/lit/ - Literature

>>20818915
Hello. I hope everyone has a great thread. I checked out the goodreads group in the OP. I don't really know how good reads works. But I guess I need to read one of the books listed on their bookshelf to get in?(I don't fucking know) Well I started Swords and Deviltry, and it's pretty good so far! I'm a little shocked because my expectations were very low starting out.

>>20819149
I'm glad you're enjoying it! Please keep us updated with your progress. Thanks

Dave "Two Ton" Smith
USMC 1967-1972
Selling 1971 Chevy Nova, 25 grand. No lowballs
Cash, grass, or ass. No one ride for free.
30-06 is God's caliber

Bakker is a supreme ruler
Sandi is your average drooler

Simple as.

what is the sexiest scifi/fantasy that is decent and not straight up smut

>>20819276
BLACK SEED

>>20819306
an author would be helpful

>>20819312
Bakker

why was the SF scene so full of degenerates?

>>20819312
Lurk moar newfaggot

>>20819331
Fantasy had its fair share too. Eddings (literally had a child slave) and that woman who wrote Mists of Avalon (was a fem-nonce)

Does she rule supreme over men?

it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out - one hundred and thirteen times a second it reaches out

>>20819696
Doors and corners kid

read cradle

>reached the "Honor is dead. But I'll see what I can do." kino
>immediately followed by what felt like 200 pages of Lift and Parshendi snoozefest.
Way to ruin your pacing.

>>20819881
>He fell for the sandersnoy meme

>>20819881
Lift is easily the worst thing Sandy has shat out, and the fact that she is his favorite character to write pisses off. I want to punch him in his Mormon face everytime I'm forced to read "Lift became awesome".

>>20819896
>>20819897
I don't mind Lift all that much desu. I am a cute thief girl enjoyer but I can see why people hate her. She is very out of place (so far).
Eshonai's chapters on the other hand are so fucking boring. I just can't stand them. They just kept going and going. They are filled with dull dialogues and barely anything happens, they kept talking about the same thing repeating in a circle.
I can only read her PoV in a toilet where I have nothing else to do (and I have to intentionally leave my phone outside to do so.). I am sure he could give you the same amount of information and 2 pages or less.

>>20819910
I think what bothers me the most is how unfitting of a character she is for the setting, everyone else is written and takes themselves seriously and then you have bootleg walmart brand Vin acting and talking like a shitty YA protag, but I digress.

I actually like Eshonai and Venli's POV personally, I'm a sucker for Sandy's world building and I found it fascinating seeing how the race that was treated primarily as an evil to be purged in book one lives when they're not fighting the Alethi. Stuff like how form changing works and their sing-song languages is pretty cool to me desu. Also I think it adds more impact to what happens at the end of WoR because you got to know some of the characters involved and you're there for most of the steps of their grand plan.

I do have to agree, ultra instinct Kaladin was fucking kino and I hate how Elhokar ruined the whole thing.

Sorry if that was little rambly it's 4:33am my time lol

Bakker is King.

>>20819910
i think venli when she meets the terriswoman meddler that starts off the entire clusterfuck of current sa (gavilar's peace dinner with the parshendi) is very interesting; who tf is axindweth and what faction does she represent?

>>20819947
The Lord Of The Rings by R Scott Bakker

Gandalf sleeps with his daughter; she is a prostitute. Twenty years ago he slept with her mother; she is also a prostitute. Gandalf also slept with a male apprentice of his, taking advantage of a vulnerable pupil. It is unclear which experience overall was the most enjoyable for him.

The Fellowship gather at Rivendell, it looks exactly like the Mines Of Moria. For some reason, all of the elves of Rivendell are management Consultants, they may also be incel Greek philosophers. The management Consultants give Frodo a VR helmet to aid him on his quest, this is the sort of thing management Consultants do. Elrond is an exceptionally ancient and senile, giant incel. He wallows in darkness and filth at the bottom of a pit beneath an inverted mountain, feeding upon pig carcasses. He is however very helpful. Elrond kills all of the elf Consultants and smashes the stupid VR helmet.

Boromir has forgotten he is actually Legolas. He feeds the hobbits highly addictive drugs. Everyone goes insane and kills each other.

Aragorn leads a great warhost on an arduous Ordeal to overthrow Sauron upon the endless desolation of Mordor. Previously Aragorn was crucified upside down with Eowyn, we often forget about Eowyn, especially after she had her heart ripped out of her chest by Aragorn and maybe it was also set on fire. Eowyn is a prostitute. Aragorn's true love is of course Arwen. Arwen is also a prostitute. In fact, Arwen was the aforementioned mother of Gandalf's child, the daughter that he slept with. Does all of this make sense now?

Sauron is an alien. Now he is very ancient, he learnt the way to conserve his power was to forge it into objects that contained his malevolent soul and to bequeath them in dark rituals of his followers, management Consultants. It would be convenient if Sauron chose some portable vessel, something easily carried and worn on the hand or finger. Like a bracelet or torc or carcanet, an armband or circular ornament of some kind. So Sauron chooses the limbless torsos of five humans suspended before a golden chamber of inverted fire.

>>20819881
>>20819910
>>20819897
Hahahahaha. 8 days, 14 hours, 19 minutes, 28 seconds
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>20819988
you dont need to add unnecessary stuff, the second apocalypse is a jaded version of lotr but more enriching philosophically without constant fellating lineage and angel/demon paradigm
> the outside corresponding with the creation lore of tolkien
> nonmen: realistic elves if they live for long enough, with deteriorating memories
> nonnmen mansion: elf/hobbit cumulative with the degradation of the ages
> emwama: hobbits under the tender care of the insane long-lived elves

Why did Kellhus do it?

What were Tolkien's Peredhil/Half Elves like before they were forced to pick elf or human at the end of the first age? Discount elves, prototype numenoreans?

>>20820014
the conquering hell bit?
he is just trying to stick to the slogan, "what comes before determines what comes after", in their shithole world, the entities (gods) came before that required sustenance from human suffering and thus created it; kellhus as the master of finding and grasping the absolute factors these into his calculation, and comes to the conclusion that gods in his world are parts of the absolute and goes about subsuming them to reach the genesis of the absolute whose origin the inchoroi have been sent to obscure

>>20820015
Not as mighty as elves, didn't age like humans once they hit their majority. Didn't stay kids for ages either. They'd never match an Elf sorcerer, let alone a son of Feanor or something, but they'd shit on a numenorean one. Not that we ever got much information because of the final chimpout.

>>20819988
can someone explain to me why Kellhus ripped out the heart of Serwe and maybe burnt it? What is that supposed to symbolise or even mean?

>>20820014
My question is why the Halos?

>>20818915
What am I in for?

Bakkerbros - please use spoiler tags. I've only read the first series.

Flashback is worse than exposition.
You cant convince me otherwise.

>>20820168
There is a character in the book who nobody remembers. People interact with him, sort of remember interacting, but remember nothing of what was said.
That is my experience with the book, and the only part i remember.

>>20820178
Agree desu, I can't remember long flashback sections of books that I enjoyed. In very short doses, like a few pages, okay, but when there are whole chapters made up of flashbacks it really has me losing interest.

>>20820176
Everyone gets cucked and everyone gets buggered, no exceptions btw.

>>20820168
It's not bad. Especially compared to his later works. Eminently forgettable, though. I remember more of the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul than I do American Gods and their hamburgers.

>>20819988
>>20820006
>>20820014
>>20820053

The Nonmen are akin to Greek philosophers (the Prometheus people from that Ridley Scott film, vs the Inchoroi aliens)

The Nonmen tutelage was a golden age where they retaught humanity what they lost (like a renaissance?)

The Nonmen madness and isolation symbolises how the wisdom of ancients is being forgotten by society.

The addictive drug qirri is democracy.
- It is made from the ashes of dead Nonmen, ie the legacy of dead Greek philosophers

- qirri/democracy quickens the journey of the world towards the Apocalypse. It does however make you feel better.

- Cleric / Incariol does that weird stained finger ritual thing, like imbibing drugs. Bakker spends a lot of effort on that section.

The qirri stained finger ritual is like in the middle east elections in Iraq under the Muhasasa Ta' ifia (it means, sectarian Apportionment) proportional representation democratic system where they emerge from voting with stained fingers etc.
https://fpc.org.uk/iraq-and-muhasasa-taifia-the-external-imposition-of-sectarian-politics/

- rejecting the qirri finger ritual/democracy leads to Achamian and Mimara being punished (in different ways...)

- the key lines of major characters under duress all refer to Portions and Apportioning, just like the failed democracy stained voting finger ritual Apportionment Muhasasa system in Iraq.

Moenghus (blurts out during torture)
>And more than anything he had begged.
>Sister! Sister!
>Show them! I beg you please!
>Show them our Father’s portion.

Cnaiur last words before the whirlwind No-God
>“ANASÛRIMBOR!” he roared in no human voice. “HEAR ME, DECEIVER!”
>The winds began chewing his naked skin.
>“I SHALL HAVE MY OWN PORTION! MY OWN PRIZE!”

Here is how the glossary describes Apportioning
>Apportioning—Once the ritual division of spoils between conquering Ishroi, now debased into a slave auction.

This is why I think Bakker is hinting that the Qirri stained finger ritual / Iraq muhasasa sectarian apportionment / Apportioning is democracy as enslavement:

>>20820249
>What began as a remedy in the Cil-Aujan deeps had somehow transcended habit and become sacred ritual. “The Holy Dispensation,” Mimara once called it in a pique of impatience.

>Each night they queued before the Nonman, awaiting their pinch of Qirri. Usually Cleric would sit cross-legged and wordlessly dip his index finger into his pouch, darkening the pad with the merest smear. One by one the Skin Eaters would kneel before him and take the tip of his outstretched finger into their mouths—to better avoid any waste. Achamian would take his place among the others, kneel as they did when his time came. The Qirri would be bitter, the finger cold for the spit of others, sweet for the soil of daily use. A kind of euphoria would flutter through him, one that stirred troubling memories of kneeling before Kellhus during the First Holy War. There would be a moment, a mere heartbeat, where he would buckle beneath the dark gaze of the Nonman. But he would walk away content, like a starving child who had tasted honey.

>>20820168
>What am I in for?
Overrated as fuck. But a decent read. Nothing spectacular in any way, though. Don't expect to be blown away. I think most people have such strong reaction to the book because an average American jizzes in his pants when he sees world-building reliant on something else than usual american schlock, like european deities.

>>20820176
>Bakkerbros - please use spoiler tags. I've only read the first series.
I've been meaning to read Bakker for the last few weeks, but the unstopping barrage of spoilers and people spamming the plot points is filtering me. Just use spoiler tags and let people read on their own ffs. Even webnovel fags spoiler their stuff

>>20820290
>It's a "Meng Hao smiled shyly" episode

>MC is perma-locked into a railroad path, or his power will vanish.
Lol

>>20820396
That's your brain on mormonism desu

>>20820006
>more enriching philosophically
If you’re a total pseud, yes

>>20819656
I will never read her stuff. It makes me sick how her name is often on the covers of Wolfe‘s books. Disgusting

>>20819881
I often skip the interludes for a bit and only read them once I know what happens to the main characters.

So why does Peake switch to the present tense towards the end of Titus Groan? I assumed it is to give the Dark Breakfast a certain weight or gravitas, as the switch coincides with the breakfast - like the story has been leading up to today, the day of Titus' breakfast. It also seems to occur right around the point where Sepulchrave fully loses his mind and starts to think he is an owl. What are your thoughts, Gormenbros?

>>20819881
You fell for the meme. Sanderson is a shit author and stormlight is his worst series.

Who is the most based and redpilled fantasy author? Aside from Tolkien of course.

>>20820650
Tolkien is neither based nor red pilled.

