[Slick Mongoose]

Hobb, Zelazny and Bakker are the only contenders for me, although i'm not so widely read as some on here. All very different, Hobb in particular. I don't agree that her endings are bad, not at all, they are just understated. She's more about the emotional kick, for me, and less epic in scale that the others.

Zelazny is very good, particularly the Amber series, but only the first Amber series, not the second, which isn't so good.

[Werthead]

Well, I hated the ending of Farseer. Really irritated me. Liveship Traders had a better ending, but I felt the final book was incredibly long and dull. I put it down at one point and didn't go back to it for a year. The actual ending itself wasn't so bad, more the lead-up to that ending. These factors have pretty much killed any interest I had in picking up Tawny Man.

Didn't realise you were on Malazanempire as well, Slick!

[Slick Mongoose]

Lurking, mostly.


I can completely understand why people don't like Hobbs endings, but to me it's a stylistic difference rather than any inferiority. A lot like many people don't like Mieville's endings, but I do. It's completely the opposite of Erikson's convergence style of endings, so many people here will probably dislike it.

[telorast]

nobody beats se, but please read robert holdstocks "Mythago wood" books. so very very readable...

[Dr Trouble]

R.A Salvadore!
That's a man who can write!

*cough*

[Arkmam]

Trouble, you're in trouble...

[Whelp]

Agraba:
Imho, top SF writers would be Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and Stanislaw Lem.

Fantasy writer better than Erikson:
The only possible name is Terry Goodkind. Anybody dare dispute it?

If we leave out His Majesty, Whose Name Makes Cthulhu Tremble In Fear, imo Neil Gaiman, Tolkien, Terry Pratchett and George R.R. Martin.

vera adina gunnersen:
Alas, Holdstock was compulsory reading at the university, so I kind of disliked it Nevertheless, the Mythago Woods is interesting.

[polishgenius]

I'm not a huge fan of Bakker. It's good, but it seems to get a lot of people who like it because Erikson does, and for some reason, for me it's really quite a slog in the end. I've been halfway through Warrior Prophet for months, even though I find it intriguing. Odd.

Then again, Mieville is a slog for some people and I've already mentioned him as right up there, so different strokes I suppose.

On Neil Gaiman - he's nothing like the majority of the authors mentioned here. For starters, the fantasy he writes is set in or connected to 'our' world. American Gods is probably his best novel, but it really doesn't matter which order you read them in.
His best work, though, is 'The Sandman', which as I've said in other topics I'll put alongside anything anyone wants to call literature. Costs a bomb though - between £10 and £13 for each volume of a ten volume main series. But I think it's worth it.

Oh, edit: definite yes! on Prachett - he's so obvious to me now I forget to mention him. He's practically his own genre.
And Stansilaw Lem is aces. I get to read him in the original even though it's a struggle.

[sarlinspellweaver]

Tolkien all the way!!!

Erikson is good - damn good in fact - but re-reading the Silmarillion and the LotR is like wandering into a lush green field barefoot after you've been walking through stony desert...

[stone monkey]

Small correction for Werthead - Whilst Sandman may at present be a series of 10 or so Graphic Novels, it was originally published as a series of 60+ monthly comics by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint over a period of 5 or so years during the late 80s and early 90s - I know this, because that's when I bought them.

[Werthead]

I know it was a series of comics, but given you cannot buy it as a collection of comics any more (and it would be ludicrously expensive if you did), the graphic novel collection seemed an easier way of mentioning it. And it was 8 years - 1988 to 1996.

[Mane of Chaos]

Tolkien has been my all-time favourite author for 3 years. I am not sure if Erikson could ever reach the complexity and depth found in the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien, but I have to admit that I am deeply moved by the fates of the characters in Malazan Book of the Fallen and if the books continue to be as good as they have been so far (I've read up to HoC), I believe that I will one day be able to say that Erikson is equal to Tolkien.

[No-God]

Gooch said:

nobody is essentially better, persay...but I think Guy Gavriel Kay is topnotch.

Bakker redeemed that series with a great book#3, but still needs to grow.

The Prince of Nothing was an amazing series. I thought book 2 was the absolute best, though... such an emotionally draining book!

