/sffg/ - Science Fiction & Fantasy General

>lol what?
Lurk moar faggot

J.K Rowling month when?

When hell freezes over. Sorry Joanne

>read first story ever written by a writer
>it's a mess with too much shit happening and none of it fleshed out
>don't bother reading anything else from this writer
>see positive review for one of his stories from reviewer who also said the writer's first story was not very good
>decide to check this positively-reviewed story out
>it's good
Reminder not to judge writers too harshly when they first start writing.

I just read Hyperion and really loved it, but are the sequels any gud?

Hey guys, what was the name of that one fantasy series where invariably a poor girls fucks some sort of nonhuman entity and dies

any good sff that has anal sex in it? male/female only, no gay shit please.

/ss/ = short for straight shota, lurk moar

I bring to you a new literary tool that will help persons looking for authors that are similar to what they read.
I nominate we put it in the OP so we have less people asking "what book is like gene wolfe, etc".
literature-map.com/

Damn. I put in E William Brown and got a bunch of people I read before, and some I never heard of. Seeing as I liked a few of the ones I read I will give the others a try.

i was expecting this to suck but it seems surprisingly accurate

Any recs for sci-fi/fant that feels similar to Neurosis (band) strength and wisdom through pain, howling against the void, lost in forests and darkness creeping?

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...

Hmmm...
Also this site has an Amazon certificate, so it probably just uses the amazon recommendation algorithm.

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>dante == pic
???

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>Trump, Clinton, Hitler, Marx, Disney, Evola, etc all share the same ideology
Checks out. Also thanks. I can now spot pol threads easier, even if they use obscure authors.

I'm asking for books dingus

Books for each of these possible futures? Or whatever is available. Like D4 is probably just that paperclip optimizer blogpost.

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C3 could be River of Gods by Ian McDonald

D2 - Synners by Pat Cadigan

see
It's based on Amazon's recommendation algorithm, which checks out for similar search interests. These authors are usually in "classic" lines like Wordsworth Classics or Everyman's Library, which are recommended if you check for Dante's Inferno.

I just finished this book. I really enjoyed the ideas and concepts it presented but the narrative was so difficult to follow. Way too many characters and I still don't know how they defeated the virus at the end.

We don't like you Yea Forumstants here. Shoo.

I would love an explanation of each of these.
Prospective futures get me hard.

D3 at least is SimCity Magnasanti
youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU
The music is a little bit cheesy but the prospect of ultimate population density is pretty scary.

Ok, never read either but those look close. Which is good, since I really had no idea on C3.

Makes me wonder if simcity had a happiness measure. Don't forget to add that to the AI! Any books on it?

I believe Approval is the simcity measure.

A1: Probably humanity fucks itself up and we go back to normal nature without sentient beings anywhere
A2: Matrix without the matrix or robots. The atmosphere outside might be too toxic and we have to live underground to survive
A3: Self explanatory. Perhaps we use something like the Reapers from Mass Effect to reset us once we advance too much back into the original start date. Or perhaps we use a secret society to manipulate the technological advancement so it never gets to A.I. singularity.
A4: Ted Kaczynski dream world. We go back to tribal societies while killing a lot of the world population and rejecting any kind of technology, making sure that we never reach the oblivious state of industrial societies.
B1: Oligarchical elite rule the world that is nothing but a hedonistic addicted population.
B2: No idea
B3: Robots are the underclass and do everything while every human a king.
B4: Alex Jones's worldview. Except, it's true!
C1: Neon Genesis Evangelion ending
C2: Starship Troopers.
C3: I don't want to talk about that one
C4: Xenofeminism.
D1: Kinda like Evangelion
D2: Key point: The organic body must be alive and sustained, so it can operate in the virtual world.
D3: In case we never manage to solve population growth.
D4: Possibly Von Neumann machines, going on a slaughter on planets while following a single command... "expand".
This is by no means the objective explanation, this is my personal view on those things that I didn't google a single little bit.

How does this one compare to Latro in the Mist? How are the Egyptian gods portrayed?

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The quality of the book is on par with the first two, however another volume was obviously intended so if you read it you will be left with an unfinished story.

Thanks for the explanation user

>What do you think?
Sounds like a fun idea, go for it.

B2 is medieval-techno Kingdoms scattered over a post apocalyptic world no longer recognizable as earth.
Might include giant insects, dense forests alternated by toxic wastelands, and sword and axe and primitive rifle boarding from plane to plane, some powered by ancient engine technology, others by sails, patchwork or other "primitive" means.

See Valley of the wind

And yes, its the most comfy option.

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B3 is obviously The Culture.

Finished reading Descendant of the Crane and loved it, currently halfway through A Gathering of Shadows.
Any recommendations on what to read next? Also what do anons think of Six of Crows and The Lies of Locke Lamora?

B2 might be related to Moldbug's "Patchwork" idea.
B3 seemed to me like Star Trek:TNG. The Culture maybe better though.
B4 (((metaphorical vampires))) apparently
C2 or the human part of warhammer40k?
C4 is that artificial wombs replace motherhood?
D1 perhaps Asimov's Galaxia but synthetic intelligence is allowed.
D4 totally paperclip optimizer, my fåm.

Trying to go through the entire selected fantasy list
>imgoat.com/uploads/0935e4cd59/105363.jpg

I've finished The Gormenghast series, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Once and Future King, and LotR (obviously)
Any suggestions for which I should read next?

