Fantasy Faction
Fantasy Faction => Fantasy Book & Author Discussion => Topic started by: eclipse on October 15, 2019, 06:47:22 AM
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I’ve read the
Grace of Kings, it didn’t blow me away
The tea master and the detective, again didn’t impress me
Green Bone saga , quite like this one
Have got the Black tides of Heaven by J.Y Yang on my Tbr list
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*what* is 'silkpunk'?? :o
From some of your names it looks to be books set in an alternative Asia (instead of the usual alternative Europe), is that it?
Seems a strange name to call...
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Lol, silkpunk. ;D As suggestions goes, I'd tossed you my novel, "When Crows Cawed".
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*what* is 'silkpunk'?? :o
From some of your names it looks to be books set in an alternative Asia (instead of the usual alternative Europe), is that it?
Seems a strange name to call...
https://io9.gizmodo.com/author-ken-liu-explains-silkpunk-to-us-1717812714/amp
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Thanks, I get it now.
And I haven't read any book in this genre.
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I was going to link that article as well, hah. :D
Having heard Ken Liu talk a lot at the Melbourne convention this year (where he was a Guest of Honour) I am newly interested in going back to the Grace of Kings / Dandelion Dynasty world. But the books are just so massive! I won't do it for Sanderson, and I'm not sure I can persuade myself to do it for Liu either, even if he's an amazing renaissance man.
I'm very much looking forward to getting into the Tensorate series. So many books, so little time.
Jade Bone feels less "silkpunk" and more... urban fantasy? Gangster wuxia? But hey, labels are mutable, so why not!
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I’m not strict with my labels :)
The throne of the five winds looks interesting but 750 page count ....
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Gosh yes, I'm looking forward to Throne of Five Winds (even at that page count - Priory of the Orange Tree was big too but SO worth it).
Though seeing the comparisons to K Arsenault Rivera in the description of ToFW made me wonder... why not include The Tiger's Daughter et al in silkpunk? And I guess the answer is because Asian as that setting it, the books are clearly fantasy, straight fantasy, no technology/sci-fi blurring. (Ditto Elizabeth Bear's Mongolian / central Asian fantasies.) So the silkpunk needs a bit of that "steampunk but Asian not Victorian" element to it.
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I was going to link that article as well, hah. :D
Having heard Ken Liu talk a lot at the Melbourne convention this year (where he was a Guest of Honour) I am newly interested in going back to the Grace of Kings / Dandelion Dynasty world. But the books are just so massive! I won't do it for Sanderson, and I'm not sure I can persuade myself to do it for Liu either, even if he's an amazing renaissance man.
I'm very much looking forward to getting into the Tensorate series. So many books, so little time.
Jade Bone feels less "silkpunk" and more... urban fantasy? Gangster wuxia? But hey, labels are mutable, so why not!
I’m reading Jade War the 2nd book of the Green Bone series and it’s closer to how @cupiscent describes it than how ‘silkpunk’ is supposedly described.
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Gosh yes, I'm looking forward to Throne of Five Winds (even at that page count - Priory of the Orange Tree was big too but SO worth it).
I’m loving Throne of Five Winds thank you for mentioning this title , I love the court intrigues and I’m in love with Lady Komor.
There’s no magic or military battles in this book so not everyone will like it.
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There’s no magic
That ended it up for me :)
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There’s no magic
That ended it up for me :)
Thought I best mention that hehe. Who needs complex magic systems over plots and character development 😛
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I’m loving Throne of Five Winds thank you for mentioning this title , I love the court intrigues and I’m in love with Lady Komor.
There’s no magic or military battles in this book so not everyone will like it.
Court intrigues? Awesome ladies? No battles? This sounds so much like my sort of thing that I might just have to go buy it.
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I was going to link that article as well, hah. :D
Having heard Ken Liu talk a lot at the Melbourne convention this year (where he was a Guest of Honour) I am newly interested in going back to the Grace of Kings / Dandelion Dynasty world. But the books are just so massive! I won't do it for Sanderson, and I'm not sure I can persuade myself to do it for Liu either, even if he's an amazing renaissance man.
I'm very much looking forward to getting into the Tensorate series. So many books, so little time.
Jade Bone feels less "silkpunk" and more... urban fantasy? Gangster wuxia? But hey, labels are mutable, so why not!
I’m reading Jade War the 2nd book of the Green Bone series and it’s closer to how @cupiscent describes it than how ‘silkpunk’ is supposedly described.
I will third this - unless Silkpunk is used for generic vaguely Eastern Asian vaguely technological, I don't think Green Bones is.
That said, that's about how well used all other X-punk labels are used, not to mention that most X-punk genres are poorly named to begin with due to being about as punk as a Shell PR meeting, so why the devil not.
Using the loose definition, Jay Kristoff's Stormdancer series is vaguely in the right place. But not that great anyway.
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I’m loving Throne of Five Winds thank you for mentioning this title , I love the court intrigues and I’m in love with Lady Komor.
There’s no magic or military battles in this book so not everyone will like it.
Court intrigues? Awesome ladies? No battles? This sounds so much like my sort of thing that I might just have to go buy it.
