What's currently in? fantasy only

[Leofric]

I don’t know what is considered “in”, in fantasy.  All I can say is what new fantasy over the last couple years that has grabbed my attention and made me excited for more.

 

We have those mentioned/the more famous:

Joe Abercrombie’s newest series, starting with A Little Hatred

Adrian Tchaikovsky - I started with his Echoes of the Fall Series, then Children of Time and Children of Ruin (both SF), and just read Guns of the Dawn.  Haven’t yet made the 10-book commitment to his most well-known Shadow of the Apt Series.

Mark Lawrence – Read everything, but most recently has been his Book of the Ancestor Series, his Impossible Times series, and then The Girl and the Stars, the start of his newest series.

Miles Cameron – Read his Masters and Mages Series, though he is probably more known for his Traitor Son Cycle, or his historical fiction as Christian Cameron.

Ann Leckie - her first foray into fantasy, The Raven Tower, though she is much more known for her Ancillary/Imperial Radch  SF books.

Lois McMaster Bujold – World of the Five Gods books, most recently the Penric and Desdemona novellas. 

Guy Gavriel Kay – latest A Brightness Long Ago

 

Lesser known authors (to me anyway)

S.A Chakraborty and her recently completed Daevabad Trilogy

Juliet E. McKenna’s Green Man books

Josiah Bancroft – the Books of Babel

Nicholas Eames – Kings of the Wyld and Bloody Rose

RJ Barker – His The Wounded Kingdom Trilogy and The Bone Ships, the start of the new Tide Child series. 

And, of course, our own David Craig (aka Derfel Cadarn) and his Sooty Feathers books.  (Maybe not ”in” yet, but its your chance to get in on the ground floor).

[Sir Thursday]

A question occurred to me as I read through this thread - do you think that part of the dearth of new prospects is because of the self-publishing boom? I could see how previously we might have seen promising new authors picked up by publishing houses, whereas now they'll just take the easy route and self publish. As a result you end up with a higher volume of self-published work that is much harder to search through and pick out the diamonds in the rough (as opposed to a smaller number of authors that have been pre-filtered by the publishing houses to some degree).

 

ST

[ljkeane]

14 hours ago, Sir Thursday said:

A question occurred to me as I read through this thread - do you think that part of the dearth of new prospects is because of the self-publishing boom?

I don't think it's self publishing. If self published authors do well publishing houses have shown themselves more than willing to sign them up and publish their books. I think it might be something to do with the general rise of e-books though. You used to go to the bookstore and know what's supposed to be the next big thing because it was on a stand at the front of the store. Now the market's been splintered a lot more with the majority of books being bought online. 

[Caligula_K3]

4 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I don't think it's self publishing. If self published authors do well publishing houses have shown themselves more than willing to sign them up and publish their books. I think it might be something to do with the general rise of e-books though. You used to go to the bookstore and know what's supposed to be the next big thing because it was on a stand at the front of the store. Now the market's been splintered a lot more with the majority of books being bought online. 

This is very true. I worked in a bookstore for many years and it was very obvious when publishers wanted a new author or book series to be the next big thing. It didn't always work, of course, but it does have an effect: customers see the pile of books and want to know what it is, us workers want to know what it is. And then if someone comes looking for a new horror novel, as someone who doesn't know much about horror aside from Stephen King, I'm more inclined to recommend Cronin's The Passage because we have 100 copies of it than a book we got one or two copies of, just because I know what The Passage is and know it has buzz.

I do find it interesting how Brandon Sanderson is the biggest deal in many other fantasy communities but not here. I read the first three books of the Stormlight Archive and thought they were pretty average; sometimes fun, sometimes dumb, sometimes interesting, always way too long and very adolescent. I'm stopping after book 3. But in many other places, Sanderson is the best thing to happen to fantasy ever. In general, the big pushes in commercial fantasy seem to be towards more YA oriented books, compared to 10 years ago. So this is just a huge guess, since I don't know the ages of posters on this forum, though I figure it trends older than other places (how many people under the age of 25 use an old fashioned discussion forum like this?). But maybe this forum's mainly too old to really get into the "big hit books" that are popular right now.

