You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Anatoly_Vorobey comments on June 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: ArisKatsaris 01 June 2014 03:04PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (95)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 02 June 2014 02:09:22PM *  3 points [-]

Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. This is fantasy for adults: complex flawed characters, a world rich in detail, multitude of characters who live and do things for their own sake rather than to advance a plot point or help the hero. Utter disregard for conventions and cliches of the genre. A hero who is an anti-Mary Sue. Endless inventiveness of the author.

To my taste, this novel is what books like The Kingkiller Chronicles promise, but then utterly fail to deliver. But if you're a fan of Rothfuss, try Swanwick anyway, and you might get a fuller and richer taste of what you like.

I've also read a science fiction novel by the same author, Stations of the Tide, which won a Nebula in 1991. It's also very good. In it, a nameless bureaucrat of the interplanetary government is pursuing a self-declared magician (who's suspected of smuggling restricted technology) across the surface of a planet where half the surface is about to get flooded for many years, and a great migration of the populace is imminent. One of the themes is unfriendly AI - the Earth with its entire population had suffered a horrible fate in the world of this novel, which is discussed and explored in one of the episodes, although it's not a major plot device.

Comment author: gwern 09 June 2014 02:44:18AM 0 points [-]

This is fantasy for adults: complex flawed characters, a world rich in detail, multitude of characters who live and do things for their own sake rather than to advance a plot point or help.

So based on your description, I read The Iron Dragon's Daughter and liked it a lot and agree with the rest of your description (that gargoyle scene!). But this part I don't really get: what part of it gave you a sense of many characters being agenty and pursuing plots unrelated to the heroine? It didn't give me much of a sense of that.