And please don't recommend The Name of the Wind, even though everyone raves about it I thought it was appalling Mary-Sue guff of the worst kind.
Honestly, Tolkien's legacy means absolutely every fantasy book is about war, flippin' tedious.

Are we mixing fantasy and science fiction here?

If so, I can't recommend anything more highly than Ready Player One.  Best SF novel I've read in years -- an 80s gamer/geek/popculture masterpiece.  Put the rest of my life on hold to read it straight through, cover-to-cover.

But if you want an epic fantasy series, you can't go wrong with Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series.  Welsh-inflected modern fantasy with a surprisingly coherent back story and cosmology.

Oh -- and there's Zelazny's Amber series. 

The first five books were head and shoulders above most fantasy series.

I want to read your stuff, Quants!


My sib gave me The Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness for a solstice prize. I spent the entire time reading it yelling and shaking my fists in frustration because it was like Twilight for history & yoga snobs who want a better quality of bodice ripper. I'm very aware of the problems with my own writing  so it's hugely frustrating to read a book that's structurally solid, but a complete waste of a tree, imagination wise. ENOUGH WITH THE ETERNALLY HANDSOME VAMPIRE BULLY LOVE INTEREST.  Sheesh ladies, strong dominant male personalities are not the same as overbearing elitist jerks.


I'm also fucking tired of series having read a few amazing one-shot books as a kiddo. There's something about putting an entire story into one package that I consider a semi lost skill.

You hate the Malazan book? You're fucking dead to me, Quants. DEAD.

Just out of curiosity, which Donaldson was awful? I got the first Thomas Covenant books out of the library, and they were... OK. Sort of interesting conceit.

---

You should read The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, a collection of three books (sold under one cover) by Barry Hughart.

They're really pulp mysteries set in an ancient China in which most legends are true and magic kind of works.

The Name of the Rose and some of Avram Davidson's stories would be close relatives, if not influences.

Aye aye on the Master Li Po and Number Ten Ox. Good stuff.

Another vote for the Lankhmar/Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. 

Two cynical heroes in an extremely strange world. 

Classic fantasy, but much more baroque and urban than Tolkien. 

And the grandparents of Skyrim, now that I think about it.

Also I'm pretty sure Lamkhmar is one of the ancestors of Terry Pratchett's DiscWorld's Ankh-Morpork.


A very cool collection of short stories are in Dangerous Spaces. I'm happy to lend out my copy but please don't buy it from Amazon even though the link goes there. It's fantastic not only for the stories but for the creative way about writing about the topics including obscuring a character's gender in a pretty amazing way. So very good.

Thirding Lankhmar.

@quantum - ever read any Gene Wolfe? Some find him infuriating and reactionary, I find him bewildering and exhilarating. Catholic in both the literal and broadest senses of the word.

Gene Wolfe!

I'd call him SF rather than fantasy, but like most things Gene Wolfe, the lines start to blur a bit . . .

Stories within stories.  Worlds within worlds.  Puzzles within puzzles.

Reading The Book of the New Sun (Shadow, Claw, Sword, and Citadel) requires hard work, and multiple readings, and lots of thought, and a bit of research, and probably diagrams.  But it's a transformative experience.

And as a title, you can't beat The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.  (A collection that includes "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories," "The Death of Dr. Island," and "The Doctor of Death Island.")

I'd say Wizard and Knight as well as the Soldier books are fantasy rather than SF, but the Sun books deffo lean more towards weird SF. Either way he's someone that all fans of SF, fantasy and plain great writing IMO should at least try and acquaint themselves with.

Oh, and the Book of the New Sun. For years - YEARS, like 4 years or 5 - I couldn't get hold of Sword and Citadel. This was early 90s, I was like 16 and broke and there was no internet. The relief when I finally bought a copy and got to read it was almost as good as the books themselves. Have to re-read all four soon.

I should get the Long Sun books. 

XK might appreciate "The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps," a poem about the tarot written partially in FORTRAN. 

