I know there’s a lot of criticism of Brandon Sanderson on this sub, which is completely alright of course, even as a superfan i agree with a lot of it. But today marks the 21st anniversary of Elantris, Therefore I thought it would be nice to talk about some things we like about Sanderson. I’m not doing this in one of the Sanderson themed subs, since every day is Sanderson appreciation day there.

I’ll go first: I just love his overall plots. The structures and the twists and turns, especially in his bigger books really works for me. I love that in Stormlight, each part ends with something quite substantial, either an important and hype action set piece, or big plot twist or decision.

What about you?

I’ve read fantasy since the 90s. Stopped reading in the early 2000s and then picked it back up around 2020. I’ve read through the recent big names - First Law, Locke Lamora, Licanius, etc. The vast majority of what I’ve read that has been published in the last 15 years has completely dropped environmental description and storytelling. I mean full-on dropped it.

For example, I have not read a single book written after say 2010 that has anything like what Tolkien wrote below.

“Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms …

Not just a favourite. I mean the full package: writing, characters, world-building, plot. The one that made everything else feel a little lesser by comparison.

Edit: Novel or Series

I tore through the first three books. The 4th was slower, but I still enjoyed it. Wind and Truth lost my interest several times. I took two breaks. During one of the breaks I read all seven DCC books. I came back finally and finished it. Szeth’s extremely long and repetitive mission, the scattered nature of the numerous sub plots, so many chapters ending with little cliffhangers or micro expositions, leading in a very protracted “ending.” I loved The Realm of the Elderlings, so I don’t need everything wrapped up in a bow with a beautiful sunset behind, but I guess I needed more than I got. ***Minor spoilers*** Dalinar copies Sizgil, and no character gets a definitive end arc except Mraize. Mid-point or not, it still was less than. For me. I read one of the new Conan .99¢ short stories afterwards. In 35 pages I got a complete, enjoyable story. I might save one for the end of every Sanderson novel henceforth.

As a librarian, I receive occasional PR boxes from publishers, and I wish I could tell them to cool it with the bookmarks. I have more than I could ever use, and readers don’t want them at all. I used to put out these PR bookmarks as free goodies for library patrons to take, but I was still left recycling dozens of bookmarks when they went untouched for months.

I wish I could tell publishing houses and authors to stop spending their money designing and printing something that’s going to quickly end up in the trash.

What do you all think? Do you like getting bonus bookmarks, or are they just more clutter for you to find a home for? Am I being too harsh? What item do you prefer to get when you go to book events or receive promotional material? Personally, I love a consumable-an individually packaged candy or tea bag that’s relevant to the story in some way.

I would prefer getting nothing over being burdened with yet another bookmark.

I’ll start.

I HATED Contact by Carl Sagan. I felt like it dragged on endlessly and homeboy cannot write a female protagonist and should have just not even tried. I hated the pointless tangents and the completely unnecessary love story. The glowing reviews are bewildering to me and I say that as a bonafide sci-fi neeeeerd

Also, I loathed The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. I love me a good faustian bargain story but god damn was this one a let down. How was this book only 254 pages? I swear it felt endless. This book takes such a cool concept and executes it in the most dull and lifeless way possible. It’s like reading wannabe edgelord tweets from a brooding 14 year old. Armchair philosophy and half-baked shower thoughts. Insufferably pretentious with no right to be.

In the last month or so, there have been several weird posts on this subreddit about Ursula Le Guin. The fact that they are about Le Guin is not the odd part, for of course she is commonly regarded as one of the greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy writers of the 20th century.

But what IS weird is the commonalities between these posts, and the fact that they are potentially all written by AI.

Here are four of the posts. I believe there may be more, but these are the ones I found:

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1rz6i5x/le_guins_the_dispossessed_made_me_realize_i_had/?ref=share&ref_source=link

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1snz3qm/i_keep_accidentally_reading_le_guin_in_the_wrong/?ref=share&ref_source=link

https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1s7tr4e/the_left_hand_of_darkness_is_50_years_old_and/?ref=share&ref_source=link …

I grew up reading Three-Body Problem in Chinese and recently went through the English translations to compare. I knew there would be some differences but I was genuinely not prepared for how much changed between versions.

The biggest one that nobody talks about: in the Chinese Book 2, Wallfacer Tyler’s entire plan is built around ball lightning weapons from Liu Cixin’s earlier novel. His real strategy involves quantizing Earth’s own soldiers into a ghost army. The English version completely replaces this with a different mosquito fleet kamikaze plan because Ball Lightning hadn’t been translated yet when The Dark Forest came out in English. There’s a detailed comparison of both versions that goes through it scene by scene and it’s honestly like reading two different characters.

The chapter order in Book 1 is different too. The Chinese publisher made Liu Cixin move Ye Wenjie’s backstory from the beginning to the middle to reduce political …

Orson Scott Card on the editorial process for Ender’s Game:

My short story “Ender’s Game” was rejected by Ben Bova at Analog back when that was the top market for a sci-fi story. Ben gave me feedback. He thought the title should be “Professional Soldier” and he said to “cut it in half.”

But I knew he was wrong on both points and submitted it to Jim Baen at Galaxy. He sat on it for a year, and responded to my query with a rejection. There was some kind of explanation, but I don’t remember what it was. I concluded at the time that Baen’s comments showed that he had barely glanced at the story.

So … I got feedback both times, but it was not helpful. I looked at Ben’s rejection again. What was it about the story that made him think it should, let alone COULD, be cut in half?

Apparently it FELT long. What made it feel long? Now, post-Harry Potter, I would call it the quidditch problem. I had too many battles in which the details became tedious. So I cut …

“Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It’s much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it’s true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it’s over in a minute or so. It’s a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I’ve now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.”

How true do you think this is, and what are some examples of books/stories that illustrate this point? (For me it was Harry Turtledove’s “A World of Difference.” Everything interesting about that book you can find in the Wikipedia page and save yourself 300 pages of human infidelity drama.)

The Hugo Awards finalists have been released! I have only read a couple of these. I have seen some say that this seems like a very safe, “boring” list, with a lot of the nominees coming from the same publisher and from authors who have already been nominated or won Hugos in the past. I nominated the novel The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes and am a bit sad it didn’t make the cut. I’m not that into following awards in the genre or anything, but I was at last year’s Worldcon and plan to go to this year’s, where these are voted on.

I will update this post with my thoughts as I read these. I just wanted to have a convenient collection of links for my own uses.

#Novels

• A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape): Sequel to last year’s Hugo winner, The Tainted Cup. I read this and thought it was good.

• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow; Gollancz)

• Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US)

• The …

Two examples for me would be:

- In “What Lies Beneath,” Michelle Pfeiffer uses a hair dryer to clear the fog off of her mirror. That totally works and I’ve done it ever since I saw that movie.

- In “Spanglish,” Adam Sandler “pre-“wakes up his kid. He basically says you don’t have to wake up yet but start thinking about waking up and this is another thing I’ve used and that has really helped the wake-up rituals in our house.