Bad Fantasy Books (Dragonlance, Pern, Xanth, and more)

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Bad Fantasy Books (Dragonlance, Pern, Xanth, and more)

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Mad Hamish posted:

My landlady has a massive collection of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Andre Norton novels. MZB was a child molestor and Andre Norton churned out a shitload of books about hot witches who lost their magical powers if they had sex.

She also has a lot of CJ Cherryh and CJ Cherryh is pretty rad though.

I will submit that the first Pern novel is pretty good but oh my God did they start getting worse and worse.

it's easier to make a list of fantasy authors who weren't pedos, than to list the ones that were

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 01:44

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 17:47

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Colonel Cancer posted:

I've been revisiting Terry Pratchett in form of audiobooks and the quality definitely is consistent. I've spent probably hundreds of dollars buying the paperbacks when I was a high schooler but I don't think I've read anything TP wrote in 5-10 years before his death. Can't wait to get there...

nightwatch was his best work, after that the quality plummets, but the next two books, monstrous regiment and going postal, are still readable

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 01:49

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

sweet geek swag posted:

It was extensively reported locally when it happened, but that was years before he got a publishing deal I guess. It only became known outside North Dakota after he died from what Wikipedia said about it. Well that sucks, but I guess there is no way I could have known about it.

my guess is that the incident got publicity only because the small local paper digitized its archives, and some fan wanted to search more about him

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 02:26

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

not liking pratchet is like not liking rick and morty or the big bang theory, most people just don't have enough iq to appreciate high art

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 02:46

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

loving hate Terry Pratchett and I'm the biggest nerd who ever nerded

hate is a p strong word, but his fans are kinda strange. like, they're not creepy like most fans of nerd poo poo are, but they do overrate his works, especially the later books

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 05:17

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I've read all 9 books of the goddamn Lost Regiment series. Though I'm not sure what genre they are. Military fantasy?

glenn black? or was the army unit black something? that's the only military fantasy poo poo i've read. iirc i read one book, and then checked from wikipedia what happened in the rest of the series. i think that it had a magic princess too. and people didn't use their "real" names because of magic

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 05:20

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

It all blurs together. Although the last thing you said was from Earthsea which in no way belongs in this thread.

Grimoire posted:

Sliding in to say Black Company and Garret PI are good, and I hope Glen Cook is not a sexfiend. Thanks

yes, it was that series. grimoire, did it have the name thing or did i misremember?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 13:40

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Galewolf posted:

I only read the first book and by god that was a slog. By the end, I already forgotten who was who and what is what. And to think that there is like more of those double brick sized tomes to follow I just noped out even during my peak nerdling phase. I remember reading about the eighth book coming out by then.

I mean, at least I still somehow remember wtf was going on in Dragonlance

Just look at this page/word count total:

11,898pp (PB) / 10,173pp (HB)
4,410,036 words

That being said, I'm a sucker for tl;dr world building and might tackle that mighty dragon (heh( if I feel like a reading revival is happening in my pea sized brain

you made a smart move by stopping reading it

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 13:41

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Galewolf posted:

I was lucky to read the og four back when I was 19-20 iirc. My mind was blown and I felt that some kind of veil over my perception of the world was lifted after reading them, if that makes any sense. Tombs of Atuan is barely a Readers Digest in terms of pages but, by god, it's an amazing read and possibly my favorite.

and the one chapter of wizard school in the first one is better than the whole corpus of jk rolling

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 16:48

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Servoret posted:

Yeah, I was baffled. It�s not like I did a report on a Xanth book or something.

or bible!

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 17:48

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

hah, though shartes and the same guy's viking books are entertaining trash, they're even more formulaic than wheels of times or d&d paperbacks

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 20:39

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

CheeseThief posted:

Is this really a stance people take on Earthsea? I reread the series over the lockdown, just the final book to go, and I can't see the association for anything other than the fact the author is a woman.

I mean, this series makes all female magic users sneaky ignorant witches or the occasional evil sorceresses. Magic school is a literal boys club. Pretty sure the second to last book makes it clear that magic requires you to be a male virgin no less .

the first 3 books were a very traditional male centric fantasy bildungsroman, where the protagonist grows to be a man and saves a hot broad, except that the good guys and bad guys skin colors were changed. iirc from tehanu onwards they turned into more feministic works

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 21:17

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Blurry Gray Thing posted:

Sanderson is alright, but I'm getting really confused by people acting like he's The Most Important Fantasy Author Of The Modern Era, on account of his revolutionary, trailblazing idea of Hard Fantasy.

