[Flipside]

I thought Mark Twain held the record for second largest selling book in English?

[Geezer]

If you are looking for non-Tolkienesque epic fantasy, you might try David Edding's "Belgariad" pentalogy.  Well, the bad guy is a Melkor-like evil god who "broke the world" but there's no orcs or dwarves running about.  And most of the main characters have a delightfully snide sense of humor.

[mikhael]

Bugger me dead. Stay away from Eddings. That man has never written a decent novel. EVER. I'm shedding tears of blood forcing myself to finish the last book of the Mallorean (sequel to the Belgariad) hoping desperately that it will get better. Every time I think it can't get worse, the bastard turns the screws a bit tighter. The pacing is awful, the characters are unbelievably stupid (IE: characters are shown a set of facts and routinely come to either utterly wrong conclusions or blatantly ignore logical conclusions, only to have one of the other characters explain, at tedious length the  obvious conclusions). His plots have no suspense or character development. In fact, he throws in about sixty secondary characters that are so sketchily detailed that they are reduced to a stereotype and a name, and only come out of the background to perform a taske every fifth chapter or so (despite travelling along with our central characters for the entire series). The story has less of a plot and more of a series of events that happen one after the other. And did I forget to mention that any situation more complex than sword swinging is resolved through deus ex machina? Spare yourself. Really. Eddings starts his series' with excellent premises (the Belgariad has a wonderful setup, almost Tolkienesque in character and quality) but can't write anything to back them up. Just about the best thing I can say about the series is that it has Polgara. She and her father Belgarath are the only characters with genuine personalities. Unfortunately, pretty much all the rest of the characters share precisely one personality among them, with only vocal ticks to define them (one character speaks in an irish brogue. If you imagine all the other characters speaking in an irish brogue, you won't be able to tell who they are at all. Their personalities are precisely that bloody thin).

icespeed, give the second book of the Sword of Truth a shot. Wizard's First Rule is uneven at best, but Stone of Tears is nothing short of brilliant.

Orson Scott Card is fine if you stop early in all of his series. Ender's Game is brilliant. Quite possibly one of the finest science fiction stories ever written. Ever. I mean EVER. Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead are pretty good. After that its all downhill. Tales of Alvin Maker? First two rock like Bad Religion.  The rest are utter pain. Then there's the Book of Morm--er, what I mean to say is the Homecoming series. That one kicks off brilliantly, but pretty much at the end of the second book starts heading for sheer pain. I rembember forcing my way through the fifth book and wondering if he wrote it just to fulfill a contract, since he obviously took no joy or care in the doing.

[Geezer]

So, Mik, should I assume you don't care for Eddings? Even after 9 1/2 books? I do admit that the Mallorean was nowhere near as good as the Belgariad - it was one of those times I kept reminding myself that authors get paid by the word.  But then, I had the same feeling about Jordan.  I also don't care much for Clark's Rama - I found it deadly dull.  To each his own, I guess.

[mikhael]

Actually, Eddings Sparhawc books weren't nearly as bad as the Belgarath books. There he showed he had the ability to write characters. So, this estimation is after 19.85 Eddings books. I'd say that's enought time to decide if an author sucks or not.

Rendevous with Rama and Rama 2 (don't bother with the rest) were a very special kind of book, one that really can only appeal to a specific set of readers. They're what i call "discovery" books: characters only exist to act as tour guides to a subject (in this case the Rama artifacts). If you're not the sort who goes in for boldly going where no man has gone before (to borrow a phrase), you're not going to like them. Personally I love them (I even have the Rama2 video game!), but I understand precisely why some people wouldn't.

Me, when it comes to fantasy, I expect dense plot, careful and well thought out character development and I expect recurring characters to make genuine contributions. Jordan, Goodkind, Tolkien and Martin all have this. Eddings' Belgarath books treat characters as generic tools in Belgarath's toolkit. It makes for a bad reading experience.

I read a lot. I can generally read a thousand page novel in about 5-8hrs, depending on my interest level. When I was younger, it was more like 3-6hrs. If, like recently, I have a job that takes up lots and lots of my time, I never get to settle into that sponge-like groove that lets me do that, so its more like 10-15hrs. I have a series of bookshelves literally sagging under the weight of hundreds of books and that's just the ones I bought and haven't sold back to a used bookstore. In some cases (like Jordan, Tolkien, Goodkind, Martin and Rawn), I've read the books at least twice, usually more like four or five times each. Even an author I don't like gets a fair bit of reading before I decide that I don't like him (that's a lot of Eddings I've read, for example) enough to write more than a short blurb like "Tepper? yeah, she sucks." (incidentally, she really does).

