The GMG SF/Fantasy/Horror Club

[DavidW]

I'm reading the polar opposite... Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon so no sex, nothing graphic. Just people trying to be heroes.

[Karl Henning]

You hadn't seen anything then! He will include completely unnecessary, gratuitous, nasty stuff in his books that never make it to film.

Even his published work needs editing for him to seem a "brilliant" writer. while in So. Carolina, I lured Rob into watching 11.22.63, Sadie tells Jake that her husband's mother put a clothespin on his male organ. Me, I took that as a largely superfluous detail. My friend's curiosity was piqued and he did some internet sleuthing and found that King expanded on this point substantially in his book. My TL:DR takeaways were: King has some mighty peculiar obsessions and has managed to make himself famous and wealthy despite insisting on making some of them public. And King himself has apparently no sense of how inessential and unnecessary some of this ballyhoo is.

[VonStupp]

You hadn't seen anything then! He will include completely unnecessary, gratuitous, nasty stuff in his books that never make it to film. I think that one expects it in horror, but it is another thing to find it in what should be fantasy, which is what VonStupp is reading.

Indeed. The idea of an old-West, fantasy epic from King was intriguing to me. It is slow going, some of which is a matter of time for me to be able to sit and read. The series certainly requires an investment, which hopefully I will be able to cash in on. We'll see.

Seeing you comment on Brandon Sanderson, my wife and I both enjoyed his Mistborn trilogy. I think she has reread it a couple of times since. I also believe we may have borrowed those books from a friend and never returned them...
VS

[Roy Bland]

I find  interesting that a former military police sergeant could become a good writer

[Daverz]

Even his published work needs editing for him to seem a "brilliant" writer. while in So. Carolina, I lured Rob into watching 11.22.63, Sadie tells Jake that her husband's mother put a clothespin on his male organ. Me, I took that as a largely superfluous detail. My friend's curiosity was piqued and he did some internet sleuthing and found that King expanded on this point substantially in his book. My TL:DR takeaways were: King has some mighty peculiar obsessions and has managed to make himself famous and wealthy despite insisting on making some of them public. And King himself has apparently no sense of how inessential and unnecessary some of this ballyhoo is.

I'm not sure ballyhoo is the right word for that infamous scene from It that seems to get skipped in all the adaptations for some reason:

[DavidW]

I finished Empire of Silence the first book in the Sun Eater series. I will be reading the rest of the series!

The Good: great character work, world-building, and high-quality prose exceeding the norm for the genre.
The Bad: distracting homages to Dune and Shadow of the Torturer. There is an entire chapter that is almost straight-up lifted from Dune. I don't think the other books in the series will suffer from this.
The Ugly: I enjoyed the novel (though it sagged in the middle) but the bookish community has well overhyped it. Fantasy booktubers that are very poorly read in SF are praising the series as the best in SF period. As someone who reads science fiction, not only do I disagree, but I don't see it as SF. It is fantasy in a space setting. And that is fine, but the hyperbolic praise I think is ultimately a disservice to what the series really is, and has resulted in an equally egregious clapback from some readers.



I enjoyed the novel, don't get me wrong. But I need to see the series through and some time to see if this series is one for the ages or just a Booktube darling for today.

[DavidW]

I read Howling Dark, which was way better than Empire of Silence. It had me hooked from the first page and never let up. I devoured it in a few days.



Anyone else reading SF these days?

[DavidW]

I've read a couple of good ones. The Fisherman and Empire of Grass. The second one took me a long time to read. It is good, but it has middle-book syndrome, and the small font and single spacing make me want to cry. I ended up switching to the ebook version even though I had sworn them off.

The Fisherman is a Lovecraftian story about a guy who gets over the loss of his wife by going fishing.


Empire of Grass is the second volume in The Last King of Osten Ard, a sequel to one of my favorite fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. This volume pushes the character and plot arcs forward, resolves most of the mysteries, and sets up the central conflicts for the series.

[VonStupp]

The Dark Tower by Stephen King
  IV. Wizard and Glass (1997)
  V. The Wolves of Calla (2003)

I finished Book 4 of Stephen King's Dark Tower series a while back and am close to finishing the fifth. Wizard is a nearly complete flashback, fleshing out the background of the main character. Only a short, strange storyline reference to The Wizard of Oz is visited in the story present.

Book 5 reminds me of The Magnificent Seven, although this whole series has had a dark Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Western tint to them. The stories are interesting enough for me to cruise right through them, despite the occasional weird and icky digressions and a high quantity of total page numbers.

VS

[DavidW]

I read Into the Narrowdark and I'm now reading The Navigator's Children which are two parts of the same novel by Tad Williams split for publication due to the total word count (635k). Looking like a great conclusion to perhaps the greatest fantasy series of the past decade, that nobody is reading because Tad William's name isn't Brandon Sanderson.

[Fëanor]

I read hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy novels between about 1965 and 2000.  Since then only really Toklien's 'The Children of Húrin'.  Nowadays & given my failing eyesight, I really only read non-fiction;  (attempts to reread The Silmarillion and War & Peace have failed.)



During those 35 years my fantasy standouts were

• J.R.R. Tolkien ~ The Lord of the Rings, (well duh!!)
• E.R. Eddison ~ The Worm Ouroboros
• H.P. Lovecraft ~ The Dunwich Horror (-- as representative of that particular horror genre)

My sci-fi standouts were:

• Gene Wolfe ~ The Book of the New Sun
• Frank Herbert ~ Dune
• Brian W. Aldiss  ~ The Helloconia Trilogy

[DavidW]

Sorry to hear about your failing eyesight.

[Irons]

Reading this thread gave me mind to dip a toe in SF waters. Browsing the shelves of a local charity store, I took pot-luck with Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land, Book One in the Saga of the Exiles. A good read or not?

[VonStupp]

Stephen King
Dark Tower: VI. Song of Susannah (2004)

SPOILERS FOLLOW
I knew Stephen King made cameos in film adaptations of his books, but who knew he showed up in his own books as well. Self aggrandizement or importance to the plot and multi-book arc?
VS