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High Warlord Zog posted:Neil Gaiman has a new book out which is getting a lot of good buzz. Has anyone checked it out yet? I read it in one sitting today. With the caveat that I've been a huge Gaiman fan since I was a mopey teenager and stumbled into Sandman, I think this might be his strongest novel yet. It isn't broad and sweeping like American Gods and that's really to its benefit, it's an extremely intimate and personal tale and I love how it's told from the perspective of a child, but by that child as an adult reminiscing. Short read but totally worth picking up if you've enjoyed any of his previous work. It's equal parts whimsy and horror, and since it's approached from a childlike perspective I found that the horror had a lot of weight to it (that crushing sense of absolute helplessness you get when you're a kid and you know no one is going to take you seriously on something), but so did the sense of wonder and awe and acceptance at all the fantastic stuff happening over the course of the story.
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Jun 23, 2013 03:24
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Decius posted:To interrupt the "I didn't like it"-train, I really do like American Gods and can't wait to see it on TV, but the best Shadow story/story in the setting is still the short story The Monarch of the Glen. Yeah, I love American Gods like crazy (mainly because I got into it as a teenager who was just starting to delve into mythology outside of the Greek/Norse/Egyptian sets, so the rose tinted goggles are in full effect) and it was like a scavenger hunt of awesome little details Gaiman had worked in, but The Monarch of the Glen blows it completely out of the water. I haven't really met a Gaiman story I disliked but I would definitely say that he really works best in the comic, short story and novella settings more than he does the full length novels. He has some of the coolest ideas out there but he has trouble stretching them for more than a hundred pages of narrative prose without losing steam in character development and overall pacing. Past a certain point they stop being stories and start being "here's a stroll through Neil Gaiman's brain, check out what obscure folklore he researched this month" (which can be fun in and of itself, I think). The Ocean at the End of the Lane is probably my favorite of his longer books and it's only 200 pages, but if he made it any longer than that I don't think it would have worked. His strongest work outside of the Sandman comics is probably the Smoke and Mirrors anthology. It's got great twists on established fairy tales, turning Lovecraft's work on its head, a bit of nonfiction, one of the finest Michael Moorcock tributes I've ever read, just a wonderful collection of tidbit stories.
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Jul 11, 2013 12:23
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muike posted:People really really exaggerate how overtly political mieville's work is. Yeah, it's there, because that's the lens he sees the world through. His fiction is not the same as his paper on international law and marxism or whatever. He's a marxist who likes cool rear end monsters and strange fantasy worlds. Absolutely this. He's said as much in a few interviews, I believe. Outside of his books he takes a big interest in politics and while that informs how he puts together plots he never goes in with the explicit idea of promoting his values. Honestly, a lot of his work is left-leaning by sheer virtue of the protagonists struggling against authoritarian/fascist antagonists, but he's still very critical of the people on his side. (Very minor spoilers) in Kraken the familiars' union strike is painted as wholly ineffective and broken up by what amount to deranged supernatural pinkertons and in Iron Council the revolutionaries are co-opted by third party forces and used to push other agendas when they aren't splintering and infighting and loving themselves over. It's one of the things I really respect him for as an author, even if he tends to go a little overboard on the purple prose in some of his books. Everyone and every system is presented as flawed, some are just slightly less flawed than others or more sympathetic when they aren't in power. In stark contrast to something like, say, Goodkind or Rand or Correia where the libertarians are all daring ubermensch figures who spit out "witty" one-liners at breakneck speed and anyone who opposes them is obviously a drooling big government crony who can't find his rear end with both hands and a map.
