Gormenghast Edition
Fantasy
Selected:
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General:
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Flowchart:
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Science Fiction
Selected:
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General:
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NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books:
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Previous Threads:
First for warlock of the magus world.
>Starting off with a book that isn't memed on
and ironically trashed/praised every single thread
Careful. We might actually have to discuss things.
Do you guys think I'm going to crash and burn if I pick Titus Groan as my first fantasy book ever? I've been getting tired starting with the Greeks and Romans lately and i need a break. I don't think i will be spending as much time as you guys reading fantasy and sci-fi so I want to go straight for the very best. On the other hand, I'm afraid I might be prematurely put off if the work i pick requires some prior familiarity with the tropes--some already acquired taste, if you will. Whatcha think, fantafags?
I think the stylistic shift might actually kill you if you've actually been reading ancient works.
anyone read pic-related?
read one review where the person thought it was his best, but otherwise seems to be a bit polarizing.
>Gormenghast edition
You did good OP, absolutely love the first two books, haven't bothered to check out three and four as I've heard some less than positive things about them. Pretty curious how Peake was going to make it last ten books though.
Gormenghast has pretty good prose for fantasy fiction, lots of great descriptions kind of feels like you're reading Last Year at Marienbad a little.
Why hasn't Gormenghast attracted the faux geek chick fans in the way franchises such as Harry Potter, GOT or Star Wars has? I can see someone like Disney trying to make it into a movie or something but I really don't see it working out all that well.
Haven't gotten to it yet, but from what I've heard it's a kind of unpleasant experience until/unless you get it, at which point it's great. It doesn't seem to have that surface-pulp tone that makes most of Wolfe's work enjoyable even before you understand what he's doing.
>Why hasn't Gormenghast attracted the faux geek chick fans
It's way too bleak and literary. The aesthetic is basically grim-core Tim Burton, and he already ran off with the goods and made his own fanbase, so.
>It's all YA teenybopper shit made to attract tumblr fandom retards and MUH WORLDBUILDING Sandersonfag mouthbreather
>It was bad from the start, but not for the reasons you've said.
Why do you say it's bad? I read far worse. Please enlighten me.
I just read the opening of Prince of Nothing. It's supposedly an edge-fest but so far there's been nothing too offensive. The only potential problem is the constant references to things with retarded names. The made up names all sound ugly and I have the creeping feeling that I'm going to have to actually remember them to make sense of this story.
>he fell for the meme.
There's no reason you can't read both the Greek/Roman classics as well as the best of SF+F. It would work especially well with somebody like Philip K. Dick, who often alludes to Plato and the pre-Socratics. Robert Silverberg is also a Greek/Roman nut - his novel Dying Inside has a protag who ghost writes student papers about Greek plays. I recall a couple of allusions to Heraclitus in Ursula Le Guin's work, too. Most of all there is Gene Wolfe. Many New Wave era SF/Fantasy writers are steeped in that material and allude to it.
as promised, here comes the discord
when it started we had some ok trolling and some ok discussion. get back on here and discuss Ubik with me you cunts
>discord
fuck off
Why are you creating discord on my dear board when you have Discord to create discord as you please?
>being gay
WEW
You guys got any tips on how to begin with third person limited
The names sound ass retarded until you realize that theyre pseudo ancient Mesopotamian type civilizations
>Do you think that Sci-Fi/Fantasy have actual merit, for example being able to pose and construct tough questions such as the benefits of human engineering or is it a bunch of armchair philosophy?
Not inherently they don't. It heavily depends on the author. SF/Fantasy can of course pose tough questions and >really make you think, but that's not inherent to the subgenre either. I also believe authors who try too hard in that aspect often fail miserably, because instead of starting from a good idea about a fictive world and building from that, they start from what they want to say and articulate the world about how to convince the reader, and it really shows in the final work. In the end I think the best way to insert more philosophical questions in a fiction is to do so subtely through the actions of the protagonists and their consequences. (For instance, you could write a remake of LotR with a female Frodda and she gets caught 50 miles out of the shire, thus subtely making the case that females are good for nothing except cooking, cleaning and vaginas)
It certainly isn't his best. It's middling Wolfe.