Perhaps disappointment can heavily rely on one's headspace when reading a given book... Not to say there isn't a lot of trash out there.

I was in my late teens/early twenties when the R.A. Salvatore Dragonlance books came out, and at the time, being big into AD&D, I quite liked them, even the Dark-Elf spinoffs...

I just started re-reading the whole Narnia series compiled in one paperback. I read LW&W, Prince Caspian, & Silver Chair when I was 11 or so... The christian references went over my head at the time. Since then, I have actively avoided them because of this until recently watching the movies with my wife re-kindled my interest. I know there are some noxious elements (which I haven't gotten to yet) and the whole "Sorcery/witches=BAD" thing is pretty ridiculous and insulting, but there is still appeal in the simplicity of the stories. And for a Christian metaphor, it's sure seems pretty Pagan as well - Nymphs, Dryads, Naiads,  Fauns, Satyrs & "River-Gods" are all considered "good-guys"... Either way, I'm committed to reading the whole series, and hope I'm not too turned off, but so far (I read Magician's Nepher and am 1/2 way through LW&W) I can see why the world was so magical to me way back when...

Beyond fairy-tales, my first true love in the Fantasy Genre was Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, especially "Taran Wanderer". I was just at the right age to truly be inspired by those books. I have re-read them several times at several stages in my life, but can't seem to do so with a critical view, unlike Tolkien, which I only completed in my mid-twenties after several tries: The first complete reading was with love, the subsequent readings found all sorts of faults.

Another children's classic I cannot *not* love is L'Engles "Wrinkle in Time" (I do seem to love a lot of fantasy  turning-of-age lit - maybe because the first time I read them I empathized so much... Mind you, I only read the "His Dark Materials" trilogy three years ago, and was very taken with it - Maybe I'm a child at heart, or haven't grown up. I don't think Neil Gaiman ever did either, which is probably why I love his work so much...)

For more recent work, I read Tad Williams "Otherland" not too long ago, and while it was interesting, I was disappointed that it was sooooo slow. 1000 pages, and things only really start to happen around p.700, and even then, at a snails pace - way too much back-story and description.

And of course - who could not really become disappointed somewhere half-way through "Children of Dune"? I think I read God Emperor, Heretics and Chapterhouse out of loyalty and curiosity, but they weren't satisfying... Brian Herbert's continuation aren't bad, but pretty much on par with the above mentioned "Dragonlance" novels, or 1980's film adaptations by Alan Dean Foster (I read a tonne of them in my teens: Krull! - I always wanted a Glaive...)

Sure there's a lot of disappointing Fantasy/SF out there, but sometimes it depends more on where you are in your life when you read them to determine their value. TBH - I'm a bit more interested in finding out about what people love, and why, as opposed to what people *don't* like, or were disappointed with... Maybe I'm just afraid of having the memory of something I may have once loved being shattered...

I'm going to start the Awesome Fantasy thread, and Fafhrd and the New Sun are kicking it off for sure, love them.
@Nolte, really? Malazan, really? Convince me.

@Quantum:

I’m 99% sure that Nolte will back me up…

Malazan – There are come obvious tropes and clichés, both in
characters and plotlines, however, it’s the layering of these, usually nuanced
but sometimes overt, which make the Malazan series so compelling. The scope of
the narrative is breathtakingly complex, slowly uncovering
plots-within-plots-within-plots-within-plots, and personally, I was very
satisfied with how the author converges the story arcs and keeps the climaxes
open ended to spin off new arcs which are subtly foreshadowed earlier. The author
certainly seems to be always thinking many steps ahead, keeping the large
picture firmly in mind all the way. This is no mean feat considering the story
spans 10 novels of roughly 1000 pages each shown from the point of view from
dozens if not over a hundred characters. It’s GRR Martin on steroids…

I also found that many of the characters easy to empathize
with: Most are very well fleshed out and complex, even if some of them speak
with a very similar voice. Seeing as though most of the main characters are
grizzled veterans, it wasn’t too much a stretch or a flaw that they seemed to
share similar personality traits and speech patterns.

