I love the fantasy genre, lots, and I want it to stop sucking (OR: recommend me fantasy stuff that does not suck)

"A GAME OF THRONES" BY GEORGE R.R. MARTIN. THUS BEGINS THE BEST FANTASY SERIES OF THE PAST TEN YEARS.

Guy Gavriel Kay to thread.

x-posts I play a bunch of rpgs! Recommend some! Darklands was amazing and what I wanted, good point.
x-posts Ian I'll check it out!

Favorite fantasy novel: The Man in the Tree, Damon Knight.

That Gardens of the Moon book was ridiculous. Same for all ten Robert Jordan novels where nothing happens.

Also search: Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy ASSASIN'S APPRENTICE / ROYAL ASSASIN / ASSASIN'S QUEST. I remember when the first book came out it was the most exciting new genre work I'd seen in ages. It's substantially less metaphysical than the McKillip, more straightforward action fantasy.

My favorite one-off novel of the past couple years is WAR FOR THE OAKS by Emma Bull, which is actually a re-release of the book which originally pubbed in the 80s, I think. It's got new recommendations by Neil Gaiman and Charles deLint (and is in fact similar to most deLint in using an urban setting + fantasy) and new author's notes which are great and enlightening. Please give it a chance -- although this is heavy on elves it's also heavy on dry humor and on music, too -- it's set in the '80s and the narrator's rock'n'roll band is central. Plus the new trade edition has a fantastic cover. Love this one especially for the narrative voice, which is very female without using any of the shortcuts of stereotyped "femininity".

Also, second the Guy Gavriel Kay. I have a bind-up of the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy and these are wonderful, wonderful.

On the young adult side, you can't call yourself a fantasy reader until you've done Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, which runs to about 7 books and is set in a mythologized ancient Britain (sort of). Borrows heavily from Welsh/Celtic mythology but is ultimately very human and true. These are widely famous and you may already have read them, I only include them here on the off chance.

Good modern YA fantasy author is Garth Nix, do his Abhorsen trilogy SABRIEL / LIRAEL / ABHORSEN. He's an Australian author, did a couple of adult sci-fi novels years ago but I think he's really found his voice in the YA fantasy genre. Great for having female main characters without depending on any gendered behaviors, just magic (again with a central musical component, in this case, the ringing of a scale of handbells each of which performs a different function of necromancy), and rollicking good adventure.

Sorry these are mostly trilogies, I don't really take to huge series. And I most love female sci-fi/fantasy authors who don't let the D&D tropes take over, I must say. Enough damsels in distress, already, and equally enough of the damsel's supposed "opposite": the woman warrior wearing naught but leather straps and a fur bikini. Feh.

The last two books especially blew my mind as a kid.

NB: Not that S/F SHOULDN'T explore issues of gender & privilege, in fact I think that's one of the things these genres are BEST for, it's just that it so easily slides into some kind of, oh...second-wave feminist screed, and then it's really ruined for me as a serious work. If I wanted that kind of new agey womyn-friendly fix I would totally, totally read Sheri S. Tepper or Barbara Hambly or Marion Zimmer Bradley or Andre Norton or GAH at the very end of the spectrum, maybe Mercedes Lackey (which is basically trash).

Seriously. They're great. Not much in the way of the supernatural, which is refreshing. Plenty of intrigue, suspense, humor and moral gray area. Incredible well written; the characters are very full and three-dimensional. I have a love/hate relationship with many of them.

Prydain = roxor. McKillip = must reread. Powers = so genius, but I've not read Declare.

Martin does do an excellent job of fleshing out his characters, Ian. Often a weak point in much fantasy. Something I find unique about his writing is that he is unafraid to kill off characters, no matter who it is. With many other authors, you get the feeling that certain characters are untouchable..

I just googled the Martin and recognised as the series my dad's really into, score, I will read it as soon I get home.

I love Nine Princes and I try to read the rest of Amber occasionally but can never quite make it through book two for some reason that's probably pretty close to the one L said. There's a bit in Lord of Light when the big battle is about to happen and he's listing all these previously unmentioned (& completely irrelevant!) races and legendary creatures and heroes and gods who will fight on either side and you just feel the possibility mushroom inside you, all of that strange history converging, I seriously have to stop reading and just breathe - I dunno, coffee, but I really really love this stuff.

I am totally excited about these riddle books! They sound perfect, I love riddles.

Mieville fans, tell me more! I googled him and found this in an interview:

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of Tolkien is no friend of mine - that would cut my social circle considerably. Nor would I claim that it's impossible to write a good fantasy book with elves and dwarfs in it - Michael Swanwick's superb Iron Dragon's Daughter gives the lie to that. But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Thankfully, the alternative tradition of fantasy has never died. And it's getting stronger. Chris Wooding, Michael Swanwick, Mary Gentle, Paul di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others, are all producing works based on fantasy's radicalism. Where traditional fantasy has been rural and bucolic, this is often urban, and frequently brutal. Characters are more than cardboard cutouts, and they're not defined by race or sex. Things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life. This is fantasy not as comfort-food, but as challenge.

- who are these people?

i) That bit in Planescape, where you speak to an alley, and the alley tells you that she's pregnant, but that she can't give birth. And if you sort things out just right, she can, and she thanks you, and says she has a child, now. And there's a new alley, suddenly there, and you can walk down it to somewhere new.

ii) This moment when I was playing Baldur's Gate I with my dad, the first time, we had Minsc and Edwin both, two shades of crazy, one good one evil, both telling us to find the kidnapped girl. So we went in, the way you do, burnt through the gnoll fortress, laid waste to everything in the way, got to the still quiet centre. And couldn't find her. And realized suddenly - that we'd killed all those hundreds on the words of two madmen, that we'd done it because of rules of genre stuck and rigid and suddenly horrible.

(she was actually there of course - we were just being idiots - but it is still the best moment in videogaming for both of us)

a) Fantasy without magic in.
b) Fantasy in the style of genuine ancient myth - ie, with lots of weird motifs that don't actually make much sense because the storyteller has forgotten what they originally meant. My main reference point here is Culhwch and Olwen et al.

The reason I want to try to write this is because I'd love to read some, but I've never really come across any. However, I are a crap writer.

with lots of weird motifs that don't actually make much sense because the storyteller has forgotten what they originally meant.

This is a great sentence.

I remember Zelazny had lots of other cool concept fantasy that I liked ages ago when I was young, but maybe it doesn't hold up. Also, L. Sprague De Camp -- the Compleat Enchanter stands out in my memory. His stuff is all supposed to be funny, I think. I always liked the goofy stuff more than the "serious" stuff. Obv. the Pullmans should also count as great great fantasy work. Brin can be a pompus boring dude but I also remember liking "The Practice Effect."

I also liked v. convoluted systems of magic and the idea that there really was a well-worked-out logic to it all which is partially why I like that Full Metal Alchemist anime series. There was one series I faintly remember reading that was particularly spectacular at hinging on a very finely tuned system of different magics (Jim Dodge's "Stone Junction" tho hardly a fantasy in most senses, does a great job with this stuff in its own way -- i should get around to rereading that. the poker section is particularly magnificent)

Eventually I'll try to check out some of the stuff on this thread.

re: Steven Erikson; Gardens of the Moon is not his best work. I'd advise reading the next one, Deadhouse Gates: which doesn't end well for the best part of 40000 people, including a fair number of the main characters, to get a true idea of what he's up to. Erikson's world is convoluted in the extreme and his writing style is not the best, but I think that the feverish fecundity of his imagination makes up for this.

I second the Chona Mieville recommendation; all three books are very worth reading. Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter is outstanding in it's utterly vicious and weird way. I can see why Mieville would respect it; it does reminds me a little of his own work, actually.

Speaking of fantasies that involve poker, Last Call by Tim Powers is outstanding stuff.

Possibly one answer to the issue of fantasy sucking is to extend your definition of fantasy. At the mo this seems to only include the Tolkienesque subgenre. It sounds like you're missing out on a world of other stuff. John Crowley's work, for instance; Aegypt is one of my favourite books in any genre

A very good fantasy stand-alone is Ash by Mary Gentle (which imo, and don't tell anyone, is actually an SF novel in disguise), it's visceral and meaty stuff.

Apparently the guy to watch is R. Scott Bakker. His series that starts with The Darkness That Comes Before is interestingly different...Although I'm not as impressed with them as some people I've spoken to (who think it's the best thing since sliced bread)

unless you love politics in Fantasy, in which case, it's right up your alley.

I really loved Stephen R Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenent - two trilogies, long and involved, all sorts of spells, no elves.

Gene Wolfe thirded - Forest Pines you might like him too. His Book of the New Sun novels are a far-future fantasy which can be very cryptic because it's written first-person and the perspective shift is often quite unforgiving (this is also how it gets round the "magic" thing). Beautifully done, though, easily my favourite fantasy novels.

His Soldier of the Myst, set in ancient Greece, plays with the mythic stuff, there's more 'magic' in that but there's also the real possibility that it's mostly delusional.

I'd like to read the McKillip again, maybe - I remember those from when I was small.

FP, I'm not familiar with Culhwch and Olwen but you might -- might -- like McKillip's more recent THE BOOK OF ATRIX WOLF or ALPHABET OF THORN. I've read a smattering of her back catalog but not nearly enough, and I'm not even sure that many of 'em are still in print. Sometimes she just makes the ineffable seem effortless and I love, love her for it. (Actually I am somewhat named after a character in THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD because my mother is a crazy romantic like that).

Also try Mike Jeffries, I thought he had a similar out-of-place-and-time feeling that doesn't have any antecedents in my experience of the genre, it really seems to hang out by itself in a lot of ways even though the basic events are the same as any young man's quest novel. Think the series is called The Loremasters of Elundium and there are 3 or 4 of 'em and then some associated books not directly in that plot line, one of which is THE ROAD TO UNDERFALL, which is the only one I've read. Narrative style is very formal and stylized, like a Grimms' fairy tale or a classical myth. It took me a while to catch the rhythm but what comes through the most strongly for me are examples of flinty courage and nobility and valiant sacrifice offered for the defeat of evil. Really very affecting.

Will is, unfortunately, utterly right about the third book of the Farseer tril -- I found it hugely disappointing not in the quality but in the results for the characters, that not all ends rosily and fairly as you might expect from action fantasy. Still, I spoke to one of our sci-fi eds yesterday and she said that last book made the whole series for her, so I guess YMMV.

Laurel is secretly Simon AND Schuster!

Wow this sentence brings back memories! Wasn't it always foreshadowed?

I have memories of the Raymond Feist/Janny Wurts collab-o series being v. good - no real magic, no elves, lots of intrigue. I'd definitely recommend Guy Gavriel Kay, esp. A Song For Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Yes yes yes. Tigana was the point where I realized that he wasn't simply good but absolutely great, however those next two are when he perfected not merely the alternate Europe approach but the sheer moral greyness of his world.

nooooob!

David Eddings writes totally formulaic, but immensely readable, fantasy. It's done extremely cynically on his part but it doesn't stop them being pulpy fun to read.

Out of everything Stephen Donaldson has done I would recommend the two volume Mordant's Need series - the lead characters are much more likeable than Thomas Covenant.

Robert Jordan was brilliant for the first 5 or 6 Wheel of Time books but it's fallen apart since. When he finally gets round to finishing the series I'd say to give it a shot.

Gene Wolfe's torturer tetralogy is immense.

I've heard a lot of good things about China Mieville, but I've not quite managed to read any of his stuff (I own them all, too).
If you like Mieville, you should check out M John Harrison - particularly the Viriconium stuff.

I enjoyed Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, but it's got elves in it.

I can't recommend Pullmans' His Dark Materials enough.

Avoid Terry Goodkind - his books are awful. I'd also suggest avoiding Terry Brooks.

Charles Stross's new fantasy series (just the first two books out) is really good.

Roger Zelazny is really good - I would say to only read the first five Amber books (the last five aren't terribly good). I would also recommend some of his standalone novels and especially some of his short stories.

Guy Gavriel Kay's books are all really good - I personally think Tigana's the best.

You might like some of Jonathan Carroll's books. I think his mixture of horror and fantasy works really well.

Neil Gaiman's stuff is all really very good, some are more fantasy than others. The complete Sandman comics are among my favourite works of fantasy I've ever read. Whatever you might make of certain aspects of his fanbase.

Diana Wynne Jones' books are brilliant, whatever age group they're aiming at. I have a particular liking for the Chrestomanci books.

Obviously Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea books are classics.

Other people who's opinion I trust recommend both Steven Erikson's Malazan books and GRR Martin's big series. I'm waiting for them to actually finish their series first though - Jordan has put me off reading ongoing fantasy series.

Little, Big by John Crowley is rightly regarded a classic.

Steven Brust has a good reputation and I enjoyed the Jhereg books - others are written in an annoying style

Stephen King's Dark Tower series and The Talisman are both pretty good in my opinion.

There are loads of great books out there amongst the dross. You could check out Michael Moorcock, Phillip Jose Farmer, Patricia McKillip, Mary Gentle, John M Ford, Emma Bull, I could go on...

Pretty much anything in the Fantasy Masterworks series is worth considering.

The Tad Williams stories are absolutely great, and the elves are not traditional elves either, so it might work out ok for you.

Little, Big is wonderful, but maybe not what you want in a traditional fantasy novel.

Eddings is a great fun read, usually funny and cynical like G said, but so ridiculously formulaic. he's written practically the same story 4 times (at least) already over the course of like 15 books!

but fun, all in good fun.

Re: Stephen R Donaldson, yes, Thomas Covenant is NOT a likable character, but that's what my 15 yr old self loved about these books at the time. Still, the writing is very colorful and immerses you into the Land...

His discussion of how he writes his stories (with the help of his wife too! It's actually a full writing partnership from the sound of it) in The Rivan Codex was actually kinda cool. I like how he prefers to see fantasy through the lens of Dunsany's work more than Tolkien's, which I think is very apt and gives him a chance to play around some more.

