/hob/ - Hobbies

>>68271
things that make sense. not too much outstanding elements

>>68272
to me*

This is one of the most beatiful books i ever read. This is what a fantasy book should be.

I've read thousands of books from cultures fortunate enough to have achieved literacy across the chasms of time. What I'm about to tell you is a brutally short summation of my understanding of fantasy, which is deeply rooted in a vast comprehension of literature. I'm not bragging; I'm just urging you to pay attention.

What makes a good fantasy? It's simple.

The fact that the author doesn't know it's a fantasy. And that's why, OP, fantasy as a genre is abject garbage. A fantasy written with intention is like watching the shadow of actors performing a shadow of a play. There's no real fear, no real guile, no real wonder. The staunch belief of the writer in the stunning things they're narrating is the main factor determining the quality of a story. Everything else is detail. This might not be obvious to neophytes, but the further you delve into the human soul using literature as a medium, the more apparent this truth becomes. A fantasy is only good when the writer is deeply immersed in the world they're weaving; in that narration, their life hangs in the balance. Relate something incorrect about a god, or write words that can anger demons, and your life is forfeit. This pressure breathes real life into the pages of a story.

Modern fantasy writers are a joke. Their stories are copies of copies of copies—bland, insipid, safe dreams of fat, weak men with nothing to lose but a paycheck. I don't understand how anyone can read that stuff and enjoy it; but then again, most people have not even scratched the surface of literature, while I am as deep in it as is humanly possible.

What are good fantasy books? Look towards mythology, religion, and the geographers and historians from the time when Man was young. That's where the sense of wonder is at its strongest, most concentrated form: during the childhood of humanity.

I may sound harsh but you won't hear this from anyone else, not many people have gazed at literature for as long as I have. Make of that what you will.

>>68277
what do you think of J.R.R Tolkien and G.R.R Martin?tolkien is better than Martin, right?.
can you recommend us good fantasy book or medieval dark fantasy?
How do I write a good book about fantasy? (I'm a brainlet NEET whi didn't read enough/know nothing about life so far)

>>68278
Mr. Tolkien was a sweet, pious man and a scholar. His fantasies are not without charm. He knew that his own literature was merely a weak transfusion of much darker, more powerful, wonderful forces. To recommend something, I point to what Mr. Tolkien himself preferred to read above all else: Beowulf, Mabinogion, Prose Edda and Nordic mythology, and the Bible.

G.R.R. Martin is chaff, not worth one's time, unless that is all one is able to achieve as a reader.

>>68278
>How do I write a good book about fantasy?
Well, I suppose I might as well respond to that part as well. Listen, a good story is indistinguishable from the reality in which the writer finds himself. Look for the things you cannot escape from; that is the beginning of your tale.

>>68280
>Look for the things you cannot escape from;
and where can I find these things I cannot run away from?

>What makes a good fantasy or science fiction novel for you.
Good plot, well written primary characters, consistent internal logic, decent pacing and development of both the plot and primary characters.

Prose is not a substitute for good story telling and is the primary reason I will never take anything from shitchan's /lit/ seriously. They exclusively care about prose over the substance of the story to sometimes extreme degrees. It disgust me.
In fact, overwrought prose gets in the way of story telling, kills the pacing, and destroys immersion.

A great fantasy book draws you into the world, it's immersion gets ahold of your imagination until you are imagining the goings on in that world weeks after you put the book down. Overwrought prose kills that and is just a way of authors with ego issues to masturbate over how expanded their vocabulary is as they sit with their draft and abuse their thesaurus to make up for their personal weakness of character. It's a sign of midwittery and I hate it.

>>68277
What a crock of shit.

Op Here. Dont forget to discuss your favorite book or the ones you are reading actually

>>68277

>Modern fantasy writers are a joke

Most modern fantasy books, with some honorable exceptions, looks like a shitty fanfic. If you want to see what is the look of a modern fantasy book go and see veilguard. I know is a game, but you get the idea.

