/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>i legitimately don't understand how you've gotten this far if you hate the prose and think everything is edgy for the sake of it.
Because the writing has plummeted off a cliff in quality. The first book was amazing, the first trilogy excellent, then the first book in the second part was good, the second okay, the third acceptable, and the fourth shit. It's like watching a man slowly get sick and die while writing. Every book is worse than the last. The edge is pounded into your skull so often it becomes blunt and boring. I don't give a damn how fucked up shit gets, if it's repeatedly described for HUNDREDS of pages, it gets fucking annoying! By the end of the book I just didn't give a single fuck about any of the characters anymore. Edge only works if you actually CARE about what happens!
In the entire book, there were only a few moments I actually was interested: Kelmomas's insanity progressing, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with Kellhus and the Demons, and for a very brief moment being interested in Moenghus's mental break. Everyone and everything else was just bland uninteresting filler.

what are some books that mix scifi and fantasy, and feature behemoth, gargantuam sized creatures? the devouring the fabric of space and time-type.?

oh yeah

>ib4 the bible
>inb4 terry pratchett

thanks.

Book of the New Sun

Oh wonderful, I have the Shadowof the torturer and claw of the concillator two volume paperback. thanks.

He looks like a James Bond villain.

>Should I read Mistborn or start the Stormlight Archive next?
Asked right as the other thread died.

Best vampire novels? Anything with the Shakespearian, melodramatic feel of Symphony of the Night?

>inb4 /v/ gtfo, I read more than most people on Veeky Forums

I'd also like more things in general with the general feel of Castlevania. Nothing else really has the same atmosphere.

Stormlight is better

I just finished Quest for Lost Heroes and really enjoyed it. Unconvincing romances are the worst part of his books so the unrequited crush this time around was refreshing.

>tfw audiobooks for 1/2 of the Drenai Saga are only available in frog

>in frog
??? Do you mean french? Wouldn't it be snail then?

Tsukihime remake (not out yet tho)

Library at mount char
Roadside picnic

>I read more than most people on Veeky Forums

How can I read more books like you? I tend to play computer games on the weekends and browse Veeky Forums for 5 hours before work on the weekdays.

Am I weird for preferring audiobooks? I just got audible because I think I'd use it more than other methods of getting into Lit and I don't think I'm gonna go back.

Is this a memelist or have you been taking /sffg/ seriously?

It's not weird. Audiobooks are super popular at the moment. I get bored easily so I like listening to them while doing other things.

I just finished reading the Sabriel saga. I really liked it. Can you guys please recommend me something similar?

The infamous BLACKED scene with Sorweel makes a little more sense in context since he had to wear that nonman helmet, and most nonmen were gay out of necessity. Add up millenia of nonman gay sex and Sorweel probably got a little confused. As for Zsoronga, he'd been eating that meat for so long, it's a miracle he didn't kill Sorweel first before raping him.

>Everyone and everything else was just bland uninteresting filler.
I wouldn't say that. What I would say is that 85% of the philosophy stuff and 50% of Proyas's scenes could have been axed outright to make room for other characters, and even Bakker admitted that he dropped the ball there. IIRC, he got to the end of TUC where Kayutas and Moenghus pop up more and was like "Shit, this could have been something interesting..."

What we needed more of:
>foreshadowing of Kellhus and the demons
>Consult scenes two chapters was just not enough, and most of it was fucking Dunyain
>Akka doing cool shit (being a failure is his shtick, but come on, throw him a fucking bone)
>Cnaiur doing cool shit instead of dying like a chump what the fuck
>Esmenet getting BTFO for being a jealous, hypocritical retard
>Aurax freaking out

> best books in sf genre

So basically Bakker just shouldve just not sent his first draft

I read genre fiction, but my name's pronounced like pee-noose. Let me know what you think.

What books have you read that had the best written characters? Probably my biggest problem with sci-fi/fantasy is that the characters are rarely interesting or written well.

In terms of fantasy, Robin Hobb has some of the best written characters in the genre imo. That first assassin trilogy. Awesome stuff.

More time in the planning stage would have been preferable.

Splitting TGO and TUC probably would have been fine had he spent time revising both books afterword. As it stands, both have serious pacing issues.

I'm still going to read the next two books. I want to see how this turns out.

