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Topic ClosedFav Fantasy writer

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Poll Question: Your personal favourite
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7 [20.59%]
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BaldFriede View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 18:31
None of the above. It is Michael de Larrabeiti, author of the Borribles trilogy.
You may ask: What is a Borrible?

A few quotes from a page about Borribles:

"Borribles are generally skinny and have pointed ears... They are pretty tough-1ooking and always scruffy, with their arses hanging out of their trousers, but apart from that they look just like normal children."

The ears are important and Borribles always hide them under woolly hats when they are out and about. If a Borrible is caught by the police his ears are clipped and he starts to grow like any ordinary child.

"Normal Kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is... A child disappears from a school and the word goes round that he was 'unmanageable'; the chances are he's off managing by himself".

A very entertaining trilogy. I read it when I was around 14 or 15.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 22:07

For God's sake have nobody ever read:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges
  2. Julio Cortazar
  3. Gabriel García Márquez

?????

I would also include Mario Vargas Llosa and Bryce Echenique but they're more in the historic/Autobiographical style than in the Latin American Real-Wonderful.

All nominees or winners of the Literature Nobel Prize except Cortazar who has recieved a recognition from many Nobel Prizes due to the unfairnes of not being awarded with the prize to him.

Borges was nominee for 30 years but never awarded for political reasons.

Iván

 

            
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 22:32

Tolkien of course

LOTR = greatest fantasy trilogy ever.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 23:11
Originally posted by ivan_2068 ivan_2068 wrote:

For God's sake have nobody ever read:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges
  2. Julio Cortazar
  3. Gabriel García Márquez

?????

I would also include Mario Vargas Llosa and Bryce Echenique but they're more in the historic/Autobiographical style than in the Latin American Real-Wonderful.

All nominees or winners of the Literature Nobel Prize except Cortazar who has recieved a recognition from many Nobel Prizes due to the unfairnes of not being awarded with the prize to him.

Borges was nominee for 30 years but never awarded for political reasons.

Iván

 


You confuse "phantastic" literature with "fantasy" literature. "Fantasy" is a specific genré of literature, which usually deals with swords and sorcery. Borges, Cortazar or Márquez don't fall into that category, however phantastic their literature may be.


Edited by BaldFriede


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 23:45
I've got most of the Dark Elf related Forgotten Realms stuff to read by R.A. Salvatore.  I haven't started yet, but I'll get back to you on this.

Tolkien I never got into really, The Hobbit was actually his best work.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 10 2006 at 23:58

Originally posted by Geck0 Geck0 wrote:

I've got most of the Dark Elf related Forgotten Realms stuff to read by R.A. Salvatore.  I haven't started yet, but I'll get back to you on this.

Tolkien I never got into really, The Hobbit was actually his best work.

Forgotten Realms books are awesome.

Have you read the Icewind Dale trilogy yet?



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 00:15
I've got all the R.A. Salvatore in (12 books) the Dark Elf/Drow series, except the last (4 I think) books in the series, Broken Shards or whethever they're called.  So yes, I have The Icewind Dale trilogy to read.

I've yet to start them, but I have 12 books in the series to get through, I bought them just before Christmas.  I have a whole backlog of stuff to read.

I don't have R.A. Salvatore's "The Cleric Quintet" yet either, I quite like Elminster from the Baldur's Gate games.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 00:55

Do you like the Dragonlance books?

There are a ton of them and most of them are very good but the  initial three books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman-Dragons of Autumn Twilight,Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning are superb fantasy books.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 02:19
I've haven't Jody, but I'll do some investigations.

How about the Elaine Cunningham Forgotten Realms books also?  I've read good reviews about them.

I've heard bad reviews about Ed Greenwood's efforts though.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 03:32
Originally posted by ivan_2068 ivan_2068 wrote:

For God's sake have nobody ever read:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges
  2. Julio Cortazar
  3. Gabriel García Márquez

?????

I would also include Mario Vargas Llosa and Bryce Echenique but they're more in the historic/Autobiographical style than in the Latin American Real-Wonderful.

All nominees or winners of the Literature Nobel Prize except Cortazar who has recieved a recognition from many Nobel Prizes due to the unfairnes of not being awarded with the prize to him.

Borges was nominee for 30 years but never awarded for political reasons.

Iván

 

Of course I have, but the Latin American Real-wonderful strongly differs from the fantasy

liteature. All three are great, I think that Cortazar is underrated or at least not really well-known.

Vargas Llosa doesn't really fit this fantasy topic, a great writer anyway. 

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 12:25
Originally posted by Norbert Norbert wrote:

Originally posted by ivan_2068 ivan_2068 wrote:

For God's sake have nobody ever read:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges
  2. Julio Cortazar
  3. Gabriel García Márquez

?????

