Recommend things to me!

[swan_tower]

As many of you may have noticed, I am a fan of historical fantasy and historical-adjacent fantasy — by which I mean, stories taking place in settings clearly modeled on a real period and place, but technically a secondary world. (In other words, the kind of thing the Memoirs are.) I like this sort of novel a great deal.

But.

I find myself craving stuff that isn’t quite so tied to reality. Secondary-world fantasy in which invention can fly more freely. I don’t mean that it has to be so wacky and out there that it bears no resemblance to anything we know; things like Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky books are fine, because while the cultures are clearly inspired by Central Asian sources, they also have lots of imaginative details unrelated to real history. But further out is also good. I want worlds where humans rub shoulders with sentient non-human creatures. I want cosmologies that don’t obey our rules. I also — and this is a more specific and directed part of the current craving — want settings where the tech level isn’t generically medievalish, but has printing presses and guns or things that are like printing presses or guns but operate in different ways and occupy not quite the same role and are powered by magic or whatever instead. (Because this notion that high fantasy and technology are antithetical is bollocks.)

Things I do not want: grimdark epic fantasy. China Mieville (I’ve bounced off too much of his work.) Brandon Sanderson (ditto.) Anything else is good, though: adult, YA, comic books, humorous, dramatic, stand-alone novels, series, etc. I feel like I need to feed my brain with some stranger stuff than it’s been getting lately.

Recommend things to me?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[starlady]

Kate Elliott. Kate Elliott. Kate Elliott. I would recommend starting with the Spiritwalker books, since they're influenced by our history more closely than the Crown of Stars, but seriously, everything Kate Elliott.

Also, if you can find them, Sarah Monette's Melusine books have an interesting combo of technology and magic. The fourth book has a subway! I've also heard great things about her new book The Goblin Emperor, which has AIRSHIPS.

[green_knight]

Blair MacGregor's (blairmacg) 'Sword and Chant'. link to Smashwords

It's a rich world, not based on any serial numbers I recognised; a world where women have agenda and people form relationships and TALK to each other. (Tense moments are tense, then get resolved rather than having idiot plots based upon them.)

It got me through all of the boring bits of a holiday: 'hey, there's a queue, I can read a bit more'. 'Boring underground ride, another chapter'. 'Too late to do anything too early to sleep: READING TIME' and I inhaled it.

[sillylilly-bird.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Mary Gentle?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Only The Book of Ash, and 1610: A Sundial in a Grave. I quite enjoyed the former and don't much remember the latter; I also have The Black Opera on my shelf. But that's all historical; I've never gotten around to picking up her non-historical stuff.

[sillylilly-bird.livejournal.com]

Golden Witchbreed/Ancient Light [SF, different planet, intelligent aliens, politics etc] and the series that starts with Rats and Gargoyles are very good. It's been YEARS since I read them, but they still resonate. I also loved The Book of Ash :)

PC Hodgell's The Godstalker Chronicles?

Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book? [historical and futuristic - one of the central "characters" in a number of her books is a time-travel agency that studies the past - this goes back to one of the worst outbreaks of the plague and all of the accounts in the book were found in contemporary writings of survivors and witnesses] OH! and Bellwether! It's absolutely delightful and a quick read.

Jacqueline Carey's Banewreaker/Godslayer? [I think the elevator pitch was something like "if everything thing that is good and right in the world thinks you're evil, are you?"] And if you're looking for a long series, her Kushiel series' - I think it's 9 books; 3 trilogies.

Sheri Tepper? She can be a bit heavy with the message stick, but her stories are brilliant. I'm particularly fond of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. She can be hard to get into - she tends to have 4-5 separate lines of story that end up together but it can take a while to get there.

oh yeah, this is Barb, Elise's friend @ WisCon :) Hi!

[sillylilly-bird.livejournal.com]

Pat Rothfuss?
Liz Williams?

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

Man, I looked at that and went "my jam! I love that stuff!" and then looked at my books and wasn't sure I had anything that fit the bill that you haven't read (like Throne of the Crescent Moon, which may not be as far out as you're wanting, though, or Robin Hobb's books which I am 200% sure you've read already....)

Mostly I wanted to post because: yay for the ego boost; that's almost all the second world fantasy I write. Lots and lots of non-human creatures and industrializing/ed societies. I don't know why I focus on that, because it's definitely not steampunk.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The Goblin Emperor is probably already on your radar, but for anybody else reading this post OMG OMG OMG OMG SO GOOD SO GOOD SO GOOD.

Marie Rutkoski's The Winner's Curse should also probably get some attention here. I also got caught up on Adrian Tchaikovsky's gigantic series, which has its points. Anne Ursu's The Real Boy is good, too.

