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Deptfordx posted:I feel like Elfstones was alright. Elfstones was alright, sure. I'll freely admit that one of my fondest memories of reading a book was staying up til 3 am to burn through the last quarter or so of Wishsong in a feverish marathon just to see how it all played out. Wil Ohmsford was still a loser who magically irradiated his balls to figuratively carry a printer for the elf lady who turned into a tree, though
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Mar 28, 2022 23:49
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Asterite34 posted:magically irradiated his balls OK I need to read these books actually
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Mar 28, 2022 23:52
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i re-read ElfQuest recently and while the original quest holds up and was even better than i remember, holy mother of pearl everything after it is so much worse than i remembered
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Mar 29, 2022 02:26
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I think I have a bunch of dragonlance and D&D books like the Drizzt series somewhere. Also some demon gem war saga that RA Salvatore wrote. I was a pretty big fan of his as a teenager and young adult. Probably made me a worse person in the end.
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Mar 29, 2022 03:42
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Stealthgerbil posted:I think I have a bunch of dragonlance and D&D books like the Drizzt series somewhere. Also some demon gem war saga that RA Salvatore wrote. I was a pretty big fan of his as a teenager and young adult. Probably made me a worse person in the end. the icewind dale books are boring but totally inoffensive. very much like a description of an RPG. i think i read only the first two Drizzt trilogies and i vaguely remember some weird kinky stuff about witch orgies or something and that Drizzt was super boring
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Mar 29, 2022 03:55
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like, i'm pretty sure Drizzt had this arch nemesis across many many books named Artemis, and literally the only thing about him was "he does swords good, like Drizzt".
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Mar 29, 2022 03:56
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yea that assassin's whole deal was drizzt was his nemesis because they are both really good at using swords or whatever and artemis had to be the best. its that trope which we all know has been done over and over so much.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:15
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I did read the Dragonlance series, or the first two trilogies, decades ago, and I was too mentally regressed due to undiagnosed autism/Asperger's to notice its flaws (hell, I even read Pier Anthony's infamous Firefly and even ITS grossness flew over my head), but people keep saying that they, and Drizzt, read way too much like a story made of a D&D campaign. And I just wondered, how? Do the fights read like people rolled dice to decide the order? Do they really drive home that each character has 'a class'? Do they repeatedly do the same move over the books? I recall someone mentioned how the heroes got stuck and then some guy called Paladine literally dropped gryphons on them to get them somewhere, which was an analogy for when the DM railroaded IIRC, but I'm interested in details.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:17
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precision posted:the icewind dale books are boring but totally inoffensive. very much like a description of an RPG. His half-sister was a priestess in the orgy and his lame self wussed out of the action and ran off. What a lame-o.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:22
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Drizzt died to some adventurers who locked him in a house full of skeletons and acid fog in Balders Gate.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:32
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Cornwind Evil posted:I did read the Dragonlance series, or the first two trilogies, decades ago, and I was too mentally regressed due to undiagnosed autism/Asperger's to notice its flaws (hell, I even read Pier Anthony's infamous Firefly and even ITS grossness flew over my head), but people keep saying that they, and Drizzt, read way too much like a story made of a D&D campaign. And I just wondered, how? Do the fights read like people rolled dice to decide the order? Do they really drive home that each character has 'a class'? Do they repeatedly do the same move over the books? I recall someone mentioned how the heroes got stuck and then some guy called Paladine literally dropped gryphons on them to get them somewhere, which was an analogy for when the DM railroaded IIRC, but I'm interested in details. yes
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Mar 29, 2022 04:38
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OzyMandrill posted:The first one is such a blatantly transparent rip off of the lord of the rings, just utterly shameless. Shannara or Wheel of Time? Trick question: Both.
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Mar 29, 2022 04:42
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Re: Tolkein influence, one of the best descriptors I ever read of China Mieville's books (they are mostly good go read them) is: "Standard fantasy from an alternate world where Peake's Gormenghast defined the genre rather than Tolkein. They really do escape the influence for the most part.
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Mar 29, 2022 05:00
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Kharnifex posted:Drizzt died to some adventurers who locked him in a house full of skeletons and acid fog in Balders Gate. i looked up the way he actually dies and it's even lamer than this
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Mar 29, 2022 05:06
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I think deathstar lands on him or something
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Mar 29, 2022 05:13
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Atopian posted:Re: Tolkein influence, one of the best descriptors I ever read of China Mieville's books (they are mostly good go read them) is: Likewise, Gaiman described Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell as being from a world where Lud-in-the-Mist was the foundation of the genre. cptn_dr fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 29, 2022 05:22
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Deptfordx posted:I feel like Elfstones was alright. I got to the party late on Dragonlance; I don't think I read those until I was out of high school. I never really saw the appeal  IIRC they call out both the exact name and level of numerous of Raistlin's spells, especially at the big showdown with the evil-mage-guild-whatever Wheel of Time is not good, but i sort of owe it to myself to finish it. I just can't read A Shadow Rising again....... 
