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TheAardvark posted:I guess I'm looking for something more like novels where people get superhero-esque powers but not capes and tights? Like Steven King's firestarter could be looked at as a "superhero" story. Or hell, Unbreakable lol The Power is pretty good, it’s about all women getting electrical powers and the chaos that follows.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:06
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Obligatory "Worm" recommendation if you're cool with a web serial. Warning: it's a chonky one, clocking in around 7,000 pages (or it would, if it was printed). https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ Synopsis taken from Goodreads because I'm bad at summarizing something that long: Goodreads posted:An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:18
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TheAardvark posted:I guess I'm looking for something more like novels where people get superhero-esque powers but not capes and tights? Like Steven King's firestarter could be looked at as a "superhero" story. Or hell, Unbreakable lol These are all incredibly schlocky and dumb and I would absolutely read more: Wearing the Cape - Marion Cooper - Young girl gets “flying brick” powers in a superhero world, joins the not-Justice League Full Metal Superhero - Jeffery Haskell - Young paraplegic girl is secretly not-Tony Stark! Joins the not-Justice League! And its spin-off: Superhero by Night: Young girl possessed by a Spirit of Vengeance! Becomes not-Spawn/Ghost Rider and fucks up the people who done her wrong!! Ex-Heroes - Peter Cline - The Not-Justice League is...OH gently caress ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!!! Yep. If that sounds like fun, then you should read these.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:18
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Nthing the Ex-Heroes books. Peter cline makes a zombie apocalypse kinda actually fun instead of nothing but dreary monologues. I'll dig around and see what I can find that fits your description.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:57
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shirunei posted:Naw he is a legit good dude. Shame about his writing being utter trash but there are some good bits here and there. By trash I mean digestible shlock Boy I hope you don't ever try reading the Malazan books or Abercrombie's First Law series if you think Sanderson's writing is shlock.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:57
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TheAardvark posted:I've actually never read a superhero novel. Any recommendations? Tom De Haven's It's Superman!, which is set in the 1930s, with Clark Kent having just moved to Metropolis and not yet started dressing up in a cape and tights. It's a surprisingly fresh take on the Superman cast, without dipping into deconstruction.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:30
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TheAardvark posted:I guess I'm looking for something more like novels where people get superhero-esque powers but not capes and tights? Like Steven King's firestarter could be looked at as a "superhero" story. Or hell, Unbreakable lol Charlie Stross' new one, Dead Lies Dreaming is right up your alley then. It's about a group of people with low-level superpowers on a heist. It's based on his Laundry series, but it's crime, not espionage or espionage-adjacent. It's a really solid novel with interesting characters and a juuust a little bit different than our world setting (Nyarlathotep has been installed as the Prime Minister, and yes, the alternative was much worse).
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Nov 14, 2020 03:02
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TheAardvark posted:I guess I'm looking for something more like novels where people get superhero-esque powers but not capes and tights? Like Steven King's firestarter could be looked at as a "superhero" story. Or hell, Unbreakable lol This isn't that, but I gotta rec Soon I Will Be Invincible.  Here's a first-page excerpt shamelessly ripped off of Amazon's Look Inside feature, which is why it's an image and not text: 
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Nov 14, 2020 04:24
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Seconding that book. It's pretty great.
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Nov 14, 2020 04:36
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TheAardvark posted:I've actually never read a superhero novel. Any recommendations? Soon I Shall Be Invincible (Austin Grossman) and From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (Minister Faust)
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Nov 14, 2020 04:49
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I like Peter Cline so bought Ex-Heroes and Soon I Will Be Invincible because it sounds interesting. thanks 
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Nov 14, 2020 04:52
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TheAardvark posted:I like Peter Cline so bought Ex-Heroes and Soon I Will Be Invincible because it sounds interesting. thanks Oh man totally forgot about Soon I Will Be Invincible! Yeah I like that one too!