>Wizard of Earthsea
All of them or just the first two-three? I felt like the books later on really dropped off in quality.

>(obviously)
It's not obvious if you finish that boring trash.

Which of these does Alex Jones fear?
Which of these does David Icke fear?
Which of these does thejudaism fear?

Just the first three before I decided to move on to something else, might finish the rest some time. The first and third were my favorite but the fourth didn't seem that interesting to me from looking at the synopsis. I really liked the magic system because it doesn't subscribe to the modern idea of over explaining magic until it looses all its mystique and whimsy, but struck a good balance. It had a very nice folk tale feel to it which I think is all too absent from modern fantasy.

If you want something different try Conan or Watership Down.

Anyone ever read the Viriconium books?

Well, I imagine the guy who wrote them did.

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Your question was retarded to begin with, I was merely humoring you.

Alex jones fears a mixture between the virtual mmo and (((vampire))) globalism.

David Icke fears the cocaine capitalism due to its feeding of the "reptillian" energy vampires

Mr. Yahudi fears the ecofascist man-hunters as there is nothing to subvert, no reliance on finance or bureaucracy, no media to peddle and his body is frail and not accustomed to tribal warfare.

Yeah, an opener for discussion regarding a specific series of books on a board about books, in a thread dedicated to a specific genre of books of which that book is a part of, is retarded.
Why don't you go humour a bottle of bleach.

Your question was stupid, should have phrased it better.

>It's a black Perrin episode

I haven't read in a while even though I used to really enjoy it. Recommend me a book that will keep interested someone with a short attention span.

Mein Kampf

Hey Yea Forums I'm trying to get into sci-fi. I don't think I've read any so would like a few series to sink my teeth into.

I finished Starship Troopers yesterday. I had kind of written it off and was only really familiar with the 1997 movie. I can see why people think it's mindless militarism, not least because Heinlein was a soldier, but others claim it's anti-military. What do you guys think? There was also surprisingly little plot, it's very much a philosophy and morality of politics kind of book.

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I will be cold and dead before I read another Mark Lawrence book. Fuck Prince of Thorns, what a shit book.

heinlein is mad as fuck because it was meant to be anti military but all the readers like militaristic stance all the citizens had. the nationalism portrayed by the populace in support of the army was supposed to be a bad thing but people kinda started liking it and somehow started to identify with it.
if heinlein would be alive hed still be assblasted. the movies reinforced the satire angle but that also backfired spectacularly.
in my opinion though the movies are better simply because as you pointed out there is much more actual plot in them.

Do you feel better after posting your cool contrarian opinion on an anonymous website?

Get ready for Woke Tales!

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Why can't we ever have nice things?
And why must other people take them and corrupt them if they become popular?
WHY

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We should make our own online pulp magazine without this bullshit

not happening. the only projects from Yea Forums that ever took of are those that did not require monetary investment.
making a magazine very much requires a lot of effort.
it could be doable if everyone who worked on it was a neet but id doubt they would have the resolve to actually do something productive for other people to enjoy without asking for anything in return.

He said ONLINE which would be way easier: we'd just make Pepe inspired Sword & Sorcery art to sprinkle throughout each issue and stories written by anons about the evil of jews and thots.

>stories written by anons about the evil of jews and thots.
FUND IT

Pol is going to freak
As the tourist are already freaking in this thread

Why would you want a magazine with sexism and homophobia?

What's really retarded about this is he's basically saying that if he were in charge when Weird Tales first originally ran then he never would have published writers like Lovecraft and REH; who were the most popular writers for Weird Tales and almost single-handedly kept that magazine afloat.

because it would start as an underground Yea Forums thing for shit s and giggles. eventually it would catapult itself into the limelight and make people mad.
think about it. a magazine full of antisemitic jokes but competently written. with editorials and pretend interviews of dead authors. there could be an OY VEY column dedicated to writing stories not even the daily stormer would publish. heck there could even be a column comparing the pube hair color and density of popular fantasy women in incredibly elaborate details.

all the assmad that would come from everywhere alone would be worth it.

Why would you want a magazine edited by someone more concerned with who was writing for it than what they were writing?

Why
Why do they feel the need to constantly bring this shit up? Is it some kind of religion to them? Or do they just live off the natural high they get from stroking their egos and blowing their self-righteous mind-loads all over their deranged followers in one massive dogmatic circle-jerk.

Why does everything need to be political?

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I meant a magazine just without sjw bs, not Yea Forums incarnate
but if someone wants to make a Yea Forums literature magazine feel free to do so

Haven't read a book by him in years, but I don't remember Maberry being particularly woke. Did he turn, or is this just boilerplate pandering?

Hes always been a faggot in real life.
That being said. he actually did his best to remove his personal views from his works. So kudos to him for that.

True-to-life depictions of women and gays are today regarded as sexist and homophobic.

he wants that reddit gold

He’s shitting on lovecraft for woke points. That should be enough explanation

Based on interviews I'd wager he's going to kill himself before the third book sees the light of day. He's depressed and overwhelmed by his own creation. He's also a fat lying bastard and I am having a hard time feeling sorry for him. He's so unpleasant, but also obviously struggling with some shit. He's always been a lazy fuck and admits so himself - just see his university track.

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Anyone know a good place to torrent audiobooks? TPB is pretty lacking
inb4 >audiobooks
My commute to work is an hour and I'd rather spend it listening to books than music or the vacuum of silence.

