/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

I've got an exclusive look into the title of Bakker's next quintrilogy: DUN-YA-IN-the-ass: featuring Ache-in-my-end and the O-God

NO MORMONS ALLOWED

hey chums

just started BotNS and I'm a little worried about how little I think I'm taking in. I good way past it, but when I read about the statue of the armoured man on the moon in the archives, and saw the section where it detailed how the moon wasn't green in the past, I was able to make the connection to Buzz Aldrin etc only because I read an anons post a few weeks back explaining this.

Should I just blitz through the book then go back and re-read, or take my time and think this all out. The dream sequence in the inn went right over my head, and I think there's a lot of little details I'm missing too. Plus I have to look up a damn word every page. Am I just dumb? I've only read genre fiction before, and only sci-fi at that

Finish the whole thing first. Shit makes sense much later. The first book in particular is filled to the brim with foreshadowing

Don't expect to understand what's happening during your first read.
It comes together in the final book, when it turns out literally everything in the first book was important.

I tried Dhalgren. Experimental work is beyond me.

is this /sffg/ or just pretentious wank like Ballard?

A question about Words of Radiance
How the fuck did Shallan get a Shardblade? They didn't explain it at all and Shallan wasn't even shocked to find out she had one.

>(...)Tell me many tales, but let them be of things that are past the lore of legend and of which there are no myths in our world or any world adjoining. Tell me, if you will, of the years when the moon was young, with siren-rippled seas and mountains that were zoned with flowers from base to summit; tell me of the planets gray with eld, of the worlds whereon no mortal astronomer has ever looked, and whose mystic heavens and horizons have given pause to visionaries. Tell me of the vaster blossoms within whose cradling chalices a woman could sleep; of the seas of fire that beat on strands of ever-during ice; of perfumes that can give eternal slumber in a breath; of eyeless titans that dwell in Uranus, and beings that wander in the green light of the twin suns of azure and orange. Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.

I didn't get it.

Where do you nerds get your textbooks when the usual spots (libgen, bibliotik, google, etc.) don't fucking have it? I'm frustrated.

>They didn't explain it at all
Do you know what Pattern is and what it can do?

>Do you know what Pattern is and what it can do?
Do they explain that later?
I get what he is, but so far they haven't explained the Shardblade part and why Shallan wasn't surprised.
So from what you are saying, they are gonna explain it later in the book?

Bonding with Pattern is how she gained the ability to Surgebind and Pattern, like other spren, can manifest into a Shardblade. It's nothing crazy.

Yeah i know that. Except the Shardblade part.
I'm talking about how she wasn't surprised at all by it.
Also, do I need to read Edgedancer before Oathbringer?

>reading through Judging Eye
>waiting for all of the weird sex shit I know Bakker has to have in store
>finally get to the period scene
Jesus, took you long enough.

meme shit

Judging Eye was a bold new direction for Bakker but he couldn't hold it. The Great Ordeal/Unholy Consult are pure guro.

fuck you homo, ballard is LEGIT

Just read the New Sun series.
What an unsatisfying mess.

I don't remember. Keep reading. That may be a particular thing that only you care about to so you'll have to keep reading. It's inconsequential to me. Also yes. It covers shit Lift gets into and has some cameos of other important characters.

>The Great Ordeal/Unholy Consult are pure guro.
>Guro is bad

Anyone interested in characters storyline speculation for Oathbringer?

Adolin will get the Honorblade, he's the only candidate that makes sense. Shallan will uncover his murder of Saedeus and reveal it to Dalanar. Saedeus's late wife will tell Dalanar that her faction will break off from the Alethi and it will be civil war. If Dalanar doesn't prosecute his son he will break his oath to unite instead of dividing in order to protect a murderer. In the end: Dalanar won't break his oaths, but Adolin will escape by cutting his way out of his jail then flying away into a storm or something.

Close this tab right now
CLOSE IT

they all died in the explosion
just Runthorn less injured so able to help Chip find Ubik in Chip's half-life
as the book ends Runthorn's condition deteriorates and the then more powerful Chip has to help him find Ubik

I mean that's my theory take your pick

I didn't say that. I said Bakker tried a shift in presentation starting with the Judging Eye but eventually reverted back. Guro isn't really my think though. unless extreme forced tf counts

he's just weird for the sake weird, and tries too hard to be Veeky Forums.
but he's universally loved so probably just me

>extreme forced tf

Truly the most degenerate of fetishes.

