Books

[Kugelfisch]

Unlike Lupa, she dies. Also was less than 500 years old.

[rabidtictac]

Looba is Nurgle.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Nonsense. Papa Nurgle is a chill dude who loves his followers. Lupa is pure hatred and has no love for anyone.

[Complicity]

It's Swinequeen.

I wanted to try with "Hogface", but i didn't because i thought it was too dumb. This is worse.
Maybe This book has been ghostWriTTen by famous sci-fi auThor FaTTrick Thomlinson.

[Kugelfisch]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by someone else.
The universe was pretty nice because it was fairly hard sci-fi. There is no FTL travel, for example. Which is something that I'm usually fine with in sci-fi, because travel time is the biggest problem on even the galactic scale.

But it makes for interesting perspectives. Take the transhumanistic Ultranauts for example. Space traders with pretty much no political interests, as while for them a round trip of some systems at relativistic speed close to lightspeed may take 30 years of ship time they mostly spend in reefersleep, a planet experiences 200 years in between visits.
Hard to give a shit about whatever nations and conglomerates you trade with when next time you visit only a hand full of the people are even going to be alive next time you visit and the entire political landscape may be different.

No such concepts in Inhibitor Phase, as almost all of life has been wiped out at that point.
Turns out that an empty universe is a very boring one to read about.

[rabidtictac]

I finished The Queen of the Swords not too long ago. It's the second of the Corum novels. Corum is another one of Michael Moorcock's "eternal champions," basically just a single protagonist who gets reborn through all his novels in various forms. Doesn't matter-you don't need to know anything about Corum going into these stories. I read The Knight of the Swords already and enjoyed it quite a bit. I think these stories, that is to say, sword and sorcery stories, hinge rather heavily upon the weight of the villain and the strength of the conclusion. In that respect, Knight of the Swords was much more satisfying than Queen. Arioch was a more entertaining "villain," compared to Xiombarg. Arioch is Tzeentch (after a fashion,) while Xiombarg was closer to Nurgle or Khorne. She's a bloated gasbag who screams a lot and sends demons out to kill people. Not as much fun as the machinations of pure chaos from Arioch. Arioch's whole thing is he's a bored god, so he plays games. He allows a mortal to obtain power so they think they're a god, just so Arioch has someone to play his game against. He builds up Corum and deliberately shows him weaknesses so the game is more entertaining.

The Queen of the Swords is much more workmanlike. Xiombarg is evil and sending demons to fuck with the good human villages because she's evil. She's mad and screams a lot because Corum "killed" Arioch in book 1. Corum travels to another demon world and uses his magic eye and left hand to overcome demons there. Then he gets on a space ship and flies back to his own realm to kill demons there. The end.

Moorcock's prose is high-quality. I think these Corum stories are a little less flowery than his Elric stuff. He's less up his own ass about morose descriptions of mundane bullshit. Corum's still rather mopey, as is the trademark.

I recommend The Knight of the Swords heartily to anyone looking for an enjoyable sword and sorcery story. Queen of the Swords feels like filler. Aside from the appearance of Dandelion, nothing much happens. The good guys are threatened by a new evil, but they survive. There are no particularly interesting characters in this story or compelling plot twists. Arkyn is a fucking boring God and I hope he shows up less in future novels.

One nice aspect of sword and sorcery is the brevity of these tales. I can't really say Queen of the Swords was a waste of my time, considering how short it was. As a bridge to (hopefully better) future stories, it was fine.

[Kugelfisch]

Are the Conan novels any good?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Really only one (at least by the OG creator himself) has any kind of novel-length. The rest are more a handful of chapters at most.
If they're any good depends on whether or not you you like sword & sorcery pulp where just about every main villain is some kind of sorcerer. A lorefag might get triggered because the stories, at least going by their original release dates, jump back and forth in time - though really the only two major Conan "eras" you really have to worry about are before and after he became king (most stories are pre-King, anyways).

[Old Black Man]

I like them, I grew up reading collections of pulpy stuff like that.

[rabidtictac]

Are the Conan novels any good?

Like Voice said, Conan is mostly short stories. They are certainly... Fun. I think that's the best way to put them. I don't think the Conan stories approach the level of narrative or character depth of Elric or Corum. They're adventure tales, and Howard spends a lot of his page space describing Conan's musculature, his similarity to various animals and his utter physical superiority. Add in some vivid descriptions of busty bitches Conan ends up fucking and whatever disgusting monster Conan is carving up this week and there you go.

I finished the first of the Elric new omnibus... Things. Forget the name. I think it's just called Elric of Melnibone. It contains a bunch of novellas from the chronologically (in the story) earliest parts.

Edit: It contains specifically these:

Elric of Melniboné (1972)
The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976)
The Weird of the White Wolf (1977)

The first couple of stories are largely set dressing. You learn who Elric is, what Melnibone is all about (aka chaotic evil drow/dark elf degeneracy) and why Elric wants to go exploring. From that point, the series springboards off into adventure tales, and I think it is these stories that work the best.

The first really good Elric story in the collection is The Fortress of the Pearl. One of the problems with Elric is he's overpowered as fuck. With his sword in his hand, he can deux ex machina bullshit his way out of any fight. This story addresses his strength by removing it. Elric finds himself trapped, manipulated, poisoned and forced into a dream journey to steal a jewel so fabulous it could only exist outside of physical reality. He can't use his sword in the dream and his other magical abilities are weakened. The characters in this story are great. The villain is a real piece of shit and the conclusion of the story is pure red meat to the reader. Absolutely satisfying on every level. I particularly appreciated the creativity of the dream world (which you would expect, but still.) I think this is the best story in the first omnibus.

Sailor on the Seas of Fate is okay. Moorcock sometimes gets too up his own ass with his damn multiverse and vast, timeless, unknowable battles between dimensional entities. This is one such story. I didn't care for the start of this story, although it ended better than it began.

The Weird of the White Wolf is a stitching-together of short stories. It begins with the largest action and ends on a wet fart. I don't particularly find Yrkoon or Elric's bitch stimulating characters. As motivations, they are perfectly fine. So I prefer stories where they are thought of but not seen. Not to my tastes.

To reiterate, Fortress of the Pearl is great. It's a later story and Moorcock's writing is less self-indulgent. Elric of Melnibone (the first stories) are good to set the tone. Sailor on the Seas of Fate is fine. You might enjoy it more than I did. Weird of the White Wolf could be enjoyable for you if you want to see lots of giant battles and high stakes at the beginning, followed by a lot of faffing about.

I'm currently reading the next omnibus in the collection and it's quite good. One thing I like how Elric is how universally he's hated by everyone. Unlike Geralt, he's not some secret good guy trying to do nice stuff all the time. He's a fucking Drow who kills for Khorne and summons demons. What does Geralt do? Inject himself with Botox? Gay.