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Previous Thread:>Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs)
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Posting superior story before 'Reverend Insanity' fag arrives.
On another note, how good is 'Wings of Fire' series? I saw it recommended in one of the last /sffg threads. I want to read something with Dragons, but I also heard this series is for children. Is it worth reading? If not, recommend superior story with Dragons being characters or having prominent presence in the plot.
>try to read fantasy post-Tolkien
I can't do this. It's all just gay shit.
what books have skeleton characters in them
It was all downhill after Dunsany, anyway.
The Wandering Inn. It starts with one, then there's the other side one, and in Volume 6 you get one of the best character you can get, and it's a skeleton bone daddy the likeness of you've never seen before.
Things that are true usually stand the test of time.
Mods delete dumb posts now? Not that it wasn't a retarded one, but I thought people are allowed to be retarded here, desu
Things that are true usually get deleted by tranny janny.
Reminder that Sanderson sucks.
>what books have skeleton characters in them
You should consider Sylver Seeker webnovel, it's not stricte a skeleton MC as it's a necromancer, but he's aiming towards returning to be a proper Lich.
Nope, there is a roastie janny or just some liberal who delete based posts
Federations - John Joseph Adams, editor (2009)
Mazer in Prison - Orson Scott Card (2005)
The 50 relativistic years journey of Mazer Rackham preceding Ender's Game that led to the foundation of Battle School. The premise is shaky and hero worship and wish fulfillment is plentiful, but it's fun.
Ok
Carthago Delenda Est - Genevieve Valentine (2009)
A delegation awaits the arrival of an alien species based on a message that almost no one is allowed to hear. There mustn't be any war before their arrival. The delegation has been waiting 400 years. However long it takes, they'll be waiting, to ensure peace.
Meh
Life-Suspension - L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (2009)
A space opera romance filled with Japanese mythology.
Ok
Terra-Exulta - S. L. Gilbow (2009)
A linguist picks a file at random to translate from Galactic Standard to Ancient Planetary English for submission to the Galactic Society of Ancient Languages to show that it can be done. The file is a transmission from a terralogist about their life's work of terraforming and all the neologisms they coined to describe the process. The story becomes something different than what it first seems to be.
Enjoyable
Aftermaths - Lois McMaster Bujold (1986)
A Pilot Officer observes a medtech, in this case basically a mortician, involved with Personnel Retrieval and Identification of those who have died in space. This would've been more meaningful if I had read any of the Vorkosigan Saga. Maybe I'll try again, someday.
Ok
Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy - Harry Turtledove (2006)
A story overflowing with intentionally groanworthy puns, 4th wall breaks from an omniscient narrator talking to you, and bants about the French and at least one author. Space Cadet Rufus Q. Shupilluliumash, an overgrown hamster, must solve the titular crime.
Ok
Prisons - Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason (1992)
A prison planet overseen by a single AI has been overthrown. The Federation is desperate to reclaim it, as the withdrawal symptoms of the illicit and addictive drug that comes from there are often deadly.
Ok
Different Day - K. Tempest Bradford (2009)
Various aliens use Earth as a competition to see who can trick the humans into giving them the most stuff. Probably also a political allegory.
Meh
Twilight of the Gods - John C. Wright (2009)
The third part of a sequence that retells The Ring of Nibelung in space. Those upon the generation worldship, one of several, have forgotten everything. The implied setting for this story is immense, but takes place in a single location. So, in that regard it will be much more enjoyed by those who can fully appreciate the implications. For me, it's mostly a tease.
Ok
Warship - George R. R. Martin and George Guthridge (1979)
The first SF story that Martin tried to sell, which failed. It was rewritten by Guthridge then sold. Alecto is an invulnerable spaceship, its only weakness being its human crew. Most of the narrative is in devotion to a dead lover.
Meh
Swanwatch - Yoon Ha Lee (2009)
A small group of exiles aren't allowed to leave the space station unless they perform a masterpiece. The highest form of art involves suicide.
Meh
Spirey and the Queen - Alastair Reynolds (1996)
Betrayals, desperation, and sentient AI with vast plans.
Ok
Pardon Our Conquest - Alan Dean Foster (2009)
A comedy of three species involved in conquest, surrender, confusion, and friendship. This is set in his Commonwealth series, none of which I've read, but I was amused regardless.
Highly Enjoyable
Symbiont - Robert Silverberg (1985)
Biological warfare between humans and an alien species makes living through an attack worse than dying, so his friend asks, "Why didn't you kill me?"
