SpacePig posted:

This is more or less true.

Thanks for all of the recommendations. I think I'll end up trying out Sabriel and Mistborn first. The Wikipedia page for Mistborn has a goddamn chart to describe the magic system, so I know it's probably worth checking out.

BananaNutkins posted:

Codex Alerra were very mediocre.

Each book recapitulates the last.

The big plot twist hinted at in book one, re-hinted at in book 2 to the point of insulting obviousness, is finally revealed in book something to be exactly what you expected.

The magic system, while initially cool, is disappointingly utilized.

Benson Cunningham posted:

It doesn't quite work like that after you hit #1 on NYT bestseller repeatedly. Rothfuss is a huge cash cow for his publisher now, even if he takes X years to release.

And if anyone thinks Rothfuss is sitting down and writing 8 hours a day, five days a week, do I ever have some dissappointment to visit on you.

anilEhilated posted:

coughEriksoncough
Not to mention his stuff is way above Rothfuss in just about every way.

...Suddenly feeling a huge sense of déja vu here.

anilEhilated posted:

Just to clear up my position here: I frankly don't care how long he takes; I just find the "other writers write/don't write" argument stupid as hell, no matter how it's utilized.
As for the other half, I wasn't aware a discussion thread was reserved for people who are in favor of the topic. My interest in this thread has been - for quite a while now - trying to figure out how the hell did this get so popular; I don't really see it as less valid than any other point of view presented here.

anilEhilated posted:

Holy poo poo this looks bad. It's made in RPG maker, has all the modern buzzwords ("open-world", "roguelike", "crafting") and the most generic setting possible.
What I'm saying is this looks horrible even without Rothfuss on the team.

jivjov posted:

It's silence. A cut-flower doesn't make sound, but there's a certain quality of expectation and futility. You cut a flower, it dies. It might take a while to stop looking like it is alive, but it will soon be dead.

Oxxidation posted:

It's been a while since I've read Moby Dick but most of its allegory is pretty front and center. It's dense and wordy in the style of the period, but not an especially difficult read, I think.

If nothing else you can always amuse yourself by looking out for the homoeroticism.

quote:

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.

Reene posted:

Except that time he used an elaborate meal as a setup for a pun one-liner, which was still totally worth it.

Reene posted:

anilEhilated posted:

The Kingkiller Chronicles not making sense? Surely you jest!

Atlas Hugged posted:

Robert Jordan did this to describe his sword fighting forms and it was pretty effective.

SpacePig posted:

I'm glad an off-hand joke of mine lead to somebody registering an account. Neat.

BananaNutkins posted:

Pat posted an update

About Tak. His new kickstarter.


Tak does not look beautiful.

Tak looks like two stoners dumped one of those Hillshire Farms smoked sausage gift baskets onto a chess board and started playing klingon tri-D checkers with the stacks of cheddar/crackers/processed meat and took the occasional bite out of the pieces.

Even the waitresses in his blog are fictional stock characters.

Dienes posted:

Funny you should mention that.

a bit of a chemistry geek posted:

But as I read more it all started sounding like a *huge* pain in the rear end. The books went on and on about about how I’m supposed to check the ph level and… I don’t know, hydroginize things or some poo poo like that.

What it sounds like is a lot of fiddly bullshit work to me, and that’s not what I signed up for. I wasn’t looking for a part time job. I didn’t want to babysit this goddamn thing for 6 months, petting it and taking its temperature and cooing sweet nothings in its ear.

No. I wanted to muck about with glass bottles and tubes for an afternoon. I wanted to make a potion. I wanted to do some goddamn mad science and then not think about it again until the stuff was ready to drink.

ChickenWing posted:

Calling the 'two ships passing in the night' bit plagiarism is pedantic even for you. The phrase and variants have entered common parlance to the point that I'd imagine most people have no idea they have a literary source.

quote:

gently caress this book. Don't read it to your kids. That's the short version.

If you want the longer version, settle in. We're going to have a bumpy ride.

Also. There's spoilers here. And cussing. And some indignation. Be warned.

I've always thought of myself as a bit of Roald Dahl fan. I read BFG growing up and loved it. I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and loved it.

But recently, my love dimmed a bit when I read James and the Giant Peach, a book that was a serious boatload of meh. A nickel's worth of story in a dollar-long book.

