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GhastlyBizness posted:Try M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books, they’re 100% this. Is Sunken Lands sci-fi/fantasy/genre-fiction, or more critic-pleasing literary stuff? I loved Harrison's Viriconium stuff, and the praise for Sunken Lands was very real, but not a single review I've read has been able to indicate whether it's ~*~ Literature ~*~ or SF/F? And to forestall the inevitable derail, I know that these two things are not mutually exclusive, but this is the terminology we have to work with, y'all know what I mean.
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Nov 3, 2023 09:48
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Kestral posted:Is Sunken Lands sci-fi/fantasy/genre-fiction, or more critic-pleasing literary stuff? I loved Harrison's Viriconium stuff, and the praise for Sunken Lands was very real, but not a single review I've read has been able to indicate whether it's ~*~ Literature ~*~ or SF/F? Tricky one. Critics did love it and it won the Goldsmith… To quote Harrison himself, it’s “not science fiction or folk horror or psychogeography, but it contains parodic elements of all three, and more”. In general, even in stuff like his Kefahuchi tract books which are nominally space operas, he’s not interested (actively disinterested, really) in working to genre conventions. That being said, if we’re going with touchstone references here, it’s probably closest to horror or weird fiction in terms of genre, if in the stranger reaches of those. Robert Aickman, some of Stanislaw Lem, that sort of thing. It’s not plot driven, there’s no action scenes or what have you, much more of a vibes-based character story. There is a big murky unclear conspiracy going on - probably to do with fish people or something like that? - but the two main characters are basically too wrapped up in their own poo poo to really notice or even comprehend it when it’s rubbed in their face. This chap’s review gets at it quite well, I thought: https://schicksalgemeinschaft.wordpress.com/2020/07/22/the-sunken-land-begins-to-rise-again-m-john-harrison-2020/
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Nov 3, 2023 11:12
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I thought Sunken Lands felt a lot like a Robert Aickman story, in that there's weird poo poo going around in the background, but the characters aren't able to understand what they're seeing, or are too busy with their lives to even notice it. Anyway, as for books with long, complex, and obscure histories, for me the obvious answer is Dune. I'd also suggest Michael Moorcock's "Second Ether" trilogy (Blood, Fabulous Harbours, The War Amongst the Angels), which is a long exercise in not doing exposition.
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Nov 3, 2023 13:24
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fez_machine posted:My brother have you read Jack Vance? The Dying Earth and Lynonese series are as influential as they get on the authors you have mentioned. (Every month or so in this thread, someone comes in and goes wow you said Vance was good but I didn't expect this good) I just finished the second book in The Dying Earth series. Overall, there is a lot that I like about it and I can see how it was foundational to several future fantasy series (and D&D). But yikes, at the depiction of pretty much every single female character. Product of its time and all, but this is pretty rough. I am pausing my read through to go through Le Guin's Rocannon's World and the other short stories in the collection for the Book Club thread. Pretty excited, since I have managed to never read anything from her. I'll come back and read the final two Dying Earth stories after.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:05
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Le Guin is so very good.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:12
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Groke posted:Le Guin is so very good. I think I say without exaggeration that she is the Hemingway of the SFF genres, given her ability to evoke such emotion and vistas of the mind in so few words. Not a word out of place.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:41
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Screaming_Gremlin posted:I just finished the second book in The Dying Earth series. Overall, there is a lot that I like about it and I can see how it was foundational to several future fantasy series (and D&D). But yikes, at the depiction of pretty much every single female character. Product of its time and all, but this is pretty rough.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:41
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anilEhilated posted:That is true, but there's also the fact that most of Vance's characters are, not to put too fine a point on it, assholes.
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Nov 3, 2023 15:49
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I don't think you'll go wrong with BotLS. I thought he got banned
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Nov 3, 2023 17:21
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General Battuta posted:I thought he got banned a prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.