>>20820654
> reject modernity return to tradition
> absolute monarchy enjoyer
> jacobite
> ancient superior race (aryans/elves)
> love and admiration for the little englander (common folk will save the west)
> myth of the blood
> genealogy blood and soil are of the utmost importance
> hated gnostics, luciferians, masons, and golden dawn
>Uncle Tedpilled
He was one of the most based writers who ever lived.

Can anyone help me find a series/author I got stuck in my head for some reason? I think he writes fantasy books, is a white guy with a black wife in his picture and advertised his stuff on various youtube channels.

I'm probably not even going to read any of it, but it's been stuck in my head the last few days and I might have seen the ads a year ago.

>>20820708
>Can you help me find this series/author
>No, I'm not going to tell you anything about what he writes, just some autistic shit you'd never know about unless you stalked him on social media or something

>>20820711
I don't know the name of any of the books. If I did I wouldn't be asking others for more information. I just remember it was a fantasy series and that he had a twitter profile pic with his black wife and their mulatto child. I don't understand why you're accusing me of being unreasonable.

>>20820717
So what were the books about, retard?

>>20820720
About fantasy. Basic nerd shit and the books were advertised on youtube.

>>20820708
soulship guy?
https://www.amazon.com/Nathan-Thompson/e/B07FLG9GWT/

>>20820722
I know who it is, I'm just not going to tell you because you're a faggot.

>>20820722
>>20820723
well i highly doubt it but this is the only dude i know of who has any kind of picture with a black wife + baby

>>20820723
Thank you.

>>20820720
Fuck off.

>>20819988
no, you need to replace the names
Gandalf is Gordgomeshadalf
The Fellowship is the Band of the Members of the Fellowship
Rivendell is Rivedellenfordurken
Can't have bakker without retarded, nonsensical names

did you know he was a metalfag?

>>20820650
>>20820650
Cook

>>20820799
Yeah the black company is pretty based.

>>20819988
The Lord Of The Rings by Tad Williams

Gandalf dies in a fire. Frodo the mooncalf is too busy playing with beetles to notice. The charred corpse of Gandalf reappears to him in dreams, mutters about three swords called Sting, Narsil, and the horsey-sword King Theoden uses.

This prophecy is not too important, we still have 3600 pages left.

Once when climbing around the Shire, Frodo sees this flash of beautiful gold - this precious, precious golden... oh look: a mysterious youth named Sam. Sam is probably a man's name. Not a girl.

Thinking about Sam makes Frodo dizzy. He is being chased by these Dark Ringwraiths from Norway, oh no! It is one Norwegian man, but he has a lot of angry dogs, branded with a mark of a mountain. Sam and Frodo are utterly helpless! They are going to be caught and torn apart by the Norwegian Ringwraith Man, oh no!

Gimli the dwarf saves him. Everyone knows the weapon of a dwarf: an eskimo blowpipe walking stick. Gimli scares away the Norwegians.

Legolas is tied upside down from a tree. Frodo kills someone with an axe and Legolas gives him a pretty White Arrow. How convenient! Frodo is telling this to his best manly man-friend Sam who is not a girl. He falls into a river.

Galadriel is an owl. No, just an old witch who lives in a house with legs not at all stolen from Baba Yaga. Galadriel finally shows Frodo the true meaning of his dream:

You see a long time ago in Gondor, there was this White Tree. But it got poisoned with iron by Sauron. Sauron did this! Sauron was the one who sent the Norwegian Ringwraiths; only Aragorn the True King can stop Sauron. But who is Aragorn?

Princess Aragorn is a girl. Oh, Aragorn is Sam! Sam was a girl all along! It was not gay. In fact Princess Aragorn looks quite pretty.

Frodo is tormented by this, he imagined he was Aragorn. He had some dream about a Fisherman not at all stolen from Arthurian legend. Frodo fights Smaug on a frozen mountain with his greatsword Sting, the dragonbreath scorches his hair white and Frodo makes Elijah Wood Pain Face.

Rohan has fallen to evil Grima Wormtongue, who poisoned the mind of King Theoden, Princess Aragorn's father. This is what the prophecy is all about, reuniting the magic swords Sting, Theoden Horsey-sword, and Narsil forged from the poisoned Iron Tree of Gondor! It is not nonsense. But we often forget about Eowyn...

Princess Aragorn has a dalliance with Sir Eowyn on a ship, maybe this occurs when all the undead are leaping onto it due to Aragorn's necromancy. Eowyn is very haughty and aristocratic. Let us just say Sir Eowyn's face is not the same afterwards. We often forget about Eowyn. Does all of this make sense now?!

Everyone knows Aragorn's true love is Arwen. But wait, Arwen is a man! In fact, Arwen is Frodo! Princess Aragorn and Arwen Frodo caress each other tenderly. So fisherman Frodo was Aragorn all along? Or maybe it was all a dream.

Shallan is a psycho

>>20820871
Just a very poorly written character.

>>20820885
>Just a very poorly written character.
What makes her a poor character, though? I have yet to see a solid write-up on WHY people dislike her. I haven't even seen negative receptions of Shallan before reading this general.

She suffers from Brandon's pretentious emotionality, but that can be said about Kaladin as well. Me thinks it's just 4chan's irrational schizo hatred towards any female PoVs.

>>20820898
There is nothing schizophrenic about hating women, it's a very sensible position to take.

>>20820871
Shallan is one of the worst characters I’ve ever read and by far the worst in Stormlight Archives. I skip almost all of her chapters. What a stupid cunt

>>20820898
Personally I dislike that her entire relevance is basically solely centered around her seemingly infinite backstory or her relationship with the Ghostbloods. She seems ancillary to what is the central conflict, because the Ghostbloods explicitly don't wany anything to do with Odium and all that.

>>20820898
I don’t think you understand. Everybody hates women and by extension female PoVs. The only people who claim they don’t are either dishonest or delusional.

>>20820898
Not him, I actually like her. My waifu.
But Brandon's oversold her tragic past a lot.
I don't see how her flashback is supposed be anywhere near emotional damaging as Kaladin's. But Kaladin be praising her and shit about how EMOTIONALLY UNTOUCHABLE she is compared to him.

>>20820249
>Cnaiur
Man, what I wouldn't give for a series on him on what he'd be without any of Dunyain interference. The world is fucked either way, really. Might as well enjoy it.

Cnaiur and Akka travelling the world and having adventures, because a fucking meteor hit the Inchiroi ship and the Dunyain monastery.

>>20820939
Like, sure, she's had a rough time. But it's hard to really sell anybody's life as being worse than Kaladin's except maybe Taln.

>>20820898
I don't think she's poorly written, but she is a literal schitzo so I don't like her

>>20820940
Throughout the series I had the hope that Cnaiur and Achamian would team up together. But Cnaiur was just too far gone. What a waste

>>20820953
I just want to see how many problems an Akka powered railgun that fires Cnaiur can solve. Hell, that can be what happened to the Monastery and the Ship. Cnaiur travelling at an appreciable fraction of light speed. Wrapped in sorcery to ensure he doesn't die on impact. Right as Kellhus' dad was about to set out - impact. Explosion. No more Dunyain.

>>20820935
I liked Esmenet.

>>20820943
Taln is the most retarded godlike figure I've ever read in a novel. Literally no one would endure that.

>>20820940
Who would your cast for him be?

Feel free to come at me, but I loved Kelmomas POV chapters.

>>20819149
Working even better than intended.

>>20821003
Peter Stormare, but after a few years of juicing. Man's performance as Lucifer in Constsntine is fantastic. As is? Probably either of the GoT Cleganes for the sheer physicality of the role.

>>20821017
I liked them too, but probably mostly just because we get lot of interesting scenes and backstory during them.

>>20821017
The Inrilatas / Maithanet scenes were very tense. However I would say the Cnaiur Moenghus scenes were very disappointing. If you had not read Prince Of Nothing you would be very confused why Cnaiur was the Most Violent Among Men etc, at the end he seemed very forgiving?

My favourite scenes were the Sorweel / Serwa ones, hehe

Sorweel, I sleep.

I've seen this thrown about here in a couple /lit charts and was wondering what people thought of it? Been in the mood to visit Camelot as its been years since the last time I did so.

To be honest as best as I an recall the only direct King Arthur content I've imbibed are the Merlin 1998 Miniseries and the Merlin 2008 TV series, both of which are among my favorite fantasy kinos (and not to turn this into a /tv thread but make sure to also check out Robin of Sherwood 1984, Conan 1982, Solomon Kane 2009 and of course the Dark Crystal Movie and series if you haven't.)

So anyway after wrapping up The Acts of Caine and catching up on DCC and finally getting back to Mirror Dance I'd figure I'd get to a more direct depiction of Arthurian Myth with The Once and Future King, before moving on to Cornwell and Lyonesse and Memory, Sorry, and Thorn someday, the latter of which as I understand it contains Arthurian themes.

What I'm wondering though is if this is actually worth diving into? I think at the very least I'm going to be reading the first two books, but I've always been wary of the whole Lancelot/Gwyn cuck plot line which I've always found to be annoying. Any thoughts on or opinions on this specific aspect of the story and on the series as a whole in terms of quality?

>>20821076
Not developing Maithanet is the biggest flaw in the series for me. He is very underrated. Kayûtas too, but he was never interesting to me.

Just picked this up, what am I in for?

>>20820794
All manlets are.

>>20821191
OH SHIT

>>20820450
I just looked into it and the first chapter of that sequence in the present tense is 'Early One Morning', and it begins "Spring has come and gone, and the summer is at its height". The sequence ends with 'Here and There' just after the dark breakfast ends.
Now I agree that it places a certain stress on the dark breakfast, I think to mark it out as the beginning of the end, after which all of the plotlines begin to wrap themselves up. I say beginning of the end because, as shown above, a serious time lapse has taken place prior to it. So it basically heralds the final act, the resolution as it were. I don't think 'the story has been leading up to today', as it just isn't that big of an event. More of a hard signpost marking the final movement.
Hope that makes sense, let me know what you think. Always happy to talk with a Gormengoon about these things.

>>20819988
>>20820831
The Lord Of The Rings by William Gibson

The sky above the Shire was the colour of a dead channel, the grey and stagnant sprawl of water Frodo found the Ring in. The Elves of Rivendell had already forgotten more magic than the Men of Gondor had ever known.

At the Prancing Pony he dreamed of Arwen. He would see Elrond, Agent Smith from the matrix, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colourless void... Mordor. He was just a hobbit trying to make it through.

On Weathertop the dreams came through like voodoo, ringwraiths bearing cursed steel, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, wake alone in the dark, curled between boulders, lembas bread crumbling in his hands reaching for The Ring that was not there.

He had been trained by the best, Bilbo and Gandalf. He had operated on an almost permanent high of youth and proficiency, projecting his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was Mordor. He was a thief who worked for other, wealthier thieves, but he made the mistake he'd sworn to never make. He'd stolen the Ring, kept something for himself and tried to move it through Rivendell. He wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. Before the Ringwraiths he'd expected to die, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the Ring. And he was going to need it. Because - still smiling - they were going to make sure he never worked again.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Morghul blade.

***
He'd found her, one night, in Rivendell.

Under bright ghosts burning through the blue haze of the river's skyline. He'd remembered her that way, face bathed in restless light, cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure as the Ringwraiths drowned. He saw her glance up, grey eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Their night together stretching into a morning. She'd stood with him in the
midnight clatter of Rivendell and held his hand like a child.

It took a month for the tension to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
reflexive need.

***
Closed his eyes. Found the ridged Ring Of Power.
And in the bloodlit dark, silver runes
boiling in from the edge of space, symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now -
A gray ring, the color of Shire sky.

Now -

Ring beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a Palantir.com of paler grey.

