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Dresden Files is probably your best bet. 12 or so books so far, 12 or so more coming, all of them heavy on the action with good plotting and decent character development. Noir wizard fantasy. Given the other books you mention -- mostly sortof hardboiled sci-fi -- I'd strongly recommend you read William Gibson's Neuromancer if you haven't yet. I'm not even going to sell it to you. I've told you about it. If you don't read it now it's your own fault. You might also like Larry Niven's Ringworld (avoid at all costs all later books in the series. Just read Ringworld). A few of Heinlein's books might appeal to you also. Try The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It's about a libertopian revolution in a penal colony on the moon. Well-written and tightly plotted with likeable characters despite being libertopian fantasy. Does have some invented dialect, so that plus the politics might make it avoidable. If what you want is a hero, a quest, an evil empire, and a brilliant fantasy, I can never recommend Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds enough or enough times or to enough people. Neil Gaiman's Stardust and Neverwhere are both excellent and probably right in line with what you're looking for. A few other recommendations I'll toss out, without warranty; all you get is the title and author. Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Misenchanted Sword. Jim C. Hines' Goblin Quest. Robert Asprin's Another Fine Myth Dianna Wynn Jones' The Dark Lord of Derkholm. Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Glen Cook's Black Company series. William Hope Hodgsons' The Night Land (actually you might not like this one, the writing style is a bit outdated) As to the other stories mentioned above: Zelazny's Amber series is his worst. It's still pretty decent, because Zelazny was a brilliant writer, but he was pretty obviously phoning it in with Amber in an attempt to write a "popular action series that will sell and support my kids." I would second the people who recommend reading Lord of Light and/or Isle of the Dead by Zelazny first -- I know a fair number of people who started with Amber and never went on to his better stuff. The Altered Carbon series is decent sci-fi noir, great action, but the body count and special technology/"techniques" get a little silly after a while. Might be what you're looking for. China Mieville's writing is brilliant but his endings are kinda bleh. Not so much an action/entertainment romp as "I Am Writing Pretentious Fantasy about Marxism, But I'm a Good Enough Writer to Justify my Pretensions." Pratchett's discworld books are absolutely brilliant, there are forty-odd of them and all but one or two are excellent. They're more lighthearted comic fantasy than they are the action-oriented stuff you seem to be searching for, though; you might start with 'Guards, Guards" which starts his Watch sub-series, essentially fantasy police/mystery novels. The Callahan series by Spider Robinson is weird -- it's really emotional sci-fi stories that all center around a bar. They're good stories, but you can really see the sixties/seventies vibe in them; they're stories about emotional problems.
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| # ¿ Sep 7, 2010 18:38 |
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| # ¿ May 25, 2013 02:19 |
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John McCain posted:Gene Wolfe is probably the best living scifi/fantasy author and you should definitely check out The Book of the New Sun (originally published as 4 novels beginning with The Shadow of the Torturer) and The Book of the Long Sun (also originally published as 4 novels beginning with Nightside the Long Sun). He has more series, including The Book of the Short Sun, Latro in the Mist, and The Wizard Knight, all of which are great. He's also got several collections of short stories out, which are universally fantastic. Basically you can't go wrong with Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe's a great author but I'd actually say that Guy Gavriel Kay is the best living writer of epic fantasy; everything he writes is just gold-touched. (Note that epic fantasy excludes Gaiman and Pratchett, neither of whom write tolkien-style epic quest fantasy).
