Hi r/Fantasy, thanks for inviting me back. I’m Brent Weeks, the author of The Night Angel trilogy and the Lightbringer Series. I’m a husband to the best wife in the world and a father to two amazing daughters (ages 10 and 7), and as my Covid-era distraction now a fountain pen aficionado. I am formerly—and fervently hope that makes me forever—a winner of r/Fantasy’s Stabby Award for Best Novel. I’ve won some other plaudits too, but none of those came with cool flair, so they’re not really worth mentioning, are they?
Today, I hope to talk to you a bit about my new novel set in the Night Angel world that is coming out next week called NIGHT ANGEL NEMESIS, to talk about unveiling secret ambitions, and to dodge as few questions as possible—I’m the one who signed up for a thing called Ask Me Anything, so I do expect the usual amount of silliness and irreverence.
If you’ve never heard of Night Angel or me, you CAN read NEMESIS first. Here’s the blurb to help you see if it might be your kind …
I have over 40 tagged as “read later” and the lost keeps getting longer because I see something here, search for it, and if its available, borrow it then and there. Darn it.
Lol, I know this will get deleted because its not in line with the subs rules but before it does: thank you! I love this sub!
EDIT: you all have spoken. …and shamed me for my measly 40 book TBR list. I now know that averting my eyes from this sub to avoid books is not The Way, and I now aspire to add zeros to that number. Thank you for showing me The Light.
Everybody’s got spells that run on emotion, incantations, rituals, channeling gods and spirits, and various symbolic items, but what books have magic that is governed by really bizarre rules?
I would nominate RF Kuang’s Babel, in which magic is produced by finding a words that don’t quite translate between languages, and the magical effect is the concepts embodied in one word but not the other.
I’m rereading all my fantasy novels in the order in which I originally read them, and the 20th century children’s books I’m starting with are packed with amazing archers and big moments where they have to shoot stuff: Robin Hood, Legolas, Odysseus, Susan Pevensey, Paris, etc, etc
I can’t really think of anyone written this century whose bow is more than a prop. Can we start a campaign to bring back archers?
EDIT
Thanks for all the comments.
Sorry for forgetting about Katniss as well - my Big Fantasy Reread is going to include 272 books, so I thought it best not to include SF, which is why I didn’t think of our most obvious twenty-first century Robin Hood
I just finished reading the Tawny man series which has a huge Checkov’s Gun in the form of the >!Crown feathers!< Fitz finds >!on the beach of the other in book one, with them being used in the very end of book 3. ! So my question is, what are some really long, good, creative or weird Checkov’s guns that you came across in fantasy. Something that was teased or hinted at early on, only to linger for a very long time before being used?
Amazon recommended the book “Every Anxious Wave” to me. The description sounded amazing…
It was basically described as a Bartender discovers his apartment closet has the ability to send people back in time and uses it to set up a side hustle charging people to go back in time and see concerts from now defunct bands. Until he accidentally sends his buddy to 980 instead of 1980 and needs to rescue him.
So that sounds cool as shit. Back to the future meets high fidelity.
Now let me tell you what the book is actually about.
The description was sort of accurate. However. What was left out was: bartender had been in a band that had a hot run of success when he was younger. Band wrote a song that was essentially about how much the lead singer enjoyed… heavier set women. Main character quit the band after that song resulted in all the groupies being… heavier set.
Now, he does send his friend back 1000 years too early. There is some nonsense about …
Just now getting into COR and noticed something. In part 1 section 4 Senkovi is playing “a tile laying game. A little idealized landscape half constructed from squares linking roads, rivers, cities. And it was a mess, pieces all over, roads spiraling to nowhere the spiky walls of towns clustering like sea urchins.”
Is he playing Carcassonne with Paul the octopus?
I’m on a “space porn” kick. What’s space porn, you ask? Good question. I refer to “humans go to space, HOLY CRAP ALIENS, pew pew pew pew, HUMANITY SAVES THE DAY” story archs as space porn.
Since I got KU two years ago I’ve read around 70 books, most in the space porn “genre”.
It wasn’t until recently that I started encountering authors that load their books up with religion, and some more obvious than others.
For example, the Grimm’s War series Jeffery H. Haskell touches on religion (and modern politics of today). At first, it was subtle (the MC prays a bunch, but it’s never more than a paragraph or two and by no means defines the book). Then, when the token Islamic bad guys start screeaing Allahu Ackbar, it gets a bit much… which was too bad, as the series was otherwise passable space porn reading (especially if you didn’t venture into the authors Twitter feed, where he participates in dumb culture …
Just finished reading Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. These novels, especially the first, are dense with ideas about the human brain, quirks of perception, and the question of consciousness, with a side helping of genetics and the ways of alien minds.
Must have more!
What do you recommend?
A few books I’ve read that seem to cover similar ground:
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (and, to an extent, Anathem and Fall, or Dodge in Hell)
Greg Egan, Distress and Teranesia
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia
China Miéville, Embassytown (ok, reaching now)
Edit: Thank you all for the suggestions!
If you’re a Becky Chambers fan, or perhaps interested in writing scifi, I stumbled upon an episode of The Hugonauts podcast that I highly recommend. She talks about how she got her start with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – with something like only 50 backers on Kickstarter. And it gets into the craft of writing; how she comes up with character names, how she thinks about novel length writing (The Wayfarer books) vs. novella length (Monk and Robot series). The style and feel of her books (perhaps not so surprisingly) match her approach so perfectly. I don’t know, I found it pretty fascinating, hope others enjoy too!
I know this is the stupidest most unreasonable pet peeve of all time, so I’d like to hear all yours to feel better about myself but…
I hate how modern sci-fi often uses the term “microgravity”, but often in the first usage then goes on to explain for us plebs that it’s basically “zero-g” / “weightlessness” except technically a tiny bit of gravity is everywhere so haha gotcha!
Like if you feel the need to explain (or illustrate by redundant example) a term to the reader, maybe it’s better to not use it and leave the pedantic distinctions to the encyclopedia if the reader feels so inclined to research it further? I guess I’m just of the opinion that you should never have to slow the action to explain your vocabulary if a perfectly understandable layman’s terms exists. Either you’re writing for a hard sci-fi audience or you’re not, why straddle the fence?
“Dialogue Boost” uses AI to increase the volume of speech relative to background music and effects.