Malignant Dying Earth Edition>Old:>>24920667Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs).https://mega.nz/folder/kj5hWI6J#0cyw0-ZdvZKOJW3fPI6RfQ/folder/4rAmSZxb>Archive:https://warosu.org/lit/?task=search2&search_subject=sffg>Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1029811-sffg
>>24929120Currently reading Man in the High Castle and most of this board would be pinocs (short for "pinocchios") who are white puppets of Imperial Japan.
>>24929132Imperial Japan was the best faction to live under in that setting though
>>24929138I can see you bowing profusely to a full-blooded Nip. Remember to banzai for the God-Emperor!
>>24929141Probably better than Nightmare Straw Nazis
>>24929132Always found I-Ching a weird inclusion.
>>24929120So what's some good fantasy released this year?
>>24929152I-Ching is a cultural mirror that the novels needs to disrupt the limited points of view from the characters; it is also used to further the plot. However, its strongest use as a literary invention is to comment on the ideology and worldviews situated in history, whether that is totalitarian or the failed liberal project that sees itself as the best system for all eternity. These worldviews could be falsely deterministic, or deluded into thinking they are eternal; some worldviews might see people capable of agency in the flow of history, which PKD may pessimistically critique as not true agency. On a side note, PKD was also pro-Chinese throughout his life, which is why he chose the I-Ching rather than the Bible; his first novel was about Communist China despite him not being a Maoist. But PKD later wanted to become a Jew and subscribed to the idea that the Torah held the entire truth.
>>24929161Here is PKD talking about the Torah:https://youtu.be/mXP4Okf5vtQ?si=_c2NY92U_wLNxMkY&t=2633
>>24929152The show should have cast stalks for all its major decisions just like the book.
>>24929159my diary t𐐚h
Found some art of the special edition of Lightbringer and it only proves that if Red Rising is adapted it should be animated.
Billy Pilgrim woke one morning and, to his dismay, found that he had been transformed into a cockroach. But he nonetheless rolled out of bed, got dressed into his work uniform, and walked into the kitchen. Strange as it was, nobody took notice of Billy's new carapace nor mandibles. Instead, they ate a breakfast of eggs and bacon and orange juice. His father, Mr Pilgrim, was hunched over a newspaper. It read: NAZI DEATH CAMPS LIBERATED BY G.I. JOES! AMERICA TRIUMPHS DEATH CULT!Billy Pilgrim was astonished at the sight of his family. They did not blink an eye. Did they not see that he had been turned into a lowly bug?'There were a total of six million deaths in the gas chambers in what they're calling *the* Holocaust,' Mr Pilgrim said, stuffing his face with fried eggs. 'Thank god we dropped bombs on Dresden to stop the evil dictator, Adolf Hitler.'Billy Pilgrim shook his antennae. 'That's not right. Six million is far too many for a gas chamber. If six million did die, it was not in the death camps, but in the mobile executions with gas vans and shootings by the einsatzgruppen. But the death camp myth is a fairytale told to little kids. It's not real history,' Billy Pilgrim cried. 'And there are no heroes in a tragedy!'There was silence.Then Mrs Pilgrim let out a shriek: 'Did you hear what he said, Mr Pilgrim?''I did, dearie,' Mr Pilgrim harumphed. 'I did.''I think Billy is asking if he can have THREE eggs this morning!''By golly,' Mr Pilgrim replied. 'I think you need to serve him up FOUR eggs for good measure so he is ready to go to work, satiated and full of energy!'They fed Billy Pilgrim an entire banquet of breakfast foods. And that was called the breakfast of champions, despite Billy Pilgrim's protests that there were no heroes in World War II. So it goes.
A NEW NOVEL OF ALTERNATE HISTORY FROM MASTER OF MILITARY SF TOM KRATMAN, JUSTIN WATSON, AND KACEY EZELL. As WWI comes to a close a German general, an escaped prisoner of war, and the crew of an airship converge to effect THE ROMANOV RESCUE. Can there be a world without communism?Mankind's history is bound up in the fabric of fate, a strong cloth, tough and closely woven.It is the beginning of 1918, the last year of the greatest war in human history, to date. All the belligerents stagger on their feet. Starvation is an ever present reality, while disease waits in the wings. In Russia, no longer a belligerent but, instead, rapidly descending into civil war and chaos, a lone family—Father, Mother, four beautiful young girls, and a brave but sickly boy—await their own fate, shivering and hungry in the dark, hoping and praying for salvation.Their relatives in England have turned their backs. The guards set over them do little but torment them. They look Heavenward, but God doesn't answer. They know they're a threat to the new regime, a threat that will, in time, be eliminated.But even the strongest fabric has flaws. An escaped prisoner of war, caught, injured, and punished, but still highly capable, might be one. An airship, returned and at loose ends after a failed mission to Africa might be another. A German general, taking a wrong turn on his nightly walk and suddenly coming face to face with the reality of the monster rising in the east, would be a third.Follow, then, as the general gives the orders, the prisoner of war raises the men from among his fellows, and the airship launches itself forward, to contest fate, to tear the fabric of time, and to effect The Romanov Rescue.
>>24929132No. I'd still be an anarchist.
I am interested to hear what the high effort Sanderson hater from the last thread likes to read. They had a lot of criticism but knowing Sanderson sucks doesn't help me find great sff books.Pic related is poetry
Erikson is a chubby chaser isn't he?
>>24929260Yes. He is the fantasy architect
>>24929260Yes. Not sure why he denies it. Wonder what his wife looks like
>>24929260he has a type for sure
Went to the bookstore80% of the fiction shelves were "#booktok"
>>24929425Just go to the actual sff section to judge their selection.
>>24929425Don't you have an independent secondhand bookstore? I go to mine for Baen books.
>>24929434nta, but my books a million has a decent selection of Baen books.Granted, I Iive in a red midwestern state, so take that as you will.
>>24929260Reading it right now, my impression
>>24929208I can't see how this could be interesting to explore. Even the monarchists in Russia didn't want the Tsar's family back after he got deposed, they wanted a new one who was less likely to be horrifically incompetent. What if the romanov's survived? Isn't a very compelling what if
>>24929260I'm not sure why you keep pushing this meme. There are like two fat women in the whole series: Tattersail and Felash.None of them is an important character and Tattersail died around one-third of book 1 or somethingHis most wanked woman is Apsalar, and she is a petite asian girl
>>24929481Do you think the author knows anything about history? He's just a dumb Iraq War vet who used the milslurp to get free college.
>>24929485said this years ago in here but there's no worse SFF writer than a US veteran who wants to write anything even vaguely troop-adjacent
>>24929494What about Heinlein?
>>24929496I'm thinking more modern really, like guys who sat around in iraq/afghanistan doing nothing and now want to tell everyone about how cool they were.
Having no previous experience with the Metro franchise I spent the last week and a half reading through the trilogy.>2033Fantastic from start to finish even if the last 5 or so pages were badly fumbled. I'm not completely sure how we were supposed to just accept that the blackies dindu nuffin when the novel spent enough time to show in no uncertain terms that wasn't the case, but alright. Artyom is beyond brainfucked so it doesn't really matter. The final scene with Ulman was pure kino.>2034Liquid dogshit. Physically painful to read. What the fuck happened.>2035>hahaha bro if you liked 2033 you fell for Homer's propaganda bullshit for the masses>hahaha if you don't like this you are too dumb to accept The Harsh Reality™>you just don't get it bro hahahahaOh suck a dick Glukhovsky. On the bright side under the same breath it more or less admitted to the shittiness of 2034, so that's something. But all in all I didn't hate it. Anya is 10/10 best girl, Artyom doesn't deserve her.
I need some non-human (but not werewolf/vampire/demon/orc) mc books.Could be fantasy or scifi.Something like Kaz the Minotaur.
>>24929733children of time
>>24929159I have read 14 fantasy novels published in 2025. Were they any good? 5 stars: 14 stars: 8 (including rounded up)3 stars: 5Maybe I've been too generous with my ratings. Would you like them? I'd guess it's less than likely.
The pic is from the cover of the dying earth RPG, some editions even has jack Vance's autograph. The cugel campaigns were the best
>>24929425This bookshop clerk on tiktok blackpilled me when she said it's about 1 male customer for every 100 female customers
>>24929429>how a werewolf and a vampire DP'd me(both CEOs)man I love fantasy
>Berlin: a megacity of 24 million people, is the world’s first gay state. Its distant radio broadcasts are a lifeline for teenager William, so when his love affair with Gareth is discovered the two flee toward sanctuary. But is there a place for them in a city divided into districts for young twinks, trendy bears, and rich alpha gays?>Meanwhile, young mother Cissie loves Berlin’s towering highrises and chaotic multiculturalism, yet she’s never left her heterosexual district – not until she and her family are trapped in a queer riot. With her husband Howard plunging into religious paranoia, she discovers a walled-off slum of perpetual twilight, home to the city’s forbidden trans residents.>As William and Cissie dive deeper into a bustling world of pride parades, polyamorous trysts, and even an official gay language, they discover that all is not well in the gay state – each playing their part in a looming civil warman I love speculative fiction
>>24929784I don't know, anon. Maybe if you posted their titles.