It's good to have consistent rules to your magic, but a lot of his action scenes are just incredibly dull. It turns into a series of supertechnical Uses Of Power about as exciting as reading a combat log in a videogame. He did this, but the other character did this, and so he responded with a [Power] used on the wall behind him and this happened, and so... He also breaks his own Rules, for all that people make a big deal of them. Sooner or later, super-gods who don't follow the established rules show up, and the heroes will discover a new powers, and things get solved by a brand new solution that conveniently appeared just in time to solve the big problem.

His Hard Magic also tends to read like superhero superpowers more than anything else. That's not a coincidence, either. He did write a love-letter-to-superheroes type of YA series. The powers were handled the same exact way, and it felt way more natural in a world full of skintight spandex.

Mind, you really have to respect just how incredibly prolific he is. He's just constantly writing new books, new stand-alones, and new settings.

his battle scenes in wheels of times def read like combat logs from bideo james too

# ¿ Aug 27, 2020 16:28

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Bismuth posted:

Oh man I looked at the FR wiki to remember why teen me got so annoyed at Catti-Brie. Shes a loving mary-sue thats why. I guess RA decided to give Drizzt a human girl friend but she couldnt be like, in her 30s or something and actually experienced at life and good at anything, they had to meet when he was already an adult who'd gone through a hard rear end life and gained all his skills through actual experience and hard work, and she was...a teenager. Who was nice to him. He didnt have them be in love right away thankfully but i kinda hate that bella/edward poo poo anyway.

So since she was a lovely teen and he was an accomplished adult RA had to do something to make her more on Drizzt's level so he (RA) started piling magic artifacts and poo poo on her. Years of bow experience? No, magic bow. Years of sword experience? No, magic sentient sword that only she somehow conquered its evil consciousness. Years of magic practice? No she gets some wand and a necklace or something and is suddenly good at magic and goes to train in it with some elf.

Then apparently something happens in a book I didnt read where all of them but Drizzt die or something and she goes off to a god realm afterlife with some other guy and gets to dance in the woods and become deeply connected to that realm for some reason.

F in the chat for Regis I guess. She can also now call the god's power straight down and do whatever she wants I guess.

Then they all get reincarnated, and she comes back and is super good at everything, and also super racist (not kidding)

The wiki makes no note of this actually being resolved or changing at any point.

I didnt read ALL of the books this poo poo happens in but I definitely remember this is one of the things that made me stop reading them. I just hated this character so much. If you're going to have her die and be reincarnated ANYWAY why not just have her be an older human with something in common with the love interest, then she can die and be reborn, or something. Not like there arent ways in fantasy worlds to stop a human from getting old so they can hang out with her elf bae forever. She comes off as some 14 year old girl's self-insert fan-character made to be Drizzt's girlfriend, but shes been there since the first Icewind Dale book.

e: gently caress I almost missed the part where she gets two "spellscars" on her arms, one is an hourglass and one is a loving unicorn. Usually the spellscars apparently show up as some kind of deformity, but hers showed up as some stick-on tattoos from claire's.

she was probably pro-genocide because of all the xp

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 13:35

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Prince Reggie K posted:

has there been a fantasy novel from the perspective of a party of murder hobos?

most of them?

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 13:51

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

been ages since i read tehanu, but i remember that it wasn't as good as the first three

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 20:15

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

WeedlordGoku69 posted:

also, uh, don't read this book. I had to jog my memory real quick to make sure I was thinking of the right one (it's actually called Grunts), and

to give you an idea, the author appears to think the idea of an orc raping an elf child to death, to the point of "splitting" the elf, is the funniest thing ever

it's over-the-top edgy to borderline levels and not good enough to be worth it

whats the deal with fantasy authors

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 23:25

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

twistedmentat posted:

Dom Noble recently did some videos on Earthsea and as my only exposure was with the boring tv mini series that from those vids have shown was an awful adaption. I'm going to have to give them a read at some point.

But holy poo poo I read a ton of the stuff discussed hear when I was a teen and into my 20s. When you're a weird nerd kid you end up alone and reading is a good way to pass the time before phones, and you eventually just end up reading anything you can get your hands on. I didn't like Dragonlance because even at like 13 I hated the Kinder. Forgotten Realms was my jam though. I started with the Drizzt novels but read a lot of the other ones as well. Big fan of that series that was about the gods being tossed out of their realms and ended up with a bunch of the characters replacing them. I'd probably find them garbage today though.

Goons are forgetting that Cattie-Brie talked with a Claremont level phonetic accent.

Xanth though, I read ALL of those stupid books up until Giest of the Gargoyle when I realized how stupid they were. Just puns and juvenile humor all over the place. The only thing that gets a chuckle out of me these days is the fact Xanth is literally Florida.

