This might not be your favourite book of all time, but it sticks out in your mind as having no excess fat - no POV that felt unnecessary, no silly contrivances to wrap up a loose thread, no low-stakes B plot, consistently good prose, consistently engaging dialogue, a strong marriage of the theme and the events of the story, etc.
For me, the title I always come back to is ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ - 10 chapters, just over 55k words, and every part of it feels vital. Everything that happens to Ged during the course of his journey contributes to the evolution of his character and in turn feeds into the theme of the novel. And that classic LeGuin prose is just divine (I’m not one of those angry weirdos that hates ‘Tehanu’ et al, but they are masterful in a very different style)
Am I the only one who just completely skips any long song/poem in fantasy novels? I feel guilty doing it because so many fantasy writers love to include multiple songs with so many lyrics, and sometimes they’re important to the plot of the book, but I just can’t bring myself to dig in.
Hello! I’m the author of The Spare Man, which is currently a Hugo finalist. The Spare Man is a standalone murder mystery set on an interplanetary cruise ship with a pair of newlyweds and their small dog. If you think this sounds like The Thin Man in space, you are correct.
Every chapter begins with a cocktail recipe, which includes zero-proof cocktail recipes for folks who don’t do alcohol.
In addition to being a science-fiction and fantasy writer, I’m also an audiobook narrator, puppeteer, and the former president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. I’m happy to talk about anything except stories that aren’t mine to tell. Want to ask about being creative with ADHD and depression? Regency underwear? Centrifugal gravity?
Teaching your cat to talk with buttons? Oh, yes… My cat, Elsie uses Augmentative Interspecies Communication to communicate. She has a 110 word vocabulary.
Please check out The Pixel Project ( …
#“I know the first few books are pretty rough, but stick with it and by book x it will be amazing” - An essay about recommending books.
Welcome to my essay about this pernicious idea that maybe its worthwhile to read stuff you dislike because it might become good in the future?
Shards of Honor is pretty rough, but the Miles books are way better try that.
The first few Dresden books are pretty basic but the series becomes awesome if you stick with it.
Gardens of the Moon is pretty rough, but the series really comes into its own by Deadhouse gates or Memory of Ice, just stick with it for the pay off.
Even hardcore fans think the first two books of Throne of Glass are rough but by book 3, oh baby! If you can stick with it until then.
Have you tried a different Pratchett?
Maybe you haven’t found the right Sanderson series to start with?
I know it takes three chapters for a character to walk through a door, but at page 400 Memory Sorrow Thorn really starts …
As a long-time fan of the grimmer side of fantasy, I’m not sure how I made it to 40 without coming across this series earlier. I’m just glad I read Martin, Rothfuss, Abercrombie, Lawrence, Sanderson, Lynch, et al. before Hobb, because she’s a tough act to follow. What to do with my life now?
I’m one of his Chinese readers, and I’ve just finished the first book of the Mistborn series, along with a few other odd short and medium stories, one of the short stories about the Chinese setting made me feel that the story was very interesting, even though it was not true of Orientalism. To get back to the point, I see a lot of people in this sub despise Sanderson, even feel disgust to him. I don’t understand what the problem is with his work? In the Chinese Western fantasy community, he is second only to Tolkien and George Martin and Le Guin in popularity, and almost fourth. I rarely see negative reviews of him, so I’d like to ask why
Just to encourage anyone struggling with the first book maybe thinking “alright I guess this is cool but why is it hyped so much?”. I get it. The first book is odd, but ultimately fine. The last 50 pages are super cool but there’s a huge slog in the middle, at least for me.
The second and third however, are maybe the best sci-fi I’ve ever read. The ideas are incredible and so interesting. One of those books where after finishing I just sat in my chair for half an hour and continued to think about it, doing nothing.
Also each time they introduced an idea and I thought “hm ok but what about X?” thinking I’d found a plothole, usually a page or two later he would write “As for X,…” it’s crazy good.
Also, not spoiling anything I think, but just to whet your appetite, the proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is….I mean. It makes sense and is laid out so simply. I’ll leave it at that.
Bite the bullet, read …
Like the title says, I just read TGG for the first time as an adult, and am blown away by how relevant it is to the world we live in, and how beautifully it captures how we can try to recreate the past, but never succeed at doing so. I will definitely be pondering it over the next week.
Like most of us, for me this book was required reading in high school. I don’t remember much about how I felt about it, but I do remember finding it tedious and boring as a 16 year old. Same with Great Expectations, which was assigned when I was 14. The list goes on and on of classics that are far too advanced for teenage minds to grasp. (I understand that this is not the case 100% of the time, but I think most will agree that they didn’t particularly enjoy reading Dickens over their summer holiday).
Because of this, I actively disliked reading as a teenager. It was made into a chore, a mandate. My love for reading was awakened in my mid -20s and I have had a book in my hands every day …
What I’m interested in might be called blue collar sci-fi but I’m not that up on subgenre terminology. So to explain, novels or stories in which the leads may be intelligent and able, but are in essence ordinary people who seek ordinary lives and just want to get along, who get through their adventures more with hard work and a bit of craftiness than greatness or magical science powers, and are not immune to making mistakes along the way. I recently reread Virtual Light and Berry Rydell appealed to me for this, but on a different note I remember fondly the beamjack cast of Allen Steele’s Orbital Decay. Some cinematic examples would be Dark Star, Alien and Space Truckers.
If you are a Steven Erikson fan there is a HumbleBundle containing 17 of his books:
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$18 for the full bundle.
I’m tired of space operas. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great, but I want something else. I came to realize why I love the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper books, its slice of life. I’m tired of the fate of the universe being in the hands of the MC. Any good recommendations?
Is there any space opera books set in a grandiose,far future, very advanced setting?
Kind of like Revelation Space if it was set 10000 years in the future, or The Culture books (if there was no FTL).
I’ve felt something was different about the Hugo Awards for a few years now and couldn’t quite put my thumb on it until recently when I finally realized that it’s moving more and more in the direction of Fantasy and away from Science Fiction. I don’t have anything against Fantasy. I follow many of the Fantasy awards as well but the Hugo Award traditionally was an award for the best in Science Fiction. At what point did the Hugo Award go from being The Science Fiction Achievement Award to including or even being dominated by Fantasy? Hell if you search google for “The Science Fiction Achievement Award” it pulls up the Hugo Awards search page even so it’s obviously not just me that thought this award was a Science Fiction based award.
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Have people read Remnant Population? The protagonist, Ofelia, is an old woman who decides to remain behind on a colony world after the company who sent her there pulls out. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1997
We can all name a bunch of movies that take very little from their source material (I am Legend, World War Z, etc) and end up being bad movies.
What are some examples of movies that strayed a long way from their source material but ended up being great films in their own right?
The example that comes to my mind is Starship Troopers. I remember shortly after it came out people I know complaining that it was miles away from the book but it’s one of my absolute favourite films from when I was younger. To be honest, I think these people were possibly just showing off the fact that they knew it was based on a book!