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big dyke energy posted:So I read Priory of the Orange Tree recently and thought it was loving phenomenal. I also realized that I've barely read any fantasy novels, apart from Terry Prachett and the one time I read the Hobbit. I'm looking for more sweeping epic fantasy written by women/lgbt folk, especially ones featuring women/lgbt characters. i know it's sci-fi but I've also read all of Becky Chambers' stuff as well, which I also love, and I think Record of a Spaceborn Few is my favorite of her Wayfarer's triology. Haven't read her new one yet, but I have a hold on it at the library. Caitlin R. Kiernan might also be worth checking out. Laurie J Marks' Elemental Logic series might be exactly what you're looking for: https://www.tor.com/2019/05/23/living-in-hope-is-a-discipline-fire-logic-by-laurie-j-marks/ Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series, which is kind of science-fantasy about a secret society of women trying to piece together the scientific method after it has been repressed by a patriachal monarchy. Kage Baker's Anvil of The World series might tickle you and The Company series also by her is off the walls bananas. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 13:02
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Ninurta posted:Have you tried out The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthologies edited by Jonathan Strahan? They're not strictly SF but they include a number of authors who have come up previously in this thread and elsewhere (Yoon Ha Lee, Scott Lynch, N.K. Jemisin, Neil Gaiman) and seem to be fairly inclusive, their detriment if my Audible reviews are to be believed.(sigh) They are apparently also door stoppers, usually clocking in around 24-26 hours as an audiobook. I just got a new credit for Audible and am probably going to spend it on either last year's or this year's edition just to give them a shot. Strahan is ended the SF and Fantasy series this year and is starting a new SF specialised one with Saga Press in 2020 (seems like it's aiming to fill Dozois void). fez_machine fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 12:56
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occamsnailfile posted:The current Storybundle has some pretty interesting stuff in it--a lot of big authors but often lesser-known titles or essays and things like that. Basically an exploration of authors speaking out in one way or another. The Outspoken Authors series is very good and well worth checking out, discover a goddamn good author for once in your life. This is your chance to do it for cheap!
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Dec 5, 2019 19:07
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Here's some more good Science Fiction by women: Nancy Kress is probably the most consistent woman writing traditional hard science fiction today. Some great thought experiment stuff. Kage Baker was corny as hell but beneath that she's entertaining and clearly followed her own interests in one of the better long as hell science fiction series out there. Christine Brooke-Rose is a name that's mainly mentioned in the literature thread but if you're looking for actually good writing she wrote a number of science-fiction novels, but why not read everything she wrote. Angélica Gorodischer was translated by Ursula Le Guinne and I like her stuff a lot.
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Dec 26, 2019 12:55
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ToxicFrog posted:gently caress me I also forgot to mention Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series, about a member of a roving organization of cartographer-researchers who ends up at odds with the Mages' Guild actually the only people on this backwater planet who have electricity and radios over her investigations into mysterious iridescent blue gemstones with silver veins running through them actually fragments of solar panels from a crashed satellite. Kirstein is good but she lost me in the first book when she was like torture is good and super effective actually. That's a real knock on a supposedly humanist series.
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Dec 26, 2019 18:49
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Captain Monkey posted:I just read the first book today after the recommendation and that is not at all what I got from that scene. Having it work but be horrific is, while inaccurate, a far cry from ‘good’. Nah, it's presented as a dirty business that sometimes you just have to do, and if a badass does it instead of you, you're not responsible. It's basically brushed over because it resolves a particularly knotty plot problem. Maybe I should have said, "torture is necessary" instead of "good" but that's splitting hairs.
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Dec 27, 2019 00:59
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pradmer posted:Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney - $1.99 Read the good book. Sandman Slim is better than Dresden Files but that means it's still bad.
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Feb 2, 2020 14:56
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tiniestacorn posted:Robert Jackson Bennett writes semi-frequent essays on craft, and imo they're very good. Yours for the low, low price of $1. mmm yes writing advice from the man bullied off the forums by FYAD posting excerpts from his book
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Feb 17, 2020 00:32
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StrixNebulosa posted:when did that happen? 2010 (good FYAD pre-eat the eggs, transphobia, and the twitter exodus) soon after the publication of Mr. Shivers there was a writing advice thread or something and RJB was posting in it FYAD discovered it and tore the book to shreds for being phony depression era hobo nonsense
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Feb 17, 2020 00:50
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xcheopis posted:So? That doesn't say anything about the quality of his advice or his writing. really defending the idea that easily mocked fake as hell Old-timey hobo dialect horror is unreflective of a person's writing It's much harder to bully an author that has prose quality backing them. I'd like to see someone try to bully Samuel R. Delany out of a forum based purely on his writing style.
