> . . . I will admit that the wife of the late, great Jim Morrison is better at selling
> herself than at writing . . .
And one of the ways in which she has sold herself is by calling herself Morrison’s wife. She was Morrison’s girlfriend, having a romantic relationship with him while he continued to live with and be romantically involved with his legal wife. This is what some people call having an affair with him or being his mistress. His wife tolerated her just as she tolerated Morrison’s dalliances with groupies. Only in Kennealy-Morrison’s eyes did the ceremony she and Morrison went through create a marriage. It was his wife who went off with Morrison to Paris where he soon died, not Kennealy-Morrison. I’m not condemning anyone here for their actions except Morrison himself, who I think was a jerk, but this is distorting the common definition of “wife.”
I think with fantasy writers, there’s a very easy way to tell the good from the bad: the very best fantasy writers either do a vivid recreation of an little-known mythology, or reinvent existing mythologies, or invent entirely new ones (often using elements from existing mythologies.
Cases in point: H.P. Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu mythos was so powerful and well-realized that it’s well on its way to becoming a sub-genre, and was pretty much an entirely new mythology. Tim Powers, who uses existing mythologies but reinvents them so completely and so powerfully that it’s like entering an alternate reality (frex, his reimagination of the Green Man mythos in Last Call). Or John Crowley, whose “Little, Big” is a completely fresh take on the faerie mythology, making it somehow mundane for the people involved in it even as they live in a world in which no one believes in them. And John Norman, who reimagined the standard sword and sandal fantasy as an extended bondage and dominance fantasy.
OTOH, if you find yourself reading a book cover about a young prince who either firghts with or befriends a dragon and must find a treasure/rescue a princess in the course of a magical journey, in 99 cases out of a hundred, you can safely put the book down and be on your way, knowing that you have missed nothing, or almost nothing. Frankly, once you’ve read Lord of the Rings and Princess Bride, you’ve got all of those stories covered.
I’m a bit shocked that I haven’t seen a mention of anything by Iain M. Banks yet. His SF novels (he also writes non-SF fiction) are a well-blended mixture of swashbuckling fantasy and hard SF, and Banks both writes complex, vivid characters that are carefully drawn according to the various alien cultures that spawned them (even the spaceships have interesting AI personalities), and provides a cinematic scope to the huge settings on which the stories play out.
His strongest SF books, IMO, are Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons (both concern a pan-galactic civilization known as The Culture), Against a Dark background* and Feersum Endjinn. Again IMO, I’d tend to avoid Excession and Inversions as they seem rather flat compared to the others.
First of all, a few people have already mentioned Geoge R R Martin, but I must repeat him. His A Song of Ice and Fire is the best fantasy I’ve ever read, bar none. Sadly, book 4 seems like it will NEVER come out. Sheesh.
I also recommend Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson.
Another thing to watch for is a series called the Tor SF Doubles. This was a set of paperbacks published between 1988 and 1991 - they should still be fairly common in used book stores. Each book contained two science fiction (or occasionally fantasy) novellas. Many classics were included.
A Meeting with Medusa - Arthur C. Clarke / Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
Hardfought - Greg Bear / Cascade Point - Timothy Zahn
Born with the Dead - Robert Silverberg / The Saliva Tree - Brian Aldiss
Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo - John Varley / The Star Pit - Samuel R. Delany
No Truce with Kings - Poul Anderson / Ship of Shadows - Fritz Leiber
Enemy Mine - Barry B. Longyear / Another Orphan - John Kessel
Screwtop - Vonda N. McIntyre / The Girl Who Was Plugged in - James Tiptree, Jr.
