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specklebang posted:If we are giving a recommendation, can we post the link to Amazon (or other source)? I'm new here and I want to properly participate. Since this is a new thread, I'm excited to be here. I've gone through hundreds of pages of older threads but here is a fresh opportunity. I've read SF all my life and I have some favorites to suggest and am hoping for new suggestions to add to my library. If you post links at all, link to wikipedia. It contains all the relevant information (author, links to other books in the series, genre, short description, number of pages, year it was published, tv/film adaptations, awards won, etc) and the reception section (if available) is much more useful than amazon ratings or whatever. Also, I can't be the only one that organises my list of books by bookmarking their wikipedia pages (and putting those bookmarks in relevant maps). It's certainly a habit I can recommend.
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Jun 16, 2013 19:28
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Lately I've been wondering wether the Braided Path trilogy (by Chris Wooding) is actually good or if I simply think so becaus it was one of the very first fantasy series I read back when I was 15 and knew little about books. Is there anyone else who read them? What I remember of the plot makes me assume it was actually pretty good, but I've never seen it mentioned here before so who knows. Rough outline: there are a bunch of "weavers", who are some kind of corrupted magicians, that act as spymasters for pretty much all kingdoms (basically, one king employed one and all others had to follow if they wanted to stay alive) despite them being vile, capable of horrible things and worst of all, terribly expensive. The main protagonist belongs to another group who want to replace those weavers. There's quite a bit of political intrigue, backstabbing and mysterious princesses to be rescued. Now that I think about it, those weavers are pretty similar to the mages in the lies of locke lamora.
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Jun 22, 2013 19:28
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systran posted:Is there anything out there even comparable to Ted Chiang? I just started reading Nexus by Namez Raam... it seems pretty good so far but it's too early to tell. He isn't recommended here a lot because he's not really a science fiction writer, but you should give Vonnegut a try. His books are literary philosophical/satirical novels that happen to contain science fiction elements instead of the literary sci-fi books you're asking for, but I always thought that Ted Chiang had more in common with him than with other sci-fi writers. I'm actually pretty sure that Vonnegut is one of the main sources of inspiration of Chiang. Start with Sirens of Titan or Cat's Cradle.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:01
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Schneider Heim posted:Has anyone read anything by Catherynne M. Valente? I'm curious because Haikasoru, an imprint of Japanese SF, released a book of her titled The Melancholy of Mechagirl. Yes, I read The Orphan's Tales: in the night garden. It was extremely good, one of my favorite books this year. Well written and a fantastic story.
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Jul 27, 2013 18:19
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Aston posted:Does anybody have good recommendations for time travel books? Ideally something where time travel is a major component, as opposed to a fish-out-of-water type thing like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (which I admit I haven't finished). Really, any suggestions are welcome. To Say Nothing of the Dog is the best time travel book I ever read, it's really awesome. The cool thing is that the rather unique time travel mechanics are experimented with and a central part of the story.
