I think it was here on the Dope that I heard of James Stoddard’s The High House. Not only is it a good fantasy novel in its own right, it’s sort of a homage to the works of older fantasy writers (like Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, Mervyn Peake, William Morris, etc.), so if you like it, it may turn you on to some of them.
Have the tried Mike Carey? He’s better known as a comic book writer ( I discovered him reading Lucifer ), but has a current series of novels set in a modern London where ghosts and other unquiet spirits have started emerging in the last couple of decades and centering on a part-time exorcist named Felix Castor. Four of a projected seven novels in the series have been released in the UK, with a fifth coming in September. Two released so far in the states, with the third due in July.
I’ve read the first two and thought they were fairly decent. Quick, fun reads if nothing else.
Otherwise another big thumbs up for Scott Lynch.
Like anthologies?
May want to check out:
No, he isn’t sci-fi-ish at all - CS Friedman is. (Again, don’t let that turn you off of her Coldfire Trilogy - its really a fantasy world, just with a sci-fi backstory.) Brust has written several series (of varying styles and quality) - I believe his Vlad Taltos books are out in a compilation now, which you’d probably like.
Have you read Little, Big? S’good.
I just finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s works (the stand-alone Elantris and trilogy of Mistborn), but seeing as how he was tapped to finish the Wheel of Time series, he might be too well-known to qualify. He definitely writes some great books though - very interesting and well-designed magic systems, good characterization, and lots of thought of ideas like religion without getting too philsophical/boring/preachy.
I read David Gemmell’s Rigante series (four books, with a several hundred year gap between the second and third books) way back and loved it. I just recently started with his books in the Draenai saga, going in order of publication (so Legend first, then King Beyond the Gate, etc…) His works tend to go for the “larger than life” characterizations, but all of his characters still have interesting flaws.
Also, my personal favorite still remains Simon R. Green, with his Deathstalker (sci-fi) and Blue Moon (fantasy) series. They’re over-the-top and approach cheesiness, but I find them to be great fun. (Never read his vampire stuff, not sure how it compares).
(FWIW, I’ve also recently read Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, and R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy, all of which were kinda meh to me. Temeraire is good enough to keep me interesting (just bought the latest book, Victory of Eagles), but the other two turned me off enough that I was not interesting in picking up the future books).
I will second the recommendation for Stephen Brust. Start with *Jherig *to get an idea of his flavor. Not at all science-fictiony, by the way.
*The Worm Ouroborous *by ER Eddison is rightly called a flawed masterpiece. It is brilliant but unusual. If you take a look at it, be aware that the framing device is forgotten almost immediately–you can safely skim it until you get to the introduction of the real heroes, the Lords Juss and Brandoch Daha.
Another one that may be “new to you” is James Branch Cabell. Literate, humorous and sardonic, if you get tired of Tolkein retreads written for adolescents you can try Jurgen, his most famous (because it was banned in Boston for obscenity, it has rarely been out of print).
Finally, I love James Blaylock, another unusual author. If you can find The Elfin Ship give it a try. Again, light-hearted and unusual.
::TV announcer’s voice:: Wait! There’s more!
William Browning Spencer, like Carroll but with more “meat”, I think. Resume With Monsters is a Lovecraftian take on office culture, and it’s awesome. All Spencer’s stuff is good, in my opinion.
While you’re browsing, check out Jeff Vandermeer (City of Saints and Madmen) and Charles Stross (The Atrocity Archives had me sympathizing with ghouls).
Have you read anything by Charlie Huston? His Joe Pitt vampire series is good, although it’s very violent. His dialog is outstanding once you get used to his style.
Tanya Huff has a brand new urban fantasy novel, released last week, called The Enchantment Emporium. I haven’t started it yet. It’s either a standalone or the first in a new series. Her *Blood *books and Smoke & Ashes books are good, too.
I like P.N. Elrod’s Vampire Files books, about a vampire detective in 1930’s Chicago.
You’ve probably heard of Patricia Briggs’ urban fantasy series, starting with Moon Called. It’s good.
You’ve no doubt tried some of the below already, but I have no idea what’s well-known outside my house these days!
Brust isn’t at all sci-fi; I think Zsofia meant that CS Friedman is sci-fi-ey. Some of Brust’s stuff is good stuff, and he’s prolific, and he’s been prolific for a while. I like his Taltos series best.