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Nov 14, 2020 05:04
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Kinda old school, and technically not novels, but I liked the first two or three Wild Cards books edited by Martin. Like all the big short story shared universes, this one went off the rails after awhile and just got weird, but the first three books more or less hold up.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:14
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Evil Fluffy posted:Boy I hope you don't ever try reading the Malazan books or Abercrombie's First Law series if you think Sanderson's writing is shlock. Dude, Abercrombie is practically Shakespeare compared to Sanderson when it comes to prose. The First Law is only a step above or two above Mistborn, but you should be comparing it to Elantris. Discounting his novellettes, Sanderson's prose seems to have peaked around Warbreaker and has gone down hill since he began his assembly line draft process with hundreds of beta readers and spreadsheets and 400,000 word book, while Abercrombie hit his stride in the Heroes and has continued to improve. I particularly like that Joe will use filmic/cinematic techniques, whereas most Sanderson chapters are homogeneous in style. I like Sanderson and think he's a great teacher and a nice guy with a special talent few writers have for suppressing the gag reflex the rest of us seem to have when it comes to the sameness of the work. Malazan, however, is all over the place. Its either extremely bad or sort of good. Gardens of the Moon sucked, but Deadhouse Gates has some very impressive segments. Every character is some kind of philosophy expert who spends half their chapters navel gazing or expounding on truths of existence and the other half talking about power levels with skeleton lizards. MartingaleJack fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 06:23
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BananaNutkins posted:Malazan, however, is all over the place. Its either extremely bad or sort of good. Gardens of the Moon sucked, but Deadhouse Gates has some very impressive segments. Every character is some kind of philosophy expert who spends half their chapters navel gazing or expounding on truths of existence and the other half talking about power levels with skeleton lizards. What Erikson can do really well is paint a world full of mystery and history you can barely touch on since it's all conveyed by unreliable narrators - and then make it really satisfying when something clicks and you figure out (or you think you did anyway) a connection. Magic is a force of nature few people understand and it becomes clear when you're being given contradictory explanations by wizards and gods. Sanderson, on the other hand, while having some nice ideas about what magic actually can do, completely ruins it by explaining everything. Poof. The wonder's gone. I tried to like Sanderson, I really did, he's got the occassional cool idea with magic here and there, but I pretty much had to force myself to finish the Mistborn trilogy - it is just soulless. The weird thing is, I actually kind of liked Elantris, dull character interactions and silly resolution to the missing magic plot bit aside. But Warbreaker and Mistborn felt incredibly exhausting to read just due to the sheer boredom. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 09:39
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I really liked the Super City Cops series by Keith R. A. DeCandido. It has tights, but it's sort of a CSI kinda thing in a world with heroes. I think there are 3 books in it. Vicious by V. E. Schwab is pretty good. The sequel was decent, but not as great as the first. It really sets up the whole "world just discovering superhumans" well.
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Nov 14, 2020 09:45
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For superhero stuff with a twist may I suggest you read Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots. It's told from the PoV of a henchwoman-for-hire in a world a bit like in The Boys (except the supervillains are also real, as in "not manufactured"). I liked it a lot, and it's been getting recs from fairly prominent authors.
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Nov 14, 2020 11:08
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jng2058 posted:Kinda old school, and technically not novels, but I liked the first two or three Wild Cards books edited by Martin. Like all the big short story shared universes, this one went off the rails after awhile and just got weird, but the first three books more or less hold up. Like all shared universe anthologies, the Wild Cards series is a curate's egg. There's some great, there's some actively bad. When the second generation of writers headed by Daniel Abraham came in a lot of characters started being written in ways that were off, and most of the new characters weren't as interesting. But there's always been some good stories in the books. I wish they'd publish the sequence of stories from the POV of the Oddity as a small volume, because they're all excellent and the last one is perhaps the best story in the entire series.
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Nov 14, 2020 11:09
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buffalo all day posted:Kavalier and Clay? I enjoyed Soon I Will Become Invincible by assuming the author knew the genre was trash.
