“If i wanted to kill you” while offering a drink to the captive
For me its
- horny males/females. No, I am not against sex/romance/love in fantasy but when its every three pages and/or character being willing sexslaves after meeting for the first time, I start to get really annoyed (especially if the story is otherwise really good)
- the setting being too grimdark. Like everybody is a bastard. Everybody murders/rapes everybody and is a captial a assh*le. If I want depressing stuff, I turn on the news.
What are yours?
Welcome to my ‘I’m slightly tipsy so I decided to rant on the internet’ Saturday night. I’m sure I’m going to regret this around noon tomorrow.
I love epic fantasy as much as the next Tolkien dweeb, but seriously fantasy timelines make no sense.
Oh an ancient undefeatable evil emerges from an unknown city last sealed 3000 years ago? That would be Troy, you know the city that people assumed was some sort of allegorical myth and couldn’t even find on the map? And putting aside the 20th centuries’ military advancements, I’m fairly confident that Napoleon or someone similar could kick their ass.
I get it- fantasy is all medieval all the time, but 3000 years later things should have advanced even at a glacial pace. You can see something like this in Sub-Roman Britain, which was basically fucked in terms of military or government but they eventually got it together.
Then there’s the classic ‘I’m the heir of a national hero …
For me, it’s the idea from The Stormlight Archive: “The most important step a man can take is the next one.”
It’s been ten years since the last book was published. Is it gonna share the same fate as The name of the wind and Game of thrones?
Could you guys recommend any fantasy books with heist theme ?
Late to the party on this enduring classic but I did finally get around to reading it. It’s honestly such a beautiful story. It has a vibe and atmosphere that’s really unlike anything else. It felt like someone recounting a long-lost, campfire fairy tale. The prose is so gorgeous, the words are beautiful in their simplicity and elegance. The whole narrative feels mystical and symbolical. Geds journey to find his own shadow felt like a massive, epic undertaking even as the book itself is a tiny little thing at like 200 pages. Le Guin is an absolutely masterful writer to be able to weave a tale of such depth, emotion and profundity with this kind of brevity and economy.
I actually read the book twice in a row, that’s how much I loved it. I have a feeling that it will stay with me in a way very few books do. It filled me with such a weird sense of nostalgia and melancholy.
I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
I LOVE Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi action movie Children of Men. I’ve watched maybe six times and every time, the ending always almost brings me to tears. So when I learned it was adapted from P.D. James’ book of the same name, it was a no-brainer deciding what my next book would be.
After finishing the book, it wasn’t difficult to reach to the conclusion that I enjoyed the movie better.
While James’ book gives a more in-depth look at how human infertility and humanity’s slow death march towards extinction affects the sexual dynamic between men and women and almost demented ways humans try to cope with a world without children or a race of dead men walking, I feel the book dedicates WAY too much time describing the failing of human civilization and the Regrets and guilt of Theo Faron. It’s not even until after 2⁄3 through the book where it feels like the plot and story are properly paced and stuff of consequence actually begin to happen.
The film’s adaptation by, comparison, feels …
But then I was also wishing she was alive to read and see everything she’s being confronted with bc that was a LOT. Living through her daughter and manipulating her and she’s jealous of her fame? Plus washing her the whole time she’s on icarly? I always thought Jennette had a chill life like Miranda just bc of her character, so I was so shocked to hear she was being controlled. Maybe it was fate that her mom was ill, it was karma. Imagine if she was never sick. Most of us sad to say hope that the abusive one in the family somehow would pass.
For context, I’m Egyptian.
The story itself is… Alright… But the way Egypt and the Sahara are represented just doesn’t make sense to me. I guess to the western audience it’s supposed to be exotic and stuff, but to me, it is not only mundane, but most of it is also untrue.
Faiyum is not a random Oasis in the middle of the desert where a bunch of Tribes live in tents, it is one of the country’s oldest urban centers, and served as its capital for a while, under Persian rule.
That basically ruins the middle part of the story for me because I just find myself cringing at a hyper exotic version of a real place i live very close to.
a part of the story revolves around a point where the main character can not leave Faiyum because the desert is dangerous at that time, problem is, Faiyum is not in the desert. You can walk straight to the nile without going through any desert.
