Solitair posted:

I'm going to ask for recommendations here. I have a bunch of ideas for stories, but I need to be a good reader to be a good writer, and I was hoping to find other authors who worked with similar themes and ideas to see how it's done.

I want books with at least one of the following:
-Good New Weird authors other than China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer.
-Cosmic horror stories that break away from the Lovecraft purism model in interesting ways.
-Anthologies of stories in the same world, like City of Saints and Madmen.
-Stories about regret, guilt, redemption, or falls from grace.

Solitair posted:

I'm going to ask for recommendations here.
-A magical academy where a Chosen One student doesn't hog all the focus. I want to see what it's like to teach at or even run such a school.

orange sky posted:

So, it doesn't fill most of the requests, but have you read the Culture books? They made me a much more imaginative thinker and some books differ completely in content and plot from others. Some are medieval, some are (almost) post-human, and all of them are great. Best series I've ever read.

occamsnailfile posted:

Bob Leman is old and obscure and extremely difficult to find but he wrote really good weird fiction that had what we'd call 'Lovecraftian themes' but were his own creations. Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron also do some cosmic horror which may or may not break from 'purism'--do you mean the use of Lovecraft's entities or the conclusion of human insignificance?

The Litany of Earth is a story about a Deep One told from a very different angle. It was pushed off the Hugo ballot this year.

occamsnailfile posted:

Have you read the Borderlands anthologies? They're kind of held up as the best in the 'shared world anthology' vein.

Robot Wendigo posted:

I admit to having been slightly interested in the Monster Hunter books because I (mistakenly) thought they would be along the lines of Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series. But after listening to Larry Correia on a podcast, I was quickly disavowed both of that belief and of the need to read anything he wrote.

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

I just got through reading Bios by Robert Anton Winston. It's very good, but thematically incredibly similar to Axis. His prose is getting better and I like the shift to a more small-scale intimate story. It's just kinda of annoying that again that the antagonist is some grandiose, world-spanning vague unknown that turns out to be a gigantic alien consciousness that has no ill-will towards humanity, but is so very different from us that its attempts to communicate with us end up being fatal. The climax is the protagonist having their body colonised by something physical (crystals in Axis, fungus/bacteria in Bios) that allows them a link with the grand consciousness but also ends up killing them while they spout a big monologue to an ancillary character about how everything in the universe is connected and it's so beautiful.

Solitair posted:

I'm going to assume you mean the ones by Thomas F. Monteleone and not tie-ins to Gearbox's video games?

coyo7e posted:

If you'd taken as many hallucinogens as RAW you'd end every novel with a "we are all one" deus ex machina, as well. RAW actually too so many drugs that saw The Green Man while he was sober.

Combed Thunderclap posted:

Diana Wynne Jones' The Year of the Griffin is one of my all-time favorite fantasy stories, and it's a drat good school story to boot — and one that focuses on a magical college and means it, instead of the usual high school hijinx. The school dean is a viewpoint character too.

(It's actually a send-up of college life: the dean is incompetent, the student characters are bored out of their minds by the rigid curriculum and begin doing independent magical research, things go utterly insane. Or, in other words, what happens at normal colleges.)

You could also try Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic Quartet, which is about a group of kids born with elemental powers (in contrast to the normal dry academic mage magic done by others in that world) who get a very practical kind of education at a temple run by people of similarly inborn magic talents. It's pretty YA, and it's more homeschooling than magic academy, but it scratched that itch for me.

Pierce has also been promising a book where one of the characters from the Quartet goes to one of the Normal Academic mage colleges for years now, but it's anyone's guess when that's coming out.

EDIT: I actually have a recc request of my own. Started watching Fear the Walking Dead and can't stop yelling at the screen about how surely someone would have done something by now about these zombies everywhere, you're all so stupid, etc. Maybe this is something for the Horror thread, but are there any books besides World War Z or Station Eleven (both awesome) where the authorities or even just ordinary civilians realistically handle a potentially apocalyptic disaster and don't instantly, permanently, fall to pieces or turn into a parody of Big Brother? Doesn't even necessarily have to be zombie-related.

