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Dead Country (Craft Wars #1) by Max Gladstone - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B3762QDG/ Devices and Desires (Engineer #1) by KJ Parker - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002B9MHPY/ The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008R2K8VO/ Into the Narrowdark (Last King of Osten Ard #3) by Tad Williams - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JBCZ7VW/
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Aug 8, 2023 00:41
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^burtle posted:Is this Court of Thorns and Roses just Twilight or is there something to it? Ehhh. It's better than Twilight but that's not a high bar to clear.
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Aug 8, 2023 01:08
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HopperUK posted:Ehhh. It's better than Twilight but that's not a high bar to clear. Twilight becomes much more interesting to me once you grasp that the relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in the first book is basically the same as the relationship between Arthur Dent and the talking cow in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
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Aug 8, 2023 01:29
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pradmer posted:Dead Country (Craft Wars #1) by Max Gladstone - $2.99 If you liked Gladstone's other stuff this is a slam dunk
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Aug 8, 2023 01:54
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Jimbozig posted:Anyway, my initial reaction to Too Like The Lightning and Seven Surrenders: Oh man, I hope you do. Those books ask a lot of the reader, in terms of buying in to this grand, weird, detailed world, but they really reward this sort of interrogation. Also I read Light Bringer. I liked it! Not quite as BIG as Dark Age, but I don't know if I could have taken two of those in a row. It was nice to slow down and spend some time with Darrow & co. as they piece themselves back together. Ted Faro's an angel next to Lysander.
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Aug 8, 2023 05:08
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Kazzah posted:Oh man, I hope you do. Those books ask a lot of the reader, in terms of buying in to this grand, weird, detailed world, but they really reward this sort of interrogation. Lysander strikes me as being basically a mushroom. He soaks up the "flavors" of those around him. If he's around evil pieces of poo poo, he becomes more of an evil piece of poo poo as they all talk him (and he talks himself) into doing worse and worse things for "the greater good." After Dark Age I had this weird theory/wish that somehow Lyria would end up being around him and help him pull his head out of his rear end. I doubt it'll actually happen.
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Aug 8, 2023 09:16
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So, I'm almost finished with The Poppy War trilogy and wow I was not the intended audience for those books. While parts of the books were very interesting (first book in particular), I just cannot stomach the whole grimdark violence thing they've got going on. It's too bad because the reviews are almost all stellar and I kind of feel like I must have read a whole different book.
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Aug 8, 2023 13:31
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monochromagic posted:So, I'm almost finished with The Poppy War trilogy and wow I was not the intended audience for those books. While parts of the books were very interesting (first book in particular), I just cannot stomach the whole grimdark violence thing they've got going on. It's too bad because the reviews are almost all stellar and I kind of feel like I must have read a whole different book. Should have asked this thread! I feel like the consensus here is more along your assessment (book one ok, incredibly diminishing returns, feels like author is trying to punish the reader [and possibly herself?)
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Aug 8, 2023 13:59
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What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide?
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Aug 8, 2023 14:45
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I recall Dune Encyclopedia being an interesting read back in the day. Also, it sounds like you might want to get into tabletop RPG sourcebooks.
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Aug 8, 2023 14:46
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17 by Jeff Rovin is exactly this but for sci-fi and I wish there was more like it.
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Aug 8, 2023 14:48
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide?  (as long as you don't want to read it)
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Aug 8, 2023 14:52
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. go read “tlon uqbar, orbis Tertius” by Borges, right now!!! Go!!!! (It’s a short story)
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Aug 8, 2023 14:52
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? You might get some milage out of tabletop RPG books. Lots of them can be pretty good reading even if you don't care about the rules. I don't have any specific recommendations for the subgenres you want, but you could probably ask in the TTRPG forum general chat thread and get some ideas.
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Aug 8, 2023 15:08
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The Guide to Glorantha.
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Aug 8, 2023 15:09
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A few years ago I would have recommended some Tékumel stuff but, well, dude turned out to be a nazi. Not like "fascist rear end in a top hat" nazi, which covers a lot of people, but "decade on the advisory committee of a holocaust denial journal" nazi.
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Aug 8, 2023 15:18
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Tough Guide to Fantasyland? Not horror, though. e: Also, buffalo all day posted:go read “tlon uqbar, orbis Tertius” by Borges, right now!!! Go!!!! (It’s a short story) anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 15:19
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I was coming to recommend The Tough Guide to Fantasyland too. Or Dictionary of the Khazars, although that's magical realism, not horror.
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Aug 8, 2023 15:58
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90s Cringe Rock posted:A few years ago I would have recommended some Tékumel stuff but, well, dude turned out to be a nazi. Not like "fascist rear end in a top hat" nazi, which covers a lot of people, but "decade on the advisory committee of a holocaust denial journal" nazi. Motherfucker, not another one!
