|
Speaking of reading fantasy as a kid, when I was a youngun I absolutely loved Brian Jacques's Redwall series. Just thinking about them now makes me want to reread them. Has anyone read them recently and, if so, do they stand up as an adult? I remember them being full of cool characters and decent action sequences.
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 01:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 17:41 |
|
|
USMC_Karl posted:Speaking of reading fantasy as a kid, when I was a youngun I absolutely loved Brian Jacques's Redwall series. Just thinking about them now makes me want to reread them. Has anyone read them recently and, if so, do they stand up as an adult? I remember them being full of cool characters and decent action sequences. Since we’re on SA, it’s obligatory that I link this.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 01:59
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:Since we’re on SA, it’s obligatory that I link this. Wait, was Brian Jacques a crazy racist or am I missing some kind of joke. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 02:11
|
|
|
USMC_Karl posted:Wait, was Brian Jacques a crazy racist or am I missing some kind of joke. He did get a bit weird about the vermin, especially in the later books.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 02:12
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:He did get a bit weird about the vermin, especially in the later books. Thanks for ruining my one foray into fantasy.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 02:15
|
|
|
I'm not prepared to call him a racist against like, humans (because lol), but in 95% of instances if you were a fox, weasel, stoat, or rat you were irredeemably evil. I can only remember one time in which a vermin creature turned good and stayed that way
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 05:25
|
|
|
At the very least 4/5ths of the books all tended to follow about the same plot formula. The ones that didn't were fairly okay. And of course the obligatory three page descriptions of every meal that make GRRM appear restrained when it comes to food.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 05:31
|
|
|
Rough Lobster posted:I'm not prepared to call him a racist against like, humans (because lol), but in 95% of instances if you were a fox, weasel, stoat, or rat you were irredeemably evil. I can only remember one time in which a vermin creature turned good and stayed that way
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
Speaking of kids fantasy I've recently re-read some Roald Dahl with my son. Some of the books hold up ok, but Witches is all about how you shouldn't trust ugly people and The Twits is all about how domestic violence is funny. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is still great.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 05:59
|
|
|
Urcher posted:Speaking of kids fantasy I've recently re-read some Roald Dahl with my son. Some of the books hold up ok, but Witches is all about how you shouldn't trust ugly people and The Twits is all about how domestic violence is funny. Roald Dahl was an actual lovely racist so not really surprising. That said my favorite gag is still when they meet actual vermicious knids in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and they spell Scram with their bodies because they love spelling but that's the only word they know.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 06:09
|
|
|
papa horny michael posted:Is there a reason i love K.J.Parker but dislike Tom Holt? You like serious books with creepy revelations and horrible (outcome, not craft) endings rather than mostly one-note joke books that are like if Douglas Adams had written more fantasy and comparatively sucked at it? (I had the same experience when Holt unmasked)
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 06:38
|
|
|
papa horny michael posted:Is there a reason i love K.J.Parker but dislike Tom Holt? If an artist works in several wildly differing styles/traditions, it's okay to only like some of their output. papa horny michael posted:Any people writing like Pratchett recently? Terry, not Ann. I am glad you asked! Kevin 'Iron Druid' Hearne, apparently!  quote:In an irreverent new series in the tradition of Terry Pratchett novels and The Princess Bride, the New York Times bestselling authors of the Iron Druid Chronicles and Star Wars: Phasma reinvent fantasy, fairy tales, and floridly written feast scenes. There's an extract to read.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 14:44
|
|
|
Megazver posted:If an artist works in several wildly differing styles/traditions, it's okay to only like some of their output. Unf. That excerpt reeks of try-hard. "... in the tradition of Terry Pratchett novels" is a really high bar to clear.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 14:53
|
|
|
It's a very low bar, actually.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 15:11
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 15:19
|
|
|
BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's a very low bar, actually.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 15:29
