/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

Thonre of glass isn't too bad

I ignore posts with pictures of that nature.

Oi, the Wallfacers were anime-tier my man. Like literally shounen manga level writing.

Logical? Maybe. But still.

Is it better than Three Body Problem? That was kinda mediocre IMO.

Humanity fuck year, old Veeky Forums meme about how badass we are

So far, yeah

>HFY
>What's that?
"humanity fuck yeah", usually implies humans are portrayed as extremely tough, inventive and reckless (in a positive way) compared to other sentient species. I believe it's a Veeky Forums meme mostly.

SLOG OF SLOG BOYS
WHEN?????

What companion did Rothfuss write in Tides of Numenera?

You wouldn't happen to be in the Torment thread on /v/ right now would you?

Any decent fantasy set in Babylon?

Patrick Rothfuss is the best fantasy author since Homer.

Prove me wrong.

Of course that's me. I really want to finish this piece of shit.

>“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”

What is this shit about brent weeks and tight pussy problems

>gnostic
Dropped.

Fucking three talent whore.
Please tell me she dies arc user.

Read blood mirror and find out.

I read them in that order, but I can't remember whether the order had anything to it.

Probably the best one, considering the game is written by a YA romance author.

None of you give Hubbard the time of day because of your biases and you're no better than the sort of person that tries to get HP Lovecraft banned because of his racist views. If it weren't for his religion he would be revered as a science fiction icon.

nigga he made the """""""religion"""""""" because nobody wanted to read his sf

>lyrics
.... what?

Amazon says it comes with "original lyrics for the novel written by L. Ron Hubbard." I have no idea what that means.

Is he the jesus/prophet for Tom cruise and will Smith's scientology church?

Hubbard didn't publish Battlefield Earth until after Scientology was successful though and his earlier pulp was moderately successful and widely praised.

Appendix N, the list of inspirational reading materials from the original D&D 1979 with many fantasy titles. What holds up and what doesn't?

IMO Moorcock's Hawkmoon isn't very good.

I want cyberpunk recs. I'm looking for themes of societal decay and reformation (akin to Akira) and utopia turning into dystopia (akin to Itoh's Harmony). Existentialism of MCs in a transhumanist society is a bonus. Should delve heavily in the philosophy of cyberpunkian themes, I don't mind characters turning into mouthpieces if what they're saying is unique or interesting.

Fritz Leiber's stuff hasn't aged well, Gray Mouser subverted a trend in fantasy which was on its last legs when he wrote the books and then wrote Our Lady of Darkness which was so stereotypical of its time it requires a lot of effort to get past the cringe.

Leiber is a time traveller who decided to publish everything at the worst possible times to achieve the least impact, book about a corrupt church ran by the illuminati elite? better publish that at the exact same time every other author is publishing similar books.

>a corrupt church ran by the illuminati elite

cool jrpg bro.

I thought you guys hated Steven Brust tho.

I plan to soon read Leiber. I like a few of the writers of his pulp vintage like Lovecraft and Howard, whose stories vary in quality. Lovecraft's inclusion seems out of place, but then I have never played D&D.

Whereas I've read a few things by Jack Vance, and his use of wizards, demons, monsters and magic objects coheres very well with my idea of what D&D is, and it's a good read. Stuff like The Dying Earth, The Eyes Of The Overworld, and The Miracle Workers is still imaginative, witty, and sometimes humorous.

What the fuck is wrong with Asimov?
Why won't he use sex in his books?
He tries so hard to avoid even mentioning sex

I just got to the part where Tool kills himself. Oh fuck, bad shit is gonna happen to Hetan and their kids now right?

I like Andre Norton, but maybe that's because it's some of the first sci-fi I read back in middle school.

I'm in the mood to just blast through something easy and fun. What's pic related like?

He was a antinatalist.

I really like the first book

It's very typical Sanderson but it also has some proper thematic stuff driving it.

It's the only book in the recent trend of deconstructionist fantasy that I actually enjoy. Mainly because the deconstruction isn't just the "instead of heroes everyone is sad and edgy" shit others pull

Shit targeted at children.