Expanding - And flowed, flowered for him. Fluid unfolding of his distanceless home, his land, transparent and extending to infinity. Inner eye of Sauron opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Haradrim burning beyond the green grasslands of Rohan, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of warlike Orthanc, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in white-painted Gondor, distant fingers caressing the Ring, tears of release streaking his face.

He never saw Arwen again.

>>20821242
The interesting thing about this one is I wrote it and cut it down to exactly the 3000 char limit on 4chan here lol

>>20820940
Cnaiur is my favorite character after Kellhus

based

>>20821242
The Lord of The Rings by Robert E. Howard

"Know, oh thain, that between the years when the oceans drank Atalantë and the serene havens, and the years of last sailing of the Quendi there was an Age undreamed of, when noble realms and hidden enclaves lay sprinkled across the desolation of the world like gems on a black velvet — Dale, Khand, Lindon, Dorwinion, Lothlórien with its gold-haired women and forests of elf-haunted mystery, Rohan with its chivalry, Umbar that bordered on the pastoral lands of Harad, Moria with its shadow-and-fire-guarded depths, Rhûn whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest realm of the world was Gondor, reigning supreme in the fading West. Hither came Aragorn, the Arnorian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a captain, a ranger, a healer, with brooding mien and veiled joys, to tread the jewelled rings of the Middle-earth under his high-booted feet."

- the Periandian Chronicles

>>20821520
Damn... if only the real LOTR was as good as this.

The Lord of the Rings is the most overrated series in this entire general.

He most certainly was based. I’m a huge fan of classic style S&S and I think Wagner’s name belongs right up there with Howard, Leiber and Moorcock as the best to ever do it.

I also hear he was primarily a horror author and I have a few of his stories lined up for Octobers: Sticks, .220 Swift and River of Night’s Dreaming. Open to other recs as well, hoping to catch his best ones.

>first 100 pages is pure kino
>proceeds to change the tone the moment Heinlein's self inert shows up to bitch about taxes and property rights
What did he mean by this?

>>20820650
Herbert

>>20821616
.220 swift is my favourite horror story of his, definitely recommend when the summer ends and in the pines as well

I've heard the book is better than season 5 of the show, pretty excited to find out

>>20820396
>>20820415
Huh?

>>20821852
I think they might be referring to that train dilemma. Do you let the train kill the fat guy or the kids or something. Kaladin constantly has to question the morality of his actions and he can’t just do what he feels like doing. It always has to align with his spren.

>>20821658
Bro, sending your wife to fuck other dudes is totally enlightened. You don't read Locke; you wouldn't understand.

>>20821658
Who you think coined "no such thing as a free lunch"?

>>20821463
Who is this guy?

The Lord Of The Rings by Isaac Asimov

The First Empire of Men was failing. It had been decaying and breaking down for centuries and only one man fully realized that fact.

He was Saruman, the last great wizard of the first Empire. He had shaped its psyche and perfected its history, the magic of human behaviour reduced to mathematical runes.

The individual Orc is unpredictable, but the reaction of Orc hordes, Saruman found, could be treated statistically. The larger the Horde the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of the masses that Saruman worked with was no less than the population of all the inhabited dominions of Middle-Earth.

Saruman's incantations told him that, left to itself, the Empire of Men would fall and that thirty thousand years of mortal misery and agony would elapse under Sauron. And yet, if one could adjust some of the conditions that existed, that Interregnum could be decreased to a single millennium—just one thousand years.

It was to insure this that Saruman set up two realms that would be the Foundation of the hope of Men. The First Realm, Rohan, was centred around horses, and set up in full daylight. The Second Realm, Gondor, with its stewards and white spires of scribes and historians, was drowned in silence.

It seemed as though the “Saruman Plan” was going through smoothly and that nothing would prevent the Second Empire from being established on time—and with a minimum of intermediate devastation.

But sorcery is a statistical science. Always there is a small chance that something will go wrong, and something did—something which Saruman could not have foreseen. One man, Gollum, appeared from nowhere. He had mental powers where Middle-Earth lacked them. He could mould men’s emotions and shape their minds so that his bitterest opponents were made into his devoted servants. Armies could not, would not, fight him. Rohan fell and Saruman’s Plan seemed to lie in ruins. The Witch-King was stopped first by the action of a woman, Eowyn, and that bought enough time for Gondor to organize the proper action and, with that, to stop Gollum permanently. Slowly they prepared to reinstate the Saruman Plan.

But, in a way, the cover of Gondor was gone. Rohan knew of Gondor’s will, and the Horse Lords did not want a future in which they were overseen by scribes and historians. This, under its greatest First Speaker, Grima Wormtongue, Rohan managed to do. Gondor was allowed to seem to win, to seem to defeat Rohan, and it moved on to greater and greater strength in Middle-Earth, totally ignorant that Orthanc even existed.

It is now four hundred and ninety-eight years after the Shire had come into existence. It is at the peak of its strength, but one hobbit does not accept appearances—

>>20821520
This one is really good anon, I like it!

>>20820430
Is it true that she ruled supreme over Wolfe? why would he let a woman rule supreme over him?

>>20821600
LOTR is overrated but I think because everyone knows the films it is a good baseline narrative to anchor the others upon. It probably does not have enough female characters to pull off a very comprehensive fantasy dramatis personae though.

I wonder if some literature is Turing complete, computationally capable of remapping every other story. And is there some Kolmogorov complexity criterion, some story which cannot be compressed further, that possesses all the archetypes and permutations of scenes events and locations that can be compiled into any other story. This is what I was exploring rewriting these stories as LOTR (and other anons also are welcome to contribute!)

If you are familiar with Jorge Luis Borges (I regard him as a fantasy author) many of his short stories explore adjacent areas to this theme etc.

The only rule when rewriting I think is that you cannot use any other character names, they all have to be from LOTR. Ideally if you can make character archetypes, events and locations line up in unusual ways, eg Asimov Seldon Plan/Saruman Plan it works as well!

Murtry did nothing wrong and Holden is a massive hypocrite.

>>20821898
Yep, and it takes 4 books to finally reach the point where Sanderson admits that Spren have a level of free will and relative morality themselves. He should have addressed that in book 2 at the latest. But you can clearly see him dance around topics he doesn't want to address until later books.

>>20820939
>>20820943
Look at it from Kaladin's perspective. He thinks about killing himself. And when he's not thinking about killing himself, he's thinking about when he did want to kill himself. He's perpetually depressed and struggles to enjoy himself even among friends. He's always a hair's breath from giving up on the world.

And then he looks as Shallan, and she's all bright and bubbly and full of piss and vinegar. And from the outside, it appears like nothing ever gets her down. Despite what she's been through, she never shows a hint of wanting to give up.

Again, look at it from Kaladin's perspective. Rather than counting up the tally for who has the most tragedies.

I have a specific turboautism complaint about Wolfe. Please forgive my autism. But it is this: he made me look up the word fiacre. And it is a 19th century carriage, from the Hotel de Saint Fiacre.

This ruined everything and all immersion for me, like if you read Tolkien and he referred to those Hyundai war chariots of the Rohirrim or something. I know there is some anachronism in Wolfe and a lot of the older fantasy sword and planet style or even just Dying Earth has helicopters etc., but they were not called Toyota or anything.

It is not the technology it is just this name, there is something ridiculous about Wolfe choosing to look up this obscure fiacre word and deploying it with purpose. I genuinely stopped reading about the executioner with his cool mercury tiltswitch sword after he got into the fiacre, and I read that word.

This week I binged through Dan Simmons' Hyperion and I have to say it liked it a lot.
The pacing is excellent, I did not feel bored with useless filler or unrelated worldbuilding. Each character's story was a different trope and refreshing to read. All of the main characters are somewhat relatable. Someone at some point we could do one of these alignment charts for the characters. Would be fun.

>>20822342
You're making zero sense. Fiacre is a word people used to generally refer to carriages for hire. Your examples aren't words used for cars and are from the future.

>>20822342
Speaking of oddly specific yet unfitting terms: I'm in the middle of reading Swords and Deviltry. And at some point, the description "Angel Food Cake" is used. I'm pretty sure that term wasn't invented until relatively modern times.

>>20822354
The rest of the series is good too. Get's a bit out there in the last book but whatever

>>20822066
>I wonder if some literature is Turing complete, computationally capable of remapping every other story. And is there some Kolmogorov complexity criterion, some story which cannot be compressed further, that possesses all the archetypes and permutations of scenes events and locations that can be compiled into any other story. This is what I was exploring rewriting these stories as LOTR (and other anons also are welcome to contribute!)
The Wandering Inn has a shitload of character and scenes within its 10 million words and even that might not be enough to achieve literary turing completeness, lmao

>>20822385
>>20822399

No it is more the image that the word conjured in my mind. After all, that is why we read literature here - to imagine things, right? Because if I want to see fantasy I can play videogames etc.

I read a lot of 19th Century literature so I know what phaetons and curricles are (did not know fiacre though).

But the moment I looked up this word it completely shattered the fantasy worldbuilding in my mind. As mentioned, it is not the technology in itself, I quite liked the Dying Earth story with the helicopters.

Maybe another way of describing it would be like if you were reading Conan. Like this anon really captured the right feel and changed all the right words and wrote the appropriate descriptions:
>>20821520

Conan is fighting these swords and sorcery exotic guards wielding tulwars and yataghans etc. And suddenly Conan unsheathes his... bayonet. It just feels wrong?

Wain would have been maybe too rustic and medieval, but carriage would have been fine if slightly anachronistic. But Fiacre just feels really wrong, and shatters the worldbuilding for me. I think somehow what makes it worse is that it is an unusual word purposefully deployed. Like Wolfe looked up this image
>>20822342 (picrel here)
and decided, yes, this is what I am describing.

But anyway, these are just silly fantasy stories lol. It doesn't really matter. I did enjoy the executioner story up to the point before the fiacre fiasco.

>>20822478
It takes place in the future. Language often has etymologies that are disparate, evolved, or genericized from what they're used contemporaneously. Some people refer to print copies as "xeroxes", bandages as "band-aids", tissue paper as "kleenex", "escalators", "kerosene", etc. There's many cases of trademarks becoming generic words.

>>20822427
hehe, I am not a computer science academic. I really just meant it in a sort of analogous sense of re-mapping archetypes, dramatic events, scenarios, locations. It is fun to do this if you are an author or also engage in worldbuilding for games and rpgs etc. Maybe novels are not the optimal way to do it, something like tvtropes and wikiquote / gutenberg instead etc.

>>20821985
Take your meds.

>>20822537
Etymology does matter a lot to me, I read a lot of old and ancient stories (even if I do not speak the languages sometimes etc). I am not condemning Wolfe's work at all, he is a very respected author and I did enjoy it up to that point, and if nothing else it taught me what a fiacre is lol.

Using unusual words probably should not be discouraged, as the anguish confronting the vast quantity of written fantasy resides rather in the famine of peculiar words as opposed to their surfeit. It is fun to collect these for writing and worldbuilding settings etc, it helps to evoke distinctive belletrism.

>>20822567
hehe, have you read Asimov anon? It is taken almost exactly (truncated though for 3000 char length) word for word from Foundation's Edge, with only a few minor emendations and character name changes. The Neuromancer LOTR one follows the same methodology. I wonder if anyone has already done it because it is so obvious that Agent Smith and Elrond is from the matrix

>>20822611
I just don't understand why you have a problem with his use of the word. I'd understand if it took place in the past or a different world, but it takes place on Earth in the future when Fiacre would've existed in the world.

>hehe

>>20822635
I think it is just word associations. If you read 19th Century literature, words like phaeton, curricle, fiacre make you think of Regency era Jane Austen, or Charlotte Bronte lol.
https://www.regencyhistory.net/2019/07/curricles-gigs-and-phaetons-in-regency.html?m=1

I am not sure what Wolfe was trying to evoke (maybe he was trying to do a Jane Austen scene? Isn't the fiacre bit where the executioner kisses some random girl and it crashes or something? Not sure if I remember it correctly)

But just that mental association of 19th Century Jane Austen and Wolfe fantasy became too ridiculous for me to contemplate, it felt really like the wrong tone for the world especially after he was just fleeing from his guild as they are flaying the skin off a woman's foot or something.

