/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

He's not wrong about the loli thing. The main villain basically takes the main character's pre-pubescent daughter under his wing, and spends so much time thinking about how she's like this other little girl he remembers fondly (the main character as a child), and other such things.

There's one scene where she's sitting in his lap using her magical senses to see his pain and offers to use her powers to cure him, and he tells her not to because he needs to protect her etc. etc, all but saying "I love you". It was uncomfortably erotic reading.

>Character and Deities motivations are pretty out in the open.
I sure as fuck didn't know what Shadowthrone and Cotillion's end game was until we more or less made it to the end game.
I think the books are more oriented towards society than culture. There are clear differences between Lether, Malazan, and the "uncivilized".
I wouldn't say so. Book 8 can drag a bit, as his writing was affected by the death of his father. Book 9 and 10 are basically one long book, and I can't say it felt like he ever lost interest in the series.

nah

What are some fantasy or scifi with /straight shotacon/ themes?

In Prince of Nothing young Xerius gets handys from his mom.

Is there a fantasy novel similar to Pynchon ?

>What sff book snuck past ideologies onto you, and you didn't realize it until much, much later?
Three Body Problem series. While reading it felt like it supported the views and actions of the character Thomas Wade (and Zhang Beihai) but only when discussing the series later did I realize that the point of view character who acted on >muh feels and spent the rest of the book dealing with the consequences did the right thing. And that Wade also realized this.

Also this

Already on my list, but thanks.

Damn this looks like some quality dinosaur material. Anyone here read it?

loa.org/books/373-american-science-fiction-nine-classic-novels-of-the-1950s-boxed-set

What should I read after Cixin Liu?

They cost me around $20 ;^)
Already read the first one and it's great!

Lovely

Yeah. There are also illustrations inside.

Tried his short stories?

I moved onto Stross but it didn't really sit with me.

Is Neal Asher any good? I heard him recommended in the context of Banks fans.

Is hyperion worth the read ?

Only the first one.

When are we getting more incredibly tight pussies?

Try "shadow of the scorpion" and move on from there if you like it. Follow the Wikipedia reading order if you want to continue.

How is that series anyway?

It's enjoyable for what it is. The author just tried to impress some girl he wanted to fuck, and fucked up the entire vibe of the series because of it.

I'm going to write more about this when Count to Infinity comes out and I've read it, but the Count to the Eschaton series by John C. Wright has a lot of thematic parallels to TBP while being written from a wildly different point of view.

Warning that it's also a lot less focused and the author isn't particularly subtle with the subtext.

If there's something you particularly liked about Liu/TBP say what it is and maybe I can make a more specific innovation. I think Greg Egan might be the closest parallel among Western writers in general to Liu.

Only the first two

>The author just tried to impress some girl he wanted to fuck
Care to elaborate?

Some shitty disease where chicks have uber tight vaginas that clamp up and don't let benis in

>Character and Deities motivations are pretty out in the open
You are either lying or you have no clue what you're talking about. There's in fact very few characters with easily understood goals or motives until they are finally brought to fruition. Shadowthrone's motives are a complete mystery until book 10. The Adjunct too is a mysterious, inscrutable woman. And good fucking luck trying to figure out what Iskaral Pust is planning or what he actually believes, the guy is either insane or so very good at pretending he is insane that there's effectively no difference between the two.

>no real sense of culture, like these countries don't really exist
Did you only read one book or something? Cause Erikson does culture and society level world building than any author I've read. Nobody else really captures the scale on which these things happen.

It's here.

Can a Moorcockfag verify this?