Read Acts of Caine for "easy and fun".

The romance is horrifically bad to read tho

>call something childish
>recommend a star wars EU author

I like acts of caine but you have to see the irony here

Is he the GOAT fantasy protagonist?

when was the last time SEX came up in modern politics, lol.

I was binging through a lot of tamora pierce's stuff, I love her circle of magic series.

Read the first book. Didn't care enough to read the rest desu

She's quite obviously dead by the end of TGO

Maybe her soul skates by on magic handwavey shit.

Most dystopias are pretty collectivist by design: they portray countries where citizens are forced to wear the same clothes, think the same thoughts and live the same lives as everyone else, with harsh consequences for non-conformism.

What about an individualist dystopia? A society where everyone feels pressure to design an original wardrobe, live in a unique house, have contrarian opinions on politics and religion and be an adventurous entrepreneur. If you just want to go with the flow and imitate someone else - well, that's going to be hard to do.

Any works that explore this theme?
>inb4 real life
>inb4 individualist utopia but I interpret it as bad lol

>What about an individualist dystopia?
Like somalia or liberia?

Just started the Left Hand of Darkness, can already tell it's going to be a good read.

Ah, so you haven't read it then?

Obviously not, Donaldson gets shit on a lot here but I loved both Covenant and the Gap Cycle for their unique qualities. Reave the Just is a decent read too (not great but decent).
For anyone interested he's writing a new fantasy trilogy. Prologue can be found here - stephenrdonaldson.com/SeventhDecimatePrologue.pdf

Shit
I had this exact idea
Every time I get an idea I see it somewhere later on

I loved that book when I was a kid, read it more than once. Gurren Lagann did it better though.

I've read it and I like it but that's the main reason given for people disliking it

Was Vodalus important at the end of the day, beyond the general introduction he "gave" Severian to the reality of things?

Also, any good commentaries / reviews on BotNS? I want to hear people talk about it.

/poul/ Anderson is incredible, he really should be the king of /sffg/. Most modern SFF authors are pale shadows of some aspect of Poul. He's my favorite from what I've read from that list.

Leigh Brackett's got some really good stuff, like Barsoom but more intimate. Great action, great tension, great Horns of Elfland.

Burroughs himself is great too. Very readable. Haven't read him in a while but he was my thing in high school.

Harold Shea and Carnelian Cube are really cute, not the best-written but some very original ideas.

Tolkien is worth all the hype and more. Don't let anyone ever tell you he isn't a good writer because he is.

Jack Vance is very very good and I've liked what I've read but for some reason I don't read him often. Cugel's boring, read Dragon Masters instead.

Manly Wade Wellman is a hidden gem. Silver John stories are short and sweet and American, it's like O Brother Where Art Thou starring Johnny Cash.

Zelazny's great too, very lyrical prose, mythic feeling. Huge quality dropoff between the Amber series. Night in the Lonesome October and For a Breath I Tarry are my other favorites. I wish we talked about Creatures of Light and Darkness.

Because his editors censored stuff because they didn't want a moral panic. When he went back to writing fiction after the 60s he wrote sex. It was awkward and terrible, even worse than Heinlein sex.

IDK but ignoring the hate Gurm receives, he can write some pretty likeable characters.

Carnelian Cube has one, actually. One of the AUs in it is the American South ruled by individualist poets that have running gun battles with each other.

I've only read the first trilogy. Was it supposed to end just like that, out of nowhere?

He was part of the Autarch-creating mechanism, creating opposition for proto-Autarchs to push back again, and he was also there to be an Emmanuel Goldstein reference.

So basically he had no REAL purpose for the story overall, he was just another piece of the big master plan, he was nothing intimate to Severian...

I mean I knew it but having it pointed to me made it all the more real. I hated the lil bitch at the end anyway.

No, he was real to Severian. He handed him the coin, Sev as a boy was super-loyal because he'd never felt that before, it carried to his adulthood but it got a bit weird because he made Sev eat Thecla.

