Meta post, I guess, since I’m more asking about the psychology of other posts on r/Fantasy,
I see these posts all the time. Poster will ask for recommendations where the hero is “not an idealist” or where it has “realistic characters” and then give a bunch of examples of book they’ve read where the main characters are mass-murdering straight up villains, or they’re a bunch of selfish assholes that basically kill/enslave everyone who gets in their way.
Where does the perception that this is “realism” come from? They’re basically describing criminal/warlord/bandit behavior, but the vast majority of human history… most of the people banded together to kill/stop people like that. They were outcasts and outlaws. They were the fringe of society, not the mainstream.
What was actually “realistic” is that you were born into, lived, and died in whatever social strata/class/caste you were born …
Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a wonderful book. It’s the story of a man returning to his childhood home and reliving memories he’d long since forgotten. It’s sort of a cross between a fairy tale and a horror story, in the most delightful way. I love the setting of this book in the Sussex countryside and the lively characters, particularly the Hempstocks. Perhaps my favourite aspect of the book was the use of magic. I love this style of old magic which is inherently tied to nature and ordinary life. I enjoy a Sanderson-style hard magic system as much as anyone else, but I’ve always found something special in magic which works simply because it does.
I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the book draws on some of Gaiman’s own childhood experiences. It felt very personal, and some of the details about the narrator’s life felt too real not to have come from his lived experience. His relationship with his family, his school …
The Watch is a recent television series loosely-based* on Terry Pratchett’s Watch series, particularly Guards, Guards.
It’s just bad**, folks.*** I wouldn’t suggest that anyone else attempt it.
* “loosely-based” being a euphemism for “horrible bastardization”.
** Bad casting, bad writing, bad plotting, ugly to look at…
*** Worst of all, it’s not funny. Expect no Pratchett.
The weavers in Bas-Lag (Perdido Street Station) are by far the most memorable that I’ve come across. Most fantasy novels depict spiders as savage beasts that think only of food. The weavers are one of, if not the most advanced of races in Bas-Lag. Calling them Lovecraftian might be a stretch, but I think it fits just because of how unknowable they are. They operate on a completely different field that’s so far beyond anything humans are capable of perceiving. It’s like an ant trying to understand human engineering or politics.
https://ilona-andrews.com/2021/answer-it-is-upsetting/
Granted, most of this is stuff I’ve personally said, so I’m biased in my agreement. But I found the comments section and their update at the end really interesting:
Update: for the commenters who are expressing that us dying would be the absolute worst because the books would be unfinished, who raised you? No, seriously.
I laughed but it’s true. Like, there’s this weird obsession with an author dying being the worst thing because they can’t pump out another book, not ya know…that a human being just died.
Anyway, have a read and come back and comment :)
CW: mentions of child sexual abuse (“CSA”)
I just finished reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time. We’ve all heard that liking this novel is a “red flag” and folks seem to talk a lot of shit when men and young boys like this novel especially. I knew this book resonated with some real criminals who enacted awful acts of violence, so I was truly expecting the worst. I was completely shocked by the actual nature of the novel.
As someone who works with teens/in youth services, I found Holden heartbreaking. He’s a teenager dealing with depression, isolation, and trauma, both from the loss of his brother and, it’s revealed, childhood sexual abuse/sexual assault. After he evades assault from Mr Antolini, he has a panic response and confesses to the reader: “that kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it.”
I feel like all anybody ever speaks about when it comes to Catcher is how annoying/pretentious Holden is - but …
I saw a recommendation of a comic book by none other than GRRM himself. The comic is called Saga and it’s very good. It’s star wars meets game of thrones in a way. Annd I thought it was a complete series since it started in 2012 but it’s on hiatus as of 2018 and only 50% complete. Any book or series for me will have to be completed before I begin. I just can’t have so many incomplete stories (kingkiller, gentlemen bastards, asoiaf,) and be left with the cliff hangers. Or am I wrong and hurting new authors for having their first book in a series be ignored because its only the beginning?
I’m old enough that I remember when audiobooks were called books on tape, and they were on a carousel in the bookstore at the mall. Then they appeared on compact disc.
I never thought there was anything wrong with them, or that they weren’t “real reading”, I just never got into them. Maybe the selection back then was lacking, so it was mostly popular fiction, which isn’t what I usually read.
About five years ago I started working remote location industrial construction jobs and I got a tablet for my 18 hour commute. I got so many magazines from the library that I eventually had to cut my subscriptions in half, I just couldn’t read them all. The same app has audiobooks but I never bothered to check any out.
I don’t even know what eventually motivated me to do it, but this year I finally checked one out.
My life is transformed. Anytime I’m doing something that I used to listen to music for, it’s now audiobooks. If I’m in the …
As someone who reads alot of sci-fi literature, this might be the best science story I’ve ever read till now.
A lot of sci-fi I’ve read till now uses sci-fi elements like spaceships, aliens, portals, space guns, cyborgs to tell plot driven or character driven stories. It’s rare to find stories with science and discovery at their center. And even if you can find one, they tend to be quite pessimistic and depressing.
