Other countries with good novels

Discussion in 'Novel General' started by Okuri Ookami, May 19, 2022.

  1. Okuri Ookami

    Okuri Ookami 'Chi Chi Chi' calls the Sparrow

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    I'm sick or Chinese novels for the most part as certain things just grind my gears. I still enjoy the good ones but they are far and few.

    Anyone know a country with good fantasy concepts and long publication lengths? I like the the unique things like Tao/Dao, Qi, etc..., the organized system structure of cultivation and I hate short reads.

    Please no Japanese or Korean.

    Japanese novels are the worst and Korean is the best but novel lengths are to short.

    I'm lookin for genres popular around the world like

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fantasy_genres
     
  2. sjmcc13

    sjmcc13 Well-Known Member

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    Dresden Files is good and long...
     
  3. BeardyRABBIT

    BeardyRABBIT <Not a Rabbit>

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    I recommend reading, western fantasy such as Wheel of time or Game of thrones, or The First Law trilogy.
     
  4. Greater thunder

    Greater thunder Well-Known Member

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    You have just made an enemy fer life!

    Let's see.

    Terry Pratchett- Discworld has 40ish books and he wrote other stuff too.

    Robert Lynn Asprin's MythAdventures, around 20 books.

    Will Wight - Cradle (cultivation, 10 books and going), House of Blades (lotsa shonen influence, 3 books).

    Brandon Sanderson - many (in the broadly same multiverse. I just read Elantris and the one where colors were power, forgot what it was called -Warbreaker- possibly?)

    That's all that comes to mind now.

    But seriously, Dresden fell low in my eyes the longer it goes on.
     
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  5. Silver Snake

    Silver Snake Magician of NUF|Show-off|Awkward|Genius

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    Don't read western fantasy, it's shit, full of tropes and cliches born from Tolkien. Who was/is highly overrated because of people who read maybe 1 or 2 books a year.

    Read historical fiction, much better on average.
     
  6. sjmcc13

    sjmcc13 Well-Known Member

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    Diskword is not a first series read, you need to read bad books first then decent ones to appreciate diskworld's greatness.

    Everything is filled with tropes and clichés, it is just are they decently used or not, and are they ones the reader likes or not.
    No, that is just plain wrong.
    Tolkien like most authors can only be properly evaluated based on his contemporaries, those publishing works at the same time.
    On world building alone he deserves his reputation, he outshines pretty much everyone before him and most authors since.
    The only really big fantasy properties before it are Cthulu Mythos and Conan.
     
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  7. Silver Snake

    Silver Snake Magician of NUF|Show-off|Awkward|Genius

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    You know what, I actually agree with you. Like pretty much 100%.

    I only read The Hobbit and 90% of the first third of the LOTR, but I found reading up to the end of the council scene in LOTR to be the best that Tolkien had to offer.

    It is true that those of the past should be judged by the capabilities of their time. Like it is amazing, dare I say, astounding, that the first writers were able to do what they did with so little in resources, compared to our modern age, where information flows so freely and quickly.

    But Don Quixote and Musashi are two books that are both better and older than LOTR. Both historical fiction, though I suppose for Don Quixote, it was just fiction. Don Quixote being a deconstruction and antithesis of the tropes and cliches of the fantasy genre, supposedly before novels as we see them even became a reality. Mushashi being a book so simple yet at the same time vague and complicated that I cannot even express what it was about or if it was about anything. I really have to reread it, I currently am actually.

    Tolkien was a good writer, an okay writer, great in one aspect, but there is so much more to writing than that.

    And yeah, most books do suck because of tropes and cliches, because most authors suck at/don't know how to write, so they copy things from other writers, but there's less seminal stuff to copy off of in historical fiction, plus it still has the draw of a different, less advanced setting that fantasy does.

    You are right, but it doesn't change my rightness.

    Edit:
    Plus there's less stuff to fuck up, literally no one has ever used magic correctly/in a fulfilling way in fiction. Writers just don't how it works or how to make it work. And if it works too well, then it may as well be technology. Magic is complicated and people are stupid.
     
    Last edited: May 19, 2022
  8. Amaruna Myu

    Amaruna Myu ugly squid dokja (●´∀`●)

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    magic is pretty much fantasy(entirely made up) and I think people fail at making it work at times because they have no imagination
    (they probably haven't had a chuuni phase in their lives... i think they're missing out)
     
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  9. Greater thunder

    Greater thunder Well-Known Member

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    Yes, authors do lean too much into Tolkien.

    Lev Grossman's Magicians books on the other hand mix ideas of Narnia books and Harry Potter.

    Everywhere you go, authors are influenced by what they themselves read.