Eddings is funny, thoroughly thoroughly modern and contemporary voices in a standard action fantasy setting, not at all otherworldly and basically forgettable in the literary sense. For all that, the dialog is friendly and jocular and kind of irresistible, which is why I have most of the Belgariad and the other series in used mass market editions. And I wonder where all my shelf space is going....

God, I can still remember the visceral experience of reading TIGANA for the first time, it was like being torn apart and fused back together.

I remember this series now. First book took forever to get going, didn't it? And the main character was so miserable and solipsistic, like Eddings with 35% extra prepubescent identity crisis. I remember the series getting much much better though - wasn't the main love interest storyline quite interesting? It seemed to kinda simultaneously follow the tried-and-true formula (ordinary boy gets princess and turns out to be King himself) and diverge from it quite significantly with all sorts of quite-odd-for-fantasy sexual politics. But I may be misremembering it.

Is this separate from his sci-fi books?

(I've read a couple of his sci-fi books from a feeling of solidarity - we used to drink in the same pub a couple of years back)

I think reading this (which i really really agree with! I love rules and limitations and numbers that go up with practice) what I'm almost actually looking for (though I am still excited about reading the things I said I was excited about and they may even actually fit this) is not so much a clever innovative "twist" on fantasy that blurs the boundary with SF or something, as something that uses the fantasy that I know and distrust and unwillingly love as the setting for something that would be good, moving, wise anywhere? I was in Barnes and Noble today, I saw Trance and thought about buying it, a vast sprawling experimental funny sad mess about the seventies sounds alright I guess, maybe I'll buy it in paperback. Why isn't there a vast sprawling experimental funny sad mess about the Forgotten Realms? I would buy that, hardback, fast.

although the love interest part is ok, I think the more interesting parts of the story do not center on Simon. that is, you pretty much know he's destined for either greatness or royalty or both right off. the world he creates is much more interesting than that though. the ghants! christ! giant running spiders with a huge maze of a hive. crap. almost shit my pants. and those creepy things in the sea?

Love,
Your Aunt Laurel

Question is because i am wondering if it is worthwhile putting in a request for them and this is usually pointless if the books are in any way unusual, in fact not a single request i have ever made to the library has been found except Dante's divine comedy which took six months and i ended up hating because i really don't want to read 3 pages of notes on biblical figures for every one page of actual book.

Yes! I think the ghants sort of explained claustrophobia to me.

And what about the girl who goes mad in them there mountain tunnels?

The authors you list as being in stock at your lib are the MOST mainstream of fantasy, the kind of books that find their real success in grocery stores, so I wouldn't consider them the backbone of the genre or anything. Basically it sounds like your library sucks but you should be able to inter-library-loan all the titles recommended in this thread. Can you try another library location in the same county/system? They might have a better selection right off the shelf. Good luck!

I'm a third of the way through this gothic urban fantasy in the Meiville vein. I'm enjoying it a lot, it has a nice balance of horror and humour.

Also search: Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy ASSASIN'S APPRENTICE / ROYAL ASSASIN / ASSASIN'S QUEST. I remember when the first book came out it was the most exciting new genre work I'd seen in ages. It's substantially less metaphysical than the McKillip, more straightforward action fantasy

this was good.

Apparently the guy to watch is R. Scott Bakker. His series that starts with The Darkness That Comes Before is interestingly different

this was very good.

Thomas Covenant is fucking horrible and only suitable reading if you have a burning desire to slit you wrists as a final gesutre of hopelessness towards the complete and utter uselessness of the human race. Fucking asshole dickshit fuckface fucker.

this is true.

anyone got any other recommendations? Ned was good enough to make some before, but i lost the thread and can't remember them.

Almost everything Robin Hobb has written has written is brilliant; the Soldier's Son trilogy is a little to reliant on food pr0n to be a fun read. The Liveship trilogy was fantastic.

I will have to look out for R. Scott Bakker!

Someone I'm getting back into is Steven Erikson; I read the first 5 Malazan books and really enjoyed them.

Erikson is very much worth a read, although I've had some problems with the last two books in his series. Still, he and Martin are probably the gold standard for contemperary authors.

If you liked Bakker there are a number of newer authors doing interesting, relatively different things in fantasy right now including Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss and Richard Morgan. Of those four I've liked Lynch's novels the best; they're light, sure but excellently paced with suprisingly well-drawn characters. Abercrombie's stuff is much more overtly political but his world isn't as deep or considered as I'd have liked. Rothfuss and Morgan's series are worth a look but also really new.

Not sure if it's worth going into but I really think that fantasy is at a high point right now - there's a lot of decent stuff getting published.

I read the Book of the New Sun and loved it - it was, almost exactly, what I was looking for.

I tried to read Little Big and I liked the idea of it - a fantasy world envisioned without violence - but couldn't get into it.

I still haven't read the George RR Martin stuff!

Mieville's been pretty quiet recently.

I really think that fantasy is at a high point right now - there's a lot of decent stuff getting published.

This is good to know -- it's a slight pity because I really haven't been able to keep track of any of it this decade outside of earmarking a couple of names for reference. Other interests crop up first.

Scott Lynch seconded.

Of those four I've liked Lynch's novels the best; they're light, sure but excellently paced with suprisingly well-drawn characters

yes, absolutely agree. great character driven fantasy.

george r r martin- read first two, have rest siting there- for some reason i haven't gone back to them. i'm finding them a little 'dry', to be honest.

Mieville's been pretty quiet recently.

he had a young adult novel that came out last year that looked good

I still haven't read the George RR Martin stuff!

Dude, if you are still in New York I will buy you a copy of the first book.
I'd offer you mine, but a friend still has it.

i can't get past the first few pages of that book for some reason.

I asked this of SF books, but I'll ask of it here too, any amusing novels in this genre worth reading?

I pretty much stick to those 'Fantasy Masterworks' published by Gollancz, and the average quality level is pretty high.

okay so

"Mieville's been pretty quiet recently"

Has a new one "The City and the City" just out, supposed to be a Kafaesque thriller, sounds good, haven't got to it yet. Saw him in panel discussion recently - very sharp politically, which I expected, very funny indeed, which I didn't. Seriously, stand-up careers have been built on less.

Thanks to this revive, I'll be purchasing Tigana tomorrow.

I can't say enough times that Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (recently issued again as a single inexpensive volume Severian of the Guild) is the best fantasy (or science fantasy or whatever) ever written.

Oh wow I do love GG Kay. His Fionavar Tapestry trilogy is sitting on my office shelf as I write this. Tigana is a heart-breaker.

Yup.

I recently read Ysabel by GG Kay. I think it's aimed more at a teen audience, but it's very good. Got a bit of a tie-in to the Fionavar books.

got to catch up on some of these recommendations

does anyone have some recommendations?

also best ggk was lions of fake spain one. altho the three previous to ysabel were really good too

Martin books were great. Steven Brust does a pretty good job w/ these variously collected novels about an assassin called Vlad.

after posting last week i actually picked up the 1st book in the second R Scott Bakker trilogy, and it really is very good indeed.

i h8ed that book

well then we disagree, sir.

good day to you.

have u finished it cause i will elaborate my critical stance but i dont want 2 spoil it

no, halfway through it. now worried.

what did you think of the first trilogy?

it was good enough for me to read the new one but i had problems w/ it - dude kind of h8s women and is kind of smug abt blowing yr mind on a philosophy tip and really smug nerds are the worst kind of nerds and making the magic terms garbled ancient greek was pretty cheesy um

its a cool world and its really well realized and the peripheral male characters are often subtle and interesting. hes a lot better at social anxiety than action but thats w/e hes good about writing to his strenghts that way

i guess its frustrating because i really like that someones writing ambitious thoughtful fantasy but he traps himself w/ some stupid conceits and k-dawg is just such an unsupportable character by the end - taking him o/s for the judging eye one of its big +ves - the historical endnotes are some of the best fantasy ive read this decade more like that plz

Has anyone else read "The Lies of Locke Lamora"?
I thoroughly enjoyed it.

yeah, we've covered scott whatyoucallhim upthread. sequel is out there, red seas over red skies i think it's called, would also recommend.

xpost- i like the women hating aspect of bakker's work, though.

i kid, i kid- yeah the women characters don't have what you'd call ideal role model material.

i hope mainstream bores don't appropriate this dude now
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

i would have thought vance was safely just too geeky: 'the excellent prismatic spray' and all that

when bestselling writers start pimping him though, look out. hopefully there won't be some horrible 'last earth' hollywood travesty down the road with like shia leboeuf as cugel

haha did anything even happen in the cugel books?

i was paused over a box of old SF paperbacks unable to quite work up the enthusiasm for them yesterday, i think now i will start with 'the languages of pao'

read the new joe abercrombie book "best served cold" which was pretty dope if not really as satisfying as the first law books (takes place in the same world) has sum of the same themes and concerns tho and i rep hard for the dude for really attempting to write complex and interesting female characters~~~ pretty much the only dude doing so imo

apparently ben affleck is makin a movie out of the blade itself which im ~concerned~ about cause the series so dope and tbh i kinda had a "vision" of it all my own~~~

ps does any1 want to talk about the tremendous interest in the economics of exploitation in contemp fantasy its getting to be fascinating to me this radical element

hey guys BRANDON SANDERSON. i've already read his standalone novel ELANTRIS which was surprising...well-paced and unorthodox. i've just started his trilogy now, it's pretty cool, his approach to magic is really novel, his characters are well drawn, his storylines are fresh. i can't imagine they could've gotten a better author to finish the wheel of time series.

hey 'the languages of pao' was pretty good fun

yah the stuff with metals is pretty dope its a fun series (xpost)

I just started reading The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks and, for the first 50 pages at least, it's a pretty good bleak feudal fantasy novel about assassins and political intrigue; no magic stuff yet and I don't know if there's any to come, although there's mention of spawn of a god that might lead to a metaphysical confrontation later in the story/trilogy.

I will not read any fantasy series until that fucker Martin finishes A Song of Ice and Fire. Making me so mad.

alex i mean its your choice but i think theres some really dope new fantasy stuff out right now - abercrombie's series is finished btw all three books are out. alex bell rights stand alone stuff so that might be a good check too.

i wish i hadnt gotten high b4 that nyrb party cuz i do think there an interesting essay in the way that post-2001 fantasy has become really interested in talking about societies mfg and maintain privledge and how fragile and viscious these engines are. some of its pretty superficial and cynical but i think like lynch and abercrombie and (some) erikson hav a lot more to say about l8 capitalism than [insert challop-y author here]

also i already have a snappy title for it: "china syndrome"

Because of this thread and the epic Jordan thread (which I don't feel like searching for to link to) I picked up the first five Erikson's from the good ol' SciFi Bookclub. I'm on the third one, and am totally gobsmacked. Had no problem following things in Gardens of the Moon - reminded me of Dune actually, in how it just drops you in the world and lets you put the pieces all together - and Deadhouse Gates is easily one of the best fantasy books I've ever read. Right up there with Tigana, A Game Of Thrones and Iron Council as favorite contemporary works.

xxpost -- That's why the standalone route is so much better.

Or two novels, so: Hal Duncan's Vellum = very great. Ink concludes it and I need to get hold of it.

Erikson's conception of magic is one of my favorite pieces of writing in the past 10 years.

My brother's reading this at the moment and says it's great: http://www.amazon.com/Name-Wind-Kingkiller-Chronicles-Day/dp/075640407X

I will certainly get stuck in when he's finished and report back.

ink really loses the plot tbh altho its kinda a trip to read an actual published book thats not much more than a coke-fueled paranoid gay-marxist dreamscape/rant

name of the wind is aight but its kinda sum harry potter for forumz kidz shit

Erikson isn't the greatest at characterization and dialogue - serviceable to good, so far - but his world is rich, varied and real. His magic is really great, as is the ideas around ascendancy, lost gods, etc.

xx-post

the sequence from memories of ice (my fave) to midnight tides is probably the strongest run in fantasy for years he gets better at character and the dialogue is a little hackneyed but in an enjoyable way ~ insouciant quips in the face of danger are pretty lol imo ~ and dude does epic like no1 else. the siege in memories is pretty fukken INTENSE

I am an enormous fan of the completely hellish ride the Bridgeburners go on throughout the series, even as his prose becomes purpler than Prince covered in eggplants.

ink really loses the plot tbh altho its kinda a trip to read an actual published book thats not much more than a coke-fueled paranoid gay-marxist dreamscape/rant

Works for me!

yah my biggest problems with erikson who ive kind of given up on are

a) totally baroque O RLY graphs from the pov of farm animals
b) gave up on writing characters when he decided that LOL NOBLES, LOL CAPITALISM was better
c) rapefic tendencies

the sequence from memories of ice (my fave) to midnight tides is probably the strongest run in fantasy for years he gets better at character and the dialogue is a little hackneyed but in an enjoyable way ~ insouciant quips in the face of danger are pretty lol imo ~ and dude does epic like no1 else. the siege in memories is pretty fukken INTENSE

― ♀ + ♂ + ♋ = ☿ (Lamp)

I am an enormous fan of the completely hellish ride the Bridgeburners go on throughout the series, even as his prose becomes purpler than Prince covered in eggplants.

― it's like i have a couple worked up vadges under my arms (HI DERE)

x-post

not looking forward to rapefic fantasies :(

I look forward to all these developments!

That ended up weird! The look forward part was to what I quoted, the sadface to the rapefic.

