I adore heroes and stories that inspire me to live a life of virtue. As a child, I would stay up late reading about noble nights and the sins of evil. I believe every person is endowed with a yearning for all that is Good, True, and Beautiful. In a time when the zeitgeist is muddled with grimdark determinism, I’ve noticed wounds and cries for a life of virtue. Stories can inspire the good in us; thus, I am passionate about tales that fan flames of light in the hearts of their readers.
I fell for this book like a leprechaun for gold. The world and characters are colorful, and the magic is based on color. From a sensational sensory standpoint, Warbreaker lifted my spirits to a magnificent place.
I am drawn to this book because of the wondrous world and storytelling that revolves around the true spirit of femininity. I love books that reach for the highest virtue of the noble spirit, and Warbreaker did not disappoint. We watch as the two heroines use the true power of femininity to draw out the best in masculinity forces, thus calling them to their destiny. Talk about a story that embraces the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago.
Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren's capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one…
The
Pariah features a protagonist, Alwyn Scribe, with such a distinct voice and
motivations you cannot help being captivated by him. Ryan is also incredibly
gifted at making the medieval fantasy setting feel grounded and real.
The plot
is twisty, taking Alwyn through transformations that are incredible, yet
believable every step of the way. And when we are swept into the greater plot
and war, its version of the Joan of Arc story continues to captivate and awe.
'A gritty, heart-pounding tale of betrayal and bloody vengeance' John Gwynne
When the task is a killing, be quick and make sure of it.
Torment is an indulgence.
Save it for only the most deserving.
Born in the troubled kingdom of Albermaine, Alwyn Scribe is raised as an outlaw. Quick of wit and deft with a blade, Alwyn is content with the comradeship of his fellow thieves. Yet an act of betrayal sets him on a new path of blood and vengeance, which leads him to a soldier's life in the king's army.
Growing up and still today, I read a lot of fantasy, including reading the covers right off my copy of The Lord of the Rings boxed set. I’ve also written two major epic fantasy series each more than a million words in length. So I know a thing or two about what makes compelling epic fantasy stories. And these five books (and the series that follow) go above and beyond any measure. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed, but your REM cycle might suffer!
If you’re in the mood for a darker story to fill the moonlit hours between dusk and dawn, Chasing Graves is what you’ve been searching for. Galley’s writing is nothing short of magnificent, his creativity almost alien in its imagination. Not a second went by while reading this book that I wasn’t utterly lost between its pages, living in the world of the author’s creation, immersed in a story with one of the best twists I’ve ever read. When you begin this book, you might as well forget about sleep altogether, it’s that good.
Meet Caltro Basalt. He’s a master thief, a selfish bastard, and as of his first night in Araxes, stone cold dead.
They call it the City of Countless Souls, the colossal jewel of the Arctian Empire, and all it takes to be its ruler is to own more ghosts than any other. For in Araxes, the dead do not rest in peace in the afterlife, but live on as slaves for the rich.
While Caltro struggles to survive and tries to reclaim his freedom, those around him strive for the emperor’s throne in Araxes’ cutthroat game of power. The dead…
Not only am I a cyberpunk writer, I’m officially a Doctor of Cyberpunk. My Ph.D. thesis, The Dark Century: 1946–2046, looked at hardboiled fiction, film noir, and tech-noir (AKA cyberpunk) traditions across the past, the present, and an imagined future. It was a radical break from my previous career as an aid worker, where I ran poverty alleviation programs throughout Southeast Asia. And yet, I’ve drawn on that experience in my prose, using the experience of the cultures that I lived and worked in to breathe life into the settings for my short stories and novels.
This book largely takes place over a three-day battle. It showcases the stupidity of war, the cowardice, the luck, the incompetence, and yes, sometimes even the breathtaking courage.
As you’d expect from Abercrombie–the so-called Lord of Grimdark–the ‘heroes’ are no such thing, but rather, flawed and broken individuals who go to war out of obligation or ambition or because they know no other way of life.
Joe Abercrombie writes superb action scenes. Visceral, urgent, bloody. He’s also particularly cruel to his characters. I’m not sure if he’s picking on me particularly or if it’s just the dark alchemy of his literary soul that makes him such a popular author, but he’s always a bit of a bastard to the characters I like the most.
They say Black Dow's killed more men than winter, and clawed his way to the throne of the North up a hill of skulls. The King of the Union, ever a jealous neighbor, is not about to stand smiling by while he claws his way any higher. The orders have been given and the armies are toiling through the northern mud. Thousands of men are converging on a forgotten ring of stones, on a worthless hill, in an unimportant valley, and they've brought a lot of sharpened metal with them.
I published my first book in 2017 and I’m currently working on book number 11. In that time, I’ve got to know some great indie authors and read some great indie fantasy. These five titles are a selection. I could easily have done this exercise ten times over with different authors and titles. But if you’re looking to see what indie fantasy has to offer, or simply searching for your next engrossing read, I think these will do the trick.
Another book that leans into the grimdark genre but also with the ambitious scope of epic fantasy.
The world is human, but with some pretty terrifying creatures in it. The character work is excellent – each of the three POVs is a complex individual, an outsider, and none are heroes. But each is being pushed by a plot that suggests something terrible is going to happen if they don’t get their collective acts together.
