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Rygar201 posted:Michael is probably the best depiction of a Paladin I've ever seen, at least Deed of Paksenarrion is pretty awesome for that. Michael is a bit more preachy than I'd like, especially since at least from Harry's perspective Michael mostly gets things pretty easy. With the exception of the occasional call to action Michael seems to have a literally charmed life. Which makes it pretty easy for him to talk about how awesome it is to be righteous.
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Dec 10, 2014 01:29
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, I think the American publisher wanted a dramatic-sounding title and was worried American fantasy audiences wouldn't want to read a book about London's rivers. What they missed is that "dramatic" = "generic" in most modern book titles, and that the American fantasy audience is incredibly anglo-philic. It's because we all move to 10 Downing Street when the books get UK kindle releases four months ahead of the US release.
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Jan 6, 2015 18:00
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:Do the Daniel Faust books get any better? They were pretty highly recommended earlier in the thread but the first few chapters of the first one are pretty awful They remain mediocre. If the idea of oceans 11-esque plans all coming together (cue the Sinatra with the reveal), they're reasonable enough, but the character depth and development are lacking at best. Some things I find particularly jarring, like the Succubus and Faust's interactions.
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Feb 3, 2015 20:29
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docbeard posted:Now try being a Vernor Vinge fan. Oh come on, Vinge writes one every five years or so. If you don't expect more than that, it isn't disappointing. It helps that, with the exception of his newest book, he doesn't do sequels.
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May 21, 2015 19:59
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Goggles mentioned in the first sentence. It sure is steam punk! Not that "The Aeronaut's Windlass" isn't already parodical as a title. "Quickly, set the ether engines to full power, extend the dynamo and charge the voltaics!" *grimaces at tightness of corset* "'Ware the phlogston throwers and chymical bombs! We must persevere on our mission. For the Queen!"
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Sep 1, 2015 20:32
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I agree with the summary and interpretation of Burned. Very changes-esque, and I feel like it's a necessary transition given the politics of the setting. We've been told for a bunch of books how bad dark mages (and especially Richard) are but only rarely shown, and it's time for that to happen.
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Apr 9, 2016 12:32
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I'm not sure. (massive spoilers for Alex Verus Burned follow) On the one hand, obviously it's not good to be forced to work for Richard again. He left because he had moral issues with the way he operated, and that won't have changed since then. Anne has a similar background and will be challenged more directly given her lethal powerset, but Verus is definitely going to make tough choices. On the other hand he is now working for people who actually want him not-dead. The end of Burned showed conclusively how worthless the council is, and how powerless even the people he trusts were when push came to shove. The overarching political stuff was interesting, too. Chalice explicitly saying she opposes Morden's ambitions, and basically operate on her own is very similar to what Alex wants. Meanwhile Morden's endgame is basically just what the council does already, but with him in charge. Richard's own goals remain unclear, but I suspect political power is not involved. What do you think the odds are that the next book has Verus forced to steal back the Jinn he stopped Morden from getting this time?
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Apr 9, 2016 19:11
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Yeah. More moronic release date hijinx. Guess I should move to Downing street temporarily.
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Nov 4, 2016 01:04
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Really, I should fake a U.K. Address because gently caress the us publishers for constantly releasing three to six months later in the states for no loving reason.
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Dec 3, 2016 04:15
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It's incredibly sexist and unnecessary. As if we need explicit rules about female sexuality and roles in addition to all the implicit ones. Oh no, a woman might have sex! Better nip that in the bud and teach her a lesson about why she's so wrong. Edit: Jesus Christ, I just remembered that Harry banned Molly from sex too. Butcher is obsessed with chaste women. Velius fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jan 20, 2017 |
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Jan 20, 2017 19:26
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Exmond posted:Here we go again I realize the misogyny is a common theme in the thread, but this is pretty beyond the pale even by comparison to the run of the mill baseline of the series.
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Jan 20, 2017 19:44
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Faust has this very weird, very schizophrenic dichotomy of morality that the books don't remotely handle well. I’m really hoping Caitlin is playing a long game with Faust for some non-twue Love reason. They introduce the idea that maybe she is then it’s resolved shortly after that. Her being with Faust doesn’t really make sense otherwise - she’s demonic royalty, whatever that entails in the setting, while he’s some small time criminal.