Octavia Butler is one of my all-time favorites. She definitely wrote in the sci-fi/fantasy mix space. The Xenogenesis trilogy, aka Lilith’s Brood, is her most sci-fi-ish work, I think, with aliens in the future after a nuclear holocaust, though her aliens are unlike any other aliens I’ve read, and aren’t military space opera types at all. *Kindred *is a work of genius if you ask me and the only sci-fi element is a sort of time travel; it’s historical fiction as much as anything else. The *Patternmaster *series is only sci-fi in having an alien origin story for its otherworldly, slightly vampire or werewolf (depending) like, semi-immortal, ESP-having characters. The *Parable *two-book series is near-future survival post-urban stuff. Her last one, Fledgling, is definitely a vampire book, and I loved it even though I generally do not enjoy vampire books.
Ditto on hobscrk777 and Alessan’s suggesting Scott Lynch.
Ditto on Wednesday Evening’s suggesting Kage Baker. The Company series is technically sci-fi, though IMHO in the very best way. The Anvil of the World is all fantasy.
Lois McMaster Bujold also wrote a space-opera series; if you enjoyed her other books, you might enjoy them too despite the military bent. Really, they’re almost as much feudal as military. You can see if it appeals to you in general by reading her Baen Free Library novella, The Mountains of Mourning. If you like that, there are lots of Miles Vorkosigan books!
Greg Keyes (a.k.a. J. Gregory Keyes) is another wonderful author. I particularly love his first set, The Waterborn and Blackgod. He’s also got an alternative history series in the time of Ben Franklin called the Age of Unreason, starting with Newton’s Cannon, where sorcery works; and a sort of British-Isles-flavored-but-totally-different series that starts with The Briar King.
Guy Gavriel Kay is another prolific one. He most often writes fantasy inspired by some real period of European history, but set for his storytelling freedom in an alternate universe.
Connie Willis may be my very favorite. *To Say Nothing of the Dog*is light comedic Victorian time-travel fiction; The Doomsday Book (which at the moment I’m rereading for maybe the fourth time) is serious Medieval time-travel fiction. All her other stuff is great, too, though some of it (especially stuff she co-wrote with Cynthia Felice) lets some formulaic-ness show.
Lian Hearn is relatively new with a feudal-Japanese-inspired series.
I thoroughly enjoyed Acacia by David Anthony Durham. His other work is straightforward historical fiction, but Acacia is fantasy, 750+ pages in paperback, and supposedly the first in a series. The next one is due out in hardcover in September.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is also supposed to head a series and is also delightfully long, and I agree with **Alessan **that you might like it.
Ursula Le Guin recently (well, in 2004) started a new young-adult series called Annals of the Western Shore that I like.
Sharon Shinn has written rather a lot, but it doesn’t strike me as the highest quality writing; more like romance novels in fantasy settings. I enjoyed her Samaria series more than the 12 Houses series, but it’s all pretty predictable stuff. Good for if you’re down with the flu and want something to take your mind off things without thinking too hard.
Garth Nix tends towards the young-adult and is maybe over-serious, but I like his Abhorsen Chronicles (originally the Abhorsen Trilogy) anyway.
Greg Bear is famous for hard science fiction but his Songs of Earth and Power is fantasy.
Here’s an author you might not have heard of: Nalo Hopkinson. Why she is not hugely famous I am not sure, but Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring are amazing.
Clive Barker is famous for horror, but has some great fantasy titles too, especially Imagica and Weaveworld.
You know about Robin McKinley, right?
Gregory McGuire, famous for Wicked (on which the musical is based), has retellings of other fairy tales too. My favorite is his Cinderella story, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister.
You’re young enough (IIRC) that you might not have come across Peter S. Beagle. The Last Unicorn is his most famous, though my favorite might be The Innkeeper’s Song.
The Esther Friesner edited feminist fantasy-heroine short-story anthology series is starting to show its age but is still great fun: Chicks in Chain Mail, The Chick Is in the Mail, *Did You Say *Chicks?!, Chicks ‘n’ Chained Males, and Turn the Other Chick. Good authors contributed to the anthologies, and you can look up the ones you like from here.
The Renshai series by Mickey Zucker Reichert, a trilogy with the titles “The Last of the Renshai,” “The Western Wizard,” and “Child of Thunder.” There are other books about the Renshai written afterward, which are a separate series only loosely connected to the first trilogy, but the originals were the best. One of the reasons I like the series so much is described pretty well by an Amazon reviewer, below
One of the most sympathetic characters is the last member of a race that was destroyed in an act of genocide, but the world is probably better off without. He makes no apologies for the atrocities his people committed before they were destroyed, and in fact completely embraces his culture (although in secret, since anyone who knew his heritage would kill him). Another sympathetic character is a ruthless lunatic who attacks and kills people in fits of rage. He can not control his temper, which leads to innocent people being hurt and even killed. Somehow Reichert is able to cast this brute as someone we desperately want good things to happen to. Another character, the “bad guy” is an essential part of the stability of the entire universe, and even his enemies recognize he is simply filling a role that must be filled. He recognizes he is evil and embraces it, but is anything but a typical antagonist.
