Take one of my favorite writers and give him license to contribute to the phenomenally successful Honor Harrington series, and what do you get? You get Eric Flint working with David Weber on the short-stories-turned-novels, Crown of Slaves and Torch of Freedom.
Do you like space opera? How about great characters engaged in spy games and intrigue? Or maybe true badasses going up against incredible odds? All of them? Good. I’ve got some books to recommend to you.
The Mongoliad, Book One, is the first in a series of books written by a collection of authors (Bear, Bear, Brassey, deBirmingham, Moo, Stephenson, Teppo). It is an alternate history starting in 1241 AD with brief moments of the fantastical / spiritual. They make no jokes about the devastation wrought by the Mongols, and paint a convincing portrait of medieval Europe (everything is dirty and most people are poor). It’s a quality story, with the promise of more good tales to come.
Servant of the Dragon is the third book in the epic fantasy series Lord of the Isles, written by David Drake. Published in 1999, it is a excellent sequel and addresses the few issues that I previously had with the series while continuing the better traditions of the first two books. I recommended the series before, I recommend it even more strongly now. If you want to dive into a fantasy setting built on the sunken ruins of an Atlantean past, constructed from the stones of Sumerian mythology and mortared with Greek and Roman poetry, this is the series for you.
Queen of Demons is the second book in the Lord of the Isles series, printed in 1998. David Drake continues to show that he knows his craft, with this sequel giving a suitably dramatic follow-up to the beginning of the epic. This time I wasn’t skeptical at all, and I was right not to be. That musty scent of genuine historic fantasy setting, cobbled together from the corpses of bits of real history, takes life once more.
I had always thought of David Drake as a military sci-fi author. He has a long history of writing exactly that, with Hammer’s Slammers and Northworld being the examples I’m most familiar with. So when I came across Lord of the Isles while browsing his wikipedia page, I was a little surprised. A renowned sci-fi author tries his hand at epic fantasy?
I shouldn’t have been skeptical. Continue reading
For my first review, I was all set to review a book by Brandon Sanderson. I outlined what I liked about the book, what I thought Brandon Sanderson brought to the table, where his writing felt flawed, and so on. And then I tried to introduce Brandon Sanderson. I couldn’t do it. To talk about what Brandon Sanderson does right and wrong was something I had only ever learned to do in contrast to Robert Jordan, and anything I could write about Brandon Sanderson would be overshadowed by my 5 paragraph intro about Robert Jordan. Brandon Sanderson is a spectacular author in his own right, and deserves to be written about on his own, without a page of intro about somebody else. So instead, I find myself writing about Robert Jordan.
Fistful of Wits 