fantasy novels.

that said i think fantasy is the only genre i like children's fiction in. (pet theory being that the general theme is something like 'the definition of evil') (i.e. just what you want in children's books.)

the nasty fantasy/anti-fantasy stuff: does it go back any further than m. john harrison's viriconium? were any of the other new wave SF wonks writing like that? .. the books i've read that fit into all this do seem better than the TSR model of making tolkien grow up, tho, i.e. elf sex. one thing for grown-up fantasy to interrogate might be the sort of wonder and fascination the stuff is meant to evoke in you as a child, and where the hell it goes. (oh, i should find the ILE threads with mark sinker's grand tolkien theories and link them here.)

my sectioning off the genre fiction fantasy isn't quite right, bcz there is a sort of high culture interface - t.h. white copping malory wholesale, or tolkien's other reputation as a scholar of medieval english. of course those two were originals and i don't know if that whole bit persists in modern fantasy, except maybe the odd sublimed trace.

are there any other trends in recent fantasy i could have pointed out to me? or is it all hawk-headed rapists?

Friends, more into the scene than I am, often extol the virtues of George R. R. Martin as the best old-style fantasy novelist.

Harrison's nasty fantasy was preceded by Moorcock's, whose was preceded by Fritz Leiber's, mostly his Lankmar stories.

I like Dragonlance, but I'm sorta hokey. Especially the Legends trilogy that deals with Raistlin's tragedy. But I haven't read any of those books since I was a kid; maybe if I tried reading them now, I wouldn't get very far.

The high/low interface has been going on a long time. One of the memes in Don Quixote is his inability to distinguish fantasy and reality because of all the chivalric romances (kights, dragons, quests) he reads. Some of the greatest works of English literature are fantasies: Spenser's Fairy Queene, Shakespeare's Midsummer Nights Dream and The Tempest, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and (though he didn't mean it to be) Milton's Paradise Lost. The TSRish RPG fantasies don't compare, obviously, but there's more to their literary heritage than Tolkien.

i dunno how i forgot about moorcock frankly. i was unsure how well it fit in but i did just remember how elric ends up, so i suppose it's possible. i don't remember the lankhmar stories having much of the same to them, but i never read that many - there is the thing with the american pulp 'weird fiction' sorta thing that i don't know many things about, this thing.

(i just ordered the two books you recommended on the mieville thread off've the library, by the way) (will probably burble about them on here, eventually)

I haven't even read any of Samuel Delaney's fantasy series out of post-adolescent anti-fantasy bias. I think I should get over that, though?

Tom, that old weird fantasy stuff can be pretty nasty, yeah. Clark Ashton Smith loved writing about necromancers and such.

I hope I didn't overhype those two books. Let me know.

I recently "inherited" some Stephen R. Donaldson stuff. Assuming I ever have an urge to read it, is it any good? The guy who left it to me bragged that he had to buy the most comprehensive dictionary available to look up all of the obscure words Donaldson uses. Sounds a bit pedantic to me.

I just picked this up because it's part of Gollancz's classic fantasy series (presumably a sister collection to their excellent sci-fi classics series). Have I wasted my money, I wonder?

If it's China Mieville you're talking about, Bloke also rates that stuff very highly indeed.

I read the Thomas Covenant books when I was 13 or 14. I thought the first three were wonderful, but the second three were a bit disappointing. I can't remember why, now. I don't recall any truly difficult words, but I do remember that he used the word "mien" a lot, which became a little wearing after a while.

I remember loving Raymond E. Feist as well. Again, I don't even remember why.

Anyway, I've read enough of the Mieville thread to see that the books you were recommending were not his, but something else. But I didn't read the rest of the thread because I intend to read Perdido Street Station and don't want to know anything about it before I do.

i also remember liking thomas covenant a whole lot when i was fourteen. i had an RE teacher who thought they were the best thing ever written. i mean an actual grownup. i never did finish the second lot. was anyone sad enough for the final chronicle thing that came out the other uh year?

Deconstructionist philosophy to the extent they deal with the dawn of history, the birth of codified language, when signifiers were freshly coined, and so as yet not "suffering" from slippage with the signified. Also, they stpries are quite meta-, the narratives self-deconstructing at times, if I'm remembering correctly.