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| # ¿ Sep 20, 2010 20:09 |
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Thrill Cosby posted:How about specifc low (magic) fantasy recommendations? The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. Set in a fantasy world that's essentially a rewrite of Reconquista-Era Spain, it's almost closer to alternate history than it is fantasy. The only explicit fantasy elements are 1) The map has different names, and the religions are different (sun and moon and star gods instead of christianity/islam/judaism, respectively), 2) One of the secondary characters has occasional (as in, four or five in the whole book) clairvoyant flashes, 3) there are two moons in the sky. It's pretty much perfectly written and probably Kay's best book -- essentially, it's the story of two men, a general and an assassin, who perfectly respect and admire each other but nevertheless are forced by necessity to be on opposite sides of an inevitable war. If you like that, try most anything else Kay's written (avoid the Fionavar Tapestry books, they're bad). He writes a lot of books that are essentially fantasy version of (historical era) -- there's one series he did set in a fantasy version of the Byzantine Empire, another "set" in Dark Age scandinavia, so forth. His latest one's set in a fantasy version of (Mongol?) China, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Sep 24, 2010 around 17:48 |
| # ¿ Sep 24, 2010 17:45 |
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Just want to post thanking people for recommending the Vorkosigan Saga; I don't know how I'd missed it for this long. About halfway through now, and it really is quality writing, at least by space-opera standards. So many of that kind of series turn into, well, Honor Harrington style brain poison.
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| # ¿ Dec 6, 2010 13:38 |
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Jackstarum posted:I've been having bad luck with sci-fi/fantasy novels lately, so I was happy to find this thread. Here's a few suggestions I tried and what I thought: You might want to try Zelazny's Isle of the Dead then. Same "humans setting themselves up as dieties" theme -- though they use what the protagonist believes, at least, to be psychic training, not technology -- but the dieties in question are from an alien religion instead, so it probably will avoid that sort of tokenism. Jackstarum posted:
His initial fantasy trilogy is unutterably bad, agreed, and that's coming from someone who things Lions of Al-Rassan is one of the best fantasy books in the past twenty years. His good books aren't really "alternate history" so much as they are a very, very low-magic fantasy setting based on medieval Europe. He's worth giving another shot, just, yeah, don't touch the Fionavar Tapestry series, it's baaad. Kids From Our World in Fantasy Universe, Plus King Arthur Shows Up Halfway Through bad. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Dec 18, 2010 around 01:24 |
| # ¿ Dec 18, 2010 01:20 |
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It's been too long since anyone recommended the Prydain Chronicles. Everyone, go read the Prydain Chronicles. It is that time.
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| # ¿ Jan 15, 2011 23:21 |
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Ape Gone Insane posted:Can anybody give me a pointer on which of the following series' are worth reading first, if at all? This is why Sword of Truth is bad : http://sandstormreviews.blogspot.co...d-parodies.html The other two are both good in their own ways but have problems. The main difference is that 1) In October of 2005, a new Wheel of Time book and a new Song of Ice and Fire book both came out. 2) Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time, then died. George R R Martin, author of Song of Ice and Fire, is still alive. 3) Since October 2005, two additional Wheel of Time books have been published based on Jordan's notes. They're both surprisingly good considering they were written by a dead guy. 4) No further Song of Ice and Fire books have been published since October 2005. Martin has, however, blogged regularly.
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| # ¿ Feb 6, 2011 16:03 |
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Ape Gone Insane posted:As an aside, reminicising over the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I can't seem to find any science fiction novels on par in terms of humour and satire. More importantly out of those two aspects, the humour present in Douglas Adams' books. That really made the series for what it is for me. Are there any science fiction novels that are similar to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? There's not much that's up to the same standard. Some of Kurt Vonnegut's early work, like Sirens of Titan. If you're willing to read fantasy, Terry Pratchett has ~40 books of very high quality comic fantasy.
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| # ¿ Feb 15, 2011 19:44 |
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This is a cross-post from the Shadows of the Apt thread, but having just blown through all six books or so in a little over a weekend, it's really very high-quality pulp steampunk fantasy, and it deserves a mention in this thread. Sortof China Mieville Lite -- all the clockwork, steam, and fantasy insects, but replace the literary pretension with action sequences and take out the Marxist preaching. It's original enough to be interesting without going off the rails, and unlike a lot of imaginative writers (Neal Stephenson, looking at you here) the author knows how to actually end his stories with satisfying conclusions. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Feb 16, 2011 around 18:55 |
| # ¿ Feb 16, 2011 18:52 |
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Justaddwater posted:Already ordered Ship of Fools, anything else like this out there? "The Boats of the Glen Carrig" and "The Ghost Pirates" by William Hope Hodgson spring to mind. Both should be a free ebook download, out of copyright. If you like Hodgson's work, try his masterpiece _The Night Land_, but it's a story of exploration on a dead Earth, whereas those two are explicitly naval stories.