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yes

How about just reprints of the most morally dissonant shit history has to offer. All made into a comic format with the latest /pol/ memes.The more important, well known and liked hero to liberals the better. Everyone on the editorial staff could pretend to be some oppression Olympics gold medalist, creating this journal to catalog all the worst aspects of the white man.

It's ok to study long at university and not being 100% productive all the time. We all have to find our path in life and it isn't straight all the time. Dismissing it as laziness isn't fair.

Generally speaking, do you prefer reading MCs who don't know much at the beginning, goes from weak to strong... Or one who already has some/alot of power and is knowledgeable from the start?

In my opinion it's much harder to write a likeable MC who's competent from the start as opposed to one who grows to competence as the story progresses. MCs who start incompetent and stay incompetent are a crapshoot.

>tfw you wanted to write about a wimpy MC who learns to solve his problems with science
>tfw you ended up writing about a wimpy MC who who learns to solve his problems with friendship, magic and brute force

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>friendship
>magic

was the first thing I thought of, too.

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I didn't realize what words I was stringing together, I regret it

Just saw them in Philly. They still got it.

True. There's something quite disheartening as a pretty normal white guy about seeing the whole "We are looking to hear from a range of underrepresented voices..." bullshit on a magazine's submissions page. Fuck that shit. Earn your place, fucker.

They can do whatever they like, it's their magazine.
If they specifically want to hear from underrepresented voices, that's their choice.
You can still write, but they're giving priority to those who have historically have had little voice in this regard.

Too many haves. You know what I mean.

I'm interested in good writing, so I'm not the intended audience. Luck to 'em I guess.

Ah yes the WOMEN AND NON-WHITES WERE NEVER ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING UNTIL THE LAST 6 MONTHS meme.

You never know, you might like writing coming from someone who isn't a white dude.
Ah yes, the "it's been at least a generation, so everyone should be equal now" meme.

I've read and enjoyed plenty from someone who isn't a white dude. Just not interested in pandering.

>Ah yes, the "it's been at least a generation, so everyone should be equal now" meme.
Do you have proof they're not?

The old story of foreigners declaring that whatever hires had in the past is now theirs, and anyone who might disagree or balk at what is lost is a bigot

Naturally all of these foreigners keep their own “backward” home country which they visit once a year

>caring about this at all

get out

So what's the appeal of this series?

B1 - Snow Crash
D1 - The Quantum Thief
C3 - Lord of Light
B4 - The World we Live in not a book

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Let's make it happen

Ever since I started reading actual, genuine literature I can't stand sci-fi/fantasy shit. And I used to love sci-fi/fantasy.

Bragging about reading it. It makes retards feel smarter for having read it because it's so fucking bloated they feel like they really accomplished something important by finishing it.

No one cares.

Stay mad, pleb/lit/

See

t. incel

>Hey Sadeas is a pretty interesting character with a lot of potential.
>Let's kill him.

>Hey Amaram is an actual ambiguous villain who seems to really believe he's doing the right thing.
>Let's make him into a bitch and kill him.

>Hey this deeply grounded series about men struggling with powers they can't understand and desperately trying to survive is pretty interesting.
>Let's add anime powers.

Fuck you Sanderson.

>Read the first book
>Read the first book again
>read the first book a third time

I still do not understand how magic works in this setting, or who any of these fucking countries are.

Once I too believed that that Branderson wasn't a meme, but after barely finishing book two of Stormlight through of his horrendous female characters just to watch it devolve into anime bullshit with like twenty fucking Naruto Jutsus I just couldn't anymore.

Because we've reached the point of societal decay at which it is transgressive to be right?

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Rothfuss is the living stereotype of the white liberal pseud. All windup and bluster, zero followthrough, and reading his work a few times reveals horrible, HORRIBLE writing habits that were originally concealed by his prose.

Kvothe being the omnicuck was easily the funniest part of NotW, not because it wasn't realistic, but because it read like a /pol/ack wrote it as a joke, but it was dead serious.

>hahaha sure she's had your dick in her mouth but I make her smile! Who's laughing now buddy?

Lovecraft was already shit.
>muh unexplainable horror

>tfw you realize you can spend literal years of your life suffering for your writing, fighting tooth and nail for every plot point, every bit of symbolism, every artistic flourish, and then after years of planning and years of writing and years of trying to get published you finally get accepted and your book will sell a grand total of 300 copies over your entire fucking lifetime
>tfw this is the actual total of the average fucking book
>tfw for your book to be within the top 10,000 you have to sell about 70,000 copies at the barest fucking minimum

Why, yes I am a bitter, resentful person. How did you know?

Are you speaking of the founding of Americlap?

Plenty of words to say "i never read it, don't know".

I've read it and everything I said is true. You can apologize now.

>doesn't ebook publish, then publish paper back after you get a huge following
Kys and stop shitting up the general

>t. never read Lovecraft

>trust me, I'm not the Malazan hater who flips his shit every thread, I read it, I know what I'm saying
What was the saddest thing you remember reading in malazan and what was the funniest?

Nobody in this general except two autists actually read what they criticize. They get wiki and sparknotes and pretend like they know wtf they are saying.

There was no "funniest" because Erikson is shit at humor. And I didn't find anything particularly "sad" about any of it either, but I guess what's her face murdering her sister without knowing it was her sister?

