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I think the issue in this thread and generally is that people don't read short fiction and Sci-Fi is a genre that works really well as short fiction where as it's mostly the opposite for modern Fantasy. To use a home-grown example General Batuta's short work in Destiny is Science Fiction while the overarching plot and story of the game is basically Fantasy with technological trappings. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Jun 16, 2021 |
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Jun 16, 2021 09:18
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There is plenty of cool short fantasy. Lord of the Rings, Mistborn, some authors even stick to duologies!
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Jun 16, 2021 09:22
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I think to me there's fantasy in the Tolkienesque subgenre - and even a lot of the more modern well regarded stuff still sticks to that model, i.e. two I recently bounced off were The Goblin Emperor and A Stranger in Olondria - and what I would much more broadly define as fantasy even though it's not what most people mean by fantasy, i.e. Piranesi or The Bone Clocks or stuff like that. Which isn't really what I think of as urban fantasy, either...
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Jun 16, 2021 09:33
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Lampsacus posted:Bookbarn lurker here. I read 80% science fiction, 20% fantasy. So I'm curious as to some good fantasy novellas to break more into the genre. I love Kim Stanley Robinson but mostly Greg Egan. I mostly like how Greg Egan uses science fiction as a delivery vessel for interesting and strange ideas. Kind of like the Edge Questions (edge.org) but in fiction format. This isn't the entirety of my reading, so don't get me as somebody who hates character development or something haha. This may fit for you, KJ Parker has two short story collections that are really good, Father of Lies, and Academic Exercises.
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Jun 16, 2021 12:46
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Lampsacus posted:Bookbarn lurker here. I read 80% science fiction, 20% fantasy. So I'm curious as to some good fantasy novellas to break more into the genre. I love Kim Stanley Robinson but mostly Greg Egan. I mostly like how Greg Egan uses science fiction as a delivery vessel for interesting and strange ideas. Kind of like the Edge Questions (edge.org) but in fiction format. This isn't the entirety of my reading, so don't get me as somebody who hates character development or something haha. Fantasy isn't as "idea driven" a genre as SF is. If you read about 20% fantasy, what fantasy have you read before now? Piranesi springs to mind as the obvious novella pick. I'd also suggest you pick up some of Roger Zelazny's hybrid "sf and fantasy" novels like Lord of Light or Isle of the Dead. If you want something short and light, pick up his Night in the Lonesome October. Here's a short story by Lord Dunsany. Read it and if you want more of that just keep reading other things by Dunsany : https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/swld/swld09.htm
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Jun 16, 2021 12:55
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Lampsacus posted:Bookbarn lurker here. I read 80% science fiction, 20% fantasy. So I'm curious as to some good fantasy novellas to break more into the genre. I love Kim Stanley Robinson but mostly Greg Egan. I mostly like how Greg Egan uses science fiction as a delivery vessel for interesting and strange ideas. Kind of like the Edge Questions (edge.org) but in fiction format. This isn't the entirety of my reading, so don't get me as somebody who hates character development or something haha. https://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Hall-Fame-Robert-Silverberg/dp/0061052159/ I have read through this many times and love it. It's got a really nice set of stories from the "modern" era, from Borges to Chiang.
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Jun 16, 2021 13:57
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breadnsucc fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Aug 21, 2021 |
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Jun 16, 2021 15:15
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Lampsacus posted:Bookbarn lurker here. I read 80% science fiction, 20% fantasy. So I'm curious as to some good fantasy novellas to break more into the genre. I love Kim Stanley Robinson but mostly Greg Egan. I mostly like how Greg Egan uses science fiction as a delivery vessel for interesting and strange ideas. Kind of like the Edge Questions (edge.org) but in fiction format. This isn't the entirety of my reading, so don't get me as somebody who hates character development or something haha. The Raven Tower is a unique one-off, although I think it's a normal sized novel (short by fantasy standards maybe). It even uses second person narrative for extra strange 
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Jun 16, 2021 16:26
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fantasy is "a wizard did it" science fiction is "technology did it" low fantasy is "techno wizards did it" hard scifi is "real world laws of physics apply in story until the author gets bored then it turns into low fantasy" Alastair Reynolds is notorious to me for doing that hard scifi is really low fantasy over and over and over again. My personal reading habits are 80% non-fiction, with the remainder being an blend of fantasy, scifi, horror, pulp era adventure, or RPG sourcebook stuff. I should have added the saga of Daniel Keys Moran to the most memorable highlights of my SFL Archives readthrough, although it's more a slow cooker burn vs a brief-abrupt memorable event.