[Sir Thursday]

14 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

This is very true. I worked in a bookstore for many years and it was very obvious when publishers wanted a new author or book series to be the next big thing. It didn't always work, of course, but it does have an effect: customers see the pile of books and want to know what it is, us workers want to know what it is. And then if someone comes looking for a new horror novel, as someone who doesn't know much about horror aside from Stephen King, I'm more inclined to recommend Cronin's The Passage because we have 100 copies of it than a book we got one or two copies of, just because I know what The Passage is and know it has buzz.

I do find it interesting how Brandon Sanderson is the biggest deal in many other fantasy communities but not here. I read the first three books of the Stormlight Archive and thought they were pretty average; sometimes fun, sometimes dumb, sometimes interesting, always way too long and very adolescent. I'm stopping after book 3. But in many other places, Sanderson is the best thing to happen to fantasy ever. In general, the big pushes in commercial fantasy seem to be towards more YA oriented books, compared to 10 years ago. So this is just a huge guess, since I don't know the ages of posters on this forum, though I figure it trends older than other places (how many people under the age of 25 use an old fashioned discussion forum like this?). But maybe this forum's mainly too old to really get into the "big hit books" that are popular right now.

For what it's worth, I've just come back to this forum after a four year hiatus, and the *vast* majority of the names I see posting are ones I recognise from when I was here before. From that I extrapolate that the average age at least in the Miscellaneous section is close to 4 years older than when I was last here. And given that back then I thought of this place as a fairly mature community, I'd guess that average age skews quite a bit older than a lot of other fantasy discussion forums on the net!

ST

[mactwist2]

On 7/10/2020 at 11:23 PM, Infidel said:

In the same boat currently. My give-a-shit about the characters has decreased with every page...

 

Nothing is really exciting me out there in fantasy land, except the next Abercrombie...

Same I'm mostly reading old stuff now aside from Abercrombie. I had been reading new stuff like rage of dragons, priory of the orange tree, and a few others with hype but nothing grabbed me so now I'm reading wheel of time. 

 

Abercrombie certainly grabs me though and I find his stuff among the best I've ever read. The characters just lend themselves to adaptation and hopefully they can get the HBO special some day.

[Werthead]

11 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I don't think it's self publishing. If self published authors do well publishing houses have shown themselves more than willing to sign them up and publish their books. I think it might be something to do with the general rise of e-books though. You used to go to the bookstore and know what's supposed to be the next big thing because it was on a stand at the front of the store. Now the market's been splintered a lot more with the majority of books being bought online. 

The move to ebooks stalled out quite a few years and has receded. In the USA the ebook share of the market topped out at around 22% and by last year had retreated to around 18%. In the UK it's slightly less than that.

The overwhelming majority of book purchases remain of physical copies. However, the number of books sold in shops continues to decline, with more and more sales being online.

Quote

I do find it interesting how Brandon Sanderson is the biggest deal in many other fantasy communities but not here. I read the first three books of the Stormlight Archive and thought they were pretty average; sometimes fun, sometimes dumb, sometimes interesting, always way too long and very adolescent. I'm stopping after book 3. But in many other places, Sanderson is the best thing to happen to fantasy ever. In general, the big pushes in commercial fantasy seem to be towards more YA oriented books, compared to 10 years ago. So this is just a huge guess, since I don't know the ages of posters on this forum, though I figure it trends older than other places (how many people under the age of 25 use an old fashioned discussion forum like this?). But maybe this forum's mainly too old to really get into the "big hit books" that are popular right now.

There was a huge discussion about this recently on r/fantasy, which has been having a lot of debates about people recommending Sanderson and Jordan (and, although a lesser extent, Erikson, Hobb and Abercrombie) to everyone even when they're not what the person was asking for (sometimes even specifically saying they'd already read or didn't want to read those authors). Reddit's very nature means they'll keep pushing the same authors though, and even popular new authors with a lot of buzz find it hard to punch through because of the way Reddit's upvote system rewards the LCD.

[AverageGuy]

17 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I worked in a bookstore for many years and it was very obvious when publishers wanted a new author or book series to be the next big thing.

I like to call this the Robert Newcomb gambit.

[Poobah]

21 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I do find it interesting how Brandon Sanderson is the biggest deal in many other fantasy communities but not here. I read the first three books of the Stormlight Archive and thought they were pretty average; sometimes fun, sometimes dumb, sometimes interesting, always way too long and very adolescent. I'm stopping after book 3. But in many other places, Sanderson is the best thing to happen to fantasy ever. In general, the big pushes in commercial fantasy seem to be towards more YA oriented books, compared to 10 years ago.

