If you haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice books, I’d recommend tackling them next. The series is incomplete ( only three books have been published so far ), but what exists is well worth getting addicted to. If Martin ever finishes the series and doesn’t blow it in later volumes, it might well end up approaching classic status. The only caveats ( in addition to being incomplete ):
While the prologue of the first book starts with a touch of the fantastic, magic is actually scarce in this world, though the fantastic elements start to pick up a little steam in later volumes. If you prefer sorcery heavy ‘Swords and Sorcery’, this ain’t it. Political intrigue is more the central motivator.
They are “realistic” in the way most heroic fantasy is not. Grimly realistic. Characters are complex - both good and bad guys are flawed and have redeeming features and just who is “good” and who is “bad” is sometimes highly subjective. Also even the most appealing, central-seeming characters can die. Which can make for unsettling reading - in a good way IMHO. It breaks from convention just often enough that it can shake up your expectations and predictions.
Here in America, we just don’t have as much history to draw on as they do in Britain.
Many of the great fantasies mentioned look to the past for inspiration and are set in worlds that bear at least some resemblance to Europe of some time past (e.g. the medieval period), in the days of castles and swords and armor and such. They also lean heavily for source material or inspiration on the old English and European fairy- and folk-tales, mythology, sagas, legends, and such (think King Arthur, Beowulf, Grimm’s fairy tales, the Mabinogeon, etc.)—certainly Tolkien knew this stuff.
J. K. Rawling sure was well-positioned for success, as a Brit being able to reach as far back as Grendel and a recent as Roald Dahl for source material, in a country with a rich tradition of literature about sorcery and boarding school, et cetera.
As an American Midwesterner, I could see little of equivalence, which makes me appreciate L. Frank Baum all the more.
I’d stack up Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber against any fantasy series going.
Powers’ Earthquake Weather trilogy is also powerful.
I enjoyed both a LOT more than I enjoyed LOTR or the Silent Planet series. (In fact, I don’t consider the Silent Planet novels worthy – seems to me that their religious implications have given them a big boost that the story itself doesn’t deserve).
Which irks me a little bit. I appreciate the complex natures of Tyrion, Jaime, Sandor Clegane—hell, even Walder Frey!—but I want Cersei dead. Reading some of her POVs from A Feast For Crows that GRRM has leaked unsettles me because I do not want her motivations presented in a sympathetic light. I want someone I can abjectly hate.
At this rate, though, I’ll transfer the hate to GRRM until AFFC is published.
Yeah, Cersei’s a piece of work. But hey I know more than a few people that want poor, dumb as a sack o’ hammers Sansa Stark dead and we’ve had plenty from her naive, romanticized, and really rather dim point of view :p.
Seconded. Though I’m pretty sure she’s British. I ordered Fool’s Fate (the last book in the 3rd series) from England because I didn’t want to wait on the US release). BTW, the series also has the best love story in the world.
Also, Sara Douglass is an epic writer who is very famous in Australia. (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED WRITER).
Well, as I alluded to before, I’ve had kind of a weird fiction reading history. I read a ton of sci-fi and some fantasy as a kid and through high school, but then in college all my time was sucked up by reading foreign-language fiction. It was a challenge, to say the least (all my classes in my major were conducted in Spanish, and I was usually the only non-native speaker in the class, so I had some catching up to do).
So I was pretty burned out on reading fiction for a while after that, and around the same time I started feeling like my knowledge of history and politics was woefully deficient, so I started reading more nonfiction. And then there was grad school, and the more I read, the more I realized how little I knew about a lot of things that were becoming more important to me.
Oh, and Slithy Tove, I’m a Midwesterner myself. But what’s to stop Americans from drawing from the same classical/mythological literary background? It’s the same stuff I read when I was a kid, whether it was part of the school curriculum or not (some was, and some wasn’t, and I went to a kind of wacky grade school, where we read everything from the Arthur legends to African folk tales, but that’s another thread). You’d think that as a result, Americans would be able to write in any vein we chose. Or are we just too unfocused because of the variety of material available to us?
