Can you rec me some fantasy?

[lobelia321]

I read very little fantasy (except for Ursula LeGuin and Lord of the Rings) but I know many of my trusty Friends do read it (and even write it).

So can you rec me a novel or two, bearing in mind I am a novice to the genre? (And kind of resistant to the sub-Tolkienesqueness of it all but open to persuasion!)

Oh yes, and I know naominovik's books, *g*.

It seems that I have invented a fantasy plot bunny despite myself and now I feel I need to do some research into the genre!

Comments

[mir8lle.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know to what extent these are the sort of traditional fantasy stories you're thinking of, but I can strongly recommend G. R. R.Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series, as well as Robert Jordan's 'The Wheel of Time' series.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not really thinking of any 'traditional' fantasy stories as I didn't even know there were 'traditional' fantasy stories (as opposed to any other kind) but now that you say it, it seems obvious that yes, there must be 'classics', as with any genres. *is woefully ignorant of all things fantasy*

Thank you for teh reccage! (And good luck with thesis. *g*)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Aha, ithiliana below has just explained 'traditional' for me: traditional fantasy (meaning a lot of Tolkien imitators? or that is sort of medievalesque sort of secondary world but not really)?.

Is that the sort of 'traditional' you were thinking of??

[mir8lle.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sort of. I think of traditional fantasy being stories that run along the line of 'young man find he has destiny, sets out on journey to find magical sword/girdle/kitchen knife, meets magical friends along the way and marries a princess from far away land'. Personally, I'm not into stories with elves and fairies, so I generally tend to avoid stories like that. Wheel of Time is the exception for me, because even though it is generally viewed as a classic of that genre, while it starts out in the fashion I've described, it sort of explodes into this vast, extremely complicated plot that essentially boils down to a boys vs. girls hair pulling match.

A Song of Ice and Fire could I suppose be said to fall under the second, medieval category, but honestly no amount of explanation can do the series justice. It's vast, tightly plotted and populated by some of the most amazing/poisonous characters ever to have graced print. It's traditional in the sense that there are dragons, and magic, but frankly they take a backseat to the political intrigue which drives the series (or at least they have until now. The later books start to touch on this a little more).

Let me know if you want to borrow either of the first books!

[mir8lle.livejournal.com]

Reading the comments below, if you want urban fantasy, I quite like Nancy A Collins' hyper-violent vampire/punk novels starring Sonja Blue, I think the first one is called Sunglasses After Dark. They're pretty much as gritty as it gets.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

omg, vampire/punk/urban... The sub-categories make me dizzy. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to 'go there' yet but I'm adding it all to my new, specially set-up fantasy amazon wishlist (I have about 13 amazon wishlists, all private, and all basically designed as a kind of online filing cabinet).

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh thank you for the details plot outline. All helps me to navigate through the rapids and swamps of the weird'n'wonderful fantasy world. *dips toe in cautiously*

Traditional fantasy sounds hilarious! I want to read about the Magick Kitchen Knife!! (Um. Not.)

Thank you for borrowing offer! May well come back to this. (I mean it's not as if I haven't got 38 non-fantasy 'to be read' books stacked up on the carpet throughout the house... argh, what am I doing, taking on board a new genre?)

*whispers* Before last summer, I hadn't even read any genre novels. I decided that I needed to read some and marched out to get myself some thrillers. And then I read Harlequin/Mills & Boone sheikh romance!!!!!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Are you wanting traditional fantasy (meaning a lot of Tolkien imitators? or that is sort of medievalesque sort of secondary world but not really)?

I have a bunch of fantasy writers I adore, but they are more and more urban fantasy (not necessarily in cities, but fantasic elements in a recognizably contemporary world).

Alternate world: Barbara Hambly (Dark series), Robin McKinley (one of most famous/well known; her revisions of Beauty are great, and she took on a major adult theme in Deerskin (father raping daughter)), Patricia McKillip (connected to Tolkien but having a unique take with female protagonist, lovely stylist).

Lois McMaster Bujold (totally awesome Chalion series--she will seriously wipe you out in major way that only Bujold can).

Diana Wynne Jones for some very quirky and amazing stuff (Dalemark series is her more traditional stuff). One of my favorites is Dark Lord of Derkholm which spoofs the Dark Lord plot in amazing ways (followed by the Year of the Griffin--these are a bit more YA in that some major characters are adolescents, but they're superb).

Charles de Lint (one of the major poeple in urban fantasy, many of his novels set in a North American city: his theory is that the fantastic being immigrated to Canada and the US (he's Canadian) with the Europeans, and there is a mix of fantastic worlds, practices, realities. Superb with women (a lot of the traditional male fantastists do the standard male hero quest plot--Robert Jordan is most famous, David Eddings at least gets a bit of humor into the Ponderous Archetypes in his early series before he started repeating everything).

Diane Duane's "Take of the Five" series is the only bisexual erotic alternative world fantasy I know of (and she started writing Tolkien fanfic and wrote it into her own universe)--fire demons, dragons, because one thing that sets her stuff apart from Tolkien is wow sex! The Door Into Fire; the Door INto Shadow; The Door Into Sunset.
Duane's Young Wizard series is one of the best wizards learning their craft series ever (makes Rowling look like a penny-ante player in my humble opinion).