|
|
|
Kevin didn’t write Phasma, what a weird mistake. E: the mistake is me, two authors
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 15:41
|
|
|
Thranguy posted:I've never been able to get into Holt. Maybe I tried the wrong books though. What's a good starting point for him? FWIW, Fforde is unfunny and boring. Hearne is just unfunny if you have some tolerance for bog-standard UF, otherwise he's unfunny, boring and occassionally outright stupid even for the genre. So here's where I remember I haven't recommended Bridge of Birds in a while so if you've got a hankering for humorous fantasy definitely go check that. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Dec 1, 2017 |
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 18:33
|
|
|
Stanfield posted:Are there any good/mediocre/just not offensively bad books that aren't about epic adventures or wars or evil empires or whatever and are just about a group of people hanging out in a cool Fantasy/Sci-Fi world? Classic pulp fantasy used to be like this, as long as you're not opposed to violence. Jack Vance's Tales from the Dying Earth has a lot of these kinds of stories involving smaller personalities just trying to get by in a weird world, as does his short fiction. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories usually boil down to the pair running a scam or trying to procure a moderately rare item for a buyer. papa horny michael posted:Any people writing like Pratchett recently? Terry, not Ann. If you don't mind YA, I remember Jonathan Stroud's work being pretty funny and lightly satirical, but it's been a while. I would say that Moore, Fforde, and even a lot of Pratchett are targetted for YA as well, though. The Guardian's Best Sci Fi/Fantasy of the year is up. As with the Tor list it focuses more on the literary side, which suits my tastes fine. pospysyl fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Dec 1, 2017 |
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 19:36
|
|
|
Not all Jonathan Stroud, but the Bartimaeus books are definitely a lot of fun if you don't mind it being YA. Also features probably the only case ever of a snarky narrator I didn't feel like strangling thirty pages in.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 22:43
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:Not all Jonathan Stroud, but the Bartimaeus books are definitely a lot of fun if you don't mind it being YA. Also features probably the only case ever of a snarky narrator I didn't feel like strangling thirty pages in. I must admit, both series of his I tried, that was precisely the issue I've had with both of them.
|
|
#
?
Dec 1, 2017 23:02
|
|
|
Thranguy posted:Recasting the question to "Is anyone writing non-horrible f/sf humor," because yes, nobody else can or could be Pratchett, I'd recommend Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde. Try Joe Zieja's Mechanical Failure. Kinda Spaceballs/Naked Gun in style. Haven't read the sequel yet though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 01:48
|
|
|
cis autodrag posted:Consider Phlebas is easily his worst book and excession is only fun if you're already fairly immersed in the universe. Try Player of Games and if you still don't like it then he's just not for you. I clearly should have read this thread before I started Reconsidering Phlebas the other day. I did not necessarily hate it the first time it just did not keep my attention. The prologue with the 'mind' has stuck with me and I figured I would see if there is a worthy payoff for that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 07:59
|
|
|
Expired Vitamin posted:I clearly should have read this thread before I started Reconsidering Phlebas the other day. I did not necessarily hate it the first time it just did not keep my attention. The prologue with the 'mind' has stuck with me and I figured I would see if there is a worthy payoff for that. Don't get me wrong. Banks's worst is still 10x better than most authors' best, but if you read all the hype that the Culture series had and then started with that, you might be left wondering what people were thinking. I do like the vaguely ascended beings who just hang out memorializing worlds that destroyed themselves in war. Like as a society they ascended to perpetuate a morbid joke. They interfere directly with normies so they're not Sublimed but he never really followed up on them at all. Shame.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 08:10
|
|
|
cis autodrag posted:Don't get me wrong. Banks's worst is still 10x better than most authors' best No. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 09:11
|
|
|
Rough Lobster posted:I'm not prepared to call him a racist against like, humans (because lol), but in 95% of instances if you were a fox, weasel, stoat, or rat you were irredeemably evil. I can only remember one time in which a vermin creature turned good and stayed that way Hell, he wrote an entire book (Outcast of Redwall) to set up the question "can a predator raised in Redwall culture from birth be good?" and then answer it with "haha lol no, of course not, they're all born evil and will be evil forever".
