/sffg/ - Science Fiction and Fantasy General

no

I converted to mormonism before even attempting him

GRRM writes okay bodice ripper novels.

>tfw warlock of the magus world is some of the best fiction you've ever read

Does anybody have any good recommendations for fantasy short stories?

Not fantasy in the traditional sense but R.A. Lafferty is easily the best short-fiction writer to ever work in science-fiction/fantasy. Hell, even outside of the genre competition-pool he's still an all time great.

>tfw don't want to hit on cute girl coworker because you're a professional but she keeps being cute
>what is after work

It would just get weird.

You just have to charm her with your superiour knowledge in sci-fi & fantasy and she'll make the move. Remember, SF&F is actually cool in this day and age.

Is this a good place to start with Heinlein? How does it compare to the rest of his books?

It's good, though very much of its time. I think it was the second book of his that I read. I liked it more than Starship Troopers, but less than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

It's a little weird and personally I felt that the ending was quite a letdown. It's not a bad place to start but I think part of why it's so famous is because the idea that it's ok to fuck was not so commonplace back when it was released.

>King/Queen of Filler
>Not Robert Jordan

Just finished the first Black Company book. Pretty good, will continue the series in the future. But next I doing sci-fi. I'm split between starting Quadrail or Revelation Space. Any suggestions?

>Remember, SF&F is actually cool in this day and age.
"Hey do you watch Game of Thrones" doesn't count.

Is that show actually good, or is it a normie thing? Just on the surface, nothing about it interests me, I just don't see the hype.

1st season is good, 2nd and 3rd seasons are okay, rest is unwatchable garbage.

>Is that show actually good,
No. Well, maybe the first season or two.

> or is it a normie thing?
Normie thing. Most of the fans now don't even know the characters names. They watch it because everyone watches it.

I just finished reading all of the black company novels. I enjoyed it for the most part. Are any of Glen Cook's other books/series worth reading?

I reread the series a year or so back and the complaints about filler are incredibly overstated.
I remember being annoyed with the pace when it was coming out but reading it as a complete series its not really there.
The only real pointless segments in the whole series were the Faile is kidnapped for like 3 books arc and even still you had some character growth for Perrin going on and Elayne being a fucking retard and trying to become queen. Both of those honestly come down to Elayne and Faile being bar none of the worst characters in the series who couldn't make anything interesting.

>I reread the series a year or so back and the complaints about filler are incredibly overstated.
By that standard I have trouble imagining what you even consider filler.

Actual reading does however and while not as mainstream as playing games or watching GoT it's certainly quite popular. Don't be a cynic user.

The only fantasy most women read is Harry Potter. Either that or I just have bad luck.

>Harry Potter
Eh, really? I would've thought Hunger Games. Maybe Twilight, but is that even relevant anymore?

The only book most people have read is Harry Potter. But if you associate with people that actually read (man or woman, it's not like dudebros read ASOIAF 15 years ago) fantasy is increasingly common.

Forgot to add: But maybe I'm just lucky.

>Hunger Games
>Fantasy

Something irrelevant or meaningless to the overall plot, though even that can be argued since character growth can happen.
The Perrin and Masema arc is good example of this. He was sent to bring Masema back, gets interrupted by his wife getting kidnapped, spends 3 books undoing that, then they kill of Masema anyway. You could argue that him accepting the role of a Lord and leadership to be something that happened but honestly that was more of an afterthought to the arc where Tam sits him down and tells him to quit whining and accept his job in life or step down and allow someone less qualified which they both know he wouldnt do.

Everyone I've known that read Harry Potter read at least the first Twilight but over half of them just did it to laugh at how terrible it is.

>Something irrelevant or meaningless to the overall plot,
The majority of every single book after Shadow Rising in wheel of Time is filler then. Fucking delusional fanboys.

"most women" don't really read that much, just like most men. You have to find somebody who actually likes reading first.

Everything good about the series came from the books. It starts deviating heavily in season 3 and consequently the quality takes a nose dive. Yet viewership for the show has only increased every year, in direct defiance to how shitty it has become. Says all that needs to be said about the people who watch it, really.