Authors can vary immensely between books (Rawn, for instance wrote the Sunrunner books, which I think are excellent, but her Ambrai books hurt like broken glass in your jock; Orson Scott Card is another good example) so you really have to read more than just one and write off the author. I can't imagine reading Jordan's take on Conan the Barbarian and using that as a basis to read the rest of his works. Likewise, Terry Brooks: the reason I hate him so much is that he took Magic Kingdom: For Sale--Sold! (a wonderful little story) and ruined it with both sequels and his Tolkien ripoffs. Good authors make mistakes and bad authors sometimes get it right. You have to read more than one book (and sometimes more than one series) to make definitive judgement.

[Ford Prefect]

In science fiction (and fantasy, but I'll say science fiction for brevity), there are two general types of authors: Those who are science fiction, and those who use science fiction. The former are responsible for most of what we know of as "hard" science fiction. Their work is written to put forth questions about the future, to ask "what if?", or simply to create exciting adventure stories. Many of the monolithic names in science fiction, (Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, etc.), fall into this category. Authors in the latter category very often could not care less about creating science fiction, because they are using it as a literary tool to convey something that has nothing to do with the genre. Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley have all produced this kind of work. Obviously, it's a sliding scale, and many works can be read as either.

Anyway, my point is that when you debate genre literature, especially science fiction and fantasy, it's important to first establish the context in which you're dealing.

[mikhael]

I find it interesting that you call Poul Anderson "hard science fiction", since his stuff was almost always space-opera and science fantasy. When you say "hard science fiction" I'm thinking of people like Baxter, Benford and Bear: scientists who write speculative fiction based on scientific theory.

[Ford Prefect]

Poul Anderson's work is about space colonization, which is speculative fiction based on scientific theory. In contrast, it is not about the fundamental nature of humanity, theological questions, or contemporary politics.

Like I said, I don't mean to imply hard and fast rules here. The concept of "hard" and "soft" science fiction is sort of nonsensical anyway. What  I'm getting at is that literature is defined by its purpose, not its content.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Iain M. Banks.

Shrike put me on to him a while back. Clever, inventive, touching and humourous. I think I may run out of superlatives for his books.
[/color]

[karajorma]

Originally posted by mikhael
Rendevous with Rama and Rama 2 (don't bother with the rest) were a very special kind of book, one that really can only appeal to a specific set of readers. They're what i call "discovery" books: characters only exist to act as tour guides to a subject (in this case the Rama artifacts). If you're not the sort who goes in for boldly going where no man has gone before (to borrow a phrase), you're not going to like them. Personally I love them (I even have the Rama2 video game!), but I understand precisely why some people wouldn't.

It's worth noting that this is why the third and fourth books are so bad. Rama is reduced to simply being the place where the events of those books occur. The central question of what Rama is becomes an afterthought.

[Flipside]

Try the Foundation Quintet by Asimov if you prefer something more down to Earth, as it were. I've owned them for nearly 20 years, and I still sit and read through them again from time to time, especially the first 2-3 books, which are a collection of 'short' jumping from one phase in the Foundations growth to the next. You suddenly reaslise that what Asimov REALLY was, was a study of Human nature, the science fiction covers a lot of very carefully thought out physcology

[mikhael]

You know, I need to read Foundation. I picked up the unauthorized sequel, Psychohistorical Crisis (finding out only later that it was related) and I loved it. If this guy was just writing a story inside Asimov's world, then I need to go read the stories written by Asimov in that world. It was AMAZING.

For what its worth, I've read precisely one Iain M. Banks Culture novel (Player of Games). I have to read the rest. I bought Excession the other day, but haven't got to it yet.

[Ford Prefect]

Originally posted by Flipside
You suddenly reaslise that what Asimov REALLY was, was a study of Human nature, the science fiction covers a lot of very carefully thought out physcology

I know it's sort of sacrilegous in the science fiction world to say anything "bad" about Asimov, but his studies of human nature are rudimentary by comparison. That's not to say they aren't interesting-- the parallel in the Foundation books to the fall of Rome is certainly creative-- but he was still an author who focused more on telling the story than anything else.