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.