Daughter of Crows is my 20th published novel and starts The Academy of Kindness trilogy.

It’s my first grimdark work since The Broken Empire trililogy, and the first grimdark I’ve written in 15 years. So you can go back to calling me grimdark author Mark Lawrence … if anyone ever stopped :D

You can read all about my work in this handy Guide to Lawrence

I have a second book coming out this year in October, The Bookshop Book.

This one is a standalone loosely associated with The Library Trilogy.

Daughter of Crows is a whole new thing not connected to any of my other works - jump in here.

Since “what’s Daughter of Crows about?” hasn’t been among the first 100 questions … it’s in part a dark academia book, but VERY dark, and it features as its lead, an old female character. A type of character which people say is under-represented in fantasy.

I’ve delivered 20 books in 15 years, so you’re pretty safe starting now. …

I’ve spotted an interesting tendency in recent years - we have less and less non-human races in fantasy. There were interesting times when everyone wanted to be like Tolkien (publishers especially), due to what we have our lovely standard ‘DnD’ setting with elves/dwarves/gnomes/orcs/halflings etc. There is a lot of fantasy using this set of races - some more blatantly, some with deviations, but it was logical and, to be honest, a good thing that it started to meet it’s end.

So finally, we could get a new era of fantasy, where each author could express themselves and create totally new, unique, non-Tolkien inspired races… Wait, what? What do you mean there is no more races now?

Let’s just too at this list of most popular epic fantasy https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/50.The_Best_Epic_Fantasy_fiction_ . As you can see, in 90’s-00’s everything shifted and the most icon fantasy of time like ASOIAF, The Wheel of Time, The Realm of …

Just wanting to share.

I’m reading Temple Hill by Drew Karpyshyn. There’s a little that’s off here and there, the prologue is a bit long-winded and the action sequence drags, but altogether I’m having fun.

However.

The main city in the book is called “Elversult.” And I have unfortunately learned, as I read, that I read words as a whole. My brain says “Everslut” every time.

“We have some of the finest ale in Everslut”—wait, no, it’s “Elversult”! Ok, back to reading…

“In Everslut, that life was particularly harsh”—Elle-vuhr-sult! Elle-vuhr-sult! In ELLE-VUHR-SULT, that life was particularly harsh! Ok, back to it…

I keep getting pulled out of the text because it’s fun and lovely and D&D adventuring, and then the stupid city name pops up again. I’m about to give up and let it be Everslut. Whatever.

Anyone else experience this with a story? 🤣

I really enjoy reading, but am not really good at critically paying attention to themes, characters, and ultimately forming an opinion on a book. Eg, I recently finished Babel; I remember feeling like it fell a little flat for me, but I overall really liked at least the first half.

I wanted to see some discourse, but saw that a lot of people were pretty critical about the novel. I actually agreed with a some of the critique but didn’t even realize it until seeing other people explicitly voicing it; I also was a bit surprised that so many people felt bored by the first half of the book, which was the part that drew me in the most.

I’m fine not having the same opinions as others when it comes to lit, but I want to be better about reading more thoughtfully, just wanted to see if anyone had thoughts on how I could improve my reading habits!

Seriously, you think if a Fantasy book had a female MC the author would try to write other female characters who they have a complex relationship with but no.

Spoilers for the first two Poppy War books.

just finished the Dragon Republic and it annoyed me how many female characters were killed off when they were so few compared to male characters. Qara, the Sorquan Sira, that female military officer who was kissed when she got killed by that Wolf Meat General (seriously, what was that about) and Niang.

Yes, male characters died too but when your cast is male dominated the deaths of female characters sticks out more.

Most of the characters the female MC has complex relationships with are male. Kitay her best friend, Nexha her frenemy (how else should I describe him) her mentor Jiang, Altan, Chaggan, Vaisra and most of the Cike.. In comparison, for women, there’s Su Daji and Sister Petra and that’s it. Maybe Aunty Fang, though Venka looks to be shaping up to have a bigger role. No …

Rutherford County Library Director Luanne James said moving the books constitutes a violation of the First Amendment.