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Apr 17, 2018 00:46
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smertrioslol posted:Just finished the third Wisdom’s Grave book, really enjoyed it. It wraps up a lot of loose ends that have been dangling for awhile and I’m curious as to where he goes next. Maybe more Faust involving the First Story characters? What the gently caress has the Enemy been doing this whole time? I kinda forgot what he was up to since going through the wild ride of Wisdom’s Grave. I was just coming to post something similar. So post-wisdoms grave we’ve learned: (Extreme spoilers, obviously) The Network is down a King, a bunch of support and Adam is off stranded somewhere. Adam is presumably a figure relating to Eden since that is specifically called out as real a few times in the mythology, and he’s clearly not human. His agenda is unclear. Hell is a failed experiment by Lucifer and an unnamed-but-presumably-responsible-for human religions Angel who burned out and closed Heaven. The Demons of Hell themselves don’t seem to have a particular agenda beyond the usual power and control stuff. Lucifer, we know, is on earth and remorseful about how it all went down and seems to be trying to tacitly help the good guys. Unclear about the heavenly counterpart’s fate in the end. Hell and demons are unique to the Faust/Black Earth. A bunch of religious backstory gets introduced. God has a son who fucks up a lot, making angels/Kings, the Story, and many Earths. His death in the end disperses the Network to isolated worlds by maybe purifying the magic plane. The Enemy we know has been in contact with the Network, but his agenda isn’t really clear. The Kings supposedly want to corrupt and breed more humans, he’s laid waste to multiple worlds, which seem at odds. A lot of interesting changes in the tone of the bad guys. In Faust the Enemy and Network were mythologized as mysterious, terrifying, powerful entities. Faust beat them, but it was always through trickery. In this book among other things The Network gets beaten in a straight up fight by the FBI, Adam is panicked and incompetent,and God turns out to be kind of an idiot who ruined everything from the start. There’s a lot of nice Girl Power stuff going on which is probably part of it, but it does seem like the bad guys are a lot less omniscient than they were portrayed as earlier. Overall I enjoyed the series a lot. It’s a big change in tone from Faust, at least until the most recent one borrowed a lot of Faust characters. There’s a lot of plot moving stuff too; clearly the books aren’t going to keep going indefinitely.
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Dec 20, 2018 14:51
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smertrioslol posted:As to Smith, Rosales comments to Adam that he should defrost another one. Maybe he’s a series of clones of the same guy and therefore has no real history? Or copied in a way that spits him out as an adult? This shows up in Double or Nothing, the most recent Faust book. There’s a guy at the bar Daniel talks to who mentions he and a partner were in a big architectural project “Before I retired,” he said, “I was an architect. A damned good one, too. My best friend and I went in on a new undertaking together. It was a housing project. Enormous, you wouldn’t believe how big. Ecological, entirely self-sustaining, a landmark to end all landmarks.” “How’d that work out for you?” I asked. “Great. At first.” He gave a tiny shrug. “Soon enough, the arguments started. We disagreed on everything , from the aesthetics to the heating system. Finally, we had a mother of a fight and I stomped out. Said fine, hell with it, I’ll do my own thing and show him just how wrong he is.” The old man’s eyes went distant. He stared at his martini glass, but he was a million miles away. “I’ll cut to the punch line,” he told me. “Turned out he was right about almost everything. I was a damned fool. And not only did it cost me the contract of a lifetime, it cost me something even more dear: my best friend. And I know, to this very day, that we could be friends again. All I’d have to do is go to him and tell him I’m sorry.”