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 12:28
|
|
|
cis autodrag posted:Don't get me wrong. Banks's worst is still 10x better than most authors' best, but if you read all the hype that the Culture series had and then started with that, you might be left wondering what people were thinking. I did not get too far into it on my first attempt to read it. I could not decide if the issue was on Banks' side or mine. Based on what I read of Consider Phelbas last time I would describe the plot as meandering. However, when I read the book we had just had a new baby so I am not sure if my sleep deprived brain just temporarily degraded my reading comprehension. The friend who suggested the Culture also put me onto The Expanse so configured it was worth another shot. That same friend and I are on different sides of the devide on Vinge's dog aliens, so who knows.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 15:09
|
|
|
Expired Vitamin posted:I did not get too far into it on my first attempt to read it. I could not decide if the issue was on Banks' side or mine. Based on what I read of Consider Phelbas last time I would describe the plot as meandering. Consider Phelbas is a non-Culture fan's viewpoint on the Culture sorta like https://youtu.be/Cg-pnGFbwMQ Phelbas gets interesting just after the escape from cannibal island/the Damage game (which Player of Games sort of did/didn't live up to). The escape sequence from the Culture GSV(non Culture controlling Mind) is one of the highlights of the Culture books though, it gives the feel of how mindblowingly MASSIVE Culture spaceships are.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 16:13
|
|
|
it's Phlebas, not Phelbas
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 16:59
|
|
|
Consider Phil Bass
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 17:17
|
|
|
General Battuta posted:Consider Phil Bass That would have been a MUCH better title to describe the doings of Horza Borza Oingo Boingo.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 17:44
|
|
|
Thranguy posted:I've never been able to get into Holt. Maybe I tried the wrong books though. What's a good starting point for him? Who's Afraid of Beowulf? is a good starting point for Holt. It's also a good finishing point, because Holt has written the same book 20 times.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2017 20:32
|
|
|
ToxicFrog posted:Hell, he wrote an entire book (Outcast of Redwall) to set up the question "can a predator raised in Redwall culture from birth be good?" and then answer it with "haha lol no, of course not, they're all born evil and will be evil forever". This actually isn’t true at all, the other Redwall books are really uncritical “rats=bad” stuff but in this one the vermin kid 1) is willing to give his life to do the right thing in the end (im not going to spoiler this because it’s like a 20 year old kids book about mice) and 2) nobody at Redwall ever gave him a chance because they were all bigots except the protagonist, causing him to grow up with no respect for anyone and a huge chip on his shoulder and 3) he went back to his evil rear end in a top hat dad precisely because he felt that everyone was bigoted towards him and the protagonist wouldn’t stand up for him against bigotry. Redwall as a whole is neat until whatever point you get old enough to realize they’re all basically the same book. Fortunately there’s no overarching plot so it’s not like you miss out on anything by quitting. — On that note, against the thread’s good advice, I blitzed through the entire Shannara series lately. The number one thing I remembered about Shannara from reading it as a kid is that it was readable: yeah it was all cliches but it was all pleasant and likable and moved forward at a good clip and never did anything challenging or unexpected. Somewhere along the line, Brooks lost this knack — probably when his publisher started demanding trilogies rather than single books, leading him to stretch out insanely basic plots that were rehashed to begin with as if there was actually anything deeply interesting about them. There’s some truly turgid poo poo in this franchise, enlivened only by the slow ramping-up of violent and sexual content over the decades (but still nobody in Shannaraland can swear or actually use the word “rape”) and Brooks’ need to come up with more and more ridiculous names (my favorite is probably either “Eton Shart”, which I swear I am not making up, or, for a romantic lead, “Cinnaminson”). The one reasonably interesting thing Brooks has managed to do is that, because every story must follow the same arc and be about the same bloodlines, he has to move the timeframe forward a few generations at least for each new trilogy. This means that quite an amount of time has passed in universe and this has led him to think of the age old question; why none of the six thousand year old elves in Middle-earth had ever invented the can opener. Unfortunately he doesn’t want to take this far enough that it would actually change his formula, so he’s left with the increasingly bizarre situation of the later books having non-magical video chat, flying ships, and hand-held laser rifles, but the exact same setting elements and political structures persist for a thousand years with no variation. Even when the capital city of the evil empire is literally razed to the ground together with the whole military and political elite by a literal invasion of demons from Hell, they’re back again in the next book like a collective Wile E. Coyote. It’s kind of insane. It also has the odd effect of making this series feel increasingly like the Star Wars EU. The current tetralogy, of which only the first book is out, is supposed to be the end of the whole miserable affair. Though I’m sure Brooks will find a way spin off more spinoffs till his heart gives out, it actually made me more favorably disposed towards that book, or maybe it is actually better. I found myself liking some of the characters even, which was quite nice after the previous trilogy, an astonishingly boring piece of work about a guy with a magic sword who feuds for a couple of years with an rear end in a top hat sorcerer and bangs his daughter for a while. Then he kills the sorcerer and she dumps him for a stable boy. This was probably worth writing three books about. Anyway, it was a bunch of time I needed to fill filled in, and my next question is what is the least worst gigantic epic fantasy series out there? Malazan? Sanderson? Black Company? Something else?
