/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>indians (natives) never existed
Alternate Facts?

I'm listening to the 10th anniversary edition, finished the first chapter, it's pretty good so far. I also really really liked the foreword by the author, reminded me a bit of Stephen King, it's what motivated me a lot to continue

welcome to /sffg/

Sounds like we have similar taste, user. Let me recommend you the brilliant set of novels by dan brown. Good luck on your literary journey!

I read his first one in the Robert Langdon series and quite loved the adventure, should really finish all of them at some point

Anansi Boys was way better

>tfw no hidden pool cavorting, birdgal princess to espy, kidnap, and betroth
I had low expectations for this (given my previous experience with Piers), but was pleasantly surprised. It's an early work of his that is a retelling of the Bird Maiden tale from One Thousand and One Nights. Has an author's note in that back describing the terrible time he had getting it published (I'm a sucker for these). 4 out of 5 alabaster chicken breasts.

That sounds like fictional history, or alternative history fiction.

If you have to post Dragonlance at least make it the somewhat good trilogy

>4.95$ for book almost 5$
>equivalent of 10,000$ in my currency
Who would I spend 10grand on a book?

Are any of the earthsea/dragonlance/other d&d setting shit books actually good? Or at least decent, I am fine with d&d stuff in general, mostly played pathfinder though.

>dragonlance

why was it so excellent, bros?

Err, eberron not earthsea.

Play Planescape: Torment. It's basically a book disguised as a video game. Think of it as a deconstruction of DnD in general and rpg video games in particular.

I read Walter Tevis' superb dystopian novel, Mockingbird (1980.) It's set in a 25th century New York where people live a society much like 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451; under robot overseers in a TV and drug induced stupor, where books are long forgotten, and people have forgotten how to think. After centuries of automation, however, everything is shabby; the robots are losing the ability to fix themselves, and the human population is sterile and dwindled to only a few million worldwide (2 mil North America.)

The plot revolves around a love triangle between a suicidal governing android, a rare reading man who he employs to transcribe silent movie captions, and an unusually intelligent woman with a rebellious nature. There's a lot in this book about the problems of automation, drugs, TV, and living in a society based on principles of pleasure seeking and self fulfillment; as well as the power of reading, thinking, and being self-aware. The preoccupation with androids and humanity makes the book dovetail nicely with Philip K Dick's DADOES, as well as Orwell and Huxley. In my view, the storytelling and human interest is better here than in any of those authors. Surely this deserved a Hugo or Nebula back in the day? Full marks for this, 5/5.

anything cool?

Yes!

My Freezer

some of the Forgotten Realms books are pretty nifty, especially the one-shot types or trilogy types. you just have to pick your poison in regards of writers and whatever you like.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Forgotten_Realms_novels

Literally pick your poison.
Also if you are just interested in the lore, download some pdf for The Grand Atlas of the Realms and The Greant History of the Realms, you'll get a lot of reading time out of it.

forgot to mention about writers:
you can read the Dark Elf trilogy and the Icewind Dale trilogy by Salvatore but I'd advise you to drop it after that because it just goes downhill from there with Drizzt, until Salvatore went full SJW in recent years
>Orcs dinndu nuffin
and I felt most of Denning's stuff wasn't enjoyable at all.
Also I generally hate elves

Writing a fantasy novel here and my chapters are damn long, around 5k each. I really don't like the idea of people reading less than a chapter in one sitting, but I really am struggling to find ways to break them up or pare them down. Should I just roll with the long chapters?

Anything with ninjas?

Because it might let you forget for a minute or so that you live in a third world hellhole

Get an actual editor

5k word chapters are fine. You can always use scene breaks within chapters if you want to divide them up at bit more

Mason & Dixon is better

Jut forget it. You don't have to force every one to read every single thin your characters do.

I havent been able to finish a book in over a year, its fucking killing me

How?
I am for the most part
I also despise the idea of readers skipping over stuff. I'd rather cut out the stuff a reader might be compelled to skip over than to have a book that is bloated but tells the whole story warts and all.

Maybe I just run in the wrong circles, but I have never once heard someone said "I read that book, but I skipped so and so". You either drop it or you read the whole thing.

Believe it or not, we're trying to give you good advice.

I enjoyed reading the Wheel of Time until I realized that 90% of the series was spent traveling.

Furthermore, if you don't have an editor find yourself a community of writers, go to conventions, meet people. Lend your book to your friends.

Never said I didn't appreciate the advice, I'm just new to the world of writing.

So lets say I finish the first 5 of these chapters as a sort of "demo" of the book (so like 25k words). Is there any way I can shop this to agents and see if there's a chance they'd buy it? I imagine its difficult to get published writing a large-scale fantasy novel, and I don't want to waste my time if it will never make money.

