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The Gunslinger posted:Cook is definitely not for everyone, threadbare characterization and he rarely describes any element in detail. I do get your frustration about telling instead of showing, he does a lot of that in the first book. It improves later on in the series but it sounds like he's just not your bag. I really like Cook but I'm all over the place on the various series hes written, some are great and others are terrible. Cook influenced a lot of authors so sometimes it's nice to see where things originated, there's a character in his Dread Empire series that was the basis of Kruppe from Malazan for example but if you're not enjoying his writing style then it's probably not worth sticking it out. I have finally made peace with Cook (and Erikson, really) and realized this myself. With how often people go on about both Black Company and Malazan as fantasy standards, I keep forcing myself to try them over and over. I never get far before I just kind of sigh and eventually start making excuses not to read them and then ultimately give up. At this point, I'm fine with saying I prefer high-energy, character-driven stories over vast reaching plots of epic proportions.
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Jun 22, 2013 23:21
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Carrier posted:Haha, GoT is ultra-successful, quick we need to copy that with another popular fantasy series! This was my thought. The books aren't for me, but I can see why some people love them. But I note that its traditional weaknesses (plot, pacing) are things you kind of need in a TV show. And its biggest strength (prose) is something that's...decidedly hard to convey without abusing the heck out of inner monologue. I'll be curious to see how it does, but I don't think the medium fits.
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Jul 20, 2013 01:58
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Barbe Rouge posted:Christ, I just now realized that Scott Lynch is planning to write 4 more novels in his Gentleman Bastards series. He's said he's medicated now, where he wasn't before. Given that he's back to doing con tours and being outgoing, I'd say it's working. He's always been one of the less industrious writers, so while he won't be pumping books out once per year he'll probably not take another seven years to write one.
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Aug 28, 2013 05:47
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Schneider Heim posted:Has anyone read anything by Harry Turtledove? Skimming through his Wikipedia page, I see that he's written a lot of cool-sounding alternate history. Some of his books have magic in them so I guess he counts in this thread? I read the first part of The Legend of Krispos or something similar by him. I gather that, as a straight-up fantasy (as opposed to alternate history), it's not his best work, but I found it pretty abhorrent. It was your standard Chosen One "He's Just Better" narrative that also had a large amount of time spent by the characters who are not the Chosen One discussing just How Much Better he is than everyone else. Lots of girls throwing themselves at him, lots of powerful men admiring him and of course, all his enemies are shallow, stupid and ugly who hate him because He's Just Better. I'd not recommend it. But his alternate history stuff sounds like it's more his forte.
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Sep 14, 2013 22:01
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Oh Snapple! posted:I absolutely agree on that. I know I was critical of Sanderson a little while ago, but I really do hope for his continued success due to things like this. I feel like the publishing industry sometimes lags a little behind the reading consensus, hence why we're only now seeing the tail end of dystopian YA, even though The Hunger Games has been done for awhile. I don't think it can get much more grimdark than The Broken Empire trilogy.
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Sep 21, 2013 02:08
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Danny Dravot posted:So, the wife recently played through The Witcher 2, and I decided to read up on the source material because it seemed to know what the hell it was doing. Apparently the novels were good enough, and rooted in Polish folklore enough, for the Polish Prime Minister to give them to the U.S. President as a gift. But no matter how many reviews I look up, no one seems to say definitively that they aren't just Polish R.A. Salvatore. Anyone familiar? I've read part of Blood of Elves. I find they tend to meander quite a bit, as in a typical taciturn dwarf, a curious gnome and a flighty bard sit around discussing the politics of the world for awhile in a way that's peculiarly unnatural. So I put it down.
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Sep 25, 2013 20:15
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Bhodi posted:Second? I absolutely hated The Magicians so much that I'm avoiding anything written by him in the future. Including articles and reviews. I have never read a book that was so far up it's own rear end before. I slogged through it hoping it would get better - it never does. Later, I find out he deliberately made magic boring and mundane and the characters contemptible. On purpose. You know, as a reversal from the normal childlike wonder / coolness of magic and interesting characters. It was anti-fun. And anti-enjoyable to read. I've been struggling for a way to express my lack of fondness for this book for a while, but the characterization of the book as a hipster is pretty accurate. There's very clearly no joy in it or anything written in it, and I get that that's the point, but it just strikes me as a point that's been made to death and wasn't that interesting the first time. Where someone like Abercrombie does darkness and cynicism well enough that they shape and create a world, this book just sort of seems like a teenager trying to be edgy by telling you there's no god. No offense to those who loved the book, of course. I finished it, so naturally I can't deny that it's well-written, but I'm not keen on returning to its series.