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| # ¿ Feb 20, 2011 13:21 |
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Amazon tells me that the next book in Patrick Rothfuss' series is coming out on March 1st. Is this the final book in the series or am I going to have to wait five more years for the next one after this one?
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| # ¿ Feb 20, 2011 15:37 |
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I won't say the Thomas Covenant books are "bad," because they're technically well-crafted. But I'll agree with Metonymy insofar as I found them extremely unpleasant to read -- and I've read and enjoyed plenty of "Dark Fantasy," from the Black Company books to Moorcock's Elric to Karl Edward Wagner's Kane novels. It's really difficult for a book to be entertaining when then protagonist is a set-piece exercise "How to Create Antipathy in your Readers." The Covenant books are certainly interesting in a technical sense but it's hard for me to disagree with those who don't find them entertaining or pleasurable to read.
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| # ¿ Feb 21, 2011 04:17 |
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Faldoncow posted:So I recently finished reading Lord of the Changing Winds http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Changing...y/dp/0316072788 and while the book was ok but not great, I really liked the idea of the main character's transformation into something no longer human. Can anyone recommend a good story in which the main or primary character undergoes a fairly extreme transformation, either physical or mental? One caveat though: while I would be totally ok reading a GOOD vampire or werewolf novel about a character becoming one, there's just so many crappy vampire romance books in the fantasy section these days that I groan and mistrust nearly any book about them. God Emperor of Dune is gonna be your go-to book there.
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| # ¿ Feb 23, 2011 21:06 |
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Bohemienne posted:I'm looking for some good fantasy that features or at least includes female characters who aren't scenery/completely incompetent, with at least better than average writing. Similarly on the Lois McMaster Bujold front, her first novel, The Spirit Ring, features a female protagonist that's sharp, clever, independent, etc. It's also a neat novel in and of itself -- it's very loosely based on Benevenuto Cellini's autobiography. The overarching titan classic of the "female fantasy" genre is going to be Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which is a retelling of the Arthur story from the viewpoint of the female characters. I've read it once and it's absolutely loving brilliant and I'll never read it again because it's so full of estrogen it'll drat near make you grow a secondary vagina if you're a dude and you read it. Still, great book, just, you know, girly. I've always had a fondness in my heart for Eilonwy in the Prydain Chronicles, but she's not a central character. The Wheel of Time books were notable when they first came out for having relatively strong female characters relative to other mainstream fantasy, but, well, if you've read WoT you know. My current obsession is Adrian Tchiakovsky's Shadows of the Apt series, and it's got some fairly well-developed female characters, though most of them spend the first few books being pretty conventional fantasy stereotypes ("I'm a girl and I wish I could be good at stuff, like [prettier girl]!"), so I don't know if they'd be your first choice. Still, it's a fun series and definitely worth reading if you don't take it too seriously -- essentially, "ancient greece meets steampunk world war two, with giant insects." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Feb 25, 2011 around 15:35 |
| # ¿ Feb 25, 2011 15:26 |
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fritz posted:Are you seriously saying it's cliche to have female characters who are written as human beings? I think he's saying " strong, realistic female characters are so common in modern fantasy that the act of asking for fiction that contains them is in itself a cliche."
