/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>minecraft megaproject

I personally though it was awful, but Tchaikovsky's Children of Time features a crew of distant decedents of Earth trying to decode the works of their ancestors. One of the protagonists is an antiquarian who has to decode all the ancient languages of Earth etc

Anyone read Senlin Ascends? I'm reading it right now, and though it has a bit too many similes at the start, it really takes off after chapter 6.

Funny characters, original setting, and a sense that there's more going on below the surface.

Laseen from Wurtz and Feist's Empire Trilogy.

I wonder if anyone has ever made it though.

alright boys, newbie to fantasy and sci fi here:
I've read do androids dream and man in the high castle and dark tower and here's my reading order:
1. Dune
2. Book of The New Sun
3. The other Herbert Dunes
4. VALIS
then I'm gonna take a break from the genre and read some cormac mccarthy and ernest hemingway. Is it a good order to read in/what else should I read?

You must read NEUROMANCER.

You can skip most of the Herbert Dunes, they get worse with every book. The first one is alright, some people like the second one, after that it's eeeeeh.

VALIS may not be the best intro to PKD as it's his most 'i'm actually mentally ill' book. I'd try Ubik, or maybe A Scanner Darkly.

Try Stanislaw Lem for great concepts, maybe Solaris, or His Master's Voice. The Strugatsky Brothers are similarly cool, get the recent translations from Olena Bormashenko (IMPORTANT), maybe Hard To Be A God.

Multiple people raged that book 2 was shit. Didn't bother with one after that.

Cyberpunk is insulting to the tastes.

High-tech low-lyfe, brah.

Cyberpunk lit is actually dope

I don't even want to read cyberpunk, I want some good fantasy, mainly

Foundation would make a kick-ass game. It's got all the glamour and weight of 40k without the ridiculousness. When I get my PC fixed maybe I'll try and whip up a Trantor/Foundation scenario in Stellaris, that would bang

A faint shuffling noise disturbed his thoughts and he moved back to the window, peering out into the shadows.
A man was climbing the wall some twenty feet to the right - it was Scaler.
'What are you doing?' asked Pagan, keeping his voice low.
'I am planting corn,' hissed Scaler. 'What do you think I'm doing?'
Pagan glanced up to the darkened window above. 'Why didn't you just climb the stairs?'
'I was asked to arrive this way. It's a tryst.'
'Oh, I see. Well, goodnight!'
'And to you.'
Pagan ducked back his head through the window. Strange how much effort a man would make just to get himself into trouble.
'What's going on?' came the voice of Tenaka Khan.
'Will you keep your voice down?' snarled Scaler.
Pagan returned to the window, leaning out to see Tenaka staring upwards.
'He is on a tryst ... or something,' said Pagan.
'If he falls he will break his neck.'
'He never falls,' said Belder, from a window to the left. 'He has a natural talent for not falling.'
'Will someone tell me why there is a man climbing the wall?' shouted Rayvan.
'He is on a tryst!' yelled Pagan.
'Why couldn't he climb the stairs?' she responded.
'We have been through all that. He was asked to come this way!'
'Oh. He must be seeing Ravenna then,' she said. Scaler clung to the wall, engaged in his own private conversation with the Senile Eternals.
Meanwhile in the darkened room above. Ravenna bit her pillow to stop the laughter. Without success.

kek

You cannot resist the cyberpunk forever. But until then, try this.

>space-rastas
>razorgirls
>cassettes
>Hiro Protagonist
Stop, Cyberpunk is easily resisted and died for a reason.

>Arianus, the World of Air, is composed entirely of porous floating islands, aligned in three basic altitudes. In the Low Realm, the dwarves (called "Gegs", an elven word for "insects") live on the continent Drevlin and cheerfully serve the giant Kicksey-winsey, a city-sized machine that is the source of all water in Arianus. In the Mid Realm, elves and humans have warred for centuries with each other and amongst themselves for water, status, and advantage. Above them all in the High Realm live the Mysteriarchs, isolationist human wizards of the Seventh House rank. They were some of the most powerful wizards of their kind, leaving fellow humans behind in their disgust for the constant warfare, but they never equalled the likes of the missing Sartan and Patryn races.
this sounds pretty good... I may...

genre shit is gay

>only thread on Veeky Forums about books

no, u

>THAT WAS MY BEST HAT

>Amphetamines
>Jars
>Mentally unstable supersoldiers doing the bidding of A.I.
>Cyberspace
>Harddrives in yer fuckin' head
>Keanu Reeves
I'm sold.

The problem is "cyberpunk" as a genre is only the vision of the 80s and 90s. Some interesting modern cyberpunk would be cool, kind of like all the social media commentary you see on shows like Black Mirror.