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Nov 3, 2023 17:28
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GhastlyBizness posted:Tricky one. Critics did love it and it won the Goldsmith… To quote Harrison himself, it’s “not science fiction or folk horror or psychogeography, but it contains parodic elements of all three, and more”. In general, even in stuff like his Kefahuchi tract books which are nominally space operas, he’s not interested (actively disinterested, really) in working to genre conventions. Goootcha, probably not for me then. Thanks for sorting that out! I'm still in the process of looking over the many, many recommendations for alien-environment SF over the last several pages - thanks, folks! - and wanted to follow up on a couple of them. Hieronymous Alloy posted:The book you're looking for is probably The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. It's a bit dated in parts but some of the first truly well done survival themed SF ever written. Iiiiiinteresting. Looking into this one, I see that there's the author's original version, and a version which was supposedly rewritten by James Stoddard "as a labor of love, to bring the work to a wider audience" because the language is supposedly impenetrable. Any thoughts on these versions? Are we talking impenetrable to wider audiences as in The Silmarillion and Book of the New Sun, or like, Finnegan's Wake? pseudorandom name posted:Dark Eden trilogy by Chris Beckett, which I didn't like enough to finish the second book. Argh, that's a shame, I've had Dark Eden on my to-read list for years because the pitch of "permanently dark planet with a bioluminescent ecosystem" sounded great. Is the first book a decent enough standalone?
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Nov 3, 2023 18:35
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I also bailed on the second book but the first stands on its own, absolutely
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Nov 3, 2023 19:46
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Selachian posted:
I'm sure it got retconned away by the Brian Herbet/Kevin J Anderson atrocities but the 1984 Dune Encyclopedia is a legit amazing expansion of the history, culture and tech of the universe and had Franks seal of approval.
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Nov 3, 2023 20:27
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Chairman Capone posted:Never read Book of the New Sun, but I did read Book of the Long Sun and really enjoyed it at the time. I do wonder if it would hold up if I went back to it now. I remember my girlfriend at the time getting really into my attempts to explain the plot. I do think it has a cool setting, though. I guess it'd depend on what you liked about it the first time but yes Wolfe's books tend to "hold up" on a re-read because you're likely to see and understand things you missed the first time. I should read the Short Sun books again for that reason...I don't think they were as good as Long Sun or New Sun but still had a lot of Wolfe's weirdness
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Nov 4, 2023 00:05
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That's actually a pretty odd opinion. Usually people who read the whole solar cycle either rather New or Short as the tops and almost universally rate Urth and Long the lowest. I find Long to be the most inconsistent, Silk is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and the whole scenario and plot are great but stretches of the novels can be a huge drag.
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Nov 4, 2023 00:13
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Admiralty Flag posted:I think I say without exaggeration that she is the Hemingway of the SFF genres, given her ability to evoke such emotion and vistas of the mind in so few words. Not a word out of place. I'm slowly going through her anthology The Unreal and the Real and only hit something vaguely SFF at the fifth story in. Absolutely fantastic prose in everything, her landscapes are amazing.
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Nov 4, 2023 00:19
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Levitate posted:I guess it'd depend on what you liked about it the first time but yes Wolfe's books tend to "hold up" on a re-read because you're likely to see and understand things you missed the first time. I find wolfes stuff drops off kind of sharply, like after soldier of arete? Not the most popular opinion, but it feels like his characters spend most of their time explaining the plot to each other past a certain point
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Nov 4, 2023 01:17
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fez_machine posted:…highly recommended sourcing Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness from the high seas (they're long neglected and out of print)
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Nov 4, 2023 05:59
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Remulak posted:I found A Chorus Line more interesting to think about.
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Nov 4, 2023 06:32
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Remulak posted:Read the first of these and half of the second; first is unusually imaginative 80’s fantasy, with some interesting narrative approaches. Second is inferior Cudgel with a lot of stuff that should work better than it does. Dance 10 looks 5 oops I mean imagination 10 execution 5 but I found A Chorus Line more interesting to think about. The first Chronicles of an Age of Darkness is pretty brilliant and unique imo, although with some rough edges. The second one I haven't read yet, but apparently it was a book that Cook was urged to write by the publishers to tie the other novels together, and he himself thought it was a bit unnecessary. So it's probably not surprising that it's inferior.
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Nov 4, 2023 07:34
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I like the third entry a lot which recasts a lot of the first book's heroes in a starkly different light and is a pretty good attempt at recasting an imposing minor character with a quasi-feminist eye. But it never really stops being Cudgel-lite every second book, but I liked that plus the bottle swapping.
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Nov 4, 2023 07:52
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Even if you don't go any further, I'd definitely say The Wizards and the Warriors was worth a read.