It's a harder question than it ought to be; a lot of fantasy out there right now is historical-ish or contemporary. Jean-Christophe Valtat's things are not exactly either and are weird, but may be too close to historical for your purposes.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Frances Hardinge? The milieu of the Mosca Mye books (Fly By Night and Twilight Robbery (Fly Trap in the US)) is modeled after the English Civil War, and it has lots of printing presses! Also coffeehouses and revolutionaries and a well-read but poorly educated twelve-year-old heroine who goes on the run with a poet-cum-con artist and her homicidal pet goose.

Gullstruck Island (The Lost Conspiracy in the US) has an 18th-century tech level and South Pacific colonial dynamic, but the colonizers are modeled in about equal parts on the Inca and the Mongols. It's a middle-grade post-colonialist fantasy of manners about ethnic cleansing, and it's one of the best books I read last year.

Hardinge has a new book out; I need to read it.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett's Points series, or Martha Wells' Ile-Rien books work as being not generic medieval and having magic as technology, I think. (Wells has books set several hundred years apart, with the fay being serious threats to humans in the earliest but driven back by later ones, and technology considerably advanced.) Perhaps the Flora Segunda books? Or Kate Elliot's Cold Magic? Oh oh, I know, Diana Wynne Jones, The Dalemark books.

Or one of the weirder classics? Moonwise, Lud-in-the-Mist, Little Big?

[dragonbat2006.livejournal.com]

Check out Jeremy Dale's Skyward comic book series. If you haven't yet read Tamora Pierce, please start!

[lcohen]

ile-rien and martha wells were my first thought! for this particular hankering, you want the trilogy that starts with the wizard hunters. (there are other ile-rien books that take place in earlier times.) it's a slow starter but pretty soon you can't put it down, so have the other two books in the trilogy handy.

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

I second Frances Hardinge and Martha Wells. Also Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead?

[marycatelli]

Second Emperor.

[marycatelli]

Seconding Lud-in-the-Mist.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Have you read Jo Walton's Lifelode? It's set in a fantasy world inspired by Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought universe.

[dhampyresa.livejournal.com]

I came across Kwerey (http://www.kwerey.com/) today, a site that catalogs genre fiction by women and lets people add reviews. It's very new and doesn't have that many books yet, but you might still find something you like.

The only rec that comes to mind right now is in French (the Pixie completed comic book series), sorry.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

God Stalk
Lud-in-the-Mist ('England', but Faerie next door)
Celestial Matters (Richard Garfinkle; "It is a work of alternate history and meticulously elaborated "alternate science", as the physics of this world and its surrounding cosmos are based on the physics of Aristotle and ancient Chinese Taoist alchemy.")

Bujold Curse of Chalion; Sharing Knife series.

anime/novel Twelve Kingdoms
ditto Spice and Wolf
anime Seirei no Moribito

Can't do much on secondary world fantasy with printing presses I'm afraid, though Celestial Matters might, with its spaceships and such. Twelve Kingdoms probably has printing, being based on pre-industrial China, but it's not high tech.

[marycatelli]

Have you read Patricia McKillip's work? The Bell at Sealey Head is, I think, the best.

Also, you might enjoy the Foglios' Girl Genius. It's Mad Science! not magic, but you might like how the machinery works.

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

Frances Hardinge is so great. But I think her best book may be her most, erm, imaginative: A Face Like Glass.

Another hearty recommendation too for The Goblin Emperor as mentioned above.

[dr_whom]

I just read Kage Baker's Anvil of the World. Relatively lightweight, interesting setting, fun characters. The first part of the book takes place on a clockwork/spring-driven inter-city caravan and a third of the characters are named Smith.

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

Read Julie Czerneda's Turn of Light. It's unusual with a lot of sense of wonder. Love it. Also, this is historical, but Jamie Lee Moyer's Delia's Shadow and Barricade in Hell are so amazing, I can't begin to tell you. I also really like Anne Bishop's Murder of Crows. Phenomenal.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Jay Lake did some alternate cosmology/science about a world that runs by clockwork. Iirc one title wasMainspring. Mieville's Railsea might be less grim than his others.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I want worlds where humans rub shoulders with sentient non-human creatures. I want cosmologies that don’t obey our rules. I also — and this is a more specific and directed part of the current craving — want settings where the tech level isn’t generically medievalish, but has printing presses and guns or things that are like printing presses or guns but operate in different ways and occupy not quite the same role and are powered by magic or whatever instead.

M.C.A. Hogarth -- she posts on LJ as haikujaguar -- has several series you might like. There's shoulder rubbing on the differently-civilized Kerishdar. She also has a series about The Pelted, and many other good things.

[lindenfoxcub.livejournal.com]

Jay Kristoff's Lotus War Trilogy is set in a secondary world inspired by japan, and I read the first book. I picked it up because I was promised chainsaw katana's, and was rewarded with so much more. Stormdancer is the first in the series.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I second this recommendation, but don't read the prequel (House of the Stag). The third book in the same world (Bird of the River) is OK but not nearly as good as Anvil.

[dr_whom]

Should I um

should I bring House of the Stag back to the library then?

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I would. I wish I hadn't read it.