>>24929159Forth Wing.It features a man that's brave, masculine, takes what he wants, skilled, fucks the girls, and an overall badass. Everything ssfg wants in a male protagonist.Face it, you fags want romantasy garbage characters.
>>24929481But did they really have to kill the princesses? They were all so cute.
>>24929934Nah, I'm saving that for later.
>>24929918>Quarantining all the fags into their own country so we no longer have to deal with them.B...based?
I'm currently looking through a lot of books. Some could be amusing to post about it, like I did with>>24929918But mostly it's just been small stuff that I don't feel like putting together into a aggregated post. Mostly because it'll be taken in a different way than intended.
>>24929733The Crucible of Time
>>24929244sneederson would shudder at that pic. it says more in a single frame and text blurb than he has managed with a 20m+ word bibliography.on the topic of my own reading, i'm afraid to say i will probably disappoint, as i don't dig through the modern sff bin that much. the only thing in terms of 'traditional' genre stuff i'd recommend in its entirety is probably tolkien, along with a soft spot for verne (20k leagues, if i had to pick one). i've recently started book of the new sun, and have enjoyed what little i've read, though i don't think i'm far enough along to really discuss it further.outside of that, i'm relatively basic; things like your moby dicks, your frankensteins, your don quixotes, your paradise lost, your gatsby, etc. i've been working through alice in wonderland/looking glass (and dipping into carroll's poetry) and have been having fun with it.favorite book in all honesty, even though it's an incredibly basic and somewhat juvenile option, is catcher in the rye. just something about it, i don't know. every time i go back to it, i love it more than before. it was probably just a right place, right time deal, as my school's curriculum never forced me to read it.mormons are phonies, methinks.
Power Play Jake Ross #1 Ben Bova352 ratings 77 reviews 2.93Published January 3, 2012 by Tor Books>It's written from a totally misogynist mindset. The women in the story are sexual objects to the protagonist, which if written well may have made a statement about the male thought process, however, it's not. Men are described via their character, and women via their looks. It's so comfortable, middle class and male-centric I want to puke. the story will definitely alienate any female readers. >How can a decent sci-fi writer move to political intrigue and revert back to early puberty thoughts projected through his main characters? >His protagonists constant whining about females is disgustingly amateurish.>His relationship was mostly about whether they would have sex with him or if they had had sex with the other men in the story and so on.>Ben Bova was no friend to women in this book.>Just bland and overtly sexist without telling much of a story
>>24930003ntaThanks for revealing your oatmeal porridge self.
>>24930008better to be oatmeal than high-fructose corn syrup.sorry i don't like your power fantasy. i don't need to pretend i'm a magical superhero to feel something.you call it 'porridge' because it actually has nutritional value. i'm sorry that a book without a video-game magic system or a funko-pop tie-in feels 'bland' to you. you mistake quality for boredom because you have the palate of a toddler.enjoy your diabetes
>>24929733Second Dawn
>>24930003>doesn't like sff>blogposts in /sffg/Please get over yourself.
>>24930024Have you played Final Fantasy or do you like the concept art?
>>24930024>he thinks you read because it's good for you
>>24929138If not for the cult of the emperor, the people would've rebelled against the tyranny of the imperial military junta.
>>24929445I always forget about Tattersail, since she's not really relevant past book 1 not counting Silverfox
>self-publish your sff book>a couple years go by>still literally 0 ratings or reviews on Goodreads and only 2 on Amazonhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199841036-termination-of-species
>>24930044>Book 1>Here's a chubby sorceress everyone wants to sleep with>Book 2>Here's a junkie whore slave everyone compliments for not being skinny and wants to sleep withIt gives an impression, maybe even an expectation.
>>24930048>only promote book in forum notable for disinterest and piracy>not get any interestThe Jews did this
>>24930058You've misunderstood. This is some random guy's book, not mine.
>>24930056Felisin is a skinny child thoughwhat makes you think that she is fat?
>>24930070Being primed by Tattersail probably
>>24930029i literally just listed tolkien, verne, and wolfe. that is sff.just because i don't eat out of the dumpster doesn't mean i don't like food. the fact you think rejecting sanderson equates to 'not liking the genre' proves how thoroughly colonized your brain is. you think sff is defined by whatever is currently on the barnes & noble end-cap display. all you do is consume product.sneed.>>24930039imagine telling on yourself this hard.yes, unironically.you are admitting that you view art as nothing more than a distraction. you treat literature like a fidget spinner for your fried dopamine receptors. i read to engage with the human condition, you read to escape it because you have the interior life of a goldfish.you confirm everything i've said: you are a junkie looking for a cheap high, not a human being looking for meaning.consume product, get excited for next product.>>24930033yes, i've played the main line and some spinoffs (tactics, bravely default, etc.)but i also just really like looking at amano and takahashi art, though amano is my favorite. it's the 'stained glass' quality i talked about before, it's ethereal, messy, and interpretive. it highlights exactly what the cosmere is missing. sanderson could write a 10,000 word description of a suit of armor and it would have less narrative weight than a single messy amano sketch.
>>24930091>the only things anyone could read for are dopamine highs and moral instruction
>>24930091Why do you play videogames?
>>24930070Been years but I remember felisin being written to have big tittys. Her journey through raraku shrinks them.
>>24930107she is probably just thiccwhen he writes actual fat women it's pretty obvious
>>24930091>you are admitting that you view art as nothing more than a distraction. you treat literature like a fidget spinner for your fried dopamine receptors. i read to engage with the human condition, you read to escape it because you have the interior life of a goldfish.You'd be surprised by how many people do exactly this and view all passive hobbies this way.
What went wrong? It can't be a sudden drop in quality for Joe.
>>24930125It was written with the intention of being turned into a movie. The fact it was picked up so quickly by James Cameron makes it more evident.
>>24929733The Quintaglio trilogy
>>24929733GATO
>>24930095nice false dichotomy, dipshit.you think 'substance' means 'moral instruction' because your brain is so rotten by consumerism that you can't conceive of art doing anything other than giving you a dopamine hit or giving you a lecture.you view the world like a child; it's either 'play time' or 'school'. adults can understand beauty.it's called the sublime, you soulless bug. it's called resonance.i don't read moby dick to be 'instructed' on whale hunting. i read to witness the crushing illustration of the human condition and the beauty of language. the fact that you view anything that isn't a cheap, plastic thrill as 'homework' proves you have the interior life of a pocket calculator. you are spiritually hollow.>>24930101for the storytelling, the aesthetics, and the interactivity. same reasons i watch film or listen to music, as each artistic medium has its own strengths. video games utilize visuals, sound, and mechanics to convey a narrative experience.the problem is trying to turn one medium, in this case, literature, into another, being video games.i play final fantasy because the mechanics interact with the art and music to create a holistic story.i read books for prose, interiority, and thematic depth, things that literature handles better than any other medium.sanderson fails at both. he writes books that lack the interiority of literature, substituting it with the hard mechanics of a game system. but because it's a book, you can't actually play it. you are effectively reading a transcript of someone else playing an rpg. it's the worst of both worlds. and don't even get me started on litrpgs.>>24930120disappointing, isn't it?millions of people eat mcdonalds every day. millions of people scroll tiktok for 6+ hours a day. the fact that a behavior is common doesn't make it virtuous, and it certainly doesn't make it a standard worth emulating.treating reading as a 'passive hobby' is a slight contradiction in terms, i think. watching tv is passive, scrolling a feed is passive. but reading requires active engagement, interpretation, and visualization. if you treat it as a passive activity where you just let the words wash over you like static, you aren't really reading, you're just consuming content. you're 'reading', but you're not reading. just because the bar is on the floor doesn't mean we should dig a hole under it, though.
What's his end game?
>>24930149How much do you love the attention you're being given?
>>24930125It's not exactly sudden. People have just been ignoring it.
why does asimov use ftl technology in his novels despite criticising it in sci fi as unscientific or impossible theoretically?
>>24930125It's adaptation bait. It got picked up instantly by a studio.
>>24930149>nice false dichotomy>presents a false dichotomy
>>24930171Because when he writes FTL he's not writing about FTL
>>24930125The Queen of England tore this book to shreds on her channel
>>24930157about as much as i love watching a zoo animal try to solve a puzzle.don't confuse 'attention' with the entertainment value of watching you fail. i'm posting because bullying midwits who treat commercial slop like scripture is a public service. i don't need your validation.but please, if you'd like to actually say something of substance, you're more than welcome to.>>24930173mimicking terms you don't understand isn't an argument.it's not called a false dichotomy, it's a hierarchy.distinguishing between art and slop is called having taste. just because you are incapable of distinguishing between a nutritious meal and a bucket of high-fructose corn syrup sludge doesn't mean the distinction is 'false'. it just means your palate is broken.it's called discernment. learn the difference.
>>24929159I thought Strength of the Few was decent.
