Sci-fi/Fantasy recommendations

[Siege]

Well, if you look at Fantasy from a certain angle, it could be interpreted as Science Fiction.
After all, if the tech gap is wide enough, tech looks like magic to the folks at the lower end of the gap.

Take nanotech, for example. If you have a full 3.0 full nanobot composite body, whether orgbots or inorgbots, your body could transform in the air into dust, to reassemble somewhere else, in a diferent body shape if you so desire, so to the lowtech observer, it would be like a vampire transforming in the air into dust, or an animal, or rat pack.

The possibilities for a post technological singularity civilization are endless.

It even answers the Fermi Paradox and promise to complete the Drake Equation.

[Malthus]

Is it science fiction that only a true Scotsman could love? 

Since you are the one who made the argument, ask yourself the question! 

I assume you got my quip. 

Point here is that, conciously or not, you guys are defining the category of "fantasy" in such a way that good stuff other people think is fantasy lies outside it, and bad stuff other people classify as non-fantasy gets included within it. Given that, it is then no surprise whatsoever that you don't like "fantasy".

[Sheilbh]

Point here is that, conciously or not, you guys are defining the category of "fantasy" in such a way that good stuff other people think is fantasy lies outside it, and bad stuff other people classify as non-fantasy gets included within it. Given that, it is then no surprise whatsoever that you don't like "fantasy".

I'm not saying I don't like fantasy. I do. I want to read it but, in general, I find the quality of the writing is poor and in some cases bad enough that I can't finish a book I've started. There are great fantasy writers who I've enjoyed and 'literary' fantasy fiction too like Glass Bead Game. But the average seems lower than other genres I enjoy. Which is a shame because they ones I like, I like a lot but they seem a lot rarer.

As I say I think there's something to the Douthat post I linked at the top:

'Game of Thrones' and the Fantasy Author's Challenge

Just in time for this weekend's premiere of season 3 of "Game of Thrones," John Lanchester has a fine London Review of Books essay on the show, the George R.R. Martin books, and fantasy fiction's place in literary culture today. I recommend reading the whole piece (so long as you don't mind significant spoilers), but I was struck by this meditation on fantasy's longstanding segregation from more respectable forms of fiction:

Given permission to read books of this kind – permission derived from the books' success – people have shown that they are willing to wolf them down by the millions ...  This surely implies that there is nothing innate to fantasy which puts people off reading it. But there does appear to be something off-putting about fantasy as an idea. The fact that people are willing to read fantasy novels in practice emphasises the parallel fact that, most of the time, they aren't willing to read them in principle. They're only willing to read the freak mega-sellers: fantasy itself is off limits to large sections of the general reading public.

... When you ask people why they don't read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, 'because elves don't exist'. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don't exist, and as it happens, things that don't exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We're very good at things that don't exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There's no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it's perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It's as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to 'off'.

Of course some of this is part of the general disdain for "genre" in all its forms that permeates the respectable literary world. But I also suspect that there is a particular obstacle with fantasy that doesn't exist with, say, horror novels or murder mysteries: The sheer immensity of the standard-issue fantasy saga, and the fact that committing to a bestselling fantasy author takes much more, well, commitment than reading Dean Koontz or Peter Straub, Michael Connelly or Tana French.

Fantasy, by design, is an exercise in world-building, and many of the most famous examples of the genre, from Lord of the Rings and Narnia and the Gormenghast novels and Earthsea down to Martin and Pullman and Rowling and so many others in the present day, are multi-volume affairs that require a serious investment to actually finish. (The multi-volume expectation has an unfortunate tendency to encourage today's bestselling authors to never ... actually ... finish their stories, which as Lanchester notes is the great fear gripping Martin's fans today.) So it would make sense that there would be a higher bar for mass success than in many other genres: Reading a bad murder mystery only sets you back a day or two, and the satisfaction of finding out whodunit can compensate for lousy prose, whereas I've definitely found myself flagging at page 300 or so even in many highly-regarded fantasy novels I've dipped into. (My apologies, Steven Erikson.) It would make sense that certain readers would be more likely to commit only in cases where the books in question are already mega-sellers, and thus pre-approved by millions of other readers. And it would also make sense that adolescents, who have more time on their hands (especially, ahem, the somewhat awkward ones) and more empty headspace waiting to be filled, would be more likely to gravitate toward the sprawl of mediocre fantasy than adults ... which then, in turn, ratifies the perception that the genre is just for teenage Dungeons and Dragons dorks, and not for grown-up readers.