Not him butt,
Try browsing Veeky Forums for 4 hours instead of 5 and read the remaining hour.

Malazan. It's a grey, grey world. Just get past the first book (which, imo, isn't bad either, but it's common to place it as the worst in the series).

What? How is it symbolism when the god and gods are real in the universe? Moral good and damnation are also objectively real. I mean if you're gonna trash it, at least know wtf you're talking about

The gods may be real, but the religions and philosophy sure as hell aren't realistic.

>religions and philosophy sure as hell aren't realistic.
I don't know what you mean by that. Why aren't they realistic? Damnation is definitely real. Morality is definitely objective (judging eye). Unless you mean that the religions don't make any sense in the fiction? In which case you gotta make some arguments

The book was a mess. It had some interesting ideas but the execution was fucking terrible compared to the other books. It seriously felt like 75% filler. And the thing is, I understand the philosophical ramblings, but they were just endless, and seemed so fucking crackpot this time around that they had my eyes rolling. I think Bakker really needs to learn the value of showing, not telling. Except he's good at that when it comes to building his mysteries.

I didn't even mind the fact that Zsoronga BLACKED Sorweel, but it came out of nowhere, and on top of the aforementioned 200ish pages of necrophilia, rape, cannibalism, incest, etc., it was just the last straw. I was just so frustrated with the book by that point. When Kellhus came back it picked up a little more but still, what a waste of Sorweel. He was building up to be such an interesting character, and then he gets shanked after anal rape and finally getting his waifu (their sex scenes were painfully pootly written).

The entire book needed a better editor to trim the mounds of useless fat. Yet Bakker's most rabid fanboys will still claim it's the God of God's gift to Men because it has some sophomoric philosophy, "deep" shit, and cringeworthy self-fellating, ludicrously over-abundant pseudo-medieval prose. Maybe it's just the fact that it's been a year since I marathoned all of the books and my tastes have changed but TUC just left a bad taste in my mouth. His writing is so clumsy and cringey.

I have those same feelings after reading TGO, its pretty clear he's just shitting things out. Reading this makes me glad I dropped him before wasting anymore time.

TGO at least had the god-tier dungeon delve of Ishterebinth and the whole battle at Dagliash; and even though it was by far my least favorite sub-plot, the Momemn storyline had some good moments like Theliopa's death and the shit with Inrilatas. It at least felt in some way unified with some measure of pacing. But I agree, that's where he started shitting the bed. While I loved TGO it obviously had a lot of problems compared to previous entries (TJE and WLW especially were pretty damn good), like way too florid prose. It was ridiculous in TGO but I just reached my breaking point with it in TUC. And it even looked like he was going for a more streamlined style starting in TJE. It's "how many adjectives and adverbs can I use" the prose. If I read "masticating" or "knifing" again I'm going to wretch.

I might skip the next series as well but I predict it's just going to drag me back in so I can see how badly a train can wreck.

>Yet Bakker's most rabid fanboys will still claim it's the God of God's gift to Men because it has some sophomoric philosophy

Most Bakker fans (me included) were disappointed with it. Almost everyone thinks it should have remained as a part of TGO with the padding trimmed out. And yeah, he definitely needs a better editor. Who the fuck would read all that philosophy shit and think "yeah, send it through to print"?

>Except he's good at that when it comes to building his mysteries.
This too. The world building and character interactions are fun, but holy shit are they swamped in philosophic rambling.

Oh yea, the dungeon and crawl was great, and honestly Inrilatas was my fsvorite of all the characters, his death scene was great too.

Hopefully Bakker gets his head out of his ass, he really can be great if he learns a little restraint. I remember wanting to throw away TGO due to how choppy the Sorweel/Serwa pov switching was inside the nonman mansion.

Some of the people I've seen on the Second Seas forum and Reddit have been sucking his cock for the latest book/defending the decisions he made. Which I mean, is fine in-and-of-itself, but I don't know how anyone can defend that prose. I saw a thread called "Do you ever get stuck for the tragic beauty of the prose?" and its contents were thus:

>Finished Chapter Six of TUC perhaps ten minutes ago... lost that interval of time re-reading its conclusion a myriad times, simply reveling in its splendor, its *weight*, its near *perfection*.

>Happen to anyone else? Any laments over how many profound moments you might have lost in hurried reads, eyes skimming the page, beauty offered but not *seized*?