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Aug 14, 2013 23:41
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NinjaDebugger posted:I mostly wonder why y'all keep talking about Sanderson's magic systems when none of his novels contains one. There are fantastic natural systems that work in ways our universe doesn't, and they're treated by people the same way people treat natural systems in our world. By doing their absolute best to find out the rules that drive it and exploiting them mercilessly for whatever benefit they can get. Yeah, I agree with this post completely, his "magic" is just part of his excellent world building. For somebody who dislikes reading about magical heavy worlds his books are excellent. I do think that in many of his books those natural/magical systems are badly implemented, but this isn't because of the nature of how he writes those system but rather because these books were simply badly written. In other words, it's possible to write a great natural/magical system and write a bok around that (The Emperor's Soul, TWoK in particular, Allow of Law and Legion to a lesser extend) and those shouldn't be discarded because he didn't do it as well in books before that. My experience with Sanderson is basically "yeah, he's terrible, but so is pretty much every other popular fantasy author recommended here". I actually find it quite frustrating how this threads alternates between recommending a very small group of "epic fantasy" authors and bashing/hating all those same authors. I mean, look at the authors mentioned in the OP: Daniel Abraham, Lord Dunsany, Glen Cook, Jo Walton, Mary Gentle, Mark Lawrence, Anthony Ryan, Tolkien, GRRM, Joe Abercrombie, Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson, Brandon Sanderson, R. Scott Bakker, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Jim Butcher and Peter V. Brett. Sometimes others are recommended in this thread, but these are generally the most popular recommendations. The point I'm making is that among the other writers in that list, I'd consider Sanderson to be in the top 4 (worse than GRRM, Abercrombie and Lynch). His world building is in my opinion only second to Tolkien (who I don't like because of pacing issues and lack of mystery) and while his characters aren't as interesting as those in GRRM's books, Lies of Locke Lamora, or Abercrombie's books they're still pretty good compaired to those written by the other authors in that list. Compaired with writers outside his genre Sanderson is pretty bad, but every once in a while I enjoy these kind of books and I've read so many recommended books from this thread that turned out to be horrible despite that their authors don't get anywhere as much hatred as Sanderson does (acacia, the long price quartet, the steel remains, the painted man, the darkness that comes before, colours in the steel, the wise man's fear, the eye of the world, etc) so I'll still read Sanderson his books when they come out. That said, many better authors have been mentioned as well and there have been many books I've enjoyed more than Sanderson's, but most of these weren't in the same genre (Catherynne M Valente, Pratchett, Bridge of Birds, some others) and those that were I've read every book of that author already anyway (Lynch, GRRM, Abercrombie). Obviously there are also many writers/books recommended in here I haven't read yet and without a doubt some will turn out to be better than Sanderson his books are, so recommend me these writers/books. Feel free to disagree. De gustibus non est disputandum. Tldr; recommend better writers please. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 08:31
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quote:I recommend Guy Gavriel Kay for fantasy that's light on magic and is well written. You can start with Tigana or Lions of Al-Rassan. Don't start with the Fionavar trilogy, they are his first novels and it shows. Oh, I actually read Lions of Al-Rassan already. Very well written and I liked the setting, but I didn't find the story that compelling. However, I admit part of the problem might have been that I knew the story of EL Cid and as such found the story too predictable, so I'll certainly check out his other books anyway. Pretty sure Fionavar is on my list of "books I started but never finished". quote:If I understand your post, you're looking for fantasy writers that are more prose oriented, and less pulpy. Well, I often read fantasy as way to alternate with prose-dense, heavy books so I don't mind it that much if a fantasy book is pulpy and doesn't have that well written prose as long as the story is good. That said, good prose and good story telling appears to me to be highly correlated. Thanks for the suggestions. I admit The Half Made World and The Dispossessed are both on my list of "books I started but somehow never ended up finishing", although that doesn't necessarily mean I found them bad. quote:Really, I think Sanderson's problem is that he does a workmanlike job at everything without excelling at anything. A jack of all trades while a master of none. I contemplated making the joke answer that Sanderson stands out in that he writes a lot faster than any other author on the list. But that aside, I see what you're coming from although I honestly think his world building stands out compaired to other writes in the same genre. In fact, I actually like his world building generally more than Erikson's (I read the first 3 books of Malazan, gave up at the 4th due to various issues I had with it) if you include the magical systems, pantheons, etc in the world building aspect. Before I'm misinterpretated, I don't think Sanderson is the best writer ever. At all, not even within his subgenre however you define that. He's certainly not the best at world building either, the world building in bas-lag is a lot more fascinating for example. There are some books of him I couldn't finish on my first try and I can easily point out badly written things in every single book of him. The only reason I'm making this much fuss about it is because for some odd reason every single time his name is mentioned in here (no matter what context, even when no opinion is asked) there are instantly a bunch of people posting about how bad he is. I wouldn't mind that so much if they could convince me there are enough better writers in the same genre out there that merit the reading time more, but as it is I don't think that's the case. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 19:02
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Okay, everybody should read The Red Knight (Miles Cameron), it's easily one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. Great intricate story, fantastic action scenes (apparantly the author is a military veteran and historian with expertise in medieval combat), good pacing and plenty of intrigue/mystery. I think the best comparison to his style is Joe Abercrombie. Apparantly the second book in the series (The Fell Sword) just came out as well.