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Feb 17, 2020 14:59
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Gravy Jones posted:what a loving stupid victim blaming sentiment, stop celebrating bullying and humiilating people... it's nothing to do with the quality of writing and everything to do with being lovely people I found the original thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3249773 and you're right! instead of hillarious burn after hilarious burn on the poor prose quality of "Mr Shivers" it's just pages of people empty quoting the word "human being"
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Feb 17, 2020 20:57
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I can't imagine a worse argument than one between a person who says, "let people enjoy things" and a person thinks that Shakespeare and Howard Stern are in any way equivalent. It was better when people were arguing you had to read 100s of pages of awful writing to reach the point where you could enjoy 1000s more pages of mediocre writing.
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Feb 18, 2020 22:14
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Shakespeare's plays were literally as many sex jokes as he could get away with and progressively more homoerotic characters purely to piss off the aristocracy. He wasn't writing plays for the highly educated people of his society. holy poo poo
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Feb 19, 2020 01:19
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Why else do you think American public education puts as much effort into mythologizing his work as they do claiming Columbus "discovered" The New World? hahahahaha please explain what this means and relate it back to Howard Stern
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Feb 19, 2020 01:57
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AlternateNu posted:I read Stand on Zanzibar a few weeks ago and am in the middle of The Sheep Look Up. I love Brunner's sociological interjections which flesh out the world without being exposition dumps. Also, he's probably the most prescient author I've ever read considering how hosed up our world is right now. 334 by Thomas M. Disch might be exactly what you are looking for
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Apr 29, 2020 23:42
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Kestral posted:Is there anything like Asimov’s Foundation, but… Good? I hate to put it that way since it’s a classic of the genre and I know a lot of people have fond memories of it, but coming to it for the first time as an adult, the only reason I’m making myself struggle through the flat prose and awful dialogue is because I want to experience this, ah, foundational piece of SF. I love generational stories though, and a sci-fi epic spanning a thousand years of history would be extremely my jam if it were well-written and had more characters than “the smug, correct person” and “the obstinate wrong person.” Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer (Translated by Ursula Le Guin) The Glory of the Empire by Jean D'Ormesson and of course the origin, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbons are all extremely good. The Starbridge Chronicles by Paul Park also crosses generations but it's up to taste on how good it is as series.
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Jul 16, 2020 07:20
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Kestral posted:Would love recommendations for more generational stories in SF or fantasy. I saw Centennial early in life and for all its faults, I have never stopped being fascinated by that sort of story. Here's a few more generation spanning stories of varying quality: The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning The Last and First Man by Olaf Stapeldon Realtime/Bobble by Vernor Vinge The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury Little Big by John Crowley (also maybe Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr but I haven't read it) The Beggars in Spain series by Nancy Kress The Emortality series by Brian Stableford A Canticle for Lebowitz by Walter M Miller The Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson Accelerando by Charles Stross
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Jul 16, 2020 08:56
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TheAardvark posted:That does make me want to ask: what are some good sci-fi short story collections? Either one or multiple authors. Anything Gardner Dozois edited should be of a high quality, the same with Jonathan Strahan. Neil Clarke also puts out Forever magazine which is usually a very high quality collection of previously published stories.
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Aug 1, 2020 23:55
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feedmegin posted:And yeah her characters' dialogue is very noticeably American. I had to stop reading after awhile because it's such a badly drawn depiction of English speech and mannerisms. It's an American tourist's idea of an English person should talk and act like. Before they've ever visited. Any Connie Willis story is likely to be as corny as poo poo. But it's particularly egregious here.
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Aug 12, 2020 10:54
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space marine todd posted:Yeah, I enjoy a lot of his other works as well, b r god drat, I want more Bas Lag weirdness and goodness. Michael Cisco is your man for this, Animal Money is Bas Lag weirdness to the ultimate degree. Oh and The Divinity Student and The Golem will scratch that itch. Jeff Vandermeer made his name with The City of Saints and Madmen which should also work. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 09:29
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StrixNebulosa posted:A friend asked me for sci-fi/fantasy books that tended feminist and were mostly happy, and she'd just finished Gideon the Ninth, so here's what I came up with in case anyone else wants my recs: Lois McMaster Bujold heaps struggle on her characters but usually the protagonists get happy endings. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 10:24
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Arcsquad12 posted:Anyone have some recommendations for SF novels following Generation Ships? I had a recent thought about a premise where a Generation ship sets off for a new solar system but in the proceeding centuries faster travel methods have allowed ships to make it there before the initial ship so they send someone to pick up the original colony mission and get them there hundreds of years ahead of schedule. I figure someone must have done a story like that already and I'd be interested to see how it played out. It's only a small spoiler but Non-Stop by Brian Aldis is a classic of the genre. "Far Centaurus" by A.E. van Vogt might be the first story to feature the idea you outlined. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 02:05
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I'm reading Kage Baker's The Company series of time travel books/stories and I'm liking it. But every time she writes about the future it's like listening to someone complain about cancel culture, political correctness, and sjws.