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Nov 23, 2013 11:40
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savinhill posted:Yeah, it was very conventional fantasy with a lot of standard tropes, but the author's an awesome storyteller and I couldn't put this down til I was finished. Really looking forward to what this dude writes in the future. I found Blood Song to be kind of...well, hard to stomach. On the one hand, it pulls off the tropes pretty well. If you want straight up fantasy with no particular surprises, this is definitely the book for you. But sometimes it hits the tropes a little too on the nose. There's magic wolves, magic swords, cockney orphans, feasting, training montages, etc. The only thing that really bothered me was that it was a very "no girls allowed" fantasy. There's a lot of testosterone-fueled dialogue about brotherhood and honor and strength while the main female roles are either a priestess who's biggest job is to get kidnapped or a scheming, wicked princess. That's a trope I have a hard time getting past. Now, as to whether that's better than the women-involved-in-the-creepiest-way-possible methods of Rothfuss is up for debate, but I'll agree, it's got the same kind of rhythm as Rothfuss, if none of the prose.
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Jan 30, 2014 10:30
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Has anybody read The Iron Druid Chronicles? Both Goodreads and Amazon keep recommending them to me, but the blurbs are giving me this really creepy quasi-erotica feel and I don't want to buy them if it's some weirdo stealth paranormal 50 Shades of Grey or something. They're a lot of fun. And the dude does "fade to black" in lieu of sex. I wouldn't call them erotica at all.
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Feb 8, 2014 06:30
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andrew smash posted:If you are, like me, bothered by an author being a massive shitlord don't read SM stirling. Is this the dude that wrote stories where society collapses and all pretty young girls are enslaved and it rings a little like a nerd revenge fantasy or am I thinking of someone else?
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Feb 18, 2014 05:14
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andrew smash posted:Same guy. Except not a little bit at all, the world is literally taken over by SCA dorks because they know how to swing swords around and poo poo. That seems like a benign nerd thing. Did the sex slave thing happen in his books or am I thinking of another creepy dude? And I echo the demands to know why he's a shitlord.
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Feb 18, 2014 10:55
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Megazver posted:I believe there's already a place for that, the comments section of Requires Only That You Hate. Going to be as productive, too. That place is still around? Anyway, can anyone recommend me something fun in fantasy that isn't totally stupid? It doesn't have to be brilliant, but something along the lines of the energy of the Gentlemen Bastards stories would be good.
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Feb 20, 2014 06:49
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Fried Chicken posted:One good point against him I saw was that he, being a minor celebrity who does outrageous stuff, has tabloids follow him and dig into stuff he is associated with to find juicy stuff. And the community has had plenty of poo poo go down lately that has been damaging, only a part of which is public. Tabloids being there could dig up stuff they don't want public and allow a new way for the attacks within the community to escalate through telling the reporters things about other authors (true or false) both of which could damage sales I really don't think tabloids would find anything weird about SFF authors that isn't in their own books.
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Mar 8, 2014 02:53
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Cardiovorax posted:I can't for the life of me understand why. I mean, how hard can following a few simple rules like "do not use rape as character-building drama" and "don't have sex scenes unless you're writing porn" possibly be? Because "don't have sex scenes unless you're writing porn" is one of the weirdest "rules" I've ever heard of. What's wrong with a sex scene?
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Mar 10, 2014 08:26
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Jedit posted:Spoken like a man who's never read one. No, I've read plenty. I don't actually mind them because sex is something that just kind of happens between people sometimes. And yeah, there's plenty of bad sex scenes out there. There's plenty of bad fight scenes, love scenes, scenes of emotional turmoil and scenes of character development. Bad writing is bad writing. I don't think a rule like "don't ever write sex ever" is all that helpful. I know Joe Abercrombie gets a lot of hate for his sex scenes, but I honestly found them pretty refreshingly realistic. It was a lot of sweaty grunting between two people who were trying to remember how to be intimate, as opposed to the usual analogies of women being in chocolate in hands or some poo poo like that.