>>68285
>Most modern fantasy books, with some honorable exceptions, looks like a shitty fanfic.
Maybe if you look at webnovels or stuff put out by and for middle class white succubi.

Most male fantasy authors self publish or hybrid publish, so you have to put a little more effort to find their stuff, but it's well worth it.

I already post the stuff I read and listen to (audiobooks and full cast audioplays) in the two other book related threads so it feels redundant to post here too.

>>68278
>>68279

>G.R.R. Martin

Don't waste your time reading song of ice and fire. I have the idea that Martin writes things like violence and incest just for shock value. Besides, every beautiful thing that hack touches is corrupted. The ideal of errant knigth is personified by an amoral being who fucks his own sister, throws a kid from a tower, and leaves a female that is not related to him. The only good thing about Jaime is that he kills the other king who wanted to destoy kings landing. 

If you want a writer with similar themes but much better written, read Andrzej Sapkowski and his Witcher saga. Much of the themes are there, but executed in a more magistral way.

When I read The Caves of Steel and at the end it says that humans will have to stop working so that robots can take their place, I started to believe that there was something wrong with Asimov. When I read one of his stories where old people are recycled I confirmed it. When I learned the concept of technocracy I knew what the problem was.

Asimov does not question technological progress, he celebrates it without questioning who it will take with it. He favors a government of experts to control every little aspect of human life. Hari seldon is a technocrat who plays with the future of humanity like a horse breeder, instead of letting it evolve spontaneously. No one asked him to save humanity

That is why I always preferred Philip K. Dick. He was the first to understand that this kind of thinking was dangerous, as well as predicting that a world government of the people in the Rockefeller Building in New York, where the governments of the world meet to take away our freedoms, in the name of science is a big mistake.

>>68291
I've read blade runner/do robots dream of electric sheeps. it's good and the noir ambiance it gets makes it unique I guess

>>68290
> Andrzej Sapkowski and his Witcher saga
Forget that plagiarist hack. Read the real original in the form of the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock.

>>68301
I have the whole books in one book. it's a pretty book

R.E.H.'s melancholy was ahead of its time. The melancholy of believing he was born in the wrong era to be able to live adventures like the ones he dreamed of as a child is much more common than many believe. He always regrets not having been born in a wilder time, possibly since, at the age of 12, a supposed psychic told him that his previous reincarnation had taken place in Atlantis. At the end of the dark horse comics about Conan, sometimes there were a few vignettes telling anecdotes of his life. What was described there was quite a character.

Personally I prefer Kull. I love contemplative and melancholic characters, but he wasn't a character he could put on new adventures in every story. Besides, Conan has a strength that other characters don't have. He thought of it when he was already king. And he never seemed to come up with a story before that. Instead, with conan, he always said that writing a story of his was as if conan himself was telling it to him. But even conan was leaving him almost at the end of his life. The one who never stopped was Brak mak morn. He always came up with stories for himself.

>>68302
Nice.
I am mildly envious, but in a good way.

>>68308
may you have beautiful books you too,kind wizzie👍

>>68291
Ray Bradbury was way more human than Asimov.

>>68302
Thats a really cool book. In spanish, the only thing similiar to this is a conan book that have all his stories and some essays about him and the author

>>68325
may you have beautiful books you too, kind wizzie

I saw an Amphibia thread on /co/, i know is a cartoon, but They were bitching about how isekai is escapism for the characters and how the characters must return to their lives.

how many novels have characters that decide to stay in the other world. The only one i know is the The Wizard Knight by gene wole

>>68344
A recent audiobook I listened to would qualify.
Mage Throne Prophecy by James Haddock.

Dude "isekais" himself after getting a terminal illness diagnosis.
Wakes up in another world due to a ritual, that ritual goes wrong due to the will and training of the MC, MC becomes OP as a result.

While he eventually gets the chance to go back to his world for a bit, he finds the life he built for himself on the otherside far more satisfying and goes back.

