Sadly, I’m putting this series down for good after 9 books. It has been a rocky ride with ups and downs and I felt the need to share my experience.

It’s difficult to talk about this series because any form of critique is inevitably met with ‘it’s written that way on purpose!’ Erikson has been open on how Malazan is a meta-commentary on the fantasy genre. All writing is meta to some extent - taking the tropes of the past and innovating on them to produce something new and exciting. Other series like Dune and Game of Thrones subvert many of the same tropes as Malazan, but I’ve never seen them described as post-modernist philosophy. Discussions around this series feel like they turn all of its faults into an philosophical test that you fail if you don’t ‘get it.’ Just because something is opaque and confusing on purpose doesn’t make it good (and I’m still not sure if its on purpose, or a post justification).

Malazan …

I used to be an avid reader but this year I barely read 5 books. Since reading has been a part of my identity for a really long time, now I feel like I don’t even know myself anymore. Partly I can blame my low attention span, being spent on doomscrolling for at least 11 hours a day but I really want to get out of this and start reading again. Which series would you highly recommend?

P.S. I might be moving out of my home soon so I won’t be able to buy or take much books with me until I settle down. So if you have any recommendations that would be easier to read as an ebook (as I’m the kind of person who reads certain books only in paperbacks because I know it’s so good and I’m going to love it and I don’t want to waste that experience on the e format. I don’t know if this makes sense or just a weird habit of mine)

I feel like “plot armor” has become one of those terms that gets thrown around so often that it’s started to lose its meaning. It seems like any time a protagonist survives something dangerous, people immediately call it plot armor, but I don’t think that’s what plot armor actually is. To me, plot armor is when a character survives solely because the plot demands it, and the story has to bend or outright ignore its own rules to keep them alive. A character surviving impossible odds by itself isn’t plot armor. People survive situations in real life that seem completely unbelievable, and history is full of stories that sound like they were made up. Fiction can absolutely have moments like that too as long as the story earns them. If a character survives because they’re skilled, because they prepared, because another character saves them in a believable way, or even because they get lucky, I don’t automatically see that as plot armor. Luck exists, and sometimes people beat the odds. I …

This has happened in many books, but currently I’m just starting book three of The Queens of Renthia. Fun books, no high stakes, interesting concepts, won’t read again.

And the first sentence of the third book says the Queen is on the highest tower of her castle and can see so far distant that she can see the “untamed lands” beyond her border.

And in the series the surrounding environment is surrounded by really tall trees, like taller than normal, that people build entire towns in.

Yet this lady can see beyond these massive forests hundreds/thousands of km to some mysterious beyond.

And like…I’ve been to the top of Taipei 101. It’s not the tallest building anymore, but it’s really fucking tall. Like insanely high up. And even so you can’t see the fucking Taiwan Straight from it, even though it’s on the western plain where it’s flat.

So either this country is the size of a postage stamp, that castle tree is higher than the Burj Khalifa, or the author doesn’t know how to imagine …

SPOILERS FOR WHOLE SERIES OF “EMPIRE OF THE VAMPIRE”

“There we were, freezing our pantaloons off in the mountains of buttfuck nowhere. The darkness was so fucking dark it was like a sinner’s prayer. The kind of fucking sinner who knows there’s no fucking heaven waiting for him at the end of this fucking dark road. A sinner like me. I grimaced at the thought, thinking about how much I hate fucking potatoes.

‘Fuck!’ I shouted. I was all out of my fucking vampire meth, and the withdrawals were about to fucking come down on me like an evil bitchy she bitch on her moonblood, who is also a bitch. To top off this fucking fuck festival, vampires were chasing us. Mean ones. And they were probably going to suck us dry like when a prostitute whore bitch on her period moonblood does a fucking fellatio.

”‘Oy, Silversaint,’ said one of the other characters of this book. ‘Vampire tracks.’

“Indeed there were. There in …

Removed so rewriting for ya’ fatherless karks!

I’ve read my fair share of grimdark (Abercrombie, Lawrence, Bakker, etc.), so I don’t get unsettled very often, but “The Pull” in The Blacktongue Thief hit me hard.

Until this chapter, I saw the goblins as the typical fantasy horde monsters. Horrible? Yes, but not breaking any dark fantasy rules, you expect monsters to do monstrous things. Then “The Pull” happens, and my take on the goblins shifts from horde monster to existential dread. In a blink, tough guy postering escalates into senseless violence. Malk’s arrogance and hatred were apparent, and the goblins saw a mark immediately.

The kicker was how the townsfolk reacted to the aftermath. This was just another day for them, and everyone went back to what they were doing. Even the human kid that barely survived just got his hair tousled and was off to the pub.