>Anyone else perpetually delaying a tattoo of a quote from the series for inability to select just one?

The fact that someone has this opinion makes me want to kill myself.

>Anyone else perpetually delaying a tattoo of a quote from the series for inability to select just one?

Lmao i'll grant some lenience on this one

"Do you have your mother's bones?" Was 10/10

>Yet Bakker's most rabid fanboys will still claim it's the God of God's gift to Men because it has some sophomoric philosophy, "deep" shit, and cringeworthy self-fellating, ludicrously over-abundant pseudo-medieval prose.
There is no argument in the world that you can make for what is good prose in this scenario. You might hate it because you think it's "sophomoric philosophy", but others will like it because they think it's contemplative and breathes air into the thoughts of multidimensional characters. It makes them seem like people with fully fleshed out thoughts.

So I don't know why you're so butthurt about people liking it. I can certainly tell you that no one gives a shit that you hate it.

>It's like watching a man slowly get sick and die while writing. Every book is worse than the last. The edge is pounded into your skull so often it becomes blunt and boring.
I don't think you understand grimdark and why some people enjoy it at all. Whereas most people get boners out of moments of epic heroism and moral validation, people like me that enjoy grimdark get boners off of tragedy and degradation. This is why I'm legitimately confused as to how you made it this far into the series because the entire thing is just a mythological tragedy, similar to Illiad or Agamemnon.

I can already tell there will be many things I am unable to comprehend throughout the Orthogonal trilogy.

I mean, check this shit out:

gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html

Fuck. I just wanted to find a fucking list or description of Yalda's physiology. I grasp that she has four eyes instead of two (is this common or unique to her?) and she can change parts of her body like growing an extra limb and so again (again, unique or common?) but I'm not sure what else is abnormal from our kind of humans--besides the weird birth thing.

hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath, hood's breath,

>the entire thing is just a mythological tragedy, similar to Illiad or Agamemnon.
lets not get ahead of ourselves

Besides that user was talking about the quality of the prose and Bakker's shoddy plotting (see: grimdark is most effective when you actually give a fuck) not about the mere presence of grimdark

You don't get it man, you're not a REAL grimdark fan. I can't enjoy it unless I develop a deep emotional connection to characters who then get brutally raped, murdered and eaten. If it's just a pile of worthless soldiers I don't give a fuck. Not even Sorweel himself cared about getting assraped! Non-characters suffering isn't emotionally strong. Esmenet breaking down as more and more of her children get brutally murdered was dark, Moenghus being tortured into insanity while his sister totally disregard and ignored him was dark, Proyas being brainwashed into total loyalty, lead to commit horrible atrocities, then REBRAINWASHED to realize his god is false and he's an unspeakable mass murderer doomed to hell, all for the purpose of being forced to lead a death march halfway across the world so that he can then be betrayed AGAIN and left to slowly and painfully die in infamy with the certain knowledge that not only is he going to hell but his entire family is probably going to be tortured to death is dark. Random soldeirs from bumfuck nowhere bumfucking eachother isn't dark, it's just filler.

I'm really arguing two points here.
1) It's not a tragedy if you don't care about the characters
2) Things lose their shock value and become bland and annoying when repeated too often
An army killing and eating itself could have been inetersting, if it hadn't be described again, and again, and again, over , and over, and over again in endless walls of text for several hundred pages. By the end I wasn't even paying attention anymore, just hoping it would end soon and we could get back to the story.

Cugel the Clever is my favourite character out of all of the /sffg/ crap I've read.

If he was criticizing the plot, then I did not see any specific comments other than bawwing about cannibalism and necrophilia.

If you want to talk about plot, then let's talk about why you think it's terrible. Frankly, I think the march across agongorea makes perfect sense. You have a total badass assemblage of the greatest armies of the world sent to save the world being battered into oblivion by a a million rape goblins and then by itself. Where in that plot is that "bad"? If anything, it's really straightforward.

just read I'm the guy saying Bakker was already slipping around TGO. The dude needs to seriously read his shit over once or twice before sending it in. Once I noticed him recap the same thing twice like five chapters apart.

>if it hadn't be described again, and again, and again, over , and over, and over again in endless walls of text for several hundred pages.
It was like 10-20 pages maximum. Go back and skim through the sections again. You're misery is just being amplified.

