3 ms·
Not what you're asking for, but an interesting angle is R Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books. He has a race called the Cûnuroi who are approximately Elves,
by thom 3y ago
Not what you're asking for, but an interesting angle is R Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse books. He has a race called the Cûnuroi who are approximately Elves, and they accept immortality in a deal with a race of depraved starfaring bio-engineers, except it renders them sterile. They go quite mad over the years, and require increasing levels of violence to feel anything at all.
- climb_stealth 3y agoOoo, that sounds quite interesting. Which book is a good starting point for getting into it? Just asking because I don't want to look too closely and see spoilers. Thanks!
- thom 3y agoThe first book is The Darkness That Comes Before, and it's the beginning of two trilogies (the second of which ends up with four books...) The first three books are as good as anything in the genre. They're quite dark, but have very deep metaphysics, the stakes are incredibly high, and the central character is fascinating. I would tempt you more but I'm trying not to spoil anything. The books do go downhill (as does the author's mental health, I believe). But they are definitely worth knowing.
- beaumayns 3y ago+1 to these books - they have some really interesting worldbuilding. Even the later books have some good parts (quite a good Moria-like sequence, some more exposition on the current state of the insane remnants of Cunuroi society), but they definitely do lose the plot a bit. I'm still not sure myself what really happened in the end.
- thom 3y agoYeah it’s very interesting meeting the youngest Elf. But what happened at the end is pretty clear, I thought, and the series is called the Second Apocalypse after all.
- climb_stealth 3y agoThank you, much appreciated! I have noted them down to start next after my current series. And yep, I'm quite at home with fairly dark books.
- jandrese 3y agoThey turn into Cenobites?
- thom 3y agoThey’re certainly given immortality by cenobites, and they do end up serving them to some extent.
- arethuza 3y agoThere are elves in the Laundry Files universe - and they are not nice elves, as Stross says in notes on the first novel to feature them: "in the Laundry universe, elves are nazis with pointy ears" They aren't immortal although they do deploy WMD levels of magic. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/06/crib-sheet-the-nightmare-stack.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/06/crib-she...
- bee_rider 3y agoYeah, I’m thinking of more like hard military fantasy than sci-fi body horror. I want to see elves that have to come to terms with the fact that will always be fighting wars outnumbered hundreds to one, attempting to make up for that gap by using their special characteristics. I don’t want to see them corrupted to debauchery by boredom, but to grim pragmatism by desperation. With wizards-engineers spending hundreds of years on a project, I want to see bizarre siege weapons. Indirect fire guided by giant eagles. The other species should have to pull trench warfare into the fantasy era to reasonably do battle. I think this was put vaguely into the back of my head by the Artemis Fowl books when I was a kid, I thought they had interesting vibes, but of course they were YA novels, and IMO this would be better set in a fantasy era.