/lit/ - Literature

>>9541799

>Even though I would like something catchy and ok and a bit dark like Herbert or Martin.

Continuing my Vance shilling. Ignore the Spanish book names, Vance is an American as his name suggests.

Martin (assuming you mean GRRM) is actually probably more influenced by Vance than by any other author. So he says, at least, in a preface he wrote to a collection of Vance stories. In fact I doubt I'll ever read Martin's SF, because it just sounds like bootleg Vance, and why would I read a mediocre writer like GRRM imitating the master?

Vance's stuff is definitely a bit dark, he loves exploring the horrible fucked up ways that society can go wrong. But the heroes are either from (relatively) normal interstellar culture, or rebels against those fucked up cultures, and his books don't wallow in the hopelessness of the human condition. All his books are fun, except Emphyrio, which is melancholic to the extreme but done really well.

See here >>9541968 for specific recommendations. Vance is at his best in multi-book series like the Demon Princes. Other series include The Chai cycle (4 books, about a stranded Earth spaceman on a planet of primitive humans ruled and selectively bred and brainwashed for servitude by 4 alien cultures), and the Durdane trilogy (about an ass-backwards planet with no metal, and 40 crammed cantons of the founder effect gone wrong).