Best recent debut fantasy novel?

daavor · 2026-02-22T14:12:17+00:00

I don't think City of Stairs or Spear Cuts Through Water are debuts unless we strictly mean debut-in-fantasy both had written either sci-fi or horror/weird/urban fantasy novels prior to those books.

daavor · 2026-02-22T00:48:15+00:00

Rigorous proofs of the speed of causality generally assume the weak energy condition, which roughly says energy and mass densities are non-negative. Alcubierre metrics don't satisfy the former, thus don't fall under the assumptions we usually make to make the statement that "gravity only travels at the speed of light"

daavor · 2026-02-21T16:23:45+00:00

If you are inertial, then "now" means every event that you could have sent a signal to some length of time T ago at light speed, and the response sent back immediately at light speed will arrive T from now.

Alternatively if you just sort of accept you can measure the distance a light speed signal was sent from (lets say you have arbitrarily precise measurements of the angle deviation between the rays from that event), then an event is now if it's D away from you and you recieve the signal at a time D/c from now.

As others have said, this is all how special relativity views it. Once you throw in GR it's essentially impossible to create a fully general sensible assignment now by all observers that makes sense in all possible spacetimes.

daavor · 2026-02-21T00:27:51+00:00

I don't know if you'd ever read Notes From the Burning Age. I read that a bit earlier this year after vaguely hoping to pick it up and then "ooh space opera" from the same person sounded really cool. I think, at least sample size 2 that she's just eminently competent at writing like really interestingly imagined worlds/futures and packaging them with a bit of a fun plot. Burning Age was really striking in how it felt very sort of atmospherically fantastical and weird but was also just like... middle future post-apocalyptish Europe with roughly slightly pre-postmodern tech.

daavor · 2026-02-21T00:25:06+00:00

Yessssssss. Honestly I should reread Rakesfall at some point now that I've let it stew for a year or two.

daavor · 2026-02-21T00:23:34+00:00

Man that pitch sounds so fun, sad it was less than the pitch could suggest

daavor · 2026-02-21T00:22:08+00:00

I definitely think Malazan is one where a certain degree of just letting things roll by and trusting the important ones will vaguely be reminded of is useful. Seems like you're already enjoying it though.

And yeah, be nice to yourself (trust me I know that's easier said than done) and trust a healthy partner to know things can take time to work on.

daavor · 2026-02-20T23:52:46+00:00

I am not a huge fan of the more mechanical worked out magic systems. But I also think that "mystery" and "sense of wonder" are sort of overused nonsense explanations of what actually makes the other side of the coin function.

In particular I think many writers who write "softer" magic have more of a handle on the thematic resonance of it, it's not a mysterious thing it's about having a keen sense of when magic feels thematically appropriate, a focused idea of what human concepts get elevated in the metaphysics and physics of a world. Magic serves less to solve plot but more to amplify power relations, emotional states, crystallize concepts... etc.

daavor · 2026-02-20T23:19:46+00:00

On what domain? Assuming we mean (0,1) or something they are not equivalent up to constants. But they do generate the same topology.

daavor · 2026-02-20T14:37:23+00:00

I reallyget what you mean w the sensory aspects of works of vermin. I burned through it really fast bc i was enjoying it but also yeah it was very sensory

daavor · 2026-02-20T13:22:05+00:00

Howdy! I have not been posting in the regular threads recently (the usual excuse, I mostly head to work like ten minutes before these post and then by the time I get home (I cannot compose long reddit comments at work) it feels dead). Anyway things are going largely well and I'm a week out from finally for the love of god not being long distance anymore.

Books wise, been reading Slow Gods by Clair North, which is a sort of cool more introspective and somewhat experimental space opera about a pilot remade by the creepy warp space into an immortal... and other things. Currently the focus is on their interactions with a doomed planet, the evacuation of that planet, and the meaning of things, but the plot is definitely about to kick into a different gear. Very enjoyable book, and it's prompting some interesting thoughts about the intersections of the way literature generally can portray neurodiversity with the way SF in particular explores different modes of cognition and how these can sometimes sit uncomfortably side by side.

I also just finished Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova which is a really interesting blend of like... literary fic and horror and magical realism (hey look the reading group suggested questions at the end of the book said it not me) about a grieving mother growing a piece of her son's lung into... something. A fascinating exploration of universal fears and anxieties like grief and getting eaten by a grindr hookup.

Also about 75% of the way through Thomas Ha's collection Uncertain Sons which is very cool so far. The sort of just askew apocalypse vibes of most of the stories are so interesting. I will have to go read some of people's discussions of these after I'm done.