It’s not a perfectly written story, but I wouldn’t hesitate
to call it great. Not certain as to why you hated it though… The character you refer to may seem a bit like Drizzt Do'Urden from Salvatore's books, but I found him to be more like an immortal and infinitely more jaded version of an Elric style character - Further into the series, you actually discover who he is and the (reasonable) explanation behind why he is more than just a "A black skinned angsty elven antihero with white hair and a big magic sword?"

And if you did
hate it, what else did you hate about it, and why stick through to the end?

Oh! Speaking of which - What are peoples opinion of Moorcock's Elric series?

Loved the (more-or-less) original six books, and the whole Champion Eternal series, as a teen.

So many killer ideas, characters, and settings.  And the idea of inverting the Conan trope (urban sophisticate instead of barbarian, physically weak instead of strong, etc.) was original at the time.

The first Corum series was my favorite.  And "The Stone Thing," written by Moorcock himself, is the best Elric parody ever:

Out of the dark places; out of the howling mists; out of the lands without sun; out of Ghonorea came tall Catharz, with the moody sword Oakslayer in his right hand, the cursed spear Bloodlicker in his left hand, the evil bow Deathsinger on his back together with his quiver full of fearful rune-fletched arrows, Heartseeker, Goregreedy, Soulsnatcher, Orphanmaker, Eyeblinder, Sorrowsower, Beanslicer, and several others.

Where his right eye should have been there was a jewel of slumbering scarlet whose colour sometimes shifted to smouldering blue, and in the place of his left eye was a many-faceted crystal, which pulsed as if possessed of independent life. Where Catharz had once had a right hand, now a thing of iron, wood and carved amethyst sat upon his stump; nine-fingered, alien, cut by Catharz from the creature who had sliced off his own hand. Catharz' left hand was at first merely gauntleted, but when one looked further it could be observed that the gauntlet was in fact a many jointed limb of silver, gold and lapis lazuli, but as Catharz rode by, those who saw him pass remarked not on the murmuring sword in his right hand, not on the whispering spear in his left hand, not on the whining bow upon his back or the grumbling arrows in the quiver; neither did they remark on his right eye of slumbering scarlet, his left eye of pulsing crystal, his nine-fingered right hand, his shining metallic left hand; they saw only the fearful foot of Cwlwwymwn which throbbed in the stirrup at his mount's right flank. . . .  

In my "trash fantasy" bin there are a few Warhammer 40k novels. They wrote a few about Chaos Space Marines which are a chuckle.

Another total guilty indulgence of mine is John Butcher's Dresden Files. Terrible cliche ridden RPG inspired glop, with some occasionally really creative bits and for some reason I just keep reading them. Some story/style elements are serious irritants- The Catholic Church, and Angels are the default good guys with no irony, the main character is a sanctimonious moralizing twit- but for some reason I keep at it. The last one "Ghost Story" was the worst of the bunch with a "it was all a dream" type of easily predicted ending, but there are some other good'uns in the series. If you like the first one, you'll probably like the rest.

Lankhmar and Amber FTW!!

Quants, if you don't like it don't bother, as it's a massive investment in time to read the whole series. I love it, but it can't be for everyone. BTW Anomander isn't Elric, although of course there are echoes.

I recently read "The Stolen Throne," a tie-in to the Dragon Age computer RPG series.  DA has one of the better world designs for computer RPGs.  It's better done, I think, than some tabletop RPG worlds I've known.  Anyway, I had to try at least one of the novels, so...

Not so much a real disappointment as a "eh, it was all right."  Not terribly imaginative parade of standard fantasy tropes.

I can't say enough good things about Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, though.

I find game tie-ins to be like candy floss or popcorn, they're not disappointing because frankly what do you expect from a Magic:the Gathering novel or a Warhammer paperback? They're the equivalent of Mills&Boon, formulaic but you get exactly what you expect, and lightweight fun.