I found it funny when that guy raped the cat and it scratched his eyes out afterwards

It's especially stupid with the LOVECRAFT NEVER DESCRIBED ANYTHING morons. I mean how the fuck do they think we got shit like Cthulhu and pic related?

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I think the idea of "Lovecraft never described anything" is true in a few cases- The Music of Erich Zann, for one. But I think it's also a misinterpretation of the way he would describe things in detail but outside of any context where the reader could intuitively understand them. I think a major weakness of most post-Lovecraft "Cthulhu Mythos" fiction is that the stories lose out on that element of the out-of-context horror because they keep returning to the existing pantheon and taxonomy. Like the entire climax of At the Mountains of Madness would completely fail if you went into the story knowing what a shoggoth is.

>werewolf massacres a family then rapes the teenage daughter to death
Based.

The ending of the Chain of Dogs storyline was soul-crushing. In fact, it was the only legitimately good part of the entire series. Coltaine's Chain of Dogs, written as a book solo with more detail and better pacing, would have been better than the entire Malazan series combined. It's like The Voyage of the Beagle meets Dunkirk.

The random introduction and the equally random defeat of the Jaghut Tyrant had me laughing my ass off because I couldn't believe what I was reading.

I have absolutely nothing against getting rid of racism, sexism and homophobia but as a main selling point? Not very interesting.

Slight correction but Heinlein was a officer in the US Navy in the 1930s and was medically discharged. He wasn't like Harry Harrison and later Vietnam war authors like Haldiman and David Drake, enlisted men who actually "saw the elephant."

I view it, broadly, as being a pro-military and pro-government service tract, almost pseudo-Stalinist stuff about how great the Party members and Red Army soldiers who place the state above their lives are.

That's a interesting appraisal and not exactly one I've seen before, since he wrote the book in response to an early anti-nuclear weapons campaign. IIRC when Rico tells his parents he's joining the military his father tells him it'd be a waste of his time and the recruiters themselves try to get him to do something else.

I think you're partially right though, he'd probably be upset that people have focused entirely on the military aspect and not that a social worker or tax auditor or librarian would be getting the same voting rights as Johnny Rico.

What was sadder, Coltaine at the end or the little wizard boy dying a meaningless death in the river.

>I have absolutely nothing against getting rid of racism, sexism and homophobia

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What a terrible thing to be in a story. Tell me the title of this work so I can avoid it.

>I view it, broadly, as being a pro-military and pro-government service tract

Then you completely miss the point of not only Starship Troopers, but everything Heinlein wrote. Heinlein's books aren't pro anything. All he really did was take a political Ideology, apply a premise, and use that premise to explore the pros and cons of the ideology.
He literally just wrote "How would [ideology] work in a space-faring civilization". The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about Libertarians on the Moon, Starship Troopers is about Intergalactic Greek Democracy, and that other one whose title I can't remember is about Hippy Communes on Mars.
While I doubt he was completely free of bias, for the most part he did a pretty good job of being non judgemental about all of the different ideologies he explored, his works are examination rather than promotion.

Fall of Hyperion is all right. The last two are complete shit.

>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about Libertarians on the Moon

Even as a child I realized that it was quite silly that the Libertarians Commune survived by... stealing power and water and air from a functioning society.

>>What are some revolutions or revolutionaries that you've enjoyed reading about in the sff genre?

Salazar Aaron kind of, though not a true revolutionary. Frankly I thought it was a cop out to avoid giving him a real political or revolutionary motivation and instead make it so personal.

Insilian although once again a case where it seems like a copout, similarly for being too destructive and vengeful. Where did the forward progress, enlightenment elements of revolution go? And why has capital gotten its enemies into a twist by convincing them they don't know what to do?

From top left to bottom right as though reading a book.
>Memory by HP Lovecraft
>Snow Crash
>Titan by John Varley
>Accelerando
>At Winter's End by Robert Silverburg
>Earthsea
>WH40K books obviously
>The Golden Age by John C. Wright
>The Peripheral by William Gibson
>The Culture books
>Lord of Light
>Blame!
>Earth Abides
>I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream
>Friendship is Optimal
>Blindsight

What stories? Link?

Catch 22 is much better

Surely the Kovacs trilogy is in there somewhere...

I've never read it.

It's an interesting setting, worth a read.

Pic related

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I don't even remember the wizard boy, so I guess Coltaine. I'd say the saddest part was the scholar saying goodbye to marine girl who then presumably got horribly brutalized by her captors.

It fails in the titles, but I assure 100% that the spirit is there.

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OK, but why not?

Give me something like cugels saga/eyes of the overworld.
Alternatively, give me something to read that's like the lyonesse trilogy.
please

>in an /sffg/ thread
>interested in good writing
toppest of keks

>Give me something like cugels saga/eyes of the overworld.
A Quest for Simbilis
In Yana, the Touch of Undying
The Incompleat Nift

There we go with the fantasy again.
On top of that horrible chinese cartoon as in OP's post.

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>that horrible chinese cartoon as in OP's post.
If anything, it's an anti Chinese poster ya dummy.

Fucking newfags.

So I can post this if anyone (read Chinese) talks about 3 meme problem and they will disappear from the general?

>in toxic environment
>wears hazmat mask and gloves
>zips suit down to expose skin better to radiation
>female logic

Not really. That used to work for your ordinary bugmen bugging you (heh) in your favorite online game.
It will not work for someone green lighted by the glorious CCP to shitpost on the Internet.