J.D., are Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass and The Little Prince children's or adult fantasy? What about Rushdie's fantasies, Grimus and Haroun & The Sea of Stories?

i should look up the neveryon books. (isn't there a science fiction one of his meant to be "about" deconstruction too?)

what about 'midnight's children', which is about superheroes?

This could apply to almost all of his fiction, but probably most to The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17 and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.

The Neveryona series is really good, even for people like me who've never studied deconstructionism and barely know what semiotics is.

stars in my pocket... is like pure wish-fulfillment for the academic-left - as well as being a beautiful love story, and great literary fiction. but i don't think it makes strong statements about literature / reading the way dhalgren does, or at least it's not the point of the book.

dhalgren is about an amensiac named "the kid" who travels to an american city called bellona. bellona has been afflicted by a terrible, unnamed disaster. it is mostly deserted, but has become a gathering-place for misfits. something has ruined the flow of time and space in bellona - streets and buildings change location unexpectedly, roads lead different places on different days, people experience time differently. you may leave overnight, when you get back, a week may have passed for your friends.

several identities are proposed for "the kid", none of which are confirmed. "the kid" eventually becomes de facto leader of the street gangs and nomadic hippie tribes of bellona. this is because he writes a book of amazing poetry. though later, we find out he may not have written the book after all - he may have found the notebook. or was he the owner of the notebooks, before his amnesia? as events speed up towards the climax of the book - which may or may not be the original disaster that "deconstructed" bellona - "the kid" exchanges identity several times, before finally dissolving into ... what?

ok, the novel's not as heavy-handed as you might think from reading my synopsis - except when it is, like the scene in which the kid puts on a sci-fi shapeshifting suit, looks in a mirror, and sees - i kid you not - SAMUEL R DELANY. OMG WTF !!!

no really, though, i found it absorbing and compelling over the length of it's approx 2,000,000 pages. sometimes i was like "this is the best scifi novel ever" and sometimes i was like "this is the worst scifi novel ever". i am really glad i read it, though.

rec'd to everybody!

(same w/ stars in my pocket... and triton, though i didn't like or "get" nova, and ballad of beta-2 and his early shorts (collected in aye, gomorrah aren't all that distinctive - w/ lots of them you feel they could easily have been written by a sexually liberated, hipped heinlein or van vogt or even cordwainer smith or somebody ... but w/ triton and stars and dhalgren he really works the academic/theory angle hard, it really shines if you dig that stuff)

MORE SPOILERS

The aspects of Dhalgren that gave me the worst karates (that's a good thing) were the circular structure and the fact that the novel had happened before to the female sculptor he meets on the way in, and was going to happen again to whoever it was he met on the way out. The unbreakable cycle is kinda heartbreaking to me.

I would describe Dhalgren more as a fantasy novel than SF, personally.

i think the one i meant was 'stars in my pocket'. i had been putting off dhalgren until after i read finnegans wake i.e. more or less never. (i've only read delany's easy books and the autobio and some of the criticism) (i feel moderately shamed over this)

has anyone read a princess of roumania, by paul park?

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/21/a-princess-of-roumania/#comments

"I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force."

right on.

has anyone else read Mick Farren's DNA Cowboys? it deserves some pimping

Did Delany say this? I missed it if he did.

Wait, I don't remember this at all, was I asleep during this part?

the hint is the bitten nails and the beard.

...maybe he saw William Dhalgren!

And I don't think he even had the beard yet back then?

Consider:

http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/FORUM/s98/images/delany1.jpg

So I have this class and I have to pick one fantasy novel to read for the week after next. There are tons of stuff I would love to read, but, as would be expected, most of it is ludicrously long, and usually part of a series too. So any ideas on what's a great, short fantasy novel to read? We're already reading A Wizard of Earthsea, so it can't be that.

David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus" or James Branch Cabell's "Jurgen", perhaps?

George R Martin's 'Fevre Dream' - 19th-century-set Mississipi steamboat action with vampire on board
James (?) Stephens - The Pot of Gold: Irish leprechaunery, early 20th century
William Hope Hodgson - House on the Borderland: mad stuff, also early 20th century, about a house that's a portal to another dimension/future apocalyptic earth full of monsters
Jurgen is great. Arcturus is bonkers (not that that's a bad thing).

cosign on The Pot of Gold, it's misogynistic Irish genius

you could also read China Mieville's Un Lun Dun, kids novel from 2007 that is fast and fascinating

the appeal of fantasy to the 10-14 age group is that most other writing for the 10-14 age group is piffle

well, that was how i felt at the time.

fantasy novels are a lot of fun, if done right.

you don't really pick that up from reading this thread, kids!

the best fantasy i've read lately is still the prince of nothing trilogy, but i'm trying to get into george r r martin too, when i get the time.