STOP REPLYING TO BLOGFAGGOT
>>24929425>bought Empire of Silence and Will of the Many at 30% and they were both on the #booktok table
>>24930201caps lock isn't an argumentcrying out to the hivemind to stop engaging is just admitting you've lost. (you) can't refute me, so (you) need to quarantine me to make the bad thoughts go away.seethe always and forever, fren.
Silk Fire - Zabé Ellor400 ratings 255 reviews, 2.07/550% 1 star reviews20% 2 star reviews30% 3 star+ reviewsSeems the author really hit a nerve.
are her books worth reading?
>>24930227Was this written by an uruk-hai?
Why are women so worthless at writing?
>>24930152crashing this empire with no survivors
>>24930246I never knew Foundation series was so ... steamy
>>24930235I own Babel but haven't read it but the fact she acts like she had to work really hard to get where she is despite having her enormous family wealth propping her up in case she fails really soured my view on her
>>24930235For /sffg/, not really.
>>24930243Why are males?
>>24930254Your comment makes no sense. If both males and females were worthless at writing, there would be no worthwhile literature. It exists, thus males must be good at writing. Maybe drop the pills, my dear anon.
>>24930235Not really, no. She's a "modern female audience" kind of writer.
>>24930251Its Asimov what did you expect, best part is that he isn't even close to the most pervy writer of his generation. Nowadays a pervert wont even touch a book, all of them became software developers.
>>24930267or making gooning edits
>>24930243it's physiologicaltoo many mirror neurons
I am a performative male that carries fantasy books around and occasionally flip a page to seem like I'm reading. It's fake enough to not be feminist literature, but safe enough to catch the eye of young girls.
>>24930235>gets her education at oxford and cambridge>shits on the entire system in her novels
>>24930258>He doesn't think, probably can't think.>No discernible brain
>>24930300Based
>>24930235Nah. She's basically from that wave when everyone started sucking off Chinese authors for some reason as replacement for black authors. She's doing the same racial grift except hers is about China. The Poppy War trilogy is overrated as fuck, and less said about Babel and Yellowface the better.
Today's haul:Liar's Oath by Elizabeth MoonVoices of Heaven by Frederik PohlPrivateers by Ben BovaHyperion by Dan SimmonsGeneration Warriors by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth MoonDaggerspell by Katherine KerrShadow Kingdoms: The Weird Worlds of Robert E. HowardAnd yesterday I got one of the Honor Harrington books that came with the CD that has every Honor Harrington book on it.How did I do?
>>24930318>Elizabeth MoonI really liked her Remnant Population novel.
>>24930295Tell me, O Muse, of how the performanceOf deadened, pallid males from ancient YaleHad merely read the classics in a sieveAnd barely understood the holy grailOf Saint Shakespeare's glorious EnterpriseAnd durst disliked the reign of Poesy arm'dWith words that eyes may try to syllabize,These eyes that, blinded, make our Fancies calmed, With darkness made from strangling IgnoranceThat capers nimbly like a wanton nymphThrough shelves and tears the leaves with insolence From every library, defacing every plinthAnd statue which, erect for pride, may stand To show the world whate'er our kings command!
>>24927759Don't wanna lose this gold post to the old thread. Basically the last few posts were shitting on Sanderfags. To add to this...I've always been very confused by the soft/hard magic system thing. At first, I remember I was like, "oh interesting. Just an overall way to look at how it works in books." Then it became this autistic obsession of power levels, logic, science, "le loopholes" and all that shit. At that point it really stumped me why people who liked reading fantasy would even worry about whether magic was ambiguous or mysterious or whatever. It's fucking magic. That's the whole point. That's why classic fantasy (meaning Tolkien and his contemporaries + the authors before) will always be superior to modern fantasy because they weren't fucking obsessing over how "cool" it reads or whether "Gandalf's power level is a bit too much". They simply wrote about the human condition with myth, fairy tale and legends as their inspiration. And that's really what grinds my gears. It's the fact that it seems the humanity is stripped off these stories to make it as digestible as possible to as many other magic system obsessed autists out there (or spicy obsessed gooners for w*men) instead of AT LEAST making you try to feel something genuine and complicated about the human experience.Another thing, too. EVERYTHING is pathologized. This isn't /lit/ but I saw this with the new Stranger Things season (which mostly sucks). The bad guy just had a mean poppa and another character calls this out explicitly, as if it wasn't dogshit exposition for the villain's le trauma. And many other instances of this. It pisses me off so much. How fucking stupid are the normies that when a character gives a pathological exposition on the villain they just go "OOOH He's NOT ACtuaLLY le BaD?!" and give the book or show a 100/10 because it "totally understands trauma and depression". Jesus Christ.Anyways, rant over.
>>24930125The writing's been on the wall for a while. If you've read his Shattered Sea or Age of Madness trilogies, the cringe has been steadily on the rise.
>>24930171Asimov would be one of the all time greats if he didn't have that soi foible of thinking science and logic were panaceas for problems and you could have gay space communism or whatever system du jor you ideologize if we all just embraced science and reason. Am I the only one who feels that way.
>>24929438>red midwestern statethis is probably it. My independent bookstores are all ran by femgoons with "spicy book clubs" (this is not a joke)
>>24930003I liked your posts but couldn't you have made a seperate thread outside of /sffg/ to rant about Sandersoy? I mean, I agree with most of what you say but you don't even seem to be that into sff
>>24929733The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear Rumo & His Miraculous AdventuresThey're both by Walter Moers and I love his books. Captain Bluebear is much more zany and whimsical while Rumo is a lot darker and violent. You can read them in any order but highly recommended.
foundation tv > foundation books
>>24930417Genetic Dynasty is the one good addition.
>>24930417Wow. Actually the stupidest thing I've seen today.Are you gay?
>>24930464Yes
>>24930464only when I suck dick
Any good fantasy works set in a Pike & Shot/Napoleonic Era analogue? I'm fucking tired of medieval mudcore crap.
>>24930417Not a high bar
>>24930512Powder Mage
>>24930512
Objectively speaking, Susanna Clarke was an unknown quantity for the majority of her early career before her debut novel. She was an obscure fantasy author (who didn't even make it on the front covers of a lot of anthologies she was published in) for 6 years while she was publishing a short story, four novelettes, and a novella in the same universe. I guess this helped her fandom build before the novel dropped, but it seems like a strange trajectory. She must have really loved her worldbuilding enough to sit in it for the better part of a decade.
>>24930235>boycots UAE and Israelwtf i love wokeness now
IT'S OUT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIDj37z3Vx8
>>24930573It's entirely because of nepotism and dicksucking that her shitty novel got the reception it did.
>>24930614this, it's probably bad
>>24930614She was mainly published in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow (an editor of the horror genre, and a pretty mediocre one at that). I doubt Ellen Datlow has any sway over how normies read fantasy novels.
>>24930614Strange and Nowell? Yeah good concept but what a chore to read. I liked Piranesi up until the moment that gay ass tweest "It was the modern world all along" happened, what a way to go toward the least interesting direction.
>>24930631I took Piranesi as a parable of the stone arch world being the past, where power flowed through but stopped, and the protagonist was a modern guy stuck in statue avi vibe video land, which was honestly offensive for how little an alternative she presented.
>>24930401yeah, you're right, i could have. sanderson just makes me see red.this is the general. if the thread is infested, it needs to be cured. i can't build a separate containment chamber for the cure, i need to apply it directly to said infection.i hate him because i care about the genre. if i didn't care about sff, i wouldn't care that he's turning it into a soulless content mill. you don't let weeds choke out a garden just to be 'nice'.>>24930386modern writers (and sanderson is the king of this) are terrified of subtext. they don't trust the reader to understand human behavior through action, so they have to explicitly diagnose it using modern clinical language. it turns character psychology 'character A does action B because of trauma C'just look at the absolute state of kaladin in the most recent two entries;>"No," Kaladin said. "I'm his therapist."it's the most jarring anachronistic, cringe shit imaginable. you have these ancient, broken demigods who have suffered thousands of years of torture and magical madness, and kaladin's solution is to sit them down in a circle and use 21st-century gentle-parenting therapy-speak.and it fucking works.and the worst part? it isn't even good therapy. it's generic, instagram infographic pop-psychology. it's all surface level 'i see you, i hear you, you're valid', slop that reads like a corporate hr pamphlet on conflict resolution. it has no depth, there's no jung, there's no freud. sanderson thinks he's writing a profound exploration of the psyche, and all that came out was a shitty self-help book for teenagers.the worst part is how it just completely destroys the 'mythic' story he spent so long setting up. the knights radiant aren't a holy order of weapons anymore, they're a modern hr department managed by mentally ill millennials. kaladin isn't a hero anymore, he's an idiot's idea of a guidance counselor with a spear. sanderson can't conceive of 'madness' as a divine or terrifying affliction like old stories used to, he can only see it as a 'mental illness' that needs to be managed via his cbt worksheet autism.
The portal fantasy genre is really symbolic of losing your innocence and should have a subtext of sexual trauma..... Gene Wolfe knew this
I've read a few big fantasy books this year picked after barely reading the title and the back cover, purely because they had interesting vibes>Babel (sucked, way too preachy)>Imaginary Friend (great until you reach the halfway point of the book and realize you still have half the book to go)>The Cartographers (immediatly obvious plot twists and yet so obtuse in what it shares)I no longer trust my own guts.