I love science fiction and like fantasy to an extent but I'm a pretentious fucker so I'm just ITT to hear some Veeky Forums core recommendations of the genre.
Solaris
Gateway
The Thing Itself
Wolfe's works
Best recent authors: Peter Watts, Guy Gavriel Kay, Daniel Abraham (Expanse is fucking shit, avoid expanse)
Best FUN classic authors: Asimov, Dick, Strugatskys, Gibson, Orwell, Lem, Oscar Wilde, Jack Vance
Fantasy authors to keep an eye on because they're probably going to be the next classics: Bradley P. Beaulieu, Ada Palmer
Do not miss these fucking authors because they are great and fun and amazing: Vonnegut, Dan Simmons
>Gormenghast
>Fantasy
if Gormenghast is fantasy so is Shadow of the Wind, which sets everything up for a ghost story but just leaves it as an incest story instead.
>mfw I thought Name of the Wind was Shadow of the Wind whenever it was rec'd to me, so I just put on a weary face and said "I've read it"
there's already a Veeky Forums discord
I got banned for toasting the admin in an argument months ago so I couldn't tell you how active it is
>m]24 / 2 / 20 / 2 [Update] [Auto]
Veeky Forums =/= /sffg/
ain't that the truth
it was mostly SFF there anyway, that's what everyone that put their writing in the weekly meetup was writing
Thank you guys!
Thank you, most informative. For sci-Fu i was going to start with a classic such as A Case of Conscience or The Stars, My Destination or A Cantiicle for Leibowitz or Childhood's End, but i will look into PKD and Silverberg. My dad was a big fan. His sci-fi cheap translated paperbacks are what reminds me most of him.
"Alone" by Robert Reed was a pleasant story. Also, I can't export my goodreads library. What a shit fucking unworking feature that they need to fix.
Oh boy, oh boy
>I get to post, that!
Tfw all hard science settings (no FTL) with competent aliens are unenticing to live in...
Oh killing star, your my only hope.
also
>laughs at us and goes to his email ip name club
>his fellow discord users of the past 10 months up and left him
>discord is completely dead
>comes back to sffg to try and recruit
>he took all the reddites and tumbfags with him last time
I saw there were some new redshitors exposing themselves last thread, you can take them.
honestly when I see a classical or high culture reference in these sort of book its usually so ham fisted and pointless, ie dont be exzpecting Moby Dick like intertextuality from SF
That's not how hard sci-fi is defined, you chalkboard.
>The Thing Itself
its actually none of the above. SF is just a narrative tool, it allows you to construct narrative and characters that you otherwise wouldn't be able to in a conventional setting.
>spaceships and trulit force each other off the page
yeah no
if you wanted shilling i'd have mentioned Too Like the Lightning
tTI has a fair bit of Kant and philosophical themes but it's a good book nonetheless
>I've been getting tired starting with the Greeks and Romans lately
You actually fell for that?
So what should I get into now?
Thinking of
>First Law trilogy
>Malazan Book of the Fallen
>Titus Groan
Tired doesn't mean I'm not enjoying them or that it's a meme. I just need a break, that's all.
lordy
the prologue was pretty well written, but this is quickly degenerating as i read more
>First Law trilogy
Read Best Severed Cold, The Heroes and Red Country instead.
Would Stevian be allowed there?
Malazan is amazing
Brandon Sanderson is the Best
Anime
Did i do good?
Enda en norsk jævel her ser jeg.
Ways in which Stormlight Archive is anime (feel free to add to the list):
>power levels
>emotion represented by colorful blobs floating around the characters (red angerspren when someone's angry)
>anime/video game mechanics (you have to his the Shardplate twice in the same spot for it to break)
why would any one buy half a book?
H-hvordan fant du ut det snusmummeriken?
