/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

Vox Day's fantasy stuff is comfy as fuck.

Can we add "To Kill a God" to the recommendations?

Would u plz shut the fuck up

Is soft scifi the same as science fantasy?

Not quite.

There's no such thing as "soft" sci-fi.

Imagine putting Conan The Barbarian on Mars. That's science fantasy, ERB's John Carter. Or writing about a King on planet Saturn, or a necromancer on Venus. It's just about transposing some fantasy elements with exotic secondary planet setting.

Soft SF is more like pic related.

Cease posting this. The actual plant one is funnier.

Gimme some hot elves. Bonus points for dark elves.

I need a good Space Opera

Here.

Tolkien?

lots of blindsight on goodreads, who's the author?

Peter Watts

A Fire Upon The Deep
Count to a Trillion
Night's Dawn ... although pretty soft
Xeelee...start with Vacuum Diagrams

Is Garth Nix's 'Keys to the Kingdom' actually a good series?

I remember liking it when i was a kid, but i never finished it

It was pretty damn good when I reread it. Nix manages to combine an imaginative isekai scenario with an "I wanna be normal" character without making him a tedious asshole, and the supporting characters were quite fun. The ending was very weird though. I'd say it peaked at book 4/5, but the ending wasn't bad.

Should I read an english translation of Battle Royale, or should I learn japanese?

Use google translate.

For whatever reason, he is absolutely fixated on death, funereal imagery and scenes of decay, to a degree I haven't encountered hitherto; charnel houses and their worms, mausoleums, burial vaults, necropolises, mummification, torturers, necromancers, cannibals, cere-cloths, sarcophagi, lichens, fungus. CAS is your man if you like mordantly exotic morbidity, and he has an irresistibly surreal eye for monsters; somebody who can toss off a paragraph like this without it even being the climactic part of the story:

>In the wide intervals between the tables, the familiars of Namirrha and his other servants went to and fro incessantly, as if a fantasmagoria of ill dreams were embodied before the emperor. Kingly cadavers in robes of time-rotted brocade, with worms seething in their eye-pits, poured a blood-like wine into cups of the opalescent horn of unicorns. Lamias, trident-tailed, and four-breasted chimeras, came in with fuming platters lifted high by their brazen claws. Dog-headed devils, tongued with lolling flames, ran forward to offer themselves as ushers for the company. And before Zotulla and Obexah, there appeared a curious being with the full-fleshed lower limbs and hips of a great black woman and the clean-picked bones of some titanic ape from thereupward.

no, it's really not

>tips

The movie is better than the translation I read. The plot is slightly different but in a way I actually found less interesting. The book is more 'government be keeping us down, adults don't get it and are evil, pretty much 1984+violence+youth-angst' while the movie is more 'holy fucking shit how did we let our country get this bad everything is so fucked we're bad people'. The book doesn't have Takeshi Kitano's character running the show, instead it's some boring evil bureaucrat.

Wait that guy actually writes?

Have you even read his books? Everyone is so triggered by his political opinions that they trash his books without even picking them up. Goodreads is filled with one star reviews that review him as a person but not his prose.

>Goodreads
There's your problem.

He's a shit writer too. I didn't even know about his permavirgin blog and his prose was still rancid garbage.

lol nice try.

It depends? Soft scifi tends to be more like Star Trek in that it deals with, say, the ethical, religious and moral issues behind creating sentient robots. Or linguists talking to aliens. Many times it's simply an issue for the author to write a commentary on real-world social issues. The hard SF issues of how the characters travel the stars or power their laser guns never really matters.

Science fantasy on the other hand, that tends to be fantasy/pulp stories and plots with a scifi veneer. The Cyborg C0-N4N swinging his laser sword at the dastardly psyonic masters of the jungle planet Venus or so on.

Don't know about his fantasy, but I picked up that "Rebel Moon" book he did about ten years ago and it was total trash. Not a whiff of an original idea, the main hero is called "Dalton Starkiller" without a trace of irony, the rebels just invent a game-changing weapon halfway through for no reason, it didn't even have a proper ending. Probably tied with Ready Player One as the worst thing I've read.

His fantasy is top notch.

Tried reading blindsight and wow it's just a bunch of nonsensical science terms strung together. Do people actually read this garbage or do they just pretend to because they think it makes them look smart?

The movie is bizarrely tonally inconsistent though. It flipflops between being over-the-top dark humor and satire to taking itself 100% seriously.

>"MyFriend-chan has a crush on you!"
>"shut uuuup, no I don't!"
>both get shot
>mfw

Top kek fuck off back to your blog.

Please leave, reddit.

Stop shilling your shitty books you silly cocksucker.

>Book discussion not allowed
You leftists and your desire to silence everyone.

