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[Lesifoere]

Speaking of China Mieville, I just picked up Perdido Street Station and plan on reading it after I finish the Prince of Nothing. Sounds very interesting.

It is very, though PSS is somewhat weak on characterization and heavy on setting/weird stuff. The Scar, I feel, is his best book--rich both with ideas and characterization that doesn't feel like just an instrument for info-dumps about strange magic and strange monsters.

Re: Simmons, I really did enjoy Hyperion and most of Fall apart from that which I shall not speak of again. Particularly liked the AI Ummon, whose speech patterns are crazy and gimmicky but fun. Hell, I even picked up Ilium and Olympos (granted, at a used bookstore).

 

[Solohk]

Lesifoere answered for me, though I'll add that being an evangelical Christian hippy seems to be a prerequisite for not throwing up periodically when reading his SF (there's more than just the Hyperion series and it's not the worst of it either).

I must be an exception to that rule then. Maybe his other SF is crap (or more crappy in your opinion) but I included it because I haven't read much Sci-Fi/Fantasy, so if I just included my favorites it would be a very short list:
-Dune
-The Mote in God's Eye
-and likely The Prince of Nothing series (on book 2 of 3 at the moment)

His horror is very, very good though. If you like Simmons, that's what you should be reading.

That might be why I liked the priest's story so much then, because his encounter with the cruciform and the dread he experienced when he put it all together was great in my opinion.

Edit:

It is very, though PSS is somewhat weak on characterization and heavy on setting/weird stuff. The Scar, I feel, is his best book--rich both with ideas and characterization that doesn't feel like just an instrument for info-dumps about strange magic and strange monsters.

Just looked up The Scar on Barnes and Noble and decided to add it to my wish list so I don't forget about it. Thanks for the recommendation.

Re: Simmons, I really did enjoy Hyperion and most of Fall apart from that which I shall not speak of again. Particularly liked the AI Ummon, whose speech patterns are crazy and gimmicky but fun. Hell, I even picked up Ilium and Olympos (granted, at a used bookstore).

Yeah, I really liked Ummon as well. I also liked the "secret" of the TechnoCore, even if I should have seen it coming.

Anyway...

 

[WanderingThrough2]

Here's a quick list of five fantasy authors whose work is demonstrably better than AD&D fanfic novels. They're all quite different from each other and none is without its flaws--what is?--but if you haven't read them, you might as well. I've included a book to start with from each author.

Gene Wolfe (Shadow of the Torturer)
Robin Hobb (Assassin's Apprentice)
Patricia McKillip (Forgotten Beasts of Eld)
George Martin (A Game of Thrones) (though I'm not a fan)
Guy Kay (Tigana)

There are countless other authors also better than the AD&D fanfic authors--really, pulling any random book off the shelf in the fantasy section at Barnes and Noble will do you better--but these five have sufficiently distinctive styles to be worth singling out. I've left off fantasy/scifi hybrids (like Hyperion), "literary fantasy" (like Jonanthan Strange & Mr. Norrell), and classics (like The Once and Future King or Lord of the Rings or Robert E. Howard's books). These are all contemporary writers producing very good, but basically still mass-market fantasy (Wolfe is debatable). Each has better style, more complex and interesting characters, more engaging stories, more moving sacrifices, more affecting romances, more thrilling battles, more chilling horror, more unnerving strangeness, and so on than Weis & Hickman. Put otherwise, I do not believe there is a single dimension along which Weis & Hickman's ouvre outperforms any of the best works of these authors except, I suppose, adherence to D&D settings.

 

[Seboss]

Man, oh man! Once in a while, you get something really, really good off these forums, and this--calling out Dragonlance as the pinnacle of fantasy fiction and, by implication, suitable to someone older than a teenager--is just perfect."

I wasn't referring to Dragonlance but to The Death Gate cycle. Which is pretty good as far as I remember it.

And I think Hyperion is fantastic. Fall of Hyperion, not quite so.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

If we expand a little, the short story "Tygers" in Green Lantern is also exquisite.

 

[Seboss]

I'm curious about Moorcock. I never read anything from him, though I played Stormbringer and Hawkmoon for a while.
I heard all kind of good and bad things about him. So, what's the position of the Codex on that?

 

[Disconnected]

[...] if I just included my favorites it would be a very short list[...]