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Jan 18, 2014 21:03
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Piell posted:Nope, the second book isn't out for another couple months. Since I'm reading the second book right now (bought on Google play books, I'm in Belgium) I'm confident the book is out already here. edit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fell-Sword-...=the+fell+sword Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 10:41
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FastestGunAlive posted:Finished reading The Red Knight last night. I wanted to like it, I really did. The author has great potential and I might even give the sequel a chance but it was not a good book. Don't read the sequel then, I really liked the first book but the second soured me a bit. Mostly because I somehow assumed that it was set on some alternate europe while reading the first book, which was disproven in the second (and the map). In hindsight this should have been obvious, I attribute it to mental gymnastics to explain the french and the religion (and the place names being similar to real ones in a way that could have made sense). Since it is not set in an alternate earth, I agree that the many references to things from real history and the French grate a lot. I did enjoy the first book regardless, because although there are too many point of view characters and hence too little characterisation for many, the overall plot is still very enjoyable because of good use of mystery, strategies and very well written fights. The characterization of the cast greatly improves in the second book though, because very few new members are used and everybody from the first book get's more backstory/uniqueness. My problem with the second book (beyond the language and Earth parallellism stuff) is that it starts a lot of different stories/plots and resolves almost none of them, so my advice for now is to wait and see if the third book resolves some of the plot lines before starting the second book. To be honest, I'll probably read the third book as well anyway, simply because the backstory is honestly still plenty interesting and because I just don't know many better books in that specific genre (military fantasy).
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Mar 8, 2014 23:04
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homercles posted:I don't think I have anything spoilery written here, but if you want to read The Red Knight then probably avoid this post. Yeah, the relationship with Amicia is very badly written (especially the first scene which is absolutely awful), although slightly redeemed because Amicia is still more than just a love interest and follows her own objectives. You're also a bit unfair to Mag because everybody was insanely stupid for not seeing that the priest is the traitor (actually, I think they knew he was but didn't realise he could do anything) and Mag didn't own the company anything and to the Queen. Almost all of the women in the (first) book are portrayed as independent since they follow their own objectives and decide for themselves what they'll do (regardless what men around them say/want), which is a refreshing change from most books in the genre. The abess and Sauce in particular. I don't get the comment on the magic. There is no one standard way to write magic, a writer can do whatever he wants and at least this is pretty consistent.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:11
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FastestGunAlive posted:I think all the women were sexualized in one way or another. The Queen is insanely beautiful and is lusted after by every single man, and we get a number of descriptions of how good she looks naked. Sauce was a prostitute at one point in her life. Amica mentions how she is not pure (it was early in so I can't recall if she was raped/a prostitute/or just had taken several lovers before becoming a nun). Mags feels guilty for all the times she got it on with her neighbor after her husband's death. Even the Abbess was the lover of both the old King and Thorn before he became evil. Then there are the Lanthorn girls, beautiful peasants who are nothing more than sex objects. Maybe I'm just a huge prude or something but I didn't feel any of the characters were favorable toward women. Hmm, fair enough, the Lanthorn girls where especially bothersome ("let's seduce some rich knights so we can leave our horrible lives"). I had forgotten that about Mags, that's pretty stupid characterization. Although I still think Sauce and the Abess are favorable toward women, really. Sauce once having been a prostitute doesn't get in the way of her being a badass and holding her own and the same goes for the Abess and whatever past she had before she became a leader of the abbey. Amica's backstory is that she grew up in the wild, I can't recall any mention of rape/prostitution or sex at all. Basically, as I see it: there are female characters whose beauty is their main attribute (or very important to their characterization) and there are female characters whose beauty is never relevant because they're too busy slaying monsters or running an abbey. So it's certainly not perfect but could be worse. Perhaps I'm getting too used to how badly women are usually depicted in fantasy and as a result have trouble recognizing it anymore. Sidenote: second book is worse in this respect and contains some things I did have issue with (no rape, 2 people mindcontrolled to have sex with each other to cause internal strife). Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 23:22
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neongrey posted:By a lot of definitions (including my own, which is why I'm bringing up the persepctive), what's contained in that spoiler contradicts the first point of that parenthetical. Hmm, true. It's probably even worse. There are so few fantasy writers that do it well it's a bit hard to evade all this crap. I guess I should go read Pratchett again.
