The Cleanrot march to Caelid Edition
Previous Thread:>Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs)
mega.nz
>Archive
>>>>warosu.org
>Goodreads
goodreads.com
>A link to the ultimate colossal science fiction and fantasy collection torrent
>Discord
Never going to be created.
Other urls found in this thread:
esquire.com
twitter.com
What are you guys currently or planning on reading?
Been reading a bit more game of thrones and Sansa second chapter was great. The hand’s tourney was something i found myself enjoying, really captured the Middle Ages tournaments. Sansa’s denial about Joffrey is something that surprises me, yet her blaming Cersei and her sister is in-character of her. Ned’s second half of the tourney is just as great, with the intrigue and the such. Really loving Ned ignoring all the red flags he’s provoking with his investigation. Tyrion’s fourth chapter was also superb and shows the naivety of Catelyn in just trusting littlefinger blindly with nothing but his words, also the battle with the mountain clan was well done.
Is robot sci-fi dead? Are we destined to meandre in the wake of Blade Runner forever?
My current reading order is:
Three Hearts and Three Lions
The Broken Sword
Bastion
King of sffg
Simple as.
The darkness that comes before?
More like the garbage that makes you snore.
fucking gottem
Patrician subgenre.
Cradle. Lindon is compulsively polite while also a borderline kleptomaniac.
Why the fuck do those cleanrots look like midgets?
T. fan-artist
What is the best lit-rpg of this millennium?
She's like 12 feet tall. Her half brother is like 30 feet tall.
Radahn and Malenia do have some interesting dynamic
Based Cradle poster. We will dab on the Bakkerspammer and continue to make him seethe.
Eithan > Kelhus
Jannytranny having another meltdown? Stop fucking removing my posts you womanish eunich
GRRM didn't write any of the characters though. He said in an interview that he just provided the setting for the story, e.g the Lands Between.
Probably Disco Elysium desu.
Just finished Frankenstein. I unironically think it's more Gothic than Science Fiction, definitely unworthy of being called the first Science Fiction work. Really good book though.
I prefer the Castlevania levels feel of the older games. Open world ruined it. They can't go bakc either, that's how videogames work. Once you get OPENED you can't close again. Just look at Need for Speed. Aside from the whack tire physics which you can fix in the .ini files it's better than most track racers released since and nobody cares because it wasn't le open world street racing. How are you going to get these retarded normalfags to give a fuck about future FromSoft games if they can't go on "le adventure"? I really liked Dark Souls, man.
They did a good job with the open world though, most games don't.
He's actually got a fairly unique set of traits for a protagonist. The underdog and determination stuff is pretty standard, but you don't often have protagonists whose defining traits include ambition and greed on quite absurd scales. They're typically villainous qualities, and Lindon exemplifies them with a heroic bent.
I dunno if this is the right place to post it but if you guys are worldbuilding or anything, what does the end of the world of your world look like?
>worldbuilding
Why not just tell a story nigger?
And also his inclination to cheat like a bastard whenever the opportunity presents itself and steal everything that isn't nailed down. Actually, if you look a bit closer, basically every main cast member in the series is a villain archetype twisted into a non-villain protagonist role. Yerin even gets comments about the fact that she's technically on a Slaughter path several times. Eithan is basically a trickster villain, Mercy's entire family is all about death and shadows. The closest to non-villain would be Ziel, and funnily enough he's the only one who succeeds in the evacuation plot without everyone assuming he's trying to screw them.
I have enough imagination to make up cool concepts in my head and make branching stories and so on but not enough patience (or time anymore) to write it down into something coherent. I'm basically doomed to write 20 pages, think what I wrote was shit and not try again for another 6 months.
Mercy is probably the most straight-up heroic archetype (good person from a bad family). I also like how Ozriel/Eithan is basically a standard super-genius xianxia protagonist who got really bored and lonely after schooling everybody and everything.
Honestly Eithan shouldn't even work as a character, in basically any other series he'd be an outright mary sue and completely insufferable. The fact that he actually fails at several points obviously helps, but his borderline fourth wall breaking antics shouldn't work, but they do.
I think Will Wight has a lot of talent specifically when he's writing character who are active. And by that, I mean character who are acting upon the plot, rather than reacting to the plot. I've tried several of his series and the trend had always been the same, the ones he writes with active protagonists are enjoyable, but his reactive protagonists are always awful.
This really was the perfect storm in Cradle because *everyone* is perpetually goal-oriented simply because that's what the genre is about.
That's probably why I didn't like Traveler's Gate all that much. Simon is incredibly reactive after the first book, and he's just not a particularly well-characterised protagonist. Meanwihle if you look at the Elder Empire stuff, Calder is way more proactive than Shera and I generally liked him more, even if I think Shera's books overall had more enjoyable content.