>>24930386Never understood people's obsession with Sanderson or these "hard/soft magic systems". I tried reading Way of Kings. It was trash. The obsession with magic systems is a profoundly low IQ thing. It's the retard pretending sophistry, and thinking himself smart, who cares what "magic" in the story is. News Flash: Magic in fantasy is just a tool for storytelling! Becoming obsessed with the tool misses the whole point of fantasy or sci-fi, the ability to tell stories that are fantastical, not constrained by what is real.
>>24930640Exactly this shit. I know we're specifically talking about sff but that therapist HR tone when some confrontation with the big bad is about to happen is EVERYWHERE. Legitimately everywhere. In what fucking stage of humanity did people go, "your mom fondled you as a 5 year old? Bro... I feel you. You're loved." People don't even do that nowadays, they just pretend you should do that because this shit is smeared everywhere you look. The stupidest part is that 95% of the time it doesn't even work in the story and the villain just goes, "...you can't change me." and then proceeds to do whatever evil shit he's doing anyways, so you know it's explicit exposition from the writer to say, "See? I know a Human Being™ is Complex®" and then the audience claps or some shit. I feel you, bro. I do. I wonder how the genre could've evolved had it not been taken over by women and midwit postmodernist pseuds
>>24930631That was my only complaint with Piranesi. Even the ritual the professor made the mc go through in the modern world was interesting but I thought leaving our world completely ambiguous would've made the story 10 times better.
>>24930624>>24930631>she went to oxford and is married to a guy who went to oxfordThere, had it immediatly.Americans don't realise how nepotistic these upper class retards in the UK who are all privately educated. You can be as shit as you like but if you attended a private school and made some buddies there you can get whatever you want published. Add some nepotism and that's how you get trash like Jonathan strange and piranesai published and lauded by the mainstream. Her husband is jewish as well which likely adds to it.
>>24930911YWNBAW.
Why did medieval and contemporary become the default settings for fantasy?
>>24931014Because it's based
>>24931014Because half of fantasy authors want to be Tolkien, and the other half have given up on being him.
>>24931014Because Romanticism is the precursor of all Fantasy and Romanticism was medievalist>>24931040>Le tolkien invented fantasytolkiendrone retard
>>24930184Based Zara, Matt cucked out because he got an interview with Joe if he lied about The Devils.
>>24931076Based Zara told Joe to lick her arsehole
I watched the e-celeb video about Shadow of the Torturer someone linked in the last thread. I listened to it on the side, but I was surprised by the amount of retardedly simple mistakes the guy made. Not even borne out of failing to decipher meaning, but simply not reading what the text even says. He claimed to have spent 36 hours on this, 12 hours per day, on just Shadow. Yet he constantly misunderstood very simple passages, like the note in the Inn of Lost Loves, thinking it was for Severian, despite the note explicitly warning the recipient about Severian. Then he said Dorcas split the avern with Terminus Est, when Severian was dazed, but the passage very clearly says that she forgot to take the sheath off, and thus just knocked the avern away. The video is full of mistakes like that, where he hasn't even bothered to read what the passage actually says. He claimed to have a notebook full of notes. What notes?Did this guy just ask ChatGPT for what happens in Shadow or did he spend 1 hour per day reading it, meaning quickly glance at keywords he saw in paragraphs, and 11 hours jacking off? How do people listen to idiots like him? I guess it is good people are reading Wolfe, but he should be shamed of himself, for either lying or being so stupid.
>>24931229daniel green said him and his wife estabished him having "hall pass hookups" with the opposite gender since he's bisexual and since the goth baddie he hooked up with considered herself a they/them that it was gray area and to him fell in his criteria.
>>24931014Because of William Morris and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the contrast it offered to the Industrial Revolution
>>24931229People think Severian raped that one bitch, you can't trust people.
>>24931237I'm not aware of this stuff and I don't particularly want to be. I don't watch his content outside special cases like this.>>24931254Truly the great filtering of our times.
Finished book 6, now onto the home stretch.
>>24931270I have to ask, since you seem to have been able to read the series: does Hadrian get any better? I'm almost done with Empire of Silence. The actual worldbuilding is pretty decent*, yet the protagonist, Hadrian, is absolutely insufferable. He's a childish, weak and pathetic faggot. I'd rather read six books of him being raped by a big black nigger, than finish the book, if he actually doesn't develop into something better.Like he mopes about killing the mutant, despite not having any cohesive idealogy about the value of life. He claims to be a agnostic, but thinks killing shouldn't be done. Why? Because he simps for the whore? He's the ultimate fedora tipper in the universe and I'd rather read the book from any perspective that isn't his. In fact, the mutant dude would have been trillion times more interesting as a protagonist. Talk about overcoming your circumstances!I don't really know what it is specifically about Hadrian that pisses me off. I wasn't this annoyed by even Rand. I guess it's just the fedora tipping and thinking himself so smart, when he is actually just a idiot. Ruocchio claims to love Wolfe, but why can't he just copy Wolfe's protagonists, who actually were interesting, with the touch of 'tism. Latro had more soul in a single chapter, than Hadrian in the whole book.*Except the chantry. It's the most cartoonishly evil shit available and makes me surprised the author isn't a fedora wearing atheist.
>>24931293I didn't mind Hadrian's "fedora tippingness" so much, I actually liked it. Book 1 and most of 2 were a struggle for me because of how low stakes they were, but the series is quite good starting with 3, when it opens up into the wider world and Hadrian starts interacting with the top of the empire.I do think Hadrian becomes less of a fedora tipper has he ages, though I may have just gotten used to it so ymmv. He goes through very dark times in the later books and they leave a lasting impact on him.>he protagonist, Hadrian, is absolutely insufferable. He's a childish, weak and pathetic faggot.IMO that does get better, especially by 3 when he's working directly under the emperor.>He claims to be a agnostic, but thinks killing shouldn't be done.As time goes on, Hadrian loses all his qualms about killing. That the Cielcin cannot be reasoned is mostly why.This shit never goes away though:>I heard a rough voice say, "y'all are retards," which was followed by an uncomfortable silence. It took a moment before I realized the voice was my own.Must happen at least once every 50 pages.
>>24931270I'm about halfway through, I think this one has been the best so far, maybe tied with KOD.
for years and years I keep hearing about M John Harrison but haven't read anything by him. do (You) like him? what book should I start with? my impression is his books are a bit "smart"/"heady"/"weird"
>>24929120Thank you whoever recommended this
>>24931399>recommended by Neil Gaimanoof
>>24931422I love how there was a period when he was doing introductions for every vaguely fantasy-associated book and overnight he became a pariah probably for tamer stuff than the previous generations of convention pests got up to but I'm happy whenever any of them get what they deserve
>>24931399https://warosu.org/lit/?task=search2&search_text=Harrison&search_tripcode=sffg&search_ord=old
>>24931420Can i get reccommended it too?
>>24931660one of hells demons has a change of heart and wants to return to heaven
>>24931660God's Demon
Has anyone read Ashes of the Imperium yet? Any good?
>>24930651you know that it says on the cover if a book was written by a woman right?
>>24930235Would
>>24931076Matt hates Conan. It's natural he'd love Abercrombie's quippy slop.
>>24930695Magic systems should be inevitably broken.
>>24931850How can you even hate Conan?
i only read sci-fi novels where the white male protag has SEX
Is The Expanse worth reading?
>>24931959i've enjoyed the first four books so farthere is a twist in the first book that might make or break the series for you
>>24931959Ye
>>24931877No idea, but I'm sure his reasons were retarded.
I kind of agree with blogfag in the sense that Sanderson is slop, just thin flavorless gruel with no actual depth or heart. But every time someone tries to imply some kind of usefulness or meaning to TRVE ART I wonder how we got to this era of worthless dogshit novels that are just porn or videogame proxies if that's the case. Like if all this epic deep art was so good for the soul why is everyone who reads it generally still a braindead emotionally immature faggot? It doesn't ever seem to have affected society's downward plummet.One might be forgiven for thinking TRVE ART is just slightly more competently written worthless timewasting slop with imagined merit for the sake of the reader's ego.
>>24931908what the fuck happened to scalzi? I can hardly believe the same person wrote those old novels and his modern drivel.
>>24932036Chasing relevance.
>>24931696>female custodians
>reading modern SFFT>ever
>>24930318>Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl>Hyperion by Dan Simmons>Daggerspell by Katherine Kerr>Shadow Kingdoms: The Weird Worlds of Robert E. HowardThe rest are shit.
>>24932178There's probably some golden nuggets in the sea of shit, anon.
>>24931399Read his Viriconium series.
>>24932188Better to swim in a sea of gold where occasionally some shit appears.
