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Just a final heads up that the new dungeon crawler Carl comes out tomorrow and the preorder price is cheaper than the release price will be, so last chance (for now) to get it for less than full price
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Jul 2, 2023 00:56
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Good Citizen posted:Drew Hayes just released a new book which appears to be an anthology taking place in the Villains Code world. I’m in the middle of another book right now but will definitely be picking it up as soon as I finish It's a really enjoyable read and I recommend it!
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Jul 4, 2023 03:20
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 https://www.amazon.com/Capacity-Serve-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B0C9TRVQ4Q My short story collection should be on KU now. Any feedback is welcome  .
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Jul 5, 2023 11:05
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8one6 posted:It's a really enjoyable read and I recommend it! Drew Hayes is one of my favorite KU-level authors. I finished the latest Dungeon Crawler Carl book - I liked it, but as always Dinniman leaves off with an escalation in stakes that makes me eager for the next book. I hate how much I love these deeply stupid books.
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Jul 5, 2023 16:16
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Captain Monkey posted:Drew Hayes is one of my favorite KU-level authors. I just finished it last night too. This book was always going to be a bit of a build up book since so much weight is being put into what’s going to happen on the 9th floor. Overall it was a good book and had a lot of great character driven sections especially with the AI. Not sure if I need to spoiler that but I will anyway. Carl was generally more reactive in this book instead of having huge plans he was pulling off, but it all made sense in the story.
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Jul 5, 2023 16:25
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I also finished up the latest DCC, and enjoyed it a lot. I'm always impressed with the author's ability to walk the line between comedy, action, and pathos, especially considering how utterly goofy most of the setup is. I got a little annoyed at one of the points when Carl got yet another seemingly impossible quest dumped on his lap, but all in all I feel like everything came together really nicely. I cannot believe that the author doesnt preplan these books.
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Jul 5, 2023 17:28
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I do always wonder with Villains' Code whether Tori is meant to be gay as hell and clueless (go on, tell us again about Britney's 'captivating eyes') or whether it's just Hayes having difficulty turning off the male gaze. Titan in Corpos certainly came across as one of the straightest gay dudes I've ever read.
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Jul 6, 2023 01:47
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Haystack posted:I also finished up the latest DCC, and enjoyed it a lot. I'm always impressed with the author's ability to walk the line between comedy, action, and pathos, especially considering how utterly goofy most of the setup is. It ended with a pretty hilarious climax too.
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Jul 9, 2023 12:53
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As some who uses KU mainly for the access to magazines like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, I’d like to delve more deeply into, well, this stuff you guys are talking about. I know that’s there is hyper specific niches like ‘progression fantasy’, but I have no idea what my ‘in’ to the most representative, best example works in the KU sci-if fantasy categories. What’s my ENG 101 KU Appreciation reading list, basically?
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Jul 10, 2023 22:45
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Marsupial Ape posted:As some who uses KU mainly for the access to magazines like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, I’d like to delve more deeply into, well, this stuff you guys are talking about. I know that’s there is hyper specific niches like ‘progression fantasy’, but I have no idea what my ‘in’ to the most representative, best example works in the KU sci-if fantasy categories. Duchy of Terra is good for KU SF.
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Jul 11, 2023 00:14
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Marsupial Ape posted:As some who uses KU mainly for the access to magazines like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, I’d like to delve more deeply into, well, this stuff you guys are talking about. I know that’s there is hyper specific niches like ‘progression fantasy’, but I have no idea what my ‘in’ to the most representative, best example works in the KU sci-if fantasy categories. KU Sci Fi that I've read and enjoyed (and seen recommended on thread): Mil Sci Fi: Poor Man's Fight Spiral Wars Marko Kloos's stuff Other: Murderbot Silo series used to be KU but got pulled with the TV show coming out I think Rabidbunnylover fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 05:07
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Duchy of Terra is good for KU SF. +1, Yeah, Glynn Stewart cranks out an absolutely insane amount of writing, and it's all pretty respectably enjoyable.