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| # ¿ Feb 28, 2011 16:45 |
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The Deadly Hume posted:It's less than 50% now? That is actually progress, it's nice that we're getting away from the sausage party novels of yore. Especially considering that a lot of written fantasy is going to be first-person perspective, which (if you have a male narrator) is going to almost auto-fail the Bechdel test. It's a test for films, not books. Still, though, point taken -- I wasn't making that argument, just explicating the argument I think that guy was making. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Mar 2, 2011 around 13:36 |
| # ¿ Mar 2, 2011 13:34 |
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House Louse posted:
Well, I'll admit my "almost" there carries a lot of weight, and yeah, I was thinking that a male involved in the conversation would disqualify it -- i.e., that only conversations purely between women would qualify -- which may be beyond the boundaries of the "official" test. But I do think that there's a big difference in terms of perspective between film and text, at least when you've got a first-person narrator. In a first-person text, everything's coming at you through that character's perspective; in a very real sense, everything that happens in the text is "about" the perspective character. Even if you get a scene where it's something like a male narrator listening in to two women talking about [something other than a man], the scene's not really about the two women, it's "about" the male listener's reaction to the two women's conversation. Which to my mind would make it "about a man" and thus insufficient for the test. Of course you can still get those kinds of perspective issues in film, too, but generally speaking, in film you're usually in third-person (has there ever been a second-person film?); conversely, in books, and especially in modern popular fantasy, you're generally either in first person or in a roving third-person-subjective/limited, and in either of those you're running into this issue. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Mar 2, 2011 around 18:52 |
| # ¿ Mar 2, 2011 18:42 |
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There are two other series I've been wondering about -- has anyone tried the "Tales of the Otori" series or Peter Brett's "The Warded Man" series? They look neat but I've never seen them directly recommended.
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| # ¿ Mar 7, 2011 03:33 |
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Lyon posted:I just read The Warded Man because of this thread. It screamed Runelords from David Farland. .. I make one post asking if Warded Man is worth reading and everyone says "no" but then people read it, but I make like five posts saying "Go read Shadows of the Apt" and nobody does =(
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| # ¿ Mar 15, 2011 13:13 |
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Lyon posted:That might be crossing too many fantasy boundaries for me. I prefer my magic, non-"human" races, and conflict to be less fantastic! Hahha, yeah, that's the thing -- the concept's seems like it's too far out there, but once you're into it, it's just like any other fantasy. We're just *used* to elves and orcs and poo poo so it all seems normal. The best way to think about the "insect kinden" bit is that everyone basically has totem giant insect spirits instead of totem animals.
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| # ¿ Mar 15, 2011 16:55 |
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Iacen posted:Is there any books out there that has the same kind of magic or tech as China Mieville's Perdido Street Station or The Scar? I briefly read about CthulhuTech, which seemed to have that "Humans using arcane science to enhance themselves", hopefully with ill results, monsters and/or aliens. Nothing's exactly like Mieville. If you mean the sort of mix of pseudo-fantasy-victorian-era technology and magic, it's generally referred to as "Steampunk", and there are a few other authors that do it, but nobody's really yet managed to pull it off at the same level that Mieville has, at least not that I've read. Michael Swanwyck's The Iron Dragon's Daughter has a fair bit of it and has a similar "literary" feel to Mieville. Similarly, the Shadows of the Apt series I was just talking about does the same sort of mix of steam and clockwork technology with a low-magic setting, and, like Mieville, has lots of giant insects, but the overall tone is less literary/intellectual and closer to more mainstream fantasy. Another term you might run into is "New Weird," so you could try googling that and looking for authors that fit. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Mar 15, 2011 around 17:11 |
| # ¿ Mar 15, 2011 16:58 |
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Adar posted:the sequel to Inferno was so bad it actually made the original book worse. Niven's sequels are always that bad. See: any of the Ringworld sequels.