Awkward!

i gave up on erickson but might try again given the enthusiasm here. some other thoughts: loved elantris except the end (um what exactly happened?) and same goes for the first book in sanderson's subsequent trilogy. the lies of locke lamora is totally dope and deserving of mention here. it's a cross between fritz leiber's 'lankhmar' series and say ocean's 11/12/13 in the best possible way. also r. scott bakker's first book is immense, if you can get past how the major female characters are all primarily either prostitutes, concubines, or mothers, and none are in major positions of authority. i'm trying to get into daniel abraham's 'long price quartet' right now, and though it reminds me of gene wolfe's 'book of the long sun,' in that the style is pretty ace, describing a bizarre world that isn't terribly medieval, i'm struggling. anyone gotten very far with abraham?

I will not read any fantasy series until that fucker Martin finishes A Song of Ice and Fire. Making me so mad.

― Alex in SF, Monday, August 10, 2009 5:54 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

I am reading the first book of this right now and am still waiting for a display of massive badassery, so far it's just been a bunch of bullshit court intrigue and shock-at-using-fuck-and-shit-as-cursewords

I couldn't get into The Lies Of Locke Lamora; the style was a little too breezy for me or something. Might try again down the road.

If you like Mieville, you should check out M John Harrison - particularly the Viriconium stuff.

I liked Light a lot.

After reading Gardens Of The Moon last year, I was more or less convinced there'd be no more S. Erikson in my future. I found his characters pretty appealing, and didn't object to his prose, but the thing was just such a busy, tangly mass of causes and effects that it almost felt like a magical procedural novel or something.

But so many people have assured me that the first book is the hardest bezoar to swallow, and SE blooms rapidly after that... I guess I will probably read the second one after all. Also, finding out the first book was partly grown from an actual rpg campaign of SE's made me understand its problems a little better.

Erikson's conception of magic is one of my favorite pieces of writing in the past 10 years.

― it's like i have a couple worked up vadges under my arms (HI DERE), Monday, August 10, 2009 5:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

can anyone summarize? i love this kind of stuff.

the thing was just such a busy, tangly mass of causes and effects that it almost felt like a magical procedural novel or something.

I had similar feelings... Didn't get through Gardens of the Moon. Also, everything was painted on such a grand scale from the start that there was no intimacy or variation in texture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_in_the_Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

something of a summary here; I don't want to post it directly because it's something of a pivotal information reveal in one of the later books

Yeah, please, *don't* post it here. I still have yet to read Erikson and I don't want a spoiler on that level.

I'm a bit surprised so many people found Gardens of the Moon confusing. It isn't the typical fantasy novel hero quest, but there aren't really that many threads to follow. A lot less than a typical George RR Martin, for example.

I thought it was nice not to have too many scenes where the obvious noob has to have something explained to him. Take it as given, and let the gradual accretion of information fill in the gaps. Like I said upthread, reminded me of Dune in that regard.

I really adored the fact that he basically didn't spend any time explaining how magic worked until the fourth book.

Kelly Link is great - dunno how "fantasy" she qualifies as. Although she gets published in things with title like "The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm" so that must count for something

xpost I didn't find it confusing so much as, like, business for the sake of business. I normally LOVE the tradition of toss-the-reader-into-deep-end.

Read Robin Hobb's first trilogy this year and now count myself firmly a Hobb fan. IMO she has nothing to fear from GRRM (who I do love). I'll probably wait awhile before continuing on to the Liveship books or the Tawny Man; really hoping she hits for similar distances in those.

Name Of The Wind and Locke Lamora are on my to-read pile. Of course the wife read both as soon as I brought them home.

Also, xpost to a month ago, after that NYT Sunday Mag profile, the New Yorker of a couple weeks ago had Nicholson Baker mentioning Jack Vance in his article about Kindle. It's a veritable Vance Big Media Frenzy ovah heah!

Everything I've read about Kelly Link suggests I'll adore the shit out of her. Kind of just putting it off for some reason...

Robin Hobb's Forest Mage trilogy is an immense letdown btw; the writing is still good but the basis for magic is really kind of disgusting in a wholly unexpected way (ie, not bloodsex magic but something else gross) and turned me off from finishing the third book.

Fungal infection magic?

Pimplepus magic.

Again, describing it spoils the series, so if you want to read it, go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Mage

The loving detail Hobb uses to describe how he fuels himself is incredibly repulsive.

I didn't like the one Hobbs I read, but checked out that description for the hell of it. That conception of magic is one crappy idea.

ann and jeff vandermeer's new weird anthology from last year is a great resource for finding new exciting stuff. it centers around a thread started by steph swainston in like 04 or 05, discussing the latest movements in fantasy. m. john harrison ended up bringing a lot to the debate, reflecting on the similarities between the energy and innovation in the fantasy of the 00s and the new wave in the 60s. some great stories in the anthology, too, especially jeffrey ford's and alastair rennie's. an excerpt from steph swainston's recent series convinced me to read her first novel, the year of our war, which has a lot of the same weird flavor as clark ashton smith, michael moorcock, and gene wolfe. another participant in the anthology, felix gilman, published a great first novel a couple years ago, thunderer, a page-turning urban magical realism/urban fantasy, kind of what i always hoped china mieville would be like

was very disappointed with the Mieville I picked up

I'll totes seek out that Felix Gilman!

The anthology you're talking about sounds v similar to the New Fabulists one edited by Peter Straub.

Have 2 Mieville novels and am perpetually postponing reading them b/c I have a strong suspicion they're going to be too cool/cute/nowsville.

My brother's reading this at the moment and says it's great: http://www.amazon.com/Name-Wind-Kingkiller-Chronicles-Day/dp/075640407X

I will certainly get stuck in when he's finished and report back.

― chap, Monday, August 10, 2009 10:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

about halfway through...I am not really a big fantasy person, read Narnia, LOTR, and the George RR Martin books....but this is honestly such a well written, fun, well paced, and engaging book I could not recommend it highly enough.

Rothfuss is the truth.

That book sounds interesting, but again it's a trilogy that is not complete so I will not be reading it, etc. . .

Or basically fuck you George R R Martin for ruining this entire genre for me.

Hahaha I hear you, Alex.

Seriously if George Martin dies from consuming six-hundred Twinkies in one sitting or getting too excited cuz the Jets finally won the Super Bowl (okay haha that's the real FANTASY isn't it) before finishing the series, I will never read a fantasy book again.

yeah no doubt...especially after how feast for crows basically did very little to even advance some of the really key plot lines like come on dude! like i love brienne and stuff but it was just felt like a whole novel of side-plots (except for cersei self-pwn which was nice to get some comeuppance and whatnot)

The biggest tragedy re: GRRM's series is that Roy Dotrice wasn't the reader for the audiobook of Feast For Crows. I am seriously almost as big an admirer of Dotrice's reading as I am of GRRM's writing.

Read Robin Hobb's first trilogy this year and now count myself firmly a Hobb fan. IMO she has nothing to fear from GRRM (who I do love). I'll probably wait awhile before continuing on to the Liveship books or the Tawny Man; really hoping she hits for similar distances in thos

head straight for tawny man, do not pass go, do not collect liveships or forest mages etc.

Kelly Link is real good, yeah. Theodora Goss is similarly good, only a little less jokey, with a more sorta Projekt records vibe, if that makes sense. If you want less goth, maybe check out Aimee Bender.

I've had the usual problems with Steven Erikson- loads and loads of characters you never get to spend enough time with, etc, but his world is awesome. I like Gardens of the Moon when I think about it, but not when I'm reading it.

do ppl really rate robin hobb? i picked up a friend's copy and got to the inside cover — "Wizardwood. A sentient wood. The most precious commodity in the world." — and just ... i think i've developed a real aversion to this stuff, somewhere, though in theory I still like it.

in re: 'the new weird' —

m. john harrison ended up bringing a lot to the debate, reflecting on the similarities between the energy and innovation in the fantasy of the 00s and the new wave in the 60s

— he fucking would, though ...

The thing I liked about the Liveships trilogy is that it starts out supertwee and precious and slowly gets, not gross per se, but kind of horrifying. The story behind the wizardwood is kind of horrifying in the context of that world.

I listened to the first two Farseer audiobooks trying to satisfy a craving left by the Song Of Ice & Fire saga, and found them pretty disappointing: very low death count for something that clearly thinks it's well dark, and a predictable prose style (there were times where I could recite almost line for line what characters were about to say; that never happened to me with grrm.)

The biggest tragedy re: GRRM's series is that Roy Dotrice wasn't the reader for the audiobook of Feast For Crows. I am seriously almost as big an admirer of Dotrice's reading as I am of GRRM's writing.

OTM, that dude is amazing.

just reading that sentence gives me bad flashbacks to Speaker for the Dead xxp

I see Michael Swanwick has written a sort of sequel to The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I found IDD a stupendously successful & original threshing/revivification of the usual fantasy ingredients. It became one of those books I'd buy cheap used copies of to give away to friends.

The very idea of a sequel is kind of dispiriting to me, but at the same time I can't help but be interested-- anyone read it?

this thread reminded me vaguely of a couple books i read in high school -- i found a thread about them:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/48280-cant-remember-this-book-title.html

Teot's War and Bloodstorm. third book still "forthcoming". good stuff!

i am reading patricia mckillip's 'the riddle-master of hed' trilogy, it is okay

it has one of the worst unpronounable fantasy villain names ever though: Ghisteslwchlohm

reading book of the new sun again theres a lot of words in it

wow man that's like deep

lamp, should i read george r r martin or proust next

u shld check the ilc book thread if u want recc's ive got OPINIONS posted to that msg board

really into this book called "black flies" btw - think ud like it

oh its not "fantasy genre" tho. fwiw im not really a big proust fan and martin is good but w/e this series is never going to end so kind of *humorous picture of cat in sticky situation with impact font caption indicating this is a trap of sorts*

you know i always assumed I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX was a board about cricket but whenever i look i'm reminded i'm wrong

black flies, by shannon burke, about paramedics? i'll have a look for it. cover is uggggly though.

& yeah i kind of want to read one of the big post-robert jordan doorstop fantasy series right now. not sure why but i think martin seems like he might be the one with the least stuff that i will find annoying and crap? i might be wrong, i haven't been paying that much attention —

I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX

^ just wanted it on record i didn't type this

[nabisco] [.]

lol ilc is ilx's best kept secret

yeah s.burke's novel. is the englander cover the one with the ambos and the black, black night? i mean w/e but it looks aight. its really, really good - ive posted a bit about on ilx before if u care 2 have a look - and i think the language is precise and sparse and wise.

if i had to do a rundown of post-jordan epics id go like:

abercrombie - the first law (completed)
morgan - steel remains (first book done 2nd due this year)
lynch - gentleman bastards (first two complete)
martin - song of ice & fire (four of six done i think?)
redick - chathrand voyage (two of three are out)
erikson - malazan book of the fallen (like eight of ten, i think? but post-5 they fall off BIG TIME)
rothfluss - kingkiller (only one complete second has been delayed and delayed)

lol there are actually a couple of others i dug too but thats more than u want probably. oh - glenn cook's black company series has been reprinted in omnibuses - hes pre-jordan but dooooooooope and its complete. id rep for that

that is helpful! i will investigate further. oh if you had to do a ranking of them where they were penalized massively for anything that might be characterised as 'twee bullshit' would it change at all

also i will look out for some of those glen cook books second hand maybe but much as i hate to be that guy those omnibuses are deeply ugly objects — hm apparently both the UK and US eds of 'black flies' went with photo of ambulances plus LOTS OF BLACK — ehhhh

how is book of the new sun going? god i actually read book of the long sun or short sun or whatever the first sequel tetralogy was, it was not very rewarding

none of them are really twee as i understand it - rothfluss is probably the closest i guess, altho its more corny wish fulfillment stuff and *fist-pump, one time!* boy's own adventure shit than "twee". redicks kinda corny as well and he goes for a self-conscious pulp tone that u might not like ~ its a little affected esp the century gothic font switch stuff

haha book of the new sun - im on this sad quest to revist all the things i loved the most when i was 13-15 so im rereading the first four and they... kind of suck? the writing is really ornate and opaque and i cant tell whats figurative and whats literal and there are all these *deep* moments that have no real context or content like:

lol u r a flower from the future no i am a man oh okay oh u dont believe me well just u wait i still love u thanks u r a true bro what was my point again idk im just a timetravellin green dude oh forget it ill go brood on existence and kill sum 1 cool c u

and then thats it. the jarring shifts and omissions used to seem kinda cinematic but now they just feel cheap

ps - i only have a couple of weeks we need to play civ imo

"im on this sad quest to revist all the things i loved the most when i was 13-15"

haha i'd noticed

i totally agree with you about botns tho, at the time i was convinced there was, like, MORE GOING ON; in retrospect wolfe makes you work very hard for a book which is basically about how big guy's sword is

oh i have mostly given up on civ 3 /: also i am staying with friends for next couple weeks and i do not think the terms of staying there will include my sitting in front of a computer playing antiquated videogames which only work in like four-hour sessions, i think that would make them not be my friends

Been reading a book recommended by such luminaries as Brian Aldiss, Anthony Burgess, Martin Skidmore and thread favorite George R.R. Martin - Pavane, by Keith Roberts. Takes place in a world in which Elizabeth was assassinated and the Spanish Armada successfully completed its mission, crushing the Reformation. Doesn't seem to have any magick or elves, but so far there is a lot of great writing about driving a low-speed locomotive in the cold.

starting reading the mazalan, very good so far, but hey book 1 is always easy, right?

i bought the first books by, er, abercrombie and lynch. but i ordered them delivered to a different address so i doubt i'll get around to them for a while. and i bought a copy of pavane the other day. actually i read ward moore's bring the jubilee not long ago and was all through going: i thought this was meant to be set in the UK. and it wasn't until i found pavane that i realised for years i'd been convinced they were the same book. oops.

man i want the next chapter of the kingkiller series from rothfuss sooooo bad!