I hope you enjoy these books as much as I did! Just be warned, for a long time in the beginning, the books are not very magical or supernatural. Everyone talks about wizards and a pantheon of gods and prophesies and rituals and stuff, but we don’t actually see any of it happen and we’re sort of in doubt about whether these people who claim to be wizards are actually just hallucinating. Part of the lore of the stories is that any use of magic or supernatural power allows chaos into the world, which brings everything one step closer to apocalypse. Magic is used very sparingly, and it’s always a world-changing event when it happens. There’s no casual spell-slinging to be found here.
Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser series seldom get mentioned much these days, but they’re pretty much fantasy essentials. Pure unabashed pulp plots told in the the driest, wittiest, and most urbane fantasy prose ever written, with a philosophical barbarian and a cynical thief as the rather eccentric tomb-plundering heroes combine for sheer reading pleasure. It’s far too smart to be mere parody, but fantasy aware of its own tropes - just why are adventurers who make a living stealing enormous gems from evil sorcerers permanently broke? - pretty much began with Leiber: writers such as Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are vastly in his debt.
I know, but I don’t think the third one has come out yet. Can’t wait to see what happens with Juliet, though.
Prince Ombra by Roderick MacLeish is quite good.
I enjoyed Wizard of the Grove (Daw Book Collectors) by Tanya Huff
The True Game by Sheri S. Tepper was fun and IMO a fresh idea.
Oh, do you dig the New Weird stuff? If you’ve read China Mieville, try The Etched City by, um, somebody Bishop. Although my first copy accidentally had its first half switched with conference proceedings on Virginia Woolf, of which I read several pages thinking it was possibly on purpose, because, you know, it’s New Weird, right?
Never seen this discussed: David Clement Davies’s Fire Bringer. Like Watership Down, only with deer. If you hated Watership, don’t bother, though.
I think this is moderately well known, not sure–The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly. A boy who has recently lost his mother either finds his way into a fantasy world or has hallucinations; the book doesn’t definitively answer which “really” happened. Eerie. A little disturbing.
David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox. The title is pretty much the plot. From 1922.
FWIW, I thought the first two books of the Kingdom of Thorn and Bone series were excellent, the third meandered a bit and seemed like it was killing time, and the fourth went in some weird directions and gave a very anticlimatic/unstatisfying conclusion…
Here’s my chance to yet again push John Morressy. The major problem with his stuff is that it’s basically all out-of-print. The better-known series of his is the Kedrigern series, which is about 6 novels and a number of short stories about a married wizard who specializes in counterspelling. This was being reprinted in what was originally planned to be three (and then four) volumes by the now-defunct Meisha Merlin. I don’t know how easy the two that were printed are to find (I need to look for hardbacks to replace my paperbacks), but if they were representative of the stuff Meisha Merlin put out, I am not surprised they went out of business. He also wrote four books known as the Iron Angel series (The Time of the Annihilator, Graymantle, Ironbrand, and Kingsbane, in internal chronological order) which are, I think, pretty good sword-and-sorcery books that’s more restrained than a lot of the stuff in the genre. In any case, you’ll have to looking in used book stores and maybe online to pick up any of his stuff.
John C. Wright has written a two-volume fantasy novel, The Guardians of Everness and Mists of Everness.
Personally, I prefer his two three-volume sci-fi novels, The Golden Age and The Chronicles of Chaos, but the Everness books were wellreviewed.
The Long Price Quartet, starting with A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham.
The Outremer books, starting with The Devil in the Dust, by Chaz Brenchley.
Ricardo Pinto. He and Brenchley have some strong gay themes, so if that turns you off you’ve been warned. Pinto depressed me so I stopped reading.
It’s YA and famous but maybe not everyone has read it yet since it’s newish: Kristen Cashore’s Graceling.
For urban fantasy, Patricia Briggs and Ilona Andrews. I like Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty books, too, but I think they are a step below Briggs and Andrews.
I love Barbara Hambly, though I haven’t read enough by her. She’s well-known, but again seems to slip through some cracks.
I’m getting into Sharon Shinn recently. Lovely writer, though definitely with romance overtones. (Not that awful “sleeps with anything supernatural” trend that infects so much urban fantasy.)
Pamela Dean writes so well and she baffles me. I love to read her work and always want to find someone else to ask them questions afterward.
Yeah, I thought that series really didn’t end on a great note, but still very worth reading.