Fantasy & Science Fiction worth Reading/Re-reading

Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time died yesterday. He was 58 years old.

http://www.dragonmount.com/

K.J. Bishop: The Etched City.

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/etched/

http://www.kjbishop.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.J._Bishop

I wouldn't call this breathtaking, but it was an entertaining first novel.

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Joseph Bruchac: Bearwalker

http://www.josephbruchac.com/bruchac_biography.html

This is technically a YA novel, but the central character is interesting for any age and the bits and pieces of Indian folklore are fascinating.

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Morgan Howell: Queen of the Orcs: King's Property

http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345496508&view=excerpt

Light--but not featherweight--reading. A very enjoyable first novel.

Sherwood Smith: Inda

Inda is the first volume of a trilogy set in a rather eastern sub-universe. Ms. Smith has done a lot of writing for Children and Young Adults and obviously knows both how kids think and what kids think about.

We meet the central figure in Inda, but this "child's" world includes Pleasure Houses, military boarding school, scheming adults....

I wouldn't classify this as Great Literature, but it is a good, meaty story and I'm looking forward to the next two installements.

http://www.sherwoodsmith.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwood_Smith

The best science fiction/ fantasy book series is Enders Game by Orson Scott Card.

A boy genius is recruited to military school in space to learn to become the world's military leader (at the age of 10) to defeat the Buggers (aliens)
It doesn't sound that interesting, but trust me, it is amazing!

'Golden Notebook' author Lessing wins Nobel Prize
12 Oct, 2007

STOCKHOLM: Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic ?'The Golden Notebook,' won the Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday. She was praised by the judges for her "scepticism, fire and visionary power."

Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, is the oldest person to be honoured with the prestigious awards given by the Swedish Academy, said Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary.

"This has been going on for 30 years," she told reporters, learning of the award after she got out of a taxi outside her North London home, two hours after the announcement.

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all," Lessing said. "It's a royal flush."

Earlier, Lessing's agent, Jonathan Clowes, said she had been out shopping and neither he nor academy officials had been able to reach her.

Lessing is the 11th woman to be awarded the prize. In its citation, the academy called Lessing an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Lessing's work, which has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, has explored the divide between whites and blacks, most notably in 1950's ?'The Grass Is Singing,' which examined the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The academy called it "both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts."

Lessing was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran. The family moved to a farm in southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, in 1925, an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography ?'Under My Skin' that was released in 1994.

Because of her criticism of the South African regime, and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, who was a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s, had also campaigned against nuclear weapons.

Her semi-autobiographical ?'Children Of Violence' series five books spanning 1952 to 1969 was largely set in Africa. Her breakthrough was the 1962 novel ?'The Golden Notebook,' which was seen as a pioneering work by the feminist movement. "It belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship," the academy said.

Her other important novels include ?'The Summer Before Dark' in 1973 and ?'The Fifth Child' in 1988. She has also been lauded for her work in science fiction, penning the series ?'Canopus in Argos: Archives' from 1979-1984, that studied the post-atomic war development of humanity.

"Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles," the academy said. It said that Lessing's "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life" has been readily apparent in some of her recent books.

Those include ?'Mara and Dann' from 1999 and its sequel, ?'The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog,' published in 2005.

Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years, after Harold Pinter in 2005. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.

Lessing has won a string of prizes, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1995 and the WH Smith Literary Award in 1986. However, she has never won the Man Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize, which was established in 1969 and is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies. The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced and one of the most hotly anticipated given the sheer amount of guessing it generated in the weeks leading up to award.

On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.

Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

Americans Mario R Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes. Prizes for peace and economics will be Friday and Monday.

The awards each worth 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.5 million) will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.

Italy--

Thanks for calling Ender's Game to the collective attention of A2K. Ender's Game is a book I've used to convert people who proclaim, "I never read Science Fiction."

Welcome to A2K.

My fondness for EG is just a bit muted by Card's release of several re-tellings of Ender's story from other points of view.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender's_Game_series

Djjd--

Thanks for your very topical Doris Lessing post.

I'm having some trouble enjoying Ararat. I loved the evocative description of the dry, abandoned beach with shells and a light house in the middle of the Iowa fields. I was prepared for an elegant fantasy.

Unfortunately Candy's adventures in the Other World strike me as a bit disorganized and arbitrary. Perhaps as I continue reading the single bead-like episodes will start forming patterns, but....

I agree. The rest of Ender's life (Xenocide and Children of the Mind) was amazing, however, I didn't find "Bean's Quartet" as interesting.

Regardless, these books are one my favorite series

agreed, i have shelved the book for the moment and moved on

i just listened to a fantasy by orson scott card, titled "lost boys"

it's an interesting story, with a very interesting twist at the end



In Lost Boys, an acknowledged master storyteller weaves a powerful, uplifting tale of loss and redemption around an ordinary American family's bittersweet triumph over a welter of dark forces, both natural and supernatural.

