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ROFLburger posted:I'm looking for a fantasy recommendation. Some of my favorites have been Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, Name of the Wind. I'm looking for something in the same vein - standard high fantasy but not on such a huge scale. Are there any single novel fantasy stories that you guys like that are similar to those popular epics but.. not quite as epic? Cherryh's Fortress series!
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Sep 21, 2017 01:12
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I'm fond of Kage Baker's Anvil of the World. Lois McMaster Bujold's Curse of Chalion/Paladin of Souls are good - I'm not quite so keen on The Hallowed Hunt, but it's still pretty good.
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Sep 21, 2017 07:16
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Lord Dunsany's novels might be just the thing! My personal favourite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rodriguez:_Chronicles_of_Shadow_Valley
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Sep 21, 2017 14:16
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ROFLburger posted:I'm looking for a fantasy recommendation. Some of my favorites have been Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, Name of the Wind. I'm looking for something in the same vein - standard high fantasy but not on such a huge scale. Are there any single novel fantasy stories that you guys like that are similar to those popular epics but.. not quite as epic? If you read Stormlight, than I assume you've read Sanderson's other standalone novels? They're quite good. I go back to Elantris from time to time, and Warbreaker was fun. Fevre Dream by GRRM is another one I'd recommend for a standalone (he also did a sci fi romp pre-GOT that I remember being fun if you can track it down). If you are looking for a new series to get into, I do highly suggest the Gentleman Bastard Series by Scott Lynch.
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Sep 21, 2017 14:37
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ROFLburger posted:I'm looking for a fantasy recommendation. Some of my favorites have been Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, Name of the Wind. I'm looking for something in the same vein - standard high fantasy but not on such a huge scale. Are there any single novel fantasy stories that you guys like that are similar to those popular epics but.. not quite as epic? Track down a copy of "The Sword and the Lion" by Roberta Cray.
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Sep 21, 2017 14:56
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ROFLburger posted:I'm looking for a fantasy recommendation. Some of my favorites have been Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, Name of the Wind. I'm looking for something in the same vein lol How about Rothfuss's slashfic starring Devi and Tom Bombadil's wife Goldberry? It's got both Lord of the Rings and Name of the Wind!
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Sep 21, 2017 15:17
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Anybody have a good audible recommendation? I just finished the stone sky and need something new for the car.
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Sep 21, 2017 15:31
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:lol ... That was a thing I read. I'm now even more content with my decision to stop reading Rothfuss after The Name of The Wind. As for single-volume epic fantasy, how about Neil Gaiman's Stardust ? And from the depths of the '80s, The Last Unicorn and The Neverending Story are good reads too. If you want to go even older, there's E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros,, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld,, or Fletcher Pratt's The Well of the Unicorn. Oh, and of course, Bridge of Birds. It has sequels but they're really rather unnecessary.
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Sep 21, 2017 15:34
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andrew smash posted:Anybody have a good audible recommendation? I just finished the stone sky and need something new for the car.
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Sep 21, 2017 16:26
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andrew smash posted:Anybody have a good audible recommendation? I just finished the stone sky and need something new for the car. In the current sale that's about to end, there's a heap of good books. Classics like Childhood's End, 2001, The Forever War, and Nine Princes in Amber. Somewhat more recent books such as The Sparrow, Hyperion, and Blackout. Recent books such as The Water Knife, Aurora, and All the Birds in the Sky (personally didn't like it, but a lot of people did). Not to mention an Expanse book, and the sequel to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Strange Matter posted:Embassytown has an awesome audiobook. Hell yeah.
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Sep 21, 2017 16:38
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Tokamak posted:Classics like Childhood's End, 2001, The Forever War, and Nine Princes in Amber. Somewhat more recent books such as The Sparrow, Hyperion, and Blackout. It's less distracting than Dune, with about 1/3rd of the chapters having a full cast and the rest just narrated. The Forever War and The Sparrow are awesome in audiobook. The Sparrow in particular is heartbreaking.
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Sep 21, 2017 16:44
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:lol
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Sep 21, 2017 16:49
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Xaris posted:aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Sep 21, 2017 17:01
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ROFLburger posted:I'm looking for a fantasy recommendation. Some of my favorites have been Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive, Name of the Wind. I'm looking for something in the same vein - standard high fantasy but not on such a huge scale. Are there any single novel fantasy stories that you guys like that are similar to those popular epics but.. not quite as epic?
