Are there any fantasy books not by tolkien that are actually good? I would like to read a good series of books...

Are there any fantasy books not by tolkien that are actually good? I would like to read a good series of books, but each one I start I find terribly dull and dissapointing. So far I've tried Wheel of time, the name of the wind and a song of ice and fire and was let down by all of them.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy
youtube.com/watch?v=AD3TSrfwJgE
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Maybe. They're usually about interesting concepts and characters rather than artistic experience, though. You could try "The Elenium".

Read literature that happens to be fantasy instead of searching for fantasy and hoping for literature.

David Eddings is good, the Elenium and Tamuli being slightly darker in style than the Belgariad and Mallorean.
Raymond E Feist is good, slightly faster paced writing style.
Janny Wurts' is good, Mistwraith series has a cool system of magic and history, but the two main characters get kind of annoying after a while.
Tad Williams is good, the Dragon Bone Chair trilogy has a style that feels similar to Tolkien's, though not as epic or elevated. Cool history though.
Terry Brooks in his Shannara series is okay, kinda slow and long-winded in the early books, but his writing style improved later on. The books are better than the tv series imo.
Melanie Rawn has a two good series, the Dragon Prince series (which is complete), and the Ruins of Ambrai trilogy (incomplete), which happens to be better.
Piers Anthony's "Xanth" series for laughs.

All of these authors are equal in quality to GRRM. Actually, Eddings is significantly worse. These are bad suggestions given the OP

UNSONG

The Elric Saga is pretty good. The stories have plenty to energy, characterization, and larger themes about mankind. They're also very different from whats considered 'normal' fantasy and can get pretty weird in places.

I'm no expert, but together with the OP this kind of looks like a list of every fantasy series I've ever heard of.

Gormenghast
Book of the New Sun and others by Gene Wolfe

Also

Mervyn Peake -- The Gormenghast books
John Crowley -- Little, Big; the Aegypt quartet; Ka: Dar Oakley
Hope Mirlees -- Lud-in-the-Mist

Powder Mage
I, the Sun (Most of her work is pretty good actually)
>Dragonlance: Legends
The Riyria Chronicles, and then The Riyria Revelations (even if Revelations was written first, Chronicles is written better and occurs, chronologically, before. Also written such that this is possible to do: "zero" spoilers.)
The Mists of Avalon
I hear "The Children of Telm" which nobody has read, including me, is very Tolkien like.

>10 replies
> not a single mention of Malazan

Disappointed in you Veeky Forums

There's "epic" fantasy from the likes of Tolkien, Martin, and Sanderson. Then there's that one truly epic fantasy that transcends the genre into it's untapped potential. Malazan is & was that breakthrough. Hundreds of characters, each with their own struggles & sufferings from the consequences of their actions and from others'. A complex narrative spanning hundreds of thousands of years in a unique world reeling from the effects of the misdeeds of their own gods. Gut-wrenching brutality coupled with some of the most intense action sequences, philosophical & at times, gritty dialogue make ASOIAF & Lord of the Rings appear as Disney works.

The short answer is no.

this, though

Or just read history. The inconvenient truth is that no world-building can come close to actual history. The problem I have with fantasy is twofold:

a. the "adventure group/fellowship/king's champions" going off to do xyz pretty much never existed in history. So long as fantasy insists on being derivative of D&D, a game, it can never transcend that. Real life politics as early as the Sumerians, let alone the fucken medieval ages, has been too complex to support a traditional narrative, its far larger than the fates of a couple individuals as your common nu-fantasy plot would have it

b. like I said before, the best a fantasy novel can do, especially those that insist on """realism""", is imitate real world history. If there exists a fantasy author that can grant their world the same level of historical depth and entropy that the passage of real time does to our history -- rather than quibbling about magic systems and decking out their not-viking nation who live in not-norway -- maybe they'd be onto something. Tolkien is the only one I know of. If there's others I'd love to hear them. You might think that historical fiction is a good middle ground here, but again, why not just read actual history.

Because of these two things, almost all fantasy just feels like anime bullshit to me. ""realistic"" fantasy just feels like a Marvel movie zipping around between plot armoured individuals.

So imo, a genre fiction book should have to be spectacularly original, wrapped in a completely unique aesthetic that shrugs off all definition, to be worth troubling with.

i liked lud-in-the-mist, could not get into gormenghast tho.

i love Brigde of Birds by Hughart,
or maybe something like dunsany or gaimen?

I always hear high praise for Malazan. Besides being bigger in scope then most fantasy, is it better written? My biggest problems with ASOIF and wheel of time is that the pacing is glacial and that the prose simply isn't very good.

Couldn't have said it better.
There are historical events more interesting than any fantasy, but people ignore it because history books don't have the same "glamour" as fiction.

Its not very good, Prose is medicore, the worldbuilding is ok. i have only read the first two books, so maybe the author got better along th way.

>Tolkien is the only one I know of
But he also did the quest archetype that you spent the first paragraph criticising. It doesn't get much more questy than LotR.

