Don’t kill me first of all but am currently reading warbreaker and siri is giving me so much of shallan, serene, lift, rsyn vibe??

Like that same witty sarcastic humor, disrespecting others, rebeling and all. Which was the main reason i have to drop oathbringer for a while and started with warbreaker thinking it would be fresh breath but man here i found another shallan. Like omg in stormlight archive it’s been 3 books and shallan is still the same :((

And it doens’t mean sanderson can’t write good female characters. Vin, navani, marasi, steris and shai are my one of favourite ones. Though shai and steris still little bit feel same. But is just me or anyone else felt like that too? Maybe it’s because of sanderson’s YA Writing??

https://preview.redd.it/w0v0k983sq3h1.png?width=938&format=png&auto=webp&s=50e14fe75f263ce0dcd960ecd5926605d9527165

Hey folks,

As some people may know, I’m a contributor and sometimes staff member of GRIMDARK MAGAZINE, which has done a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect from an Aussie press like publish one of TR Napper’s cyberpunk books and also successfully summon the hordes of Chaos. However. one thing that a lot of Scott Lynch fans are unaware of is that it also published the 4th Locke Lamora published work in the novella, LOCKE LAMORA AND THE BOTTLED SERPENT (see: Grimdark Magazine 40 and 41).

Well, I just wanted people to know that the novella is out as an independent purchase and you should pick it up if you feel inclined. Amazon and Kobo both hold it. It’s not THE THORN OF EMBERLAIN but it’s a sign Scott is easing his way back into the world of Camorr and I’m very grateful my good friend, Adrian Collins managed to convince …

As the title says above, I wanted to get other’s peoples opinion, maybe see their choices.

Everyone has books that they read over and over again, that bring out strong emotions when read, be it a smile or tears or Holy Cow! That was good!

I won’t go into the well known books like Tolkien, but some lesser known ones.

I want to bring up two from my short list that might be forgotten, but shouldn’t be. If anyone has read these, or reads these because of this thread, I’d like to hear about it

The first is just so much fun. It’s “Silverlock” by John Myers Myers. Written in 1949, its a single book that’s fairly thick

The MC gets his nickname from the streak of white in his hair. At the beginning he’s a major jerk. He falls overboard from a ship and winds up on a large island called the Commonwealth.

On the island, he meets numerous characters out of legend, myth and history, growing into a normal, caring person as he goes. …

Maybe it’s just me, but in the 2000s the cover art qualities seem to go down. Before that it seems like we got actual paintings or at least what resembled that. Now it seems often much cruder covers predominate. I don’t know whether this was due to publishers cutting costs or what, but when looking back at books from the 90s and 80s it’s usually a stark contrast. That didn’t always ensure the book contents’ qualities were superior, but we do judge books partly by their covers and good art did help sell them I imagine. Recent editions of older books also display this-their new covers often have far less art or worse quality that I’ve seen. Anyway, what do you think?

What fantasy fortress or city actually felt realistically defensible to you? One thing I’ve always loved about fantasy is seeing how different worlds approach siege warfare and city defense, but I’ve noticed a lot of castles in fantasy seem designed more for aesthetics than actual survival.

Minas Tirith is one I always thought would’ve been far harder to take than most adaptations make it seem. The layered elevation alone basically turns the city into one giant uphill choke point where attackers would constantly lose momentum the deeper they pushed.

Helm’s Deep is another good example because the fortress actually feels designed around fallback positions, kill zones, and forcing attackers into narrow approaches.

On the opposite side, some fantasy castles feel like they’d collapse the second the outer wall falls because there’s almost no layered defense behind them. It got me thinking a lot more about how terrifying siege warfare would actually become once exhaustion, corpse buildup, …

Thoughts? I found this to be interesting.

I’m starting a marathon of the BBC Sherlock series with my daughter, and it got me thinking. What’s the most famous address in literature? The one that you hear and instantly know who lives there, that immediately conjures images of the characters and stories in your head? The one that comes to mind for me immediately is 221B Baker Street - it instantly brings to mind Holmes and Watson and classic English mysteries. Which ones come to mind for other folks?

