Good epic fantasy!

superconor

Hey all. I want people to reccomend me some good old fashioned epic fantasy! Real taverns, dungeons, quests and spells stuff! Nothing is too cheesy for me, look forward to hearing the 80's reccomendations!

tSubh Dearg

well I'd recommend the George RR Martin series, A Song of Fire and Ice. It's full of good guys, bad guys and not so sure guys. ooh and dragons!

It's not cheesy, but is well written and really pulls you in with it's story lines.

Dades

Definitely recommend the George RR Martin series - absolutely fantastic.
Although fantasy, it's very light in the whole magic thing and heavy on character and story. Gritty and real is how I'd describe it!

On book three of Raymond Feist's "Riftwar" series at the moment. The first book starts off very fluffy but gets better as it becomes a bit darker. A different read to George RR Martin, but if you like magicians and elves and whatnot you'll probably like it.

Illkillya

Sounds like the OP is looking for the traditional stuff - half-elven misfits, angry dwarves with battle axes, and all that stuff. Haven't read them since I was about 12, but the Dragonlance Chronicles might be what you're looking for. Pure fantasy, full of clichés but fairly enjoyable. Similarly, there are some David Eddings epics that might fit the bill.

GRRM's ASOIAF is undoubtedly a better quality series, but not your typical fantasy fare, and you can go 800 pages without seeing a guy with pointy ears. A good compromise would be the Feist's Riftwar saga... it has all the elements you're looking for but is still a great read.

Rhiannon14

A little Terry Goodkind never hurt. The Sword of Truth series starts with a book called Wizard's First Rule. Warning: graphic violence and sex.

tSubh Dearg

Actually the Belgariad and Mallorean series by David Eddings are super cheesey but a fantastic read, only prblem is that then you can never read another of his series as they have all the same characters in them.

But first time through, they're a great light read with lots of magic and mayhem. The first of the series is called Pawn of Prophecy (though I always end up calling it Prawn of Prophecy)

Saruman

Any of the Robin Hobb series.
I second Martin, he is great.

I think though Raymond E Feist is the way to go for what he wants. Start with Magician (or magicians Apprentice, same book). (Do not start with the Empire books as they are a spin off of the Riftwar books).

John

Terry Brooks stuff are fairly cheesy and enjoyable reads (obviously not a patch on Tolkien but pass the time well enough).

Seeker

To be honest Martin delivers very little on the Fantasy front so that might not be what you're loking for. For pure cheese I recommend David Eddings stuff. After you read another series by him you'll notice him to be very formulaic. This is because he quite literally has a formula for writing fantasy books (Look him up on wikipedia.org and you'll see it).

Ill probly gett a lot of flames for saying this but I think Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is probably one of the best when it comes to epic fantasy. WARNING though at around book 7 it turns into a waffle filled bitchfest with a deluge of superflous detail. I've started to reread book 8 recently and im finding it a chore unlike the first 6 books which when rereading them get me nostalgic about those good times I had reading them. They had some really great moments that dont just involve killing someone off (im looking at you ASOIAF)

Robbiethe3rd

Does wheel of Time have decent characters who you can empathise with or is it more like LOTR with emphasis on the plot?

Saruman

It has some characters in it, but they do not change and the women are all the same character.

tSubh Dearg

Wheel of Time does have some decent characters, however, now by book 11 we're dealing with a cast of thousands all of which have similar sounding names!

I keep forgetting who some of the minor characters are or mixing them up with others.

The plot gets totally lost during book 7 and is only getting back on track now at book 11. I've also heard a rumour that Robert Jordon is battling with some serious illness, which means it could be a race to see will he actually finish the series or not.

No elves or dragons or any of that, but Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series is certainly epic and highly enjoyable. Great charachters and storyline, I would recommend it to anyone.

John

Deleted User wrote:

No elves or dragons or any of that, but Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series is certainly epic and highly enjoyable. Great charachters and storyline, I would recommend it to anyone.

+1

humbert

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This book doesn't really fit the description as it's set in 19th century(I think) London but it's about two rival magicians and I couldn't put it down.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

The wheel of time was absolutely amazing until the end of book seven, at which point it fell apart completely. I may read the last few chapters of the last book if it's ever released.. but I am never putting myself through the experience of reading a post 'crown of swords' Robert Jordan book again.

and yeah, he has a heart condition.. might die before he ends it, his final joke in what's left of his fan base.


Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn Trilogy is really, really good. Classic fantasy, ancient castle, ancient races.. modern races.. magic, good elves, bad elves.. elves that just don't give a ****. One of the best fantasy trilogys.. feck it, The best. Ever. It just can't get any better.

Someone mentioned Terry Goodkind... decent enough until later on in the series. Goodkind starts using his novels as a soapbox to play the patriot and big up American foreign policy. There was on book where Richard gave a three page long speech about the neccesity of striking at evil before it strikes at you at least once a chapter, at least.
--edit

if you like rape, goodkind is the man for you. iirc there's around two or three per novel.


all my fantasy books are packed away in the attic of one of the sheds and it's so long since I read most of them I just can't think of the names..

Ash - A secret history (mary gentle) .. not entirely classic fantasy, jumps about through time between a joan of arc character in medieval europe and a modern day science expedition.. when I finished this book I just sat there for an hour or two repeating 'wow.. ****ing.. wow'

randylonghorn

Saruman wrote:

I think though Raymond E Feist is the way to go for what he wants. Start with Magician (or magicians Apprentice, same book). (Do not start with the Empire books as they are a spin off of the Riftwar books).

Agreed ...

tSubh Dearg wrote:

Actually the Belgariad and Mallorean series by David Eddings are super cheesey but a fantastic read, only prblem is that then you can never read another of his series as they have all the same characters in them.

... and agreed.

Slightly different type (no magic as such, for instance) but as epic fantasy goes, Anne McCaffrey's Pern series is well worth a read.

Spyral

dragonlance, staple stuff, easy to read.

Aedh Baclamh

Gemmell - Legend.

nonamemark

Like a few people said The Wheel Of Time, although he can go into ridiculous detail about say, a wall. I thought towards the end of book 4 and most of book 5 was cack, book 6 is a great change of pace thats the one im on now. Robert Jordan has a rare blood disease, not a heart condition, his wife will finish the last book if he doesn't make it

LOTR, obviously

The Assasins Apprentice by Robin Hobb is excellent, a bit depressing in places but still a brilliant read. I never got bored with it.

ZorbaTehZ

My favorite was probably Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Basic storyline, young guy gets banished from his guild, before this happens he is given a task to travel to a distant village to complete an errand of delivery, along the way some seriously epic stuff happens. Definitely my favorite fantasy book, it's a pity though that it's still rather unknown to most.

johnnyskeleton

Seeker wrote:

Ill probly gett a lot of flames for saying this but I think Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is probably one of the best when it comes to epic fantasy.

It's not a flame if I don't attack you but I attack the argument, is it?

Robert Jordan is a terrible writer and Wheel of Time is a terrible series. The writing is terrible, the pace is deathly slow, and the characters bear little or no resemblence to humans, nor are they particularly likeable or interesting. The plot is full of tangents, fragments and occasional bouts of spanking. Read the comments on www.amazon.co.uk for the later books to get an idea what it's like.

Then again, this could be what the OP is looking for...

nonamemark

johnnyskeleton wrote:

and the characters bear little or no resemblence to humans, nor are they particularly likeable or interesting.

what? lets see, the aiel are humans, along with aes sedai, sea folk, seanchan and white cloaks infact most of the population of the world is humans apart from (obviously) mydral, oigers trollocs ect. even darkfriends are human! i mean it IS a fantasy, so giving out about characters not being human is idiocy and whats not to like about the three boyos rand, mat and perrin. and what about lan? what a legend with a cliff for a face.

yes the books are slow but the first 3 are brilliant, books 4 and 5 get slow but on 6 (where i am now) the pace is picked up again.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

rand: omg, life is so awful. heroes have it so much easier in the books. I wish I was more like matt and perrin, they know how to deal with women.

matt: omg, I miss playing dice in the two rivers. I wish I was more like rand and perrin.. they know how to deal with women.

Perrin: I like to hammer things! I wish I was more like matt and rand, they know how to handle women.


I hate those three bastards... that's what happens after book 8. You start to hate all the main characters, and start rooting for the dark one. It's a masterful piece of writing skill by Jordan.

johnnyskeleton

nonamemark wrote:

what? lets see, the aiel are humans, along with aes sedai, sea folk, seanchan and white cloaks infact most of the population of the world is humans apart from (obviously) mydral, oigers trollocs ect. even darkfriends are human! i mean it IS a fantasy, so giving out about characters not being human is idiocy and whats not to like about the three boyos rand, mat and perrin. and what about lan? what a legend with a cliff for a face.