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Nov 4, 2023 09:34
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2 & 5 are the weakest, with 8 a probable runner-up, but yeah 3 is amazing, 4 is hilarious and appalling picaresque with a protagonist who may or may not be learning to be a better person than Cugel by the end, 6/7 are my favourites because Shabble. And Codlugarhia. And Empress Justina. And terrifying therapists lurking underground. And my unholy love of footnotes. Oh, and 9 and 10 are both great too. Dorgis! The demon Jocasta and its previous career! Embarrassing sisters joining Darwinist cults!
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Nov 4, 2023 10:59
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Hugh Cook's self-published work is also worth checking out. To Find and Wake the Dreamer is perhaps the best response to 9/11 and The War On Terror that Fantasy produced. Ignore the copy that says how edgy the book is and how triggered you'll get. The book is fine, it just deals with some tough subject matter. Cook was very very bad at selling himself. https://www.lulu.com/shop/hugh-cook/to-find-and-wake-the-dreamer/ebook/product-1m4jyn77.html?page=1&pageSize=4
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Nov 4, 2023 11:33
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Gaius Marius posted:That's actually a pretty odd opinion. Usually people who read the whole solar cycle either rather New or Short as the tops and almost universally rate Urth and Long the lowest. I find Long to be the most inconsistent, Silk is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and the whole scenario and plot are great but stretches of the novels can be a huge drag. Dragging through Long was worth it for some amazing payoffs in Short, imo.
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Nov 4, 2023 16:00
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Going Postal (Discworld #33) by Terry Pratchett - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W965QM/ Quicker than the Eye by Ray Bradbury - $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C4TJAD8/ Baudolino by Umberto Eco - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PDMMYQ/ The Prestimion Trilogy: Sorcerers of Majipoor, Lord Prestimion, and The King of Dreams (The Majipoor Cycle) by Robert Silverberg - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDBM7NHG/
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Nov 4, 2023 18:50
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Looks like the Exordia ARCs have dropped, because my friends in the industry are foaming at the mouth [complimentary] about it.
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Nov 4, 2023 20:22
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ToxicFrog posted:Looks like the Exordia ARCs have dropped, because my friends in the industry are foaming at the mouth [complimentary] about it. Hate the way the publishing business runs, there have been wildly complementary quotes on Tor.com for like a year, why bother giving away free ones and delaying the actual release? Lemme pay money and buy the damned book!
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Nov 4, 2023 20:37
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Gaius Marius posted:That's actually a pretty odd opinion. Usually people who read the whole solar cycle either rather New or Short as the tops and almost universally rate Urth and Long the lowest. I find Long to be the most inconsistent, Silk is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and the whole scenario and plot are great but stretches of the novels can be a huge drag. Yeah I dunno it’s been a long time since I read Short Sun so that’s why I said I wanted to re-read it. Reading Long Sun now and almost done with Litany.
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Nov 4, 2023 21:09
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Gaius Marius posted:That's actually a pretty odd opinion. Usually people who read the whole solar cycle either rather New or Short as the tops and almost universally rate Urth and Long the lowest. I find Long to be the most inconsistent, Silk is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction and the whole scenario and plot are great but stretches of the novels can be a huge drag. I'm also in that bucket of New > Long > Short - just found the opacity was that much higher in Short Sun that I was losing track of what was going on too often. In the earlier books, what was going on at a surface level was still super clear, which gave me a framework to hang the deeper layers on.
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Nov 4, 2023 23:26
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pradmer posted:Going Postal (Discworld #33) by Terry Pratchett - $3.99 If you haven't pulled the trigger on Pratchett yet, unfuck yourself and start here.
