malkav11
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 59
Registered: 01-05-2007
IP: Logged
|
Re: Essential Fantasy (+3)
Some other things:
Donaldson....very talented writer, without question. I really didn't like the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The rape, the relentlessly depressing subject matter. Thomas Covenant going through each book refusing to believe for like, 95% of the dang thing, having some big revelation, AND THEN RIGHT BACK TO UNBELIEVING IN THE NEXT BOOK...yeah, that made me want to strangle him. The Land, the other characters, those were good. But Covenant...*resists urge to murder*
The Second Chronicles were much more appealing to me, simply because he wasn't so intensely annoying. (I think the woman he had along for the ride helped. Even though he really didn't deserve her.)
I grant that Donaldson has a range of subject material, but I'm not so sure about his range of styles. I found the Gap series to be very much the same sort of extremely dark, character-punishing , enormously-depressing stuff that the Thomas Covenant books were (albeit the Second Chronicles being less so than the first), except in SF. I liked it a lot more because the characters were not Thomas Covenant.
Recommendations:
Old Stuff:
The usuals, plus I can't believe no one's mentioned Robert E. Howard's Conan stories (and to a lesser extent, his Kull and Bran Mak Morn and so on stories). Sure, they're pulpy, but Howard's original Conan is a lot more interesting and varied than the stereotype we're used to these days. He's substantially more intelligent than is usually remembered, for one thing.
New Stuff:
Epic fantasywise, Martin is of course a god among men with his plots full of treachery and politicking and his subtle, looming threats and sudden killings of the sort of characters that will survive all 34 of Jordan and Goodkind's eventual books (that's 34 each, not total). Though yeah, I expect they wouldn't be much fun if you didn't identify with the characters, but I've found Martin to have an astonishing talent for making you identify with them. Even people who were/are among the villains of the series. Although honestly....nobody's perfect in his books, and it's a lot more complicated than just good vs. evil. Another thing I like.
But I'd also like to recommend Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series is, I think, right around the same level of quality. Honestly can't decide if it's better or worse. (Definitely a cooler name, though.) Martin gets me with all the political maneuvering and internecine strife while bad things are a-rising. Erikson gets me with the sense that ancient, historical forces are at work. Gods are mucking about with things on a very personal level. Gods who used to be men, who ascended. Magic derived from warrens that are entire, ancient dimensions with their own secrets inside. Military campaigns that make history. I mean, Jordan and Goodkind play with things like prophesied heroes and such, and that's okay, but Erikson's stuff just feels inherently epic without all this gobbledygook. I don't know if I'm accurately conveying how I feel about this series. Let me try again - Erikson feels like he's recording the history of a real place (most of the time) with all sorts of things that are off-screen playing roles that are only revealed in the fullness of time. But not one of those dry-as-dust history class textbooks. If I have a complaint, it's that they tend to be fairly slow builds towards just shatteringly eventful climaxes in the last, like, fifty pages or so. It's not that there's not a bunch of stuff happening in the rest, but it's..well, background. That, and he really seems to write characters less as people than as roles. There's some characterization, but...anyway. Just try it. Gardens of the Moon's the first book.
Other fantasy:
Martha Wells - She's got a couple of other standalone books (both excellent), but her bread and butter seems to be (at this point), a series of books set in a sort of magically influenced France analogue called Ile-Rien. I was going to describe it as Victorian era, but that's not really accurate as the five books she's written in that setting occur in multiple time periods in that setting. I'm mostly thinking of my favorite, Death of the Necromancer, which involves a gentleman thief's attempts to gain vengeance on the man who had his father executed on (false) charges of necromancy. Attempts which wind up turning into a hunt for a very real necromancer who's on the way back and wreaking various kinds of havoc. There's also a rather Holmesian detective and an opium-addicted sorceror. A great deal of detail's gone into the world-building and the characters, as is typical of her work. There's also an earlier book, "The Element of Fire", which I have not read as it had been out of print for ages and I would have had to pay $40 or so for a mass market paperback. Fortunately it has recently been rereleased in a lovely trade edition. I just haven't had the chance to pick it up. And there's a trilogy involving the daughter of "Death of the Necromancer"'s protagonist, of which I read the first book back before the other two were released, and was less thrilled, although it was still comparatively excellent as fantasy goes. I have all three these days, but...so many books, so little time.
Steven Brust, mostly for his Vlad Taltos books about an engaging sorceror/witch/assassin (and a spinoff series adopting a Three Musketeers-like style discussing earlier parts of the setting's history). They're not the deepest books in the world, but they're fun and reasonably original. (Although as I understand it, the setting is from a roleplaying game Brust was in, along with one or two people I know. Hey, he used to live in Minneapolis. I wish I'd managed to meet him before he moved to Vegas.)