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| # ¿ Mar 20, 2011 02:34 |
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Velius posted:So I'm out of books to read again. I've burned through most of the 'new wave' sci-fi authors (Reynolds, Banks, Asher, Hamilton, Stross, Scalzi, Morgan and Vinge, although he's not new), and on the fantasy front most of the good authors I'm familiar with (most recently Sanderson, but I've read all of the Malazan series, the Wheel of Time, Ice and Fire, Lynch, Cook, Moon, Rothfuss's two books, Mieville, etc.) I'm burning through the Malazan books at the moment (finishing up book six) and, jesus, if stupid fantasy language bugs you, how can y'ou r'ead the'm ? I keep recommending Adrian Tchiakovsky's Shadows of the Apt series -- it's fun, original, and well-executed, especially after the first book, and nobody seems to've read it, perhaps because the premise sounds silly. Still, good series. Beyond that, my recommendations depend on how much niche fantasy you've read. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart? A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny? If you don't mind going a bit retro, there are a lot of now-neglected authors from the 70's/80's that weren't half-bad considering. The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans is one of my all-time favorites, for example. Watt-Evans has written like 30 books, so he's worth exploring if you haven't -- he's a solid B-list fantasy author, and nothing he writes is *bad*. His best work is the Ethshar series, not so much a series as a collection of stories set in the same universe; his world's very very high-magic and most of his stories are about relatively ordinary people who get caught up in dramatic magical accidents. All his characters are likeable and intelligent and believable and he seldom has "villains" as such -- his stories are generally about relatively psychologically normal people in fantasy universes, not about Good Versus Evil. Similarly, the first three books of the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz aren't half-bad if you're willing to hang your critical faculties at the door and roll with it -- sure, compared to something like Neil Gaiman they're dreck, but compared to David Weber's Mary Sue Fantasies they're solid goddam gold. She wrote a bunch more after that, I've never been able to get into them though. Dianna Wynne Jones also turned out a number of extremely clever books, and is a must-read if you haven't. Read her Tough Guide to Fantasyland for the best skewering of fantasy cliches ever, and then pick up Dark Lord of Derkholm to watch her turn all of that on its head into an excellent fantasy novel. If you want brainier recommendations, there's always Lord Dunsany's stuff -- he wrote a shitload of short stories, and he's still probably the best prose stylist to have written popular fantasy, to the point that he makes Gaiman and Tolkien look bad by comparison, but for some reason people today seem to not read him much. Best thing is most of his stuff is public domain now. Start with Idle Days on the Yann. If you've already read all that stuff then try out this site: http://greatsfandf.com/ the author's a bit pretentious (for example, he slams Katherine Kurts but good in like the second sentence on his site) but he has a TON of book recommendations, so I find something new to search out pretty much every time I look at his site. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Apr 10, 2011 around 07:04 |
| # ¿ Apr 10, 2011 06:55 |
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Quid posted:So I take it if I read a Dragon Lance series I'll be pretty underwhealmed? My aunt just bought me like 3 different sets and they don't look like anything special but I kind of feel obligated to read at least one of them. But if they're really terrible I'll just tell her they're not for me. From looking around a bit it looks like it's a pretty long series. Would I be lost just picking one at random or is there a better spot to start? I have Chronicles, Legends, and Rise of Solamnia. The reviews made Chronicles and Legends sound like simple but not altogether awful books. But this topic doesn't seem too high on them. It all depends. How badly will you get annoyed when a character literally says "I cast Featherfall" ? They're horrible by the standards of general fiction but not half-bad by the standards of AD&D licensed fiction.
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| # ¿ Apr 12, 2011 02:07 |
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Decius posted:
When you're reading history, names show up in context and are introduced one by one if it's well-written) and are generally the only thing that isn't translated into the language of the text. They're also internally consistent -- you don't get six different Polynesians named everything from Liliʻuokalani to Mxyzptlk (and if you do get a Polynesian named, say, Patroclus, there's going to be a reason for that that's explained). The problem isn't "everything has to be like English," it's "everything has to be explained and introduced by the author in an intelligible fashion", "the author shouldn't be inventing words when an existing word will do," and "everything has to be internally consistent." Otherwise, you get this problem: http://xkcd.com/483/ . I'll admit that the fact that this kind of thing *is* a problem in low-quality fantasy has probably made me a bit hypersensitive to it. At this point my eyes pretty much do a reflexive roll whenever I see a fantasy name with a diacritical mark, even when I find out later there's a good reason for it (such as with Erikson's T'lan Imass).
