Timewaster's Guide Archive
Departments => Books => Topic started by: Patriotic Kaz on May 29, 2009, 08:52:45 PM
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This thread is for the compilation of the key figures in the genre and introductory books to them not a list of fun reads... meaning if the person is less known than George R.R. Martin don't list them. I am trying to get a more realistic feel for the genre as a whole (I've always read the genre but i want to expand my knowledge over it). This is adult fiction only so please leave out teeny bopper books like twilight. Also please second other peoples post because without it I'm left with simply one opinion and since i am looking for key figures one nomination isn't enough. Names without a book are open to suggestion also.
List i have read or own and have yet to read:
Robert Heinlein- Stranger in a Strange Land
Issac Asimov- Foundation
Larry Niven- Ringworld
Orson Scott Card- Ender's Game
Kim Stanley Robinson- Red Mars
Rodger Zelazny- Nine Princes in Amber
Steven Erickson- Gardens of the Moon
Robert Jordan- Eye of the World
J.R.R. Tolkien- The Fellowship of the Ring
Ray Bradbury- Illustrated Man
Frank Herbert- Dune
Not Read not owned
Terry Pratchett- Discworld
Terry Goodkind-
George R.R. Martin-
Phillip Jose Farmer- Riverworld
Arthur C. Clarke- Space Odyssey
I'm sure i forgot some but whatever...
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Do you only want SF, or do you want SF & Fantasy?
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SF and Fantasy
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Here's a list I found. Not sure if its what you are looking for, though.
http://www.bestfantasybooks.com/top25-fantasy-books.php (http://www.bestfantasybooks.com/top25-fantasy-books.php)
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that list has some good stuff on it. Here are some novels I recommend:
Fantasy
Steven Erikson - Malazan Series
George R R Martin - Song of Ice and Fire
R Scott Bakker - Prince of Nothing
Joe Abercrombie - First Law Series
Scott Lynch - Gentlemen Bastards Series
Simon R Green - Nightside Series
Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn
SF (I don't read much SF, but here are some authors you may find interesting)
Joel Shepherd - Crossover
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
John Scalzi - Old Man's War
David Weber - Off Armageddon Reef
Horror - The reason I put this here is that realistically the line between Urban Fantasy and Horror is very blurred
Brian Lumley - Necroscope
Dan Wells - I Am Not a Serial Killer
F Paul Wilson - Repairman Jack novels (The Tomb is the first)
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I think very highly of Brandon Sanderson but i really wouldn't call him a major player quite yet give him 5-10 years and he will be asw big as R.A. Salvatore but he isn't there yet
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Karl Schroeder - Anything he's written
Walter Jon Williams - Implied Spaces
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I think very highly of Brandon Sanderson but i really wouldn't call him a major player quite yet give him 5-10 years and he will be asw big as R.A. Salvatore but he isn't there yet
Seriously? You do know that Brandon outsells many of the authors on your list right (including Erikson)? He is a major player according to readership and according to Tor. How can a guy be finishing up the WoT and NOT be a major player?
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Honestly wow i didn't think he was that well known this early in his career wow foot in mouth syndrome and i must say it doesn't taste very good. pardon my ignorance :-\
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No worries, I just think people continually underestimate how well Brandon is doing. I mean, Tor is pushing hard to make Brandon their #1 author.
In all fairness, I think had the whole WoT thing not happened to Brandon, your 5 year estimate would have been pretty accurate.
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I would like to nominate Patrick Rothfuss for The Name of the Wind. It's amazing.
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I think Brandon is doing very well. However, I think other authors such as Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch are more popular/ well-known than him.
Quick unrelated comment. I don't read much sci-fi these days, and the only people I have actually read on Bookstore Guy's list are Weber and Simmons, though I have heard of Scalzi. I have to say, I was not at all impressed by HYPERION, by Dan Simmons. (Although Weber is amazing!)
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Comments like that are VERY MUCH RELLEVANT please make more of them when you feel it is appropriate to do so
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I hated Weber's On Basilisk Station but I like the 1633/1634 collaborations he's done with Eric Flint. I've been told Weber gets better after Basilisk but haven't tried any.
I would add Lois McMaster Bujold. Her SF series, the Vorkosigan series, is top-notch. Her Chalion fantasy books are also very good. The Sharing Knife fantasy books are better if you consider them as two books in two parts each rather than as four books. Her publisher split the first book into two, and I think it hurt the complexity of the narrative.