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Mar 9, 2014 23:54
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I think a story loses something once the magic is completely explicable. If everything's understood and explained, there's a danger that it all becomes less frightening, less evocative, less emotionally powerful. The "magic" gets lost and it's just a different kind of technology. If you read the article, Sanderson agrees with you. It's a choice to make. Basically, Sanderson argues that the more often you want to use magic in your books to resolve things, the better you should explain to the reader what is and what is not possible. He also argues that all great fantasy writers follow this guideline, since writers with those inexplicable magic (like Tolkien) tend to just have a lot less scenario's where magic is used to resolve a conflict. He gives quite a bit of reasoning why this is the case, but it boils down to "if you don't follow this guidelines, you end up with too many deus ex machina moments where the books loses suspension because the wizard can always pull some new trick out of his hat". Sanderson likes to use his magic a lot, so he feels compelled to explain it. That said, I would argue that Tolkien and Sanderson hardly write in the same genre anyway (exactly because of these kinds of distinctions). I also personally disagree with people who say Tolkien is a model example of good fantasy, but that's another discussion.
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Mar 10, 2014 03:01
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Cardiovorax posted:This sort of attitude is exactly what I don't like about some more recent authors. It makes me feel like they must have watched too much Dragonball Z as children - "Of course Gandalf can't defeat the Balrog yet, its power level is over 9000 and he doesn't know the Kaioken yet!" This sort of thing works in comics, but not in myths, and an approximation of Christian myth by way of Norse flavour is exactly what Tolkien was trying to write. Yes, I feel Tolkien and Sanderson just try to do very different things with their writings. Tolkien wants to create a new mythology in an awe-inspiring world. Sanderson wants to write a page-turner that's enjoyable to read. In the article above he even compaires what he does with superhero comics. quote:If magic is so mundane and everyday, why are people using it so narrowly? Elantris and Warbreaker actually do what you want, the magic system influences the society in these books greatly even outside of their combat ability. (Sadly they are his 2 worst books) edit: also, you should read Pratchett.
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Mar 10, 2014 14:04
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I have never seen anything related to d&d, have no idea where I would have to go to find it or even where to find somebody interested in it and if people hadn't been mentioning it constantly in this thread I'd never have taken notice of it. Can we please stop talking about whatever this is? General Battuta posted:It's not even an inherent cost - you're creating a false dichotomy. You can write a mechanistic magic system and you can write it well. But most writers who attempt it (like Sanderson) don't know how, because they are Objectively Not Very Good on the technical level. What you're forgetting is that pretty much all fantasy writers have bad prose anyway, regardless of which kind of magic system they use. I mean, yeah, there are plenty of fantasy writers using "hard magic" (to use Sanderson's terminolgy for writers like himself) that write bad prose. There are also plenty of fantasy writers using "soft magic" that write bad prose. Obviously only people in the first category can have bad prose about the magic system (because in the second they tend to evade talking about it), but that doesn't mean anything. Both Tolkien and Sanderson have horrible prose at times and both have plenty of superfluous paragraphs that break the "show don't tell rule", so when Sanderson has a horrible paragraph it's a bit quick to conclude that it's because he chose this particular way to explain his magic. In the end, I do think we largely agree, I just would state it slightly differently: it's possible to write a mechanistic magic system, but just like pretty much everything else in fantasy they tend to be written in a bad way. edit: typo Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 14:31
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This is not a universal condemnation of all mechanistic magic systems, just of those passages on a prose level.