[No-God]

Master of the Deck said:

Tolkien has been my all-time favourite author for 3 years. I am not sure if Erikson could ever reach the complexity and depth found in the stories of J. R. R. Tolkien, but I have to admit that I am deeply moved by the fates of the characters in Malazan Book of the Fallen and if the books continue to be as good as they have been so far (I've read up to HoC), I believe that I will one day be able to say that Erikson is equal to Tolkien.

I have a few issues with Tolkein.

First, he isn't that good a writer. I give him a ton of credit for being as creative as he was, but the fact he wrote in old English doesn't make it flawless. He had a very, dare I say, aggrivating narrative style.
I also don't feel he was really that complex. He had a lot of characters, but it seemed that most of them had the same lineage - for example, on first glance, it's good that each character has a family tree. Looking closer, however, it seems that most of the characters do the 'same thing'.
I think my greatest issue regarding Tolkein was his complete failure to successfully conclude such an intricate story. It annoyed me when the ghosts came to help Gondor/Rohan at Pelannor Fields - if that isn't the most glaring example of Deus ex Machina, I don't know what is. The ghosts weren't mentioned anywhere before that part where Aragorn meets with them, they come out of nowhere, and they are essentially invincible. It seemed to me that Tolkein was unable to think of some realistic event to help Gondor out of Pelannor (At least Helm's Deep had Eomer's charge), so he created something else to fix the problem for him.

Besides those criticisms, don't get me wrong. It was a very good book for it's time.

[Agraba]

Trouble said:

R.A Salvadore!
That's a man who can write!

*cough*

Thanks! I'm gonna go buy all his pieces right now!

[on to seriousness]

Tolkien's work is good for putting into a movie with special effects, but the stories are just too simple to take that seriously. As Steven Erikson said, things are never simple. There are always shades of grey, ambiguity, and contovorsial issues. Tolkien just points to this and that, and tells you what's right and wrong and black and white. Also, the Silmarillion isn't really a novel, just a bunch of notes put together by his son. It's not really a decent piece of work, just things about his world that are interesting to know.

Let me hear more about R. Scott Bakker, the second most mentioned guy.

And I'm going find the time to look at Good Omens, and Book 1 of the Sandman series. But what is a "Graphic Novel"?

[Brahm_K]

No-God said:

. It annoyed me when the ghosts came to help Gondor/Rohan at Pelannor Fields - if that isn't the most glaring example of Deus ex Machina, I don't know what is. The ghosts weren't mentioned anywhere before that part where Aragorn meets with them, they come out of nowhere, and they are essentially invincible. It seemed to me that Tolkein was unable to think of some realistic event to help Gondor out of Pelannor (At least Helm's Deep had Eomer's charge), so he created something else to fix the problem for him.

In the books, the ghosts played a very miniscule role. They basically won a small battle and freed Gondorian slaves who then went to fight on the Pelennor Fields, which can be seen as a deus ex machina (the far bigger one would be the Eagles). Still, we're on an Erikson board....

[Whelp]

Agraba:
Graphic novel
Not fantasy, but Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels are also worth checking out. Terry Pratchett has also a few (The Last Hero being imho the best).

[Mane of Chaos]

No-God, I think that style is a matter of personal taste. I personally enjoy Tolkien's style, I adore it. I also dare to disagree on the question of characters. I do not think that the characters in his books are alike. I'd much rather say this about Steven. His books are filled with so many heroes and some of them are bound to be similar. No offence, I love his series, but sometimes there's just too many heroes. And what's more important - some of them have very similar characteristics.
Agraba, I dare to disagree. I consider The Silmarillion the better of Tolkien's two major works, the other being The Lord of the Rings. I think that most of you do not understand that in mythology things are simple. There's good and evil. There are almost no shades of grey. Tolkien wanted to create a mythology for his country, England, because he did not think that the Arthurian cycle, which was not even genuinely English, and the other old Irish/Scottish/English/Celtic stories, could be called English mythology. His works were not only a mythology, they were epic stories. In mythology and in most epic stories good guys are just like Tolkien's good characters and bad guys are just like Morgoth, Sauron, etc. So, you see, Tolkien's works were not simple. He was an innovator, he could perhaps be dubbed the founder of fantasy, but what's most important is that his world is filled with wondrous characters, there are many details to it, he even invented languages for some of the peoples. Can you even imagine how hard that was? I don't think that any other author, modern or classic, has ever invented a language. True, some of you might not be as interested in philology as I am, but I think that we should certainly give credit to Tolkien for what he did.