/lit/ - Literature

Here's what I read recently:

>The Winter of the Witch by Arden Katherine Arden (Russian alt history/fairy tale/magical realism/otome)
This is the final in a trilogy and luckily the author doesn't shit the bed a lot like most authors and the quality is maintained generally throughout although it does kinda reuse some of the ideas from the second book. Book 1 is low stakes alt hist, Book 2 has more action and Book 3 invokes a lot more magic.

Third book is not as good as the second book and the pacing is a bit off but if you enjoy the genre it's definitely worth a read because it has nice prose and nice characterisation.

>The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman (American alt history/a little bit of supernatural fantasy/Western)
The Half-Made World has a very unique setting and worldbuilding featuring the conflict between the supernatural forces of the Gun and Line. Unfortunately, the protagonists of that book have a greatly reduced appearance in this one although Ransom and his Process is quite intriguing. Certainly, this book is not a bad book, in some ways it is more creative than the first one, although some aspects of the setting are far more down to earth which annoyed me and although the plot twists were enjoyable I saw them all coming. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

>The Alchemy Wars Trilogy by Ian Tregillis (European alt history/robots)
I admit I started reading this series because I am a shallow person who saw the word geas and like Code Geass. What I got was alt history Europe with a very beautiful prose and excellent worldbuilding. Main character was sort of lacking, two of the characters were pretty sociopathic like characters in a series by Alistair Reynolds. The author also has a somewhat cynical view of humanity. I enjoyed the fact that the author put the freed robots in conflict with the humans by the end as it did seem that that particular point was somewhat absent from Murderbot (which I also enjoyed). However, the ending of this trilogy and the Horologists turned out to be pretty goddamn disappointing. I tend to like priests in numerous pieces of scifi like in Dan Simmons' Endymion and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow/Children of God so I was really pissed when the faggot of an author killed Visser sama off he was a fucking based character up until that point. But I guess anyone remotely familar with /m/ animu/mango or books could see it from a mile away.

>>8224352
At least he didn't go on hiatus.
Arc anon please deliver. ;_;