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Who is the best fantasy author? Just curious.
Tolkien it's not even close
Depends on the criteria, which should of course be what I happen to like the most at the moment.
Bakker if you want a book that sucks you in, makes you exult in the victories of the holy war, weep in joy and terror with his amazing prose in the heat of battle.
Should fantasy protagonists be sex havers or celibate?
Me.
Herbert, Tolkien, Wolfe take your pick
Le Guin, Lewis, Peake if you want more options
We asked that once in /sffg/, this was the result.
Currently reading To Green Angel Tower. Very good shit, long as hell. Weird book name but it makes you intrigued about where the characters will end up eventually.
Overall, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is quickly becoming one of my favorite series. Don't regret finding The Dragonbone Chair back in 2017 in a rundown bookstore and keeping that series in the back of my mind.
>proxypoll
I just think it's super funny he literally lived the story in that comic
Tolkien and it's not even close.
What is cooler in your opinions for an MC, an albino zombie with a scared face? Or a homunculus inhabiting an ancient suit of armor?
homunculus inhabiting an ancient suit of armo
Latter.
jolenta booba moving in such a motion to convey to severian she was ready for sexual pleasure upon the skiff
Does this ever become an actual adventure story or is it just "look at all the scientific mumbo jumbo I can spout off"
Poul Anderson
kek you didn't learn from the martian?
What's some good fantasy with rapist protagonists who are not condemned for it?
This is my first Andy Weir book
Thanks!
Welp I've read the first ~35ch of ISSTH, amongst my other xianxia, and
>exploding butts!
The fuck do you niggers have me reading
Are you familiar with the lord and saviour, Bakker?
I laughed out loud
A lot of gay cultivation novels.
What's the biggest drop in quality in a sequel or second book from an author
pic related for me
Speculative Japan 4 (2018)
Genesis: Dark Birth – Shining Death - Asamatsu Ken (2001)
This is the preface to a novel. I'm baffled to why it was included because it doesn't stand on its own at all. A ninja enters The Inner Realm where there are statues of many mythical beings and things go very wrong.
Excerpts are Unrated
Prototype No. 3 - Kobayashi Yasumi (2008)
I was amused by this because it's so utterly filled with tropes to the point of being self-parodying. It starts with infodumps where another character begs them to stop but the infodumper just continues doing so. Various reversals occur. The initial character isn't the protagonist, assuming usage of "I" means the protagonist. It also plays a bit with reader by not revealing critical information. I don't know whether it's self-aware. For someone who isn't familiar with the relevant tropes this would probably read as even more absurd.
Ok
Nightfall - Suzuki Miekichi (Early 1900s)
Some kind of ambiguous horror story involving spiders, suicide, identity, and lovers.
Blah
Pearls For Mia - Kajio Shinji (1971)
Aki volunteers to be a human time capsule. Mia has a lifelong obsession with him. What a dreadful "romance".
Blah
Dancing Babylon - Makino Osamu (1999)
A surrealist mortification fantasy. A human becomes the pupil of a literal furniture-human hybrid who wants him to become an assault appliance that would live in the Garden of Discipline on the Top Floor. To unlock the human's potential he must undergo increasingly painful religious mortification rituals. Why? Because Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish said so. That's what one of the numerous in-text linked notes said anyway.
Ok
Last Words - Inoue Masahiko (1994)
Two people in the mountains are about to die of hypothermia but he's determined to write until death. I don't know, maybe some people would find this emotionally moving, but I didn't at all.
Meh
The Burning House - Tsukimura Ryoe (2010)
Apparently a side story to a novel which seems to have required reading the novel to appreciate. It says this special police force uses 3.5 meter tall battlesuits, but this is entirely a discussion with a man on his deathbed about events of the past and it didn't even do that well. Maybe the novel is better.
Meh
Vermilion - Ueda Sayuri (2008)
A weird urban fantasy postcyberpunk. A man has a five year old girl stolen from him by a magical being, which have become common in the area, and hires another magical being to find her. It doesn't say it is, but it reads like the introduction to something and seems entirely incomplete on its own.
