I’ve been deep in Sarah Beth Durst and similar cozy fantasy authors lately (The Enchanted Greenhouse, etc.) and I love everything about the genre EXCEPT one thing that’s started to haunt me:

The love interest is always a brooding, barely-verbal man who communicates exclusively through shrugs and meaningful silences. The heroine is a whimsical, high-energy social butterfly who talks to plants and befriends every sentient mushroom she meets.

And I’m supposed to believe this couple is thriving five years later?

Like yes, opposites attract, I get it. But I need someone to explain to me how Year Three looks when she wants to talk about her feelings for two hours and he responds by handing her a cup of tea and staring meaningfully at the wall.

The enchanted greenhouse is sustainable. The relationship? I have questions.

Anyone else think about this too much, or is it just me? And does anyone have recs where the cozy fantasy romance is between two people who are… …

I’m not talking about villains, but about real heroes, the ones you’re supposed to root for, according to the plot.

I have two such characters from books I’ve read recently, and the first is 100% Kvothe, and I think most people who have read the books already know why.

I just imagine that in real life, Kvothe is the guy at every party who has a story that surpasses yours. You remember having a difficult childhood, but he was an orphan on the streets. You learned to play an instrument, but he mastered it in a few weeks. You had a complicated relationship, but his was a tragedy of cosmic proportions. And he’ll tell you all about it, in detail, under the guise of modesty, as long as you listen…

And the second character is Rand al’Thor. I thought that Rand in real life was a man who had gained enormous power, and then for years he made disastrous decisions and processed his feelings about them while everyone around him absorbed the consequences. In …

As the title states, I’m curious to know of any fantasy authors that were well-known at one point, but whose names have faded over time.

EDIT: Wow! I did not expect this to blow up the way that it did! Thank you all for posting your comments.

I just started Promise of Blood and am enjoying it. Having dabbled with recreational substances in my youth, I chuckle every time McClellan writes how so and so “snorted the powder,” which gave them these incredible extrasensory powers that let them do stuff normal humans could only dream of. LOL

Yeah man, Red Bull gives you wings.

Anyways the idea is just… so on the nose. Too funny to sit with by myself haha

I honestly have no idea where to start other than WTF? It is written like a poor translation of a Dostoevsky novel. The scenes are thrown willy nilly around. Women aren’t merely sexualized in a way like “and she looks hot.”, but rather “she’s dripping below with lust.” or “her breasts stood firm”. Phrases like “a huge mountain of flesh” about a big titted curvy woman, and her parts below the waist as “the secret flesh”. Like wtf - I knew King had a weird and off-putting way of writing about women, but geez this is so much worse than I expected.

Besides that, what is going on with the narrator? At some points, he instructs us about information, at other times he just doesn’t know stuff and there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to what he knows and not. And the shifting perspective, like he’s inside two peoples head at the same time? Also the skips in time were jarring.

I enjoyed the scene where …

I picked it up because someone here mentioned it in a thread about political science fiction, and honestly I went in a little skeptical. I’d read The Left Hand of Darkness and liked it but never felt that “wow” moment people describe. So I started The Dispossessed expecting a dry thought experiment about anarchism and capitalism, two societies on twin planets orbiting each other, and sure, that’s what it is on the surface. But what actually happens is Le Guin spends 300 pages slowly, methodically dismantling every comfortable assumption you brought to the book. Both societies are shown to be compromised. Neither utopia works the way it promises. The anarchist moon Anarres, which should be the “good” option, turns out to have its own suffocating social conformity, its own way of punishing people who think differently. It’s just less visible because there’s no government to point at.
What wrecked me is Shevek, the physicist at the center …

Because I just finished reading Blindsight, and I understand if, for most people on this forum, it will be something from that book. The idea that consciousness may be an evolutionary dead end that self-awareness is metabolically expensive, strategically disadvantageous, and that the universe may be full of intelligence that never evolved really turned my worldview upside down. And I love science fiction, so I’ve read a lot of stuff that, for example, makes humanity feel small, but this idea, I don’t know, makes it feel like humanity and its consciousness are a mistake.

And after that, I remembered a few theses/theories from A Fire Upon the Deep, where the concept that the laws of physics are not universal in themselves, that closer to the core of the galaxy, intelligence is impossible, that further away from it, faster-than-light travel becomes possible, that the universe has a literal geography of what is possible, and what is not possible sounds like a plot device, but …

Folks, I’m going to level with you. I was not initially a Kim Stanley Robinson fan. This broke my heart because KSR is such a key figure in leftist science fiction, but I seriously had trouble getting into his stuff. I started with Red Mars--I found myself absolutely frustrated with the characters and rather impatient with the long, scientific descriptions of Martian landscape and the engineering responses to it. This is not any objective measure of the quality of the book, but rather personal preference; I tend to lean “softer” rather than “harder” science fiction, more invested in drama, imagination, and sociological speculation than I tend to be in the realist details of the science, which KSR excels so beautifully in. Similarly, I had difficult vibing with *Aurora,* though I think I also may be crashing out on generation ship narratives in general.

BUT…

All that changed with Ministry for the Future. I feel like this is one of the most …

I’ve been thinking about this after finishing Blindsight, and I keep coming back to the same frustration.

Because most sci-fi aliens are humans with different aesthetics. They have motivations we recognize, communicate in ways we understand, and want things that map onto things we want. Even the “scary” ones are usually just humans with aggression turned up, like the Klingons want honor, the Borg want order, and Predators want sport and fun. These are all human concepts wearing rubber suits.

Genuinely alien intelligence, something that processes reality in a way that doesn’t translate into human frameworks at all, is vanishingly rare. Blindsight does it better than almost anything I’ve read. The Scramblers aren’t evil, aren’t curious, aren’t hostile in any way we’d recognize. They’re something that operates on a level where our categories simply don’t apply. That’s frightening in a completely different way than a …

I recently read and enjoyed the first few books of the Sun Eater series, which is very unabashed about its influences, but it did get me thinking about some of the typical conventions in works that I enjoy and how many of them are linked to Dune.

Despite the title, I’m mostly looking for recommendations and discussion of space opera or space fantasy that you found particularly unique (even if it is a little bit Dune).

I’m particularly looking for settings that either aren’t focused around a central Space Empire or have a Space Empire that isn’t either pseudo-Roman or pseudo-Medieval. I liked Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit as an example of the “space empire with a calcified state religion” trope that drew from Korean folklore and numerology to do something a bit different.

I haven’t read anything better than the culture series and I’m actually worried that nothing will ever scratch that itch the same way. I’m about half way through the series, just finished excession and about to start Inversions.

Banks characters are just so good, they absolutely carry the story and I practically never feel bored. I just can’t get enough of all the snarky minds and drones quipping back and forth. Peter Kenny does a great job with the voices in the audiobook and keeps me entertained.

Is there anyone or anything better?