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Readers' Guilty Pleasures: Fantasy/Sci Fi

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Oh my, do I have guilty pleasures!

Dragonriders of Pern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern

61942.jpg

I guess what's interesting about it is that the main "villain" is just a large number of mindless beasts that fall from the sky.


A space colony from Earth was doing well until the "thread" showed up and drove humanity back to the dark ages, but before losing all technology, they were able to genetically manipulate a local species to produce large, flying, fire-breathing telepathic dragons that form a bond with their riders.



There's some cool ideas buried in the series, but mostly it's just a fun romp and a soap opera, with a B-plot about[ent]hellip[/ent]

humans on this planet trying to regain their lost technological heritage. It's fluff, but dammit, I like it.

 
The Heralds of Valdemar Series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velgarth

Elspeth.jpg


Where as the Pern stories are mostly about riders who form special bonds with telepathic dragons, this is sort of the same idea but with horses. What sets this series apart is that the author has a lot of rules about how magic works, so we hear lots of details about magic in this world that one normally doesn't get from fantasy stories. There are many different kinds of magic in this world, and it's one of the interesting parts of the stories.

Notable from the series:

The Last Herald-Mage trilogy
This was the first ever story I read with a gay protagonist. Some say it's not a very good representation of homosexuals, but for a lot of people this is the first time we were presented with a gay character we were supposed to empathize with and identify with, so it'll always hold a special place in my heart.

Mage Wars trilogy
This was the first fantasy stories I read that included sympathetic African characters. After many long years of criticism, someone finally bothered to include someone other than European protagonists with the occasional Asian/Near-Asian antagonists.

Mage Winds trilogy
The first fantasy stories I read with sympathetic cultures based on indigenous Americans. The culture is well-enough defined and realized that I simply enjoy spending time with characters living among the people of those cultures.
 
Oh my, do I have guilty pleasures!

Dragonriders of Pern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern

View attachment 13442

I guess what's interesting about it is that the main "villain" is just a large number of mindless beasts that fall from the sky.


A space colony from Earth was doing well until the "thread" showed up and drove humanity back to the dark ages, but before losing all technology, they were able to genetically manipulate a local species to produce large, flying, fire-breathing telepathic dragons that form a bond with their riders.



There's some cool ideas buried in the series, but mostly it's just a fun romp and a soap opera, with a B-plot about[ent]hellip[/ent]

humans on this planet trying to regain their lost technological heritage. It's fluff, but dammit, I like it.


Oh, me, too! Me, too!

Really had a lot of fun with the series, especially the first three or so.
 
Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deed_of_Paksenarrion

0671654160.jpg

A couple of things are notable about this series.

First, it stays very close to the D&D formula. It borrows as heavily from D&D as D&D borrows from Tolkien. In fact, the whole thing reads like you're listening in on someone else's pen & paper D&D game (provided the game was being played by fantasy authors instead of your friends). While this does show a certain lack of creativity, it's also what's fun about it. If you ever played tabletop D&D, this will make you feel nostalgic.

Second is the interesting perspective. Normally, we start with a lowly protagonist who is right away thrown in with the powerful movers and shakers of their world and instantly begin to have a global impact with their decisions. In this story, you follow a runaway sheepfarmer's daughter who has to bite, scratch, and claw her way to the top, and by the time she is thundering among the movers and shakers of her world, you really feel that's she's earned it. For most of the series, you feel as though you're getting bottom-up view of this world instead of a top-down view like you would get in a more typical fantasy story.

Lastly, the author goes into incredible detail about life in a military unit in a pre-gunpowder civilization. In the first chapters, you spend a lot of time learning details of how soldiers are trained to march, and the proper way to dig latrines. Later, as she becomes a veteran in a mercenary company, you learn the gritty details of sanitation during a siege. In many ways, this reads like a swords 'n sorcery version of Tom Clancy, but with latrine pits instead of high tech self-guided missiles. :D No other fantasy series I know of goes into quite so much detail about logistics.
 
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Red Mars
  • Green Mars
  • Blue Mars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

Mars-Trilogy.jpg

It's one of my favorite "recent"(ish) hard sci-fi stories.

Not only is this good old-fashioned hard science fiction, but it's also like a multigenerational Game of Thrones. The first terraformers sent to Mars all had a wild variety of ideologies and political agendas that leads to endless back-stabbing once they start to transform the planet and make it livable. You get a large cast of characters, and while there is not quite as much murder as in Game of Thrones, you still shouldn't get too attached to any one character.
 
Heh...I guess the fantasy/sci fi readers needed some outlet, eh?
 
Those are the stories I read when I should be working my way through the ever-growing unread pile.

- - - Updated - - -

Heh...I guess the fantasy/sci fi readers needed some outlet, eh?

I miss the old hard sci-fi stories. In fact, I'm bummed that we now need a special word for what used to be called simply "science fiction" while the term "science fiction" has become the default term for what I would call science fantasy (e.g. Star Wars). I enjoy science fantasy, but it just doesn't sweep me away with "what if?" questions like the old Asimov stories when I was a child.
 
Oh my, do I have guilty pleasures!

Dragonriders of Pern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern

View attachment 13442

I guess what's interesting about it is that the main "villain" is just a large number of mindless beasts that fall from the sky.


A space colony from Earth was doing well until the "thread" showed up and drove humanity back to the dark ages, but before losing all technology, they were able to genetically manipulate a local species to produce large, flying, fire-breathing telepathic dragons that form a bond with their riders.



There's some cool ideas buried in the series, but mostly it's just a fun romp and a soap opera, with a B-plot about[ent]hellip[/ent]

humans on this planet trying to regain their lost technological heritage. It's fluff, but dammit, I like it.