I always wanted to attempt this, but I read so many reviews saying how the story suffers from all the things you list as positives.
The fact there is hundreds of characters means that none are truly fleshed out and you end up not caring about them or even knowing why they are important to the overall story.
Tell me I'm wrong because I think The Great Epic Fantasy Series has yet to be written.

>Tell me I'm wrong because I think The Great Epic Fantasy Series has yet to be written.
I'm writing it ;)

If the story has any "strong female characters," just giving you a heads up that it already belongs in the trash.

>REEEE DON'T MAKE FEMALE CHARACTERS BE PEOPLE! REEEE DON'T FLESH OUT FEMALE CHARACTERS WITH FAULTS AND SHORTCOMINGS AND QUALITIES BECAUSE I SAID SO
Are you a teenager per chance?

It has three, one of which is a literal sociopath.

There really is no thread that you shitters won't shit up, isn't there?

...

>"strong female characters,"
Does this just mean Mary Sue?

>spending all those characters to say, "I don't like fantasy."

Honestly OP, maybe fantasy might not be your genre. You're one of those people who say they want fantasy but don't want all the things that make the genre.

No, because Mary Sues are not strong characters.

>giving imaginary females male qualities to make them seem strong
It's like poetry really

Or you know, you can just write strong characters that happen to be female? You realize that women are actually people too...right?

Pray tell, what is a male quality?

tru

fags

>samefag

Integrity

>women can't have integrity
are you some sort of an incel?

So basically you're arguing that because you don't like women, women can't be written as likeable?

Mine

W-well my dad liked it

no its a bankrupt genre for faggots who can’t get into mythology or religion. its quite literally race memory+faith for autists of the new age. if you read even one fantasy book as an adult you lose a piece of your psyche to chaos forever

I'm halfway through this now and it's fairly good

Came here to post this. Good taste.

I'm seriously writing (slowly) a high fantasy series.

>women
>people
Lol

I'm working on a story but I don't know if it's low or high

What even makes the difference? I know examples of the two, like ASOIAF (low) or Sanderson (high) but what specifically makes the difference?

ASOIAF is not "low" fantasy, that's a meme. Here, read it:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy

I thought ASOIAF was high fantasy.

Yes, they are classified as actual people, MGTOW. They are human females.

Shardik.

Surprised no one mentioned Zelazny.

It is, he's just being a cheeky cunt.

My MC is a strong non-white female. Come at me

Details?

>actually surprised that we haven't gotten those fedora-tippers who shit up genre fiction threads

It was a sort of self-imposed challenge, to create the most PC type character and actually build a worthwhile novel around her. Whether I succeeded or not is another matter, of course

I feel like unless you are some goofy /pol/nigger, that's not hard. Just stop caring that the character is a person of color or a woman and just WRITE A CHARACTER. Why you need to preface that it's a "challenge to make the most PC" character as possible, seems baffling and a waste of energy.

That's basically what I did in the end. That jokey starting point really just gave me a platform from which to work

Here's my favourite fantasy author. She writes quite amusing fairy tales, I think.

It seemed like a retarded "jokey" start point to begin with and really shows where your priorities are. It sort of seems like you'd be the one to complain about those types of things, if they are on your brain enough to use as a writing prompt.

All of these are bad though. David Gemmel is the only one unique enough to venture into.

Start with Legend, it's his best, and arguably one of the best Fantasy works around, then you're off ether of his serries. Doesen't matter which, they're all fairly good, but just don't be afraid of ditching him and going back to Tolkien.

Lud-in-the-Mist is brilliant.

My priorities five years ago, sure. A lot has changed since then, and that retarded jokey start proved the inspiration for the creation and ultimate completion of something I believe to be worthwhile.

Great, now we’re going to have dragons flying around with fucking spinning rims on them

Motherfucking DRAGONLANCE

I read Paradise Lost, Iliad, Odyssey, D. Comedy, the Bible, and Blood Meridian all as fantasies.

This nigga got must’ve gotten sent to bed without no tendies

youtube.com/watch?v=AD3TSrfwJgE

Then tell me abou tit.

>Let me show you Crowder explain anything
Oh, fucking kill yourself.

Crowder is literally the example of a "conservative" snowflake, imagine complaining about female characters in fiction.

DUNSANY you plebs

It's a sort of pseudo-20th century setting, a fantasy world coming to terms with modernism, from an outsider's perspective

C.S. Lewis - Space Trilogy

Thoughts on the Witcher books?

Discworld.

Jack Vance.

The Lyoness trilogy, The Dying Earth,Rhialto the Marvelous, Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga.

Also Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series...

When a woman is described to be feminine in appearance, then beats up a bunch of men through physical prowess: Immersion dies.
>Unless implied the woman is magically strong

I'd like to see more female characters who have the good sense to run away in the face of danger.

He at least pre-dates DnD.

Yeah its a bit of a contradiction, but for me, Tolkien falls into the "utterly unique" category.

No actual plots though, or anything you could call a story. Moorcock was a hack.

Being able to fight other males.

Plotless, pulpy trash. Same goes for Conan and all "muh classic" Murcan fantasy authors.

I don't think you know what "feminine" means, mate. Men can have feminine appearances. I think you just have your own problems to deal with concerning women.

