SF and Fantasy wot I ave been reeding

[MoreauVasz]

I'll add a few I have enjoyed in the last few years:

Ed McDonald's Raven's Mark trilogy (starts with Blackwing) - Imagine the Black Company novels set in the world of Tarkovsky's Stalker. Essentially, a load of monsters come bubbling up out of the dark places of the Earth and in order to defeat them, a group of weird post-human wizards build an engine that destroys the world and twists the laws of physics. Books revolve around one of the wizards' servants, trying to keep people alive in a world that is already beyond saving.

Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood and Co series - - Young adult novels set in a version of Britain haunted by ghosts. The only people who can see (and fight) ghosts are kids.  In order to keep itself together, Britain has adapted to the ghosts including allowing these big companies to work sensitive kids to death. The novels revolve around a group of independent contractors who fight ghosts and expose the rot in British institutions.

[Famous Mortimer]

That "Raven's Mark" trilogy sounds interesting, I shall add it to the list.

[Small Man Big Horse]

The Honours by Tim Clare - Fantasy horror set in 1935 where a young teenage girl comes up against supernatural creatures after her father is committed to a sanitorium. Clare's prose is superb, and though it perhaps takes a little too long to finally reveal the answer to the mystery it sets up in its first few pages these are characters and a setting that I found gripping, and the ending was very satisfying too. 4.75/5

[Famous Mortimer]

I just started "The Inheritance Trilogy" by NK Jemisin, somewhere in the region of 1500 pages. I immediately warmed to it because the stuff that would normally take up a big chunk of the first volume of these things - hero learns of their birthright, goes off to seize their rightful throne or whatever - is dealt with in the first 20 pages here. I like her style, so I think this is going to be a fun read.

When I properly got stuck in, I finished "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" by NK Jemisin very quickly. It has an odd thematic link to the Sarah J Maas YA novel we were discussing on the previous page -

Spoiler alert

female protagonist has sex with a god

[close]

- but it's much much better. On to the next volume of the Inheritance Trilogy now.

I found a box of those D&D novels for virtually no money the other week, so I'll probably have a bash at a few of them. I assume they'll be extremely light reads - like watching an episode of a Chuck Lorre sitcom - and there won't be any complex relationship stuff, as I imagine the intended audience is somewhat younger than me. But, they might be fun, and I'm rather enjoying getting back into RPGs.

[Alberon]

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I came to this one by a rather odd route, later novels in a spin-off series is set in my home town and features a book named after the suburb where my Mum lives.

It is very light and whimsical. Set in an alternate 1985 (though it feels more like the 1950s) Thursday Next is a member of Special Operations 27 which specialises in literary crime (this world is literature mad). Her dad, a former member of another SpecOps division dedicated to temporal anomalies is on the run, but drops in occasionally and there's another division devoted to fighting supernatural agencies. In to this already quite overloaded world comes the central conceit of it being possible for people to enter the world of a book or have a character from a book come out into the real world.

Many of the characters have puns for names, some obvious others less so. Paige Turner, Landen Parke-Laine,  and the like. The ease with which the characters accept new outlandish concepts seems a bit unconvincing, but the book doesn't hang around too long and it's not too bad. I didn't find it that funny, though a Richard III show treated to Rocky Horror style audience participation wasn't bad. I guess I'd get more out of it if I knew more about British literary classics.

Not sure if I'll give the next in the series ago, but it was worth trying something a little different.

That "Raven's Mark" trilogy sounds interesting, I shall add it to the list.

Me too.

[Famous Mortimer]

I tried "The Eyre Affair" and didn't make it all the way through. Something about it irritated me.

I'm a good chunk of the way through "The Broken Kingdoms", the second part of the Inheritance Trilogy. Still very good.

[Alberon]

I tried "The Eyre Affair" and didn't make it all the way through. Something about it irritated me.

Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. I might try another one in a few books time, but all the time I was reading it I had the feeling it related to a real book like a pile of frothy bubbles relates to food. You can technically eat it, but there's nothing to it.

I'm a good chunk of the way through "The Broken Kingdoms", the second part of the Inheritance Trilogy. Still very good.

I enjoyed the whole thing. Working from The Broken Earth and through this I tried her Dreamblood Duology next and hit a brick wall, I just couldn't get into it. I think it was despite the fantasy setting the characters felt and talked like they were from the 21st Century. Completely stopped me from getting into it.