Not a bad one though. If you want a couple of suggestions based on those, I think you also might like Asimov's Foundation stories, Brian Aldiss' Helliconia series and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, just to name a few.

As for Simmons, perhaps it'd be more honest of me to say that I intensely dislike reading hard SF only to find out it's actually character-centric Science-Fantasy either based on or with strong themes of contemporary Christianity. It's sort of like biting into candy bar, only to discover it's someone's sugar coated faeces. And it's all the worse because - as I said - he's a damn good horror writer, but the bulk of his writing is pseudo-SF.

 

[Seboss]

Concerning Simmons, I think Carrion Comfort is a must read.

Lesifoere answered for me, though I'll add that being an evangelical Christian hippy seems to be a prerequisite for not throwing up periodically when reading his SF (there's more than just the Hyperion series and it's not the worst of it either).

That's kind of strange since the guy is jewish. Go figure.

And I concur about Foundation and Mars series. Stay away from Foundation prequel though.
I guess Arthur C. Clarke is worth a read too.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

Kay's first trilogy and his last four books were not very good. Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of al-Rassan, while still incredibly melodramatic, are wonderful.

Of course, complaining about melodrama in fantasy is a little like complaining about melodrama in operas.

 

[Lesifoere]

No, it's possible to write dramatic things without dragging the emo on for a few hundred pages. GRRM can do it; Mieville can certainly do it, and many more are capable of unsentimental treatment of their characters' sentiments. I still remember that shitty, shitty scene in Tigana where the main character is sat down to listen to that song about Tigana or something like that and oh god it hurt. It was just so very, very bad.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

GRRM isn't melodrama? I think we're operating on different definitions. The over-the-top slaughtering of characters is melodrama, too. (And doesn't he have characters moodily communing with wolves and staring despondently out windows?)

Mielville's writing is not particularly melodramatic, which is one of the reasons it's on the fringe of mainstream fantasy.

 

[Lesifoere]

I don't know, slaughtering characters (especially with deaths not being treated with much sentiment. Heads are lop off, they are lopped off) to me is a great deal more interesting than sitting down to listen to a song and getting emo over it for pages with no discernable reason. The guy never knew Tigana; am I supposed to believe he develops this instant patriotism in roughly one second?

Kay's characters don't act like real human beings to me, but like romanticized, high-minded caricatures that tend to populate bad fantasy. Yes, I do include Tolkien's characters in that category, so if you do happen to think Tolkien is a good author--well, we know where our opinions diverge. Kay works if, and only if, you are convinced by the prose and feel the emotions the author expects you to feel, at precisely the degree he expects you to. Otherwise, it all looks deeply ridiculous and silly. Kind of like Simmons' passage about LOVE IS ALL THAT HOLDS THE UNIVERSE TOGETHER, actually.

And characterizing melodrama as a defining trait of fantasy strikes me as bizarre.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

You may well be right; I really don't have any huge vested interest in defending Kay, and I read Tigana when I was pretty young, so perhaps it really isn't appropriate for readers older than 16. My recollection is that the characters were actually complex and fairly interesting, that the moral crux of the story was a good one, and that the prose was very strong (if somewhat purple). There were a few (melodramatic) moments that really moved me (the duke's amputation of his fingers, the finale with Brandin and Rhun, the ring dive). But I'm frankly unwilling to pick the book up again to test whether it holds up, because it probably doesn't.

I do think that you're falling into the trap, though, of equating sentimenality with melodrama. Maybe you're just using the terms interchangeably. As much as I hate recourse to the dictionary, to simplify things let's just use a fixed definition of melodrama: "a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization."

I'm not sure whether the first knock (ignoring the laws of cause and effect) is true of either author; you would probably say it is of Kay, but certainly both authors believe that the actions of the characters carry consequences and try to tie those causes and effects together as best they can. Both authors emphasize emotions--it's just that rage and bitterness, rather than love, typify GRRM's writing. And certainly GRRM "emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization"--to quote you he "slaughetsr characters . . . with[out] much sentiment. Heads are lop[ped] off, they are lopped off."

As for which mode of storytelling is more interesting, who knows? I find GRRM extremely tedious and predictable (like Scooby Doo, you can anticipate what will happen precisely by assuming the most unlikely events to take place--the kindly lighthouse keeper was the ghost; the heroic and loyal old knight gets his crotch chewed through by wild dogs). But I know I'm in the minority there. I might well find Kay unreadable now, too. My last efforts to get back into fantasy (after years of Serious Literature self-improvement) were total failures.