I'm not giving out that they are not human, what I mean is that the way the characters act, think and go about their business is so detached from the real world that it is difficult to empathise with them any more than in the most superficial way. Put another way, the elfs, dwafs, hobbits and other wierd creatures in the lord of the rings bear much more resemblence to real people (in our world) than the people in WoT do.

I mean, what's with all the spanking, extreme pettiness, pirate talk, and the ridiculous political system?

mordeth wrote:

I hate those three bastards... that's what happens after book 8. You start to hate all the main characters, and start rooting for the dark one. It's a masterful piece of writing skill by Jordan.

To be fair, the only reason you start to root for the dark one is that he is hardly ever in the books, so you don't get a chance to hate him as much as the other characters.

nesf

I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Erickson yet.

r3nu4l

tSubh Dearg wrote:

Actually the Belgariad and Mallorean series by David Eddings are super cheesey but a fantastic read

Yup, there are 5 books in each series and they are brilliant. I read them when I was 15 and loved them.

Humbert mentioned Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell, possibly the best book I've read in years. Excellent, not classic fantasy in terms of elves, orcs, mystical swords etc but still brilliant

My brother read a series called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the unbeliever. Apparently it's a bit strange but enjoyable. Can't remember who wrote them.

nesf

r3nu4l wrote:

My brother read a series called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the unbeliever. Apparently it's a bit strange but enjoyable. Can't remember who wrote them.

Stephen Donaldson. They are good but not an easy read like Feist, Gemmell et al.

r3nu4l

nesf wrote:

Stephen Donaldson. They are good but not an easy read like Feist, Gemmell et al.

That's him, thanks nesf...too lazy to use Googly-bear!

FionnMatthew

Just to throw in my bit with the Robert Jordan bashing: It's awful. It's sub-Dan Brown stuff. The only reason it's tolerated is because it's genre fiction. The prose is terrible, the plot isn't just out of control - there never was one. It hits all of the generic fantasy signposts. It's a bundle of cliches. Jordan doesn't create characters as a novelist; he creates them as an RPG gamer. Which means hejust ticks boxes.

Name: check.
Age: check.
Sexual orientation: check.
Weapon of choice: check.
Emotion of choice: check. (yes. Most characters in the WoT has only one typical emotion. If you have two, you're a 'deep' character.)
Alignment: check.
Type of women/men you find attractive: check.

It's tedious, formulaic and utterly devoid of any actual discretion. The characters have no purpose. They don't fulfill the requirements of plot, they're not there to bring anything extra to the story. The series has long since become enumerative, like a bestiary of one-dimensional rpg character types.

I once humoured the idea of enumerating in a piece of writing everything that bugged me about Jordan, everything that was wrong with his abuse of the epic-fantasy genre. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to include, the more ridiculous the fact that he still sells books seemed, and the less realistic became the task of actually writing it. It would, by now, probably be as long as one of his prologues. That's 10000 words, on average.

Don't waste your time on Robert Jordan. It's trash.

I've read an awful lot of this genre, trying to get back to the original thrill of Tolkien. I still don't think anyone has superseded Tolkien at what he did, but there are writers in the genre who have done comparably amazing work, just in a different vein.

Someone's already mentioned Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The Book of the New Sun is an incredible work; it's stunningly intricate, thematically mature, heavily atmospheric and demands multiple reads. It feels like a great epic, and it is also a singular work of literature. If you don't mind the fact that it is also, secretly, a science fiction sequence, (which is something to bear in mind while reading it) it is highly recommended.

Gene Wolfe's other work is equally recommended. He's an ex-engineer, but also a war-veteran, and a classicist. His prose is always excellent, and he never sticks to any one style. For instance: The Book of the New Sun is written in the first person, as a memoir, in a Dickensian/Chestertonian register, with just the right air of eloquent wistfulness and mystery to endear it to the reader after the first sentence: "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future." But, say, Free Live Free, one of his single novels, is written in a compact, stripped back, third person style, like Hemingway.

