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mllaneza posted:The last of the Instrumentalities series is done, I just checked and it's scheduled too! http://www.locusmag.com/Resources/ForthcomingBooks.html  Walh Hara posted: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. I read those books maybe 5 years ago, and they were generally solid fantasy. House Louse posted:That's interesting, as in "interesting times". Someone with a backlist the size of that, who can't sell a book that looks rather easy to sell. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, but it's interesting the target is so low - he's figuring a print run of 200 copies. It's nice that the reward tiers are named after aspects of the novel, too. I've found LWE's last few books (the tipjar Ethshar ones) to be way, way under par, but like gently caress I'm not going to kick in for a physical copy, I've been reading his books since the 1980s.
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Jul 1, 2013 04:44
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Dr Scoofles posted:Can somebody recommend me a fantasy series that has decent female characters in? They don't have to be the protagonist but it would be nice if they were. I'm not really interested in fantasy romance books, but romance as a part of a bigger story is cool. I have previously read the Mistborn series and really liked them, and I remember liking Trudi Canavan's Magicians Guild series although I read them ages ago so I forget a fair bit about them. It doesn't have to be magic stuff though, I'm open to anything. I like war, politics, quests, whatever! I've also never read any sci-fi before either so I'm totally up for giving that a try too. You can't go wrong with Kate Elliot.
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Jul 9, 2013 16:09
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General Battuta posted:On an unrelated note, barring perhaps the shared theme of SF/F being a cesspool, I don't know if anyone here pays attention to or cares about the tiny incestuous horrible world of SFFWA politics, but it's been pretty hilarious of late. Oh, geez, yeah. I didn't see you mention that Vox Day/Thomas Beale is an actual white supremacist who had this to say about NK Jemisin: Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious reason that she is not. She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self defence laws have been put in place to let whites defend themselves by shooting people, like her, who are savages in attacking white people. Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the law… Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support. Considering that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilised after their first contact with an advanced civilisation, it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do so in less than half the time with even less direct contact. These things take time. Being an educated, but ignorant savage, with no more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity with SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance… Reconciliation is not possible between the realistic and the delusional. (spoiled because even tho this is SA, people might not want to read hatespeech)
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Jul 9, 2013 16:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Mieville is a good writer but sometimes he uses fifteen syllables where one would do and sometimes he'd rather preach about Marxist doctrine than get on with telling his story. He's not as bad as john Ringo / David weber mil-sf libertarianism, sure, but it's still there and something new readers should be told about in advance. In some ways he's the Heinlein of marxism (though that may be overstating the problem). I think the background level of support for libertarianism and capitalism in the genre is so incredibly high that any amount of heterodoxy will really stand out.
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Jul 14, 2013 18:19
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Hedrigall posted:Titanides come in two sexes, male and female. Both sexes have a rear vagina and uterus, and a large penis in the position where a horse's penis would be. Both sexes also possess humanoid breasts and can thus give birth to and suckle young. Post the chart.
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Jul 23, 2013 04:24
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Stuporstar posted:I couldn't even stand to read all that. I'd heard there were bizarre creepy sex centaur whatevers in Titan, but that poo poo is all shades of Tumbler level creepy. Think I'll skip that novel then. 
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Jul 24, 2013 00:19
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General Battuta posted:Normally I would say 'read a book by a woman' but I actually don't know of any epic fantasy series by women that I would recommend off the top of my head The Deverry series by Katharine Kerr (at least the first 4 books, or first 8, both of which are reasonable stopping points)
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Jul 25, 2013 16:08
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House Louse posted:The World Fantasy Award nominations are up. Here's the novel nominees: Only one of those I've read is the Jemisin, but it was pretty good.
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Aug 16, 2013 01:18
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Oh in other news related to Jemisin, did y'all see that SFWA kicked out Vox Day/Theodore Beale this week?
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Aug 16, 2013 01:22
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Jedit posted:They're not time travel stories, they're weird sex stories. So's the Gerrold that people posted upthread.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Any advance reviews out? I think three solid entries is my threshold for starting a new series. Says right there reviews should be scheduled to run after publication date.
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Aug 16, 2013 18:47
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Who wants to see more terrible opinions from a white dude about the state of science fiction today? Everybody does? Cool. Here: http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/09/science-fiction-science-fiction/ re: Book of the New Sun: quote:I can tell you that these books–masterpieces as everyone seems to think they are–are actually medieval/Arthurian fantasies. In fact, there is virtually no real “science fiction” in these books other than various tropes… Severian’s travels and adventures and storytelling (Book Two has a long fairy tale inserted in the middle of the novel that goes absolutely nowhere and adds nothing to the novel) are straight out of a YA rite-of-passage fantasy… The earth does not wobble on its axis (as it would if the moon were gone) and without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life. These things don’t matter to the fantasist. They didn’t matter to Wolfe. re: Bujold quote:Another writer well-praised (from every corner) is Lois McMaster Bujold. Her great work is the Miles Vorkosigan series. These are supposed to be military science fiction stories, but they are really at their core Romance novels. At first, they were military science fiction novels of a higher order than most. But the romance elements creep in very early on. Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors. All of this is right out of Alexander Dumas. True, these intrigues and flourishes do happen in the real world (or they used to), but Bujold, over time with novels such as Miles in Loveand Cordelia’s Honor, you can see that Bujold is a closet romance writer. Not that this is a bad thing, but some of us aren’t that interested in romance. For me, personally, it takes much of the dramatic urgency out of a story if the hero is already married or if during a skirmish comes back to canoodle or wine or dine with his beloved before rushing back to the fray.