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I would add Mercedes Lackey…unfortunately many of her books are co-authored, but The Obsidian Trilogy (with James Mallory) was (IMO) her best series yet.
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I'd add Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. I'm not sure how popular they are in the grand scheme of things, but I really like them. :)
They're one of those books that's hard to genre-fy. They're technically Sci-Fi but read like Fantasy, mostly due to the dragons.
Edit:
Dean Koontz seems pretty popular. He writes Horror/Thrillers with supernatural elements, leaning more towards the thriller side than the horror side. I'll read one now and again, but I'm not that into horror.
Also, if you're just going for popular, you can't leave off Stephen King. I don't personally care for anything he's written, but you can't deny that he's huge.
Finally, on the success of Brandon, the fact that he's able to afford a full-time personal assistant says to me that he's doing very well for himself. :)
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I hated Weber's On Basilisk Station but I like the 1633/1634 collaborations he's done with Eric Flint. I've been told Weber gets better after Basilisk but haven't tried any.
Oh much better. Actually I had the exact same reaction to ON BASILISK STATION; it was a Christmas present and I read it, but didn't continue on with the series until about a year later, when two other members of my family told me how great it was.
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McCaffery is great. And Martin is great too, Although he's a talented hijacker like Rigney rather than an originator.
Rothfus is going to be a big star, if he can find a formulaic approach. The Story within a Story is going to work for about two more novels then he'll have to go to a more conventional approach.
I think Doctor Forward is phenomenal but the man is not prolific. Greg bear has a lot going for him too.
I don't read horor, unless it is fine old gothic lit like Shelley or Poe. But Lumley has something going for him, if you can overlook the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
I saw some chatter about Brandon Sanderson earlier. He seems to be a nice guy but there are issues with his work.
Not to be indelicate, but I would never have read anything by BS if he hadn't been chosen to finish WoT. The titles and the synopses on Mistborn and Elantris were real turn-offs and his was one of the shelves I simply bypassed when scanning for new titles. I prefer the sensual experience of perusing an actual brick and mortar and scanning synopses for a good read. His books were too short, sounded a bit too new agey and had substandard cover designs. Layout and design often say more about how a publisher feels about a property than the actual painting selected. Tor didn't seem to believe in Brandon and I couldn't bring myself to try.
I found after reading Elantris that he has potential, but his own work really needs to come up a notch in characterization and plotting before he'll be in the same league with Martin or Eddings. On the other hand he's probably on par with Feist and Howard. But Rothfus does seem to have an edge on him, though both are in the same league. And he doesn't borrow the classics. Rigney stole from Feist who stole from Tolkien who from the Edda. But each put his own mark on the work and we forgive them. But it is refreshing to see someone like BS or Rothfus build a world that is uniquely his.
Working with WoT will probably help BS grow quite a bit. But I have to say, the online release of Warbreaker had some holes that needed plugging and some major issues with Characterization. I think his own work is suffering because of WoT. That's to be expected. He has a lot riding on how it's received. But I do think he gets some undeserved praise in this forum because of his close ties. That is to be expected too, he shares the faith of the majority, who have a vested interest in one of their own becoming the next "Milton or Shakespeare". And he was a founding TimeWaster.
No shame in cheering your own, just remember that the world at large might not be quite as thrilled. :P
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No shame in cheering your own, just remember that the world at large might not be quite as thrilled.
Or maybe just you aren't.
It's Rothfuss, not Rothfus.
What are some of these 'issues' you're talking about, hmm? You've been pretty vague so far.
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McCaffery gets very repetitive, sometimes literally (when she rewrites the same thing from a different point of view). She's a great author to read when you're in junior high/early high school. Then she gets old. (At least that was my experience.)
I love the Mistborn hardback designs, as well as Elantris. (The first Mistborn paperback cover sucked.) The cover copy for Elantris was just the prologue, so if you don't like it it's probably not a book for you. I think the Mistborn cover copy is also good, though hyperbolic at the end. (Please, don't tell me fantasy will never be the same again...let me decide that after reading it, thanks.) And Warbreaker was written before Brandon started on WoT, so whether his own work will suffer or benefit remains to be seen. And...too short? Brandon's books ain't short, unless you count Alcatraz. Publishers prefer books half his length. And I don't see a "new age" connection at all.
