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Sometimes I wonder if the preponderance of Trashy Fantasy Series Drek isn't entirely down to the growing marketplace dominance of chain bookstores like Waldenbooks back in the day. Unless you had a used bookstore with a robust SF/Fantasy section - which weren't all that common - and you were a kid who liked dragons, well, you got a Dragonlance book 'cause that's what was on the dang shelves.Caesar Saladin posted:I read Lord of Light and found it to be one of the most awesomely creative sci fi books I've read. What else of his is good? So Zelazny is my favorite author and I have every book the man ever published (even the two poetry collections) so I would have answered this closer to the time it was asked except I had to stop and read the thread first so I didn't become the seventeenth person to wander in and go "Has anyone mentioned Xanth yet?". But besides the previously-mentioned Eye of Cat, which is genius but also super experimental, I'd suggest Doorways In The Sand as a pretty entertaining romp, though it's more SF; Zelazny didn't do a ton of straight-up fantasy. He did some, though, so if you can find them I found the two books Dilvish, the Damned and The Changing Land to be pretty sweet. The former is called a "fix-up", it's a collection of short stories that were previously published and occasionally given framing sequences or slight reworks to make them flow as a single narrative; the latter is the novel he wrote to wrap up that character's story (and it has a fun approach to magical politics, honestly). There was also Changeling and Madwand, which were also published as a single volume under the title Wizard's World, which were cool and good but mostly get remembered today because Changeling was published with illustrations by an early-career Boris Vallejo. But for my money, the best stuff he ever wrote was his short stories. My personal favorites are both in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories (a title he reportedly hated). "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" is one of the best things I've ever read. Anyway, sorry, back to lovely Fantasy ...fuckin' Xanth, man. Jesus
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Apr 7, 2022 03:43
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precision posted:Eye of Cat owns It seriously does. In one of his collections (I want to say Frost and Fire but I'm not 100% certain) he includes an essay about his writing process for Eye of Cat with bits like "So I got the idea that these characters' sections should be freeform poetry; I've always considered poetry to be the closest thing you could find to exercise and stretch your writing ability, the way calisthenics does for your body" and why he chose the myth structures he did and that kind of thing. It's one of my very favorite books. Just, y'know, be aware going in that this isn't gonna be a straightforward no-thought-required beach read is all
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Apr 7, 2022 04:47
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CaptainSarcastic posted:The man was just a great writer - I find it odd he isn't a bigger name than he is. a lot of the New Wave authors struggled to get any sustained attention; they'd get Hugos and Nebulas because they were too good to be ignored, but the whole idea was to break up some of the rigid structures that had been built around genre lit. Problem is, in the 70s and 80s, the Internet wasn't a thing, so the fandom coalesced around conventions and fanzines - the very people who loved those rigid structures, as superfans are wont to do. Everyone loved the New Wave, but the kind of tastemakers (influencers, I guess, in a proto-form) who decided what was and wasn't a Classic Of The Genre would always be talking up the older authors they grew up with like Heinlein or Asimov or Tolkein for hours on end before anyone reminded them that there were good books published in the past decade. Then you get into the market's saturation by mass-market Trash Fantasy like D&D tie-in books and pun-filled farces like Piers Anthony or Robert Aspirin (all of which, for the record, I devoured at the time), and by the time the New Wave writers should have been experiencing the Established Successful Author phase of their career, no one was interested unless it was a trilogy about dragons, preferably with a multimedia tie-in of some sort. So while Zelazny was, to my mind, one of the three or four best writers of the New Wave... everyone forgets the New Wave.
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Apr 7, 2022 05:23
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