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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4345 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

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Anyone have good fantasy or sci-fi recommendations? I have read a ton of speculative fiction and am always looking for more good, completed series. I tend not to read something if it's ongoing. Sadly the subreddits I've found for fantasy don't tend to skew towards my taste.

Some examples of more obscure fantasy series I've enjoyed:

  • Malazan

  • The Traitor Son Cycle

  • The Black Company

  • The Second Apocalypse

  • The Inda Quartet

  • Chronicles of the Black Gate

  • Mother of Learning

  • Commonwealth Saga

  • Night's Dawn Trilogy

  • The Void Trilogy

  • Diaspora (Greg Egan)

  • Aching God Series

  • Annihilation

  • The Broken Earth

  • Memory, Sorrow, Thorn

  • Book of the New Sun

  • Otherland

  • Gravity Dreams

  • Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

  • Magician series by Feist

As you may be able to tell I prefer my series to be somewhat morally gray, and at least try to have a system of magic/technology that makes internal, consistent sense.

I've heard Worth the Candle is good but haven't gotten around to reading it. Any other suggestions in line with the books/series I listed above?

For epic/classical fantasy, I always recommend Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy. It’s my ur-example of how to worldbuild outside of a Tolkien nation war/angel war or D&D adventuring party in a land of many gods context. It’s at once the most personal and the grandest story I’ve read in fantasy, operatic in scale and tone.

I also recommend Matthew Woodring Stover’s SF / fantasy series, the Acts of Caine. Starting with Heroes Die, we follow the son of a failed freedom radical on a cyberpunk dystopia world, an actor with a brain implant which allows his studio bosses to stream his adventures live to the world’s paying customers in full five sense VR. He travels through a portal regularly to an alternate Earth where magic is real and there are various Tolkien-esque/D&D-style races, and commits acts of destabilization (assassinations, starting and ending wars, etc.) to keep the masses entertained. The novel’s trouble begins when the cult of a strange new god captures his ex-wife, a river goddess and an actor herself. Where this novel shines is the visceral descriptions of bodily combat; the writer is a martial artist. It gets more philosophical in the second and fourth novels, and delves more into worldbuilding in the third, but the first novel is one of my top five books of all time. Once I reach the 2/3 point, I can’t put it down until I finish it, even if that’s 2am.

Riddle-Master of Hed is so overlooked. It should be in top 10 lists.

I will check out your 1st recommendation, I've read acts of caine and I actually shouted it out in the book thread.

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