I suppose if you do not have these mental associations with Jane Austen, carriages and things, it probably will not bother you. As I said, it is just a fantasy story lol. It may just be my turboautism.

>>20820168
Uninspired rehashed garbage. In the beginning I though the concept was a decent premise, but it is just so disappointing. In my opinion it is literally a book so pseudo-intellectual reader can say "I got that reference" everytime a new ancient or modern god comes up. None of the characters are interesting. And then there are the constant weird sex scenes. Literally fucking why. Such a mess of a book.

>>20821240
Nice observation. I think post the breakfast, Peake really makes it clear that the characters are struggling with change. Steerpike as the agent of change really forces things within the castle to move, which causes mass confusion and anxiety in all the characters except maybe the twins, who wish for change from the beginning. I find their character(s) fascinating

>>20821085
Watch Excalibur. Read The Idylls of The King and Le Mort d'Arthur. There are other novel adaptations of Arthur, like Bernard Cromwell's series. Lots to read before you're forced to read The Once and Future King

Here is a memorable romance scene I enjoyed between two hideous grotesque caricatures from Gormenghast (this is Peake satire). Irma Prunesquallor I believe is using a hot water bottle stuck to her flat chest as some sort of prosthetic breast.

***
For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delicious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her – to shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle. To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-experienced gushes of sham remorse – would this be worth the lowering of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.
‘This arbour,’ he said, ‘is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me – it is this darkness that I called damnable – and damnable it is. It is your face, Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand? By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling’s brow?’
The word ‘darling’ affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.
For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said, stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma’s voice. The gurgle must have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was beyond his sounding, for ‘O master,’ she said, ‘take me to where the moon can show you me.’

>>20822830
Irma is pretty gross, inside and out. I considered her similar to the twins (ugly but very vein - although not nearly as stupid). But damn Peake could write about her taking a shit and make it sound poetic.

>>20822869
I think it is because he was a sketch artist, Mervyn Peake had a good eye for the grotesque. Incidentally, if you read a lot of fantasy or literature in general, you pick up small worldbuilding details...

Notice how in Gormenghast, the kitchenfolk (Swelter, Steerpike etc) are mostly all male? No scullions, scullery maids?

Yet in Tad Williams, you have that Sarah the Dragon in an apron in the castle fussing over Simon and all the scullery escapades? Kitchen folk are nearly all women?

Well, it turns out Mervyn Peake is obviously more accurate, in medieval -esque fantasy settings, it used to be the case that for large castles, the kitchen folk are all male (think to the era of stewards and seneschals, also you might possibly know this instinctively if you are from the United Kingdom).

Scullery maids came much later, more of a 19th Century workforce emancipation thing. I do enjoy Memory Sorrow and Thorn, but Tad Williams commits an anachronism and the pangs struck me whilst reading his books after having read Gormenghast. It is not as bad as a fiacre though.

>>20822922
Jesus dude, I would kill myself if I was autistic like you. Can’t even enjoy a fucking fantasy book of make believe because of something so trivial and frivolous.

zzaświaty

i rarely sleep, but when i sleep, i dream of ships. ships, rockets, vessels, cargo, passengers, goods, materials –pressurized, semi-pressurized, non-pressurized; ships and shipping lanes, harbors in orbit, cylindrical conexes with the emblazoned names of evergreen, yang ming, and emma maersk. i dream of supersonic crackling tearing a hole in the atmosphere, torches weighing four hundred tons careening upwards, soaring above skyscrapers and mosques into the endless void. i dream of lunar lithium extracted, refined, packed, and sent back down the nearby azure gravity, or sent on the weeks long journey to the rust-red valleys of the god of war. i dream of imported tunnel boring machines, of three hundred tons of bamboo resin composite on its way to the jovian system. and without fail, always, somewhere in my dream, a low pass filtered sound of wind chimes and crashing waves, as if asking me when i will return

>>20822945
hehe, as I said above I still enjoy all the stories, they are just silly fantasy stories. But if you take it too far, you start to get characters like Game Of Thrones Aegon Insurance NV and eventually Critical Role characters taking vacations in fantasy hotels.

The small details matter for worldbuilding, otherwise you shatter the narrative illusion and coherence of the make-believe reality.

I think a lot of modern audiences have difficulty situating the meanings of words and events in history. (Maybe this is Bakker's warning) It is fine if you enjoy pure fantasy anachronism stuff, it is just not for my personal tastes.

>hehe

>>20822922
It's not an anachronism if it's a fictional location. Have you never heard of time travel stories and how much small changes in history can effect the future?

Books for this feel

>>20823095
Look no further.

>>20820831
I read Tad Williams and I fucking hate him
this summary is actually being too generous to Memory, Sorrow, Thorn, it's much worse than this

>>20823095

why does that gril have a pennis

>>20823133
No idea.

>>20821520
actual unironic kino
now do Lovecraft

>>20823142
INTERIOR
CROCODILE
ALLIGATOR

>>20823078
Oh, are you referring to this one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder
The dinosaur hunting, Butterfly Effect one? This story is good, but it is not really that deep.

I am interested in what fantasy or sci fi you enjoy. I like all the fantasy stuff I mentioned, from Bakker to Tad Williams to Mervyn Peake to William Gibson and Asimov.

For something that is truly intellectual in fantasy I recommend Jorge Luis Borges. A lot of his stuff reads like nonsense, but it is hard, you have to really think about it. Also you might be surprised how many videogames or other novels are influenced by Borges short story telling approach. For something else experimental in the exercise of literary technique, I recommend J G Ballard. His speculative fiction is sometimes dated now but his short stories often try to create unusual effects.

Finally when I do worldbuilding I often just fall back to Beowulf and Shakespeare. Beowulf for swords and sorcery, Shakespeare for almost anything else. There is actually a lot of magic in Shakespeare (Tempest, Macbeth etc) and you can use the histories like the Henriad for medieval battles. It always feels very real.

>>20823130
hehe, I can understand why you feel that way. I am nostalgic about Tad Williams, because Memory Sorrow Thorn was the first American fantasy huge sequence I ever read. Looking back, a lot of it is just dream visions and every time that sword prophecy comes up all the characters recite it with imbecilic profundity lol.

Also because Tad Williams keeps cutting back and forth some storylines are not that compelling.

For instance the Maegwin / Eolair one, I think Tad Williams was trying to steal or retell the Welsh Mabinogion (?) perhaps, make it a tragic counterpoint to Simon / Miriamele... It meanders a bit though. Some characters like Jarnauga, Strangyeard, the Wrannaman, feel completely pointless (I think they even lament it in-character)

The ending of the whole series is really strange. There is some Freudian Electra complex sublimated wish-trauma going on there lol, not sure what Tad Williams was thinking. In some ways that ending is actually darker than Bakker (despite the seemingly happy fulfilment resolution etc)

>tldr Tad Williams thinks he is a raped girl who murders her own father

Just finished Solo Leveling 4. I rated it a bit of a step up from the earlier ones, partly because I've maybe caught its vibe a little better and partly because of the scene where the Japanese President is forced to prostrate himself before his superior Korean counterpart. Thanks to the author for sparing the American recruiter such humiliation. Maybe he sells well here. I find I enjoy the Asian neediness, where the hero in story terms craves respect not just from the public, but from country, peer group, family, adversary, etc. yet as a character is unable to acknowledge that need in any way. It's turbo power fantasy and I feel like the author is kind of winking as he invites you to play along. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But I had a goofy kind of fun.

When are we going to do a read a long lads? We should do one a month, or maybe two. Pick a nice long book and talk about it in the thread.

>>20823332
Were going to read the entire Wheel of Time and we need to be done by the end of the month. No excuses.

>>20823332
We had this for ages. I'd like it to come back too. Perhaps we could re-commence it with something short-ish?

>>20823332
We used to do that, but it kind of fell apart. I did get to read Library at Mount Char when it came up so no regrets.

How about Piranesi for our first read-along back? Something not too difficult, reasonably short. We could start next month, or smash it out for the remainder of this month?

>>20823234
I read it last year and its one of the biggest fucking letdowns I've ever suffered, way worse than Dragonlance, but nowhere near as abysmal as Chronicles of Amber

I read Mercedes Lackey's Obsidian Trilogy a few months ago and that seemed to me like Memory Sorrow Thorn but good
I'm reading Fionavar Tapestry right now and it also is also similar but Guy Gavriel Kay invariably succeeds at every point where Tad Williams fails

>>20823445
How was Dragonlance a letdown?

>>20823456
much like Memory Sorrow Thorn it sort of peters out at the end without really accomplishing anything, and also like Williams there's thousands of pages of nihilistic sequel content that kills off all the remaining characters and their children rendering everything they achieved futile
honestly Black Library novels weren't as bleak as some of the crap I've read lately, and that's literally the codifier of "grimdark" as a concept

>>20823469
Did you actually read all the mainline stories beyond War of the Twins? I'm impressed.
How did you feel about THE quintessential power-hungry, voluntarily-celibate 4chan archmage Raistlin?

>>20823478
>Did you actually read all the mainline stories beyond War of the Twins? I'm impressed.
No of course not, I wiki'd that shit to see the bullets I dodged after Dragonlance Chronicles turned out to be a wet fart, and boy am I glad I did. To think I could have gotten suckered into wasting money on 200 paperbacks that'd go fucking nowhere.
>How did you feel about THE quintessential power-hungry, voluntarily-celibate 4chan archmage Raistlin?
He was cringe but not as cringe as that fucking garbage cunt girlfriend of Kris Kristofferson the half-elf simp

>>20823489
sasuga
I liked them fair enough. The characterization was great, getting inside the heads of the players and important people although the scope was all over the place and some events felt inflated in importance like that entire plot with the elven... mutiny? coup? whatever it was. Didn't care for the Mina plot.

>"The Red Knight is comfy"
>Opens with the description of a nun torn to pieces into little bloody fleshy bits
ummm /sffg/ what did you mean by this?

>starting to get bored with 'action' sequences in my sci-fi and fantasy since they're uniformly predictable and generally written with very little style
>start reading a 'cyberpunk' novel; thinking it will be different
>first 4 chapters are almost one long action sequence
I think I prefer 'adventure' over 'action' now.

>>20823390
It's kind of a letdown after her earlier book desu. It's a slow reveal that the reader gets ahead of, so it's just sort of frustrating.

>>20823518
It's really good

Your /sffg/ waifus are written by males.

>>20823714
Sex with Vin.

>>20823489
>To think I could have gotten suckered into wasting money on 200 paperbacks that'd go fucking nowhere.
Do dead tree fetishists really?

>>20822696
I wasn't a huge fan of Wolfe, but I think you're fundementally mistaken about his intentions. The word was chosen BECAUSE it evokes that incongruity. The entire series does this over and over and over again, it seems like the entire point actually, to be a bizarre dreamlike mishmash where medieval torture guilds operate out a spaceship and people ride fiacres pulled by alien monsters to the biodome that holds the botanical gardens to have a duel to the death with invisible psychic flower swords.

>>20823756
*Sex with Brando's wet dream

>>20822922
> I think it is because he was a sketch artist, Mervyn Peake had a good eye for the grotesque
This is the key to unlocking Gormenghast. As for the rest, try using your imagination a bit man.

>>20823844
Sex with Brando.

>>20823867
Ewwww

>>20823714
not mine

>>20819853
based

>>20820184
>>20820234
Agreed, forgettable is the best way to describe it.
Listened to it as an audiobook which I never do and it was good, but after a few years I can't really even comment on it any more...

