Often, in a fantasy story set in a standard medieval world, you’ll hear a character say something like: “Wait 15 minutes, then go!”
This annoys me. Because first of all, how are the characters supposed to measure 15 minutes? Are they wearing wristwatches? More importantly, how are they even familiar with the concept of minutes? How have they gotten the habit of measuring time in minutes?
As I see it, if you grew up without easy access to clocks, you wouldn’t think in minutes. You might know what hours are, because there might be something like hourglasses or church bells that ring every hour. And when you have an idea of what an hour is, you might be able to roughly estimate half an hour or even a quarter of an hour, but nothing more precise than that. And I think the average person’s estimate of “a quarter of an hour” will be extremely unreliable.
When characters think and talk in terms of minutes, it yanks me out of the story and makes the …
Hey everyone! Amazon improperly removed one of Wraithmarked Creative’s books from the store recently (they admitted to this), forcing us to relaunch and losing us all the momentum the original book had! For anyone who is a fan of Wraithblade, any love for the “new” book would be much appreciated!
“Connor Magnuson is going to conquer Death itself. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
For people seeing this book for the first time, it has almost 1500 reviews on Amazon with a 4.6⁄5 rating, and 4.5⁄5 on Goodreads!
Easy enough! Comment below and toss us an upvote, and be entered to win a copy of the single-printing Limited Edition copies of A Mark of Kings, coming to Kickstarter in September!
(Also, please consider checking out …
It’s due for release (mostly) this weekend and has been getting some banger reviews. Anybody excited to check it out?
As a big fan of the weirder and darker takes on celtic mythology I am very much looking forward to it. However, it looks like those in the UK will have to wait a little longer before it get’s released.
Hi folks, thanks for having me here at r/fantasy! I’m Shelley Parker-Chan, author of SHE WHO BECAME THE SUN, which gets pitched as Mulan meets The Song of Achilles…although Rebecca Roanhorse disagreed and blurbed this book with: “Patroclus could never.” Which is fair enough. Patroclus was a decent guy who had the misfortune to love an asshole, whereas everyone in my book is the asshole.
SWBTS is the story of the rise to power of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. But I modified the history with a giant What If: what if this 14th century peasant, this monk-turned-rebel-commander who eventually defeated China’s Mongol rulers and made himself emperor, wasn’t actually a man? It’s a queer book, a book about gender rather than battles, and I believe the main theme is—to put it as nicely as possible—“fuck you, Confucius.” This book is for everyone who could never be the Perfect Asian Son.
Prior to authoring I’ve been a diplomat (which often involves fucking over other countries …
It seems like most works of high fantasy seem to be in a fictional setting more or less around the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance in some fictional analogue to Europe. By this time firearms and cannons were already quite common and widespread and were even used before several weapons commonly shown in high fantasy such as rapiers and broadswords and were much more common then other weapons such as flails which are shown in fantasy often. So why are firearms and other gunpowder weapons more often than not absent from works of High Fantasy?
I’m not a big reader. I just read a few books every year. 4 years ago I was browsing my local bookstore and no book caught my eye. The bookstore owner asked what my favorite childhood book was and I said that I always loved Harry Potter. He then recommended The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss saying that I will like that book since it’s Harry Potter for adults. (He didn’t mention that the series wasn’t finished yet…)
I vividly remember reading it with so much joy! Every chapter kept getting better and better. It was the first time in my life that a book actually gave me a ‘wow’ moment. I just didn’t know a book could be that beautiful.
It’s been awhile since I read a book like that. I’ve read some really good books but nothing spectacular.
Have you ever got that feeling and what book was it?
EDIT: Wow, what a way to wake up! I’m currently reading ‘Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief’ by Maurice Leblanc …
Sometimes employers will ask you if you’ve read anything recently. Maybe they do this to gage your attention span? On an interpersonal level, I think this is a great question to get to know someone. Its the first thing I ask when I meet someone, but I doubt employers actually care.
Anyways, I think “American Psycho” would be the worst possible answer. For obvious reasons, one of which being that most people know it as a movie.
Did you know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the famed author of Sherlock Holmes – was once tasked to solve a real life crime? The case involved a savage murder, stolen jewelry, an international manhunt, and a wily maidservant who went to her grave knowing far more about the killing than she had revealed…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So let’s get our pipes and funny hats and start from the beginning.
