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Mike Carey's Felix Castor books were decent, I think. I didn't like Stephen Blackmore's Dead Things, though. It's like he was aiming for the thing where the early Sandman Slim books manage to be so ridiculously over the top that they cycle around from horrible to being kind of fun to read, but he couldn't quite manage it and just ended up with 'trying too hard to be edgy'.
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Nov 9, 2014 06:50
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Ornamented Death posted:Which is more likely: Glen Cook's Garrett series isn't urban fantasy, or you're just an idiot? I don't know if I'd call the Garrett series urban fantasy, honestly, because Tun-Faire is a magical enough world that I feel pretty comfortable with calling them outright fantasy.
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Jan 29, 2015 01:09
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KellHound posted:This is in regards to part b of you process, are you okay reading female authors and passing on male authors entirely or are you say you will only put female authors up to that extra requirement. Either is kinda hosed up, BUT ITS YOUR READING LIST so whatever. With Urban Fantasy, I generally avoid female authors unless I have a positive review from a thread here or some other trustworthy source. This is because there's a thin line between Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and a huge loving market for the romances, which means there's a metric fuckton of romances. Search for urban fantasy or something on Amazon and you're going to be inundated by pages and pages and pages of 'Anita Thompson: Vampire Fucker' clones all of which are by female authors(or at least by authors using female pen names). I mean, hell. The only female authors I can think of who are writing non-romance urban fantasy are Alex Hughes and Seanan McGuire, and McGuire's within sight of the romance border. I have no problems with female authors in any other genre and I don't make distinctions anywhere else, but when it comes to urban fantasy skipping over female authors who haven't gotten a good review is lazy and sexist and also the easiest way of eliminating paranormal romances from my choices.
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Feb 1, 2015 07:52
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Xander77 posted:The logical leap from "a suggestion we slightly expand the scope in which we police magical abuse - something we already to" to "then we'd have to invade the United States" is baffling. It's more "If we should have intervened and destroyed Germany in WWII for their unquestionably evil bullshit(which was Harry's idea), then we should have intervened and destroyed America back when the US was doing their unquestionably evil Trail of Tears bullshit" and Harry's response to this was basically "But America's not the worst and I'm an American and of course I wouldn't attack America!". Luccio's point was that most all wizards feel that way about their country and that that's why the White Council doesn't take sides. It would lead to dissension and desertion and the White Council would splinter, and that's a bad outcome for everybody. lovely as it is, the White Council is a major stabilizing influence in the world.
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Feb 3, 2015 21:44
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Mars4523 posted:Nightingale the veteran who has done it all before. He's the mentor, which is a vital role. But the series starts with introducing us to two rookies, where one is a good copper and the other is Peter. I think he literally ruminates on how easy the circumstances could have been flipped if he was the one to get coffee instead of her. So, why's he the lead? Because it's more interesting when the book is about a fuckup, imo. Peter is a lovely street cop who's on the verge of an exciting career in desk work when he lucks into a position as a sorcerer's apprentice that just happens to also let him be a 'real' cop. That is, imo, much more interesting than a story about an actual good cop falling into the same thing.
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Mar 1, 2015 10:16
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Wade Wilson posted:They kind of remind me of Alex Verus with the protagonist never *really* being threatened by anything and brute forcing his way through any opposition; except cranked to 11. That seems like more of an Iron Druid thing than an Alex Verus thing, imo.
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Mar 9, 2015 15:07
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I don't exactly get where you're coming from here. It's not like Alex learned those adepts were after him and straight up smoked them. Dude busted his rear end trying not to kill them, but he couldn't find a way out of it. It came down to a "me or them" decision and he decided on the "me". Yes, they wanted revenge for some horrible poo poo he did in his past, but does that mean his choices are "lay down and die" or "be evil"? And as far as everything else goes, his hand's been forced pretty much every time since he's run away from Richard, and none of that stuff was revenge for past wrongs, it was all defense of self or friends. It ain't like he's going out of his way to rack up a body count. Is this a case of "once evil always evil" or something?
