MockingQuantum posted:

For Evil Fluffy, though: if you haven't read them already, the Chronicles of Prydain are excellent, though they do get dark at times. But they're cozy and satisfying in a similar way to Misenchanted Sword. They probably get marketed as YA these days but don't let that put you off if you're not someone who usually dips into YA fantasy.

Jack2142 posted:

The second series in the setting starting with Prince of Fools is more enjoyable imo.

Edit: Saw that mentioned already, so backing it.

I don't think Mark Lawrence is my favorite author, but is decent and cranks out work I think he has finished 4 trilogies since 2012.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

You ever read any Janny Wurts? I keep telling myself I'll start her giant epic fantasy series one day.

instead I just read whatever random suggestion here's caught my attention in between stuffing my eyes with web serials and fanfic.

Look Sir Droids posted:

How is the sequel? I’ve seen mixed reviews.

Xenix posted:

They were what came after said empire collapsed. Their technology was based on what they could scavenge from the ruins of that civilization an untold number of millennia later once the planet was more livable again. I got the impression they scavenged enough to make their ark ships and shoot them into space as quickly as possible to find a viable place for humanity to live for the long term.

PST posted:

Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon/Steel Remains et al) is a massive loving terf



https://twitter.com/quellist1/status/1207744446340747273

This seems like brainworms given his breakout series essentially said that flesh was mutable and you could switch bodies, and his fantasy series had a hella gay protagonist, but...yeah, apparently the signs have been there for a while, he's just now come out with it to defend jk rowling of all people (whose post basically ignored all of the actual legal reasons why the employee was fired, the court supported that firing, and then the appeal court supported it, all because they were a massive bigot as well).

StrixNebulosa posted:

To get on my soapbox for a mo - once I started looking there is so much good genre fiction written by women, and when I look in reclists on reddit or elsewhere they almost never come up, nevermind that they've been around for the same amount of time and are as good as the dude-written stuff or better. And that ticks me off!

Okay thank you, I needed to get that off my chest.

Take the plunge! Okay! posted:

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

For just one example, we know that the Georgia election was very likely hacked, because the whole election routed through one server and there's a federal lawsuit over the server records being hacked.

pradmer posted:

Daughter of the Empire by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts - $1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJH5XR/
Oft recommended as the best Riftwar trilogy.

DreamingofRoses posted:

Maybe don’t encourage people doing the equivalent of: “Well, if MLK were alive he’d...”

Edit: Shameless page snipe. I’m working on Daughter of the Empire right now and I’m enjoying it. How’s the rest of the series?

ToxicFrog posted:

The thing I liked about the first book was the focus on underdog Mara and her cunning plans, and book 2 delivers more of that; it actually felt like book 2 had two major story arcs back-to-back and would have done ok split into books 2 and 3 of the trilogy, and it concludes the main arc begun in book 1 quite nicely.

Book 3 picks up a few years later and has a rather different focus; I found it started out weak and while it did improve over the course of the book and ended strong, I never liked it as much as I did the first two. It feels like the first two books are "the trilogy" and book 3 is more of a coda.

ToxicFrog posted:

Yeah, and I honestly liked it more than any of the ones written by Feist alone, although it's been a while since I read them.

IIRC (but my recollection may be faulty) the original four books avoid this problem by not really having any female characters at all. I believe this was also pretty much the case in the Serpentwar books (but it's been even longer since I read those).

tildes posted:

I think I'm getting a bit lost w/ these series. If I haven't read anything by Raymond Feist, what is the first series I should read?

freebooter posted:

I cannot easily recall any major character in Game of Thrones who is outright stupid. Cruel, vain, reckless, short-sighted, sure - but nobody who is so arrogant and pompous as to be actually dumb, because that's just not an interesting character trait and it doesn't lead to interesting stories.

freebooter posted:

If I said to you I'd just read a book involving:

- a post-apocalyptic world which centuries later has developed into a new generic-fantasy-level-of-tech society
- A centuries-old cybernetic super-soldier from the past era
- Ancient orbital weapons being reawakened

What would you think it's ripping off? I just read a fairly obscure book which strongly reminded me of something else, but maybe these are fairly common tropes?

StrixNebulosa posted:

Oh! I have never seen that movie, didn't know what you were doing.

General Battuta posted:

Somebody from this thread asked him to do a piece on me, iirc, so he did. I don't remember much, it was five years ago and never really led to anything more. Have you really arrived until Vox Day has done a hit piece on you?


I have never received a royalty statement and genuinely have no idea how many books I've sold.

biracial bear for uncut posted:

Anything that was made into a Tom Cruise movie is automatically forbidden in my reading recommendations.

wizzardstaff posted:

Yeah, it’s a shame how political and preachy the new Star Trek shows have been, compared to the early stuff like TNG and DS9.

PawParole posted:

Anyone know of a story where humans are conquered by aliens and it’s set in the aftermath? ( no ai, vampires or weird poo poo).