>>20823882
You're telling me you'd turn down this SEX MACHINE?

>>20823983
He was pretty hot.

Is this any good?

>>20824030
>was

>>20823280
I hate SL so fucking much

Man
I just finished the traitor son cycle (the red knight series)

It was amazing.
The whole last book is like 3 long ass campaigns across different areas.
If you like Malazan and TBC you will love it.

>>20823849
>this is the key to unlocking Gormenghast
Sorry, what? The key is to foremost consider Peake a sketch artist?

>>20824042
It's ok, turned out to be more YA than I expected. All of the books follow the same thing of shit happens then a big fight at the end.

>>20823849
>>20824064
>The key to unlocking gormengoober

>>20824050
Why? It's so fun.

>>20824048
He would look 10 times better if he grew a big beard. Cover up his gobble

>>20821085
Read it recently as my first Arthurian book and it was good for that. If you do read it please for your sake do not read the book of Merlyn though, it is a huge drop in quality compared to the others and an utter waste of time

>>20820430
What's the issue with her? I thought earthsea was like required fantasy reading

Why is Shallan so mean to Renarin?
Poor boy :(

>>20824125
I thought it was fucked up too.

could she sense odium though him?

>>20824080
Yay or nay?

>>20823902
based

>>20824124
>Required fantasy reading
Stupid meme
I read the hobbit and LotR when I was a child, I have no internet in rereading them.

Why do male authors all have 'that' look

>>20824064
>>20824076
Precisely, we'll make a Gormengoon of you yet

>>20824138
He needs the full wizard treatment. Neck and all

>>20824042
It never raises above ok, read it for the cute mute tribal waifu and nothing else

>>20821778
Wuxia? More like Wushit.

Seriously, its such a fucking drag. Dont read this shit

>>20824234
People who can appreciate good sffg are harder to find than phoenix feathers or qilin horns.

>>20822783
Right, its the beginning of the end of the first book, but also sets up the conflict of the second book nicely. I've always loved how Peake structured it all.

>>20821778
Good book, Fang Yuan did nothing wrong.

I can feel the Chart Maker Supreme conjuring the most sublime of charts, he will unleash a chart that will crush all charts, all other versions will be obsolete. Hopefully he would remove sandi's books and add a new tier for Bakker only.

>>20823806
I guess I could ask you (if you are very familiar with Wolfe's work) is there a fundamental philosophical or aesthetic point that he is conveying?

So if you take The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman (1972) by Angela Carter, that novel is similar in style to what you described.

Basically that novel resembles what happens with gpt-3 or DALL-E 2 CLIP one shot bidirectional transformer ML models if openAI actually made it open and removed their sex, violence censorship lol.

Angela Carter uses similar imagery with executioners and flowers across her other short stories, a lot of bizarre words and imagery too across medieval / modern / future settings. eg. The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter (1974)

But Angela Carter writes as a sort of pastiche or picaresque style, it is all written as a literary joke (many scenes are so ridiculous, they are not meant to be taken seriously).

I skipped through some of that Gene Wolfe, I feel he writes deliberately and utterly seriously. Maybe it is the Catholicism. Religion can inspire very good fantasy but you have to get the tone right, otherwise it becomes sententious.

I feel if Gene Wolfe truly understood the meaning of his words, and wanted to prove his erudition, he would write historical fiction, or maybe just short stories like Borges... a lot of the jumps and changes in tone like medieval torturer to Jane Austen 19th century fiacre to moon landing astronaut (? I did not get to that part) feel like Wolfe subjugates the tone to the glossary; he has desperately written a comic book embellished with literary archaisms (this is fine) - yet is also being utterly serious and grandiose about it.

Borges in Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius (1941) is often credited with a vision of computer science and modern programming languages; he imagines languages with no nouns, only actions, languages with only adjectives, or attributes, no other words (it is like imperative vs declarative programming). Borges old stories and myths about pathless labyrinths feel almost like he invented proto-wikipedia overlaid with roleplaying games or gamebooks (a lot of his stories explore parallel choices and hidden endings occurring simultaneously). But Borges is a very difficult writer to understand; I am not sure if Gene Wolfe is the same.

>>20824148
the same reason they're all named "Terry"

>>20824369
I have nothing against anachronism, as mentioned before I like the Dying Earth helicopter story, Shakespeare is literally anachronisms of Elizabethan Ancient Greece and Illyria lol. Dan Abnett wrote some 40k novel where they uncover some ancient rocket relic with CCCP on it, I was amused by that, and I liked his reference to Maze Undue / Maison Dieu (lightning struck Tower card in Marseilles tarot) in Bequin.

In fact I would say I enjoyed Eisenhorn more than Gene Wolfe lol, but that is because it is just a grimdark wh40k action intrigue and also sort of detective story. These are all just silly fantasy stories that do not really matter, if you enjoy them then they are worth it. I am just not entirely sure what Gene Wolfe is trying to do.

She ruled supreme over Wolfe

Using Freud to interpret Tad Williams

Freud = everything is a phallus

White Arrow = phallus, with... white stuff coming out of it

Every character = what the author is doing to themselves

Miriamele stabs Elias with Simon's White Arrow given to him by Jiriki = Tad William's feels insecure about the ending. He has borrowed the phallus-power of Tolkien, Ancient Arthurian myth and legend (Jiriki / Sithi who came before) to defeat the evil of his own father / (critical reception? audience response?) and bring the story to an end. Isn't Morgenes League Of The Scroll symbol s bit like a quill? A writer's support group?

Maybe the strain of writing 3600 pages is distancing him from his wife... Elias does it for his wife... Tad Williams needs to turn back time for her...

But Tad Williams is too repressed to murder his father himself in his male character-surrogate Simon, so he externalises his confused feelings of vulnerability and imbues them into a girl, Miriamele. Tad Williams cannot be a girl! So there will be nothing to be ashamed of... after penetrating his own father with a White "Arrow", Tad William's relief is such that he can manage a Happy Ending.

This is much darker than the obvious horror armageddon of Bakker, because it is all hidden behind the repressed memory of a happy conclusion.

>>20820089
He was batshit insane from trauma at the moment and it was a purely irrational act - the first purely irrational thing he did in fact, and to his own later surprise it was interpreted by those present as a divine miracle.

This serves to create the ambiguity of his prophetic status and his madness which he later discusses with Moenghus - by the time of their meeting Kellhus is most definitely insane by Dunyain standards (and probably no longer clinically autistic by human standards), but this "insanity" is the same thing that makes him an actual prophet.

It's a very blatant symbolism of Dunyain totally missing the human passion and irrationality as a core element of le Truth/Absolute/Whatever in a world where human passion is unironically a big deal. This is underlined by Moenghus' condition as a very bad water-bearer. Their interaction is first and foremost Kellhus concluding that "yeah, the Dunyain have done fucked up in their search of the Truth by deliberately ignoring this whole Human Condition thing that existence is made out of".

>>20824389
There is another interpretation that Kellhus is pretending to be insane using it as a goad to fight the Consult (the inverse fire is a goad, Kellhus resists it). He confessed all that madness to Proyas during the Ordeal just as a trick to betray him and mske him a scapegoat for the cannibalism. If you read the Serwe heart bit, it is not entirely clear what has exactly happened (is this why it is not depicted on the Circumfix).

And remember how Mimara god judgement eye does not work initially on Kellhus - there is nothing to see, on the Prince Of Nothing?

There is a theory that Kellhus is not even there at the end (maybe he is actually the decapitant, he has done the Shaeonanra Consult daimotic soul swap thing, and is atop Malowebi's corpse in Zeum Africa, which is why Bakker keeps chanting head on a stick etc).

>>20824418
>There is another interpretation that Kellhus is pretending to be insane using it as a goad to fight the Consult
Yeah, but Bakker plainly added later in the series.

>>20824383
>>20824369
I can't say objectively what his intentions were, but I personally got a very strong feeling of dreams/delirium/insanity from the series. Each moment is connected to the last, but every scene is a mixture of the mundane and the bizarre, everyone and everything is floating through a soup of ambiguity and it's impossible, for both the reader and the characters, to completely make sense of what's happening. Like the entire setting is the physical incarnation of dreamlike suspension of disbelief, where anything can and will happen and you'll just go along with it as if it were perfectly normal.
And it's not just the setting/characters/plot that's dreamlike and foggy, the narrative itself is a biased autobiography that skips around time, describes some mundane things in extreme detail and deliberately avoids other topics that seem vitally important, adding and omitting facts in such a way that it's almost impossible to tell what if anything is truth or fiction, or even if the narrator himself knows the difference.
It's literally the fragmented rambling recollections of a madman's journey through a nigh incomprehensible landscape surrounded by bizarre mentally disturbed characters using deliberately obfuscated vocabulary. Despite it being an entirely fixed perspective the narrative nonetheless shifts between multiple unrelated characters at great distance from the person claiming to write his personal experiences of said events, and an entire section of the book is the transcript of an in universe Shakespearean play. And that's just the first book!

>>20824420
>>20824418
>>20824389
There's also the "consensus reality" idea, that Kellhus "went insane" but due to the strength of his mind his insanity became reality. He hallucinated, but the hallucination was real. And thus it's actually IMPOSSIBLE for him to be irrational, because automatically anything he's absolutely convinced of becomes real. The only true irrationality is rationality, clinging to some subset of reality as truth and rejecting all else as falsehood.
Hence the whole ciphrang/magic incompatibility, white luck warriors, the judgeing eye, etc...
Basically, everything is subjective, including damnation. If you're absolutely convinced that you aren't damned, you won't be. The inverse fire is a goad because it itself damns anyone who looks into it. The gods are eternal and atemporal because they're simply ideas in the minds of men. The skinspies aren't damned because they can't imagine what isn't, they're genetically lobotomized to not be able to entertain hypotheticals and thus cannot be convinced they're damned. The No God functions by interfering with human perception, it cannot see itself, so it cannot be damned, it cannot see the outside so there is only oblivion, and all living men are forced to see it and acknowledge it's power, so they are saved and drawn into it's reality.

>>20820831
>>20822922
>>20824386

Good theories should be falsifiable and verifiable.

To test the Tad Williams is a girl / Freudian father murder theory, it should be the case that Miriamele first appears during a point of childhood distress or trauma, necessitating Tad Williams needing to externalise his weird repressed Oedipal Freudian Father Murder memories. So look:

>For a moment that flash of green and gold kindled him like a spark on dry timber. He felt all the bother and resentment that he had carried disappear, burned away in a hasty second. He was as light and buoyant as swansdown, prey to any breeze that might carry him away, might waft him up to that golden gleam.
>Then he looked away from the wonderful faceless girl (Note: revealed later as Miriamele), down at his own ragged garments.
>Rachel was waiting, and his dinner had gotten cold. A certain indefinable weight climbed back into its accustomed seat, bending his neck and slumping his shoulders as he trudged toward the servants' quarters.

Yes, I think this qualifies. Tad Williams decided to turn to fantasy and become a girl to externalise his childhood repressions of drudgery and shabby, lowborn pretensions. He joins a League Of The Scroll (becomes a writer) to overcome this, and borrows the gift of a White Arrow (Freudian phallus) ie words of the ancients, wisdom of Tolkien Arthurian myth to defeat the great evil and commit the Freudian murder of his own Father through his girl-self, upon whom he heaped grievance (Aspitis rape) and externalised shame. It really does make sense.

>>20824458
I wonder if this is the sort of thing Anasurimbor Kellhus would tell Tad Williams if he met him.

By the way, I am Dunyain.

>>20824467
so are you saying your mother is like those whales in Ishual monastery basement

>>20824434
which Shakespeare play is it?

is Lightbringer any good?

>>20824454
>And thus it's actually IMPOSSIBLE for him to be irrational, because automatically anything he's absolutely convinced of becomes real.
Doesn't work because a lot of the time he is confused about the whole divinity thing himself.