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Cardiovorax posted:Right. I'm not talking about what I think of mechanistic systems, although I don't like them personally, but of how I think information about them should be revealed. For one, because it breaks a rule as basic as "show, don't tell" and for the other because I think that it limits the dramatic potential of conflicts between characters. In fiction like Branderson's, where every capability is detailed up-front and there's a clear "who can beat up who" pecking order, there's so much less tension in conflicts, because it's a lot easier to predict who is going to come out on top in any match-up. I'm sorry but I don't think you know what you are talking about. First of all, you are generalizing an entire group of fantasy writers from one single author. Second, you are utterly and completely wrong about the statement that Sanderson explaining his magic decreases tension in the conflicts. It's exactly the opposite as has been explained very well earlier in the thread and in his blog post about this. Third, you are also wrong in the statements "every capability is detailed up-front" (some are, some are not) and in the statement that there's a pecking order (edit: in the sense that characters beat stronger characters often). For reference, blog post: http://brandonsanderson.com/sandersons-first-law/ Anyway, I'll start with saying that I agree that Sanderson writes bad prose sometimes, especially when explaining magic system. The explanation is often badly written. That's besides the point here though since it does not mean it can't be well written. It does not limit the dramatic potential of conflicts because if these limits are not obvious it means that you end up with characters suddenly using magic never expected of them, i.e. deus ex machina solutions. The arguement is that the more you want to use magic in the conflicts, the better the readers should understand what's possible and what is not (implicitly or explicitly), because surprising the readers with magic abilities they could not expect where possible you will lose your audience. Conversly, you do not have to explain to your readers (implicitly or explicitly) what is possible, but if you don't you should refrain from using magic often. In fact, pretty much all fantasy authors follow this strategy. I honestly can't think of a single good fantasy book in which you have a mysterious/mystique magic system (like Tolkien) in which that magic is also often used in conflicts. This is really not controversial at all. The specific statements about Sanderson you got wrong are kinda irrelevant to this discussion since we should not generalise all fantasy writers using mechanical magic systems from him. quote:I used the example of Gandalf not because I think that Tolkien is categorically superior, but because it's a good illustration. Think of how much less meaningful that scene would have been if Tolkien had told us in excruciating detail how Gandalf is totally swole, but his boss told him not to use his full power, so the Balrog will totally spank him. It's just so much less compelling in every sense. It is not a good illustration since you really can not compaire Sanderson and Tolkien like that. They aim to do completely different things with their books and although you are correct that LotR would be much worse with a mechanical magic system, you are forgetting that this is irrelevant because Sanderson's books would be impossible without one. They are honestly different kinds of books with different aims. To go away from Sanderson, imagine that there had been no implicit/explicit limitations in Harry Potter's universe and every single fight you'd end up seeing completely new spells (oh, magic portal under your feet connected with the moon, next fight change all air into water and suffocate somebody, next fight put everybody to sleep) that you could not expect to be possible. It would severely limit the dramatic potential of conflicts between characters because you would know that anytime the writer wants it she could write in a new spell that suddenly resolves the conflict. There would be no tension because you would never know if a character is in a hopeless situation, in fact, you would never know if a character is in a losing position. All magic using conflicts would degrade in an utterly confusing mess where anything is possible. If you can think of an example of a good fantasy novel in which magic is used often in conflicts yet is utterly mysterious/unimaginable/unbounded, I'd like to read it. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 22:38
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General Battuta posted:This isn't really the opposite position, though. The opposite position is numinous magic, which works on narrative, emotional, or resonant logic - not a hard set of rules but a feeling of how things should be, what the costs are, who pays and why. 'The power of love' is a really basic, trite example of numinous magic. The way the elves guard their lands in the Lord of the Rings is another example: orcs don't go there, they are turned back, but there's no explicit wall of force or circle of protection vs. orc. Other good authors using a numinous system are grrm, Abercrombie, Lynch, Valente, Clarke, etc. Numinous magic systems are probably more common than mechanical ones anyway, there's no shortage of good examples of them. I was merely refuting the claim/opinion that mechanical magic systems limit the potential conflict between characters.