>>24931420his art is awesome. this book has been on my wishlist for a while but I've never read Milton's Paradise Lost, don't know if I need to in order to appreciate Barlow's book, and not sure if I'm even smart enough to appreciate Milton's poem
>>24931293Hadrian grows a lot, from "maybe the alien invaders are misunderstood and I hate my dad" to "kill all xenos for the good of mankind and I love my hot witch wife" to "my empire won't survive the death of noblesse oblige" to "you can't kill me, I'm on a mission from God"DiW > DG > HD = KoD > SuT > AoM = EoS
>>24932231You don't need to do any homework to enjoy God's Demon. It works perfectly fine as an atmospheric dark fantasy novel even if you have no background knowledge of Abrahamic lore. Though if you are really curious, it's worth noting that only the first two chapters of Paradise Lost take place in hell and those chapters can be gotten through very quickly. 90% of modern media that takes inspiration from Milton takes from those early chapters specifically.
>>24932036he has a lot of fun ideas, but his execution got super boring
>>24932327can i start on book 2 and still enjoy it?tried reading book 1 but quit when he was homeless on a new planet
>>24931328Thanks for the reply.>Must happen at least once every 50 pages.Sad to hear, but I can tolerate a decent amount of bad writing. It's just increasingly hard, when the narration is done in this very personal manner. A lot hinges on the quality of the narrator.>>24932327Good to hear he progresses at least, although I have to say I am not a fan of Valka. I'm nearly finished with the first book. I'll try to struggle through. I guess book 2 will be the true test, then.>>24932536I can't speak for what happens, but it feels like a lot of world building is done in Emesh. I think it's done decently well, the universe feels sufficiently large (unlike Dune). Like you, I struggled a lot with the book. This is actually my second time trying to read it. If only because I've liked some of the interviews of the author, and everyone says the latter books are better.
>>24932536I think it'd be hard to read the series without completing the first book, Emesh is very important for Hadrian. Cool stuff does start happening soon.
>Classic fantasy authors: racists >Classic sci-fi authors: perverts>Classic horror authors: either both racist and perverted or completely normal chill dudes.What caused this?
>>24932630Modern society being prudes in hindsight. People will be people.
>>24929120Mandatory "is Wheel of Time actually good?" post.
>>24932013True Art is for the elect, who can find deep meaning in everything but get special insights from great literature. Those who can only get slop out of slop can only get slop out of the great books, and so live as tormented souls, as we have observed.
>>24929132Is national socialism just "capitalism if it were successful"?
>>24932651Read it and find out
>>24932682NTA but it would be really superb if we can just get answers before we dump hundreds of dollars reading tens of thousands of pages when our reading backlogs are already numbering in the hundreds of thousands of page k thanks.
>>24932688>hundreds of dollarstf are you reading that costs hundreds of dollars?
>>24932651No. It has great moments, but it has way too much filler and retarded women moments. Also, due to the author dying early, the last three books are noticeably lower quality, due to being done by Sanderson.
>>24932735Must be a folio society aficionado.
>>24932735Entire book series'. If I get WoT, all of them, it's going to be at least 100 or 200 dollars. Now if your go-to answer is "read it and find out", and we do that with *every* book and series, then yes we're spending money somewhere. Personally I can't read fiction on tablet, only non-fiction, and I'm sure others are like that.Your post is not very helpful and betrays you for not having a backlog and therefore not being a true /lit/izen. Begone, poser.
>>24932754You can't just buy the first book to see if you like it and then get them in sequence?
>>24932767>he can't pick up a copy of the first book at a public libraryYou know there are big buildings that keep copies of popular literature and can mail them to you if you ask them, right?
>>24932767Why would you drop big boy money on the whole series without knowing if you'll like it, why wouldn't you just buy book 1
>>24932767>get the first book from a library or a cheap second hand copy>if you like, get book 2>if you don’t, skipThere you go
>>24932536Book 1 is worth pushing through, but if you absolutely can't do it, then skipping to book 2 is fine, there's a time skip and there's enough exposition that you won't feel lost.Howling Dark is also a massive step up from Empire of Silence, the stakes are higher and it explores a lot of neat sci-fi concepts that EoS doesn't.
>>24932777No I didn't. Will they make me send it back? Also do they have Agathias Scholasticus?>>24932780Because if I buy one book and say I hate it you'll be like >"you didn't give it a try">"don't knock it til you try it">"read them and find out if they're any good". Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!>>24932781My library sucks. They don't have Agathias Scholasticus. I went to their Christian section and it was all stuff like "The New Testament Through Jewish Eyes", "The Dead Sea Scrolls", and "The Judaism of Christ". They won't order anything and even though it's a big country library they don't have most of the popular stuff unless it's like Eragon. Maybe if Wheel of Time has a NYT "Best Seller" sticker or award it might have snuck in. There's a black lady there that's really rude too. I hate my local library.
>>24929733Chanur if you want cat milfs
>>24932800*county libraryI can't type today, my brain is auto-correcting to wrong words now
are there any good warhammer 40k books?watched the astartes fan video and got hard
>>24932800>You could try finding this incredibly popular fantasy novel at your local library>b-but it doesn't have this obscure medieval scholarAsk them about "interlibrary loan"
>>24932800>Because if I buy one book and say I hate it you'll be likeIf you're that dominated by the general maybe your priority should be becoming your own person and making your own decisions.
>>24932814>interlibrary loanI did and the Sephardic lady dodged the question by saying they only do that in special circumstances. She didn't say what they were but apparently I'm not special enough to warrant it. I'm not even going to bother with the black lady.
Thoughts on The Keep?
>>24932800Chads can judge an entire series based on just the first book.
>>24932817You made a really bad reply. Obviously, if we all had all the time and money and good libraries in the world we would just read everything, but even reading one book without knowing whether you'll like it or not is a waste of time. You're just wasting people's time with dumb comments. I don't even know why you're posting here.
>>24932811No. Just read whatever Warhammer ripped off.
>>24932830And that's mostly 2000AD comics.
>>24932829>but even reading one book without knowing whether you'll like it or not is a waste of time.what level of autism is this?
>>24932829Or if we didn't have tender eyes~ that didn't let us just rip epubs like everyone else, anons are trying to help you even with your special needs and you're just whining
>>24932811Not sure but I know Adrian Tchaikovsky has written a few. Try those
>>24932836The kind where nobody wants to waste time on more than 200 pages of slop when they have a big backlog to go through. I'm wasting time chatting with you when I should be leafing through the Historia Augusta. You have been useless and I feel unfortunate for having interacted with you. You are an intellectual pauper and a spiritual thief. We are all worse for having met you. >>24932837>you're just whiningI just wanted a good review... You're not helping me at all by telling me to waste several hours, potentially days, on what may or may not be trash. Not to mention having to leave my hovel to speak to the mean library ladies again.
I'm reading Children of Hurin
>>24932842>literary tough guy reading Latin>also has time to ask for slop fantasy recsThere are very few fantasy series in the world with more online reviews available than Wheel of Time and you literally cannot stop sucking cocks.
>>24929120In my book enemies are a copypaste of alien you think i can get away with it?
>>24931420Anyone knows if the sequel 'Heart of Hell' is good?
>>24932849Plagiarism has worked for many authors, so why not?
>>24932845That's a good cover. I wonder how much editing Christopher did across the board. Some say the Silmarillion is heavily collected from loose notes, which would explain the lack of Tolkien's narrative flow. >>24932853What did this plagiarize?
>>24931293>Like he mopes about killing the mutant, despite not having any cohesive idealogy about the value of life.You can't be conflicted about murdering someone if you don't have "a cohesive ideology" ?The books are not perfect and neither is Hadrian, but God is your critique retarded
>>24932863Little from what I understand. He just compiled all the manuscripts and notes to create the completed novel.>What did this plagiarize?Dune
>>24932872>He just compiled all the manuscriptsOh, so it was a purposeful remolding of style.>DuneUnfortunate! I bought Dune one time at an airport and never finished it because it felt like a pastiche of what a future history should read like, as if it were the bad copy of a good copy of a real text pretending to be about a future history. But it has made lots of money and several movies and that's good enough recognition for most. Talk about failing upwards, in my humble yet scalding opinion.
>>24932866This isn't the place for an essay, but yes, it is contradictory to believe in a ridiculous thing like sacredness of life, without anything backing that up. Peak retard morality. Either there is something sacred about humans, or life in general, something more than the sum of its parts, or death, and consequently lawful killing, is not so bad at all. Hadrian, at least in the first book, is an idiot without any concrete beliefs, except that he must simp for the even more idiotic Valka. Ruocchio states that she thinks X, and Hadrian thinks Y, but he fails to argue why these things are so. This is a massive failing for book written in the style that it is, namely a personal narration of a singular protagonist. Ruocchio name drops basic bitch shit, Shakespeare, Augustine, etc., because he thinks it makes Hadrian, or him, look smart, but it has the opposite effect. Compare this to Wolfe, from whom Ruocchio apes much. Severian actually bothers pondering these things in a satisfactory manner.
Also, don't start talking about morality arising from rationality. Kant has been blown the fuck out ages ago and it only makes you look stupid.
