/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

The opening of Clark Ashton's The Abominations of Yondo is hard to beat for a sense of the grimly exotic:

--

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world's rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.

It was noon of a vernal day when I came forth from that interminable cactus-forest in which the Inquisitors of Ong had left me, and saw at my feet the gray beginnings of Yondo. I repeat, it was noon of a vernal day; but in that fantastic wood I had found no token or memory of a spring; and the swollen, fulvous, dying and half-rotten growths through which I had pushed my way, were like no other cacti, but bore shapes of abomination scarcely to be described. The very air was heavy with stagnant odors of decay; and leprous lichens mottled the black soil and russet vegetation with increasing frequency. Pale-green vipers lifted their heads from prostrate cactus-boles and watched me with eyes of bright ochre that had no lids or pupils. These things had disquieted me for hours past; and I did not like the monstrous fungi, with hueless stems and nodding heads of poisonous mauve, which grew from the sodden lips of fetid tarns; and the sinister ripples spreading and fading on the yellow water at my approach were not reassuring to one whose nerves were still taut from unmentionable tortures. Then, when even the blotched and sickly cacti became more sparse and stunted, and rills of ashen sand crept in among them, I began to suspect how great was the hatred my heresy had aroused in the priests of Ong and to guess the ultimate malignancy of their vengeance.

Are those pictures from any specific books? I'd like to know the names if so.

Did that fella who said they were going to read The Death Gate Cycle a few weeks back ever get around to it? What'd you think?

Don't get your hopes up, dude. I've been waiting months probably around a year for some faggot to read the Radix Tetrad. Death Gate Cycle was baller though, Dog a best

Fun fact: Butcher wrote Storm Front as a joke, intentionally shitting out the worst, most cliched, half-assed thing he could think of. Then it became by far his biggest success.

books like the blade runner movie?

This sounds like bullshit but I believe it

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. Feels like he watched the movie and thought "You know what, I can do that exact thing but better."

I dunno, I might be desperate enough to read it.

Read Iain M. Banks' Culture novels instead.

which is the best book in the wheel of time series

THE ONE WITH THE SPANKING

Probably number 2. It's a pretty terrible series though if you're not a 16 year old just discovering their fetishes.

Was there one without spanking?

I tried to read WOT and it seems like such a cliched shitfest

It's a window into the state of fantasy at the time, and shoes you how ASOIAF managed to become so popular.

I don't remember any spanking in the first one. Jordan had to get a successful novel under his belt before he revealed his power level.

Allegedly the working title was Semiautomagic. Which is stupid enough to make me believe it.

Also since we're talking urban fantasy, I remember hearing about a series ages ago about a hacker who is also a druid? wizard? something like that. Sounded incredibly corny but people said it was good.

>changes the title to the name of a white supremacist internet forum
What did he mean by that?

it plays with a lot of cool concepts and ideas
and ruins them by having every character except like 2 or 3 be horrible human beings

finishing up sword of shannara, just me or are these 3 books really boring

I remember reading the first one while I was on vacation and finding it sort of interesting because it seemed like it was vaguely post-apocalyptic despite being a fantasy setting. I got up to the part where the dwarf sacrificed himself as they were fighting some Cthulhu monster. However, at that time Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had just come out and my father bought me a copy, so I was much more interested in reading that and never got back to Shannara. I enjoyed HBP, personally.

>Sword of Shannara
>3 books
question mark

The next quadrologies(?) are much better

Please be bait

opinions?

Holy shit, I miss when this website wasn't retarded and didn't have to respond to every obvious joke post calling it bait.

You mean you miss when it wasn't so retarded that people were wary of such an obvious joke being bait in the first place?

what are the best cyberpunk books?

Maybe if people like you didn't respond to every baitfag and enable their behavior, people like baitfags would be deprived of their attention and eventually stop fucking posting.

I hope Rothfuss kills himself so we have one neckbeard author less. Next up should be Sanderson and that RPO man.

Just finished The Forever War. I was thinking about jumping to Old Mans War, since theyre often compared.

