It's surprisingly difficult to find good fantasy/urban fantasy series outside of the most well known ones. I've been going through some more obscure fantasy books. Even though I've found some that were good and surprisingly enjoyable, I've also slogged through some real crap. I had an especially run of bad luck lately, going through about half a dozen bad books.
There are so many books trying to be A Song of Fire and Ice or Wheel of Time, but they do it so terribly. I read two WoT wannabes around last year, The Shadow Of What Was Lost: The Licanius Trilogy and Circle of Reign: The Dying Lands Chronicle. They crammed so much stuff into the story and there were so many contrived fantastical events that came out of nowhere, and there was so little explanation that it was kind of hilarious. The books were like kids playing with action figures and making up stories along the way.
The worst fantasy book I read recently was Nightblade by Ryan Kirk. I don't remember how I stumbled on it but it's like a perfect storm of bad. It's got a generic medieval Japan inspired world, boring prose, bad dialogue, and stupid characters. The badness is almost indescribable. There is a female character who exists for the sole purpose of being tortured to motivate the male protagonist. I was only able to finish the book out of morbid curiosity.
I loved the Rook, and wholeheartedly second that recommendation.
I have hated everything that I've read by China Mievelle. He's one of those creators whose virtues entirely escape me. I think that Perdido St. Station might be the most unenjoyable book that I've ever finished.
Which books have you read, and which aspects of his writing did you not like? I like his books very much, but I often read about people who have very negative feelings towards them.
I read King Rat and Perdido St. Station, as well as a couple of short stories whose names escape me.
There's three main things I dislike about his books. The first is his style - I don't like his made-up words much. It's fantasy though, and I'm used to authors using words that make me roll my eyes - this is by far the least of my complaints.
The second is that I don't enjoy or like any of his characters. I can enjoy characters without liking them, and I can like characters without enjoying them, but I need at least one of the two to have any kind of interest in what happens to them. Neither applied to the China Mievelle books that I read. This is the biggest thing for me - if I don't care about the characters, I don't care about the story, and Mievelle did not hook me in at all.
The third is the straw that broke the camel's back and has kept me from trying to read his books again. I got a really nasty vibe about how he wrote about filth of various sorts - it felt like he sometimes was a half step away from the line of being a erotic fetish writer, and he was not always on the same side of the line. To be clear, I mean "filth" in a very literal sense - whether it be things rotting, mold, ichor, things going rancid, the smell or appearance of feces, etc. Also, a certain degree of body horror that also feels somewhat fetishized. It's been over a decade since I read anything of his, so it's possible I'm remembering incorrectly, but that that was the impression I got.
The story that finished me for China Mievelle was one of his short stories - I decided I was going to read it until the first mention of filth and then reevaluate at that point. If I recall, I couldn't make it a page without the line "the pigeon sounded and shat" showing up; I put the book down and moved on with my life.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I'm about halfway through If on a winter's night a traveler and it's fucking great, that's all
I kind of think it gets "worse" as it goes along, and I don't necessarily like where it ends up, but it's obviously amazing, and never bad. I like Invicible Cities a bit more on the whole, even if there are parts of Winter's Night that are better.
I enjoyed the first few of Mike Carey's Felix Castor series, but I think they're kind of tough to find in the States due to publisher shenanigans.
I think the Castor books fall into a lot of the same pitfalls that most 'urban fantasy' ends up in; but, because Carey settled on a finite number of books, and wrote an ending, I tend to give it a pass - and there's some good stuff there.
Full disclosure, for whenever I mention urban fantasy: I think the Dresden books are trash, and not the fun kind. So take the vague endorsement above with that in mind.
It's a curious, and interesting sub-genre, though. Like, there are elements of Anita Blake books that work - the zombies in that series are horrible and actually nasty. But most of the books are 50 pages of plot and 300 pages of werewolf fucking. And, like, if that's your thing, that's cool. It just doesn't make for a good book. There is literally an Anita Blake book that goes: 'Setup of mystery: vampires afoot! -> 300 pages of fucking -> epilogue: oh, yeah, the vampires got away, I guess?'
