malkav11
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 59
Registered: 01-05-2007
IP: Logged
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Re: Essential Fantasy (+1)
Interesting to be reminded of where I was at, reading-wise, back in '07. I still stand by most of that.
Robin Hobb is amazing, if a mite depressing.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen is now finished and even more amazing collectively than I had thought back then. I wound up spending like four or five solid months reading all ten books in sequence and...man, that was an intense experience. The level of planning that went into that thing is incredible. He very clearly knew exactly where he was going from the very beginning and things tie into one another in an immensely intricate web, all there from the start. There's been a couple of followup books in the same world, addressing some side questions that don't directly relate to the main narrative of the series, but at this point I don't think I could go back to that well. It's incredible, but it's draining.
Joe Abercrombie's emerged as a major talent in gritty fantasy, with a fantastic trilogy (The First Law) and then three subsequent standalone works in the same setting and sharing certain characters, but evoking other sorts of story. I think probably the highlights are The Heroes - an exhaustive and uncompromising tale of a bloody three day battle as well as a phenomenal meditation on heroism - and Red Country - a sort of classic western with imperfect characters and outright villains trying their luck outside the furthest reaches of the law and nobody much getting what they deserve.
Daniel Abraham's also one to watch. His Long Price quartet is meticulously crafted, exquisitely written, and conceptually innovative. Each book is its own sort of story with its own emphases and purpose, but collectively they form a sort of biography of the key moments in the life of one exceptional man and his country. And then he's got one of the best urban fantasy series I've read under the pseudonym MLN Hanover, and is one half of the team working on the excellent moderately hard-SF Expanse trilogy (under the pseudonym James S.A. Corey).
And one more to round out the lot:
Check out K.J. Parker. Many of the books Parker's written are light on any purely fantastical elements, focusing more on the actual mechanics and rhythms of medieval/renaissance era living in fictional realms, but a couple of the trilogies have elements of more traditional fantasy. All of them contain certain core stylistic elements - a deep understanding and emphasis on how, e.g., smithing or fencing or engineering or whatever actually work, a fascination with human nature and peccadilloes, dry, black humor, and a very keen, almost dissective understanding of the characters, coupled with a certain distance from them whether they behave in heroic ways or perform unconscionable acts. And, oh yeah, the sense that the author has never heard of this "happy ending" nonsense and wouldn't particularly hold with it if they had. (Not much is known about K.J. Parker. Not even gender.)
Make no mistake - they're bleak books. But they're also extremely well written and often surprisingly funny in an occasionally morbid way.
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