i ended up liking the name of the wind even more than george r r martin

lynch - gentleman bastards (first two complete)

i am reading the first of these now (needed a change from robert musil lol) - it's weird how it's plotted like the first season of a tv show rather than a novel, though. actually a lot of the dialogue is quite buffy-ish or whatever, the faintly anachronistic tendency to colloquialism and smartarsery. like if joss whedon did a show about fantasy world con-artists it wouldn't be too far from this. (nb. this is a good thing, for me; ymmv obv etc.)

loses points w/me for introducing only one female character with any kind of agency of her own in the entire first half of the novel, and then killing her in fairly nasty and arbitrary fashion; this is lame.

it's still pretty enjoyable, and will probably pick the next one up on my next day off. oh er apparently he has not only announced he's doing a seven novel series but he's holding up writing them to write other novellas set in the world of the gentlemen bastards. that's just, you know, not necessary.

it's very well done fluff. sometimes that's all you can ask from the genre, ime

yeh, i wouldn't necessarily disagree. and it is very, very well done fluff.

awfully well done.

this scott lynch dude is gonna have a bald patch from all the headpatting

he really doesn't look like the kind of dude that wants that to happen

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/authphoto_110/69948_lynch_scott.gif

omgtbh

glenn cook's black company series has been reprinted in omnibuses

got around to reading the newest of these ^ v. highly recommended

whats the dealio

military fantasy told in a v. sparse/realist voice w/flawed and compelling characters. interested in examining some of the usually elided over moral qns in the the epic fantasy model (what is "evil"? what is the cost of resistance? of blind duality?)

deserve sb for the laziness of this but its the first thing that came 2 mind ~ really similar to the wire in that it focuses on peripheral actors in a big conflict btw to institutions (sub the evil empire and the white rose resistance for the police force and the street gangs) and believes in dramatizing the relationship btw its characters and bureaucratic systems. also cook often avoids introducing characters that we havent met but the person telling the story has and only really reveals background stuff "naturally" w/o long world building chapters and paragraphs

yeah i'm still not getting over scott lynch's yahoo profile pic

is the resistance actually called the white rose??

darraghmac OTM

oh yes s1ocki it most certainly is

ww2 much

Weird Robin Hobb connection:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/23/teen.jane.doe/index.html

i ordered the first black company mass market paperback of the old editions a couple weeks ago. the omnibuses are just so spectacularly ugly /:

um also i just finished the abercrombie books, i don't really want to admit just quite how into it i was but i did read the second one in like a six-hour period

the ending annoyed me though, i think the whole strategy of introducing a bunch of fairly loathsome dudes and getting the audience invested in the possibility they might redeem themselves at some point and then spending the last 100 pages going 'haha lol no they are just as loathsome as ever, ur all suckers' is slightly less clever than joe abercrombie thinks it is

also i thought the final twist would be that the evil bankers/forces of capitalism/democracy were much more important than the Grand Old Magical Powers From Way Back In The Day, which was a lot more interesting than the actual final twist

this richard morgan dude's pretty good. should i read his SF?

bought books by rothfuss & george rrrrr martin today ¬_¬

morgan was really good, actually; kind of showed up some of the more juvenile aspects of all the other dudes. amused that i had previously thought some of these guys were gonna be twee - genre seems to have swung as a whole waaaay back in the other direction. who was it started making their characters cuss? was that martin?

gemmell's always had a bit of the old anglo saxon peppering his dialogue

bought books by rothfuss & george rrrrr martin today ¬_¬

morgan was really good, actually; kind of showed up some of the more juvenile aspects of all the other dudes. amused that i had previously thought some of these guys were gonna be twee - genre seems to have swung as a whole waaaay back in the other direction. who was it started making their characters cuss? was that martin?

i think in tone and scope and def in politics that china melvielle informs a lot of this stuff (esp the british dudes) more than martin who is still kinda working the lil nell and magics end of things.

the ending annoyed me though, i think the whole strategy of introducing a bunch of fairly loathsome dudes and getting the audience invested in the possibility they might redeem themselves at some point and then spending the last 100 pages going 'haha lol no they are just as loathsome as ever, ur all suckers' is slightly less clever than joe abercrombie thinks it is

im kinda sympathetic to his plight here tho - its hard to avoid cliche in either direction really - and the ending feels pretty honest to the rest of the book and to the characters. its also true to the themes and aims of the rest of the series it reinforces a lot of what abercrombie seems to believe about the nature political power and sytems of control *shrug* i think he redeemed his characters as much as he could within the larger scope

buddy of mine and a fellow morgan fan loaned me his copy of 'the steel remains' and said, 'yeah this a good shit but get ready for the gay porn version of avatar up in this' and he was otm but it was still vv good.

has anyone read the Lies of Loch Lamora? peeps at work are trying to get me on that one...

My wife liked it but I haven't read it yet, mostly because of Lynch's photo posted upthread.

Listening to the audiobook of Steel Remains. I've read Morgan's first two books in the Altered Carbon(and took a break with the third). The description of it as Brutalist Fantasy seems fairly accurate.

His interview with io9 is pretty illuminating.

the lies of locke lamora is awesome, an ace lankhmar update. the intro's called "the boy who stole too much" and it just gets better and better, becoming something of an ocean's 11 as done by david gemmell

it's very enjoyable, written very well. i've read the second installment too, and that's good. one criticism is that they might feel a little lightweight if you're into you're heavier 'high concept' fantasy stuff, but it didn't bother me none.

Got a hold of Black Company omnibus based on this thread, but haven't started it yet, instead started the first of his private eye+elves+gnomes series, which is Sweet Silver Blues.

the l of l l is very enjoyable but i'm worried the whole thrust of the gentleman bastard story is that it's going to throw out the most interesting aspect - neither of the first two novels are really sufficiently dedicated to The Con, & the third sounds like it's the 'you see, all along this story was really about wizards' reveal - also i have certain *issues* with the torture scenes

i read the first black company (novel not omnibus), i can see why it gets props. it does one or two things similar to that 'orcs' abomination but, like, with a point to them. i did like that the writing was trying for laconic - sometimes it only managed flat, but it's still more interesting than the standard third-person over-shoulder slightly overwarmed thing

and the rothfuss i liked; it was kind of the most david eddings-y of all of these things i've been reading lately, tho. but also quite slyly aware of the various threads of anti-fantasy fantasy going around -- the whole thing with the dragon, that was pretty clever, i think. it seemed a fairly random choice of a place to end a 700-page novel though i would say. (i find it hard to think of a fantasy novel that's cleverly or well-structured, though. i'm not sure it matters.) actually abercrombie was pretty good, particularly in the second one, and some aspects of the plotting of the third.

im kinda sympathetic to his plight here tho - its hard to avoid cliche in either direction really - and the ending feels pretty honest to the rest of the book and to the characters. its also true to the themes and aims of the rest of the series it reinforces a lot of what abercrombie seems to believe about the nature political power and sytems of control *shrug*

er, i think i half-agree with you (*shrug* indeed :/ ) - particularly about avoiding cliche in either direction - but i think what abercrombie is getting at ought to be a bit more nuanced than 'it was all the fault of the damn wizards all along' - which is where the narrative is by far at its wonkiest mechanically, actually, trying to come up with plausible reasons for all the magi and such to act why they do all through.

ok i have far too exacting demands for my popular fiction i guess

i think in tone and scope and def in politics that china melvielle informs a lot of this stuff (esp the british dudes)

i actually have trouble telling which of them are british most of the time - i only twigged it with abercrombie when one character said to another "do you have to be such a c**t?"

been thinking about rereading perdido street station actually. thought it was pretty awes when i was 15

said it upthread and i'll say it again -- people should give steph swainston a shot. the year of our war is really well-written and refreshing, entirely devoid of generic cliches beyond the main character's elric-esque addictions. i started her second novel, no present like time, a little bit ago, and so far it's even better than the first one. also, kj bishop's the etched city is one of the best novels i've read in a while, regardless of genre. the vandermeer's new weird anthology features stories from these two and in general's a real treasure trove

the lies of locke lamora feels like it could be a really dope movie

ok the ocean's 11 thing got me! i'm gonna get this.

you could say that about any 'light' fantasy novel less than 700 pages though. but totally agree.

1/3 of the way through Rothfuss, enjoying it a great deal. It's well written, and he has a refreshingly light touch, particularly when it comes to dialogue. I've not read another fantasy book in the form of a biography, though I'm sure they're out there.

Recommendation on Locke Lamora definitely cosigned - though not quite enough sex in it to be a true Lankhmar update, IMHO. Great, great stuff though, and I'm looking for the next volume.

hey guys - I'm trying to think of fantasy books to recommend to my friend over here, who's EFL (English as a foreign language). his english level is okay - maybe middle school level? can kind of hold a conversation but his vocabulary isn't great. want to get him reading books so his english level can start improving.

thinking about harry potter level or thereabouts - thought about getting him Lloyd Alexander's the Chronicles of Prydain series but I can't find it in bookstores here and can't remember if it'd be appropriate or not. any other recommendations?

diana wynne jones, if he doesn't mind looking a bit of a girl

narnia, perhaps?

second the Prydain recommendation - awesome stuff, way better than HP (or Narnia, for that matter)

Maybe Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy?

Actually I'd recommend Susan Cooper

Actually, Tolkien would be fine - accessible, but stretching. Start with The Hobbit.

dyao does he like fantasy-type stories generally? it feels weird to recommend kids books (altho howl's moving castle is lots of fun regardless) to sum1 thats a grown up. wyndham might be good, and kay's language is evocative but p clear.

totally. was just gonna suggest 'the hobbit' and 'over sea, under stone.' also, people shit all over him, but david eddings' first series (the belgariad?) is great for intermediate readers. maybe too edith hamilton's 'mythology' -- not necessarily cutting edge epic fantasy, but really readable, easily comprehensible retellings of all the ancient tales

x-post

haha i was thinking abt saying eddings but i mean the dude isnt actually ten, u no?

yeah he's in his mid 30s - but he told me he's fine with reading children's books. and children's books can be great! bought him the outsiders last week (lol) let's see how he does

thanks for the recs everyone - I will see what I can find here (did see howl's moving castle the other day)

its been sitting around my apt 4eva but "rats and the ruling sea" by um robert redick i think is -amazing-

tone is p diff from the 1st book more absurdist and horrible its a little dragonball z actually - the very fabric of reality gets torn in this book fyi - its hard to tell whats farce and whats sincere and whos putting on who. also genuinely creepy in parts. one of the books big things is ideas abt consciousness itw animals have started to "wake" to became self-aware and talk (somehow...) and theres weird qns of authorship/intent/awareness. the vaguely epistolary conceit and the strange shifts in tense/time are much more effective here imo

recommended!

oh i mention that i had it sitting around because the whole book is deeply unattractive on 1st glance

that sounds right up my street actually. also i have now read most everything else from the list you said upthread /:

so yeah steven erickson really really can't write sentences

which is annoying bcz deadhouse gates was pretty excellently structured, 'compelling', etc.; the first one really was the opposite of that, i just found myself thinking "fuck, can i not just read the sourcebook here"

he does suffer from redundancy a little - it's not necessary for every single character in your novel to at some point look at some venerable ancient ruin and go "oh, it's amazing how unimportant you are, like, when you really think about it" - also possibly sometimes pass over the fact that ppl often shit themselves when they die perhaps

he also cant really write female characters, or exposition, or plausible philosophical exchanges

i still really <3 memories of ice to midnight tides for the world-building and the scale and the magic system and the battle scenes and unabashed emotionalism of the series. the deeply loathsome political/sexual stuff is... less noticeable in those three (well okay not mt)

i think the overwrought qualities work w/in a v specific context - like these are fukken dragons and gods and immortal warlock kings FUKKEN THINGS UP AND THEY ARE WHATS REAL but, yah, it gets wearisome. also most irksome of all are the "clever" "winking" "verbose" "retarded" characters like kruppe and the other ones that just get more and more and more pages devoted to them as the series goes on

Erikson learns his craft as the series goes on; though the subject matter can be a bit annoying later (economics ain't my bag) his authorial chops are much better. I just read volumes 1-8. 2-5 have the best stories, but I can't fault the writing of 6-8 at all. In retrospect, the first volume is rough all around.

I just started Reddick's The Red Wolf Conspiracy (good so far) and am glad to hear good things about the next one.

i think the structure is helped esp in the first 5 by his sticking to the idea of "convergence" as an overriding narrative/thematic device - like its an easy way to keep all these disparate strands and characters interesting and moving forward

really ez? i think maybe 7-8 is the absolute worst writing in the series. all these overwrought, baroque sentences weighted with pseudo-insights and pronouncements. like just the section from the pov of a -donkey- where hes like "what fools these mortal be" or w/e for like pages and pages and pages

i am getting the idea that 6-10 will actually be equally enjoyable in a faintly masochistic fashion

It might have actually been helpful for his publishers to say "Actually Steve take your time on this, don't feel you have to write the whole thing so quickly, you know?" Which is unusual for the genre, seems like.

the "clever" "winking" "verbose" "retarded" characters like kruppe

Fizban has a lot to answer for rite -- have you read the dragonlance thread btw

Pet hate stretched over a lot of the stuff I've been reading — the rather limp sub-creation of songs and entertainments and er literary culture which everyone seems to feel necessary to try and show off with. Martin and Erickson are both truly dreadful with this. I like how every single fukken culture in the latter's books seems to have bad free verse as their single poetic form. Also how Martin's pagan northmen's folksongs are more like nursery songs or really, really twee nineteenth-century Christian hymns.

Lynch and Rothfuss both managed to get by on this — kind of smirky and annoying, but at least not shit — Morgan was okay — Abercrombie actually managed to do a really good scene with, like, actual dramatic purpose in the first one in his trilogy, which is kind of surprising

The narrator he introduces in the 8th book was horrible (I admit, I skimmed everytime it appeared after the first time), but I felt he was able to give some of the minor characters distinct voices (like Harllo) - a skill he didn't have earlier on. Every successful fantasy writer needs a better editor, which I think is the great distinction between Memories Of Ice and Toll The Hounds. I think the latter's writing and story may be just as good - if not better - than the former's, but Memories is a lean machine and Toll is plumper than Kruppe.

