“O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller …
The OG orcs represented, among other things, the worst aspects of industry, and industrialized warfare in particular. So whatever their other flaws, they certainly weren’t stupid or ill-equipped. But they were explicitly shorter than Elves and Men.
But nowadays, I feel that whenever the “orc” name is slapped onto a fantasy race, they are inevitably very physically strong, but often dumb and usually living in primitive, shamanistic tribes with crude weapons.
(Heck, I recently played the D&D game Solasta: Crown of the Magister, and in a cutscene where an orc stands up straight next to an elf, the elf comes up to the orc’s elbow.)
Overall, they feel more like a stereotyped take on “scary savages” that threaten civilization. Which is a bit odd, since the days of civilization being under threat from barbarian tribes are long, long gone. Meanwhile, we are all familiar with the more negative aspects of industry in the modern world, ranging from …
Could you be any more delusional and self-serving as this man? I loved him in Friends and for a long time was feeling very sympathetic towards him and his struggles, addiction can get to the best of people and I do admire those who keep fighting. But this book was something else. A blatant lack of self-awareness, narcissism and inflated ego was just too much.
This is the man, who admits he cheated on basically each of his girlfriends, yet at the same time thinks “he’s a very good person, he would never hurt anyone and God can see this”.
This is the man who hurt and drove away those who helped him the most, those who spent months with him in hospitals and rehabs, risking their careers and private lives, and suddenly were disposable when he was discharged because “as long as I’m sober, I don’t need them any more and now they’re needy”.
This is the man who constantly shits on every person more successful than him. Who thinks that every …
You can add as many qualifiers as you want (fiction/non-fiction only, good for a summer day, etc.). I had it explain to me why it recommended each book and the logic checks out.
I used it to recommend a book to my friend too based on their interests, and to find a book that we might both like so we can read it together.
Edit: as others point out it may require some “prompt engineering” to correct it from making recommendations by the same authors or well-known bestsellers. Try giving it a nudge in the right direction in response
Edit2: by “better than any website” I meant other algorithmic recommendation websites like Goodreads, Tertulia, TheStoryGraph. It’s a given that these algorithms will never deliver the serendipity of finding something you never would have guessed you’d like, nor the meaning of a recommendation by a friend. I just mean that among the algorithms, this one is clearly the most sophisticated, and is helpful if you know what you like
I loved LOTR as a kid. All my friends were into it, I loved the movies and the battle scenes. I loved the video games. I loved the books too, but I can’t say the process of “reading” them was as enjoyable as I’d like. I think I just wanted to read it to get the full story and say I did it. When I was 14⁄15 I think I read and reread the Fellowship of the Ring 3-4 times just because I would always get burnt out towards the end and have to start over. It felt like a challenge but one that I wanted to finish.
Flash forward to now. I’m 30 years old, and I never thought it was possible to enjoy reading 25 pages about Hobbit relationships in the Shire as much as I do now.
I’m picking up so much humor and sarcasm that went over my head when I was a kid. Instead of being bored to tears reading the description of every little grassy knoll, I’m now enjoying every word and fully being able to put myself in Middle Earth.
My girlfriend …
What a book. I can’t believe I didn’t come across this book sooner. I had certainly heard about it over the years, but for me, this book should have had bold, red “READ ME” letters flashing over it. First book in a long time that “transported” me, as only good books can.
Superb world building, some of the best I have read in ages. Each of the pilgrim’s sub-plots feels like it could have been a book, universe, and story on its own, and the depth and scale of each backstory is beyond impressive. I literally laughed out loud at some of the poet’s dialogue, felt deeply for Sol and Rachel, was a little spooked with Father Hoyt’s story, intrigued by the mystery with Brawne, etc. And somehow they all tied together.
I should also confess to consuming the audiobook that was superbly done.
One thing that puzzled me was how abruptly the book ended. I was very interested in the outcome of the pilgrimage and curious about what happens in …
I’ve been reading SF&F for over 40 years and have read so, so many books over that time. But recently I’ve been making a push to always be reading some book every day. I even read more than one book at the same time. I’ve recently discovered audio books so now I also listen to a book whenever I go on my daily walks. Over the course of the last six months, I’ve read some Asher, Banks, Dick, leGuin, Herbert, and new stuff by Gear & Hamilton. I’ve also been re-reading some Harrison’s . Through all of that, I find that the most satisfying stories of the lot were certainly from Harrison.
Each of the others seem to be long and convoluted stories, and I like those as much as anybody else, but for a good quick and simple romp of a story, I can’t fault anything by Harrison.
For your reading pleasure.
A very short story by KV that’s unusually profane. Originally written and published in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions.
https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/consider-phlebas.html
UK publisher The Folio Society has released the first illustrated edition of Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. It’s not cheap, but they did say that if the book sells well, they hope to print the rest of the Culture series.
I think the prospect of a matching, high-quality, hardcover, illustrated set of the Culture series is very appealing. As far as I am aware, the only fully matched set that was available anywhere is the paperback one.
Hey, so I was curious if there were any books that were about a war against alien creatures invading earth with humanity slowly losing the war. But also with the aliens seemingly not even being sentient and not communicating with humanity.
I doubt many people here have heard of it but there is a visual novel called muv luv alternative that is basically about a hopeless war against endless waves of alien creatures who have bases set out all over earth that periodically sends out a wave. They dont fight with technology but vast numbers and evolving into new types of creatures as they need them.
I was hoping for something similar but I honestly don’t know anything about what type of sci-fi books are out there at the moment.
This is a question for all the Greg Egan nerds out there.
I’ve just finished Permutation City and there is one little detail that captivated me. When Paul Durham is the copy (or the flesh-and-blood Paul Durham) being tested by himself in the virtual environment, he has a password to bale out. When he utters it in the prologue, the interface window with the icons appears. Later on, when he awakes and his wife tells him that all these tests were an elaborated ‘scam’ to make him feel like a copy, he says the same word: ‘Abulafia’. This time, no interface window appears.
First I was so immersed in the story that I just took it as his password or safe word, with no particular meaning. But then I remembered that this is one of Egan’s books, googled the word and found out that Abraham Abulafia was a Jewish mystic in the Middle Ages.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia article about him: “He immersed himself in the study of the Sefer Yetzirah (“Book of …
Banks played a lot of games. I’m wondering if one of them was making a kind of imagery so big you have to piece it together in your mind’s eye. Like, if you imagine the shapes of the landscape described in different scenes, and make a mental map, it forms some unmistakable symbol (or maybe an ambiguous one)… literary Nazca lines.
In “Surface Detail”, there are some clues, on the theme of contrasting “surface details” with bigger or deeper structures: “She could see the greys, blues, blacks and whites of the painted flat she was pressed against – though she still had no idea what the enormous painting represented” (in this case, the larger painting is later revealed). Or this bit: “You hardly needed the schematics; just step back far enough from the whole thing, replay what had happened since the war had broken out and you could see it writing itself out in front of you.”
And then you’ve got the descriptions of …