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 16:00
|
|
|
skasion posted:
Depends on what you mean by "least worst" but Wheel of Time is better than Shannara. Black Company is the ur-grimdark series. Malazan is Black Company + a PhD anthropologist's GURPS campaign. Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber is a fantasy grandmaster churning out pulp to make a quick buck.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 16:10
|
|
|
Black Company is so good it doesn't feel like genre fiction, oh man. Enjoy it!
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 16:11
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Depends on what you mean by "least worst" but Wheel of Time is better than Shannara. I read the first Wheel of Time book around the same time as I first read Sword of Shannara and was soon bored with it. Might give it another chance at some point. I think I’ll try Amber for now, I’m not in a grimdark mood.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 16:37
|
|
|
Another option could be Shadows of the Apt. Reads like DnD as well, but it's not that big on grimdark and fairly enjoyable. Malazan is really good and most of the time manages to mix the grimdark up with some (admittedly black) humor. It's a bit more difficult to read than your average fantasy saga due to crazy amounts of names and lores and basically everything being conveyed by unreliable narrators.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 18:12
|
|
|
The first Shannara books are the bigges LOTR rip off I have ever seen. It has rivendell with dwarves instead of elves. It has not-Rohan corrupted by not-Wormtongue and everyone takes refuge at not-Helm's-Deep (but they get there by boat!!). It has Moria with a water balrog instead of a fire balrog. It has a seven tiered city. It even has Gollum, who is now a gnome. He follows the main characters as they carry magic stones (and iirc a sword?) to - I poo poo you not - skull mountain.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 18:12
|
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:The first Shannara books are the bigges LOTR rip off I have ever seen. It has rivendell with dwarves instead of elves. It has not-Rohan corrupted by not-Wormtongue and everyone takes refuge at not-Helm's-Deep (but they get there by boat!!). It has Moria with a water balrog instead of a fire balrog. It has a seven tiered city. I know, right? It's hilarious.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 18:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 31, 2024 17:41 |
|
|
Strategic Tea posted:The first Shannara books are the bigges LOTR rip off I have ever seen. It has rivendell with dwarves instead of elves. It has not-Rohan corrupted by not-Wormtongue and everyone takes refuge at not-Helm's-Deep (but they get there by boat!!). It has Moria with a water balrog instead of a fire balrog. It has a seven tiered city. Sword of Shannara is an utterly unabashed rip-off way more so than that. You could stand there all day and list poo poo it ripped off, it’s hilarious. That said, the second half of it is less so than the first and the other books aren’t at all, apart from taking place in the same Tolkien-lite world (which does get somewhat less Tolkien-lite over the course of the series with the aforementioned weird poo poo like airships and the hell dimension and shape shifting lizard people and the book with the AI) and being so titanically lazy that they rip themselves off when they aren’t ripping off something else.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2017 18:19
|
|