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Sep 21, 2017 17:30
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coyo7e posted:Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy I recommend Rothfuss to people, but even I think that tricking someone into reading Hobb's mawkish misery porn is a joke in bad taste.
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Sep 21, 2017 17:33
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I recommend Rothfuss to people, but even I think that tricking someone into reading Hobb's mawkish misery porn is a joke in bad taste. Hobb has an audience but it has very limited demographic overlap with SA. Same reason our urban fantasy thread never discusses True Blood or that werewolf sex lady.
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Sep 21, 2017 17:50
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Strange Matter posted:Embassytown has an awesome audiobook. Great idea, thanks.
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Sep 21, 2017 18:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hobb has an audience but it has very limited demographic overlap with SA. Same reason our urban fantasy thread never discusses True Blood or that werewolf sex lady. possibly the best Penny Arcade quote because of just how often Anita Blake comes up out of left field
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Sep 21, 2017 18:05
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andrew smash posted:Great idea, thanks.
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Sep 21, 2017 18:07
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As a honest recommendation I'd say check out Django Wexler's Shadow Campaign series. I enjoy them a lot more than the Powder Mage stuff.
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Sep 21, 2017 18:26
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:lol
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Sep 21, 2017 18:29
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coyo7e posted:As a honest recommendation I'd say check out Django Wexler's Shadow Campaign series. I enjoy them a lot more than the Powder Mage stuff.
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Sep 21, 2017 18:36
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Yeah overall now I think Wexler's stuff is the better Napoleonic-period fantasy series.anilEhilated posted:I'll second this with the caveat that he keeps sticking badly written romance in it and it gets really grating by book 3-4. Really good military fantasy thingy otherwise; basically a magical twist on Napoleon's campaigns. After Lost Fleet/Lost Stars my heart has been hardened to bad romance in military fiction.
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Sep 21, 2017 19:54
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DACK FAYDEN posted:"They start out okay, but then it's all sadomasochism and lycanthropic sex" I mean if you like your urban fantasy with more sex with werewolves and vampires than urban fantasy, the Anita Blake books are great. I read the first 20 or 30 of them while bored at work and they were fun reads, but definitely not the sort of stuff people that post here read or admit to reading. But then, I am the guy who can't stop reading LitRPG so take what I say with a grain of salt.
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Sep 21, 2017 19:56
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coyo7e posted:Yeah I read most of the second one but wandered away for some reason midsummer, a lot of the quantum Computing was pretty out there for sure but at that point it's sci-fi and there isn't really any science that anybody has been able to use to back it. I mean in the first one, I'm pretty sure they didn't have a way to sync up the human flipflops that would of actually worked at the speeds they were operating at. A few other things too, again been too long.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:02
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Amazon has a pretty good deal on George Alec Effinger's cyberpunk classic The Budayeen Cycle: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss: $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0741QZVZ7/
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Sep 21, 2017 20:03
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coyo7e posted:As a honest recommendation I'd say check out Django Wexler's Shadow Campaign series. I enjoy them a lot more than the Powder Mage stuff. I read the first one and thought it was incredibly boring and derivative and if you like that sort of thing just read Sharpe.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:27
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I have been meaning to read some books that people generally ought to, and started with Asimov's Foundation series. I ... didn't like it. I enjoyed the plot, but I found the characters undeveloped and one-dimensional. And his writing style just did not please me. Like, literally the only part that gave me any pleasure just from the prose itself was the early chapter in Second Foundation where Arcadia Darrell eavesdrops on her father's associates accompanied by her teenage internal monologue. I haven't gotten to the later books in the series and am not sure if I will. I think I will read more Asimov because he's one of the big names, but I really thought given the weight people associate with his name I would have liked it better.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:48
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Just started The Warded Man this week. Did the authors wife gently caress another dude while he was writing this thing or what the gently caress is going on? Everyone is either cheating, thinking about cheating, or wanting to cheat.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:48
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Fart of Presto posted:Amazon has a pretty good deal on George Alec Effinger's cyberpunk classic The Budayeen Cycle: When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss: $2.99 Read these. ElGroucho posted:Just started The Warded Man this week. Did the authors wife gently caress another dude while he was writing this thing or what the gently caress is going on? Everyone is either cheating, thinking about cheating, or wanting to cheat. Don't read these.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:00