...

>Black Mirror
Jesus don't remind me, god damn that show was so incredibly disappointing, people were making it seem like it was actually pushing new territory.

meh, for a high budget TV show it was fairly novel. Plus it was netflix, so the normies loved it

best episode got a hugo-related nomination, San Junipo, one with e-lesbians

Being new to the genre, you should read The Lord of the Rings instead of the other Dunes.

If you really like Dune, go ahead and read the others later.

Is it fair to say that Death's End deserves to win the Hugo for Best Novel the most out of all the nominees?

It really hasn't. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of the genre, but it underperforms literarily.

It's been like 100 years man, SF on TV/film doesn't break new ground. Should be pretty obvious by now.

I desperately tried to like Cyberpunk, but I just couldn't, even the best of the best of it made me want to remove my eyes.

This
You can't judge film and TV against literature, only against other film/TV. Black mirror is way ahead of most other scifi/spec-fiction stuff, so it deserves credit

I've not read any of the other nominees so I can't say.

Too Like the Lightning seems intriguing,so I'll probably read that.
Closed and Common could be good too, I've heard warm things about Small Angry Planet.

The rest, meh. Nothing exactly bad, which is better than some other years Best Novel nominees, but nothing really special. Death's End should probably win.

That's LITERALLY already a manga.
bato.to/comic/_/comics/arifureta-shokugyou-de-sekai-saikyou-r18091

Right down to the losing limbs and monster stuff.

Tried to read Neuromance and it has some interesting ideas (for its time) but the author utterly fails at making any of the characters or settings come to life.

Cyberpunk that takes itself seriously is usually pretty lame. Try Snow Crash. It's terrible, but at least it's readable.

Holy shit, someone else who read the Death Gate Cycle. I picked up the whole series a couple years back at a flea market for $14 in total, and it was seriously the greatest fucking thing. Absolute sleeper hit. It's a fucking travesty it isn't more popular.

Did your edition have those pieces of sheet music in the back? I wish I could hear them played.

netflix could do it
I want my tigana adaptation first

I want to lure my feminist brother into reading something with lots of rape, what shoud I give him?

mind you it has to be something that will get him hooked for long enough to get him mad

Arifureta is literally the worst isekai ever made.

Its like a frankenstein of a story with nothing but stolen characters from other series.

Do you want lots of rape and incredibly shitty story?

Because Sword of Truth is one long series about rape and bondage

Got myself "The city and the stars" and "The songs of distant earth".
I like it so far.

So how is the Broken Empire series?

I know, I skimmed several reviews that all call it straightforward or accessible. Without spoilers, it's difficult to tell if someone "got it." Even if you do realize the twist, it's still one of the most straightforward and elegant examples of Wolfeian duplicity.

Why didn't they just go to sleep or something?

Edgy

I did it. I finished The Crippled God. I'm done reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen. After 10 huge door stopper books I should be burned out or satisfied but I just want more. Mainly I want to see the fallout from the end of the book and what the pantheon looks like now. Like I want to know if Gesler and Stormy Ascended when they were killed.

I love Neuromancer. It's one of the few books that I re-read at least once a year.

Anything can be adapted (adopt is when rich people buy Chinese kids)

But I don't think it would be very good and I think you would lose a lot of what makes the thing great
I hope they never try

>adopt is when rich people buy Chinese kids

Shit, sorry.

It would lose the whole unreliable narrator aspect. You'd have Severian pointing at a space ship saying "look at the citadel!"

"pshh nothing personnel kid" the book.

Damn it.

Guess I'll just go reread the first three books of the Black Company.

Did you marathon the series or read other stuff in between? How long did it take you?

Just started Gardens a few days ago and loving it so far but the scope and length is pretty intimidating.

>'Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double.'

I thought I'd throw this quote about Jorge Luis Borges into the discussion. For me, identified here are the four building blocks (or inspirations) of fantasy:

1 ) The problems arising from the world and its lore and culture, i.e. the 'work' within the work, (the worldbuilding), and its conflict with the protagonist.

2) The problematic nature of reality and knowledge; forbidden knowledge, diabolical, boundless, mind-bending. E.g. Everything from Lovecraft's Necromonicon to Wells' Dr Caligari, Frankenstein, PKD's tenuous realities-within-realities.

3) The problem/drama of time: running out, or the problem of mortality itself. Man VS time, illness, etc.

4) Problems of the self: conflicts of self identity, conflict with others. All of the unreliable narrators, coming-of-age stories would fit into here.

Borges is good stuff so I recommend him in any case.