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Mar 13, 2014 11:23
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DimpledChad posted:I just finished The Emperor's Blades by Brian Stavely. It's the start of a new Epic Fantasy Trilogy™ and also the debut of a new author. Just came out in January 2014. I think Stavely is going to be a big name to watch out for in the fantasy world. The book's gotten pretty overwhelmingly positive reviews. It's doesn't break much ground; most of the situations and characters are pretty standard fantasy tropes. However, Stavely shows that if a book is well written, it doesn't have to be innovative for the sake of novelty. He executes so drat well that the book is tremendously enjoyable from start to finish. It's well paced, the world is cool and immersive (there are some really awesome terrible monsters), the characters are compelling, and the quality of the prose is way above the standards of the genre. That is earily similar to Acacia: The War with the Mein. Extremely similar. In that book (light spoilers): - The emperor got assassinated. - His four children are separated in far-flung corners of the world for the past 9 years. - The eldest daughter has lived at court, learning the arts of political intrigue and pouting. - The younger daughter is trained as a battle princess while living with some religious sect where she has to deal with a giant bird. - The older brother is training to become an elite soldier in the wilderness. - The younger brother became a pirate. - Each of the kids has a coming of age story over the course of the book, setting them up nicely to take on the Other Races in the sequel. - A race that was defeated long ago that tries to come back (by mass magical resurrection). - Mysterious and creepy magic of a long time ago being revived, all connected to the old gods. - Several evil ancient races. - Focus on intrigue, etc. The similarities are uncanny. Side note: I did not like Acacia, but that has more to do with flawed execution of his (too) many ideas than with anything in the spoiler tags.
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Mar 14, 2014 15:53
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General Battuta posted:It's not exactly funny but I would really recommend The Orphan's Tales. Dizzyingly baroque and intricate and then at the end it all comes together with unbelievable grace. I felt warm for a week after finishing. Seconded. The Orphan's Tales is phenomenal although it takes some getting used to the nested storytelling technique.
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Mar 16, 2014 10:34
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Kraps posted:I'm near the end of The Way of Kings and it's freaking great but man is it hard to follow in audiobook format. Gonna scour coppermind.net when I'm done. It'll be very hard to avoid spoiler for the second book in the series if you do that. Consider Tor's reread instead: http://www.tor.com/features/series/the-way-of-kings-reread-on-torcom .
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Apr 2, 2014 14:37
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VagueRant posted:Ah, there's (probably) nothing wrong with being well read. But I do absolutely wonder where everyone finds the time to read all these series. ASOIAF took me a good six months and I was unemployed for most of that! Weird. I believe the average reading spead is around 60 pages/hour (page being between 250 and 300 words). The first 5 books of ASOIAF together is as such about 71 hours of reading material if you don't take into account that these kinds of books tend to read a lot faster than normal. For it to take you 6 months, you probably read an average of about 23 minutes/day. Of course, that's fine and you can choose your own hobbies, but that's honestly very little. Compaire it to how much time you spend surfing the internet daily on average, or how much time you spend watching tv, etc... edit: pagecount ASOIAF is per wikipedia, which claims it's 4273 pages. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Apr 28, 2014 |
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Apr 28, 2014 16:30
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Cardiac posted:Only 60, thought it was higher. I think I have clocked myself at 120-150 pages per hour and with my 2hs commuting a day I go through a lot of books. Well, the 60 pages/hour thing is just a guess based on articles that claim an average untrained adult reads around 250 words per minute and me assuming that's about one page (it normaly is). However, I just checked and apparently asoiaf only has about 180 words per page, probably because of the dialogue. Because of this and since you would obviously expect that people in this subforum read faster than average because we read more than average, most people here could probably read asoiaf at a rate of 100 pages/hour or more. Note: it should be obvious reading speed depends on the book.