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Jul 11, 2023 14:48
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Marsupial Ape posted:As some who uses KU mainly for the access to magazines like Asimov’s and Clarkesworld, I’d like to delve more deeply into, well, this stuff you guys are talking about. I know that’s there is hyper specific niches like ‘progression fantasy’, but I have no idea what my ‘in’ to the most representative, best example works in the KU sci-if fantasy categories. For 'progression fantasy', your best entry-point to the Chinese xianxia style (about magical martial artists going from zero to hero in an amoral social-Darwinist world through hoovering up secret techniques, forbidden sources of power, and ancient artefacts like there's no tomorrow) is Will Wight's Cradle series, about a talentless young man in a backwater village who's shown a terrifying vision of his homeland's destruction and is told to git gud fast enough to stop it. Unfortunately, that's also likely to be your departure point, because most of the rest of the genre is poo poo even before you take into account how much of it is crudely machine-translated from Chinese into English. You may also want to try Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinninan for a more horror-comedy-flavoured take inspired more closely by western RPGs (both computer and tabletop) about a man and his suddenly-sapient cat struggling to deal with the fact that a coalition of horrible alien civilisations have turned Earth into a gladiatorial arena/reality TV studio with the rapidly-dwindling human race as its hapless, unwilling stars.
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Jul 11, 2023 15:31
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Gwaihir posted:+1, Yeah, Glynn Stewart cranks out an absolutely insane amount of writing, and it's all pretty respectably enjoyable. All the Duchy of Terra books kind of follow the same formula and I dropped them after awhile, but I had a lot of fun with the first few.
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Jul 11, 2023 20:38
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Darth Walrus posted:For 'progression fantasy', your best entry-point to the Chinese xianxia style (about magical martial artists going from zero to hero in an amoral social-Darwinist world through hoovering up secret techniques, forbidden sources of power, and ancient artefacts like there's no tomorrow) is Will Wight's Cradle series, about a talentless young man in a backwater village who's shown a terrifying vision of his homeland's destruction and is told to git gud fast enough to stop it. Unfortunately, that's also likely to be your departure point, because most of the rest of the genre is poo poo even before you take into account how much of it is crudely machine-translated from Chinese into English. yeah, its a bit of an odd genre because its defining works in Chinese are more notable for their length than anything else (though it wouldn't continue to exist as a genre if it didn't have enjoyable aspects), and the main examples we'd consider "good" in English tend to be deliberate deviations or meta-commentaries on a genre/corpus that in some sense doesn't exist in English and which are hard to fully appreciate unless you're down to read millions of dubiously translated words (and then you get into the weird syncretized stuff like the English translations of Russian takes on xianxia) the genre also embraces serialization, so a lot of the "better" English options in the series are also more likely to be found on Royal Road than KU (at least initially), something like Beware of Chicken falling into that category (though its on KU now - and also falls heavily into the genre meta-commentary camp) - if you want slightly more straight ahead takes on the genre the relatively recent Unintended Cultivator is pretty decent, and Forge of Destiny is ok writing and actively interesting from the standpoint of how these works and serialization can interact/interface with the online medium (without getting too into details its origin is a writeup of a sort of choose your own adventure thing) for KU native stuff I'd maybe point out something like Silver Fox & The Western Hero, and some of Sarah Lin's series (Street Cultivation being an early and frankly middling effort for her, but a good example of an urban fantasy/wuxia hybrid, and The Weirkey Chronicles being a more interesting take on a lot of xianxia-adjacent progression fantasy stuff) as alternatives/expansions to "just read Cradle" e: the best introduction to the Chinese works may be the classic "I Shall Seal the McDonalds" copypasta, which is a nearly pitch-perfect condensation of the experience of reading Er Gen I Shall Seal the McDonald's posted:Meng Hao walked into the McDonald's. The cultivator taking his order gave a derisive snort, but Meng Hao did not really care, because he had repressed his aura down to the Single Patty Realm, and a fool would not be able to tell his true level of burger eating. LGD fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 11, 2023 |
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Jul 11, 2023 20:39
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Excellent recommendations, thank you. If anybody has entry points to other hyper specific sub genres, I’d appreciate more of those. I am in a mood to read something I never would have, otherwise.
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Jul 11, 2023 22:16
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I've been reading through the In Dying Starlight series by Emily McCosh. All seem to be on KU, all pretty breezy quick reads (tops out at about 140 pages), and book 10 comes out in a week. A rogue malfunctioning cyborg and his half-robot intelligent failed genetic experiment badger buddy mess up bounty hunts in spaaaaaaace. First book is like 70 pages and you can figure out if you like the quippy action bits from there. They pick up a few side character tag-alongs as the book goes, and overall it looks like they are going for a bit of a Firefly-ish feel to it.
