fantasy novels.

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.

this guy says brandon sanderson is the top of the gloomy mountain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z95GJbromsI

oohhhh mookieproof you are reading the absolute best of the genre imo, what an utterly amazing list. If you run out of things to do, I recommend going with the GGKay "Tigana" next, that one will never leave me.

Second all the Naomi Novik recs but espesh Uprooted and Spinning Silver.

McKillip: The next move here is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. All the other fairy tale one-offs are varying degrees of fine to good but they are not TFBoE.

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

L'Engle: Do the traditional A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet. They won't take long and they'll reward you with truths that will form kernels inside you and stay there forever. I know it sounds painful and it's not entirely comfortable tbh but MLE gave me the cosmos.

Broken Earth really left me confused and cold, Idk. I loved everything Jemisin up until then. Maybe I've gotten too unfamiliar with weirdness. I should spend this winter getting much, much weirder.

I'll second Tigana. It's one of my all-time favourite fantasy novels

Patricia McKillip is a pretty astounding writer, she just has this effortless, poetic style, and Winter Rose is a great one for sure. I just bought a book which compiled her Riddle Master trilogy too.

https://icollectible.thriftbooks.com/cimage/1235929318/1.jpg

kirstein (the steerswoman) (trilogy, I think?)

I read these. They're good. Really great in parts about their analysis of the world and of people, and having a certain kind of perspective on both. I don't want to give things away but there's a particular plot arc that these kind of take which isn't my favorite but it's common in works of a certain era. I was actually in the middle of re-reading the whole trilogy(?) but they had just gotten mentioned somewhere and the hold wait time was insane.

i read tigana last year! and yes it was great -- the curse was a simple but exquisite touch

oh i've read all the early l'engles -- first three time ('trilogy') books, the austins, the ones that are kind of in-between like 'the young unicorns' and 'arm of the starfish'. also saw her speak when i was in college and it was very moving even though i am not religious

the local auction house here sold l'engle's library at auction a while back and you could buy a shelf full of her book collection for peanuts. they sold everything in lots. also tons of different editions of her own books obviously.

so wait i meant to ask on here on that video i posted the number one series was by brandon sanderson and he is not mentioned on this thread at all. is that series all that or what?

I watched that video, Scott, and I hadn't heard of half of those books? I took a recommendation from the list and am reading a certain trilogy and it's just another A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES analog where people have sex with non-human beings and save the world with/from magic.

Sanderson is fine, I think? I've read a bunch but I honestly forget what a lot of it was about. My bigger problem with him is that he's a Mormon tbh.

MORMON FANTASY. hmmmmm...okay.

i'm still gonna seek out those mole books.

Sean Russell swans’ war series is excellent. River-centric high fantasy. I think he may have stopped writing but these deserved to be a big hit.

If you want an early 80s gem with the usual trappings elves wizards etc, but taking inspiration from wind and the willows and dickens rather than Tolkien, The Elfin Ship by James P Blaylock. There’s two sequels that aren’t quite as good (he quickly moved on to writing several masterpieces of Southern California magic realism through the 80s and early 90s but is today pigeonholed as the “godfather of steampunk” based on the admittedly wonderful Homunculus and its sequels)

I’ve been too depressed to list for several months now but somehow this thread has coaxed words out of me

*post, not list

nice to see you here!

like the olden tymes of yore.

Hi Scott <3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncton_Wood

imagine tryin to convince someone how much these books will wreck you

they out of print? trying to find new copies don't see any...

Following ilx discussion of Alan Garner a while back, I just now finished reading The Owl Service for the second time in the past week, which never happens---second time was much quicker, though mainly because the whole thing was still lodged, incl. what I couldn't quite remember or forget, to near-quote one character on another, sympathetically and not: that's just how it is these days, in the book and out, to some extent---but mainly, I knew and kinda knew, with a squint sometimes, what had happened, was happening still, is happening still, anywhere and anytime I open the book, the real and modern and fantasy and ancient, recurring and mixing---I found that I did understand it/take it in (incl. class and English and Welsh and gender and generational and generative and other identity markers, clashes, proximities) a bit better for having read it the first time, also recognizing again and moreso the questions that will never be answered: my struggles somewhat mirroring/aping those of the characters, although they have it worse, or most of them do.
Enjoyed the author's afterword as well (btw, he mentions the TV adaptation, filmed in the valley of his inspiration---any of you watched it?), reminding me of enjoying Lethem's afterword to We Have Always Lived In The Castle, another rec if you want to take it as fantasy, personal mythology.

TV version seemed underwhelming to me, they didn't capture the atmosphere of the book very well and the casting was odd.

There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elidor#Television_adaptation
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Shift_(novel)#Television_adaptation_and_popular_culture

neither of which I've seen. Elidor quite infamous in the UK for scaring the shit out of any kids that did see it though, in true British style.

Plus these, although The Moon of Gomrath doesn't seem to have been adapted at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weirdstone_of_Brisingamen#Adaptations

is the owl service the one that takes a lot from the Mabinogion? that keeps cropping up here and there to the point where i feel i should read it.

(yes - The Owl Service interprets a story from the Welsh Mabinogion, namely, portions of the story of "Math Son of Mathonwy.")

strangely, published in the US as "Maths son of Mathsonwy"