re: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Recommendation & Discussion Thread

quote:

---

Just want to throw out a recommendation for a relatively new author named Ryan Cahill and his series The Bound and the Broken. 3 books of 5 out so far. It's a perfect series so far for anyone who is a fan of Jon Gwynne's Faithful and the Fallen stuff.

---

I just started this. A little over an hour into the audio book but I’m really liking it so far.

Reckoners was good but it is definitely YA so the tones etc are for a younger audience. Again I enjoyed it (wife knows I love Sanderson and I hadn’t read them so got for Xmas last year).

The expanse was awesome and after going from stormlight/Malazan it was nice to get an easy page turner. 10 page chapters each ends on a cliffhanger that makes you want more. 9 books so you can take breaks and read other stuff if you need a change of pace.

Lies of Lock Lamora was by far the best of the 3 Gent bastards out but please correct me if I’m wrong, the writer has some issues and likely we’ll be stuck for a while with the 3 that are out.

Those are the 3 I’ve read, good luck

First Law: Abercrombie is amazing. Highly recommend.

Dresden: Fun modern urban fantasy. Lots of books. Bigtime page turners.

Expanse: These are excellent, and I definitely appreciate them more than the television series. That being said... I'd probably go with something else before this one.

Gentlemen Bastards: Also excellent. Frustrating because not concluded and don't know when they'll be concluded.

Assassins Apprentice: Not a big fan

Reckoners: Haven't read.

Black Company: Probably some of the original gritty fantasy. Really good, though I think I'd pick Abercrombie over this currently.

First Law: I recommend these books to everyone. Well worth the read, at least the first trilogy.

Expanse: I only watched the first season of the show, and it follows the first book pretty closely. its another outstanding series that I recommend to everyone

Gentlemen Bastards: the first book is really, really good. A lot of people didn't like the second, but I thought it was great. Third book is also good. But be prepared for the series to never be finished a la George R R Martin. The author suffers from anxiety, and severe Trump Derangement Syndrome. And its been radio silence for a while now on when the next book will be published.

I'll add Kings of the Wyld to your list of fun and interested fantasy.

If you're looking for SciFi, Old Man's War is a good page turner with an interesting concept.

quote:

---

Lies of locke Lamora was so dang good. I loved it. But I stopped after it because I didn't know when I started it that it is supposed to be 7(?) books and he's only written 3 and it's been like 4,000 years since his last one. That dude is NEVER going to finish them. I'm done reading series where the author doesn't know how to finish a story.

---

I've given up even seeing the 4th book. Which is a shame because I really enjoyed the series so far. The last update I've seen from Lynch was way back in August of 2021 where he said:

quote:

---

We're Gonna Do Drugs, Folks

About ten years ago, I watched a video of filmmaker Kevin Smith discussing the time he was invited to Paisley Park to participate in an extremely loosely-defined collaboration with the late Prince. Although no actual project emerged from that strange brief interlude, Smith was able to spend some time talking with various members of Prince’s staff. One of them let slip that Prince had spent years writing and recording an entire body of hidden work— entire albums and cycles of music videos, all fully professionally produced, all locked straight away into Prince’s vault unreleased, for reasons of Prince’s own.

Smith didn’t know quite how to take this. Was it quirky disinformation, an exaggeration, a misunderstanding? I assumed it must have been something of that nature when I first heard the story— even for Prince, a man whose eccentricity could barely be measured by the metrics of planet Earth, it seemed too much. Then, in 2016, Prince passed away and the existence of his unreleased song vault was confirmed to the world (as of this writing, it’s still being catalogued, and to the best of my knowledge its true size and scope have not been revealed).

I bring this up, because it turns out I have been filling a tiny Prince vault of my own. Or, perhaps, my brain chemistry has been allowed to curate such a vault for too long without oversight.

I don’t have much experience of writer’s block. Other than the need for an ocasional break and some reasonable interludes of fallow brain time, I’ve never had sustained trouble with composition, even when wracked with anxiety and depression. Despite my generally fragile mental state during the pandemic, I have remained more or less steadily productive, writing and editing thousands of words on a weekly basis. Words which I have been completely unable to show anyone, thanks to the crushing goddamn chest-filling pressure-out-to-my fingertips sensations that herald another anxiety attack… sensations I am experiencing right now, and have been experiencing intermittently in the time it has taken me to write the current toal of five (5) paragraphs on display here. When did I begin this writing process? Four (4) days ago.