And don't you DARE say, "Oh it's just a children's book." Or "Kids don't know any better." Or "You can't hold YA fiction to the standards of…"

Stop. Just stop. That's such bullshit that it's an insult to the word 'bullshit.' Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food.

The fact is, what you feed your kids is important, and that includes what they put in their heads as well as what they put in their bellies.

So let's talk about this book: Esio Trot.

In this story, you have Mr. Hopper. He loves two things, the flowers he grew on his balcony, and his downstairs neighbor. Mrs. Silver.

He's terribly lonely and he's terribly shy.

His downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Silver, has a pet tortoise that she adores. The tortoise is named Alfie, he lives on Mrs. Silver's balcony, and Mr. Hoppy is terribly jealous of him.

One day, Mrs. Silver laments to Mr. Hoppy. (They talk while on their balconies. She with her turtle, him tending his garden.) She's had Alfie for eleven years, and he's still tiny. She wishes he would get bigger. "I'd give *anything* to make that happen," she says.

Mr. Hoppy gets all twitterpated hearing this, so he lies to her, telling her he knows a magic spell that will help her tortoise grow. And I quote:

"I beg you to tell me, Mr. Hoppy. I'll be your slave for life!"

When he heard the words your slave for life a shiver of excitement swept through Mr Hoppy.

End quote.

So he gives her some bullshit he makes up, telling her it's a spell he learned from a Bedouin. Then he goes out and buys a hundred tortoises. Then he builds a long grabber arm of the sort you would use if you wanted to, say, steal someone's tortoise off the balcony right below yours.

At this point I thought to myself, "He's not doing what I'm thinking, is he? Then I flipped a couple pages, and told my son that it was bedtime and we'd finish the book tomorrow.

Disappointed, he went to bed. I finished the book.

Here's what happens: Mr. Hoppy spends the next two months slowly replacing Mrs. Silver's pet with progressively larger tortoises.

Mrs. Silver is amazed by this, of course. And out of gratitude, she marries Mr Hoppy.

Then Mr. Hoppy gives away all the tortoises. Including Alfie, Mrs. Silver's pet of 11 years.

Do I really need to explain to anyone that this is hosed up?

Do I feel bad for Mr. Hoppy? This lonely, shy man? Do I empathize with the fact that he loves someone but can't bring himself to tell her? Hell yes. I've *been* that guy. Sure.

But his actions are loving awful here. And their matter-of-factness makes them doubly awful. Hey there lads" it seems to say, "Love a girl? Here's what you can do! Lie to her, trick her, steal from her, make her obligated to you, then you get to be in a relationship!"

And that's not even touching on the subject that Mrs. Silver is shown to be a complete loving idiot, who recites a magic spell three times a day to make her tortoise grow. Then fails to notices when her beloved pet of 11 years is exchanged for a completely different animal, not just once, but several, several times….

Suffice to say the next night when my boy asked to read the rest of the story, I deviated from the original script.

This was made a little more difficult by the fact that the book is heavily illustrated. But even so, I was fairly confident I could do better than Dahl's original "trick her into marrying you" storyline.

In my version, in addition to buying a bunch of tortoises and building a tortoise-grabber, Mr Hoppy also goes to the grocery store and buys a bunch of vegetables. He then spends the rest of the week inventing recipes for tortoises and testing them on his new pets, figuring out which ones are the most delicious to tortoises.

Then, every night, he uses his long-armed tortoise grabber to lift Alfie up to his apartment where he feeds him delicious food. And, as we all know, when you eat more, you get bigger, right?

He discovers that what Alfie likes best is some of the flowers Mr. Hoppy grows on his balcony. The flowers Mr. Hoppy loves.

So Mr. Hoppy uses these flowers from his garden in his recipes. (I described these to my boy in some detail to pad out the story. I am a fantasy author after all.) Mr. Hoppy feeds Alfie every night, and Alfie grows bigger and bigger and bigger…

Finally, Mrs. Silver is overcome with joy and invites Mr Hoppy down to her apartment to show off her lovely tortoise. She thanks Mr. Hoppy for his magic spell, and asks him if he'd like to have tea.

Over tea, Mr. Hoppy says, "Mrs. Silver, I have a confession to make."

"Yes?" she says.

"That spell wasn't really magic," he said. "I just made it up."

"Really?" Mrs. Silver said.

"Yes," Mr. Hoppy said. "I've been feeding Alfie special recipes every night so he would grow bigger."

