Example like if Stephen King wrote Twilight, or George RR Martin wrote Mistborn
Seriously. Every time I ask for a recommendation (with specific details), my post gets removed, I post in the daily thread, and I get no answer.
It’s really aggravating.
Ok so I grew up in the 1990s and going into the sci-fi/fantasy section of a bookstore was great fun, and I bought a lot of books half-based on artwork alone. Maybe a bit shallow, but hey, I was a kid. I liked the fact that so many fantasy novels had pictures of something I assumed was a scene from the book on them - I didn’t find out until I was an adult that half the time that wasn’t the case - or some sci-fi novel with a picture of some futuristic world on the cover was actually somewhere depicted in the story. etc etc.
These days… I went into a bookshop on the weekend and god some people got lazy and/or cheap. There’s still a bit of good ol’-fashioned sword and sorcery artwork getting around, but there’s also just a lot of muted, bland, pointless cover art.
Case in point: I read a lot of Raymond E Feist as a kid. Loved all his stuff. Lots of fantasy artwork going on. Then I got his newest book a few weeks ago, and the cover looks like AI or …
Like when you’re reading the book and it’s literally the same thing as another, more popular original. And the resemblance is so striking that you immediately have a question, how this thing wasn’t taken to the court for such a shameless robbery (or, actually, was).
And i’m not talking about some guys like Brooks and Eddings, who heavily relied on the LotR’s formula and used a lot of it’s tropes, i’m talking about serious plagiarism.
Like for example, i’m from post-soviet country and in the past we had a lot of crappy russian fantasy, which just flooded all bookshelves. And there were such good examples for this post.
Tania Grotter is russian female version of guess who. Her parents were killed by evil wizardess (Tania received a birthmark after that, yeah, birthmark instead of scar) and she’s living with her relatives (on a balcony) who hate her. Then she attends to the wizards school, where she’s got two friends, playing …
I’m 28 F, grown as hell and yet I broke down sobbing yesterday because of the reality that I’ll never wake up and be an immortal magical being who spends their life questing and adventuring and saving the world. Like even if your only goal in life is to become rich, as long as you’re still alive that’s a possibility..but my dreams can never come true. I’m still a mortal human working 40 hrs a week to barely survive. Does anyone else feel like reading too much fantasy has been detrimental to their mental health like this? I’m genuinely so heart broken that I’ll never get to go on an adventure in middle earth.
Update First of all I want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to comment, share your personal experiences and give advice. Thank you to everyone who reached out to me privately to check in on me and share their own struggles with this particular issue. I am okay, I’m not suicidal or anything I was just shocked at how upset it made me as an adult that life isn’t …
I have seen a lot of posts asking for fantasy trilogies with strong female protagonists or alternative views and I rarely see the books of NK Jemisin suggested. Her Broken Earth Trilogy and Inheritance trilogy are both astounding and breathed fresh life into the genre for me. I’ve read most of her work and even despite all her accolades and awards I feel like she doesn’t get the love she deserves.
Lately I’ve checked out some books from the library because they were showing up at the top of the library’s “popular” list, only to read them and find out that they’re possibly the worst books I’ve read in the last few years.
Books like “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” are hugely popular, but I was bored out of my mind and couldn’t stand the characters. I’m also currently reading “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store”, another popular book, and I just find it so ungodly boring, with far too many characters to keep track of and very little of note happening, as the characters in the book just seem to be living their daily lives with little plot development.
So… why is this? It’s not even just that the recent books I’ve read are mediocre, they’re actively dull to read. If you look at other forms of media, you don’t really have this problem. Popular movies may not always be the …
I just finished reading the entire two part series which I literally could not put down and somehow a book about mice and cats had me feeling so many human emotions.
It also sucks seeing the parallels to what’s happening today and how people haven’t really changed.
There’s also the part where his father ends up bringing up similar racist tropes to a black man as the nazis did about Jews and it made me think how hopeless it is that if someone who went through all that could still not see the issue with racism than what chance do we have.
My father is making me read this book and I already went through half of it. I am absolutely bored.