It feels better than reading a 1000 pages in pocket
I recognized the bookmark. Better not be in Bergen or I'd fight you for buying a Ian Brandon Sanderson book
>Not buying the superior Hardback version
I'm from Molde. I would't want to punch a guy who plays league, my hands would get filthy
I doubt it would hurt much you limp wristed contemporary anime fantasy fag. it's ok I love you anyway
where's blindsight?
Y-you too.
Gone
no point reading the whole first law trilogy.
read the first book if you have to or alternatively just glokta chapters because they're the only ones worth a damn.
>tfw a mad moon tyrant drains the powerful rays of Blue stars to destroy your rocket ships and all you have are rays drained from the puny Red stars
The pulps are weird
catholicworldreport.com
Catholic Fedora Man getting noticed by serious publications.
This is shockingly bad.
elaborate
>YA
>Serious publications
I don't have a sustained critique, just wanted to vent.
The prose isn't even serviceable, there's essentially no setting, it reads like the outline or summary of a plot, culture remains completely static over hundreds of years, and is just 1950's America except with FTL, the worldbuilding is stupid (numbers and scale make no sense), 'all according to keikaku,' fedora-tipping, plot points never actually happen but are only explained in retrospect in clumsy 'let's sit around and talk about what we already know' dialogue, plot points themselves make no sense (taking over entire stellar systems with an invented religion in 30 years, entire solar systems forgetting about nuclear power in decades, manning spaceships using coal), unhappy mixture between dialogue transcripts / play format and ordinary prose, juvenile character interactions, prophecies, ridiculous portrayal of 'symbolic logic'
I felt exactly the same about the trilogy, but the books around it Asimov wrote later were much better and enjoyable.
Getting noticed by serious publications is not the same as writing a serious publication, can you not tell the difference?
Any publication that "notices" YA is not a serious publication.
Hey guys I'd like some recs.
I'm in the mood for a fantasy series...something that's really just fuckin weird without being uncomfortably/twistedly so. Maybe the right word is wonderful?
...
...
I literally cannot get through Titus Alone. I've tried three times now. I've realized that I care very little about Titus himself, Gormenghast was the interesting character.
Asimov writes like a historian, part of the appeal for some (like me)
It's the 50s with space but then that's a product of its time really
It's just old man, compared to a lot of pulpy shit from back then it's bretty gud
>compared to a lot of pulpy shit from back then it's bretty gud
what's really bad then
I've finished this trilogy.
Well, at first I hated these books: slow, verbose and too many environmental descriptions, but progressing with reading, however, I have become very attached of history and characters, expecially reading "Green Mars" and "Blue Mars". Probably "Blue Mars" is the best book of the trilogy.
What do you think?
Do you know good books about the space colonization and/or the terraformation of the planets?
Thoughts on this book? I've been thinking about picking it up because I like the idea of a mailman in a post-apocalyptic world.
I really liked it even though it's heavy-handed on the feminist hippies beating gun-toting survivalists angle. Very hopeful story, very feel-good.
>Molde
wew
thanks gonna check it out
Maybe Vandermeer? City of Saints and Madmen was pretty good.
How come?
What was the name of that one microfiction magazine that used to shill here? Did it have something to do with bards?
...
Give me something short to read
...
Just finished wheel of time, 14 books feels too short. I would have preferred it if they had kept some loose ends to think about.
>14 books feels too short.
Are you serious?
Absolutely, because as many as the words were, the world was so much larger.
No, are YOU serious?
god seven surrenders is even worse
I just want to read about the plot & not genders
futa? joocy tho
>w..what are we gonna do on the bed user-san
>why do.. why do you have a book about my tight no no place?
>waahh
>pomf
>brent weeks
no
>a book about my tight no no place
What is no no? Anal? There is a book about all anal there? Which one???
Is the illustrated edition of Gormenghast worth getting?
amazon.com
>doesn't know the tight meme
how new are you bruh
heres a hint the entire book is about a girls vagina
When is it coming again guys? I forgot the date.
got this in a fucking cereal box
comfy/10
11 days until the Unholy Consult is released! Remember to preorder my book!