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McCaffery gets very repetitive, sometimes literally (when she rewrites the same thing from a different point of view). She's a great author to read when you're in junior high/early high school. Then she gets old. (At least that was my experience.)
Funny, that's exactly when I read her stuff. Middle school and early high school. I have fond memories, but I haven't picked one up since. *shrug*
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Of course the Dragonsiger duo is YA. But while The Dragon Riders has an open and easy language style, the stories have more subtext the older you are when you read them. They aren't high literature, but as post apocalyptic Sci Fi they are pretty good stories.
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The first Dragonrider story ("Weyr Search") was fantasy, pure and simple, with its talk of the "old blood" and all. Only later did McCaffrey change the series to science fiction because fantasy was frowned upon a lot more than science fiction at the time. Her books never made good science fiction. Her orbital mechanics are very bad. (Any type of planetoid/comet with an elliptical orbit around a star so that the closest approach is every 250 years would, at closest approach, shoot through the inner system in weeks, not 50 years!) And in her Rowan books she set the planets around the brightest stars in the sky instead of stars that are anywhere close to each other. Oops!
They're fun until they get repetitive, but they're hardly great literature of the genre. I do think she would count as a key author for historical reasons, because everyone since her has been influenced by her ideas of what dragons are, and every dragon book since then has been either her dragons slightly changed, or a reaction against her dragons.
She does get the junior-high-nobody-understands-my-genius-angst pretty well though. She has some very good characterization.
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I don't care a filp about horror so stephen king and the likes i ignore...
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Brandon's novels are not short at all. The long length of his novels was a serious concern for Tor when publishing him. Since his novels were close in length to Jordan (by about 50K words), but didn't sell 1 million copies HB worldwide, he was an expensive author to print early on. He is definitely still perfecting his art, but he is in the class of authors who are changing fantasy. I do find it odd that you, Renoard, would say that Tor didn't seem to care about him based on the cover art. His Elantris cover is beautiful, and is done by one of the best recognized artists in the industry right now - Stephan Martiniere. His Mistborn HB covers were by Jon Foster, another very well received artist, and they are great covers. Those covers alone (especially Elantris) have sold numerous copies of the novels themselves. Now I'm not saying this because I'm giving him the "home-field advantage", I'm saying it because I read the novels, and because of the hundreds of people who I personally sold the novels to who ALL came back and loved the books. In my experience, booksellers all over the country (with whom I spoke to personally) were getting great feedback on Brandon's novels. It isn't just a local thing. It isnt just favoritism. Brandon is very well received.
Kaz - as for horror, I think you have the same misconception that most people do about horror. It isn't all blood, guts, and gore (and if it is, it really isnt worth reading in my opinion). Most good horror has elements of fantasy or SF in it. Stephen King's Dark Tower is fantasy. The whole Urban Fantasy genre is really just another name for Fantasy Horror. HP Lovecraft's stories are literary horror/fantasy. I'm just saying, you do yourself a disservice by ignoring all horror because then you are ignoring some fantasy and SF as well.
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Also, Renoard–why do you not read short books?? That seems very, very nonsensical to me.…
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@ Shaggy
Typically (in my experience) short novels gloss over characterization and finer plot points. I usually feel that the novel has finished before the author "got out of first gear". Conversely some can be loaded with poetic language that is too dense and obscure to be a "good read". Camus for instance had this problem. A third common issue with short novels is that they may be targeted at young readers and have the excessive dose of Teen angst that Ookla was referring to, without the relief of a satisfyingly mature subtext or cast of genuinely adult supporting characters.
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I think Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer are both fantastic and satisfyingly mature, and they're both rather short. (Of course, neither are SF.)
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@Books
I meant to reply earlier. I wasn't talking about the artists or illustrations, I meant the layout and design work that was done after the illustration had been completed.
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Hmm…I under stand that, Ren, but can you really always tell if a book has that stuff you don't like just because it's short? I certainly couldn't.…
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No of course not. But there are so many books out there in the "slush pile" that you have to have some admittedly arbitrary rules of thumb to categorize and avoid the bad ones. If libraries carried EVERY book published in a particular genre you still wouldn't have time to give every book in the genre you like a fair chance. And buying a book or even taking the time to finish one you borrow is an investment of sorts.