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Mar 29, 2022 05:26
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Kchama posted:Shannara or Wheel of Time? wot wasn't a straight copy of lotr, it's essentially a coming of age story with some novel ideas, but its execution wasn't good
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Mar 29, 2022 05:30
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Vampire Panties posted:I got to the party late on Dragonlance; I don't think I read those until I was out of high school. I never really saw the appeal lol that was one of the better wot books, so if you don't like even that one then you should read something you like more. no one should feel obligated to waste time reading novels they don't like. if you want to find out what happens, check wikipedia
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Mar 29, 2022 05:34
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ChubbyChecker posted:wot wasn't a straight copy of lotr, it's essentially a coming of age story with some novel ideas, but its execution wasn't good It wasn't a straight copy but it was still a very transparent and shameless ripoff. Also the 'coming of age' aspect is pretty silly when you learn that Rand's twenty years old, despite the first book being written like he was 12.
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Mar 29, 2022 05:47
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WoT Book 1: "gently caress, I'm running out of book and they're nowhere near the action. Better put in a warp zone." Book 2: "Here's a completely different kind of warp zone to get to somewhere else." Didn't read book 3, decided to cut my losses there.
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Mar 29, 2022 05:51
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super sweet best pal posted:WoT Book 1: "gently caress, I'm running out of book and they're nowhere near the action. Better put in a warp zone." There's at least two other warp zones IIRC. ChubbyChecker posted:lol that was one of the better wot books, so if you don't like even that one then you should read something you like more. no one should feel obligated to waste time reading novels they don't like. if you want to find out what happens, check wikipedia WoT is a weird one for me - I started reading it in 6th grade (I actually think I read Eye of the World & The Great Hunt before I read LOTR) and I was obsessed. I read and re-read and read all of those books again. I cut class my senior year to pick up my pre-ordered copy of A Crown Of Swords from Waldenbooks and devoured it in 24 hours. I didn't really have friends in middle school or high school, so I hung the gently caress out with Lan and Moiriane. Eventually I got a job and a car and graduated and moved on and stopped reading them, specifically because I couldn't keep up with all of the names and subtle references without going back and rereading 7 or 8 or 9 books. I always said I would sit down and re-read them all once the series was complete, and I've spoiled the ending for myself on various wiki sites so I know that the ending is actually worth reading, but yeah.... I used to read 12 books in a month without question, and now I read less than 12 books a year.
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Mar 29, 2022 06:33
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super sweet best pal posted:WoT Book 1: "gently caress, I'm running out of book and they're nowhere near the action. Better put in a warp zone." I have a deep and unholy love for Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, which often reads like he's having arguments (or occasionally agreeing) with whichever sff author he read most recently. There's 10 books in the series; the first 5 are basically all simultaneous with different POV spread over a couple of continents but after that he decided to set the next 2 on one small island because, according to him, he was absolutely pig sick of having to manoeuvre his characters all over the map to get them to the meetups and places his plot demanded and wanted to just have them walk places for a change.
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Mar 29, 2022 10:14
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precision posted:ah right. I tend to lump all pre-90s sci fi into one big pile, and forget that the guys in the 50s were even worse If you think it was bad in the 50s, check out some stuff from the generation before that. Ah, this reminds me of a gloriously wonderful moment from an old Edmond Hamilton story. "The Star-Stealers". This thing was written in the late 1920s, Hamilton was one of the foundational space opera writers. We didn't know about how stars work by nuclear fusion yet. So it's a hundred thousand years in the future and humanity has colonized the entire solar system, have an advanced culture with very little recognizable from our time, and is part of a wider galactic civilization with many many aliens; we contribute starships to the common space patrol, to keep peace and justice across the galaxy. So there's an extragalactic threat with tentacle monsters that try to steal the Sun because their own sun has gone out. Now the story follows a human-crewed ship, and one of the few named (and surviving) characters is a young female flight officer... amazingly, for something written in the 1920s, she's described as being exactly as tough and competent as the men, and I don't think the author even wastes a word on describing her appearance (not that he spent much on any of the characters, each of them was just there to do a job in the story). But. However. At the very end, once the tentacle monsters are defeated and the survivors get to go home for a victory parade and some well-deserved R&R... she heads straight to a beauty parlor, as is ever the unchanging way of her sex. I died laughing.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:22
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Cornwind Evil posted:
4b) Really. You are not Nabokov. Don't. n+1) Don't be a loving Nazi either.
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Mar 29, 2022 11:23
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Empty Sandwich posted:one of the main characters in Shannara is named Allanon and every time his name came up I thought "well, I'm glad he's getting help" I read them when I was 8, and they were amazing. I'm glad I got better.