I see you enjoying this one @cupiscent ;D
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I’m loving Throne of Five Winds thank you for mentioning this title , I love the court intrigues and I’m in love with Lady Komor.
There’s no magic or military battles in this book so not everyone will like it.
Court intrigues? Awesome ladies? No battles? This sounds so much like my sort of thing that I might just have to go buy it.
I see you enjoying this one @cupiscent ;D
Loving it! It's not perfect - I think it probably doesn't need to be as long (and lush) as it is and sometimes the author gets a bit lost in her descriptive detail. (A problem I've had with Lilith Saintcrow before, but it works better for her in this setting.) In fact, it's amusing reading this thread again, because I'd forgotten about its page count, so when the guy at the bookstore thumped it down on the counter I went, "...oh." The last two things I read were nice and short! ;D
But the politics! The refined control on everyone! The scalding poetry-quoting cutting remarks! The epic queen bitch! I love everyone in this bar.
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Now we just need book two ;D
Give me more court intrigue and Lady Komor
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Now we just need book two ;D
Give me more court intrigue and Lady Komor
I went immediately upon finishing to trawl Lili Saintcrow's social media to see if there were any hints of when we could expect book 2, and was pretty devo not to find anything. (I wish to note that I absolutely love Prince Takshin, but I am 100% Team Kai when it comes to Romancing Lady Komor.)
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Swinging through here because Fonda Lee tweeted about silkpunk, and feeling very like @eclipse in seeing that "Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days" note. :D
Says Fonda Lee (https://twitter.com/FondaJLee/status/1290040182641582080):"Silkpunk" is a term coined by the brilliant Ken Liu to describe a blend of sci-fi and fantasy inspired not by Victorian-era steam-powered technology ("steampunk") but by East Asian antiquity. It does NOT apply to every SFF story inspired by Asian history or culture.
I mean, shouting about what people want to label things is always a shaking-fist-at-cloud sort of scenario, but in this situation I feel that there's a nuance to the use or misuse of subgenre labelling to do with the minimisation or othering of an entire race-related body of work. i.e. "let's not talk about the details of what the work is and does; it's Asian and that's the only thing that matters".
As Lee further said in that twitter thread: Leaving aside the issue of '-punk' being egregiously and erroneously overused *in general* - taking a term for a specific fictional aesthetic and lumping in all Asia-inspired works (or works by authors of Asian descent) simplifes, misrepresents, and flattens a huge range of work.
In the responses to this little thread, there's someone contemplating writing a piece for Fantasy Faction about the nuances of subgenres especially for "diverse" authors, and I definitely hope that happens!
What I'm uncertain about is whether the SC Emmett fits the bill. Sure, no magic, but also no real technological edge. It's just... non-magic fantasy?
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Now we just need book two ;D
Give me more court intrigue and Lady Komor
I went immediately upon finishing to trawl Lili Saintcrow's social media to see if there were any hints of when we could expect book 2, and was pretty devo not to find anything. (I wish to note that I absolutely love Prince Takshin, but I am 100% Team Kai when it comes to Romancing Lady Komor.)
we want book 2, we want book 2.
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Now we just need book two ;D
Give me more court intrigue and Lady Komor
I went immediately upon finishing to trawl Lili Saintcrow's social media to see if there were any hints of when we could expect book 2, and was pretty devo not to find anything. (I wish to note that I absolutely love Prince Takshin, but I am 100% Team Kai when it comes to Romancing Lady Komor.)
we want book 2, we want book 2.
Hey @eclipse, guess what was just delivered to my doorstep! ;D
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Excellent! We can be Reading buddies.
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I've first got to finish reading something that I think almost counts as silkpunk - Andrea Stewart's The Bone Shard Daughter. Very Asian-based fantasy, with myriad strangenesses in worldbuilding that make it feel almost more like the new-weird stuff of Mieville than straight-up secondary world fantasy.
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I've first got to finish reading something that I think almost counts as silkpunk - Andrea Stewart's The Bone Shard Daughter. Very Asian-based fantasy, with myriad strangenesses in worldbuilding that make it feel almost more like the new-weird stuff of Mieville than straight-up secondary world fantasy.
Oh I've been looking at that one, wondered if I'd like it... "new weird" sounds like "check before you buy" for me hehe
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I've first got to finish reading something that I think almost counts as silkpunk - Andrea Stewart's The Bone Shard Daughter. Very Asian-based fantasy, with myriad strangenesses in worldbuilding that make it feel almost more like the new-weird stuff of Mieville than straight-up secondary world fantasy.
Oh I've been looking at that one, wondered if I'd like it... "new weird" sounds like "check before you buy" for me hehe
So... let me clarify! :D It's new-weird in its worldbuilding - it's set in an empire spanning a massive chain of islands that (we find out very early on) are not "islands" as we know it but something floating??? and the Emperor can use shards of bone from living people to power chimeric constructs that can be programmed to perform tasks. It's an interesting mess of fantastical and systematic elements, and that's what makes me think "new weird". In style, it's very epic-fantasy (one of the reasons I've been struggling with it is it has about five POVs and I find that tricky to get into with my piecemeal reading-time these days) and there's a lot of fascinating intrigue and mystery going on.
But I always support trying before you buy. :)