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sebmojo posted:yessss hypercatholics and i suspect a lot of gay coding, I used to love these. Katherine Kerr’s name reminded me of Katherine Kurtz. What are the scorching hot takes on the Deryni books? I only ever read The Harrowing of Gwynedd- why that one I couldn’t tell you, but I thought was extremely dumb at the time. I’ve since wondered if maybe I should at least take a look at the original trilogy.
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Sep 18, 2020 22:07
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sebmojo posted:yessss hypercatholics and i suspect a lot of gay coding, I used to love these. I'm not sure if her earlier Silver Dagger books belong in this thread (I remember loving them but also being put off by some hosed up poo poo but I'm not sure if it's well handled hosed up poo poo or just an author being weird), but I'm fairly sure everything after Rhodry becomes a dragon does. Actually same qualifier for Sheri S Tepper's True Game. I remember enjoying that and it's sequel trilogies but also it having hosed up stuff that may be worse than I remember. Might be time for a reread but hey fantasy recs.
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Sep 18, 2020 22:29
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there wolf posted:We're a little past it, but I liked Kingkiller Chronicles, and when people talk about what a perfect Mary Sue Kvothe is it always sounds like when people say Nabakov is total pedo for what Humbert Humbert is thinking. (a little loaded, but it's the most popular example of an unreliable narrator.) The setup is the story of a legendary figure, being collected by someone inherent skeptical of everything attributed to the hero and I think book one does a good job of balancing that, but then two kind of falls apart. Like the story about being a shy virgin until he gets picked up by a sex fairy that he then has to trick is classic tall-tale garbage, but then it gets tied to a real need to acquire something from the fairy realm so you can't just dismiss the entire event as horseshit. The problem is that Nabokov has a level of self-awareness and wisdom that allows him to create deeply pathological characters. I thought Rothfuss was doing the same thing at first, but the more I read, the less I felt like I was reading someone writing about a toxic shithead adolescent and more like I was reading a book by a shithead adolescent. Ohthehugemanatee fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Sep 18, 2020 |
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Sep 18, 2020 22:35
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ChubbyChecker posted:blame tolkien Tolkien wanted the whole Lord of the Rings series to be in one book. Blame his publisher and possibly the postwar paper shortage.
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Sep 18, 2020 23:50
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Black August posted:Speakin' of that i'm certain that i've read that trilogy but i can't actually remember a thing about it.
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Sep 19, 2020 00:18
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Xenocides posted:Tolkien wanted the whole Lord of the Rings series to be in one book. Blame his publisher and possibly the postwar paper shortage. hah, did he want to have one giant book, or did he want to cut it shorter?
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Sep 19, 2020 00:21
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I have a copy of all three LOTR books in one volume, and it's actually substantially smaller than your average Sanderson-grade doorstopper. I mean I realise I am being arbitrary, but if you think your epic fantasy book genuinely needs to be longer than Tolkein then sit the gently caress down who the gently caress are you.
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Sep 19, 2020 00:38
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The problem is, Map Fantasy wiriters want to have the Lord of the Rings AND the Silmarrillion all in 3+ volumes. Tolien at least shoved all his boring-rear end worldbuilding and 100 million named characters in one book. (I've always wanted a "good parts" version of the Silmarillion; keep the interesting stories, leave off the "and then there were Flewasdfwdur and Flafsgdnwe and Flimbhgjfgatul, the sons of Araasdgdfgwe, and Gyrafdfs the daughter of Wuterofsdfsa, and (insert an entire page full of fake-Gaelic names, none of which will come up again)." I liked Name of the Wind because Kvothe is a brilliant dumbass (and an unreliable narrator), but The Wise Man's Fear was a bloated mess. And now that there's never going to be a third, I find myself wondering if I should bother to keep the first two.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:03
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Black August posted:Thanks for the detailed response. I've been writing for years, but I've only now felt comfortable having developed a catalogue of ideas and a style I want to try to turn into a great number of short stories, serials, and written novels. My primary genres I like to play with are horror, modern day weird/fantastical/sci-fish, various kinds of fantasy (mostly petty takedowns of the genre), and stuff that explores a variety of current social issues as well as themes of spirituality/divinity. No problem. When I started putting my work online, no one had really interrogated a lot of the feasibility of doing it, so, I'm just giving out a perspective I wish I'd had access to. All of the advice that got passed around came from people like Wildbow who, when you examine it like a history, was operating with a different context and one very