Stuff the Albion on Monday and that will do very nicely.Could not endorse this post any more.
Also, the Grant Naylor 'Red Dwarf' books are a brilliant read too.
Ps Bill...thanks for the PM
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Top 25 Best Fantasy Books ?
- Thread starter slobake
- Start date
I noticed Wyndham wrote "Day of the Triffids." One of my favorite movies when I was a kid. Looking forward to reading him.
Besides whaddaya want from me anyway? I quoted one of your Welsh countryman in the Ragequit thread. Yeesh, the pressure, the pressure.
Stuff the Albion on Monday and that will do very nicely.
I hope so, I really do.
Anyway, back on topic, have you read 'The Chrysalids' ?
Loved it! Hadn't thought of it in a long while.
Most of what I'm reading lately leans much more towards sf. Douglas Adams was a true trailblazing genius. Pratchett is my favorite author now. But when I describe the Discworld books to people who don't do fantasy, I say "You know how the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy took the cliches you see in science fiction and twisted them for a laugh? Pratchett does that with fantasy."
Currently I'm all over the midst of the 1632 books. There are about a zillion of them.
One of the worst cliches in (sort of)science fiction is "Hey! What would happen if people from our modern-ish times somehow got sent back to some form of ancient-ish times?"
In the first book a cosmic art installation by a race that didn't worry about the consequences of their art sort of grazes Earth lightly. And the place it touched, a fictional town in West Virginia in about AD 2000, gets dropped back into Thuringia, Germany in the early 17th century, during the Thirty Years War.
There's a BUNCH of room for that to turn into crap. So the fact that it's mostly been fairly well told, so far, is amazing.
Those start with 1632 > Ring Of Fire > 1633 > 1634: Baltic War > 1634: The Ram Rebellion > 1634: The Galileo Affair > 1634: The Bavarian Crisis > Ring Of Fire II > 1635: The Cannon Law > 1635: The Dreeson Incident > 1635: The Tangled Web > 1635: The Papal Stakes > 1635: The Eastern Front > 1635: The Eastern Front > 1636: The Saxon Uprising > Ring Of Fire III > 1636: The Kremlin Games
Then there are a few dozen issues of submitted works by fans, mostly decent work too. They are called the Grantville Gazette and there are 40 or 50-ish of them.
Great author, really liked the Secret History and Orthe books.
Could not endorse this post any more.
Also, the Grant Naylor 'Red Dwarf' books are a brilliant read too.
Ps Bill...thanks for the PM
Need to pick up the rest of those, I've only read "Backwards".
I did read those. I expected to really enjoy them based on my love for HHGTTG but for some reason they didn't do much for me. I thought they were very well written and rose to the high literary standard I expected but I just thought they were . . . kind of boring.
I know - BLASPHEMY!
The list is somewhat focused Slo
Stephen Brust - Vlad Taltos series. The early books were some of my favorite fantasy written. Later some of the side projects disappointed me greatly as they were tedious and supremely uneventful. I had HUGE hopes for them as I was immensely interested in the characters and their back grounds. They failed to deliver on any level imo. Those are referred to as the romance novels...
Terry Goodkind - Sword of Truth series. The first book, Wizards first Rule is as good a book as fantasy can deliver. The books are massive in size but manage to keep a good pace and deliver everything I love about the genre.
Michael Moorcock - I love English authors and he is my favorite. He may not have been the inventor of the anti hero but he sure perfected it and made it his own. I also loved that he linked some of his works in a shared multiverse interweaving characters between series. The Eternal Champion and Jerry Cornelious are excellent and the last paragraph of the Elric saga is my favorite ending to a book. Any book. Ever.
Jack L. Chalker - I loved the way he put sentences together. He also had a real knack for creating characters and then letting them grow in his books. Four Lords of the Diamond series, All of the Well of Souls books including the Watchers, Dancing Gods series, Ring of the Masters series, Changewind series, Wonderland Gambit series ... on and on. SO good.
Fred Saberhagen - Empire of the East series, Book of Swords and the Lost book of Swords series, Berserker series ( sci fi ). He was a very gifted story teller.
Stephen R Donaldsons Chronicals of Thomas Covenant books. Thomas Covenant is exceedingly hard to like as a main character, but his growth as a person throughout the books ( and it takes all of them ) makes him bearable at the end.
The Legends Trilogy by Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman are some of the best fantasy written. Exceedingly memorable characters and stands as one of the few authors that made me so distraught that I put the books down for a while because they killed a beloved character off. I was devastated.
Elizabeth Moon. The Deed Of Paksenarrion series is a fantastic read. The Speed of Dark is also a fascinating read by Moon.
Damn! Resurrection of the dead! Where you been Funky?
Oh,...a bit old but Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