Now that I think of it, I haven't read Mira Grant's Newsflesh trilogy, will give those a try.

occamsnailfile posted:

I really hope they manage to pass the E Pluribus Hugo thing. It won't take effect until...well, Finland but it at least seems very likely to mitigate 'slate' tactics from anybody.

I am also completely unsurprised that a bunch of middle class white (or mostly white) christian males decided their merit was so self evident and the only way it could have failed to win recognition was conspiracy.

Seriously, the puppy stuff I have read was basically terrible to mediocre. They couldn't even pick a good comic to push on the ballot (Fables? Bill Willingham is a fellow traveler of theirs). Marko Kloos deserves respect for choosing to withdraw, but having read part of his book, I wouldn't ever list it as one of the best five books written in a year either. I haven't read Butcher and that might be the sole exception, though he's also popular on his own without their clique.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Day by Day Armageddon series is kinda cool. The main guy is a marine or something though (been a while since I read em) but it follows the whole "Whoops, oh poo poo" part to "Oh, drat, world's been overrun" and even includes what happens to the zombies when people decide to try and nuke em, etc.

The Ex Heroes series is pretty good as well. It's a mishmash of superhero comic book and zombie apocalypse. Fairly decent reads.

boom boom boom posted:

Holy poo poo, John Carter and Dejah Thoris's kid is named Carthoris? That is the stupidest loving thing I've ever heard. And people give Twilight poo poo for the made up baby name, but it's a million times better than Carthoris, oh my god.

Jedit posted:

Evidently nobody told Edgar Rice Burroughs not to put the Cart before the Horis.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Day by Day Armageddon series is kinda cool. The main guy is a marine or something though (been a while since I read em) but it follows the whole "Whoops, oh poo poo" part to "Oh, drat, world's been overrun" and even includes what happens to the zombies when people decide to try and nuke em, etc.

Combed Thunderclap posted:

Thanks for the reccs! I'll check it out.

Also the Newsflesh series seriously rocks, I can't believe I ignored it for so long. It's not exactly unpredictable, but at least the setting seems pretty accurate (Things Go Crazy Paranoid and Bunker-Crazy, not All Human Civilization Returns to Warlording/Agriculture).

FastestGunAlive posted:

Not a big zombie guy but I liked the Ex heroes series as well. I'll also recommend the Remaining series. Standard zombie set up but the protagonist is part of a govt program that puts special forces into bunkers during possible apocalypse events. His mission is to help civilization rebuild by rescuing survivors and helping them re establish society. He's definitely a bad rear end when he has to fight but he does his best to avoid conflict. I thought that was enough of a fresh twist on the genre that I read through the series. The action is really intense and well written as well.

sky shark posted:

I liked Day by Day, but I'm going to make a separate recommendation: "The Remaining" series by DJ Molles

The Remaining is pretty awesome for a number of reasons - despite it being a mil sf storyline it keeps the gun wankery very low, and the hero gets his rear end kicked on a regular basis and makes really bad judgement calls and then has to overcome. The zombies are the 28 Days type instead of World War Z, so your suspension of disbelief isn't as bad.

The last book in the series came out last month, so you can binge through the entire list in a week or two.

Solitair posted:

I'm going to ask for recommendations here. I have a bunch of ideas for stories, but I need to be a good reader to be a good writer, and I was hoping to find other authors who worked with similar themes and ideas to see how it's done.

I want books with at least one of the following:
-More worlds like Urth from Book of the New Sun, The Night Land, Bas-Lag, Ambergris, Fallen London, , or the ones in Tormentum: Dark Sorrow or From Software's Souls games.
-By the same token, a world with inventive races distinct from elves, dwarves etc. that aren't in a planet of the hats scenario (a homogenous, interchangeable group).
-Stories about regret, guilt, redemption, or falls from grace.

Solitair posted:

-Something with a culture like something from the real world's Renaissance era, though not necessarily an Italian-inspired one. I specifically want to get a feel for period dialogue that strikes a balance between being authentic and easy to read.

Evfedu posted:

Also if you have not yet read all of Abercrombie's work you could improve your life noticeably by doing so.

