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so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? i also recentoy read mistborn and it was too quippy for me--i've never liked "cool" modern dialogue in fantasy.
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Sep 18, 2021 03:08
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I liked The Coward. Good read, brilliant idea considering it's the first time I've seen PTSD in fantasy in a protagonist anyway, but overall pretty good book. I also liked the Kings of the Wild series but it does have a small amount of quip.
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Sep 18, 2021 03:15
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie.
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Sep 18, 2021 03:37
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? Gene Wolfe! 
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Sep 18, 2021 03:45
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? The Gap Cycle by Donaldson is an easy and lighthearted space romp.
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Sep 18, 2021 04:15
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? Piranesi.
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Sep 18, 2021 05:08
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shirunei posted:The Gap Cycle by Donaldson is an easy and lighthearted space romp. The Gaps main characters makes Bakkers main characters appear as paragons of virtue.
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Sep 18, 2021 06:02
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Read The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin as it was mentioned up thread and it was pretty fun pulpy stuff, following a member of alien lizards who are at war with alien bugs over several campaigns. It also made me miss The Race from Turtledove's WorldWar series which seemed like spiritual successors. It's a quick read and not deep but there isn't as much out there like it as there should be.
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Sep 18, 2021 06:26
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so i am 100% going to read gormenghast, but wpuld love to speed through something a little less dense first. i'm a huge fan of moorcock's novels, black company, and the book of the new sun. recently finished and greatly enjoyed canticle for leibowitz. any recommendations? Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, maybe?
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Sep 18, 2021 06:28
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Selachian posted:Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, maybe? Then you want Dread Empire, Glen Cook's other major fantasy series. It's small-scale characters like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser getting caught up in major world-shaking events. I recommend chronological order, starting with the A Fortress In Shadow omnibus and continuing with the core trilogy in A Cruel Wind. Wrath of Kings wraps up the novels, and An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat collects his short stories, the earliest of which were written because he like Leiber's stuff and wanted to do that kind of thing with his own characters. Fun fact, Leiber and Cook were friends; Cook wrote a short story as a birthday present for Leiber while actually in Leiber's living room.
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Sep 18, 2021 07:29
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Ccs posted:That one has a sequel There's... more than one KJ Parker book about engineers and sieges.
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Sep 18, 2021 08:46
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Tars Tarkas posted:Read The Bug Wars by Robert Asprin as it was mentioned up thread and it was pretty fun pulpy stuff, following a member of alien lizards who are at war with alien bugs over several campaigns. It also made me miss The Race from Turtledove's WorldWar series which seemed like spiritual successors. It's a quick read and not deep but there isn't as much out there like it as there should be. Ever read The Cold Cash War? It was the book that inspired Asprin to write the Myth Adventures - he finished it, thought "gently caress me, that's grim" and decided that he wanted to be more lighthearted in future.
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Sep 18, 2021 10:14
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Anyone want anything added to the OP of this thread?
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Sep 18, 2021 18:51
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The Way of Shadows (Night Angel #1) by Brent Weeks - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001E0V112/
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Sep 18, 2021 18:52
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Web of the Chozen is the weirdest loving book and I don't even know where to begin explaining it. It's by Jack L Chalker, who is known for writing weird transformation into basically everything. The concept is, in the far future humanity has mastered FTL and everything is a perfect utopia run by megacorps - everyone has universal healthcare and income, and it's only weirdos like our protagonist who wants to escape and do something different. (It's written from his pov so expect disparaging anti-socialism comments and "you're on the dole, ugh". That sucks!) So he's a scout, and he finds planets that could be colonized. So he finds a planet with an old colony ship in orbit around it, and finds a one word warning written on the wall: "Don't" But he goes to the surface anyways, and rapidly his equipment melts away, and soon he begins to transform into a herbivore. A kangaroo/mule thing with no hands, that sees through sonar, has to hop everywhere, and speaks on a higher frequency. He meets others who have been transformed, and their offspring... and he discovers that the species is forced to go into heat every year or so, and so there are LOTS of these weird herbivores on the planet. I still haven't read far enough in to understand why this is happening, but it's SO WEIRD and vaguely disturbing and 
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Sep 19, 2021 00:59
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StrixNebulosa posted:Web of the Chozen is the weirdest loving book and I don't even know where to begin explaining it. Don't stop I'm almost there
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Sep 19, 2021 01:04
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D-Pad posted:Don't stop I'm almost there page 66, a direct line: quote:Good Christians just aren't made for incestuous harems. page 77: quote:This was the first time I'd broken into anything by pissing on it, but this was the way of this world. StrixNebulosa fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 01:43
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Thompson commented that "The redeeming feature of The Web of the Chozen is that some of the ideas are interesting and, in selected spots, are handled with moderate style." drat son
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Sep 19, 2021 02:30
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Hahaha this book sounds like a trip. The last time I read sci fi that involved sentient creatures going into heat was The Sparrow or it’s sequel.