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Dec 20, 2018 20:35
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As a science experiment I decided to look at the descriptions of love interests in a bunch of Urban Fantasy novels and similar fiction to see who is truly the gooniest of them all. What do you all think?quote:She was young, midtwenties at most. She was dressed in a long wool skirt, a turtleneck, and a cardigan sweater, all in colors of grey. She had hair of medium brown, held up into a bun with a pair of pencils, wore glasses, and had a heart-shaped face that was more attractive than beautiful, her features soft and appealing... She put a hand to her chest, breathing a little quickly. It had to be a fairly generous chest, given that I could notice the curves of her breasts even through the cardigan... Good ol’ Jim Butcher, Dead Beat quote:[She] was short, blond and impossibly perky even when wearing a stab vest. We’d gone through basic training at Hendon together before being transferred to Westminster for our probation. We maintained a strictly professional relationship despite my deep-seated yearning to climb into her uniform trousers. quote:[She] led me into a ground floor flat and I tried to keep my eyes off the long legs that emerged slender and brown below the hem of the T-shirt. It was even hotter inside the flat proper and I recognized the smell of palm oil and cassava leaf. I knew exactly the style of home I was in from the walls painted hint of peach to the kitchen full of rice and chicken and Morrisons own brand custard cream biscuits. We stopped at the threshold to the living room and [she] beckoned me down so she could murmur in my ear—“ You show some respect now.” I breathed in cooked hair and cocoa butter. It was like being sixteen again. quote:The girl on the right looked twenty or so, with black shoulder-length hair and odd reddish-brown eyes. We’d met only once, though I’d gotten a good feeling from her; she had a gentle manner I found appealing. Benedict Jacta, Cursed. He really doesn’t go for detailed physical appearances at all. quote:She was beautiful, any fool could see that. A pale angel with a body built for daydreams, her scarlet hair worn in a twist over one shoulder. She wore a French maid’s outfit barely a step removed from lingerie, her long legs sheathed in black fishnet, garter fastenings on display a quarter inch below the flare of her ruffled skirt. Any fool could see that. quote:She was blond and tall with skin like the finest satin I’d ever seen. She wore a hint of unusual scent and a smile that said she saw through everything and [I] was one big piece of crystal. She looked scared but she wasn’t spooked. “I think I’m in love,” quote:[She]was in her early twenties, a little bit of a thing but with hips that were amply ample and mounted on gimbels. She had breasts that would make a dead bishop jump up and howl at the moon. She had lots of long red hair. The breeze threw it around wilder than I suddenly hoped I might be doing in about five minutes. Glen Cook, Garret, P.I. quote:The woman still wore the janitor’s jumpsuit they’d used to sneak into the library, but even Zeddig, who planned the delve, had to admit the limits of her disguise. The jumpsuit hid [Her] like a gemstone filter hid a flame: even covered, she shined through, sharp and glittering as ever, the whole blond, slick, otter-muscled length of her, a deadly curve bent against the room’s sole desk, waiting for an excuse to spring. Max Gladstone, Ruin of Angels quote:[At] that moment the first of the party guests were shepherded in by a very busty, very blonde, very beautiful woman who was obviously much too good for the likes of James Dodson. Or the likes of me, to be fair. She was wearing a white bloused top and a khaki skirt with an asymmetric hang, which probably had a designer name attached to it somewhere and cost more than I earned in six months. For all that, though, she looked a touch worn and tired. And quote:[She]laughed. It had a chilling ring to it. ‘Who tells me that I can’t do these things?’ she asked, her voice caressing me roughly like the tongue of a cat. She has minute control over those harmonics, and she knows what she’s doing. She knew, right then, that she was bringing me to a painfully intense erection: a casual show of force intended to remind me of what else she could do to me if she had a mind to. ‘You? You’re giving me commands? I might be inclined to take that personally if your words were backed by anything besides insolence.’ She took a step towards me, those luminous eyes flashing like beacons in the dark. Another step and she was right in front of me, her head leaning in towards my throat. ‘But they’re not,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Are they?’ Mike Carey, The Devil You Know. Also known as that other urban fantasy with a succubus sidekick. quote:She was not only built like a Victoria’s Secret model, but the sun streaming through the windows lit up her smooth, flawless skin, which was white as confectioner’s sugar. And: quote:She was a mystery to me, and a beautiful one at that. Long locks of curly red hair cascaded over her shoulders, which were always covered in a tight but otherwise chaste T-shirt. She did not earn tips from her cleavage, like many barmaids do, but rather depended on her green eyes, her pouty lips, and the light dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She had pale, creamy skin and a few fine golden hairs on her arms, which led eventually to fingernails she had painted green to match her eyes... she gave off an ineffable scent that was not quite floral, more like a pinot grigio and mixed in with something that reminded me of India, like saffron and poppies. Kevin Hearne, he is the worst. quote:Short and heavyset, with large eyes and dark lips, [She] didn’t look like someone who could go toe-to-toe with a pissed-off vampire and walk away without a scratch. Her skin was the rich brown of oiled oak. A single black braid hung to the middle of her back. Cutoff jeans emphasized the curves of her hips. She was barefoot, her toes curling into the dirt with each step. A pair of curved wooden swords—Japanese bokken—were thrust through her belt. If I were to pick a single word for what attracted me to [Her], it would be her passion. Not merely physical, but for everything she did. She threw herself into life with no reservations, never holding back. She possessed a fearlessness fearlessness few humans ever matched. Jim C. Hines, Codex Born quote:[She] had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We’d been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, “I can do magic. Want to see?” “Of course.” She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom. She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim quote:The covers slipped from the slope of [his] belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair burst from him abundantly. China Mieville, Perdido Street Station quote:Once upon a time, she smelled wrong. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. She smelled clean, like fresh snow and air after a lightning storm and something hard to identify, something like sex and butter pecan ice cream. Honestly, I think she was the best thing I’d ever smelled. I was inferring “wrongness” from the fact that she wasn’t entirely human... Standing at least six feet tall in running shoes, she had shoulders as broad as a professional swimmer’s, sinewy arms, and well-rounded hips that were curvy and compact. All in all, she was as buxom, blonde, blue-eyed, and clear-skinned as any woman who had ever posed for a Swedish tourism ad. My main takeaway from this is I’ve read too much Urban Fantasy. Especially the bad kind.
