/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General Thread

Okay, maybe I should have specified that it's shitty and normey but not being constantly shoved in my face every moment of every day.

Something lighthearted

I assume you've checked out Vance, Bakker, Wolf, eetc. Right?

The Face in the Frost

The princess and the goblin.

now you're just trolling

Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom. Unironically great YA.

Can anyone toss me some recs based around any of the following genres/ideas:
-dark fantasy or horror a la Lovecraft(no zombies/vampires; I'm thinking of a hellish/demonic or otherworldly flavor)
-sf/f that discusses or focuses on sexual degeneracy or other decadent excesses
-sf/f involving peoples/races with unusual or alien sexual/relationship practices

Thanks.

Plebby Potter
Pleb Of The Rings
A Song Of Ice and Plebs
The Pleb Files
The Pleb Of Shannara

I'm still fucking butthurt over the fact that Mister Monday died.

What Egan books are good? four threads running fuck all of you

How to deal with post The Unholy Consult depression?

Perdido Street Station, maybe? It's got these horrific moth creatures that eat your mind and leave you a drooling vegetable, giant spiders that walk through dimensions we can't see and weave probability together, and at least one man/insect sex scene.

Everybody died

Underrated, probably too patrician for him desu

Why is Mieville so obsessed with bugs, squid, and trains

In a foreign thread, in a foreign board.

Forget it. It's impossible to get a good rec out of this board. Your heads are so far up your own ass all you can do is shit on books that are popular and insist upon horrible ones that aren't.

How have you been reading for so long and you have yet to find a single gem that you don't hate because other people agree its good?

>mfw

A U T I S M
U
T
I
S
M

It's a slow general, faggot. Have some patience.

But I rec good books all the time user :(

Autistic people always want recs and then they're never good enough

Don't forget rusty junkyards/wreckage

I LOVE FANTASY

I've been asking for at least two years. I've had maybe two hits and hundreds of misses

plus I don't have another source of recs since Charlie Jane Anders left io9 to write terrible books. Her replacement literally recommended a minecraft book this month

I'd start with Permutation City or Diaspora. His new book that just came out, Dichronauts, seems pretty cool, but havent had the chance to read it yet.

start with the greeks

Marxist retardation

What is the best PKD book besides Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, UBIK, The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, or Dr. Bloodmoney? Those are all of his novels I've read and I'm wondering what to read next. I've tried to read VALIS a few times and never got very far. What else is good by him?

You do know that this is /sffg/ right? Are you lost?

Here you are my friend.

I'm well aware. How can you be the plebs of the board and still be such fucking elitist douches

There's bound to be spillover, even in a pleb enclave like here. Not much we can do about it.

Your request is vague and retarded. Just go read Harry Potter.

How important are tax policies to a good fantasy book?

The Dying Earth series is probably one of the best books I have ever read in it's respected genre. Simply amazing stories

Every story's different. If your story is about taxes and economics on a basic level, then really important; but if it's about something else, they should be a background detail at most.

Mog/Kel probably killed Esme

Is urban fantasy a meme genre or are there actually worthwhile books in it?

Read Bakker's series. It's literally 100% demonic alien rape monsters vs. decadent middle eastern slave kings.

>that cover
>that title
>"Carlton Melick III"

Going through the third book of Wheel of Time.

Well. At least Rand is not the main point of view character.
But reading this is painful. I might have to take a break from this series if it doesn't get better fast.

If you don't like it by now chances are you never will. It does gt better from here, up til around book 6 or 7, but not drastically so. Then again I suppose there must be something you enjoy about it for you to have kept going so far.

>Is urban fantasy a meme genre or are there actually worthwhile books in it?

Meme Gaiman is good

>Spanking (duh)
>Bondage
>Submission
>Femdom
>Public humiliation
>Sissies
>Mind control
>Bimboization
>Mental torture/mind break
>animal transformation? (Moghedien turning Nynaeve into a horse)
>transgender transformation? (Aran'gar)
>Ageplay
>Multiple personality rape
>Wolf nuzzling :3
Stick at it senpai

>I suppose there must be something you enjoy about it for you to have kept going so far

Curiosity. I know it was fairly popular, I just want to know what made it so.
It just uses too many of those lazy fantasy storytelling crutches, like the cliched actions that supposedly help you identify characters.
A long time ago I went through some of the Dragonlance books and that kept bugging me.

In general the books just feel like they're full of padding and restating of conflicts and intention with no progress whatsoever.
Book 1 was generally just meandering and slow paced without a good aim. Book 2 was plagued with the main character verbally struggling with the same issue ad nauseam. Book 3 seems to have switched to Perrin but I fear it might end up being just a different repeated complaint.
On the other hand I appreciate the author is dedicating time to another of the main boys. But it probably should have been Mat, since he's still a non character, having spent a large portion of the first book not being himself and barely present in the second one.

Mat will get time to shine, but if you're not enjoying the first books you'll probably not enjoy the later either.

>"Carlton Melick III"

Vurt by Jeff Noon is great

We really should assemble a chart of recommended/essential Carlton Melick III.

is there anything that does political intrigue better than or as large as ASOIAF?

I was going to read Malazan or Inda.

Is malazan really like that? I was under the impression it was going to be almost entirely warfare focused at least from other people talking about it. I only just started reading it myself.

Oh no, I only inferred because it's epic fantasy! I just assumed because it has a shitload of characters to my understanding. I have been sitting on the first book for ages.