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Aug 8, 2023 16:26
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons is a wild and creepy rear end reference book explaining, with science!, how dragon myths are all true actually. Haystack posted:You might get some milage out of tabletop RPG books. Lots of them can be pretty good reading even if you don't care about the rules. I don't have any specific recommendations for the subgenres you want, but you could probably ask in the TTRPG forum general chat thread and get some ideas. Yeah, I was thinking along these lines as well, but I don't have any solid recommendations for the specific genres OP is asking for.
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Aug 8, 2023 16:31
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? The Faction Paradox Book of The War For TRPG stuff that's heavy on the world building/light on game play mechanics in the source books you might enjoy: Delta Green (especially Countdown, Targets of Opportunity and The Labyrinth) Unknown Armies (especially 2nd edition's Reveal) The Dying Earth RPG's Scaum Valley Gazetteer If you can get The Invisible Sun collection on stiff discount (or sail the seven seas) Worlds Without Number RPG's The Atlas of the Latter Earth The City of Lies Boxset by Greg Stolze edit: I forgot Warhammer 40k has a bunch of these coming out of the Black Library fez_machine fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 16:31
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One of my favorite authors, Lilith Saintcrow, has released the final book of a fantasy duology y'all might be interested in:quote:American Gods vs. Baba Yaga in this contemporary fantasy: Spring's Arcana, by New York Times bestseller Lilith Saintcrow. https://us.macmillan.com/series/thedeadgodsheart I haven't picked up either yet as I'm busy with her backlog, but I can always trust her to write cool fight scenes, worldbuilding, and traumatized heroes.
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Aug 8, 2023 16:45
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Maybe Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials? It's a collection of info on known* alien species *Fictional, such as the Thing or a Puppeteer, but presented as factual iirc
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Aug 8, 2023 16:45
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PeterWeller posted:Peter Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons is a wild and creepy rear end reference book explaining, with science!, how dragon myths are all true actually. Along those lines, how about Pamela Wharton Blanpied's Dragons: The Modern Infestation?
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Aug 8, 2023 16:56
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Everyone posted:Twilight becomes much more interesting to me once you grasp that the relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan in the first book is basically the same as the relationship between Arthur Dent and the talking cow in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. This is really funny, thank you
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Aug 8, 2023 17:10
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StrixNebulosa posted:Motherfucker, not another one! We only found out after he had become a good Nazi.
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Aug 8, 2023 17:19
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Groke posted:We only found out after he had become a good Nazi. No such thing!
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Aug 8, 2023 17:23
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The Guide to Glorantha. Absolutely this. If you want something that is just an insanely detailed look at a fictional world, the Guide to Glorantha is your ticket. It’s ostensibly an RPG book, but there’s no actual rules in it, because Glorantha is notorious as a setting that is so deep and so weird that you need to do Actual Research to play it correctly. And if the Guide doesn’t satisfy your craving, there’s tens of thousands of additional pages by Greg Stafford et al, going into the minutest details of life in an absolutely bizarre and fascinating world that is grounded in the mythopoetic insights of - and I do not say this lightly - one of the great minds of our time. Stafford was a genius and it’s a goddamn shame more people haven’t read his stuff.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:14
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I read The Library at Mount Char on the recommendation of this thread. Didn't like it. I guess on some level it is a me problem, anything with a lot of child abuse and murder is going to put me off. The wild tonal shifts were also offputting. There'd be this really dark poo poo like what I spoilered out and then some silly goofy lore on the level of like, Hitchiker's Guide or something. I also though the protagonists were not that well characterized, especially the main one (already forgot her name!). I think the whole story would have been better told completely from the perspective of the war veteran character, who was the most well developed out of any of them. This hardnosed detective up against the weirdest poo poo he's ever seen would make for a more compelling story.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:33
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Benagain posted:If you liked Gladstone's other stuff this is a slam dunk What about if you've never read him before? Is it a decent start?
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Aug 8, 2023 18:35
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:What about if you've never read him before? Is it a decent start? No, but only because it’s the first book in the second major arc of his Craft series. You’ll want to start with Three Parts Dead. (And you definitely should, it’s good.)
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Aug 8, 2023 18:40
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:What about if you've never read him before? Is it a decent start? ehhhhhhh it says it's supposed to be a good starting point to the craft series but it's basically the start of a new series that builds off what came before. I think it works way better with context but it does a capable job of telling you what you need to know to enjoy the basic plot. Three Parts Dead is the first book in the Craft series and the first intro of the character that this one is about, but for my money Two Serpents Rise works better as a self contained intro to the series and Gladstone as a whole. If you want to see if you like him without trying the series Empress of Forever is a space opera in one book, Last Exit is a multiple worlds thriller in one book.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:No such thing! They mean that he's dead.