Meh
The Ship Who Returned - Anne McCaffrey (1999)
A mind ship laments the loss of her pilot she had for over three quarters of a century. She then returns to a people she saved a century ago and may have to again.
Enjoyable
My She - Mary Rosenblum (2009)
Clones are bred in convents on each planet to serve as quantum communication devices. The protagonist is a sapient seeing-eye dog, which allows the clone to see through their eyes. His newest clone to be paired with is different from all the others.
Enjoyable
The Shoulders of Giants - Robert J. Sawyer (2000)
Space pioneers have been in cryosleep for 1,200 years, but now they've reached their destination, only to find it was colonized long ago by far faster ships. What's to be done?
Enjoyable
The Culture Archivist - Jeremiah Tolbert (2009)
A rogue ethnographer's day is ruined when the United Planets's spaceship Jolly Happy Fun Time comes to assimilate the previously uncontacted sentients, except by him, into their consumerist hegemony.
Ok
The Other Side of Jordan - Allen Steele (2009)
A blue collar working class man escapes Earth to travel the galaxy by doing manual labor jobs on space freighters and at space ports. There are several alien species described. It has a retrofuture aesthetic that reminded me of leaving Europe for the New World. There's also a romance with the daughter of a plantation owner.
Enjoyable
Like They Always Been Free - Georgina Li (2009)
The specifics of this sexual relationship elude me, but it's some kind of literary alien sex erotic romance.
Blah
Eskhara - Trent Hergenrader (2009)
US occupation of Baghdad, but in space.
Ok
The One with the Interstellar Group Consciousnesses - James Alan Gardner (2009)
A romantic comedy where entire civilizations are cast as individuals.
Enjoyable
Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy - Catherynne M. Valente (2009)
A tale of history and war told through wine vintages.
Ok
The current circumstances are that lightning struck right outside my house during a mild storm and destroyed some electronics, including my modem. Related to that I don't currently have an residential ISP. I don't know when that will change. Phoneposting usually isn't an option as my IP range is almost always blocked. These posts are an exception. So, I'll be posting writeups infrequently as a result. Yes, I have access to wifi elsewhere, but I generally I can't be bothered.
>Space pioneers have been in cryosleep for 1,200 years, but now they've reached their destination, only to find it was colonized long ago by far faster ships. What's to be done?
Sounds like a Dick short story I've read.
You should check out Axiomatic by Greg Egan.
Rather, the short story collection "Axiomatic", of which the singular short story "Axiomatic" is included.
polite sage
I haven't had internet at my home for a month now and I've been tracking my books read on fuckin' post-it notes since I can't get to my goodreads. I phonepost to lurk here sometimes and that's it. My plan has little data and phoneposting is godawful.
I'll probably be reading that collection sometime before the end of the month.
>Sounds like a Dick short story I've read.
I'd guess "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", though it's rather different from that.
I have all my passwords and whatever else also on the phone. The Goodreads app has a lot of limitations, but it works well enough for what I need to do. I can also tether my phone to the pc, which fortunately survived. That's what doing right now, so it's more phoneposting by proxy. The tether speed is only ~64KB/s, so it's limited in use.
His collection Luminous was good as well. I don't remember every Dick story but I'm rereading the entire collection, slowly, and would recommend it to anyone. Plenty of good ideas.
I can briefly tether which is what I'm doing now too but my plan only offers 10gb/mo and I can only hotspot for up to 5gb so I've mainly used it to read up on threads early in the morning or other daily update kinda stuff.
Anyhow, to get back on-topic, I'm reading Inverted World now after seeing it mentioned in a previous thread and hope the story turns out to meet my expectations. I'm on chapter 7 now and I've read too many duds recently.
>lightning struck right outside my house during a mild storm and destroyed some electronics
unplug your shit during storms
>he does not unplug everything when it's raining
NGMI
This confuses and frightens /g/
Read this a few days ago, a little under 100 pages long. It had a cool premise (two detectives working through a snapshot molecular recreation of a city so that the "real detectives" on the outside could gain more evidence and leverage in their cases) but the writing was pretty boring and basic. So very pedestrian. It had a twist that you could see coming from a mile away yet all Goodreads reviewers are talking about how ingenious the idea is. Still, I can't ever hate Sanderson, he just seems like a nerd who tried to write and ended up working extremely hard at it, more than we could say of anyone on this board. I just wish he was lauded a little less for his fanfiction-tier storylines.
