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General Battuta posted:To whom it may concern, please find attached my #ownvoices story about being a baby I know every fantasy author aspires to be George RR Martin nowadays, but could you please finish the series you're writing before you start on the prequels? (CW: attempted humour) Masquerade Babies 1: The Rugrat Baru Cormorant (2023) Masquerade Babies 2: The Adventures of Itinerant and Lil' Hesychast (2024)
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Aug 10, 2021 09:43
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Aardvark! posted:I was resolutely against trying anything on KU for years, until a friend convinced me to read a specific series (Cradle). It's not high literature or anything but I absolutely had more fun reading that than many traditionally published genre books I've read over the years. I think if you're going to bring something up from that stuff ITT it needs to be something you're pretty comfortable defending as being in that top % that rivals published work. IMO. Like I've read/tried quite a few now and it's a very small list that I'd ever bring up here at all. Cradle is good poo poo, and I'm still looking for things that get anywhere close to it in terms of pacing and distilled, sugary fun. It seems like it should be easy, but you read literally anything else, KU or otherwise, and you realize how it's basically the most finely crafted junk food on the market.
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Aug 10, 2021 13:07
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Yeah if one wants to read a single cultivation series then Cradle is it by a rather large margin.
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Aug 10, 2021 13:30
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Tars Tarkas posted:Finished your book a few days ago but didn't have time to mention it until now, it was great, please write the sequel. I left an Amazon review which almost I never do thanks to extreme laziness. Thanks so much! If I write the next book it's gonna be a lot to chew on, so I've toyed with first releasing a collection of short stories in the same world that tie into major plots from the novel and try to strengthen my prose. On that subject, I entered one in a contest on this forum and it won me temporary moderator-ship. If you'd like to read it it's here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3967207#post514767913 Also I just got an email about Tor's free book for the month, called The Bright Sessions. Pitched as "“What if the X-Men, instead of becoming superheroes, decided to spend some time in therapy?” Maybe good? Free anyway. https://ebookclub.tor.com/?utm_sour...9853b3826781f89 Ccs fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Aug 10, 2021 |
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Aug 10, 2021 14:29
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rmdx posted:Yeah if one wants to read a single cultivation series then Cradle is it by a rather large margin.
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Aug 10, 2021 14:43
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Why would you though Because it's fun/cool adventuring with a power-up system you don't typically see in fantasy! I really hate this snobbishness, let people enjoy cool books even if they aren't your jam!
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Aug 10, 2021 15:12
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Ccs posted:Also I just got an email about Tor's free book for the month, called The Bright Sessions. Pitched as "“What if the X-Men, instead of becoming superheroes, decided to spend some time in therapy?” I don’t know anything about that book, never heard of it until now, but I listened to a story with that premise and name as a serial audio drama/podcast. It was pretty good, glad to see they’re continuing to work with it. E: looking at the link, seems like it’s focusing on my least favorite character of the ensemble, so 
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Aug 10, 2021 15:14
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StrixNebulosa posted:Because it's fun/cool adventuring with a power-up system you don't typically see in fantasy! The only Cool cultivation book would be one about guys refraining from cumming until they can shoot inches-thick ropes.
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Aug 10, 2021 15:32
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that's dragonball z, if you can get past the complex and layered symbolism
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Aug 10, 2021 15:52
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I was introduced to Cradle by people telling me "yeah, the first couple volumes are slow but in the [x] arc things really get moving!" It's similar to manga, except a volume of manga takes like 40 minutes to read whereas a whole book will take at least 3 hours at the minimum. I don't have time for a series to pick up steam that late. But it scratches a particular itch for people and that's fine, there's not a lot of cultivation books in the west that aren't bad translations of chinese web novels and its kind of cool to see a dude from Florida put his spin on it, especially since he's apparently approaching the material with enough respect that it doesn't seem like blatant cash grab cultural appropriation. It's an interesting synthesis of chinese-inspired storytelling combined with japanese light novel structure combined with some western sensibilities. And it's satisfying a part of the market that traditional publishers didn't even have on their radar and therefore never would have published, which is points for the self publishing model, discovering new markets that are completely invisible to the powers that be.
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Aug 10, 2021 16:21
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SimonChris posted:If we are talking self-published SF, I would like to recommend goon-written Hard Luck Hank, which is the best kind of self-published fiction: A pile of crazy ideas thrown haphazardly together in ways that would never make it past an editor but is extremely entertaining to read. Oh poo poo, I didn't realize these were goon written. It's an awesome series.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:44
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Just found out that Ernest's Cline best-selling scifi novel READY PLAYER ONE was directly stolen from a DAW Books scifi novel, in every loving way start to finish. Nice, thank you SFL Archives. Retroactively finding stuff like this is worth all the terrible moments the SFL Archives readthrough has inflicted.
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Aug 10, 2021 18:04
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Which book?
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Aug 10, 2021 18:13
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Ready Player... Zero?