You really trying to shill and make this author the next Gene Wolfe meme huh? It's possible. Took 2+ years of focred shilling (along with absolute aram) for Wolfe to be a constant meme. You could try your hand.

Gene Wolfe has always been very well regarded, you dumb slut.

Cool your jets buddy. Just discuss whatever book you want and leave the politics at the door. Don't want to draw the attention of the mods upous now, do you?

>slut
I wish. Also i was talking about plebs wanting to read his books. He was well regarded by authors, not readers. This general introduced so many people to Wolfe.

Shut up you schizoid loon.

Are there any other fantasy or sci-fi books like Hyperion where characters tell stylistically different stories?

Book of the New Sun

Don't pretend Jordan was ever better

>M-mommy, they're discussing forbidden authors again!
It was good, admit it.

Take your medicine

Who wants to talk about Sanderson?

A response straight from the goon playbook, how dull. Well, for those of you who aren't SA stooges I recommend it.

Any fantasy with cute girls?

I know a lot of people here dislike Moorcock because his prose isn't great and he gave an only half-coherent criticism of Tolkien, but I still think he's a good storyteller, and creates interesting worlds with fascinating characters.

Plus he helped popularize the "new wave" of sci-fi along with people like Zelazny.

The fantasy and SF threads on SA are fucking weird places man

I do. WHEN IS THE NEXT BOOK????

You really do suffer from persecution mania user, don't you?

What is SA anyway?

somethingawful

Ah, right. From the "leftists are trying to censor muh shit books" thing I thought he might have meant Socialist Alternative.

Is there such a thing as Gothic SF?

40k duh

BotNS

What doesn't it do?

Since half life 3 is never going to happen.
What's the closest thing to that story in a book form?

>read solaris
>technobabble out the ass
>don't understand shit

>What doesn't it do?
Gay rape. Traps and boipucci

Dune, in the sense that you get to various characters' thoughts.

About to read Sabriel, what am I in for lads?

>You're delusional
>Bogeyman something something
>Nobody is out to get you
>Etc
Yeah, I know the routine. At some point you will misstype words and act as if that is brilliant and witty. I've seen it all before too many times, lad.

>Dune
Read a couple of them many years ago. Should give them a try again soon.
>in the sense that you get to various characters' thoughts.
Not what I asked for, but something I think is really important anyway. Vernor Vinge did this well in his "zones of thought" series.

Everyone who has read Watts knows he sometimes has trouble explaining things clearly, but calling those terms nonsensical is just false. If you don't want to imagine what the ship looks like you could just skim through the part.
People read Watts for his take on consciousness, free will and the unique aliens.

Why do so many people think other people read to pretend x?

I quite liked that, it's something you don't see much and it adds a lot of depth.

Something pretty good and unique. The cover art is also excellent, at least it used to be.

Oh yeah, I definitely avoided the dumb YA Hunger Games covers they put out for that series.

It's like the concept of a cover that depicts the main character, important elements of the setting, and clues and foreshadowing about the plot, while establishing an aesthetic and mood is lost to time. Even among the old style covers, that one's great, it just fits so perfectly.

youtube.com/watch?v=LAJ73QerzzE

What are some fantasy books with badass elves like that instead of gay elves?

Look who's back

The only good series about necromancy you will most likely ever read

Drizzt.

who here has written something of his own? care to share an excerpt?

Skip everything that isn't the original trilogy though.

*cough*

Gotta admit, I have precisely zero interest in engineering speculation my dude

Any love for Poul Anderson here? I'm reading The Broken Sword right now and loving it. I'm going to get to Three Hearts and Three Lions right after it.

It's definitely a weird movie
>She didn't have her period
>I checked
ok wat. But it actually is one of my favourite Movies. (Maybe I have the Yellow fever, because I also love Oldboy and a book called "Welcome to the NHK)

Just finished this. I enjoyed it, but there was no reason for them to be goblins and elves. Felt like fantasy in name alone.

Fuck off thief.

Have never heard of this guy, what book specifically do you recommend? I don't want to read anything with a protag named Dalton Starkiller, that's Jemison-tier

yeah because people also stole all shit posted in critique threads was stolen

Some stories are like this, where they went in with Microsofts find and replace tool and changed the country name to "realm", "black man" to "Orc" and "jewish" to "goblin"

>and "jewish" to "goblin"
Alex Jones does this.

Who else should I read if I like Zelazny and Moorcock? In particular, I like the law/chaos stuff, the kind of conflicted hero who loves excitement but kind of also wants to settle down and live a normal life, and a willingness to have lots of exciting passages and weird shit, and also slow down and let us see the characters just being people sometimes.

I mean not that it's literature but the Star Wars prequels are basically just lazy stereotypes put on aliums. I mean.. the fucking "jew" thing in that has a gigantic nose.

>love the money hate the work I'm a black jew
Can someone convert to Judaism? Are there black jews?