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Sep 19, 2021 04:15
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Science Fiction & Fantasy Mega-thread: This was the first time I'd broken into anything by pissing on it, but this was the way of this world
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Sep 19, 2021 06:13
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Ccs posted:Hahaha this book sounds like a trip. The last time I read sci fi that involved sentient creatures going into heat was The Sparrow or it’s sequel. The sequel to Turtledove's Worldwar series has it as a major plot point.
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Sep 19, 2021 12:05
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Jedit posted:The sequel to Turtledove's Worldwar series has it as a major plot point. I read those quite a long time age. No idea if they'd hold up now, but I remember even then I skimmed over a lot of text. Otherwise quite fun.
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Sep 19, 2021 13:15
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I read them in middle school and loved them. Been meaning to try them again to see if I still enjoyed them. Wasn't aware there was a follow up series. How is it?
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Sep 19, 2021 14:22
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I finished Web of the Chozen last night and it continued to be an absolute trip, and it asked some weird questions. SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE drat THING FOLLOW. Our hero, who will spend the rest of the book transformed into this kangaroo thing, ultimately winds up being the near-death of humanity. How? - After experiencing the heat himself and winding up with an egg in his pouch, he teams up with another kangaroo dude named Gregory. Gregory was one of the original Christian colonists on this planet, and he's also a biogeneticist. He agrees to help our hero talk to the AI in the colony ship. - The virus that turned them into kangaroo THINGS is yes, made by an AI that's trying to protect humanity and give them utopia. By turning them into what it calls "Chozen", it's guaranteed that they have immortal lifespans, perfect regenerating health, easy to feed, and it can control their population by influencing when/how they go into heat. - Also the virus can infect plants too and basically turn them into a super-fast farm. Any stretch of organic matter can be turned into a potato factory that will perfectly feed the Chozen. - So the hero's ship was encased in web, because the Chozen can also spit web. yep. Anyways to dissolve the web you have to pee on it. - The hero gets into his ship with Gregory and oh, gently caress. No hands. Fortunately - and this is really cool - he's psychically linked with his ship, and can remote pilot it with his mind. These parts of the book are cool, with the Choz figuring out how to use human ships and equipment with hooves. - To cut a long story short, the AI is hostile, they call in human help, the humans go "what the gently caress" and while they fail to destroy the AI's ship, they DO nuke the Chozen homeworld. - Aaand our hero, Gregory, and their two eggs are the last remaining Chozen. Dun dun dun!!! - This is where I have to take a moment to reassure the reader that there is no incest. Because that happened off-screen earlier in the novel (as the heat cycle is uncontrollable) and Gregory is still really upset about it. There will be no incest for the Chozen, so help him god. - Our hero and Greg convert their ship into a mini-Chozen home, with potatoes growing in the lower deck, and they raise their eggs and get two kids who they teach. - They quickly realize that they need more space, and there are no safe places to land. Humanity will keep expanding and finding terraformable planets and they will nuke again, so... they hatch a plan to hijack a terraforming supply ship that'll have two people on it and supplies. - To no one's surprise the two people on the ship are both women. One goes completely insane while being turned into a Chozen so they have to kill her, but the other one is the hero's true love.  - Capturing the ship and dealing with its robots and working its controls is written to be really fascinating and fun, as they have no hands and can't speak on human frequencies. This is also a neat way to see the kids interact with human stuff and that's neat alien psychology - as well as anti-human racism that the hero has to try and nip in the bud. Yes the humans nuked their homeworld, but they're not all bad, etc etc. - So Gregory, now with the aid of (briefly) human hands (she has a day or two before she's transformed) figures out how to control the virus, influence the heat cycle (there will be NO INCEST, GOD DAMNIT), and speed up/slow down the infection cycle. They can make infinite food! They can disintegrate human tech, if they want to! - Several years later, they have a thousand Chozen living on the ship, and they strike back at humanity by sending a raiding party to a planet. - Cue a freaky sequence of radio clips from that planet as humans get, well, infected. World's worst pandemic, everyone turns into kangaroo things. - And our heroes realize that... no. The humans will not negotiate. They will use this planet as a lab to figure out how to get rid of the Chozen. Which means that the only way for the Chozen to ultimately survive is to hit every single human planet. - Which they do. The Choz virus is so awful that you can drop it basically anywhere on a planet and it'll infect everything given time. - By the end of the novel our hero has a wife and kids and freedom to do whatever the hell he wants, there are only protected pockets of humanity, and the Chozen are everywhere. - This is weirdly framed as better for humanity as... here we come back to the insane moralizing of the story. Listen up: if you're on welfare and on the dole, you're going to be lazy and do nothing. Most of humanity will be useless. Only a special few will decide not to be lazy and become scouts or whatever, like our hero did. The violent transformation of humanity into the Chozen killed off the weak ones, the lazy ones who couldn't adapt, so humanity got a "fresh start" with only the smart, adaptable humans surviving. Which is good for the species? From my perspective, the only good result here is that the virus broke the megacorps, but even this is iffy as, well, the megacorps are depicted as being unambiguous good guys. They provide welfare, they don't war on each other (military exists because it's fun and because they might find aliens), they employ people to go scout new planets for expansion, and so on. So - the Chozen are monsters, but also if you become one you are guaranteed immortality and good health. And with the aid of robots (which humanity has! and the Chozen can use!) they can get around the lack of hands problem. In conclusion: absolutely bonkers book with an insane morality system. I devoured the entire thing in one day and am still thinking about it. Highly recommended if you like buckwild sci-fi stories.
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Sep 19, 2021 14:28
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... and this isn't a horror novel? Jesus Christ. People getting modified into something else while still alive was always insanely more horrifying to me than just like, cloning half brain dead slaves or something. I'm gonna be thinking about that book, alright. Just your description makes me loving sick lol.
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Sep 19, 2021 15:03
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Larry Parrish posted:... and this isn't a horror novel? Jesus Christ. People getting modified into something else while still alive was always insanely more horrifying to me than just like, cloning half brain dead slaves or something. I'm gonna be thinking about that book, alright. Just your description makes me loving sick lol. This is Jack L Chalker's entire MO. I've read four of his novels and he has over twenty more and it's my understanding that literally all of them feature involuntary transformation. Highly recommend you never, ever read any of his stuff. I, unfortunately, am as fascinated as I am squicked.
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Sep 19, 2021 15:17
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So no final reveal that the megacorps or something else was a shadwoy puppetmaster for humanity, just straight up "this socialist utopia was awful because people were happy and didn't have to wageslave until they die so they're all lazy and this must be destroyed" as the setting? 
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Sep 19, 2021 16:16
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Evil Fluffy posted:So no final reveal that the megacorps or something else was a shadwoy puppetmaster for humanity, just straight up "this socialist utopia was awful because people were happy and didn't have to wageslave until they die so they're all lazy and this must be destroyed" as the setting? It literally opens with a short little story that "probably didn't happen but should have" about Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw takes Twain to a meeting of fellows who are discussing utopia and Twain goes "Sounds like a herd of cows after they shot the last wolf."
