“Ride forth, and fear no darkness.”
RIP.
I’m very curious around what readers, writers, or other fans of the genre think. This would be the fantasy series that hasn’t been finished. It could only have the first book, second book, or the series is already past this point. However, the ending of the series hasn’t been completed yet, but if the series continues or even gets better with written book, there’s a huge chance it will be in the same league of other greats in the genre?
With that, what is the best ongoing fantasy series that is destined to become a classic?
With anticipated this can really range from something that is yet to come out and will in the latter half of 2024. Also, this could be the fantasy book that you have been waiting for years or decades to come out. There are a couple that immediately come to mind, but want to see if there are others that aren’t as well known. When a book takes forever to come out and people are still interested in it years or decades later that speaks to how good it actually was. With that what fantasy book is your most anticipated that is yet to come out?
Well meshed out fantasy recommendations with the protagonist not being a teenage boy.
Storm light was amazing but every time they mentioned he was 19!; completely took me out of immersion. Red rising- love the concept, but a 16 year old just suddenly being a lead revolutionary just doesn’t make sense to me no matter how sad you try to make him.
Could be high fantasy, could be more sci-fi- just trying to find my next page turner
Basically title.
Recommend the books that you can never recommend to anyone because the niche they are aiming for fits like ten people.
(Or simply books that are very far off the norm, but I feel like we won’t get past Miéville, The Library at Mount Char and for some reason a Sanderson rec if I simply phrase it like that.)
Weird stuff, genre-bending stuff, unusual protagonists, you know the drill.
The current ebook of Carrie (which has the new Atwood introduction) has changed “of fighting with desperate decorum to keep the n****** out of Kleen Korners” to “of fighting with desperate decorum to keep the Kleen Corners white”.
I know this is a small change but it still sets a worrying precedent. If you weren’t aware there was a whole fiasco over the publisher editing Roald Dahl’s books in the UK.
I snagged this book as part of swap with a friend. I know it’s some people’s favorite, there was talk of adapting it for TV, and, hell, the author even won a Edit: Pulitzer Nobel Prize for it, so I figured I’d give it a go.
I’m having an incredibly hard time getting through it. I usually read a book every 1-3 weeks, and I’m only about 2⁄3 of the way through two months in (I’ve taken breaks to read other things).
It feels like the book (so far) is a story of barely-connected anecdotes and I am legitimately baffled by the (numerous!) people who say this is their favorite book. I find the main characters at best hard to get invested in and at worst noxious.
I won’t pretend I’m some mental giant, so it’s entirely possible the book is simply more highbrow “literature” than I’m used to.
Maybe it’s just not a story “for” me?
Please help me find the magic in this book.
Edit: It is a bit …
Most of us probably have an example of a book that we found challenging, either to our intellect or our attention span (or even emotionally). Often we’ll DNF these books, but sometimes we push through and finish them, and either regret this or not.
For me, I found the first two thirds of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon quite boring, and I was close to DNFing at multiple points. But everything built to a very good sequence near the end of the book and I eventually gave it a 5 star review.
What are your examples of books you loved that almost got away?
I’ve been reading Elder Race and really enjoyed it.
I have fond memories of Scott Card’s Homecoming saga, which uses the same trope of an primitive civilization rediscovering it’s own relics, and would like to read some more.
(Xeno-relics, such as Hutchins saga are not the same thing imho)
What are your personal favourites?
Title says it all.
I finished The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov and realized how much I enjoy really strange sci-fi novels. Some other examples of the type of weird I’m looking for are: the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler, The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai, and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (this one felt less weird TBH but along the right lines).
Possibly relevant: I haven’t been able to get into Jeff Vandermeer, China Miéville, or Philip K Dick at all. (Edit: I haven’t enjoyed what I’ve tried of these authors thus far. I should have worded this clearer.)
Hoping for novel recommendations (including YA) but also open to short stories.
TIA!
My dad died when I was 12. He read occasionally and one of the books I remembered him reading always stuck out to me. The cover had a early 90s looking desktop computer on what I think was like a cobblestone fantasy-esque pathway, and I think there was some sort of fantasy animal maybe like a Pegasus or half man half horse looking thing in the background something that clearly indicated it was not in normal reality and the story for what I remembered was something about a writer in an alternative fantasy world maybe one they themselves created but I can’t remember more and now 20+ years later the book is long lost, and I’ve never been able to find it or anything like it. Do any of you have any suggestions by chance? Thank you so much for reading this far.
I’m not sure whether it’s the writing or the focus on characters at edges of the Culture’s society but it seems like living in the culture would be a lot of fun for awhile but then you’d die of boredom and loneliness.
Like a video game, you can change your sex, appearance, you never die of old age, you have no resource constraints, you take all the drugs with no permanent consequence. However, there’s no point in striving to build something new or scientific research because you’d just waste centuries in hyper specialisation and be the object of condescending curiosity (like many characters in the book).
You live so long that having children is a life experience like bungee jumping and any family attachments become meaningless.
It doesn’t sound like a post-scarcity utopia, it sounds like a ticking time-bomb for either de-evolution or widespread societal mental catastrophe. The smartest animals on the planet are all hyper competitive, take that away and humans become what.
Edit: The …
I just finished When Gravity Fails and I absolutely fell in love with it, thought it was brilliant. I plan on reading the rest of the books in that series but I was hoping I could get some more recommendations for sci-fi noir/sci-fi detective books.
When I searched for books similar to When Gravity Fails, I would see a lot of recommendations for Neuromancer and other Gibson novels. I read Neuromancer years back and found it a bit hard to get through. I’m willing to try it again but I’m specifically looking for books that have a similar voice/tone to Effinger’s writing as opposed to flat out cyberpunk recommendations.
Thanks in advance!
I’ll start. One of my biggest ones is women poorly disguising themselves as men without anyone seeming to notice. A great example of this is the protagonist team in Shaolin Soccer going up against the Mustache Team. There’s a character in The Pirates! Band of Misfits whose name is The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate. Throughout the movie, there’s a series of goofy mishaps that nearly lead to her discovery.
There are a ton of examples, but one that comes to mind is “Scotty Doesn’t Know”, the Lustra song used for the movie “Eurotrip”. Lustra’s song has an iconic guitar riff and is fairly well known worldwide, but not many people remember that movie, and I was wondering if there are any other examples of songs made for a movie that eclipsed the original in popularity.