At 82 years old, and living in one of the wealthy neighborhoods of Glasgow (West Princes Street), Marion Gilchrist had a quiet life. She lived alone, but for her hired help, a maid named Helen Lambie.
On December 21st, 1908, Lambie left Gilchrist alone “to fetch the evening newspaper.” Just after 7:00 PM someone came into Gilchrist’s house, attacked, and beat the elderly woman to death.
According to Lambie, she returned from her errand in time to hear a noise in the house then see a man rushing down the stairs. She then found her employer …
I’m reading American Psycho and while I knew it was going to be a tough read, I was not prepared for this. The writing style does not appeal to me whatsoever. I understand why it is written like this, but the tedious descriptions of Bateman’s apartment, his clothes, conversations are a slog to get through. At what point do I drop the book? I’m 50 pages in and I don’t think I can get through another 300 pages of this.
I recently asked for recommendations for books with really beautiful prose, and the range of answers I received was pretty surprising. The few that I’d read, while good books, did not stand out for their prose. What it made clear to me is how divergent our interpretations of “really beautiful prose” can be.
So when you hear “really beautiful prose,” what authors come to mind for you? For me, I think of authors like Rushdie, Nabokov, Leguin, Diddion, Murakami, Kundera, and - in a different way from the others - Hemingway. I could list others, but these are my go-to when I’m looking for beautiful, emersive prose. What are yours?
Edit: This got way more traction than I expected! There are so many great authors and books here. Keep the recommendations coming, I’m really enjoying the discussion!
Edit2: Thanks again for all the recommendations. I just ordered three new books from the comments here, and I’ll be coming back to this thread any …
Listening to the audiobooks, I’m very glad there is a wiki I can use to keep track of some of these character names. I’m convinced that Iain M Banks heard the narrator’s frustration in the first book and intentionally made each book more ridiculous.
It seems I’m late to the Octavia Butler party or maybe I’m right on time. This is one of the darkest, grittiest, and heaviest dystopian novels I’ve read, but it’s also the most grounded and relatable. Being a Californian, I truly related to the protagonist’s journey through the freeways and small towns. What really shook me is how plausible the world she created really is. Covid has shown us just how delicate our society is. This book portrays that societal breakdown with a realism and grounded humanity that really shook me. Beyond her incredible and wonderfully realized sci fi premises, Butler writes beautiful rendered human characters. I’m obsessed and went immediately to my bookstore to get Parable of the Talents to finish this two book series!
I’m posting this to draw attention to a possibly almost forgotten classic of British SF that’s also an almost perfect embodiment of the tropes of zombie horror despite not actually featuring any zombies.
The Day of the Triffids is a typically British SF novel from 1951. British science fiction of the Golden Age has a very different feel to contemporary SF from the US. The themes and ideas are the same - space flight, alien invasion, robots, atomic war and so on - but where American writing was generally adventurous, bold and optimistic, British SF tends to be very pessimistic, dour, and wary of the technological advances and innovations it incorporates.
John Wyndham is no exception to this tradition (a heritage perhaps begun by H. G. Wells, whose main novels were quite miserablist) and wrote a handful of very bleak SF novels including The Chrysalids, and The Kraken Wakes, both of which are superb, though Triffids is the one that people are perhaps still dimly culturally …
Basically any space sci fi series that have a similar level of creepiness and cosmic horror in them based on somewhat grounded concepts. It doesn’t necessarily need to be diamond hard sci fi but I’d prefer it not to be anything close to Star Trek/Wars soft. I’d especially like it if it has the same level of focus on transhumanism.
Edit: for clarification I’ve already read Echopraxia and every other story set in Reynold’s verse.
I believe my example is from one of the Revelation Space books, (plot irrelevant spoiler warning, I guess?).
There is an accident at the lab where they are developing the ftl drive. Because the drive messes with time dilation the scientist nearest the explosion is erased backwards through time like 30 years. The second closest scientist is the only one who remembers her and everyone else thinks he’s crazy for talking about a scientist who never worked there.
Totally irrelevant to the story but totally awesome concept.
Anyone else have any random tangents that stuck with them?
Whenever I google this I always see recommendations for things like Do Androids Dream, Altered Carbon, The Caves of Steel, etc… All good recommendations for mystery novels in the most classic sense. But they are hardly what I’d call mysterious. They’re solid detective novels about someone solving a mystery or a case.
I’m looking for something that makes you think, “Uhhh, what the fuck.” Something that grips you with the mix of sheer weirdness, horror, and intrigue but rooted in hard science.