Is that a bad idea? Will I get bored of more of the same? Has anyone read both of these?

Is there a genre where people have specific superpowers that isn't capeshit?

I'm sorry, but they will literally never stop. A common misconception is that people on this site function off being replied too. They are very self-centered and will post regardless of whether they get replies.

Stand On Zanzibar.

Science-fiction and Fantasy are 99% the domain of neckbeards and faggots. For every one that dies of diabetes complications or a sudden attack of self-awareness followed by a noose/replica fantasy sword to the guts ten more will emerge to take their place. The genre is doomed to be dominated by veteran dungeon-masters who know their magic systems and boring ass lore backwards and forwards but never read the Greeks.

Uh, yeah, fantasy? Read Traveler's Gate.

oh, this is the YA book that everyone was shitting on for being literally anime.

I don't know why I'm hesitating on this. Normally Veeky Forums only shits on things that are enjoyable by the other 99% of the population

>Children of Hurin

Man...

Strongly consider becoming an hero

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny has this.

>but never read the Greeks.
The Greeks are full of shit tbqh

There is a good amount of /sffg/ audiobooks posted
here

...

You can learn more from 1000 pages of their shit than you can from 100000000 hours of D&D.

That's not saying much.

Why

What are some good books to listen to? Any to avoid listening to?

Read the half drunken musings about musings of bored aristocrats from 2300 years ago yourself and find out. I particularly like the self-fucking wheel people.

Just finished powder mage trilogy, it was alright.
Never see it recommended.

Some cool concepts, kinda underused, and it keeps pushing powerful characters to the sidelines to the sidelines so they dont mess up the plot too much.
Also like that one of the main protagonist is a detective and always ends up in the middle of trouble by trying to help someone.

Shame about the new trilogy in the series, much worse.

Don't read anything by Scalzi ever. Head on over to his twitter if you want to find out why.

>Sanderson
>neckbeard
what?

Also at lest Sanderson has some great books under his belt, Stormlight and The Rithmatist are pretty good.
Rothfuss cant even wrap up his one shitty series.

Started reading the Powder Mage trilogy and I'm enjoying it so far. If I had one complaint it would be that it seems to move very quickly through events so that the mysteries and intrigue don't really have time to gestate. But that might just be because I'm used to my fantasy books being extremely long.

Either 2 or 3 imo

Turin was a fucking shit.

I'm tired of being out of touch with contemporary fantasy, so I just ordered The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Jewel and Her Lapidary.

What am I in for /sffg/?

I've never heard of either of those, let me know how they are cause I'm always looking for new books.

I'm going to be honest, if you're on Veeky Forums you're not going to like them. They are very, very gay and very, very black

I'm not necessarily opposed to either of those things in principle. And I like plenty of things that the rest of this site seems to hate.

Have you tried the Shadow Campaigns series? Overall I think I'm liking it more than Powder Mage for Napoleonic fantasy.

same here. I'm a tumblrite and thought it was too fucking much. Then again, I'm not really hard-line

No, but i was thinking about trying it
I got 2 other books i wanted to try as my next one, but if they suck ass i will probly get to The Thousand Names

But i wouldnt be surprised if it was better, Powder mage has an amazing set up, but ultimately is too afraid to go way outside of the regular fantasy tropes. Also every book has a big military battle for some reason, and i get one of the main characters is the commander of military and he has to have something to do, hes also the head of state and some political resolutions wouldnt really be much worse.

But is the plot actually good or is it actually retarded? I have found nothing but retarded books lately.

I couldn't make it far enough to get to the plot

Okay, looks like something to avoid.

That's weird, I've only seen one other person talk about it here, and that person liked it too.

It is indeed pretty anime though. Which is good for some, bad for others. But it has exactly what you're looking for.

They are different beasties, I enjoyed the OMW and follow up books immensely tho latest two titles are somewhat unimpressive for my tastes. I'd say give it a shot, similarities between it and FW are greatly exaggerated

Well gee, thanks for the reply, buddy. Guess I'll continue baitposting since I know it gets you mad.