And those books are better than the Dresden books.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
I like Mike Carey a lot as a comics writer - I think that his Lucifer is on par with Sandman, and his Suicide Risk is one of my all-time favorite superhero stories - but the Felix Castor novels did nothing for me.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
Please continue to suggest good urban fantasy novels and series!
I have one, that seems to be awfully underpraised around on the internet:
Matthew Swift series by Kate Griffin. First book, called A Madness of Angels, is about dead sorcerer in London who cames back to life by merging with anthropomorphic personifications of electricity, Blue Electric Angels, and then goes on a mission to have revenge on his murderers.
None other urban fantasy have a magic so connected with a present day motives like ths day.
I was quite pleasantly surprised with that series. Still need to finish the last one.
So I felt like reading House of Leaves again (this is maybe the 5th or 6th time? God I love that book), but I lost my copy awhile back and had to order a new one, and in the process, I discovered Danielewski started a new series, The Familiar.
Well, I say to myself, it can't be any worse than Only Revolutions, which was like reading The Jabberwocky cut up and reassembled into a ransom note
So let's check out the reviews for this thing, shall we? Oh, scrolling down to the reviews I notice the book is 880 pages. That seems pretty big, especially for a first book in the series!
The first volume in what will be a 27 volume epic introduces us to numerous characters and several areas of the world. The majority of the book takes place on, surprise, surprise a rainy day in May in Los Angeles. Other locations include Mexico, Singapore and Texas.
Oh. Oh wow.
(Paragraph about how House of Leaves is his favorite book)
The Familiar, on the other hand, strikes me as deliberately hostile to the reader. The characters are almost completely obscured by the writing style. One chapter is written entirely in lowecase, and in some bizarre pidgin dialect peppered with unfamiliar idioms. As a reader, I didn't know if I was supposed to be looking out for character names (which are frustratingly non-standard names like Alstair and Xander for no apparent reason, like every name came from some celebrity's kid) or waiting for characters to be revealed by their behavior. Instead, I finished the chapter with no idea who was being described, what age or sex they were (the author is an expert at The Ambiguous Pronoun Game!), or why I should care either way. The reader has invested a good deal of time reading maybe 100 pages, and the narrator (or narrators?) is unknown, the significance of most that has been uttered is still utterly hidden, the illustrations have nothing to do with anything being described beyond superficial connections, and nothing of consequence has actually happened.
So I felt like reading House of Leaves again (this is maybe the 5th or 6th time? God I love that book), but I lost my copy awhile back and had to order a new one, and in the process, I discovered Danielewski started a new series, The Familiar.
Well, I say to myself, it can't be any worse than Only Revolutions, which was like reading The Jabberwocky cut up and reassembled into a ransom note
So let's check out the reviews for this thing, shall we? Oh, scrolling down to the reviews I notice the book is 880 pages. That seems pretty big, especially for a first book in the series!
The first volume in what will be a 27 volume epic introduces us to numerous characters and several areas of the world. The majority of the book takes place on, surprise, surprise a rainy day in May in Los Angeles. Other locations include Mexico, Singapore and Texas.
Oh. Oh wow.
(Paragraph about how House of Leaves is his favorite book)
The Familiar, on the other hand, strikes me as deliberately hostile to the reader. The characters are almost completely obscured by the writing style. One chapter is written entirely in lowecase, and in some bizarre pidgin dialect peppered with unfamiliar idioms. As a reader, I didn't know if I was supposed to be looking out for character names (which are frustratingly non-standard names like Alstair and Xander for no apparent reason, like every name came from some celebrity's kid) or waiting for characters to be revealed by their behavior. Instead, I finished the chapter with no idea who was being described, what age or sex they were (the author is an expert at The Ambiguous Pronoun Game!), or why I should care either way. The reader has invested a good deal of time reading maybe 100 pages, and the narrator (or narrators?) is unknown, the significance of most that has been uttered is still utterly hidden, the illustrations have nothing to do with anything being described beyond superficial connections, and nothing of consequence has actually happened.