Step Fletcher, his wife, DeAnne, and their three children move to Steuben, North Carolina, thinking-hoping-it might be just the right place for them. its traditional values coincide with theirs, and Step has the promise of a good job at a hot software company. But Steuben is definitely not right for their oldest child, eight-year-old Stevie. Introspective even in the most comfortable surroundings, Stevie becomes progressively more withdrawn from this alien place. Soon he is animated only by computer games and a troop of fictitious playmates. The Fletchers' concern for Stevie turns to terror when they discover that other young boys have disappeared from Steuben-and someone seems to be stalking Stevie.

As they struggle to keep their son from joining the "lost boys," the Fletchers battle a bevy of more conventional torments as well. Their new house is an insect-ridden matchbox dependent on the attentions of an eccentric old handyman. Step seems to be the only sane man at his snake pit of a job. DeAnne must acclimate herself and the three children to a new world while she is hugely pregnant with a fourth. A woman at their church believes God has given her an insight into Stevie's best interests that his parents lack. Evil hides in myriad mundane corners, threatening the Fletchers and their children. One of these threats, or maybe all of them, or maybe something else besides, may take Stevie away. But, though evil is all around them, goodness is within them, and that goodness will bind them together with a strength no force can break.

Orson Scott Card's forthright, moving prose, his remarkable gift for chronicling everyday tragedies and triumphs, and his uncanny ability to conjure up emotions-his characters' and his readers'-all blend together in a poignant, masterful novel.

Djjd--

Lost Boys is one of Card's books that make it seem like Such Great Fun to be a Morman. I believe that parts of the book were drawn from the death of Card's son from Cerebral Palsy at the age of 17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card

In spite of the increasing preachiness, I'm very fond of the Hatrack River series.

Just finished Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

While I had some issues with the plot, I stayed up 'til 5:00 a.m. one night reading it....

DrewDad--

Thanks for the jog to my ailing memory. I bought the first two volumes (Dragon Weather and Dragon Society through the SFBC. I just checked my shelves and evidently either Dragon Venom was not offered or I missed it.

Amazon New & Used had a copy for $1.10--plus $3.99 P&H.

I like Lawrence Watt-Evans and I'm a bit bemused that he isn't more popular.

Brian Ruckley's first novel, Winterbirth (the first installment in a fat fantasy trilogy) isn't quite worth the publisher's hype, but it is a good read and an excellent first novel.

Extract here: http://www.brianruckley.com/latest.htm

I found it difficult to get into, but once I did I enjoyed the characters enormously. There are no villians here and no heroic types--just people caught in epic conflict.

Review: http://www.sffworld.com/brevoff/401.html

Another excellent book--although it is a quirky cross-genre story:

Leonie Swann: Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story

Twenty-four hours after finishing the book, I'm coming up with a few quibbles and flaws--it is taken that long for the narrative spell to fray very slightly.

http://www.amazon.com/Three-Bags-Full-Sheep-Detective/dp/0385521111

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonie_Swann

Earlier in this thread I recommended Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest as a very satisfactory ghost story with lots of squirrely southern atmosphere.

Her second book, Wings to the Kingdom is also excellent.

Also, earlier in this thread I praised David Drake's swashbuckling-in-space series featuring a Bright Young Officer and a somewhat older female librarian with exceptional computer skills. some Golden Harbor is a worthy installment in the series.

I'm nibbling my way through Steven Brust's "history" and epic fantasy which parallels his better-known Jhereg series. Occasional I find the echos of Dumas and other discursive French novelists a bit tedious, but The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After are both very pleasant, leisurely reads.

Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars got good reviews. I'm a great fan of Lewis Carroll and rather resented Beddor appropriating the Wonderland landscape as the setting for a bang-bang, slash-slash narrative of his own.

The book was not my cup of tea and I probably won't read the next two volumes of the projected trilogy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Beddor

Diana Wynne Jones: The Pinhoe Egg

Ms. Jones is supposedly a "childrens" author. Ms. Jones also creates fascinating worlds and tells interesting stories. I have no shame about reading below my supposed maturity level.

The Pinhoe Egg is a very welcome installment in Jones' "Chrestomanci" series.

http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/

http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Wynne_Jones

Kathleen Bryan: The Serpent and the Rose (The first book of The War of the Rose.

This book is High Fantasy and there are times when I find the subject matter and/or prose a wee bit top-lofty for my taste. In spite of my limitations the book held my interest and I'll probably invest in Volumes II and III when they're released--although since I have plenty of reading stockpiled, I might wait and buy them second hand.

http://www.tor-forge.com/theserpentandtherose

http://www.amazon.com/Serpent-Rose-Kathleen-Bryan/dp/0765313286

Lian Hearn's Heaven's Net is Wide is a prequel for his Otori Quartet set in a medieval, mystical Japanese-like world.

The oriental background makes for an off-beat fantasy novel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Rubinstein

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Lian+Hearn&ots=skWmLp9G0w&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational

I've praised Lisa Tuttle before in this thread.

Last night I finished The Mysteries a multi-layered story about missing persons and persons who choose not to be found both in this world and the Otherworld of Celtic myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Tuttle

http://home.arcor.de/anyx/lisatuttle/start.htm

http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=31606

haven't got around to this yet, have the audio book as this seemed more like a listen then a read

i'll let you know what i think

djjd--

Please do. I've donated the book to the library because I know my taste is far from universal.