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Mar 29, 2022 12:02
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thoughts and prayers posted:I read them when I was 8, and they were amazing. LOL, yeah. I was feeling a bit bad about all the terrible books I read as a kid. Whole series of bad books. Then I remembered that I read constantly. 4-5 novels a week by junior high. Of course I read a bunch of dodgy stuff, I was reading hundreds of books per year of whatever was available in the local libraries.
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Mar 29, 2022 12:15
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Caesar Saladin posted:I read Lord of Light and found it to be one of the most awesomely creative sci fi books I've read. What else of his is good? Eye of Cat is excellent. It's also one of Zelazny's personal favorites. It's based on Navajo mythology, which is rare and refreshing, and like many of his books of that era, also a total acid trip. IMO the parts that struck me most were these small interludes sprinkled throughout, of several of the Gods and what they personify. Coyote was hilarious, because he really is the trickster god, who has great ideas but always goes too far and ends up tricking himself. (Yeah, it's obvious where Loony Tunes Coyote comes from.) Over the course of the book, I could feel these inform the inner journey of the protagonist, in a different way than a straightforward narrative would have.
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Mar 29, 2022 12:22
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Cornwind Evil posted:I did read the Dragonlance series, or the first two trilogies, decades ago, and I was too mentally regressed due to undiagnosed autism/Asperger's to notice its flaws (hell, I even read Pier Anthony's infamous Firefly and even ITS grossness flew over my head), but people keep saying that they, and Drizzt, read way too much like a story made of a D&D campaign. And I just wondered, how? Do the fights read like people rolled dice to decide the order? Do they really drive home that each character has 'a class'? Do they repeatedly do the same move over the books? I recall someone mentioned how the heroes got stuck and then some guy called Paladine literally dropped gryphons on them to get them somewhere, which was an analogy for when the DM railroaded IIRC, but I'm interested in details. The first Dragonlance trilogy is explicitly a novelization of the D&D campaign that inspired it, so yes, it reads like that on purpose.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:12
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Isn't there a new-ish genre where they do away with even the veneer of it being an actual world and just stat out characters and poo poo?
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Mar 29, 2022 13:16
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We don't discuss anime here!
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Mar 29, 2022 13:17
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They're actual books I believe. Well "actual books" may be stretching it. I'd never sully the bad fantasy book thread with anime.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:20
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Dude had some rough edges of his time, but for his time he was impressively not hosed up. And his prose is utter delight, at times poetry. Edit: referring to Zelazny, didn't see the intervening posts.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:20
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Groovelord Neato posted:Isn't there a new-ish genre where they do away with even the veneer of it being an actual world and just stat out characters and poo poo? LitRPG. It's as soul-destroying as it sounds.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:20
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Facebook Aunt posted:LOL, yeah. I was feeling a bit bad about all the terrible books I read as a kid. Whole series of bad books. Then I remembered that I read constantly. 4-5 novels a week by junior high. Of course I read a bunch of dodgy stuff, I was reading hundreds of books per year of whatever was available in the local libraries. Old SF and Fantasy used to be waayyy shorter as well.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:25
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Groke posted:However. At the very end, once the tentacle monsters are defeated and the survivors get to go home for a victory parade and some well-deserved R&R... she heads straight to a beauty parlor, as is ever the unchanging way of her sex. I died laughing. I think it's really hokey and silly, kind of cringey in that old time sexist way, but realistically I think I would want a haircut and a mani after a long space voyage and defeating a monster, especially if I were to be in a parade! Like, how did you even cut your hair in space? Clippings all over! Miserable! If you turn it on its head, it's kind of a reasonable reaction, though the writer was just being a patronizing, typical example of his type.
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Mar 29, 2022 13:59
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Runcible Cat posted:LitRPG. It's as soul-destroying as it sounds. I know someone who wrote(writes?) this. She said she had to keep track of all the character stats and actions so the turbo nerd readers wouldn't be able to pour over the plot and point out that some character wouldn't actually have been able to do that today.
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Mar 29, 2022 15:38
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Runcible Cat posted:LitRPG. It's as soul-destroying as it sounds. Yes but you get to pad your writing with walls of text like code:I should probably cash in on this.
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Mar 29, 2022 16:17
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Spazzle posted:I know someone who wrote(writes?) this. She said she had to keep track of all the character stats and actions so the turbo nerd readers wouldn't be able to pour over the plot and point out that some character wouldn't actually have been able to do that today. I remember years ago on goon safari to the TVTropes forum we found someone who must've been close to Patient Zero for this trend. He was agonising in one of their writer advice threads about how he was having trouble with his character's first boss fight because he only had 3 healing potions and that wasn't enough and he had to win that fight because he got his girlfriend as a rare drop at the end of it and god how we mocked that. Had we but known...
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Mar 29, 2022 16:35
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Just the description of LitRPG the first time I encountered it in the wild was enough to give me a hard Nope! on ever reading any.
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Mar 29, 2022 16:36
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