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Sep 19, 2021 16:25
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D-Pad posted:I read them in middle school and loved them. Been meaning to try them again to see if I still enjoyed them. Wasn't aware there was a follow up series. How is it? It's pretty decent. It's set 20 years later as the Race's colonisation fleet arrives and covers all the anthills that this kicks. It looks a lot more at the Race as a complete society than the original series did.
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Sep 19, 2021 17:25
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I just started The Wheel of Time and it appears The Eye Of The World is the longest book in 40 pages of my Kindle library. 
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Sep 19, 2021 17:37
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Aardvark! posted:I just started The Wheel of Time and it appears The Eye Of The World is the longest book in 40 pages of my Kindle library. It is best, reading that series, not to ever, ever think about how far there is to go. Just try to relax and enjoy the journey as far as you can.
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Sep 19, 2021 18:09
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Aardvark! posted:I just started The Wheel of Time and it appears The Eye Of The World is the longest book in 40 pages of my Kindle library. Don't be surprised. The books in the rest of the series get progressively longer.
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Sep 19, 2021 18:36
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StrixNebulosa posted:It literally opens with a short little story that "probably didn't happen but should have" about Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw takes Twain to a meeting of fellows who are discussing utopia and Twain goes "Sounds like a herd of cows after they shot the last wolf." "mark twain would totally be on my side  "lol what a moron
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Sep 19, 2021 18:45
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When will Mark split me in Twain
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Sep 19, 2021 19:00
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I don't even know what that quote was trying to say, lol. Mark Twain was one of the most vocal supporters of the nascent American Socialist Party, and he was a big fan of the Knights of Labor. The dude mostly spent his life as professional writer and doing speaking tours and poo poo, but when he was working, he was a union organizer. I don't know the details enough to know whether he'd be considered a utopian socialist or not. But Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and other stuff by Marx and Engels was already widely published by then, and the utopian movement was already dead. I guess it kind of goes without saying but to invent a hypothetical statement like that you'd have to not actually know anything about utopian ideas, Twain, or socialism, lol. I don't think the dude who spent his entire writing career demonizing the idle rich would think the idea of permanently removing predators like this would be bad.
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Sep 19, 2021 19:05
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n…no…a sf writer with stupid opinions…I won’t believe it
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Sep 19, 2021 19:19
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Under sharia – which will be the universal law of Eurabia,” persisted the Time Traveler, “the value of a dhimmi’s life, the value of your grandchildren, is one half the value of a Muslim’s life. Jews and Christians are worth one-third of a Muslim. Indian Parsees are worth one-fifteenth. In a court of the Eurabian Caliphate or the Global Khalifate, if a Muslim murders a dhimmi, any infidel, he must pay a blood money fine not to exceed one thousand euros. No Muslim will ever be jailed or sentenced to death for the murder of any dhimmi or any number of dhimmis. If the murders were done under the auspices of Universal Compulsive Jihad, which will be sanctioned by sharia as of 2019 Common Era, all blood money fines are waived.”
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Sep 19, 2021 19:20
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lol. Greetings, guy who never read a history book in my entire life here, wondering why the Caliphate suddenly had hostile relations with Christian Europe in the late medieval period. must have been because all Muslims are racist,
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Sep 19, 2021 19:26
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Nobody in 2021 should ever read Jack L Chalker, unless they are getting paid to do so. Him and Spider Robinson were the creepiest writers of the 1980's, and that is saying something. Been slowing moving my collection of russian scifi authors that are never getting ebook edition re-releases into digital format myself. I love the time-travel into the literary future bit from Monday Begins on Saturday, more people need to read Strugatsky brothers stories.
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Sep 19, 2021 19:27
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quantumfoam posted:Nobody in 2021 should ever read Jack L Chalker, unless they are getting paid to do so. *looks directly at Piers Anthony*
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Sep 19, 2021 19:28
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