>>24932884Filtered. Dune is probably as close as you will get to being the LOTR of sci-fi. It's influence in modern sci-fi is extremely visible. However, unlike LOTR it didn't have the love and attention that Christopher Tolkein gave to the series. Herbet's son milked the series like a cash cow, ruining it with his own ideas, reconning stuff his father wrote, claims it's all his fathers ideas but does not provide proof (unlike Christopher and JRRT's notes), his username on all social media is @DuneAuthor and worst of all his books are SHIT
>>24932454great thank you anon
>>24929120
>>24932893Way to miss the point. Most people don't have much in the way of coherent ideology, and most would feel bad about killing because it's both in our nature and our cultural ambience, if nothing else. Wolfe sucks. Wasted a good setting because of his massive skill issues with actually stringing sentences and paragraphs together properly.His book felt like something produced by a brain-damaged from concussive trauma shizo armed with a thesaurus and intending to make this everybody's problem
>>24932910Dune isn't complex enough to filter anybody. They are decent books at best. They are popular and with a lot of influence, because they were written for the average Joe.
>>24932921>Way to miss the point. Most people don't have much in the way of coherent ideologyWhich is why asked whether he got better as the books went on...>most would feel bad about killing because it's both in our nature and our cultural ambienceModern culture, sure, but in our nature? That's a radical claim, and frankly, untrue. Humans have been killing each other as long as humans have existed. It's one of the most natural things humans do to each other. Put it this way, if it weren't in our nature to kill, would it exist so prevalently, despite authority trying to stem it and culture fighting against it. If it is in our nature to feel bad about killing, in and of itself, why is killing so widespread?>Wolfe sucks. Wasted a good setting because of his massive skill issues with actually stringing sentences and paragraphs together properly.Lol. Wolfe's prose is among the better qualities of his novels. I can now see why you, and seemingly so many others, think Sun Eater a masterpiece.
>>24930695>>24930752>>24931853it's the same thing, i think: safetyismthe obsession with 'systems' is a desperate need for control. 'system' implies rules, boundaries, and predictability.fantasy is supposed to be about the intrusion of the chaotic, divine, and dangerous into the mundane. but the midwits are terrified of the unknown. mystery is scary, so they don't want it, they want a user manual. and if you can put it in a spreadsheet, it isn't magic, it's just made-up physics with a glitter filter.the hr problem is much the same, just applied to human morality, which causes the immediate death of dramatic tensionmodern writers (and sneederson is patient zero) are terrified of actual evil or actual tragedy. they can't handle a character being a villain, so they have to pathologize them into a 'trauma victim' so the protagonist can 'validate' them, and just like that, every epic conflict becomes a corporate mediation session.as you said, it's performative complexity.>'look, i acknowledged his trauma, therefore i am deep!'no, you're just boring. it strips the humanity out of a story to make it 'safe' for the modern audience that views conflict as a microaggression.sanderson fantasy is for people who are afraid of the dark
on the topic of books taking place in Hell, how is Brust's To Reign in Hell?
>>24932952>Which is why asked whether he got better as the books went on...in terms of coherent ideology and character development? Yes, he did. >If it is in our nature to feel bad about killing, in and of itself, why is killing so widespread?That's a big topic. I don't feel there will be much return in discussing it with you, but part of the answer, as I see it: -violence is unavoidable in the natural world because of its basic zero sum dynamics-but intra-species violence is naturally inhibited for obvious reasons-but humans are wired to split the world into us/them, with violence against "them" being less inhibited-yet sapient creatures are able to notice that murder is an act that has big and permanent consequences, even absent moralfaggotry overlaid on top of their biology. Ultimately this isn't relevant because cultural explanation in our case will suffice, and also the author is a christcuck, so you can see why he'd also believe it's fundamental, whether or not you or i agree. >Wolfe's prose is among the better qualities of his novels. lol. lmao even. the narration feels like a headache inducing fever dream. But I guess in your book it's le profound and grants the books an air of mystique, not like other, boring, pedestrian writers with more coherent and clear prose. >I can now see why you, and seemingly so many others, think Sun Eater a masterpiece.You dreamed the part where I said that up. that said, Ruocchio could give Wolfe a run for his money based on the first new sun book i've read.
tfw huge fan of Wizard Knight as a portal fantasy adventure with real medieval chivalry but I didn't get all the medieval chivalry references but all the analysis anyone else does is about clever Wolfe tricks and how it's actually a totally different story
>>24932972Do you have opinions on any other fantasy author other than Sanderson or Tolkien?
>>24932013you're falling into the utility trap, frenyou are judging art by its ability to 'fix' society and 'cure' the masses. that isn't what art is for. art isn't a wrench, it isn't a policy proposal, it doesn't stop the plane from crashing. art is what allows you to watch the crash with your eyes open and understand why it's happening, rather than blindly screaming in the dark>>24932658 gets it completely, the reason society is plummeting despite the existence of 'true art' is because the vast majority of people, even those who claim to read the canon, are spiritual tourists. they read dostoevsky for the aesthetic of being 'smart', not to actually engage with the textpearls before swine. just because a pig tramples a diamond into the mud doesn't mean the diamond is worthless, it just means the pig is a pigthe difference between 'slop' and 'art' isn't that one fixes the world and the other doesn'tthe difference is that slop (sneederson) is anesthesia. it is designed to keep you comfortable, numb, and distracted while the ship sinks. it's a big ol' dopamine drip from the pod, where you will own nothing, and be happyart is cold water, it wakes you up. it forces you to confront the beautiful, the ugly, the realit can't and won't save society, that's a lost causebut it might save (you) from becoming a bug like the rest, and that is worth the effort, methinks
>>24932990I've owned the first book for probably over 20 years and just still haven't read it, what do you like about the books anon?
>>24933031Don't reply to me blogfag, you're the tormented soul only getting slop out of everything which is why you are vomiting slop into this thread. In fact get a trip so I can filter you.
TL;DR:Art = red pillSlop = blue pill
>>24932972>>24930386Most of your criticism is eloquent and on point, though I wouldn't dismiss 'hard' fantasy quite so strongly. It takes away part of the mystery but can also make the fictional world more tangible and fleshed out, explore different counterfactuals and interactions similar to soft/hard sci-fi, I can't say that one is better than the other in some objective sense
>>24933036They're just good action novels with a lot of cool fights and weapons, with a dreamlike atmosphere going in and out of Faerie all the time, the protagonist really goes native in a medieval-mindset world that's broken on a deep but not fundamental level and can be fixed by miracles which can be invited by courage. The stakes are high throughout, the tension is high, the villains are completely evil and very sympathetic at the same time, and there are a lot of layers to it and meaningful names and such but the core of it is how a knight's honor is metaphysically essential and the protagonist gets to show this.
I'm looking for a meaty trilogy to carry me over the holidays. How is The Book That Would Not Burn and its sequels?
Are there any anons ITT that have NOT read Lord of the Rings?
>>24933078>How is The Book That Would Not Burn and its sequels?Burnt
It is finished. No surprises thematically and with the plot - which is a good thing in this case. 900+ pages of wrapping up and closing the shop. Not that it's needlessly stretched out — I'd be able to edit out no more than a few pages — but retrospective narrational style with spelling out how it all ends right at the start does take away part of excitement. I don't mind the Christian lean despite not being one myself, probably because most sci-fi has atheist/nihilist bent making this a breath of fresh air. In retrospect Howling Dark and Demon in White were the most memorable books for me. I didn't expect to find something like this in a space opera, but Ruocchio managed to come up with a new to me answer for the problem of (natural) evil with the watchers. My fedora is bolted to my skull, but I got to admit that, though not necessarily plausible or persuasive, it's at least clever and fun to think aboutOverall the Sun Eater excels in many respects and I feel quite sentimental about it, but a bit weary of it too. Will probably re-read in a few years.
you all got me to read Bakker which I did enjoy but no I will NOT be reading Ruocchio
>>24933015tl;dr, if you bought it in airport in the last 15 years, i probably hate it.>rothfussfedora fantasy. i hate hoid, and double it for kvothe. mary-sue self-insert for guys who think they're 'too smart' for girls to like them.i think his prose is performative and cloying. plus, he has the same grift as sanderson, but with way less output. hasn't released a book in a decade because he's too busy streaming minecraft to the paypigs.>jordanthe godfather of 'magic system' autism. walked so sanderson could run (into a wall).wheel of time has some cool world-building concepts, but it's just so damn bloated. 4 million words of braid-tugging, skirt-smoothing, and gender essentialism (call me a redditorfag, i don't care) that reads like a boomer stand-up routine. you could probably cut like, 70% of it and not lose much of value.>wolfei'm still not very far into book of the new sun (just met dorcas), but i am very much enjoying it. dense prose, a lying narrator, a world that sanderson could never replicate.>le guinunderstood magic is about balance. a wizard of earthsea does more in 200 pages than stormlight archive does with 5000. i miss her.>r.r. martinthe patron saint of the midwit millennial.he is another hand directly responsible for the soulless state of the genre today, an 'anti-sanderson'. he managed to convince an entire generation of millennial husks that 'subverting expectations' is a substitute for storytelling, and that cynicism is the same as realismtolkien wrote about the return of the king as a spiritual restoration; aragorn rules because he possesses the divine right and the nobility of spirit. martin, quarter-jew that he is, looks at that and sneers.he wants to, say it with me kids:>know aragorn's tax policyhe wants to drag the mythic down into the mud and say 'look, the hero is actually just a horny drunk who gets stabbed at a wedding.'he thinks he's being mature, but he's just being a materialist. i don't think he can conceive of a world where virtue, honor, or the divine are real forces. to him, everything is just power dynamics and sex. and look where it got him. he's a gluttonous, blocked writer who sold his soul to hbo and now can't finish his magnum opus because he accidentally deconstructed his own story into a corner. he stripped away all of the magic and meaning just to be 'edgy', and now has nothing left but a pile of misery and loose plot threads he doesn't care about.the ultimate symptom of a culture that values 'shock' over 'soul'.