>Where do you nerds get your textbooks
University bookstore or Amazon usually.

say that to my face and not online and see what happens

I hate when authors name things in scifi in sch a tryhard manner. Like, let's say that there some kind of drug that makes you smarter or something, just an example but could be anything. Nine times out of ten the authors will call them some kind of really shitty forced neologism like 'Coggies'. This shit is so transparently just there to sound cool and nonchalant - of course something super advanced has a colloquial term, what are you from the past or something?! And on top of that I always get the sense that the author uses them to trick dumb people reading the book into thinking they're smart by being able to tell how the neologism came to be: cognitive enhancing drugs become 'coggies for short.

Such a fucking awful trope, when will it die out? Neologisms can be fine, but only if they're very sparse and seem natural, not unnecessarily capitalised gay pieces of slang that sound like slang from the 1980s not the 2080s.

Why can't authors just describe what they are using already existing words. They could just say 'drugs' and then tell us what those drugs do.

...

>he doesn't understand neologs

fuck you
I do, but most authors use them in unbearably shitty ways

>all those spikes and ridges

ummm wrong

inchoroi are supposed to be smooth and sensual

you're literally supposed to get a whyboner just by looking at them

It'll never die out so long as there are bargain bins to be filled.

The fantasy equivalent of this style seems to be making a shallow uninteresting world full of bullshit meaningless names for things that are literally just named weird to be different.

Both are related to prose in that it should be used as a needle and thread, but some authors use it as a hammer and nail.
Possibly a club and nail, now that I think of a few more egregious examples.

>you're literally supposed to get a whyboner just by looking at them
They're supposed to look like some pallid slimy thing dredged up from the deep ocean. The whyboner is only because of compulsions and pheromones. But yeah the artist gets it wrong, it's just the best pic I've got.

I'm sad there's not gonna be anymore scifi aliens in muh fantasy world after Unholy Consult

There's still Aurax. He a good boy.

Get off Veeky Forums Aurax no one likes you here either

Is it just me or do recent fantasy books feel very "anime"?

user there's a reason my mum always laughs at the name "snapchat"
We can't chose what names take off, and even though usually snappier ones succeed, explain to me why we always say "double-u double-u double-u" instead of "world wide web" for www.
Shit catches on and it doesn't always make sense. A conversation between any young people about Instagram etc would confuse the hell out of any sci-fi writer 30+ years ago.

But I hate neologisms too so apparently I'm on the same side as you. I think Watts is an author who handles them alright

Just finished the Book of the Fallen, finally. Seemed like there were a lot of big characters who never got resolution.

Request it on Apollo and Redacted with substantial buffer generally gets it bought and uploaded.

80s-90s fags are getting published now

Guess what they grew up on

Wheel of Time was basically already a harem anime and it was huge in the 90's.

Like what?

No.

Wolfe seems a hack, in the most literal sense.
It seems he thinks can spew out snippets of philosophy and allegories without context and not be called out for being a pretentious sod, as long as he makes the context dubious enough and the meaning muddy enough, that his mud-castle will be forever unassailable.
It's a whole book series where there is only one core pillar: 2deep4u

Also, fucking bible similes and ancient roman/greek concepts and ideas being the extent of his "depth"? Really?

The Wheel of Time is one of the least "anime" fantasy series there is, m8

I suppose he's talking about nufantasy/"crossover" stuff, such as Spooks, City of Bones, Percy Jackson, Darren Shan, etc.

New Sun isnt even that hard of a read. Its just layered with details that pop in and out of relevance. As a whole its pretty consistent.

*travels behind u*
*cuts ur head off with heron sword*
Nothin personnel...kid...
*goes home to tsundere waifu trio*

You are lying to yourself.
It's true it's not "hard to read", but it is a mess, and it seems designed to trick fans into inventing their own ludicrous theories about every little insignificant detail to fill the void of an actual context.
The point isn't the work itself, but to make people analyze it, thus giving it legitimacy as "high literature". It's a lazy cop-out dragged out over 4 books, and it's clear that for the most part, Wolfe just wrote whatever came to mind. Most of the grand plans and implications are just imaginary creatures of the readers' own minds.
In that respect, he has sort of succeeded in writing a "religious book" - one that is so self-contradictory and convoluted, and so far removed from a logical context, that everything is up for discussion, and every passage can be interpreted in a million ways.

