Mournelithe

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/greg-bear-birthday-bundle-open-road-media-books

So there's a great bundle up at the moment for Greg Bear, one of the big names in 80s and 90s SF, and it's open to the world, raising money for SFWA.

27 books all up, including both SF and Fantasy short fiction collections, his big space epics Eon & Eternity, the alien invasion duo The Forge of God & Anvil of Stars, several horrors, near future cyberpunk in Queen of Angels & Slant, the Hugo and Nebula winning Blood Music, it's got something for everyone.

It also includes his underrated Songs of Earth and Power duo, which is a really different take on the Sidhe, much more modern in feel.

Hugo nominee, award darling, the obvious question is “how good can it be?”

Well, I might be late to the party, but the answer is in general Very Good Indeed, especially if you’re an older reader.
Our protagonist Saffy is a 38 year old highly skilled and highly professional Director of Magic for a prestigious English boarding school. Yep, turns out we’re back in magic academia again, blended with modern urban fantasy vibe. But the delight is in the details - the mind numbing minutiae of being both a modern teacher and also Management, the sixteen hour days, the incessant bureaucracy, GCSE exams and the self-centered idiocy of teenagers, the wistful knowledge that in their eyes you’

So I've read pretty extensively across SF up until around the late 00s, and then dipped in and out since, keeping a vague eye on the Hugos, Nebulas and other awards for suggestions.
Instead since then I've been reading far more Fantasy, and feel like I need to get back in touch with the SF zeitgeist.
So what are the iconic works out there that I probably missed out on? Are there any great SF webnovels?

More recent SF authors and books I've read and really enjoyed include Andy Weir, anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Murderbot, Becky Chambers, the Expanse, Megan O'Keefe's The Protectorate series, the Bobiverse, Some Desperate Glory and the Lost Fleet books.
I read the first thre

A Comprehensive Guide to r/Fantasy Genres

aka No Dear, I can't come to bed, because Someone is WRONG on the Internet.

Right, first things first. This post is here to be helpful, not proscriptive. Human brains are literally designed to categorise things, and we love to subdivide things into ever more overly specific groups that have practical meaning to fewer and fewer people.
^^Eggnog, ^^Flax ^^and ^^Laguna ^^are ^^all ^^obviously ^^different ^^shades ^^of ^^yellow ^^and ^^it ^^was ^^apparently ^^vitally ^^important ^^to ^^my ^^cousin ^^to ^^have ^^the ^^right ^^one ^^in ^^the ^^right ^^place.

Secondly, new Genres and subgenres are regularly being inv

Industrialization. Social unrest. Underground movements. Government corruption and surveillance. They’re occurring all at once in Guldor — The Empire of Gold.

Something has to give.

Steffan Dekkard is an isolate, one of the small percentage of people who are immune to the projections of empaths. As an isolate, he has been trained as a security specialist and he and his security partner Avraal Ysella, a highly trained empath, are employed by Axel Obreduur, a senior Craft Minister and the de facto political strategist of his party. When a respected Landor Councilor dies of “heart failure” at a social event, because of his political friendship with Obreduur, Dekkard and Ysella fi

If Simon R Green wrote a children’s book after drinking heavily and reading Snow Crash it might feel like this.

A madcap kitchen sink combination of a dystopic cyberpunk future, uncontrolled body sculpting, rogue AI, technology that has become magic, people who have turned themselves into elves or vampires or necromancers ... and all seen through the eyes of a manic depressive fourteen year old girl with a knack for machines and a built in profanity filter.

This book is immensely good fun. The central characters are interesting, and have just as much depth as they need to fill out their roles. Our heroine Vanity Rose is a wannabe goth tech hacker with gravity boots who can run up the

Papillon meets Heart of Darkness, by way of The Book of the New Sun.

A long slow meandering tale, every so often interrupted by lengthy flashbacks into the past of the protagonist, this is a strange dying earth story of a man condemned to a dreadful floating prison, and the bizarre and inimical surroundings in which it is set.

It’s strange reading a prison tale without a constant undercurrent of how do we escape, but in this story the question is much more how do we live long enough to even consider it. Between the psychopathic Marshal who controls the prison, the insane Governor and his deranged scientist mistress, the inevitable prison conflicts, and the astonishingly hostile jungle

Not a review as such, because I’m only a third or so through the story. The underlying concept is quite interesting, it’s effectively a grimdark setting with mental illnesses as magic powers.
The characters so far are mostly archetypes, but the plot is at least novel.

But I’m really really struggling because of the names.

All the names are in German, which is a nice variation on the usual suspects, and reinforces some of the Nietzschean style undertones to many of the delusions. But Fletcher obviously started having too much fun with his google translate and I know just enough German that it is doing my head in!
Every character name is a literal description. The thief is named “

Interesting changes afoot in the Agricole world - looks like La Mauny (and Trois Rivieres, and presumably Duqesne) is going to be sold to Campari.

That'll give them a good Agricole rum to move alongside Appleton Estate and a solid foothold in the French markets.

https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/les-rhums-francais-trois-rivieres-et-la-mauny-repris-par-campari-20-07-2019-2325714_28.php#xtor=CS2-238

One of the Fantasy Masterworks series, originally published in 1986, Replay is an older quiet slice of life fantasy based on a very simple idea.

In 1988, 43 year old Jeff Winston dies of a heart attack. He wakes up shortly afterwards in 1963, as he was at the age of 18, but with all his memories and knowledge of the next 25 years intact.

Think Groundhog Day played out over half a lifetime, with all the sweeping changes that could ensue.

We get love and loss, easy wealth and meaningless relationships. The pain of seeing your child grow and then being taken away from them only to start anew. The ennui of sameness, of reliving t