Other Bakker mystery: what the hell is that Ekkinu thing. It is mentioned a few times, is it some sort of OLED hypnotism mesmerism device? I cannot help feeling it is significant. The way it is described reminded me of that weird heretical abstract art thing in the Andiamine heights palace (forgot the name). I feel like they were both significant in some way. If you read the glossary some entries are unusually long and detailed. However, the Pa'bikru below is not I believe mentioned at all in the story outside of the glossary:

Ekkinû—Sorcerous arras behind Kellhus’s bench in the Eleven-Pole Chamber. Sorcerous artifact of unknown provenance or function, first reported in the possession of Anasûrimbor Kellhus in 4122 (thus earning a place among the Orthodox “Articles of Damnation”). Several theories regarding its origins and uses have circulated through various literate entrepots around the Three Seas, among them the suggestion that the undulating displays constitute some kind of language, but consensus considers them decorative merely.

Pa’bikru—“Warring Glimpse” (Invitic). Known as “Cage-carvings” in the Eastern Three Seas, Pa’bikru are the product of the peculiar spiritual sensibilities of Nilnamesh. In the twilight preceding the ruin of the Ceneian Empire, a nameless monk translated Memgowa’s Celestial Aphorisms into the Invitic dialect of Sheyic, thus inspiring the famed “screen sculpture” of Nilnamesh. The techniques evolved wildly over the centuries, but the premise was always the same: the sculptor would carve miniature scenes, many of them drawn from the Tusk that they then placed in a so-called “peering box” or behind some other obstruction. The original idea was to recreate Memgowa’s conception of the “Blind Beggar Soul.” Like Ajencis, the famed Zeumi sage was forever arguing the folly of Men, but unlike the famed Kyranean philosopher, he argued that it was the inability of the soul to know itself, and not the inability of intellect to grasp the World, that was the origin of the problem.

In Celestial Aphorisms, the Sage continually returned to the Rebuke of Angeshraël in The Chronicle of the Tusk, the famed story where War, dread Gilgaöl, upbraids the Prophet for “peering through cracks and describing skies.” He also uses thel egend of Ilbaru, a Zeumi folk tale about a man who spies his wife through a cracked shutter, and confusing her attempt to save his wounded brother for an act of passion, murders her, and then must watch his brother die. His argument, refracted through the smoked glass of his aphoristic style, is that the soul is that which sees, and therefore can scarcely be seen.

Thus the aesthetic of screen sculpture: the creation of scenes that utterly contradicted the way they appeared when seen through some fixed aperture.

Historically, the most famous of these was Modhoraparta’s “Dance of the Demons,” where the face of the God of Gods viewed through the aperture became a group of demonic monstrosities viewed from all other angles. The rumour of the work so incensed Shriah Ekyannus IX that in 3682 he outlawed all art works that “blaspheme the Simple, the Pure, and the True with foul Complication.” At his trial in Invishi, Modhoraparta claimed that he wanted to show the how the myriad evils suffered by Men find themselves redeemed in the God of Gods. Indeed, all the sculptor’s acts, let alone his work and his claims, argued that he was as devout as any who would presume to judge him. He would be burned for impiety nonetheless: reason counts for naught in matters of outrage—truth even less so. In those days, the Thousand Temples was always eager to display its authority in Nilnamesh, where the scalding sun and indolent air seemed to engender heresy as regularly as harvests.

>>20824534
>>20824539
It's a Mystery Thing that Kellhus uses to appear more mysterious.

Stories with huge architecture like The Night Land? I keep dreaming about stuff like this.

How do I do world building? How does someone like GRRM come up with a thousand names and locations that all sound real while my shit always sticks out

>>20824557
By asking the writing general, a general dedicating to helping aspiring writers like you.
>>20821957

>>20824534
>>20824539
>>20824545
anons, I worked it out. It is literally nothing.

Just like Ciphrang / ciphra / chiffre / cypher / zero; sorcery of the Prince Of Nothing

>ekkinu

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ekki
Old Norse
Etymology
From eitt (“one”) + -gi (“not”), literally "not one". Originally neuter of engi.

ekki
(obsolete except in set phrases) nothing

ekki m (genitive singular ekka, nominative plural ekkar)
sob, sobbing
(archaic) sorrow, sadness

***
Through the course of his ruminations, Sorweel's gaze had waded across the pavilion's chaotic interior, insensible to the sights they chanced upon. He found himself staring at the grand black-and-gold tapestry that dominated the far wall, reaching to the pavilion's highest recesses. At first his eyes rebelled—something about the brocaded patterns defeated his ability to focus. Absent scrutiny, it had seemed to consist of abstract geometric designs, not so different from the Kianene rugs his father had hung in their chambers. But now, each shape he glimpsed, or thought he glimpsed, found itself undone by the natural play of eyes discerning figures. At every turn, the lines, be they ruler straight or twined into curlicues, betrayed the representations they seemed to constitute. Everything was yanked short of sense, held in a kind of puzzling in-between. And when he averted his gaze, looked through the sideways lense of his periphery, the almost-figures appeared to resolve into patterned strings, as though they were unreadable sigils of some kind...

Sorcerous, he realized with a shudder of dread. The tapestry was sorcerous.

>tfw researching PTSD before writing a story about the life of a retired hero who had to sacrifice all of his party members to save the world.

>>20824615
Mistborn?

>>20824604

T R U T H
S H I N E S

S A N D I
W H I N E S

>>20824640
ehhh, I don't think I will go down that route.
a bit more relaxing, a feel-good story.

>>20820168
There's a chapter which made my pp hard when reading it at 12 years old

all the burdens the sanderson reader have seen throughout the years: a thread dominated by Bakkerchads, suicidal thoughts, the resignation of Sandi's rule, and life in a demoralized general held under the thumb of Bakker's rule. It is, you might say, the misery of the Sanderson reader.

>>20824503
if you are willing to put up with one of the mother of all retcons being that a pov character is actually someone's schizophrenic delusion and that the series ends with a literal deus ex machina, then maybe it is for you
I personally think Brent Weeks is semi ok at world building but the moment characters begin to talk, everything goes to shit. Never read anything he writes

King of /sffg/.

Simple as.

>>20824787
>spoiler
that does sound pretty bad....

>>20824615
This is not your Blog, faggot.
>>20818915
Gonna read Whisperer in the Darkness properly. What will I read after? Oh my…

>>20824792
I KNEEL

>>20824807
okay.

>>20824792
I think this Dutchman needs to confess his homosexuality. Otherwise, his writing is very, very bad.

>>20824839
>go to kfc
>order the supreme box
>gain weight
>terrorize sandi twinks
Life is good

I want Shallan to strangle me while she rides me and calls me daddy.
If you catch my drift.

>>20824995
Sorry, she is built for BBC (Big Bakker Cock)

BLACK SEED

INSWEAR IF YOU BAKKERFAGS DO NOT START USING SPOILER TAGS I WILL FIND EACH ONE OF YOU AND BE VERY CROSS

The Lord Of The Rings by Jorge Luis Borges

I owe the discovery of Middle Earth to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

In Middle-Earth, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Shire occupied the entirety of the Shire, and the map of Middle-Earth, the entirety of Middle-Earth.

The following Generations saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all of Middle-Earth there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Bilbo had come to dinner at my hobbit-hole that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers—a very few—might divine the horrifying or banal truth.

Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bilbo remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Angmar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. I asked him where he'd come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in The Lord Of The Rings, in its article on Angmar.

I confess I nodded a bit uncomfortably; I surmised that the undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch or Witch-King were a fiction that Bilbo had invented on the spur of the moment, out of modesty, in order to justify a fine-sounding epigram.

We read the article with some care. The passage that Bilbo had recalled was perhaps the only one that might raise a reader's eyebrow; the rest seemed quite plausible. Of the fourteen names that figured in the section on geography, we recognized only three (Khazad-dûm, Arnor, Erebor).

The pronouncement was entirely true with respect to Middle-Earth, entirely false with respect to Earth. Their language and those things derived from their language—religion, literature, metaphysics—presuppose idealism. For the people of Earth, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts —the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial.

There are no nouns in the conjectural Elvish of Earth, from which its "present-day" languages and dialects derive: there are impersonal verbs, modified by mono-syllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs. For example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word "Ring," but there is a verb which in Elvish would be "to Ring-enate" or "to enRing." "The Ring rose above the lava" is "Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.," or, as CS Lewis succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onLava-ening it Ring-enated.

*throws white cat at u*

The Lord Of The Rings by Mervyn Peake

Sauron is seven.

His confines, Gondor.

Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual; for his ears, echoes; for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone; and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy.

Sauron the seventy-seventh. Heir to a crumbling summit; to a sea of nettles; to an empire of white rust; to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone.

Gondor.

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra; the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a bird whistles; the Shire bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone Gollum’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A Wraith shifts its length. A spider, Shelob, stirs …

And Sauron winds between the characters.

***
He has learned an alphabet of arch and aisle: the language of dim stairs and moth-hung rafters. Great chasms are his dim playgrounds; his fields are dungeons; his trees are pillars.

And he has learned that there is always an Eye. An Eye that watches. Orcs that follow, and goblins to hold him when he struggles, to lift him when he falls. Upon his feet again he stares unsmiling. Tall wraiths bow. Some wear Rings; some in rags.

The Halls of the Dead. The shapes, the voices that throng his mind, for there are days when the living have no substance and the dead are active.
Who are these Dead – these traitors of violence who no longer influence the Steward of Gondor save by a deathless repercussion? For ripples are still widening in dark Rings and a movement runs over the gooseflesh waters though the drowned stones lie still. The characters who are but names to Aragorn, though one of them his father, and all of them alive when he was born. Who are they? For Sauron will hear of them.

>>20825245
Sauron ruled supreme over middle earth and it made the fellowship rage and scream.

The Lord Of The Rings by Mervyn Peake

Sauron is seven.

His confines, Gondor.

Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual; for his ears, echoes; for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone; and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy.

Sauron the seventy-seventh. Heir to a crumbling summit; to a sea of nettles; to an empire of white rust; to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone.

Gondor.

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra; the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a bird whistles; the Shire bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone Gollum’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the precious palm. A Wraith shifts its length. A spider, Shelob, stirs …

And Sauron winds between the characters.

***
He has learned an alphabet of arch and aisle: the language of dim stairs and moth-hung rafters. Great chasms are his dim playgrounds; his fields are dungeons; his trees are pillars.

And he has learned that there is always an Eye. An Eye that watches. Orcs that follow, and goblins to hold him when he struggles, to lift him when he falls. Upon his feet again he stares unsmiling. Tall wraiths bow. Some wear Rings; some in rags.

The Halls of the Dead. The shapes, the voices that throng his mind, for there are days when the living have no substance and the dead are active.
Who are these Dead – these traitors of violence who no longer influence the Steward of Gondor save by a deathless repercussion? For ripples are still widening in dark Rings and a movement runs over the gooseflesh waters though the drowned stones lie still. The characters who are but names to Aragorn, though one of them his father, and all of them alive when he was born. Who are they? For Sauron will hear of them.

>>20825255
One cannot raise rings against hands that have been in a pocket

>>20825255
Sauron rules and Gandalf drools.

Sauron is the true ruler of middle earth, after his rule middle earth turned into a turbo pozzed state where manlets rule supreme over men.

I must say, this has been one of the better /sffg/ threads in a while. Good show, all.

When Sauron ruled supreme
Aragorn raged and scream

>>20825255
>>20825254
I deleted the original, replaced and edited this line

>Deep in a fist of stone Gollum’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the precious palm.

The original has frozen instead of precious.

Also, in the TV adaptation of Gormenghast, Christopher Lee / Saruman portrayed Flay. He looks exactly the same.

