Best books of ficton

[Loppan Torkel]

Fantasy- or science-fiction - which books are your favourites so far?

I haven't read that many, but for me it's still Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and for science fiction it's Asimov's Foundation series.

I recently read a column about the writer Mervyn Peakes who wrote a trilogy about the castle Gormenghast. Anyone know if it's worth getting?

 

[Kyriakos]

I do not really like science fiction, and have read only a few stories in that genre, the best of which imo was The Star

As for fantasy: my favorite is Lord Dunsany.

Do you want horror books too, or are they part of fantasy?

 

[Loppan Torkel]

I don't mind. I've only read some Poe stories. Not sure if they qualify as horror any more.

edit: Although I remember being read The Hound of the Baskervilles, by my teacher in middle school, and as much as I enjoyed the story I was really spooked by it.

 

[Ajidica]

I like Dune quite a bit, with Ringworld being very good.

Honorable mention goes to Demon.

 

[Kyriakos]

In that case:

Horror lit and related literatures

-H.P.Lovecraft (check out www.hplovecraft.com, for all of his stories online)

-E.A.Poe (i have the complete works, he was a very influential writer, spawning genre-defining authors and creating a couple of genres himself)

-Arthur Machen (author of my all-time favorite horror story, "The recluse of Bayswater"; you can find the entire "The three impostors", of which this is part, online)

-Guy De Maupassant (my favorite author currently. Arguably if not the best short story writer of them all, in the top three at any rate. He wrote many tales of the fantastic, although almost all of them have psychological explanations and are about madness).

-E.T.A. Hoffmann (a major influence on many key authors, like Dostoevsky and Theophile Gautie, Hoffmann is in a genre by himself. You can find his best story, "The Sandman" online, it is worth reading, definitely!)

Also you might like some Stephen King. I have only one short-story collection by him, The Night-shift. I think it was his first collection (?), it has five stories that i liked, with Grey matter being a favorite.

 

[Petek]

For scifi, I also like Dune and the Foundation series (first three volumes only, though). Another favorite is Phillip Jose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the sequels (except for the last one). I re-read all of the above every so often.

 

[sanabas]

Sci-fi: Lots of stuff, most of which I've mentioned in other threads. Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, John Wyndham, Iain Banks, Lois McMaster Bujold, etc, etc.

Fantasy: The two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. Everything by Neil Gaiman, especially Neverwhere and American Gods.

 

[Plotinus]

The Gormenghast books are the sort of thing most people either love or hate. They are absurdly over-written and bombastic. There's an old tradition of humorous writing where one describes actions or situations in ridiculously minute detail (Sterne was a master of this), and the Gormenghast books seem to me to be a sustained experiment in seeing whether the same technique can be used to different effect. I felt that there's a very heavy "precocious sixth-former" feel to them, although I may have been put off by the number of typographical errors in my edition. All that said, there is something undeniably splendid about the weird imagination and creativity they show; the main problem is that the story never quite lives up its promise. And I did read all three of them so I must have liked something about them, although it was years ago.

Also, the third one is greatly inferior to the first two, and was never really complete (I believe Peake died while redrafting it). It's also more clearly science fiction than the earlier ones.

On the general question, I have still not found any fantasy sequence I love as much as Dragonlance, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I think that the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, which I discovered a couple of years ago, is superb - although I lost the inclination to continue reading after it started quite transparently and clumsily incorporating Randian ideology into the story. I have recently discovered China Miéville, who is astonishingly brilliant. His Perdido Street Station is fantastic - it owes a great and acknowledged debt to Mervyn Peake but is much better written and more interesting. Miéville is a bit like a combination of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker. You might also try Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, which is brutal and difficult in every sense but I think succeeds better than any other fantasy books I've read of making you feel like you've experienced a very strange and completely convincing world.

On science fiction, you can't go wrong with Iain M. Banks. I was also very impressed by Hyperion by Dan Simmons, which is not unlike Banks. But I haven't read the sequels. Asimov's Foundation series starts off very well, but the later ones drift into mystical obscurity, and not in a good way. One series that is worth recommending is the Helliconia books by Brian Aldiss, which are good old-fashioned high-concept science fiction done rather differently from normal (and with a bit of standard Aldiss mysticism, but not too much).

 

[Yui108]

ASOIF all the way

 

[Dachs]

Dan Simmons is probably the science fiction author I like best apart from delving into the Star Wars EU. Ilium and Olympos are great, a combination of science fiction, fantasy, history, and some metaliterature. Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion were also fantastic; I'm not as high on Endymion and its sequel, but they were all readable.

