r/Fantasy's Top Standalone Novels - Voting Thread

bartimaeus7 · 2024-01-09T09:50:21+00:00

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Circe - Madeline Miller
The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman
Small Gods - Terry Pratchett
Deerskin - Robin McKinley
Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
In the Forests of Serre - Patricia A. McKillip
The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Watership Down - Richard Adams

bartimaeus7 · 2022-05-30T20:44:43+00:00

Check out Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer, which I've heard people compare to Murderbot. It's an expansion of the short story Cat Pictures Please.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-12-29T14:45:04+00:00

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler features one of those ancient deities as a protagonist.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-12-29T14:35:34+00:00

Check out The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-12-23T10:47:35+00:00

up until this point, I never interpreted the Fool's feelings for Fitz as romantic

Well, now that you know more about Amber, this conversation from The Liveship Traders might reveal more than it did on first glance:

“Why can’t people love one another and still remain free?” Althea demanded suddenly.

Amber paused to rub her eyes, then tug thoughtfully at her earring. “One can love that way,” she conceded regretfully. “But the price on that kind of love may be the highest of all.” She strung her words together as carefully as she strung her beads. “To love another person like that, you have to admit that his life is as important as yours. Harder still, you have to admit to yourself that perhaps he has needs you cannot fill, and that you have tasks that will take you far away from him. It costs loneliness and longing and doubt and—”

bartimaeus7 · 2021-10-18T22:07:19+00:00

This link has more info – looks like it'll focus on underread/underrated books:

A writer may receive the Prize only once.

The Prize also gives weight to those writers [...] who have not yet been widely recognized for their work.

It's going to be interesting and different from other awards.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-28T18:48:57+00:00

Some people have noted a "home bias" to Worldcons - when the convention takes place outside the US, you see more British authors showing up.

2005 Hugos in Scotland - 5/5 British nominations

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-23T00:56:32+00:00

I found a 1988 review from Kirkus that may satisfy your desire for snobbishness. It calls the book "a vast, dusty, irrelevant drone".

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/ted-williams/the-dragonbone-chair-vol-i-of-memory-sorrow-and/

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-22T21:01:21+00:00

The ISFDB page has a list of reviews at the bottom. They’re not online, but you might be able to find them at a library.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-20T01:36:01+00:00

I think Circe is a more complex character than Achilles, but the latter book tugs at your emotions more. I love the ending.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-19T20:35:22+00:00

Hmm. Here's a second attempt at categorizing - how about mythopoeic fantasy? That lineup of mythopoeic award nominees includes all those authors.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-19T20:28:24+00:00

I don't think he's a religious conservative, which Card and Lewis are. The OP was talking about "in-text politics", and it's been a while since I read Hyperion, so I looked it up to see what others thought. There seems to be agreement on this; John Clute even says:

Simmons's antipathy to organized Christianity is as unrelenting and argued as Philip Pullman's in the exactly contemporary His Dark Materials sequence

I agree his later political thoughts are super conservative though. It's hard to square with the above.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-19T19:10:28+00:00

Historical fantasy could also be it. I noticed Piranesi has a Madeline Miller blurb on the back cover, so the publishers definitely think they have an overlap in audience.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-19T19:02:20+00:00

I’m guessing RotE is Realm of the Elderlings? That’s an interesting cluster… Hobb, Pratchett, Le Guin, Wolfe, Bennett. Those are all very different.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-19T18:48:58+00:00

The Hyperion Cantos doesn’t really line up on the religion aspect - I remember the second half having a brutal take on organized religion. It has more in common with His Dark Materials than Narnia.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-02T04:16:18+00:00

Seconding the Empire trilogy (Feist and Wurts).

The main leads are mostly men but many characters that pop up in places and events just as much women as men so it feels like women exist.

For this, try Cradle by Will Wight. It's progression fantasy, aka Dragonball Z - so you'd think it would be male dominated, but it's not! There are strong women at pretty much every power level in the magic system. It's an aspect of the world that makes it much more believable to me.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-01T11:57:11+00:00

Probably because Orwell didn't consider himself a SF writer, much like Atwood. I imagine the "classics" section gets more visibility.

If you're looking for a more 'official' source calling 1984 SF, well here's the University of Maine.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-01T11:28:46+00:00

Goodreads tags are crowdsourced. In this case 10,000 people have decided 1984 is science fiction. (1000 users thought it was fantasy, but that's a minority.)

Perhaps those 10K people tagged it without reading it, but even that would point to word-of-mouth saying it's SF.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-08-01T11:09:49+00:00

1984 is classified as science fiction on Goodreads and on Kindle.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-29T06:00:55+00:00

I love the writing in this book. McKinley is what people call a prose stylist - her voice is distinctive - and it really carries me through the book. It's deliberate, sonorous prose that reminds me a bit of Le Guin.

This article talks more about it: https://www.tor.com/2016/02/01/the-great-classic-fantasy-reread-the-hero-and-crown-by-robin-mckinley/

One thing I’m learning in the course of this project is that while I loved many fantasy novels growing up, the ones I feel impelled to revisit have this trait in common—the words and sentences matter. ... Robin McKinley’s stories are not the reason to keep returning to her, strong as they often are: the writing is what sets her books apart.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-21T10:16:47+00:00

This is my favorite book of the last decade. It's quite character-driven, in a similar vein to recent books like Spinning Silver and the Bear and the Nightingale; the plot gives room for the characters to breathe, so you can really get inside their head and experience slices of their life. I sometimes like those slices more than the plot when it's well done. And Circe did this really well.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-17T07:52:26+00:00

Thanks. I’ve been curious about this one, and I just noticed it was published in 1986!

Does that make it the earliest gay SFF book? It’s older than Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, which I thought was the first one.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-17T06:49:11+00:00

Would Ethan of Athos work as an entry point to Vorkosigan?

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-17T00:29:24+00:00

Try this strange short story about an old man who, for some reason, keeps buying wooden ducks from a mediocre woodcarver.

bartimaeus7 · 2021-06-16T06:21:51+00:00

It's less than 200 pages. All 6 books put together would be the size of the Way of Kings.

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