Steven Erikson--I really like the Malazan Book of the Fallen, although I hate the first book in the series (many people do). Erikson's writing vastly improved in the ten-year gap between writing Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates. If anyone is interested, I'd recommend starting with Memories of Ice, especially because of the Seguleh. A nation of Nietzsche supermen sends a punitive army of THREE MEN to punish a neigboring Evil Empire for bothering them. Now that's style! (They probably would have gotten obliterated if they hadn't acquired allies, an ancient sorceress and a T'lan Imass, but they would have given it a good try.)
I enjoyed Martin for a couple of books, but eventually the grinding unpleasantness of the world got through to me and I said the Eight Deadly Words: "I don't care what happens to these people." I haven't gone back. Martin admitted in an interview that, of the characters in SoIaF, he identified most closely with Tyrion because of his sexual obsessions, which made a disturbing amount of sense given the gratuitousness of some of the material. The thing that got me interested in Martin in the first place was someone's comment that Martin examines "real evil," which is to say not some evil overlord in a tower who wants to Take Over The World, but rather the plausible kinds of evil that actually occur. It's true, and he delivered on that promise. I guess I just got turned off by, among other things, the fact that there aren't enough GOOD people in the stories to counterbalance the evils. Or if there are, they get far too little screen time. YMMV.
I second the recommendations for Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, and Brust's Vlad Taltos books. I started with /Issola/, of which you can read the first chapter here:
http://www.tor-forge.com/Excerpt.asp...589177#Excerpt
-Max
Re: OT: good fantasy books
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