I enjoy the big epic fantasy series of novels and I recently completed The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I have read other stuff like The Rover series by Mel Odom, Runelords by David Farland, and several others. I am looking for a new series to read and was wondering if anyone has an opinion on any of the following:
Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind
Shadowmarch by Tad Williams
Any opinions and input would be highly appreciated.
Malazan book of the Fallen. Definetely. It's set in the authors own campaign world and is a hugely detailed and rich setting. It's not so much telling an epic story about a small group of people so much as reading about epic "historical" events as they unfold.
ReplyDeleteDammit, I'm making something incredible sound incredibly boring. Allright, look at it this way: it's a gritty, high magical setting where mortals struggle against the machinations of Gods, Near-Gods and ancient races. Entire cities are razed by magical energies, God-like beings die and are replaced. Jihad. Crusades. Civil War. Brutal warfare, abiding love, Intricate political plots and intrigue spanning centuries. Non-human races that actually think and act in non-human ways. Ancient (vaguely) good-aligned undead who sacrificed their mortality to defend the world from an even more ancient evil. Earthquakes, disasters, dozens of different pantheons, hundreds of wonderfully realised characters, "realistic" chances of survival (by which I mean that even the most beloved characters can -and often will-die and not neccessarily in heroic ways either.
You cannot go wrong by collecting this series. The first books seems like a fairly standard fantasy story until you start reading subsequent books, which draw you in. Sometimes something you read will make no sense whatsoever - until three or four books later when you learn something that will leave you slapping your forehead in amazement and wondering why the hell you didn't make the connection earlier.
Oh hell - SOLD! I am starting those with the next trip to the bookstore. Thank you.
Delete. . . Here I was going to suggest Sword of Truth. Amazing though Sword of Truth is, Malazan sounds potentially better.
ReplyDeleteBy all means, state your case! I will probably just read both of them anyway. This will probably just affect which one I read first.
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