>>24933091They really ought to stop making these things out of paper
>>24932910Filtered by it's distastefulness like a strainer holding against the muck.
I just almost finished empire of silence since you fags area always talking about the sun eater series. I am a bit annoyed with how much the narrator will interject during conversations. Like when you have 10 lines of text between characters talking I start to lose track of the conversation. I prefer my reading a bit more easy.Other than that though I can see the potential. I like the warhammer 40k and dune type universe. The MC seems somewhat based. I didn't detect any cringe wokeness that would piss me off. Even some characters being fags was fine.
>>24932910Dune fucking sucks though. It was one of the most tedious books I have ever read in my life. I don't even remember anything happening except walking around aimlessly and drinking piss.
>>24933170Lmao same
>>24933135you remind me @Scearpo from twitter, anon. the writing style is distinct enough that I can tell you're not him, but you're spiritual brothers (and probably within 1-2SD in terms of verbal IQ)
>>24933088Present! Will definitely get around to it at some point though. Haven't seen the movies either.
>>24933088Haven't read it. Know too much about it through osmosis to care to read it at this point
>>24933209This is how I feel about half the lit that gets recommended here. I know the big twist or ending from tv shows or movies or fucking twitter comics and now I have no desire to read the books.
>>24932845Speaking of CoH, any more fantasy books with a focus on cursed, dysfunctional families? (I've already read Tolkien and Grrm's works)
>>24933261Broken Sword or anything by KJ Parker
>>24933120Not enough gay sex for you?
>>24933261The Lyonesse trilogy
>>24932981cant help you, but thanks for the rec. sounds cool.
>>24933261The Gormenghast trilogy
>>24933411Based rec. Love the character names in this series
Book of the new sun how does it rank?
>>24931067Illiterate levels of reading comprehension
>>24930300>>24930252So she's a "knock the ladder down after climbing" type or "haha I'm so quirky I'm from a rich family and I'm gonna disparage all the things that made me successful so you think I'm Just. Like. You." type?Would love to make Xiran Jay Zhou eat my cum out of her pussy either way
>>24927759>sanderson fundamentally cannot understand that depth. he has lived his entire life in a sterile, saccharine, high-control cult bubble in the modern american west. his idea of 'hardship' isn't watching civilization collapse in the blood-soaked mud of france, it's writing 30 bad manuscripts before finally getting published.I'm on the third mistborn book and I agree with what most of the anti-sanderson posts are saying but I don't think this is an excuse when GRRM can write about the same stuff as a conscientious objector to a war and never seen battle. I think the most interesting part of the Mistborn story is the religious part, and the cosmology of the Cosmere is the thing that makes me want to at least try Way of Kings. Zane has gotta be one of the most eyerolling characters I've ever seen in a book and it baffles me people can say "Sanderson is an amazing writer on mental health" when my only exposure to him writing a mentally ill character is Zane, who is defined in his introduction as insane.>>24930386>I've always been very confused by the soft/hard magic system thing. It was the first stage of gamification of fantasy brought on by D&D and everything that followed it. No one gave a shit about Gandalf being "overpowered" because there were other reasons he couldn't just solve everyone's problems by lacking omnipresence. As long as stakes continue to exist and you don't feel like the wizard should just be blowing over all opposition, it's fine.>EVERYTHING is pathologizedI really think this is more of a "show don't tell" issue than anything.>>24930640>modern writers (and sanderson is the king of this) are terrified of subtextI wonder how much of this is caused by the over-presence of authors due to social media and the internet in general. Old authors can't get canceled because they didn't have a twitter where they vomited every minor opinion they ever held. They were only known for their books and you have to figure out their beliefs from them.
>>24931229He's an agnostic/atheist who misses every religious reference in BotNS, a book where the author said in interviews that the New Testament is a prerequisite reading to the series. So the lens he's starting with is inherently flawed.
>>24930006*adds to reading list*
reading between two fires because someone on /ic/ derisively called it "dark souls video game crap"
>>24934111I meant /lit/, this board.
>>24933854>I think the most interesting part of the Mistborn story is the religious part, and the cosmology of the Cosmere is the thing that makes me want to at least try Way of Kings.If you're interested in Cosmere, then Stormlight books are the way forward. It's merging into a larger MCU like project where all his books are part of a wider narrative and shared universe.
>>24933265>>24933379>>24933411Seems interesting, thank you!
>>24932851Heart of Hell was very disappointing. I really wanted to like it because I loved God's Demon so much, and it does have some great worldbuilding in parts, particularly the culture of the Salamandrines who are the indigenous population of Hell. Everything going on with Abaddon, the main antagonist, feels like an ass-pull and the tension doesn't build satisfyingly- most of the characters we follow don't learn of the threat until immediately before the apocalyptic final stand. Boudicca's story was just Hannibal from the first book over again, but not as good. There is no character that replaces Sargatanis for being interesting and sympathetic. Read strictly for the worldbuilding, the plot and characters are weak.
>>24932981i liked it very much. i found it a very interesting take on divinity and existence and so on, while still being just a fun, engaging fantasy story. it didn't try to take itself too seriously, but there's still a lot of spirituality and deep themes if you care about them, specially if you look at the parallels that everything has with traditional christianity. and despite all those parallels and twisted references, i felt it was quite respectful to the actual religion unlike other books
>>24925209i just finished this. i liked it overall, but it fell off towards the end. the best part of this is the innocence and imperfections of Sumner, then the story is less interesting. and the spiritual babble gets too over the topthe world building is really nice
>>24934517nice. I ended up starting it last night (I've owned the book for probably over a year now) and I think it's great.
>>24930392>gay space communismBased Banks' Culture.
>>24932884>I bought Dune one time at an airport and never finished it because it felt like a pastiche of what a future history should read like, as if it were the bad copy of a good copy of a real text pretending to be about a future history.Moorcock, is that you?
>>24933088Hi.
>>24933854The first Mistborn book was pretty good. The 2nd in the series was a drag for like 90% of it because it had the worst love triangle ever put in a book, Zane took me out. The 3rd one, I felt like you were waiting around for this telegraphed big finale to happen.I think I just hate the "sanderlanche” shit because it just means the 90% of the rest of the book is just setup for this big epic ending.
>>24934205Mythago Wood is also good.
>>24934788The premise is interesting although i found the ending rather dissapointing
>>24933046you're stuck with meyou hate me because i have standards you don't. i get plenty of joy out of actual art, just as much as i get disgust out of commercial garbage. it's called having a pulse.so, no, i'm not getting a trip. i want you to check under your bed for me. i want you to wonder if every anonymous post mocking your garbage taste is mine, if it's secretly me lurking in the shadows without an art signature just to mess with youif you're too weak to scroll past a post without using software as a crutch to create a safe space, you deserve to be bullied. /lgbt/ is down the hall, and r/fantasy is the next building over.cope, dilate, seethe n' sneed>>24933047yeah, basically>>24933057while i respect the opinion, i must disagree with and reject the premisethe comparison to 'hard sci-fi' is exactly the problem. sci-fi deals with the extrapolation of natural laws, while fantasy deals with the violation of them. when you apply the rigor of 'hard sci-fi' to magic, you aren't making it 'tangible', you are fundamentally changing it's nature from mystery to technologylike i was droning on about before, sanderson's characters are engineers instead of wizards, exploiting a resource instead of communing with the unknown. sure, 'fake physics' can be fun in a vacuum (like a video game), but in literature, it inevitably shifts the focus away from the human heart to focus on the mechanicswhen you reduce magic to a set of rigid rules, the climax of the story almost always hinges on technicality, exploiting a loophole in rule #743 rather than a moment of character growth, sacrifice, or spiritual realization
sorry bloganon I have already minimized you
>>24933854>I'm on the third mistborn book and I agree with what most of the anti-sanderson posts are saying but I don't think this is an excuse when GRRM can write about the same stuff as a conscientious objector to a war and never seen battle.you're missing a small distinction. while martin may not have fought, he is a student of history. he understands that humans are ugly, horny, violent animals driven by base instincts. he understands the mud, even if he hasn't bathed in it himselfsanderson, on the other hand, thinks drinking coffee is a sin and showing an ankle is pornographic. he has no frame of reference for human vice or desperation because he lives in a bubble where 'evil' is just a term for enemies with a red health bar>I think the most interesting part of the Mistborn story is the religious part, and the cosmology of the Cosmere is the thing that makes me want to at least try Way of Kings.I wouldn't get your hopes up. the 'religious part' of mistborn is literally just mormon theology with the serial numbers scrubbed off. the whole 'god is just a guy who held power and ascended' thing is literally the mormon doctrine of exaltation. the whole thing is like reading an advertisement for joseph smith's planetary fanfic.>It was the first stage of gamification of fantasy brought on by D&D and everything that followed it.yep, d&d/vancian magic ruined everything. i'd argue sanderson's contribution is worse, though, as he industrialized it. he looked at d&d and went 'what if we removed the roleplaying and just focused on the stat block?'>I really think this is more of a "show don't tell" issue than anything.i'd argue it's a moral problem too. they don't want to show because 'showing' is ambiguous. if you just show a character acting traumatized, the reader might interpret it wrong, so they need to tell you (via clinical diagnosis) exactly how to feel so they can maintain the 'safe' moral purity of the narrative>Old authors can't get canceled because they didn't have a twitter where they vomited every minor opinion they ever held.i think a lot of these authors view themselves as pr managers first and artists second. their characters are employees of said hypothetical brand, so they can't write a character with a genuinely alien or 'problematic' worldview without pausing the narrative to flash the neon 'I DO NOT SUPPORT THIS' sign.it's the death of subtext by way of cowardice
>>24929918>>24929963The author :> They are nonbinary queer, and currently live in Berlin with their two boyfriends.