>>68344
Gene wolfe looks like eggman grandfather

Is there any book that can be compared to this. It is easily one of the best science ficction book ever written. Do you want to be a monk in leibowitz abbey or a simpleton

Stephen King always seemed to me too overrated. The banality of his characters never made me sympathize with him. All the characters have almost always the same ideas. Liberal, which in the United States means democrat, censor who loves to take away freedoms and to give more power to the state. Several times I came to think that the characters preferred the monster more than a republican. His intention to make everyday horror pass him by and he completely loses the strangeness and uneasiness he should provoke by presenting completely alien and not at all human threats. His style to provoke fear is only based on cheap shock, like the part where he cuts off the head of a child who was sleeping in the street and not to mention the orgy that took place in the sewer. Simply disgusting.

ST Joshi always said that ramsey campbell was much better than king and above him Thomas ligotti, the true heir to Lovecraft.

King was just lucky to be in the right time during the horror boom of the 80s. Almost all of his films are from those years. And if we talk about quality the one who should be enthroned would be Clive Barker. Whose stories manage to keep the everyday tone and still be strange and transgressive.

Stanley Kubrick hated him and said he was a awful writer.

>>68369
I don't like king either

>>68369
I'm watching a TV series called The Stand, it's based on King's book and it's stupid as shit. The characters are extremely stereotypical, like if you build a character around a single trait, turn that trait up to eleven, and remove all other traits. The plot is chaotic, inconsistent and hard to follow, gives the impression that the plot is only there to provide circumstances for the characters to do what they do.
I think his books and films are so shallow and the characters so predictable, because his target demographic is succubi. succubi fantasize about bad things happening to men who don't satisfy succubi, and King delivers that.

>>68369
Some of the adaptations of his work are alright but I can't read his work.

His pacing is infuriating and he spends FAR too much time describing bullshit no one cares about and wasting my time with absurd amounts of pointless padding that don't push forward the plot or develop actually important characters.

That said everything I have read of Clive Barker has been fantastic. I really love his style of horror. And best of all it has a perfect pacing throughout most of his written works.

Alright I'm turning in my book report to wizchan. I'm hoping for a good grade. This book is a collection of short stories, a sampler if you will, that I picked because it has writers I liked and was hoping to use this to find more.

"Malak" by Peter Watts (short story): best one by the best writer. Watts is a former Marine Biology grad student who takes the science so seriously he cites scientific articles of some of the concepts he uses. I knew him from Blindsight, a book about first contact with an alien that talks to humans like a Chinese Room. In Malak, the story is about the life of an automated military predator drone flying over some middle eastern country. The drone absently mindedly goes over its code and prerogatives in almost a religious way like the humans it blows up below.

"Watching the Music Dance" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Never heard of this writer before but she was pretty good. It's theme is largely about the dangers or teaching apps for children.

"Laika's Ghost" (Gennady Malianov series) by Karl Schroeder: Starts of like a political thriller, but ends up with the "Soviets on Mars" trope that's pretty popular. But it does so in this retarded way of an inverted pyramid taking off like a rocket with an entire village on top of it.

"The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter: This one is cool, though all the dialogue takes place in a boring setting, but it is generally about aliens from outside the solar system approaching Venus. Earth think it's going to attack them, but the plot twist is we find Venus has its own alien life that is about to have a war with these extra-solar aliens.

"The Server and the Dragon" by Hannu Rajaniemi: This is a dumb super transhuman story by a string theorist. Basically about a fully self replicating robot making a life for itself on a distant star, only to be infected by a computer virus. Oh and there is a sex scene between robotic dragons.