Get a grip nigga.

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I'm reading a series of books whose main common themes are the relationship between faerie and mankind. Now I've finished Lud-in-the-Mist and it has reinforced some of my beliefs concerning the relationship between the "enchanted world" and the world of man, and between paganism and Christianity.

Because whether the author intended as such or not, the end is horrifying. An eldritch abomination, spawned from a dead psychopathic rapist aristocrat returns to the world and uses delusion and murder to spread his influence over a city of law-abiding citizens, turning them into drug addicts, but that's fine because now they make good art.

I read the author later converted to Catholicism but I see no Christianity here to offer refuge and salvation from the predations of faerie. Only law and history, which as the book shows, are as fickle and delusional as the fairies themselves, and can offer no true refuge.

Now on to Little, Big, and then Jonathan Strange.

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What other books have you read? I don't fully agree with you on the ending being horrible, the city just changed. It went from one extreme state to another. I didn't notice many Christian themes in Lud either.

I've already read Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions, Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter and Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies.

All of them have amoral or outright evil (in Pratchett's case) elves. The first two have Christianity (or something similar) as a refuge from them and their world, but Pratchett, being a fedora, couldn't have that, so his characters go straight from the enchanted and dangerous world of elfin paganism to enlightened rationalism.

eriksson adds a few zeroes onto the age of everything so it makes it seem more epic
also, power levels

Isn't Resident Evil another chinkshit IP?

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You're supposed to follow it up with book two, and so on.

I would not say the fae in The King of Elfland's Daughter are evil, or even amoral. The Elfking just don't want to be bothered and do no harm while the humans actively mess with him and in the end destroy his country (since he used all his runes, my interpretation is that Elfland will stand without defense once humanity move on and organized religion become a more dominant force).

Why is the cute girl going to be kill? :(

You caught me

Apparently like 75% of xianxia consists of these absurdly long meandering fanfiction-tier serial stories that are basically badly written Shonen anime in prose form, but people read them, so I'm going to start transcribing my tabletop RPG campaign then making it flow better and putting it online to try and make some money.

Xianxia nothing, people have been making their DnD campaigns into books since the 70s man.

From left to right it's t-t-t-t-t-tism

Yeah, now that I think about it I think I remember hearing that the Drizzt stuff was based on a D&D campaign but with the main character swapped out, and I know Record of Lodoss War was based on published notes from a tabletop RPG campaign.

im not sure I should keep writing /sffg/. my entire motivation is fame and that dream is so wildly unlikely and takes so much effort to put my foot in the door im just asking for defeat and humiliation

If you literally just want fame, find the next hot game on Twitch, find a niche (like how there are people who primarily play Super Mario Maker 2 troll levels), and hope it's something you can actually enjoy so you don't get burnt out.

Then spend time hanging out and chatting in big streams and wait for one of them to feature yours.

Odds are better than becoming a J. K. Rowling or whatever, anyway.

that's not the kind of fame I want user.

the sad part is, I actually like coming up with stories. its just writing I hate, and Im not exactly an orator either

Have you considered learning to draw and making comics?

Or you could write audio dramas and get together a cast to make one. It's like TV but way cheaper.

Not Drizzt, no. It was Elminster. It's literally Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms character and kind of his self-insert.
The whole of Forgotten Realms is based on his D&D campaigns, which he sold to them and then started working for them, too.
Stuff like spell names (Mordenkainen' Sword, Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Transformation etc) are named after the characters of his friends.
Drizzt is sn actual "nee" creation in a way that R.A. Salvatore never played D&D before starting to write for them. Originally it was even supposed to be a completely different, already existing character, a human with a dog, since his only FR-exposure until that point was the first FR-novel (Darkwalker on Moonshae) which he thought was all there was to the FR-setting until he found out that the Moonshaes are just a small chain of islands off the Swordcoast.
Pic related, the bearded man is Greenwood.
>t. It says so in the foreword of the new printing of Darkwalker on Moonshae regarding Drizzt and picked the rest up from wikis.

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Oh, okay. I remembered it was a FR thing; that makes sense. Thanks.

all of those are even more work than writing. dammit, if Im going to devote months or years of work to something I should at least get something for it. call it entitlement if you want, but it's just not worth all this struggling for a reward I have maybe a 1/100000 chance of winning. its like playing the lottery if it took a year to finish scratching the ticket

Then maybe find something you enjoy in itself instead of worrying about fame.

Do you guys often re-read books? I've read Asimov's Foundation around 10 years ago but I only vaguely remember what happened and can't remember the ending.

unfortunately, the need for external validation is a mental illness that never goes away

I don't do that often, and usually wait at least a year before I re-read something. I actually got Foundation last month. Looking forward to reading it

What’s funny about this, is that Robert E. Howard saw himself as progressive for his time, and also a feminist. This editor only dooming himself and the stories he accepts for the magazine to be examined under the same lense that he uses for these 80 year-old stories, in 80 years time. The dumbass thinks he can escape from the idea of “product of the times” by being a product of our times.

