Pssssssssst! celestina! Don’t do it! You’ll end up loving ‘Eye of the World’, want to read the rest of the series, and end up putting your eyes out in a fit of rage after reading the crapfest that Jordan descends into after the fourth book.
I couldn’t have that on my conscience.
And Tranquilis, great recommendation on Stephen Barnes. He also has strong black protagonists in other books such as Iron Shadows and Blood Brothers (as well as the followup to Gorgon Child, called Firedance – IMO the best one of the entire Aubry Knight series). Oh, yeah, and the love-to-hate-him bad guy Bishop in The California Voodoo Game.
Lynn Flewelling’s Nightrunner series, which is relatively recent (late 90s, I think), features two bi-sexual men as the heroes. By the third book they have come to be in a commited relationship with each other. She does gloss over the specifics of their sexual relationship though.
I was thinking that I remember reading books that feature homosexuality from back in the 70s and 80s. But it occured to me that those were SF books, and MGibson specifically said “fantasy”. While the two genres are closely related, you can draw a distinction between them. And perhaps because of the nature of the genres, I suspect SF has traditionally been more progressive.
Oh, one fantasy series from the 80s that mentioned homosexuality was Theives’ World, specifically the stories by Janet Morris that featured a mercenary company comprised of gay couples. That may have been modeled on a real group of soldiers from ancient Greece (the Sacred Band of Thebes), but I don’t know much about that.
George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which has been (in my opinion, rightly) recommended by quite a few posters in this thread, also features some gays and lesbians. The gayness is mostly hinted at, but there is a fairly explicit lesbian scene involving one of the main female characters in the third book.
As for WOT… Eh, it’s OK, in my opinion, but nothing very special. I think the early books are overrated and the latter books are underrated. Overall, it’s a sometimes entertaining, but deeply mediocre, series.
I think WOT would make a decent anime series. If a picture is worth a thousand words usually, in Jordan’s case it’s worth at least several chapters. Some of the later books could be made into one hourlong episode each, with room to spare.
So who wants to be a voice actor? I’ll be the narrator… ahem
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose over the land called Essdee Ehmbee. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
I hear the new book is going to devote half a page to each woman character describing how she smoothes her skirts and the rest of the page describing her sniffs.
One gay relationship - the one between a certain prince and his knight - is so obvious that it’s almost a running gag (not the fact that they’re gay; the fact that some characters are oblivious to it).
Guy Gavriel Kay almost always has at least one gay character per book - Duke Sandre’s son, for instance, from Tigana, and Thierry de Carenzu from Arbonne.