Tolkein gets away with it because he was the first.

Doesn't mean it is flawless, and that you should call it 'good' just because it was the first. However, considering future authors had the opportunity to improve the model he presented and haven't does a disservice to both.

>implying there are no differences between how men and women behave

is trash. Probably the second worst fantasy series i've read tied with the Drizzt books.

Why are WotC books so devoid of quality? I'm not even trying to be an ass about this. They just suck.

Holy shit, what is wrong with you? Nobody said that. The point was that it's not hard to write women as people, since you know, they are people? Do you have some cartoonishly MGTOW opinion of how women act?

Blatant rip-offs of Moorcock's Elric Saga but with some pretty good humor mixed in there. I don't read them though becaus Andrej Sapkowski, or whatever his name is, is a liar and a hack writer who can't get over the fact that the games are what made his books popular outside of his own country.

Check out "The Land of Elyon" books. They're meant for middle school kids but the MC is a young girl who has to rely on actual able bodied characters in physical confrontations.
maybe hits somebody one time and it only works because she surprised them.

>are there any fantasy books that are actually good
No

Men and women think and behave differently, you knee-jerk liberal.Taking the mindset of 'oh i'll just write a good character and make them X' isn't going to make them real because a variety of cultural, sociological and biological factors will affect how they interact with the world. Changing one of those things will have to drastically affect how the character acts.

I bet you're colorblind too you left leaning parasite.

>Men and women think and behave differently
Right, but there is a difference between understanding and writing in differences and going full-blown retard and making women into caricatures based on their gender.
>Taking the mindset of 'oh i'll just write a good character and make them X' isn't going to make them real
Your first and foremost priority should be writing a good character, not worrying about their sex or gender.
>because a variety of cultural, sociological and biological factors will affect how they interact with the world.
No shit, Sherlock.
>Changing one of those things will have to drastically affect how the character acts.
Only people who seem to complain about shit like this, already have cartoonishly retarded beliefs on how men and women behave. Women aren't a completely different species you dumb retard, it's not hard to write a woman with flaws and believable characteristics. UNLESS you already subscribe to some obviously MGTOW-esque reality where women are subhuman or out to destroy men or some other aspie shit.
>you left leaning parasite
Ah, there it is. Rent free, right faggot?
>REEEE DON'T BE COLORBLIND!
Yeah, all my black characters go "sheeetttt niggaaa look how juicy this watermelon is" amirite?

>I bet you're colorblind too you left leaning parasite.
You should try to relax.

Where did I say you should make caricatures of women and that this is the only way for them to be realistic? You seem to be contradicting yourself and/or arguing against things I never said when You say "no shit, obviously these things will affect how a character acts." Of course they do, so why are you fighting with me about how differently a man and a women would handle the same situation?

"good" is an arbitrary term when it comes to writing characters. Your goal is not to write 'good' characters, but believable and fully fleshed out ones. If you write a character that can have any one thing about them changed, then they are not fully realized. are you telling me that if Don Quixote was not Spanish, but instead a Turk or an African or a woman he would act exactly the same? Bullshit.

>Of course they do, so why are you fighting with me about how differently a man and a women would handle the same situation?
I'm not, I'm saying there is a difference between acknowledging minute differences in behavior, and going full retard and making women into cartoons.
>Your goal is not to write 'good' characters, but believable and fully fleshed out ones
You're going into semantics here. That's what I implied.
>are you telling me that if Don Quixote was not Spanish, but instead a Turk or an African or a woman he would act exactly the same?
No...I'm not saying that. You want to pretend I am.

You've already sperged out and called me a liberal blah blah blah or some other insult, so this conversation isn't a discourse anymore. All my point was is that it's not hard to flesh out female characters when you consider them as actual people, not caricatures. You somehow took offense to that. Like you need me to agree with you that women are so vastly different, that it's hard or impossible to write them as characters.

I hope you aren't retarded enough to think that all women do is talk about boys and shopping and have sex all day, I really hope you aren't some MGTOW poster.

i took no offense. your exact words were "you can just write strong characters who happen to be female. you realize they're people too right?" people act like people but men and women do not act identically simply because they are human.

And don't pretend like i'm the one who's sperging out here when you flipped your shit after my first comment. I'm not getting hung up on semantics, you're not being transparent and saying what you mean. All the while assuming what i'm saying when all I said was that men and women are different, and due to a myriad of factors, would not perform identically.

Are you sure you're not projecting your own misconceptions and insecurities onto me? I've only said it about two other times now that i don't think women act irrationally just because they're women.

>Are you sure you're not projecting your own misconceptions and insecurities onto me?
lol you immediately jumped to calling me a liberal boogeywoogey.

You immediately called me a MGTOW

>So far I've tried Wheel of time, the name of the wind and a song of ice and fire and was let down by all of them.
Multiple Point of views usually suck. Try a fantasy novel with only a single point of view

>Some faggot's DnD game put into words
no thanks

Fantasy books used to be good but after Tolkien they became absolute garbage. The only good fantasy novels after Tolkien is BotNS