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Aug 10, 2021 21:38
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Seed to Harvest: The Complete Patternist Series by Octavia E Butler - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008HALOVO/
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Aug 10, 2021 23:15
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quantumfoam posted:Just found out that Ernest's Cline best-selling scifi novel READY PLAYER ONE was directly stolen from a DAW Books scifi novel, in every loving way start to finish. Nice, thank you SFL Archives. Retroactively finding stuff like this is worth all the terrible moments the SFL Archives readthrough has inflicted. which novel?
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Aug 11, 2021 00:38
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Ccs posted:In Sword of Kaigen we're presented with a seemingly feudal Japanese world where the swordmen of a certain tribe have ice powers. They're able to generate spears of ice. A pretty powerful technique, if this was set during actual fedual era. But instead we're expected to believe this group of warriors exists in a contemporary world, complete with video games and modern industry. Yet these ice spear wielding warriors are the unconquerable warriors of their civilization. What the heck are some ice spears going to do against bomber jets and aircraft carriers? Also the insistence on slipping japanese words and honorifics into the text constantly pissed me off, like I was reading a bad fan translation of manga. so sword of kaigen is a pretty twisty book that honestly i didnt love the prose either but the absurdity is clearly intentional the feudal samurais's entire culture is built on denying the existence of the fact that they are dependent on the government's actual military and infrastructure [and how that government is subsequently dependent on the american stand-ins] and they're just cultural icons. i think this is reasonably clear since the nerd character continues to point out how absurd everything is but then geeks out about how anime it is. they got owned once the chinese army invades . even bigger plot spoiler: the twelve-year old protag actually dies once he realises this fact knowing that his final stand is completely meaningless other than a symbolic gesture. his mom becomes the protag from there and the novel seems like it's going a completely different way about a woman trying to prove her worth in a feudal society to her abusively distant husband but then it turns out that's not an accurate interpretation of the plot either once we get to his pov. got some chores tonight fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 01:10
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Hmm alright that’s interesting. I’ll give it another shot once I finish Parker’s Engineer trilogy. Parker has a similar thing going on where there’s a highly mechanized and advanced civilization (though not modern, just much more industrialized rather than feudal) that hasn’t conquered the world because they find trade more beneficial plus they see the nearby feudal societies as a useful buffer against a giant population of horse archer nomads whose numbers might even give their mechanized weaponry a run for their money. In every way it’s an improvement on Parker’s Fencer trilogy in showing how one would bring industrialization to a culture unfamiliar with the technology. It’s also got much clearer emotional stakes and some really eccentric and funny characters.
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Aug 11, 2021 01:49
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I see "cultivation story" and I think "doesn't Anna Karenina have a lot of cultivation?"
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Aug 11, 2021 03:24
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FPyat posted:I see "cultivation story" and I think "doesn't Anna Karenina have a lot of cultivation?" Levin didn’t develop dbz powers though. A missed opportunity, really.
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Aug 11, 2021 04:23
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Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel (The Murderbot Diaries Book 5) by Martha Wells - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WZ7SB5D The Last Emperox (The Interdependency Book 3) by John Scalzi - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QPGW9FS Peace Talks (Dresden Files Book 16) by Jim Butcher - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082S1N87S
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Aug 11, 2021 12:01
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quantumfoam posted:Just found out that Ernest's Cline best-selling scifi novel READY PLAYER ONE was directly stolen from a DAW Books scifi novel, in every loving way start to finish. Nice, thank you SFL Archives. Retroactively finding stuff like this is worth all the terrible moments the SFL Archives readthrough has inflicted. More details for people, this plot synopsis (from a SFL Archives poster) sound familiar to anyone who read READY PLAYER ONE? Sir Mary de Courcy (or, in real life, Mary Craven) makes her living jousting in a VR gameworld of the Middle Ages. When she defeats the overconfident Grey Knight of the Sea in a joust and then in single combat, he hands over to her as his ransom the manor called Saint Chad's-on-Wye, which, later on, she discovers isn't an authorized part of the gameworld. Meanwhile, in the flesh, someone is trying to kill her: her plane crashes, she's run off the road, someone breaks into her house and a concrete block nearly smashes her. With the help of the creator of the VR gameworld, she explores Saint Chad's-on-Wye, and the attempts on her life and a popular fantasy novel whose author has refused to license his work for VR seem to tie in with the manor somehow. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?993 A Point of Honor by Dorothy J Heydt While looking for that specific synopsis post discovered that Dorothy Heydt has been a SFLer for at least two years, and also saw what appears to be Karen Traviss posting in the SFL Archives tool, a good 6+ years before Traviss switched over to becoming a a SFF author full time.
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Aug 11, 2021 13:19
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As much as i'm enjoying Erikson's new book, Cradle is exactly the kind of book I need after a tough couple of days at work and thats no disrespect.