>SNK is based on the book "The Eternal Champion", and the characters seem to have references to characters in the book in this way:

>Erekose (Protagonist) = Eren (They both swore "kill them all", and they are gonna die soon for a curse, they want be normal guys)

>Iolinda (Human princess) = Mikasa (They are both very jealous and both accuse the protagonist of sympathizing with the enemy, remember Annie)

>Ermizhad (Eldren princess... yeah her race is called Eldren and The Eternal Lover) = Historia (They are both blondes and have blue eyes, both had a sibling who had the key to unlock the ancient power of the Eldren people, remember Frieda)

>Erekose reincarnates to be the savior of mankind and has dreams in which he can see his past and future lives (as the user of the coordinate can see his previous and future users). In addition he is stuck in a battle between two sides, humanity and the Eldren.
The Eldren have an old power that almost destroyed the world and its ruler has decided not to use it even if that means the extinction of its species -the 145th king-

>He is destined to commit genocide of some kind, and at some point says "I swear I would kill them all"

>Erekose sounds like Eren
>Erekose loves Ermizhad, an Eldren princess who is described as a blond woman with blue eyes.
>John Daker/Erekose carries the burden of remembering every incarnation he has ever had/ the coordinate.
>Prince Arjavh is a stand in for both the 145th king and Armin

The sunken cost fallacy is almost getting me.

Recommend me some shorter weird work so I won't continue Malazan

Second Apocalypse.

>There's a scifi story about an alien race that doesn't sleep, and then they meet earthlings and this is basically their thought process. Would like to know the name if anyone recognizes it.
Figured one of you guys might know this.

>I think Greg Egan might be the closest parallel among Western writers in general to Liu.
Except Greg Egan's work actually makes conceptual sense :^)
Not that I didn't enjoy TBP, but I would like to know of other writers with such depth and scope as Egan.

The threads deleted fampai

Nah I'm an idiot who forgot how to crossquote

Read the synopsis. Seems cool but also seems like it could be really shitty given the cover art, the fact that it's a nobody publishing house and the fact that there's two authors.

Is the series any good? I mean actually good, not just a cool universe, I mean good prose and characters and a story that doesn't make me want to vomit.

Not the story you're looking for, but Exhalation by Ted Chiang might interest you.

Does anyone have some nice fantasy with a little girl protag?

The Broken Earth series has little girls as prominent POV characters.

Who would read more than 6-8 of his books anyway? I doubt anyone will be able to respond tbhq

thoughts on clive barker? I like the hellraiser film and thinking of checking him out

Books with good plots but shit everything else are very good at being made into movies because the director and the acting add what's misssing, but they make for shit reads. Like Stephen King.

>the fact that it's a nobody publishing house
Yes because as all know publishers like Tor produce nothing but top quality books said no one ever.

Sounds interesting, thanks.
There should be more science fiction from the perspective of aliens, without any human involvement at all.

I agree but unless you anthropomorphise it's hard to follow. And excessive anthromorphisation just creates a cast of normal humans

No, but now I want it. Looks like exquisite dinocore science fiction.

>tfw the one-and-done epic fantasy is a lost art and now everything has to be stretched to 500 books

The bloat really is annoying.

Books in series sell more. The free market strikes again.

I don't like reading tragic things. Should I read Malazan?

It's much cooler and more satisfying to be able to immerse yourself in a world for 10k+ pages than for just 1k or so.
That being said, getting through 10 books can be a bit tedious and difficult at times if you're not a NEET.

No, particularly not book 2, 7, and 8, but no character is safe in the Malazan world, and every book is loaded with tragedy.

Thanks.

>It's much cooler and more satisfying to be able to immerse yourself in a world for 10k+ pages than for just 1k or so.

I think that's a dubious claim at best.

I just remembered something. In one of the later Malazan books, Aranict, Brys' atri-ceda and slam piece (I think) meets Quick Ben, and thinks "maybe the 'quick' in his name doesn't refer to his quick wits, but his Quixotic nature"

This tells us two things. One: that Erikson pronounces it "quicks-ote".

Two: Don Quixote is a book in the Letheri Empire.

How long did finishing the entire series take you?

>Epic fantasy
>Someone says "For Pete's sale!"

I think I started around the beginning of May, or the end of April, and just finished a week or two ago. Couldn't read much in June though.

I mostly hear "Key-hoe-tay" and "Quick-sotic", including from the same people.

