Anybody recommend any fantasy books?

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NowWhat
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02 Jul 2011, 12:01 am

Steven Erickson's Malazon series. Lots of character building, and action. He's not afraid to kill major characters so it's not predictable. The characters are flawed, make mistakes, and don't always know what the others are thinking. I liked the G R R Martin books too.



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02 Jul 2011, 12:14 am

NowWhat wrote:
Steven Erickson's Malazon series. Lots of character building, and action. He's not afraid to kill major characters so it's not predictable. The characters are flawed, make mistakes, and don't always know what the others are thinking. I liked the G R R Martin books too.


He sounds a lot like James Elroy, one of my favorite authors.

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02 Jul 2011, 10:03 am

Clive Barker's Imajica and Weaveworld

Tad William's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn

William Horwood's Duncton Wood (first of two trilogies) (similar to Watership Down, but much better, in my opinion).

If you like Sci Fi, then Orson Scott Card's Ender series is excellent.



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05 Jul 2011, 8:22 pm

The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. It's about a family of good-guy necromancers fighting evil necromancers and undead using magical bells. In the second book, there's a girl who I really identified with, who's growing up expecting to be something she isn't - she's from a family of clairvoyants, but she's not clairvoyant herself.



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05 Jul 2011, 10:25 pm

My favorite fantasy books are probably Charles R. Saunders's Imaro books (there are four of them, but I've only read the first three so far). They're unique from most other fantasy novels in that they draw upon African rather than European mythology. Definitely worth reading if you want a more exotic setting than usual!


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06 Jul 2011, 12:43 pm

pakled wrote:
Cook - not sure of the first name, but it's Wizards meets programmers. Wizardry Compiled, is one of them.

I don't think Rick Cook has an overarching title for that series. The titles of which I'm aware (in approximate sequence) are:

Wizard's Bane
The Wizardry Compiled
The Wizardry Cursed
The Wizardry Consulted


I understand there may be more in the series, but I haven't found them yet. He also wrote a fun light fantasy novel called Mall Purchase Night, in which a night security guard at a shopping mall discovers that the place was built on an ancient elfin power source - and that he is the only person standing between Earth, and its destruction by the powers of Faerie...

If you like your fantasy with a sci-fi tinge, I can also recommend Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels (starting with Dragonflight). Basic setup - the planet Pern was colonized long, long ago - so long ago that the humans don't remember that they're from another world, although their oldest lore says their ancestors had superior technology. Those humans with the requisite mild telepathy are trained to link with the telepathic dragons they breed, in order to fight the incursions of alien spores called Thread, thrown onto Pern every two hundred years by the eccentric-orbit planet called the Red Star. They've fallen into disregard, though, because it's been four hundred years since the last Threadfall, and many people think the Thread are no more. But now, the Red Star is growing brighter in the sky, and bronze rider F'lar is trying to make people remember the old songs about what that means...


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06 Jul 2011, 1:57 pm

I've already made mention of Robert E. Howard's fiction, but another great author is David Drake, who is very much influenced by Howard. A great book of his, which I had read in high school (way too many years ago) was The Dragon Lord; a King Arthur novel very much inspired by Howard's fiction.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



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10 Jul 2011, 2:20 pm

Drake's more of a 'techno war' kind of writer, I've read many of his works, but hey, no one says you can't write in different genres...


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10 Jul 2011, 2:36 pm

pakled wrote:
Drake's more of a 'techno war' kind of writer, I've read many of his works, but hey, no one says you can't write in different genres...


Actually, The Dragon Lord was Drakes very first novel, back when he was writing more like Robert E. Howard.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer