/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>people will believe this
>if this continues sffg will be no better than outer lit
>mfw this is a ploy by outer lit to kill discussion

And the Sanderson rebellion has been foiled. The remaining Sandersonfags will be hunted down and defeated. The attempt to label me a pseud, has left me epistemologically scarred and metaphysically deformed. But I assure you, my resolve has never been stronger! The Unholy Consult will hit store shelves on July 6th!

In order to ensure the patrician taste of /sffg/ continuing sales of my series, this general will be re-organized into the Wolfe general. For an informed and tasteful membership!

Don't forget The Unholy Consult (UHC for short!) hitting store shelves on the 6th of July! Or just buy it on Kindle!

Are you serious, my nigger? Fucking Witcher, maybe?

this post is nowhere near autistic enough to be bakker

Aren't these threads just Reddit dens anyway? Might be an improvement if the rest of Veeky Forums weren't as awful as they are.

Imgur is dogshite. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

I'm getting near the end of All The Birds In The Sky.

Why did people insist this was good again? I'd rather have Charlie Jane Anders back on io9

Blue and Gold by K.J. Parker, though be warned that it is one of the very worst things I've ever read.
I'm not opposed.

These threads have been shit for like a month now, I barely even stop here anymore and I think I'm just gonna stop coming. All the interesting people are gone and never post, it's just the same small circle of redditor pseuds jerking off to boring trash.

Wtf.. The OP is shit with "book of the thread" posts, and now these redditors trying to push wolfe (like if the help is needed). This general is dying. I just hope it turns out to be summer.

>the things were different in the past meme

Why don't you contribute instead of whining, loser?

nice reddit spacing ;)

>reddit spacing

People have done this for as long as I can remember (which is '08, '09). How long have you been here, cupcake? Unless you've been on Veeky Forums since it's inception, you can take your baseless accusations and fuck right off.

anyone want to read a sci-fi story where a guy from space terrorist land goes to space new york city and investigates a space 9/11, only to learn the truth?

Sure. Fiction that deals with hot topics can be fun. Beats the hell out of retreading ground that was done to death decades ago like most genre-writers.

yay! it kind of alludes to a lot of hot topics. mass surveillance, privatization of police (to cheaply protect corporate assets), internet psyops, corruption from the bottom all the way to the top and other shit like that. There's a scapegoat for the space 9/11 a particular group of people (nothing like muslims IRL), and one character is of this race

it's not super actiony, but i want to make it very tense. Whole book takes place on the planet. just need to organize this shit and start writing

This could work well. And if your writing turns out to be mediocre call it a homage to classic pulp. Or you could double down and write a modern day 'The Iron Dream' and call it a response to 'The Turner Diaries' or something. Hell, that's such a good idea I think I might write it down somewhere.

Does anyone know of a good Dune analysis?
Looking to get some more insight in this work.

dude it's just a book about sand worms and space ships

How bad is it and why is it bad? I have it lying around and thought about reading it during summer.

i couldn't get into dune. i tried, but i couldn't.

> The Divine Comedy is just some book about a guy who goes to hell
> Invisible Man is just some book about a black guy

I just finished it yesterday and it's an instant favourite of mine

Griffin wasn't black

John Carter's obvious invulnerability does kill a lot of potential suspense. The appeal, though, is less about *whether* he's going to make it through than how exactly he does it (meh, he usually just fights his way out, but to his credit Burroughs does describe "boss fights" in pretty good detail) and what cool stuff he sees along the way.

Regarding similarities, it'd be more accurate to say a lot of anime feels like Barsoom. There's also an obvious parallel to videogames: the player/protagonist *is* going to make it to the ending, the real value is in what he does and sees on the way there.

>comparing Dune to The Divine Comedy

you fucking genre kids lmao

Dante is fantasy, religionfag.

>genre kids
What are you even doing in the sffg thread then?

GLHF
Try not to get sad when no one else will play in your sandbox :3

Giant robots!
I want stories of giant robots!

This has been talked about in the past, but I made a few images as an introduction to some SF authors with a basic description of the author's style, subject, worldview, recommended works, and other similar/related authors.

1/4

2/4 criticism of both style and content are welcome.

3/4

>ywn be Captain John Brannigan
Stfu fag Hyperion is good
Latro in the Mist is the combo of Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arête
Kim Stanley Robinsons The Years of Rice and Salt
Tim Powers Anubis Gate
The Tool album Lateralus
Heresy
Read Leigh Bracketts mars stories and C.L. Moores Northwest Smith stories

4/4

>its the Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein triptych meme with Vogt thrown in for some reason
Nigga u ever Alfred Bester or Walter M. Miller, Jr or James Blish?

>tfw giant robot war stories will be revived and written with greater literary depth the way space opera has been

How could it be done?

