this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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The Powder Mage trilogy is kind of fun. The setting is more late 18th/early 19th century than medieval, and it is far from perfect, but a bit of French revolution era fantasy with magic and gods and stuff never hurt anyone.
China Miéville's New Crobuzon series must qualify as fantasy somehow. It's New Weird, but you have weird magic and grotesquely weird fantasy races living in a fantasy world, so it must count. Also, because Miéville is some flavor of trotskyist you get a fantasy world written from some kind of Marxist perspective, but because it is a fictional world where Stalin never existed you don't have to read 50 pages about how every successful socialist revolution was never real.
What I've read of Robin Hobb has been fun, but it's been more than a decade so take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.
You could also hate read David Eddings, a child abusing drunk of a hack author who hated the genre of fantasy and all of its readers. That's what I'm doing, because I want to examine my childhood idol more closely. This is a bad idea and will not improve your life in any way, but it is something you could do.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm curious about the last paragraph. You see, I found an Eddings audiobook and I started with it, considering I've seen the name recommended here a few times. I've been thinking it's well written but also really really boring. Is this why you say he hated the readers? Have you figured why he achieved idol status for you during your childhood?
He got into writing fantasy because he thought the people who read fantasy would read absolutely anything. He wanted to get as much money as possible for as little effort as possible, and since he didn't consider fantasy to be real literature he figured it would be easier than adventure books about rock climbing, which he had written before, because he had to do literally no research. Reading them as an adult it is obvious that they are very lazily written. Every character has a personality that can be boiled down to a single adjective like "grumpy", "sneaky", "funny", or in one very annoying case "having an axe". This lazy writing however means that because the characters never really have much to say about anything things can move at an incredibly fast pace. This is what I liked as a child.
Fast!? I've gone through over 2/3 of the first book and I was thinking the worst so far had been the slow pace. I do agree the characters haven't said much but I figured it was because they were keeping things a secret from the MC. Thanks for sharing your perspective though!
I think the first series he wrote may have a bit of a slow start. The one I'm hate reading is his latter work about the knight Sparhawk. I was convinced the plot of the first book would revolve around stopping the nefarious plot that he - I swear to god - just happened to overhear a villain just explain to an entire room in an inn. Like 8 or so chapters later and he is on a different continent, kidnapping an ambassador after having completely stopped the evil plot, fought in two major battles, adopted a child, commited arson, survived a shipwreck and infiltrated a cultist meeting. It's remarkable how fast things can happen if none of the characters have any personality you have to write around.