God fucking damnit, Danielewski.
I think this review makes a little too much of the failure to introduce you to characters, and the style associated with each character make it pretty easy to keep track of which of a variety of protagonists.
The writing is just sort of annoying, the characters writing and the whole thing overly ambitious in bad directions make it more a sort of piece of performance art than literature.
Edit:
It's bad. Don't get me wrong. Don't read it. But, I disagree why the reviewer about why it is bad.
I enjoyed House of Leaves in spite of how obviously in love with itself it was. It does not surprise me at all that MZD disappeared up his own ass afterwards.
I enjoyed House of Leaves in spite of how obviously in love with itself it was. It does not surprise me at all that MZD disappeared up his own ass afterwards.
House of Leaves is among my favorites. It is not surprising that MZD took all the wrong lessons from the success of that book, but it is really damn disappointing.
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I finished Three Body Problem.
There's a seed of something good there but it's very rough or possibly it's a Chinese fiction thing but I was probably ready to stop reading before I got through the first chapter. Fortunately I did and it picked up.
Up until the point when the author got near their target word count and included several chapters of exposition before just stopping the story abruptly.
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I kinda liked the Three Body game parts too, going through their history was kinda neat. But yeah, the dialog in particular was just so jarring, but I'm sure that, at least in part, it was a translation thing.
I can't, under any circumstances, recommend the sequel. Its one of the very few books I just couldn't finish.
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
The Ophiuchi Hotline turned out to be a little bit of a lost SF classic from the seventies. Excellent, bleak, surprising stuff.
I've read almost all of John Varleys stuff from that era. I really love that universe he created. I reccomend his short stories and other novels (Steel Beach is probably the pinnacle) in that universe.
To anyone looking for SF or fantasy to read you could do a lot worse that work your way through the Millenium Masterworks and Gollancz Classics (the ones with the yellow jackets) series for either genre. It's how I got The Ophiuchi Hotline and dozens of other old SF or fantasy books I might never have read. I've got like three shelves of a bookcase taken up by these lovely editions.
The line really shows the value of a curated list of recommendations.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
The main issue with the Garrett books is that they are disposable and samey in the way a lot of serialized fiction used to be in that era.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
The main issue with the Garrett books is that they are disposable and samey in the way a lot of serialized fiction used to be in that era.
I guess I find them no more samey than any other long-running episodic fantasy series is. I suspect that when Rivers of London hits 14 books, there will be people who find it to be samey, too.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
The main issue with the Garrett books is that they are disposable and samey in the way a lot of serialized fiction used to be in that era.
I guess I find them no more samey than any other long-running episodic fantasy series is. I suspect that when Rivers of London hits 14 books, there will be people who find it to be samey, too.
Not really. There's been a huge shift in how these serialized series are created. Writers have learned a lot from comics and TV about how to build an uber plot within the context of individual novels.
The Garret files are of the era when series were more like 80s TV - disconnected episodes that may have a returning villain or plot but didn't attempt to seem like part of a longer, coherent story. They also have the sin of copy/pasted descriptions and lines of dialogue from one book to another. I tend to binge read series, so it really hits me when I go back to some of long series of that era.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
And I think some of that is adopting the style of the Rex Stout. Archie Goodwin is a ladies man of the 1930's and the descriptions of women by Garrett line up with the descriptions Archie Goodwin would give. Usually said description is then followed by Garrett getting insulted by someone for being a pig or thinking with his genitals first.
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
The main issue with the Garrett books is that they are disposable and samey in the way a lot of serialized fiction used to be in that era.
I guess I find them no more samey than any other long-running episodic fantasy series is. I suspect that when Rivers of London hits 14 books, there will be people who find it to be samey, too.