"Bit Rot" (Saturn's Children) by Charles Stross: I knew Stross from Halting State, a post-cyberpunk novel I got because it treats China as the dominate political force. It was kinda meh in the end. As for Bit Rot, it's kinda like cyberpunk in deep space. Transhumanist robots are traversing between distant stars to make a new colony, until they get hit with by an emission from a magnetar. While designed to be radiation hardened, this is too much for the robots on the ship. I really liked the part where he goes through the different types of decay processes for different isotopes, like how the carbon in their graphene circuits has been made into a larger isotope that is going to decay into nitrogen and destroy the circuit. Eventually it becomes a zombie story as the robots attempt to look for "feeder stock" that has not been heavily radiated in order to stay sane.

"Creatures with Wings" by Kathleen Ann Goonan: This one felt like an acid trip. Phil K Dick would have enjoyed it. Basically a shitty Buddhist monk and his commune get rescued from the end of the word by some weird aliens. The shitty monk walks around clueless but finds out apparently it is the end of the whole universe and the aliens are trying to look for enlightenment from this shitty monk before the universe ends.

"Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar: Okay now the stories are going to start sucking. This one is about an involuntarily time traveling associate professor applying for tenure who's wife hates him.

"Mantis" by Robert Reed: So some people on treadmills at a gym are looking at a smartmirror at some people waiting at a bus stop playing with a mantis bug. Each are wondering who is real and who is a virtual simulation being generated for the other's amusement.

"Judgement Eve" by John C. Wright: This one put me off as "boy pining for a succubus that doesn't want him", but it turns out that was all for setting up the plot twist. Anyway, something-something aliens gave nanotechnology to humans something-something humans have devolved into hedonists something-something same aliens are going to kill all of humanity because of this. Basically they all casting magic with computer programs.

"A Soldier of the City" by David Moles: This one is a bit more interesting. Basically Israel and Gaza in space from the point of view of an Israel solder.

"Mercies" by Gregory Benford: A guy travels back in time and to alternate universes to kill famous serial killers before they get started.

"The Ki-anna" by Gwyneth Jones: This one is a bit better. Basically alien fiction about a slave holding race that ritually ate their slaves. Was a bit hard to follow though.

The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees by John Barnes: Something is growing under the sea of a Earth that was saved from climate change and a female attractive humanoid robot is investigating it.

>>68301
>Forget that plagiarist hack
why is he a plagiarist?

>>68379
>the dangers or teaching apps for children.

whats this?

>>68379
>The Invasion of Venus" by Stephen Baxter: This one is cool, though all the dialogue takes place in a boring setting, but it is generally about aliens from outside the solar system approaching Venus. Earth think it's going to attack them, but the plot twist is we find Venus has its own alien life that is about to have a war with these extra-solar aliens.
sounds cool

>>68379
the rest of your books are wtf tho in a good sence

>>68383
Geralt of Rivia from the books is a fan fic rip off of Elric of Melniboné.
The story structures are also suspiciously similar, some of the plot points are similar, and they even both die basically the same way.

For fuck sake, Elric is literally called "The White Wolf" as a moniker.

It be like if a book had a dude called the black swords man, who swung around a giant sword, had one arm and a prosthetic with a cannon in it, and one eye, who is constantly accosted by demons, and is out to thwart a dude who betrayed him in the past but everyone else thinks is a hero, then claim all that isn't a blatant rip off of berserk.

What is the worst fantasy or science fiction book you have ever read. For me it is Dying of the Light. The most pathethic thing i ever read

>>68398
In the past few years, I guess The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind.
The plot was retarded, the world building was retarded, the MC was 100% passive throughout, and the overall story craft was abysmal.
The only thing remotely decent about it was the competent prose. Which was like throwing cheap glitter onto steaming turds.

Oh, also the vast majority of weeb web novels are atrocious. Like someone tricked me into reading a chapter of Shadow Slave. It was sad how bad it was. To see someone write that much yet never get better at their craft is tragic.

>>68399
Because succubi like that book so much. What is the reason for the fanaticism. I have seen news about succubi crying, because they think that now The us will be like in that book.

