I enjoyed the heck out of A Princess of Roumania, and did like the subversion, but got distracted about a third of the way through Tourmaline and haven’t picked it back up yet. The last book is due for paperback next spring, so maybe then the mood will strike for the full run. Park is also playing around with recent and 19th century history. A Romanian ruler named Ceausescu certainly has associations, and the story of Germany’s rise within Europe (which I take the Ratisbon angle to be) is one of the more potent ones for the 19th/20th century in our timeline. Sinking Britain like Atlantis is a nice swipe at the usual conventions of the genre.

Vance also sprang to mind as someone who told great stories without their dominating the spiffy world’s history. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are in here too, as is a lot of Poul Anderson. Even Conan, iirc, was not the center of the world. Is small-ball fantasy a niche waiting on a few good manuscripts? A fashion soon to return?

Thanks for the names — I’ve been overseas a long time now, and only get to browse an f/sf section once or twice a year at best. Dorothy Dunnett and Henryk Sienkiewicz, both on the historical fiction side of things, have appealed to some of the same things I like in good fantasy.

Discoveries in fantasy, people who break the mold? I would love to discover some new titles to investigate. I really did like Lois McMaster Bujold’s Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. She has a much leaner prose style than you see in most fantasy novels (maybe because she spent years honing her craft with the Miles Vorkosigan books). And both novels feature an interesting, well-realized, middle-aged protagonist, which is something of a revelation in fantasy.

But I’ve gotten kind of burned-out on fantasy, ever since I read Tad William’s comments at the beginning of ‘Memory, Sorrow and Thorn’ that it wasn’t like other fantasy novels and then, when all is said and done… it is exactly like every other fantasy novel!

I also agree that once you do world-building, you’re almost certainly going to want to do “the big story” of that world. Which is ok, and I like me some epic as much as anybody else. But I also think it’s right to suggest that the really original thing might be to do smaller, richer stories if it’s a genuinely compelling world. Jack Vance did that very nicely, for one example.

So who breaks the mold with fantasy? I like some of the mood in Mieville, Vandermeer, Bishop, and some of the desire to do a very different kind of imaginative work. Bishop’s novel The Etched City was probably my favorite out of that sensibility, though Perdido Street Station is also great. I also like Greg Kurzawa’s Gideon’s Wall, which I think is a bit in this vein, but less dreamy and extravagant.

Paul Park’s fantasy series has been an interesting subversion of a lot of the genre’s tropes, but he’s mostly aiming at an even deeper template for fairy tales, etc. rather than the typical world-creating Tolkienesque doorstop series.

I don’t know why, but sometimes the bloat doesn’t get to me as much even when I can see how an editor could seriously trim a lot of self-indulgence out of a text. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind was like that–a good read even with the wretched excess of the characterization and narrative.

I wonder if bloated books sell better than their svelte cousins. Then constraints on editorial personnel would dovetail with commercial desires, and probably authorial ambitions as well. (Who wants to leave so much of their spiffy world on the cutting room floor?) Or maybe experienced readers (dare I say old?) have less patience for extraneous spiff than they did when they were twelve? And folks who have read a fair amount of history are probably even worse off, because we know the models that the authors are cribbing from.

I skimmed through big chunks of Game of Thrones et seq. going, ok, War of the Roses, Richard III, Mongols, yeah yeah yeah. I’m in the middle of The Lies of Locke Lamorra right now, which is reasonably enjoyable, but of course it’s an exaggerated version of Venice. I barely got through Sailing to Sarantium, for example, because it was just the story of Emperor Justinian tarted up with a few glowing lights pretending to be magic.

I also wonder whether there’s a related problem of authors who are well read within the genre, but not very experienced outside of it. Looking at these two, maybe not, though Durham is probably a different problem. Acacia seems to be his fourth novel, with one about Hannibal and two other in the 19th century US behind him. I’ll be his editor doesn’t know what to think. And Bakker is about our age, so he ought to have read a bunch of stuff apart from f/sf and the reading list for his philosophy PhD studies. But maybe not. Over at Charlie Stross’ blog not long ago, a reader asked why starships encountering a new planet didn’t pop out a slew of GPS satellites when they went into orbit, the better to orient any landing parties. Stross said it probably came from writers reading science fiction instead of science, and thinking within the genre rather than within reality.

Enough on why things are the way they are. Who breaks the mold? Your favorite discoveries of the last few years?