What are some of the best books in the fantasy genre?

you got any recommendations for me?

Steven Erikson, Malazan Books of the Fallen are all very good. First one is kind of odd and doesn't really explain itself. The tone changes drastically in the second book of the series. They were written 8 years apart, I believe.

What are some nice depressing, solemn, and subdued fantasy books? I need a break from happy elf shit, but I'm not exactly in the mood for realist literature. I want my feels but I want them to be magic as well.

Objectively: A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Book of the New Sun, The Drowned World, Frankenstein, Dune.

For some reason I read science fiction.

Abercrombie is better than most contemporary fantasy, but he's still trash.

All trash, except Anubis Gates, but it's weird and may not be to everyone's liking.

G A R B A G E

Elric is good, more fantasy should model itself on its level of magical prevalence.

Book of the New Sun counts as science fantasy and may be included, as it is fantasy par excellence.

what a surprise, a tripfag is a colossal faggot.

Eh, anons in this thread are assessing books by how good their 'magic system' is and using terms like 'grimdark'. Personally I'm far more inclined to trust a tripfriend calling everything trash.

The best Fantasy book ever written is the "Memories of Ice", part three of the Malazan books of the fallen.
Its one of the few fantasy books that is not build upon layers of tropes and stereotypes (like Sanderson/Rothfuss/etc.) and treats its characters as actual humans.

BotnS is also very good.

The Discworld series, 41 books seem daunting and the first three books are a bit iffy because Pratchett was finding his comfort zone with it but from then on the series gets better and better.

I put off the series because it was so long but I am currently on book 40 and very depressed there will never be anymore additions to the series.

...

The author mentioned that the army setup is based around how the Romans were set up, so they have sergeants, captains, "fists"/generals, and squads.

There is a Middle Eastern vibe about the seven cities too, not some medieval European clone like a lot of other books do.

The magic system is pretty unique as well.

Bretty gud.

>Trip fag hates Rune Lord.

Don't you got some cocks to gobble up Mr?

Earthsea is good, main protagonist slaps the shit out of some dragons and makes the Father Dragon his bitch (for a minute) in the 1st half of the book.

The heck is BotnS?

Seconding Abercrombie. Everything set in his First Law series is good. Book of the New Sun is technically sci-fi but it could easily be classified as fantasy as well. I really dug the Black Company but then I'm a bit biased as it was the first fantasy epic that I really put my time into.

I almost forgot to check out the front page today. thanks

The Heritage of Shannara tetrology.

Duuuude, Name of the Wind was HORRIBLY written. Good story tho.

I fucking love Runelords. Thanks to college, I lost my taste in fantasy a while ago, but I was going through my owd fantasy/scifi paperbacks to sort between keep/donate. Realized I'm still going to finish Runelords because it was fuckin based.

Titus Groan

JRR Tolkien and GRR Martin.

Why wouldn't you just read what's popular? It's all the same anyway.

Maybe he already read them user?

Well why would anyone read fantasy after that then? Not that it's bad, just wondering why people would think they could find anything remotely at that level.

>tetrology

Good man.

Everything by Brandon Sanderson, Brent Weeks or Patrick Rothfuss

Horrible writers.

I've seen some people talking about the Iron Dragon's daughter in the general.
Is it any good?

>ad populum

All the Malazan books are in horrible need of revision. Don't read the Malazan tripe unless you're a loser willing to waste your time on thousands of pages of nothing.

Discworld's humor is subsumed by Shrek. Almost nobody above the age of 12 finds its "humor" funny.

Earthsea is great for beginners and veterans of fantasy alike. I bet its thematically tightness will help LeGuin outlast Tolkien.

Gormenghast is great as well.

All T R A S H, except for Tolkien and Wolfe.

Swanwick is weird. IDD is something of a deconstruction of fantasy tropes, with a dash of philosophy. But you're on this site, so IDD may actually appeal to you.

Book of the New Sun.

Asoiaf.

But that's where Black Company went to shit. First book is an absolute masterpiece, next two are good, rest are very sketchy.

Gene Wolfe is far above and beyond any other fantasy writer. He's one of the literary greats, transcending the genre.

I read IDD back when I was like 14 or something and the weirdest thing I had read was a couple PKD books. That shit blew my mind at the time, I really want to find a copy again and see what I think of it now.

>Gene Wolfe is far above and beyond any other fantasy writer. He's one of the literary greats, transcending the genre.

Other fantasy writers would easily be on his level if they went beyond the basic idea of "I wanna write a fantasy adventure" and made their worldbuilding actually mean something.

In other words, just be a good writer. SFF is really just too tolerant of average.

Wolfe isn't about worldbuilding, it's about the storytelling. His world is built through more or less opaque hints (sometimes he is eager to show too much and these are the lowest points of New Sun books).

He worldbuilds like any other sff author but he does it with a more specific thematic purposes in mind, its not just things thrown out at random.

That's not true at all, especially since his 'worldbuilding' is shown through the eyes of unreliable narrator. His themes are triggered by narrator's flights of fancy.