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Nov 14, 2020 13:35
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Most of the names in Invincible had the feel of something you'd come up with in City of Heroes after half an hour of trying to find something that wasn't taken
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Nov 14, 2020 14:40
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BananaNutkins posted:Malazan, however, is all over the place. Its either extremely bad or sort of good. Gardens of the Moon sucked, but Deadhouse Gates has some very impressive segments. Every character is some kind of philosophy expert who spends half their chapters navel gazing or expounding on truths of existence and the other half talking about power levels with skeleton lizards. I kinda just did this spiel in the thread here, but here goes again. I started Malazan a couple of months back. Gardens of the Moon is actually pretty fun - it's got a bunch of silly fantasy bits - ancient elf wizards with cool swords, dragons, psycho wizard puppets - and it comes off really well as a fun fantasy romp. Then you hit Deadhouse Gates, and it's like someone took a bunch of Cannibal Corpse album covers and wrote them out pompously. Also, rape. Lots of rape. Jesus, so much rape. In Deadhouse Gates, rape (or raped women's corpses, or rape gangs chasing young girls through the streets, or raped women who've been strangled with the entrails of their murdered by husbands) is like the black and white western film's black hat. It just serves to indicate that some person, people, or situation is bad. There's frequently no effect on the plot, and often the characters don't know or care about any of the women who get raped, so it's not even that fridging thing that people complain about. In the worst example I bumped into before deciding that the book was worthless poo poo and abandoning it, one of our protagonists has bumped into some bandits, gotten away, then comes back to kill them later. When he gets back to their camp, Erikson describes the camp, and then just mentions that there are some raped women's corpses there, then we move on with the story. We're in the middle of the desert at this point, and there's zero mention of these women before or again. They're just little signposts that say "these bandits are bad dudes" before the protagonist kills them and moves on. Nothing else about Deadhouse Gates is good enough to put up with this trivialization of rape. I'm not sure anything about Deadhouse Gates is good at all, honestly - it's so ponderous and relentlessly self-serious and self-important. In sum, do read Gardens of the Moon (if you're in desperate need of a fantasy novel), and then definitely don't spend like 70 dollars on the complete collection because you like Gardens of the Moon. a foolish pianist fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 18:53
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The Fall of Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells - $4.99/$4.99/$3.99 The Wizard Hunters - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKI9Q/ The Ships of Air - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKIA0/ The Gate of Gods - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKIAA/ Paladin of Souls (Chalion #2) by Lois McMaster Bujold - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC138Q/ The Hallowed Hunt (Chalion #3) by Lois McMaster Bujold - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCK55I/ On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004LLII12/ Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clark - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XD75HGV/ Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKTAU/
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Nov 14, 2020 19:08
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Silver2195 posted:Yeah, and that's the key to The Eye of Argon's appeal. It's not bad in the sense of being unreadable, it's bad in the sense of being unreadable without laughing. This sets it apart from a lot of other supposedly so-bad-it's-good writing, at least IMO; I find My Immortal unreadable, for instance. I know that this is ten pages late but the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back did a let's read of both of these books and they had a blast with them. They actually did think Eye of Argon was very charming and enjoyable.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:53
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a foolish pianist posted:I kinda just did this spiel in the thread here, but here goes again. I started Malazan a couple of months back. Gardens of the Moon is actually pretty fun - it's got a bunch of silly fantasy bits - ancient elf wizards with cool swords, dragons, psycho wizard puppets - and it comes off really well as a fun fantasy romp. This is my take on GotM too, and its too bad the rest of the series wasn't more like that. quote:I'm not sure anything about Deadhouse Gates is good at all, honestly - it's so ponderous and relentlessly self-serious and self-important. This is the other big sin of Malazan, entire books in the back half are full of this.
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Nov 14, 2020 22:28
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pradmer posted:On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers - $4.99 This was technically adapted into the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie but they only took the most basic part of the premise (Blackbeard is after the Fountain of Youth) and none of the interesting stuff, like explaining how there used to be magic in the past but wouldn't be in the present/future.
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Nov 15, 2020 01:04
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pradmer posted:The Fall of Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells - $4.99/$4.99/$3.99 These are pretty good Regency-era fantasy with lots of ancient mystery and sword fighting and such. They aren't funny in the way that Murderbot is but there's still a dry wit that Wells has always had here and there.