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Apr 29, 2014 13:59
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less laughter posted:Or you could just recommend books based on their literary quality instead of because of the writer's gender or race, which is pretty insulting and condescending? If N.K. Jemisin had been a white man, her books would suddenly not be worth recommending? I'm pretty sure she would want you to recommend her to others (if at all) based on the quality of her books and not her gender or race, even if only used as a first sifting, and doing so anyway only proves you have actually learned and/or understood absolutely nothing from the books you have read. I'm pretty sure nobody here will recommend books just because the writers is a woman, it is of course also necessary that the book itself is good. Luckily, it turns out that those books are often extremely good despite them often having more trouble getting noticed/published because they are not the safe renowned white male choice the publishers/advertisers know. In a sense, my feeling is that people sometimes mention N.K. Jemisin being female/black not because they think that alone merits you to read her book, but rather because they want to emphasis that she's good despite not being part of nor is similar to the established/renowned white male writers everybody knows. Or at the very least, that's why I would sometimes mention stuff like that. That doesn't mean I think anybody who doesn't read female writers is sexist (although everybody should honestly read female writers, they're really good), just that I think too many people stay in their comfort zone of renowned authors. Basically, it all boils down to female writers not getting the attention they deserve and people trying to rectify that. Related: everybody should read Catherynne M. Valente. The Orphan's Tales for example is amazingly good.
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May 8, 2014 23:34
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zoux posted:I despise the Black Company books and am constantly rechecking to make sure that yes, it is that Glen Cook everyone in the thread is raving about. Agree, but to be honest I have this for a ridiculous amount of writers people rave about, so I think that kind of epic fantasy just isn't the best genre for me. Patrick Rothfuss, Glen Cook, Peter V Brett, N K Jemisin, Trudi Canavan, Scott Baker, K J Parker, Richard K Morgan, Brian McClellan, C S Friedman, David Anthony Durham and probably others I forgot were all much less good than I expected based on ravings here. Some of them are just horrible, some of them merely okay-ish. To clarify, writers that I think should be raved about much more often are for example Barry Hughart, Catherynne M Valente, Connie Willis, Helene Wecker, Ted Chiang, Terry Pratchett, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, Megan Whalen Turner, etc (Note, I often only read 1 or 2 book(s) of these so maybe they wrote bad books as well). Clearly a lot of different opinions exist about which kinds of fantasy/sci-fi books are good.
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Jun 6, 2014 19:45
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coyo7e posted:That said, what makes Terry Pratchett stand out for you? In my personal opinion he's about the level of a Koontz but lacks the world-building of Feist. I guess I read a lot of Pratchett sorry. Very enjoyable satires with plenty of references, great characterization and humor and all in a neat world that gets better/more intricate the more you read, what's not to like?
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Jun 7, 2014 11:02
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thehacker0 posted:Wheel of Time and Malazan? How do you feel about Kingkiller? First book is somewhat okay but the second book is so extremely bad it makes the first worse in retrospect.
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Jun 19, 2014 22:30
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Vehementi posted:
All quiet on the western front It's a classic as well and has been out for so long that I don't think it's a problem I just spoiled the ending.
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Feb 14, 2016 22:35
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House Louse posted:Is it first person though? It does have the best sex scene I've ever read though, the soldiers are in a hospital and one's wife comes to visit. After a bit they draw the curtains and everyone else talks loudly and looks the other way. Yep, all quiet on the western front is first person. I also remembered that Jim Butcher has the first person narrator die in one of his books (Changes, afterwards he's a Ghost in the next book)
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Feb 15, 2016 21:23
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Stiletto is a weird book: there are tons of scenes which I didn't like, where unnecessary or contained plotholes. Yet overall I did enjoy reading it despite all it flaws.