“Project Hail Mary” is a perfect ode to science. It paints an optimistic view of the universe- that it’s not a cold and empty void, that humans and their simple ability to overanalyze the universe could save the world.
Real life science is hard, it takes years of research and pointless bureaucracy. But most people who pursue science do it for that bit at the end when you finally get the knowledge and understand a small facet of the universe.
Andy Weir has filtered that tiny bit out, and filled a whole book with it. You just get a sheer …
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on …
I was reading this book for school thinking it was going to be another one of those boring books, but it turned out to be a fascinating read especially after analyzing the contextual influences that sparked his entire writing to be so nihilistic/existential in his writing. Particularly in Cat’s Cradle, no spoilers, but the way the ending is necessary in order to give the rest of the book a sense of cohesion and purpose is such a beautifully written story.
It’s absolute mesmerising to see how the metafictive creation of the book actually amounts to the cohesive manifestation of meaning and purpose, where Vonnegut is able to explore the inherent intrincacies of the human condition, criticising science for not being able to understand the absolutely nuanced and multifaceted aspects of the various human conditions.
If anyone has any points or thoughts about this book I would love to hear it!
What should I read next?
For reference, here are some of the books I’ve really enjoyed in the past:
SCIFI Contact, Carl Sagan Three Body Trilogy, Cixin Liu
SHORT STORIES I KEEP RECOMMENDING TO MY FRIENDS The Last Question, Asimov A Really Old Man with Wings, GGM The Ones who walk away from omelas, le guin The Star and Nine billion names of God by Arthur C Clarke And there’s this amazing short story by Ray Bradbury where astronauts arrive at another planet only to discover that it looks like their hometown. I don’t remember the title but it was a story in his Martian Chronicles
MAGIC REALISM One Hundred Years of Solitude
MISCELLANEOUS SPEC FIC Kafka on the shore
Final note: Although I appreciate Borges, and my favorite poem is written by him, I feel like I don’t enjoy reading him that much. Reading Borges to me feels like a lot of work? While the works I listed above just fly, you know.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but I read the first two of the ancillary justice trilogy and I feel that they do not reflect the high praise they receive. Nothing against Ann Leckie, I’ve read other novels of hers and liked them!
With exception of the ending of the first book, I feel like the book moves along at a snail’s pace and nothing happens. There are stretches of events that take place throughout the book that I think will matter by the climax or at least the end but they never add to the overall plot. Things just happen and the plot doesn’t find a way to tie them back in. I understand they might serve well for character development but the extent to which they go seems unwarranted.
Additionally, I feel like the premise of the book in regards to the emperor is a really interesting idea but it never takes off in the second book. Also, I felt as though the entirety of the second book is solely about the main character waiting and the book could’ve …
I’m asking this bc I’ve been reading a book that’s been getting a lot of hype called Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Obviously most ppl here know about it.
My short thoughts are that it has fantastic world building and great interpersonal character drama. And it should be made into a movie. But it’s never going to be my favorite sci-fi book bc creative world building by itself won’t make a book 5 stars (to me).
Tchaikovsky’s prose are more than serviceable, like definitely better than Asimov in that regard, but he’s no PKD or Kurt Vonnegut or Gene Wolfe or Octavia Butler when it comes to creative writing/prose.
So which sci-fi writers would you say have the best prose?
Thanks to /u/lightninhopkins for letting me know Robert Charles Wilson was on Twitter. When I got there, someone had taken the initiative to ask him already:
To which Robert Charles Wilson responded: >A year and a half ago I would have said yeah, mostly. But now I have a couple of interesting projects percolating. It would be premature to say much more than that, so…ask me again in six months.
Thanks to Twitter user @Gatton for reaching out to RCW for comment.
Edit 8/31/21: Wow, thanks everyone for the great response! Based on feedback in the comments it seems there is interest for me to periodically update the predictions, which I plan on doing near the middle of each month.
I hope no one’s disappointed that the “algorithm” does not use any sophisticated programming as, alas, I’m just a statistician, not a coder. My dad helped me use R code to make it more convenient to input and analyze my data (I had just been plugging everything into an excel spreadsheet).
Allow me to try and explain my methodology: I use a discriminant function analysis (DFA) which uses predictors (independent variables) to predict membership in a group (dependent variable). In this case the group (dependent variable) is whether a book will be a Hugo finalist.
I have a database of Hugo finalists that currently goes back to 2008. Each year I only use data from the previous 5 years to reflect current trends that are more indicative of the final …
I know about 40k and star wars. Big fans of them.
I’ve read Dune - brilliant. Will try Hyperion in the future but it just isn’t enticing me at the moment.
I’ve tried Empire of Silence but was too melodramatic for my taste and had to stop (yes, I know - how melodramatic of me!)
So I’m looking for a grimdark military science fiction/fantasy that’s driven by plot rather than big ideas and is set in the backdrop of SPAAAAAACE.
Thanks.