>Doesn't have an audiobook

>but I thought it fit perfectly
Same here. It was absolutely fine, it's just that it was also very short and didn't have a traditional denouement, just like Snow Crash.
>How's Cryptonomicon? What can i expect?
Mad soldiers. Autistic savants. Entire passages explaining the superiority of STEM fields over humanities. An early idea of cryptocurrencies. And lots of cryptography. The book is like a computer nerd's wet dream.

>tfw the hardcover edition of Cryptonomicon that would go perfectly with my collection is out of print and costs 40 bucks on the second-hand market
I think I'll finally shell out the cash for it and Anathem next month. Collecting hardcovers is more addicting than crack.

Any Malazan readers who have completed the series ITT? I have a question concerning (MT or RG spoiler) Silchas Ruin.
Brys gave him a couple of swords. When Brys and Quru chose the swords, the chapter ended along the lines of how the choices would have been different if Quru had been told whom the swords were for, and it was implied the choices made would have grave consequences. I never really saw any consequences, so can some of you enlighten me?

It has quite a lot of social commentary. Book 5 and 7 deals a lot with the Lether society, and while many have asked if the Lether society is based on the USA, Erikson refuses it is. I guess it's easy to jump to that conclusion, so be wary.
The series doesn't really have the same political intrigue as ASOIAF does. There are characters scheming and conspiring, but it's not in the same way as ASOIAF's kingdoms fighting over the throne.

literally bakker on all points

Not the one you're replying to
Bakker has middle east shit?
Fuck, and I wanted to read his shit because it's shilled so much here, so thanks for the warning.

Meant to reply to this:
sorry who I originally responded to

Hello, /sffg/. I'm looking for a fantasy series with detailed history where lineages, culture and the present are heavily described. See:
>Tolkien
>ASoiaf
>Gormenghast

Imagine the bible, but with a lot more rape demons.
Why does the middle eastern stuff bother you?
If it helps the protagonist is a six foot tall blond hair blue eyed Ubermensch come from the far north who the lesser races worship as a living God.

What are some SF novels that are like Star Trek but are not Star Trek novels?

literally any pulp sci fi mag from the 50s

Sanderson

While waiting for the next translated book, is there anything else like this I can read?

Just finished The Night Land, that ending was pretty good. I was so scared it was going to be shit, but it was actually better than most of the book. It would be 10/10 if someone took a hacksaw to the endless nonsensical philosophical asides, and took the air out of the hideously bloated prose.
The setting, the quest, the characters, and the resolution are all amazing. It's like a scifi odyssey, a true epic.

Has anyone read the other versions(shortened edition and rewrite)? How do they compare?

I'm a little way through Shadow of the Torturer and it's quite good, I'm definitely going to finish the whole Book of the New Sun.

Got a question though: does it ever become more overtly scifi? At the moment it's just fantasy with some hints of scifi at various points (the forested moon, mentions of alien visitors etc.). Does it ever become more scifi-ish?

I need some good fantasy young adult fiction for research references.

I'm about this far away from just starting a web novel about !not skeletor.

>Does it ever become more scifi-ish?

Yes. Definitely does. Don't want to say any more for fear of spoiling it for you.

Also if you ever go back an re-read the Shadow of the Torturer again, you'll probably find it much more sci-fi than you did the first time. There are some big obvious sci-fi things sitting there in plain sight that you might have missed due to reading things from Severian's point of view

Cheers, good to know, thanks for no spoilerino
I'm sure, but hold your horses there buddy I need to finish it once already for the time being

Everyone on Veeky Forums hates sapkowsky right?
or is just a meme?
Just readed Viper and the Hus wars trillogy recently and find them very good.

>putting sci-fi and fantasy into the same category

kys

they're two different categories and almost all books discussed here fall very neatly and clearly into one or the other
however as a part of literature as a whole scifi and fantasy are incredibly pervasive, hence deserving of their own general

It's important to understand how feudal tax actually works compared to modern tax if you don't want to sound like a dipshit yank

But other than that it's not important unless you're writing economic fantasy

Also there's a shitload of authors who write in both genres

It's very important. The lack of this is why Tolkien is overrated and a scrub

Sapkowski is a curmudgeon, who thinks he's "above it" even though his best works are just grimdark inversions of classic fairy tales.

His Witcher trilogy is just the adventures of his anti-hero Gary Stu Geralt and his Mary Sue daughterfu Ciri. It's all easily skippable.

Can't speak for his other works.

witcher is not a trillogy, and i find its prose really fresh and I like how it does not take itself too much seroius. Its really character driven, and Gary Stu is a perfect character right? Geralt and cir are the oposite of that.
My 2 cents

oh and he is a curmudgeon indeed, this doesnt automatically make his work bad. It rather make his character more funny in my eyes

Anyone willing to recommend something?

Book of the New Sun

Could never get into Mieville. It astonished me how a book with such an original setting could end up being so dull.

A Maze of Death

either because he's a baddie (and the swords are really good) or because he later gives them to rud ealle

Names of the Wind.

Yes, definitely. Although it's 'sci-fi' right from the start if you pay attention. But to Severian, a lot of this stuff is just as astounding to him as it would be to us, and he can only describe it in terms he understands.

He's not really a baddie tho.

>not realising the best works of both genre embrace the patrician area of Science Fantasy

"More than any of us – more even than Anomandaris, Silchas Ruin thinks… draconean. As cold, as calculating, as timeless. Abyss below, Sukul Ankhadu, you have no idea…"

"The Cruelest"

yeah but it's from a certain point of view, I'm saw the soldiers at pale thought Anomander was an evil piece of shit.