To the fantasy readers and writers, recommendations needed

[Carol Rose]

Exactly.

This is a fantasy thread, after all. Non-linear time is no issue.

LOL!!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

I sympathise @Rich. I really do. I started out by deciding to go a walk with this writing- a- novel exercise. I was very unwell and it was getting me down, I'd had to stop work and needed a project. I'd had so much from books, I wondered, could I too, approach that shimmering pantheon, and produce a novel length story with a beginning, middle and end. Could I physically do it. Glue backside to seat and produce that word count, 60 K plus, even if I produced a pile of 'meh'. I don't say manure because manure is useful.

I sort of had the story, but the genre. Eh? I didn't know about that yet. I'd always been a reader, but my readings was eclectic, and I'd never considered genre, although doubtless I'd unwittingly absorbed patterns and conventions.

To complicate the picture further, there's also that enduring oddity, General Fiction, as I check the back covers of what's in my bookcases, eg, Life of Pi, The Poisonwood Bible, Masai Dreaming.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

General Fiction—that's a term that's slipped between the gaps, in favour of Genre Writing and Literary Fiction. It's difficult to define what qualities General Fiction has, but one of them would be readability, thanks to a lack of snooty pretension. Masai Dreaming is excellent, as are all of the Justin Cartwright novels I've read.

 

[Rich.]

I sympathise @Rich. I really do. I started out by deciding to go a walk with this writing- a- novel exercise. I was very unwell and it was getting me down, I'd had to stop work and needed a project. I'd had so much from books, I wondered, could I too, approach that shimmering pantheon, and produce a novel length story with a beginning, middle and end. Could I physically do it. Glue backside to seat and produce that word count, 60 K plus, even if I produced a pile of 'meh'. I don't say manure because manure is useful.

It's interesting how first books are born, isn't it? I came relatively late to this writing game and my novel started as a bit of flash, written at the suggestion of a writer friend and submitted to an anthology. The editor rejected it but said he liked the character.

And three years later, as much to my surpise as to those around me, I had a novel.

Life's a funny thing sometimes. (But I did discover a passion for writing, where before, like you, the passion had all been for reading).

Funny in a good way.

 

[Rich.]

Oh, double post! Naughty me.

I've said previously that this thread has taken on a life of its own, and I wouldn't want to curtail that in any way. But I am going to re-post a request I made for specific recommendations a little earlier in the thread – only because I'm sure y'all have got some.

In terms of epic fantasy – the broad canvas stories, often medieval in setting and almost always involving magic, the ones that can be used as doorstops and sit squarely in the fantasy section of the bookshop – what have you read that subverts the tropes and takes the genre somewhere new? Game of Thrones made high fantasy gritty. Joe Abercrombie did away with good vs evil. Ursula Le Guin (writing in the sixties) had black protagonists in a bronze-age world. Lynn Flewlling, in her Nightrunner series – an otherwise standard bit of fantasy – had a gay love story between her heroes. And the Saga comics (not doorstops, admittedly) have a breast-feeding mother kicking ass.

You get the idea. Tell me about epic fantasy* that isn't centred around a poor white boy with a destiny.

*epic fantasy/high fantasy – Wikipedia