Some of the books which were supposed to be moved, in order to protect children from “gender confusion”:

The Airless Year” by Adam Knave: flagged for “female empowerment”

“Desert Queen” by Jyoti Rajan Gopal: flagged for LGBTQ themes, “strongly” promoting “gender equality, female empowerment, following one’s dreams and challenging rigid social roles.”

“We Belong” by Laura Purdie Salas: flagged for “diverse children in urban setting”

“Bodies are Cool” by Tyler Feder: flagged for “boys shown bare-chested; a woman nursing a child is depicted.”

“Answers in the Pages” by David Levithan: flagged for “classroom discussion of books bans and censorship.”

“Harlem Hellfighters” by J. Patrick Lewis: flagged for “graphic depiction of lynching.”

“What was Stonewall?” by Nico Medina: flagged for “LGBTQ community’s fight for equality”

“You are not Alone” by …

As seen here: https://xcancel.com/rifflexielian/status/2036286051388461363

I know the Scholar’s Tale gets all the emotional credit and fairly so, it’s devastating in a way that’s hard to argue with, and the Soldier’s Tale has the best action and I get it.

But the Priest’s Tale does something none of the others do because it starts as a fairly conventional SF story about a mission to a remote planet and then about two thirds in it just becomes something else entirely and Simmons doesn’t warn you it’s happening. The moment with the crosses on the hill genuinely made me put the book down for a few minutes, not because it was shocking but because I needed to process what kind of book I was actually reading and the horror in that story works because it’s not explained. The Shrike is at its most terrifying in the Priest’s Tale specifically because Simmons resists the urge to make it make sense. Later in the series that restraint disappears and the Shrike becomes something you can understand and categorize and …

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying the series. It has an incredible sense of scope and a nuanced plot that still feels focussed and well planned. But something has always “annoyed” me about it.

I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out but it finally dawned on me: it’s the wise-cracking.

Almost all of the characters, regardless of which faction they are from, speak in a brash, bantery kind of way. Something like:

“Sir, the lasers are pointed right at us. We either scram now, or sure as shit our ship boutta grow a thousand new assholes.”

I understand this makes the action scenes pithy and I guess some people might find it.. witty ? But the effect it has on the series as a whole is a kind of flattening of the characters into a homogenous blob. Avasarala comes off the worst here.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Maybe this is a common complaint.

I just finished the book, and Takeshi Kovacs might be the most deliberately broken protagonist in SF and I dont think he gets nearly enough credit for it, becausr most complex SF protagonists are complex in a way that’s designed to be readable and even likeable and you always feel like the author is guiding you toward understanding them but Kovacs is different because Morgan genuinely does not seem interested in making him sympathetic in any conventional sense.

He’s an Envoy, which means he’s been trained to adapt to any body and any situation so completely that his sense of self has basically been weaponized into a tool and then the tool got damaged and then he kept using it anyway. The thing that makes him interesting isnt the violence or the cynicism, it’s that he operates from this position of almost total detachment and every rare moment where something actually gets through to him hits completely different because of it.

What I find underrated is how …

Checked out a local shop tonight that I thought only sold comics and they’re sitting on an absolute gold mine. Tons of Ballard, Dick, Lafferty, Vance, even some Strugatsky brothers. Not proud of the noise I made when I saw The Instrumentality of Mankind… But man I’ve been looking for a copy for so long. 4 bucks and it looks brand new like it’s never even been read. I can’t wait to go back when I have more time.

This series was INCREDIBLE. Deep, thoughtful, quite strange, and insidious is a subtle way. Just pure brilliance all the way through. But after the third book I wanted more. This was my first encounter with Butler and will definitely be reading more. The Patternist series especially interests me, Parable of the Sower not so much (not that attracted to post-apocalyptic/dystopian stuff despite the fact you could somewhat characterize Xenogenesis in that way).

Can we talk about this series? And is there anything else out there with that sort of biopunk feel?

Hello reddit! I’m James McAvoy. AMA!

my directorial debut, CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN’, is out in UK theaters on April 10.

Two Scottish lads from Dundee conned the music industry by pretending to be an established Californian rap duo, bagging a record deal and appearing on MTV until their scam unraveled.

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUTSyu4Ovcc

Tickets/other things:

http://www.californiaschemin.co.uk/

I’ll be back at around 1-2 PM ET/5-6 PM GMT today, Friday ³⁄₂₇, to answer questions.