Lanchester comes up with several reasons (besides, of course, the whole HBO thing) why Martin has managed to break out of the ghetto, including his ruthless willingness to kill his darlings (the major characters, that is) and the fact that his world is "low magic" and thus more accessible to people allergic to magic rings and wizard's orbs. These are excellent points, to which I'd add that the whole "Wars of the Roses"-style frame that Martin's story uses — the emphasis on gritty dynastic politics — lets him exploit what I've always thought was fantasy's most underappreciated advantage as a genre: It's ability to benefit from feudalism's gift to fiction — the intermingling of family relationships and political machinations that so many historical stories, from Shakespeare's York-Lancaster plays down to Hilary Mantel's books today, rely on for their power — but with the added narrative bonus that even the best-informed the reader won't have any idea how the fantasist's story of betrayals and beheadings ultimately turns out.

But maybe these are all just ways of saying that Martin is simply, well, a better writer than most of his fellow fantasists, and that the path out of the fantasy ghetto is always there: It just takes a special kind of talent to walk down it.

Also I think we just disagree on what is fantasy. I've not read enough Calvino to comment but I'd certainly include Borges. For me the defining feature of fantasy is making another world, as distinct from this world with fantastical stuff - like magic realism. Had I started this thread and got a Marquez  and Bulgakov reading list I'd be annoyed

[Malthus]

Point here is that, conciously or not, you guys are defining the category of "fantasy" in such a way that good stuff other people think is fantasy lies outside it, and bad stuff other people classify as non-fantasy gets included within it. Given that, it is then no surprise whatsoever that you don't like "fantasy".

I'm not saying I don't like fantasy. I do. I want to read it but, in general, I find the quality of the writing is poor and in some cases bad enough that I can't finish a book I've started. There are great fantasy writers who I've enjoyed and 'literary' fantasy fiction too like Glass Bead Game. But the average seems lower than other genres I enjoy. Which is a shame because they ones I like, I like a lot but they seem a lot rarer.

As I say I think there's something to the Douthat post I linked at the top:

'Game of Thrones' and the Fantasy Author's Challenge

Just in time for this weekend's premiere of season 3 of "Game of Thrones," John Lanchester has a fine London Review of Books essay on the show, the George R.R. Martin books, and fantasy fiction's place in literary culture today. I recommend reading the whole piece (so long as you don't mind significant spoilers), but I was struck by this meditation on fantasy's longstanding segregation from more respectable forms of fiction:

Given permission to read books of this kind – permission derived from the books' success – people have shown that they are willing to wolf them down by the millions ...  This surely implies that there is nothing innate to fantasy which puts people off reading it. But there does appear to be something off-putting about fantasy as an idea. The fact that people are willing to read fantasy novels in practice emphasises the parallel fact that, most of the time, they aren't willing to read them in principle. They're only willing to read the freak mega-sellers: fantasy itself is off limits to large sections of the general reading public.

... When you ask people why they don't read fantasy, they usually say something along the lines of, 'because elves don't exist'. This makes no sense as an objection. Huge swathes of imaginative literature concern things that don't exist, and as it happens, things that don't exist feature particularly prominently in the English literary tradition. We're very good at things that don't exist. The fantastic is central not just to the English canon – Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens – but also to our amazing parallel tradition of para-literary works, from Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Pullman. There's no other body of literature quite like it: just consider the comparative absence of fantasy from the French and Russian traditions. And yet it's perfectly normal for widely literate general readers to admit that they read no fantasy at all. I know, because I often ask. It's as if there is some mysterious fantasy-reading switch that in many people is set to 'off'.

Of course some of this is part of the general disdain for "genre" in all its forms that permeates the respectable literary world. But I also suspect that there is a particular obstacle with fantasy that doesn't exist with, say, horror novels or murder mysteries: The sheer immensity of the standard-issue fantasy saga, and the fact that committing to a bestselling fantasy author takes much more, well, commitment than reading Dean Koontz or Peter Straub, Michael Connelly or Tana French.

Fantasy, by design, is an exercise in world-building, and many of the most famous examples of the genre, from Lord of the Rings and Narnia and the Gormenghast novels and Earthsea down to Martin and Pullman and Rowling and so many others in the present day, are multi-volume affairs that require a serious investment to actually finish. (The multi-volume expectation has an unfortunate tendency to encourage today's bestselling authors to never ... actually ... finish their stories, which as Lanchester notes is the great fear gripping Martin's fans today.) So it would make sense that there would be a higher bar for mass success than in many other genres: Reading a bad murder mystery only sets you back a day or two, and the satisfaction of finding out whodunit can compensate for lousy prose, whereas I've definitely found myself flagging at page 300 or so even in many highly-regarded fantasy novels I've dipped into. (My apologies, Steven Erikson.) It would make sense that certain readers would be more likely to commit only in cases where the books in question are already mega-sellers, and thus pre-approved by millions of other readers. And it would also make sense that adolescents, who have more time on their hands (especially, ahem, the somewhat awkward ones) and more empty headspace waiting to be filled, would be more likely to gravitate toward the sprawl of mediocre fantasy than adults ... which then, in turn, ratifies the perception that the genre is just for teenage Dungeons and Dragons dorks, and not for grown-up readers.

