/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Your waifu a shit

Debate me

Anyone one knows some good hardscifi stories about exploring life on another planet? I want a realistic story about the alien biology and stuff.

martian

>Which current authors do you see leading us into the future?
Watts for scifi and Bakker for fantasy :^)

You could start with the book that image is from.

That Titan book someone mentioned sounded biologically interesting.

Any fantasy books that feel like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure?

No aliens

Yeah gonna buy it when I see it for a good price.

Holy shit TUC is a slog to read. He really got carried away this time.
I just want akka to be happy at this point. Poor soul deserves it

Is Wolfe admired here by the nerds who frequent this general? I have never been here before and he seems divisive in general on lit. I'm halfway through the Claw of the Conciliator and loving it.

1) are long/short sun worth it?
2) what are some other books/series to check out if I enjoyed BOTNS

yes, wolfe circlejerks occur every thread

>Is Wolfe admired here by the nerds who frequent this general?

What does that image mean?

Why do I think when I look at this picture that I'm seeing some bizarre alien sex act?

>Holy shit TUC is a slog to read. He really got carried away this time.
He wanted it and TGO to be a single book but his publisher split it and he had to rewrite it to justify.

>I just want akka to be happy at this point. Poor soul deserves it
Fuck Akka SorweelxSerwa OTP

His Dark Materials Phillip Pullman

that it doesn't matter how well written or "classic" your book is, stuff with dinosaurs will beat it every time

Wolfe is our undisputed king.
>what are some other books/series to check out if I enjoyed BOTNS
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance and all the other great works by Wolfe.

>He wanted it and TGO to be a single book but his publisher split it and he had to rewrite it to justify.
>letting your publisher completely fuck up your work
what a cuck.

Actually a good read. Ending was dumb tho

Those are some stupendous covers

>ordered these and they're all the same except for Citadel which is a different edition
JUST
I need to send it back, right?

>Axiomatic by Greg Egan
jesus christ is there a better hard sci-fi short story collection in existence

Probably the only good book with YA-esc setting and themes I've read
Re-read it a year ago and it was as crisp and enjoyable as when I was like 10

It could be interesting, but only if you don't make it too generic. Which relevant books have you read? Besides the long sun I see in that picture.

Alastair Reynolds has two takes on the generation ship theme - one of the plots in Chasm City, and the second book (and third) in the Poseidons Children trilogy. Those takes had similarities but were still different, and they were interesting. Especially how they handled the shifting political climate on the ships and how cooperation between several ships on route to the same planet falls apart.

A gen ship book I didn't like was KS Robinsons Aurora. Besides the Mary Sue main character I disliked the ending of the book where:
after a couple of setbacks at their destination (and a failing ship ecosystem, which was interestingly explained though) she convinces most people to just turn around and fly the long way back to earth, which they do with newly constructed cryogenic sleep caskets.
The end of the book has the former crew helping fix the effects of climate change and jamming heavily down our throats the morale that it is not ethical to send out colony ships to other planets because the children of those colonists didn't sign up for the horrible conditions there, where they would live short unhappy lives. The book says the human urge to explore the stars, even with cryo-sleep, is stupid and that we should just sit wanking on earth.

Has anyone even read the Poseidons Children trilogy? Haven't seen it discussed here.
The series has many interesting aspects if you can stomach the elephants, like AI, posthumanism, a mechanical-darwinistic Mars, a somewhat functioning welfare state where your every action is monitored, some signs of alien life and so on. The series has superficial similarities to the Revelation Space saga, only without the doom and gloom.

>Which current authors do you see leading us into the future?
Brandon Sanderson is already setting a standard. I guess the future will have more similar authors, and many more books by the man himself. It would be nice to one day read the sci-fi Mistborn trilogy, but that thing is so far back on his roadmap. We've already had one short story set in the magical Cosmere with spaceships. There might be more on the way?

>Brandon Sanderson is already setting a standard.

>Has anyone even read the Poseidons Children trilogy?
I tried to read a few chapters of the second or third book (saw they could be read as standalone) but I couldn't get into it. I was more interested in one of the summaries about a 'secret in another system' or some such; knowing Reynolds, it might be fuckin' neto. Spoil the overall story for me please if you'd like

I'd go mad with autism if I got them and just one was different.

>Which authors (iyho) do you feel defined the sff genre?
Asimov.
>Which current authors do you see leading us into the future?
Greg Egan.

Has anyone here read Michael Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh?" What did you think of it?