It's too soon for that. Do you know any one in the business/scene?

>and I don't want to waste my time if it will never make money.
You'll never make it bro. There are literally thousands of people who write without making a dime for the sake of it.

That's what short stories and novellas are for. Pick up an anthology. I go through weeks where I can't face a novel and favour short stuff. After some time with short stories I begin to crave the depth and involved feeling of long-form writing.

I recall when the rotund Mormon Brandon Sanderson said that a lot of writers skip parts of books. Women move past fight scenes whereas guys tend to skip domestic scenes. It happens. There are a lot of uneven and unnecessarily bloated books out there, and this stuff isn't sacred. As for my own preference on chapters, 15-20 pages feels like a good rhythm. There's no rule, look at Tolstoy and his 4/5 page chapters.

Yeah a couple people. My brother is a published author for example

Because he's a well written character with understandable motivations and fits well into the plot. not just controversy for the point of controversy

Cool, I'll try that

Got any good suggestions to start off with?

Not that user, but Lem has some funny/comfy anthologies. There's the Ijon Tichy series (The Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveler are short story anthologies, there's also a couple of full-length novels) and then there's The Cyberiad.

You could also read some of Borges' stories (does he count as /sffg/?), or The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe, as every user in this general should.

In SF, if an anthology is edited by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, or Martin Greenberg, then there is something worth reading in there. They must have edited hundreds of themed anthologies between them. Asimov edited one called The Super Hugos with award winning stories and there are a lot of similar collections. So just follow your nose. If you don't have any idea of what appeals to you then that will change after reading a couple of anthologies.

As for novellas, look at the second hand market if you don't mind yellowing paperbacks. The format of three novellas in one volume used to be quite common.

Shit, I meant short story collections, not anthologies. Stupid mistake.

Thanks a lot you two, i'll go take a look

Does anybody know of any good curators who review self-published SFF? I'm sure there are plenty of hidden gems out there but there's no way I'm willing to read through the shit myself to find it.

First off you need a completed manuscript before you go shopping for publishers. Nobody is interested in something half-done. No publisher will give you the time of day unless you have a complete draft for them to work with. So step 1: finish your manuscript.

Step 2: Research the publishers you're going to submit to, most of the big ones do not accept unsolicited manuscripts which means you'll have to get an agent first or find somebody who can introduce you to a publisher personally. You have an in with your brother, so first see if he can introduce you to somebody before you resort to getting an agent. If you end up needing an agent then you should research agencies to see which one is a good fit for you, then carefully read their submission guidelines before you proceed to the next step.

Step 3: write a query letter. This should be very short,

real author detected
P-peter?

Nice.

>tfw it's impossible to find a "write by numbers guide"

Trying to get into writing from an artists perspective is fuckimg painful.

is painting by numbers a legit way to learn how to paint? i remember reading da vinci used it on his students but never bothered to look it up.

as for "writing by numbers", read your ass off. if youre short on ideas, read short stories. if you suck at getting the prose out of you take a paragraph or two from a story that you like and copy it word for word.

Jesus. I'd rather keep making minimum wage on the side from my shit on Amazon.

Kinda, if you're aiming to understand the "why" as much as the "how."
With art you can atleast do figure drawing for three months and make definitive improvements.

I was thinking more like a scene by scene book skeleton, something more detailed than a three act structure guide.
Back to reading I guess.

How is this?

How is this.

shit senpai im gonna go buy me a kit. ill be a mediocre painter in no time.

if youre just starting out, just write. it will be trash but you will get better. study 3 and 5 act structures but i dont think you should dwell on it too much. know the structures, but make reading and writing your main form of practice and learning.

I just started reading this (no spoilers plz). Does it get better? He kind of throws you in there and expects you to care about these characters early on. I checked the cover twice to make sure I was reading the first book lol

That cover art makes me want to check it out, what can I expect?

>mfw didn't know five act structures were a thing.

Oh boy, how exciting.

Anime
Will Wright writes Brett good anime

>"author of The Crimson Vault"
>look up that title
>it's the sequel to the book in question
How does it make sense to put that in a book cover?

I just finished reading this. It's god-tier and I couldn't put it down. Was amazed by pretty much everything?

Are there any other books that have come out recently? Non PC, non-feminist, anti-polyanna sci-fi works concerning aliens?

>want to be a fantasy author since i was a kid and read the time machine
>spend years building a detailed world in my head every waking moment
>start to read a bunch of fantasy to refine universe
>come upon a series where basically all your carefully curated ideas are already realized better then anything i could hope to achieve

back to the drawing board i guess, 10 plus years of imagination down the fucking drain

have you played tyranny? black company is basically the main inspiration

Reminder that in one week and one day The Unholy Consult will be released. Get hyped!

please write this exact same setting without a fucking trash tier storyline. the idolizing of the sorceress who loses her memory was so goddamn awful that I had to give it up which is a shame because I really liked the introductory chapters.