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Aug 11, 2021 13:44
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quantumfoam posted:While looking for that specific synopsis post discovered that Dorothy Heydt has been a SFLer for at least two years, and also saw what appears to be Karen Traviss posting in the SFL Archives tool, a good 6+ years before Traviss switched over to becoming a a SFF author full time. Dorothy Heydt was a usenetter for a long-rear end time and I still see her posting on James Nicoll's site. As such I of course bought&read 'Point of Honor' but don't remember a dang thing about it beyond 'VR'. I still have my copy, even. She also wrote 'The Interior Life' as 'Kathleen Blake' which is very different and which I liked a lot better.
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Aug 11, 2021 14:25
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Ccs posted:Levin didn’t develop dbz powers though. A missed opportunity, really. 
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Aug 11, 2021 15:02
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Lol me too, maybe he could’ve kept Stalin out of the succession if he went super saiyan
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Aug 11, 2021 15:16
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quantumfoam posted:More details for people, this plot synopsis (from a SFL Archives poster) sound familiar to anyone who read READY PLAYER ONE? Sounds quite similar, albeit without the obsession with 1980s geek culture.
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Aug 11, 2021 15:23
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..and now John Scalzi has started posting in the SFL Archives, a year or so before his first book is published. If the number of professional SFF authors who have posted to the SFL Archives at some point isn't in the triple digits by now, it is pretty close. Still groan whenever the future TOR Books editor-in-chief posts there (it's weird how my dislike of that person is slowly translating into loathing of TOR Books, but hey guilt-by-long term association), but enjoy seeing other book editors from various other book publishing companies occasionally give status updates on things.
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Aug 11, 2021 16:06
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quantumfoam posted:..and now John Scalzi has started posting in the SFL Archives, a year or so before his first book is published. What'd Tor's editor do?
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Aug 11, 2021 16:26
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hi future scholar of the something awful science fiction and fantasy megathreads. you really shouldn't read the entire archives of these, no matter how many famous as-yet unpublished authors are posting here, but I appreciate your effort to compile a full list of bad running jokes anyway. edit: I of course do enjoy seeing the sf-lovers chat, but we all know those files will be lost in the data warz and the only remnants will be those quoted in this thread. you'll really be missing out on the real thing, future scholar, lol. and we have all the cool lost media you'll never recover. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 16:49
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quantumfoam posted:..and now John Scalzi has started posting in the SFL Archives, a year or so before his first book is published. Just as a point of clarification; despite the EIC title, Patrick Nielsen Hayden isn’t in charge of Tor. He reports to Devi Pillai these days. This is not a statement on whether you should like or dislike anyone (I don’t know PNH), just a bureaucratic map.
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Aug 11, 2021 17:21
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I'm always confused as to why there's a Tor and a Tor Dot Com as separate publishing entities. Is one considered more prestigious? As far as I can tell they both publish doorstopper fantasy books.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:08
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Haven't read this yet but it's been on my wishlist and lo! It's on sale! There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm - 2.99$ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHHQRM2/
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Aug 11, 2021 21:09
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StrixNebulosa posted:Haven't read this yet but it's been on my wishlist and lo! It's on sale! I enjoyed this. I know I said a few pages ago that I can't finish most self published books but this one was very engrossing.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:15
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Ccs posted:I enjoyed this. I know I said a few pages ago that I can't finish most self published books but this one was very engrossing. I liked that one so very much. I haven't seen much like it other than of course that awesome Dr Who plot. They have some other books that are pretty good too. Ed is easily the worst of them, a mediocre "I know a genius guy here's a smattering of SCIFI stuff we did" tale. But RA and Fine Structure are much better.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:25
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Ccs posted:I'm always confused as to why there's a Tor and a Tor Dot Com as separate publishing entities. Is one considered more prestigious? As far as I can tell they both publish doorstopper fantasy books.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:31
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Tor.com publishes some short fiction but no actual books, as far as I know.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:38
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Ah, that's interesting. Going through their Publishing section, it looks like the books listed are credited as being published by Tor/Forge and "Tordotcom", so I really don't know what's what now. Maybe the Tordotcom imprint is for ebooks?
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Aug 11, 2021 |
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Aug 11, 2021 21:45
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Carrier posted:Read Shards of Earth based off the recommendations a few pages ago over the weekend. A lot of fun, scratched that space opera itch. I bounced off of Children of Time really hard despite all the hype around it so I was a bit sceptical but Shards of Earth was a good time. Definitely one of the better books I've read this year. I did the same. I think Children of Time was 'better', but Shards of Earth didn't give me nightmares about intelligent spiders so I guess it's a wash.
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Aug 11, 2021 21:49
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ah, that's interesting. Going through their Publishing section, it looks like the books listed are credited as being published by Tor/Forge and "Tordotcom", so I really don't know what's what now. Maybe the Tordotcom imprint is for ebooks? The two imprints offer different terms for authors, in that Tordotcom is a smaller advance but a larger royalty share (if I’m remembering right).
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Aug 11, 2021 22:16
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