I tried reading George R. R. Martin, on Onei's recommendation, but found it very hard to read. I think I ground to a halt about a hundred pages in.
I'm also kind of sick of dragons. Why dragons? Because you felt like it, fantasy author?
Let's see, I've read some Neal Stevenson lately. He loves his strange subgroups, but his historical cyberpunk is unique and great. I read
Cryptonomicon quite recently, and while it takes a while to get a handle on the story once it gets going it's really good.
I constantly recommend
Ian Irvine, an Australian author who splits his time between environmental disaster thrillers and meticulously constructed fantasy. By that, I don't mean a detailed backstory - I mean that each character has a reason and a purpose for being there and everything they do is believable and feels real. His first series,
The View From The Mirror is a great Darwinian fantasy; his second,
The Well of Echoes, is even better, but unfortunately isn't self-contained.
Isobelle Carmody is a guilty pleasure; mostly because he books break all the rules for a good fantasy (avoid prophecy, make sure your heroes have a reason for being the heroes, don't make your characters act stupid and not share information to draw out the plot, that sort of thing) and it infuriatingly tries to inject half-baked philosophies comparing this fantasy world to the real world and finding ours wanting (duh! it's a
fantasy world, of course you're not going to put the things in from the real world you don't like), but despite its flaws I really like it. The characterisation is really good, and improves as the books go on (not least because it takes her five years to get around to writing them, the third and final book is coming out sometime
next year, when the first was written in 1994) and the cuts to Earth and the echoes left behind by the main characters are probably more interesting than the thrust of the action. Also, there is a totally charming secret agent.
Terry Pratchett's young adult books are far more entertaining than his adult novels, which have sadly let various real-world references, the same three plots and Commander Vimes, who got quite samey around his third appearance and is now well into his tenth, dominate them. The Tiffany Aching series and the standalone <
i>
Amazing Maurice<
/i>
are all excellent, offcolour looks at society. Even though the Tiffany Aching books are partly about Granny Weatherwax, who is still kind of predictable in her badassery, he's managed to get away with it simply because Granny is sick of being such a badass.
I intend to read some non-fantasy soon, honest.
____________________________
What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?
Click here to view the secret text
×Lost.
Yeah, me too. Her two Fitz trilogies are very excellent; I didn't like the Ships one as much, mostly from the prose, not the plotlines. I liked her newest one better than some of the reviews I've seen, though.
