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DurianGray posted:I think I need to add the Inthya series to my TBR if it's got trans werewolves though, that sounds rad. I enjoyed them a lot, with the caveat that it's a planned six-book series that currently exists as five books + a bunch of short stories on Patreon; each book is its own story but there's also an overarching metaplot that has as yet seen no resolution. They're all fantasy lesbian romances with the formula "take someone from an abusive shithole past and put them in an environment full of friendly and supportive people and watch things get better for them", with each book following a different pair of leads in the same setting.
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May 24, 2022 17:37
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ToxicFrog posted:What do people think "cis" stands for? I'm going crazy here trying to figure it out. I just assumed all the Fox talking heads were really obsessed with the former Soviet bloc.
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May 24, 2022 17:41
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Has anyone in here who grew up with them reread Artemis Fowl as an adult? How'd you feel about it?
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May 24, 2022 17:42
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ToxicFrog posted:I enjoyed them a lot, with the caveat that it's a planned six-book series that currently exists as five books + a bunch of short stories on Patreon; each book is its own story but there's also an overarching metaplot that has as yet seen no resolution. And the author isn't the kind of coward who uses subtext? That's definitely going on the list.
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May 24, 2022 17:44
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Shitstorm Trooper posted:Has anyone in here who grew up with them reread Artemis Fowl as an adult? How'd you feel about it? I read them as a kid and thought they were pretty cool. Now, I haven't reread them but I imagine they would be lame. Same with Series of Unfortunate Events. I did reread those and the first few are decent but it just goes on too long with no concrete resolution.
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May 24, 2022 19:02
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MartingaleJack posted:The Culture is basically the perfect trans friendly universe. You can be anything. Even an orbital weapons platform. Truly, one can finally identify as an attack helicopter. Obviously CiS stands for Correct Internal Sexuality and I will be taking no questions at this time 
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May 24, 2022 19:09
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Against a Dark Background by Iain M Banks - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002CT0TXK/ Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C102SPC/ The Traitor Spy trilogy by Trudi Canavan The Ambassador's Mission (#1) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00351DSHI/ The Rogue (#2) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047Y16K8/ The Traitor Queen (#3) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007WUW72K/ The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron The Dread Wyrm (#3) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011J4H2XS/ The Plague of Swords (#4) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HBK294G/ The Fall of Dragons (#5) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MUQLAV2/ Spellsinger series by Sebastien de Castell Queenslayer (#5) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7H9WR5/ Crownbreaker (#6) - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NL6ZZ3V/
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May 24, 2022 22:46
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MartingaleJack posted:The Culture is basically the perfect trans friendly universe. You can be anything. Even an orbital weapons platform. As previously mentioned I'm a CiS-gender male, but I work in the "service industry" and there are times with some stupid/rude customer that I really do identity as an orbital weapons platform.
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May 24, 2022 22:47
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what I dislike about the Culture stuff is that the implication seems to be that most everyone is super jaded with their utopia that is not very utopic
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May 24, 2022 22:50
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thotsky posted:what I dislike about the Culture stuff is that the implication seems to be that most everyone is super jaded with their utopia The implication is most people are ecstatic with it. We just follow the jaded ones because all the normal people are off having 2 week orgies or whatever while the leads dick around trying to find deeper meaning
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May 24, 2022 23:05
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thotsky posted:what I dislike about the Culture stuff is that the implication seems to be that most everyone is super jaded with their utopia Zore posted:The implication is most people are ecstatic with it. We just follow the jaded ones because all the normal people are off having 2 week orgies or whatever while the leads dick around trying to find deeper meaning and that lives are so long you can spend 20 years in orgies, master a particular skill for a 'lifetime', hand build a house and still have hundreds of years to do something else
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May 24, 2022 23:22
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Does the last of the first five Amber books (The Courts of Chaos) by Roger Zelazny actually contain an ending, so I don't have to order the next five?
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May 25, 2022 01:11
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Does the last of the first five Amber books (The Courts of Chaos) by Roger Zelazny actually contain an ending, so I don't have to order the next five? Yes. They’re two separate (but related) series.
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May 25, 2022 01:13
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Kalman posted:Yes. They’re two separate (but related) series. Cool, thanks. I got worried when I noticed the first three books are all just the same on-going story.
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May 25, 2022 01:16
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Runcible Cat posted:God knows how many books out there where people can change into wolves and hawks and dragons and naked mole rats and bags of prawn cocktail crisps and whatever, but into themselves but a different gender? Inconceivable! It's often really amusing the lengths people will go to, to preserve gender through otherwise crazy transformations. Like if a girl turned into a chair, some people would think it would be appropriate if it was somehow a girly chair. I remember there's one episode of the horrible Star Trek Enterprise where Archer and three crew get stuck in some kind of room full of white alien goo that makes them all mind meld. One of the crew members is female, so they conveniently have her pass out and not be involved in the mind meld.
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May 25, 2022 01:18
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Does the last of the first five Amber books (The Courts of Chaos) by Roger Zelazny actually contain an ending, so I don't have to order the next five? Yes, it has an ending. It's the second series that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger with no follow-up ever written.