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Mar 10, 2015 01:43
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Mars4523 posted:It's also really stupid. Are White Court vampires really so low in number that they're limited to a handful of families, with each family feeding on its own emotion? The White Court vampires in Chicago are probably not the only White Court vampires in the world, they're just the only ones we know about because they're the only ones Harry is concerned with and he's our viewpoint character. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to me that there's only one family in Chicago that feeds on any one given emotion; they don't share territory because they don't want to compete for hunting grounds/food/etc. tithin posted:Not really sure if I'll enjoy a non bob Laundry novel tbh. Non-Bob doesn't bother me so much. I'm just skeptical because I don't find Mo interesting at all. I'd rather read about Mhari or Pete or basically anybody who is not Mo. Khizan fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 08:51
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Clinton1011 posted:The Nightside is the best bad series I have ever read, I own every one that has come out & do not regret it. Simon R. Green manages to build worlds I really like and then completely gently caress up the story he tells in them.
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Mar 31, 2015 02:58
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Wheat Loaf posted:Can I look at this without spoiling the book? It's talking about the same incident that you mentioned in a previous post, it's just from the point of view of another character who was at that particular incident. If you already know about 'the biggest thing Nightingale ever killed', it is not a spoiler.
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May 5, 2015 21:11
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Deptfordx posted:The whole Your bodys limiters are turned off. It's all hysterical strength and ignoring pain seemed lame as hell when it was explained explicitly. It was guessed at by Butters. Fix was doing effortless ~40 foot wire-fu sword attacks on the island and Harry was sure that he could have gone further, and after that he parried a Fairy Queen's flaming death orb with his sword. This is not the kind of poo poo that you get to do just because your body turned off its limiters. My personal guess here is that Harry's using the bare minimum of the power that the Winter Mantle grants, because he doesn't want to give in to Winter. He's not actively using the mantle, he's just using the mantle's passive benefits while he relies on being a wizard. In other words, Mab gave Harry a jetliner and he's using it as a reading light. I also think that this is what Mab wanted; she gets a Winter Knight who can fulfill all the Winter Knightly duties without having to be utterly reliant on the mantle and on all of its instincts.
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May 12, 2015 00:07
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Mac: The notable thing about Mac's injury to me was that it wouldn't start healing until Mab pulled the bullet, at which time the injury started closing right up. This is sort of similar to the way Harry popped back awake as soon as Butters pulled that last fishhook barb out of him. Combine that with the way that Mab clearly knew how to handle his injury, the way Mab clearly didn't want to talk to him, the way that the Outsider at the bar seemed to know him(calls him watcher), the way Mac reacted to the Outsider, and the fact that Mac somehow got his bar classified as Official Neutral Ground under the Unseelie(Winter) Accords, and I'm going to have to guess that Mac was associated with Winter before he was out, and maybe with the Outsiders as well.
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May 12, 2015 06:31
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Benny the Snake posted:I mean, does London just call to UF writers like Seattle does to Cyberpunk writers? There's only a few cities with enough personality and renown to pull off an urban fantasy, imo. LA, NY, Vegas, Chicago, London. SF and Boston, maybe. You stage your UF in Chicago or LA and I've got a mental image of the setting immediately. Indianapolis or Oklahoma City? Nobody but locals will have any idea about the setting. That matters, imo.
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May 14, 2015 07:25
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The Monster Hunter books could be fun in an action movie kind of way if it weren't for the fact that he can't go five pages without stroking off to an issue of Guns and Ammo while muttering about liberal pansies.
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May 16, 2015 19:59
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Mortanis posted:Being able to predict exactly where someone will be and how to dodge an attack should make him deadly with pistols. The only time I remember him actually using his pistol, he was shooting at the super-speed kid and the problem was that the kid could practically dodge bullets. He did the whole 'deadly with a gun' thing back in the end of book 2, though. ImpAtom posted:It would have worked if not for the intervention of two absurdly powerful near-godlike beings and a parasitic spirit of intellect!
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May 18, 2015 21:10
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Wade Wilson posted:Verus kind of explains that with the whole "can't predict something that hasn't been decided yet" clause. As well, he can't predict the outcome of something like rolling dice because there's so many potential factors and outcomes that he can't isolate any particular future until the die is thrown. And hell, in the book where he fights the vigilante adepts there's a point just before he gets stabbed where he looks into the future and goes "Yep, all possible futures result in me getting stabbed" because knowing what would happen didn't mean that there was a way to avoid it. The diviners mentioned that manage to avoid all conflict do so by basically being hermits out in the middle of nowhere that have no contact with anybody to reduce the amount of variables they have to deal with, and who have no ties/attachments to anything so that they can run from any problems. That's really effective at avoiding troubles, but also a really miserable way to live.
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May 19, 2015 21:39
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Rumda posted:Now take Sanderson into that equation and realise that doing multiple series in parallel speeds poo poo up. Sanderson does this by replacing characterization and dialogue with  -ing over the magic system. It's no surprise that he writes so much faster than anybody else; he's mostly writing glorified Player's Handbook fluff.
