In the movie Troy, Achilles is shown to be the ultimate warlord. He’s spoken of in legendary hushed tones and we get to see insane examples of his prowess in combat. But one of these, his spear throw at the temple of Apollo, literally demonstrates him to be superhuman. Not just incredibly skilled, but literally superhuman.
Hector describes this throw as “impossible”, except it’s not hyperbole. It literally is impossible for a non-demigod. The spear throw literally gives us data to work with.
From the moment of release until the spear hits Hector’s lieutenant is about 4 seconds. From the point of impact, it takes Hector’s mounted cavalry 16 seconds to reach the temple steps. Armored cavalry charges typically reach a gallup of about 30mph, or around 13 meters per second. Given a decent margin of error, that puts the distance at around 200 meters. This is insane for so many reasons. First, that’s more than double the distance that gold medalist …
I realized why I dislike romance in fantasy books so often. Its because of how toxic it so often is. I dont dislike reading about good relationships, platonic or romantic. But I do dislike when two friends get angry at each other over stupid stuff, over a “mistake” or some other nonsense. And that is what happens so often in romance. There are these cliche mistakes of saying the wrong thing, getting misunderstood and not being able to explain. Just freaking communicate for Gods sake.
Its not a loving relationship and its developement that I hate. Its all the stuff opposite to that. Enemies to lovers can work, its just that at some point you need to become lovers and not be enemies. Not enemies to lovers to fighting to almost back enemies to mending the relationship to ooh now everything is fine for 5 pages… okay fun is over back to fighting….
A good example is a book I am currently reading. The republic of thieves, book 3 of gentleman bastards by Scott …
This is a safe space. Name it and be freed.
I’ll go first:
Completely unrelated to anything, but my first time through The Lord of the Rings, I read it so fast, and with such poor attention that up until about halfway through, I thought Merry was a girl and that Sauron and Saruman were the same person, but there was a printing error.
Honorary mention: I read the entirety of Sword of Truth, The Law of Nines, and the Richard and Kahlan Tetrology before I realized how wrong I was.
I love a good monster, I think Vampires are such an amazing concept and I love how many interpretations to the species there are. That being said I don’t feel I read about knew monsters as much, certainly not as impactful ones.
So I was just wondering what monsters you guys like that are original to novels (not based on folklore or off other works basically).
I would say I really enjoy the concept of Kandra from mistborn (I won’t say more due to spoilers) and gore crows from the Abhorson series also stand out to me!
I’m speaking of physical books on this. I don’t really go buy physical book copies often, but it is upsetting to find a cover or a title interesting, turning back and only seeing a bunch of positive opinions of the book by people we don’t care about. No sypnosis or plot information inside either.
Are we supposed to just take the book anyway, make us look up what is it about, what exactly? What happened to keeping the comments on the first or last pages of the book?
Can’t think of a faster way to make me put a book back on the shelf, unless I already know what is it about.
Is there any explanation for this format?
Hello all, I’ve decided to read Lolita due to morbid curiosity. I’m about half way through and I have some thoughts and want to discuss them.
My biggest thought and something that is confusing me, is how come in the discussions I’ve seen some people say Humbert Humbert comes off as charismatic or charming? It’s made clear from the foreword that he’s insane, and then from Humbert’s own admission that he’s a pedophile. How do people not see that he’s trying to trick the reader? I understand that he’s speaking eloquently with beautiful prose, but he’s coming off as a condescending narcissist who likes to sprinkle in his French to sound/feel superior to the reader.
I’ve also noticed that at a lot of times when Dolores she doesn’t sound like a child, it’s clearly an adult writing what they think a child might say; I don’t know if that’s intentional on Nabokov’s part or not, though I assume it is intentional because it gives me further reason to distrust Humbert.
Overall I think it’s been …
In another sub, someone commented about female characters who would rather sword fight than sew because sewing is so boring, using that as an example of a character being “not like other girls.”