Those were my exact thoughts on those two series as well. Calder kept me wanting to read more, but Shera was a snorefest to read. I barely got past the introduction of Travelers Gate.
Which reminds me, the author said he wanted to put out a new Elder Empire book some time, I wonder how he's going on that.
Currently doing Kane’s Night Winds on the week days and The Three of Swords Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collection on weekends.
Well, neither series really ended on a way that they'd get a sequel, so probably focused on a new character (maybe a jump into the future). He's also wanted to make new Traveler's Gate stuff eventually, and I can see how, there's a LOT of uncovered ground and even straight-up new questions by the ending of book 3. Maybe he can make Simon an actual character, or just relegate him to a side-character role because Simon is genuinely only really likeable in the specific instance of when he's fighting because Will Wight clearly enjoys writing absurdly high-power anime swordsman, there's one scene in... I believe it's early in book 3 that's just Simon and Leah vs some big deal thing and it's, like... You can tell when it would've been "Oh the cool part of the fight music kicks in now", if that makes sense. Will Wight writes fights right.
I think Eithan largely works because he's just funny.
HE'S ALIVE
Help a poor user out, is there any fiction involving hot angel girls?
h a b b e n i n g
The Club Dumas
TRUTH SHINES
The End is Now, The Apocalypse Triptych #2 - John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey, editors (2014)
After having been disappointed with the first volume overall, I considered not continuing because I didn't care about about the stories really. I had already previously read the Ken Liu one, so that was even less incentive. I kept reading though for three reasons. I wanted to see how the experiment went, it bothered me to only have a third of the story, and honestly probably most of all I wanted to be accurate with creating the image that summed up the stories of the three volumes.
HERD IMMUNITY - Tananarive Due
She hasn't seen another human in 9 months. When she finds a guy, she's desperate, even though he doesn't want anything to do with her, for good reason.
Blah
THE SIXTH DAY OF DEER CAMP - Scott Sigler
...was the counterattack
Meh
GOODNIGHT STARS - Annie Bellet
The daughter of a woman on the moon colony and her friends rush to find safety from the moon debris.
Meh
ROCK MANNING CAN’T HEAR YOU - Charlie Jane Anders
They're wacky adults now making zany gonzo films, but for some reason their films keep ending up with someone killed. WEIRD! Also, the world is a disaster, but don't worry about that.
Blah
FRUITING BODIES - Seanan McGuire
A mother and daughter attempt to survive in a world devoured by fungus. It's repetitive for a short story, which I assume was to mimic the mother's OCD, but I didn't appreciate it. I also don't have any appreciation at all for this particular type of dark story.
Blah
BLACK MONDAY - Sarah Langan
Another group attempts to survive, but choices make in desperate circumstances often lead to unfortunate outcomes.
Blah
ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE - Nancy Kress
Now everyone under 30 is docile. Popular sentiment is that they all need to be killed because they're soulless monsters. Also, it was aliens all along.
Blah
AGENT ISOLATED - David Wellington
Agent Whitman tries to escape with a group of survivors and evade both the zombie hordes and the military who are hunting down the potentially infected.
Ok
THE GODS WILL NOT BE SLAIN - Ken Liu
The uploaded human consciousness battle each other for supremacy.
Enjoyable
YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING - Elizabeth Bear
A woman treks against the United States to be reunited with her partner and child. Flu has killed off many, more than it should have, as it was exacerbated by the anti-vaxxer movement.
Meh
BRING THEM DOWN - Ben H. Winters
The two characters in the dead world bumble around until the plot happens.
Blah
TWILIGHT OF THE MUSIC MACHINES - Megan Arkenberg
Highly acidic rain slowly corrodes the world, but in this town mostly everyone lives as if doom wasn't upon them. A slice-of-life during an ongoing apocalypse.
Ok
SUNSET HOLLOW - Jonathan Maberry
Hack & slash survival horror zombie b movie with an infant escort mission
Blah
PENANCE - Jake Kerr
He didn't decide who would die, but he had to tell them that they would, which would forever haunt him.
Meh
AVTOMAT - Daniel H. Wilson
1707, Imperial Russia, the last mechanician creates two humanoid automata using ancient relics that give them life.
Ok
DANCING WITH BATGIRL IN THE LAND OF NOD - Will McIntosh
His wife of twenty-two years announced she's been having an affair, so he leaves to try start a relationship with his celebrity crush, the 58 year old actress who played Batgirl in her younger years.
Meh
BY THE HAIR OF THE MOON - Jamie Ford
In 1910, a cousin of the protagonist from the previous story tries to survive while high on opium.