Meh
Morceaux - Minagawa Hiroko (1998)
Oviparous water serially crystalizes people who are then split in two, polished, and sold. The last paragraph was especially cryptic. I didn't know what I was reading.
Blah
Encounters on the Solar Wind - Hori Akira (1996)
The first story in the author's Xenoarchelogy series. As ordered by his superiors, a lone man travels to a distant observation station that orbits the star 110 Herculis to assess the functioning of the biological computer based on his deceased wife-to-be who has reported detecting a mysterious signal.
Enjoyable
The Ebb and Flow of the Aurora Sea - Mase Junko (2012)
A lovecraftian mythos story with a grotesque sex ritual.
Meh
The Sparrow Valley - Hanmura Ryo (1987)
The entire story is a one-sided dialogue. Sparrow Valley is a graveyard that very few know about and it's meant to be that way.
Meh
Matsui Seimon on the Case - Yamada Masaki (2013)
A samurai seeks to kill the governor of a province, but comes across a friend he thought dead. The vast majority of the story is a flashback to a mission where they slew zombies and another monster.
Enjoyable
The Fish in Chryse - Azuma Hiroki (2010)
Mars has been colonized for centuries and peace has reigned between all of Earth's colonies. Alien technology has been discovered that will allow for instantaneous travel between gateways, which threatens their independence. Several years earlier, an 11 year old boy falls in love with a 16 year old girl. This is their story.
I have no idea how much more I enjoyed than the average reader would, but I really did. It's a shame that it isn't a novel and that that author has few of his fiction works translated to English. I also have to wonder how much I enjoyed it was due to the translator. I may have to read some other works she's translated for the sole purpose of finding out, assuming I'd even be able to.
Highly Enjoyable
Communion - Takahashi Takako (1966)
The included biographical notes state this was 5 years before the death of her husband and 9 years before her conversion to Catholicism. Considering the title, the year, the circumstances, and the content of the story, it could be allegorical for many different ideals.
Meh
I reading this book RIGHT NOW (60% through), directly following the 1st book which I read last week.
I don't know what to say... I really like both. Maybe I got brain damage. Or my contrarian nature subconsciously acting up.
Then again, I'm a SciFi-guy, so I enjoy the space opera elements that are being expanded upon.
I already got all the feels from the 1st book in the back of my mind, so I'm not missing my heartstrings being tugged on yet.
Ya I was expecting a more artistic ending, rather then all the epic opera stuff. I was interested in the characters but I didn't care for them so I wanted a more poetic ending for them.
Where did the Game of Thrones "What's everyone reading?" user go?
I'm here, I've been busy prepping the Dragon (my term for getting ready for House of the Dragon) and putting all this nonsense about House Valeryon's ethnicity to rest. It's finally GOT season again :)
>10 people
>that delusional about their by-the-numbers YA
i don't understand how people can get hype after the last few seasons
did they all collectively forget about it?
They're dumb Godless normies.
The issue was the creative team seemed to just give up. It's not an inherent problem with the GoT universe. HBO is normally quite good, so as long as the writers are up to the normal HBO standard it should be a decent show. The production quality certainly puts to shame all the other fantasy shows of late.
Classic
Anyone knows where the literary trope, or whatever to call it, that is being used in Hyperion originates from?
I'm referring to the setup of a group of strangers being confined to each others company and telling the (implausibly detailed) stories of their past.
I just realized, I've seen this in a whole bunch of books. Most recently, Hamilton's Saints of Salvation series. It even directly borrows the the idea of revealing the information, that one of the strangers is a "spy". That gotta be a homage, right?
John C. Wright, did something similar, I'm sure I could dredge up a bunch of similar setups.
Is this something really old? Or just a naturally continent way to tell a story, I can figure it evolving independently
Or is there some grand old book that invented this?
What are you reading and what are you planning to read?
It's at least as old as the Renaissance in literature (The Decameron)
urth
not sure yet
I'm rereading Urth too.