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Nov 4, 2023 23:29
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Remulak posted:Hate the way the publishing business runs, there have been wildly complementary quotes on Tor.com for like a year, why bother giving away free ones and delaying the actual release? Lemme pay money and buy the damned book! At some point I actually thought it was releasing this month, and I don't know if that changed or if I just misread something and remembered the ARC date as the actual release date. I know that for hardcopies, ARCs have historically served a functional purpose; it's a chance to catch typos and typesetting errors (and solicit feedback on the layout, pagination, etc from people who don't work for the publisher) before the table of contents, index, etc get finalized. My wife has an ARC cookbook with "000" for all the internal cross-references (including the index) and lots of margin boxes calling attention to potential problems and things they particularly want review feedback for. With ebooks, making changes is a lot faster and easier (and cheaper), but presumably they still want the version that gets uploaded on release day to be as good as possible, and of course many books (Exordia included) are also released in hardcopy, which is much harder to release updates to post hoc. So like, I think the concept of ARCs as a sort of limited beta test for books, a chance to get far more eyes on it than internal QA could ever provide, makes sense. I have no idea how they decide on the timing, though. They've been posting glowing reviews of it for nearly a year! I can only get so hyped up! At least I've got lots of books to read in the meantime, and if I want something to take the edge off, I still haven't played Blue Planet.
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Nov 4, 2023 23:42
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I'm contemplating just reviewing everything I've read in the last 2-5 years on Goodreads so I can get access to books like these sooner. I've had it on preorder since February and that wouldn't change but I'd like to read it.
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Nov 5, 2023 01:26
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ToxicFrog posted:I have no idea how they decide on the timing, though. They've been posting glowing reviews of it for nearly a year! I can only get so hyped up! e: the short version is "it's different by publisher and also ridiculous," but the long version is -- Years ago, I had family friends who worked in purchasing for a library and as far as i can tell, most publishers had the strategy of "send ARC as soon as possible dear god buy our books" - but there was one major publisher who had policies where they basically wanted you to beg them to please, maybe, please consider sending us an ARC. Practically demanding poo poo like a 5 page essay to justify why they should send a book they, presumably, wanted people to buy. This resulted in significantly less purchasing, go figure. I'm a couple years out of date, at this point, so big grain of salt and all, but you might think the change to mostly e-ARCs would change things but aside from speed of sending out a copy, it seems like the same spread of publisher behavior from 'sure, have one' to 'demonstrate your worthiness' except for the new dimension of at least one pub selling e-ARCs like video game companies sell "early access." timing feels equally inconsistent; sometimes I got ARCs of books freshly sent over that were ready to be published in six weeks, one time it was ten months. I have to assume there's some scheduling process going on at most publishers, but it could be darts at a dartboard for all it made sense to me. Psion fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Nov 5, 2023 |
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Nov 5, 2023 01:53
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As far as I can tell, Tordotcom sends out ARCs quite far in advance, and makes a big deal of it, which leads to a bunch of hype on social media months out from release, and then when the books are actually released, nobody talks about it because everyone visible already talked about it months ago. I think that's a problem with how social media/influencer style marketing interacts with traditional publishing practice (where ARCs are to get booksellers to buy and reviewers to review), leading to people very publicly showing off books that nobody else can read and sort of defeating the purpose of ARCs as advertising, but also I bet those grapes are sour anyway.
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Nov 5, 2023 03:02
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Rand Brittain posted:Speaking of self-published authors, you know what would be really useful if someone could develop it? Some kind of tool that will automatically produce decent-looking typography so that authors can put the title and author's name on top of a piece of cover art without it screaming "SELF-PUBLISHED! SHAME! SHAME" to anybody who looks at it. Pretty much the only self-pub authors doing their own covers these days are the ones who have the skills to do it, like newts, or the ones who can't afford to pay even the $35 USD it costs to get a GetCovers (discount arm of Miblart, a pretty well known cover design firm) cover done. Everybody else is getting pro covers and typography done because if there's one thing you should spend on it's your cover. You will still run across the occasional book with one of those "I did this in MS Paint while blindfolded myself" covers but they're pretty few and far between. Sometimes it's not the author making the cover though. I've seen authors get confused about art they personally like and art that sells books. Having control over your covers is usually a big plus for self-pub unless you have no eye for cover design or art because that is how you end up with authors commissioning covers that are just not good. ToxicFrog posted:I think the concept of ARCs as a sort of limited beta test for books, a chance to get far more eyes on it than internal QA could ever provide, makes sense. ARCs are to build hype and for