>>20825275
Ah, that's why you deleted it, Saruman also rules supreme but I prefer Sauron.

>>20825255
Well done at making me heartily chuckle, although I will object to Peake being as abstruse as you've made him out to be here.

>>20825062
Excuse me, you mean Big Brando Cock.

=>>20825292
NO! there is no way he has a big cock, his cock is average at best.

Any female isekai/litrpg protagonist stories that don't suck? Not TWI

>>20824792
based

Prism Academy - Inferna might be my biggest surprise since I've started reading self-published harem/erotica. I've stumbled onto this book by chance, looking for normal superhero books, but as I wanted a quick erotica I chose this. And I at first I was full of regret - the prologue was utterly horrible. To witness such a blunt, deftless, devopid of any literary ability infodump that shouldn't even be considered 'dialogue' made me understand why some people have such a hard-on for 'show, don't tell.' This might be the worst one I've ever experienced to this day, and believe me, I've seen some shit. I just kept on reading it with an open mouth, baffled.

It wasn't even the infodump that offended me so, but the author trying to present is as a dialogue, even though it shouldn't be. How can a person fuck up a quick prologue is beyond me, especially because it's an actual semi-successful book of a professional author who has around dozen books on his back. Utterly incomprehensible.

And what's most shocking, it gets better. Much, much better. There are a few more events of bad telling instead of showing, but overall this might be top 5 erotica/harem self-published books on my personal list. Almost everything in this book works:
- The world and story supports sexual elements, instead of just being a sandbox to put them in
- Characters actually make sense, the author took effort to make the relationships between characters to feel authentic and believable, if to a degree
- Shockingly, the characters are somewhat rational and their decisions make sense, expressing real needs and emotions
- The sex scenes were sparser than I'd think, but their quality was decent, especially because they had good set ups
- The story was interesting, it wasn't very good, but good enough to read for more than just looking for sex scenes

Neutral aspects:
- The main character is just particularly executed average joe with a bit of ambition for a better life (well, a hard-working average joe), but the author tried to justify that with certain story developements. Feels more like a band-aid due to lacking talent than an actual literary choice, though
- It's cliche in many aspects, but the execution is more than decent, even though it tries to introduce some snippets of 'idealism'. It's rather uninspried in that regard, but it appears the author is self-aware of that

Now, for the flaws:
- As mentioned earlier, the infodumps and 'tell, not show' prickled, but it's the worst in the short prologue, past that it's not particularly annoying
- Doesn't introduce any interesting concepts or ideas, consider it a particularly tasty common meal cooked by a seasoned cheef (well, maybe except for one thing, there was one interesting girl that the protagonist couldn't fuck due to a relevant and serious issue)

[I'm at word limit but I think I said enough. For people who read these revies, tell me if bullet-point of pros/cons is better than previous ramblings]

My rating: 7.25/10

>>20825342
she cute

>>20825325
Calamitous Bob
Cinammon Bun
Beneath the Dragoneye Moons
There is no Epic Loot here, Only Puns
Azarinth Healer
This Quest is Bullshit

Prophecy Approved Companion (haven't read this one, but supposedly good)

I don't like all of these, but all are popular for that or other reason. Recommended in order I find them good

>>20825347
>>20825342
Forgot to mention, I'm baffled that the author used a cover art this bad for his story. A story this good deserves a better cover, this type of 'art' is reserved for the trashier stories full of trashy sex, not actually decent ones. A self-published author should know (and afford) better than this. Maybe it's because his wife makes them /shrugs

>>20822787
Thanks I’ll do that. I want to say I must have seen Excalibur before when I was a kid but memory is kind of fuzzy on that. It sounds like you are too high on The Once and Future King though if I understand you correctly.

>>20825342
I read it recently too. Enjoyed it well enough, nothing amazing but enough that I'll read the sequel. I feel like the author went a little too fast on adding new girls. Felt like Inferna and the water girl were enough even without the set up with the others.

>>20825368
Cover art is hard if you want a western styled cover. You could commission someone who does anime style quite easily (pic related for example), but a lot of authors want to stay away from that for some whatever reason.

>>20821983
That’s the aforementioned Karl Edward Wagner, the horror and sword & sorcery author I was talking about.

>>20825383
>I read it recently too. Enjoyed it well enough, nothing amazing but enough that I'll read the sequel. I feel like the author went a little too fast on adding new girls. Felt like Inferna and the water girl were enough even without the set up with the others.
I agree, it might be that the author falls into the common pitfall of adding girls too fast after the first. Surprsingly few authors can pace it out in the right way, it's almost shocking how clueless they are.

As for the cover, not sure what suprises you about the lack of anime covers for harem/erotica. Self-published harem erotica is not the same crowd as anime crowd, and I personally would be put off by seeing anime cover. I hate anime art, it's cheap and soulless. If they don't use it spite of overwhelming amount of artists versed in anime art then it proves they have at least some awarness.

A proper cover art for harem lit needs to be both sexy and serious enough to signal it's a story and not just porn. Look at Saving Supervillains, it has decent though a bit too porny cover, yet the quality is good. Scholomance and its author have the best cover arts in the bussiness, though

GUYS
>>>/tv/172489620

>>20825402
>Self-published harem erotica is not the same crowd as anime crowd
I mean, it's basically the exact same shit as most smut manga. Prism Academy is basically Boku no Hero Academia with smut. If anything, I'd say smut manga has higher peaks as well even in the story department, simply because the authors always have editors to bounce ideas off of. Granted, there's an even larger sea of shit to go with those higher peaks though.

>>20825437
Thank fucking God that we live in a timeline where Bakker will literally never see an adaptation.

>>20825457
what are you mean bakker

>>20825457
This desu. You just know that they would ruin it.

How do I make my Shallan tulpa stop making SPH quips, bros.....

The Lord Of The Rings by Angela Carter

I remember how, that night, I lay awake in Rivendell in a tender, delicious ecstasy of
excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of
my heart mimicking that of the great haunches ceaselessly thrusting the horse that bore me through the
night, away from the Shire, away from hobbits, away from the green, enclosed quietude of my Father's
dwelling, into the unguessable country of marriage.

And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my Father would be moving
slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little
relics, the Evenstar I would not need any more. He would linger over this torn ribbon and that
faded jewel with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of an Elf-Lord on his daughter's
wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, when he put the gold
Ring on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be his child in becoming Aragorn's wife.

Are you sure, he'd said when they delivered the Elessar jewel, that showed all who looked through it what was aged and withered as young once more. My eagle-featured indomitable Father, what other Elf-maid could boast that her Father had outfaced Keanu Reeves as Neo in the Matrix, nursed Natalie Portman in that V for Vendetta film, and shot Optimus Prime with his own hand as Megatron, and all before he was old as I?

"Are you sure you love him?"
"I'm sure I want to marry him," I said.

He sighed as if it was with reluctance that he might at last banish
the curse of Ringwraiths from their habitual place upon Middle-Earth. For my Father himself had gladly,
scandalously, defiantly beggared himself for love; and, one fine day, his gallant soldier never returned
from the fiery pit of Mount Doom, leaving his husband and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a shattered scabbard full of
the shards of Anduril, that my Father, grown magnificently eccentric in hardship,
kept always near his forge, in case -- how I teased him! -- he was surprised by Sauron on his way
home from Weathertop.

>>20825487
One post was interesting, this is just spam. Go make your own thread instead of spaming these excerpts. This isn't Writing Excersie General

>>20825325
I vaguely enjoyed Touch of Power, This Quest Is Bullshit (not isekai, but is LitRPG), and... I haven't actually read any others of note because female protagonist LitRPGs are just quite rare.

Do you guys prefer names that sound somewhat familiar (Eddard Stark, Catelyn) or the exotic ones (Yatwer, Hanamanu Eleäzaras)?

>>20825595
as long as it doesn't have umlauts it's fine

The Lord Of The Rings by William Shakespeare

SCENE V. Mines. Before Moria.
Alarum. Enter TROLL, GANDALF, ARAGORN, LEGOLAS, GIMLI, FRODO, SAM, MERRY, PIPPIN and BOROMIR

BOROMIR.
Out upon it, old carrion! Rebels it at these years?

TROLL.
I say the orc and goblin is my flesh and blood.

ARAGORN.
There is less difference between thy flesh and theirs than between Saruman and Sauron.

TROLL.
There I have another bad match, who dare scarce show his head on the Rivendell; a beggar that used to come so smug upon the mine; let him look to his Ring. He was wont to call me a Troll; let him look to his Ring: he was wont to steal treasures for an Elven cur’sy; let him look to his Ring.

LEGOLAS.
Why, I am sure if he forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh! What’s that good for?

TROLL.
To bait Men withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgrac’d me and hind’red me, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s his reason? I am a Troll. Hath not a Troll eyes? Hath not a Troll hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Man is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Troll wrongs a Man, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Man wrongs a Troll, what should his sufferance be by mortal example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Anything similar to pic related? That feeling of emptiness is not going away

>>20824234
I enjoyed it

>>20824143
and we have no internet in reading you, lil Snarf-boy.

>>20819988
End it with "sauron is a prostitute" and you have a gem

>>20820831
Frodo the mooncalf is too busy playing with beetles to notice.

>>20825595
no umlaute
if the large majority of your readers can't spell the name of your character out loud then you're just being a jackass.
especially because you don't need umlaute to make exotic or interesting sounding names.
if you find two umlaute in your characters names then you're a proven hack.

I find the lack of Avasarala POV chapters in the novels extremely frustrating. I guess I've been spoiled by the show including her way more.

>Tonight, he thought, was a good night to kill
This sentence filtered me from Bakker, and maybe genre fiction in general. Who should I try next?

>>20826030
>Tonight, he thought, was a good night to kill
Did Bakker actually write that? holy fuck how does anybody over the age of 14 put this shit to paper

>TWI 7 interlude chess and ships
erin "texting" niers is so friggin cute. lots of fun and cute moments so far. i hope the "broadcasting" schtick doesn't get old eventually.
also not sure if we really needed another new POV with in pomle. i'm really starting to realize how much more i crave some POVs over others.

>>20826056
>t. litlrpg/sandyfag

>>172504978
>Le name but also le other name
>le language is le other le language in le past
>le family in le tree
>woww very linguini a la linguisti

I just got done watching a bad vampire hunter movie, and it struck me that I can't think I've ever come across a single piece of media where the vampires are intelligent and actively take advantage of their abilities while also minimizing their vulnerabilities. It's always just "guy has hypnosis/super speed/super strength and must drink blood and he knows he is weak to sunlight/garlic/stakes in the heart/silver/cruciforms/etc. but doesn't do a fuckin' thing about this."

I figure that there's gotta be a few books out there somewhere where the vampires are just as clever as the vampire hunters.

>>20826091
I have never read a litrpg (and proud of that fact) nor have I read Brandon Sanderson, although I intend to if I ever get around to reading the entire Wheel of Time series, but that day is a long way's off
I won't read Sanderson's other works though because Mormons are bad at making Christian allegory in fantasy, which is a natural consequence of being non-Christian heretics.

>Some Tolkien descendant decides to co tinue the legacy

what is your reaction

>>20826214
Every bad fantasy writer since Tolkien has been 'continuing the legacy', so fuck it, why not. sff needs a decent writing family like the Tolstoys or the Axelrods anyway.

>>20826084
>not sure if we really needed another new POV
Another POV? In MY Wandering Inn? Surely not. Pirateaba wouldn't do that, right?

>>20818915

I wonder if anyone here can help me find a book I (probably inaccurately) remember from my childhood.

I think it was called "Mission to Mars" or something similar, one of a series of books for young adults I read in the late 1960s - early 70s with similar alliterative titles and central characters. The basic plot is that a returning probe from Mars has brought back a red weed/growth that threatens to consume all life on Earth, and a ship is sent to sample the Martian atmosphere.