I am getting incredibly tired of picking up a highly praised first contact novel only to find out that the hyper-advanced entities from the fifth dimension basically think like a slightly frustrated human project manager . It feels like a massive failure of imagination when an author builds up this massive cosmic mystery, builds the tension for two hundred pages, and then the big reveal happens and the alien lifeform is just a guy in a rubber suit speaking in metaphors. They want our water, or they want to teach us about peace, or they are just space colonizers doing a standard empire bit. It completely deflates the cosmic dread and the actual wonder of what an encounter with a non human intelligence would look like.

We live in an era where we can barely understand how certain neural nets reach their conclusions, yet I am supposed to believe that a biological or digital entity that evolved under a completely different set of physical laws is going to bother explaining its philosophy …

Wow. What an awesome book. I could not put it down. I consider myself to be relatively well read, and I’ve never encountered anything quite like this. Picked it up after doing a Total Recall rewatch.

I don’t even know how to classify it. Drug-fueled, reality-bending, psychedelic sci-fi? Philosophical paranoia fiction?

Wanted to use this thread for two things:

1. Recommendations for books that scratch a similar itch (if that’s even possible)
2. General discussion/interpretations of the book itself

I’ve just finished his final fiction novel ‘The Quarry’. It is stellar, with the same brilliance of conversation and description as all his work.

So if you’ve read all his science fiction and want more of his writing, you will find his fictional novels to be intriguing - placed in settings or situations that are slightly askew, demanding solutions not normally angled. Not science fiction, but unreal all the same.

This was announced mid-April but it looks like nobody posted about it.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association has long awarded the Grandmaster Award as a lifetime achievement award. It can only be given to living authors, so a few years ago they created the posthumous Infinity Award for people who died before receiving the Grandmaster Award.

https://nebulas.sfwa.org/award/infinity-award/

https://nebulas.sfwa.org/celebrating-roger-zelazny-sfwas-newest-infinity-award-recipient/

I have been a fan of Vinge for a while now, but only on my second re-read of A deepness in the Sky I come to appreciate how incredible this book is.

As a disclaimer, I am a distracted reader and I like to re-read books mostly to uncover angles that I might have missed on a first read.

While reading Deepness, I realised how incredible the work that Vinge has done in portraying the multiple sides of the story and the Arachna / Humans perceptions.

The plot was already incredible, with the discovery of a unique world with peculiar traits. The quest for survival, the character building and the reveal of Trinli’s identity were simply excellent. The epoch-spanning plans for Qeng Ho, the localizers etc just fit the story beautifully.

But what really blew me away this time was the _perceptions_ .

It takes you almost 80% of the book to realised you’ve humanized somehow the spiders, picturing them as some human-like characters living in some buildings that resemble ours, driving …

I’m working my way through the Foreigner series, and it is really cracking me up that on the one hand Bren Cameron is handling this delicate, multi-layered crisis involving a conspiracy inside the assassin’s guild, trouble in his lord’s marriage, a political debate about the introduction of cell phones and fragile alliance negotiations.

And then in the next chapter, Cajeiri has lost his pet monkey. And these things will, somehow, end up having everything to do with each other. We’re lucky to have CJ Cherryh, is all.

“I was adamant about not doing television, because I didn’t want to do anything that was too homogenized or that was like everybody else. And my son sat me down during COVID, and he showed me “Breaking Bad.” I began to see that the actors in that show were afforded the luxury of time to tell their story. I saw Bryan Cranston staring at a suitcase for what seemed like minutes. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and all he was doing was staring at a suitcase, and it occurred to me that you can’t do that in movies: You don’t have the time. I thought, maybe with an eight-hour narrative I can start planting seeds for a character that can bloom into something that I don’t have the luxury of time to do in a movie. That was the main attraction.”

So his idea is to have only 2 of them (him and his girlfriend) in the cinema (he is arranging with the crew for a “screening” of the movie, when the place is vacant.) He wants to play a montage of them 5 min into the movie (when the screen begins to glitch).

I think this is a insensitive idea given the context of the movie- it is about two people in a toxic relationship who literally try to wipe memories of the other away.

I want to tell him that, but I don’t know if I am in the wrong…. I mean, the movie is still centered around love right?