Also whoever on this board is the Too Like the Lightning-shill...I just finished the first book and goddamn was it enjoyable, thanks for shilling.

>pump the PLA propaganda straight into my brain senpai

The old Bungie Real Time Tactics game Myth also drew heavily from The Black Company. Hasn't aged that well though, IIRC there's a good LP on the Let's Play archive.

What's so special about this setting?

quite the opposite. he got a lot of shit for fucking with commies.

just quit kohai. it's pointless. go watch anime.

You know that feeling after painful diarrhea where you body sends out endorphins and the diarrhea is over so you just get to rise the end of that high with no pain?

Nice, I'll pick it up when I get the chance. Thank you for sharing user.

So I have to finish my giant 200k words novel before I find out if it will be published or not?

What else should I read besides his BotNS and Wizard Knight series?

Soldier of the Mist.

It gets better, the way the characters shoot the shit with each other is hilarious. Its part of a trilogy, you can buy the entire thing in one book. Cook wrote more, but they're not as great.

Yes that's how it works if you're submitting manuscripts. Having an incomplete manuscript drastically reduces the chances of anyone taking you seriously. If you have some kind of connection and get a sit down meeting with somebody at the publishing house without having to submit anything, then maybe you don't need it finished. But if you're taking the route of getting an agent to represent you, it's a lot harder for him to do his job if you don't actually have a book to market and only the promise of one.

Speaking of Hyperion, I just started out and liked it until I found out that the entire novel is more or less retellings of past stories. Yuck. Not to say that this narrative frame is bad, but it's just not something I'm into.

May I get some recs for novels similar to Hyperion?

But it's cool to criticize on Mao and the red guards in China now.

Also lol at the part where Nicolas Maduro defeats the US in a war and gets selected to help lead humanity against the aliens. Dates the book like a late 80s novel where Japan didn't suffer economic collapse or the USSR exists in the future.

Is there any Fantasy Novels with a Lovecraft style horror atmosphere based around a small village? I thought VanderMeer may provide but his stuff, while good, is also not what I am looking for.

Which of these links is legit?

>is painting by numbers a legit way to learn how to paint
No there is only Loomis.

Stick to mobilism.org and the IRC there is an IRC guide stickied to Veeky Forums. This covers 99% of books you will ever need to download.

Am I doing it right?

...

Everything's pretty much self explanatory.
For everything not on IRC and Mobilism do this With enough practice you can tell that every single link on is fake.

The trick is to just not click the garish buttons, then?

And not to use one of these websites without credible certification from others too.

And the IRC is also like the biggest source of books in existence. Anything you can possibly imagine is on there.

>tfw nobody to talk about Xeelee with

>The trick is to just not click the garish buttons, then?
The websites you are posting in this post are created by bots that automatically grab text and paste it on the website to make advertising revenue. There are no legitimate books on these websites at all.

Some websites will have legitimate books but think about what happens when I choose to share books or other things like music on /mu/ for example. If the link is visible to google then bots will go through and take the links down. So anyone who actually shares files online will hide their links. Also google will remove copyright complaints from their indexer. So you are left with a high proportion of very spammy fake links. (after some experience in looking at links you will be able to distinguish which ones are fake from which ones are real, though.)

To avoid needing to filter the shit out, learn how to use the IRC. encyclopediadramatica.rs/Bookz 99% of every single piece of fiction on the internet will be on the IRC, it is the largest collection imaginable.

Mobilism, MAM and Bibliotik as stated in this post are three other very large and accurate libraries. These three get the new releases the fastest. Mobilism is the only public one and because it is direct download and people want to make money out of it a lot of the filehosts are spammy but do contain the books. MAM requires an invite you can get from the interview you can regularly sit and Bib is sealed up very tightly.

If you want to use mobilism install uBlock and use adblocking lists. Alternatively you can use jdownloader. What jdownloader does is access links so you don't need to click through spammy shit or anything in order to downlaod the books it will find the links for you and you can grab them en masse.

If you use IRC it is updated less often but you don't need to bother with advertising or anything also, it's just simple copy and paste a command to get a book.

And libgen and all the other sources I've mentioned are also very good.

Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

All of his short fiction, all of his novels, all of it. Do you think that the man behind Book of the New Sun ever wrote anything bad? Sure the quality goes up and down but it's not like you'll be doing anything better.

Start with The Devil in a Forest. It's a nice and easy one that nobody talks about.

sharp

Jdownloader is always the best choice, make sure you use JDownloader 2 though, as the original JD isn't supported any more.