> If it's just a pile of worthless soldiers I don't give a fuck.
See And to cement it further, the cannibalism and necrophilia directly ties in with Proyas' and Sorweel's tragedy

TGO is his fucking peak, imo. Ishterebinth, Dagliash, Momemn, Ishual is my jam. That and Cil' Aujas.

We get that the entire thing is a mythological tragedy. We get that the plot in and of itself isn't bad; it's actually really good.

But it's padded to hell and covered up with horrendous purple prose and poor philosophizing. We don't need the fact that this is a massive tragedy to be shoved down our throats to realize that it's a massive tragedy. That's the entire point. There's next to no subtlety or beauty to it.

I don't mind that there is a contemplative air to it; in fact, that's what made the series good in the first place. But the entire point is that it took 300 pages to advance the plot because it was bogged down in its own contemplation and the muck and mire. Plus we've already had 6 books of fleshing out the characters.

And if you want to talk about fleshing out characters, where exactly did that happen in this book, other than Proyas and Sorweel? Fucking Malowebi's severed head got more screentime than half of the main cast and that was "May Likaro burn in the Hells" x 10000.

Bakker is so entirely stuck up his own ass that the pacing, narrative, and character development are lost.

malazan.

imo once again the big mistep was the splitting of TGO and TUC. Someone convinced Bakker that TUC needed to be its own shit, so he had to fill up more pages of random bullshit. That's why everything seems stretched out, almost meaninglessly so.

I'm pretty certain that the original "TUC" was something more like 600-700 pages, with the march being much shorter. The prose is honestly the same as it's always been, if not better, on a sentence by sentence basis. bakker was always good at terse but momentous descriptions. But he wrote too much shit for TUC because of the book splitting.

This is the editor's responsibility. I think it's blatantly obvious that whoever the new editor is (since TUC/TGO), he's shit and doesn't give a fuck about the books he's editing, unlike the last one.

imo Bakker should just do a "definitive" version that merges TGO and TUC, writers have redone shit before

>It was like 10-20 pages maximum.
Are you fucking kidding? 10-20 pages of what? You mean eating the Scalded? Fuck that, I'm talking about the ENTIRE BOOK being one NONSTOP ENDLESS FUCKING description of the soldiers going srancy. Raping eachother at night, fuckig eachother in the ass with swords, murder,murder, more murder, etc... I GET IT! THEY'RE GOING FUCKING INSANE! I DON'T NEED TO BE REMINDED EVERY FIVE FUCKING SECONDS! AND WHEN YOU DO MENTION IT HOW ABOUT NOT SPENDING AN ENTIRE CHAPTER REITERATING IT IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS?
And oh God the FORESHADOWING! It was laid on so fucking thick it's like everything happened three times! By the time we got to the Scaled I was just waiting for it to be over.

Think for a second what 90% of the "state of the army" chapters were ACTUALLY COMPOSED OF. Fucking 90% was "death came swirling down", "mouths like wrinkled sphincters", "greasy beards", and "erect phallusses". STOP IT YOU FUCK! STOP DESCRIBING HOW ROCK HARD, HAIRY, DIRTY, MUSCULAR, AND WRINKLY EVERYONE IS! I GET IT! PLEASE STOP!

Each thing was described in full once, then copy pasted fucking 20 more times to pad things out.

"The man had a massive hardon, and he walked into the room licking his scrotal, moist lips, his penis was gigantic and hard as he glanced from side to side at the pile of hot sweaty men covered in grease grinding against eachother. Slowly he walked forward with a large penis, his penis being erect as it was large, when suddenly a large sweaty man, as musled as he was covered in oil blocked his path. Grabbing his large, erect, pulsing cock, he grunted and glared at the man's wrinkly anus face, slowy lowering his eyes until they met the hard and erect manmeat emerging from the thicket of his girthy loins. For a moment he paused, cock erect, judging his situation, before grunting once, grabbing his large penis, and exiting the tent. Tonight, things would be different."

Now imagine that for 300 pages and you've got TUC.

You're addressing the potential weakness of the medium. SF+F writers should ideally construct interesting settings, as well as a good plot and characters. Most writers can only do two out of three of these in a given work. Other writers are also a lot stronger in one area than the others. Robert Silverberg (Dying Inside) is definitely a character writer, so is Walter Tevis (The Man wHo Fell To Earth), Gateway by Frederik Pohl is a good character study.

