OT-Black Company

[Edi]

After the first book of Serpentwar, Feist's writing started to get seriously stale. I loved the original Riftwar saga and the Empire trilogy he cowrote with Janny Wurts (who is one of my favorite authors, though she can be pretty wordy sometimes).

J.V. Jones also writes good fantasy, but the Book of Words trilogy can take some getting used. Barbed Coil is a first rate standalone book, though.

I also happen to like Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World trilogy. It's a rather original take on several elements of Finnish and Celtic mythology.

[Xietor]

heh. My sense of humor is not apparent at times. I was kidding about a hero named Pug or Calais.

But I do take issue with your condemnation of Feist. Some of his work is not good(talonhawk stuff), but Jimmy the Hand was one of my favorite characters.

Edit-Edi, my comment was directed at Wranna's dislike of Feist, not your comment immediately above mine. sorry for the confusion.

[Edi]

Uh, hello? Jimmy the Hand is a major character in the original series and also appears in Serpentwar. He's my favorite too, but the books after Serpentwar are nowhere near as good as the older works.

[Endoperez]

I like early Feist a lot.

Locke Lamora is about a group of gentlemen-thief-actor-geniuses in a low-fantasy world. It's more about the stuff they can pull off than about the magic, but it's so over-the-top it can only be fantasy. The Feist I like doesn't really have anything in common with Scott Lynches writing. EDIT: It seems I've missed Jimmy the Hand, though.

Name of the Wind is new. It's captivating. It has promise, and great build-up, but I'm not sure how well Rothfuss can deliver once the "past" has been told and it's time to actually move forward in the story.

Wrane wrote:
While I'm not great fan of Tolkien myself, I think that if you say that Martin is even close, you just demonstrate a lack of understanding the genre and/or lack of reading much good books. I surely don't hold it against you, but...

Tolkien helped make fantasy popular. He was one of the first. That means he made many mistakes that he would have been critized about had he not been one of the first popular ones. I think LotR could be written much better.


It could be written worse, as well. Unfortunately, someone decided to prove it true and wrote LotR, worse. Warning: bad fantasy ahead!

McKiernan's Silver Call starts with "warrows" that keep "sir Tuckerby Underbank's Unfinished Diary and His Accounting of the Winter War" safe, and then one of them (Peregrin "Perry" Fairhill) is hired to retrace his ancestor's steps when group of dwarves wants to reclaim mines of "Kraggen-Cor". Yes, there's a priceless chain mail of "starsilver, silveron, stronger than steel, lighter than down, soft as doeskin." The world is called "Mithgar". The big bad that was killed with the "red arrow" was called "Modru"

[HoneyBadger]

Feist's "Faerie Tale" I also found enjoyable. It's set in the real world, not Midkemia.

The point where Feist became hopelessly unreadable to me was 'Merchant Prince'. I like to call it "fantasy accounting", and as far as I can tell, is basically some kind of wacko Midkemian corporate thriller, from the little bit I could stand to choke down.

[MaxWilson]

I liked the whole Serpentwar series (Shards of a Broken Crown was a pretty good climax to a tale you thought had already climaxed in Rage of a Demon King). There are things I have liked about the Talon books--starting fresh with new characters is always nice--but I couldn't even finish Flight of the Nighthawks.

-Max