>>24933181i don't go on twitter, so i'll assume it's a compliment loltruthfully, i don't think i have that high of a 'verbal iq', i just think that modern fantasy readers operate on a massive deficit. when the standard for 'good writing' is brandon 'kaladin grunted' sanderson, anyone who has read a single book written before 2000 sounds like a rhodes scholar by comparisonin the land of the blind (and aesthetically illiterate), the one-eyed man is king>>24934763i hate the 'sanderlanche' bullshitwhen fans brag about it, they're admitting their favorite author is incapable of writing a compelling narrative arc. they are admitting the first 90% of the book is effectively a waiting room. if you have to slog through 600 pages of 'drag' to get to the 'good part', it's not a good book. it's a manual with a cinematic at the end.on the love triangle, mistborn era 1 is proof sanderson writes romance like a sterile alien trying to simulate human mating rituals.zane isn't even a character, he's just an edgy anime trope dropped into a high fantasy setting. the 'tension' between him and vin is laughable because sanderson is too terrified of actual sexual chemistry to make it work. there's no heat, just plot mechanics.
>>24934865i forgive you, anon, and i love you, even if you hate menow, every time you read a clunky sentence, every time hoid makes a cringe marvel quip, every time kaladin mopes, you'll think of me. i am going to live forever in the back of your mind, pointing out the flaws you used to ignoresee you soon (we both know you're still looking)
>>24931959It's Hollywood entertainment in book form. If you're looking for dumb sci-fi adventures and don't mind logical inconsistencies it's decent enough.
>>24931966>there is a twist in the first book that might make or break the series for youWhich one? I've heard about "that one twist" before, but I think it had several twists that were a bit.... "interesting". So which one are you talking about?
I recently read a 1960s science fiction story called COUNTERCHARM by James White, which takes place in his Sector General universe wherein different aliens from across the galaxy come in to receive specialized treatment for their respective species. In COUNTERCHARM, the main doctor, in order to operate on an alien crab species, must download the conscious mind of a long-dead crab doctor in order to have the requisite knowledge to perform surgery. The problem is that when the copy of the crab’s intelligence was made, he was at the peak of sexual maturity for his species, and thus perpetually horny for crabmeat. The main character, a human, must navigate teaching these crab aliens about how to conduct surgery on their species while also having the hots for one of the female crab students. It was quite entertaining.
>>24932651I’m troubled by WoT. On one hand I can really say I enjoyed the journey (especially the early books) and I have actually considered a reread sans the filler books. On the other, the slog is real and there is way too many POVs. The ending is not as bad as the other anon says and it was pretty good considering the circumstances. The only way I actually enjoyed Sanderson’s work was him workinng on another person’s ideas kekI say go for it but don’t be afraid to skim in the later books. If the first two books don’t grab you let it go
>>24932651Thing with WoT is it's one of the myriad of fantasy series from the time period that may as well have made it far bigger. In hindsight WoT had zero impact on fantasy at large.
>>24935057Sounds like a monster girl romance anime.
Just read Roadside Picnic & Solaris, and loved both, is there any other really thought provoking science fiction like that? Where it's about exploring mankind more than a menial drama between characters.
>>24935448buck rogers
>>24935448Tau Zero - Poul Anderson The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Blood Music - Greg BearPermutation City - Greg EganBlindsight - Peter Watts
>>24931229He does this for everythingHe claims Wheel of Time is his favorite series that he's read 12 times and he still makes rookie mistakes during his hour long "reviews"(summaries)He did it to Malazan even worse. Dude either speedreads or plain just does not pay attention when he's reading, then blames it on "dyslexia"
I feel like some writers try so hard to make their MC seem cool that they make things boring. A guy walking into a city and taking over two of the largest thieves' guilds within a day sounds interesting. Having him do it by just walking in, killing their bosses, and saying he's in charge now with little effort is boring as hell.
When reading modern literature, especially genre fiction (which I have an inexplicable love for), I’ve noticed that I hate most of it. I constantly think of writing my own stories, thanks to my too vivid imagination, but I am a ESL and can’t satisfy even myself with its quality, thus forced to read the writings of others. I’ve also thought of making games, but oh well. Perhaps it is my place to consume the slop of others, while drudging through corporate life.
>>24934456I think the sequel was largely stitched together from ideas that had been left on the cutting room floor as he wrote first novel. For example it seems to me that the decapitator and Beelzebub were the same character at one point, and the decapitator was spun off into a different character for the sequel because the original version grew to big during the brainstorming phase to fit into one character. In pic related(I think this painting predates the novels) you see Lucifuge confronting a guy who has a lot of motifs from both characters, and in the books Lucifuge himself gets decapitated, but not by the one who specializes in decapitating. The Lilith and Hannibal plot, the Abaddon plot, etc. all similarly feel like cool ideas that he couldn't fit into the first book but couldn't bear leaving in the trash either.
>>24935114>in hindsight WoT had zero impact on fantasy at largewhat do you mean by this?
well dammit I'm gonna buy God's Demon at least
>>24936051It is difficult indeed to find the diamonds in the rough. Sometimes it feels like juice isn't worth the squeeze. I know I spend a lot of time and effort on it, to unsatisfactory results. Maybe eventually there will be personalized recommendations that are accurate.
>>24935835> amazon reviewerHe couldnt even find a real writer to praise his book.
>>24936121You'd think AI would be perfect for stuff like this, but I've tried using it for recommendations, but it just gives slop or hallucinates non-existent books.
What’re the best /lit/ approved urban fantasies?I read the first dresden and liked it, rest were too pulpy.
>>24936264Little, BigThe Sorcerers HouseBobby Dollars trilogy
>>24936057Exactly what he wrote? No trends were started by Wheel of Time nor were there copycats.
>>24936345>tfw an entire dead-end genre was spawned out of frustration at LotR being short
>>24936194Does it? Recommendations have been pretty good for me, and there were zero (0) hallucinations. Just avoid going too niche with anything but the biggest models.I just tried again with claude opus and the output is pretty solid. A slight tendency to hyperfocus on the wrong thing(blindsight is all about those vampires, right?), but after one sentence of clarification to go by 'feel' instead I agree with almost all of what it recommended, well at least the ones I have read.
>>24934865do you play multiplayer video games, anon? niggers who set people on ignore THEN tell everybody else how they totally owned that person by filtering their messages are gay niggers and usually underage or manchildren.
>>24936351nothing should go on forever. someone should tell that to light novel and fan fiction writers, though.
>>24936345I'm not a fan of WoT but I'd argue that it popularized the concept of lengthy "epic" novel series. Coincidental that Sanderson finished WoT and writes some of the longest examples in the genre.
>>24936389Webnovel fans will pretty much wirehead with their chosen series, it's a new and scary form of literature. Maybe we're the dinosaurs.>>24936394There were lengthy epic novels before that, some partaking more in the paperback than doorstop nature like Shannara (which was explicitly published to catch LotR rereaders) but Sanderson was inspired by, iirc, Barbara Hambly.
>>24936400Shannara books were not as long as WoT. I said lengthy. And I never said invented, I said popularized.You are bad at this entire READING thing.
>>24936408STOP
>>24936408I said lengthy too, are you bad at this READING thing? What do you think something that contrasts with "doorstop" is? Yes, Shannara books were not as long, but they were still part of the desire to keep reading LotR forever, with their length constrained by editors, and the long novels in long series tradition was well established by Jordan's time.
>>24929120New thread:>>24936611
>>24935448Childhood's End by Clarke
>>24933261>a focus on cursed, dysfunctional familiesBut enough about you