War or the Worlds

I'm sure someone in the 60s during the new wave asked how could space opera be better written?
Sam Delany and M. John Harrison pointed the way with Babel 17 and The Centauri Device
Since the 90s a bunch of authors have been doing it
Hyperion, Revelation Space, The Culture series, etc

Saved, thanks man

Brandon Sanderson is The Best modern fantasy writer

Erikson

pic unrelated.

Post essential Nazicore

I loved his naruto shippuden episodes

Read Gundam Origon

>I felt no physical need for Dorcas because I had poured out my manhood again and again with Jolenta in the nenuphar boat.
>Dorcas wept in private, vanishing for a time only to emerge with inflamed eyes and a heroine's smile.

FUCK YOU SEV
HOLY SHIT I'M MAD
FUCK YOU GENE, FUCKING PRINGLES LOOKING MOTHERFUCKER
DORCAS IS TOO PURE, SHOULD'VE PUSHED SEV INTO THE RIVER WITH THAT MONSTER

I think these are well written. Nice to see some oc in any case.

>Again the presence of truth where only more betrayal was expected let me smile. “I wasn’t lying, Caesar. There is a story in the book too, one I was supposed to finish. Apollo was rewriting the Iliad with giant robots.”
>He half laughed. “Giant robots?”
>“You know the old science fiction stories where the pilot rides inside a giant human-shaped robot. Apollo’s Iliad was set in the future, a space war where Troy is on the Moon, with Hector and Achilles facing off in giant robot suits and smashing asteroids. It was badly written, too. If you saw a chapter, Caesar, you would laugh.”
>MASON frowned, uncertain, as if believing me only because the claim was too stupid to be a lie. “Why would Apollo waste their time on such a thing?”
>A touch of lightness let my tears pause. “It was the only way Apollo could imagine a future war where one soldier still matters. Apollo hated war, could not forgive a universe where such horrible suffering was necessary to get to Mars. They desperately wanted to find something else worthwhile in war, something to make it more than an unforgivable but necessary evil. The Church War consisted of statistics, a hundred thousand dead here, a million there, mostly civilians, but even the majority of soldiers were killed by faceless bombs, and those who did see the whites of the enemy’s eyes did so only in waves of thousands.(...) Apollo wanted a war of meaning, two sides embodying two futures, who would fight with respect and honor, putting their lives on the line for their philosophies, as it was when Saladin and I faced Seine and Apollo. Homer’s heroes could have that, be that important to the course of the war, because they were part god. Apollo’s future version had cyborg pilots bonded to special giant robots that only they could use, which made them overwhelmingly powerful compared to common soldiers. In Apollo’s version the gods were powerful A.I. robots, so a human pilot in a giant robot suit was literally wearing a prosthetic god. There were only a handful of pilots who could do it, so when one left or entered battle, or switched sides, that individual decision could change the face of the war.”
Ada Palmer baiting all the /m/ fags I see.
Give me /m/ or give ME DEATH YOU KEK.

>Ywn randomly skip several decades between chapters and miss all the action

*
>where Troy is on the Moon, with Hector and Achilles facing off in giant robot suits and smashing asteroids.
And honestly if Valrave didn't inspire this I will eat my fucking hat.

Valvrave was so fucking weird.
>alien space magic vampire ghost illumination
Just fuck my shit up senpai.
At least the mechs looked cool.

Anyone read fortune's pawn?
It comes pretty close to a good Metroid adaptation, but then turns into romance novels schlock. Quite a shame.

Can anyone who has read Van Vogt books give their thoughts on his best books?

The ending gave me tears for real though.
>Haruto? Is that my name?

And this is why nobody thinks genre fiction is real literature

Nice job making /sffg/ look even worse guys!

>“Angela was twenty-two then. She had been the real head of the family since she was sixteen, since Mother died, since I was born. She used to talk about how she had three children—me, Frank, and Father. She wasn’t exaggerating, either. I can remember cold mornings when Frank, Father, and I would be all in a line in the front hall, and Angela would be bundling us up, treating us exactly the same. Only I was going to kindergarten; Frank was going to junior high; and Father was going to work on the atom bomb. I remember one morning like that when the oil burner had quit, the pipes were frozen, and the car wouldn’t start. We all sat there in the car while Angela kept pushing the starter until the battery was dead. And then Father spoke up. You know what he said? He said, ‘I wonder about turtles.’ ‘What do you wonder about turtles?’ Angela asked him. ‘When they pull in their heads,’ he said, ‘do their spines buckle or contract?’
>“Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb, incidentally, and I don’t think the story has ever been told. Maybe you can use it. After the turtle incident, Father got so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his laboratory and stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next day and looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.
>(...)
>“Will that do? Is that any help to your book? Of course, you’ve really tied me down, asking me to stick to the day of the bomb. There are lots of other good anecdotes about the bomb and Father, from other days. For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’
The best books are the ones that are self aware.

What is genre fiction? Anime?