But you don't like Kruppe :( Do you at least like Tehol and Bugg?

x-post

I don't read anyone's bad poetry. I'm not nerd enough.

thomp i havent read dragonlance or really any 80s sci fi/fantasy except eddings and early jordan (or is that 90?)

i think the most successful of the made up histories is the stuff in mistborn which is both short and has a real point tbf i completely skipped all the poetry in martin and erikson

i dont really like any of the wise eccentrics/authorial stand-ins in erikson's stuff. he weights the scales so heavily in their favor (bugg is immortal!) & has every non-evil character talk abt how cool & smart & handsome they are i tend towards vaguely rooting for one of those dragons to eat them

guys if you don't skip poetry/songs in fantasy epics ur doin it wrong

no, we are next level

i kind of assume anyone nerdy enough to have read, like, any fantasy, at all, will also have read dragonlance. not that they were any good. also the 8-bit era videogame adaptation is a masterpiece of fascinatingly awful design

Just finished Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist & Soldier of Arete. Pretty good, especially if you like Greek myth. Dude gets a head injury and can now talk to gods, the dead, etc. Only problem is, he can't remember what happens after 24 hours, so he has a journal scroll entitled 'Read This Each Day'.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3416/3332379221_bb83421de5.jpg

you'd think he'd have thought of tattooing it somewhere?

Nah - a scroll makes a better memento.

I had about 100 pages to go with The Name of the Wind (which I was enjoying quite a bit), but I left it on the train the other day. How annoying.

The scrolls are the document supposedly found and translated to make the story.

xpost - Hey Kingfish, Soldier of Sidon, the long-awaited third part of that trilogy is now out.

I'm reading Wolfe's latest An Evil Guest right now. Actually Soldier of Sidon and Return to the Whorl are the only Wolfe novels I haven't read now.

Just finished Martin's 'feast for crows' - some serious bullshit. 900 pages of filler about the dud characters followed by a note from the author dated 2005 saying "oh yeah don't worry you can read about tyrion next year when I publish the next one"

Strongly suspect he will never finish this series...

i just finished 'storm of swords'. though i've been bitching about it on the feast for crows thread.

i can't believe it took >2,500 pages to notice how obviously 'lannister' and 'stark' are derived from 'lancaster' and 'york'

makes me not wanna finish the first book

the best one is 'dornishmen' though. the first book is definitely worth finishing.

To be fair the first three are great and well worth reading and the 4th wouldn't be so bad if he had actually published 5 the next year as promised instead of taking 4 years and counting to re-edit the bloody manuscript.

I was really really into the first book until the last five pages, which fuck that.

were u mad that he didnt include u in the acknowledgments or just at the explanation of the typeface that was used?

im currently reading acacia i think by something something durham it doesnt not suck so far

read the first one, found it pretty hollow and uninvolving. haven't started no 2 yet.

is it time for me to mention the 'prince of nothing' series again yet?

have new robert jordan unopened since christmas, along with books 2,3 & 4 of mazalan book of the dead. jan 4th is gonna come round all too soon.

if dan hasn't convinced anyone to start reading the wheel of time again, then i'll hardly manage to, but in case you're swayed by numbers- it's safe to start reading these again.

I'm going to have to do a comprehensive re-read of the WoT books before I tackle any new episodes, so I might as well wait until Sanderson's got the whole thing finished before I commit myself to reading that number of books.

were u mad that he didnt include u in the acknowledgments or just at the explanation of the typeface that was used?

I am trying not to spoil the ending but there is [suprise twist introduction] of [common fantasy trope] and, like, I have read all the Forgotten Realms books I ever want to read? I do not need you to write me another? Did this seriously not bother anyone else?

"here are some dragon eggs - unfortunately they will never hatch, that would be impossible"
"oh ok thanks"
"man what a cheap gift that guy gave you - those aren't even ever going to hatch"
"yes i feel strangely attached to them though - it's such a shame they're never going to hatch"

etc

etc

Haha ok possibly I am not the most nuanced reader? I dunno! Dude seemed willing to break the rules, I assumed he wouldn't do something so completely lame :(

reading the first joe abercrombie book. this shit rules. the masterful plotting and characterization is a sweet tonic to the last fantasy book i read -- the first one in steven erickson's series -- which i did not feel at all. anyways there was a LOT of good stuff published between 2000 and 2010, and this is up there with the best of it

am not feeling erikson after book one tbh. btwn that and not having any interest in george rrrr martin's much recommended series after book one i'm kind of at a loss.

the last book that got me out of a fantasy reading lull (my millionth) was lois bujold mcmaster's curse of chalion. crisply written, subtly themed, and not terribly magic-heavy first fantasy novel by a veteran sci-fi writer. it sort of reminded me of stephen king's eyes of the dragon but not as overtly fairy taley

er sorry that's "lois mcmaster bujold"

http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/1/18/in-which-we-count-down-the-100-greatest-science-fiction-or-f.html

p trash list i mean book the new sun is garbage and lol @ the weird highbrow inclusions

also of note got sent a book of generic epic fantasy last month where the epigraph was from white noise

I love Dick and Wolfe (Dick Wolf not so much) but come on.

finally reading song of ice and fire, just started book 3. fantastic stuff, very compelling characters (love the Hound!). really exciting to finally get chapters from jaime lannister's perspective.

for years The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was my favorite book but now I can't remember any of it

u gonna do a list u gotta give us a little more text than "Incredibly entertaining and knowing about all sort of aspects of life, some of which I'd never even thought of before." i mean, that's the ENTIRE snow crash description. it knows about certain aspects of life.

Well I can expand upon that:

A pretty accurate prediction of the proliferation of dickishness on the internet tied to an excellent espionage story fronted by two incredibly charismatic protagonists (one of whom is named Protagonist, lol) with startling side peeks into refugee camp life.

Knowing about all sorts of aspects of internet life.

this seems like a good enough list to me

didn't really look at it closely but why are some books included as entire series while others get individual entries for different books in the series?

Cuz it's a poorly constructed list.

Am getting through Deadhoue Gates a few pages before sleep each night. It's fine, but not dragging me back to it, and when I get tired I just turn the light off. that didn't happen on the latest WoT, for instance.

David Gemmell- discuss

Just read The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers - time travel, romantic poets, evil clowns and magical gypsies. Fun!

I recently finished Richard Morgan's "The Steel Remains", which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I've started reading Joe Abercrombie's First Law books (well, I'm nearly finished the first one.) which seem good as well.
Read the Powers ages ago and liked it.
I've not read any David Gemmell, ever. Anyone got recommendations for his stuff.

Legend for a start. All his books become the same pretty quick, but I'd have no issues recommending that.

Hey yo d@n p£rry and lamp or whoever else i've just finished book 2 of erikson's (deadhouse gates) and i'm very confused.

does this get any less confusing, is my question?

i liked it a lot better than the first one,launching into bk 3 tonight iirc.

IIRC, a whole bunch of stuff is explained either at the end of book 3 or book 4 that pulls a lot of confusing historical details and interpersonal relationships into focus

btw, they are total pulp throwaways but Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden books are fun to read

oh yeah i seen the movies with michael caine actually

Whole lot of parallel talk going on now at Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog -- check the comments:

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/04/quote-of-the-day/38446/

Erickson, George R. R. Martin etc. all down there plus others.

I have only read the 1st Erikson and it's just really really hard to make myself proceed despite the rewards everyone promises. At some point, though, I am definitely gonna try the 2nd one.

man I keep meaning to reread Zelazny

jon- i read the first one, was 'meh'

just finished second one, am 'eh?' but it's certainly much better

everyone (well ok, HI DERE) assures me it's worth it.

in fairness, I loved the first two, so I would expect an appropriately scaled-back reaction to the subsequent books

I do think they ramp up in quality up through at least book 5, at which point they straddle the enjoyable-tedious line (I still haven't finished 8 and have even gone so far as to read almost every Harry Dresden book Butcher has written as well as Brandon Sanderson's Elantris and Mistborn trilogy instead of finishing the Erikson book; I'm also about to reread Andrew Mitchell's Supervirus to see how it's changed between rough draft and final publication).

What do y'all think of the Black Company series?

i think i'll be buying it next chance i get, based on all i've heard here and elsewhere

Haven't read it, looks pretty fucking cool

Yeah it's been repped to me many times, I bought the first three used last time I was in the Twins (yay Uncle Hugo's) but haven't dug in yet.

by the time i got to the end of 'deadhouse gates' i wasn't aware of anything not making sense i think

i just finished memories of ice last week. my opinion of erikson has definitely gone up to 'competent plotter of plots'

I've got most of the Black Company books sitting on my shelf going "You are going to read us one of these days, right?"

audiobooks become self aware?

thomp- many many many things in this life make sense yet still confuse me.

actually, thinking back, i definitely lost track of my confused and angry ancient races wandering in the desert

does this get any less confusing, is my question?

yes & no - the basic plots become more comprehensible (i think) and the world gets expanded & given more/better/less retarded context but its still p messy & overwrought. also towards the back half of the series he starts doubling characters intentionally & otherwise so things start to blur 2gether again. the next three books - memories of ice through midnight tides - are v much the high point of the series tho - if u enjoyed deadhouse gates at all then i think its worth sticking with

hmmmmmm or maybe not? i got a review copy of book 9 (dust of dreams) & it was so authentically terrible in every aspect i ended up taking like four months to finish it & really only did bcuz ive invested so much in the series.

re: black co. im a huge stan for the series crtl-f a bunch of my posts upthread ~ final omnibus came out last year & its really good altho a little less spare & considered than the earlier books. really the first collection - the books of the north - is a ~must read~ imo everything else is good but not imperative

& 4 ppl who dont read my tumblr ive read recently:

guy gavriel kay "under heaven" - dope book but not his best.
tad williams "shadowsomething" - cant really keep his titles str8 tbh. bloated & somewhat weak plotting but hes p underrated as a writer w/ a better sense of imagery & metaphor than a lot of his peers.

the worst thing abt both these books is that kay & williams lean really heavily on characters that are p terrible poets & songwriters. not sure why fantasy dudes love doing this so much but its hella embarrassing

I finished the Abercrombie series, thought it was pretty good. Next fantasy for me is Sanderson's Mistborn, though I might actually get round to reading the Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay instead.

Lamp where is yr tumbler u are quality poster.

the worst thing abt both these books is that kay & williams lean really heavily on characters that are p terrible poets & songwriters.

Blame Tolkien.

nah that's harsh. they should know better.

Lamp where is yr tumbler u are quality poster.

cosign, i wish to 'follow' yr 'tumblr'

Williams is much better at sci-fi than fantasy IMO (Otherworld was straight-up amazing)

waht does a tumblr?

ps dan have started book 3 and am greatly encouraged by the prologue being set 3 million yrs in advance of plot so far. when you ask an archaeologist for backstory you better mean it i guess.

bought the lies of loch lamora yesterday

have high hopes!

Jordan is (was) probably the most sophisticated "plotter" of any writer I've read in terms of the dizzying interplay of characters, twists, narrative arcs etc. but because the actual writing style is fairly conventional, this can never be celebrated as such, it's defined as being soap opera-ish (which it is) or even decadent b/c fantasy just isn't supposed to try for complexity; while at the same time a "merely" complex plot isn't enough by itself to impressive in a non-fantasy context. It would be different if he had been constructing a social realist drama or if he'd been playing with literary convention (or both!) both of which provide a more respectable framework in which the complexity of the plot would become at least for some critics a point in its favour.

ive been thinking a lot about this post lately both w/r/t jordan specifically and fantasy generally. i was arguing about this w/ someone irl and one of the things that i was trying to argue is that the complex plotting in fantasy novels is made to carry some of the thematic weight that language & character might in other genres. like for ex rand's storyline is interesting & engaging in a strictly narrative "soap opera-ish" way but at the same time there are all these quiet repetitions & variations on a couple of basic themes - ideas abt personhood & free will & the cost of memory.

so the very first scene in the book has elan morin tedronai (didnt even have to look that up :/) confronting lews therin with the memory of ltt having murdered his own family & taunting him with the fact that the war hes sacrificied so much for was just "one of a thousand, a thousand times a thousand" such wars in the turning. & the last scene in the latest book which is the book that afaik ties up rand's storyline has rand standing in the same spot in which ltt annihilated himself having been driven there after almost murdering his adopted father. & rand has to confront his memories & his past lives but this time he manages to find some peace w/ his fate. part of that is him realizing that implicit in the pattern's promise of rebirth is the capacity for change & the ability to chose but also that rather than simply being forced to wage endless war until time ends & the void consumes everything hes also been given the opportunity to reexperience the things & the ppl that gave him joy. that each new cycle redeems the last.

all of this is written in p simple language shorn of complex metaphors or imagery. what gives this moment so much weight is the 10,000+ pages in btw these two scenes. the reader in part "gets" the parallels and the significance that tie these two moments together because there have been countless echoes of this choice in all the other books.

lol i had some other examples from different series of authors using story/plot moments to develop themes but this is super tl;dr already. but i do think its interesting to think abt techniques that the genre uses to achieve some of the aims of "literary" fiction.

so very OTM

btw after reading Sanderson's other books, they really couldn't have picked a better person to finish the series than him

yeah i think hes a great choice. new book is out this fall too which hasnt happened since like 1993

also with wot the whole idea of the pattern is kinda rad metacommentary on the construction of epic fantasy. like the series of chapters where rand relives his ancestors lives has all these obscure plot implications that superfans can obsess over but theres also the idea that all these manipulations of circumstance were required to get rand to this specific spot in this specific moment. that all the "big moments" in the story are built on a series of much smaller, less visible moments.

also those chapters are a lot of fun just read str8 up

Just picked up the first book in Sanderson's MIstborn series on a whim. Looking forward to it now reading some of the comments on this thread.

