multijoe posted:

Who the gently caress is reporting fantasy book discussion in the fantasy book megathread

pradmer posted:

In that vein, does anyone have any recommendations for books with journeys through weird and alien settings. The best examples I can think of are Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance and Kameron Hurley's The Stars Are Legion when they're traveling through the inside of the world. Not so much Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous at Rama because I found that pretty sterile.

quote:

I finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's new book Cage of Souls late last week. Most folks ITT loved his Children of Time and while this isn't quite as good, I'd rate it about 8/10 of the way there. Set on a very Vancian Dying Earth, a too-smart-for-his-own-good graduate student gets himself sent upriver on a Heart of Darkness trip to an Island where your life is worth precisely zero, and his subsequent adventures thereon and flashbacks to how he got so deep in the poo poo. I enjoyed it a lot, well worth picking up.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

If you're new to Vance the PoA and tDP series are absolutely your first *ahem* Port of Call, if you have read a bunch of his stuff I would also recommend the essay 'Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance' as it has a lot of good insights into his work.

There's a Gbooks preview but the actual book is only in paper print - which I have a copy of somewhere - as far as I've found so far:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0s4DiakfSjEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

I also just found this:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2UPUAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA193&ots=KoeLZyTbch&dq=Lop%20Loiqua&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false

The first few pages of the chapter on "The Art of Xenography: Jack Vance's “General Culture” Novels" are missing from the preview but the full book is on Amazon for just a few quid:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00F5N4NHI

so I have that to read this weekend.

Bear Sleuth posted:

Vance! It's not all comedic by any means but his signature ironic tone is the source for loads of humor, and there are books like Cugel's Saga which is nothing but a series of goofball escapades. The chapter Cugel spends as a worminger jumps to mind as a highlight.

quote:

Cugel gave Bunderwal a careful inspection. "He seems to be a modest, decent and unassuming person, but definitely not a sound choice for the position of supercargo."
"And why do you say that?"
"If you will notice," said Cugel, "Bunderwal shows the drooping nostrils which indicate an infallible tendency towards seasickness."
"Cugel is a man of discernment!" declared Bunderwal. "I would rate him an applicant of fair to good quality, and I urge you to ignore his long spatulate fingers which I last noticed on Larkin the baby-stealer. There is a significant difference between the two: Larkin has been hanged and Cugel has not been hanged."

quote:

Iucounu led the way into a hall panelled in fine dark mahogany, where he was greeted effusively by a small round animal with long fur, short legs and black button eyes. The creature bounded up and down and voiced a series of shrill barks. Iucounu patted the beast. “Well then, Ettis, how goes your world? Have they been feeding you enough suet? Good! I am glad to hear such happy tidings, since, other than Cugel, you are my only friend. Now then! To order! I must confer with Cugel.”

Iucounu signaled Cugel to a chair at the table, and seated himself opposite. The animal ran back and forth barking, pausing only long enough to gnaw at Cugel’s ankles.

A pair of young sylphs floated into the room with trays of silver which they set before Cugel and Iucounu, then drifted once more back the way they had come.

Iucounu rubbed his hands together. “As you know, Cugel, I serve only the best. The wine is Angelius from Quantique, and the biscuits are formed from the pollen of red clover blossom.”

“Your judgment has always been exquisite,” said Cugel.

“I am content only with the subtle and the refined,” said Iucounu. He tasted the wine. “Matchless!” He drank again. “Heady, tart, with a hint of arrogance.” He looked across the table at Cugel. “What is your opinion?”

Cugel shook his head in sad abnegation. “One taste of this elixir and I never again could tolerate ordinary drink.” He dipped a biscuit into the wine and tendered it to Ettis, who again had paused to gnaw at his leg. “Ettis of course has a wider discrimination than I.”

Iucounu jumped to his feet with a protest, but Ettis had already gulped down the morsel, thereupon to perform a curious contortion and fall down on its back, with feet raised stiffly into the air.