SPOILERS Excuse me while I delve into excruciating detail about Malazan... prefaced by emphasizing that I do not think any the less of you Nolte & Freektemple for liking it, different strokes sauce for the goose and all that, YMMV obvs.
There are come obvious tropes and clichés
I have a pretty high tolerance for tropes in fantasy as they are the narrative building blocks that allow access into the world without pages of explanation, but I found in the Gardens of the Moon they were intrusive. IIRC there are five or six instances in the book of a main character getting fatally stabbed, and then miraculously surviving. Once is OK, twice is lazy, by the fourth time I just wanted the character to die to reduce the headcount. It got so bad that by the end even though it was obvious the adjunct was going to die I half expected her to return from the grave. I think it is because the story derives from RPG where player-characters often get reprieved just because they are players, which in a novel just doesn't work.

I also found that many of the characters easy to empathize with: Most are very well fleshed out and complex
How odd, I found the exact opposite! Out of the dozens of p.o.v. characters I honestly only found three that were at all memorable- Kruppe, Tattersail and the puppet-dude. All the rest seemed to be three adjectives and a career class (usually an assassin). The Bridgeburners are the A-team, most of the Daru citizens struck me as NPCs apart from the Phoenix Inn player-character party which is another A-team. Each of the factions seemed to have the same structure and parallel characters, making them hard to distinguish from each other, and the repeating tropes made it even harder to tell the difference between them.

I guess the main problem I had with it was the escalation. Someone would be introduced who was an amazing swordsman or wizard, like Batman good, who would then easily get bested by a super-sword/wizard, who would in turn get instantly defeated by an ultra, who then gets crushed by a super-ultra-mega warrior wizard, who then faces an unbeatable opponent who is a demigod, who gets killed by a god, who gets defeated by a bigger god...
For example Murillion is supposed to be an excellent fencer, and Coll is a good warrior. The adjunct beats them both at once without breaking a sweat in about four seconds flat (inflicting another one of those fatal-oh-wait-I'm-alright wounds on Coll), but then later on gets absolutely pwned by some character who will obviously feature in the next book (presumably a member of yet another A-team) and easily beaten.
Another example, Tattersail is centuries old and a superwitchhighmage, but is not a patch on Tayschrenn who can control major superdemons that can level cities and turn into dragons, demons who get one-hit-killed by Drizz't the weredragon, who himself has no chance against the evil zombiewizardlich Jaghut-tyrant, who gets completely dominated by a treestump of magical ominous power. No doubt in book 2 the magic treestump-house will fall to an avatar of the god of axes who will get defeated by the demon of rust or something.

And none of the characters have believable emotions. Tattersail's partner gets brutally murdered in front of her in the first act and she is sad for about two paragraphs and then never thinks of him again. The feeling of battle-weary tiredness is explored in repetitive detail and there is a little adolescent confusion from the thief character but not much else. In fact I found the description of everything throughout to be sparse and insufficient, maybe with the exception of the wagon in the magic sword and the food Kruppe describes, which didn't help the blurring between characters, locations and factions.

And another thing, every single character is secretly a badass superhero with impossible powers, or used to be world famous, or is chosen by the gods, or is actually the world best superspy or whatever. It spoiled a lot of the characters for me to have such heavy-handed backstory which again I think comes from roleplaying character creation.
Contrast the characters with other works and you'll see how I feel- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Druss the Legend, Ged the Archmage, Theon Greyjoy, Chrestomanci, I could write essays about any of them from memory but most of the Malazan characters I can barely remember their names. Characters are the lynchpin of fantasy and make a book good or great, and the Gardens of the Moon had too many that were too shallow.

Anyway I could go on but that's probably enough to clarify why I didn't like it.