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Jul 12, 2023 02:55
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A common specific sub genre is portal fantasy/isekai novels, and I think a good introduction there would be Magic and the Shinigami Detective, by Honor Raconteur. Not a lit-rpg, not a complete power trip fantasy, and it includes a reasoned approach to someone from the modern world getting dropped into a world with magic, but also technology and society roughly at turn of the century to inter-war period levels. It is presented as case files written by a magical investigator, who partners with an FBI agent from our world that was abducted by a witch, pumped full of magical protections and body enhancements, who then killed the witch and found herself in this world. There are quite a few books in the series, but they started to spin their wheels around book 4 or 5, in my opinion.
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Jul 12, 2023 03:01
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Bremen posted:All the Duchy of Terra books kind of follow the same formula and I dropped them after awhile, but I had a lot of fun with the first few. I did enjoy how the resolution to the final galaxy-shaking threat was "hey, did we ever try asking nicely for them to stop?" Ceebees fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Jul 12, 2023 |
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Jul 12, 2023 08:31
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Ceebees posted:I did enjoy how the resolution to the final galaxy-shaking threat was "hey, did we every try asking nicely for them to stop?" Yknow I've actually completely forgotten what the ending of the series was, what even was the final threat? I vaguely remember some cult under the thrall of the guys that spooked the precursors/forerunners/whatever the ancient guys who the mesharom used to serve were? One thing I really liked about that series was how it presented a universe where, typically, problems were solved by reasonable people on both sides talk things out while setting hard lines like "say no to slavery and genocide"
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Jul 12, 2023 10:47
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yknow I've actually completely forgotten what the ending of the series was, what even was the final threat? And I'd forgotten the cult. The last book or two were about the enemy of the precursors, who were a non-evil version of the zerg / the Beast from homeworld, organic space gribblies that would get into your spaceship and wear it like a hermit crab. I don't think they influenced the cult, since they were totally dormant ever since the precursors killed themselves in the space kablooey. The protag accidently woke them up and they saw a bunch of people using precursor derived technology, so they assumed the war was still on and started shooting. It is nice how Glynn's books include dialogue and politics as reasonable solutions to problems most milsf would throw an improbably large missile salvo at. But... it does also get a little trite the third or fourth time he has the Reasonable Faction emerge from the previously implacable and monolithic bad guys so the protagonist can warily team up with them without compromising their morals and pave the way for the eventual redemption arc. It's an author foible, not a problem with any individual series, but still.
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Jul 12, 2023 17:12
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Ceebees posted:And I'd forgotten the cult. Very specifically, the starkiller bombs they had are effectively just now-defunct precursor FTL drives, and the space aliens thought they had been enslaved by the precursors and freed them, opening up a chance for dialogue that had previously been thought impossible due to circumstances. It's actually kind of a novel solution for things to have continually escalated so much despite kind of being resolved a bit too neatly. The main plot before that had been the cult enslaved by a precursor lab-grown space alien that had grown large enough to devour stars and had grown far, far beyond its implanted restraints.
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Jul 13, 2023 01:17
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Couple thoughts on what I have read lately: Fourth book in the Mark of the Fool came out, it was alright. Anyone hoping for less academy stuff, you will probably be disappointed. There was more stuff in his homeland, but still a lot of school stuff. Lots of setup of plot threads for later books, some dungeon delving, not much resolution. His improvements to his body rub me the wrong way, it feels really out of place and unnecessary, but I don't know that I can fully articulate why. Read the Bronze Ranked Brewer books, and enjoyed them quite a bit. I like the plot and world building, and most of the characters, but good lord this might be the worst example of a fantasy world that needs therapists I've ever seen. And not in the typical "I am a bloodsoaked harbinger of death, that has killed a thousand thousand people since the age of 6" way most fantasy books do it. More "My childhood boyfriend cheated on me, time to live as a hermit forever". Also, I have zero interest in beer and brewing, I can't tell if I was supposed to take the absurd descriptions of beer seriously or not. Either way, I enjoyed it, will look forward to the next book. Finally, just finished the latest published book in Beneath the Dragoneye Moons. I asked a long time ago in here for a book about healers, and this series was basically laser focused on what I wanted. If you want a book about someone reincarnated from Earth on a Roman fantasy world with a full System, with all her knowledge of medicine intact, this is it. Warning: it is very, very heavy on LitRPG sins. Skill spam, massive stat blocks, endless class and ability descriptions. I only got through it because it was so close to what I wanted to read, if your tolerance for LitRPG bullshit isn't high, avoid. To tie this into the other two books mentioned: There is a very, very long set of chapters detailing the main character's improvements to her own body later that drags (and a bunch of sections where she is choosing a new class throughout the series that overstay their welcome). And another book where the characters all desperately need a therapist, but they do find one! Its nice.