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May 21, 2015 20:09
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The objection is not to him using the prologue to explain Szeth's powers, the objection is to fact that he wrote the equivalent of "Joren the mage hurled a fireball through the door. His fireball was a spell with a range of 400 feet that would explode into a sphere of flame 40 feet in diameter when it reached Joren's target. The guards fired back with crossbows, so Joren raised a wind wall in front of him. A wind wall is a spell with a range of 100 feet that creates a vertical curtain of upward flowing air that is 10 feet long, 5 feet high, and 2 feet thick. The wind wall redirected the arrows..."
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May 23, 2015 02:33
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I find Peter Grant to be way worse than Dresden because I can at least look at Dresden's past and see reasons why he's hosed up. He has problems dealing with women? Well, his mother's a half-legendary sorceress nobody will talk about, his foster father manipulated him into falling for his foster sister to bind them both closer to him(and the foster sister was mind controlled into betraying him), he has a literal fairy godmother who's even more manipulative than the average fae, and the rest of his childhood was spent on an isolated farm with a man who was born more than a century ago. On top of that, he can't make eye-contact without triggering a soul-gaze and when he gets emotional his mere presence will blow out cell phones/computers/lightbulbs, cause your modern car to fail, and de-magnetize your credit cards. He basically doesn't get to participate in modern society. When he has problems with women I can see reasons why he'd be that way. Grant doesn't have anything like that going for him, which makes me less tolerant of him.
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May 26, 2015 00:36
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I think it's pretty clear that Peter is objectively bad at being a cop. Those occasional flashes of brilliance don't make up for the 99.5% of the time that he's busy loving up the job because he saw a butterfly or wanted to read some graffiti.
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May 26, 2015 05:09
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There was no way a book titled "Peace Talks" was actually going to be peaceful.
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May 26, 2015 07:45
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The more I read the Rivers of London books, the more I realize that I don't care about Peter Grant very much at all; the series that I really want to read is all about Nightingale blowing away Tiger tanks and generally being awesome.Hieronymous Alloy posted:Peter's never going to casually burn down a building like Dresden. Nightingale, on the other hand...
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Jun 5, 2015 06:08
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Illuyankas posted:I'm pretty sure the White Court will be one of the, if not the, next big faction to taken out of the picture entirely. Lara's resources are too much for Harry to have access to and retain as much tension So are Mab's. And the White Council's. And the Gray Council's. And Marcone's. And every other organization Harry's ever allied with. I'm not really seeing a reason why the White Court would be next up on the chopping block.
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Jun 11, 2015 10:19
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Benny the Snake posted:Second, the plot involves supernatural entities which manifest as slasher-film characters to slaughter con antendies and feed of their fear. Reading it now in 2015, I'm wincing because ever since Aurora, Colorado, it's not slashers in movie theaters we're worried about. Normal people aren't worried about movie theater shooters, either.
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Jun 12, 2015 00:18
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Skippy McPants posted:Try to only be afraid of things that are statistically sensible! And clowns.
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Jun 12, 2015 01:29
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Annihilation Score: I thought the book was pretty good. I didn't really care for Mo before reading this book, but after getting to see things from her viewpoint and dealing with her as more than just a flavor character in Bob's story, I actually started to actively dislike her!
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Jul 9, 2015 07:06
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Fried Chicken posted:Again, they were separated. Bob had to move out because her violin wanted to eat him. I never got the impression that they formally separated in a 'this isn't working out, maybe we should think about divorce/see other people' way. It felt very much like a 'we don't want to split up but it is no longer safe for us to live together' separation, both from Bob's viewpoint in Rhesus Chart and Mo's perspective in Annihilation Score. More like a medical quarantine than a real separation. That's why Mo being so quick to jump on the 'Make out with Officer Friendly in the limo' train made me dislike her so much; they separated on the basis of "your violin wants to eat my soul" and she jumped from there to justifying going out on dates with other men without ever talking about it to Bob. It is not too much of a stretch to get hyped about that. Also, I missed that medical condition part you're talking about, when was that?
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Jul 11, 2015 21:24
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Heroes are almost always reactive, villains are almost always proactive. It's just the nature of the beast.
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Jul 13, 2015 06:37
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I liked all the parts of Jennifer Morgue that didn't include Mo. I've never liked that character.