I would also include Mario Vargas Llosa and Bryce Echenique but they're more in the historic/Autobiographical style than in the Latin American Real-Wonderful.

All nominees or winners of the Literature Nobel Prize except Cortazar who has recieved a recognition from many Nobel Prizes due to the unfairnes of not being awarded with the prize to him.

Borges was nominee for 30 years but never awarded for political reasons.

Iván

Of course I have, but the Latin American Real-wonderful strongly differs from the fantasy

liteature. All three are great, I think that Cortazar is underrated or at least not really well-known.

Vargas Llosa doesn't really fit this fantasy topic, a great writer anyway. 

Well Norbert, maybe we have different worlds or terms referring to literature.

We use the term Fantasía and Fantastico as synonyms, if you read Cortazar's "Rayuela" he talks about Magaitians (La Maga).

In any Peruvian and I believe South American library you can find Borges, Cortazar and Tolkien in the "Literatura Fantástica" (Fantastic Literature) zone.

We use that term to identify any kind of literature that talks about fantastic or Mythological creatures, not necesarilly swords and dungeons, but you cand find a lot of swords and mythycal creatures in Borges like Aben Hakan the Bohary dead in the Laberynth or The two laberynths (translated as "The two Dungeons") or Angels and mythical creatures in El Aleph and also in García Marquez (An old Man with Great Wings") described as a fairy tale what falls in the Fantasy frames.

It's a matter of perspective. 

And about Vargas Llosa yes we both agree, he only uses some fantasy mixed with historic reality in The War of the End of the World, so I wouldn't include him as I said before. 

Iván



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 13:19

I can't believe that nobody here has mentioned Stephen Donaldsen from the list

The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant-The Unbeliever (6 books) are outstanding.

 

Since its publication in 1977, this award-winning trilogy has become an indisputable fantasy classic. Outselling The Lord of the Rings in its day, hailed by critics and loved by readers all over the world, no fantasy library could be considered complete without it.

Thomas did not believe the strange world he found himself in, but, undeniably, the Land tempted him. Back in his world, his illness made him an outcast, unclean, a pariah – but here, he is the reincarnation of Berek Halfhand, saviour and hero. Only the mystic power of his white gold ring can protect the Lords of Revelstone and the Land from the evil of Lord Foul, the Despiser. Foul possesses the Illearth Stone, his deadly armies hold sway, and to free himself from his prison, he will destroy the Land.

With only a small but determined band of followers, Covenant is inexorably drawn into a confrontation with evil that will decide the fate of both worlds . . .

I cannot recommend them too highly.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 13:44
Ooh thanks for that Tony R, I have to say, I hadn't heard of that series.

If using Iván's ideas, then we must also include Lord Dunsany as well, he writes about Fairy Tale type scenarios and he's excellent.

Iván, what Borges do you recommend?  I'm not a Spanish speaker, so I require English translations, are there any really excellent ones and some awful ones I should avoid?  I read some translations of some his poems, but not much else.  In fact, I think one was a story, but it was really short!  I did like style though, he uses the idea of labyrinths and mazes a lot I believe.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 13:58

Just an example and please seems long, but it's only a short story by García Márquez, and it's called real - Wonderful or Real - Fantasy becauuse this movement blends facts of the normal life with fantasy

I'm sure that even if you don't consider it fantasy, you will like it:

Quote

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.


Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

“He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest’s tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

The translation is less beautiful than the original , but very similar, hope you enjoyed it.

Iván

            
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 14:01

Originally posted by Geck0 Geck0 wrote:

Ooh thanks for that Tony R, I have to say, I hadn't heard of that series.

If using Iván's ideas, then we must also include Lord Dunsany as well, he writes about Fairy Tale type scenarios and he's excellent.

Iván, what Borges do you recommend?  I'm not a Spanish speaker, so I require English translations, are there any really excellent ones and some awful ones I should avoid?  I read some translations of some his poems, but not much else.  In fact, I think one was a story, but it was really short!  I did like style though, he uses the idea of labyrinths and mazes a lot I believe.

Borges was  obsessed with the Labyrinths and the mirrors (Which he described as  evil in a couple of stories  because it's a reflexion without soul).

I rather read Borges the Storyteller than Borges the poet, because a poem written in Spanish should not be translated (Neither a poem in any language) being that the words chosen has a specific meaning depending on the language.

But his stories are simply wonderfull, magic amazing.

In Amazon I could find two items The Aleph (Which is the one I read 100 times ) and the Aleph and other stories which I believe contains stories from his book Fiicciones, but if you want to go fopr the sure, buy the one titled THE ALEPH (Both can be found in Amazon.

Customers who searched for The Aleph ultimately chose:

1.