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Jul 25, 2023 21:57
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My only real problem with BTDEM is how hard it simps for the cops - excuse me, the “Guard”, lol.
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Jul 25, 2023 23:18
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I was reading dragoneye moon and it was going ok and then the author I guess got tired of the arc where she was a sentinel and just time skipped out halfway through. Looked up whether she just really wanted to do the next arc and everyone online said the series got worse after that so I figured it was time to bail.
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Jul 26, 2023 23:46
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Went through duchy of terra and enjoyed it even with the thread mentioned formulaic resolutions. Lots of great stuff even if you know the book is going to end well. It’s still fun to guess who is going to have a real bad day, and Stewart does a nice job of introducing enough side cast that some of them get wrecked and others get lucky. What is the next good series of his to read? Also accepting general recs for hfy nonsense and uplifts.
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Jul 27, 2023 02:36
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30.5 Days posted:I was reading dragoneye moon and it was going ok and then the author I guess got tired of the arc where she was a sentinel and just time skipped out halfway through. Looked up whether she just really wanted to do the next arc and everyone online said the series got worse after that so I figured it was time to bail.
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Jul 27, 2023 02:48
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I enjoyed his Space Carrier Avalon stuff, it has a weirdly brisk start and struggles to find its footing, plus some unfortunate terminology that he summarily drops presumably when it’s pointed out to him, I enjoyed it because it’s nowhere near as clean as Duchy of Terra, with issues usually only being partially resolved. Stewart seems like a really well meaning guy honestly, so I’m happily reading everything he’s done just for that.
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Jul 27, 2023 02:50
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30.5 Days posted:I was reading dragoneye moon and it was going ok and then the author I guess got tired of the arc where she was a sentinel and just time skipped out halfway through. Looked up whether she just really wanted to do the next arc and everyone online said the series got worse after that so I figured it was time to bail.
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Jul 27, 2023 13:10
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wrong thread, i think
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Jul 27, 2023 13:46
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battle mage farmer is like if Beware of Chicken was Sanderson-vibes instead of Xianxia. also... a little too focused on the magical fantasy violence. get back to inventing a combine dammit john. also love the bandit king who was trying to sexually assault a lady being a protag now
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Aug 10, 2023 02:48
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tokenbrownguy posted:battle mage farmer is like if Beware of Chicken was Sanderson-vibes instead of Xianxia. also... a little too focused on the magical fantasy violence. get back to inventing a combine dammit john. Yeah, that’s kinda when I glided for the exit.
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Aug 10, 2023 04:52
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I read a few books into BMF and it just never got interesting or well written enough to continue. The BM always wins and the mega computer brain power solves everything he can't instantly win through 'im just that good'. No hate on the people that liked it, but Beware of Chicken was a lot better in my opinion.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:45
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continued my random lovely litrpg journey with All the Skills: A Deck Building LitRPG. pretty dang good. almost slice of lifey. no cringey dialogue, the main character is a child so no creepin'. compelling start to the heroes journey. would recommend.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:37
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Is there anything on KU that is akin to Terry Brooks Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold!? Basically, isekia for depressed middle aged men? Asking for a friend.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:21
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....isn't that most isekai? It's pretty rare that the MC actually enjoys their life prior to being yoinkrd. though admittedly it's becoming more popular.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:38
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Telsa Cola posted:....isn't that most isekai? It's pretty rare that the MC actually enjoys their life prior to being yoinkrd. though admittedly it's becoming more popular. Emphasis on ‘middle-aged’.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:45
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Marsupial Ape posted:Emphasis on ‘middle-aged’. The Weirkey Chronicles, probably. And Ar'Kendrithyst, although that's on royal road.
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Aug 29, 2023 05:14
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Haystack posted:The Weirkey Chronicles, probably. And Ar'Kendrithyst, although that's on royal road. Thanks. I’ll check those out.
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Aug 29, 2023 05:23
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Fair warning: I read the first Weirkey book and found it excruciatingly dull. I like Ar’Kendrithyst but it has a weak beginning. It really does get good after the first 30 or so chapters.
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Aug 29, 2023 05:27
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