Blah
TO WRESTLE NOT AGAINST FLESH AND BLOOD - Desirina Boskovich
Despite aliens constantly destroying cities all over the world, many people rise up against the "true enemy", the government, because they don't believe that the aliens exist. It's all a hoax and false flag they say. One young woman doesn't want anything to do with any of it and only wants to survive.
Ok
IN THE MOUNTAIN - Hugh Howey
Oh no, the Chosen Ones thought they were superior to all but it turned out that they weren't!?
Blah
DEAR JOHN - Robin Wasserman
An epistolary story written on toilet paper by a woman in the ark about all the men in her life, almost all of whom treated her terribly. This was surprisingly amusing and funny.
Enjoyable
OVERVIEW:
>even though he doesn't want anything to do with her, for good reason.
She's fat.
>Oh no, the Chosen Ones thought they were superior to all but it turned out that they weren't!?
SHUT
IT
DOWN
He survived the apocalypse by being extremely careful, but then she sexually assaults him while he's sleeping, infects him, and he dies. She takes all his stuff. The End.
TOO
LATE
NOW
Any recommendations for fantasy with a circus/clown theme?
name of the wind
why are her breasts weird and blurry
God Emporer of Dune really drags on, huh. On page 290 or something. Leto having a cult-like ceremony saying he doesn't like males in his army cause they turn to rape? Why am I getting 20 pages at a time of bad philosophy. And all the chicks want to fuck Duncan, even the most disciplined soldiers? Was Frank Herbert just a horny man writing all of this? The book was set up nice with a rebellion story and now it's just dragging on.
user, that isn't a real woman.
A maze of death is super dark man. And it gets darker the longer I think about it. Going to be reading more Phillip K. Dick. Books are long enough for good character development but not long enough where it begins to drag on.
I really like the themes of questioning reality.
Why do trannys hate Sanderson?
They love him. He's part of the non-problematic wizarding world.
I thought I hated sanderson but I'm coming to realize that I just hate fantasy altogether
I was trying to look for an HP Lovecraft story where Lovecraft describes the literal last human on the planet trying to survive the scorching-hot death of the sun. The guy lives at the south pole.
I haven't touched fantasy books in ages but someone recommended Bakker's Prince of Nothing books because I like Dune and they are apparently Dune but fantasy. But then I heard from other people that they are shit and "problematic" whatever the fuck that means. So which are they and why would they be problematic? Something to do with rape I guess?
> then I heard from other people that they are shit and "problematic"
From who? Redditors? If it's not an evil white person being killed disney-villain style by blameless, saintly brown people, then the work of fiction is problematic. Hell, evidence against the "out of Africa" theory is problematic. Those books might be shit but "problematic" is a nothing word used for people that are afraid to more carefully articulate grievance; because in careful articulation all of their grievances crumble into nonsense.
I've heard a lot about Patricia McKillip, and her prose. And I'm wondering where should I start.
The "problematic" claims usually come from the brain-addled feminists who hate the trilogy for having only two female characters of note both of whom are prostitutes. Apparently the fact that 90% of the story is dedicated to a military campaign flies over their head.
>In relation to your portrayal of women (and any controversy thereof), it seems to me that the demands of the (Kellhus-centric) plot rather the constraints of gender roles in pre-modern societies have dictated your choice of weaker, more needy female types over stronger ones. Would you say that this was the case?>
>Not at all. I've always thought that sanitizing gender relations in ancient worlds comes very close to 'selling out.' The only real editorial pressure I received to make the book more commercially palatable was to make it more 'female friendly' - they even wanted me to change Conphas into a woman at one point! Apparently the male share of the fantasy book market is dropping quickly (because of weed and video games, I suspect). Once you decide to portray a repressive patriarchal society, then character becomes the place to explore the inevitable distortions that result. I actually think of Esmenet as quite strong, though in a conflicted (which is to say, unsentimental) fashion.
Funnily enough, the sequel tetralogy overcompensates by introducing a dozen Super Important female characters
orange woman bad
What's the most generic fantasy name that ISN'T "X of Y"?
I looked through my complete works of HPL and couldn't find it, (I may have missed the needle in the haystack) my HG Wells short story collection. Asimov may have written something like it but it was him, and it wasn't in the I, Robot collection. I remember it reading like Lovecraft, there was only one named character that remembered his mother or friend.
X and Y
The X Y.
Nice, but bro...you realize GERM's novel was a dying sun story right?
The X of Y and Z
esquire.com
>50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time
>#13 "a foundational text for feminist fantasy."
>#12 "20th-century Black woman in California who travels back in time to a slaveholding plantation in Maryland before the Civil War, where she meets her own ancestors"
>#11 "an action-packed epic about colorism, classism, and sexism"
do you guys think these books deserved to be that high?
>fifth season number 1
Lol.
Lmao.
*first novel