I just read that trilogy; it's great.

interesting argument, lamp. i say this not having read any of this ish but, yeah, put off by the sheer length and over-elaborateness of the genre, somewhat.

but more i'm put off by the basic genre pillars themselves. as in, i don't immediately understand why this particular mode of life ought to have so many books written in it. something vaguely like europe in the middle ages, with some overt metaphysical stuff like gods and magic thrown in. dozens of books a year, thousands of pages... really? something about this surfacey take-off of late feudalism before the technnological/political/religious breakout of europe is taken as a given, a natural set of setting tools for all these epic stories. and it bugs me.

that's my natural reaction tho, no insult intended. and i read all the D&D novels as a kid, believe me.

That's the "classic" high-fantasy framework but there are lots of other kids. Urban fantasy, for one -- of which Charles deLint is the most known author I can think of...? And Emma Bull's War for the Oaks is, imo, a very neat little package of writing about making music, disguised as a fantasy that makes a lot of departures from the norms.

I take a pass on the more recent sub-genre of "paranormal" urban fantasy, as it has been re-made. That "vampires hunting werewolves on the streets of Cleveland, now with 30% more light erotica" thing just isn't for me. But there are some real gems out there.

I think these books tend to be set in pre-industrial settings because the magical solutions are supposed to replace the technological solutions we came up with in the real world.

xp: Laurel, check out Butcher's Dresden Files; they basically ditch the erotica for detective noir.

Well I do have a weakness for Nancy Collins' Sonja Blue vampire-hunter character, but a) Collins was like 18 years ahead of the curve, and b) I don't know of anyone else who has gone for the rawness that she did, she certainly wasn't writing for the "romance novels but with an EDGE, like ME" crowd.

Also she learned me about the Winchester House, that was the first I'd ever heard of it.

i loved war for the oaks! minneapolis!

oh, is that about the highway 55 expansion?

The new China Mieville Kraken definitely takes another tack with the whole "Urban Fantasy" thing. It reminds me a bit of Gaiman's Neverwhere but with about 100x more imagination put into it. It's about as far from the "Mills & Boon with Magic" genre as you could possibly imagine.

the lies of locke lamora was fantastically fun to read!

ocean's 11/the sting meets george rr martin!

War For The Oaks holla!

I'm pretty intrigued by that new Mieville; if anyone's read it, pls to discuss.

Have Locke Lamora on the shelf but right now I'm about 100 pgs into Rothfuss. Really great so far.

i would say this is more pulpy than rothfuss who is a pretty amazing writer IMO, but this is just like summer movie fun type thing and what i was in the mood for

(also this is an unfinished series, but frankly this book stands alone pretty well, i don't think it would be mandatory to read the next one if you didn't feel like it)

rothfuss who is a pretty amazing writer IMO

Guy can definitely write, though I found Name of the Wind a bit too meandering for my tastes. Will read vol 2 though.

Just read Name of the Wind and was properly impressed. Fine writer, that Rothfuss. Read Lies and it's sequel recently and I like the plots but the rest... not so much. The crap characterization and faux-edginess through swearing don't do it for me. The plots though are really something, well woven and coherent.

yeah not the best writer...haha didn't occur to me abt the swearing but now that you mention it they are potty mouths

i just thought bringing the whole "con" thing into a fantasy setting was pretty fun....it's a "beach" type book IMO not classic

is the sequel (Red Sails over Red Seas i think?) worth it?

cuz i liked this but at the same time i don't feel totally compelled to read the next one

i thought that the story in the 2nd lynch book was underdeveloped partic the central con - he throws so much into the mix that the pacing felt off and theres a lot of narrative sleight-of-hand required to have things make any kind of sense. also, yeah, the characterization of the romantic interest was... less than amazing.

i guess im the only one that wasnt wowed by rothfluss? its a fun book but its really sloppy imo & veers into embarrassing wish fulfillment territory more than once. also really poorly structured w/ how he choose to break up the 'story' sections.

It's fine - the further adventures of Locke and Jean. I thought it would be more piratical, but it really isn't. Some decent cons within cons within cons, open double agents, etc. Again, good plot, limp characters, no real advancement of an overall arc.

I don't think I'll bother with the series as it goes on - I'll just read Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for the umpteenh time. I love those two so much as characters that I don't care what the plot is.

also im a little ashamed to admit this but ive ended up really enjoying adrian tchaikovsky's insect ppl series & his us publisher is almost caught up i think. theyre even slighter & more script-like than lynch but im sucker for interesting & original world-building.

xpost to EZ

hmm...yeah maybe i'm done w/lynch then...some of the **SPOILERS*** main character deaths bummed me out, like he was trying to be all george rr martin "YOU DIDNT THINK I WOULD GO THERE BUT I DID" at the expense of the sorta fun "band of brothers" thing they had going, which to me was much more fun and light and entertaining (and what he's actually good at) than the "serious" plot twists

xpost Lamp I have not heard of those-- are they coming out here from a major publisher?

Yeah m@tt, I don't like that Lynch's idea of great plot twist is basically torture porn. Doesn't fit the tone - part of that faux-edgy thing, I guess.

Lamp, more details? Like Jon, those are completely foreign to me.

heres the dudes website. his us publisher is pyr who also put out joe abercrombie's stuff in north america. in his world humans evolved in a paleozoic-style environment and various tribes took as their totem animals the giant insects that populated their environment. the tribes with insect totems prospered and began to evolve characteristics of their totems - ants possessed a hivemind, spiders could climb sheer surfaces, beetles extraordinary endurance, wasps have stings, flies wings - the variety and ingenuity he brings to this is def the best thing about the series.

central to the series are two conflicts: one is btw the wasps & all the other races & the second is btw races that are technologically apt and those that practice magic. the latter is p interesting and @goole def helps the series avoid a lot of generic high fantasy tropes. its not really subtle but he does have some thoughtful stuff to say about the cost and the nature of technological progress, how that relates to political freedom, 'craft' & identity. the conflict with the wasps is really generic fantasy adventure meets spy novel stuff but its so fast paced u dont really realize how tired it is until its over. the characters are very thin and the prose is bare bones but again, the world is well realized and detailed. theyre a fun, quick read imo

I'm pretty intrigued by that new Mieville; if anyone's read it, pls to discuss.

Have Locke Lamora on the shelf but right now I'm about 100 pgs into Rothfuss. Really great so far.

― Yes! Yes! Hammerheads! (Jon Lewis), Thursday, June 3, 2010 2:24 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

liked the mieville a lot. sort of his style + borges + umberto eco + raymond chandler. really cool concept and he plays with the ideas in a fun way.

Oh noooooo Lamp that insect-totem world-building thing totally pre-empts one of my (unstarted) story ideas! Fuck! Well that's one less to feel guilty about, I guess. And I think I will read those, it sounds like a Jack Vance kinda trip (tho I guess without the prose magic).

just started Sanderson's Warbreaker; dude is pretty fucking inventive with his magic

so the republic of thieves is now being released in 2011? pretty sure i will have lost interest entirely by then

Lots of stuff I didn't clock before in this thread:

read the new joe abercrombie book "best served cold"

This is ours and there are a few copies floating around on shelves right now!! It's pretty awesome. I never read The First Law trilogy, but will have to order or find it now.

it does one or two things similar to that 'orcs' abomination but, like, with a point to them.

So glad I'm not the only one whose reaction to this series is "GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME EWWW" although the cover design and packaging are A++++ which is really too bad.

You guys not to be a company shill but the other thing I can't believe no one has talked about is the Engineer Trilogy by K.J. Parker. I don't know anything about her other work, mostly because my employer did not publish it, but I simply <3 the Engineer plotline and characters and the way things progress.

Devices and Desires
Evil for Evil
The Escapement

No magic, only science. And a total lack of any pretension to characters who talk like romance novels or fakey courtiers or whatever. This is all modern-feeling, all the time -- the best thing after the plotting is the character sensibility.

about a third of the way through the first Black Company book, this is fucking great

^ must get these, book four of malazan dragged a bit and not sure about launching into the next 8 or w/e

Black Company is pretty awesome. First trilogy kicks butt; second set of stories I wasn't enjoying as much so took a break.

FYI KJ Parker is apparently a pseudonym for another (well-known?) author and I haven't put much effort into finding out who.

tell me more about the engineer thing laurel!

xpost

never read 'her' novels, but since I was curious about the pseudonym, reading a couple of other forums, people seem to reckon KJ Parker is actually Tom Holt.

I'm not good at round up a story into a soundbite, slocki, so I apologize for what you're about to read. There's this society that has invented a lot of stuff but the designs are so rigidly codified that no one is allowed to deviate or reinvent them. There are approved guild designs for everything from music boxes to war machines, and everyone in the known world pays $$$ for their goods because of their expertise. One of the engineers from this city makes a mechanical doll out of spec for his daughter, and is somehow revealed/caught by authorities, and escapes to another city and begins to assemble the pieces and move the levers in people in order to (eventually) get his family back.

He thinks a lot about how people are like machines, where you put pressure, where you harden the steel, how you get a result and in which direction. And he basically starts a war on purpose but then a million other things happen but the tone of all the books stays so cool and collected. If this book were a teenager, it would be the sort that shrugs its novelistic shoulders when monsters eat the rest of the graduating class, instead of having hysterics. But it doesn't do this because it doesn't CARE, it's just the chosen perspective.

^^^^
I'm sold.

that synopsis kinda makes me want to reread the Diamond Age for some reason

ok so i read the first one of those. i am unsure about it

there's a bunch of fairly standard complaints which aren't really parker's fault - i mean, if i'm in a mood that stuff like 'there is no linguistic rationale for these names' bothers me i shouldn't reading this stuff - related stuff w/r/t speech patterns etc.

my main problem is how - for a book which keeps insisting on its HIGH THEMATIC HOOZIT about people and machinery - the plotting seems terribly inconvincing. i mean the middle 250 pages where nothing is happening is probably the most compelling bit?? i dunno. when THINGS START FALLING INTO PLACE it's kind of impossible not to go 'okay that would not work. nor would that.'

I don't know, I'm really enjoying them - finished the first during the weekend and started the second. But then, I'm an engineer.

Anyone read the 100,000 Kingdoms? Just starting it, and wondering if I'm wasting my time...

i mean i'm probably going to buy the second one tomorrow

I'm curious about the things you thought wouldn't work. I do think the character Jarnac was lifted straight from Brian Blessed's Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon, but I sort of love that.

mm. most everything you learn about (character x)'s plan after (character y)'s arrest rings false to me; the scene straight after, where (character z) is bemoaning in what a lame way (character q) is acting is particularly bad, because i did not feel at all convinced that the ways that characters q, z, and y were acting made any sense, other than due to authorial dictat

lol @ general form

i meant to get those books but i never find them in stores so i havent

Ah, I thought you meant mechanical things :) Agreed. I also thought the shift from moaning-about teen to full-charge total-command man for (character v) was weird.

ok so all the people randomly mentioning SULPHUR and NITRE and CHARCOAL, is this going where i think it is

today I was thinking that what I really want to read is basically just an rpg rulebook, only with a 250+ page epilogue of actual characters going through an adventure in the system, possibly including their die rolls, hp totals etc? Or failing that something very close? Can anyone think of something like that?

I read the first of the KJ Parker trilogies many years ago - I remember thinking the first book was awesome, but that the second and third didn't quite live up to it. I did enjoy the idea of having a 'scientific' fantasy world, and the books were well written.

I'm sure there are Magic the Gathering books where the characters have duels which are the equivalent of playing a game of cards if thats the kind of thing you mean - I'm also fairly sure that they would be dreadful.

play videogames instead imo

(this hypothetical book would have lots of detailed maps obviously)

(there are various 8-page chunks of what-I-want in the 1st and 2nd ed. AD&D Dungeon Masters Guides fwiw)

(a lot of things I really like in grown up writing e.g. Alain Robbe-Grillet basically come from reading those over and over again)

ok so all the people randomly mentioning SULPHUR and NITRE and CHARCOAL, is this going where i think it is

I know, right? Plus so much more of the implausible.

I remember thinking the first book was awesome, but that the second and third didn't quite live up to it.

This second book has gotten agonizing, honestly.

i think he meant the second of her/his other trilogy. also hey i called that one ~

a lot of the implausible stuff is oddly gratuitous and seems like it's never going to have any real effect on the plot. well, except that every time someone gets lost they end up near the same pub

mean, if i'm in a mood that stuff like 'there is no linguistic rationale for these names' bothers me i shouldn't reading this stuff

on the other hand, having a race called 'the mezentines' and an unrelated character from a different culture called 'mezentius' is really something an editor should have caught, i think

overall i would say i did not like these very much

okay on book 3 of The Black Company, this series rocks balls

Damn. Now I feel like I led everyone down the primrose path. I think my standards for a good read truly just aren't very high -- I devoured all three volumes.

Maybe I skip over more than I think so that I just get out of it what I'm looking to get out of it. I don't really know. I'm a super lazy reader, though.

haha i've just been in a bad mood all week, don't worry about it

there were points where it was pretty compelling stuff! it just kind of pushed my buttons in various places

Anyone read the 100,000 Kingdoms? Anyone?

Yes. I did. It was a slow start, and I kind of wondered why I should care, but it got to me by the end. Don't remember anything about the writing except that it didn't impress, it was really the plotting that I cared about. Maybe I'm undervaluing the writing, I don't know. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT'S TRUE ANYMORE

thomp: I wasn't so much worried about you as about Jaq -- if she said it was agonizing, my world must have gone crazy without my noticing.