It so fucking self-indulgent

I actually dont give a fuck about the theories, the book itself makes its own case pretty damn clear.

The only "clear" thing about it is the 'messiah of doom'-story, rewritten with "some ulterior motive, which we shan't explain".
Everything else is a jumble of random thoughts and ideas.

If you insist

I do.

What else were you able to extract from it?
Original world and nice world-building, I'll give it that. Beyond that it was trite as fuk.

Severian's tale is essentially how even the most lowly person can have a role in the divine plan. The world he lives in has fallen from grace and is consumed in stagnation, and as a result it needs a person with knowledge of both its past and future to change its inevitable fate. Severian, for the most part, is being groomed to do this over the course of the story, while dealing with his own ignorance and shortcomings.

BOTNS is a very Christian story, particularly Catholic, so some of its underlying ideas motifs may not resonate with you if youre not too familiar with it, but for the most part it made sense to me.

>Do they explain that later?
Ladies (male) and Gentlemen. This is prime example of someone who speed-reads / skips parts in books, then becomes confused later on, playing like what was revealed came out of no where.

>Severian's tale is essentially how even the most lowly person can have a role in the divine plan
Why?

Severian's position was never particularly low. He was in a fine guild and on track to become a master.

>The world he lives in has fallen from grace and is consumed in stagnation, and as a result it needs a person with knowledge of both its past and future to change its inevitable fate.
Because Severian is meant to become a master, he receives some basic education from the old master, but it is not about the ancient past. He "knows" that man has fallen, because he sees that Nessus once housed a lot more people, and because everyone knows they once travelled the stars, but now they don't know how any of the old tech works.
Severian is almost completely ignorant about Urth's past, and he only idolizes Vodalus as a revolutionary and a bringer of change (he doesn't even know what motivates Vodalus at all).

>BOTNS is a very Christian story, particularly Catholic, so some of its underlying ideas motifs may not resonate with you if youre not too familiar with it, but for the most part it made sense to me.
The Christian motifs, as I mentioned, are very obvious. So much so as to make it seem heavy-handed, which in turn makes his own little philosophical diversions seem even less valuable.

Torturers are not held in the highest regard on Urth, and are even seen as particularly malicious.

is sabriel good as an adult or is it too ya-ish?

Being seen as malicious isn't the same as being "low". He enjoyed a relatively high position in society, although people fear him.

Low in the moral and ethical sense.

So far as his education goes and his knowledge of Urth - the alzabo is a big part of the story for a reason.

>Low in the moral and ethical sense.
Severian goes out of his way (repeatedly) to explain why his destructive work was not evil, and why pain, suffering and death are necessary. That was kind of a main theme, user.
Now, some argue that that's just Severian trying to put himself in a prettier light, and that he's actually a villainous cunt.

>So far as his education goes and his knowledge of Urth - the alzabo is a big part of the story for a reason.
Literally anyone could have taken it, and indeed a lot of people did.

Alotta people did, but only the Autarch had taken it on a level that could be compared to a sort of global consciousness, which would allow him to fulfill the role of the New Sun, and to reach the Autarch there were quite a few trials to endure.

Sev definitely has a darker side to him thst he obscures throughout the text, but of course the story follows him on his path to betterment.

>of course the story follows him on his path to betterment.
Except he doesn't get better at all?
The rape is towards the end in the final book, isn't it?

Which one

>The Christian motifs, as I mentioned, are very obvious. So much so as to make it seem heavy-handed

Don't think of Shadow of the Torturer as one book, Book of the New Sun is one book. A lot of the stuff you're reading now won't seem important for a fair while, but it's all important. I'd say read the whole thing, wait a while, then read the whole thing again. The second reading is amazing.

Read Urth of the New Sun any time after the second read, but I think reading it after just one go through of BotNS is doing yourself a disservice. Book of the Long Sun is also excellent, haven't read Short Sun.

who specifically are you thinking of? karsa?