    I could say too many webnovels are shit because their authors slap on their fond terms from Jin Yong's wuxia novels into their xianxia webnovels or just recycle Journey to the West (and in either case, its rather blatant).

    Read a wuxia like DemiGods and SemiDevils and now you can't unsee how much an already shitty webnovel lifting stuff like Nine Yang/Yin Manual/Skill is even shittier, because not only was it bad, it failed to be good using something used well back in late sixties by the original author (which is closer than Tolkien's works and more accessible being far shorter and tled into english fairly well).

    I'd have to disagree all western fantasy is shit.

    Overly Sarcastic Productions sheds a lot of light on older stuff like Atlantis story or Zahak the Serpent King story as well as newer (well, vampires are old as concept, but Bram Stoker's Dracula which made them popular is relatively new) like Frankenstein (the real takeaway was always Victor's cowardly act of being a deadbeat creator) or Lovecraft's works (it explains so much that the guy was afraid of nearly everything and was just writing that out) or modern take on zombies (mostly movie driven on the bite infection thing) being very, very different from the older version.

    Imma call you @Silver Snake out on historical fiction though. There can be good ones (alternate history as presented by Temeraire books) can be pretty attractive, but it has its own issues of authors getting too swept up in their preferences (shitty romance drama as example of historical fics of literotica genre), knights and political wanking(just because things appear obvious in that far a hindsight, still doesn't mean you are getting conclusions from impartial truth data because "winners" and scribes liked their own takes to write down more than the truth), conspiracy bait like Dan Brown's books,......
     
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  10. Dr_H_16

    Dr_H_16 Well-Known Member

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    Mother of Learning (RRL), Prophecy Approved Companion (RRL), Breath of Creation (RRL (DROPPED, but still great read)), The Iron Teeth: A Goblin's Tale (RRL (Good, but though for some), and Trascendence (RRL (In my humble opinion, all Andur's stories are great).

    Historical fictions are good, too, especially the alternate history. I recommend 1945 (where Japanese never surrendered and decided to fight until last man) and The Years of Rice and Salt (basically, Europe went extinct and Asian fill the empty space).
     
  11. Silver Snake

    Silver Snake Magician of NUF|Show-off|Awkward|Genius

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    You know, in another life, I think we could've been great friends.

    Ahem ahem ahem, okay, so yes, one could say that all fiction one writes is influenced by the fiction one reads, but the difference between good influence and bad influence is simple, the difference between learning from and growing from a work, and blindly copying because rather than judge whether that aspect of that work was good or not, they simply blindly believe that what was good there will be good here, even if the scenario does not call for it.

    There is a difference between learning and a blind belief that what was good will always be good. So when or if I said influence, I meant the bad sort. People are prone to being badly influenced, because learning requires thought and thinking is exhausting and scary.

    I take issue with you calling Frankenstein fantasy, as I feel it's more sci-fi, what with the questioning of one's own existence and birth of Frankenstein's monster through vaguely scientific means. But it was good in that it melded its plot with its themes, I'll give you that, but if you want to call the creation of life "magic", then you're fucking insane, because we all know that no one thinks of magic as that sort of thing these days.

    And lovecraft and zombies aren't really fantasy either, neither is Dracula, really, at least not in the modern sense, those are more horror elements. I suppose Frankenstein is thought of that as well. Even jackel and hyde was more sciency than fantasy.

    And yeah, romance sucks, but I wasn't really talking about romance or any subgenre within history, just as a generality of the genres fantasy and historical. Historical is better because it's less complicated than fantasy, has fewer loud but stupid influencers within its mechanism.

    All in all though, I have not read nearly as many historical novels as I have fantasy ones, like I've probably read eight times more fantasy than history, and I've only read like 100 books, but I almost always enjoyed historical fiction more than fantasy fiction.
     
    Last edited: May 20, 2022
  12. BurgerKong

    BurgerKong Well-Known Member

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    Web novels are very big in Asia but much less so elsewhere, so unless you're willing to settle for fanfiction it's going to be slim pickings.

    But if you're willing to spend some money there's a glut of content on Kindle that will likely be of interest to you. Personally, I've been reading the Soul Cycle series by Brian Niemeier, and The Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski.
     
  13. Esha07

    Esha07 ☄your favorite meanie࿐ྂ

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    I rarely see any Thai novel in NU. They are pretty good too. Maybe try them?
     
  14. Okuri Ookami

    Okuri Ookami 'Chi Chi Chi' calls the Sparrow

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    I've never seen them are they good? I like fantasy novels as well so it'd have to fit that taste at least

    Witcher I might try since brush is basically a wolf but honestly I'm sick of western novels and tbh as a person of color I'm more sick of White heroes no offense but I've spent nearly 30 yrs seeing 80% of heroes as white I'm not interested anymore