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Mar 10, 2014 10:12
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The Emperor's Blades is a sticking point for me. I'm interested in it, but I've heard some things. For one, the daughter doesn't do much and I'm kind of burnt out on "No Girls Allowed" fantasy. And I hear the prose is very tin-ear. Any confirmation?
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Mar 14, 2014 05:01
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It's also worth noting that VD campaigned for president of SFWA on the promise that he would expel all women from the organization (and he got 10% of the vote).Fried Chicken posted:So Vox Day/Theodore Beale got nominated for a Hugo. Twitter about it is blowing up, accusations of having bought the nom somehow? Voting membership for the Hugo costs $40. He is said to have purchased several people memberships who agreed to vote for him.
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Apr 20, 2014 04:49
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Victorkm posted:That sounds awful and depressing. Mark Lawrence is also boasting that his series is going to be make it onto TV, as well. So I guess audiences are really hungry for uncomfortable, heavy-handed nihilism?
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May 1, 2014 20:16
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BrosephofArimathea posted:I just finished The Emperor's Blades(Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne #1)by Brian Stavely. It was really fun, pretty drat good for a first novel, and I'll definitely read the next installment. I decided to try this. It's pretty good, but it has some parts that are hard for me to get past. The fact that the female lead doesn't get half the attention of the two male leads has already been a well-documented complaint. The fact that one character motivation has a pretty lazy "woman gets fridged" arc is also an issue. But for me, the biggest grievance is that they introduce the main thrust of the plot within the first two pages and only get around to addressing it within the last quarter of the book. "The Emperor is dead." "Wow, that's kind of a big deal. I should go warn my brother or do some duties or something?" "Yeah, but that can wait until we finish your Ninja School Training."
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May 15, 2014 09:56
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Bolverkur posted:Has anyone read Retribution Falls or other stuff from the Ketty Jay series by Chris Wooding? I can't tell if this will be a fun adventure through the skies or a cringy cheesefest. I read the Broken Sky series as a kid and at the time I thought it was absolutely amazing, although I have my doubts it holds up as a fun children's sf series today. Having no knowledge of anime at the time probably helped. And being a kid that Ferretbrain, which is usually a pretty thorough review site, did not like it one bit. That said? It's supposed to be like Firefly. So maybe that's your thing?
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May 16, 2014 11:38
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Ornamented Death posted:You know that the nomination process is, in a lot of ways, nothing more than a glorified popularity contest, right? Correia spent a lot of time and effort on a troll campaign to get his book on the list. This is also how Vox Day and Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant got on the ballot. They just went out and asked people to do it. There are rumors that Vox Day bought memberships for people to do it, though. As per the Orbit thing: the only new readers a Hugo brings in are the people who vote for a Hugo, so giving the books away means they wouldn't really buy anything. And if you read the comments on Scalzi's blog, there's a lot of people saying they weren't going to buy these books of their own volition, anyway. Besides, they're going up against Memory of Light, which kind of makes campaigning pointless.
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May 16, 2014 22:23
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zoux posted:I figured out what's inspiring the wave of self published scifi/fantasy garbage that's clogging the Amazon genre sections. The latest kerfuffle involving self-pubbed authors following Hugh Howey's petition to fellate Amazon is not to be missed.
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Jul 11, 2014 20:55
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There's a couple of links out there, but Chuck Wendig has some good write-ups on the subject.
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Jul 12, 2014 00:05
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I was really drawn into that book until he started rehearsing battle formations. Someone on this forum said you can tell exactly when a fantasy author started touching himself if you read closely enough and it was about the moment "battle squares" got introduced.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:27
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General Emergency posted:Anyone read The Emperor's Blades? It's getting some positive buzz. It suffers from a few points. The protagonists are sometimes willfully stupid to hurry the plot along, the female lead doesn't get much screen time at all, the villains are kind of laughably evil for no reason. But as others have said, it's well-written (enough that I felt compelled to finish it). Recommended.