(And any BritDopers out there, how common is it for British kids to read things like the Oz books? I know my spelling was a bit weird as a kid from all the British literature I was reading; confused the heck out of my homeroom teacher.)
But hey, a girl’s gotta have some fun, and I think it’s time to dive into some novels again.
Hey, maybe you can fill me in on this. Spoiler tag 'cos it’s … spoilerish on major events of the third book.He’s the one who kills Robb at the Red Wedding, that’s evident. However, didn’t he flay the skin off of Theon Greyjoy’s finger? We were told it happened second-hand, but saw no verification of that, and he did turn on the Starks later. Theon had no appearance after that, so I’m not certain whether it happened or if it was a ruse to play up his (Bolton’s) allegiance to Robb while he was being bought off by the Lannisters.
I’ve considered that, but what use do the Boltons have for the Greyjoys? After all, if they want to rule the North, have much an interest in driving off the Ironmen as the Starks did. The Bastard’s sack of Winterfell was a case of killing two birds with one stone. If Theon’s still alive - and he may well be - then he’s rotting away underneath the Dreadfort, a fate which, frankly, is better than he deserves.
Anyway, I never thought Cersei was all that evil. Ambitious, yes, not to mention ruthless and self-righteous, but she always seemed to be more a victim of her own circumstances than a true monster like Bolton or the Mountain (or Melisandre or the Ghiscari or the Others). Maybe it’s because she truly loves her children and wants what’s best for them… at any cost.
You’ve obviously missed Gene Wolfe. His Book of the New Sun series, not to mention the Long Sun and Short Sun, are definitely epic. He’s started another epic with The Knight. Yes, I know Gene Wolfe was mentioned above, but you can’t say Gene Wolfe enough. GeneWolfeGeneWolfeGeneWolfe.
Steven Brust’s Dragaerian series are very good epic fantasy as well.
And who can forget the mythopoetic Amber Chronicles from Zelazny?
Those are all epic. Only time will tell if they are classics, but I think they’re all epics. Tim Powers, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favorite authors, and has some good (and different) fantasy, but I don’t know if I’d still consider it epic. Hard to say.
I wouldn’t count Pterry out of the epic category - with each book in the Discworld series, his universe becomes more well-rounded and polished, his characters gain more facets, even if it is just through aside references in a book not dedicated to them, and we also learn of new and interesting places and people living there. Plus, with 20+ books in the series, I’m not sure how it can’t be categorised as epic.
My tuppence:
Accepting ‘classic’ as ‘likely to be read for years to come’, then if by ‘epic fantasy’ you mean ‘in exactly the same vein as Tolkien, Lewis and T.H. White’ then, well, there aren’t any Americans like that, but then again, there aren’t any other Britishers like that – you’ve kind of defined the genre narrowly enough to exclude everyone else.
But my list of ‘classic epic fantasy’ would probably include Lovecraft, Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs (like him or not, people are still reading him), Moorcock, Fritz Leiber and maybe some guys who sneak in from the sci-fi edge. I think it’s too early to tell if Raymond Feist and all the others are classic yet (and I haven’t read enough of them to know, except Feist is I think a marginal shot at classic). I’m not sure there’s really a huge difference.
For the sake of argument, if there really is a difference between American and British writers, it could be that American culture is a bit less oriented towards kings, knights in armor, etc. and writers with similar themes here might pursue them as Sci-Fi (is LeGuin American?), or Western (Cooper’s ‘Last of the Mohicans’/Leatherstocking tales are really a cheap fantasy series in a very slightly different setting) or Crime drama, which is where a uniquely American mythic tradition exists.
Yep, Quercus, LeGuin is an American. Always Coming Home, one of my favorite books by her, is set in a very distant future California. Much of her non-SF stuff is set in the Pacific Northwest as well, IIRC.