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Jun 16, 2021 16:42
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Aardvark! posted:The Raven Tower is a unique one-off She's got some short stories in that setting also.
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Jun 16, 2021 16:59
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fez_machine posted:I think the issue in this thread and generally is that people don't read short fiction and Sci-Fi is a genre that works really well as short fiction where as it's mostly the opposite for modern Fantasy. There's just so much short fantasy now, though I guess a lot is maybe urban fantasy. Seems like every time I go to the library there are several new fantasy books at <200 pages. I think there may be a tendency for fantasy readers to be the sort that enjoy 10k page series.
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Jun 16, 2021 17:03
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fritz posted:She's got some short stories in that setting also. And they're all good, I like the setting more than the Ancillary universe
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Jun 16, 2021 17:31
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Piranesi and The Raven Tower are excellent recommendations for thought-provoking fantasy, seconding those. For Big Ideas Fantasy, you're often looking at "Science Fantasy." To that end, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, and M. John Harrison's Viriconium (a compendium of four short novels, collected in 2000) are masterpieces. If you're up for fantastic takes on the modern world, Tim Powers has written a bunch of (excellent) novels about the occult underpinnings of the real world, notably Last Call and Declare. Finally, if you want pure, unalloyed fantasy, the recently-discussed Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin may have some merit for you. The first book isn't what Lampsacus is looking for - that's more in books 2 and 3 - but it's beautifully written, and each entry in the original trilogy is quite short.
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Jun 16, 2021 18:50
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holy poo poo i cannot thank you enough everybody. Kestral, Aardvark!, buffalo all day, Hieronymous Alloy, A Proper Uppercut and everybody else who helped. Today I learned about the terms Big Idea Fantasy and science fantasy. I've got a bunch of your recs. on download/order. I've always enjoyed portal fantasy and also malazan book of the fallen. but yeah, big idea science fantasy is exactly my jam and toast so cheers yall
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Jun 16, 2021 19:09
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quantumfoam posted:low fantasy is "techno wizards did it" I thought low fantasy was historical fiction with the occasional demon or conjuror crossing the protagonist's path.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:13
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Loaf fantasy is what I have since my doctor told me to cut back on carbs 
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Jun 16, 2021 19:15
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Ccs posted:I thought low fantasy was historical fiction with the occasional demon or conjuror crossing the protagonist's path. Yeah I think of it this way as well. The lowest you can possibly go is probably The Saxon Chronicles/Last Kingdom books, where it's pretty much straight historical fiction but the main character (a 9th century Saxon) is pretty convinced that magic/witches/fortunetelling/curses are real (even though we'd probably interpret everything has having a "scientific" explanation).
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Jun 16, 2021 19:35
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I dunno about all these labels but my favorite historical fiction is still the Baroque Cycle. Having enjoyed 16 Ways and the Two of Swords I started Shadow. I'm so very confused
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Jun 16, 2021 19:54
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buffalo all day posted:Yeah I think of it this way as well. The lowest you can possibly go is probably The Saxon Chronicles/Last Kingdom books, where it's pretty much straight historical fiction but the main character (a 9th century Saxon) is pretty convinced that magic/witches/fortunetelling/curses are real (even though we'd probably interpret everything has having a "scientific" explanation). The King Must Die is great for this. I may make it a BotM at some point.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:57
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Harold Fjord posted:I dunno about all these labels but my favorite historical fiction is still the Baroque Cycle. Yeah I couldn't get into Scavenger trilogy. It's the only Parker thing I've ever dropped. I'm sure it has its moments and there's some cool setup and mystery going on, and also sword monks, but the plot is so aimless.
