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Guy Gavriel Kay


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  • 1 month later...
2 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Are the two fairly different from another, in terms of the story it tells?

Yeah Under Heaven is a more personal story, rarely straying from the protagonists with a smaller scale whereas River of Stars is much more spread out covering a fair few more areas and characters and the characters are far more involved with the wide scale events of the book.

But there both set in the same universe, though centuries apart with a couple of callbacks.

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I'll second his high fantasy Fionavar Tapestry.  It's true the starting premise is pretty silly and it is kind of uneven in that their are some definite lows but when he hits the highs, my God does he ever hit the fucking highs. I've read most of his other stuff and I can say pretty confidently that the high points in Fionavar pretty much eclipse everything else he's written, and quite frankly eclipse most of what I've read in the fantasy genre as a whole.

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6 hours ago, Slurktan said:

I'll second his high fantasy Fionavar Tapestry.  It's true the starting premise is pretty silly and it is kind of uneven in that their are some definite lows but when he hits the highs, my God does he ever hit the fucking highs. I've read most of his other stuff and I can say pretty confidently that the high points in Fionavar pretty much eclipse everything else he's written, and quite frankly eclipse most of what I've read in the fantasy genre as a whole.

This is encouraging.  I've already bought the first Fionavar book and was wondering whether or not that was a good idea.

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It has been 20 years that I read it, and I'd say that Fionavar will probably show its age today in many respects, e.g. some strange premises, both "college kids enter a fantasy world" and "reenacting Arthurian love triangle" seem somewhat silly. But it is still quite atmospheric and better written than a lot of more recent very popular stuff and probably overall important and interesting enough to deserve a try.

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  • 1 month later...

I've just read A Song for Arbonne, and it's easily the worst of the Kay books I've read thus far - the others being Fionavar and Last Light of the Sun (I do have Lions on my reading pile, but it'll have to wait for the new year).

Anyway: Song is a flabby nonentity of a novel. Kay spends way too much time describing facial expressions and tonal shifts in long conversations, rather than letting the characters' words speak for themselves. The characters are uninteresting, and too often fall into the Kay stereotype of "a heroic character is unnaturally good-looking, a bit emo, and has lots of sex" (Bertran being chief offender there). As for the setting - it went out its way to contrast the noble pro-feminist Arbonne against the evil misogynists from Gorhaut - problem is that the book ends up coming across as vaguely homophobic to a 2016 reader, and I say this as someone who is not normally bothered by temporal values dissonance - the early 1990s was not that long ago.

And then there is the ludicrous deus ex machina conclusion to the battle. Did I mention I really hated this book?

Edited by Roose Boltons Pet Leech
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On 12/28/2016 at 10:50 PM, Andorion said:

Lions is an utterly awesome book. I think you will love it. 

Concur. Lions is an amazing tour de force. I sincerely believe it's Kay's masterpiece.

Song is fine. I know it isn't for everyone, but he's trying to accomplish something fairly specific and if you can't buy into that, it isn't going to be your cup of tea. That said, the prose is still wonderful, even if it's a lesser story.

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On 12/28/2016 at 7:50 PM, Andorion said:

Lions is an utterly awesome book. I think you will love it. 

Here! Here!  It's really great and is my fave too.  :)    Fionavar Tapestry series least interesting and not fun books of his I read.  Sounds like Songs is worth passing over too.  But Lions, great.  

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15 hours ago, LongRider said:

Here! Here!  It's really great and is my fave too.  :)    Fionavar Tapestry series least interesting and not fun books of his I read.  Sounds like Songs is worth passing over too.  But Lions, great.  

I'd say A Song For Arbonne is closer in style to Lions than the Fionavar books. It does get a bit overshadowed by Tigana and Lions among Kay's 90s work, but I think if you're a fan of Kay's writing then it is worth reading.

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It's been long enough since I read it for me to have forgotten almost all the details of the plot, but I remember A Song For Arbonne being a lot closer in tone and style to The Lions of Al-Rassan than it was to either the Fionavar books or The Last Light of the Sun.  So I'm not sure somebody who hated Song would enjoy Lions that much -- there are plenty of stereotypical Kay characters and, as unJon notes above, Lions has a couple of potentially irritating narrative devices as well.

That said, if you enjoyed LLotS and haven't read either Song or Lions yet I'd probably guess you'd be happy with both?  If anything, LLotS is usually considered the weakest book of those three, I think.  (Personally, the Sarantine Mosaic duology and Under Heaven are my favourite Kay novels.)
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