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The Worldbreaker Saga by Kameron Hurley


Werthead

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Unnecessary extra confirmation: Yep, Lawrence's Prince of Thorns was 2011, not 2009, in both the US and UK, and I know absolutely it was 2011 in the UK because I recall hearing that a bookseller ... it was Waterstone's, I think, was giving people free Prince of Thorns arcs in exchange for ADWD preorders, and ADWD came out in 2011 -- Martin and Lawrence share a UK publisher, though not a US one.

 

I'd say the term epic fantasy gets a little slippery when you start talking about authors like Gladstone and Jemisin, who may not have some of the furniture but have broad-canvas worldshaking storytelling -- gods, huge magic, earthshattering stakes -- aplenty. I'd count them. Perhaps there have not been any debuts to match the overwhelming greatness of something like Lynch, but I'd call several debuts this decade that I've read very very strong -- Jemisin, Gladstone, Wexler. And then there's work by writers who have really leveled up -- having either debuted this decade or previously -- and are now on the absolute wave crest of the genre in my opinion -- again Gladstone and Jemisin, also Robert Jackson Bennett, Elizabeth Bear, maybe Brad Beaulieu. Kate Elliott has leveled up again this decade. If you like ya there are authors like Bardugo and Hartman doing big stuff in secondary world fantasy. I can't say it's never been better, certainly, both because I don't quite know that I think so and because I haven't been reading that long, but it's a golden age for sure. Great, great stuff.

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I read this a couple years ago I think I even posted a thread for it. Really good! Incredibly hard at first because of the nomenclature and massive cultural inversions. though there is a glossary I was totally unaware of its existence since I read I on a kindle and one of the things you lose with an ebook is flipping to the back and getting an explanation of vocabulary. The glossary is there in the kindle, but it never occurred to me to look on an ebook.

I actually thought the plot was too ruthlessly propulsive and it was so pulpy and nonstop that I never felt like I had a chance to catch up to the world. It feels rigorously edited to be constantly moving, so once you get through the nomenclature it's really hard to put down, reminds me of Charles stross writing in that regard. I blazed through it in a day or two and really enjoyed it.

iirc, the magic system is sort of like an anime magic system, am I right?

I haven't gotten to the sequel yet because I want to reread the first one.

 

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3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Lev Grossman is way better than Kameron Hurley, that's why.

Thanks, I needed a really, really good laugh this morning.

Grossman is a talentless hack who takes other people's work and rights shitty fanfic versions of it and adds a heap of misogyny on top. His prose skills are not the worst, but his abilities with plot and character are borderline non-existent.

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Thanks, I needed a really, really good laugh this morning.

Grossman is a talentless hack who takes other people's work and rights shitty fanfic versions of it and adds a heap of misogyny on top. His prose skills are not the worst, but his abilities with plot and character are borderline non-existent.

I've never read his stuff, but that sounds like it's a Fifty Shades of Grey version of Eragon. :lmao:

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I only read the samples avaliable online (I can seldom browse English books in Germans stores) and got the impression that she tried too hard to be diverse. Since I had no problems at all with Gardens of the Moon, it can't have been the dive into the world start.  

I couldn't get into Jemisin, either; the first person POV of that Thousand Kingdoms book reads like chick lit. 

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1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Thanks, I needed a really, really good laugh this morning.

Grossman is a talentless hack who takes other people's work and rights shitty fanfic versions of it and adds a heap of misogyny on top. His prose skills are not the worst, but his abilities with plot and character are borderline non-existent.

Eh. I get the misogyny accusation based on the shitty rape-as-character development aspect of Julia's plot, but don't really see it otherwise. Off the top of my head I have no problem with the rest of his plot and character work.


Sure, it's very in love with Narnia, but so am I so...

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Quote

I've never read his stuff, but that sounds like it's a Fifty Shades of Grey version of Eragon.

He couldn't decide if he wanted to rip off either The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter, so he combined them and ripped off both simultaneously, which was, if nothing else, quite economic of him.

The misogyny element isn't just the rapey stuffy, but when he starts describing female characters by their bra size, which got a bit weird. Then the TV show did exactly the same thing to the same character, which was unnecessary.

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I don't remember the bra-size bit, so fair enough.

I wish people would stop describing everything that has a magic school in it as a Harry Potter ripoff, though. HP hardly invented the concept and there's no similarity between Hogwarts and Brakebills beyond the magic. Not to mention past the first half, or a little more, of the first book it isn't an especially big part of the series as a whole.

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On 3/12/2017 at 6:19 AM, Gabriele said:

I only read the samples avaliable online (I can seldom browse English books in Germans stores) and got the impression that she tried too hard to be diverse. Since I had no problems at all with Gardens of the Moon, it can't have been the dive into the world start.  

I couldn't get into Jemisin, either; the first person POV of that Thousand Kingdoms book reads like chick lit. 

I understand how you would get this impression, but I think it is the nature of the universe the books are set in, which is a (presumably) network of parallel worlds capable of being traversed, and the two parallel worlds that are featured in the first book just happen to be worlds that are universally matriarchichal for all the cultures portrayed.

From the perspective of the characters who have never encountered a patriarchical world, they have a lot of very deeply set biases and uncomfortable prejudices against men, and these thought processes are well realized and well executed within the context of this profoundly different culture.

I imagine if there were parallel worlds it would just be a coin flip whether one wound up in a universal matriarchy like Hurley posits, or a universal patriarchy like our own world. So in Hurley's universe, the two worlds she wrote about came up Heads (both matriarchy), sometimes coins do that, come up two-in-a-row. and of course, the structure of the novel itself depends on the interactions across two very like worlds, so she would need to have two that are alike in order to write the story properly. 

That doesn't strike me as trying to hard to be diverse, it strikes me as fundamental to the story, the inversion of the patriarchy.

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I always (meaning here both in this series and in the Bel Dame books) have the reaction to Hurley that I respect the ruthlessness, love a lot of the ideas, end up less than enamored with the action as it ends up on the page, but most of all, I find I want to read and know about everything that *didn't* make it onto the page, like there's another novel lurking behind it that's the story I'm interested in, not these particular assholes.  It's an interesting feeling, if a somewhat confusing one.

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On 15.3.2017 at 9:14 AM, lokisnow said:

I understand how you would get this impression, but I think it is the nature of the universe the books are set in, which is a (presumably) network of parallel worlds capable of being traversed, and the two parallel worlds that are featured in the first book just happen to be worlds that are universally matriarchichal for all the cultures portrayed. [...]

Maybe I miss a good book there. But I don't have the time and money to buy all books that get overall good reviews to find out if I'd like them in the long run. When the samples I can find don't work for me - and in case of Hurley I at least read all of them because of the positive talk about the book (often, a few lines are enough to sya 'no') - I won't buy the book. My TBR pile is scary enough as it is. :D 

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