And in particular, what can you recommend for examples of the kind of fantasy that he speaks highly of, that's designed to challenge the reader rather than just bring the reader comfort, that are also actually good fantasy?

I've already read plenty of Le Guin and Pratchett, as well as Moorcock himself. I think the Magicians trilogy is another example of this type of fantasy, as well as ASOIAF and Bakker's The Second Apocalypse stuff.

Bakker sucks at marketing and despite a cult following is a mid tier fantasy author in terms of commercial success. He's not GRRM. He can't just tell them to suck his dick. Although he tried, and that's part of why it took so long for TGO to be published.

Hahahah good luck. It was £20 for a pristine copy when I bought it in 2010, it's now £120 for the worst version. It's not going to get cheaper.

>"Epic Pooh?"
>Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence.
Damn, Michael.

But doesn't BotNS have pseudo-megafauna? That's gotta count for something.

>General:
stanislaw lem - eden

youtube.com/watch?v=N4ZDBOc2tX8
He literally lectures to future sff writers.

Read it a while back, can't go into details, but it was pretty neato, with the earhlings meddling with giant alien ruins and ancient machines and shit. I recommend trying the whole series, as you can see some characters/concepts/stuff grow up during the series, and it's pretty satisfying.
But the book is tonally different from most of his other work. He approaches many of the same problems from new angles.

>He literally lectures to future sff writers.
Depressing.

>He's not GRRM. He can't just tell them to suck his dick.
Didn't grrm plan to have shorter story originally and only wrote feast and dance because publisher told him to ? He is even bigger fuck up since he wrote himself into a corner and can't finish his books now.
Agree about bakker. He's done nothing commercially except doing ama's on reddit and shitting out that atrocious trailer. Not to mention those dish plates on book covers

>Didn't grrm plan to have shorter story originally and only wrote feast and dance because publisher told him to ?
The story was planned to be a trilogy initially but he seems to have abandoned that idea either shortly before or shortly after Game of Thrones was published. And rightly so, there's no way the story could have been concluded in three books given the scope and pace of Game of Thrones.

>Didn't grrm plan to have shorter story originally and only wrote feast and dance because publisher told him to ?
no, I believe feast and dance were supposed to be one book but the overwrote (LOL who woulda thought that word would be mentioned in reference to him) and had to split it into two parallel books

When did Renarin become a Truthwatcher?

Needs a lot of subtle grammatical editing, not blatant typos but things like "whom" misused, "had" overused, commas where a semicolon might be more appropriate, and the (extremely common to genre fiction) over-usage of over-complicated words where a simpler word would suffice. Names are a little bit generically "fantasy", and I always prefer things to be shown rather than told ("Wardens are a part of the army but" etc.)

That said, I have these complaints about tons of stuff I get recommended in here, so take it as you will. You have to decide if you care about quality prose (which plenty of readers here explicitly state they do not care about) or if you intend simply to compensate with a good narrative and/or interesting setting.

If you just want to make it the latter, I would suggest taking the most common piece of advice I see anywhere, which is make sure the first page, ideally the first sentence, and especially the first chapter, are a serious "hook" for the reader. I found myself skimming the first chapter because I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, and it was a little too slow-moving.

Abercrombie's "The Meme Itself" is a good example of poor prose but good popular fiction techniques. The Shadow of the Torturer, on the other hand, is a far better example of taking a mundane opening event (four teenagers trying to sneak back to their dorm after recreational swimming) and making it seem tense and interesting by witholding information (you don't necessarily know that they are teenagers, why they are sneaking into a place, or where they just came from; it's stated so vaguely that one is inclined to believe they are on a secret mission and just swam across a moat or something) then leading to an action scene.

It seems like you're trying to lead into things gradually, but you really need to do something to win over the reader on page 1, ideally paragraph one.

>lel le pol is le dum because i no liek and what i no liek is dum

/pol/acks use words like "miscegenation", "Hebraic", and "crypto-Bolshevik" on a daily basis

Why did /sffg/ tell me Sanderson is shit?

>Brandon Sanderson is already setting a standard
I sure hope not.

>shit
Because this is Veeky Forums. Sanderson is like the definition of average. Warbreaker is, in my opinion, way better than most of his other stuff.

>What did you think of it?
Michael Morecock is a degenerate, a marxist and a hack. That's what I got out of it anyway.

>and a hack
You can only tell that by reading his writing, though, not by reading his criticisms of someone else's.