Cugel looked questioningly at Iucounu. “You have trained Ettis well in the ‘dead dog’ trick. He is a clever beast.”

Iucounu slowly subsided into his chair. Two sylphs entered the chamber and carried Ettis away on a silver tray.

quote:

"Most interesting, although I am unfamiliar with such extensive vistas. In fact, I feel almost a sense of vertigo. What is the source of the savage red glare?”

“That is the light of our ancient sun, now westering toward sunset.”

“It does not appeal to me. Please be quick about your business; I have suddenly become most uneasy.”

“I will make haste,” said Cugel.

The sun, sinking low, sent a shaft of light through the portal, to play full upon the altar. Cugel, stepping behind the massive chair, twitched away the two shutters which guarded Phampoun’s eyes, and the milky orbs glistened in the sunlight.

For an instant Phampoun lay quiet. His muscles knotted, his legs jerked, his mouth gaped wide, and he emitted an explosion of sound: a grinding scream which propelled Pulsifer forth to vibrate like a flag in the wind. Phampoun lunged from the altar to fall sprawling and rolling across the floor of the temple, all the while maintaining his cataclysmic outcries. He pulled himself erect, and pounding the tiled floor with his great feet, he sprang here and there and at last burst through the stone walls as if they were paper, while the Kind Folk in the square stood petrified.

Cugel, taking the two sacks of gold, departed the temple by a side entrance. For a moment he watched Phampoun careering around the square, screaming and flailing at the sun. Pulsifer, desperately gripping a pair of tusks, attempted to steer the maddened demon, who, ignoring all restraint, plunged eastward through the city, trampling down trees, bursting through houses as if they failed to exist.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

I posted about enjoying Blake Crouch's RECURSION awhile back, it has a big written-for-Hollywood energy but is still a lot of fun; a quid the next 24h

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Recursion-Bestselling-Author-Exciting-Thriller-ebook/dp/B07LCSPGTN/

may / may not be on offer in other countries

Groke posted:

Well you loving HAVE to have coffee or life would be completely unbearable.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

2nding this. Literally the plot is thing appears in area and people wonder why, then poo poo gets weird.

I can't remember if it's good or not, it's been years since I bought it. It's precisely the sort of plot you are looking for though. It's on ku if that helps.

Fart of Presto posted:

If you are up for some trashy/pulpy post-apocalyptic reading, PC games seller Fanatical has a bundle just for you (3 tiers):

Deathlands Sci-Fi Novels Bundle (Vols 1-40) (3 of them also as audio books)
_{PDF format. Use Calibre to convert to ePub/Mobi}

I believe I still have book 3, Neutron Solstice, somewhere.
I don't plan on reading it again, but back in 1987 when it got released, I immediately bought it when seeing the cover and reading the back cover


I didn't really have standards then...

Jesus Christ, I just saw on the Wiki page that there are 125 books in this series.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

the new TOR 'Best of' anthology is now up as a free legit download

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B09Q1Z1Z96

USA https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B09Q1Z1Z96

Other links apart from Amazon on the TOR page

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/08/some-of-the-best-from-tor-com-2021-is-out-now/

Another Dirty Dish posted:

Currently reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It’s set in the near future, where everything sucks in a similar way to the present: there’s a pandemic, due to a mysterious virus found in the melting Siberian permafrost. It seems to mutate organs in unpredictable ways, and primarily infects children and advanced elderly, though there’s heavy foreshadowing for it mutating into something that can infect adults. It’s a great book to read if you want to ruin your whole day: chapter 2 features an underemployed comedian who ends up working as a Mickey Mouse analogue at a euthanasia park for children, complete with a 2000 foot murdercoaster; a few chapters later we get a lab pig that became sentient and learned to talk, and it’s about to learn that it was raised to grow organs for harvesting, and that the mutation in its brain is going to kill it eventually. There’s even a funeral industry cryptocoin: “For only one thousand bereavement crypto-tokens, you can scatter your loved one’s ashes on a one-hour cruise around SanFancisco Bay.”