I started trying to refute you point by point but I quickly realized you don't actually have any real criticisms and I'm not even sure you've read the book.

Even taken as a straight adventure story Book of the New Sun is fantastic. On my first reading I wasn't able to follow much beyond what was right in front of me but there are still plenty of interesting ideas and excellent writing to be appreciated even if you have no interest in the greater story.
>short stories told in different styles which reveal details about the tellers and the greater Urth universe
>crazy dying earth shit (alzabo, Typhon, a city which is more like a half-inhabited ultra-ruin, huge armies fighting with bizarre weapons for exotic causes, alien predators, mad astronauts)
>Christian theology delivered in a straightforward manner emerging naturally from the vents of the story to BTFO atheists and agnosticucks

>not immediately thinking about Severian's memory and the Alzabo's memory-stealing when being told about the significance of the past
I'm surprised a brainlet like you can even work a computer.
>Christian motifs
Did it occur to you that you only noticed the obvious ones? Did you pick up on the constant association drawn between water and both life and destruction?

>he doesn't get better at all
It takes a lot of strength of character to admit that you're a bad person and to strive to better yourself. He's still got glaring character flaws by the end of the story which endure into Urth but he certainly picks up a far more humanistic outlook.

and as for the rape, if you're talking about the initiation horse-taming and the lady mercenary that's not rape. They just kind of made a game out of it. Their interaction before the big battle makes it quite clear that they're on very good terms with each other.

still good

I like Sabriel a lot.

Can you elaborate on these terms? I have genuinely no clue what you mean when you say Apollo and Redacted.

Oh they're private trackers right? Welp that's still entirely unhelpful but thanks for trying, I guess. They seem mostly related to music as well so I'm not sure how they would be relevant in any way to what I asked.

The only reason first time readers get a little confused when reading Gardens of the Moon is because Steven forgot to give a map letting people know where shit is happening in the first chapter.

Beyond that, its pretty standard and easy to follow.

The music trackers are very good for getting stuff bought for you, because they are very hard to get buffer on. Even 90 mb is enough to get most overdrive requests filled instantaneously.

*textbooks always require a whole bunch more because people actually have to buy those, however

R. Scott Bakker - Prince of Nothing Learned

Herbert Read, in The Meaning of Art:

>[...] [T]he function of art is not to transmit feeling so that others may experience the same feeling. That is only the function of the crudest forms of art—‘programme music,’ melodrama, sentimental fiction, and the like. The real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding. That is what the Greeks so perfectly realized and that is what, I think, Aristotle meant when he said that the purpose of drama was to purge our emotions. We already come to art charged with emotional complexes; we find in the genuine work of art, not an excitation of these emotions, but peace, repose, equanimity.

I suppose not everyone has been introduced to R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing novels by having the “black demon seed” scene quoted at them. This is the delightful sequence in the second part of the trilogy, where Bakker describes the horror of a man, his wife, and his child being raped by a demon and the setting’s resident subhuman scum (Orcs, but less talkative). The phrase “raper’s thrust” is used. The defences offered was, first, that Bakker’s writing is good outside of the creepy sex stuff, and second, that the rape by demon/orc was actually a brilliant philosophical counterpoint to the moral-ethical pretensions that drive conflicts in the story.

The latter defence is of course misses the point that Bakker’s writing is terrible.

The first defence comes from the fannish mindset where problems in the text are to be tolerated instead of confronted. It is also the same defence as afforded to Japanese visual novels.

It is a befitting introduction, because the overriding mode of Bakker’s narrative is perversion – of civilization, of humanity, of trust, of religion. There is nothing in The Darkness that Comes Before, first in an interminable saga, that is not overshadowed or at least overcast by dread. The thrill of this dread is what draws in the reader, and it is where Bakker’s meagre talent as a storyteller lies. Throughout the novel he displays a skill for catching the twinge of anxiety and dread within the reader, even with his amateurish prose. And being such an effective yet observably bad writer, Bakker’s novel is the very definition of hackwork. Much of the novel is concerned with a reimagining of the First Crusade, given a nihilistic bent and names that sound like somebody slurring through Tolkien’s elf-languages. Bakker likewise offers familiar genre clichés, just more vicious and with worse named.

