Per the official Ranger’s Apprentice Facebook page, John Flanagan has passed away. Like so many here, these books were a major piece of my childhood. I loved the characters and stories he created so much. Rest in peace to a great storyteller and world builder. My sympathies go out to his family and friends.

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Hi everyone!

What is the best fantasy book series you’ve ever read in your life? Or, if not a series, perhaps just a single stand-alone novel?

I’ve read Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit way back in the day. It is what it is. I’ve also read the first 3 books of A Song of Ice and Fire way before it became the popular show it became. I’ve heard about Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson but never got myself to read those. I remember reading Name of the Wild awhile back but wasn’t into it. Out of everything I read in the fantasy genre, I’d put A Song of Ice and Fire at the top of my list above everything I’ve read so far.

I’m looking for moral ambiguity and truly great character development and writing as well as realistic and unpredictable story and plot. Sorta like where you can’t tell who really are the good guys or bad guys. I don’t like the standard typical good vs evil tropes especially where the villains are …

I went into Legends & Lattes with pretty high expectations. It gets recommended everywhere in cozy fantasy threads, so I figured I was in for something special.

And yeah…considering the author’s background, it is a decent book. But top tier¿ I just don’t see it.

This is obviously personal preference, but here’s why it disappointed me,

1) Low stakes is shouldn’t be equal to low effort storytelling. I actually wanted the low-stakes vibe ..that’s why I picked it up. But if you remove tension, you have to compensate with something else: strong character work, immersive daily life, or meaningful interactions.

Instead, a lot of it felt… summarized.

2) Too much telling, not enough showing One example that really stood out: when Viv is under pressure from the stone thief, we’re told she’s snapping at coworkers constantly and feeling guilty.

But we don’t really see those moments.

That’s a big miss for a cozy story. The appeal is in those small, lived-in …

I read Piers Anthony as a teen and into my 20s (80s and very early 90s) Firefly and first book of Tyrant series turned me off.

So last week I got a Kindle so came across Piers Anthony and it had free Xanth books. I downloaded Question Quest. I am halfway through and his creepiness is so apparent.

A) A female demon D Metria is always truthful but she can lie about her age since a woman lying about her age is not considered a lie.

B) Looks and intelligence of women are linked. Plainer you are smarter you are with some exceptions.

C) Again obsession with teenage girls panties. It comes across as a fetish Anthony has that he puts on paper.

D) Innocence is tied to sex. This disturbs me a lot. Maybe it’s the era we live in but we have seen this idea weaponized against women especially children. I know he is from the Silent Generation but even then it’s a problematic concept and more so now. I know in 40s cartoons with Betty Boop she wouldn’t have sex since she would lose her Boop which …

If you go to my profile, you will see my latest post about trying to get into the litrpg genre. Overwhelmingly, comments told me to read Dungeon Crawler Carl, even after I said I would get to it. But, with enough convincing, I figured I would bump it up my TBR and see what all the fuss was about.

I finished in 3 days.

This book is addictive. I don’t know what it is, but holy cow, all I wanted to do was read more and more and more. Every scene moved the plot forward, and even the exposition bits didn’t feel too much. The only thing I felt confused about was all the syndicates and kingdoms and whatnot, but I’m sure the next books will clear that up.

I think what made this litrpg work and not others was the inclusion of Princess Donut. Other than the fact that she is an incredible character and I love her, and her few moments of vulnerability, she adds something much needed to the litrpg protagonist: a friend. Most of the time, our heroes enter their new mysterious …

I’ve read about halfway through Book 3 of Red Rising and then dropped it. I’m trying to understand something that’s been bothering me throughout the series.

My main issue is this: there are no Reds in the actual decision-making spaces where the revolution is shaped.

What I mean is:

• The story is about a Red revolution on the surface
• But the people making strategic decisions about it are almost entirely Darrow and Gold or Gold-adjacent characters, just about every other colour but red
• Darrow, after his transformation, operates fully within Gold’s identity and systems
• I don’t see sustained Red presence in leadership or in the rooms where the direction of the revolution is decided

So my question is simple: when do Reds actually get into the room where decisions are made about their own liberation?