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Aug 12, 2014 20:02
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Strom Cuzewon posted:How much does Malazan pick up after the first one? Because Gardens of the Moon was a loving terrible book. The whole flow felt disjointed and garbled, characters seemed to just wander around with no purpose, and the author shotguns fantasy names onto the page without saying who or what they are (I still have no idea if Rhivi, Barghest or whatever are ethnicities or species) or why anybody is fighting. Oponn and Shadowthrone are apparently immensely powerful, but also dumb as hell, but despite the whole book being driven by their machinations we're not given the slightest hint what they're trying to do, and why that would be good/bad for anyone. And then Tattersail nukes themself for little reason, gets reincarnated in a dream, but not they've soulshifted, but no, they were reborn in the past and jesus just write in a straight line I went through the same thing. Read Gardens of the Moon, thought it was confusing and weird. People told me to read the second book first, so I tried that: still confusing and weird. I picked up random books in the middle and they actually made a little more sense, but still confusing and weird. I have friends who swear by Malazan and I'd dearly like to know what about the books speaks to them, but I just don't read in a way that lets me appreciate them. I think it's like any other fetish: you either get it or you don't.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:56
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Echo Cian posted:Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick This keeps getting suggested when someone's looking for a Locke Lamora fix. Thematically, they're kind of similar, but Lynch writes with a level of soul and joy that Hulick just doesn't match. Plus, the constant fencing-porn grated on me.
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Aug 28, 2014 01:50
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Megazver posted:I like the Takeshi Kovacs books, but man, the rest of Morgan's books are way too "am I too loving edgy for you? Call me a baby, but The Steel Remains pushed me right to the edge of this. Like, okay, I get it, this is super grim and dark and there's a lot of poop. Then his post about grimdark and people who don't like it being stupid fat babies kind of turned me off of finishing the series.
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Oct 7, 2014 02:19
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Zeitgueist posted:Unrelated: Yes! It's very thrilling, exciting fantasy full of exciting monsters and magic and crazy poo poo. I found I had been yearning for that sort of thing without even realizing it. Highly recommended. I got an advance of the sequel, too, and it's very good.
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Jan 13, 2015 10:42
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coyo7e posted:R A Salvatore's author photos have shifted over the years. Twenty years ago they looked like Duncan McCleod cosplay, now he just looks like a schlubby nerdy dude. It's a shame I burned out on him so hard, I imagine some of his independent stuff not involving drow elves is probably okay. Eh... I mean, Salvatore's got some cool ideas and he's one of the few authors out there who actually values fun as a concept, but it's kind of hard to go back to him in general. He's got a real frenetic energy about his writing that should make the story move faster, but ultimately leaves you unable to focus on what's happening. Plus, his combat writing has aged kind of poorly.
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Feb 26, 2015 04:51
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Hedrigall posted:Q: What's good in recent (last 2-3 years), non-grimdark fantasy? I'm nearly finished The Goblin Emperor, and it was a delight! Are you defining grimdark as like Prince of Thorns or like "people die, sometimes messily" and stuff. Because all the stuff recommended here, I wouldn't call grimdark but I wouldn't call it on par with Goblin Emperor.
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Mar 19, 2015 00:31
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I thought The Thousand Names had a very readable style. But I didn't get very far. There's a saying that, if you read a fantasy novel close enough, you can tell when the author started touching themselves. With that book, I think it started with the word "battle square" and didn't stop until 100 pages of tactical formation descriptions later.
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Mar 31, 2015 02:09
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syphon posted:Does anyone have any thoughts on the Witcher series, as made popular by the video games? They have a peculiar style of pacing, I thought, with a lot of exposition just coming out in random dialogue. But I ultimately enjoyed them. They are both low fantasy and high fantasy; a low presentation of high fantasy, if that makes sense. I think they're worth the read, especially if you want to know more about the game world.
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Aug 18, 2015 00:20
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Mars4523 posted:Knight's Shadow is also a bit of a mess. It's enjoyable, but still a mess. I loved both Traitor's Blade and Knight's Shadow precisely because they were a mess. They were enthusiastic, energetic, at times embarrassing, but always in a way that made you think the author was having the time of his life. Those kinds of books are extremely rare, I think. "Childish rubbish?" I guess if you want to call it that. But it seems like a nebulous term.
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Sep 4, 2015 08:31
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less laughter posted:It even won the 2015 Locus Award for best Young Adult Novel It was pitched and marketed as Young Adult, but near as I can tell, it's mostly bought by his existing adult fans. And the deeper in I went, the more it read like his other books (not that I complained, I love his other books).
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Sep 25, 2015 06:32
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