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You can reduce it, though, to where having a few people who enjoy what you do and family and friends who are proud of you are enough.

does anyone have any idea how many fantasy novels are published every year?

you mean outside of self-publishing?

according to locus in 2009, the number was about 436. according to forbes in 2018, sales doubled since then so we can cautiously estimate that the number published traditionally doubled as well. that would mean roughly 900 fantasy books are published every year, and presumably 10 of them will see any real success. therefore, the chance of a novel succeeding is about 1%

that's a hopeless chance, but not painfully so. that's a large enough chance for individual skill and perserverence to make a noticible difference

>turning them into drug addicts
Don't forget they are also now a major drug hub to spread to the rest of the world

>evil elves or fairy folk in general
Didn't that start with the rise of Christianity?
If I remember correctly, in the pagan myths the fae were mostly respected, acting as sources of unearthly wisdom.

Sure, all the time

There's something extremely wrong with discriminating against pure entertainment fiction because of your political views.

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It's even worse when you start policing the thread like a commissar on account of your political views.

Howard is also a big part of why Lovecraft chilled out later in life, and near the end of his career even wrote a story with a black family as the protagonists, in which they were portrayed very sympathetically.

Lovecraft and Howard were friends and regardless of some stuff in Conan that might be considered insensitive, Howard thought hating people on the basis of race was horrible.

>writers of all kinds
Pulps were already pretty varied, and even though we may have issues with them when looked at through modern lenses, they were among the first places in popular culture to let black people represent themselves, or to depict LGBT people as sympathetic (even if it always had to end tragically because of cultural mores of the time).

oh boy its finished now i just need to actually write like 6k words before the mech even gets used

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>they just live off the natural high they get from stroking their egos and blowing their self-righteous mind-loads all over their deranged followers in one massive dogmatic circle-jerk.
You answered yourself.

What is The Three-Body Problem like?

Howard believed that some cultures were more civilized than others, and even if in his worldview civilized people were often decadent and barbarians energetic and dynamic, it doesn't change that this is considered a "right-wing" worldview. Specially considering that what Howard thought corrupted civilized civilizations was luxury and ease.

He would be considered a fascist nowadays, without a doubt.

Yeah having a projected lifespan in the 30s does make you appreciate the moments more

Writing should be a pleasure in and of itself. If it isn't, for you, you will never be successful because your work will lack soul.

He was more of a fascist who became so out of its aesthetic qualities and atavististic libidinal energies, not ideology and praxis. This is still pretty common among artists especially young ones

its very problematic

i like writing stories, I hate writing words

This hits a little too close to home, could you not?

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really boring

Howard was specifically opposed to fascism, he actually wrote a letter to Lovecraft that you can read, in which he chides his friend for countenancing Mussolini's ideas on the grounds that it's a violation of human liberty.

He'd be "considered" a fascist today by white liberals, who are too stupid to know what fascism is.

You shouldn't even "see" the words. Write the story, the words are just movements of your fingers as you move through the adventure.

A thing that helps is being slightly intoxicated, or having a very good imagination and a love of dialogue.

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I hate that I can enter this state but only if i am not trying to do so
drinking does not help, i tried
sleep deprivation does

Can a series get too long that you just lose interest in it ?
Like if you want to pick up a new book but see it has about 12 sequels, does that discourage you from reading it ?

Consider taking up an intense to-exhaustion weight training regimen and then writing immediately afterwards. Cardio if that's more your shtick.

I have a pretty good scheme going where I got used to sleeping for six hours. I function just fine on that much sleep, but of course I can go for a shorter amount of time without exhaustion than I would if I slept longer.

So I just write once the post-work exhaustion hits me like a freight train and passes, then in that weird state of semi-awake trance I can write without agonizing over the individual words and getting roadblocked by my own cognitive processes.

Too tired for left brain to run so right brain is in control.

>What are some revolutions or revolutionaries that you've enjoyed reading about in the sff genre?
>Have you come across any books that explore the aftermath and the fallout from a successful revolution?
The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams, the goblin leader was a kino character.

Well there you go. Everyone has a ritual way of getting around their write's block or dislike of certain elements of writing.

Personally I have a measuring cup with the exact amount of whiskey I have to drink before I'm comfortable sitting down and writing.

It also really helps to have a group of friends or whoever who want to see your work, and will give you feedback and stuff on it. It gives you a shorter work to dopamine hit cycle and will keep you productive.

>it also helps to have a group of friends or people who want to see your work and give you feedback on it

Man I fucking wish, I have been posting my work in multiple groups for a while now and I rarely ever get feedback beyond the generic "I like it".

>I burned my body in the furnace of science and industry, my soul as tinder for the flame. My blood to oil the chains, my bones to stoke the embers. In the inferno I forged myself wider
shoulders to bear the weight of the world with, and on that day the mortal man that I was died. I am still no more than a man who knows he is free, but you cannot kill me in a way that matters.

join the writing thread, nerds
this isn't the place for this discussion

Faggot

Howard was the complete opposite of a fascist. He even told Lovecraft, in the nicest way possible, that he was a stupid fucking asshole for thinking the Nazis were the greatest thing ever.

>Like if you want to pick up a new book but see it has about 12 sequels, does that discourage you from reading it ?
If it's Epic Fantasy? Yes. I have absolutely no interest anymore in reading Epic Fantasy that goes longer than 3 books because the average EF writer doesn't know how to write EF without making it a slog and the longer that slog is the more I want to kill myself. BUT a series like Undying Mercenaries, which is at 11 books now, I have no problem with because it isn't a slog to read.

By dan simmons?

The books are really bland and boring. Very disappointed in them, but I'm finishing them anyway. Grumble.