I think we have different ideas of what constitutes worldbuilding, which to me is just having an established and detailed setting. You cant really tell me that Wolfe dosent do that. And if you look at some of his interviews concerning BOTNS the entire condition of Urth and its relation to the New Sun has its own meaning behind it, and even then down to things like the Alzabo.

Again he worldbuilds (every author does, otherwise you dont even have a setting), but with far more purpose than most authors.

Thing is that it isn't worldbuilding in a classical sense, it's more of a world warp with some themes taken from mythology and sci-fi concepts. Ascians are hardly built by him, it's just a particularly mindless subset of Bolshevism. If he uses the Internet today he probably sees most American websites as Ascian media.

I dont really care where he got his concepts, I'm just telling you how it works.

And I'm telling you that worldbuilding in fantasy doesn't fit your definition. Wolfe cares not about genealogies or exact lay of the land.

heres this thing

Read my definition again and tell me where I mentioned genealogies and geography.

And I really think you should read the Appendixes of BOTNS and try again to say he dosent worldbuild. The proof is in the pudding.

He has a point, stop shilling your childish, personal, superficial, theories on how science fiction works. You clearly haven't made systematic, ironclad reckonings on the nature of sf's techniques.

You didn't but there is a common definition of worldbuilding in genre fiction and it's not what Wolfe does.

>genre fiction
>formulaic

Pick two.

What is that definition?

Genealogies, maps, general infodump, exact data. From Middle Earth to Malazan.

And where are you getting this definition from?

If we just look at the term itself, worldbuilding, in the context of fiction it means no more than building up your setting, which literally every fiction author does to some degree, all that varies between them /is/ the degree. I'm wondering how this has even become a debate.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding

take your pick

>Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.
And Gene Wolfe does not do this in BOTNS?

>Developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities such as a history, geography, and ecology is a key task for many science fiction or fantasy writers.[5] Worldbuilding often involves the creation of maps, a backstory, and people for the world.

>Tolkien addressed the issue in his essay On Fairy Stories, where he stated that the "Secondary World" or "Sub-Creation" (the constructed world) is substantially different from the art of play-writing: "Very little about trees as trees can be got into a play."[7] Constructed worlds shift away from storytelling, narrative, characters and figures, and may explore "trees as trees" or aspects of the world in-and-of-themselves.

Wolfe does all those in BotNS. Can the pedant stop sperging on what they think world building is?

GW very much defined a geography and backstory for the people of his world. Even if there's no map there is a very clear sense of direction in the world with references to things like the river Gyoll, Asicia, etc.

>>Constructed worlds shift away from storytelling, narrative, characters and figures, and may explore "trees as trees" or aspects of the world in-and-of-themselves.

Considering how BOTNS functions, this definition isnt even all that valid. We have a constructed world WITH a focus on storytelling. Dont even try to tell me Urth isnt a constructed world.

Stop stretching and just understand the term 'worldbuilding' is one of the most self-explanatory things in existence. And again I seriously recommend you read BOTNS appendixes, that'll shut this stupid argument down for good.

Wolfe also gives a sense of time during Sev's travels by keeping track of lunar cycles. If one calculates how far Sev travels in between mentions of the moon, a feasible map with accurate distances between cities, Gyoll, pampas, ruins, the coasts, Lake Diuturna, the mountains, et al, can be made.

Good job lads, successfully converted this shithole fantasy thread into a Wolfe thread.

r o b i n h o b b
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h
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I cry every time.

technically it's scifi, but Anathem is great...

The Prince of Nothing series, The First Law trilogy, and asoiaf are all the best of grimdark

I just started reading Book of the New Sun and fuck me, not being a native speaker I feel at such a disadvantage.
People say it's great but the narrative paired with the language Wolfe uses is just so difficult to understand.
I have to re-read some paragraphs several times to actually get what's even happening.
Could just as well read Ulysses :|

Any advice? Git gud?

>I just started reading Book of the New Sun and fuck me, not being a native speaker I feel at such a disadvantage.
My English wasn't as good when I read it the first time, but I didn't feel like I had a problem.
>People say it's great but the narrative paired with the language Wolfe uses is just so difficult to understand.
That's half the fun. It's like a mystery novel in a sense and it needs an almost biblical exegesis.
>I have to re-read some paragraphs several times to actually get what's even happening.
That's normal, especially for certain sequences.
>Could just as well read Ulysses :|
Don't know, but you should go with Portrait and Dubliners first.
>Any advice? Git gud?
Just give it your best and that's it.

...

If BotNS turns out to be unbearably turgid, do a trial run with Wolfe's Peace. It's a much subtler work, but shares some of the themes and techniques used in BotNS, such as engaging the reader's rational ability to sort different strands of accounts from the unreliable narrator. Wolfe considers it the best thing he ever wrote. It's one of the finest, subtlest works he ever wrote, and at the end, there's even some undertext that grants passage to BotNS's quest (the phoenix is a symbol in BotNS; here they are represented by resurrecting geese):

"And at last it came to him that each year the wild geese came to Lough Conn, and to the other lakes that were about; and that though as it might be this goose died, or that, the flock never died, but was beautiful and wild and free, and returned to Lough Conn each year."