Not really. There's been a huge shift in how these serialized series are created. Writers have learned a lot from comics and TV about how to build an uber plot within the context of individual novels.
The Garret files are of the era when series were more like 80s TV - disconnected episodes that may have a returning villain or plot but didn't attempt to seem like part of a longer, coherent story. They also have the sin of copy/pasted descriptions and lines of dialogue from one book to another. I tend to binge read series, so it really hits me when I go back to some of long series of that era.
I think Cook does a bit better than that with Garrett. Every book has a self-contained plot, but the state of the world definitely advances from book to book. A war ends, as a result of that, society changes over the course of multiple books. Recurring characters undergo changes of circumstances and advance their lives. Some even wander off of their own agency or die. Events from early books have a definite impact on later books. There's a real and well-developed sense of continuity and the passage of time in the Garrett books that 80s sitcoms never had.
That being said, I agree that every Garrett book contains a bowl of copy pasta, but I'd say that's more from a sense of ritual that Cook follows because the Garrett setup is an homage to the Nero Wolfe books. There's very much an element of the old-timey detective serial to the Garrett books, in which the writer uses verbatim forms across multiple books as a sort of a branding technique.
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
To anyone looking for SF or fantasy to read you could do a lot worse that work your way through the Millenium Masterworks and Gollancz Classics (the ones with the yellow jackets) series for either genre. It's how I got The Ophiuchi Hotline and dozens of other old SF or fantasy books I might never have read. I've got like three shelves of a bookcase taken up by these lovely editions.
The line really shows the value of a curated list of recommendations.
I've been reading a lot of older stuff recently since the library branch I usually go to has an unusually large collection of like 50s to 70s stuff. Tiny library but they have a lot of shelves given over to Philip K. Dick etc. I think it started with some dude donating his personal collection, and then they built from there. The sign isn't there anymore but at least at one point they called the couple of shelves 'the Philip K. Dick collection'.
This is also the library that lends out board games and has the biggest collection of comics of the various Copenhagen branches. All around awesome place.
Involution Ocean and Broken Sword are two examples of stuff I've enjoyed hugely that I would have never thought to read if not for randomly picking it up there.
I am almost done with the girl with all the gifts by mike carey -- I wouldn't have chosen it if I knew what um, genre or whatever? it is a part of, but I'm enjoying it (which is why I'm not spoiling that here). I'll deffo pick up his next one, fellside, after I'm done with this
I packed my ipad in my checked luggage on a flight yesterday (boo) so I had to buy a rando book from the airport bookstore
I got the night sister by jennifer mcmahon, and thought it was pretty okay. it was um, mystery + some horror -- I had read another book by her previously (the winter people) and more or less liked it
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jakobaggerLO THY DREAD EMPIRE CHAOS IS RESTOREDRegistered Userregular
That's how I came across The Broken Sword as well. An incredible novel, a genuine classic of fantasy.
Andersen's Three Hearts And Three Lions is another fine, under-appreciated fantasy novel, and in a completely different style.
I like that title. Just in case anyone was in doubt about which tiny European country he traces his ancestry to.
(Denmark's coat of arms features three lions and ok not three but 9 hearts)
Edit: also from wiki this quintessentially Danish fear:
In later years Anderson completely repudiated this idea (a half-humorous remnant is the beginning of Tau Zero: a future where the nations of the world entrusted Sweden with overseeing disarmament and found themselves living under the rule of the Swedish Empire).
I am almost done with the girl with all the gifts by mike carey -- I wouldn't have chosen it if I knew what um, genre or whatever? it is a part of, but I'm enjoying it (which is why I'm not spoiling that here). I'll deffo pick up his next one, fellside, after I'm done with this
finished the girl with all the gifts, it was quite good
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I finished off The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's quite a bit like The Wind Up Girl in that the setting is very good but the story is hastily pinned to it rather than being integral.
