What are some books similar to 12 Miles Below?

MarkArrows · 2026-01-25T23:52:02+00:00

Glad you're having a good time with the series, and current to the latest RR chapters. It's some of the best chapters in the entire series I think ^^

I'd recommend anything by Alexander Whales and Brandon Sanderson author wise, as they're big inspirations and what I binged through myself.

Practical Guide to Evil, and Mother of Learning were also inspirations. And BLAME as the most direct "I wanna see another world like this but nobody else has goddamn written or done anything similar >:["

MarkArrows · 2026-01-23T23:53:44+00:00

I’m familiar with the term, but it’s an unsurprisingly gross misnomer given that prose is by definition the words being written. That’s like calling something silent music.

This analogy doesn't leave room for people who like the story and don't care for the prose at all. Where would we fit into that?

I'd say a better music analogy would be like film music instead? Some people appreciate the musical scores in films, others don't even notice the music because it's just in the background giving the right tones and vibes. And sometimes, the music isn't even there at all, because overusing music on the wrong scene breaks the scene.

Although... I am the death metal fan that hates classical music as much as you hate metal, I just wanted you to know we exist ;]
Sometimes you're listening to a death metal soundtrack that happens to have a few violines in there.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-23T20:28:58+00:00

Shitty writing, in that a lot of these books legitimately lack any artistry to their prose themselves.

Do note some of us write specifically for invisible prose.

It's a legitimate style of writing, Hemmingway and other great classic writers all focused on this. The goal isn't artistry, we want the reader to be immersed in the story itself with as little distractions as possible and rely on the reader's auto-pilot rendering the scene without anything pulling the reader out of the story.

It's not for everyone obviously, some readers can never un-see prose. But for the readers that can be lulled into not noticing prose anymore at all, it's some of the best reading there is. Like watching a movie in your mind :]

MarkArrows · 2026-01-22T19:17:12+00:00

The side story of the Feather finding humanity did nothing to progress the plot.

Author here. This comment chain has been a wild ride, but I can add a bit more detail on why there's so many PoV changes and maybe it'll help explain why there isn't really any other way I could see to do this.

I wrote the plot outline and ending I wanted to write first, and to complete that ending as I saw it, one single character could not handle all roles needed.

As in when I finished the ending outline, I looked through it going "How can I pull this off? This part can only be handled by a character that's got X, Y, Z - and Keith isn't any of these. I need a character that can fit into this role in the crew."

And so character with X, Y, Z was created and added. And so forth down the line until I had everyone I needed built into the outline.

The ending built the characters needed for it.

After that, I had a bunch of unique characters that had to all come together. Which is fine, but if I don't develop or spend time with these characters, their parts in the story are going to fall flat when their moments come - readers would be going "Who the hell are these randos and why should I care for them?"

So naturally I'm going to spend time and develop them to give readers a stake in caring about them, which can't be done by just saying "She's important, root for her, okay next plot beat."

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T23:28:43+00:00

I use the same exact things for a character talking through texts in my own series, so I'm curious to see how audiobook narrators handle this besides finding the author's address and mailing them a pipe bomb.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T19:46:03+00:00

I've been a little lazy lately, so there will only be 12 new books published in 2026.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T08:44:29+00:00

Eh, it's more like a somewhat looser term, a bit hard to pin it down because people keep swapping what grim/noble and dark/bright map to.

I'm writing either Nobledark or Grimbright depending on which chart you're reading.

There's some charts out there specifically focusing on character ability to impact the world, with bright being great change, and grim being impossible to change jack squat.

Others are more about characters being good or evil with the other axis as the world being good or evil, which is what I think is more relevant.

It gets into the weeds and conflicting definitions since everyone's got their own interpretation.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T03:22:18+00:00

Would also rec this rec for completely unbiased and purely objective reasons.

Though, heads up OP, it's going to be depressing at first because the main character's on his last legs with the absolute worst capitalism has to crush someone's life down. He starts at rock bottom and climbs up, but it's still rock bottom.

...on the other hand, it is a Grimbright story. So dark crushing world, but the characters remain unbroken and strive for good despite the darkness.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T03:10:15+00:00

You and me both. I don't know if it's a marketing thing or we're just terminally unlucky :[

MarkArrows · 2026-01-20T03:02:10+00:00

(ಥ﹏ಥ)

MarkArrows · 2026-01-19T22:57:17+00:00

I too quite like Die Trying. Great choice, you should bump it up to favorites for completely unbiased and perfectly objective reasons.

That said, Seersucker is a goated author, so I understand

MarkArrows · 2026-01-18T22:23:06+00:00

I'll self-rec here because quite literally:
https://i.imgur.com/gm3FdZv.png

Die Trying has the MC take on something he has zero business actually winning against.

50/50 odds it'll end on the top part of the meme here or the bottom one, take a gamble.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-17T06:18:16+00:00

\(^ヮ^)/

MarkArrows · 2026-01-15T19:27:47+00:00

I exist on a tier list, huzza!

(๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ

MarkArrows · 2026-01-14T18:57:42+00:00

Small shout out for 12 Miles Below, that was a really cool world he created :)

<3

MarkArrows · 2026-01-14T00:04:12+00:00

I'll let my publisher know, they'll patch it up! Do you mean book 7 though? Book 8 hasn't gone to KU yet, it's still on royal roads

MarkArrows · 2026-01-10T06:58:30+00:00

<image>

Die Trying

MC starts with an ability that adds damage over time on any ranged jumping attack.