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Sep 16, 2020 22:45
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StrixNebulosa posted:How so? Basically, the way time travel works in The Company Books is that they can time travel but it's more efficient to turn people into immortal cyborgs to live through the past and take things into the future. The cyborgs and people who live in the present/past are normal, for varying degrees of normal. People from the future are consistently presented as being contemptible for having an absolute aversion to violence, including being vegetarian. I could handle them being indolent, illiterate, spoiled and consumerist. But for example Baker has an entire story, "The Literary Agent", revolving around how Robert Louis Stevenson wouldn't be able to write his adventure stories any more because everything would be objectionable. Some of it is a critique of capitalism but other times it's look at these soyboys who whine about everything, can't handle the real world, and ruin everyone's fun. Note she died in 2010 and finished the series in 2009 before the discourse got where it is today. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 01:29
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fashionly snort posted:Also also also, I loooooved Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master series when I read it in high-school but I've never gone back to read anything else she did; anyone have thoughts on her other work? McKillip is like the Joanna Newsome of Fantasy. You have to be in the right mindset for her stylistic quirks and thematic concerns but if you are it's all excellent. She's a major prose stylist in a genre that lacks good writers. It's a shame that her wikipedia entry is so threadbare but the SF Encyclopedia covers why she deserves respect: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mckillip_patricia_a fez_machine fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Feb 12, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2021 11:13
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Kestral posted:Who are the great prose stylists in genre fiction, in the thread's opinion? It'd be nice to have a list of people to check out whose writing is a cut above. Le Guin is the one that comes immediately to my mind, and Susanna Clarke. Tolkien as well, although I realize that's contentious. My list would be: Avram Davidson R. A. Lafferty John Crowley Michael Cisco Lord Dunsany (on a good day, he's so prolific that there's a lot of very ordinary stuff) Jack Vance Brian Evenson Ted Chiang Christine Brooke-Rose Leena Krohn Thomas M. Disch Maureen F. McHugh Robert Aickman Maybe/Variable Paul Park Clark Ashton Smith Samuel R Delany Theodore Sturgeon Roger Zelazny (on a good day) Alfred Bester Tim Powers Michael Moorcock
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Feb 13, 2021 09:39
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Cicero posted:I feel like there's a lot of stories with characters that kind of start that way, but then get dragged into the big world-ending plots somewhere along the series. The main party in Orconomics, for example. I guess in the Sword And Sorcery genre they don't get dragged into an epic quest? The term Epic Fantasy covers those, no matter how burtal or self-serving the protagonist. Sword and Sorcery is mainly a short story and collections of short stories/fixups genre, which kind of precludes getting dragged into big world-ending quests/plots. Orconomics isn't particularly Sword and Sorcery in any case it's just revisionist fantasy. For a good overview http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=sword_and_sorcery fez_machine fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 01:48
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Groke posted:Oh loving hell, how and when has Greg Egan been lovely? Whenever whatever he writes is a barely hidden excuse to do some MATHS. The maths asides have got very tangential to the emotional and character elements of his stories in the last 15 years or so. Try reading 3-Adica. Where other writers barely conceal their sexual fetishes and desires in the pages of their stories, Egan inserts hobbiest maths or physics forum posts. I love him, but there's a lot of bullshit once you get into 00s Edit: ooops I read this as lovely writing not lovely person. One of the things known for certain about Egan as a person is that he's very active in the fight against Australia's brutal and inhumane treatment of refugees and people seeking asylum. Edit 2: pradmer posted:The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One: Babel-17, Nova, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - $3.99 This is an extremely pro-click deal. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 00:11
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StrixNebulosa posted:https://www.humblebundle.com/books/supermassive-scifi-fantasy-horror-tachyon-books Also contains a number of authors from my big rear end prose stylists list, including the lady who started it off Patricia A. McKillip.
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Mar 3, 2021 20:42
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:I'm looking for audiobook recommendations that I can listen to while commuting. I've never read any sci fi before but I've been a Star Trek fan all my life (for better or worse) and people Doing Cool poo poo In Space is appealing to me. I'm not big into magic/fantasy type stuff but space communism is definitely my jam. To add to the already listed names Janet Kagan and John M Ford's novels are supposed to be pretty good as well.