Just finished this.

I forgot how much Bakker loves to drop the mic with his endings.

Anybody else read it yet?

Book is surprisingly god tier so far.

Are the stories in the 'best of gene wolfe' complete?
I wanted to read the fifth head of cerberus but it's only 47 pages in this edition but in others it's 150.

I'm about halfway through and dreading that everything I fear would happen, will happen.

I'd say LoC or KoD.

Why are there so many people on this board who can't shut the fuck up about things they don't enjoy? I just can't have fun browsing the rest of this board because of the chance I'll run into a stray fantasy thread and see some jackass whining about how fantasy is for children while doing nothing to convince me that he actually reads any books, literature of otherwise. I'm honestly amazed that they elect to stay out of this thread considering how invasive they are everywhere else, you'd think they'd be carpetbombing this thread with shitposts. It often feels like this is the only place on the board where people actually read and discuss books.

I'd say this thread was doing fine before you did the thing you're complaining about lol, just chill dude. Ignore the remedials.

>With measured anger, I backhanded him hard across the mouth. He collapsed sideways against the wall of the booth, losing his hat. The conversation of the young men in silk stopped abruptly, then resumed with great animation as I cut them a sideways glance. The two old women got stiffly to their feet and filed out through a back entrance. The Caucasian didn’t even look up from his holoporn
>The Caucasian didn’t even look up from his holoporn

Yes
Kelhus isn't dead

>this board
You misspelled the internet.

Any good books with lots of good action scenes but the protagonist fights with their fists? Generally it's a sword or some other weapon and while I can enjoy good swordplay I'm looking for a change of pace.

what's this from?

Altered Carbon. It's a 3.8 out of 5 star book in my opinion, quite entertaining but the ending could have been better.

>look it up on Wikipedia
>the genre name is literally "hardboiled cyberpunk"

I've never seen that before. That's great.

Also 3.8 is such an arbitrary rating, what even nudges it up .3 or down .2 points? This is why I just say like or dislike and then explain my opinion further if asked.

Dont read the sequels.
I also liked it, except some weird parts, but the sequels made me rage hard.
I think they retroactively ruin the original.

>Also 3.8 is such an arbitrary rating, what even nudges it up .3 or down .2 points? This is why I just say like or dislike and then explain my opinion further if asked.
Not him, but make those kind of ratings, (except out of ten) I just go by feeling, and I've never gone back and said, oh, that's wrong, so maybe there's something there. It's Oh, it's better than a 7 but it's not an 8, but 7,5 doesn't quite do it justice. I like to think of full numbers as "objective" and anything inbetween as "subjective" you know- little things you really enjoy but aren't necessary for a book to be good.

Although I'll admit that's just my own rating system for my own internal benefit. I'm not that autistic when talking books with other people.

Anyone hear anything about Marlon James' proposed "African Game of Thrones"? Just wondering if that's still happening or there was news I missed.

That makes enough sense, I suppose.

>“The very, very basic plot is [that] this slave trader hires a bunch of mercenaries to track down a kid who may have been kidnapped,” he told the US magazine in an interview. “But finding him takes nine years, and at the end of it, the kid is dead. And the whole novel is trying to figure out: ‘How did this happen?’”

>How did this happen?
Did he, dare I say it, take a bite of Gum-Gum?

>It all began when the wizards of the White League were under attack by their opponents of the Black League and one of their most powerful members cast a spell to bring forth a mighty wizard to aid their cause. What the spell delivered was master hacker Walter Wiz Zumwalt. The wizard who east the spell was dead and nobody -- not the elves, not the dwarves, not even the dragons -- could figure out what the shanghaied computer nerd was good for.But spells are a lot like computer programs, and, in spite of the Wiz's unprepossessing appearance, he was going to defeat the all-powerful Black League, win the love of a beautiful red-haired witch, and prove that when it comes to spells and sorcery, nobody but nobody can beat a Silicon Valley computer geek!

Neuromancer

What books are people looking forward to the most?