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@Books
I meant to reply earlier. I wasn't talking about the artists or illustrations, I meant the layout and design work that was done after the illustration had been completed.
I was referring to that too when I said I liked it.
Elantris has gold embossed foil and nicely designed title text. Mistborn uses two-tone title text and I quite like the font and the rest of the design. The top/bottom lines look a bit odd in digital form but have a nice effect on the physical book.
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Surprised noone has mentioned Asimov, Chalker or Herbert when talking sci-fi. Really, does sci-fi get any better than Dune, or I, Robot, or Well of souls? Or how about Pohl? space Merchants was great fun.
I am in line with most others on the fantasy side, but would not put Erikson as a "key" author, nor Sanderson. they have really yet to make their mark the way Jordan, Feist, Eddings, tolkien, Donladson, and yes, McCafferty have all done. (I cannot stand McCafferty, but she is influential, and would be considered a "key" author). Throw in CS Lewis and Ursula LeGuin and I think we come close to a complete set.
some people would argue that Terry Brooks should be in there too, but I dont believe so, his books are not considered "must read" books.
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read the opening post there is a list and herbert asimov and all the classics are there...
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Kaz: you are right... oops.... would you consider Zelazny a key author? I thought the Amber series was rather pedantic.
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I actually didn't enjoy I, Robot. I found it rather slow. Then again, I was like nine at the time, so maybe I just didn't have the attention span for it. :-\ Not that I do now. :P
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Zelazny has won more hugos than anyone i have yet to see...6
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Well awards are only a guideline. Often the best work is not appreciated adequately until long after the artist's death has brought a degree of objectivity. However, Zelazny was certainly not pedantic. If anything he moved too quickly, taking far too little time with description and setting. Partly that's due to the fact he has his characters making shadow runs for major portions of the books and that is necessarily vague. But the books are painfully crisp and fast moving, even cryptic in places.
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hmm, just goes to show how differently people view different books or author styles, even people who like the same genre. I found myself unable to finish the Amber series because I thought he moved painfully slow in story setup and never quite got to teh point.
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Surprised noone has mentioned Asimov, Chalker or Herbert when talking sci-fi. Really, does sci-fi get any better than Dune, or I, Robot, or Well of souls? Or how about Pohl? space Merchants was great fun.
I am in line with most others on the fantasy side, but would not put Erikson as a "key" author, nor Sanderson. they have really yet to make their mark the way Jordan, Feist, Eddings, tolkien, Donladson, and yes, McCafferty have all done. (I cannot stand McCafferty, but she is influential, and would be considered a "key" author). Throw in CS Lewis and Ursula LeGuin and I think we come close to a complete set.
some people would argue that Terry Brooks should be in there too, but I dont believe so, his books are not considered "must read" books.
McCaffrey.
I think you need to keep in mind that who was influential before may not be influential now. Fantasy now is very different than it was before. Guys like Eddings and Brooks were influential years ago, and they helped shape the direction fantasy took. Jordan was the same, though personally I feel he was more influential than the others through the 90's. Just like they were influential then (and like Tolkien was before them), authors like Erikson, Sanderson, Lynch, Mieville, Abercrombie, etc. are influential now. They are part of the new group of authors who are paving the new road in fantasy. Just because they have not been around for very long doesnt mean they haven't made their "mark" on the genre. I think you have to include those authors as "key" authors.
Also, personally I dont put much stock in Hugo awards. Those are popularity awards for the most visible authors. I read the last batch of Hugo nominated novels, and they were pretty bleh. It's more of a Fan's Choice award where the voters are fanboys of particular authors who pay to go to Worldcon. They are neat awards, but after attending 2 of the ceremonies, I realized it isnt really about the best novel of the year.
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Zelazny has also won 3 nebulas and a bunch of other stuff... and if you don't put stock in awards and i understand why i don't like card even though he is decorated out the wazoo... well pick up a book and decide for yourself...
Tolkein and Jordan are still influential authors!!!! if you have a fan base as large as theirs its hard not to be so, what you read as a kid will influence how you write as an adult!
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and if you don't put stock in awards ... well pick up a book and decide for yourself...
exactly. i really wish more people would do this. well said, my friend.