Yay! I love this thread!
I’m 6/7 of the way through this at the moment. I can’t figure out quite why I love it so much, but I do. It’s not like most of the books I love, but it’s perfect.
I’d like to give a shout out to Charles DeLint. Some of his stuff is historic fiction fantasy and some is urban fantasy. All of it is a notch in quality well above pulp, with portions that reach the cusp of divine.
I’m particularly fond of Tim Powers:
Last Call - Set in modern Las Vegas and involves magic as probability manipulation and invocation of ancient archetypes.
Declare - Set primarily in Cold War Europe and the Middle East and is like a John Le Carre spy-novel, only where magic and magical entities is at work behind the scenes manipulationg the espionage struggle. MUST read if you like Le Carre.
Anubis Gates - Time paradoxes and ancient Egyptian sorcerors collide as a modern literature professor ends up in 19th century London.
On Stranger Tides - Not to be confused with the presumably putrid Pirates of the Caribbean film where they paid off Powers because it looked like he might have been able to sue them. Involves voudun, the Fountain of Youth and 18th century Caribbean pirates.
All the above are excellent and a step above the Dresden series IMHO. Which I enjoy, don’t get me wrong. But they are a little more light entertainment and I find the first three are very slight and I had to slog a bit to get through them.
Heh, we have the same taste in Tim Powers novels – Declare and On Stranger Tides would have been my next two mentions if I’d gone to four.
I thought of yet another obscure one a few minutes after my last post, but got distracted and it popped right back out of my head again. I’ll post it in the morning if it comes to me. I used to really love this genre back in the day.
Not-an-Edit: I remembered – Tea with the Black Dragon by R.A. MacAvoy. Kinda really very hard to describe. Kinda really excellent.
In a similar theme are his Secret Histories novels; in fact they are set in the same world.
The first book in the series is pretty much universally regarded as the weakest.
Possibly *Finder *by Emma Bull. It is set in the same world as the Bordertown series mentioned up thread.
More Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard, which is about Romantic poets and their relationship with vampire-like creatures, is quite good if not up to the level of Last Call or The Anubis Gates. I liked Expiration Date quite a lot (rather odd ghosts in modern LA) but found his two more recent books (Earthquake Weather, which tried to tie together Last Call & Expiration Date and didn’t really work, and Three Days to Never, which I remember read like he was re-using generic Tim Powers plot threads, but whose details have totally slipped from my mind even though it’s the most recent book of his that I’ve read) less strong.
Oh, I guess Declare came after Earthquake Weather; I liked Declare, though don’t think too hard about the timeline.
I’ve been meaning to pick up a Dresden Files book, but I haven’t yet done so. If the first is the weakest, what’s a good one to pick for a newbie to the series?
I’d start with number 3 - Grave Peril. It’s really excellent, and you get everything you need about the characters and the backstory from it in nice condensed form.
If you end up liking the series, you can always go back and hit the first two, Storm Front and Fool Moon, at a later point.
I recently read the first two Dresden Files books, and am happy to hear that the series gets better. I didn’t think the first two were awful or anything, but they were weak enough that I wasn’t sure I’d bother with the third one.
If this isn’t too much of a hijack, how do fans of the books feel about the short-lived TV series? I have Amazon Prime and the series is one of the free-for-members shows available through their streaming video service. Should I watch it, or stay away?
Sorry - I’ve never actually seen it, so I can’t say one way or the other. I have heard from friends who DID watch it that it wasn’t bad, just very different from the way things are described in the books.
I think the first urban fantasy books that I ran into were by Mercedes Lackey, her Diana Tregarde books: Children of the Night (odd spin on psychic vampires) and Burning Water (Aztec myth re-emerging). There is a third book in the series, Jinx High (about a body stealer), but I didn’t enjoy that one as much. The strength of the books is the protagonist is likable and the magic system consistent. (imho)
I enjoyed most of it, but it is definitely quite different from the books. Magic is much more limited in the show, and Bob is a very different character (though one with a fair amount of personality overlap with book-Bob). There were actually touches I liked better in the show–like Harry using a hockey stick for a staff–but the limited FX budget hurt it, and some episodes were pretty weak.
I think Harry, Bob, and Murphy were really well-cast.
Agreed, as someone said above. Start with Grave Peril (the third Dresden book) which is where he finds the right tone for the characters and action.
Glad you mentioned Lackey.
Long ago I got Bedlam’s Bard from the SciFi book club. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the pacing. The chapters are cut like a jump-to-commercial-break in a Star Trek (Original Series) episode directed by the over-acting William Shatner. Nice tale, though, and I actually found myself hunting for a sequel the other month. No such luck.
For Young Adult audiences, Diane Duane put out the Local Wizard series – nine books total, I think. The pacing is better, and there’s clearly some teach-a-lesson plot or story elements thrown in here and there. My only irritation with those is that she often had some leads to a solution* that she would ignore in favor of her overall “Us versus the Fallen Angel” confrontation that she uses to frame every tale. That often left me thinking, “Wait! What about the XYZ? It would have been a much better way to handle the situation!” Those books seemed to pander to the monotheist paradigm in general, and I found it to be rather unyielding in the same way McCaffery was unyielding about her views on homosexuality. Oh well! She owns that universe, she can make up the rules.
G!
{Kijam}
It’s a kind of Magic!
. --Freddie Mercury (Queen)
. A Kind of Magic
. A Kind of Magic
In addition to the Tregarde stories and the Bedlam series, her SERRAted Edge novels are set in the same universe. They’re rather different in tone, however–it generally sucks really hard to be a child in one of Lackey’s worlds, at least if you’re plot-relevant, and the Edge books may be the nadir of that pattern.
There’s also her Elemental Masters series, which are set in the real world, but mostly around the late 19th and early 20th Century.
If Regency England is within the bounds of acceptability, Patricia Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward are two of my favorite YA fantasy novels.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, there was a ton of drug use in the second half of the book.
I’d give it a read. It’s one of my favorite books out there, right now.
Definite yes to Tim Powers–Last Call is among the most exciting books I’ve ever read.
As for Butcher, while I love his works, I tell people to start with Dead Beat. Sure, it’s later in the series, but there’s a particular scene in it that if you don’t love it, you’re dead to me.
Another series to consider is Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series: wooden ship novels in the Master and Commander vein, except they’re set in a world in which magnificently huge intelligent dragons comprise part of Europe’s military might, acting as combination bombers and fighter planes, manned by entire crews of soldiers. They’re quite fun.
And count me among those who loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Yeah, it was pretty slow-paced, but it was excellently written, hilarious, and convincing.
Kelley Armstrong? Kim Harrison? Rob Thurman? There are a fair number I like as well if not better than the Dresden Files.
However, the OP might enjoy books deemed magical realism too (books where magic exists in modern settings but no one thinks that’s odd), not just urban fantasy. I don’t particularly, but hey.