I just DNF’ed a book (Glass Woman, by Caroline Lea) with this trope and I wondered if anyone else has any thoughts on this:

There’s a Woman. She’s feisty and smart and Not Like Other Girls. She lives in a village. The other villagers are religious, either adhering to some Fantasy Religion or, if it’s historical fiction/fantasy, they’re borderline Puritans. The Woman is not Religious. She’s either an atheist or she follows some older belief system, which is seen by the other villagers as dark magic or witchcraft.

The Woman is Struggling. Somehow, despite this being a small community, either no one knows or no one cares. There is no poor relief system. No one from the church/fantasy religion checks up on her. The neighbors only gossip and don’t offer any help because they are religious and hypocritical and mean. When the Woman goes to church (if she does), everyone avoids her and side-eyes her. Where do the alms go that are collected in said church? No one knows. Not to the …

I’m curious about series where book one is basically a ⁶⁄₁₀, maybe even something you nearly DNF, and then somewhere in books two or three it suddenly becomes the thing people were raving about. Not just “the plot gets bigger”, I mean the author genuinely seems to level up. Better dialogue, more confident worldbuilding, characters stop feeling like placeholders, the pacing clicks… that kind of jump.
The Dresden Files is probably the clearest example for me. Storm Front was fine, but if that had been the entire selling point I doubt I would’ve kept going. A few books later the series feels dramatically more confident and Harry’s world starts feeling like an actual world instead of scenery around the current mystery.
I’ve heard people say something similar about Cradle, where Unsouled works but doesn’t really show what the series eventually becomes. Malazan also gets mentioned constantly, although that seems less like “the …

I’m thinking of moments like >!the red wedding and Ned’s execution!< in A Song of Ice and Fire. Moments that make you gasp or throw the book across the room.

For me the two aforementioned are the biggest ones by far, and I’m just upset that I experienced them in the show before the books (although admittedly that was pretty awesome too).

Which other books have the same huge shocking moments? I’ve read some other series. Farseer trilogy (1-3), Kingkiller, Stormlight (1-3), Mistborn (1-3), First Law (1-3), LOTR and Harry Potter. While some of these have big moments, I haven’t come across anything quite as shocking as in ASOIAF.

And yes, I will definitely be reading on in some of the ones I haven’t finished (especially Realm of the Elderlings and First Law), but I like to space them out a bit.

Just watched a great reel on youtube from Warhammer 40k where one of the marines has a knife and a sword left and stands facing an army while incredible music plays in the background. Obviously he is a goner but looks like he is gonna go down in a blaze of glory.

What’s your favourite “All is lost but I’ll die trying” moment in fantasy?

One of my most memorable was seeing Taln in Stormlight Archive near the end.

I feel like when it comes to urban fantasy set in America, when the story isn’t set in some random small town, New York is usually the default.

What’s interesting about LA is that when people talk about “Los Angeles,” they’re often talking about the broader LA area or even LA County rather than the actual City of Los Angeles. Maybe that is why? It’s just too many smaller neighborhoods and cities around. You have mountains, deserts, beaches, and forests all in close proximity, but I’m yet to read something set here.

I think Bright is the only thing I seen but that’s a movie.

In the order hand you got massive YA fantasies set in New York like ShadowHunter and Percy Jackson.

There’s a new Peter Watts interview up at Clarkesworld:

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_interview_2026/

Of note: “And, of course, there’s the other half of the Tachyon deal. I delivered Gremlin, the sequel to The Freeze-Frame Revolution, back in June. Far as I know, it’s coming out sometime in 2027.”

As far as I can remember, my head-canon for the thinking machines was that they controlled humanity by doing everything for them, a situation Like “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson. This had caused humanity to stagnate, with no advancement at all. This always made sense to me, especially with the Bene Gesserit focus on the perfection of humanity. I haven’t seen it for a while, but I think the prologue included in the extended edition of the 1984 Dune movie specifically mentioned this. This is completely different from the machine rule shown in the sequel novels, like the Butlerian Jihad. This had the machines ruling humanity as despotic overlords, like Skynet. I’m curious as to which version other people had in their heads.

I had bypassed Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz several times before diving in and reading it. That was a mistake on my part. The passing-it-by, not the reading.

Set in the aftermath of a war of secession by California in the not-too-distant future, Automatic Noodle tells the story of a group of friends in a desperate situation trying to open — and keep open — a restaurant in war-torn San Francisco. The friends are almost all robots, who found themselves with a sort of basic freedom bestowed by the humans at the end of the war, designed mostly to make the humans feel better about themselves than to actually do much for the freedom of those it was granted to.

Having been a restauranteur, I can attest to how real everything the entrepreneurs went through feels, from the joys of getting good reviews on their first day open to the pits of despair when things go wrong, and the strange discordance felt at being determined to fight through and wanting to give up and bury yourself in a …

I love the found family, hard sci-fi, bigger-than-life entities with lots of philosophy and neat writing….is there anything similar?

I adore the captive’s war, both of the books. Revelation space was fun too, blindsight but it’s very different. I have tried getting into children of time but again and again, i’ve quit it.

I want something closer to heart and soul of the expanse.

In case no one posted this yet, here’s a list by Charlie Jane Anders from the NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/books/space-opera-sci-fi-books.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DVE.-Vks.31D-fedTdfB5&smid=nytcore-ios-share