Also, he's not a Marxist; he's an anarchist. Anarchism is a distinct socialist tradition that arose independently of Marxism around the same time.

Le Guin is an anarchist too.

>post contains the word "degenerate"
How to tell an opinion is worthless in one easy step

...

>and only wrote feast and dance because publisher told him to
I doubt it, he's just unable to wrap the story up and due to being a fat hippy is unable to plan things ahead of time. The bloat was likely not planned, he's just a bad writer. But...
>"If I were really cynical I would start some medieval sword and sorcery thing, say it's a trilogy, then keep writing it for the rest of my life."
>- Gurm, in 1981

>>"If I were really cynical I would start some medieval sword and sorcery thing, say it's a trilogy, then keep writing it for the rest of my life."
>>- Gurm, in 1981

LMAO

>shit
*Anime

Can someone critique my work pls

docs.google.com/document/d/1KPzDXPqyfCAIHMiAANEYodDtRabJxQw44rxKmXR_PxI/edit?usp=drivesdk

I don't want to waste my time if it's going nowhere

ASOIAF isn't sword and sorcery.

>If I were really cynical I would start some medieval sword and sorcery thing, say it's a trilogy, then keep writing it for the rest of my life
fuck lol

see: Right, it just has swords. And... sorcery.

>You can only tell that by reading his writing, though, not by reading his criticisms of someone else's.
I disagree, the kind of inferiority complex on display can't come from someone who's a successful literary writer or even a good genre writer. It's especially obvious to infer this by how speaks so highly of pulp. He comes across as a leftist Terry Goodkind more or less.

As for him being an anarchist I think the distinction is meaningless in the context of the article but I suppose it's interesting to know. I have a hard time telling the subversives apart. Le Reddit being one too doesn't surprise me at all.

I suppose that's one way to never have your opinions challenged.

Lord of the Rings has swords in it, and sorcery, but isn't sword and sorcery. "Sword and sorcery" refers to a subgenre of fantasy focused on one or two individuals having adventures. Conan is probably the archetypal example.

>I suppose that's one way to never have your opinions challenged.
Not at all. When your primary point is that you think the author "degenerate" or "subversive", it's clear you're not actually engaging with the text, but with a preconceived notion rooted in your own likes and dislikes. The closest thing you get to actual criticism is claiming that he has an "inferiority complex", which isn't actually supported by anything in the text - you haven't even tried to address any of Moorcock's points or offer a counter-argument for why Tolkienesque high fantasy is good. Lazy.

I'm not writing a critique on it though, this medium is retarded for that purpose anyway. I saw a question of what I thought of it and having read it I responded. Yet for those who are familiar with how those words are used I think my fundamental problems with it are obvious, I reject even his most basic assumptions and while I could write long essays about how he is wrong in that way I don't think it would be very interesting nor productive. It's kind of like reading a critique by a radical feminist, you can't really adress the points without first addressing the underlying ideological dogma that permeates the body of the text.

Spotted the degenerate.

then you're not "challenging opinions", just shitting out virtual turds from your fingers

not bad, but it needs to slow down in general.

you're giving us too much information at the start without much context.
> who is the baron highmark
> where is glenhaven
>who is boras
>where is darrowvile
>what and where is the Vale of Dwyerland
>etc.

could be a personal thing, but i don't prefer it when authors introduce their stories (and to an extent, their settings) by throwing a lot of new names and titles around.

In, say, a fictitious civil war story, the author details how "Robert E. Lee guided his troops through the ruins of Atlanta southward to the port of Savannah," I can draw a clear picture of what's going on and why because
>I know what war is going on
>I know who Robert E. Lee is
>I can look up where Atlanta and Savannah are located

those things are common knowledge to at least some people, and there is a large amount of information readily available to those who aren't familiar with the American Civil War so that they could create look up the information if they were so inclined to. Fantasy stories do not have that luxury as most of the locations are not on out earth and the only information on the characters is that which is found within the book.

It wouldn't be hard to turn it into sword and sorcery if you just shaved off all the feasting, assorted filler and pointless multiple POVs.
>Clash of Crowns
>Barbarians of the Dragon Queen
>Ice Lords of Clim'a Tchenge

I never said I challenged your opinions, just that rejecting everything that contains the word 'degenerate' as a rule must be a good way to keep your indoctrination intact.