[mothman]

I've read "Early Riser" by Fforde, set in an alternate Britain in an ice age and in which people hibernate for the coldest parts of the year. I guess I enjoyed it, but I didn't really know what to make of it.

[Famous Mortimer]

I enjoyed the whole thing. Working from The Broken Earth and through this I tried her Dreamblood Duology next and hit a brick wall, I just couldn't get into it. I think it was despite the fantasy setting the characters felt and talked like they were from the 21st Century. Completely stopped me from getting into it.

I raced through the second one, and am now a good chunk of the way through the third. I sometimes get the feeling that her dropping in of weird modern day vernacular once in a while is meant to remind us that there are real life parallels to her settings - I'm guessing the word-similarity of the "Amareri" empire and our American empire is not entirely accidental. Might be an answer to why her characters in the book you read act like modern people. Or maybe not. I'll give her others a go when I've worked down my to-read pile a bit.

[Alberon]

Recursion by Blake Crouch. I tried this on the basis it was a Time Travel novel, but there isn't much to it. It's not so much the travelling in time business I like more the metaphysical ramifications.

Here, a scientist invents a device that can return people back to any strong memory they have in their own lifetime. The wrinkle being that whenever the person who travelled back reaches the time they left then all those affected by the change in history remember both timelines

Crouch has had a couple of television series made out of his books and apparently signed a deal over a million dollars for the novel before this one to be made into another one. This one feels more like a film novelisation which perhaps it is. He writes in a simple thriller style and it's easy to skip through the whole thing in a day at the beach. There's only two main characters really in it and even the main antagonist is only in it for a section of the book. The finale is mostly just pulled out of his arse when he's written the two characters into an unending series of apocalypses, but the rest of it is competent if very shallow.

[mothman]

I think I read that. Massively tuned out in the middle section. Also possibly too long.

[Famous Mortimer]

I polished off the Inheritance Trilogy, which was excellent (including the bonus novella on the end). Now I'm trying to build up complete collections of The Expanse and Malazan series by just going to second-hand places, and whichever one I complete first, I'll start reading. It will be a while, probably.

[Alberon]

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie Not too much to say about this one, really.

If you liked the others in the First Law series you'll probably like this one. Though I do have reservations about the plot. Specifically, there isn't much of one. The Union and the North under Black Dow have a major battle. That's it really, the rest is about a group of characters, some new, some old (like in Best Served Cold) on both sides and how they survive the three day battle. They suffer a series of successes and failures, but they largely have little to do themselves with which is which.

The battle scenes, as ever with Abercrombie, are disorganised chaos which while probably fairly accurate can get boring across a whole book. Lord Bayaz, the wizard who is several hundred years old at least, returns. Initially he forces the big battle in the first place and then uses it to try out this new invention he's got The Union's university working on -

Spoiler alert

cannons

[close]

.

So it drives the main world plot ahead a little, but it's not that interesting in itself.

[Alberon]

Blackwing by Ed McDonald.

A realm under siege defended by a region of madness called the Misery and a superweapon built by a long dead sorcerer. The book's hero is a servant of another sorcerer. He rarely hears from his boss, who, like the inventor of the superweapon, is one of the Nameless. They are so powerful they are like minor gods and seemingly little better than the similarly powered Deep Kings who seek to cross the Misery and wipe out the realm.

It's the first of a trilogy (of course) and the author's first novel and I wasn't totally convinced by his writing. It's quite bloody in places, the narrator's master communicates with him by having a crow birth itself from a tattoo on his arm which is a very painful and gory process. But later scenes of devastation in the book somehow didn't quite land for me.

I'm not quite sure why the book didn't fully work for me, but it was interesting enough that I'll try the second book in the series soon.

[touchingcloth]

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Now this one from a top Chinese author has been getting a lot of attention in the SF world and has been appearing on a few award shortlists so I thought I'd give it a go.

And it's fucking awful! The story reads like something out of a bad potboiler from the 50s. Characterisation is basically nonexistent. Only one character has anything like an original personality and he's not one of the main characters. Maybe it's the fault of the translator, but praise for this does feel like the Emperor's New Clothes. I'm all for different voices from all over the world in SF but this particular one doesn't seem able to write.

I read this this year, and loved it. Well, I read the trilogy back-to-back, and Three-Body Problem is probably the weakest of them. It reminds me of His Dark Materials in that regard, where I loved the trilogy way more than the opener. Some stuff happens in books two and three which really affected and have stuck with me.