Lanchester comes up with several reasons (besides, of course, the whole HBO thing) why Martin has managed to break out of the ghetto, including his ruthless willingness to kill his darlings (the major characters, that is) and the fact that his world is "low magic" and thus more accessible to people allergic to magic rings and wizard's orbs. These are excellent points, to which I'd add that the whole "Wars of the Roses"-style frame that Martin's story uses — the emphasis on gritty dynastic politics — lets him exploit what I've always thought was fantasy's most underappreciated advantage as a genre: It's ability to benefit from feudalism's gift to fiction — the intermingling of family relationships and political machinations that so many historical stories, from Shakespeare's York-Lancaster plays down to Hilary Mantel's books today, rely on for their power — but with the added narrative bonus that even the best-informed the reader won't have any idea how the fantasist's story of betrayals and beheadings ultimately turns out.

But maybe these are all just ways of saying that Martin is simply, well, a better writer than most of his fellow fantasists, and that the path out of the fantasy ghetto is always there: It just takes a special kind of talent to walk down it.

Also I think we just disagree on what is fantasy. I've not read enough Calvino to comment but I'd certainly include Borges. For me the defining feature of fantasy is making another world, as distinct from this world with fantastical stuff - like magic realism. Had I started this thread and got a Marquez  and Bulgakov reading list I'd be annoyed

How would you have felt if you started this thread and got "Spenser, Shakespeare, even Dickens" and "Carroll to Conan Doyle to Stoker", like the author of the article you quote with approval here? 

What the article is complaining of, is the modern multi-volume fantasy series, which is a specialized subset. If I think typical swords and sorcery -type fantasy, I think of stuff like the Fafhurd & Grey Mouser series, which has many books admittedly but does not have an overall story arc - much of it is written, in fact, as short stories or novellas.

[grumbler]

Point here is that, conciously or not, you guys are defining the category of "fantasy" in such a way that good stuff other people think is fantasy lies outside it, and bad stuff other people classify as non-fantasy gets included within it. Given that, it is then no surprise whatsoever that you don't like "fantasy".

Oh?  How have I defined fantasy at all? 

[Eddie Teach]

Does Malthus consider Star Wars to be bad stuff? 

[Ed Anger]

Look for my fantasy novel Big breasted chick knights fight the evil big boobed Witch on Amazon Kindle.

[Barrister]

Look for my fantasy novel Big breasted chick knights fight the evil big boobed Witch on Amazon Kindle.

[Malthus]

Point here is that, conciously or not, you guys are defining the category of "fantasy" in such a way that good stuff other people think is fantasy lies outside it, and bad stuff other people classify as non-fantasy gets included within it. Given that, it is then no surprise whatsoever that you don't like "fantasy".

Oh?  How have I defined fantasy at all?

Not going down the grumbler rabbit-hole, sorry. 

[grumbler]

Does Malthus consider Star Wars to be bad stuff? 

Yeah, I don't get that at all.  The last three movie (and, probably, many or most of the books, though I haven't read any of them) are not very good, but they aren't bad on the scale of Goodkin or Brooks (or the kid who wrote that apparently successful ripoff of LOTR with the dragons in it). 

My problem with much of the published fantasy stuff isn't that it is multi-volume, it is that the bar for entry into the field seems so low.  There is a lot of fantasy published that would never make it if the fantasy elements were transformed into, say, SF terms.

[Ed Anger]

Eragon. God, what a shitty movie.

[grumbler]

Not going down the grumbler rabbit-hole, sorry. 

  I didn't think you had thought about what you were saying to me.  Try to avoid responding to what I write about fantasy from now on, okay?

[grumbler]

Eragon. God, what a shitty movie.

That's the one!  Thanks.

[Ed Anger]

Look for my fantasy novel Big breasted chick knights fight the evil big boobed Witch on Amazon Kindle.

One of these days, I'm actually going to write a book. And yes, it will be suitably wacky.

[grumbler]

One of these days, I'm actually going to write a book. And yes, it will be suitably wacky.

Funny you should switch to that avatar just as I am showing parts of Gung Ho to my econ class to demonstrate differences in working cultures.