/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

Anyone familiar with Richard Paul Russo?

Got this book recommended as similar to Blindsight.

Is this legitimate advice? After discovering how much religious imagery Watts slyly packed into Echopraxia I've been intrigued about putting some religious references into my own work.

Has there ever been a comfier childhood novel series?

I don't give a shit Harry Potter was comfy as hell

...

...

That: and The Mortal Engines books.

These were fucking great

I read Potter out of peer pressure in my late twenties and while it obviously didn't have much of an effect on me, I can easily see how it would encapsulate the young and new to reading.

These weren't too bad

Is Clive Barker's Abarat books any good?

How are the mortal engine books? My gf is trying to get me to read em

readable

don't believe the hype from anyone who read them as a kid though, they won't live up to that

It was a fun world to dive into as a youth, and the worldbuilding is OK. It's good for what it is - a book for young teenagers.

>gf is trying to get me to read em
Fuck me don't go down this route
I've read so much shit she said she loved, the worst offender being Eragon

>Eragon
Up until I read the last book (or possibly the two last books) I was quite fond of the series. I simply was not well read enough in the genre to see its flaws until I was an adult.

Is Temeraire shit? I've fond memories of reading the first books as a teen but stopped reading after the fifth book was released.

>Temeraire
I read the first book relatively recently. It was OK but I didn't feel compelled to keep reading the series. It was better than Eragon though.

Narnia?

Thecla was to good for the world.

t. only read SotT

Saw someone call house of chains boring earlier today, thoughts?

>house of chains

I don't know who that is, but the google image results seem mediocre

this
Say what you will, but Discworld is pretty comfy

...

Was anything but boring tbqH.

Because he packs as much Christianity reference in them as possible.

>Clive Barker's
Don't read imajica. That is all.

>Karsa oorlong
>smaller than a horse
Person fucked up that art. He is supposed to be able to split witches apart on his spear. From what I understand he is bigger than a human.

And he has a giant fucking horse, you mong.

I found it boring, particularly going straight from books 2 and 3, which were not boring.

post book with cool settings you dont see often

Cortez did nothing btw

Short story collection. The final entry Becalmed in Hell was interesting. Spaceship as prosthetic for brain in a jar. The engines fail when floating in the Venusian atmosphere. Sole non-brainjar crewmember can't find the problem and is convinced the brainjar is having some kind of psychological difficulty.
Overall 2/5 dinosaurs.

Does anyone have a copy of After the King: Stories In Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien?
I'm trying to find an e book version of it, but can only find dead links.

Any great books about a little girl?

Matilda

She's a marry sue though

libgen bby

How little?
The lioness quarter did it for me.

Amazing, right up their with arifureta and dungeon seeker in terms of character.

I got all the way to book 11 but that was 4 years ago. I've always wanted to finish the series but I feel like I need to read it over again from the beginning otherwise the ending won't be as powerful since I won't remember the entire journey

>rereading WoT
>ever

Just read a summary and pick up where you left.

Thanks looks cool

Will check out

>Not rereading WoT

It's honestly better on subsequent readings, you get to pick up on all the stuff you missed, like Rand first manifesting his split personality near the beginning of book 1.

>reading through Perrin and Faile chapters a second time
I could barely get through it the first time

No you just skip those.

I've searched there but it didn't turn up any results. That's why I asked here.
Are you getting any?

not that guy but try this

forum.mobilism.org/viewtopic.php?f=1293&t=1388284

Way too many books on my to read list to go over endless shit like Malazan and WoT more than one time.

Just finished all of this series that's been released so far. Would recommend. Pretty much speed read the dry battle scenes though.

I fucking micrography

Do you have a goodreads? You should document your book reviews there.

Looking for some older sci-fi

It's about this hospital that travels the galaxy healing exotic aliens exotic diseases, but they're kind of like diplomats/peacemakers too

Any idea?

I don't have a memereads. Why do I need one?

Sounds like the Hospital Station series.

You ready, brother?

how about a google spreadsheet, just so we have all you dino ratings in one place

>Why do I need one?
Because threads here die. If you put so much effort into making into writing your reviews, it would be a waste not to document them.

Write your reviews there, copy paste here.

You can even start a tag as dino-core. Tag all your dino books as such. If I was still a NEET I would have made an account named dino-core, put in my "about" what you spewed about old books, then copied your post from here and post them there whenever you and donkey boy shared your books.

Not enjoy autism though. Sorry.

Ninefox Gambit is good when you get into it.

I suppose, but I only rate random garbage and my reviews are more like synopses.
>If you put so much effort into making into writing your reviews, it would be a waste not to document them.
Perhaps you are thinking of that other dino rater?
>You can even start a tag as dino-core. Tag all your dino books as such.
It's a thought, certainly. I like it here cause I'm real shy and the webs make me paranoid.

thanks man, how did you find this?

Just keep posting the reviews in the thread. I enjoy them.

