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I was disappointed in Piranesi that the amnesia effect of the House was never explained beyond "it's magic". I wanted there to be some kind of reason for it, or at least a thematic connection to the other aspects of the House. As it was, it felt like a cheap plot device shoved in to justify having an amnesia-based mystery. Still a wonderful book in many ways, but that aspect made it fall short of "classic" for me.
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Dec 22, 2021 12:12
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Cardiac posted:Ah, the Mieville/Sanderson split. What's that?
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Dec 23, 2021 03:34
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Cardiac posted:Exactly. I'm generally in that camp myself, but with Piranesi I was disappointed because it didn't seem to tie together even on a metaphorical level.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:18
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Blamestorm posted:Does anyone have subscriptions to ongoing short story zines like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Analog etc? Any recommendations as to the most consistent /best? I want to start reading more short stories again. I used to just pick up “best of” collections but it occurred to me something shorter and more frequent/regular would be nice. Beneath Ceaseless Skies is good if you like secondary-world fantasy. Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet if you want to read something weird and literary but still within the broad sphere of speculative fiction.
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Dec 30, 2021 04:58
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A Deadly Education is really bad. I don't think I've ever read a book with a higher ratio of exposition to action, even amongst doorstopper epic fantasy novels. Every actual event is followed by 2-3 pages of explanations about the magic system and how the school works.
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Jan 2, 2022 08:38
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pseudorandom name posted:The exposition is interesting though? The overall premise of why the school exists was fine, but all the explanations of class timetables and crafting mechanics felt like reading a strategy guide for a videogame.
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Jan 2, 2022 11:13
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Hollismason posted:Just started rereading The Black Company first 3 books. I'm on Shadow's Linger right now. Glen Cook writes some good fantasy. He really does. I reread Black Company last year, I should do Shadows Lingers again as well since I remember it being my favourite. Funny how the best character in the series isn't even a soldier but a hapless innkeeper.
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Jan 3, 2022 22:34
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Anybody know any good SFF web serials? I have basically never read fiction in that format but I like the idea due to my longstanding love of comic books. I had a look at Royal Road but it seems like everything there is LitRPG or adjacent genres.
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Jan 4, 2022 07:19
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Hollismason posted:The Black Company , The White Rose continues to be loving excellent. I went ahead and ordered The books of the South. Looking forward to those. Glad I found another books series to read that's so good. You might like Jack Vance's Lyonesse. Some parts of the book are more fairytale weirdness but there is warfare and it has the same sort of terse prose as Cook.
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Jan 7, 2022 03:58
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Blamestorm posted:I love Lyonesse (some questionable sexual stuff aside) but I can’t think of two authors with prose more different than Vance and Cook!! Yeah I guess when I see someone ask for "old school fantasy" I always go to Lyonesse because I love it so much. (Questionable sexual stuff aside.)
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Jan 7, 2022 22:37
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I just finished reading Akata Warrior, the sequel to Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor. These books are really good. They're charming, weird, light-hearted and steeped in Nigerian culture (both the fantasy/folklore elements and the mundane stuff like food and music). The magic and worldbuilding follows a sort of dream logic but is still rooted in reality enough that each scene has clear stakes. Oddly enough the closest thing I can compare it to is the weird fairies and wizards in Jack Vance's Lyonesse. Looking forward to the third book coming out this year.
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Jan 31, 2022 07:37
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Eason the Fifth posted:Hey, they picked up the Riftwar for the next fantasy series to televise. They won't have the SFX budget to do this justice. All the coolest scenes I can remember from these books are like, a wizard hurling meteors at 50 dragons or something.
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Feb 3, 2022 08:45
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:can yall help me find some fantasy that's driven by extremely good prose, to read? like botns, or anything ursula le quin wrote. authors who really savor the written word. been reading fafhrd and the grey mouser and in between all the goofy dialogue and bizarre fights there's some pretty beautiful writing I'd recommend The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ (sort of like a feminist rejoinder to Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, with strange stream-of-consciousness prose) or A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny (minimalist, almost Hemingway-esque prose, the story is told from the POV of Jack the Ripper's dog. it also has an extended homage to Dunsany)
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Feb 3, 2022 22:16
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Tars Tarkas posted:Thanks, this sounds great (I'm also working through the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser omnibus) and they even cross reference each other but I'll have to put this as a thrift store wish as the paperbacks are way too much on Amazon/Abe books (except maybe one mysteriously only $20, hmmm...) and no ebook option. Yeah in one of the Alyx stories it says she had a fling with "a huge red-headed barbarian". Are there references to Alyx in the Fafhrd stories too?
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Feb 4, 2022 20:56
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Strategic Tea posted:As I'm just about to start the third book, heartily recommending The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi which is a nutso posthuman look at a brain uploading. Yeah this book was awesome. I never continued with the series though.