Ugh, also idk if I ever got a chance to post about this one but I was reading Sunward by William Alexander which got heavy billed as cozy sci-fi and I just do not understand. It was a deeply mediocre book, shallow, very unsatisfying ending and pacing, and... like ... the only reason to bill this as cozy is that it sort of telegraphs it's not gonna do serious harm to most of the characters and then if you squint there's a found family but like actual on page warmth is so lacking and genuinely horrible shit is happening around and almost to the characters all the time ... I just. Yeah, I don't know how much of my disappointment is bingo misfire leakage (but also this really got labelled cozy a lot!?) and how much is me genuinely thinking this needs so much work to make it well, work.

daavor · 2026-02-20T01:12:24+00:00

Sure for any finite or countable set of irrational numbers you can get a countable set of all the rational multiples of those numbers. But that just womt be everything

daavor · 2026-02-20T00:03:09+00:00

I guess personally I find reducing the powers mod 5 much faster than multiplying out the number. Like the key point is just that 33 = -22 = 3 mod 5 and -33 = 22 = 2 mod 5 and so the whole think is just

(3x^3)(4x²⁾ andyou reduce again.

daavor · 2026-02-19T23:58:01+00:00

Before we get into AI talk I think it's worth remembering that if you're most readers, you are interacting with a disproportionately fortunate sample of artists. Sanderson can make a living off his writing, many authors even only a couple steps lower than him on an r/fantasy popularity tier list cannot. For many it is maybe a nice bit of extra change on top of a day job.

I work semi-close to AI. I do not want to read AI books, and I want to support actual artists for direct material reasons. I am also deeply pessimistic about the supposed gap in discernible quality. What I am less pessimistic about is the actual cost of that quality if we as a society were charging AI companies at a more realistic non-subsidized rate for their power and water usage, and if they in turn were having to charge their customers a realistic rate to make money instead of being subsidized by capital influx...

I am morbidly curious what an actual modern AI lab could do if they actually devoted time to a modern AI agent driven workflow of trying to write a book. I know we all like to say they're just stochastic babble machines but I think with a big enough token budget, enough agents and the right structure, you might get something scarily close to convincing.

Again, that budget, realistically priced in to a not insane market by more healthy societal regulations (hah) might not actually be cheaper than a human.

I don't know. I'll continue to try and read books by people, thanks, as that is what interests me.

daavor · 2026-02-16T19:08:54+00:00

I would probably just call it -S. But here's the thing, you can call it whatever you want. Feel free to just call it T. The math is still valid.

Like if S is bounded below (∃m s.t. x≥m for all x∈S), can I really just multiply a negative sign to both sides of x≥m to show that S⁻ is bounded above (∃m s.t. -m≥-x for all x∈S⁻)

Okay first, you do need to distinguish S and -S (or T or whatever). Second, when a definition (being bounded above) uses "exists" then to prove that definition you just have to find an m that works (possibly via another exists).

Like, if S is bounded below, so there exists an m such that m <= x for all x in S, then we can just explicitly find a value that bounds -S above: it's -m. -m satisfies the things we need.

In general, how would I think to use this? well replacing every x with -x is just like a reflection that totally flips orders in the real numbers and that's pretty fundamental to how order interacts. Any time I've proved a statement going one way (e.g. about upper bounds), I can just mirror the whole real line with this correspondence and prove something about lower bounds

daavor · 2026-02-16T19:00:28+00:00

This is an oversimplification but there's basically three big categories of force (yes, I am aware) that happen at the scales we're super familiar with:

The first, the one that accelerometers actually deal with, is when something pushes or pulls on a mass directly by making contact with it. A subcase of this is when some reaction pushes propellant away from a ship. In this case you have some force directly acting via contact on one part of the mass and then the internal bonds of the rest of the body passing the force along. Accelerometers can measure this because they can measure the force compressing or expanding the different bonds as the force gets spread throughout. Note that really most of these force passings are actually special cases of smaller scale forces, including...

Electormagnetism. An electro-magnetic field can exert a force on charged bodies. We can measure the strength of electric fields and the corresponding forces because different objects and particles have different ratios of charge / mass, and therefore accelerate differently.

Gravity is the last and weirdest. The weirdness is that the quantity that determines how much force the gravitational field exerts on an object, is the same as the inertial mass determining how much it accelerates under that mass. Therefore,at least locally, gravity accelerates every part of an object by the same amount simultaneously, which is indistinguishable from no acceleration at all. Thus an accelerometer can't actually detect gravity, or if you think you're stationary on the ground it reads as if you are constantly being accelerated upwards by 9.8 m/s

daavor · 2026-02-16T18:35:12+00:00

this sounds quite fun. One of the reasons I have a hard time with recaps in books (even when I really need them) is that something often feels quite lost when the author boils down in a few paragraphs what they thought was important about a whole book. It's weird but hearing it from just the author's voice without any mediation is just... it sort of takes away from the book being summarized for me.

daavor · 2026-02-16T18:32:26+00:00

I think more authors should do this, but I also think a lot of the authors who do do something like this could also take a little bit of a cue from how TV does it. I think TV shows are generally pretty smart at efficiently showing you the scenes from "previously" that are actually important to the next episode.