Nigger name some them. You sound like some of the retarded fucks who dont read a series but instead try to follow all the dank memes about them.

The women I run into that read all read real Veeky Forums and I don't so it's kind of an issue. If they do read fantasy it's just Harry Potter and Twilight.

Perhaps it's me who has the terrible taste.

It's been over a decade since i even tried to read Wheel of Time (stopped at book 10) and i don't lke arguing with fanboys but ok. Doesn't the entire Padan Fain thing developing since book 1 go absolutely nowhere?

Wow he was so thin back then

this is a trick question because the filler in WoT isn't dead end but interesting plots like Padan Fain or Isam or Asmodean's killer, it's endless descriptions of clothes of tertiary characters.

Gene Wolfe is a guaranteed panty dropper. Just namedropping him makes the room as moist as a tropical jungle.

>Padan Fain
Stole the horn and led Rand to the Seanchan.
Led the whitecloaks to the Two Rivers and set off that whole arc. Introduced Slayer who ended up being Perrins antagonist.
Tried to assassinate Rand which wound lead to his "death"
Final showing was a copout though but evidently Sanderson didn't have a good plan for him so just killed him off

Ah it's Sanderson's fault I see yes very good

He can't keep getting away with it!

Sanderson did some things right and some things wrong. His final segment of the book just killing off random side characters for shits and giggles was stupid as hell though.
>Hurin has a few paragraphs from his perspective
>Next chapter Rand just casually reveals oh by the way Hurin and Bashere died

That is one of the most autistic pictures I've ever seen

Was Rand's whole arc his or RJ's? I really liked it, especially the Dragonmount part.

Thoughts on pic related? I've been through a couple of chapters but I can't find it in me to keep going, so far it seems like shit.

Will it get better?

Ill let you know how the series is in 30 years when he finishes it

the time dilation near the bore was great and that seemed like an autistic sanderson thing to do

>finish book in a series
oh boy I can't wait for the next book to re-establish these characters for like 200 pages in the next book

Like every Sanderson book, its 80% filler with hints of a plot and the remaining 20% shit actually happens.

Well I'm curious, what brought this on?

Has anyone else but me noticed that the Fantasy charts suck absolute dick and is obviously based on some faggots shitty, subjective tastes. All of these books suck and no one has read.

>the time dilation near the bore was great and that seemed like an autistic sanderson thing to do
James Rigney was a physicist by training. I may hate Robert Jordan but credit where credit is due.

What's the most you ever spent on a book?

>tfw already own Emperor of Dreams, but it's missing ~4 of the stories contained in this $30-$90 novel

>oh boy I can't wait for the next book to re-establish these characters for like 200 pages in the next book
Stop reading YA literature that assumes you'll remember nothing between books.

That was the first book for him that I read. Planning to read tunnel in the sky soon.

It's almost like the chart is made by one guy and fantasy is a huge genre that's been around for a long time and has more books of more different types than any one person would probably be able to read and therefore include on a chart. Or something.

I don't know any books for adults that do this. Even the huge multi-volume fantasy epics don't do this.

I love it. It starts slow, and the flashback chapters didn't feel as interesting for me, but the book became more interesting as it went on, once I got invested in the characters and plot, as stuff started to happen.

Three more preview chapters for Oathbringer tomorrow.

It took me a while to get into it too. None of the characters really grabbed me, but that's not uncommon since I read fantasy for the setting. Eventually the world building got interesting. There were enough mysteries to make me want to keep going to find answers. If that's what you like in fantasy then keep going, cause it'll definitely grab you. I can't really say if the characters get better or not because my perspective of characters in fantasy is warped. I tend to not care about them and only "get used" to them over time, so I do end up liking them but it's more because I'm comfortable around them and they've become a fixture in the setting that I enjoy.

6I read every single book in this chart. What do you say to that?

Fantasy pleb here. Only read ASOIAF and The Name of the Wind. Loved the former (tho I'm unsure if that's because I'd watch two seasons of the show beforehand) and hated the latter with a passion (bailed halfway through).

What next?