Eddings I enjoyed the last time I read the Garion novels, which was about 10 years ago. There isn't any creepy sex stuff, but he does love that "all members of a race are the same" thing that sorta works in games, but not in reality. I guess when you explicitly say each race was created by their patron god that can make sense, but still. The fact the world it takes place in is technically post apocalyptic is a cool idea, but there wasn't enough of that idea.

I never read Pern, because the concept just seemed bad to me. I did read some of McCaffrey's sci fi books though.

Someone that hasn't been talked about is Raymond E Fiest. His first stuff, the Riftwar books are very similar to Eddings, but the invaders from another world and them being a much different culture, even if it was just Japan mixed with Aztecs, interacting with the standard Europeans was at least different. Funny thing about it is you can see him understand what he's writing a lot more, and the second major series, the Serpent War, is way better written. The forth book gets pretty weird though.

the earthsea adaptations are criminal

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 13:21

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Colonel Cancer posted:

I'm pretty sure Ged is black.

native american colored

his friend from the school who he sailed with was black

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 17:48

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

super sweet best pal posted:

The Sci-Fi channel adaptation put me off the series. Still haven't read it.

the series is good, you should give at least the first book a chance. it shares only the names of the characters with the scifi thing, nothing else

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 19:11

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

twistedmentat posted:

Yea, Dom Noble really hit that in his vids
https://youtu.be/DCyyzpsg6V0
https://youtu.be/_mfnVK9RdZk

I tried reading the first Wheel of Time book, but it was like if the party scene in Fellowship Of The Ring lasted the entire book. Also it has what is probably the WORST MAP of a fanstasy world in a book

wtf is that garbage? DId Jordan realize he needed a map for the book and drew it while on his way to the publisher? It's not even just uninteresting but no landmas would look like that and boarders are worst than what the Entant did to the middle east after WW1.

your choice of not reading it further was a good one

lol yeah that map is about as good as the gor map:

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 20:11

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

twistedmentat posted:

That literally looks like a map from a Nintendo Power for some Zelda clone.

Something like Midkemia is much better

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 20:33

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Flared Basic Bitch posted:

I read the Foundation trilogy as a kid because as a sci-fi nerd it was basically an obligation back then. I thought it was boring as fuuuuuuuuck, and it took me years to actually admit that.

Come at me.

your opinion is the correct one

# ¿ Aug 29, 2020 21:59

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Bell_ posted:

Perhaps I'll give it a shot. I bailed on the series after Crossroads at somethingorother. No sunk-cost fallacy could save my interest in how the series ended.

I guess I could read a wiki article.

yeah, don't waste your time reading bad books, wikipedia is more than enough for that series

# ¿ Aug 30, 2020 09:29

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Zeniel posted:

The loving Zybourne Clock map is better than the Gor map!

it's a great one

# ¿ Aug 30, 2020 09:31

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

yr new gurlfrand! posted:

this was a dragonlance fanfic anthology where they collected short stories from different authors in the universe and then published them

this one was in Dragons of Krynn specifically I looked it up and the draconians were in "The First Dragonarmy Bridging Company" by Don Perrin

gently caress there was also a short story called "Scourge of the Wicked Kendragon" in Dragons of Krynn and I hate it already

lmao

# ¿ Aug 30, 2020 09:54

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Bismuth posted:

Theres an origin story for Pern's name!

So I guess the name should be Pernc

actually it was meant to be Perv, but the editors rejected it because it was too on the nose

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 14:43

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Applewhite posted:

I'm stalled in my reading of the Wheel of Time series. I'm somewhere in the middle of Lord Of Chaos and the characters have been bumbling around for two entire books accomplishing gently caress all.

it will turn even worse from that point on

do yourself a favor and just stop reading it

if you want closure just read from wikipedia how it ends

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 17:19

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Mozi posted:

i've been getting into the malazan books again these days. bounced off of them pretty hard a few years ago but this time it's working for me. there's a lot of awkward stuff and things that could be improved (in the first book mainly, the second is better overall) but there's a lot of interesting and imaginative stuff he comes up with and the writing is good enough to keep me engaged

i read thomas convenant as a youngster and i honestly can't remember it. i'm not sure if i got the message or if i just breezed through it. the hyperion books were dope, i do remember that

i read one of them as a kid, and only remember that the main guy had leper, liked to whine, and was teleported to the fantasy realm from hitting his head

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 17:42

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Bell_ posted:

Thank you for the advice. Closure achieved. Besides, so many years passed since I read the most recent book I'd have to go back and read the others for remembering context or who most of these assholes were, anyways, and fuuuuuuuuuck that.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 21:45

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Spazzle posted:

Did the allusions to the world of wot being a future/past earth ever go anywhere?

not really

some references that the wheels of times world was the future and past earth were dropped every now and there, but nothing more than that

# ¿ Aug 31, 2020 21:46

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Fantasy novels are things where plot happens in between the writing exercises assigned by a therapist.

more like

quote:

Fantasy novels are things where plot happens in between the writing exercises of a rapist.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2020 09:33

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

has anyone itt read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbos_of_the_Death_Sun

is it good?