>“I am a warrior of ages, Anasûrimbor... ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.”

>“Then why,” Kellhus asked, “raise arms now, against a lone man?”

>Laughter. The free hand gestured to the dread Sranc. “A pittance, I agree, but still you would be memorable.”

In The Darkness that Comes Before, Anälsybarite Killhöuse receives telepathic summons bidding him to join his exiled father. Killhöuse comes from an isolated monastic community whose members are rendered superhuman by their postgraduate philosophy degrees, and upon reaching civilization finds himself a godlike manipulator among so many sheeple. In the meantime, great conflict brews between the great religions of the Mediterranean. The Pope preaches a Crusade against the Muslim conquerors of the Holy Land, while nobles and wizards intrigue, barbarians roam, and minions of the Dark Lord lurk in the shadows and fringes of the world.

While this sounds eventful, this introductory part of a multivolume chronicle is occupied mostly with extended political and geographical manoeuvres: a disquieting amount of time is spent on the cast getting somewhere. Add in Conan the Bisexual Barbarian, the prose stylistics of Guy Gavriel Kay, the horror sensibilities of Clive Barker, just a little bit of rape and other atrocities, and you have something like RSB’s hodgepodge. Despite these diverse elements, Bakker’s writing is characteristically flat in the manner of countless genre authors. Usually he is content with an unremarkable half-realist mode that genre authors shotgun wed to the imaginative potential of fantasy and science-fiction. Central to this is the imposition of modern psychological realism on a world that is neither modern nor realist, and emphasis on extended dialogues of short exchanges that are intercut with brief, lifeless descriptions and snatches of internal monologue. This is ubiquitous to genre writing, and one can hardly differentiate authors in this mode save for the style of their silly names:

>“I actually missed you, Xinemus,” Proyas said. “What do you make of that?”

>The burly, thick-bearded man at the forefront stood. Not for the first time, Proyas was struck by how much he resembled Achamian.

>“I’m afraid, my Lord Prince,” Xinemus replied, “that your sentiment will be short-lived...” He hesitated. “That is, once you hear the news I bear you.”

>Already it begins.

>Months ago, before he’d returned to Conriya t raise his army, Maithanet had warned him that House Ikurei would likely cause the Holy War grief. But Xinemus’s demeanour told him something far more dramatic than mere politicking had transpired in his absence.

>“I’ve never been one to begrudge the messenger, Xinemus. You know that.” He momentarily studied the faces of the Marshal’s retinue. “Where’s that ass Calmemunis?”

>The dread in Xinemus’s eyes could scarcely be concealed. “Dead, my Lord Prince.”

>“Dead?” he asked sharply. Please don’t let it begin like this! He prused his lips and ask more evenly, “What has happened?”

Bakker is also fond of a sardonically understated “chronicling” style familiar from Guy Gavriel Kay, where the prose bops and bounces in a self-contented manner:

>Confusion and tragedy, rather than fanfare, had characterized the departure of the Vulgar Holy War from Momemn. Since only a minority of those gathered were affiliated with one of the Great Names, the host possessed no clear leader—no organization at all, in effect. As a result, several riots broke out when the Nansur soldiery began distributing soldiers, and anywhere from four to five hundred of the faithful were killed.
>[...]
>The citizens of Momemn swamped the city walls to watch the Men of the Tusk depart. Many jeered at the pilgrims, who had long ago earned the contempt of their hosts. Most, however, remained silent, watching the endless fields of humanity trudge towards the southern horizon. They saw innumerable carts heaped with belongings, women and children walking dull-eyed through the dust, dogs prancing around countless feet, and endless thousands of impoverished low-caste men, hard-faced but carrying only hammers, picks, and hoes. The Emperor himself watched the spectacle from the enamelled heights of the southern gates. According to rumour, he was overheard remarking that the sight of so many hermits, beggars, and whores made him want to retch, but he’d “already given the vulgar filth this dinner.”

These dull stylistics are all the more condemnable for the fact that Bakker is perfectly capable of reaching beyond this: a brief prelude, set two thousand years before the events of the novel, actually manages to capture some bleak grandeur, after which the book quickly begins to deflate. It would be even good if it were not for too many silly fantasy names. Bakker is apparently working under a quota when it comes to diacritics.