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Nov 15, 2020 01:49
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occamsnailfile posted:These are pretty good Regency-era fantasy with lots of ancient mystery and sword fighting and such. They aren't funny in the way that Murderbot is but there's still a dry wit that Wells has always had here and there. Isn't it more Edwardian? The initial chapters had a very WWI feeling.
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Nov 15, 2020 02:08
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fritz posted:Isn't it more Edwardian? The initial chapters had a very WWI feeling. You may be right, though I feel like it wasn't quite WWI. Definitely later historical inspiration era than a lot of fantasy without being the kind of techno-dystopia that Steampunk usually goes for, it was a nice feel.
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Nov 15, 2020 04:03
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I'm about two-thirds of the way through Monster Baru and when I'm reading it, I have trouble putting it down, and when I put it down, I have trouble picking it back up because I'm terrified of what's going to happen next 
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Nov 15, 2020 18:35
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The Fifth Season (Broken Earth #1) by NK Jemisin - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00H25FCSQ/ Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) by Ann Leckie - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BAXFDLM/ Leviathan Wakes (Expanse #1) by James SA Corey - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047Y171G/ The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ECE9OD4/
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Nov 15, 2020 19:34
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Another superhero recommendation. I really like Jim Bernheimers "Confessions of a D-list Supervillian" novels. Which are shlocky as gently caress, but fun. Edit: Oh and Dan Abnett. Of Black Library and Guardians of the Galaxy fame wrote a prose Avengers novel a few years back that was pretty good as well. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Avengers-Everybody-Wants-World-Prose/dp/0785193006 Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 23:32
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He's got another book coming out soon in the D-List series. I liked that series as well.
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Nov 16, 2020 00:48
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pradmer posted:The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - $2.99 Real, real, real good.
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Nov 16, 2020 06:12
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A long awaited (maybe) vaporbook is arriving
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Nov 16, 2020 06:17
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I'm in the mood for some grimdark fantasy. Is there any grimdark out there that people can recommend? Or rather, is there a grimdark novel/series out there people consider to be the hallmark standard? I can tolerate most of the pitfalls of the genre. Might be worth a heads up if you're recommending anything really out there in terms of its impact though.
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Nov 16, 2020 10:16
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Sheriff Falc posted:I'm in the mood for some grimdark fantasy. Oddly enough, Janny Wurts' long series The Wars of Light and Shadow go very grimdark in story arcs, especially the Ships of Merior arc. It's not devoid of hope so I wouldn't label the whole thing grimdark, but hell, have a new rec.
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Nov 16, 2020 15:17
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Sheriff Falc posted:I'm in the mood for some grimdark fantasy. I'm assuming you've already read Joe Abercrombie' stuff? He's kind of the poster child for grimdark though I find his work so funny that it doesn't strike me as too grim. More grin-dark than grim dark.
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Nov 16, 2020 16:15
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I really liked Ed McDonalds Ravens Mark trilogy and it's pretty grimdark. Adds gunpowder weapons to the standard sword and sorcery which is always a plus in my book. And some interesting world building. Including one magically post-apocalyptic region literally called 'The Misery'. Edit: Oh and I listened to the first one on Audible and the narrator is pretty good as well if you're into audiobooks. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 16:41
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Deptfordx posted:Edit: Oh and Dan Abnett. Of Black Library and Guardians of the Galaxy fame wrote a prose Avengers novel a few years back that was pretty good as well. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Avengers-Everybody-Wants-World-Prose/dp/0785193006 On the other hand, his Guardians of the Galaxy novel is unreadable. I like the writer. I like the characters. Did not at all come together and I dropped it after 30 or so pages.
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Nov 16, 2020 16:50
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So while reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow I ended up thinking "I bet this author is a woman" despite that Alix is a male name in my country. Thinking about it more, being able to make an educated guess whether the author of a fantasy/sf novel is male or female based on the writing style is probably a bit similar to being able to guess whether the book was written in the 1970s or the 2010s. Or similar to being able to guess whether the book was written in English or translated. I.e. you have books that are clearly in one category or another, but also books where it's hard to tell. At the same time it's quite hard to point out why. I've also come to the conclusion that I tend to like books written by women more often than books written by men...
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Nov 16, 2020 17:08
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