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Feb 6, 2022 23:22
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I've nearly finished reading The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Akata Witch. Although it's written in a more literary style, it has the same Nigerian setting and a similar sense of unbound playfulness with the fantastic. It's a book that I kept putting down and coming back to--there isn't much of an overarching plot, but each scene and sentence is really beautifully constructed.
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Feb 9, 2022 01:45
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HopperUK posted:Isn't his prose just stunning? He's the author I most wish I could write like. Him and like, John Steinbeck. I know, right? I love the way he will come out with a casual reference to something like a god, spirit or other dimension--stuff that in western fantasy would be "worldbuilding" but with Okri is just part of the texture of the prose. Another good book in the same vein is Search Sweet Country by Kojo Laing.
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Feb 10, 2022 09:27
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SEX HAVER 40000 posted:so im listening to the audiobook of annihilation, and i cant tell if it's the narrator or the text itself that i find sort of blasé. does the trilogy improve? should i dump the audiobook and switch to paper? tia I mean I loved it as an audiobook so maybe it's just not for you. The narrator's voice being detached is definitely intentional.
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Feb 14, 2022 08:24
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Chasm City is a cool book, great worldbuilding, lots of fantastic set pieces (the mimic spaceship was a particular standout). But... the ending had a really obnoxious twist-for-twist's sake that only barely made sense, and it left kind of a sour taste in my mouth. I haven't read any more of Reynolds since, but maybe I should check out some of his other books.
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Mar 14, 2022 11:33
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Three Body Problem was great imo and the sequel possibly even better. The third one kind of shat the bed with Liu's whole attitude of "I'm going to write a female protagonist, but also I think women are inherently incapable of making The Hard Decisions, so everything important is going to happen off screen while the protag wanders around aimlessly". It does suck to hear that he has (more) Bad Opinions. quantumfoam posted:Eh, the 100 page derail in Three Body Problem to recount
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Mar 18, 2022 08:07
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Runcible Cat posted:Not quite what you're asking for, but Ian Watson's Queenmagic, Kingmagic starts off in a chess-based universe, which the protagonists escape to find themselves in universes based on other boardgames... This sounds amazing. Is it good?
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Mar 30, 2022 23:50
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Runcible Cat posted:It's a fun smart B-movie kind of book rather than a deep philosophical literary exploration of free will vs constrained patterns of action, if that helps? Yeah I guess the latter is what I was hoping for, but it still sounds interesting. FPyat posted:I preferred Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. Has Mieville's penchant for being densely packed with ideas. Babel-17 is fantastic, anyone interested in weird alien language stuff should definitely check it out. Sailor Viy fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Apr 2, 2022 |
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Apr 2, 2022 02:33
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Just finished reading The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck. I was really looking forward to this after enjoying her collection Jagganath (this novel is actually an expansion of the story "Augusta Prima" from Jagganath). Unfortunately, I found it pretty disappointing. It sits in an awkward gap between children's and adults' fantasy--the premise of plucky children wandering through the multiverse is reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones, but there are some pretty grim scenes of child abuse that make it inappropriate for kids. The plot is meandering and inconsequential. Tidbeck has this minimalist style of never describing characters' emotions directly, which worked well in short stories but here it just makes the novel feel flat and affectless.
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Apr 8, 2022 09:35
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I started listening to Unsouled after seeing people posting about the kickstarter on here. It's actually... really good for what it is? The videogame-style elements are present enough to be entertaining but not cringey, and the prose is much tighter than any web serial I've read. I'm not surprised it's been so successful. Not sure if I have the stamina to go through all 10 books though.
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Apr 25, 2022 09:14
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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 I think I've brought it up in this thread before, but I'd recommend Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. It's a sci-fi novel about a poet recruited to combat a weaponised language that warps the minds of anyone who tries to learn it.
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May 3, 2022 09:11
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:I really enjoyed Justice and would have been happy with it as a self contained book rather than a trilogy. The sequels were fine but the stories weren't as compelling, and if the Anaander Mianaai stuff could have been wrapped up as an extra hundred pages in the first book that would have made a really good standalone. Yeah, the second and third books were odd because they took a sharp turn from epic space opera that affects the whole galaxy, to the protag trying to take care of just one planet. We never even got to see much of the conflict between the different Anaander Mianaai clones. I get that that was a purposeful decision by the author to focus more on character and culture instead of space battles. But, it wasn't where I was hoping the story would go.
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May 4, 2022 00:35
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Also when I listened the audiobook, my brain filled in completely different spellings for all the characters' names. So to my mind it's "Ana'ander Miat-n'ai" and seeing the real spelling always looks weird.
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May 4, 2022 00:36
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quantumfoam posted:Levar Burton's Aftermath turned out to be really bad. ngl the way you describe it sounds kind of awesome.
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May 5, 2022 09:40
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Cheers to the people in this thread who recommended The Library at Mount Char. Fuckin' excellent book.