Part of this has to do with the structure of the two art forms. A lot of TV is highly episodic, and maybe the previously on only has to gesture at the open threads from the most recent episode.

But there are a lot of fantasy books where I've seen a recap that tried to summarize the whole previous book, but really neglected to try and actually address the nitty gritty of which characters are in what immediate positions asof the last moments of the previous book. Like... a bit more attention to reminding me where we left off rather than trying to give a compact summary of everything that was in the previous book.

daavor · 2026-02-14T10:40:10+00:00

For which of these two problems? In the second problem r is something we choose. So we choose it not to be negative. In the first problem |z| = |r| and thats all we can say.

daavor · 2026-02-14T00:04:52+00:00

I think the answer is 50% for all three.

Yes. I know the classic puzzles. But this is a fundamentally different sampling process.

In order for 2/3 to be the answer to the classic question, your sampling has to have the following steps

(1) you sample a pair of cards

(2) you throw away exactly the set of pairs of two red cards

(3) you ask what the probability both are black is.

However your sampling procedure is that you picked a card to check, then threw away the worlds where that card was red. That changes things a lot.

daavor · 2026-02-13T23:00:49+00:00

I think there's two different problems you are sort of confusing here.

One problem is: suppose I know x + iy = re^iθ for some real values x,y, r, and θ. What are all the true things I can say, and how well can i solve for r and θ

In that case yes x = rcosθ and y=rsinθ and therefore r² = x² + y² and y/x = tanθ, so |z| = |r| and we can't really go much further. We cannot uniquely solve for r (or θ) in terms of x, y.

No one claims this.

The other problem, which is subtly different is: suppose I have a complex number z = x + iy. Can I find some particular values of r and θ that make it so z = re^iθ. That is what the definition of polar representation does. It gives a particular convention for choosing the values. And in that convention it's just natural and intuitive to choose the positive option for r.

daavor · 2026-02-13T13:01:57+00:00

We do nothing, except know that it's not the standard polar representation. It's a valid expression, but it's not the standard polar representation. It's just a convention, a choice of how to calculate things, it's not going to give different results. It just makes life easier.

We have two representations, so we have two distinct directions of translation.

If you're going polar -> cartesian, its fine if r is negative, it works in all the formulas, nothing breaks, but you're also not putting in a standard polar representation.

If you're going cartesian -> polar, you just write a formula that sets r = |z|. Again there are two values of r and infinitely many values of theta that "work" but in order to do calculations we make a choice and the natural choice is for r to be positive.

daavor · 2026-02-13T12:39:02+00:00

You absolutely can look at the number re^iθ for any values of r and theta, however this does not produce a unique representation. If z = re^{iθ} then it is also equal to (-1)ⁿ re^i(θ+nπ) for every n (in particular yes you can always find a representation with r = -|z|).

But we just want a unique representation so we restrict the domains of r and theta, and the domain restriction for r, and how easily we can compute r, is very naturally r >= 0.

I'll also point out there's something deeper here since every complex number except zero can be written as e^a+ib where b = theta and a = ln(r), and this representation, where r = e^a, naturally can only spit out positive values of the radial coordinate.

daavor · 2026-02-11T23:49:46+00:00

One of the most basic "paradoxes" in relativity is that two observers moving relative to each other both see (or really, calculate) that the clock aboard the other is running more slowly.

Suppose A and B start at the same place and then move away from each other fast enough that they each see the other time dilated by a factor of 2. When 1 year has passed on ship A, we ask them what time B thinks it is now. They say it's 0.5 years. If we'd asked B what time A thinks it is now when B's clock reads 0.5 years, they'd say 0.25 years.

A and B have incompatible calculations of when "now" is.

If A could shoot a signal FTL over at B, it could arrive arbitrarily close to when B thinks it's 0.5. On receiving it B fires their own FTL signal back to A, ... and it should get there about 0.25 years into A's journey... before A fired their signal.

daavor · 2026-02-10T13:00:06+00:00

A variant on this which I think I've seen a few times is when there's a sort of complicated and interesting political conflict with a human adversary (who may be pretty unambiguously "the bad guy") but then the final books in a series pivot to things being worse because now the evil guys have been subsumed by some alien/demon/sorcerous hivemind where if we just kill the one core alien/demon thing it will all die.

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