But whether something is interesting or not is a bad measure of whether it's melodramatic or not. The whole reason melodrama succeeds as an artform is that it is interesting.

As for whether melodrama defines fantasy, it depends what you mean by "defines." I think it's more of a shibboleth than a design feature. I do think that it's hard to find much mainstream fantasy that isn't about creating action-packed, drama-intensive moments with larger-than-life characters.

(I confess, too, that I'm a total sentimentalist, so if one doesn't like sentimental stories, there's a fair chance that he won't like any of the books on the list I gave other than, I suppose, Wolfe.)

 

[Elwro]

a decent writer > .... > Perumov > Weis & Hickman > Salvatore

As a teen I read books by all these authors. I liked Perumov for the big bang he applied to the Middle Earth in one of his books, but the rest was just crappy. I liked Weis & Hickman before going to secondary school, I think, when the childish characters became unbearable. But Salvatore? There was nothing, completely nothing good about the one book by him that I attempted to read; it was book 1 of 5 of some cycle.

 

[Seboss]

Well, I haven't touched a fantasy novel in the last ten years and according to this thread, I haven't missed much

 

[OSK]

Another NWN2 topic ruined by the book fagz.

 

[Disconnected]

That's kind of strange since the guy is jewish. Go figure.

I don't see how it'd be any more or less strange than if he wasn't. The stuff I'm referring to is typically stuff that'd interest absolutely no-one but evangelical Christians, and they'd only not be annoyed if they were hippies, so it's kind of strange no matter how you look at it. And yes I'm obviously generalising here, but still.

I guess Arthur C. Clarke is worth a read too.

He generally didn't do (did he ever?) the generational type story telling that Solohk seems to like, though.

 

[Solohk]

To respond to a few people in this thread, I liked the Foundation books, but likely didn't include them in my 'short list' because the prequels were weak (but then again when aren't prequels weak?).

@Disconnected

I'd say I generally like sci-fi/fantasy that doesn't follow the standard chosen one/farm boy finds the magical sword/laser sword and kills the evil necromancer/space pirate clear-cut black and white good vs evil story. I also really like stories that don't really have a "bad guy" or "good guy" but rather have multiple groups with conflicting motives. The Mote in God's Eye is an example. Neither the humans or "Moties" are evil, but both sides use caution and deception to protect their interests and secrets, and at the end of the story the humans have to make an incredibly difficult decision that affects the survival of both species.

Also, I like sci-fi/fantasy that uses the fantastic to tell a story that otherwise couldn't be told and not to say HEY READ ME I'VE GOT LASER SWORDS AND SHIT! AWESOME! For example:

Dune - It's a story about politics, backstabbing, and power, but without Arrakis and the way the government is set up over multiple planets and the reliance on the Guild for space travel, the story wouldn't exist. The sci-fi components are there to create and support the story, not to be in the reader's face.

Anyway, this thread has added a few books to my wish list, which I'm glad for.

Edit:
And of course, I really like sci-fi/fantasy that has a highly unique setting, see: PS:T.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

And of course, I really like sci-fi/fantasy that has a highly unique setting, see: PS:T.

You really should try Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy, if you haven't read it already. It's dense, but monumental.

 

[Erebus]

I happen to mention FR novels and, two pages later, the thread has utterly derailed. Hurray !

Anyway, now that my taste has had time to mature, my two favorite heroic fantasy authors are Steven Erikson and G.R.R. Martin. Pratchett is very good too, although I'm getting a bit tired of the Discworld. And the Braided Path trilogy by Chris Wooding is very nice too. And "The Lies of Locke Lamora", which I've read recently, was also good.

D&D novels obviously tend to be of very low quality. There are a few I still find a bit entertaining ("Prince of Lies" and "Crucible", for example) but nothing more. The Dragonlance books by Weis & Hickman had left me with good memories but going back to their original trilogy a few years ago was a huge disappointment. I gave up after 30 pages, bored out of my mind. The Death Gates cycle was rather good but (1) I wish W & H would stop putting elves and dwarves in everything they write and (2) the ending was meh (a frequent problem with their series). I liked the first book of the Sovereign Stone series, hated the second one, cursed nostalgia for making me buy "Dragons of Dwarven Depths" and more or less gave up on them after that.

