And that is why I like the books. There’s a lot of great things about them including the blending of science and biology with fantasy and some not so great things including the objectifying of female characters. But at it’s very heart it is the story of a sterile mutant man who adopts a daughter that can jump universes, bringing him closer to his on and off sterile witch girlfriend and whom he fights to be reunited with after being separated.
I like how Andrzej Sapkowski writes Ciri. She is curious, stubborn and insecure but grows into a confident and powerful woman after some VERY horrible experiences. (The ice skating part is so badass.) She is the last person who is trained at Kaer Moren and I think she is the main protagonist of the books. She is “The Witcher”.
What do the fantasy community think?
Which obscure authors of fantasy are still relative unknowns in spite of their writing being up there with the greats?
I’ve seen a couple posts now about books and series that people have given up on because of horrible things the authors have said or done. It made me curious about the opposite - who are some authors who are fantastic human beings?
I’ll start with some low-hanging fruit - Brandon Sanderson. Just based on the interactions he has with his fans, you can tell he’s a very down-to-earth, friendly person. Plus what he did with audiobooks recently was really admirable.
Who else is there that you’re proud to be a fan of?
I’ve been thinking about this lately.
The song of ice and fire era might have another decade until something new rises up.
Mines are: Kaladin Stormblessed from The Stormligtht Archive
Sand dan Glokta from The First Law Trilogy
Daenerys Targaryen fron A song of Ice and Fire
I couldn’t choose between them, they live in my mind rent free 😂
Few things at school got me as excited as the Scholastic book orders. I think we had them maybe once a month or so. We were poor growing up, so we didn’t get much, but my mom would (usually) let us pick a book or two out of the book order. That’s where my love for “Goosebumps” books – and probably my love for reading and, eventually, writing – probably began.
Also: Was there anything worse in grade school than having a book order arrive when you weren’t getting anything in that month’s order? Ugh. That still hurts just thinking about it…
My kid has aged out of school book orders, but when she had them we made sure she got at least some of the books she wanted, as well as some she didn’t think she wanted but I knew she’d love. There were several cases, too, where – thanks to discount pricing, which made it possible – I made sure to order a full class-load of certain books so that every kid in her class …
So I told a friend that I finally updated my inactive goodreads account since I started to read more frequently. She reads a lot of books, way more than me. Turns out she has never heard of goodreads, so I was happy to tell her about it. She looked at me like I was crazy and said something like “What for?” and I explained that I lost track of basically all books I read as a teen and goodreads helps me to remember the books I read and if I enjoyed them. She suggested that I might have an obsessive compulsive disorder and in her defence, I do tend to track everything (goals, tasks, habits, appointments) because I need an overview of everything or else I forget and can’t plan my day accordingly. But… I still can’t understand her point of view of just reading and forgetting. So I asked her about all the books she read in the past in the sense of “what if you don’t remember them” and she just told me that it doesn’t matter.
I told her …
I finished reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist a few days ago and it’s not as good as people say it is imo. I tried to let the book sit in my head on what exactly am I missing and why I felt like I didn’t like it. Now I understood why.
The book doesn’t feel like it knows where it’s going. It didn’t feel like it had a path on where it will lead. It felt like the main character is just going and staying on a place and going to another to staying there again. Maybe I just wanted other plots to be solved than the main goal of the boy to expand the character/s more but it didn’t have much side plots to tell.
The end goal feels forced into the boy than he actually wanted it to. The decisions of the main character most of the time is not even his. These literal strangers feels like they control what the boy needs to do. He doesn’t feel independent. Even his “Ultimate Goal” is not his own idea. The end goal is not even that good …
To start, really liked the movie because it was different to every film I had watched so far. It was only last year where I found out it had a book. I got the e-book so I could just open it anywhere and read. I loved this book so much. I really love the vibe of Mark doing fairly routine and monotonous things and being occasionally reminded that this planet could kill him in an instant. I loved the parts where it shifted to a third-person perspective whenever something bad was about to go down.
I think I loved the characters most of all. I’m no expert on good character writing but I really liked Mark Watney’s balance of sass and genuine kindness. I was afraid that I wouldn’t like the Ares 3 crew as much but I was wrong. I always knew that being an astronaut was nothing but dangerous but this book put into good perspective how even the slightest mistake could lead to absolute disaster and the passage of time.
Wrapping up now, I loved this book and I’m really …
I’m looking for some suggestions for relatively modern (say, written in the last 15 years or so) books that have literary merit but also are at least partially sci-fi in feel and setting. Many of the books typically mentioned in these threads (by authors like Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, etc) are great but have been around for a while. Ideally I’m looking for something more modern.
In case it helps, to me, ‘literary’ means a book with themes and messages beyond the central plot, and ideally realistic characters and well-crafted prose as well.
To give you some comps that I think fit what I’m after, I read and loved:
Version Control by Dexter Palmer,
Radiance by Catherynne M Valente
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
I read and liked:
Void Star by Zachary Mason
The Terra Ignota books (these were good but definitely hard work!)
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated 😁
EDIT: Thank you …
I really enjoyed the alien civilization detailed in stories like “Project Hail Mary”, the short story “Mountain” by Cixin Liu. I especially loved how the evolution of an intelligent alien civilization would look like in an ecology/environment that is so different from ours.
Please help suggest books with more of the same. Thank you.
A book or series of books that goes from life as usual to the apocalypse and beyond. Disaster, zombies, pandemic, whatever. .
Plenty of books start in the post-apocalypse.
Plenty of books show the beginning of it all.
Plenty of books will show the beginning, then part 2 of the book begins with “x years later” amid the full post apocalypse.
Any good books or series of books that show the whole thing without major time gaps? Only well written, critically well received stuff please… I can’t stand highly generic genre fiction.
Likely a crap ton of work, so would need a champion to drive home… but I saw this in r/fantasy and thought it’d be cool to have a r/printSF version. Unless we already have one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/10jeg5i/the_rfantasy_2023_top_novels_poll_voting_thread/
I just wanted to take a minute to thank everyone for the overwhelming level of response to my request for suggestions (here: https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/10i2asr/modern_literary_scifi/).
I very much appreciate it and have enjoyed going down rabbit holes over the last 24 hours looking into so many fascinating books and authors. A special thanks too to those who helped dispel some of my reservations about certain works.
I will try my best to remember to reply to comments when I read titles you have suggested, so if you get a random notification weeks or months from now, it probably means I got through a book you recommended and want to let you know.
Thanks again, and stay awesome.
Up until now Marvel has really ruined fight banter for me in an attempt to make every character more like Spider-Man or more humorous. I watched bullet train recently and for the first time in a while the fight banter (mostly from Brad Pitt) was actually kind of funny and fit well. What are your thoughts?
Edit: I’m not bashing marvel. As someone who grew up in the 2000s I have a huge love for those movies, but recently the humour has gotten kinda bland (whatever phase we’re on) and I just thought this movie reminded me that there’s still a place for good fight jokes.