lucky event that shot him upward. It's actually a very cutthroat world. Which, of course, came from the drive to monetize it. A lot of writers unfortunately see it as something where if you boost someone else, you're just risking taking money away from your own pockets. And that's kinda true, because the audience is really quite small. Amazon is tough. Honestly, I'm not sure there's a real space on Amazon for legit 'independent' writing. If you check out any genre and run through the Top 50, for example, you're going to run into heaps and heaps of those garbage genres I mentioned just shoved under every tag and classification they can get away with. The way Amazon works, from gaming algorithms to the fifty-review thing, makes discoverability really hard. I've been trying to find someone who's gone the indie route on Amazon and been able to make it work without writing vaguely copyright-infringing harem LitRPG monster girl erotica and haven't had much luck so far. Most online writers I know are seeking traditional publication, and the ones who are good tend to get it. But overall, yes, that's about the long and short of it. Amazon for the more legit releases, KU for anything trashy that might build an audience just by existing, and a website to cultivate a presence. It's not dissimilar to my plan going forward when I finish this manuscript.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:08
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Flared Basic Bitch posted:Katherine Kerr’s name reminded me of Katherine Kurtz. What are the scorching hot takes on the Deryni books? oh - wait. that's who i was thinking of, katherine kurtz and the deryni books, sorry i'm a dumbass. i loved those, not sure how well they stand up - probably fairly well, the writing in those 70s fantasy books was often a fair bit better than in the extruded fantasy product doorstoppers.
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Sep 19, 2020 02:13
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Mentioning of King Arthur books reminded me of those that did a historical King Arthur and were incredibly boring. Oh just everyone standing around talking and talking and talking, and then something mundane happens and you go "oh wait that's Gowain and the Green Knight". Plus the writer had this theory about why it was called Excalibur because he thought that no one made swords in England after the Romans and so swords were magical and they were cast, which they weren't. I don't remember the name of the writer but I do remember his book about Uther was called Flight of Eagles and again, just booooooooring dialog between boring characters. Oh the sword in the stone was actually because he saw a crack in a stone and shoved the blade in there! Also don't forget to go to the Thinking Rock every 3rd page. These writers making historical fantasy can't seem think people who want to read about a realistic version of mythic figures just want a dry work where every fantastical deed is actually some boring thing that got embellished. Sisgmund didn't slay a dragon, he actually stepped on a snake!
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Sep 19, 2020 02:31
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twistedmentat posted:Mentioning of King Arthur books reminded me of those that did a historical King Arthur and were incredibly boring. Oh just everyone standing around talking and talking and talking, and then something mundane happens and you go "oh wait that's Gowain and the Green Knight". Wouldn’t that be historical fantasy’s considerably less fantastical cousin, historical fiction?
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Sep 19, 2020 03:10
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Flared Basic Bitch posted:Wouldn’t that be historical fantasy’s considerably less fantastical cousin, historical fiction? Oh yea I guess that's more appropriate. Historical Fantasy would be like, The French Revolution being about the the French throwing off their Vampire masters.
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Sep 19, 2020 03:39
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Inverted Icon posted:Bingtown can be a slog (Ship of X , Dragon X). Stay in the Six Duchies (Assassins X , Fools X, maybe X Fate) I'd argue that Fitz' inner monologue can be a slog too, especially in the earlier books. But I'm usually pretty tolerant of slow stories. That reminds me, what about that other series of hers, the Soldier Son trilogy? It's been years since I read it, but that had some really weird stuff to it and seemed almost like a feeder fetish story from what I remember. Mystic native sorcerors who consumed their own body's energy when using magic, so in peaceful times they had to bulk up as much as possible. There were definitely sex scenes with loving descriptions of belly fat.
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Sep 19, 2020 08:30
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I enjoyed the Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin recently. It wrapped up nicely, and I think she was the first African American to win the Hugo award for best novel with the first one “The Fifth Season”. It shouldn’t be mentioned in this thread, but I saw other people giving recommendations
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Sep 19, 2020 08:46
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poisonpill posted:Actually good fantasy: It's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Fritz Leiber was an awesome writer. I'd recommend those. Amber is Roger Zelazny, and he was also an awesome writer. Even his weaker stuff was decent, and his good stuff was very, very good. Michael Moorcock I've always found uneven, and I haven't read that much Elric stuff.