Shit, forgot pic
Good morning anons! The shadow of the tyranny mod is upon us. He cannot create, for his only power is total destruction of posts which are of goodwill and truth. Remember friends, you can always judge a bad book by its awful female author. Furthermore, female POVs are always shit and only exist to sell books to women. They have small brains and low reading comprehension. Also Sanderson is a subpar writer that peddles religious books to liberals ironically.
P.S. fuck trannys, jannys, and niggers.
>Whiskeyjack, Ganoes Paran, T'lan Imass, Sorry
the hell are these names
>tfw you are not native english and do not know where does the english fuckery end and fatnasy starts
Reading Malazan is double chelnging for foreign anons
40 chapters into worth the candle, I thought you said this WASN'T litrpg?
The funny thing is, even though it's not a timeloop story, it's actually extremely similar to TPL. SO I can revise my previous theory, it's not the timeloop structure that causes this, it's the type of author. Basically midwit "rationals" who think systemizing and "optimizing" mathematical functions is the peak of human intellect, all the while desperately trying to ignore their crippling mental afflictions and insecurities no amount of statistics can cure.
Basically, litrpg, rationalfic, and timeloops all feed into the same set of neurotic obsessions for maximizing some sort of number through repeated computation in order to distract the mind and not have to confront reality. They're coping mechanisms, which also explains the large wordcount, the authors are literally addicted to, or dependent on, continuing to write. This also explains the prevalence, people like this are naturally inclined to write lots of long fast-updating stories, other people similar to them are drawn to obsessively reading these stories for the same reason, this is all tied to a numerical ranking system they become obsessed with, and in the end the top spots on all the webnovel sites wind up clogged with these idiots trying to make number go up and burying any actually decent stories on the platform.
Please recommend something similar to locke lamora, i.e. weak guy who is smart af and does not become giga god later on
Whiskeyjack is a really goofy name.
And this mental problem seems to be an epidemic, given that litrpg, isekai, an cultivation are the three most popular amateur webnovel genres across the entire world. It seems like in every population the vast majority of people writing and consuming webnovels is a neurotic deviant obsessed with numbers. Combine that with MMOs, ranked fps, etc... and the problem becomes even more widespread, not to mention the obvious examples in academia and business.
These people simply have nothing else going on in their lives, and so have resorted to self hypnosis to, at least temporarily, escape their problems. Thus litrpg is double, or even triple escapism for these people. It's a distraction, it's a fantasy that this compulsion can be a good thing, and it's a fantasy that all their problems will be solved if they just calculate harder and keep bottling up and ignoring their issues.
I'm almost inclined to write a deconstruction, and I wonder how many others have been written and then buried by the hordes of litrpg addicts.
The premise is simple enough, a litrpg/cultivation/isekai setting where all the matteris is optimizing yournumber. But then have everyone at every level exactly the same.
At level 1 level 2 bandits bully you and steal your shit, at level 100 level 101 bandits bully you and steal your shit.
You go from "collect 500 rat tails" to "collect 500 heavenly rodent tails". The local village girl won't date you because you're too weak, the local heavenly beuty won't date you because you're too weak, both in the end wind up marrying people vastly below them in strength who are just more attractive and likeable than you are.
The moral of the story is the mc eventually catching on that the numbers don't mean jack shit, they don't actually change who you are or your place in society, the REAL cultivation is deep introspection and personal development.
I appreciate your effortposts. I think they're well-written and I agree with them. None of this is anything new, it's just expressed in a different ways. Over 20 years ago I came across a D&D parody webfiction where the characters had literally billions of levels in tons of classes. It was rather amusing at the time. I don't quite remember what it was called, but it's short name was ICBM or something like that. I think what you're proposing would be more a reconstruction instead.
I haven't been able to fill the Locke lamora void yet. Mostly the style, pros, and setting I love. As well as low magic. That said, if Lynch ever finishes It's hard to say if Locke gets powerful or not. That said, I love all magic users are complete assholes.
What are the best fantasy books that weren't written originally in English?
Does webnovels count?
>snaps4lol
Sanderson is a very skilled writer, in that he knows and has practiced the skills to be a writer. This doesn't necessarily mean he's a great writer, it just means he is always at least competent. Sometimes he pushes out something pretty good or even great, but all of his work is at least 'decent', so combined with his output it's relatively easy to see why he's so popular.
I was thinking about well known titles. I ask because the fantasy genre seems to be (at least superficially) mostly written in English.
Tolkien appeals to the heroic in us, GRRM to the base, vile and instinctual.