Only the 2nd one! I'm enjoying the 3rd one. There was a lot of obvious "setting up" in the second one, but now the final one can take advantage of all that.

what should i take to the cottage next weekend

Have you read the Black Company books? They're fucking choice.

^ not read but everything i hear here and otherwheres suggests this

currently enjoying gaiman's american gods v v much btw

Seconding Dan - Black Company is great vacation reading.

The only person I know who didn't like the Black Company books is a friend who thinks that Jacqueline Carey is, without question, the absolute best fantasy writer on the scene today. The Carey book I read was really well-written literal torture porn with a smattering of politics thrown in as an afterthought.

I am not trusting this dude's judgment so much these days.

cool i'll peep em!

tho locke lamora is also great light reading

would u compare 'black company' to anything in partics

It is the primary influence on the Malazan books, but is more straightforward. It's the first successful series to focus on gritty, semi-realistic, troop level warfare in a fantasy setting - it's not high fantasy epic heroism ala Tolkien.

never heard of the malazan books... what that

but that's cool, one thing i really dig abotu the song of ice and fire books is the lack of a debt to tolkien

Malazan books are the Steven Erikson epic; the first one is almost a Black Company pastiche, but the 2nd through 5th are pretty amazing. After that, his success meant he didn't have to edit and so they become a bit much to slog through. I haven't read the 9th one yet; it's half the conclusion so I'm waiting to plow straight through 'em.

The Black Company books are a closer to the pulp end of things than to Song of Ice and Fire, but everyone I know likes them both.

s1ocki you looked at the farseer trilogy by robin hobb? not universally loved but certainly worth a look imo.

no whats the deal

just a different kind of voice, not very typical in style/outcome for characters.

discussed above if you search.

also, other recommendations from lamp c&p'd from above

f you liked Bakker there are a number of newer authors doing interesting, relatively different things in fantasy right now including Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Patrick Rothfuss and Richard Morgan. Of those four I've liked Lynch's novels the best; they're light, sure but excellently paced with suprisingly well-drawn characters. Abercrombie's stuff is much more overtly political but his world isn't as deep or considered as I'd have liked. Rothfuss and Morgan's series are worth a look but also really new.

if you want easy-to-read fun books, I recommend Jim Butcher's totally trashy, occasionally hilarious Harry Dresden books

are they like harry potter... in dresden?

they are detective noir novels set in Chicago where the detective is a wizard and the cases he investigates all involve supernatural criminals, whether they be other wizards, werewolves, vampires, demons, fallen angels, fairies, etc.

so no :(

dresden files syfy tv show is on hulu. no idea about the quality or how it compares.

I read War for the Oaks and it was great. Is most of Bull's stuff pretty good?

totally trashy, occasionally hilarious Harry Dresden books

I just picked up the first 2 of these - sounds like perfect summer reading.

Has anyone else read Joe Hill's Horns? I enjoyed it - guy has a seriously hard night of drinking, does some awful stuff, wakes up to find he has sprouted horns and is turning into the devil, etc.

ok u guys i got the first cook omnibus

got a 5hour train ride and a weekend at teh lake coming up !

read 1.5 books of black company (1/2 of omnibus)

good times imo

Yay! Glad you like.

how long is this whole saga anyway?

I think 10 books? I haven't finished them yet - I needed a break after 6.

I tried to get into black company, but found it grim to the point of being hilarious. that's bad, right?

Really? I didn't find it grim at all. Not high fantasy with elves tra-la-laing in Rivendell, but it's not an Ian McEwan novel or something.

maybe grim isn't the right word. just... overly serious, hyper-masculine, and bleak to a degree that there wasn't anything grab onto. I didn't get very far before quitting for another book I wanted to read more, but I haven't given up on it yet.

heh see i think that sounds great

Recently started Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn saga. Nearly finished the first book, it is a bit meh, tbh. I was hoping for a bit more. It is all plot, very little interesting world-building.

Waterstones are having an all paperbacks 3 for 2 at the moment, so I picked up the first book in the Engineer Trilogy, recommended above, and also the first book in Joe Abercrombie's First Law series. That's my summer reading sorted!

ok so the way the black company omnibi are packaged is just MADDENING. nowhere does it say what books they contain. i mean, it says the names, but they're not numbered. and if you look at them, you end up reading all this plot. why not put BIG FUCKING NUMBERS ON THEM

does anyone know the order of the three-book omnibi???

oh yeah someone please number those books it stopped me buying any the last time i was in borders tbh

like why would u NOT

make people buy them AS SOON AS THEY COME OUT it's the marketing boys again

First:
The Chronicles of The Black Company (collects The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose)

Second:
The Books of the South (collects Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel, and The Silver Spike)

Third:
The Return of The Black Company (collects Bleak Seasons, and She Is The Darkness)

Fourth:
The Many Deaths of The Black Company (collects Water Sleeps, and Soldiers Live)

Thanks man

^ bringing important content imo

thank u

xp and u know it

xtra pretty? thank u!!!

can't deal with this level of whimsy at 3.23am tbh

u called me a totally beautiful human :D :D :D :D

i'm in no position to deny it, i say a lotta things like that at nightclub closin time

itt: ~~~~~MAGIC~~~~~~

read & really enjoyed who fears death by nnedi okorafor which is postapocalyptic scifi more than fantasy altho its not firmly in either camp, really. kinda feel like recommending this is sorta fraught? but w/e its really good

also nice 2 see that ppl are enjoying the black co. novels

i just finished the last one of the omnibus - third book in the series! like 10 mins ago

it was really good, shit really amped up.

itc "the silver spike" from the 2nd omnibus brings something like a conclusion to the events of the first trilogy & i think its better to read it before reading the first couple of books of the south.

freal?

yah - it ties up some loose ends for the characters that stay behind in the north & more importantly kinda ruins the flow of the southern books if you read it in the middle of that set.

every fiber of my being resists doing that tho haha

yes but that's how you first learn how to channel iirc

must... resist

SPOILERS

there were a couple of things i must have skimmed over not quite 'gotten' in the last pook. superdog houndstooth or whatever was the spirit raven unleashed in the barrow, right? but who was tracker? what was the deal with their weirdo relationship?

MORE SPOILERS

I think they were both escaped servants of the Dominator that Raven released when his spirit was poking around in the barrow, that took the form of a man & his dog.

^^^ this

basically, Tracker was benign and easily led while Toadkiller Dog was malevolent and just around to fuck shit up enough so the Dominator could break out of his barrow

so tracker was just a guy who would do whatever?

i feel like i missed a chapter or something explaining those two

but man some wicked EPIC shit in that 3rd book... flyin around on their supercarpets dodging whales and shit

Tracker was a guy who basically adapted into his surroundings; he never really thought for himself and whenever TKD was gone, he started lapsing into dormancy unless another forceful personality was around to direct him.

"are they like harry potter... in dresden?"

slocki if you wanna turn this into a movie i can have a script banged out in like 36 hours.

hahah

Tracker was a guy who basically adapted into his surroundings; he never really thought for himself and whenever TKD was gone, he started lapsing into dormancy unless another forceful personality was around to direct him.

― Mayor Hickenlooper and the liberal agenda (HI DERE), Thursday, August 5, 2010 10:08 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

was there ever any backstory introduced?

not really; the entire backstory was "Raven got trapped, these two got out, but since we're telling the story as Croaker finds out about it you meet them before reading about how Raven got trapped"

right.

good series.

yeah, fucking loved those books

way way better than Kushiel's Dart, or as I like to think of it Torture Porn

is that the series set in an alternate europe thats basically just super attractive french ppl boning/getting tortured & boning?

superdog houndstooth or whatever was the spirit raven unleashed in the barrow, right? but who was tracker? what was the deal with their weirdo relationship?

lol this is why you should just read the silver spike next!!!!

i need to get back on those

unfortunate phrasing?

bit of a stretch

i read the silver spike first GOOD CALL LAMPY

invested in the first chronicles of the black company

the investment will pay DIVIDENDS

i am lkn fwd, yes

of BLOOD and PROPHECY

oh dear i've only washed the floor

do u know what's great about this series

it's a sorta-continuing story

but each individual volume feels, if not completely self-contained, definitely its own 'thing'

like, each one has a different setting, totally different supporting characters, vibe, colour, tone

its not like one long slow grind of good vs evil

cool imo

so is the series still going or

Tried reading the Black Company books and just could not get into the writing at all. So many commas!

?? have no memory of there being a preponderance of commas

oh wait were you reading the black commapany books??

The Black Comma Panini Books were a bit overcooked (bad pun intended) for my taste.

xp YES!

No but in all seriousness I found them unreadable.

Has anyone read the Laundry series by Charles Stross - Cthulhu/Spy Fiction mashups, they're fun and somewhat different. And China Mieville's last couple of books have been taking a very different approach to fantasy.

i don't usually read fantasy or scifi but i just started perdido street station and it is totally awesome so far! so if you're like me maybe you should try it

all of his stuff is rad

I'm currently reading Kraken, and it returns the sense of fun that was missing from The City and The City.

i loved city and the city!

waht's kraken?

also, what's crackin'?

Kraken is new Mieville. Half way in it's crackin'.

I think I need to reread City2. Only thing I've read by him that I thought was just okay. Should probably chalk it up to wrong book for my mood at the time and give it another go.

I loved C2C as well, what an elegant and fascinating central idea. Also the most well-written of his books.

I like how he pared down his usual writing style for The City and The City. He's usually so wordy, this was quite elegant.

Interview from him here He sounds like a Geography teacher, very surprising... I'm not sure whether I was expecting frenzied Marxist philosophising or ominous Latin chanting from him, but well...

if you want to hear him in political mode, some of his talks from the british SWP's marxism conference are linked here: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=46905102128&topic=6633

er... well the first two are there, the others are dead. i enjoyed blockbusters and boy wizards

While we are posting China Mieville audio, here is him talking to Ursula Le Guin for Radio 4 last year (Margaret Atwood pops up too):
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/MP3s/ChinaMievilleInterviewsUKL-BBC-200904.mp3

(found this a couple of days ago while googling things found in links from the slash thread which turned into a gender-and-science-fiction thread)

who fears death by nnedi okorafor

just wanted to rec this again partic 4 hi dere & laurel

i did not like kraken very much, at all.

(btw HI DERE, these Harry Dresden books are perfect brain candy. Thanks for that.)

Blerrrhghgh I just finished Book 1 of the new Brent Weeks trilogy, BLACK PRISM, and of course it's rehashy fantasy stuff and in the beginning I was like SRSLY I HAVE TO SLOG THROUGH MAGIC THAT'S DONE WITH COLORS? WHAT IS THIS, MY LITTLE CRYSTAL GLOW PONY? but I closed the back cover and damnit I wanted the next one.

Also clear plot point rip-off from Iain Banks, I wd say, and revealed too early to have the impact it might. Or maybe I'm under-estimating the flow of Books 2 & 3.

i am in closing in on the end of black company series

damn this was dope

i'm finding it hard to get in to, if i'm honest. the writing style is interesting, but the episodic hopping isn't grabbing me. will stick with it.

Bleak Seasons is BEYOND DOPE

BEYOND DOPE sounds like a stoner planet fantasy

ya

i really love how self-contained each book is, while following a larger narrative arc. i think i said that upthread

Dreams of Steel was also BEYOND DOPE

like, the ending of that book was just so perfectly executed

Cook's narrative style is pretty much full-on genius

love he keeps switching POV too

he really is a pretty damn good writer

none of the characters appear to be the messiah yet, which is troubling me.

dan, i've finished book 5 of the malazan set, has it peaked yet? enjoyed it so for.

i just finished the first one. i like how it ends on a note of total chaos and uncertainty and generally speaking i love how they get from place to place and a lot of epic battles are just hinted at or tossed away, stuff like "we moved into that last town and killed them all and anyway, here we are now at this next place."

This is the first series of books I've read since probably Erikson where I've felt that the author was challenging me rather than wrapping me in a comfortable blanket AND I was enjoying the challenge; probably due to the decided lack of backstory exposition common to both of them.

dan, i've finished book 5 of the malazan set, has it peaked yet? enjoyed it so for.

lol speak of the devil! Yeah, it's kind of peaked; I still haven't finished book 8 due to Erikson fatigue yet but I understand book 9 is better.

generally speaking i love how they get from place to place and a lot of epic battles are just hinted at or tossed away, stuff like "we moved into that last town and killed them all and anyway, here we are now at this next place."

Is the first book the one with the passage where he says "I soft-soap a lot of what happens post-battle; here's a little taste of what really goes on"? And then he ends with "and I'm still kind of glossing over shit"? Because that was WAU

one of the most impressive things about the black co. series as a whole is that every new narrator develops their own distinctive voice while still managing to maintain a consistent tone and style throughout. also he has a great eye for whats interesting and important & manages to tell these p sweeping stories w/real economy

havent really read much fantasy stuff lately cuz im mostly hyped for the new wot book but im going to keep mentioning who fears death itt until someone else reads it

o ya totally xp

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Fears-Death-Nnedi-Okorafor/dp/075640617X

This one? It looks intersting!

one of the most impressive things about the black co. series as a whole is that every new narrator develops their own distinctive voice while still managing to maintain a consistent tone and style throughout. also he has a great eye for whats interesting and important & manages to tell these p sweeping stories w/real economy

havent really read much fantasy stuff lately cuz im mostly hyped for the new wot book but im going to keep mentioning who fears death itt until someone else reads it

― Lamp, Thursday, October 14, 2010 11:12 AM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

ya i agree with this. and not only every narrator, but each book has such a distinct flavour.

got black company to get through and by that stage hopefully wheel of time new release, so might not get vol. 6 until the dust settles on all that.

darraghmac -

I think you've reached the peak in the Malazan series. The ideas and plot continue to be decent, and a few great characters come to the for, but there is a complete lack of editing as it goes on. So the ratio of dross to gold rises at a pretty steep rate. Personally, I don't think they fall off as precipitously as the Wheel of Time books; they aren't as good as books 2-5, but they're still solid. Can't say that about 2/3rds Jordan's series.

xposts

dan, i've finished book 5 of the malazan set, has it peaked yet? enjoyed it so for.

youve def finished the best books but 6 has some nice 'big moments' that payoff things from the earlier books w/o too much eye roll inducing prose or sloppiness. i think book 7 was my personal nadir but ive struggled w/ all three

good advice, might well go as far as 6 before delving fully into black company so. cheers

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Fears-Death-Nnedi-Okorafor/dp/075640617X

This one? It looks intersting!

yah - its a little heavy-handed in places but the language is simple & lovely the world was really cool (although i love post-apocalyptic settings)

and not only every narrator, but each book has such a distinct flavour.

haha yeah i remember being a little frustrated w/ the one book that opened w/ completely new characters in a remote city in the north & seemed to be a completely new series for like a 100 pages.