Mary Gentle: besides her great GRUNTS (think LOTR from the Orcs point of view), she does amazing kick ass mind fucking historical fantasies (Ash A Secret History) that are alternative realities of medieval Europe.

Um, I think I should stop now....

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Wow, thank you very much!! Of all those authors you list the only one I had even remotely heard of is Diana Wynne Jones (and that only because of the Howling Castle film). This is a great rec list, especially as you give me all this bonus background info. And now that you say it, it seems evident to me that there must be a lot of tedious macho stuff fluttering around in fantasy land -- whereas the most promising element to me would be the very potential of subverting all that patriarchal stuff and imagining oneself into other possibilities. So, yes, great, thanks for all the gender and sexuality tips!

[travelingcarrot.livejournal.com]

I scrolled down to see if ithiliana had rec'd Diane Duane. She very kindly gave me several of the "door into" series and I love them to bits. I especially like the way doing magic costs the magician emotionally and physically., as well as the assumption of bisexuality. Only trouble is they are hard to find - you will have to trawl ebay etc.

[mandalaya.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought of GRR Martin too. But when I made that recommendation, I was thinking more of Mercedes Lackey, esp the Herald series, Raymond E Feist's Riftwar and Empire series, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and Julian May's Pliocene Exile series.

If you're going to write fantasy, it might as well be a series! There are several other examples, but I enjoyed all of these, they're successful, and your synopsis reminded me of them.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know Pullman!! An author I recognise! I love that trilogy and, heh, here's a sign of my prejudice: because I love it so much I hadn't even slotted it into the 'fantasy' category in my brain. *g*

Series! omg, what a thought. Yes, I guess, there are all sorts of other conventions in the fantasy genre besides the, well, the fantasy. Formal conventions, such as series. Or: trilogies?!

Well, I don't want to be pinned down, though. In my experience, I start something as a short little ficlet and before you know it, it's a tapeworm-long WIP: I don't plan these excrescences! And I certainly don't want to be bogged in fantasy for too long... But yes, it's an interesting thought! *feels dizzy now*

And thanks so much for teh recs!

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, followed some 2 decades later by The Privilege of the Sword and (with Delia Sherman) Winter King. It's billed as "a melodrama of manners", is an AU, and contains the most subtly deadly politics I've read for a long time.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, interesting. 'Melodrama of manners'. Egads, it's an entire world out there. Well, I guess I suspected that... it's such a well-established genre. Um... isn't all fantasy AU? *is clueless*

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily all AU. If, for example, you count Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill as fantasy, then the children in it belong to "this world". They begin their adventures from "the everyday"; and don't move from the earth. Likewise the Nesbitt 5 Children and It series.

In contrast, the Kushner/Sherman world is completely self-contained and has its own alternate (very elaborate) history, geography and political structure; which parallels some parts of this-world history, but doesn't overlap or relate.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. Now I understand! Thanks for clarifying! *wrestles with thorny new world of fantasy lingo*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Emma Bull's War for the Oaks -- contemporary urban fantasy.

Barry Hughart's Chinese-mythology series: Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.

Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell -- a historical novel, with magic.

Shannon Hale's fairy-tale retelling, Book of a Thousand Days.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

You're the second person mentioning 'urban fantasy' to me -- I've already learned a ton just from this post! I didn't even know there was such a sub-genre as urban fantasy! Well, this is all tremendously interesting and thank you so much for teh reccage. So many people are into this genre!

I wonder if there's a particular connection between slash and fantasy, or if this is just how it would pan out in 'the general population', similar percentage of fantasy readers.

Goodness, looking at my icon I realise that I had completely forgotten to slot HP into the 'fantasy' category. Hm, I seem to have read a tiny bit more than I had at first thought...

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

Definitely depends what sort of thing you're looking for: Tolkienesque, secondary-world (e.g. happens in another world), urban (happens in contemporary urban setting), historical ...?

The last few good fantasy novels I read include:
- Territory, by Emma Bull (alt history Western: Gunfight at the OK Corrall meets feng shui)

- Melusine, by Sarah Monette (secondary-world, wizards and thieves, magic, slashtastic)

- The Rainbow Opera, by Elizabeth Knox (secondary-world with an Edwardian flavour, surreal dreamscapes)

- The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue (contemporary America, changelings, reminded me of The Time-Traveller's Wife)

There are a lot of others I would recommend but these are all well-written and above average, plus they are standalone novels (well, the Knox is a duology but both short) and don't rely on genre conventions.

Swordspoint, by the way, is not only a very very good book but a prime example of a fantasy novel without magic. It's surprisingly hard to think of others.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much, Gloria! I trust your judgement on these things. And it's quite interesting, some of the ones you recced seem to be a kind of hybrid 'literary fantasy' while some of the others I've looked at seem much more firmly entrenched within their genre world. It's been illuminating! I've set up an amazon fantasy wishlist so I can collect all these recs together in one place, and I've learned a lot just by gazing at the book covers and skimming the amazon reviews!