Over long? Sure. But YA-leaning? For Mistborn yeah (I didn't really like Mistborn tbh), but not Stormlight. I feel like there's a tendency on this board to lean toward darker/grittier but that's not deeper or more adult, it's just more depressing.

Part of what I enjoy about Stormlight and some of Sanderson's other novels is that he's still writing fantasy that is actually epic/heroic, his books are optimistic, uplifting, inspirational even - bad shit can happen, and his heroes often fuck up and show how flawed and human they are, but they ultimately are heroes they will be victorious - they overcome, they grow, they become better people and because of that they transform into heroes. Sure maybe that's a bit on the nose, but I've never found his writing to be saccharine or overly moralistic. Compared to Abercrombie who I know a lot of people here love and I did for a while - I really enjoy his writing, humour, and characters but for me it all just feels rather soul-crushing and pointless - I know that even if some sorta happy ending and chance at victory or redemption is gonna be dangled in front of various members of whatever cast of variously evil/critically flawed wankers that gets assembled to do something that might be good they're mostly gonna end up dead, broken, and generally fucked up and worse than where they started. I got enough depression inside my head - I don't need to inject more tales about how nobody really changes, the world is shit, and no matter how much you struggle you just end up back where you started.

I certainly don't think Sanderson is experimental or anything but he's an excellent writer within the genre conventions that he's working with. Perhaps I'm ignorant because of his dominance or perhaps it's just fallen out of favour with publishers because of disasters like Rothfuss and Martin but I don't see a lot of other people doing what he's doing, and honestly, because of those disasters I'd be hesitant to pick up a new epic multi book series, even though that's what I hunger for. I love all the world building, and foreshadowing, and prophecies and theorising about all that kinda bullshit that's pretty unique to that subgenre, and Sanderson puts a lot of time and effort into all that shit. Also given my mentions of Rothfuss and Matrin and their inability to finish a book Sanderson has the major selling point in the genre these days of being prolific as all fuck. He's a writer I can actually have faith in to deliver what he promises and complete his series. In the mid and early 2000s I was starting series left and right, and sadly that well's kinda been poisoned - I'm way more hesitant about starting new series these days. I don't have patience or inclination to wait if the next big thing ends up spending a decade wanking in between instalments.

[Lady Winter Rose]

49 minutes ago, Poobah said:

I feel like there's a tendency on this board to lean toward darker/grittier but that's not deeper or more adult, it's just more depressing

You got likes for this. Thanks mate

[Caligula_K3]

4 hours ago, Poobah said:

Over long? Sure. But YA-leaning? For Mistborn yeah (I didn't really like Mistborn tbh), but not Stormlight. I feel like there's a tendency on this board to lean toward darker/grittier but that's not deeper or more adult, it's just more depressing.

 

I agree with this- for example, I find someone like Marc Lawrence to be just as adolescent, if not more (at least Prince of Thorns- I haven't read anything else). Including dark content for the sake of dark content is a 15 year old's vision of what being an adult is. Meanwhile, The Lord of the Rings feels much more adult than many exceedingly grim fantasy series (though I do think Abercrombie, especially as he progresses as a writer, is in a different category).

What makes Sanderson adolescent/YA to me are his attempts at more complicated characterization/worldbuilding. He consistently tries to create complex characters but they, imo, a few exceptions aside, devolve into YA archetypes. Similarly, he wants to have a more complex world with no completely good sides and bad sides, yet Books 2-3 of Stormlight still have to end with

Spoiler

giant battles of good vs. evil where all moral complexity is thrown out the window and the main characters win because they power up at the right moment. Again, this isn't to say that good vs. evil can't be adult- it can be (Lord of the Rings!), but everything always feels so shallow to me in the way Sanderson does it; everything always turns into a video game at some point.

And then there's the prose, the attempts at "witty dialogue," the whole character of Lift, etc...

Anyway, I don't begrudge people liking this kind of fantasy at all; I'd personally like the series a lot more if each book was 600 pages shorter. I think if I were a teenager and hadn't read Wheel of Time I would have also thought this was the best thing ever. My overall point is just that this kind of series tends to skew younger in audience or is aimed at a younger audience. And I think that's true for a lot of the recently popular fantasy series/trilogies: City of Brass and A Darker Shade of Magic are two "big" adult fantasy books I've read recently which felt very YA. Which isn't so different from what epic fantasy's always mainly been; Terry Brooks and early Robert Jordan are 100% aimed at teenagers. A lot of us on this forum are just too old to keep track of the next big things.