In my reading, Jack Vance and Ursula Le Guin are great 'setting' and plot writers - their characters are not as full of depth as somebody like Silverberg. The great prose and everything else disguises this somewhat.

Somebody I can't quite make my mind up about, in terms of character writing, is Philip K Dick. A lot of his protags are basically the same blue collar guy with confidence issues, surrounded by more domineering influences (spouses, bosses,) But he has some memorable minor characters like the flipper-boy in Dr Bloodmoney.

yeah this entire post is a gross exaggeration. I just briefly skimmed through my ebook: Most of (Chapter 6: The Field Appalling), parts of Chapter 5, and parts of Chapter 7. Everything past that is the Proyas getting betrayed and buttfucked/Achamian and niggers arriving at the scene and then Golgotterath.

>All these people whinging about there being too much ponderous philosophy in Bakker
>Conversely, all these people whinging about there being too much action

I've gotta give it to this guy, he ignites passionate responses to his fiction.

First trilogy is legit good
Second one, which is being discussed, has moments of pure gold with some really fucking silly self-indulgence

have fun

Also, with each new release most readers seem to be disappointed or angry, an yet they continue reading. What is their goad?

>Is this a memelist or have you been taking /sffg/ seriously?
I'm one of the founding fathers of sffg. You can say I'm the wet nurse who feed it and kept it from dying until it became independent. Of course it's gonna look like "a meme list" when I was shilling the ones that were good for years.

>have fun

I just finished TUC. I'm having a lot of fun. This aint no JK Rowling shit.

What do you like about Gemmel?

I read Legend and found it pretty boring and superficial.

You don't sound like you belong here friend. SFFG was built on GRI APPROVAL.

So basically a yaoi doujin then.

>mfw I realize how right you are
Like point out it feels like sci-fi and fantasy often have mediocre characters disguised by a interesting setting. One of the characters I thought about was Severian, but when I think about it it might very well only be the outstanding setting reflecting on him. Same for the other, good, characters in the book.

After thinking some more about it The Three-Body Problem (fuck me, I'm turning into a shill) feel like a book with many interesting characters. There's a quite big cast but most characters feel unique but realistic realistic and behave consistently.

Another book I thought of was Howl's Moving Castle.

Severian is definitely a good character. I do agree character is typically underdone. John C. Wright had managed to create a few memorable characters; at worst he at least differentiates them well.

worldbuilding was a mistake

blame the ancient jews

Bad writing is the only mistake there is. Everything else is literally spooks.

explain this meme

Sarbat in Children of the Dragon.

Book of the New Sun desu

So is it safe to say (seeing as 90% of this thread is about him) that Bakker's new work is filled with spooks?
Any other recent spook filled novel?

>What is their goad?

I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS

>>tfw audiobooks for 1/2 of the Drenai Saga are only available in frog

audiobookbay.me

>>I read Legend and found it pretty boring and superficial.

They're okay to listen to while doing yard work.

>Theliopa's death

She was best girl.

>socially awkward
>asperger's syndrome
>wore nothing but her own bizarre and hideous self-made clothes
>hated being touched
>anorexic
>was still human enough to legitimately care about her family
>stuttered and repeated herself constantly

Why did she have to die, lads?

sffg is The Three Body Problem actually good, or is it just meme?

Will I like it if I generally enjoy Vance, Wolfe, Asimov, Dune, etc.?

Too bad she didn't get the dick. Or did her brother (who bakker took from that movie where a son used to watch his mother in the eyes and fap) fuck her? It sounded like he diddled her regularly

Thanks to recommended Going Postal by Pratchett. I'm having a great time.

>actually thinking of falling for the meme

Wizard of earthsea cause that's the book my mom read to me and the book I'll read to my child

Do elves ever actually get the BOC outside of erotica?

not that user but I've enjoyed every sffg meme I've tried (sanderson and rothfuss specifically). maybe I should start seeking out things sffg dislike.

What book or book series has really great characters? Looking more for that instead of epic adventure. Although, both would be nice

Go ahead.

fantasy with traps? I really like traps. anything is fine.

Why? Have you ever thought to seek help for your disorder?

That seems like a list that actually tries to annoy sffg sensibilities though