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Sep 19, 2020 08:49
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there wolf posted:We're a little past it, but I liked Kingkiller Chronicles, and when people talk about what a perfect Mary Sue Kvothe is it always sounds like when people say Nabakov is total pedo for what Humbert Humbert is thinking. (a little loaded, but it's the most popular example of an unreliable narrator.) The setup is the story of a legendary figure, being collected by someone inherent skeptical of everything attributed to the hero and I think book one does a good job of balancing that, but then two kind of falls apart. Like the story about being a shy virgin until he gets picked up by a sex fairy that he then has to trick is classic tall-tale garbage, but then it gets tied to a real need to acquire something from the fairy realm so you can't just dismiss the entire event as horseshit. BotL is generally reviled, but I do have to thank them for introducing me to Umberto Doc's Baudolino, which sold everything The Name of the Wind advertised.
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Sep 19, 2020 08:50
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hobb focuses a little too much on repeatedly punching her characters in the dick for my tastes. like, i enjoyed most of her books that i read well enough but the idea of going back for a reread just seems exhausting.
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Sep 19, 2020 09:44
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Good fantasy novels: Iain M Bank's 'Inversions'
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Sep 19, 2020 10:30
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ChubbyChecker posted:hah, did he want to have one giant book, or did he want to cut it shorter? One big book. Tolkien originally wanted the Lord of the Rings fantasy world to be a shared created mythology for England which did not really have a surviving mythology outside of King Arthur which he did not think was as good as the stuff he liked (Norse mythology). He hoped that he and his friends would jointly create a shared mythology and people would add stories. He realized later it was naive plus Tolkien was a little obsessed with accuracy and consistency. Letting others play in the universe would probably have driven him nuts. He didn’t like the world of Narnia because he felt Lewis just grabbed every mythology and threw them all together in a mishmash instead of making it work together as a whole. As the novel was worked on it also became more of a chance to play with linguistics, especially in the beginning. Fellowship has a lot of the poetry. Tolkien started work on a sequel to Lord of the Rings but the only surviving piece we have is only 9 pages and ends on a cliffhanger. He gave it up as he thought the story was over and he was pessimistic about how the Fourth Age would go. He expected Aragon’s joint kingdom to start to degenerate after Aragorn’s death, cults would form venerating Sauron’s evil, and it would be bad. It was set about a century after the original and follows Beregond’s son in the bit we have and he is concerned a friend has gotten involved in a Sauronic cult. That is about it.
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Sep 19, 2020 10:52
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he was right about how lame arthurian legend is, at least.
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Sep 19, 2020 11:08
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The lord of the rings is 6 books.
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Sep 19, 2020 12:04
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muscles like this! posted:It has been a while since I've read them but doesn't the last Merlin book kind of leave things unresolved? I bought that huge tome with all 10 Amber books and as I was nearing the end I kept thinking "How is he possibly going to wrap this up in 50, 20, 10, etc pages." Then in the last couple pages the writing suddenly changes and he rushes through a handful of immediate plot points and the series is over. It was super disappointing.
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Sep 19, 2020 12:19
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I'll second Robin Hobb - the stuff of hers that I found the worst quality is still well above average. She's basically the reason I read fantasy after I finished high school. For my last year I thought I was done with the genre and happened to read Assassin's Apprentice in my first year of Uni on a mate's recommendation. But NK Jemison is good and people should try China Mievelle's Bas-Lag books (all standalone but in the same setting).
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Sep 19, 2020 12:49
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Empty Sandwich posted:the Moorcock Elric stuff is pretty grim, isn't it? I only read a couple, but I liked them. it's been a long time, though. Has the most metal ending in all of fantasy gently caress i love some Moorcock
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Sep 19, 2020 13:51
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:he was right about how lame arthurian legend is, at least. You take that back about England's most famous hot guys hugging and kissing each other because they miss each other so much sword and sorcery epics.
