Talking cat, magic bells, abandoned castles, a journey into an old kingdom, the eerie feeling of impending darkness. All woven by beautiful charming language which gives the whole novel the feeling of a fairy tale, or of a waking dream being imagined just before the all-consuming sleep.
Sabriel is the best fantasy novel I read in more than a year. This was my first book by Garth Nix and I was not expecting to like his writing so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living under a rock, but by coincidence, I had not seen any posts or commentaries about it here before I start reading it. Either way, I’m glad that I started because I was hooked by the writing style from the beginning.
You may call me Mogget. As to what I am, I was once many things, but now I am only several.
The book tells the story of Sabriel and her journey into the Old Kingdom, a place filled with magic and wonders and ruins where dormant evils await in shallow graves. In her mind, she carries the …
Hello again! Turns out that there are a lot of books out there.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
For me, this isn’t exclusively a fantasy trope and doesn’t pop up as much compared to other genres, but I hate the Karma Houdini trope. There’s nothing more infuriating than when the villain just gets away with everything with like no real consequences. It’s mostly just a personal thing, pretty much all the abusive people in my life have never faced any consequences for what they did and that still pisses me off.
I use fantasy as an escape, so when I’m reading something, I want to see the shitty people get punished!! I don’t care that it’s all artsy and subversive and realistic, fuck you, I want blood!!!
So what about you guys?
It doesn’t have to be THE best ever, simply the best of the ones you’ve read, obviously in the fantasy genre.
I asked this question r/books as well, but I didn’t specified one genre and I would like to know what you guys think.
Hello again! Turns out that there are a lot of books out there.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
As silly as it may sound, I’ve really struggled to read my whole life. Never read any of the books in my first two years of high school and every time I tried I could never follow what was happening and I often skipped around on the pages because I couldn’t focus (I’ve since been diagnosed with ADHD haha). But I just read my first book and got through all 480 or so pages of it with no difficulty and I really really enjoyed it :). The book is The House of the Spirits and I’m just so intrigued by Isabel Allende’s writing style and I love it so much. I definitely plan to read more by her over the summer when I have time. Her descriptions of the scenery in each chapter was just so intricate and perfectly said. Just thought I’d post here to celebrate a bit!
Yeah, I’m a book hog.
But last year I realized that I’m just putting books on the pile, and I’m not reading fast enough to keep it up. I had a “To read next”-pile and a “To read later”-pile and when I realized that I needed to start moving books to a “To read after later”-pile, I figured enough is enough.
So I stopped buying books.
And I started a strict skimming policy: If I start skimming while reading, the book has five pages to hook me again, or I’m DNFing it.
So my stats for last year are 102 books began, and 57 finished, which is fairly low, but for day job + writing + kids, it’s not that bad.
And my TBR-list should have been less, but I saw some great deals on Storybundle, and some of my favorite authors did $0.99 promos and… but the TBR pile is going down, and that’s a good thing :D
Also, I need more hours in the day. Either that, or explain to the kids that “sorry, you’ve got to …
I recently read my 600th unique book which was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I am reminded of the hard cap on the limited books one can read in the seemingly infinite sea of good options.
Pew research shows that the average (median) American reads about 4 books a year. This on it’s own is a fine number. I think with the wealth of information and entertainment options available to us, and the incredible amount of work it takes just to keep ourselves alive, it is comforting to me that most Americans can get four or more books in. What is a little alarming to me, is that 4 books per year means 300-400 books in a lifetime. I am now at the point where I consider 314⁄600 of the books I’ve read to be great books definitely worth reading. A lot of people will never experience those worlds or the beautiful characters they hold. They will never read that many books. And I will never experience the great books that others do. What’s even sadder is the large number of people who do not …
The term Competence Porn was created by John Rogers, a writer for the TV series “Leverage,” and (I think) very succinctly describe the unique frisson as you experience as a reader when a story’s lead character is highly competent, extraordinarily skilled at what they do … without quite straying into Mary Sue territory.
The Honor Harrington series by David Weber is probably a good example of this in the speculative fiction genre. Rationalist fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is another great exemplar of the form.
I need a fix.
Can someone steer me in the direction of other works for which this description might apply?
Science Fiction as a genre contains an unimaginable number of concepts and ideas. Some have had real world impacts, such as the invention of robots and the submarine. Other concepts, such as sword wielding space wizards, time travel and FTL are so embedded in the cultural zeitgeist that it would be strange to imagine sci-fi without them. Whilst story is the most important part of a story, the ideas that you find within science fiction are why it is my favourite genre. It is also why I spend my time writing up new ideas for r/scificoncepts. My question is what are the best science fiction concepts that you have come across.
My all time favourite is the infinite improbability drive from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. ‘As soon as the drive reaches infinite Improbability, it passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe simultaneously. An incredible range of highly improbable things can happen due to these effects.’ I also really enjoy the …
Haven’t read any sci-fi the last couple months and I’m looking to get into a series. All recommendations are welcome!
One of the reasons I love long series like The Expanse or Sword Light Archives is that I love reading multiple books with a diverse POV cast that all takes place within the same fictional world. But the ones I mentioned are part of a long series with an overarching story. I would love to read some standalone novels but I would love to also read multiple books with the novel’s world.
So are there any SF authors that do stuff like that?
I keep seeing people go down the rabbit hole of the Formic misunderstanding of humans meant they didn’t appreciate the true nature of their initial actions.
What I don’t see is people stopping to ask what the Formics thought they were doing in the first place. People point out that they thought they were just destroying drones and not sentient life, comparing it to clipping toe nails and then seem to stop thinking about that line of reasoning.
Why were the Formics destroying human drones? What is the purpose of destroying human drones, “clipping the toe nails” of the human hive so to speak? If it were just some unfortunate situation where some Formic queen performed some vivisections on humans thinking they were just doing a biopsy to learn about a strange alien, that would be one thing and the plot of an entirely different story than the one told.
The actual story told involves a Formic colonization fleet showing up to a solar system occupied by aliens …
I noticed recommendation for “Too Like Lightning” in some thread here, and decided to read it mostly on a whim. Some other comment compared it to Lois Bujold’s books, but that’s a bald-faced lie - it’s hard to imagine two writers more unlike than these two. Ada Palmer is much, much closer to Ian M. Banks, both in readability (which suffers sometimes, though for different reasons), and in imaginativeness of the world-building (Bujulod’s books, while great, present somewhat generally generic space opera world). Actually, in my head-canon Terra Ignota series is now a prequel to Culture.
What also makes Banks’ and Palmer’s books so like each other to me is that they both describe what can be considered an Utopia by modern standards. This is a very rare case in modern sci-fi, which prefers various shades of dystopia or more mundane “space empires”. The world of Terra Ignota is a FLAWED utopia, but it would be very hard to call it …
The setup is The Dude nailing the 2x4 into the floor to prop up the chair to stop the door from opening. First payoff is when he fails to remember that the door opens outwards so as soon as he’s finished, they barge in and open the door from the outside toppling the chair over and rendering the board useless.
Not only that, but later on in the movie when he comes back from behind arrested at Jackie Treehorn’s place, he trips on the board coming in the door. Fucking hilarious.
One of the greatest comedies of all time.