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Jul 14, 2015 01:45
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The first book is the weakest book by far; if you can deal with it the others are all vastly improved from it. In a lot of ways, Alex Verus is probably my favorite urban fantasy protagonist. His divination is easily the most interesting ability of all of them and the fact that it lacks direct combat power lends more importance to all his maneuverings and alliances. I also think that he's the most interesting character-wise, as well. To compare it to the Dresden Files, where Dresden is a good guy who has some ends-justify-the-means issues and whose worst personal issues can be at least somewhat attributed to Lash and Winter Knighthood, Verus is an ex-Sithlord type who's a lot more gray and when he does some dark poo poo he doesn't get to pawn it off on the Winter Mantle or a fallen angel and have literal angels descend from the heavens to bro-fist him and tell him that he's Done Right. This makes him a stronger character, imo, even if the series as a whole is weaker.
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Jul 20, 2015 09:01
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The vampire is a sentient obligate humanivore; unlike most other creatures/monsters/etc it doesn't get a 'non-evil' choice like "live in the remote wilderness" or "lock the herd up during the full moon". It feeds off people or it dies and, to make matters worse, it used to be human itself. To me, this kind of choice is inherently interesting and vampires are one of my favorite 'monstrous' creature types because they don't really get an option to be anything less than monstrous; a man's got to eat.
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Jul 20, 2015 17:18
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ImpAtom posted:My major complaint here is that unless it is a "never feeds on anyone ever' vampire, I can't sympathize with someone who has murdered people to extend their own life. No amount of angst and sadness can escape that fact. The alternate problem is that if they can just resist their urge to feed than they're boring as hell because it devalues the actual curse. It's very hard for a series to really manage to hit the sweet spot for me where I can sympathize with someone who uncontrollably murders. I dunno, I think that I'd talk myself into it pretty easily if you put me into a situation where I had to choose between killing somebody in cold blood or dying myself. I'd find myself outside some lovely meth shack out here in the sticks saying "Really now, I'd be doing the community a favor..." or surfing the sex offender registry and going "This dude's got 4 counts of fondling six-year olds, I'm pretty sure I'm more deserving of life than he is...". In a life or death situation, I think most people would find a way to justify it to themselves.
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Jul 21, 2015 23:16
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I don't know if I could call it tentacle rape, really. If you want to use a human as a hand puppet you only have so many orifices to choose from.
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Jul 22, 2015 02:01
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thrawn527 posted:Sorry for the double post, but more Turn Coat spoilers, Morgan loving dies?! That sucks. So what was the point of the book? He could have died at the beginning and saved everyone some trouble. I guess Peabody was exposed. Still...drat. Turn Coat is where Harry learns that you can't win them all.
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Jul 30, 2015 05:36
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Storm Front is not a great book but it was good enough to get me stuck on the series, my mother stuck on the series, and probably most of you as well? I mean, I let them know it's not the best book, that it started as a class project, and that the others get better, but I don't think it's so bad that I should throw them into Summer Knight without reading it.
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Aug 4, 2015 21:55
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Storm Front into Grave Peril, skip Full Moon. Go back and read it if you're really really curious about the origin of the werewolf friends. Starting right at Summer Knight is awful because it skips over introducing Morgan and such, and it also skips over the whole part where Harry starts the war with the Red Council(spoiler: this war is a pretty big deal).
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Aug 4, 2015 23:27
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Murphy was justified in Fool Moon; that doesn't mean that the book wasn't a mess in spite of that.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:36
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Skin Game: There is nothing about the 'present-day' Murphy that would lead me to believe that she would be on the side of the angels if the side of the angels found itself opposed to Team Dresden... and Team Dresden was a pretty shady side even before he became the Winter Knight. Gave Kemmler's Word to Mavra, leased out a corner of his mind to the shadow of one of the Fallen. Gave into the Dark Side more than once. His apprentice was a loving mindbender. Then he comes back from the dead, starts one massive fight, and sits out on his Spooky Island all by himself for a year? Yeah, I'm not gonna bust Butters' balls if he doesn't have absolute faith in him.
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Aug 5, 2015 03:34
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Corpsetaker.
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Aug 5, 2015 15:02
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Slanderer posted:Combining magic and technology inevitably leads to authors jerking themselves off by having their characters transform magic into systematized and quantified technology so that nerds like them can become wizards too. The interest in magic is that it is unknown and new and special. In order to combine it with technology, the world has to understand magic and then its just boring science. Clarke's 3rd law is that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In a similar vein, I think that any sufficiently explained magic is just technology.
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Aug 12, 2015 05:27
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