The Aleph and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) -- by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley; Paperback < =1.1 =text/> (Rate it)
Buy new: $11.20 -- Used & new from: $7.00  

 

 

A good starting point, it's in Amazon.com

Iván



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 14:33
In Portuguese, at least in Brazil, we make difference between 'literatura fantasia' and 'literatura fantástica' but I can't inform it this separation is recent.

BTW, talking about swords and spears, why not Cervantes? or Camoens?
There's a lot of fantasy literature in Iberia, due to the Reconquista War that started 400 years before the Crusades and both sides (Spanish/Portuguese and Arab/Moors) had much to tell. Also there were some characters that really existed like El Cid or Nun'Alvares and became legends.

From the list I voted Tolkien.


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 15:44
Originally posted by Tony R Tony R wrote:

I can't believe that nobody here has mentioned Stephen Donaldsen from the list

The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant-The Unbeliever (6 books) are outstanding.

 

Since its publication in 1977, this award-winning trilogy has become an indisputable fantasy classic. Outselling The Lord of the Rings in its day, hailed by critics and loved by readers all over the world, no fantasy library could be considered complete without it.

Thomas did not believe the strange world he found himself in, but, undeniably, the Land tempted him. Back in his world, his illness made him an outcast, unclean, a pariah – but here, he is the reincarnation of Berek Halfhand, saviour and hero. Only the mystic power of his white gold ring can protect the Lords of Revelstone and the Land from the evil of Lord Foul, the Despiser. Foul possesses the Illearth Stone, his deadly armies hold sway, and to free himself from his prison, he will destroy the Land.

With only a small but determined band of followers, Covenant is inexorably drawn into a confrontation with evil that will decide the fate of both worlds . . .

I cannot recommend them too highly.

Wonderful books, I've read them 3 times. Great !

How about Greg Bear, Orson scott Card,Terry Goodkind  .

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 16:37

Tolkien.

Also George MacDonald: check out Phantastes, a wonderful book which was especially an inspiration for C.S. Lewis. And if you read The Princess And The Goblin and The Princess And Curdie, you can see that Tolkien was influenced by him too.

Jack Vance is a very good writer: great storylines and a fantastic sense of humour.

C.J. (Caroline) Cherryh is good too: The Dreamstone is my favourite by her, almost as good as the Tolkien books IMHO.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 11 2006 at 19:30

 Tolkien. Im actually re-reading LOTR now to refresh my memory of all the stuff the movie left out.

Im also a fan of Terry Brooks' "Shannara" series.



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Direct Link To This Post Posted: January 12 2006 at 03:36
Originally posted by ivan_2068 ivan_2068 wrote:

Originally posted by Norbert Norbert wrote:

Originally posted by ivan_2068 ivan_2068 wrote:

For God's sake have nobody ever read:

  1. Jorge Luis Borges
  2. Julio Cortazar
  3. Gabriel García Márquez

?????

I would also include Mario Vargas Llosa and Bryce Echenique but they're more in the historic/Autobiographical style than in the Latin American Real-Wonderful.

All nominees or winners of the Literature Nobel Prize except Cortazar who has recieved a recognition from many Nobel Prizes due to the unfairnes of not being awarded with the prize to him.

Borges was nominee for 30 years but never awarded for political reasons.

Iván

Of course I have, but the Latin American Real-wonderful strongly differs from the fantasy

liteature. All three are great, I think that Cortazar is underrated or at least not really well-known.

Vargas Llosa doesn't really fit this fantasy topic, a great writer anyway. 

Well Norbert, maybe we have different worlds or terms referring to literature.

We use the term Fantasía and Fantastico as synonyms, if you read Cortazar's "Rayuela" he talks about Magaitians (La Maga).

In any Peruvian and I believe South American library you can find Borges, Cortazar and Tolkien in the "Literatura Fantástica" (Fantastic Literature) zone.

We use that term to identify any kind of literature that talks about fantastic or Mythological creatures, not necesarilly swords and dungeons, but you cand find a lot of swords and mythycal creatures in Borges like Aben Hakan the Bohary dead in the Laberynth or The two laberynths (translated as "The two Dungeons") or Angels and mythical creatures in El Aleph and also in García Marquez (An old Man with Great Wings") described as a fairy tale what falls in the Fantasy frames.

It's a matter of perspective. 

And about Vargas Llosa yes we both agree, he only uses some fantasy mixed with historic reality in The War of the End of the World, so I wouldn't include him as I said before. 

Iván

I agree that this is a matter of perspective. In Hungary the works of the mentioned

South-American writers are often called wonderful or magical realism. These novels are blend of normal and fantastic moments, and if you ask me they are of a higher niveau than usual "fantasy

books".

A very old Man with enormous wings is a truly beautiful piece of art One of my favourites by Garcia Marquez.

Borges really seemed to be obsessed with labyrinths.

                                                                                  Norbert

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