marketing; do not confuse with beta reading copies or with proof copies. Beta readers provide feedback to the author so the author can get feedback on whether the book is hitting the mark. The usual understanding is that the draft is finished (i.e. feature complete) but not polished (e.g. clunky sentences, passages, continuity issues, etc may still abound). And usually, at least for me, beta reads result in a few significant changes (new scenes, total rewrites of scenes, resequencing chapters, etc) to the book. I've never had a beta read where I didn't have structural revisions to do. These take a lot of time, time that you don't have when ARCs have gone out, and also you wouldn't want to, because if you change big stuff, the ARC reviews aren't gonna reflect the published book. By the time you're issuing ARCs, it's too late to change anything but the smallest of stuff because of what a massive pain in the rear end it is. You can screw up a lot of stuff unintentionally. I'm self-pub and even though I *could* change stuff any time I want for any reason, once my ARCs go out, I'm not touching a thing unless it's some sort of critical flaw that will totally derail the book launch. (I have done this once, ever.) There's too much in train to risk it. That said, depending on how big a lead up you want between ARCs and publication date, the ARCs you send out might be uncorrected proof copies that your proofreaders are also getting. But your ARC readers are NOT your proofreaders. An ARC reader is there to give an honest review of the book and to publish it, ideally to Goodreads and Amazon and their own platform be it a blog or social media. You want tons and tons of ARCs. You want to paper the world with ARCs. You want to launch on publication date with at least 20 or 50 or 100 reviews so the algos take note and start recommending the book on their own so it doesn't sink into the abyss. You need to give out like at least 10x the number of reviews you're hoping to get because unless you're the most highly anticipated release of the season, your ARC is not gonna be at the top of the average ARC reader's TBR. Of the portion who read in time for your launch, only a fraction will review in time for launch. The bigger the lead time you give for ARCs, the more reviews you can collect. Also book boxes and other things need ARCs like way in advance. The latest episode of the Publishing Rodeo podcast talks about this: https://publishingrodeo.wordpress.com/2023/11/04/s1-ep30-relaunching-a-career/ Most people need to see/hear about a book a lot of times (7 to 13 depending on which marketing guru you ask) to actually go from "aware" to "interested" to "want to read" to "buying now". A long ARC window where all they keep seeing/hearing is people talking about the ARC means more people are more likely to buy it. Also pre-orders are kind of really important for trad pub as I understand things. It's a little different with self-pub in that you can get away with not doing one, and pre-orders affect the algo differently but most self-pub is also moving towards pre-orders. Leng fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Nov 5, 2023 |
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Nov 5, 2023 11:38
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Back to book chat: all 10 finalists for this year's Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off have been announced. My book which got nominated as a semi-finalist juuuuuuuuuuust missed out on being selected as a finalist - it got beaten by a book from a previous finalist which was a pretty good way to go. Anyway, the finalists this year look very interesting with a lot of different types of fantasy represented: cozy, gaslamp, weird west, epic, something that's apparently cottagecore (I have no idea what that is), and "grindark" as opposed to grimdark. I'm most excited to read The Fall is All There Is - I grabbed it in a sale earlier this year based on the first chapter and the voice is just fantastic.
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Nov 5, 2023 11:40
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Burned through a couple older SF books the last few days. The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester goes like a mile a minute and deals in Big Ideas. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and unlike the last book I read with a terrible protagonist (Gateway) this one didn’t bother me as much probably because he was so clearly not a real person but rather a vehicle for Bester to get his ideas to the reader. I also thought the world was really cool, Bester did a good job explaining how jaunting would completely flip society on its head and because of that it felt pretty modern. After finishing it last night I picked up Le Guin’s Planet of Exile and got through it in a pretty quick sitting. It’s got some basic racism allegory stuff but it’s also just a tight little romance with just enough SF to be interesting. I didn’t realize that she was building the Hainish Cycle world up so early in her career, I thought it was like a retcon thing or something like Asimov did.
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Nov 5, 2023 14:17
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Leng posted:ARCs are to build hype and for marketing; do not confuse with beta reading copies or with proof copies. [...] Thanks for the corrections and all the very interesting information! quote:That said, depending on how big a lead up you want between ARCs and publication date, the ARCs you send out might be uncorrected proof copies that your proofreaders are also getting. I think this must be the case with the cookbook we have; it was originally received (by my in-laws) as an ARC but it's definitely uncorrected text and typesetting, with lots of publisher marginalia along the lines of "this two-page spread is, in terms of layout, hosed; ideas?"
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Nov 5, 2023 14:33
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ARCs may also function differently in the context of a cookbook.
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Nov 5, 2023 14:42
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