[Rhom]

On Sanderson being prolific... at one point on this board I would shake my head in amazement with how many books he was churning out, but I honestly don't know what he's been doing lately.  I don't think I've read anything by him since the last SA came out.  Maybe its because I didn't feel like starting a new non Cosmere story, but it felt like he was pumping out three Cosmere novels every couple of years at one point.  But there's no more Wax and Wayne.  No new Mistborn in the modern day.  No sequel to Warbreaker even though characters from that have somehow shown up in SA.

He is still regarded as prolific, but that's at least a couple of years since I've read anything new by him. 

[ljkeane]

1 hour ago, Rhom said:

He is still regarded as prolific, but that's at least a couple of years since I've read anything new by him. 

He's done some non Cosmere stuff that I think is explicitly YA. There was a super heroes series and he's got a science fiction series going at the moment.

[Zorral]

An addition to the Sanderson discussion, have his fans here seen this?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/23/brandon-sanderson-after-a-dozen-rejected-novels-you-think-maybe-this-isnt-for-you

Quote

 

Most writers have novels that never see the light of day. But 13? That’s serious dedication. The books were written over a decade while Sanderson was working as a night clerk at a hotel – a job chosen specifically because as long as he stayed awake, his bosses didn’t mind if he wrote between midnight and 5am. But publishers kept telling him that his epic fantasies were too long, that he should try being darker or “more like George RR Martin” (it was the late 90s, and A Song of Ice and Fire was topping bestseller charts). His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”.

“No one wanted to read what I wanted to write. But when I tried to write what they wanted to read, I got even worse. I was like, what am I doing?” he says now, from his home in Utah. “It was stressful. A part of you has to wonder, after you’ve written a dozen novels and they’re all getting rejected, maybe this isn’t right for you? Maybe that’s what people are trying to tell you, but you’re not understanding. Everyone collects rejection letters, but not everyone is so stubborn as to keep doing it after that many.”

 

 

[A wilding]

A quibble, but "late 90's" seems a bit early for GRRM to be topping best seller lists and being held up as an example to follow.

[Rhom]

3 hours ago, A wilding said:

A quibble, but "late 90's" seems a bit early for GRRM to be topping best seller lists and being held up as an example to follow.

Clash of Kings hit number 13 in 1999.  Storm debuted at 12 in 2000.

Not far off.

[Werthead]

On 7/17/2020 at 8:40 AM, AverageGuy said:

I like to call this the Robert Newcomb gambit.

Good lord. That's a nightmarish blast from the past.

Quote

 

On Sanderson being prolific... at one point on this board I would shake my head in amazement with how many books he was churning out, but I honestly don't know what he's been doing lately.  I don't think I've read anything by him since the last SA came out.  Maybe its because I didn't feel like starting a new non Cosmere story, but it felt like he was pumping out three Cosmere novels every couple of years at one point.  But there's no more Wax and Wayne.  No new Mistborn in the modern day.  No sequel to Warbreaker even though characters from that have somehow shown up in SA.

He is still regarded as prolific, but that's at least a couple of years since I've read anything new by him. 

 

Sanderson's prolific output was always slightly illusory: he had a big backlog of books written from before Elantris and that tied him over for years (even The Way of Kings was a reworking of an existing text, albeit a pretty thorough reworking) and a huge amount of his output has been in very short novels and novellas. When he started writing longer novels, he started taking a lot longer; the Stormlight books are coming out once every 3.5 years on average, but that's actually quite a lot slower than Steven Erikson (who wrote books almost as big in eight months, year in and year out for twelve years) and the likes of Adrian Tchaikovsky and Dan Abnett.

Sanderson's fast, sure, but he's not as fast as many others, and he acknowledged last year (or maybe earlier this year) that he is going to have problems if he keeps at this rate. Stormlight #5 likely won't be out until 2023, thirteen years after Book 1, and that's only the halfway point of the series, plus the two halves of the series are going to be separated by several years as he writes the Mistborn Era 3 trilogy. If he wants to have a hope of completing the Stormlight series let alone the other ~15 books in the wider Cosmere, he needs to start condensing the books down in size (not to mention he'll likely slow down as he gets older, which is pretty inevitable).

[Targknight]

Nothing good. Witcher series isn’t good. It is inferior to Elric and Solomon Kane.