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Dec 21, 2018 17:09
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M_Gargantua posted:Out of that list it just confirms that Max Gladstone is great and you should all read the craft sequence. Yeah, Gladstone is great. I really enjoy the books, although Two Serpents Rise was tough due to the change in protagonists and location. It’s about as diverse and inclusive as it gets though. Cornell’s London Falling is more horror than the usual UF fare and it seems devoid of awful descriptions of women (anyone interested, keyword searches like “wearing” and “she was” will usually lead the way. Surprisingly, you don’t usually find male characters with clothing descriptions). I also tried to get something from Sanderson but he’s far too chaste to describe how endowed someone is, much less the more colorful stuff. The succubus in Felix Castor is way more scary and mysterious than the one in Faust. I enjoy Faust, but Caitlin is pretty much the sexy ninja archetype. Murders all the bad people and orders food and delivers sex to the protagonist for no particularly clear reasons. Velius fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 05:53
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From reading Stross’s blog, it’s more like: Angleton, Eater of Souls is an extra dimensional horror summoned, then brought up in a life of British privilege and emulates the attitudes of the schoolmasters he was around. Bob, on the other hand, died in the botched summoning and either reinhabited his body or, alternatively is now the Eater of Souls, emulating the nerdy IT guy whose soul he consumed and whose body he now inhabits.
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Jul 27, 2019 23:58
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the_steve posted:I mean, we just had people going on about how the White Court needs to be written out because they're psychic rape monsters, which is a thing that has been shown to an extent in the books. I mean, that’s sort of the point though - the white court are psychotic rape monsters who murder on screen, with whom Harry has constant flirtations and banter with. Marcone is a crime boss who Harry constantly antagonizes and threatens who on-screen has done absolutely nothing. It’s really incongruous and silly. You can make him the lawful evil dude, but you need to give us some actual indications of evilness, even if it’s just showing drug users suffering in the streets in Chicago. Instead the portrayal of Marcone is that he’s more likely to set up syringe exchanges and supervised use locations, while profiting from the drug sales. Which, actually, I’d be okay with. Velius fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 15:38
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I always figured the Morden thing was intentional, but forgot the Drakh were actually a Babylon 5 thing too (season 5 was... not the best). Shocked there’s no fan-favorite Byron reference! Looks like there will be a new book in a couple months, preview chapter will be posted sometime soon. I’m pretty interested in where Verus goes, because it’s changing pretty fast the last few books.
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Sep 11, 2020 12:50
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Was it always 'McAnally’s' pub? I'm not super excited with Dresden lately, but that might make it more interesting.
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Sep 16, 2020 01:38
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Harmony Black and Wisdom’s grave are both relevant, but the former you can probably get away with “Harmony is a magic FBI agent” and be okay. Wisdom’s Grave is a lot more backstory relevant and seems like it will influence a bunch of things moving forward. It’s been like six months since the last book, is Shaefer okay?
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Aug 23, 2021 04:02
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ConfusedUs posted:I’m gonna read this soon but first I have to read Blitz, the third Checquay novel, following after The Rook and Stiletto. Man advertising for books sucks - thanks for mentioning this or I wouldn’t know it existed at all, much less that it was out.
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Oct 22, 2022 23:12
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On the topic of less bad Urban Fantasy, the next Daniel Faust comes out in a few days. And the second “Inheritance of Magic” book by Alex Verus author Benedict Jacka comes out in October, looks like. The first one was decent enough but had to do all the setting details so I’m hoping number two will be better. Unfortunately Rivers of London seems to be doing the “million side projects” thing so who knows when the next one of those comes out.
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Apr 22, 2024 13:18
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