# ¿ Sep 1, 2020 11:53

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Empty Sandwich posted:

I think this is one of the things fantasy authors gently caress up a lot.

Tolkien was an accomplished linguist and the stories were basically excuses to use that skill to invent Elvish. (OK, not really, but also really.)

I don't think any of these other people have any sort of experience with this stuff. (For example, some of the spells in Dragonlance are apparently Indonesian words, which perhaps one of the authors perhaps learned as a Mormon missionary, perhaps.)

yeah, if you're not a linguist, pseudo-english names work better than gibberish apostrophe salads

# ¿ Sep 1, 2020 21:10

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

CynCyanide posted:

Sure, it's a fun murder mystery. The protagonist is a computer nerd college professor who writes a lovely scifi novel called "Bimbos of the Death Sun" which I think was his publisher's idea? He goes to his local science fiction convention to promote it and also gawk at computers with the other turbo-nerds. Anyway, the corpse was a big name scifi author who wrote a Conan-esque series and pisses off everyone around him. It has a sequel called "Zombies of the Gene Pool."

Its portrayal of small, local fan conventions is very accurate, as far as I can tell from being drug along to a few by a friend when we were in high school.

nice

# ¿ Sep 2, 2020 09:59

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

rotinaj posted:

at least filk is just nerdier folk music, and isn't molesting children

Edit:

I read Runelords! I am convinced there is a group of novels published between the late '90s and early-mid 00s that got popular solely off of their cool as hell cover art, check this poo poo out

fucken lol at the darrel k sweet covers

he's truly the king of lovely fantasy covers

at least larry elmore could draw t&a

# ¿ Sep 2, 2020 10:09

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Pinball posted:

Pern as a setting is really interesting, but a lot of what McCaffrey chose to do with it and her homophobia make it pretty awkward. She gave what seemed like a lot of thought to the social structure of the dragons and modeled them after eusocial insects, but then never thought oh, if I say the only dragons that can be ridden by women are the female golds, and that leaves all the female greens to be ridden by men, and the greens will be chased by the blues and the browns that are also ridden by men...

She tried very hard to ignore the dragon-imposed homosexuality she'd written into her own books. When asked, she said, among other things, that having anything put up your butt automatically made you gay (based on someone she knew being raped with a tent peg, which therefore made him gay?), that green dragons were ridden by "feminine" gay men while blues were for "masculine" gay men, so on and so forth. When I stopped reading, women were at least riding green dragons. I don't think she ever had a protagonist who rode a blue or a male protagonist who rode a green.

McCaffrey was also notorious in fandom circles for being incredibly controlling of her IP. This isn't necessarily bad, but she'd do things like have her lawyers write to Pern roleplaying games that had the temerity to add new dragon colors, write outside a certain point on the timeline, or let "unapproved" genders ride certain colors of dragon. Which, when you're dealing with a bunch of teenagers trying to have fun, came off as a bit heavy-handed.

was it mackaffery or mercedes lackey who had huge meltdowns online about their ip, like completely cuckoo?

Manzoon posted:

I would like to talk a bit about Goodkind's character names. And by talk I mean just list:

Richard Rahl
Darken Rahl
Panis Rahl

lmao panis rahl is a great name

# ¿ Sep 2, 2020 12:07

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

Hakkesshu posted:

I almost got interested because it just looks like Shadowrun, but gosh this does not sound good

larry elmore drew a poo poo ton of fantasy and gaming art back in the day

# ¿ Sep 3, 2020 14:37

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

enomie posted:

Like if there's an old man marrying a thirteen year old in a GGRM book it doesn't make everyone think he's a pedo.

lets not get hasty

# ¿ Sep 4, 2020 11:54

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 17:47

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

EimiYoshikawa posted:

Holy poo poo.

This was in an old issue of some magazine my family had as a kid, I think it was an excerpt, if The Pear Shaped Man was a full book of some sort, and even that little excerpt has stuck in my head since I was a kid. It was just so...vivid, like you could smell some of the things the author was describing in great detail.

It included the stabbing scene. Or at least a fair-sized chunk of it.

it's a short story, and i'm quite sure that it didn't include any stabbings

when you've seen what grrm looks like, it's impossible to imagine the guy in the story as anyone else than him

# ¿ Sep 4, 2020 23:14

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