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Sep 19, 2020 13:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Gideon the Ninth is marketed pretty... shakily, though. Should've emphasized the cookie-cutter YA elements and not the cool elements that barely feature. But it's not really an 'old ruins and dungeon' story. It's like Homestuck + Warhammer 40k + Twitter memes. Tepidly doing the querying thing on a novel i sweated on (isekai i guess but super weird) but feeling like id rather just write another one thats already super marketable. Trying to see how.quickly I can write a 55k YA that takes place in a prep school for gifted youngsters. But since Im writing it, I'm stuffing alot of my criticisms of the CIA in it so far. Whats the easiest poo poo to make money off anyway? Its a fun writing exercise and it'll be interesting to see if I can do it (before i gently caress off bc of boredom).
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Sep 19, 2020 14:09
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The original stuff is great, but I wouldn't bother with any Elric written later than the 70's though.
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Sep 19, 2020 14:12
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Deptfordx posted:The original stuff is great, but I wouldn't bother with any Elric written later than the 70's though. so what, the first 6 books or so?
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Sep 19, 2020 14:15
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elrics were written for magazines, so when you read them in book form, they have too many cliffhangers but if you're into sword&sorcery, they're decent
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Sep 19, 2020 14:25
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Xenocides posted:One big book. Tolkien originally wanted the Lord of the Rings fantasy world to be a shared created mythology for England which did not really have a surviving mythology outside of King Arthur which he did not think was as good as the stuff he liked (Norse mythology). He hoped that he and his friends would jointly create a shared mythology and people would add stories. He realized later it was naive plus Tolkien was a little obsessed with accuracy and consistency. Letting others play in the universe would probably have driven him nuts. He didn’t like the world of Narnia because he felt Lewis just grabbed every mythology and threw them all together in a mishmash instead of making it work together as a whole. yeah, iirc it resembled a detective story
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Sep 19, 2020 14:26
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Cobalt-60 posted:(I've always wanted a "good parts" version of the Silmarillion; keep the interesting stories, leave off the "and then there were Flewasdfwdur and Flafsgdnwe and Flimbhgjfgatul, the sons of Araasdgdfgwe, and Gyrafdfs the daughter of Wuterofsdfsa, and (insert an entire page full of fake-Gaelic names, none of which will come up again)." Good news, this book exists! It's called The Silmarillion. People vastly overstate the amount of this sort of stuff in the Silmarillion. There's maybe two chapters of it, the part where they introduce the Valar and the part where they introduce all the main characters.
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Sep 19, 2020 14:35
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:so what, the first 6 books or so? Yeah, the original stories in their collected volumes. Edit: His Corum books are pretty good as well. Never liked Hawkmoon that much at the time, but you could give those a shot as well. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Sep 19, 2020 |
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Sep 19, 2020 15:16
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The Moon Monster posted:I bought that huge tome with all 10 Amber books and as I was nearing the end I kept thinking "How is he possibly going to wrap this up in 50, 20, 10, etc pages." Then in the last couple pages the writing suddenly changes and he rushes through a handful of immediate plot points and the series is over. It was super disappointing. probably fair, although he kinda left it open. I never got around to the stuff that came after (I think it was mostly ghostwritten?) I still have the giant book... in a box somewhere, probably. but Zelazny was way more hit than miss, read that guy. there's definitely some blindspots in his work but he tends to just run with a great idea, make his point, and then get out. brevity being the soul of wit and all that.
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Sep 19, 2020 15:26
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Which Zelazneys are the best? I asked a little earlier but I don't think anyone saw.
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Sep 19, 2020 16:05
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Lord of light is great.
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Sep 19, 2020 16:12
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:But overall, yes, that's about the long and short of it. Amazon for the more legit releases, KU for anything trashy that might build an audience just by existing, and a website to cultivate a presence. It's not dissimilar to my plan going forward when I finish this manuscript. Any experience or practical advice on the reality of the situation is valuable to me. I know the scene is decaying and changing year to year. So I should save my aces for publication, my trash for Kindle, and my smaller stuff for Amazon. Sounds like I got a lot of pen names to lock down.
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Sep 19, 2020 16:13
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Caesar Saladin posted:Which Zelazneys are the best? I asked a little earlier but I don't think anyone saw. A Night In the Lonesome October
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Sep 19, 2020 16:17
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Deptfordx posted:Lord of light is great. Lord of Light is the only one I've read and I agree that its awesome. Super creative and weird.
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Sep 19, 2020 16:59
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Caesar Saladin posted:Which Zelazneys are the best? I asked a little earlier but I don't think anyone saw. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth is solid sci-fi Zelazny.
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Sep 19, 2020 17:00
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