FPyat posted:

Can I have the exact title?

NoneMoreNegative posted:

the new TOR 'Best of' anthology is now up as a free legit download

UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B09Q1Z1Z96

USA https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B09Q1Z1Z96

Other links apart from Amazon on the TOR page

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/08/some-of-the-best-from-tor-com-2021-is-out-now/

The Sweet Hereafter posted:

standalone urban fantasy

Sax Solo posted:

Reading Blindsight based on name dropping in the previous page, then unrelatedly someone mentions it on twitter the same day, and so it's frequency illusion/ kismet.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

I have a like/ehh relationship with Adrian Tchaikovskys books but I really enjoyed his Cage of Souls, which fits well into this category (I said it was 'Dying Earth by way of Heart of Darkness' when I first read it)

Selachian posted:

Yeah, that's Piers Anthony's "Prostho Plus" stories, which were later collected into a single book. They're some of his better work, believe it or not.

Larry Parrish posted:

if we go by sheer volume of books mines probably e.m. foner lmfao. who has written about 30 of what is basically the exact same book, but I'm here for it.

quote:

Martha Wells reading from her book All Systems Red to the search and rescue robots at the TEES (Texas A&M University Engineering Experiment Station) Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR).

quote:

hardwired is good, I read it not long back for the first time and it’s like a more actiony b-movie Gibson.

Slowdive posted:

Any recs for well written sci fi books full of mindbending, amazing, original ideas and concepts like Reynolds' House of Suns, Tchaikovsky's Children of Time and Hamilton's Salvation? And what other fantasy would you recommend if my favorite authors are Le Guin and China Mieville? Bonus points for non-anglo stuff

zoux posted:

I'm reading Children of Ruin after finishing Children of Time and his aliens are so good. The whole story of the Portiids is related in such an interesting and elegant way, you get to the point where you cannot wait to see what happens when they meet humans for the first time. Also, I kinda like spiders now wtf? There's also just a sprinkle of that ironic English Adams/Prachett idiom in his prose that really makes it readable.

This thread costs me so much fuckign money.

quantumfoam posted:

The Brick Moon, a 1869 scifi novella to my attention.

Captain Monkey posted:

Was going to post this exact thing. This blogger seems like a moron, and using woke as a pejorative is just one of many red flags.

Sailor Viy posted:

Counterpoint: Lathe of Heaven is probably my favourite Le Guin, and one of the few works of fiction I could plausibly say changed my outlook on life.

NoneMoreNegative posted:

Also, Le Guin's 'LATHE OF HEAVEN' which was a lot more enjoyable - definitely had the 'classic era scifi' vibe emanating from it, but the story and the writing were top notch. Reading it I was thinking 'What else did I read that has this kinda storyline?' and it was Blake Crouch's recent-ish 'RECURSION' (which is totally a wrote-for-hollywood book but actually a lot of fun) but looking up further he claims to have not read LoH at the time of writing Recursion; I'm rubbing my chin here.

Everyone posted:

My awareness came indirectly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s72fJb7a-s8

MartingaleJack posted:

Keret posted:

Harrow is, at it's heart, actually a book about soup making.

RDM posted:

Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep and Deepness in the Sky.

Professor Shark posted:

I just finished Blindsight. I don't think I mentioned it before, but Watts is a family friend and the bleak thesis and ending absolutely fits his personality, including the "congratulatory" email I received upon the birth of my daughter.

I really liked it, but man what a depressing epilogue.

Rutibex posted:

I needed to find a thread to brag about my sweet book find. I think this is the right one, but I was very close to posting this in the D&D thread. My local university is liquidating some of their old books and they are for sale for $1 each! I've always wanted to read The Dying Earth but I've never seen a copy until now. I picked these up as well as a bunch of other 70s sci-fi short story collections