>But the boy clutched his father’s sword, crying “So long as men live, there are crimes!”

>The man’s eyes filled with wonder. “No, child,” he said. “Only as long as men are deceived.”

>For a moment, the young Anasûrimbor could only stare at him. Then solemnly, he set aside his father’s sword and took the stranger’s hand. “I was a prince,” he mumbled.

>The stranger brought him to others, and together they celebrated their strange fortune. They cried out—not to the Gods they had repudiate but to one another—that here was evident a great correspondence of cause. Here awareness most holy could be tended. In Ishuäl, they had found shelter against the end of the world.

>Still emaciated but wearing the furs of kings, the Dûnyain chiselled the sorcerous runes from the walls and burned the Grand Vizier’s books. The jewels, the chalcedony, the silk and cloth-of-gold, they buried with the corpses of a dynasty.

>And the world forgot them for two thousand years.

>The Kay connection deserves elaboration: any knowledgeable reader who grabs the introductory part of the Prince of Nothing saga will notice that Bakker’s perhaps closest literary relation is bestselling fantasist and world-class hack Guy Gavriel Kay. This is not because they both write historically-inspired fantasy, but because they write in a strikingly similar manner. Kay has a certain set of “Kayisms” that he recycles in all of his novels. One has already been mentioned above), and another is philosophizing about certain classes or types of people. At times one suspects that principal characters such as the sad wizard Drusus Achaemenes and his prostitute lover Esmeralda (‘whore’ is a word of marked prolificacy in the novel) were ghost-written by Kay. The first chapters of Kay’s The Last Light of the Sun and Bakker’s novel make for an illuminating comparison:

Kay, in The Last Light of the Sun:

>Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, deliberately embodying in his brightly coloured silks (not nearly warm enough in the cutting wind) the glorious Khalifate of Al-Rassan, could not help but see this delay as yet another trial imposed upon him for transgressions in a less than virtuous life.

>It was hard for a merchant to live virtuously. Partners demanded profit, and profit was difficult to come by if one piously ignored the needs—and opportunities—of the world of the flesh. The asceticism of a desert zealot was not, ibn Bakir had long since decided, for him.
>[...]
>Here in the remote, pagan north, at this windscoured island market of Rabady, he was anxious to begin trading his leather and cloth and spices and bladed weapons for furs and amber and salt and heavy barrels of dried cod (to sell in Ferrieres on the way home)—and to take immediate leave of these barbarian Erlings, who stank of fish and beer and bear grease, who could kill a man in a bargaining over prices, and who burned their leaders—savages that they were—on ships among their belongings when they died.

Bakker, in The Darkness that Comes Before, posted:

>All spies obsessed over their information. It was a game they played in the moments before sleep or even during nervous gaps in conversation. A spy would look at his informant, as Achamian looked at Geshrunni now, and ask himself, How much does he know?
>[...]
>Until coming to the Holy Leper, Achamian had never liked the Ainoni, especially those from Carythusal. Like most in the Three Seas, he thought them vain and effeminate: too much oil in their beards, too fond of irony and cosmetics, too reckless in sexual habits. But this estimation had changed after the endless hours he’d spent waiting for Geshrunni to arrive. The subtlety of character and taste that afflicted only the highest castes of other nations, he realized, was a rampant fever among these people, infecting even low-caste freemen and slaves. He had always thought High Ainon a nation of libertines and petty conspirators; that this made them a nation of kindred spirits was something he never had imagined.

Here one can observe the genre preoccupation with “world-building,” and making it feel “natural”. Even Kay defaults to it, despite ostensibly writing about real cultures under different names! Yet another Kayism not foreign to Bakker is the need to underline the meaning and significance of events and portents, which always conveys a sense of desperation on the author’s part:

Kay, in The Last Light of the Sun:

>In all of us, fear and memory interweave in complex, changing ways. Sometimes it is the thing unseen that will linger and appall long afterwards. Sliding into dreams from the blurred borders of awareness, or emerging, perhaps, when we stand alone, on first waking, at the fence of a farmyard or the perimeter of an encampment in that misty hour when the idea of morning is not quite incarnate in the east. Or it can assail us like a blow in the bright shimmer of a crowded market at midday. We do not ever move entirely beyond what has brought us mortal terror.