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Jul 15, 2013 12:07
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The Supreme Court posted:Other than that, any authors who've made a world quite as cool as China Mieville's Bas-Lag, which is such a drat impressive mix of intriguing, totally weird and utterly immersive. Bas-Lag is probably my favorite fantasy world ever created. Based on your appreciation of that and your other criteria, I would recommend: * Jeff Vandermeer: City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris is a stunning example of worldbuilding that defies typical narrative conventions. It's a collection of short stories that includes everything from in-universe historical essays to a police interrogation of a man who claims to have written the world to the musings of wandering priests. If you like the world he sets up there, he expounds upon it in the (slightly) more traditional novels Shriek and Finch, which push the timeline forward from something approximating the Edwardian era to a slick 1940s style noir setting. It's got some brutal stuff but never portrayed in a grimdark way so much as a really, really surreal one. * Felix Gilman: The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City are both excellent. I prefer the former over the latter for a few reasons but they're well worth picking up if you like weird fantasy. Tackles everything from the exploitation of natives by colonial powers to tearing down the idea of the self-made-man in a wonderfully bizarre wild west setting where open warfare has erupted between a council of sentient, divine train engines and an otherworldly lodge owned by demonically possessed firearms. Also forgotten superweapons, strange spirits and a planet that is literally still being forged out of a massive lightning and magma storm just beyond the horizon. I guess I should warn that this seems to be one of those love it or hate it authors, though -- most of the people I've recommended it to adore it but the few that dislike it really dislike it. * Barry Hughart: The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox doesn't really create a fantasy world so much as write a love letter to Chinese and pre-Chinese mythology and drop you smack dab in the middle of it. And then asks you to tag along with a geriatric, drunken, lecherous Sherlock Holmes analogue as he solves mysteries that seem benign on the surface but then lead through the heavens, hells and every spirit realm in between. Completely faithful and respectful to that mythology, too, although written with razor-edged humor. * Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. It looks like every other stereotypical western european knights and wizards setting ever but once you dig into it there's some really inventive magic systems, a fully realized political struggle going on between half a dozen distinct and realistic world powers, and some very unique heroes. You've got a knight-turned-galley-slave-turned-knight who was crippled physically and emotionally by his ordeal, and a middle aged woman who has spent most of her adult life struggling with curse-induced mental illness and is now trying to find some normalcy. They both spend as much time fighting against societal conventions and prejudices as they do supernatural threats, and not in a patronizing "look at the magical cripple" way like a lot of authors fall back on. I'll also second Jemisin, I liked The Killing Moon a lot more than I did the Inheritance Trilogy but I'm a giant sucker for ancient Egypt.
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Nov 30, 2013 12:16
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Megazver posted:John C Wright wrote an article about Heinlein and Leftist Thought Police. It's pretty lol. Jesus christ, this dude. A good reply in that thread posted:Yes, Orson Scott Card really expressed the mildest possible opposition towards gay marriage. What could possibly be milder than "Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage". John C Wright posted:Let us assume for the sake of argument that Card, Beale, Ashley all have exactly the opinions as Mr Selig and Mr Barton characterize them: homophobic, racist, and misogynist. Are the private opinions of the accused a sufficient warrant for public boycotts, expulsions, and witchhunts, followed by an (apparently) neverending and unforgiving ritual of public denunciation? Y...yes?
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May 7, 2014 22:45
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General Battuta posted:Earthsea, probably. It's gorgeously written. navyjack posted:Bridge of Birds. I would have gone with either of those, or Guy Kavriel Kay's loose trilogy of The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Last Light of the Sun and The Sarantine Mosaic. And if you're okay with standalone novels as well as series, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell received equal amounts of acclaim from both fantasy and non-fantasy fans.