I just read 'Replay' by Ken Grimwood - man dies at age 43, wakes up as himself at age 18, tries to live his life right this time, dies age 43, wakes up at 18, realises he's lost all the good he achieved last time, starts losing it, dies at age 43, wakes up at 18...

So it's fantasy, but not of the dragons/swords/chainmail bikinis type.

Very good stuff.

So I finished the new Patrick Rothfuss –– anyone else?

there was a fair bit of discussion on the ile fantasy thread - I love the fantasy genre, lots, and I want it to stop sucking (OR: recommend me fantasy stuff that does not suck)

is there a good thread in this generation of fantasy, or a poll even? pre erikson/martin hegemony but post seventies american dri-fi, that high fantasy landfill indie era that jordan probably straddles quite neatly

@ned thisll do i reckon seems to be plenty of discussion of the big 80/90's hitters and their forebears upthread

god it all runs together in my head now, there was one bookshop two hours bus ride away so getting a new book in 1995/6 meant planning a saturday around it and just turning up and seeing what was there so theres some real beggars cant be choosers memories of slogging through stuff that i dont think id manage a chapter of today, before jordan swept all before him (for me, anyway)

after eddings and gemmell grabbed my completionist attn i went through a few runs of half finishing feist, shannara, a few l.e. modessitt jrs, terry goodkind, tad williams (memory sorry and thorn not otherland)

after i actually moved into town and joined the library id have to take a punt at the meagre fantasy section there, often this involved starting in book two or having to skip book seven, unideal stuff

library did provide first robin hobb book tbf so not all bad

if the topic is post eddings high fantasy boom, up to Jordan/martin/Erikson superboom, is that well enough understood and defined to pick through what might be worth choosing and attempting as a comfort read exercise?

mickey zucker reichert's renshai books had a killer premise and seemed appealingly less cartoonish than a lot of the rest at the time, i wonder how theyd read now

My interest was at its peak around age 12-13 and I'm not sure I'd trust that person for book recommendations. Some things I half-remember as not quite the same as the others:

- The Empire Trilogy: spin-off from Magician but much more interesting iirc...fantasy-Japan setting...lots of plots and politics...plus alien insect civilisation?
- Duncton Wood: super dark super long books about moles going on quests and having religious schisms
- Death Gate Cycle: from the makers of Dragonlance...a bunch of different worlds connected through some plot device...it had airships?

Empire Trilogy was excellent I thought, even if the second book is basically Fantasy Shogun. Feel like it was really more Wurts than Feist.

The Duncton books too, though I remember finding them traumatically sad

moles! i might have to remember those...

So I have this class and I have to pick one fantasy novel to read for the week after next. There are tons of stuff I would love to read, but, as would be expected, most of it is ludicrously long, and usually part of a series too. So any ideas on what's a great, short fantasy novel to read? We're already reading A Wizard of Earthsea, so it can't be that.

― askance johnson, Friday, January 18, 2008 9:49 AM (sixteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nine Princes in Amber

re the meta-ness of fantasy how that can matter:

To better explain what he meant by the story being about death, Tolkien reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet, which contained a newspaper clipping. He then read aloud from that article, which quoted from Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, her moving 1964 account of her mother's desire to cling to life during her dying days.

"There is no such thing as a natural death," he read. "Nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation."
"Well, you may agree with the words or not," he said. "But those are the key-spring of The Lord of the Rings."

...While Tolkien's wartime experiences may have added depth and authenticity to the mythological world he created, the author himself always maintained that he did not write The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for WW1, or indeed any other specific event from history.