“There’s a very real chance this update, too, will go into the vault,” I just typed. If I actually manage to finish this and hit send, I presume I will put that sentence in quotation marks or something. How’s that for a glimpse of the writing process? I have not yet put the quotation marks in. The sentence starting with “I have not yet” was finished 17 hours after I typed “there’s a very real chance.” That is the rate of meaningful progress when anxiety is my co-pilot. This sentence, being written a mere 45 minutes after the last, is the first to be composed under the increasing influence of the anti-anxiety medication I took with dinner.

Because this nonsense has gone on long enough.

In my miniature Prince vault are, at a minimum, seven short stories, a novella, a novelette, a novel, and a number of essays for this newsletter. At the beginning of the pandemic I would occasionally joke with myself or my wife that “we dont’ want a Prince vault situation,” but here we are, having one. The plain fact is, my career as a writer is in danger at the moment, and the danger grows with every month I don’t get this under some measure of control, because while my existing books continue to perform very well there is a difference between being a working writer and a person who used to write, and there is only so much my patient editors and publishers and readers can be asked to wait for without clear answers. There is very little practical value in being a writer who falls over heaving and gasping every time he attempts to show people what he’s made. In short, there is very little practical value in me, as I presently am, and I am desperately tired of this, tired of it ruining my fun, tired of it confusing my audience, tired of it eating my self-respect, tired of it receding a little bit only to come roaring back stronger than ever.

So, we’re gonna take drugs, kids. I’ve already started. Ten years ago finally admitting that an antidepressant was necessary probably saved my life. In my usual fashion, since then I have resisted various pushes to take anti-anxiety medication as well, but I am through refusing. I need some answers. I need some goddamn changes. I need to be able to get this newsletter out on a non-geological timescale, among other things. I need to have an active social skill more in-depth than feigning approximately human functionality on Twitter. I’m forty-three, and I don’t want another fricking year to go by with several years of good work (though I say it myself) locked up tight in my stupid little vault of anxieties.

The medication, it has been taken, and will be taken again, and we’ll see what it can do for me. I am feeling very strange as I write this… a different sort of strung-out and nauseated than usual. It’s like someone has taken a hot towel to my usual tense anxiety attack, massaged the knots out of it, turned it into bizarre brain-drifting lassitude. My fingers are not exactly adroit upon the keys this evening, and I apologize for misspellings. I wonder if I might have been wiser to cut the pill I took in half… ah well. It already kowabunga’d its way down to the lightless water park of my innards, where it celebrated its last few moments of existence before being taken apart by my trusty acids, so the molecules of power could be stripped and shipped directly to my nervous system, where they are now doing… something.

It has to be this way. I’m tired of hiding my work and hiding from the pain of getting it back out into the world. So, drugs. Drugs and ongoing therapy.

I just put quotation marks around “There’s a very real chance this update, too, will go into the vault.” That’s a good sign. But now can I actually hit send and get this thing out the door? You’re about to find out. We both are.

---

He may have given more recent updates, but I haven't bothered looking because I'm sure its all lies at this point

First Law it is.

quote:

---

Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it. You have to realistic about these things

---

Say one thing about The First Law series, say that it's a great series.

Coming from someone who’s mom suffered from extreme anxiety, I can seriously sympathize with someone battling that. My mom was seriously a different person if she forgot to take her medicine. It wasn’t her fault and we hated it for her. But she took her medicine and didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for her.

That was a big letter saying hey everybody please feel sorry for me. Just comes off as being phony. He can write over 1,000 pages a week but his “vault is some short stories, novellas, and one novel?” Give me a break.

quote:

---

Lies of locke Lamora was so dang good. I loved it. But I stopped after it because I didn't know when I started it that it is supposed to be 7(?) books and he's only written 3 and it's been like 4,000 years since his last one.

---

At least the good news there is that Lies of Locke Lamora works perfectly well as a stand alone novel if you choose to treat it that way. Which is what I would suggest to most people, cause he's unlikely to finish the series as you said.

Just finished Blood Song by Anthony Ryan, which is the first in a trilogy called the Raven's Shadow series. I was pleasantly surprised for just randomly picking a book on amazon to download for the holiday weekend.