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Jun 16, 2021 20:03
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Low fantasy is, according to the original definition, any fantasy where the magic or whatever happens in "our world", usually within a hidden or separated group. Think Harry Potter, the Dresden Files, etc. The opposite is High Fantasy, where the story takes place in a different world - so LotR, Wheel of Time, etc. People don't really stick to this definition any more, though. My personal theory is that people took LotR as the quintessential high fantasy, so that anything with elves and dwarves and poo poo is high fantasy, thus everything else must be low. I've seen GoT described as low fantasy, presumably because it's too grimdark to seem "high". None of this really matters, of course.
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Jun 16, 2021 20:07
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Yeah I can almost picture BotL laughing in the distance as we discuss what constitutes the different fantasy subgenres.
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Jun 16, 2021 20:10
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Yeah, I don't like the low/high distinction because it gets too easily confused with lowbrow/ highbrow and is somewhat meaningless for similar reasons.
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Jun 16, 2021 20:10
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Honestly if I see the tag "low fantasy" on a book I just assume it's about GRIMDARK HARDBITTEN MEN WHO SWEAR AND HAVE BALLS AND KILL PEOPLE BLOOD RAHHH It's not according to the strict definition but I've never seen anything use the label and not also be grimdark and similar
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Jun 16, 2021 20:12
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Full transparency here, I've read the wiki blurb explanations for low fantasy/high fantasy a half a dozen times, and I've read countless books of each type over the years, And I still have no idea. I always end up describing books more specifically, i.e. "gritty political" poo poo like GOT, or "historical fantasy" like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. If you tell me something's low fantasy I'll just nod and wait for more information. High fantasy I'll get the vague idea that it's more Fantastic and Epic than usual but otherwise 
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Jun 16, 2021 20:14
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buffalo all day posted:Yeah I think of it this way as well. The lowest you can possibly go is probably The Saxon Chronicles/Last Kingdom books, where it's pretty much straight historical fiction but the main character (a 9th century Saxon) is pretty convinced that magic/witches/fortunetelling/curses are real (even though we'd probably interpret everything has having a "scientific" explanation). I've mentioned it before, but Leslie Barringer's Neustrian Cycle is a good example of this too -- it's mostly historical fiction, but there's a coven of witches lurking around the edges of the story doing vaguely magical stuff.
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Jun 16, 2021 20:19
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Against a Dark Background by Iain M Banks - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002CT0TXK/ The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084FY1NXB/ The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085C71YG5/ Don't know anything about this one but it's by the same author who did The Ten Thousands Doors of January.
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Jun 16, 2021 23:06
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The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky If you read Children of time and thought "I wonder what else this guy has written" stop. This was a lot worse than that. It's like a Dan Brown thriller with sci fi background. The concept is very interesting, and the in world book is great, but the plot itself and the characters are just ugh. And not in the usual sci fi way of having flat characters. The book has nearly non stop references to pop culture stuff that just seemed unnecessary. 7 or 8 references to narnia, 2 doctor whos, hitchhiker's guide, jurassic park, you name it. It also has the phrase "In my head cannon i'm totally shipping you". The plot gets a bit more cool sci fi at the end, but I don't think it's enough to overcome the rest of it. Which is a shame, because i absolutely loved Children of. I will postpone further reading of this guy, I had firewalkers lined up next
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Jun 17, 2021 00:44
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Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I looked through a couple other threads in TBB last night and decided to try 2312, which I bounced off of within about 15 minutes, and then jumped into The Culture series with Player of Games, which I'm about an hour into so far and enjoying. We're still clearly in the setup phase so I'm excited to see where the book goes - If I enjoy it through to the end then I obviously have my next 9 books picked out!
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Jun 17, 2021 01:02
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Mr. Nemo posted:The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky I thought it was a little cute when Gideon did it, but I pray to god we don't have to deal with mass pop culture references in otherwise straight sci-fi as a regular feature moving forward. although I can fully respect it from a "what do people want/buy" author standpoint
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Jun 17, 2021 01:05
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I looked through a couple other threads in TBB last night and decided to try 2312, which I bounced off of within about 15 minutes, and then jumped into The Culture series with Player of Games, which I'm about an hour into so far and enjoying. We're still clearly in the setup phase so I'm excited to see where the book goes - If I enjoy it through to the end then I obviously have my next 9 books picked out! FYI, while the Culture books are really good, some of them go to some hosed up places, quite a departure from the Wayfarers books.