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May 25, 2022 01:21
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Non Krampus Mentis posted:It’s astonishing to me that a fantasy author doesn’t have the imagination to conceive of a fantasy society that has a place for transition-related magic. You’re going to ask me to believe that a dude can fall in love at first sight with a magic horse* or a sorcerer father can use his daughter as a magical battery, but trans people just can’t do anything with magic to improve their lives? I suspect this is a big reason why she was already on thin ice with some people. ToxicFrog posted:What do people think "cis" stands for? I'm going crazy here trying to figure it out. Commonwealth of Independent States, naturally. 
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May 25, 2022 01:38
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GTD Aquitaine posted:I suspect this is a big reason why she was already on thin ice with some people. Confederacy of Independent Systems?
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May 25, 2022 01:52
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Ornamented Death posted:Yes, it has an ending. It's the second series that ends on a bit of a cliffhanger with no follow-up ever written. Since I'm reading the Amber books for the first time myself, is the second series worth reading otherwise? I don't mind a cliffhanger but I vaguely remember hearing that the second set of books isn't great for other reasons as well. I know it's generally known that they were Zelazny's "money" books and not necessarily his "fun" books so to speak.
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May 25, 2022 02:09
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They're not as good but they're not very long and pretty easy reads.
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May 25, 2022 02:13
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Danhenge posted:They're not as good but they're not very long and pretty easy reads. Hmm okay. I'll see how I feel when I finish the first set of books. So far I've only listened to the first two as audiobooks at work while doing soldering projects, and they were good popcorn fantasy for that, but I don't know if I'd want ten books of it.
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May 25, 2022 02:19
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pradmer posted:The Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron Also this is a terrible double-post but goddamn it why does the second book in this series never get discounted! I've had 1 and 3-5 for a while now!
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May 25, 2022 02:19
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MockingQuantum posted:Since I'm reading the Amber books for the first time myself, is the second series worth reading otherwise? I don't mind a cliffhanger but I vaguely remember hearing that the second set of books isn't great for other reasons as well. I know it's generally known that they were Zelazny's "money" books and not necessarily his "fun" books so to speak. The second series is decent enough, and I’d say it’s fairly different. The first cycle (Corwin’s books) is fundamentally a very 60s detective series; the second cycle (Merlin’s books) gets a little bit more of the 80s cyberpunk vibe going. (I didn’t think that the second cycle ended on a particular cliffhanger; it left future plot open for a sequel but it closed up the main storyline.)
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May 25, 2022 02:29
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yeah, they're both fine, and about the length of a single modern novel each. I get not being into the second series but, eh, I think it's fine.
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May 25, 2022 03:39
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Sax Solo posted:It's often really amusing the lengths people will go to, to preserve gender through otherwise crazy transformations. Like if a girl turned into a chair, some people would think it would be appropriate if it was somehow a girly chair. Light by M. John Harrison depicts a future society where many people live half their lives in VR, transformative body modification is commplace, and sufficiently wealthy people can casually download their brains into vat-grown bodies. This society also has an old-timey carnival where people come to gawk at a "half-man half-woman".
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May 25, 2022 03:44
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pradmer posted:The Traitor Spy trilogy by Trudi Canavan This is a sequel trilogy, set some 20 years after the events of The Black Magician trilogy. Most of the plot will focus on Sonea's son and some other characters. We still get Sonea POVs, but she doesn't have as much of a major plot line the way she originally did in the first trilogy, which I feel like is a bit of a missed opportunity because it would have been SO INTERESTING. Cerys gets a plot line of his own too and his arc is more interesting than Sonea's. Regin features as well, though I feel like the execution fell short of the idea (it was a good idea, but I wanted to see it developed more on the page instead of being mostly skipped over). Danhenge posted:I really enjoyed book 1 and book 2, but I think there's a definite decline across the whole series so if you're already not enjoying it I wouldn't force it. After I saw your post, I decided to give the rest of the book (Jenn Lyons' The Ruin of Kings) the benefit of the doubt and pushed through to the end. Where I've landed is...somewhere between disappointed and ambivalent. For such a hyped debut, it was a real let down. None of those convoluted plot structures ended up paying off in any significant fashion in Book 1. Maybe they will pay off in later books (I can't see how based on how they've been constructed), but if you're going to set up this many of them (here's my final count: "tell me a story", "magic rock", "footnoted transcript from a narrator", "alternating POVs with one of those POVs being in a different timeline") you better have at least ONE epic pay-off to make it worth my eyerolling. Plot twists pile up in this book like body counts in grimdark fantasy. "I'm your father." "No, I'm your father." "No, he's actually your real father." "She's not your real mother." "She's your mother." "But wait, she's not really who you think she is, except when she is, biologically, unless we're speaking in terms of her soul." This confusion over true parentage happens not just to the protagonist but to a bunch of characters. And thanks to the body swapping mechanic that enables this bloodline confusion, we also have ancient characters popping up all over the place in a way the strains credulity. Not one. Not two. Not three. Not four. Like, five, at least. I don't know, because I stopped caring and lost count of them. Also the last 1/5th of this book just has stuff come out of nowhere. Absolute nowhere, that is not foreshadowed. There was at least one scene where the protagonist is yeeted off to a random location, that I thought was some sort of magical funny business in a dream world or something, but no, actually physically transported there, and actually actually the protagonist was the one who did the yeeting, and actually actually actually nobody understands how that happened, least of all the perennially clueless protagonist. Who then magically gains convenient ancient knowledge and powers from his past live/s just in time to avail himself of them when all hell breaks loose. You don't get a slow bleed or flood gate catalyst of these past lives coming to the fore. It just...happens. Also imo the way the prophecy is finally fulfilled is pretty lame. Spoilers: he literally stumbles across a legendary god-killing sword by complete accident and uses it to break one of the eight god-level artifacts, specifically the one that bound demons. I don't have a problem with the end result; but I do have a problem with how the book got there. Also also everybody is inexplicably in love/intrigued by the protagonist who is the whiniest kid ever but he's SO PRETTY and ugh. I get the same vibes off Lyons' Kihrin as I do off Sarah J Maas's Celaena from Throne of Glass, of which I have only ever hate-read the sample because it was so  worthy.TL;DR there are enough ideas for like 25 different epic fantasy series in The Ruin of Kings and it all got crammed into one volume at the expense of things like character development. I'm not gonna bother with the rest of the series.