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>Very disappointed in them, but I'm finishing them anyway
I wish I had as much free time as you.

user, normally im mad when another user takes over my reply chain, but you imitated me so accurately im more amazed than angry

You have good taste. Try Lyonesse next.

For those interested, a Caves of Steel adaptation was in the works, and has been confirmed cancelled by the Mouse. Whether that was good or bad, nobody will ever know.

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>confirmed cancelled by the Mouse
Thank Christ

Where is the vag entry?

Just bought this, what can I expect /sffg/?

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A hatching

It’s an anal only bot sorry

What are some books about a boy and his dragon?

>cancelled
Thank fuck

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>tfw you look over all the books and stories you've read so far this year and it's mostly based Sword & Sorcery

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I don't hate the Belgariad but I don't understand how anyone would consider it one of their favorite series.

Works for comic book writers too. Neat.

Have any recommendations?

Depends on what type of S&S you're in the mood for.

doo eet!

maybe they were underrepresented for a reason, such as tehy weren't very good. Or because minorities just don't read fiction in large numbers.

Some of it was too far-fetched. Interesting concepts, decent characterization. Dry writing but could be the translation. Big redpill about Communism in opening scene. Overall worth it I thought.

I downloaded and read the kindle sample for the Three Body Problem and I found it to be truly god awful, the worst prose I've ever seen professionally published.
Is there a better translation available somewhere?

To be fair there are self-described fascists running around trying to blur the line between themselves and conservatives, so the only people who know the difference are the fascists themselves and people who are extremely online.

>who are too stupid to know what fascism is.
That's because THEY are the fascists.

Picking up The Way of Kings later, will be my first time reading anything by him. Going in with mostly high expectations seeing the praise it gets (outside of sffg).

Gross

I'll be waiting for your "I should have listened" post.

The Hunger Games

Dragonlance was based on a D&D campaign

I would, since I'm not sure which side would benefit. That appeals to me as a Yea Forums traditionalist; I just like to stir the shit. But I'm not a neet with the freedom to choose the most hilarious use of their time.

my grasp of how many fantasy novels are published every year was off by a factor of 1000

my hope is dead.

kill me

Upwards or downwards?

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the number of fantasy novels published every year isn't in the hundreds, it's in the hundreds of thousands

writing is literally a hopeless pursuit

While this is true, who gives a shit? You're not looking to write to scrap by on $15000 a year and welfare like career novelists; you want your shit to be a published hit and you want to get a movie or TV deal and live comfortably off it while you do whatever you want and everyone else waits fucking panting over whatever shit you're going to give them next. I mean, that's the only way anybody's going to read your book. Nobody reads shitty fantasy novels because it's like someone telling you about a dream that they found meaningful or funny, but you don't give a shit about it. That's got nothing to do with how many there are. It doesn't matter if nobody's reading 900 of them or 900000 of them. Nobody's reading them! Who gives a fuck? They're not actual competition; they're shit churned out to game an algorithm and con grandmas out of their Amazon dollars. The arena you actually want to compete in is very small. The only quality series still apparently being written is, what, that Too Like the Lightning one? That and, what, Sanderson and Jemesin or whoever the fuck? Those are your only contemporary competition, if you have enough of a brain to go through a good publisher and not get swindled like a fucking clown. All of this, of course, assuming that you can actually write a book capable of competing with Sanderson - I know, high fucking bar - and interact with humans competently enough to get someone to market you.

This is some good piece of advice.
Too bad I don't write

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Please screencap your post and repost it after you're finished because I really do want to see you eat your words.

Good. The last novel I tried to read from here was some ESL shit. Don't you guys read Wolfe all day? Try to do something good or just don't do it.

Where are the elven sluts?

user, I don't believe you when you say it's all algorithmic garbage. Unless it was literally made in a factory, every one of those shitty writers thought they had what it took to be a novelist, I have no reason to believe I'm an exception just because I plan out symbolism and my mom likes my writing. Maybe being in the 1% is an improbability I'm delusional enough to believe I can manage, but the 1% of the 1% is so rare I'd have to be an idiot to think I could manage it

so many bunkerchan fags in this thread, goddamn commies.

Howard believed that in the long run civilization can't stand against barbarism. His barbarians are however open minded and good people, albeit with a might makes right mindset. They almost always organize themselves in small groups, and I'd say the behave more like some kind of anarchists than fascists.

See you around christmas when you've read Oatbringer and realized what a mistake you've made.

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Much of it literally is just churned out at 10000+ words per day. Same novels written over again with different character names, machine generation, etc. Also, I'm sure a successful author in your mind is a member of "the 1%." Aim to earn it or don't try. Most authors are just writing for their kids or some stupid shit like that.

What things should I keep in mind when writing scifi and fantasy ?
What makes these kinds of books work well ?

Is this one of those "he's shit because he's popular" things or is there an actual reason?

There's a lot of reasons, you're going to find out soon enough.

>Is this one of those "he's shit...
Sanderson is not shit. Like many others he's perfectly average. His problem, a problem most of his fans share, is that he's almost exclusively concerned with world building. There's literally no point to most of his stories. His writing is peak genre fiction.

t. made the image

Is Malazan worth it?
I just started the second book, im enjoying it but in afraid it feels like a DnD campaign with epic power levels in the end.
Do we have good characters, with growth and grey morality?
Will the story keep up?

