OT: good fantasy books

[Actuarian]

Xeitor, I heard that the reason that Jon Snow and the cripple aren't in the latest book is that he made the book way too long and had to divide it into two books. Snow should feature in the next book.

[Cor]

Most everything by HP Lovecraft

the problem, he is a bleeding racist. I wish someone would go back and modernize his work, take out all those refrences to eugenics.

[Teraswaerto]

Actuarian said:
You should try Robin Hobb if you haven't already. She and Martin both write darkly, and convey a similar feeling of desperation and a sense of fatalism.

I've read Hobb's Farseer trilogy once, but it's been a while. I hear Liveship Traders and Tawny Man are good too, haven't read them yet. They take place in the same world, Liveship Traders being only peripherally related to Farseer while Tawny Man continues Fitz's story 15 years after the end of Assassin's Quest.

[Endoperez]

Naomi Novik has written a very interesting series about alternative history. Starting from His Majesty's Dragon, or Temeraire on the other side of the Atlantean empire. Napoleonic wars, with infantry, navy and dragons acting as huge air-ships. Dragons wearing harnesses from which the gunmen and the bellmen and the bombers and the cargo hang, dragon-to-dragon boardings, etc.

Here's an excerpt.

Johanna Sinisalo has written some unbelievably good books. Her novel 'Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi' (translated as 'Not Before Sundown', or 'Troll - a love story' in US) won several Finnish and international prizes.

W. Somerset Haugham's book "The Magician" isn't strictly fantasy, but in parts it's very close. I read it from Project Gutenberg website expecting something very different, but found myself enjoying it immensely. The book has a christian theme, but at least for me it was more about one man's faith than the God he believed in.

[Edi]

Teraswaerto said:
SPOILERS ABOUT A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE!



Also, she is not a preteen, so your pedophile remark is not accurate. Modern laws about age of consent are just that, modern.

IIRC, she was 13, and I would think you'd agree that there's a big difference between 13 and 15, which is closer to what the marriageable age was historically. It still doesn't wash, not given some conversations I've had with people who have actually worked with kids and other people traumatized by abuse (sexual or otherwise). Simply put, the description is unrealistic and off and lingers far too much.

Teraswaerto said:
Likewise, descriptions of brutality done by soldiers of the warring Houses are important. Writing about war and passing by the ugly parts is very common, and as I said before, the fact that Martin doesn't do so speaks in his favor.

It would, if it were not done in a way that wallows in it and makes it gratuitous and extraneous. Black Company has similar events, so does Prince of Nothing, Wars of Light and Shadow, Book of Words, Sword of Shadows and a lot of other books, but the point is that they do not do engage in such feasting on the subject. They don't especially shy away from it, but neither do they zoom-focus in on it.

Martin's writing has more in common with Goodkind's in this respect than any of those others, which is where it becomes such a turn-off, especially since the plot does not quite carry the day as far as it should.

Teraswaerto said:
I can understand that one can be repulsed by such things, but that is quite a separate issue from whether or not the books are good. Not that I'm denying your right to an opinion, but like you, I like to explain my point of view.

Yeah, I see your point of view, even understand it, but I do not agree with it. I would have, once upon a time when I was younger and much less experienced in many things, but not anymore. Our frames of reference are too different.

[HoneyBadger]

I'm going to keep adding to this and editing it where I feel it's appropriate, since there's a lot missing from the list
(I'm getting old, and my memory's starting to go).

Modern Fantasy:

"The Eye in the Stone"-by Alan L. Wold. This is really a superlative
novel. The author, the publisher, and the reading public all made
mistakes by not giving this book a lot more support. It's 1980s
modern, hard magic with lots of action

"Little, Big" by John Crowley. Absolutely THE fantasy novel of the
1970s-1990. The Best. 'Nuff said.

Neverwhere. The best fantasy novel that I'd recommend for pretty
much anyone and everyone to read. Good for kids, good for adults,
good for grandparents, good for brits and yankees, republicans and
democrats, moslems and jews. If you haven't read it, you probably
should. Probably the best of the 1990s-plus, in terms of being a
successor to Little, Big.

Sandman is supposed to be his best work, but I haven't managed to get the collection yet-it's also graphical, which isn't something I'm generally including here, because it's a little bit more difficult defining, and you start to get into movies. Otherwise, I'd list the Dark Crystal and-coincidentally, the Jim Henson Company and Brian Froud.