>>68406
many succubi think men around them are potential rapists just waiting for the opportunity, and that hitler trump will make america rape again
it's as stupid as the book

>>68406
>What is the reason for the fanaticism
Probably because it appeals to the female version of fantasies about extreme desirability for just existing.
Sort of like a succubus version of those shittier harem anime where the MC is totally plain and doesn't really do anything the whole show/manga but for "reasons" is treated as the most desirable being in the universe, with extremely powerful and desirable succubi willing to fight to the death just to be by their side.
Although even those trash anime don't usually have scenes involving ritual worship of basic bodily functions, lol.

> I have seen news about succubi crying, because they think that now The us will be like in that book.
That is just overly emotional retards whipping themselves up into a fervor but lack something reasonable to frame it, so they go with whatever pop-culture reference come to mind. These are the same kind of people who would have been in hysterics crying about the devil and end of days being near because the label on their favorite brand of soap changed if this was 30 or 40 years ago.
Now since they don't have Jesus they compare everything to shit like marvel movies, Harry Potter, and if they are really heated they bring up the one part of history class they remember and call all bad things the same as nazi.
When it comes to Handmaid's, I guess I wouldn't begruge it that much if it just stayed a shit book I didn't like. Even people liking what I think is trash doesn't bother me. But it's these kind of retards who lack other frames of reference who then latch on to such a ridiculous book as a political statement that really annoy me.
You don't see the dudes into those shittier harem anime I mentioned above act like it's a portent of reality in anyway shape or form. Even the unhinged ones accept it's just gratifying fantasy and escapism.

I don't know if the retards would be better off or not if they found Jesus, but they certainly would be better off if they found better books to read.

What do you think about Brandon Sanderson. Do you think his almost massive output of novels detracts from the quality of some of them, or is he just lucky to be able to write so much? I admire his ability to create new worlds and make each one different from the other, but I don't like how cinematic he can be at times. It's as if he were writing a screenplay instead of a novel. At least he is going to finish his sagas, not like that scam artist of rr martin.

>>68437
>What do you think about Brandon Sanderson
Only think I read of his was that novella he wrote for Magic the Gathering, which I thought was pretty good.

I haven't got around to his original stuff. I mean I heard he is good but when I look up the descriptions of the books it just doesn't really appeal to me so I put it off.

As far as output, most writers who write for a living, especially in generes like fantasy, have to have the habit of producing quality books at a relatively high rate just to be able to make a living.
It isn't luck, it's by treating writing like a actual serious job worthy of being proud of like a craftsmen. Such writers will have consistent and constant output without taking time off for the entirety of their working lives.
Litterally 6 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week, they sit down and put the time and effort in with no excuses for not "doing the work".
When you put that much time into a skill, take it that seriously, and work on your craft that consistently it makes sense that they get very good at what they do while being able to maintain a high output.

>>68437
Sanderson writes slop, intentionally I think. I get the sense from reading his blog and watching interviews that's he's intelligent and could probably write a decent quality book if he cared to but he intentionally dumbs down his writing for YA and Female readers who are most of the current market.

>>68460
>Sanderson writes slop
No he doesn't.

>>68464
he absolutely does

>>68472
I don't think you know what slop is if you think Sanderson's work slop.

Stefan Grabinski's The Motion Demon is a masterpiece of fantastic horror that immerses us in the world of the railroad, a means of transportation that the author uses as a metaphor for life, destiny and madness. Through seventeen stories, Grabinski presents us with an original and disturbing vision of reality, in which trains are living entities that communicate with travelers, stations are places of encounter with the supernatural and tunnels are portals to other dimensions.

>Grabinski is a cursed and cult writer, considered the Polish Edgar Allan Poe, who knew how to create a unique and enveloping atmosphere, full of mystery and horror.His stories are a mixture of fantasy, science fiction and psychology, exploring the darkest corners of the human mind. His style is elegant and precise, with a rich and suggestive language that captivates the reader from the first line.

https://archive.org/details/the-motion-demon-grabinski-stefan/page/n55/mode/2up