Every single one of the “precious” advice that made the book famous are just the simplest or stupidest things I’ve ever read. Like, when the autor says that poor people are poor because they are slaves of their own money and don’t become rich because of their fear of losing all of it, I get mad. Poor people are poor for many reasons, most don’t have a single cent to spend on assets, they are worried whether or not they will br able to aford their next meal or have a roof over their heads.
Also, he says that, to be rich your income has to be bigger than your expenses. To me, that’s obvious, basic math, however, poor people don’t get to choose that, even if they try to save. Also, in any moment (up until where I have read) he explains how to become richer, he just says “you need to gain more than you spend and use the leftover money to get …
Tetralogy > Trilogy
This post by AT is from 2 months ago but haven’t seen it mentioned here at all (in fact I got downvoted recently for mentioning it bc nobody believed me lol).
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/aptshadow.bsky.social/post/3kvz22tvhoh2f
Hi. David Brin here* Some say I give good scifi. I also consult with NASA and varied agencies and found a problem. Often folks bring up a new idea or ‘scary possibility’ and have no clue it’s been worked out before, in dozens of varied SF tales. YOU folks on this Reddit thread know what I mean. Many of you have brought up topics and cited old stories and had fun… but there’s no way any of it can serve as a go-to repository of past thought experiments that might (someday, suddenly) prove useful at avoiding a tragic mistake! I spent years financing development of TASAT - There’s a Story About That. And now… how about dropping by this posting for my explanation?
https://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2024/09/01/theres-a-story-about-that/
TASAT is designed NOT to be a time sink, easy to respond to challenges… and fun. We announced two days ago and already lots of nerdy(!) folks are signing in at TASAT.org … and I hope some of you will, …
I really enjoyed The Expanse, The Culture, and Revelation Space. I especially like world building and deep intrigue of each, but also the dark and ominous mystery of The Expanse and Revelation space. What’s next for me, friends?
I started reading SF as a kid in the 70s and 80s. I grew up through classic Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke and into the most extreme of the British and American New Waves. In early adulthood I pretty much experienced Cyperpunk as it was being published. I was able to keep up through the 90s with books like A Fire Upon the Deep and The Diamond Age blowing my mind. I also spent a lot of time backtracking to read work from the earlier 20th century and things that I’d missed. I’m as comfortable reading Niven/Pournelle collaborations as I am reading Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius books at their weirdest.
I admit I have had difficulty with lots of post-2000 SF. The tendency toward multi-book series and trilogies and 900-page mega-volumes drives me off— I don’t dig prose-bloat. (Not that I am against reading multivolume novels, but they had damn well better be Gene Wolfe -level good if they’re going to take up that much of my time.) And I feel that most of the ‘hard space opera’ type work written in the …
So I’m not much of a reader. I struggled to stay engaged but I just read ‘Project hail Mary’ and OMG. What a book. What a page turner. It’s funny,(no haha funny), and so believable.
Anyway, now I’m on the hunt for something similar. I know ‘The Martian’ exists but I’ve seen the movie and it’s not the same when you already know the story.
Seveneves was my first Sci Fi book and while it was so difficult to read(definitely not for a first timer) I’ve found that i really enjoy stories that could actually happen. Not ones set a thousand years from now, but set in the present day and it turns into a Sci Fi story from there.
Any other suggestion?
I know the Alien franchise explores this, but I was wondering if there were examples that feature more subtle issues. When I read Aurora by KSM, I was little horrified they just >!let the folks back into the earth biosphere - I was expecting a prion apocalypse but didn’t get it. It seemed reckless!<.
I get those vibes now with the idea of bringing back Martian samples to earth. It feels like there’s a good sci-fi story waiting in these possibilities. Have there been any such books?
I’m certainly not an expert on this subject but to me it’s an awe-inspiring performance. There’s no hint of him doing an impersonation, he is a young Tommy Lee Jones. I’d love to hear from someone more knowledgeable on the subject to judge how hyperbolic I’m actually being. I can’t imagine someone doing a better job.