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Jun 17, 2021 02:11
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I always thought low fantasy = magic and monsters exist but are rarely spoken of or encountered by most people living in this world, whereas high fantasy = magic and fantastical elements are incorporated into the everyday lives of the people. Though I suppose by that logic LOTR and Wheel of Time are both low fantasy which... doesn't sound right at all. Mr. Nemo posted:The doors of eden, by tchaikovsky Have read Children of Time and Cage of Souls and agree; I think he's basically an airport thriller writer with a very readable, popcorn-eating prose style who hit upon one really good concept in Children of Time in the same way that, say, Crichton did with Jurassic Park, but all his other stuff is probably meh. I didn't think Cage of Souls was terrible or anything, it was just 700+ pages of paint-by-numbers dying earth sci-fi/fantasy that I read, finished, and then completely forgot about. A GIANT PARSNIP posted:Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I looked through a couple other threads in TBB last night and decided to try 2312, which I bounced off of within about 15 minutes, and then jumped into The Culture series with Player of Games, which I'm about an hour into so far and enjoying. That's a pretty perfect indicator you prefer soft sci-fi over hard sci-fi - which are still somewhat nebulous terms but way easier to define than high/low fantasy. Hard is interested (at least in passing) in the ideas and concepts behind what it's doing, hence KSR is writing about space colonisation and future societies and governance models while wrapping it up in a whodunnit mystery; soft sci-fi is really just using it all as exciting and exotic window dressing (which is not to say the Culture series doesn't explore series themes and ideas, just that they're more universal).
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Jun 17, 2021 02:16
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freebooter posted:
I just found the opening of 2312 to be too...dense? Maybe it's because I was listening to it instead of reading it but I couldn't get my bearings in KSR's world and I haven't left the first scenes on Mercury. I have no issue with more complex topics and to be honest I think the technical aspects (the city on a rail that is being pushed by solar energy) is the part I thought was cool and understood, while it took longer than it should have to figure out the people outside the habitat were some sun worshiping death cult and not kids outside playing or something. I think I just didn't click with the writing style? Either that or my problem was listening instead of reading, which stops me from being able to reread a sentence or two here and there. I think I'll give it another crack after I finish Player of Games - I had to drop Player of Games down to 90% speed because the narrator's British accent was causing me some issues, and maybe doing the same to 2312 would be helpful. I do most of my listening after pulling 9-10 hours at work so maybe my brain just isn't at full capacity when I'm listening.
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Jun 17, 2021 02:56
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Player of Games is a pulpy action novel. It has some relatively slow parts but the whole thing is begging to be turned in to a big budget spectacle movie. It's 90% plot and it's great fun. 2312 is... maybe not the furthest thing from it, but pretty drastically different. There is a plot, but it's more like a slow tour of the future solar system, as we watch a few characters and their relationships change over time. It is full of fantastical ideas (in fact KSR had used "Banksian" as an in-universe adjective to describe some spectacular future construct, but had to remove it because it might be construed as a quid-pro-quo, since Banks had blurbed 2312), and punctuated by action scenes, but it's more about soaking in the characters and setting. It also has a unique structure - story chapters are intercut with 1-3 page bits that function as exposition, in the form of lists, "extracts" from in-universe books written before and after the events of the novel, short histories of the planets. They function as extended epigraphs, but some are oddly formatted, cut sentence fragments together, etc. It works in print, I'm not sure how well it works in narration. The first one is a list of craters on Mercury. Once you know they're coming and that their context won't immediately be revealed they get easier to absorb, and their overall spirit is playful. Come back to it when you're in a contemplative mood.
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Jun 17, 2021 05:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The King Must Die is great for this. I may make it a BotM at some point. And he started the thread willingly, or he was no mod.
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Jun 17, 2021 09:52
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Player of Games is a pulpy action novel. It has some relatively slow parts but the whole thing is begging to be turned in to a big budget spectacle movie. It's 90% plot and it's great fun. I'm pretty sure it was actually optioned for a movie back in the 90s but eventually dropped.