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May 7, 2022 23:16
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Cicero posted:I feel like I've definitely seen this before, where the end of one chapter is the protagonist about to fight someone and the beginning of the next is just them dealing with the aftermath. One of my favourite "fight scenes" is in Nine Princes in Amber when the narrator and his soldiers are surrounded, and then he says: "Reader, I'll be brief. They killed everyone but me."
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May 11, 2022 08:58
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Nigmaetcetera posted:I’m looking for a book like Imajica by Clive Barker. Maybe something in between Imajica and you know, “normal” fantasy. I’m only 60% of the way through Imajica but I want MORE. If you haven’t read Imajica, imagine it as one of the stories that gets called “too gross” on here. Weird, graphic sex, horrific violence, and a protagonist that thinks very highly of themselves. If you haven't already read them, the Bas-Lag novels by China Mieville have a similar lush grotesqueness to Imajica, although with less sexiness. Also check out The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick. It has some really hosed up scenes (basically delving deep into the question of what happens to children who get spirited away by evil fairies) and really unique worldbuilding.
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May 15, 2022 02:04
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Remulak posted:Great book. Swanwick never has a stinker. The only other Swanwick I've read was Stations of the Tide. After I finished that one I was kind of pissed because the plot made no sense and didn't resolve into anything. But I have to say that with a few years' distance, the images and ideas of the book have stayed with me very strongly, so it's gone up in my estimation.
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May 15, 2022 10:14
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Stuporstar posted:I don’t know whose bag it is cause it’s poo poo scifi that insulting to all scifi and scifi fans, but it’s also poo poo lit fic that’s insultingly bad to anyone who likes lit fic This is what I think of as 'literary arbitrage'. People can be weirdly successful by smuggling stuff across the borders of genre to readers who aren't familiar with the original/superior works that are being imitated.
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May 20, 2022 10:06
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Sax Solo posted:It's often really amusing the lengths people will go to, to preserve gender through otherwise crazy transformations. Like if a girl turned into a chair, some people would think it would be appropriate if it was somehow a girly chair. Light by M. John Harrison depicts a future society where many people live half their lives in VR, transformative body modification is commplace, and sufficiently wealthy people can casually download their brains into vat-grown bodies. This society also has an old-timey carnival where people come to gawk at a "half-man half-woman".
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May 25, 2022 03:44
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Having only read Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber and A Night in the Lonesome October, I'd say they are about equal in quality (very good). Yes, he is clearly rear end-pulling in Amber but that isn't necessarily a bad way to write a book. Apparently one of his other books he literally threw all the chapters on the floor to decide what order they would appear?
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May 26, 2022 07:47
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Kchama posted:I don't think he's actually blamed it on any sort of mental health thing. Every time he's done an update it's been "Well, I've been doing this 'Insert thing that I hope makes me famous here', and also if you donate hundreds of thousands of dollars that I am legally allowed to skim off the top of, then I'll write a chapter (but I actually won't, so I can promise this again in a few months when I need money)." He has in fact said he's held back by mental health problems, according to Wikipedia. (The citation links to a bunch of youtube interviews that I can't be bothered watching, but I'll assume it's accurate.) IMO there are a lot worse things to do with your life than fundraising for charity, even if you do skim off the top, and most of the ire directed towards Rothfuss is plain old fandom entitlement more than a reaction to any specific thing he did wrong.
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May 29, 2022 09:48
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The first Malazan book was great. Like someone recounting their 10-year D&D campaign while you're recovering from a fever. I should read more but I can't be hosed.
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May 31, 2022 01:58
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Remulak posted:This is a good one, I read it years ago and literally, that’s correct, literally yelled ‘Holy poo poo’ when the Powers-style plot escalations kept coming. I saw like half of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and it sucked. They didn't really use anything from the book other than "Blackbeard is looking for the Fountain of Youth". Can confirm that the book owns though.
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Jun 2, 2022 10:01
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It's a decent book until the last section imo. I think it was a noble experiment that proved that actually, no, you can't write an epic fantasy with world-ending stakes and wrap it up satisfyingly in one book. So many challenges and complications had to be swept out of the way at the end rather than developed satisfyingly as they should. The bit where they go to not-China was particularly bad--it was like the author just wanted to whisk the characters through this region as quick as possible to make the world feel appropriately epic in scope.
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Jun 5, 2022 08:53
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Leng posted:So according to Shannon's Tumblr, it's about 260k words long. That's almost 40k longer than Mistborn: The Final Empire (212k words), which even though it's a first in series now, was originally written to be a standalone (with series potential). Final Empire doesn't really have the same scope as Priory though. IIRC the bad guy is stated to rule over the entire known world, but almost all the action takes place within a single city. Other cities or continents barely get a mention. The background lore is also relatively simple. That narrow focus gives Sanderson lots of space to go deep into the things he cares about, like the magic system and the fight scenes. I would never really say "it can never be done" in fiction, but to do one thing well you always have to make cuts somewhere else.
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Jun 6, 2022 09:54
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