What did you just read?

Chanur said:

Good video on some forgotten fantasy series. It's actually too 20 plus some recommendations.

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old school fantasy had such good cover art

The novelization of the video game Alien Isolation

I never played the game. This ignores everything but the original film and has Amanda Ripley, Ellen's daughter, as the main character. Right away we're with a salvage crew that finds the flight recorder of the Nostromo and heads off to LV-426. It goes as expected and Weyland Yutani hires Amanda as a consultant and flies her out to the station where the salvagers ended up after some facehugger action.

If we were just doing Alien stuff it would have been fine. That part of the book is okie dokie. I've read a mixed bag of novelizations and my expectations for them are pretty low. Unfortunately this one spend almost half of it's pages going through all the hardships Amanda faced involving her deadbeat drunk stepfather and general Dickensian squalor. She's smart and great at engineering stuff but wouldn't you know it she just can't catch a break as the universe seems to hate her personally. Did I mention how useless her stepfather is? The book won't stop telling you.

It's not too terribly long and it moves along but it's like a D+/C-. I've had a much harder time finishing books better than this. That does count for something.

Void said:

My Kindle advertised a new Larry Correia book so I'm checking it out. In case that name isn't familiar, he did the Monster Hunter Internation books, and the Grimnoir series. MHI was really good at the beginning and was ok at the end, and Grimnoir was pretty good. This one is supposed to be in a magical world where there are different realms connect to a main hub sort of and wizards are the ruling class, and our intrepid hero wants to become a wizard. It sounded decent enough, and the reviews are sky high, but reviews on Goodreads are usually skewed so high as to be straight retarded.

I'm not quite halfway yet, and it just isn't grabbing me like MHI did. It isn't bad or hard to read or anything like that, but I'm just not excited about it like I was right from the get-go with MHI. So much so, that I'm tempted to just do a re-read of MHI anyway.

Anyway, so far I'm pretty disappointed with something from a guy I really like, but I can't say there is anything actually bad about it. It's just not attention grabbing.

Academy of Outcasts

A brand new fantasy world from Larry Correia, bestselli…

www.goodreads.com

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This book felt like he wrote a detailed prompt for an AI and then lightly edited the result. It’s not terrible or anything, just weirdly bland. Grimnoir was one of my favorite series

Ritley said:

This book felt like he wrote a detailed prompt for an AI and then lightly edited the result. It’s not terrible or anything, just weirdly bland. Grimnoir was one of my favorite series

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As an author, I have been asked “did you use AI to write your book?” Or my BIL assumed I did what you said because they really enjoyed it.

people who mean well but don’t realize how bad ai content is.

but AI makes the most uninspired generic slip. It’s EXTREMELY obvious whenever a piece of text or even dialogue in a movie is written by AI. I’m 90% sure the dialogue in the script for the Materialists (2025) was almost entirely written by AI.

INTHEMIDSTOFLIONS said:

As an author, I have been asked “did you use AI to write your book?” Or my BIL assumed I did what you said because they really enjoyed it.

people who mean well but don’t realize how bad ai content is.

but AI makes the most uninspired generic slip. It’s EXTREMELY obvious whenever a piece of text or even dialogue in a movie is written by AI. I’m 90% sure the dialogue in the script for the Materialists (2025) was almost entirely written by AI.

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I didnt mean I literally thought that it was AI, but I can see by what I wrote that it could be taken that way. It was more of an observation that the book didn’t read anything like his other books, and was a step down in quality, both in overall plot/character development and also in writing style.

Void said:

Finally got around to watching this last night. Thanks for sharing it. I've read probably 60% of those, and own a good chunk of them in physical copies, but it has been so long that I'm sure I've forgotten everything about them. I think I might start interspersing some of those series into my reading schedule because the latest shitrpg books will always be there waiting, and I already forget half of what happened in them by the time the new books come out anyway, so delaying them another few months or years won't really make much difference. I've been looking for good "real" books for a while now, but I'm usually looking at new books. I'm almost certain most of these series will be as good, if not better, than anything new, so why not?

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I like how the speaker/author has a portrait in the back. It looks like he's posing for a metal band cover.





"I write NOTHING BUT HARD ROCK!" vibes.

Which, if yall dont know, that's where the term "butt-rock" comes from. In the 2000's radio stations when they said, "All rock and nothing but rock."

Void said:

I agree with Hateyou. Maybe you young whipper snappers weren't old enough, but that term is way older than that.

Obligatory. You have to watch until the end for the reason I'm posting it. And for further clarification, Steel Panther pretends to be a "lost" band from the 80s.
Caution very NSFW!

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Oh dude, I fuck with Steel Panther for a long time.

I love 80's style hair metal. A metalcore band in the 2007 era called Blessed By a Broken Heart mixes metalcore and 80s hair metal. Pretty gnarly.

Void said:

That's exactly what I felt. Have you read any of his other fantasy stuff? I know he has a bunch of weird stuff that isn't anything like Grimnoir or MHI, and even some based around a game system I think? I have only read those two series and then this book, so I'm wondering if those other (older) fantasy books are just as shitty and maybe he just sucks at fantasy?

I will probably not read the next book in the Outcasts series because why? It was uninspired and boring. And their magic system? Am I supposed to be interested in watching them progress (it is advertised as a progression series btw) through ranks to eventually get to rank 10 and beyond? This is definitely no Cradle.

Literally the only thing I remotely cared about was the shark guy, but he's so blatantly a ripoff of the Suicide Squad's King Shark that I can't see anything else when picturing him.

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His other series I’ve read is the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series (Son of the Black Sword was the first book). It is in the epic fantasy genre, and I thought it was pretty good. Good overall plot and characters, my only real downside on it is that it does move a bit slow. And it still had quality writing that I didn’t see much in the Outcasts book.

Honestly I think he just didn’t want to put much effort into a progression fantasy like this one more than any indication that he has regressed as a writer. Seems like filler he can pump out to make some cash while he spends more time on his other books. I’ll probably read the next one, it wasn’t bad or anything just surprising coming from him since I had higher expectations.