This one is about what happens in the American desert states once they empty the aquifers and it's generally a bit harder and less speculative.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
The traitor baru cormorant by seth dickinson is nice twisty turny little story.
It's whatever genre kj Parker's engineer trilogy is. Do you call it fantasy when there are no real fantastic elements?
The first half is wonderful with lots of strange attention to economics and their place in rebellion. Then it gets a bit lost in an uninteresting key change before a really solid ending.
There's some really nice use of language throughout, especially around various names with roots that have well chosen connection.
I presume there will be more in the same setting but really it doesn't need a follow up
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Just finished Starship Troopers. Verhoeven's film is great but aside from involving Bugs isn't true to the novel in any way. The actual book is short, doesn't involve a whole lot of action, and the "controversial" content isn't. Sure, it proposes a society where the only people that can vote are those who have "earned" the privilege, but hey, it's sci-fi, and if the author wanted to make a fake society where people are ranked by smell or something more power to 'em. I guess there was a lot of moral panic and cries of "fascism" during the 60s since if Troopers came out in this day and age no one would bat an eye (ex. Neal Asher's Polity novels' approach to capital punishment).
Just finished Starship Troopers. Verhoeven's film is great but aside from involving Bugs isn't true to the novel in any way. The actual book is short, doesn't involve a whole lot of action, and the "controversial" content isn't. Sure, it proposes a society where the only people that can vote are those who have "earned" the privilege, but hey, it's sci-fi, and if the author wanted to make a fake society where people are ranked by smell or something more power to 'em. I guess there was a lot of moral panic and cries of "fascism" during the 60s since if Troopers came out in this day and age no one would bat an eye (ex. Neal Asher's Polity novels' approach to capital punishment).
IIRC the screenplay for the movie was originally for a totally unrelated scifi film. They just slapped on the "Starship Troopers" name and made a few vague similarities for publicity.
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There are so many books trying to be A Song of Fire and Ice or Wheel of Time, but they do it so terribly. I read two WoT wannabes around last year, The Shadow Of What Was Lost: The Licanius Trilogy and Circle of Reign: The Dying Lands Chronicle. They crammed so much stuff into the story and there were so many contrived fantastical events that came out of nowhere, and there was so little explanation that it was kind of hilarious. The books were like kids playing with action figures and making up stories along the way.
The worst fantasy book I read recently was Nightblade by Ryan Kirk. I don't remember how I stumbled on it but it's like a perfect storm of bad. It's got a generic medieval Japan inspired world, boring prose, bad dialogue, and stupid characters. The badness is almost indescribable. There is a female character who exists for the sole purpose of being tortured to motivate the male protagonist. I was only able to finish the book out of morbid curiosity.
I read King Rat and Perdido St. Station, as well as a couple of short stories whose names escape me.
There's three main things I dislike about his books. The first is his style - I don't like his made-up words much. It's fantasy though, and I'm used to authors using words that make me roll my eyes - this is by far the least of my complaints.
The second is that I don't enjoy or like any of his characters. I can enjoy characters without liking them, and I can like characters without enjoying them, but I need at least one of the two to have any kind of interest in what happens to them. Neither applied to the China Mievelle books that I read. This is the biggest thing for me - if I don't care about the characters, I don't care about the story, and Mievelle did not hook me in at all.
The third is the straw that broke the camel's back and has kept me from trying to read his books again. I got a really nasty vibe about how he wrote about filth of various sorts - it felt like he sometimes was a half step away from the line of being a erotic fetish writer, and he was not always on the same side of the line. To be clear, I mean "filth" in a very literal sense - whether it be things rotting, mold, ichor, things going rancid, the smell or appearance of feces, etc. Also, a certain degree of body horror that also feels somewhat fetishized. It's been over a decade since I read anything of his, so it's possible I'm remembering incorrectly, but that that was the impression I got.