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Jun 17, 2021 10:26
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Finished Paladin of Souls, the sequel to Curse of Chalion, and I especially enjoyed it. We were talking about saint themes with Chalion and Between Two Fires and I would loosely categorize this under similar themes, although the suffering in this case is less physical. I appreciate having an older woman protagonist, it’s a nice change up, and I think the Bastard is the best out of the five.
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Jun 17, 2021 10:51
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DreamingofRoses posted:I appreciate having an older woman protagonist, it’s a nice change up, and I think the Bastard is the best out of the five.
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Jun 17, 2021 11:08
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Prolonged Priapism posted:2312 is... maybe not the furthest thing from it, but pretty drastically different. There is a plot, but it's more like a slow tour of the future solar system, as we watch a few characters and their relationships change over time. It is full of fantastical ideas (in fact KSR had used "Banksian" as an in-universe adjective to describe some spectacular future construct, but had to remove it because it might be construed as a quid-pro-quo, since Banks had blurbed 2312), and punctuated by action scenes, but it's more about soaking in the characters and setting. It also has a unique structure - story chapters are intercut with 1-3 page bits that function as exposition, in the form of lists, "extracts" from in-universe books written before and after the events of the novel, short histories of the planets. They function as extended epigraphs, but some are oddly formatted, cut sentence fragments together, etc. It works in print, I'm not sure how well it works in narration. The first one is a list of craters on Mercury. Once you know they're coming and that their context won't immediately be revealed they get easier to absorb, and their overall spirit is playful. Come back to it when you're in a contemplative mood. This is pretty spot on, I think. He does love his infodumps as chapter interludes. I remember reading Aurora and there's an early chapter where the ship's computer, uncertain what it should do as the entrusted narrator, just starts listing the names of everybody on the ship, and that gets on for like five pages. And it's like, haha, yes, cute, I see what you're doing here, and of course I'm just going to flip through it rather than reading it... but listening to that in audiobook format...! If you are liking aspects of KSR but still find yourself bouncing off 2312 when you come back to it later, I'd recommend trying Aurora or the Mars trilogy down the track. I like 2312 but it's not his best work. edit - speaking of best work, I've only read a handful of Banks and never got the appeal compared to the way others love him, but I can vividly remember specific visual scenes from Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward... whereas Player of Games is just a big blank spot in my memory.
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Jun 17, 2021 11:18
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Ccs posted:I thought low fantasy was historical fiction with the occasional demon or conjuror crossing the protagonist's path. high fantasy to me is: the silmarillion. ee eddison. dunsany. the nibelungenlied. creation mythos stuff. low fantasy to me is: fantasy authors trying to speed-run the industrial revolution, or/and authors having magic taking the place of electricity or physics to drive/power/embiggen iron clad dirigibles, factories, mage-cannons, or mana artillery fire. Also Ccs, you asked me to clarify "TSR in the 1980's-90's pulling poo poo Disney has been trying since 2020 re: author royalty rights/royalty rights weirdness for Margaret Weis & Tracey Hickman" a while back and I just realized that I had never responded to you. Sorry about that. Essentially, Weis & Hickman had a preexisting work-for-hire contract that only paid royalties for the first printings of their authored Dragonlance novels or something weird like that since Weis & Hickman were also TSR contractors that had roleplayed out & helped design the TSR Dragonlance series setting/Dragonlance RPG modules. The huge sales of the Dragonlance books and the multiple reprintings are what allowed Weis & Hickman to bounce between various book publishers and churn out multiple word-replaced not-Dragonlance fantasy series. SFL Archives November 1996: Ben Aaronovitch has started posting to the SFL Archives. Aaronovitch has mainly been commenting on Cherryh's FOREIGNER series and funnily everything Aaronovitch is finding fault with in the FOREIGNER series exists in Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series to the same degree. Also this unrelated out-of-content quote from SFL Archives November 1996: "...no one would pay $5 for a 200 page novel". Looks at the $10 - $12 price tags for murderBot novellas that are shorter than that. gently caress you TOR BOOKS. gently caress you Patrick Nielsen Hayden. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Jun 17, 2021 |
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Jun 17, 2021 12:22
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