This room is for chatting about SciFi and Fantasy works. If it's ontopic on the main site, it's ontopic here.

Initial Room rules: (1) Be Nice; (2) No starting offtopic discussions; (3) If ontopic chat drifts offtopic, it should wrap up or drift to offtopic rooms.

Yay, on-topic chat!

To kick things off, a recommendation request: I'm looking for an author similar in style/approach to Eric Flint. Specifically, strong historical background/expertise that is used heavily in stories; strong character development coupled with decent battle descriptions. Specific genre isn't terribly important - Flint had books in both alt-hist as well as space fantasy.

@DVK-in-exile Although I haven't read Eric Flint, I can think of a few books which match your criteria but aren't SF/F, so I'm probably not allowed to mention them ;-) @steelershark might know some, since she's a history buff.

@Randal'Thor Seconded!

So what are we currently reading? SFF-wise, obviously.

I'm currently most of the way through solarisbooks.com/post/1103 and recently started "A Fire Upon the Deep".

@arboviral I have a massive pile of 'currently reading'. It includes, among others, Wheel of Time (book 11), Thomas Covenant (book 2), Stonewylde (book 4), I am Number Four (book 1), Allies & Assassins (book 1), and Perelandra.

Just finished The Windup Girl, a Gregory Benford collection (Artifact, Cosm and Eater) and a re-read of Day of the Triffids too. Normally I have more on the go but I

(fat fingers) get less reading time thanI used to. Which of those would you recommend most and why?

Also hadn't heard of Stonewylde before and Wikipedia isn't very forthcoming - would you recommend it?

@arboviral Of the ones I listed? Wheel of Time is definitely my favourite (see my username), but it does require time. At 14 volumes, 4 million words, and 2000 named characters, it's quite an undertaking, but worth it.

Ah - I never started them (a friend at school swore by them but the sheer size did put me off!) so I didn't get the reference.

@arboviral Stonewylde is set in a secluded pagan village in Dorset, which is so isolated from the outside world that it's essentially high fantasy. I really liked the first three books, but I recommend stopping there and never setting eyes on the last two.

@arboviral Day of the Triffids was excellent. Chilling, brilliant stuff. I've had several strange dreams based on it in the few years since reading it.

@Randal'Thor Have you read The Merrybegot? Sounds broadly similar but historical (C17th, I think, but it's been about ten years since I read it). Or any of Jenny Nimmo's Snow Spider YA fiction; I vividly remember the first from my youth and just discovered there was a trilogy.

Currently reading some Poe stories and watching Orphan Black (yes, I'm behind, the season has already finished).

@Randal'Thor DofT has aged better than I expected; I hadn't read it for twenty years. I used to love John Wyndham as a child but he gets criticised for 'cosy catastrophy' fiction these days. Bits of Triffids really not very cosy at all.

Not at all cosy.

Neither is The Crysalids. It gets cosy in parts, but the ending, damn.

@SQB Yeesh. Yes, agreed. I have to reread the whole lot at some point. adds to Amazon wish list

@arboviral Hadn't even heard of the Merrybegot. I think I looked briefly at the Snow Spider books years ago and decided I didn't like them, but I did read at least some of Jenny Nimmo's Children of the Red King series.

And my most current read was Lullaby for a Lost World, just now.

@SQB Nice, which Poe stories? I'm slowly grinding my way through a collection of his complete works.

@arboviral Cosy?! It might not be full of gore, but DofT is dark and creepy. Definitely not cosy.

Well, I just happened upon a Dutch translation of some of his stories. I've read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" so far.

Poe's detective stories are much better than Sherlock Holmes when it comes to rigorous deduction, but not as readable. I found reading The Mystery of Marie Roget (based very closely on a real story, and all Poe's deductions were later proved correct) comparable to working through a maths textbook.

@Randal'Thor Oh, I agree. It was Brian Aldiss who said it, I think, not me! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@Randal'Thor At risk of going off-topic, that sounds like Freeman Wills Croft, who also does 'rigorous deduction' perhaps too well; I'm halfway through "The Hog's Back Mystery" at the moment which the other half loved (thankfully; I got it for her last Christmas) but I'm finding heavy going.

Some Poe has aged superbly but Rue Morgue isn't one of them...

I also enjoyed Poe much more once I had read Lovecraft. I think Poe was just too different; HPL bridged it a bit.

@arboviral I read a few Lovecraft stories, but they all seemed to be more or less the same story; once you've read one, you've read them all.

So glad I didn't buy the full collection.

I'm also watching Elementary and Poe fits right in.

@Randal'Thor Some HPL is terrible, some is great. The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Shadow out of Time were all light years ahead of their time; if you missed any of them I'd recommend looking them up. Most of the rest weren't that great (although I'm bound to have forgotten something). Any of the Dreamlands stuff was terrible.

@Randal'Thor oops, forgot The Thing on the Doorstep.

So has anyone else read the Bartimaeus Trilogy?

I want more questions about it.

@Randal'Thor I have a question about Children of the Red King

@Adamant Sadly haven't read it, but it looks interesting. I read 'The Golem and the Jinni' a while back and can recommend it; sounds vaguely similar (and was probably what made me think of this question). Also sounds a bit like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in concept, but probably not in execution. I enjoyed that but it was... unusual.

@arboviral I read The Call of Cthulhu, but thought it was meh. By that time I'd already read a few other Lovecraft stories and was getting pretty tired of the whole thing.

@Adamant Yes!

@Adamant Go on :-)

@Randal'Thor Here

@arboviral I highly recommend the Bartimaeus trilogy. Set in a modern-ish world run by magicians, narrated by a cynical and witty djinni with hundreds of hilarious footnotes, both thrilling and satirical with many twists and turns.

Strange and Norrell was also great. Did you watch the TV series or read the book, or both?

@Randal'Thor Both - quite often I only get around to reading a book when I know an adaptation is in the pipeline and I'm about to lose my chance to form my own impression of the characters. I'm glad I did - I preferred the book in a few places (particularly how the 'gentleman with the thistle-down hair' was done). Thanks for the tip about Bartimaeus; I'll look it up!

@Randal'Thor Actually of all of the ones I listed I think that's the weakest, despite it being the most famous (thanks, Chaosium). I'd recommend At the Mountains of Madness if you ever feel up to trying him again.

@Adamant +1.

@arboviral I always recommend the "new manservant" chapter as a nice mini-story in its own right. Agreed the book was better in some places (e.g. the fate of Lascelles), but overall it was one of my favourite book-to-screen adaptations ever.

@CreationEdge You're watching Strange and Norrell? Or are you still talking about Childhood's End?

@Randal'Thor It was done pretty well. There were one or two scenes where you could tell they didn't have quite the budget they needed but I never hold that against a show. (coughBlakesSevencough)

What happened to Lascelles in the Tv series? I can't remember.

Also do we have a Bartimaeus tag?

@arboviral Thirding Day of the Triffids as a recommendation. Triffids was a first book that set me on a "what are the rules by which society lives and evolves, and how would they survive in the event of a catastrophe" mindset.

@Bellerephon Turned into china and destroyed by the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair (and what a mouthful that is as a name, btw).

@Bellerephon bartimaeus

@Randal'Thor Thank you.

@DVK-in-exile For anyone who likes Triffids I'd strongly recommend John Christopher's The Death of Grass, by the way.

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question: are there any non-Jules-Verne books set in his "Mysterious Island" universe? (which includes "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "In Search of the Castaways"). Wikipedia isn't too helpful.