Joel Rosenberg (NOT Joel C. Rosenberg, who is a fundamentalist Christian nutjob who writes thrillers about the End Times and Muslim terrorists.). I'm not 100% in love with his writing style - he has a certain love of going back and for with "On the other hand" or similar phrases that's kind of irritating. But he's got a series about roleplayers put in their characters' shoes that may not be original in concept but runs with the conceit in (reasonably) logical and interesting ways. They wind up in something of an anti-slavery crusade pretty quickly, and there's nation-building and families being raised and...yeah. He's also got a newer series about knights working for a British empire in an alternate history where magic works (but the wild, strong, dangerous forms of it are being/have been systematically exterminated with only a few exceptions) and not much technology beyond gunpowder has been discovered. The empire is that of the Pendragons, naturally. Oh, and some of the knights bear what are known as live swords, which come in two varieties, both very powerful and very dangerous - the White and the Red. White live swords have the souls of saints in them, saints who voluntarily gave up their souls to the live sword creation process in order to serve the King and Christianity. Red swords are made from unwilling souls. Traditionally the blackest of criminals and traitors and other evil, damned souls. Genghis Khan, for example.
Much less cliched premise, and I'm enjoying it more...though both series are quite solid. He's also written an SF novel about mercenaries from the new Jewish homeworld, and a couple of Minneapolis-set mysteries (well, not sure how mysterious they are, but you know) about a guy named Ernest Hemingway (not that Ernest Hemingway) and his friends from his squad in Vietnam (also named identically to famous people. Assigned together because the higher-ups thought it was funny.). Him I've actually met a couple times when he brought his young daughter to the weekly gaming gathering I attend. Nice guy.
Michael A. Stackpole: Okay, so he's probably most known for his turns at Star Wars and Battletech licensed fiction, and tradition indicates that licensed fiction authors usually aren't any good, but Stackpole has a fine hand at writing military action in most any setting and has come up with a few pretty nifty settings all on his own. I'm most fond of the quartet of books that start with The Dark Glory War, in which a group of heroes sets out to defeat the growing threat posed by the evil sorceress Empress Chytrine and her armies. And get their asses kicked all over the damn place and then, spirits broken, get turned into her supernaturally enhanced evil generals. That was a nice twist. (That's just the Dark Glory War. The remaining three deal with the efforts of the next generation of heroes. But there are all sorts of implications that come with what happens in that first book.)
Matthew (Woodring) Stover - He dropped his middle name at some point. You may have encountered him as the guy that almost managed to make Star Wars Episode III's wretched storyline work as a novel. (It's not great literature or anything, but it's a whole lot better than the movie.) Well, he did what he could with that, but when he does his own thing he's great. He's written a number of other things but I particularly recommend Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle, about a caste-divided future Earth that's managed to open gateways to a fantasy world and sends through Actors with implanted sense-recording technology to take the role of major fantasy-type characters in those worlds. Not heroes, necessarily. Whatever makes for good viewing back home. And more specifically, about a particular Actor, who plays a world-class assassin named Caine. Who has a deep and burning rage against the class system back home. They're pretty bleak, and Caine's not exactly a nice guy, but ultimately he's fighting for the cause of justice. And maybe he'll even win. You never know.
J. Gregory Keyes/Greg Keyes - So far, three major fantasy series (and he too has written some Star Wars) - one involving a strongly Mayan-influenced setting where everything has its own god, one involving an alternate 16th setting where all those crazy inventions that people thought up when they thought things like aether were real, well, they actually work. First book? Isaac Newton slams a comet into Paris. Good times. And his most recent and quite possibly most promising (if possibly veering off into the realm of the never-ending the way Jordan and Goodkind and so many others are) involves a humanity recovering from enslavement by the evil Skasloi and warring amongst each other with treachery and dark forces arising. Laws of death broken. Briar King awoken. Familial murders. Young love. All that sort of good stuff. I don't know. I think I need to stop now even though I could be recommending a lot more. Getting hard to give proper descriptions.
|
the characters suck because they're meant to be racial archetypes. the plot sucks because it really does have the hole in it that one of those intelligent, giant eagles could have dropped the ring into the volcano on page 2, but that's okay because the plot was just an excuse to visit the various regions of Middle Earth and read the lavish descriptions. there's a reason there was a huge appendix on history and language -- those were the central tenets of the books. "setting" novels are unusual, but they exist and this just happens to be one of 'em.