[Mr Trumpet]

I've just started Nightflyers by George RR Martin. So far it feels very much like a game of the Traveller RPG, with a bickering crew of talented eccentrics flying around in a spaceship. I like that none of the characters is particularly sympathetic, they're all arseholes or nutters of one variety or another. The story was first published in 1980 and has some of the weird sex stuff of "classic" SF - I believe he's described the breasts of every female character, and everyone is casually shagging everyone else. I imagine this is how they thought things would be by now, after the sexual revolution. Polyamory as the norm.

[13 schoolyards]

I remember reading John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (great book) in my teens and thinking the (fairly brief) relationship stuff didn't really make sense - it was written in (I think) 1969, it's set in 2010, and there's this entire class of women who are basically homeless and just go from party to party looking for someone to hook up with every night. It wasn't until years later I realised it was a take on the sexual revolution, with future men still having all the power and money but now freed of the cultural burden of being expected to "look after" or "give a shit about" their partners.

And then years after that I read a biography of Brunner and it seems he was a bit of a swinger himself and eww.

[Mr Trumpet]

I believe that is a phenomenon on Tinder actually - women (and I guess gay men) looking for casual hookups as a place to kip. Sometimes out of desperation and sometimes while travelling on the cheap. Sounds pretty grim.

[mothman]

Sexual "freedom" was a big thing in the SF literature of the period - even in, say, the Known Space novels of someone from a relatively conservative background like Larry Niven - or his idol, Heinlein. But yes, Brunner did seem to have some abiding fascination with the idea. In one of his relatively later novels like The Shockwave Rider you still have terms like "swingle."

[Pranet]

Looking at them I confess I wonder how, but lots of the old school science writers got around a lot. Reading about them a lot of them were married six times or had a reputation for womanising at conventions or sometimes unfortunately sexual harassment.

[mothman]

There was clearly a lot of wish-fulfilment in the kinds of societies they wrote about!

[Famous Mortimer]

The Gor series of books being the ur-example (to the point the writer actually decided to live it, or people made it into a lifestyle, or whatever).

[Kankurette]

From what I've read of it, Gor makes The Wheel of Time look like radical feminist literature.

[Famous Mortimer]

After seeing a SyFy Channel movie a while back, I read quite a bit about a long-running series which isn't so much a Gor-style fantasy, but wish fulfilment for a certain section of American society - "Deathlands", which clocks in at 125 novels, 16 audio stories, and a spin-off series of 75 novels. Started in 1986, the Russians decide to warm up the Cold War and there's a nuclear holocaust. 100 years later and there's a brave bloke, his tough but beautiful partner who knows her place, and where only the strong survive.

Recently, it's been aimed at long distance truck drivers, which is fairly specific for an entertainment franchise (the 8 hour audiobooks I guess make trips along long straight highways tolerable).

[mothman]

Pulp Librarian on Twitter occasionally does threads about franchises like that. He did one on Jerry Ahern's The Survivalist series, and the Doomsday Warrior series I think.

[Famous Mortimer]

They're oddly compelling to read about more than read.

I just finished "All You Need Is Kill", the novel that was slightly loosely adapted for "Edge Of Tomorrow". Very short (you'll race through it in afternoon) and a fun read; there's some good ideas that the film didn't cover but overall both versions are worth a go (much like "Warm Bodies" in that respect).

[mothman]

Huh, I thought it was a full-on graphic novel. How essential are the illustrations? My Kindle isn't good at displaying them.

[Famous Mortimer]

Huh, I thought it was a full-on graphic novel. How essential are the illustrations? My Kindle isn't good at displaying them.

The version I read had no illustrations, although he thanks the artist in the afterword. I think it's probably been released as a comic too?

[mothman]

Wiki says it started as a "light novel," a subset of Japanese YA publishing, and with illustrations. It was then adapted first as a manga, then an American graphic novel, and finally the film. So I guess we're all right? ;-)

[13 schoolyards]

Pulp Librarian on Twitter occasionally does threads about franchises like that. He did one on Jerry Ahern's The Survivalist series, and the Doomsday Warrior series I think.

I read a fairly wide cross section of these as a teen, and they varied from entertainingly mental to astoundingly dull - usually the mental ones fizzled out after a few books (I remember one that threw in another nuclear war after book five or six, just so the hero could burst out of a bunker into a future that was even more Commie-dominated) while the dull soap opera ones just kept on going. They also kind of explained why the bad guys in the (quite good) novel of The Postman were all crazed out-for-themselves survivalists.

One featured an evil Russian commandant named Colonel Killov, which amused me no end.