This wasn’t the goriest or bleakest scene I’ve ever read, but …

In Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey, a band of war-weary sailors is navigating home when a narrow strait appears on the horizon. The ship, captained by their king, Odysseus, is blocked on one side by a high cliff where a six-headed monster named Scylla is waiting to devour those who pass beneath. On the other side lies a whirlpool called Charybdis that could swallow the ship whole. Odysseus orders his men to row on. Scylla pounces, snatching members of the crew between her jaws. As she consumes them, Homer writes, they shriek, stretching out their arms in “horrifying death-throes.”

It’s a gruesome scene, one of many in this confusing, archaic poem composed some 3,000 years ago. One night this winter, hearing Scylla’s tale read aloud to him for the first time, my 3-year-old son, bundled in his pajamas before bedtime, had a request.

“Read it again!” he said.

The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a children’s book. The poem’s structure can confound even an adult reader. It does not open …

This is something that really bothers me.

If I wrote a book today and it was set in the present-day, then it won’t always be set in the present day. It will always be set in 2026, and the further into the future someone reads it the more historical it will become.

I think this is important no matter what the story is about. The era you live in and what’s happening in wider society always impacts your personal life and your relationships. There isn’t any combination of events that would happen exactly the same in a different time period. If my embryo had been frozen so that I could be born later, I might be genetically the same person but I wouldn’t be me. Too much of my identity is shaped by the time period I grew up in, the friends I had when I was a child and what was going on in the wider world. (I think in particular in my case, the fact that ⁹⁄₁₁ happened when I was seven and the Iraq War when I was nine shaped the way I saw the world quite …

Just picked up a copy at a used bookstore and have been wanting to start it, but don’t want to get bogged down by the entire series. Does the first stand well on its own?

Hey everyone, I’ve seen various forms of this argument around the internet over the past few months, but none as eloquently stated as this article does.

Namely, that Tech Titans have been ideologically weaponizing certain works of science fiction - divorced from the actual meanings of these works - in order to recreate those works’ more dystopian aspects. In other words, using works like Neuromancer as a blueprint for the type of society (or ‘utopia’) they want to see.

It’s something that has really irked me personally, both as someone who loves and appreciates these works, but also as someone who once was once an enthusiastic supporter of the Tech Industry back when it at least ‘felt’ like it was in support of egalitarian and humanitarian progress.

And I’m really glad that people like the author are starting to call out this hypocrisy.

What are everyone else’s thoughts on the conversation? Is it enough to call out this nonsense …

If you haven’t read the Children of Time series yet, consider this your sign.

I’m partway through the fourth book - Children of Strife, and it’s everything I love about scifi books: wildly imaginative, funny, genuinely thought-provoking, and still a page-turner.

Few authors can put you inside the mind of something so alien and make it feel this effortless.

Adrian, if you’re accidentally reading this - thank you!.

- Mobile sushi artillery platform. 🙃

As title says. I love sci-fi, more grounded one, not Star Wars-esque, and I really, really enjoyed The Expanse and I am looking for some other space opera. Would you recommend Revelation Space? Or something else from Reynolds? Or even different series from different author?

I would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

Tldr: I don’t understand how people can claim this is hard science fiction. Not even getting to the third act, the fundamental premise is absurd.

The first red flag is largely just Mary Sue style engineering - one or two engineers think “uhhh, biomimicry!” And somehow just reprogram a bunch of complex robots without support from the ground with absurdly complex behaviours. How this is possible isn’t even addressed, the reader is just meant to assume it’s easy.

Things get worse from there - somehow it’s now possible to fabricate and deliver new ISS modules within a month with hand-wavey “ah well everyone on earth is working on it”. The author seemingly feels no need to reconcile that with his crater lake ramblings of how the vast majority of earth can’t help with space construction as they lack the relevant competencies.

And that’s just the stuff the author shows - he then just expects us to not question how a complex …

Mass Effect is one of my favourite stories in any medium, and part of the reason is that even outside the main storyline dealing with the Reaper threat, I just loved the hangout vibe of large portions of the game. You know, the sections when you’re just chilling in the Normandy, talking to the crew and building your relationships, doing some side missions as an elite badass military unit etc. I also loved the Normandy itself, and how homey and cozy it felt. There’s something so moody and atmospheric about chilling in your comfy captain’s quarters with the endless void of space outside.

Any books that capture that vibe and feel? I honestly prefer something that’s not as grand-scale as a galactic threat like the Reapers…but with a little more oomph than a Becky Chambers book (not that I don’t like those either).