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Sep 6, 2013 05:13
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Dave Freer, Baen author and sometime Ringo collaborator, appears to have gone crazy: http://madgeniusclub.com/2013/09/09/defeating-the-anak/ (his wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Freer)
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Sep 10, 2013 02:42
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Decius posted:I really enjoy the sour grapes by all those manly-man authors. Especially if they never ever would even get a whiff of a Nebula or Hugo. Too bad there wasn't a Twitter or Blogs when Le Guin got her Hugo back in the Seventies. Friendly reminder to all concerned that Robert Silverberg wrote an introduction to a James Tiptree Jr collection in which he said quote:It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
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Sep 10, 2013 21:13
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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. 'The Robert L. Forward of fantasy fiction.'
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Sep 11, 2013 15:25
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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? It's basically schlock, and not even very good schlock.
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Sep 14, 2013 22:06
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savinhill posted:Better than SM Stirling's schlock? Jesus, that's a low bar, but at least Turtledove doesn't show up to comment pages and make an rear end out of himself.
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Sep 15, 2013 01:29
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Megazver posted:Editing and covers cost money. That was the stretch goals for the recent Lawrence Watt Evans kick starter. Something like "$5000 I hire this particular editor $8000 I commission this particular artist".
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Sep 20, 2013 20:51
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BananaNutkins posted:No, it's real. Happens sometime after Vi reminisces about going to a festival dedicated to Nysos, the god of blood and semen (really), and not being able to turn down any man's sexual advances for a week. I wish I could find it for you but I don't have my books with me. Jesus Christ, this loving genre.
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Sep 30, 2013 17:30
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coyo7e posted:Unfortunately just like everywere else, it's really esay to find his later (kind of kooky seeming, to a large extent) stuff, but you can only get 3 or 4 of the Chronicles novels there. At least none of them on lulu ate $200+. I see the first book pretty often at used book stores (and Hugh Cook books are my quick marker for how much it'll be worth going through a store's SF section, no Hugh Cook --> really not promising, first book --> ok , not bad, more US editions --> looking good, UK editions --> this place is going to have some gems)
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Oct 11, 2013 00:31
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House Louse posted:Per Wikipedia: drat but I wish there was more Jin Yong in English translation.
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Oct 14, 2013 23:37
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Play posted:Do you have to agree with an author's premise to find their ideas interesting or their material worth reading? Perhaps you might find it worth reading BECAUSE you don't agree with them? I guess there's nothing whatsoever of intellectual value in reading material written by people you don't agree with. Lol I'm not going to read the Turner Diaries either.
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Oct 15, 2013 19:04
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CaptainScraps posted:"Should I gently caress the nightlord? Oh no but he'll rip me in half! But he's sooooo handsome..." That's a pretty goony summary.
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Nov 11, 2013 03:23
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mystes posted:I just read the first book of her new series and I wanted to like it, but it felt like someone took the first chapter of a Brandon Sanderson book, inserted more weird romance elements, and tried to pad it out into the length of a novel. I find her writing perfectly readable, but when evaluating the book as a whole it just seems to fall flat. I thought it was generally pretty good, and I'm going to start on the second pretty soon-ish. For people thinking about Bakker, here's a semi-review that's pretty accurate but maybe not at polarizing as some of them: http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/the-darkness-that-comes-before-r-scott-bakker/
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Nov 11, 2013 04:45
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Hedrigall posted:
The second book was regrettable enough that I'm not too inclined to get number three.
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Nov 22, 2013 23:27
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regularizer posted:Who even are you? I'm upset I still have to wait another 9 months.
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Nov 23, 2013 03:56
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Who wants to see some horrible opinions from horrible ex-libertarian now-hardcore-catholic John C. Wright? I hope its you. quote:Also a woman who is crude inspires contempt, because she has contempt for God and man. The difference is that a woman who loses her native delicacy and modesty does not become an object of fear and respect, but an object of contempt and loathing, because the aura of sanctity women naturally inspire in men is tossed away.  http://www.scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-1/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Wright_(author)
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Nov 23, 2013 19:14
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Max Awfuls posted:How many Tea Party creeps are there actually writing mainstream fantasy and sci-fi? I've come to these genres recently and I keep stumbling on these Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card nutters and every time I look up any recommendation I dread googling the author and finding them going on a rant about feminazis and Muslim Obama. The genre is full of those kind of assholes, and more kinds than that, and has been for years and years and years.