>Dr Caligari

I mean Dr Moreau,

Any good standalone novels from Orson Scott Card?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card_bibliography#Miscellaneous_novels

>the contamination of reality by dream

+The contamination of dream by reality

I read each book one after the other without taking breaks or reading anything between them, that's how I typically read big series like this. Malazan has some slow parts and those I procrastinated reading, less than a chapter a day at the slowest parts, but the more interesting ones I could devour hundreds of pages in a single day. The Crippled God is by far the longest book in the series, nearly 1200 pages, yet I read it half the time it took me to read Toll the Hounds because of how slow that book got at times, there were some weeks where I hardly made it through a chapter. Toll the Hounds did eventually get good toward the end, like most Malazan books, but goddamn was it self-indulgent in the middle.

So I guess read in whatever way works for you. Personally, I couldn't take a break from something like this because there's so much information to keep track of I was afraid I'd forget stuff if I picked up another series between books. I wanted to keep my brain in Malazan-mode til I was done so I could follow the plots and characters more easily.

>Did your edition have those pieces of sheet music in the back? I wish I could hear them played.
There are apps where you take pics of sheet music and it plays it.

I enjoyed them, but the edginess of the books puts some people off. They're also really short so you could probably bang out the first one in a couple days unless you were so bored you couldn't stand to read it, but while the series has its faults being boring isn't really one of them.

Check the last thread. Lots of discussion there.

>tfw page 880
Do you ever not read?

Going to read ICE's novels?

I'll definitely get around to those. I actually have the Forge of Darkness already so I'll probably read the Kharkanas Trilogy first, but I think I'm going to take a break from Malazan stuff for a bit. Have some other books I've been wanting to read, especially that Tad William's Osten Ard novella that is a precursor to his new trilogy coming out that's basically like a sequel to Memory Sorrow and Thorn.

I'll look them up.
>Toll the Hounds did eventually get good toward the end, like most Malazan books, but goddamn was it self-indulgent in the middle.
Think that could be chalked up to him losing his father and exploring such subjects.

I didn't consider that, but it might explain some of it. Really I think he just enjoys writing from Kruppe's point of view way too much.

I don't read too much, but I just finished the first Dune. Can anyone confirm if the books after it are worth reading? I know there are like 6 by Frank and then a shitton after by his son, but I doubt even the first original 6 are all worth reading.

They become increasingly worse by the book. The first Dune book is no doubt as good as it is because the editor made Frank Herbert rewrite the book several times.

Would I enjoy Tiagana if I liked pic related ?

I was thinking of just reading 2 and 3. Would that be suitable or is the drop in quality that severe?

TUC soon, lads.

You could do worse. If you don't like the second book you can just skip the third one.

Is this good?

Do you really need to ask?

Going to take a wild guess and say it's shit.

>tfw I finished all the books so I can meme with the best of them

>Tiagana
It is superior IMO.

Not the other guy but that looks interesting, what did you like about it?

>Nothing to read
>Nobody is writing niche shit that I want to read

I wish I was rich so I could just pay people to write books I'd be interested in

That book was so damn good, if the user who rec'd it is still around please suggest more books.

>Why didn't they just go to sleep or something?
They can't sleep forever, user sooner or later they'll have to set everything on fire.

>Like it isn't obvious why the normies act like this when they find something more interesting than all the netflix garbage that comes on these days.

>I'm not the other guy
>I swear!!!
>answer this other question for me though

autism

Prove it.

be the change you wanna be in the world faggot

I love the idea of sentient mice in a medieval setting, thats why I love Mouse Guard and also why I recently started reading Redwall, I really like the mix of cutesy and dark.Sadly theres not a lot of stuff to go around, so I did the sensible thing and decided to start my own ripoff.

Mind you, my english is spotty, and my writing is so slow that the result of hours of work ended up being a total of 372 words, but maybe by the turn of the next sentury I will have a couple of short stories on my belt.

>Mind you, my english is spotty, and my writing is so slow that the result of hours of work ended up being a total of 372 words, but maybe by the turn of the next sentury I will have a couple of short stories on my belt.

Why not write in your native language and do a translation if you like the final product?

Hello Kyle my old friend

well, its a lot of factors, but I cringe less at my writing If I can dissociate myself from it in some level by writing it in english.

also, it has to be good practice to improve my grammar skills, right?

>not laying down sticky paper and cutting the mice heads off when they are trapped

for all my love towards fictional sentient mice I actually killed an entire litter once.

momma mouse decided it would be a good idea to nest under the steel sheets we used to cover our swimming pool during winter, given that field mice can carry all sorts of diseases it fell on me to get rid of them.

I bashed all of them to death with a shovel and then disposed of the bodies.

not my proudest moment