As far as fantasy goes, I don't generally have time for most high fantasy, and low fantasy is usually crap anyway. One of the few (low fantasy) series I have read was Matt Stover's Acts of Caine (Heroes Die, Blade of Tyshalle, and Caine Black Knife), which are slightly sci-fi and somewhat dystopian and overally rely a lot on deconstruction to work.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

The Gormenghast books ...

Thanks. They sound too heavy at the moment.

I found this list at wiki - Hugo Awards. Seems good as for other suggestions.

I've also been reading "A Song of Ice and Fire" until a while ago. They're quite good but I'm not sure I think they live up to the hype, they kind of drag on like a soap opera with new characters being introduced once and awhile. I'm on the second book and will probably pick up reading it again during the holidays. I also noticed they haven't won any Hugo awards

 

[holy king]

soif IS a huge fantasy soap opera.

but then, i do like to get hooked on well made soaps like the sopranos, six feet under or breaking bad, so, after having bought game of thrones at the end of september, i 'm currently one third into feast of crows.

and it's not like i didnt work and (successfully) study during that time.

 

[Plotinus]

i do like to get hooked on well made soaps like the sopranos, six feet under or breaking bad,

Those aren't soap operas - they're just relatively long-running dramas.

I forgot to mention that one of the best fantasy series I've read is the Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss (of Dragonlance fame) - it's a lot better than Dragonlance, though rather hard to find.

 

[warpus]

I enjoyed reading the Foundation series as well, but I don't understand why so many people rate it so highly. Is it because it was so influential and talked about? Either way, I think that there are plenty of better science fiction novels than the original Foundation trilogy (or even quintology).

 

[theskibum]

For me the best science fiction book hands down is Dune by Frank Herbert. Its sequels are good and as a series it is excellent, but the original book is far and away the best and in my opinion is a masterfully written book for any genre. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is also one of my favorites when read as a series. The original trilogy is great on its own and the many other books that are set in the same universe by Asimov or his heirs are all pretty good reads.

For fantasy it simply doesn't get any better than Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. Along with Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia, it pretty much birthed most, if not all modern fantasy and LotR is the gold standard by which to judge all fantasy since. Someone else mention Dragonlance and I will agree with that. All the Dragonlance books I have read have been top notch and well written. I also enjoyed The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, however I felt he could have condensed the books into fewer volumes and removed a significant amount of preachiness and kept the story fresher and faster paced. As it is, I finished all the novels through Confessor (the Jagang invasion arc), but by the end I was sick of reading Goodkind. The first two books in the series, "Wizard's First Rule" and "Stone of Tears" are absolutely outstanding however.

For horror (since others are including it) "The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King is mind blowing!!!! A great mix of classic King horror, fantasy and sci fi, with many nods to King's body of work including other greats like "The Stand" and "Salem's Lot" and a small measure of self indulgence (I won't spoil it) thrown in for good measure. It took him nigh on 30 years to write the whole thing and I daresay it is his masterpiece. If you dig fantasy, horror or sci fi its worth the read, even if you hate King's other works, but especially if you do like him.

 

[Kyriakos]

So, anyone else read any Dunsany?

 

[Plotinus]

By the way, anyone interested in fantasy before Tolkien should read William Morris. The Well At The World's End is probably his most famous novel but The Wood Beyond The World is also fun if you can bear the faux-archaic language. These novels were basically an attempt to take medieval-style romance into the post-Scott world by setting it in an invented world, and the influence upon both Tolkien and Lewis was immense.

The one major element of Tolkien and post-Tolkien fantasy literature that's mostly (but not entirely) missing from Morris is fantasy creatures and races. I suppose one of the major sources for this kind of thing was George MacDonald, whose The Princess And The Goblin and Phantastes are full of goblins and fairies and the like. His work was based on earlier fairy tales and it has much more in common with children's literature like that of Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis, but it was also an important influence on twentieth-century fantasy and you can see how Tolkien was ultimately dependent, to a large extent, upon traditional fairy tales.

 

[cardgame]

Speaking of Tolkien-style fiction, any love for Terry Brooks around here? I read all of his books, quite a few excellent pieces in there. My favorite from him would be something very akin to Stephen King's The Stand; I believe Terry Brooks' title was The Void.

The best fiction book I've ever read would have to go to World War Z. I also just finished a very gripping book called Fragment by Warren Fahy.

 

[G-Max]

This one beats out Ender's Game for my #1 spot.

 

[JohannaK]

The best fantasy book ever is for sure a book in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series by George RR Martin, as for science fiction, I haven't read much, but Asimov's works are great, and also Stanislaw Lem's