It's understandable due to being published as a sequel, but the way the narrator keeps reminding the audience (i.e himself) about the events of BotNS feels he's succumbing to dementia.
Thinking about writing an urban fantasy story about a NEET who unwittingly becomes a witch's apprentice based on this post, think it's a dumb idea or no?
Plato
It is for the most part alough I'm only 75% the way through
There was 2 chapters I read last night which take place after something major happens on the ship that were literally just a bunch of maths and science which bought the story to a standstill.
I really like the book but it's clear he likes to pad stories out with overly detailed math and science.
Which on should I start with. I stopped listening to audiobooks for a while but kept my account and got a bunch of books. I now have time to listen at work again. What should I go with?
I'm about 70% into Oathbringer. The 3rd book of the Stormlight Archive. And I have to admit. It's actually pretty good.
To those who said I was warned that the 3rd book would be bad, you're so so wrong. This is better than the second book, which in turn was better than the first book.
It fixes the problems I had with the first book. Where book 1 was lacking big character changing events, book 3 delivers that. And Sanderson actually managed to surprise me a few times. I'm used to being underwhelmed by his reveals, because he normally foreshadows too hard. But he actually surprised me.
The last two books feel like they were just setting up for this one. Oathbringer is just development after development. Pay off after pay off. You guys didn't give it enough time. Though, I kind of understand if you fell in love with Kaladin, and now you feel let down. Because the amount of PoV time he has is greatly diminished. However, his story is still developing in an interesting way, imo.
With still roughly 30% left, I'm already satisfied. I doubt Sanderson can write anything so stupid in the end to make me change my mind on the book now.
sounds based
if you have chronic amnesia and completely forgot book 1 and 2 I can see why you would think part 3 has character development
Robin Hobb is shit start with The Black Company .
Shadow or Black Company if you want something long and dense with good prose, Farseer if you want more traditional fantasy, Darkness that Comes Before if you want to jerk off to rape scenes, and Hyperion if you want sci-fi with a strong character focus. Haven't read anything else there, but you basically can't go wrong. Personally I'd recommend BotNS because it's my all time favorite story but I know how sick of shills people are.
How far did you get into book 3? Because everyone told me they couldn't finish it. So I have to wonder if you guys didn't drop it early on.
finished it. I thought about dropping it but powered through. instead of dropping the book I just dropped the series
Don't listen to the other anons. Farseer is not traditional fantasy, and it's good. It's Depression kino, is what it is.
Robin Hobb gets off on the main character suffering.
I finished it. I thought it was awful all the way through. It was plodding, bland, repetitive, full of cameos to other series like some sort of MCU film... Even the much acclaimed climax did absolutely nothing for me.
It was so bad, I completely dropped the series despite the fact that I enjoyed the first two books. Hell, I haven't even read a Sanderson book since.
Yeah, true. And because of that, she explores fantasy in a way that no one else does. If you can't relate to the characters, then it's likely you never knew real depression, or you want to escape from yours.
Personally I didn't find it that depressing of a story but I was reading it coming off The First Law trilogy so my barometer for tragedy may have been a bit out of sync. Honestly I'm really tired of "le subverted your expectations of a happy ending haha aren't I so clever" stories.
I really wouldn't recommend listening to either Shadow of the Torturer or Darkness the Comes Before. Both are fairly complex (doubly so in the case of Shadow) and I could see someone easily getting lost while listening to an audiobook while at work.
Depression in fantasy is immersion breaking. It wouldn't exist in those settings because they spend too much time working outside and hiking around and fighting. If anything it would be called melancholy.
Objectively speaking, J.R.R. Tolkien. In fact his talent and contribution to the genre is so monumentally above and beyond any creator before or sense that he can rightly be considered the "God" of fantasy, the Unmoved Mover, the Creator from which all fantasy of the past century has sprung, and as such is utterly unapproachable, and all lesser creators are (unfairly) judged against him.
A better question to ask is "Who is the best fantasy author that isn't Tolkien?" You might get more helpful and varied answers there. For example, I personally find David Eddings to be among the best fantasy authors I've ever read.