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Jul 6, 2016 01:34
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MockingQuantum posted:So about six months back, I read Mieville's The Scar and loved it, tore through it in a little more than a week while I had downtime at work. Now I'm reading through Perdido Street Station and it really feels like it drags, by comparison. Does the book ever really pick up to the same degree that The Scar does? If the Kindle app is to be believed, I'm 51% through the book, and things are finally happening, but it feels glacially slow. I don't know if I just have less patience for repeated descriptions of how much of a shithole New Crobuzon is, or what, but I'm having a hard time continuing. It builds a little speed exponentially toward the end of the book as he starts bringing the disparate plot threads together and tying things off, but as said above it never comes close to the pace of his other Bas-Lag novels. It's much more him meandering around the city, introducing you to its inhabitants, almost stringing together a series of vignettes to show off the weird-rear end world he's created - something that I think he improved upon with both of the following books. It's still my favorite of the trilogy because it was the first one that I read and such a nice change of pace from the pulpier fantasies I'd been reading, but I have a hard time suggesting people start there for just that reason. If you're already more than halfway through it I would say stick with it though, there are a few small bits at the end that tie into The Scar and will show up again in Iron Council and you're pretty close to the point where it does begin picking up. Plus if you ever end up reading The City & The City you'll really be able to compare it and appreciate how much he's honed his ability to give a tour of strange, urban locales since 2000.
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Jul 16, 2016 00:57
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Abalieno posted:I've discussed this briefly with my friend, and his interpretation is that the "genre" is a new thing for women. Just to focus on this part briefly, it's... really not accurate at all. There have always been women involved in geek/genre stuff. Star Trek was only brought back for its last season and later movies by massive, woman-led letter writing campaigns and women also orchestrated some of the earliest convention circuits, and that trickled into the 70s where you saw a pretty good number of critically acclaimed woman genre writers raking in awards and acclaim. They were pushed out of the scene in the 80s and 90s, it wasn't a result of them choosing to "discriminate" so much as gatekeeping publishers latching on to the success of male-penned epic fantasies like the Shannara chronicles and then the Wheel of Time and its many, many imitators. Women and PoC have been at the forefront of a lot of SF/F, it's that there are systemic problems within the industries that publish and air these stories that you don't hear so much about them and you'll see more bookshelves stocked with stuff by white men. And that's what Jemisin is attacking, the flawed system and the people who double down and claim colorblindness when presented with evidence that publishers do not consider minority genre fiction profitable and don't spend as much money publishing/marketing it, which leads to less people buying it, which furthers the perception that it doesn't sell well and creates a vicious cycle.
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Aug 24, 2016 01:37
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Abalieno posted:It's just a thesis that doesn't appear very logic to me. Abalieno posted:Are these legions of women readers completely fooled by marketing that they can't make their own choices? Especially in a world where youtube and social networks are more likely to drive sales? My interpretation is women read their own flavor of stuff, and the market is constantly growing, in a way that doesn't seem incoherent with the size of its readership. Abalieno posted:Short version: I think women writers/reading won't take over the traditional fantasy/sci-fi market, rather they'll build their own thing, and it will grow constantly. It will be very different, and it will take the space it deserves. General Battuta posted:Please stop engaging
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Aug 24, 2016 02:07
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MockingQuantum posted:Now my book club is hashing out some fantasy options, and I'm curious, I feel like I've read here that Terry Goodkind books are really not very good... Or Terry Brooks, I can't remember. Which was it, and why? I've talked the group out of doing any Robert Jordan books because frankly I'm not that interested in Wheel of Time, but they turned to Terry Goodkind as an option when I shot down Jordan. Nobody in the group has read any of his stuff, though. Brooks is kind of banal in that he started copying Tolkien before that became a big thing, so the first dozen or so of his books are rehashes of LotR except set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy future where the monsters include malfunctioning cyborgs instead of fel beasts and orcs. Eventually he goes full on JRPG with crystal-powered airships and returning technology and stuff, but his prose doesn't really improve noticeably over four decades, which is almost impressive in a weird way. Dude does not want to change his voice at all and his post-2000 stuff still feels just like his late 70s books. It's inoffensive but also incredibly bland. Goodkind is uh... Well, what is your book club's tolerance for things like demon dog nun rape, BDSM ninjas, evil chickens, really blatant Ayn Rand love letters -- one of the books is literally just a rehash of The Fountainhead except it ends with the libertarian ubermensch building a magical statue to remind the peasantry just how awesome the nobility is and inspires them to rise up against the communist fellowship in charge of the city who enforce evil edicts like "you should help each other" and "care for those less fortunate than you" -- and the hero getting props for kicking a ten year old girl so hard in the face that she bites off her own tongue and breaks all her teeth. It would honestly read like a fantasy deconstruction of objectivism where the protagonist slowly becomes a supervillain if Goodkind himself wasn't a very outspoken Rand fan and creepy misogynistic twerp.