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I have been meaning to read some books that people generally ought to, and started with Asimov's Foundation series. The Golden Age big names have a very strong tendency to cool ideas but awful characterisation and prose. If you get hooked when teenage-or-younger it's mind-expanding, but if you're older then I think your reaction is pretty typical.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:06
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I have been meaning to read some books that people generally ought to, and started with Asimov's Foundation series. Frankly very few SF authors from that era gave much concern for characterization. Even someone like Arthur C. Clarke, who is by many accounts are more capable wordsmith, created fairly flat characters (though few quite as cardboard as Asimov). I was lucky to read Asimov back in middle school and high school, which I think is the ideal age for his style. It's full of cool ideas and you haven't read enough serious literature to see the weaknesses of his style.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:17
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ElGroucho posted:Just started The Warded Man this week. Did the authors wife gently caress another dude while he was writing this thing or what the gently caress is going on? Everyone is either cheating, thinking about cheating, or wanting to cheat. Also the fact that mages are all super martial-arts-trained in wielding 40 lb staves made of exotic substances is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Spoiler (you don't want to read these so I won't actually spoiler text it) the protagonist gets so angry that he tattoos his whole body to become an unbreakable punching machine like some kind of anime, but it's way dumber and unfun than it sounds - if you want magic tattoos read Twenty Palaces coyo7e fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Sep 21, 2017 |
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Sep 21, 2017 21:34
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Good to know I am not some weirdo who just doesn't like good things. I have a collection of Asimov short stories that I'll work through and then maybe try Clarke. He randomly popped up the other day when I was reading about satellite internet and I was somewhat surprised to learn his conception of what it could be is more or less what HughesNet and Exede are doing today with geostationary satellites. That is pretty cool.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:36
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Foundation was fun but it was dated. you kind of just have to accept that a lot of classic, genre-defining fiction that has tons of press and baggage will also, well, be old, and have baggage, whether it be racism, or an inability to write characterization, or a tendency to want to gently caress all your redheaded grandchildren
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Sep 21, 2017 21:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hobb has an audience but it has very limited demographic overlap with SA. Same reason our urban fantasy thread never discusses True Blood or that werewolf sex lady. Why do you think there is limited overlap? Other than the fact that it's not a single-volume work, Hobb's three trilogies seem to be exactly what that user requested. Epic fantasy that isn't exactly sweeping. Plus, I think they're great reads.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:14
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ElGroucho posted:Just started The Warded Man this week. Did the authors wife gently caress another dude while he was writing this thing or what the gently caress is going on? Everyone is either cheating, thinking about cheating, or wanting to cheat.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:40
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I recommend Rothfuss to people, but even I think that tricking someone into reading Hobb's mawkish misery porn is a joke in bad taste. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hobb has an audience but it has very limited demographic overlap with SA. Same reason our urban fantasy thread never discusses True Blood or that werewolf sex lady. I shamefully admit that Robin Hobb's books are literally the only book to have made me cry a little (when I was a teenager). It really is misery porn, but the feels are real. I don't really have the heart to read the latest trilogy, esp since I'd have to reread the old ones.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:45
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Alec Eiffel posted:Why do you think there is limited overlap? Other than the fact that it's not a single-volume work, Hobb's three trilogies seem to be exactly what that user requested. Epic fantasy that isn't exactly sweeping. Plus, I think they're great reads. I'm not really sure why as such. It might have something to do with gender marketing. There seems to be a split where authors like Anita Blake and Robin Hobb get marketed more towards female readers, while stuff like Dresden Files or Rothfuss get marketed more towards male readers. I don't know which way the causation runs there or if it's just a ghost correlation. But SA at least historically trends more male, so, go figure. This might change with time. I've noticed we've gotten more female posters lately and some younger women I've spoken to about SA have said they like it over other internet forums because the paywall and the moderation keep out trolls and offensive content.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:56
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:lol  smh at this hetero-fic nonsense granted I'm not entirely sure that gendering tom bombadil is a practical thing to do but still
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Sep 22, 2017 00:07
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