>look for Black Company the fantasy series on good old libgen
>mfw
snaps4oΓ
I think Skulduggery Pleasant has a skeleton in there
Every so often you stumble onto erotica when searching for something else entirely and it is... Eye-opening, is a word for it.
>69kb
>look up alex belleville
>he's published dozens and dozens of books about interracial cuckolding
Obvious mental illness aside, how many times can you tell the exact same story? Surely his readerbase wants something new by now?
Neverending Story?
Well I mean if it's obvious to me after reading like half a dozen of them I would hope someone else noticed.
>reconstruction
This part I don't get, in my view the whole genre is essentially "more bigger, more better" i.e. "if I level up enough I won't be depressed and lonely anymore". Hence a deconstruction would be "only depressed lonely people care about levels" and "the more time you spend leveling, the deeper you fall into depression and isolation"
So a creepy weirdo no one likes finds an expoit to level by grinding alone in a cave, and uses it to become super powerful. Then he soars to the heavens to join the uber-elite, and is EVEN MORE of a creepy weirdo because he spent a decade alone in a hole and everyone hates him. Naturally he decides to solve this my MORE GRINDING, and reaches a stage beyond the reach of any ordinary mortal. Now he's part of an exclusive society of nothing but weird creepy maniacs who all got powerful through obsessive exploit farming and have since gone insane. They go around randomly destroying things and killing normal people who weren't insane enough to spend their entire lives grinding exploits. Initially he joins them out of a combination of personal negative emotions, insanity, and their vague whishy-washy psuedo-philosophical justifications for how they're going to make the world better. But eventually he catches onto what's really happening, probably just because his method was faster so he went less insane. He deicdes the only possible way he could help the world is getting rid of these psychos and uses his obsessive calculator brain to figure out a flaw in the system itself and destroys the entire thing, de-leveling everyone and making them all mortal again. Then he becomes a hermit and spends the rest of his life farming, because in the end he's still a creepy weirdo who doesn't get along with people, but has come to accept it and not care about gaining social acceptance anymore.
It's a flood-the-market approach. Take a paint-by-numbers story that you can crap out in a few weeks, and keep releasing more of the same to get people into that stuff grabbing your stuff over the others.
And maybe the 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear
"Almost" done with my Sanderson deep dive.
Finished Emperor's Soul, Elantris, Mistborn era 1, Warbreaker, the Way of Kings and Words of Radiance.
Honestly they're all pretty good. I'm not sure yet if I want to get into Mistborn era 2 and 3 since they're more modern.
Era 2 is generally better than Era 1, in that the characters are on-the-whole good/decent instead of just a handful of good ones and absolutely paper-thin everybody else.
Any good sci fi recs that incorporate mind control as a central theme? Specifically for more recent stuff (last 5 years) and/or books that really dive in to the internal mental experience of what mind control feels like and the moral ramifications. Not looking for stuff like code geass or star wars (sorry, just the first examples I can think of) where it's just a wave of the hand and people do your bidding with no further introspection.
I'm about to finish Mistborn era 1; not liking it; but I've been told era 2 is better so I will try the first book of era 2 before deciding if I drop Sanderson for good, I'm finding his character juvenile and one-dimensional.
>I thought you said this WASN'T litrpg?
It's definitely LitRPG, but I've heard people call it a deconstruction.
I haven't read any other LitRPGs or Xianxia or whatever so I can't say how right they are. I can say that explicit numbers become less prominent as the story continues. They still exist in the plot, but it doesn't see a need to bother you with them.
The protagonist keeps getting more powerful all the way but for me that was not a reason to keep reading. It's more about becoming a better person than about gaining levels, believe it or not.
>all the while desperately trying to ignore their crippling mental afflictions and insecurities no amount of statistics can cure.
Worth the Candle is very literally and explicitly written as a way for the author to psychoanalyze his own trauma, insecurities, antisocial personality traits, and so on. The protagonist's past is autobiographical and keeps following him whether he wants it to or not. If you keep going you'll get to read many semi-fictional recollections of how he made the lives of people around him worse and how much he regrets that and how he betters himself bit by bit. I cannot overstate this enough.
I think it gets less annoying as it progresses, and I've heard the same opinion from other people. So if you don't completely hate it I recommend giving it the benefit of the doubt for now.
In Bakker's (pbuh) books the main characters have a skeleton inside them
Or Fiddler lol. On the other hand Anomander Rake has to be one of the best names ive seen in fantasy.
Shoo, Erikson.
You've never read either.
I literally cannot understand Malazan. Is this the ESL curse?
You projection is showing, friend.