[dr_whom]

Huh. Well… good to know, I guess.

[landofnowhere]

The /Long Price Quartet/ by Daniel Abraham. Really unusual world-building. The first book, /A Shadow in Summer/, is, IMHO, not as good as the rest of the series.

[elialshadowpine.livejournal.com]

Emperor was on my mind, too, esp as a recent release.

[xahra99.livejournal.com]

The Vorkosigan series, if you haven't read them already, are well worth picking up. Same with Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars epic. Kameron Hurley's God's War series has some great biotech -if you're okay with the violence. And Carla Speed McNeill's comic Finder- described by the author as 'aboriginal science fantasy'has awesome secondary-worldbuilding and some great, nuanced characters.
I'd also recommend the Long Price Quartet, or Abraham's newest series called (I think) The Dagger and the Coin, which has heroic banking. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt? Jesus, I could go on all day.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

I second (or rather fifth or so) Daniel Abraham. Boths series.

Shadows of the Apt has a really cool concept. Maybe Steven Erikson's Malazan books; they are often dark but not cynical like Abercrombie or Lawrence. Brian McClellan - he got some e-device short stories set in the same world as his main series for cheap (haven't read them since I refuse to get an e-reader, but they could be good test to see if you like the style). David Anthony Durham, Acacia trilgoy; David Gemmell's John Shannon books and maybe the Rigante tetralogy; Paul Kearney, Monarchies of God, and perhaps John Marco's Jackal of Nar trilogy though the writing in that one's nothing to write home about.

How about Janny Wurts? - someone here surely must have read more than the first chapters of Mistwraith (I like it so far).

Dunno, I got tons of Fantasy, but some of it would definitely qualify as grimdark (Abercrombie, Lawrence, Ruckley, proabably also GRRM, J.V. Jones ....).

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

Forgot one that could be for you. Bradley P. Beaulieu, Lays of Anuskaya trilogy. Fantasy with a Russian flavour and airships.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Thirding Martha Wells.

The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy can be a little hard to get hold of, and has multiple worlds but mostly humans; it meets Ile-Rien at approximately WW1 tech, with differences caused by magic. There's also The Death of the Necromancer from the generation previous, also mostly humans but with railroads & arch criminals getting distracted by things *they* find horrifying, and I would start with The Element of Fire which is 200 years before that. Loosely based on musketeer era France, with a large fae element as well as normal humans and sorcerers. Good swashbuckling, double-crossing & confusion. Also widely available in DRM-free e-book. (http://www.marthawells.com/ebooks.htm)

[sillylilly-bird.livejournal.com]

These are from a much more widely read friend of mine:

OK, my first thought is Man of Gold and Flamesong by M.A.R. Barker – both long out-of-print but probably not too hard to track down. Set on his world of Tekumel, which had a strong Indian/Southeast Asian/Mesoamerican influence to the cultures, plus plenty of weird aliens and monsters.

Also Martha Wells’ City of Bone and her Raksura books. And Jack Vance might be worth investigating although he wrote mostly SF moreso than fantasy.

Other suggestions to follow as they spring to mind …

[landofnowhere]

I read the first book of /Dagger and the Coin/ and am waiting until the series completes to read the rest. The worldbuilding is much closer to standard medevaloid fantasy.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Seconding Martha Wells, Goblin Emperor, Francis Hardinge, and P.C. Hodgell!

[(Anonymous)]

And now that I (the aforementioned widely-read friend ... :) ) have had a bit more time to think about it, how about Steven Brust, especially his Jhereg books?

For the mix of magic & tech, there's always Michael Swanwick's Iron Dragon's Daughter.

Going back a bit further, Jo Clayton wrote some great, quirky series back in the 1980s and 1990s. And going way, way, way, way far back, there's always the John Carter of Mars books (although I realize they're kind of problematic in the same way as other books of their time).

[cofax7]

Yah. I need to look up Hardinge, but I came over to post on Wells' Raksura books, which are chock-full of non-human sapients (in fact I don't think any of the sapients are actually homo sapiens, although most are bipedal hominid-types), with a totally non-standard and well-portrayed physical world. Just loads of fun.

[rosefox]

Of course the best fantasy novels with printing presses are Lloyd Alexander's Westmark books. But otherwise they don't meet your qualifications.

I've heard good things about Irenicon, which may be a little closer to what you're looking for.

[raktajinos.livejournal.com]

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer.

It's a REMARKABLE series. I was unable to put them down. They are set in a futuristic China, and Meyer reinterprets Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel as badasses. Cinderella is a cyborg, Rapunzel is a computer hacker that lives on a satellite in space.

The series is political, funny, wickedly creative, and with an array of characters that are complex. They make me want to give the series to everyone I know as gifts.

[lokifan]

I'm sure you've read Kristin Cashore's stuff, but if not, Bitterblue fits your specs.

[libris-leonis.livejournal.com]

So very much nth support for Goblin Emperor, which is an absolutely stunning novel! So very, very good.