He wrote two other sequences in the same universe as the Book of the New Sun. These are The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun. Each is unique and self-sufficient. He also wrote a historical fantasy sequence, which he appears to be returning to recently, called Latro in the Mist, which follows the exploits of a Roman mercenary during the Persian wars in Greece. The first three books of this sequence are available: Soldier in the Mist, Soldier of Arete and Soldier of Sidon.

There's also another more typical fantasy sequence that I have on the shelf, but haven't yet given a look, called The Wizard Knight. But I hear it's excellent. He has a great deal of singleton novels and novellas I won't mention, but for Devil in the Forest, which is a tidy little historical fantasy which feels like a Robin Hood tale, but is much darker, and is set all in the one tiny village. You should also check out his non-fiction, because it gives you ideas on who else you might like in the genres he writes in.

One tip: his books are difficult to get around here, so order via Amazon.

George R.R. Martin's been getting high recommendations, and he deserves them. His Song of Ice & Fire sequence is precisely the way the Wheel of Time should have been written. It's not great literature, but it's good, solid, prose, it's compelling, gritty and atmospheric. The only drawback is that it's not finished yet. I'll add my recommendation to the clamour.

Stephen R Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is something you should check out. It's conscious of the cliches of the genre, and manages to include them by making the protagonist, who is from our world, disbelieve in the world he's entered. It's really dark; but there are some incandescent moments in it that make it one of the best fantasy sequences I've read. Apparently, Donaldson is now adding to the 20 year old sequence; I don't know what the new books are like.

Ursula K le Guin's work is always good. You'll have noticed an anime from Studio Ghibli out recently called "Tales from Earthsea". It's based on her Earthsea Quartet (which has recently become a quintet). I can attest that the first four books are excellent, and have something of their own that makes them stand out in my memory. The Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore & Tehanu.

Someone mentioned Tad William's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. I wouldn't heap quite the praises on it that that poster did, but it is good. It doesn't quite manage to invest the cliched boy-to-saviour plot with enough originality for you not to notice, but it's close; it ticks along at a fair old pace, and there are plenty of things to keep you interested. Its characters are not as interesting as its places. It's colourful, and at times tearful, and it doesn't overdo the growing pains thread in the way that, say, Jordan does. It's quaint, and enjoyable, and someday I hope to read it again.

Let's see... what else?

I found David Eddings to be fun. It does exactly what it purports to do on the cover, with a bit of a sense of humour. The five-book Belgariad was a fair old romp, which follows the boy Garion's quest as he becomes a magician. The five-book Malloreon was exactly the same sequence again, with the same characters, doing essentially the same thing, but with an air of "bigness" about it that tried to pass it off as something new.

He wrote two more sequences, a little more grown up. The Elenium and the The Tamuli, which deal with the exploits of Sparhawk. Again, the first was diverting and amusing, the second was a cynical rehash of the first, with the same characters, and ostensibly exactly the same plot.

I recently discovered he has a formula for writing this stuff, so I suppose it's to be expected. Read the Belgariad and the Elenium, and ignore the two sequels.

Raymond E Feist had a lot of shelf space on the Fantasy section until the more recent spate of new Fantasy authors. I only ever read The Magician, and I found it to be appalling, one-dimensional, cliche-ridden trash. But someone else said earlier that it improves in the later books of the sequence, so I'll not pretend I have conclusive knowledge on Feist. I'll only say that reading the Magician cover to cover will turn out, in our fantasy-wise world, to be quite tedious these days, since so many of the things which Feist was regurgitating, which might then have had the slightest whiff of freshness about it, will seem nowadays as tired as He-Man.

I've heard good things about Philip Pullman, but sadly, life has moved on, and I don't have the time to read as many epic sequences as I used to.

One final note. I'd recommend, for further exploration of the genre, Clute and Nichols The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It's comprehensive up till the 1990s, and it's so informative you won't be able to help getting lost in it, and imagining epic fantasy novels better than any you ever could have read. Check it out.

Good luck.

johnnyskeleton

Has anyone mentioned Terry Pratchett? Maybe not exactly what the OP is looking for, but they are really funny. They are more of a fantasy satire, but the satire is of real life and not one of those Bored of the Rings type cheap shots.

Obvoiusly start at the 1st discworld novel, but for me the best ones are Reaper Man, Soul Music, Guards Guards, The Colour of Magic & The Light Fantastic and the most recent one - going postal.