Bravo.
S.M. Stirling: Let’s just pull a Magic Maguffin that prevents any technology beyond swords and bows and see just how quickly civilization falls apart and is rebuilt by SCA members, Tolkien fans and gangbangers.
S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint: Let’s just fling a chunk of current landscape into the past and see how the modern people deal with it.
[FTR I’m a huge fan of all of the above}
William Faulkner: Portrayal of highly dysfunctional Southern Gothic family drags the readers through swamps of decadence and pointless angst to no good purpose.
Laurell K Hamilton: Ooooo, I’m a virgin, Catholic, Vampire slaying necromancer. Oops I changed my mind. I’m really a vampire/were-whatever sex-queen* who kills random vampire/weres I’m not having sex with because hey, we’re not having sex.
- three-somes only please, any flavor of three is fine, three is the number.
Spot on. But I still love them.
Donald Westlake: The heist doesn’t go off exactly as planned.
Richard Stark: The heist doesn’t go off exactly as planned.
Thomas Pynchon: A multitude of peculiarly named characters sup, smoke, sing and screw in a fruitless effort to avoid thinking about how their lives are unfolding into a universe in which the structure and interconnectedness they think they perceive may only be the order their minds impose on brief eddies in the chaos, while the universe itself pitilessly expands towards a state of ultimate order – I think.
If you enjoy fantasy at all, you should give the Codex Alera a shot. It’s not a paradigm-shifter, but it’s most definitely a good time.
Jo Nesbø: Alcoholic cop gets murder dropped in lap, obsesses over it and arrives always a little too late.
Oscar Wilde:
“To lose one’s aging portrait, Lady Windermere, may be regarded as carelessness; I have nothing to declare . . . that is their tragedy and a dangerous thing, but I can resist everything and the value of nothing . . . except that wallpaper.”
Staislaw Lem: Man attempts to communicate with a sentient planet…or a bunch of robots…or both…or everyone’s a robot…whatever.
Hunter S. Thompson: Hunter S. Thompson does lots of drugs and makes mordant sociopolitical commentary, not quite all of it about his hallucinations.
S.M. Stirling: Good-guy uberbadasses fight the good fight against evil slaver (and probably Amazon-Valkyrie-lesbian-dominatrix) uberbaddasses; could go either way.
Vladimir Nabokov: I cannot be trusted, but will keep you entertained and challenged with my unreliable narrative.
Edgar Rice Burroughs…Naked people with swords!
Yeah know, that sounds about up my alley, which book is the best?
Terry Goodkind: An evil wizard is attempting to take over the world, and in the first 890 pages nothing can stop him, but in the last 10 pages we learn that Richard Rahl belongs to a certain order of magic-wielders that are even stronger than the evil wizard, and Richard Rahl wins while killing 10^n bad guys, where n is the book’s place in the series.
Dashiel Hammett - Hard drinking hard bitten tough shamus drinks hard, cracks wise, plays 'em close to the vest handles gat and takes it on the chin; loses partner/sidekick to a dirt nap, feels low, juggles shady and colorful characters with smart patter, romances dames, solves one or more murders and saves/sends the skirt up the river to the big house.
Terry Pratchett: Aaaarrrgh! Oh crap! Oh crap! Oh crap! Oh nooooooooo! Oh… Um, I fixed it. It’s all good.
Bentley Little (whose books I enjoy immensely): Something horrifying and bizarre, possibly supernatural, is happening in a small town in Arizona!
Women giving birth to cactus-baby hybrids, anyone? So awful.
V C Andrews: Some creepy kids in a creepy situation suffer creepy abuse from a creepy relative as a creepy result of creepy incest and creepy inbreeding (and increase the amount of creepiest for the creepy novels written after the creepy author was creepy dead).