There is more than one dino/old book reviewer in the midst, a Borgesian double, but it is a circumstance which is entirely wholesome and encouraging. Part of the idea was to get SFFG to talk about what they read by example; a simple thing, to type five or six sentences about a book. The other part was to organise my own thoughts about a book so that I could recall it better. As for posterity, I copy and paste them into a wordpad file, and sometimes these short reviews form the basis of a larger review on an obscure blog which I indulge myself with.

So I have no propriety over dinosaurs, it's something anybody can do and should consider doing as a simple exercise in organising their memories of a book they enjoy. And why limit to dinosaurs and old books? The fellow obsessed with little girl protagonists could adopt that measure.

either create an account at mobilism so you can search the site or just chuck the title you're after, the author and mobilism into a google search

Any reason why?

What are good Battletech books?

I've read Lethal Heritage and Natural Selection, both were well enjoyable but otherwise nothing special.

People read dinosaurs because they are a safe bet.

>and then he nukes everything and gives fallout zone survival tips like the 10 commandments
What a wild ride

Just started book 1 yesterday. Chapter 1 confirmed for maximum comfiness.

>tfw you will never have a mug of brown ale poured for you from an oak cask on top of which a yellow cat sleeps

Name a comfier series of books.

lotr is not comfy at all

Yes it is. Mainly Fellowship.

what are some "literally anime" books that are actually good?

The Faraway Paladin.

>what are some "literally anime" books
Well there i-
>that are actually good
No.

Dune

Anything by Brandon Sanderson. I enjoyed them for it but it's clearly some pretty ez reader Fantasy fiction, characters usually doing cool shit and ultimately winning over the baddies.

Also random anime tier shit if mystical talismans of short-time unlimited power and Mary Sues that also turn into idiots sometimes.

Has anyone here read Dichronauts (Greg Egan's latest book)?

The more I think about it, the more it seems that the hyperbolic spacetime he chooses to be the basis of the novel actually makes any nontrivial structure in the universe impossible. Still, it was an engaging read.

>telefragging the priestess

Hyperion
But only if by "actually good" you mean "incredible"

I like Egan's earlier work, but I found the clockwork rocket heavy going. Is Dichronauts as difficult as the orthogonal books?

In a deep sense Dichronauts is almost like a companion book to the Orthogonal trilogy. There he explored a universe with (+,+,+,+) metric, here he does it for (-,-,+,+). But the "look and feel" of Dichronauts is quite different, it almost reads like a light adventure, with the emphasis on the events and how the characters react to them. In Orthogonal, the main thread was about the characters gradually discovering the physics that governs their world, while here nature of their universe and the quirks related to it are mostly taken for granted by the characters, Egan just makes them enumerate and discuss them for our benefit. They are quite bewildering and possibly confusing at first if you don't understand the underlying trick, but everything is described quite vividly, so it's easy to imagine.

That's a Jhag horse, they're large enough to carry Toblakai and Jaghut.

I always come away from Sanderson feeling like it was a totally empty experience - like, there's some nifty locations and bits of magic, but it's not ABOUT anything. Wolfe is all about Catholicism, PKD is about paranoia, even Gaiman is about folklore and myth, but with Sanderson it just feels like slick Hollywood plotting and not much else.

What is the grimmest grimdark? Extra points for sci-fi not fantasy.

Sanderson is an unabashed genre author, not really a stylist or distinctive voice like Wolfe, Dick. He just wants to write about cool stuff and sell a lot of books. I wonder if he will continue in this manner for long; I recall the immense ambition of his to have over thirty books in an overarching series, which suggests that he will be plugging away for a long time. This course, though, is the road to burnout - so perhaps he will resort to new methods in order to blow off steam between these doorstopper sized books, and write an interminably oblique, indulgent, and really far out New Wave science fiction, a rollicking intergalactic tale with extensive drug use, explicit sex scenes, cat women, little girl protagonists, book ruining female warriors, and increasingly overt references to Mormon myth.

A lot of people here have goodreads accounts. They just don't post them in the thread.
I just though with seeing dinosaurs-as-measurements he would post them there to be documented and link back in here.

Blindsight and Echopraxia.

>In the universe containing Seth’s world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a “dark cone” to the north and south.
What the fuck!
Colour me interested. Is this book worth reading?

>so perhaps he will resort to new methods in order to blow off steam between these doorstopper sized books, and write an interminably oblique, indulgent, and really far out New Wave science fiction, a rollicking intergalactic tale with extensive drug use, explicit sex scenes, cat women, little girl protagonists, book ruining female warriors, and increasingly overt references to Mormon myth.
I wish he would, really - that would seem to be the sort of thing fantasy is FOR, whereas I'm not convinced by the idea that crystal swords and realm maps are inherently interesting. Even Rothfuss, for all his bad qualities, made a weirdly meditative one-character novella about isolation and mental disturbance.

>SFFG cries out for a little girl protagonist
>Mark Lawrence actually goes and writes a little girl protagonist in his new trilogy
The madman

It's 800 pages of gender fluidity for a fat NOTHING at the end.

>all these new WoT readers praising how great and "comfy" it is
>can't wait to drink their nutritious tears
Waiting is always the hard part when you feast upon sorrows

Is it another sequel of broken empire, or something in a different world?

different world

still post apocalyptic tho