"Oh Mr. Hoppy," Mrs. Silver said. "I already knew that. But I'm so glad you told me yourself."

"You knew?" he said.

"You silly man," she said. "The balcony is right outside two huge windows, just like yours is. How could I not see you grabbing him every night?"

"Ahhh." Mr. Hoppy said, feeling rather embarrassed. He'd thought he was being pretty clever. "You're right of course. I did. You caught me. But I did it because I love you. I knew Alfie was really important to you, and I wanted you to be happy."

"I know that too," Mrs. Silver said. "I'm so glad you're finally brave enough to tell me!"

Then they get married.

I would have preferred for them to go out to coffee and have a date instead, but there was a picture of them getting married in the book, so I had to leave that part in.

In my version, they also worked together to publish a book of recipes for tortoises, and used that money to start a tortoise park, where Mr. Hoppy put his 100 now surplus-to-requirements pets.

But apparently I was pushing my luck there. When I told him the last part, Oot gave me a look. "Did you make that up?" he asked.

"Ahh," I said. "You're right of course. I did. You caught me. But I did it because I love you.

anilEhilated posted:

I feel this one would go with the picture fantastically. Might want to include quotation marks for your own safety.

Atlas Hugged posted:

See "The Baroque Cycle".

SpacePig posted:

This is, no poo poo, something Rothfuss asserts himself in this week's My Brother, My Brother and Me. He basically says that his interest in economy is what makes his world feel more real. Interview starts about half an hour in, and his parenting stories say a lot about him as a person.

Nakar posted:

I'm not gonna pass judgment or anything but that doesn't sound like a good thing.

anilEhilated posted:

I didn't need to know where the wizards came from to enjoy it. I'll agree it's overwhelming, both with characters and the fact the entire thing is absolutely loaded with foreshadowing and connections you just won't make on the first read.

anilEhilated posted:

Fairly sure it's supposed to be confusing and that doesn't necessarily detract from it.

Paragon8 posted:

On the other hand I don't think readers of Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, The True Blood books etc. were under the illusions as to what they were reading. Urban Fantasy readers are pretty happy with their niche except if you're reading Dresden in which case people are falling over backwards to distance it from the rest of it.

The conversation around Rothfuss especially but exists for GRRM etc. speaks to an insecurity in how fantasy is perceived and the need for readers to hang their hat on a "literary" fantasy novel. NotW is consistently presented as this genre transcending must read book when in reality its about par for the genre.

Fantasy readers don't want good books as much as they want things that check their boxes.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I popped into the ASOIAF thread, read an extract from a R Scott Bakker novel, I think I like Rothfuss now.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

The classic defence of visual novels.

And of Rothfuss, if any fan had the balls to admit that he' s bad at eroticism.

e:

A familiar pattern:

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

The context, from what I gather, is that the man faces the horror of his family being raped to death by subhumans. A fit of pulp shlock, by all accounts.

quote:

The violence and sex are provocative and transgressive, the basic ingredients of pulp titillation.

quote:

Chapter 89, “A Pleasant Afternoon,” is another stub chapter recounting Kvothe’s second whipping. What’s remarkable is the sheer whiplash of going from murder and intrigues back to Kvothe’s self-contentment. This is perhaps the single most uncomfortable shifts of tone in the novel, so glaring it is. The incredibly obvious option to remedy this is for the narration to state how irrelevant it seems with bodies not yet cold.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

What you're missing is that the Black Demon Seed section is that as an atrocity it's completely ridiculous. It's not an alternative to "simplistic, sanitised" depictions of atrocities, it's cartoonish and exploitative. As an exercise in vulgarity, it's very successful: people being brutally raped by subhuman Others (notice the emphasis on "race," and the relevant Wiki tells me that the savage Sranc breed fast). The appeal of it is to be over-the-top disgusting, to see how far it can go, like an Aristocrats joke - hence 'titillate'.

Atlas Hugged posted:

Wheel of Time actually has a story and characters. Jordan's weird ticks and fetishes aside, that already puts it head and shoulders above Kingkiller.

Torrannor posted:

At least Wheel of Time had the excuse that they weren't naturally formed mountains, but instead were created when all male mages went insane simultaneously as part of the backstory.

Grenrow posted:

I would love to see someone shred Prince of Thorns the way Kingkiller has been in this thread, but I don't have the patience to plow through all the stupid bullshit in that book again.