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| # ¿ Apr 13, 2011 12:18 |
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coyo7e posted:It sounds like you assume that fantasy authors only put them in to make poo poo look cool. Case in (counter)point, . .. Yeah, I think a problem with the Malazan series is that it (intentionally?) trips a lot of things that are hallmarks of Bad Fantasy. It does so in interesting ways for interesting reasons, but the reader might not find out those interesting reasons for five more books (or perhaps not even until a second or third read-through), so a lot of readers are going to have a "holy christ, cliche'd" reaction to Malazan. Basically, an author can be subtle, or he can subvert fantasy tropes, but if he tries to subtly subvert standard tropes, there's a risk that a lot of readers will miss the subtlety and just think "wow, cliched trope there." It's not really reader's fault, either, since the author's deliberately being obscure.
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| # ¿ Apr 15, 2011 17:54 |
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There are two worthwhile editions that do that. One's a single volume hardback in faux-leather binding, titled "The Complete Chronicles of Conan." The other is the three-volume Del Rey set titled "Coming of . . ." "Conquering Sword of. . ." and "Bloody Crown of. . ." Conan, respectively. The three-volume Del Rey set is a little more fastidious about textual accuracy (the single-volume set went by "originally published" for a few stories that the Del Rey sets give you as "originally written" original manuscript vs. publisher's slightly edited versions) and has a lot more additional material, critical essays, background info, etc. But both editions do a pretty good job of sticking to the original stories, and the single-volume book's probably going to be significantly cheaper, so your call.
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2011 12:00 |
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It's hard to match Tigana, but you'll probably be very happy with reading Kay's Lions of Al-Rassan and Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds. Last Light of the Sun isn't Kay's best, unfortunately. There are others I could recommend -- Zelanzy's Lord of Light springs to mind, or Terry Pratchett's Guards, Guards, or a few others, but Lions of Al-Rassan and Bridge of Birds are beautiful perfect works that almost every single person who reads them loves.
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2011 03:40 |
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neongrey posted:It's very very 80's (but the author has recently returned to writing in this setting, and I find it's much improved in this regard) but the Deed of Paksenarrion is one of my old comfort-reads, so if you can deal with a setting that does feel more than a bit like D&D with the serial numbers filed off, I think it's a good take on that set of tropes. She didn't really file the serial numbers off all that carefully, the protagonist's just a First Edition AD&D Paladin so most people these days don't recognize it. Still, though, yeah, it's a decent story so long as you don't mind her magical mount showing up when she hits fourth level, etc.
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2011 17:24 |
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My favorite 80's fantasy novel is still "The Misenchanted Sword" by Lawrence Watt-Evans. It's all right there in the title. Dude gets a magic sword, but Whoops! Badness! And story ensues. There aren't any villains, there isn't any epic, just a normal dude trying to deal. I've also got a (misplaced?) fondness for the original three Deryni books, but they're 70's, not 80's.
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2011 18:29 |
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neongrey posted:A lot of this older stuff is good(maybe not good, per se. entertaining?) in ways you just don't see anymore, too. I enjoy the current big-ticket titles a ton but these olders just have a feel that gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies and make me think back to going through my mom's bookshelf and asking permission for what was all right to read off of it, when I was a kid. I was a pussy kid, okay? Yeah, I know what you mean. If you really want to waste an afternoon wallowing in 1980's fantasy nostalgia, check out http://www.projectaon.org/staff/eric/ . Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Apr 30, 2011 around 04:02 |
| # ¿ Apr 30, 2011 03:50 |
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Hedrigall posted:Any good books about discovering alien ruins/architecture on other planets? Something a little less depressing than Alastair Reynolds please! Not really after big dumb object stories like Rama, Ringworld, etc. I'm more interested in the former civilizations than the objects themselves. Want something with a solution, not just 400 pages of If more old school stuff is ok, try the short story"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum.