Of course, the word 'slashtastic' immediately meant that this particular one zoomed to priority number one on my 'to purchase' list... :-)

Thanks also for warning me about Swordspoint. I will look at everything, though, and make up my mind, as I usually do, from a) the cover and b) the first paragraph. Nice to know, btw, that there are fantasy books that are not a trilogy or a 17-volume series!!

Definitely depends what sort of thing you're looking for
I have no idea what I'm looking for! This post has already taught me that there even is such a thing as sub-genre genre, urban fantasy, 'traditional' fantasy, and that these things come in series! i am the waiter in Fawlty Towers: I know nothing!

Intriguing that fantasy = magic. This, I admit, I wouldn't have expected. Though, now that you've said it, it seems evident: I always wondered what distinguishes sci fi from fantasy (besides the absence of mother ships) and perhaps now I know?

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Whoops. I totally misread that. I thought you wrote 'an example of a not very good book'. But you wrote 'a very very good book'.

*rubs eyes*

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

Nah, Swordspoint is a novel I recommend very highly -- and one I reread from time to time, for the sheer stylishness.
(It is also slashtastic. Coincidence? Who can say?)

I've definitely gone for the literary end of fantasy, and avoided long series: there are writers I admire a lot (K J Parker, for example, or Steven Brust) who I wouldn't recommend to someone coming fresh to the genre.

At least two one of those novels have has excerpts available online ...
... gah, no, excerpts of Melusine have disappeared.
http://www.sff.net/people/kushnerSherman/Kushner/swordspoint.html

When thinking about the sf/fantasy distinction, I used to find the technology/magic spectrum useful: is the stuff explained and sciency or mystical and magicky? But this is not always useful, as there's a lot of soft (psychology, Virtual Reality, Godlike Ancients) sf and a lot of hard (forgotten tech now classed as magic, alternate science e.g. alchemy, quantum Stuff) fantasy.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Incredibly helpful distinction (or not!) sf vs fantasy. I used to read quite a bit of scifi in my teenage years and am a bit more familiar with that -- but lordy-be, sci fi in the 70s was very macho. Asimov! There was only The Left Hand of Darkness to swoon over, and The Dispossessed which I didn't understand at the time but it resonated with me for decades until I re-read it and fell in love.

I skimmed that chapter you linked from Swordspoint (no time to read in detail! no time even to type this comment, argh! I should be marking!) and it was very interesting to read. Interesting because it is not a style that normally appeals to me at all. If I had just picked this up in a bookstore without recs, I would put it back on the shelf after the first sentence. Too many commas, too many semi-colons, too may descriptions piled on top of one another, too many clichés (windows as broken maws, roofs as fairy tale village, blood as ruby). But, and this is the strange bit, it is a style that I find totally easy to do. It is, in fact, a style that comes very naturally to me and that I have spent many fics and writing experiments trying to oust and overcome.

So reading this was weird, in a psycho kind of way.

*goes off to ponder*

I'm going to look for some of these at Amnesty International later on today. The great thing about fantasy is that it's a very well-established second-hand genre!

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

not sure that's a very typical chapter from Swordspoint, now I think of it -- that very visual fairy-tale imagery is part of it, but what made it click for me was the juxtaposition of that and the mundane human stuff.

I have finished that bloody review! well, first draft. I am so relieved! All I have to do now is polish and send! (And read another novel and review it by the end of the week.)

[shaenie.livejournal.com]

Sherri Tepper. Sherri Tepper. OMG SHERRI TEPPER.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Okay! *laughs* Sherry Tepper it is, then.

[giglet.livejournal.com]

A few favorites:

"The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle.

The "Dark is Rising" series by Susan Cooper.

"Moonwise" by Greer Gilman (which I suspect you would love, although good luck finding it).http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/619829.html?mode=reply&style=mine
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"The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling, multiple years, very worthwhile.

"Little, Big" by John Crowley. This was a life-changing book for me.

"Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

(Pretty much anything by Pratchett, Gaiman, R.A. Lafferty, Jane Yolen, or Kelly Link.)

You can also check out The World Fantasy Awards. At the very least, the stories on the short list are not genre dreck.

[giglet.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't know why that URL ended up in the middle of the comment.

I also realized you might like Endicott Studios' reading lists. They are here:
http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/jomareadinglists/

Good stuff!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Merci, m'dear! :-)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for all these extra recs! And goodness, I actually know some of these! I've read all the Dark is Rising, and ages ago I read The Last Unicorn (although I didn't love the Unicorn book an awful lot, I have to admit). And I can't stand Pratchett, alas... Although I love Gaiman! I had completely forgotten (repressed?) that Gaiman is fantasy! The Crowley looks intriguing.

[kiku65.livejournal.com]

As a late addition, I would suggest David Gemmel (particulaly the Drenai novels: they are better than their blurbs make out, traditional fantasy but with an edge) and Stan Nicholls' ORCS series, which is from the POV of the title creature. Reading that is good stuff for anyone who supports the much maligned bad guys of any genre ^_^

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Sorry for replying so late but I've added these to my (by now rather long....) list of fantasy-to-read. :-) And yes, baddies rool.