Ulysses earns its reputation for being complex. BotNS is longer, but I still feel that Ulysses is more difficult. But, it's worth noting that both authors are Irish (the goose myth above is Irish). If you read both, and do the exegetical work, you might be delighted by a few points of intertext (Including that Ulysses' unscrupulousness is more Phoenician than Greek in tone).

Also, if you want to take part in a nice discussion group for Ulysses, join:
discord.gg/01016TZPAPULpxT67
Do join! :) They're great guys and know what they're talking about™.

I'd have to say your taste is garbage, mate.
Way to shit on a bunch of good books, then recommend some trash novel that can only be described as "too subtle for you to understand."

Did you read BotNS? Why didn't you like it?

>omg
>lit nowadays is ridiculous

>omg

I agree

Also filtered.

>Earthsea is good
Too bad about the rest of the series though, I've no idea how he managed to fuck it up so bad.
The black company never had enough going on. And when something was going on it was half arsed. The military strategy was transparent, the characters were shallow and the romance was noncommittal.
>Well why would anyone read fantasy after that then? Not that it's bad, just wondering why people would think they could find anything remotely at that level.
Tolkien was good, but there are other subgenres.
GRR Martin is a hack. He's slow, dry, expressive in the wrong parts, kills off characters faster than he creates them and just does whatever he can to slow the progression of the main plot lines so he can squeeze out more books. There's plenty above this level.
Anyway a book with general appeal will never be the best for you. Find your niche or weird genre balance and really fall in love with reading.
Sanderson doesn't proof read, Weeks writes for children and Rothfuss is arrogant. But they're all great writers otherwise.
Also Sanderson sucks as military strategy. His attempts have been amazingly childish up to this point.
>All the Malazan books are in horrible need of revision
What makes you say that?
As for wasting time; the characters are brilliantly written, there's no wastage to be had .
>Wolfe
T R A S H
>Gene Wolfe is far above and beyond any other fantasy writer. He's one of the literary greats, transcending the genre.
I don't get where people pull this shit from. Book of the New Sun was a flop. Sevarian is superficial, hugely overestimates his abilities, gets side tracked constantly, and his motivations are either blatant lies or the most poorly written slop I've ever read. It's just him spouting non stop bullshit for 3 books.

>I don't get where people pull this shit from. Book of the New Sun was a flop. Sevarian is superficial, hugely overestimates his abilities, gets side tracked constantly, and his motivations are either blatant lies or the most poorly written slop I've ever read. It's just him spouting non stop bullshit for 3 books.

On and a half books. ^

>Sevarian is superficial, hugely overestimates his abilities, gets side tracked constantly, and his motivations are either blatant lies or the most poorly written slop I've ever read.

You're superficial slop user

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your pseud.

>His attempts have been amazingly childish up to this point.
Like your superficial attempts at reviewing fantasy literature? Sanderson might produce hack work, but your post is one of the most hilariously bad shitposts I've seen lately.

Next time try explanations or reasoning. Otherwise its just shitposting.
Unlike my earlier comment. Or even this one, since my feedback is constructive.

>Or even this one, since my feedback is constructive.
It isn't, but whatever.
I think 5th Head is a better point to try out Wolfe. The 70 pages you can stop at isn't much and the quite valuble re read isn't a hard thing to do.

Your shitposting is shitposting, plain and simple.

I do disagree with your opinions on the writers, but that's not why it's shitposting. You've only talked about those things in the most superficial way, without using much of the reasoning you speak of.

Your posts have more in common with those shitposts than you think.

>without using much of the reasoning you speak of
but some, therefore not shitposting
You didn't provide any reasoning on the other hand, hence shitposting.
These comments in particular, though meta and irrelevant, aren't shitposting, so good job. You've taken my advice and improved.

>Sevarian is superficial, hugely overestimates his abilities, gets side tracked constantly
>user shitposts, thinks he's the best poster in the thread
>"You guys's shitposts are shitposts, im perfect xD :^)"

>Look mom, I can use the word meta
>Shit tier user grasping for straws at this point

Next week we learn about irony.

...

>1,3,2

[RRREEEEEEEEEEE]

bakker is the best you can imagine, try out prince of nothing.

This fucking Fossil Fuel is out of my gasoline tank.

Kingkiller Chronicle senpai.

>Discworld's humor is subsumed by Shrek. Almost nobody above the age of 12 finds its "humor" funny.
Man, there's bad taste, and then there's tripfags. Sewage guzzling retard.

Shrek definitely shits all over Discworld, and when you consider how lowbrow Shrek is, that's saying something. I pity you for not having le patrician taste.

Prince of Nothing trilogy and it's sequel trilogy, The Aspect-Emperor. It's very much "gay, rape, and incest" mixed with grimdark but it's fantastic. The setting is basically the First Crusade mixed with Mesopotamian/Middle Eastern/Byzantine influences. Magic is conducted by means of epistemological philosophizing. Evil is truly, horrifically evil. The world is cruel and violent and the characters are seriously driven to the brink. It also happens to be fairly well-written. Would recommend it highly to anyone.

>Lad of Perfect Taste

Im dying

Jesus fuck can you be any less of a cuck please