Yes, I am aware that there is a literature forum. I'd prefer this stay here though due to the higher traffic.
Question's pretty simple: What is the best fight scene that you've ever read in a work of fiction literature, science fiction or otherwise? The criteria for "best" is pretty vague, here. Most well-written, emotionally powerful, etc etc.
Feel free to list multiple scenes.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Last edited by Tzeentch on Dec 22nd, 2010 at 03:40 AM
By fiction I was referring to literature, specifically. Wiiilll edit!
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Kassad and Moneta in the Shrike suits during Fall of Hyperion. Total unrestrained brutality. Not a pretty scene, though, or a very elaborate one. It's like something from 300 but if the Spartans were tearing off limbs with their bare hands . . . and then had sex on top of the pile of corpses.
In retrospect it is the model I use for a lot of the fight scenese I write (sans sex) because when you remove the whole "unstoppable killing machine" aspect it gives a great feeling of desperation.
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Last edited by Symmetric Chaos on Dec 22nd, 2010 at 03:46 AM
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
I suppose my favorite prose fight sequence would have to be the fight between Harry Dresden and the Skinwalker from the climax of the Dresden Files book Turn Coat.
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Where the faint murmurs now dwindling
echo oer tide and shore."
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i used to read some romance vampire novels with supernatural beings like dragon's, were beings, olympian gods etc etc.. but i cant remember the author nor name of the books..
they had some pretty great fight scenes of a human vamp fighting a olympian created avatar of death called thanatos the fight took place in a cabin while the vamp was trying to protect a blind woman..
he desperately tried to hold it off but thanatos was like a juggernaut and f#$3ed him up bad.. he ended up crawling back to the cabin and hid for a while till he healed up enough to escape taking the chick with him on a snow mobile till it gave out and he had to fight it one more time...
climax of the story they fought one was pure muscle the other was nimble and agile and finally manage to find its weakness in a tatoo marking placed by the gods the size of a cooin so it would never turn on them... he stabbed it with a knife if iirc correctly..
the hero was a tragic type guy... he was born in ancient greece hideous and deform.. a female god gave him immortality of a vampire but not actually a vampire since he was so ugle she didnt want to touch him to transform him and instead enchanted him making him a faux vampire..
as a vamp he is was godly beautiful but he never felt that way and the blind chick loved him for who he was so he fought really hard to keep her alive... he was desperate to be loved since he hid from the world b/c he always felt that he was ugly.. later another older vamp god who was once a slave like him but manage to drink from a god fought for his freedom and free him and discovered he never needed to drink blood or live in darkness it was running joke to the gods..
the dude after being freed from bondage turned on the goddess that had turned him but the blind chick didnt want him to kill her... the anguish of wanting revenge and wanting to be with the blind chick kept him from killing the goddess.
The Crow, when Eric Draven confronts Top Dollar for the first time.
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The Black Angel, I think it was called, by John Connolly, had an epic part that was a flashback to an old abbey that had a battle between monks and demons going on in it, from what I remember it was pretty badass, though it's been ages since I've read it.
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Some of the action in the "rogue warrior" books by Richard Marcinko are excellent. Not the sort of book you want to read for intense literature value mind
Well... Ush.. would you like to give an opinion on the titular question of thread?
And anyone else, too... I would like if this didn't die like every other thread in this sub-forum.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
There was this one book I read called Gladiatorix about female gladiator's (lesbian female gladiators), which had a pretty awesome end fight sequence. It was pretty much 2 naked chicks beating the absolute **** out of each other with their bare hands until they just collapsed from exhaustion and drew. Was pretty boss. I'll look for more though. See what I'll find.
It's been a while since I read "The Reality Dysfunction," by Peter F. Hamilton. This (hard space-opera scifi with a supernatural element) novel held a number of fight scenes that were just really cool, due to an extensive/creative use of AI and nanotech, especially from a military perspective; and a good sense of how to depict tech-vs-'demon' battles in written form.
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For me I would suggest that swordfighting and the like are best done by David Gemmell or Simon R. Green (especially in the latter's Deathstalker books), or perhaps Mickey Zucker Reichert in 'The Last of the Renshai'.
But I can recall one such fistfight which I enjoyed from 'Ravenheart' by David Gemmell when the character Jaim Grymauch, a clansmen, enters a boxing tourney and it's pretty brutal how the fights go. There's also one in the First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, by the same author.
The only other book I can think of now is 'Tegne: Soul Warrior' by Richard la Plante (strong martial arts/spiritualist theme as well), but other than that it's difficult because in most stories H2H stuff only lasts briefly and is usually ended by some weapon.
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Dec 22nd, 2010 03:32 AM