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Aug 8, 2023 18:49
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Kestral posted:Absolutely this. If you want something that is just an insanely detailed look at a fictional world, the Guide to Glorantha is your ticket. It’s ostensibly an RPG book, but there’s no actual rules in it, because Glorantha is notorious as a setting that is so deep and so weird that you need to do Actual Research to play it correctly. Stafford owns, as does Glorantha. King of Sartar is almost like a fictional Herodotus, pure ‘in-universe’ history and myth, highly contested stuff by its various fictional authors. RE: other examples, Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings and Calvino’s Invisible Cities fit the bill in that magical realism sense, though suffice to say they’re also both more than ‘lore bibles’. Lexicon Urthus, in the same vein as the Dune Encyclopedia but for Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, though as with Dune probably not that worthwhile if you haven’t read the novels. Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin is brilliant. Big, shaggy, probably a bit too much in-universe poetry of the people living in far-future post-post-apocalyptic California, but really lovely. All framed as anthropological readings and gatherings. There is a conventional narrative there as one of those strands but it’s maybe 20% of the total? Donald Tyson wrote what was meant to be the Necronomicon of Lovecraft (or rather of Alhazred), could be worth following up. There’s a few such books out there but this one’s good, like a gazetteer of the Middle East, all the locations that were of interest to a mad necromancer. Also all Tyson’s other books seem to be extremely earnest almanacks of magick, which I guess adds something like cred when Alhazred talks about sigils and such?
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Aug 8, 2023 19:26
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? It was mentioned above, but Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials and Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy. But especially his Expedition, if you can find it for a decent price. That for me is the go-to kind of fictional worldbuilding of an alien biome (it's not a surprise that Barlowe would later be hired to work on Avatar and a few of the aliens from Expedition wound up on Pandora). You also might like Dougal Dixon's speculative evolution guides, After Man and Man After Man (both about human evolution in the far future) and The New Dinosaurs (on if dinosaurs didn't go extinct and evolved into new forms). For more established IPs, I think the Star Wars Essential Atlas, Essential Guide to Warfare, and Propaganda books are the best possible looks at Star Wars from that sort of in-universe position.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:27
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There's also just, real documents of not real things that might be of interest, though it'll be dry? Compendium Maleficarium, the Malleus Maleficarium are 2 that I have. There's also just gatherings of folk lore maybe? Theresa Bane's Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, Bob Curran's Encyclopedia of Undead, and Mary Katharine Briggs Encyclopedia of Fairies are a few I've found and need to crack open. How good they are o have no idea, but it should be a thing.
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Aug 8, 2023 20:38
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Oh yeah there was a lot of stuff about the warcraft setting published in the video game books for the original trilogy of real-time strategy games that was really fun to read when I was a teenager
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Aug 8, 2023 21:22
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GhastlyBizness posted:Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin is brilliant. Big, shaggy, probably a bit too much in-universe poetry of the people living in far-future post-post-apocalyptic California, but really lovely. All framed as anthropological readings and gatherings. There is a conventional narrative there as one of those strands but it’s maybe 20% of the total? Changing Planes is another one by Leguin. It’s like a multiverse-hopping Invisible Cities with an anthropological bent
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Aug 8, 2023 21:25
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SkeletonHero posted:What are some good fictional reference books? No real plot to speak of, just world-building in guidebook/textbook format. Along the lines of Gnomes or Brian Froud's Faeries but I'm hoping for something of a darker fantasy-horror or alien theme. Something like Vermis I would work too, but I'm not sure what to even call that. Fictional strategy guide? I enjoyed The Resurrectionist https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection...ps%2C145&sr=8-1 Half the book is presented as a biography on a turn of the century medical practioner who investigated cryptids and the other half is a medical treatise by the Doctor that's basically a Gray's Anatomy/treatise on their evolutionary path of mythical creatures.
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Aug 8, 2023 21:30
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GhastlyBizness posted:Stafford owns, as does Glorantha. King of Sartar is almost like a fictional Herodotus, pure ‘in-universe’ history and myth, highly contested stuff by its various fictional authors. King of Sartar is great, I wish I could recommend it more widely, but the things that make it great are basically invisible if you don't have a little grounding in the setting, enough to get the idea that things are... More complex, than the narrative is telling you directly. That said, I'm sure we have some people here who are fans of King of Dragon Pass, and they should run out and grab King of Sartar immediately. The two are linked, if you're lucky enough to run across the hints of that storyline in KoDP!
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Aug 8, 2023 21:33
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