>The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Veeky Forums Crimestop or "Memestop" is best exemplified by the phrase "GO BACK TO /pol/!!!"

tfw you thought only two books in a series had come out and find out there's actually been five

>I never said I challenged your opinions
it was implied

What's a good fantasy book/series that's completely and utterly disconnected from the usual 'save the world' plot?

I don't know how to describe it really, just some kind of high concept story like Breaking Bad or something, that just happens to be set in a fantasy world.

re: Broken Earth: why was the Guardian "city" called Warrant? Did anyone else find it a bit anti-climactic?

>What's a good fantasy book/series that's completely and utterly disconnected from the usual 'save the world' plot?
You have to be much more specific than that.

That seems incredibly specific to me. All I usually see is that kind of plot or some kind of subversion/satire of it from fantasy books.

think user is looking for a fantasy story that deals with smaller scale conflicts. say, a human escaping from an elf slave mine or a dwarf being forced into a life of crime in order to fund his mining expedition.

Finally, Anons who get it.

>Read The Final Empire
>Its pretty good, if a bit clunky in spots
>Read the next two
>Progressively worse and worse
>My friend recommends Way of Kings, touts it as better than any of the Mistborn books
>Read Pt1.
>Embarrassingly Average
>"It gets better tho!"
>Read Pt.2
>Ok, this is breddy gud
>No more Stormlight at that point, go and read Warbreaker
>better than any Sanderson I've read yet, great , fun politcal intrigue, surprisingly decent characters
>Way of Kings rolls out
>Cue fans flipping out
>Its cumbersome, its slow, it's ultimately decent, but still full of all the problems Sanderson always has.

You might find this interesting
curtisweyant.com/blog/epic-pooh-pooh/

In general, I dislike Moorcock and anyone else who tries to say bad about "escapism" since usually when an author makes something that's "challenging" to the reader what they usually means is that they were jacking off and venting while writing it.

Also since the essay has always been attached to Tolkien, it seems right for me to say that LOTR isn't really that comforting and is in the end a pretty bittersweet work. However, and I think the essay I linked above touches on this, I doubt Moorcock sense that since he seems pretty instinctively unable to empathize with any of Tolkien's viewpoints (talk about challenging the reader!)

Epic fantasy SET UNDER WATER?

Spren are like stands in Stormlight, if you think 1500 pages of build up is worth it

Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy generally have much smaller and focused stories that aren't about saving the entire world. But it sounds more like you want an atypical story told in a typical fantasy setting and I can't help you out there.

We are so far into the future I can read Veeky Forums on my book. fun times.

Okay, fair enough. I think the piece itself is kind of poorly written and Moorcock is a bit silly for being so attached to it and not adding any nuance after all these years.

I still think he's an underrated author in his own right, though.

what about the glen cook detective series

I haven't read it and am too lazy to look up what it's called but I liked the Black Company books so its probably good

The single biggest mistake he makes is attaching his teardown of "escapist" subgenre to Tolkien and not Lewis or Jordan

Yeah. You can tell in his fiction that he has a bit of an iconoclastic streak in him, and rather than ripping Lewis a new asshole and just saying "Tolkien does this a bit too, albeit to a lesser extent" he focuses on Tolkien exclusively because LOTR is the sacred cow.

Claiming that Watership Down is fluffy escapism is also pretty fucking wild, IMO.

And this is coming from someone who actually has a good deal of respect for Moorcock.

Anyone who criticizes the traditions of fantasy (or sci-fi) should not only be ignored, but reviled. Moorcock is a shithead and is no different than the marxist fucks who almost destroyed sci-fi.

Yeah, this.
>But it sounds more like you want an atypical story told in a typical fantasy setting
Also this.
Shit, even I'll take something similar to the Dunk & Egg novellas, but I guess that would be closer to Heroic Fantasy.

I wasn't a fan.

yes, the hobbit actually does read like a whinnie the pooh book, but there is more to the Lord of the Rings series than pure "escapism" into an "unchallenging world" and Moorcock only hurts his own credibility by refusing to acknowledge this.

Moorcock is underrated in a commercial sense. In all of the world of "literary" and "academically respectable" fantasy however he is enthusiastically worshiped whenever anyone gets the (admittedly rare) chance to namedrop him. All Tolkien usually gets in these spheres is some slight lip service to his "legacy" even though his body of work is absolutely overfilled with poetic value that's basically been buried beneath the Peter Jackson movies.

I guess I'll just say that I think SFF has grown up but SFF criticism still has a very long way to go.

so... lit/ any cool steampunk books? i already read boneshaker, any other really nice book?