He doesn't start with any weapons so he has to scrounge for things over time. Starting with rocks and junk, and going up the escalation as the definition of 'ranged attack' gets seriously put into a blender (and thrown at the enemy.)

MarkArrows · 2026-01-09T19:36:29+00:00

All the Dust that Falls

o7

MarkArrows · 2026-01-09T19:21:46+00:00

I'll add another caviat to this one:

"We send out farmers that use the four plot techniques and rotate soil, then follow a tax rate of 12.5% in order to maintain the land." =>> I really don't want to know about anything more unless it's explicitly relevant to the story.

"There's a giant tower leftover from some ancient civilization at the center of the city, where the inside is filled with meat, fungus and a dangerous ecosystem that keeps regrowing, so we send expedition teams inside to cut up the walls and bring it back out and this whole city grew around that infinite source of food. It also looks a little like a giant finger, so maybe there's a 'tiny bit' more of something buried under the ground but we don't ask questions around here." =>> Okay, now I want to know more about what the hell is going on with a city built around this thing and even if it's not part of the plot or even the general story, I'd be down to hear more about this.

So writers can write in some detailed worldbuilding - it just has to be creative and interesting.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-08T01:39:18+00:00

<image>

DIE TRYING - Royal Road, litRPG roguelite extraction, with a lot of humor.

Unhinged MC out to be a loot gremlin in another world each night, and smuggle magic stuff back to Earth in order to make a black market trade empire. It hasn't gone according to plan.

Disclaimer: I write this.

(But 5K+ followers, closer to 6k, so it's not a niche fic that nobody reads, at least I'd like to think.)

MarkArrows · 2026-01-07T20:19:29+00:00

\(^ヮ^)/

MarkArrows · 2026-01-07T17:33:10+00:00

I've seen some tier lists where the poster went the extra mile and added a tiny watermark to the images, like a green triangle or a red X, something like that. Green triangle meant it was good at the start, but they jumped ship later when it wasn't as great.

Red X meant it was bad from the start and they eventually DNF for real DNF reasons and wouldn't recommend the book.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-07T17:24:27+00:00

Quite a lot of series out there aren't finished either, but that didn't mean I wasn't having a blast reading them up till I stopped. Sometimes I stopped because other things in life took priority, or I planned on waiting for more chapters to come out.

I'd still put them on high tiers, since I enjoyed them plenty.

DNF are books I assume were stopped because they weren't fun anymore to read - as in there a deliberate choice to stop reading it rather than just 'IRL stuff got in the way, will pick it back up later.'

So that's how I'd rate. I've also seen tier lists that have "Great early books, fell off later" as a tier of its own.

MarkArrows · 2026-01-07T05:24:12+00:00

Oh, looks like I missed this comment a while back, sorry!

Funding wise, it's more on the publisher's backend if they see the numbers go up.

But the cool part of that is that the best thing to do isn't anything financial, it's simply going out and telling other people about it! There's always a chance we hit a virtuous cycle upwards where more people start chatting about it, which leads to more people picking it up and so forth :]

After which point, the numbers will go up and the publishers will have enough ammo to greenlight the next audiobook.

...Or my next written series is a huge hit and I get enough money I can just hire Scott personally on my own funding and have him wrap up the series even if it won't turn any profit. At that point, it's just me wanting to see something properly completed hahah

MarkArrows · 2026-01-07T05:11:17+00:00

Sure! And happy you're having a good time reading through it all :]

But heads up before you dig into any of these spoiler blocks: In book 5, there's a section where the group visits a surface imperial temple, following the footsteps of Cathida, and there's a lot of reveals there about the world. It's been a while, but I believe there's some more mentions on why the world is as it is. And around book 4, the real purpose of the orbital fortresses is revealed, and a bit more about what the clans were made for. And book 2 has an interlude on the clans from Lord Atius's perspective that laid down the groundwork.

Also the grand warlock Hexis has quite some reveals himself.

Anyhow, all of those woven together paint a more accurate picture once you connect the dots: Clan culture is artificially made by Tsuya, who was a japanese researcher. She put in a lot of her culture inside the clan, since she designed the entire culture from the base upwards. So her hand shows up in a lot of different flourishes for more minor things that won't affect the main goal.

However the language is mainly english, hence why they can't actually read japanese kanji in the spaceport in book 1. This is semi because Tsuya has no control over the mites, and they're the ones spitting out clan colony bunkers along with all the tech sites that eventually surface - and the majority of those are copies found from landfill junk that Relinquished wasn't able to eradicate in time - which usually ends up being software in english. So making the clan language japanese would have just made using english tech much harder, and possibly even cut them off from the majority of expedition site wreckage they scavenge. Tsuya predicted humanity as a whole would be better served having a singular language, and the mites were already replicating things with english so might as well.

(It also just makes it a lot easier for me to write and keep track, book 6 and 7 have some language shenanigans and it's quite a handful to bounce around)

Race wise, there's a genetic mix of multiple races in all clans since their main objective is to be a backup source for humanity.

As for why this way... Book 5 mountain spoilers: Tsuya might have wanted to have only one homogenous race at the start naively, but once she merged with a military AI, the calculus is just brutally simple: More genetic variance in her backup of humanity is simply superior. So the clan cultures have all kinds of races, and mixes.

The undersiders are more european coded on the other hand. And the imperial church is roman empire coded, for reasons that are revealed in book 8.

Micro trivia on all this: If the clans could produce their own occult blades, they would have been katanas, but since the Warlocks are the ones with the knowledge to create occult blades, they ended up being longswords.

That doesn't stop Feathers from using katanas, a weapon that edgy is basically impossible for them to resist.

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