even read the religious main plot in a strictly materialistic way, it is ambiguous, as the author intended. And indeed, some people look at a dick and see a banana. It's not a banana though.

>female MC/heroine becomes a immoral turboslut over the course of the work

Misread that as "immortal."
>starring asa akira as The Bonelander