The Nemesis from Terra - Leigh Brackett / Battle for the Stars - Edmond Hamilton
The Ugly Little Boy - Isaac Asimov/ The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff - Theodore Sturgeon
Sailing to Byzantium - Robert Silverberg / Seven American Nights - Gene Wolfe
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? - James Tiptree, Jr. / Souls - Joanna Russ
He Who Shapes - Roger Zelazny / The Infinity Box - Kate Wilhelm
The Blind Geometer - Kim Stanley Robinson / The New Atlantis - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Saturn Game - Poul Anderson / Iceborn - Greg Benford and Paul A. Carter
The Last Castle - Jack Vance / Nightwings - Robert Silverberg
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes - James Tiptree, Jr. / And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees - Michael Bishop
Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp / The Sword of Rhiannon - Leigh Brackett
In Another Country - Robert Silverberg / Vintage Season - C. L. Moore
Ill Met in Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber / The Fair at Emain Macha - Charles de Lint
The Pugnacious Peacemaker - Harry Turtledove / The Wheels of IF - L. Sprague de Camp
Home is the Hangman - Roger Zelazny / We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line - Samuel R. Delany
Thieves’ Carnival - Karen Haber / The Jewel of Bas - Leigh Brackett
Riding the Torch - Norman Spinrad / Tin Soldier - Joan Vinge
Elegy for Angels and Dogs - Walter Jon Williams / The Graveyard Heart - Roger Zelazny
Fugue State - John M. Ford / The Death of Dr. Island - Gene Wolfe
Press Enter_ - John Varley / Hawksbill Station - Robert Silverberg
Eye for Eye - Orson Scott Card / The Tunesmith - Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
A Short, Sharp Shock - Kim Stanley Robinson / The Dragon Masters - Jack Vance
Nanoware Time - Ian Watson / The Persistence of Vision - John Varley
The Longest Voyage - Poul Anderson / Slow Lightning - Steve Popkes
Naked to the Stars - Gordon R. Dickson / The Alien Way - Gordon R. Dickson
Run for the Stars - Harlan Ellison / Echoes of Thunder - Jack Dann & Jack C. Haldeman
Bwana - Mike Resnick / Bully - Mike Resnick
Rule Golden - Damon Knight / Double Meaning - Damon Knight
Silent Thunder - Dean Ing / Universe - Robert A. Heinlein
Conjure Wife - Fritz Leiber / Our Lady of Darkness - Fritz Leiber
I also agree that IMB is worth a look, and I agree with the Feersum Endjinn and Consider Phlebas recommendations. Mind you, I actually liked Excession too, though I wouldn’t start there. The book seems to assume the reader is familiar with Banks’ Culture, and this can make things hard to wade through at times. Inversions is a bit crappy (Banks’ worst?) at least in part because it looks like a straightforward - and fairly mundane - fantasy book, unless you’ve read enough IMB books to pick up on some mildy hidden references (to the Culture, natch). Even if you pick up these references, the book is by no means the Bee’s Bollocks.
Greg Bear can be worth a look. I would avoid Darwin’s Children - it is rather disjointed, and I found his idea of the future of evolution a bit silly (So, we’ll all grow vomeronasal organs and gain mobile, technocolour freckles, you say? Sign me up!). Worse, he seems to have a bit of a God Crisis half way through which adds a some more jolly stupidities as God is found lurking in the bore of a brain scanner. I like his hard SF though. Hardfought is the standout for me. Blood Music also cracks along nicely until near the end, when it all gets a bit wobbly. There is a collection of his shorter works available (oddly enough it’s called something like The Collected Works of Greg Bear) and this is well worth grabbing.
War With the Newts by Karel Capek is superb and cynical tome that stands up tremendously, despite being written about 70 years ago.
Ballard wrote a lot of SF in his earlier years, and this ranges from the good to the good for compost only. I do like his cynical views of human nature, though this is more evident in his non-SF books.
I don’t have time to read the entire thread, so I apologize if this has been said already.
The best science fiction in my opinion are the foundation series by Isaac Asimov and the Ender series by Orson Scott Card. The Ender series begins with the novel Enders Game and then branches into two separate sequel series, including Enders Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow puppets in one branch and Speaker for the Dead (among others that I’ve forgotten the titles for) in the other.
Avoid most other Orson Scott Card science fiction books. I enjoyed very few of them, and there are tons out there that aren’t worth reading.
Among fantasy my favorite series is the Renshai trilogy by Mickey Zucker Reichart. It begins with “Last of the Renshai” and includes “The Western Wizard” and “Child of Thunder.” There is really no fantasy work that compares to this series for pure enjoyment in my opinion, including Tolkein.
Oh, I almost forgot the Alvin Maker series for fantasy, too. They are fantasy style, I guess, but in a post-American Revolution setting. These are also by Orson Scott Card, but I wouldn’t suggest reading these until you’ve read the others I’ve mentioned.
I don’t remember when I first read Asimov or Clarke.
But I remember exactly when I read my first Heinlein novel. It made a huge impact on me. I read another 10 novels in the next 15 days, and didn’t stop reading until I’d finished every Heinlein book published.
But I started with the ‘juveniles’ and worked my way through his adult fiction from earliest to newest. That’s definitely the way to read Heinlein.
Pick up one of:
*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Double Star
The Door Into Summer
Have Space Suit - Will Travel
Tunnel in the Sky
Farmer in the Sky
Red Planet
The Star Beast
The Puppet Masters
Time for the Stars
Citizen of the Galaxy
The Rolling Stones
*
And I highly recomment his short story anthologies, “The Past Through Tomorrow” parts 1 and 2.