>What are some revolutions or revolutionaries that you've enjoyed reading about in the sff genre?
Regardless of most of Heinlein's writing being quite low quality The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remain one of my favourite books.

hey /sffg/ i'm new to sf and fantasy
what are some collections and box set are good to newcomer?

>and grey morality

I am sure you'll enjoy this.

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I don't know anything about it, so all of it.

>quality series
>Jememesin

Well Robert E. Howard is the man who created S&S and his Conan stories are seen as the epitome of Sword & Sorcery so you should start there. But you should download or buy the Del Rey collections and ONLY read those. They have all the Conan stories in the order they were written and completely uncut with tons of extras.

>The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
>The Bloody Crown of Conan
>The Conquering Sword of Conan

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Is Carrion Comfort psychic kino? I didn't really like Hyperion but I like stuff about ESP

>Eddings
Truly the master of writing the same three books over and over

What happened to sffg of old? Where we actually read books and came up with memes like pic related? Where has it gone? The magic and fun has slowly drained away over the years. This general is a husk of it's former self.

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Just got to be too much. This my first thread back in months.

They days have gone down in /sffg/, behind the hills, into shadow.

I tried to engage you guys in conversation about non-fiction fantasy novels but no one really responded seriously.

I blame shitposters like conanfag and endless posting about authors people don't like rather than the ones they do

It's true for Yea Forums as a whole, there's noticeably less image based memes than 3-4 years ago.

But I enjoyed reading about Conan cutting down hordes of niggers

Fire and Blood

>Publish order instead of proper chronological order
Based retard

What is non-fiction fantasy?

Here I made this on my phone. Is the world not better now?

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>Here I made this on my phone. Is the world not better now?
Point taken, please never do it again.

Actually, in this case you are the retard. The so called chronological order is not REHs creation, but one of succeeding editors. REH intended the stories to be read as disjointed legends or stories told at random by an old Conan. There is actually texts on the subject included in the recommended collections.

>What is non-fiction fantasy?
It seems like an oxymoron but when I read that I thought of stuff like The Worst Journey in the World which basically documents a real life quest through the unknown.

>What is non-fiction fantasy?
kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I.pdf

Is The Library at Mount Char worth it? Maybe because I read too many mangas, the synopsis sounds really boring

I read halfway and dropped it. The appeal seems to be the "weird" stuff in it but it isn't weird enough to carry the novel with that. It is boring.

just finished wasp factory. seriously wtf was that book?

the synopsis is horse shit. it has no bearing on the book, which is actually decent

>What are some revolutions or revolutionaries that you've enjoyed reading about in the sff genre?
Non? most of the time I side with the status quo and in cases I don't its clear the antagonists are cartoonishly evil or by no logic could have gotten into power in the first place so I do not enjoy the read.
>Have you come across any books that explore the aftermath and the fallout from a successful revolution?
Powder Mage

because that is what makes the tales strange? When he is talking about sexism and homophobia he is not talking about some character being directly insulting to another, he is talking about limiting the roles people play in stories so they can't be viewed in a negative light

The book is not too bad, but I probably would not recommend it. It's slightly similar to American Gods.

his romances are shit. There is too much crossover internal lore. There are anime swords. pages upon pages spent on people who amount to nothing. no such thing as meta information, if a reader finds out something sanderson does not go "and then Y told X about it" no he does the whole rediscovery over and over again. sometimes 2 characters on the different sides of the world will find out something and you have to be there for it both times. There is a lot of "realism"and "grittiness" until he no longer wants it in the story and everything can be overpowered by feels or asspull

Epic fantasy is for retards.

dumped it. Did not like the style and the idea of gods being on the battlefield

>implying she was not a cunt from day 1.
you may as well have him pick it up for gender bending

there are no more than 75 posters at peak Yea Forums time. a lot of genre shit is not worth your time, you have to chose to give it and I avoid doing it as a group thing. I do it when I feel like it, not like some booktruber who reads garbage like grisha trilogy because everyone else is doing it.

>non-fiction fantasy
folklore?
I blame recaptcha and the fact that unless you are incognito the more you post the more complicated it gets.

I just started it. seems like an edge fest. I skimed around, will prob dump it. here are some spoilers that might be wrong. so main girl was in a cult,except her cult was for real and their leader is god. one day god took 12 kids into his stronghold and is teaching them each an aspect of his power to select his successor. they are in loops, at first he picked a boy whos mastery is war (and who is the main asshole in the story) but he never managed to be worthy. Eventually he picks our main character girl who at some point he even burned alive. girls power is languages and she often goes out into the real world to "Americans" thus she has an edge because others are lack understanding or are too consumed by their specialty.also despite it being forbidden she studies their specialties in secret, ending up with all their powers combined. There is also a love interest normal human male who is a pov character and seems to eat up bunch of time without amounting to anything.

oh and like the other guy said, a lot of "weird" stuff. its like you are reading a scripture of a fake religion

Nice try, Malazanfag.

>t. retarded faggot

SUMMON THE THREAD WHORE

New Thread

Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

>This general is a husk of it's former self.
That's the fate of all generals. People who've said what they had to say, who've shot their rhetorical wad, go on to camp out and set the tone forever after, squelching the dynamism enjoyed in their own younger days.

We need a hostile takeover by shitrpg fans.

It's fantastic, but if you're reading the synopsis you're on the wrong track. Only read it if you can play along. If you're banging your knife and fork on the table demanding Service me you're not going to have a good time.