I know this is stupid but the portrayal is so off it just hurts to read. I …
It gets a bad rep for being hard to read (which it is because of the sea-faring and archaic vocabulary) but it’s surprisingly entertaining with even a casual/jovial tone at times, (the opening line is just “Call me ishamel”) I haven’t finished it, but so far like 30% of the book is irrelevant to the plot and is just the authors random musings and philosophies on life. He dedicates entire pages to debating what the most comfortable room temperature and position to sleep in is, or his opinions on random countries like Japan or “Affghanistan”. It almost reads like blogposts or diary entries.
He also has surprisingly modern humor and opinions. He makes borderline gay jokes when he has to sleep in bed with a Pacific Islander “Queequog”, and then describes how he respects him, saying “the man’s a human being just as I am; he has just as much reason to fear me…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken …
For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.
On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”
What is the beauty for you?
I know there are a lot of Murderbot fans here so I thought I’d write up a report on one of Martha Wells’s book tour stops, as she dropped some interesting tidbits and news about the series as well as her other books. She did about an hour Q&A session before the signing. There were a lot of people there (I’m bad at estimating crowd sizes but I’d say at least 200-300 people). Questions were mostly about Murderbot, but also about her other books. This is from the Beaverton, OR stop on 11⁄17.
I’ll start with what I thought was the biggest news: Murderbot TV show!
For me it was the Three Body Problem books.
I loved the scale and exploration of the impact that the plot had on human society.
What was your favourite read, and why?
So, I was excited to start the series after seeing the awards and reviews. I’ve made it through the first 2 books and now on the third.
Um…they aren’t that great. The second book, The Dark Forest, was a hard read for me and kind of a slog. Had a few bright spots but overall I wasn’t a huge fan. The writing/translation seems to be better in the first and third books so they were easier to read. I’m not sure if its the translator or the writing.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some cool ideas thrown in here and there and I realize they are not native English writings so there is to be expected a different take/writing style but I just don’t see why they make it to the best SciFi books list. Its like digging for gold only to find small nuggets not worth the time investment. Even if the ideas are interesting the path to get to them is excruciating. A lot of the conversation in the books is just not how conversations go (maybe a language issue) …
Basically requesting a list of anti-tropes. Things that are weirdly rare in SF for a reason or another. I’ll start: - food. The stereotype goes that SF is obsessed with modes of transportation and infrastructure, while fantasy is obsessed with food. I’d like to add that urban fantasy is obsessed with food that immortals would also like to fuck. - trade unions. Plenty of evil corporations and work exploitation, very little organising towards collective bargaining because the protagonist is usually a contractor or a hacktivist or a renegade. What else would you add?
As titled, I’ve just finished that absolute banger of a novel and I was enthralled cover to cover. I haven’t laughed out loud reading a book in years, let alone a book with such amazing attention to scientific detail, political intrigue interplanetary warfare and so on.
With that out of the way, I’m looking for book recommendations. More context on my taste in SciFi books:
I read Ender’s Game in my tweens and loved it. Ender’s Shadow was meh in my opinion, but Speaker for the Dead was pretty good.
Starship Troopers was decent. I think I actually liked the movie better. Didn’t realize it was the same author until I finished The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I read Hyperion last month after much fanfare on this sub. Overall I liked it, although some chapters much more than others. The dolphin planet was my favourite, followed by the archaeologist, then the colonel, then the priest, then the main story. Didn’t care for the poet at all.
I liked …
Give me your most depraved, tragic, action packed, hardest ci-fi, bad people (or good), against the worst odds, in the crappiest ship, against the freakiest aliens on the harshest planets. Thank you.
I heard the news recently that BestBuy is starting to phase out 4k Blu-ray Discs and it’s really depressing. I have a fairly modest TV and sound system, combined they probably cost less than $2000. And even I can notice that streaming looks and sounds bad compared to 4k blu-ray.
Not only is the video compressed to shit, but the sound is only dolby digital and not True-HD or DTS-HD uncompressed which sounds so much more impactful even on my system. And experts say even regular old 1080p blu-rays are better quality than 4k streaming.
At least with gaming if you switch to digital you get the same quality as physical media. With movies you get a huge downgrade and often at the same cost. I don’t understand why consumers are settling with this.