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Jun 18, 2016 12:45
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Reason posted:I just finished Planetfall. Read it based on the praise it got in this thread. I didn't really like it that much. It felt like it wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be and in that process maybe lost focus on what could have made it interesting. There were some things that I felt were just plain wrong I just can't accept that a colony full of scientists would just take Mack's word and never go inside or study one of the most interesting scientific finds ever. I guess if you really read into it you could make the connection that Mack was in charge of recruiting people and in the end just recruited a bunch of religious idiots with fancy degrees or some poo poo, but man that just doesn't quite cut it for me. Especially when you take into account that Suh was actually interested in the science of it. Yeah, I didn't like it that much either. Although I did find the beginning and setting really interesting, the ending was just too rushed and poorly executed and too much doesn't make sense if you think about it. I really hate it when the protagonists are just dumb (especially if they're supposed to be really smart). Another example in addition to yours. So they assume this other group of colonists all died 20 years ago. Then one guy comes along from the other group and says "yeah, we survived for 20 years, but suddenly everybody died a few months ago and now I'm the only one and came here". And everybody goes "oh, let's just believe everything you say despite us knowing you have a very good reason to be extremely mad at us. It makes perfect sense that your colony, despite surviving for 20 long, suddenly had everybody die except for you. It also makes perfect sense that you only found us after 20 years despite the distance only being a few months travel and you knowing our location. Let's never consider the possibility that your group, who clearly survived for 20 years, might still be around. Nor consider the possibility that your group, who clearly must hate us a lot, might be planning against us. " Normally this wouldn't bother me so much, but Mack is described as having extreme paranoia. He kills one group just for the chance that people might be unhappy if they knew things some people in this group saw. And then he kills the other group so the first group crashing is not as suspsicious. Both these actions did not make any sense to me and did not seem logical choices a normal person would make. So how can somebody that is so paranoid never consider this stranger not telling the truth?
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Jun 24, 2016 21:57
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coffeetable posted:I was going over the genre fiction I've read from the past year to make recommendations to a friend, and while I've mentioned it before it's worth a re-mention: Rage of Dragons is really loving good. Far better than the title suggests it is. Self-published, first-time black author, and it's gotten a ridiculous 4.7 on Amazon and 4.4 on Goodreads. It's swords and sorcery in an African culture, and has the protagonist progress through hard work rather than just being Chosen. Dunno, I liked the first 80% of Rage of Dragons but the ending is so extremely stupid I'd have a hard time recommending it to people. I mean, the ending manages to both completely break suspension of disbelief (not just the ridiculous "it's just a flesh wound", but also simply the choices people make) while at the same time being overly predictable in a stereotypical "set things up for the 2nd book" way. The first 80% is pretty cool though!
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Jul 28, 2019 00:06
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Hungry posted:Does anybody have any decent recommendations for science fiction focused on or limited to the solar system? I've been reading a lot of space opera lately and I feel like I need something more local, but there's only so many times a human being can reread Blindsight. Perhaps Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald? It's not exceptionally good or anything, but at least it is better than The Expanse.
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Aug 20, 2019 22:57
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bowser posted:I asked this in the recommendation thread but didn't get any responses so I'm hoping you guys will be able to help. One thing I really like about Ted Chiang is his ability to take outlandish ideas and flesh them out into fully functional worlds - I'm thinking particularly of his stories "Hell is the Absence of God", in which miraculous visitations by angels are a common occurrence and "Omphalos", in which there's ample evidence that the Young Earth creation story is correct. Borges is exactly who you're looking for. Very similar style. Both are among my favourite writers, not sure whose better. Start with ficciones.
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Sep 12, 2019 12:58
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bowser posted:Thanks for the suggestions everyone, my "to read" list just got a lot longer. Sorry, I read a Dutch translation...
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Sep 12, 2019 22:44
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