The story that finished me for China Mievelle was one of his short stories - I decided I was going to read it until the first mention of filth and then reevaluate at that point. If I recall, I couldn't make it a page without the line "the pigeon sounded and shat" showing up; I put the book down and moved on with my life.
I kind of think it gets "worse" as it goes along, and I don't necessarily like where it ends up, but it's obviously amazing, and never bad. I like Invicible Cities a bit more on the whole, even if there are parts of Winter's Night that are better.
I think the Castor books fall into a lot of the same pitfalls that most 'urban fantasy' ends up in; but, because Carey settled on a finite number of books, and wrote an ending, I tend to give it a pass - and there's some good stuff there.
Full disclosure, for whenever I mention urban fantasy: I think the Dresden books are trash, and not the fun kind. So take the vague endorsement above with that in mind.
It's a curious, and interesting sub-genre, though. Like, there are elements of Anita Blake books that work - the zombies in that series are horrible and actually nasty. But most of the books are 50 pages of plot and 300 pages of werewolf fucking. And, like, if that's your thing, that's cool. It just doesn't make for a good book. There is literally an Anita Blake book that goes: 'Setup of mystery: vampires afoot! -> 300 pages of fucking -> epilogue: oh, yeah, the vampires got away, I guess?'
I feel that Glen Cook's Garrettt books count as 'urban fantasy', though the setting is more traditional fantasy than modern world, and he sort of uses that series as an excuse to play with genres (locked room mystery! Alien abductions?! Vampires!). But they're fun, and Cook is a pretty good writer.
I was quite pleasantly surprised with that series. Still need to finish the last one.
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I'm reading an omnibus of Ciaphas Cain novels. These are brilliant.
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Well, I say to myself, it can't be any worse than Only Revolutions, which was like reading The Jabberwocky cut up and reassembled into a ransom note
So let's check out the reviews for this thing, shall we? Oh, scrolling down to the reviews I notice the book is 880 pages. That seems pretty big, especially for a first book in the series!
Oh. Oh wow.
God fucking damnit, Danielewski.
I think this review makes a little too much of the failure to introduce you to characters, and the style associated with each character make it pretty easy to keep track of which of a variety of protagonists.
The writing is just sort of annoying, the characters writing and the whole thing overly ambitious in bad directions make it more a sort of piece of performance art than literature.
Edit:
It's bad. Don't get me wrong. Don't read it. But, I disagree why the reviewer about why it is bad.
House of Leaves is among my favorites. It is not surprising that MZD took all the wrong lessons from the success of that book, but it is really damn disappointing.
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There's a seed of something good there but it's very rough or possibly it's a Chinese fiction thing but I was probably ready to stop reading before I got through the first chapter. Fortunately I did and it picked up.
Up until the point when the author got near their target word count and included several chapters of exposition before just stopping the story abruptly.
The parts of The Three Body Problem that dealt with the antagonist were pretty good.
The parts that dealt with the protagonist did nothing for me.
I can't, under any circumstances, recommend the sequel. Its one of the very few books I just couldn't finish.
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I've read almost all of John Varleys stuff from that era. I really love that universe he created. I reccomend his short stories and other novels (Steel Beach is probably the pinnacle) in that universe.
The Titan series is also very etntertaining.
His more recent offerings are okay but not great.
The line really shows the value of a curated list of recommendations.
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The Garrett books are fun, but a bit... retrograde (which is not surprising, as he's been writing them since the 80s). Someone needs to teach Cook about what the male gaze is.
That being said, the fantastical Nero Wolfe setup is clever and well executed, and the overall world-building is pretty interesting, too. Recommended if you can stomach some subtle and not-so-subtle sexism.
I re-read my own reply, and realized that I'm being a bit too hard on Cook. For the all the ambient sexism in the Garrett books, there's a lot of female and PoC agency, a few outstandingly progressive characters, and a deep and abiding suspicion of traditional power structures.