Those are all good points, quants. FWIW the first book, while long, hardly does more than set up the world and introduce the main characters. But as I said, if you didn't enjoy it don't bother with the rest, as the style doesn't really change that much. Some of the characters do of course get fleshed out in much more detail, but I think due to the sheer scope of the whole work very few of them get an indepth treatment. That might be to do with the whole thrust of Erikson's work, playing with classical RPG tropes as much as fantasy tropes.

Where's Druss the Legend from? Never heard of that character.

@Quantum

Seeing your points spelled out, I find that I can't disagree with you, however, I believe that I allow myself to get so completely wrapped up in the narrative, suspending my disbelief, that the things you pointed out simply did not occur to bother me. I kind of liked the ever escalating powers fighting each other (Oh no, here's an even badder badass...) and the way almost everyone has a "super-power" which serves to move the storyline along. It read very much like an RPG or Marvel comic-book, which is what appeals to me, I suppose.

I understand now why you can hate it, though, and certainly can't fault you - I just wanted to know why... Cheers for clarifying.

Oh: thanks for the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser recommendation. I may have read one a long time ago, and I remember the Chaykin/Mignola comic (vaguely)... I'll try hunt some down...                          

I am extremely surprised this thread has got to this length without mentioning The Wizard of Earthsea.

McCaffery, Lackey, Le Guin I found to all be not to my taste, but whatever.

Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth however is some serious weird fun fantasy.

Why are McCaffrey, Lackey, and Le Guin listed together right there? One of those things is not like the other.

Which one is the one that stands out in your world, and for which reason? I can come up with several different reasons and configurations for this game...

@Nolte: Druss the Legend is from the Drenai Series, by David Gemmell -- one of the most undisappointingest fantasy authors ever. Gemmell's work draws on his significant knowledge of history and strategy. Can't recommend his books highly enough.

iLibertine said: McCaffery, Lackey, Le Guin I found to all be not to my taste, but whatever.

Oh no you did NOT just put Ursula K. next to goddamn Mercedes Lackey. It is ON. (I am only sort of kidding here; you lumped those three together because what, they all wear tits? Dude.)

Cheers, MC. Have heard of Gemmel but never got around to checking him out.

No, I'm with !FacetiousMordant here. LeGuin is a different kind of writer writing a different kind of fiction than Lackey and McCaffrey.

...Okay, to be fair, my favorite of her books is Always Coming Home, which is arguably not fantasy so much as speculative ethnography. I've read some of the Earthsea series and also think it's not the same kind of fantasy as Lackey and McCaffrey, but I couldn't articulate why as easily; I do think judging all her work by Earthsea is a mistake. What she has in common with Lackey, McCaffrey, and Lee is that she's a female writer who gets shelved in fantasy.

(Lackey was totally my candy book when I was in my early 20s. Right up until I read the one where the awful deceitful villain turned out to be a trans woman. RIGHT you can make a big deal of having Sympathetic Gay Characters out the Wazoo, but TRANS PPL ARE RIGHT OUT.)

Mercedes Lackey's books have never grabbed me. They are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- trashy pulp fantasy. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, I love trashy pulp, but the one or two I read just seemed so messy in their attempt to shoehorn the aforementioned queer characters and strong females into a standard vaguely cod-mediæval setting that I got put off. I've got different issues with Anne McCaffrey, which I've mentioned elsewhere.

Ursula LeGuin, on the other hand, writes intensely thoughtful explorations on philosophical and political themes through the medium of speculative fiction. Her work is wise, stimulating and challenging; her imaginary worlds fleshed out and well-realised; her characters three-dimensional and credible. Different league altogether. You might as well say list, say, "The IBM Plaza, The Mall of America, and La Sagrada Familia", or "Kylie Minogue, Rebecca Black and Ella Fitzgerald".

^^^ Wot MC said. Le Guin is proper writing, the rest is genre wank - again, not trying to disrespect it for what it is as I too love me some pulp occasionally, but there's really zero grounds for comparison between those three authors.