"People do not fully understand the difference between an allegory and an application," he told the BBC in 1968.
"You can go to a Shakespeare play and you can apply it to things in your mind, if you like, but they are not allegories... I mean many people apply the Ring to the nuclear bomb and think that was in my mind, and the whole thing is an allegory of it. Well, it isn't."

got into fantasy backwards because i thought the hobbit was corny and therefore never read LOTR until after i'd read several things that shamelessly ripped it off

utterly shameless LOTR ripoffs: shanarra (brooks), the iron tower (mckiernan)

let's get celtic: deryni (kurtz), prydain* (alexander), the dark is rising *(cooper), merlin* (stewart)

oh no: i thought the first three apprentice adept (anthony) books were fine

technically science fiction: pern (mccaffrey), pliocene exile* (may), new sun/long sun* (wolfe)

madeleine l'engle: meant a lot to me but never went past 'a ring of endless light'

fritz leiber: literally only ever heard of this because fafhrd and grey mouser were in a D&D book. also leiber is for some reason pronounced 'lie-ber'

moorcock: don't understand why people stan him, what a letdown

leguin (earthsea): obvs

mckillip (riddlemaster*): rules; haven't read much of her others tho

donaldson (thomas covenant): i will ride for the first two series*; the third is garbage

eddings: belgariad (good), mallorean (awful), cannot speak to the rest

king (the dark tower): v. enjoyable if you can get past the racism

foster (spellsinger): music nerds need fantasy too

pratchett (discworld): fine, whatever

cook (the black company): military porn

kay (fionavar*): great; other standalones probably are as well

card (alvin maker): only read the first two; recall liking them

wells (raksura*): good stuff from the 2010s; see also murderbot, etc.

dunno: kirstein (the steerswoman), park (stonebridge), crowley (aegypt), kerr (devery)

(* means recommended)

started malazon once but it seemed like military porn? not interested in having to know the numbers assigned to army units

it is, and worse besides, you realise about eight books in its just a long form narrative about a card game they made up in college

we have segued into more current stuff this is not a complaint

ive not stuck with them but joe abercrombie is a better writer than most in the genre and the angle is a good one

duncton moles books absolute magic, and heavier than anything mentioned

r scott bakker stuff is truly original, utterly depraved, guy has significant talent but id imagine is quite insane.

in lighter vein rothfuss builds a great world and characters but quite clearly has no idea how to finish the books so i cant recommend

Yeah, enjoyed the Rothfuss and Lynch series but have zero expectations of ever getting the final book from either of them.

Where would you start with Tad Williams? As it was implied in the other thread he was a precursor to GRRM rather than just another Tolkien clone

I tried reading Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower recently, but unfortunately found it completely undreadable

If Duncton Wood counts, I'd probably add REDWALL and THE DARK PORTAL to the list

Also curious about Tad Williams

ive only read Memory, Sorrow & Thorn and not sure I'd recommend that ahead of starting robin hobb's farseer trilogy for a series of that type tbph

melenkurion abatha lads

A decent standalone Tad Williams is The War of the Flowers if you just want to get a sense of the writing style. It's not high fantasy, more of a portal. It's not as good as Memory, Sorrow and Thorn but also it's nowhere as near slow to get going

More good standalones: Patricia A. McKillip's Winter Rose, Naomi Novik's Uprooted, both have teen heroines, managing in deep woods-farm-village-outpost-ov-empire, then disturbing male traveler appears. There must be journeys, changes, challenges, rich imagery and energy.

Yeah The Dragonbone Chair (first Tad Williams MST book) really does take forever to get going, with an absolutely astonishing amount of mopey internal monologues - though then it becomes quite zippy and action-packed. It’s like Robert Jordan in reverse order.

i thought there was a Broken Earth Series thread. there should be. i loved those books. some day i'm gonna read them again. i feel like everything else she does is going to suffer by comparison. i tried to read the Inheritance Trilogy and only got through one book. it was okay but i missed the Broken Earth. i could have lived in that world for ten books.

every time you guys mention Robert Jordan i think back to when i used to read that thread for fun knowing i would never read the books. it was very entertaining. this feeling that people liked something so much that also kinda drove them crazy.

wait, did people here read the Jemisin books? i would start a thread but its been so long since i read them.

started the war of the flowers last night. it's fine but a) not sure i need sad-sack post-breakup unemployed vaguely alcoholic dudes with dead parents in my fantasy right now, and b) not sure i can take 700 pages of tinkerbell's brogue

yeah the broken earth series was great. didn't like jemisin's new york city one that much but damn she really hates staten island

yeah i didn't want to read the city one. that seemed like a mieville kinda thing.