I dunno, that's my experience with pretty much any book I've read. They're certainly not labeled as YA but I realize the moment I give an example you could call them YA to win the argument

Give us names. Which books exactly are you complaining about?

The only books I can think of off the top of my head that does this are Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl, which were written for kids.

Zelazny. Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker. Blindsight.

sffg talks a lot about sanderson, his books does it. are they YA?

Basically everything. I just finished the first Black Company book, and I really liked it. Beige prose, grim and gritty, very serious.

I also really liked Three Parts Dead, but that's a bit harder to describe. I almost want to say it's New Weird.

Haven't read them myself, but I did read a very unflattering review of one of his books that described it as a YA shonen masquerading as adult literature.

Sanderson is quintessential YA

ASoIAF does it. is it YA?

Bout 80 eurobucks on a 1953 edition of Across the Sea of Stars in perfect condition.
Pretty happy with it. I try and get either the first edition, or the nicest looking edition when I can.

Haven't read them, but if they do, it's a good sign.

>ASoIAF does it
No it doesn't.

Only Sanderson I've read is Stormlight Archive and he didn't really do it at all that I can remember there.

Heard a lot about the black company, how do you guys feel about it? Usually a science fiction guy, but mercenaries in a Fantasy setting are dope i guess.

>ASoIAF does it
No it doesn't. You can't find a single example of it.

Yes it does, deal with it.

I read the first few installments then lost interest. Cook isn't a bad inroad to fantasy if you want an alternative to the usual epic fantasy fare. At the time he was writing it was the height of Tolkienism and he was doing something pretty different, and a lot of authors after him used him as a base for their ideas rather than Tolkien.

>YA shonen masquerading as adult literature.
Sanderson is more anime than a fair amount of actual nip light novels I have read

Show me where, cause I can't recall a single instance of GRRM re-introducing characters like they'd never been seen before. His narrative voice is so tied to the PoV character that it wouldn't even make sense for him to do that.

I really don't remember that unless your threshold for this concept is so low that literally anything from the past being referenced at all is what triggered your initial post.

He literally doesn't. Unless you're saying that any time he describes a person redundantly it counts, in which case your classification for that is so vague as to apply to any multipart book series.

It's not about outright reintroducing characters, it's about setting up scenes that re-establishes character nature in hamfisted ways.

>>It's not about outright reintroducing characters
Well that's what I'm talking about because that's actually something that is distinct and noticeable, what you're talking about doesn't even make sense as a concept because how would you even distinguish it from a character behaving normally in keeping with their character?

I'm gonna have to ask for what you meant in your initial post because I thought I knew what you meant but I was clearly wrong.

The other guy in the thread said it was all very serious and gritty. Is it, to the point of taking itself too seriously or not?

Any opinions on Gormenghast?

It's fairly serious and gritty, but I think you maybe misapprehending the style and tone of it. It's not grimdark. What people mean by "gritty" is that it feels more like real life, warts and all, rather than the pristine idealized version of people and events you get in older high fantasy stories, with larger-than-life characters and stark moral contrasts. It's morally gray and down to earth in how it deals with people and their choices. At the time it was considered pretty edgy but compared to the people who followed after Cook he's very tame.

I'm that guy. For the most part, yes, it does take itself seriously. It's about a mercenary band full of horrible people and a handful of decent ones, working for even worse people with so much power they could kill any of these people for looking at them wrong. And the people working to stop them, the rebels, despite saying they're the good guys, are barely any better. Part of the fun was seeing who's going to betray whom next. There are some lighter parts with almost cartoonish wizard duels, but that's basically it.

Nice! I spent 65 USD on a signed first edition of Citadel of the Autarch. It's the pride of my collection.

>Blindsight

By whom? Looking at goodreads there are several books by this title.

Its one of the better takes on unreliable narrator. Where even the guy writing the story acknowledges that he ignores and glosses over his comrades murders and rapes and instead tries to humanize them because they are like his family.

I've been trying to get a decent deal on a first edition of Pattern Recognition, and oddly Storm of Steel, since I've come to like it more than I expected. But both seem expensive atm.