Lannick deVeers used to be somebody. A hero, even. Then, he ran afoul of the kingdom’s most powerful general and the cost he paid was nearly too much to bear. In the years that followed, his grief turned him into a shadow of his former self, and he spent his days drowning his regrets in tankards of ale. But now an unexpected encounter casts Lannick upon an unlikely path to revenge. If he can just find the strength to overcome the many mistakes of his past, he can seize the chance to become a hero once more. And with an…
Being a human is fraught, so I've always been fascinated by stories of sentient animals, long before I sold my first short story at age 19 (about a tiny dragon that lived in a bathtub drain) or my 48th story (which features talking sand cats and is reprinted in my collection The Ramshead Algorithm: And Other Stories). While most of my 90+ published stories star humans, talking animals are a reoccurring motif in my work and in the ????+ books I've read across 40+ years. If you're ready to branch out beyond Watership Down and Redwall, here are 5 books that more fans of sentient animals should know about.
Zucchini the ferret, born in the Bronx Zoo, leads a bleak life.
When he learns about the outside world, he yearns to escape—but when he does, it's straight into chaos.
I read Zucchini many times as a child and last read it in my 30s, and it's wonderfully more grimdark than I remember. Published in 1982, the book is 1980's-New-York gritty, and so are the hard adult lessons: fighting for your needs is full of risk; betrayal is common; love, compassion, and understanding are scarce; and idealism has an unsustainable cost.
But this makes the bits of joy that Zucchini wrests from the world all the more vivid. The story, like the world, is hard; but the story, like the world, has hope.
My PhD work was in developmental robotics, which is about how a robot could wake up and learn about the world the way a human child does. The robot in my thesis work does this by building models, and, more generally, society as a whole advances when science builds ever better causal models about how the world works. The books in this collection are about what could happen when we are 5, 10, and 100 years ahead in the causal model-building process, and they look at what happens when those models are built by robots instead of humans.
I love how this book conveys the wonder of discovery as they travel the universe. You can skip over some of the early math passages without missing anything. The book is about a civilization of software agents, and the description of how their understanding of physics advances is great.
If you like this one, check out Permutation City by Egen, which explores what it is like to live forever in a simulation. You live for so long that you can load passions for hobbies into your brain to pass the time. A character has an intense desire for woodwork and all the materials a woodworker would dream of.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
I have a great passion for fantasy books and from a very early age spent any time I could with my nose in a fantasy book traveling to fantastical worlds. In my teens, I got into dungeons and dragons and began creating my own worlds and stories until I took the next step and decided to write my own stories. I work as a prison guard and while too busy during the day to write or read much I have many nightshifts that allow me ample reading and writing time. I still run role-playing games once a week and am always searching for that next great book to read.
If you are like me and enjoy grimdark novels, then this one is for you. This coming-of-age story has it all. Politics, magic, and an amazingly rich setting that explores multiple cultures told by three great protagonists. The story gripped me at the start and didn’t let me go until the very last word. Richard Nell’s breathtaking storytelling ability is made even more impressive due to Kings of Paradise being his debut novel. This is another book that needs a trigger warning.
Winner of the 2018 IRDA for fantasy / 2018 Reader's Favorite Gold Medalist #1 Best Seller in Canadian Dark Fantasy 99% liked it (Goodreads) A deformed genius plots vengeance while struggling to survive. A wastrel prince comes of age, finding a power he never imagined. Two worlds will collide. Only one can be king.
★★★★★ "This dark fantasy epic will be held up against George R.R. Martin's masterwork, A Song of Ice and Fire. Read this book now so you can act pompous around your friends when HBO turns it into a television series." - Goodreads
I was ten. Every Sunday morning, I sat in front of the TV with a notepad to take notes while watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. As a teen, I devoured every of Kafka’s books. The wonder of science and the strangeness of our existence have co-habited within me since then. Today, I’m a professional physicist and theoretical chemist. But I’m also a fiction writer. My fiction allows me to spill my science background into topics that wouldn’t be welcome in technical writing. For instance, wondering how life could re-emerge in the far future after all stars burned.
Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic is hard SciFi stretching scientific concepts into their ethical and human limits.
"Wonderful, mind-expanding stuff, and well written too."-The Guardian
Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov's between 1989 and 1992.
From junkies who drink at the time-stream to love affairs in time-reversed galaxies; from gene-altered dolphins that converse only in limericks to the program that allows you to design your own child; from the brain implants called axiomatics to the strange attractors that spin off new religions; from bioengineering to the new physics; and from cyberpunk to…
I grew up with a serious passion for mythology and fairy tales. By the time I reached college, I knew that would be my path in life: honoring the Old Deities, honoring the earth, and writing new myths and fairy tales. To that end, I have published numerous short stories, novellas, and poems (the majority with a Pagan focus), serve on the board of directors of a Pagan publisher and a Pagan non-profit organization, and edit a Pagan literary ezine.
Most urban fantasy is very firmly fixed in the modern world, and the protagonists are overwhelmingly Caucasian. Boroson’s The Girl with Ghost Eyes is a wonderful change of pace. Not only is our hero a Chinese woman in 19th century San Francisco, but she is also a trained Daoshi priestess — who cannot take over her father’s practice precisely because she is a woman. The Girl with Ghost Eyes deftly deals with sexism, racism, labor exploitation, and immigration, while also introducing the audience to traditional Chinese beliefs and practices about magic, shapeshifters, spirits, and the afterlife. A terrific reminder that tradition can simultaneously strengthen and imprison us.
"The Girl with Ghost Eyes is a fun, fun read. Martial arts and Asian magic set in Old San Francisco make for a fresh take on urban fantasy, a wonderful story that kept me up late to finish." #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs
It's the end of the nineteenth century in San Francisco's Chinatown, and ghost hunters from the Maoshan traditions of Daoism keep malevolent spiritual forces at bay. Li-lin, the daughter of a renowned Daoshi exorcist, is a young widow burdened with yin eyes the unique ability to see the spirit world. Her spiritual visions and…