It is very annoying trying to decide how many words with etymological roots in real-world-exclusive concepts one should avoid in a fantasy setting, though. The most egregious can easily be avoided, but at a certain point the vocabulary becomes too limited unless you start inventing replacements and that almost never ends well.

or just don't have characters say "jesus fucking christ" and shit like that
no need to go overboard and end up with twenty 2 or 3 letter words

>idioms can't be translated

I don't mean going that far, but for example trying to write a not-renaissance diary and getting carried away with etymonline and ruling out words and terms that originated either from a super-specific literary source, like Quixotic, or that didn't enter use until after the 17th century.

Maybe I'm just autistic...

That's pretty fast. Impressive.
I started at the beginning of June and I'm not even halfway through the third book because I slagged off and kept playing vidya and doing other shit instead of reading.
It's got me a bit worried, especially since uni is soon going to start again.

Does anyone have the "Knife of many hands" by R scott Bakker? Someone shared it a while ago...
It's from some magazine, can't find it anywhere

It's a localization. A translation of a concept from another language/culture/world into something familiar to our world.

Are there some fantasy novels with complex lore and lots of red herrings that give an illusion of near infinite depths? I like stories that I can't wrap my head fully around, like I'm trying to tie a knot that requires 3 hands.
Not something that has a nonsensical plot necessarily, but just something that let's you have more questions than answers every time you analyze it. This can both be trash and good, I'd like something that does it well.

I spent a few years. Slow reader, usually just for 20 minutes before sleep and not even every night. Studies and other stuff take most of my time, and I don't consider reading to be something I'd do outside of bedtime or travels.
Don't remember that at all and I finished the series some months ago...

The first three or four Dark Tower books were like that. The last four were quite literally the polar opposite. Never seen a series go from great to shit so quick. You can tell exactly when King got off the coke.

Name of The Wind.

Some species in the Malazan world are a few hundred thousand years old, and we occasionally get POVs quite a long way back in time, but the main series' events occur over perhaps 10 years. It does contain a lot references to past events, long-gone civilizations, etc.
The Kharkanas trilogy is set some tens of thousands of years before the main series.

Its in Dust of Dreams.

>"Since then, she'd heard plenty of curses from Ben Adaephon Delat, and had come to conclude that his quickness was less corcerous than quixotic."

BotNS
LOTR

Perditto Street Station and Embassy Town by China Mieville.

Book of the New Sun

At this point, I'm pretty sure the book changes itself retroactively to fit every request posted in /sffg/.

have you ever considered that this gen is mostly filled with BOTNS fans and that people request things with similar aspects for that reason?

I'm on a quest to make these jokers to read other shit.

>tfw been here since almost the beginning and still haven't read BOTNS

>rereading Homer's Odyssey to prop up my Greek lore

Did any science fiction writer ever use this as a basis for their own work, not just referencing but having extended analogies to it, e.g. a protag on a journey home, cyclops (some interesting anthropology at this part, they're anarchists/utopians), lotus eaters (drugs, soma and mass media?) etc etc. It's obviously ripe for cribbing and allusion, but I wanted to know if somebody has transposed the basic story to a space opera, or written something with an Odysseus-like figure.

I'd also like recommendations for greekaboo fantasy lit outside of Gene Wolfe.

When the next book comes out, the series beginning with Too Like the Lightning

>Expected publication: December 5th 2017

is dune the greatest sci-fi book of all time?

No_

It wasn't written by the blessed walrus, so no.

name one (1) book better than Dune

Botns
Hyperion
Foundation

This sucks so hard. First it happened to my Chinese picture-books but now even real books drag on forever for the sake of indefinite sales to neckbeards and autists who think that size=substance (looking at you, Malazan-shitters and Sanderson-fags).

>muh immersion
Fuck you, literature is art, not therapy for escaping from your shit life.

>Botns
>Hyperion
>Foundation

I'm actually going to read these just to prove you wrong in my mind

Downbelow Station
Foundation
Emphyrio

why? I can't imagine you're busy

Still missing Claw.

>sffg general
>literature
pick one