A few years ago, I reread what had been one of my favorite books as a teen, Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. It disappointed me. I think I was surprised at how clunky it seemed, how in-yer-face the "oo! Taoism!" bits were and how predictable the story was. (Note: Yes, I read it before. No, I don't have the same experience rereading, say, old Ray Bradbury or, more recently, The Destroyer novels - which are way more self-consciously pulpy.)

It's made me nervous about rereading the Earthsea books, even though I just watched that anime sequel thing with my young scion. And the books are just sitting there on my shelf, about at eye level when I'm on the couch.

I'm less familiar with The Lathe of Heaven. My personal favourite of her books is The Left Hand of Darkness, which I've re-read frequently over the years and which still seems to hold up.

It may have been her attempt to write a Philip K. Dick novel. Hard to say. Was apparently made into some kind of (TV?) movie... no, make that two of them.  I mean, in some ways a great story. But somehow not as great as I remembered.

I've only ever read the books, I know nothing about their tits.

McCaffery wrote the first book I ever read for myself. Rereading her as an adult I found the writing to be subpar.

Lackey is trash, and I like trash. I didn't like her trash.

Le Guin I just didn't like, Earthsea, Lathe, Left Hand none of them were to my taste. The common denominator with all of these authors is that I read them with an open mind, and didn't enjoy them.

Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth get put in the fantasy category because...they're fantasy novels? And they're good.

I've mentioned several writers with dicks here that I didn't enjoy as well.

YAY!

Drive by link posting because it is awesomesauce and didn't see it in a thread skim.


soon i will be invincible

Oh, yeah, I read that. I liked it; it was a fun read. I didn't want to reread it particularly, though... I think because it depends so heavily for humor on producing the sort of awkward, embarrassed feeling that I have such a hard time dealing with (I have to leave the room if a standard rom-com is on the television).

Staying a little closer to George R R Martin - two series:
1) Joe Abercrombie - The First Law (a trilogy) - The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings.  He's following the Game of Thrones tropes - mud, dirt, betrayal, and good writing.  His next two novels are unrelated stories in the same world.  (Minor characters cross over)

2) Richard Morgan - I love his sci-fi, and I loved his first fantasy novel (The Steel Remains).  I tried the sequel, but realized I have no fucking idea what happened in the first one anymore, who anyone is, or what I should care about.  So I'm in for a re-read.

A little farther afield is Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series - starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora.  Much less weighty than either of the above, they're Oceans Eleven in a game of thrones world - the stories are about a crew of con men in a fantasy world.

I've been getting into Robin Hobb's River Wild series lately. I guess she's not exactly intellectually challenging, but her stories are engaging and her world is well-realized, drawing you in. Also scores points for strong females + sympathetic queer characters having relationships that are at least as realistic as the het characters. And PEOPLE TURN INTO DRAGONS.

LeGuin's Earthsea was one of the inputs into my early teen brain that turned me towards magick.  It wasn't until years later that I read an interview with her in which she stated that the magic in those books was meant as a metaphor for how language shapes our experience of reality, but I think I picked up on that on a non-verbal (funnily enough) level.

Mordant Carnival said: And PEOPLE TURN INTO DRAGONS.

You should like the Malazan books then.

In case you haven't seen this The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

9. Does your novel contain a character that is really a god in disguise?

Grant- the anime has nothing to do with the Earthsea books, please expunge it from your mind and go read the books.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I do want to say that the Malazan books get considerably better after the first one, which was written (but not published) about 9 years before the second.

I bet the names in it are similar though.

Lots of Fantasy books suffer from that problem though, "Ightbur crossed the freezing Oware river, followed by Phosseld and his brother Honeld riding sturdy Dan'tia ponies. He eyed Sulusk the Turathash sorceror suspiciously, little did he trust the Aeta Vodulu and their inhuman kin..."

In fact it's spoofed all over the place- I can't help but use Issendai's rule when reading and I'm always conscious of this;

Number 9 would exclude the Icelandic sagas from worthwhileitude. Just sayin'.