Dude, you just ruined this thread with agenothree. Is that what it was called? I read those books about 3.8 million years ago.
 
Here...Let's talk about favorites and recommendations in the realm of the fantasy and science fiction genre.

Me?

I read a shipload of Sci Fi when I was much younger. I remember Isaac Asimov's Foundation Triology with a great deal of fondness. Frank Herbert's Dune (and only it of that series) is a classic. Although I think Robert Heinlein is a bit 'too much', I really enjoyed The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The last of my scifi binge was probably The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. But, by far, my favorite writer is the mistress of the anthropological speculative fiction, Ursula LeGuin. I think of her The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness as classics. And her Lathe of Heaven is set in my city.

I don't tend to read fantasy at all...indeed, I do not tend to like even LeGuin's fantasy novels. But then I was introduced to Terry Pratchett. Discworld sucked me in big time. I've tried to obtain and read the entire corpus. My favorite: The Thief of Time, with Lu Tse the Sweeper as my favorite character. I'm a fan of the Tiffany Aching series of novels because of the presence of the Nac Mac Feegle....Wee Free People. My kinda people. "Crivens!"

I dunno whut you bigjobs might like in the way of fantasy and/or science fiction reading, but this is the place.
 
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Right now, I'm reading The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. He's the guy who finished off the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan died and who is currently waiting by the phone in case George RR Martin keels over.

It's a pretty cool series and he's got an interesting setup for how magic and everything works in the world and the characters are fun and interesting.

A good read.
 
Of course, I would include Asimov, Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle among my favorites. Also love Greg Bear, Greg Benford, Ben Bova, Arthur Clarke and David Brin; all of them wrote wonderful hard science fiction.

Ruth
 
Here...Let's talk about favorites and recommendations in the realm of the fantasy and science fiction genre.

Me?

I read a shipload of Sci Fi when I was much younger. I remember Isaac Asimov's Foundation Triology with a great deal of fondness. Frank Herbert's Dune (and only it of that series) is a classic. Although I think Robert Heinlein is a bit 'too much', I really enjoyed The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The last of my scifi binge was probably The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. But, by far, my favorite writer is the mistress of the anthropological speculative fiction, Ursula LeGuin. I think of her The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness as classics. And her Lathe of Heaven is set in my city.

I don't tend to read fantasy at all...indeed, I do not tend to like even LeGuin's fantasy novels. But then I was introduced to Terry Pratchett. Discworld sucked me in big time. I've tried to obtain and read the entire corpus. My favorite: The Thief of Time, with Lu Tse the Sweeper as my favorite character. I'm a fan of the Tiffany Aching series of novels because of the presence of the Nac Mac Feegle....Wee Free People. My kinda people. "Crivens!"

I dunno whut you bigjobs might like in the way of fantasy and/or science fiction reading, but this is the place.

You said guilty pleasure.

Nothing guilty about Asimov.
 
Of course, I would include Asimov, Heinlein, Niven and Pournelle among my favorites. Also love Greg Bear, Greg Benford, Ben Bova, Arthur Clarke and David Brin; all of them wrote wonderful hard science fiction.

Ruth

Niven!

I admit that I never read Ring World, but I loved Integral Trees. He actually tried to imagine a fully functional ecosystem in free fall.
 
When I was a young man, I had lunch with Ben Bova. That was before the first US Mideast War, and he was postulating the Third Mideast War as a formative event in his characters' lives.

I read a lot of Arthur Clarke's work, too.
 
When I was a young man, I had lunch with Ben Bova.

Now I am jealous. I bet it was a terrific conversation.

Ruth

It was rather constrained, actually. It was a business luncheon and I was representative of the sponsoring organization. He was a guest speaker. A nice guy, but the conversation was vapid. Setting; not his fault.
 
Timothy Zahn's Cobra series
I do like some of Kevin J Anderson and Michael Stockpole's works. You will never hear me say it in public, but I enjoy them.
 
You said guilty pleasure.

Nothing guilty about Asimov.

It seems most have taken it as favorite Sci Fi/Fantasy as opposed to guilty pleasures. I think there is a lot of Fantasy that stands out as guilty pleasures for me, Salvator, Eddings, and Robert E. Howard probably top the list. Sci Fi is a bit different, and I have very few guilty pleasures there, though there is definitely a ton of crap Sci Fi out there, it just seems easier to avoid for me. Most of what I would call guilty pleasures with regard to Sci Fi are from when I was kid, just starting to gain exposure the genre, and far less discerning. It is kind of difficult for me to label them as such, however, as if it wasn't for some of those authors, I don't think I would ever have gotten into reading (and later writing) Sci Fi at all. Prominent among them would be Andre Norton. I was a huge fan of her work as a kid, but a lot of it doesn't hold up these days. Her Star Ka'ats novels fit the bill, but then again they were geared toward younger readers. She also penned novels like Star Man's Son, and The Time Traders that are still pretty good Sci Fi, so I wouldn't totally discount her work as guilty pleasures. Edgar Rice Burroughs and his plethora of John Carter books would be another guilty pleasure for me, and maybe Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series.
 
Timothy Zahn's Cobra series
I do like some of Kevin J Anderson and Michael Stockpole's works. You will never hear me say it in public, but I enjoy them.

Oh, Zahn and Kevin J Anderson, didn't think of those before, but I would agree on both accounts. Both have written extensively in the Star Wars universe, and a lot of that stuff definitely qualifies as guilty pleasures. I have such a love/hate relationship with Anderson. He is great at writing characters that I can get personally invested in, but he leaves much to be desired with any actual science in his books, and there are often plot holes that you could drop a neutron star through (looking at you Saga of the Seven Suns).
 
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