House Louse posted:

General Emergency posted:

Speaking of Death Stars humblebundle has a bunch of Star Wars Audiobooks in their book bundle this week. Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams are doing the narration so I'm guessing they are cool. https://www.humblebundle.com/books

FastestGunAlive posted:

Billy Dee Williams should narrate every book life.

sky shark posted:

I liked Day by Day, but I'm going to make a separate recommendation: "The Remaining" series by DJ Molles

The Remaining is pretty awesome for a number of reasons - despite it being a mil sf storyline it keeps the gun wankery very low, and the hero gets his rear end kicked on a regular basis and makes really bad judgement calls and then has to overcome. The zombies are the 28 Days type instead of World War Z, so your suspension of disbelief isn't as bad.

The last book in the series came out last month, so you can binge through the entire list in a week or two.

Solitair posted:

A story that makes good use of tarot symbolism on a level that isn't just surface.

Robot Wendigo posted:

The Malazan books popped into mind. It's not the Tarot but it hews pretty close.

Mars4523 posted:

I've caught a few scraps of this as well as skimmed through the most recent book. It seems to play the "Hard, Strong men make Hard but Right decisions" card pretty heavily, right down to having a "Civilian love interest doesn't understand all these hard decisions needed to survive" subplot. Are the rest of the books not like this, or what?

VagueRant posted:

Just started The Name Of The Wind after five years of hearing how great Rothfuss is. Granted, it's not great that I went in with high expectations, nor that I came from the pointedness of Joe Abercrombie's writing, but goddamn, who spends an entire giant first page describing an absence of sound?!

Overuse of "he said [adjective]ly" after every goddamn line of dialogue - also a concern. But the first Chronicler chapter was pretty enjoyable and by the second, things are actually happening. The writing is starting to remind me of Lies of Locke Lamora a little bit. It's good in places, but man, reading that intro was like wading through treacle. I hope the book doesn't go back to that sort of thing.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Yea, gently caress it. If I had to suffer through that crap other people do as well.

Solitair posted:

I guess? It would help if I knew the full structure of Malazan's equivalent to a tarot deck, instead of just being introduced to the cards when they're symbolically relevant.

Then again, I've only read Gardens of the Moon.

angel opportunity posted:

Dark Forest was so good. I just finished it and loved it.

I agree that the only weak point was when Luo Ji first awakened underground. The sophon block was kind of a clever excuse to be able to make a future 250 years from now that was more like 'golden-age' sci-fi. No nanotechnology, no singularity, etc. It was ALMOST kind of refreshing in the sense that most modern sci-fi really struggles with these things if it doesn't make them a focal point of the story. Revelation Space has the melding plague and a pretty goofy ban on high-level AI, for instance, and while the melding plague was an elegant solution, the "We don't make smart AI" wasn't believable to me. The sophon block was totally believable, but the underground cities felt like a bit much.

The main issue though was the pacing interrupt from the time jump. The robots and poo poo trying to kill Luo Ji was really boring, and the hibernators being in so many ways smarter and better than the modern people kind of got tiring.

These issues aside, I LOVED this book. I feel it was just as good as Book 1, and had fewer pacing problems than it as well. Book 1 took so long to get going, and the in-game scenes honestly kind of dragged at times. Everyone loved the cultural revolution scenes, but they felt a bit too long and bloated to me for what they accomplished. In Dark Forest, aside from the minor pacing issue I had when Luo Ji first woke up, everything else was just really gripping and had great pacing. The concept of wallfacers was really loving cool, and seeing each wallfacer's plan unfold was super fun.

The arrogant spacefleet getting almost entirely destroyed by a probe was great and built up to just about perfectly.

The explanation for the fermi paradox was great. I find it way way better than the Revelation Space/Mass Effect version of some race that just destroys every civilization immediately. The coolest thing, ~as a writer~, was how Liu wove together the fermi paradox explanation with a 'victory' over what was shown to otherwise be a completely unstoppable enemy. But he did it in a way that didn't feel cheap. I almost started to believe the future humans that they've surpassed the Trisolarans, but in the back of my mind I'm realizing that they made the sophons, and that is so much more advanced than even where the humans had come. Having the probe destroy the entire fleet is such a good 'show' for "The Trisolarans are so much more advanced that it really is hopeless," and then having Luo Ji earn a victory over them that doesn't feel at all like deus ex machina.