What also confuses me is the inconsistency in how Reds are portrayed:

• On one hand, Reds are shown as capable of running underground networks, smuggling, organizing resistance, and …

I’m about 200 pages in and I had to put it down yesterday because I hit the section where Egan describes the geometry of a universe with six spatial dimensions and I made the mistake of trying to follow the actual math and now I’m just here.

So like this isn’t “and then the ship went through hyperspace” handwaving, like usually in ither books and shows, but there are actual equations like the way physics works in a six dimensional space is different in specific ways that Egan works out properly, the way gravity falls off, the way atomic structures would or wouldn’t be stable, the way light behaves and he’s not using these as decoration, the plot depends on characters understanding and navigating these differences and if the math were wrong the story wouldn’t work. I went down a rabbit hole two days ago trying to verify some of it and the parts I could check against real physics papers actually hold up and the parts that go beyond current …

The story is “The Ones Wh o Walk Away from Omelas” and I know most people read it as an ethical thought experiment about complicity, which it is, but I want to talk about something slightly different in it that I’ve been sitting with since a reread last week. The premise is a city of perfect happiness that depends on the suffering of a single child kept in a basement. Everyone knows. The happiness is real and it requires the suffering to be real. Le Guin is not subtle about what she’s asking you to consider.

What I keep returning to is the section where she describes how the citizens of Omelas process their knowledge of the child. Most of them, she writes, feel something terrible when they first learn about it. Then they rationalize. Then they go on. They do not forget. They have simply found a way to hold the knowledge and continue functioning. She describes this not as moral failure exactly but as a kind of psychological necessity, which is what makes it so …

I read this book a few years ago after a Starburst review called it possibly the best SF novel of 2018. It’s a strange, demanding, 588-page debut that mixes philosophical fiction with space opera. One storyline follows an unnamed philosopher on Earth who gradually becomes something monstrous, the other follows a rebel in a far-future galaxy where everyone’s consciousness is managed by an implanted device. There’s also a woman who can move through time. The three storylines converge at the end in a way that completely reframes everything you’ve read.

The novel engages seriously with Kant, Hegel, Levinas, Milton, Dante. The prose has been compared to McCarthy and Melville, which is fair in places, though it’s uneven. It got good reviews from Kirkus and some other glowing reviews, but beyond that there’s almost nothing written about it. No Reddit threads, no essays, nothing.

I started obsessing over it after a recent reread and the result is this …

Hi, I am pretty starved for a new interesting sci fi novel. In the past I’ve enjoyed the classics (Clarke, Bradbury, Hainlein, Dick, Asimov), the more metaphorical SF (LeGuin), the popular (Culture, Murderbot, Children of time) and now Im looking for the next big thing which will give me that feeling of wonder of dread that only sci fi can.

I could not get into space operas (I’ve tried with Excession and Ann leckie) but I’m willing to give it another go! Now I’m looking for a SF book i can read over the summer that will grip me

I enjoy eerie stories and cosmic horror. I already own Blindight after reading Freeze Frame Revolution (which had very cool ideas but ultimately was kind if disappointing); I’ve enjoyed some of Philip Dick (the ideas, not the characters).

Loved Invincible by Lem.

I have always had a soft spot for the AI trope (the Minds in the Culture are really cool and fun), or first contact (Story of Your life is one of my favourite of all time); truly alien aliens, …

I keep thinking about a thing some SF writers do where the actual plot is fine, maybe even very good, but then somewhere in paragraph three of a random chapter they casually mention a completely wild idea and just keep moving like nothing happened.

Not even the big headline concept of the book. I mean the side stuff. A weird legal system that only exists because memory can be copied. A religion built around time dilation. A city designed around some obscure biological constraint. A form of labor, family structure, punishment, or education that clearly comes from a huge amount of thought, but the book only needs it for half a scene so it never gets fully unpacked.

Sometimes I love this because it makes the world feel much larger than the story I’m reading. It gives me that feeling that the author knows ten times more about the setting than I ever will. But sometimes it has the opposite effect and I get kind of stuck on the “wait, go back” detail and care more about …

I’ve had this itch for a while-specifically a more grim and nasty version of the typical space opera setting. The federation is corrupt or falling to pieces, the empire is gaining power rapidly, the rebels are on the backfoot or vicious murderers, and the general tone is “survival of the fittest”, with a spaceship crew just trying to survive.