>The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New Jersey—and said so.
Vonnegut is the most memeable author ever.

Can we discuss horror novels in this thread too?

Its hard to make genre threads outside of this one unless you're talking about Dune.

Dune is shit

Anime is the highest form of art.

It's pretty much those three. SFWA's Best Of included "Weapon Shops of Isher" but I thought it was too on the nose. We get it Alfred, you support the right of the people to bear arms.

Van Vogt's stories are all about nonstop actions. Slan is the purest expression of this: does it always make sense? Hell no. But the protagonist turns some crazy corner (maybe literally) every page. Space Beagle is much the same, IN SPACE.

Null-A is an attempt to be more "philosophical", but whatever the underlying merits of General Semantics they come across like Time Cube (or Philip K. Dick). If "TIME CUBE ADVENTURE: THE YEAR 2600" sounds appealing, you'll probably like it. If you think it sounds retarded, maybe not. Van Vogt was not and it not by any means a universally loved author.

Sanderson.

These are neat, thanks for making them!

is garbage

I've never read any of his books and I don't intend to, but I still kind of hate Berny Sanderson

I love Sanderson.

Yeah these are good.

look at this fat nerd and his stupid sword dildos

You have to go back

>read the summary on wikipedia
>Swastika Night is apparently feminist
This just confirms the fact that SJWs are the same thing as /pol/.

Giant robot war stories as literature? Just throw a bunch of literary devices at it. Wolfe-esque first person unreliable narrator, Philip K. Dick's stream of consciousness. Then combine that with some standard genre tropes to keep the plebs interested; adolescent protag, a femme fatale/tsundere love subplot, father-figure sargeant, aloof CO. Plot and narrative? Perhaps the protag is recalling events from a hospital bed after a concussion or traumatic event. Or talking to a robot therapist event (like in Pohl's Gateway.) His memories are fragmentary, unreliable, repressed, etc. Now who's going to write it?

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

>muh /pol/
>in sci fi thread
lmao every second book is either authoritarian-fetish or utopic-faggotland lmao collegebois #gasenglishmajors

So a great king's life achievements amounts to nothing but ashe? What does that have to do with sffg?

Because you can throw in a whole bunch of Ozymandias references - colossal wrecks and the remains of future, past and present wars all around and of sculpted robots and decaying interfaces.

What does this even mean?

You're smart, you'll work it out.

No I'm confused, thus the call for clarification.

It means that today he is an lmao summerfag that got off #Twitter

It's a great poem of Shelley's but I don't quite see the relevance. Unless we're just going to trade cool SF/fantasy inspiring poems now. In which case here is one I like by Clark Ashton Smith.

THE MEDUSA OF DESPAIR

I may not mask for ever with the grace
Of woven flowers thine eyes of staring stone:
Ere the lithe adders and the garlands blown,
Parting their tangle, have disclosed thy face
Lethal as are the pale young suns in space—
Ere my life take the likeness of thine own—
Get hence! the dark gods languish on their throne,
And flameless grow the Furies they embrace.

Regressive, through what realms of elder doom
Where even the swart vans of Time are stunned,
Seek thou-some tall Cimmerian citadel,
And proud demonian capitals unsunned
Whose ramparts, ominous with horrent gloom,
Heave worldward on the unwaning light of hell.

It means that he is vexed.

I like this one.

>What does this even mean?
You need an IQ of at least 103 to post here.

how do you not know Ozymandias

You also need a degree in deciphering facebook-speak.

This book deserves to become a meme. It's fantastic and delivers a punishing bog-pill to end all pills on identity politics. Nazis were right in their own way, as are feminists, Zionists, UKIP, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Charles Manson and Genghis Khan. Supremacy is the only sane ideology. To deny that you and your own are better than everyone else is suicide.A common sentiment today but back in the day this was cutting edge stuff. Incredible that she predicted what's happening now when she meant to apply it to a hypothetical victory by the other side. That just shows how little we learned from World War 2.

Pringles Can knows no mercy.

What passed for a feminist less than 100 years ago is pretty much full-blown /pol/ ally today. Burdekin would consider third wave feminism an abomination. Swastika Night is explicitly about how that kind of behavior is destructive for both sides.

Complaining about /pol/ in a science-fiction thread is stupid because most science-fiction is inherently fascist. Read 'The Iron Dream by Adolph Hitler' by Norman Spinrad if that sounds insane. He went to a lot of effort to make it clearer than I ever could.

...

>alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp–science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin science fiction-veneer
>telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin science fiction-veneer

>>“You know the old science fiction stories where the pilot rides inside a giant human-shaped robot. Apollo’s Iliad was set in the future, a space war where Troy is on the Moon, with Hector and Achilles facing off in giant robot suits and smashing asteroids. It was badly written, too. If you saw a chapter, Caesar, you would laugh.”
For you:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1aBt-_Zs4