Korgan0 wrote:I recommend The Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It'll take a while to get into, but it's suitably epic and long-winded.
Malazan is about as original as you can get while still maintaining the less-stupid high fantasy tropes. It might not be safe-enough based on the OP's specifications.
If you want to go retro, you could always read Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. There's a lot of them, they tend to be fun, and their female characters are all pretty universally annoying.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
thanks everyone.
I've read, sara douglass, david farland, and the sword of truth things. I didn't like the sword of truth.
I can believe that I forgot about discworld.
Oh, I've also read, and enjoyed, Foundation by Aasimov (how do you spell that name?), and the Prydain Chronicles by some guy.
Korgan0 wrote:I recommend The Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It'll take a while to get into, but it's suitably epic and long-winded.
I'd go a step further than Blicero's 'not safe enough,' as this really needs a full on warning.
I wouldn't recommend this series to anyone at all twitchy about rape, because there is a metric fuckton of rape, though it doesn't manifest itself much at all much in first book.
There is also a lot of archaeological interest to the series as well, with a lot of stuff about neolithic(ish) culture and fantasy in a world that isn't quite as universally medieval/renaissance.
There are a lot of neat ideas and concepts explored in the series, but a whole shitload of it I'd never want to read again.
Korgan0 wrote:I recommend The Malazan Book Of The Fallen. It'll take a while to get into, but it's suitably epic and long-winded.
I'd go a step further than Blicero's 'not safe enough,' as this really needs a full on warning.
I wouldn't recommend this series to anyone at all twitchy about rape, because there is a metric fuckton of rape, though it doesn't manifest itself much at all much in first book.
I have read three books so far and... I don't remember any rape at all. Maybe there was like, one person who had vaguely been raped in the past, but never on screen. Yeah, their was that one girl who used to sex the captain (Not any captain who you would recognize, IE Paran, just a guy who was a captain, and you never read about being alive), but aside from that I don't remember anything.
Keep going- I went through them one after another over the course of a year, so I don't remember when it started (and frankly they blurred together in an indistinguishable mass), but once the rape train winds up, it doesn't stop. Kids, dead/dying people, prominent characters from earlier books, it goes on and on. And some of the description gets pretty rough, with the victims (and sometimes perpetrators) degraded into various mindless animal states. And all this happens with various sinister overtones that this is all intentional and deliberate on the part of various groups or individuals.
The character issue is another problem- people will get abandoned for multiple books, then suddenly brought back with little context. And then the book order and chronological order fuck themselves, and it gets really weird.
Last edited by Voss on Sun Dec 01, 2013 11:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Yeah, the third one has the horde of ravenous peasants who run around and consume and rape people, and it also has the evil women who jump onto dead dudes and get pregnant from the dying ejaculations of the dudes. The books can get pretty brutal at times.
Malazan has a shit-tonne of brilliant ideas in it, but you also have to wade through a lot of shit. It's almost frighteningly uneven at times.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
The Furies of Calderon is pretty good.
It's by the same guy who writes the Dresden Files; and is pseudo-Rome with magic. Some characters are bitchy.
Prydain was probably Lloyd Alexander's series, most famous for Disney making the second into a movie.
Last edited by fectin on Mon Dec 02, 2013 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
I could swear I heard someone say that Robert Jordan spent two paragraphs (or two pages) describing someone's shoes. Did he?
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
I could swear I heard someone say that Robert Jordan spent two paragraphs (or two pages) describing someone's shoes. Did he?
Probably a little hyperbolic...he did tend to go rather overboard with the descriptions of people's outfits, though. If you're familiar with the elaborate word-porn that G.R.R. Martin writes for food and feasts, think of that but for clothes.
I am judging the philosophies and decisions you have presented in this thread. The ones I have seen look bad, and also appear to be the fruit of a poisonous tree that has produced only madness and will continue to produce only madness.
--AngelFromAnotherPin
believe in one hand and shit in the other and see which ones fills up quicker. it will be the one you are full of, shit.
Cynic wrote:That's the Tolkien school of writing, isn't it?
There are numerous times that Tolkien spends pages describing a tree or some stupid other thing.
Tolkien gets a pass - he detailed his world to the point where languages are functional and calendar matches the moon phases seen by heroes. Describing a tree at this point is just a cherry at the top.