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Sep 2, 2016 05:46
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Speaking of portal fantasy, I picked up Foz Meadows' Accident of Stars earlier this week and I... really want to like it, but man, halfway through and it's incredibly disappointing. A lot of reviewers I otherwise like, agree with and respect most of the time have praised it as this incredibly subversive take on portal stories with a heavy feminist slant, which is something that would be incredibly up my alley. But it doesn't come off as that at all. All of the POV characters are women and that's cool, and it takes place in a setting with true gender equality and poly relationships as the norm, but it doesn't actually explore any of that in the story. It also falls back on stuff that makes no sense within the context of the world she's created, like gendered slurs that make no sense in a fantasy setting where being compared to a woman isn't defaulted to a negative. Also some really worrying racial poo poo where earth races are mapped 1-1 with their fantasy alphabet soup counterparts and everyone with a certain skin color is tied to a nationality and religion and there's really not any cultural bleedover, even with cultures sharing borders and intermarrying. It's like she had a giant checklist of causes she wanted to mention but she doesn't actually go beyond mentioning them and moving on. They're window dressing for a fairly boring plot with villains who are evil just because they're evil and a bunch of 80s fantasy stereotypes bouncing off each other. Like, it's good that she is mentioning them but there's nothing deeper and nothing that adds to the sense of the other world, how these changes make it so different than earth, what similarities there are, even the impact of magic is largely ignored. Admittedly I probably should have expected something like this from an author bio listing the Dragon Age games as a major influence but I let the hype and high-star reviews get to me. People are comparing it to Ursula Le Guin and I don't see that at all, there are none of Le Guin's interwoven themes or her narrative prose, there's just a mishmash of randomly generated names telling each other how hyper-competent they are and then fumbling any opportunity to progress in order to extend the word count. One of the last scenes I just read was a bunch of random women, including a lesbian and an asexual, fawning over how handsome one of the male characters who looks like "an earth rock star" is.
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Sep 8, 2016 00:23
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Has anyone else picked up Ken Liu's Wall of Storms this week? I liked the first book in the series but I'm blown away by what an improvement this one is on every level. One of the biggest complaints about Grace of Kings was the lack of decent female characters compared to male ones (off the top of my head there were two courtesans, one super sexy noblewoman who was pressured to seduce guys for the good of the kingdom, and a fairly cool lady general) and he's definitely made a solid attempt to rectify that in this one. The closest thing to a main character is a girl clawing her way out of an impoverished background into the court of royal engineering and she's way, way more compelling than anyone from the first book except maybe Kuni Garu. The narrative voice is a huge improvement and his words pack more of a punch, too. The first quarter of the book is dominated by what amounts to a giant, three-day-long standardized test to become eligible for a scholarly title and an apprenticeship in the palace and it's as engaged and page-turning as any battle from the first book. Probably even more so. Also the mythology is really great. I remember some interviews early on where he said his vision for the magic and folklore of this series would be drawing on way more than Chinese myths but that didn't quite show up in the low-magic setting of Grace. Wall is definitely pointing towards the deities and associated primal magic coming back in a big way, and he's interwoven everything from Malay to Māori folklore. They're present in everything from everyday background ritual to the naming conventions of the seasonal cycle so it sidesteps the usual fantasy problem of having a pantheon pretty far removed from the culture that supposedly worships it. The whole thing feels like a breath of fresh air for the genre, even more than the first book.
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Oct 7, 2016 04:14
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Please just ignore him.