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Mar 4, 2021 11:57
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Another thing the later books in the Culture series highlight is that it's really weird and kind of off-puttingly stubborn that they haven't ascended to another plane of existence yet.
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Mar 6, 2021 09:55
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theblackw0lf posted:What other detective or mystery fantasy/sci-fi novels would people recommend? Lois McMaster Bujold's World of Five God Series is essentially a fantasy mystery series especially the Penric and Desdemona stories.
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Mar 15, 2021 22:49
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theblackw0lf posted:Thanks for the recommendations so far everyone! A lot of the mysteries centre on how the world works and reading in publishing order unfolds that element elegantly. It even starts off immediately with it's own mini-mystery.
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Mar 15, 2021 23:21
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Aardvark! posted:Can I get some fantasy recommendations, particularly epic/high fantasy, and series that are already complete? I've been neglecting it compared to sci-fi. I've read, off the top of my head, Earthsea by Le Guin of course. Lyonesse by Jack Vance (huge inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, there are elements that are completely lifted from it, with a very different, more fairy tale style) A Land Fit for Heroes by Richard K Morgan Patricia A Mckillip's Riddle Master Series There's nothing else quite like Hugh Cook's Chronicles of An Age of Darkness which due to publisher negligence and then the early death of the author will never be completed. Too outwardly generic to attract a large cult following. Too weird to have mainstream fans. (You're going to have to go pirate for ebooks or second-hand dealers because tragically no one's republished these ones). It's unique Rashomon-like structure with each book being self-contained but interconnected/conflicting means that it doesn't end on a cliffhanger. Elric by Michael Moorcock has dated but it's got a lot going for it. The Worm Ouroboros by E R Eddison is pre-Tolkein so your mileage may vary fez_machine fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Apr 17, 2021 |
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Apr 17, 2021 05:46
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Punkin Spunkin posted:I just wanted some good genre fiction from someone into history. This was a really weird post in part because I can't remember the last time anybody was talking about L. Sprague de Camp in glowing terms or even at all but read Avram Davidson
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May 2, 2021 00:23
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Silver2195 posted:The early posts on the blog were mostly New Wave-y stuff, not Asimov or Heinlein. The first three entries from 2017 were works by Roger Zelazny, Ursula LeGuin, and Joanna Russ, for example. Which I guess means that Nicholl was ignoring Adam-Troy Castro's actual point to some extent. Mr. Nemo posted:I'm 28 and I have to disagree about Asimov and Clarke feeling dated or whatever. Their work is as amazing today as it was back in the day. It's not like sci fi writers today are throwing amazing character studies our way. Silver2195 posted:I, a Millennial, read the Foundation trilogy as a teenager and liked them, for whatever that's worth. Yeah, it seems like the project avoided all the typical Sci-Fi onboarding stories of Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury and Heinlein for stories by far more obscure authors. "Kids don't love these stories which have no reputation for kids loving them". Asimov and Bradbury especially were my entry point into science fiction as a teenager. It's like when die-hard comics people say that Alan Moore, his 80s work, and especially Watchmen have passed their use-by date for making new people love comics when all the evidence points to the exact opposite.
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May 11, 2021 02:57
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BurningBeard posted:Are those novellas cool to read if you’ve not finished Paladin of Souls and Hallowed Hunt? There are spoilers for how the metaphysics of the setting works (which are usually treated as big revelations in the non-Penric novels but in the Penric novellas are just kind of explained) but other than that you're good.
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May 12, 2021 08:37
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I think the issue in this thread and generally is that people don't read short fiction and Sci-Fi is a genre that works really well as short fiction where as it's mostly the opposite for modern Fantasy. To use a home-grown example General Batuta's short work in Destiny is Science Fiction while the overarching plot and story of the game is basically Fantasy with technological trappings. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Jun 16, 2021 |
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Jun 16, 2021 09:18
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team overhead smash posted:I’d go publication, as I think jumping into Curse of Challion and the sequels with no knowledge of what saints and gods and demons and the like are is a better experience. This. Publication order is a MUCH better reading experience.
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Jun 23, 2021 12:03
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wizzardstaff posted:Is there ANY series where this doesn’t hold true? Publication order is always best. Reading in-fiction chronological order is okay on a re-read because it can give a different texture to the narrative, but if you're not onboard for seeing the author develop as a writer and extend their ideas as it happens, then you're missing a special joy. There's also sci-fi/fantasy fix ups where the novel is presented in chronological order when the original publication order of the stories was very different. (Absolutely kills some series where your start here introduction is some continuity wank rather than the poo poo that originally got people excited. See Elric and Fafhrd/Grey Mouser for examples).
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Jun 23, 2021 13:56
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