American Gods-also by Neil Gaiman. I actually found it a bit dry
after Neverwhere, but still, a very worthy read-and once you've read
Neverwhere, you MUST read American Gods-otherwise, you won't have a
grasp on Neil Gaiman's range as an author-plus, I command you to!

Oldschool Fantasy: This is the hardcore stuff that's every bit as relevant, and in the end, generally better written and better fantasy than, the Lord of the Rings.

Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. Really excellent techno-fantasy with lots of neat magical and technological weirdness.

The Lankhmar books by Fritz Leiber. If you haven't read them, you should. Amazing, weird, at times philosophical, and funny!

Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock, the Anti-Tolkien.
Another incredible read. Very weird, very intense at times.

Conan. Read the originals by Robert E Howard. They're a lot better than the movies and Conan's *very* different from Gubernator Schwartzenegger.

Gormenghast-all Titus books by Mervyn Peake: I've just started
reading this, so normally I wouldn't recommend it, but the author
is/was an appealing personality, and the book itself flies in the
face of all that bad fantasy stands for-plus, it feels a bit like
Kingdom Hospital.


Epic Fantasy:

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn; and the Song of Ice and Fire-just the first book, though, the rest are more and more disappointing-if you
absolutely MUST read about dragons and elves, and get your epic on,
these two are actually worth the time of day.

"The Dark Tower" By Stephen King. Stephen King gets a bad
rap-mostly deserved-of having churned out book after book in order
to get paid. He's still a really good author, and the Dark Tower
series is his Opus. Besides, who doesn't like the idea of a fantasy
version of The Good the Bad and the Ugly?

"Magician" by Raymond E. Feist
More dragons and elves, but I decided to include Feist, because Magician really is quite a good book (it was divided into Apprentice and Master for publishing reasons), even though I don't really care for most of the later books after Darkness at Sethanon, the exception being the Empire books he did with Janny Wurtz. Atleast for a little while, he was really innovative and exciting as an author, which isn't easy to do in such a tired genre.

Other:

"The Black Company" The first two books, by Glen Cook-the best
military fantasy currently extant. I'm only recommending the first
books because I've only read the first two, and I've heard
discouraging things about the rest of the series, but the first one's groovy, the second one's gravy. Cook does with fantasy exactly
what I want done with fantasy in a military fantasy novel-apparently, later
on he screws up the formula, but oh well.

"Weaveworld" By Clive Barker-I haven't read this one either, all the
way through, but I like what I've read, and I've heard very good
things, and it's written by Clive Barker-besides, if I had read all
the best fantasy, already, I'd be pretty depressed.

"Ambergris" all works, By Jeff Vandemeer. Really great quirky
fantasy/horror set in a third world and written by a teacher (and
probably a very good one) of creative fiction. Again, it's written
the way I'd want it to be written.

Terry Pratchet: The single best comic fantasy author of the 21st century, and one of the very best fantasy authors of the 20th and 21st. I recommend pretty much anything and everything he writes.

[BandarLover]

Waaahhh! How could I forget Gaiman?! I'm about to start Stardust.

And now thanks to this thread, I'll be starting some other new books later.

[Edi]

I'm going to second the people who said Guy Gavriel Kay writes good stuff. I've read Tigana and Sailing to Sarantium and they were great.

Likewise with Cecilia Dart-Thornton, the Biterbynde series was good, even if it took me a fairly long time to read it.

Sarah Ash's Tears of Artamon (Lord of Snow and Shadows, Prisoner of the Iron Tower, Children of the Serpent Gate) is great, even though I largely detest books where the premise seems too reminiscent of historical Europe with some fantasy flavorings on top. For this reason I almost hurled Karen Elliot's first book into a wall, since I'd just read two or three series with too many similarities, but I'll have to get back to it.

One writer that I have not yet seen mentioned here is David Farland and his Runelords series. Elizabeth Haydon's Rhapsody series is also a good one, even though some elements of it are annoying. Both it and Farland's Runelords certainly can't be blamed for lack of originality either.

[Teraswaerto]

Edi,
I don't remember the descriptions as "feasting", not any more than in Prince of Nothing certainly, and I found Bakker's alien flesh-lovers and their rape-driven creations far more disturbing than anything in A Song of Ice and Fire.

[Teraswaerto]

Gaiman is great. His main work is The Sandman, which was published as a comic book between 1988 and 1996. It's been collected into 10 albums which are still in print I think.