My reaction to that was “but what if someone just thinks sewing is boring”? Where does a character’s individual trait or traits turn into the dreaded not like other girls trope?
Of course, some authors come right out and say it, either by putting it in a character’s mouth or saying it as part of the narrative. That seems straightforward.
But if neither the character nor author say it explicitly, where do you draw the line? Or is it even a line worth drawing?
I don’t usually pick up books of the romance genre, but since it’s so common as a subgenre in other books, I feel like I can speak to it. I’m writing this after finishing Paradoxem; it’s a science fiction that has a huge romantic subplot, and that romance was very, well, BookTok-like. The prose was not bad overall and the science fiction part was well done, but all the romance scenes felt reaaally samey and I find this to be true for nearly all romances nowadays. The girl is smart and stubborn, the guy is hot and annoyingly flirtatious, and you can probably write the book in your head without me saying anything else. There’s one scene when the characters have to sleep inside a spacecraft hidden in a lab and, you guessed it, “there’s only one bed!”. Most of their interactions are based on him throwing witty flirtatious jokes at her and her getting annoyed/blushing. He says the word “fuck” a lot. They think about each …
Adrian Tchaikovsky has announced on his website that due to the revelation of major problems with 2023 Hugo administration he will no longer acknowledge the Best Series Hugo presented to Children of Time.
https://file770.com/adrian-tchaikovsky-will-no-longer-cite-his-2023-hugo/
I’ve read her book of short stories “Bloodchild and other stories”, and the Patternist series which begins with “Wild Seed”. I really enjoyed both of them.
She takes this low-tech, biological approach to sci-fi which is both gruesome and wonderful. Lots of strange tissues and strange brains in her characters.
Let me know if you’ve read any of her work as well, and if you have any recommendations!
I picked up Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick after hearing it mentioned on the Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast as being a sort of remixed Fifth Head of Cerberus. In some ways that’s true–the mistrials of self-cloning, a possibly extinct indigenous race, the corruption of a backwater planet, mysticism and subjectivity–but it also stands completely alone. If you like dirty, sociological, mystical, philosophical SF like Dune, Anathem, Hyperion, and The Sparrow, this is a must read.
The plot, in short: A nameless bureaucrat from the System government’s Division of Technological Transfer is sent to hunt down a rogue agent who may have taken powerful technology. His quarry is a magician or occultist of some sort, and has taken refuge on Miranda, a planet that floods catastrophically once every 100 years.
At this point, I feel I’m running short on unread SF books that could potentially join my shortlist of true classics, but this one breaks through.
To be quiet honest life happened and I stopped reading for a while. So to get back into the loop I of course looked up past winners of the Hugo awards. Some of the most thought provoking, freaking amazing books I have had the privilege of reading have been found through this award…… And than it seems like things totally changed! Where’s the quality? Am I the only one who is flabbergasted by the poor fan fiction level writing? I am not trying to offend anyone so please don’t get offended. But come on! The bar has drastically dropped. What is going on haha?
Fun probably isn’t the right way to describe what I’m looking for, but I can’t think of another way to put it.
Stuff like the Children of Time, The Culture books, House of Suns, etc. aren’t fun to me. I’ve read and loved a lot of those sorts of books, but I’m starting to realize my favorite type of sci fi is more playful and less serious.
Some of the stuff I’ve liked: Princess of Mars, Mageworlds, all of Becky Chambers, Tanya Huff’s Confederation Series, The Expanse (to a degree).
I put the Vorkosigan books above all those for fun, but probably my favorite series of all time is the Deathstalker series. Can’t beat that for fun.
I like books with bad guys, romance, space ships and FTL that just works without needing to be explained.
Not really looking for stuff that’s too much in the realm of comedy. I recently tried Terminal Alliance by Hines and wasn’t the biggest fan.
Sad. He was only 73.
I have read over 20 of their Liaden books.
Lynn