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2011 12:52 |
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The first half of The Stand is a great novel, the second half is kinda ehhh to me. Canticle for Liebowitz is a brilliant work of literature.
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| # ¿ May 2, 2011 19:52 |
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Pulling Teeth posted:Ooh, I just thought of another question I wanted to ask: one of my favourite fiction books is Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human. However, it's the only book of his I've ever read, so can someone recommend both other books by him and/or stories with similar ideas to Sturgeon's "homo gestalt"? If you like Theodore Sturgeon I highly recommend his novella "Microcosmic God." You can find it in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1 anthology, which has a lot of excellent similar Golden Age sf in it. Or you can probably find it in a google search.
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| # ¿ May 12, 2011 13:03 |
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House Louse posted:
Is this available as a free download anywhere? Should be out of copyright, correct? I've been looking for it for a while but haven't found. As long as you're looking at things in that vein, I'd recommend The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany. The aforementioned Stardust is essentially Neil Gaiman's attempt at writing Dunsany-style fantasy. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at May 17, 2011 around 21:38 |
| # ¿ May 17, 2011 21:19 |
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Pfirti86 posted:What would be the largest series by page number/book number that's worth reading (no Dragon Lance) that isn't David Eddings or Feist or based on a video/card/Dungeon and Dragons game? I really like digging into big series, but I haven't read one since high school. By page number totals for a single plotline, Wheel of Time. Keep in mind that several of the later volumes are only "worth reading" because they're part of the series -- there's a BIG variance in book quality, and some volumes are genuinely great fiction while others are thousand-page placeholders. By total books/pages in a single universe, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series; start with Guards, Guards!. By totals for a single character, any of the classic pulp serials could work -- Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars or Tarzan novels, for example. You could try the Doc Savage books but their quality is rather low by modern standards. Stay the hell-gently caress away from Terry Goodkind. You could try George R. R. Martin's series but right now it seems less likely to get wrapped up than the Wheel of Time, despite the fact that Jordan's dead.
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| # ¿ Jun 30, 2011 14:45 |
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MrBling posted:I need some new books to read. You might like Wheel of Time -- it's close enough to what you list that it's at least worth giving a looksee. For Sci-Fi I'd suggest looking at Charles Stross; he tends to write hybrid spynovel/sf and spynovel/fantasy. William Gibson might also be up your alley, especially his later stuff.
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| # ¿ Jul 7, 2011 15:13 |
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KFJ posted:Just finished the Rain Wild books, Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven. They're really nice books about some kids who are sent out to lead some weak dragons to their ancestral home. This is a very, very bad & brief explanation of the books, but I thought they were good. Just a couple of warnings: The first 3/4ths of the first book feel like a prologue to the main story, but they're pretty good. I tried reading the Rain Wilds books and felt like they just had waaaay too much estrogen in 'em for me. They're the story of a young misfit girl coming to terms with her sexuality and a housewife trapped in a lie of a marriage, both of whom find themselves having to transport and care for a bunch of disabled dragon babies. See, in this story, the dragon baby is a metaphor for having an actual baby. .. feedmegin posted:Especially if you're a programmer, try Rick Cook's Wizardry series, starting with Wizard's Bane. Basically, the concept is that magic is programmable. In Forth. Charles Stross' Laundry Files series explores some similar concepts. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at Jul 8, 2011 around 14:55 |
| # ¿ Jul 8, 2011 14:53 |
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Dan Simmons has written a few wildly anti-islamic short stories before now; in one essay where he talked about trying to imagine the future ten thousand years from now, and how the only thing he could think of was that someone would still be trying to kill the jews.
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| # ¿ Jul 25, 2011 13:48 |
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| # ¿ May 25, 2013 02:19 |
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Yeah, you can do a reading of Watership Down as science fiction (from the rabbit's point of view), or it could fall within fantasy (there's magic, there's a map of a strange country at the front, etc) but I think it's more accurate to categorize it as a book about rabbits. It's just not a work of genre fiction.
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| # ¿ Aug 3, 2011 19:52 |
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