Another example of the amazingly poor taste that was mine : I used to enjoy the Wheel of Time. Seriously. When I think about it, I want to go back in time and strangle myself while shouting "How could I ?!!!" but time paradoxes have become a rather stale plot device.

 

[Jaesun]

Another NWN2 topic ruined by the book fagz.

 

[Lesifoere]

You may well be right; I really don't have any huge vested interest in defending Kay, and I read Tigana when I was pretty young, so perhaps it really isn't appropriate for readers older than 16. My recollection is that the characters were actually complex and fairly interesting, that the moral crux of the story was a good one, and that the prose was very strong (if somewhat purple). There were a few (melodramatic) moments that really moved me (the duke's amputation of his fingers, the finale with Brandin and Rhun, the ring dive). But I'm frankly unwilling to pick the book up again to test whether it holds up, because it probably doesn't.

I could probably comment on some of those if I'd managed to finish Tigana, but I didn't. Funny, I finished Ed Greenwood/Salvatore novels, but not Tigana. Not because Greenwood or Salvatore is better, but probably because they're so bad I couldn't help but continue. Trainwreck syndrome and all that.

I do think that you're falling into the trap, though, of equating sentimenality with melodrama. Maybe you're just using the terms interchangeably. As much as I hate recourse to the dictionary, to simplify things let's just use a fixed definition of melodrama: "a dramatic form that does not observe the laws of cause and effect and that exaggerates emotion and emphasizes plot or action at the expense of characterization."

That's the thing. I don't think GRRM exaggerates emotion. Given what his characters go through, it's not strange that their reactions would be extreme or violent or any of the things they are, but the difference is that in general their emotions aren't shoved down your throat. Perhaps I'm biased and rage and bitterness are less sick-making than love, but then I never found--for example--Jaime's uncertain love for Cersei nauseating. For that matter, I don't find any of the characters' more honorable/loving actions painful to read about, so it's not a matter of "zomg i's edgy, i like teh GRITTY stuff." You're probably right that I'm interchanging sentimentality with melodrama, though.

My last efforts to get back into fantasy (after years of Serious Literature self-improvement) were total failures.

...I hope I never get like that. I shouldn't; three years of English lit undergrad course didn't destroy my ability to read anything but SERIOUS BUSINESS LITERAWRY things.

(I confess, too, that I'm a total sentimentalist, so if one doesn't like sentimental stories, there's a fair chance that he won't like any of the books on the list I gave other than, I suppose, Wolfe.)

Haha, I guess it's good I didn't bring up my opinions about Hobb too. I was going to, but then I didn't want to come across as being contrary for the sake of it.

Edit:

And "The Lies of Locke Lamora", which I've read recently, was also good.

Ah, that was another one I was going to recommend, but it falls more in the "entertaining, but not much else" category. Someone on Amazon said it's Salvatore but more grown-up, and that's somewhat right. I enjoyed Lies and the sequel very much for all the funny dialogue, but start thinking and the enjoyment begins to fade: the plot's pretty predictable, the characters can be pretty thin, and it's a little bizarre how every single person ever is capable of spouting clever even through bruised and bleeding lips.

Edit: GO BOOKFAGS GO.

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

For that matter, I don't find any of the characters' more honorable/loving actions painful to read about, so it's not a matter of "zomg i's edgy, i like teh GRITTY stuff."

Even the Daenerys psychic dragon masturbation scene?

 

[Data4]

Okay, so I read the Dark Elf Trilogy, going to the next book praying it would be better than the last. It wasn't. Salvatore's writing is ass.

However, I'd still like to read some decent FR stories, so bearing in mind that "decent" is a subjective thing, what would be considered the best of the so-called AD&D fan-fiction?

Of all the derivative works I've read, the author I hate the least so far is Richard Knaak. This is based on his Warcraft trilogy, The War of the Ancients. This is the part where you get to laugh and point. Right. Anyway, I've seen that he's written Dragonlance stories, as well as stuff based on Diablo. So, understanding that this is all pulp anyway and isn't exactly pullitzer material, has anyone read any of these other works if his?

 

[Data4]

Of all the derivative works I've read, the author I hate the least so far is Richard Knaak. This is based on his Warcraft trilogy, The War of the Ancients. This is the part where you get to laugh and point. Right.

why? WotA was good.

Play on words, my good fellow. In other words, I liked what I read.