>Prince Alun would never know it, for it was not a thing that could be shared in words, but the image, the aura he had in his mind as he sank to his knees, was exactly what Thorkell Einarson apprehended within himself [...].

Bakker, in The Darkness that Comes Before:

>Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered–they are relived.

>The death of Cnaiür’s father, Skiöthe, was such an event.

Both Bakker and Kay are admittedly absorbing writers in spite of their faults, or perhaps because of them. They have their differences, and the deciding one is that Kay acts out the role of pop historian with many of his novels – fascinated by the peculiarity and vitality of the past and its inhabitants – while Bakker writes like a sadist and nihilist. Kay’s adoration of common people and lionization of Great Men is offensive for its patronizing nature, but there are worse things. Kay writes badly but not unpleasantly. Bakker writes badly and unpleasantly. The bleakness of his story does not make it more truthful or insightful. His exploration of the fanatical vainglory of the First Crusade is rather perfunctory, despite occupying so much time.

Peter Watts

>“But prayers,” Proyas continued, “are never enough, are they? Something will happen, some treachery or small atrocity, and my heart will cry, ‘Fie on this! Damn them all!’ And do you know what, Achamian? It’s a possibility that saves me, that drives me to continue. What if? I ask myself. What if this Holy War was in fact divine, a good in and of itself? [...] Is that so hard to believe`?—that despite men and their rutting ambition, this one thing, this Holy War, could be good for its own sake? If it is impossible, Achamian, then my life has as little meaning as yours...”

>“No,” Achamian said, unable to muzzle his anger, “it’s not impossible.”

Some might defend Bakker on the basis of his academic credentials, but Bakker does not write The Darkness that Comes Before like a philosopher. Philosophy is to Prince of Nothing much like science is to speculative fiction: not a tool for understanding, but an aesthetic. Aristotle, among others, is repurposed and renamed for “world-building” purposes. Bakker does not have any philosophical treatise or thesis to propose, and covers for a lack of profundity in his novel with sheer volume. In the 600-page long first part of what will at least be a septology, Bakker introduces an army of figures, factions, metaphysical concepts, and faux-Tolkien names, yet has very little of interest to say. Clevin. Mostly he offers observations of stereotypes (“Whores sell themselves,” the wizard says, nodding sagely, “and you must be the whore when the time comes”), and rebrands medieval history while genre bullshit works at the margins (“A memorable challenge!” the villain of the prologue croaks, channelling the spirits of a thousand stock baddies).

Bakker has one trick as a writer: overwhelming readers with a sense of doom and gloom. The dread of his world has superficial appeal that does not stand up to a critical eye. It is a psychologically and aesthetically sterile domain, and one seen begins to long for the levity of a postcolonial novel. His “philosophical” fiction does not teach. Umberto Eco immediately comes to mind as a legitimate alternative in the field of fiction – the abbey of The Name of the Rose is small compared to the Three Seas, but is at the centre of a vast mental universe. It is also written as to imitate pre-modern literature, despite its many compromises with the demands of modern novels, in contrast to Bakker’s banal and patronizing prose. Bakker’s novel cannot reach the expansive, speculative reaches of philosophy – even Kay breezes past him. The Darkness that Comes Before sinks for its baggage.

That comparison to visual novels is more felicitous than it seems: R. Scott Bakker’s Darkness that Comes Before is on the level of a Type-Moon production.

This was random, but okay. It seems like the author has a problem with genre fiction in general.

I also felt that the convergence should've included more players (gods/ascendants, maybe the Skinner's Crimson Guard fellas or Kallor, though their absence may indicate betrayal I suppose), or that DOD+TCG should've included a couple of more storylines, but in retrospect I don't know which I'm missing.

Any obscure sci-fi series you'd recommend to someone who likes sci-fi with focus on military and/or politics/diplomacy? I think i've read most of the usual suspects so looking for something off the beaten patch.

Diplomacy -- Maybe the Retief novels by Keith Laumer? I haven't read them but they're what he's best known for and they were popular back in the day.

Thanks, tho it appears a bit more comedic than I like I'll check it out.