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Oct 7, 2016 12:26
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I definitely get those complaints. Outside of the stuff with Kuni it felt like a slightly dramatized historical text. I know Liu had mentioned a few times he was inspired by ancient historians, particularly Luo Guanzhong and Herodotus, who already aren't everyone's cup of tea. The second one shifts the scope and focus quite a bit and it's more like a traditional close third person narrative. Even as someone who did really like the first, this one kind of makes it retroactively feel like a lot of complicated tablesetting before the real story starts. I think even if you didn't dig Grace, Wall is worth skimming the first couple of chapters to see if it's more your style.
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Oct 7, 2016 21:05
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Powder Mage felt so much like an early Sanderson book that I was completely unsurprised to find that the author was a friend and student of Brandon. The whole series was a fun read but I agree with everyone above that the first book promised a lot of things that the second and third couldn't pay off. The magic system is really well done but never explored in-depth like a cosmere one, but it had the same paper thin characters and ridiculous power creep that Sanderson's stuff tends to be riddled with. I can handle Sanderson's really ridiculously powerful characters because they're the result of taking core concepts of the magic system and mixing them up in ways that other characters didn't expect and can't counter, so there's that cool element of creativity in there that keeps me turning the pages even if everyone is a really flat stereotype. Powder Mage takes a lot of cool stuff and then just continues amplifying it throughout the series, there's no trickery or twist to it so much as characters getting better and better with gunpowder magic. The sniper just gets more and more precise until he can headshot deities, the burners burn higher quantities of powder and turn into the Hulk. I think the basic concepts are loving amazing and I wish I could have seen those books in the hands of a better writer, though. Working class versus aristocratic mages with incompatible skillsets, the latter of which being born with their hands acting as portals to the elemental planes? A setting where the divine right of kings if actually real and killing a corrupt monarch results in angry space jesus coming down and wrecking your country because a sacred pact has been broken? The glimmers of that in the first book really, really hooked me even if the latter two turned into dully written military thrillers featuring the amazing god-sniper and his noble savage sidekick. Mandragora fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 22:21
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Telsa Cola posted:You should really spoiler pretty much all of this post. Yeah, my bad, I thought I'd hit the spoiler tags key and posted it on my way out. Fixed now. In non Powder Mage stuff I finally picked up Peter Newman's The Vagrant earlier this week and just finished it. I dug the hell out of it, it's almost like... Lone Wolf and Cub meets the best aspects of China Mieville, with a nameless and mute paladin trekking across a post apocalyptic wasteland with a sick baby in one hand and a malevolent singing sword in the other. I remember wanting to snap it up when it came out the other year but there was a screwup on the publisher's part and the kindle release wasn't for several months after the hardcover came out, so it fell to the bottom of my reading list for awhile. I saw the second book had come out recently so I grabbed the first one, went to buy the second one and they did it again, hardcover came out the start of this year and no kindle edition until March 2017. 
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Oct 21, 2016 00:48
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coyo7e posted:I'm a little over halfway through Justin Cronin's The Passage and am curious about opinions on the later books in the series? This one comes across a lot like WWZ met The Stand and while it's not Cormac McCarthy level by any means, I'm not really sure how far it can go past the first novel, or if it goes all "Coyote" (Allen Steele's) and end up with a lot of society-building and civil wars and whatnot I'm probably in the minority here but I think that while the quality did dip in book two, he pulled it out of the nosedive in book three and I think he did some really interesting things with the characters and the setting, stuff that took me by surprise. He doesn't get back to the pacing quality of the first one but his prose gets much better and he's able to focus more on character growth on some of the figures who I feel weren't fleshed out earlier. I saw him speak when he came out to Sydney for his book tour earlier this year and he said the third one is his personal favorite and was the most enjoyable to write, because it let him utilize a lot of stylistic things that he accidentally locked himself out of in the first two novels. There's some first person narration that I think reads much better than his third person. I don't know that I'd go back and re-read any of them anytime soon, but I don't regret slogging through the second and parts of the third to get the complete story.
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Jan 4, 2017 08:51
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