I just want to read about humanity crushed by aliens and quislings and all that

StrixNebulosa posted:

My brother's birthday is upcoming and while I have some gifts lined up for him, it never hurts to check: are there any cool books about dragons? And I mean: dragons as main characters, dragons as badasses, dragons as a central focus. He doesn't mind if they're evil, but he wants them to be cool alien-esque scaly winged badasses who influence the plot. One of his favorites is Deathwing from the warcraft universe, for an example.

General background: he doesn't read much but he has read both This Alien Shore by CS Friedman and Hyperion and he loved them both.

T-man posted:

since a lot of people only check bookmarks, you should know that our admin, lowtax, has been credibly accused of abusing his partner.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3928980

please do what you believe to be ethical.

MockingQuantum posted:

tbf I had the same response from a few people when I asked about Assassin's Apprentice, I feel like half said "it starts slow but stick with it" and half said "it starts great but is pretty slow halfway through."

Though with the third book in that trilogy, I feel like both are true, somehow?

John Lee posted:

Liveship Traders is real slow to start, but halfway or two-thirds through the first book, it really picks up the pace and stays there. I like it a lot!

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Gimme police in a city with orcs and elves and dwarves, cops in a city with super heroes, a shipping company that delivers magic poo poo, hell I just finished reading a book about an insurance investigator that works with demons and werewolves and vampires.

ed balls balls man posted:

This series is great.

Black Griffon posted:

I don't think I could read a fraction of what I've read on kindle on a tablet or smartphone. It works for some people, I know, but I'm extremely not one of them.

Black Griffon posted:

Screen too shiny, light too bright, distractions too many, battery life too poor!

Also someone find that Mr. Adam story please.

StrixNebulosa posted:

If we're going by wordcount, Malazan and Discworld remain the kings of "too many words":


https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/8u2xj9/longest_fantasy_book_series/

freebooter posted:

The 2000s was probably the roughest of the last half-century, though

Black Griffon posted:

soo, is it good enough to ignore Liu's horrible politics?

a foolish pianist posted:

Anne McCaffrey is a moron about sexual orientation. This is her answering questions in 98:


You can read the whole thing and the context here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Tent_Peg_Statement#The_Quote

Black Griffon posted:

loving nimbys ruining fun yet again

mewse posted:

Yeah that's what struck me about it. The bubblegum line from They Live is not gallows humour, even if it's in Chinese and before a major battle.

He comes back to the gallows humour thing twice including this gem, when the main char is on hold with the most famous scientists in the world:


That's not gallows humour either, Ernest Cline you loving idiot

awesmoe posted:

Hissing, hackles lifting, the chicken’s head rose. Kahlan pulled back. Its claws digging into stiff dead flesh, the chicken slowly turned to face her. It cocked its head, making its comb flop, its wattles sway. “Shoo,” Kahlan heard herself whisper. There wasn’t enough light, and besides, the side of its beak was covered with gore, so she couldn’t tell if it had the dark spot, But she didn’t need to see it. “Dear spirits, help me,” she prayed under her breath. The bird let out a slow chicken cackle. It sounded like a chicken, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t. In that instant, she completely understood the concept of a chicken that was not a chicken. This looked like a chicken, like most of the Mud People’s chickens. But this was no chicken. This was evil manifest.

Silver2195 posted:

Yep. Which makes it ironic that the inspiration for A Wizard of Earthsea was LeGuin wondering how Gandalf learned his magic.

Although I suspect Gandalf's fireworks craftsmanship is learned rather than innate. Middle-Earth has a lot of unknown areas beyond the edges of the map; perhaps one of them is a China equivalent...

The Ninth Layer posted:

https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1316717703139385348

Saw this floating around today, usually these lists don't get a reaction from me but uhh this one did.

team overhead smash posted:

Just started Rage of Dragons because it's been on my Kindle recommendation list for ages so thought I'd test how good Amazon's algorithms are.

I'm about 20% in and wondering if anyone confirm, does it at any point take a look and say "Hey, maybe us invading this country and trying to kill all the natives and steal their land is bad????"

NikkolasKing posted:

As much as I enjoy the book, the ending really annoys me, to the point I just skip it.

I don't mean the dinos escaping, I mean hunting down the raptor nests. The highest suspension levels in the novel is when the raptors attack the main compound and most of our heroes are trapped in one of the lodges and the kids are in the computer room. Once power is restored and the raptors are dealt with, it's a great moment of triumph.

And then the novel just keeps going and going and going. We've reached the peak and now we just trudge along. I really do like how much more detail the dinosaurs breeding is given because the movie just has one scene that comes and goes and adds nothing. But there had to have been another way to write about killing all the raptors without also dragging the story out so much.

As for dialogue, no arguments there. Crichton did so love his big speeches and using his characters to espouse his views. But I've always loved this one:

“You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.


Out of curiosity, did you read/like Sphere? I did a binge of Crichton years ago and Sphere was my favorite book by him for a lot of reasons.