This is not the Sir Patrick Moore book, but has a very "English" feel to it.

From these clues, does anyone know the name of the author and any other books from this series? Any information would be much appreciated.

>>20820945
Niggers can use phone now?

>>20825960
>>20825598
Bakker's umlauts just represent separate syllables though, like how Tolkien used them. For example Skeaös is Skay-ohs or maybe Skee-ohs. People are overcomplicating Bakker names. I like them for being non-Anglo and not generic fantasy.

>>20826459
that was really mean, just delete it

I want to try my luck here as well. Can some anon give me a good answer to >>20821982?

>>20826464
>For example Skeaös is Skay-ohs or maybe Skee-ohs.
but see, this is what i'm talking about.
i wouldn't read them like that. as someone who knows what a [ö] sounds like, i'd read it "skea-euss", or something like that. the point is, [ö] is a very specific sound and not just some kind stylistic separator or whatever you think bakker is doing.
maybe it's easier for you because you don't know any umlauts, but i at least know the germanic ones. so when i meet the ones i don't know, like weird slavic shit with carons, or [ë], i'm just annoyed because i have no idea how to read it correctly.

thanks for deleting it

>>20825325
Many, and they almost all shit. Because a female being transported isn't as interesting. All she has to do is give her cunny the most powerful and all her problems are solved.

>>20825342
I'm getting fed up of these academy books.

>>20826654
>I'm getting fed up of these academy books.
It had very little typical school/academy stuff, not even a single real lesson or anything. Honestly, if it wasn't called Academy you wouldn't notice.

>>20826565
The general rule is to just completely ignore dots and squiggles in places where they shouldn't be and plough on regardless, reading everything as just he jumble of letters it is rather than trying to figure out what's "supposed" to be going on with the letters.

>>20825342
>why, yes. I fight bad guys with high heels on

>>20826742
>>why, yes. I fight bad guys with high heels on
As much as I hate the high heels in fantasy/sci-fi art, in this instance the author actually addresed this. All supers wear highly advanced suits that change shape based on need:

>She might not be able to completely even the height difference, but she mentally ordered her suit to extend her boots with some pretty dramatic heels. They were still thick-based so as to not be too impairing.

>If she had to fight, she’d retract them, but they did wonders for accentuating her legs and ass. And now, she was tall enough that he would be able to kiss her without having to bend down entirely.

>>20826557
Alastair Reynolds and Vernor Vinge. Peter Watts to a lesser extent. Reynolds and Cringe are mediocre to shit writers, but they have that Jules Verne feel where they're looking >>150 years in the future.

>"What's this called again?" Kellhus asked, though he forgot nothing.
Damn this nigga spooky.

>>20824546
Senlin Ascends is about a large tower and each level is a city state. Currently reading it and it’s not revealed how tall it is.

>>20826442
I think I read this too but I don't remember anything about it.

>>20826168
>I figure that there's gotta be a few books out there somewhere where the vampires are just as clever as the vampire hunters.
Dracula.

>>20825971
how are you liking the series so far? i've been wanting to read it but my time's been taken up by other stuff

>>20821085
If you want Arthur, then you won't like it. TH White is a mix of lolsorandumb humor and libertarian/hippy propoganda.

Read John Knowles instead.

>>20820940
I have not read all the books, but without getting constantly mindfucked by greater powers he would just be Conan the Barbarian. So just read Conan books? Am I missing something?

>>20827491
Thank God for that - at my age it's nice to know I haven't completely misremembered it!

>>20827560
It's been fantastic so far, I'm a few chapters into Nemesis Games (book 5) now. I love that the books tell the same story but in a different way, it makes reading material that was covered in the show feel fresh.

>>20825271
Such have the standards fallen that a different flavor of spam is thought of as such.

>>20826168
I think that would require the vampires to be the protagonist, because otherwise how would the humans win?

>>20827473
It doesn't matter how tall it is. That's 100% irrelevant since nothing is meant to be taken literally.

>>20826214
Who cares.

>>20824615
What makes you think readers want that level of realism?

>>20819331
"was"? You don't think it is more now than ever?

>>20819897
If you can't laugh at that in amusement, then you are taking the books far too seriously.

>>20827938
>What makes you think readers want that level of realism?
Not OP, but authencity is very important in writing serious stuff. How otherwise would you make the reader think or feel?

>>20827963
>How otherwise would you make the reader think or feel?
Why telling them to read non-fiction.

>>20826214
Reaction to what?

>>20828052
Some fantasy series. I think anon expected everyone here to have no lives or something.

Can anyone think of any books where the protag has an extremely limited form of magic and largely gets stronger/resolves situations by working out new ways of using it?

Randomly got the craving for this recently. Spellslinger's the one that comes to mind which I have read some of but unfortunately it's very YA and not that interesting because most stuff is taught by a mentor figure instead of figured out.

>>20828100
why are you such sour, prejudiced normie-pretending bitch

>>20828139
Not even a normie. Just telling you how you sound like.

>>20828138
That is arguably Sanderson's whole deal. He tends to have pretty hard-limited magic systems where magic tends to do very specific things. There's not necessarily a lot of problem-solving with it, though, it's just kind of 'how things are'.

>>20828138
Protagonists using what they were given to conquer the world is the height of authorial skill.

>>20826214
>what is your reaction
this

>>20826565
As a native German speaker I believe that the learning of what umlauts and other such combinations of vowels in foreign languages (especially french and german) sound like should be mandatory in all English-speaking schools

>>20828196
More like fantasy authors shouldn’t use umlauts if they don’t know how.

>>20828219
Not just fantasy authors. Motörhead comes to mind

>>20828219
I mean, how else are they going to fool retards with their superficial knowledge?

read the first mage errant book because I must've put it on my kindle when I did a bulk download years ago
was fine but not really inclined to carry on felt way too YA

>>20827957
To that point brandy played the story fairly seriously and it her segments stick out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way imo

>>20828196
>>20828219
Just another example of fantasy authors trying to copy Tolkien and failing. Tolkien knew multiple languages, many fantasy authors are barely know two or three.

>>20828400
and it added fucking nothing of worth at all to his writing

>>20828405
What a retarded take.

>>20828405
Read him, anon, before making a post about it.

>>20819149
Finished Swords and Deviltry. Which I didn't realize was actually a collection of short stories. That explains something. Actual spoiler ahead: The book develops two female characters. And I was surprised at how developed their stories are. They seemed more than mere love interest. It appeared they were going to be major figures in the plot to come. But then by the end of the book, they're both dead. And all that build up was tossed into the trash, just to force the two main characters to wander alone. It seemed very unnecessary. But learning that this short story was written well after many other short stories, it makes sense that he had to kill off these characters. I just don't like it, because I was introduced to the female characters first, so I expected them to stick around for a while.

I don't like that the collection is outside of publication order either. The origins of the character are written in 1970. But then later chapters are written as far back as 1940. So you have a spectrum of about 30 years difference in writing experience between chapters. I'm not too thrilled about short stories either. I would like ah overarching narrative. The first book made a kind of sense, despite the 8 year disparity between chapters, it more or less fit together. It felt like some parts were missing however. But I fear the second book won't be able to keep a coherent plot to the end.

IDK. It's a pretty fun book otherwise. I just really hate reading things out of publication order. I like that they didn't go with the strict brain teams up with brawn shtick. Rather, they're both intelligent guys who have advantages of their own. Fafhrd is big, but he can think. Gray Mouser is small but he can fight. And Vice Versa. It's nice.

>>20828400
>>20828219
You know, reading self-publish works, web novels, and fantasy and soft sci-fi novels, authors who barely have more knowledge of a subject than their readers, are more than happy to overuse it. Its something I notice, maybe that's why I started reading hard sci-fi novels.

>>20828507
>I'm not too thrilled about short stories either. I would like ah overarching narrative
fucking retard doesnt realise that sword and sorcery literally thrives in the short story format
mong

>>20828538
Nah
You're confusing "was published in this format due to being sold to magazines" with it being actually suited to it over longer formats

>>20828510
I only read hard scifi for the Transhumanism ideals.

Original print run had about 4000 copies or so. Does anyone know how many there were for the revised edition for the hardcovers?

>>20828571
>hard scifi for the Transhumanism ideals
I really wouldn't mind reading hard scifi for the speculative biology, seems those are rarely ever done now. I did find an online story about one. It's called Serina, and it was inspired by All Yesterdays. From what I've read, its brilliant, creative, rigorous, and plausible. Really wish it was done more.

>>20828538
>duhhh, you didn't know a thing before you learned it? What a retard!
Oh sorry for not downloading all of your knowledge before reading a book. I'll be sure to connect to your brain cloud.

>>20828622
>It's called Serina, and it was inspired by All Yesterdays.
The author had to be autistic, no way he whole writes and draw this for no reason.

>A young priest named Patera Silk tries to save his manteion (neighborhood church and school) from destruction by a ruthless crime lord. As he learns more about his world, a vast generation ship called the Whorl, he learns to distrust the gods he has worshiped and to revere the supposedly minor god known as The Outsider who has enlightened him.
Fuck bros, this sounds like exactly what I've been looking for
Literally posted a story prompt asking if anyone knew of something like this here
I hope it's good

Has anyone read any issues of Cirsova?

I've decided that I'm going to read Gene Wolfe but while reading him I'm going to force mind to visualise the world as being like Yoshitaka Amano's art style
I'm not sure how I'm going to do this but I'll try my best, any suggestions?

>>20828774
I don't understand the purpose of posts like these, here's your (you) I guess.

>>20828778
I always thought of them as attention seeking or trying to seek some sort of validation

>>20828778
Well this is my favourite forum for talking about sci-fi and fantasy and although I may be delusional about this, I feel like I can express my thoughts and hope to get replies from the kinds of people I like spending time with
So the purpose of posting that was to get some ideas about visualisation while reading Gene Wolfe and also I suppose seeing if anyone else has tried to do the same thing that I'm attempting to do

>>20828789
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s both of those.

>>20828790
You need to get off the internet more.

>>20828760
No

>>20828760
>Has anyone read any issues of Cirsova?
Never heard of it until you typed it.

>>20828760
People still read magazines? Seems like a hassle.

>>20828967
I'm more surprised magazines still exist outside of tabloids.

>>20828721
... is the birdboi fag back?

>>20828967
I get a couple of history magazines and a wargaming one.
It's a little pleasure when I feel like sitting on my deck, but can't be assed to read a novel. I'm not experienced with any contemporary fantasy/science-fiction mags though.

>>20829012
>I get a couple of history magazines and a wargaming one.
I can understand that, since I have a gun magazine, but fantasy/science-fiction mags are just something I never saw.

>>20829012
>>20829029
Hobby and niche magazines makes sense. The same can’t be said about science-fiction or fantasy magazines.

>>20829012
>I get a couple of history magazines and a wargaming one.
Care to name them? Especially the wargaming one?

>>20826464
they are anglo by virtue of being written by an anglo

>>20829096
Bakker is a supreme anglo saxon?

>>20828138
Paranoid Mage is basically all about that. Protagonist can teleport shit and open portals, and that's all he can do. So he does things like recreating the Rods from God with teleportation, teleporting Thermite into Vampires, and point blank shotgun blasts from an underground bunker.

>>20829046
Actual scientific magazines make sense. But that’s about it. I like to read about space and other celestial bodies.

>>20818915
Thread lasted for two days. Rare to see nowadays.

New thread
>>20829325

>>20829326
It continues to astound me that the bakkerspammer has no life whatsoever and just continues to camp this general like it’s the only thing he has in life.

>>20829092
Sure:
>Ancient Warfare
>Medieval Warfare
>Wargames: Soldiers & Strategy

>>20829388
Thanks.

>>20829344
I pretty sure he also bans evades just to continue too shitpost. Guy really has no life.