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Nov 23, 2013 23:47
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Neurosis posted:John is trying his best to make me recant on my affection for The Golden Age. I'm told this is a quote from those books: quote:“One benevolent outcome of an otherwise dark and tyrannous world-empire period was the reduction, through eugenics and genetic engineering, of strains of the human bloodlines prone to substandard intelligence and mental disease.”
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Nov 24, 2013 09:52
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Max Awfuls posted:How many Tea Party creeps are there actually writing mainstream fantasy and sci-fi? I've come to these genres recently and I keep stumbling on these Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card nutters and every time I look up any recommendation I dread googling the author and finding them going on a rant about feminazis and Muslim Obama. Oh also I forgot to mention Jerry Pournelle, who doesn't publish much anymore but had a major influence on "Military SF". Here's a blog post from him: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=16304
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Nov 25, 2013 03:50
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calandryll posted:I didn't mind Pournelle too much when he's on TWiT. But reading that, ugh. I followed the other link and the other guy mentions reading a book on embryology but says it doesn't explain how a baby forms. He must have read a lovely book then because it's pretty well known how a fetus develops and it's a relatively simple thing. Sigh. http://old-www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf
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Nov 25, 2013 16:12
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If you have to read Dan Simmons, buy them used so he doesn't get any of the money.
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Nov 29, 2013 03:06
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Yeah, the Deepgate Codex is a total mess, but at least for the first book it's not fully the bad kind of mess. The rest of the series, not so much.
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Dec 4, 2013 04:30
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This loving genre: “Instead of insulting us, [Hines] could be using whatever influence he has in social media to help recruit more PoC into our circles. They need to know they’d probably be much more welcome here than they might be elsewhere. (After all, many of us would love to befriend extra terrestrials or anthromorphs.)” (http://www.jimchines.com/2013/12/recruiter-of-poc/ first seen at James Nicoll's live journal) (ETA: fixed link, thanks RoboCicero) fritz fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Dec 6, 2013 |
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Dec 6, 2013 03:06
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All of those books are quite excellent, with NK Jemisin's Shadowed SUn books (two of them) being probably the closest to what you seem to be looking for. It's an incredibly well-realized ancient-egypt analogue. The author is really well educated and it shows in the detail and sophistication of her world building. [/quote] I just finished the second Shadowed Sun book, and I thought it was a big step down from the first (but still well worth reading, and if there's more later I'll read them too); setting aside, the plot felt a little more generic fantasy book stuff.
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Dec 6, 2013 03:10
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Ika posted:I enjoyed bridge of birds, but I can't find that book for under 50$ I think it's just a compilation, the sequels are under $5 each on abebooks.
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Dec 11, 2013 03:13
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Play posted:Clearly I'm in the minority, but I don't mind Niven so much. His Destroyer of Worlds series was pretty fun, and if he's not the greatest sci-fi author ever he is at least a step above the pulp sci fi like Honor Harrington, Lost Fleet, even Old Man's War. The Destroyer of Worlds series has surprising subtlety and awesome scenes, admittedly mixed in with somewhat lackluster plotting and characterization. I'ver never read anything of his with Pournelle, in fact Destroyer of Worlds is the only one I have read. Go read the one about science fiction fans saving the day in a world where the new global ice age has begun b/c the us government got taken over by environmentals and they shut down all the pollution that was making it look like global warming.
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Dec 17, 2013 17:22
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muike posted:I just tried reading Ryk Spoor's Grand Central Arena and I got to chapter 6 before I realized I wasn't going to be able to go any further. Do his other books use the same prose style or did he write like a dingus in this one on purpose? He himself is a bit of a dingus.
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Jan 5, 2014 20:31
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Decius posted:Yeah, it gets noticeable later on that Asher is a right-leaning (in the European sense, so about a right-wing Democrat converted into the US spectrum) libertarian. Not to a degree that distracted from my enjoyment though, despite being about the opposite of my political beliefs. Neal Asher @nealasher 2h Oh gently caress off. The cold in the US is due to global warming? Now I have to figure out precisely when it was I entered the Twilight Zone. #fb
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Jan 8, 2014 01:54
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crazypenguin posted:I just finished reading and loved the Sharing Knife series, but yeah, you do need to be ready to handle the romance-y parts. I recall the first book having one slow part and a few horribly, horribly sappy lines, but if you can handle that, the series is fantastic. Good characters, neat world. I generally kind of distrust fantasy-magic stuff (I'm more of a hardish sci-fi person), but this series drifts in the direction of "let's do science to magic" which I appreciate. The Chalion books are the best things she's written and way better than the lovely recent Vor books.
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Jan 9, 2014 16:24
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