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May 25, 2022 03:58
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I gave up on the Spellmonger books after Book 3 when it really embraced some PUA stuff. It still had interesting battles and politics, but I just don't know if I can take it anymore, on top of all the breasting boobily that the female characters are doing all the time anyway. Made the mistake of going from that to Three Hearts and Three Lions. I was not expecting the hero to also just be such an idiotic horndog who seems to make the decision to ally with (or one might say, align with) Law or Chaos based on who he'd rather bang more: Morgana le Fay, or a questionably of-age fake swanmay. I need to get away from the shithead horndog dude protags good lord. At least the guy coming in from Earth in the portal fantasy was on the right side of the RL war he came from. ToxicFrog posted:What do people think "cis" stands for? I'm going crazy here trying to figure it out. Some people think it stands for "comfortable in skin".
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May 25, 2022 04:35
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Sax Solo posted:I gave up on the Spellmonger books after Book 3 when it really embraced some PUA stuff. It still had interesting battles and politics, but I just don't know if I can take it anymore, on top of all the breasting boobily that the female characters are doing all the time anyway. Well, the drat thing came out in 1961. Archaic views on female character should probably have been expected. I'm still a little amazed that Tolkien gave the truly badass moment of killing the Witch-King to Eowyn (with an assist from Merry). Sax Solo posted:Some people think it stands for "comfortable in skin". CiS isn't an acronym. According to Wikipedia Cis is derived from Latin and means something like "on this side of" while trans means "across from" or "on the other side of."
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May 25, 2022 04:55
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Sax Solo posted:Some people think it stands for "comfortable in skin". please say sike
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May 25, 2022 04:55
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Everyone posted:CiS isn't an acronym. According to Wikipedia Cis is derived from Latin and means something like "on this side of" while trans means "across from" or "on the other side of." So why do you write it CiS-gender you weird loving dumbass lol.
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May 25, 2022 05:25
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Finished Sword of Destiny of Witcher, 25% done blood of elves (#3) now I appreciate the tv show being as accurate to the books as possible I am kind of bored though because I've basically heard it all already so far, minus a few things here or there Not liking the narrator go back to Dan-dilli-on though.
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May 25, 2022 06:07
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Sax Solo posted:So why do you write it CiS-gender you weird loving dumbass lol. pretty sure all of this comes from someone having spelled it that way and a lot of confusion about why that was done unless that was the person who did it first then oops
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May 25, 2022 06:39
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Sax Solo posted:So why do you write it CiS-gender you weird loving dumbass lol. Because that's how I saw other people write it and like a dumbass I assumed that was correct until now. Live and loving learn.
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May 25, 2022 07:45
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Zore posted:The implication is most people are ecstatic with it. We just follow the jaded ones because all the normal people are off having 2 week orgies or whatever while the leads dick around trying to find deeper meaning I think Banks himself made the point that his culture stories all involve Contact or Special Circumstances (and the slightly- to very-weird people who work in them) because the vast majority of people in the Culture are off doing fun stuff they enjoy, and that doesn't make for very compelling storytelling. You do see some typical culture citizens around the fringes of some of the stories.
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May 25, 2022 08:04
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Sax Solo posted:So why do you write it CiS-gender you weird loving dumbass lol. ChAoS, probably.
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May 25, 2022 09:19
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CIS means Commonwealth of Independent States
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May 25, 2022 10:45
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CiS means Commonwealth of independent States
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May 25, 2022 10:59
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Commonweal of Independent States
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May 25, 2022 11:44
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there is no gender, no laws, and no kings. Only Graydon
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May 25, 2022 11:47
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Equal Rites is 99p on the UK Kindle Store for the Glorious 25th only.
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May 25, 2022 11:58
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