Okay that's it, I'm ordering the first 3 Black Co books from Amazon, used.

I would buy the Okorafor too but the cheapest used copy is $10 and I only have $11 in my bank account. :/

I know there was talk about them earlier in the thread, but I just started the first Harry Dresden novel on the recommendation of a friend and yeah, this is exactly the kind of trashy, throwaway read I needed right now.

Butcher is kind of a genius in serial storytelling and probably should be writing comic books.

Agreed. I just finished book 11 and feeling sort of panicky that there's only one more left until next April.

getting near the end of the black co books... so epic

Read Yahtzee Croshaw's _Mogworld_ for a quick funny book about a character in a World of Warcraft-type MMORPG who suddenly becomes self-aware. The thing is like 400 pages and I devoured it in a 24 hour period. The writing style is a mix of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and Charlie Brooker.

http://images.darkhorse.com/covers/300/16/16577.jpg

And God Help Me but I've started reading Discworld novels because of it.

no shame in discworld imo, except that the witches suck and they're all the same since he got alzheimers.

The first decade of Discworlds are pretty good.

I always liked the Rinsewind/Twoflower ones best.

them, and vimes/vetinari, who i think are his his best characters.

Nanny Ogg is great, you philistine

we've had this out before iirc, and while i've alway granted you maskerade, i see now that i've been too easy on you

I never got on with the witches myself.

Just remembered, I really liked the Death books. Mort might be my favourite Pratchett.

small gods for me, favourite death one is probably.... the first one with susan,- soul music, i think?

Fuck yeah, Small Gods was excellent.

Small Gods is his best book, period. The first Tiffany Aching book, Feet of Clay, Maskerade and Moving Pictures are the runners-up.

just finished michael swanwick's iron dragon's daughter. great writing, and a refreshing indifference to mainstream structural tropes: for instance, he offers a thieving slut of a protagonist, and seems to scorn hyper-expository world building. he takes it all too far though and fucks the plot up because of it. it's like he wanted to pull a flann o'brien or donald barthelme and write a daring episodic meta-fairy tale while still appealing to less demanding readers. the whole 2001-with-a-dragon ending is a complete mess. but anyways, that's not a total diss -- like i said, great writing, and it sort of reads like a bridge between steampunk and the more recent "new weird" developments. i'm also working on kate eliot's way more conventional king's dragon, and trying out storm constantine (sea dragon heir) for the first time. any insights, anyone?

Even so, I recommend you guys check out _Mogworld_, just to see what you think.

The two Discworld books i've finished so far are _Men at Arms_ and _Small Gods_

pyramids next 4u imo

also Moving Pictures, Mort and The Colour of Magic

and Guards! Guards!

moving pictures, yeah. and i liked jingo v much

I didn't like Jingo or The Last Continent all that much

im a sucker for vetinari/vimes as stated.

got a copy of the fifth elephant signed for my brothers birthday once, he signed it 'have a happy big brother'. kinda sad but mostly lol.

I've got a signed copy of Interesting Times snagged for me by one of my college roommates; it's probably the most sentimental book I own.

for me that accolade goes to the copy of madonna's 'sex' my gran left to me ;_; miss ya til i'm with ya gran

finished BC

man

that was a GOOD recommendation guys

Black Company not on US Kindle store (but IS on the UK store). Grrrr.

move to the UK

After tomorrow, that may not be a bad idea...

:(

I fin the White Rose trilogy, umm...it was all bound into one book so I forget the individual volumes. Tx for reminding me to order next bind-up! Very, very good. It has everything everyone likes about military fantasy and none of the prattish annoying stuff.

dude! it keeps getting better. takes some totally unexpected twists and turns. good stuff.

but take lamp's advice and read "the silver spike" (third one in the next omnibus) next. it's actually a stand-alone that continues straight off from book #3. makes more sense to read it first.

eh, I read them in the published order and didn't have any problems

that's not what i heard

lol hi dere missed the entire point, lol

Are any of the Discworld games any good? The listed cast for the first one:

Voice actors

Eric Idle - Rincewind
Rob Brydon - various
Jon Pertwee - various
Kate Robbins - various
Tony Robinson - various

Terry Pratchett has a cameo appearance in the crowd scene (next to Dibbler) at the end of the game.

makes it seem like it would be worth a try, especially after the ScummVM guys have updated the engine.

They're good, but they're insanely hard, even by point-n-click adventure standards.

Oh that's no problem then. I survived and/or cheated my way thru most of Gabriel Knight 3, so it shouldn't be an issue with this one then. I wonder how difficult it is to find.

And whaddayaknow, entire thing's on YT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a_6v8HM9cA

I think I've got both Discworld 1 and 2 for the playstation in a box somewhere. From what I remember not only were they insanely hard, but playing it without a playstation mouse was a nightmare of frustration...

I should say that I plan on burying my head inna sand from following any sort of american political news for the next....oh, let's say, two months plus or so until I get the actual day-to-day existence stabilized. Lotsa Discworld and Fallout: New Vegas shall fill its stead. And cheap beer.

In my life of gaming I have had two games with the same dragon-related puzzle, and both relied on such pixel-perfect pressing of "use item" before the dragon toasted you that I never managed either and decided I must just be stuck and gave up on the games, only to find much later I was right about the puzzle and they were just stupid hard.

Discworld is one. (The other was Riddler's Den, a not particularly good budget game for the ZX Spectrum.)

has anyone read ian mcdonald's alternate earth stuff? i have 'the dervish house' sitting here & just not at all tempted.

Finished Lev Grossman's The Magicians a couple of nights ago. Interesting, sort of Harry Potter meets The Secret History, falls apart at the end

ohhhh man 'the magicians'

parasitic trash written by a borderline illiterate praised for 'transcending the genre' by ppl who despise it...

not to be parochial but damn it was annoying

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gTvUbsILL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

march 1. p psyched.

stopped reading those when new WOT came out, must kick on from book 5

I'm getting ready to start book 9 so I'll be ready when 10 drops. I didn't want to read it and then wait, since in the forward Erikson said they're one book that got too long.

so: there was some talk on the best books of the 00s poll results thread about doing another write-in poll specifically for spec fiction. i think there are enough posters on ilx btw the different subgenres to make a p interesting poll but it depends on how many ppl wld be willing to actually vote.

i dont have any particular guidelines in mind although i'm tempted to try to limit this to postwar stuff just to avoid a boring LoTR #1 scenario. other ideas:

- any series that was originally concieved as a such will be voted on as a single book
- attempt to limit it to works that were 1st received as 'genre titles'
- collections w/ multiple authors allowed

Great idea imo - would really like this.

I'd be really up for this also.

any series that was originally concieved as a such will be voted on as a single book

This prob should not be the case for series of novels set in the same world and by the same author, but each featuring different characters and central plots IMO (eg Hainish cycle, Bas Lag, The Culture etc).

certainly - im kind of iffy on this as a rule tbh i can see arguments pro & con - but my general guiding principal wld be how the author conceived the work i.e. glenn cooke's black co. novels all get lumped together but ian esslemont's malazan books dont get incl. in the 'books of the fallen' series.

I'm not that a refular a poster, but I would vote.

*regular

eaw you should post more!

I think in most cases it'd be pretty clear - Book of the New Sun is one book, LOTR is one book, Culture novels aren't - tricky middle ground is something like Ice & Fire or the Amber series.

How about short stories?

Amber is two books - Corwin Cycle and Merlin Cycle.

Would comic books count in this poll? A lot of my favourite speculative fiction is in comics.

As I think I implied on the other thread, I'd be in.

postwar won't exclude lotr, btw. I'm not against a cut-off point & this:

attempt to limit it to works that were 1st received as 'genre titles'

Seems like a good idea. But - feels like a shame to exclude stuff like Wells, David Lindsay, Dunsany, Olaf Stapledon etc etc etc if they could get votes, but they might just be a fringe of the fringe thing.

Are we not doing nominations?

Perhaps if we had nominations, then we could resolve some of these issues before people start making their lists?

I assume noms, figured this was just knocking about some first broad rules before noms kick off.

Ah gotcha...

Well then let people nominate away and then we can argue if things should be excluded or separated with Lamp having the final decision.

Imo stuff that has been explicitly marketed as Book 1, Book 2 etc should count as one thing; stuff that is part of a "cycle" or shared universe should be voted for separately. Or is that too simplistic?

Also I don't know how complete it is or if it is too broad, but would it be possible to use the Internet Speculative Fiction Database http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi to decide "Is it SF?" tiebreakers?

That database seems to include some comic authors as well. I'm not a massive fan of allowing comics I have to say, just because there is a danger that the poll would be swamped with comics and I'm personally interested in finding out about SF novels.

i would not vote because i think polls are dumb

but i would have written conversations about books in this thread!

I'm not a massive fan of allowing comics I have to say, just because there is a danger that the poll would be swamped with comics and I'm personally interested in finding out about SF novels.

Would probably agree with this. It would hard to draw a clear line between speculative fiction and superhero stuff.

Polls are whatever we bring to them. They can be handy springboards to discussion.

ps, I would vote

i would vote too.

i don't think i've read enough spec fiction that i still like enough to be able to vote in a poll, but i would be excited for the results, since i'm sure there's lots of 'classics' i missed out on in my youth while i was too busy reading discworld and george rr martin

It seems to me that ILX prefers fantasy to harder SF, I wonder if that would come through in the results.

i'm way more into sci-fi + horror, hardly any fantasy. would be so up for this.

Yeah I'm more of a science fiction guy - I used to read a lot of fantasy when I was a teenager and only started re-engaging with the genre about a year ago.

I'm similar, was purely about the SF until the New Weird authors started appearing. Read LOTR and Dragonlance and stuff as a kid, of course.

I don't why I got interested in fantasy again tbh. I just had a sudden hankering for enormous never-ending escapist tales and that happily coincided with the emergence of a lot of decent to excellent new(ish) fantasy writers (China Mieville, Joe Abercrombie, KJ Parker, Scott Lynch, Brandon Sanderson etc)

i wouldnt vote in this but i would read the results and decide i was gonna read stuff off it but in the end prolly never really get round to it and feel crappy abt the whole thing

I'd vote. My SciFi Book Club membership requires that I participate.

postwar won't exclude lotr, btw. I'm not against a cut-off point

haha sorry in my head "postwar" means after 1960. my main intent was just to a) include more contemporary works and b) avoid a boring for all of us situation where consensus classics fill the top of the list.

i guess starting a nomination thread is the best way to weed things out but im happy to cast as wide a net as possible - my only real concern is avoiding situations where ppl vote for like 'cloud atlas' or '100 years of solitude' because they have some genre elements. ive seen lists w/ 'literary' novels mixed in they always feel silly & unsure of themselves.

I was wondering about David Mitchell actually, guess he's out.

(I'm not mad about excluding LOTR fwiw - I don't think it's at all guaranteed that it'd win, and it'd feel less of a list without it somehow.)

What I would like to vote for, and which might not be allowed, is RPG sourcebooks.

Might vote, might just turn up on the nomination thread annoying the hell out of everyone with questions like "Vonnegut: y/n" and not vote, would definitely read the results.

Comics didn't swamp the 00s book poll and I'd be interested to know about more SFish graphic novels, but yeah, personally I wouldn't want to see e.g. X-Men in the results, so if excluding comics is the way to avoid that, then go ahead.

I'm not a massive fan of allowing comics I have to say, just because there is a danger that the poll would be swamped with comics and I'm personally interested in finding out about SF novels.

Would probably agree with this. It would hard to draw a clear line between speculative fiction and superhero stuff.

A lot of superhero comics are speculative fiction, can't see any reason why they wouldn't count as such. Basically, I think only the kind of down-to-earth superhero comics where a non-superpowered costumed hero fights crime without any sci-fi technology would not count as speculative fiction. And talking of X-Men, they've had a lot stories that clearly belong to various spec fiction genres: space opera, dystopia, Alien style sci-fi horror, alternate history, etc. I don't see any good reason why you shouldn't be able vote for these, though I doubt they'd make it very high on the list.

One good way to include comics would be to say you can only nominate finite works. I.e. you can't nominate "X-Men" or "Superman" as an ongoing series, but you can nominate specific Superman story arcs or graphic novels.

A lot of superhero comics are speculative fiction

If we wanted to be tedious though, I'm sure all fiction could be re-defined as speculative.

I just think superhero comics have their own genre expectations, concerns, themes, conventions, critical discourse etc that are largely distinct from those of SF novels. I don't think it is useful to lump them all in together, otherwise why not put sci-fi film and television into the mix?

Basically, Comics are their own thing and yes, I know Watchmen managed to win the Hugo award or whatever, but I think it would be boring and counter-productive to try and shine a light on a seldomed polled genre of literature and end up getting Watchmen or Sandman or something winning it, when I'm sure there have been plenty of polls on I Love Comics if you are interested in that sort of thing.

cosign