Fantasy Series

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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Animavore » Wed May 02, 2018 10:21 am

The Hobbit is a children's book anyway.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Scot Dutchy » Wed May 02, 2018 12:42 pm

Still bloody boring. I prefer reality. I love Steinbeck.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Forty Two » Wed May 02, 2018 1:56 pm

Scot, have you ever read Poul Anderson's Incarnations of Immortality Series, starting with On a Pale Horse? Give your list in the OP, I think you might like it.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Forty Two » Wed May 02, 2018 1:57 pm

Animavore wrote:
Wed May 02, 2018 10:21 am
The Hobbit is a children's book anyway.
Indeed, it was written to be read allowed to children. Next time you read it, think about it being read allowed, or try to read it out loud. It is very conducive to that. Shows one of Tolkien's many amazing abilities.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar

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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed May 02, 2018 2:01 pm

I was thinking about this Fantasy stuff, and i think I actually went off it after reading Barker's Weaveworld. Trolls and sword play lost their edge.

So what are the always-a-winner recommendations for the lapsed?

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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Animavore » Wed May 02, 2018 2:19 pm

Has anyone been reading The Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin? It's supposed to be really good and departs from the usual pseudo-medieval European settings we're used to.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Rum » Wed May 02, 2018 7:38 pm

I started out reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs' books when I was about 11. For those who don't know he invented Tarzan and wrote 26 Tarzan books in all. He also invented whole 'cultures' on Venus and also on Mars (Barsoom), as well as a prehistoric land on the underside of the Earth's crust he called Pellucidar (complete with dinosaurs). They were great adventure stories - pretty thin on character and character development but great for a kid of that age. One of the attractions at the time for me was the jacket illustrations by Frank Frazetta. You can see why.. :mrgreen: I owned probably 25 or 30 of his books by the time I was 12 or so.
riceburroughs.jpg
Considering he was so prolific and well known at the time (he made a fortune out of the filmed Tarzan stories) he has gone way out of fashion these days. Maybe because the tales are so simplistic.

I discovered science fiction when I was 13 or so and I found fantasy unsatisfying after that. SF took a plausible premise in my view, stuck to the internal rules consistently and ended up with a proper story - usually. Fantasy to my way of thinking could find 'magic' solutions to problems as an easy get out. Anyway I moved on to to SF for keeps and read it avidly into my 40s.

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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Svartalf » Wed May 02, 2018 8:02 pm

JimC wrote:
Tue May 01, 2018 10:39 pm
How could I have forgotten "Conan the Barbarian" and subsequent books by Robert Jordan? Classics of the genre! For all that they are the pulps of the fantasy world, I'm tempted to put them in first rank.

As for what many will see as a yawning gap in my lists, I cannot bring myself to read Game of Thrones.

So shoot me...

Edit - Of course, the original Conan was by Robert E Howard, but Robert Jordan added to the series after Howard's death.
Sorry to be in sore disagreement with you, but none of the 'Conan' stuff I read that was made by anyone, bar REH himself was worth a treefrog's fart... and Jordan, fah, I tried reading the first volume of the Wheel of Time, had trouble finishing it, and never wished to read anything more by that particular author.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Animavore » Wed May 02, 2018 8:09 pm

Read the first wheel of time too. Remember not liking its style, but can't remember why. Long time ago.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Svartalf » Wed May 02, 2018 8:11 pm

I'd like to read Pratchett one of those days, but the corpus is so large I don't know where to start...
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Brian Peacock » Wed May 02, 2018 8:48 pm

I started at the beginning with The Colour Of Magic and progressed from there. I haven't read all the Discworld books, but I've bought Small Gods, Mort, Night Watch several times as gifts. Small Gods is my favourite of the bunch though - one of the best critiques of religion evah imo.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by JimC » Wed May 02, 2018 9:19 pm

Rum wrote:

...I discovered science fiction when I was 13 or so and I found fantasy unsatisfying after that. SF took a plausible premise in my view, stuck to the internal rules consistently and ended up with a proper story - usually. Fantasy to my way of thinking could find 'magic' solutions to problems as an easy get out. Anyway I moved on to to SF for keeps and read it avidly into my 40s...
Fear not! I'll be starting an SF series soon! (my library has more SF than fantasy, anyway...)
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by JimC » Wed May 02, 2018 9:21 pm

Svartalf wrote:
Wed May 02, 2018 8:02 pm
JimC wrote:
Tue May 01, 2018 10:39 pm
How could I have forgotten "Conan the Barbarian" and subsequent books by Robert Jordan? Classics of the genre! For all that they are the pulps of the fantasy world, I'm tempted to put them in first rank.

As for what many will see as a yawning gap in my lists, I cannot bring myself to read Game of Thrones.

So shoot me...

Edit - Of course, the original Conan was by Robert E Howard, but Robert Jordan added to the series after Howard's death.
Sorry to be in sore disagreement with you, but none of the 'Conan' stuff I read that was made by anyone, bar REH himself was worth a treefrog's fart... and Jordan, fah, I tried reading the first volume of the Wheel of Time, had trouble finishing it, and never wished to read anything more by that particular author.
From the Wiki on Conan:
The character of Conan has proven durably popular, resulting in Conan stories by later writers such as Poul Anderson, Leonard Carpenter, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Roland J. Green, John C. Hocking, Robert Jordan, Sean A. Moore, Björn Nyberg, Andrew J. Offutt, Steve Perry, John Maddox Roberts, Harry Turtledove, and Karl Edward Wagner. Some of these writers have finished incomplete Conan manuscripts by Howard. Others were created by rewriting Howard stories which originally featured entirely different characters from entirely different milieus. Most, however, are completely original works. In total, more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories featuring the Conan character have been written by authors other than Howard.
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by Svartalf » Thu May 03, 2018 4:13 am

I've read Conan stuff by Carter, de camp, Wagner (whom I greatly admire for his Kane stories and novels) and maybe others (I don't remember it all because, in part, I don't have the books at home as I most certainly threw or sold away any I might have owned) and they were all weaksauce, in the best of cases , utter an d complete trash in many others... the character may be durable, but it doesn't mean other authors can do good work on him, so high is the bar set by the original..
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Re: Fantasy Series

Post by JimC » Thu May 03, 2018 4:16 am

I basically agree, Svarty. I haven't got any of the originals in book form at the moment - I think I might see if I can get 'em on Kindle...
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