It all depends on your tastes and sensibilities, of course, but Gene Wolfe is a
serious writer is a way than none of the others mentioned so far are. Many of the other mentioned works have their merits. GRRM writes well, although I personally couldn't finish "Game of Thrones". Brust and Cook write fine entertainment. Tolkien sired the modern fantasy genre.
But Wolfe is the one you want, after Tolkien, if you want to discuss lasting value. They ain't gonna award a Nobel for science fiction or fantasy, not anytime soon, but if they wanted to, with Borges dead, it'd go to Wolfe. Many of his books are literary, no question. Some of them leave you with the impression that you weren't smart enough to read them. And that's not a path to popularity.
He writes on big themes, in original worlds, with incredible characters. He doesn't slow down for you...he writes the story, and it's your job to read it, whether he's using words that have been obsolete for several centuries, or whether his narrator is unreliable due to personality or injury, or whether he just hasn't told you the things the narrator knows, and expects you to have figured out on your own. But everything comes together, and the sum is far greater than the parts.
The aforementioned "Wizard Knight" duology is a good start. They are as straightforward as Wolfe gets, and you see the way he handles worlds and characters (and words, for that matter). He's taken the classic trope of the boy in our world falling into a fantasy world and coming of age as a hero and twisted it inside out a few times until it's become a study in the growing maturity of a hero. It's a world based on a well-known Earthly mythology, for cryin' out loud, and yet the whole thing comes off fresh and original.
I have to follow up on something Endoperez said upthread...
Quote:
Endoperez said:At times, it's more like horror, except it made me uncomfortable unlike any horror book I've read. Not afraid, but uncomfortable - I didn't know if I wanted to read what would happen, because if it went wrong, it would go bad.
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That's a familiar feeling. Wolfe can make you
feel, and not the way you expected. There's a point in his "Book of the Short Sun" where the viewpoint character becomes scary, not because he's evil, but because he is
good. It was like reading the life of a saint. I felt uncomfortable not knowing if I wanted things to go
right.
Thus endeth my rant...