Also Sev comments at one point that the coin was a forgery.

I know he was real to Severian as anything can be, as real as the boogeyman is to a kid, but I was hoping he was something more intimate than that, more than just another thing put in front of Severian to mold him into the next Autarch.
IDK, it made the world seem so small, like every character was the Autarch in disguise, or Father Inire in disguise, or whatever.

What is this thing called? I'm sure it has a definition somewhere.

Serendipity. His purpose in the story was to forge Sev - that's not a spoiler, that's the first thing he says, how he backed onto the throne - but he had his own purpose, he really did want to overthrow the Autarch (he was an anarchist, right? He had his own philosophy) but divine Purpose was able to take his evil and fold it to good.

Ted Chiang's Tower of Babylon. Only a short story though.

According to ~modern critics~, because 50's editors censored it.

According to Asimov, it was because he was too much of a dork.

He eventually did write some sex scenes (e.g. Robots at Dawn). They were awful.

Grab em by the pussy

no, there was the girl who revealed he molested her a week or two after that

Maybe he just didn't want to? He liked robots, spaceships and macroeconomics, everything else was mostly for context, like an excuse to let him talk about those things.

So I know that it is more /v/ than Veeky Forums, but what does /sffg/ think about the Elder Scrolls series?

Thin veneer over real-life events, mediaeval stasis, heavy-handedness is partly saved by background lore found within in-game books.

I just finished pic related and am looking for similar titles, any suggestions?

user a few threads ago wanted me to say what I thought of Old Man's War (in my initial post I'd just started reading it and mentioned how much more I liked it so far compared to The Forever War) so here goes:

It suddenly got much more shallow after the boot camp segment. Less character interaction, briefer descriptions and generally less immersion. Never got bad per se, but didn't hold up to the earlier parts.

Armor is still my favorite military sci fi so far, and I'm still looking for something recently written about near-future warfare.

and did it matter? not a fucking bit

asimov writes about shit that matters

Yeah that was me and almost exactly what I thought to

It turns from something pretty in depth into what's pretty much a montage

Also the metaphysics aren't anything to write home about despite what fans would have you believe.

Lukyanenko's Night Watch, The Strugatsky Brothers The Doomed City and Roadside Picnic.

Roadside picnic of course
Metro 2034 was alright but didn't really go anywhere

It's fairly unrelated but I enjoyed Red Plenty by Spufford, which explores a "working" USSR if you're into that

Metro 2034 is a pretty similar title, only one number changes

Every Scalzi book I've read reminds me of a Star Trek episode, characters know way to much about things they shouldn't; you weren't there, you haven't spoken to anybody that was there, why are you suddenly acting buddy-buddy with a character you've previously met once, for half a sentence.

Read on. Read this spoiler when you've found and answer to your question.
TOR Reread of the Fallen has Erikson come in for a discussion about the events that follow. Check it out.

He's got a new book in a new series out real soon

I'll probably read it but I'll bet it's the same as it ever was

Really? I honestly thought he was finished after Tor refused to publish his latest book citing the fear of another Redshirts.

Yeah basic setup is
-weird unstable ftl travel
-everyone ftl's away from earth to create an empire that's dependent on the travel
-ftl starts to waver and empire collapses

So in short he's gone back to traditional space opera (probably at TOR's insistence).

>It turns from something pretty in depth into what's pretty much a montage
Precisely. Which is strange because the earlier parts shows the man can evidently write better than that.

I liked the galactical free for all between many different species and how it didn't turn all grimdark because of that, but the fucking high tech samurai race was a really bad idea.

>/poul/ Anderson is incredible
He is pretty great. Definitely deserves more love.

I find him obnoxious but that illustration is an absolutely spot on depiction of what I imagine he'd look like. Peter Dinklage doesn't look aristocratic.

mite b cool

Give me the quick rundown on Poul. What were his significant works?

The High Crusade and The Broken Sword are both worth a read IMO.