It's pretty clear that Cook evolved over the 25+ years he wrote the Garrett books, but that he still hasn't quite shed some old and bad habits from an earlier age.
The main issue with the Garrett books is that they are disposable and samey in the way a lot of serialized fiction used to be in that era.
I guess I find them no more samey than any other long-running episodic fantasy series is. I suspect that when Rivers of London hits 14 books, there will be people who find it to be samey, too.
Not really. There's been a huge shift in how these serialized series are created. Writers have learned a lot from comics and TV about how to build an uber plot within the context of individual novels.
The Garret files are of the era when series were more like 80s TV - disconnected episodes that may have a returning villain or plot but didn't attempt to seem like part of a longer, coherent story. They also have the sin of copy/pasted descriptions and lines of dialogue from one book to another. I tend to binge read series, so it really hits me when I go back to some of long series of that era.
And I think some of that is adopting the style of the Rex Stout. Archie Goodwin is a ladies man of the 1930's and the descriptions of women by Garrett line up with the descriptions Archie Goodwin would give. Usually said description is then followed by Garrett getting insulted by someone for being a pig or thinking with his genitals first.
I think Cook does a bit better than that with Garrett. Every book has a self-contained plot, but the state of the world definitely advances from book to book. A war ends, as a result of that, society changes over the course of multiple books. Recurring characters undergo changes of circumstances and advance their lives. Some even wander off of their own agency or die. Events from early books have a definite impact on later books. There's a real and well-developed sense of continuity and the passage of time in the Garrett books that 80s sitcoms never had.
That being said, I agree that every Garrett book contains a bowl of copy pasta, but I'd say that's more from a sense of ritual that Cook follows because the Garrett setup is an homage to the Nero Wolfe books. There's very much an element of the old-timey detective serial to the Garrett books, in which the writer uses verbatim forms across multiple books as a sort of a branding technique.
I've been reading a lot of older stuff recently since the library branch I usually go to has an unusually large collection of like 50s to 70s stuff. Tiny library but they have a lot of shelves given over to Philip K. Dick etc. I think it started with some dude donating his personal collection, and then they built from there. The sign isn't there anymore but at least at one point they called the couple of shelves 'the Philip K. Dick collection'.
This is also the library that lends out board games and has the biggest collection of comics of the various Copenhagen branches. All around awesome place.
Involution Ocean and Broken Sword are two examples of stuff I've enjoyed hugely that I would have never thought to read if not for randomly picking it up there.
Andersen's Three Hearts And Three Lions is another fine, under-appreciated fantasy novel, and in a completely different style.
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I packed my ipad in my checked luggage on a flight yesterday (boo) so I had to buy a rando book from the airport bookstore
I got the night sister by jennifer mcmahon, and thought it was pretty okay. it was um, mystery + some horror -- I had read another book by her previously (the winter people) and more or less liked it
I like that title. Just in case anyone was in doubt about which tiny European country he traces his ancestry to.
(Denmark's coat of arms features three lions and ok not three but 9 hearts)
Edit: also from wiki this quintessentially Danish fear:
finished the girl with all the gifts, it was quite good
it mentioned in the backmatter that he also writes comics so I was like, hmm I should check those out
oh ho ho!
I liked the explanation for the beginning of life on Earth, though.
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This one is about what happens in the American desert states once they empty the aquifers and it's generally a bit harder and less speculative.
It's whatever genre kj Parker's engineer trilogy is. Do you call it fantasy when there are no real fantastic elements?
The first half is wonderful with lots of strange attention to economics and their place in rebellion. Then it gets a bit lost in an uninteresting key change before a really solid ending.
There's some really nice use of language throughout, especially around various names with roots that have well chosen connection.
I presume there will be more in the same setting but really it doesn't need a follow up
IIRC the screenplay for the movie was originally for a totally unrelated scifi film. They just slapped on the "Starship Troopers" name and made a few vague similarities for publicity.
I'm not sure that 'nice' is the adjective I would use