Range of ghosts
Going into exile after barely escaping a war waged by his cousin and brother, Temur, the grandson and heir of the Great Khan, teams up against an enemy cult with former princess Samarkar, who after a series of bitter betrayals has pursued a life of magical study.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2012–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.
I too am a middle aged dude who grew up reading and I think there's a simple explanation for that feeling: we got old. The market has moved on and left us behind. It happened to the ancients, and it will happen to the young.
> Nowadays they would probably be criticized
I don't know who Troy Gibson is, and Redwall generally got a pass because of the target audience, but all the rest certainly got tons of criticism from readers at the time. Riftwar was too generic and RPG-like. Dragonlance was also generic and the RPG elements were only barely pasted over. Mercedes Lackey was repetitive, you read one you've read them all. (Did I read all three of those in my teens and enjoy them a bunch? I certainly did).
> Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it.
We had those back in our youth as well, most notably the now-almost-forgotten Thomas Covenant books.
> All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.
Glancing over at my bookshelf, you might like the trilogy starting with "Range of Ghosts" by Elizabeth Bear (the 2nd trilogy is fine, the third book kind of fizzles out, and its biggest sin is establishing a character who's basically "Miles Vorkosigan, except a villain" and then not leaning hard into that).
Ultimately tho this plus "dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms" means you really should start reading Malazan. It's not perfect (parts of it are rapey, and the later books, especially Toll the Hounds, can be really pretentious) but it is the sprawling epic fantasy with a cast of thousands.
Dudes and ladies with huge swords? Check. And magic? Check. Killing dragons? Check. Conquering kingdoms? Well, there's a lot of attempts to reverse previous conquests and stop ongoing conquests, so I'll give that a chek.
- New: Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed
Old: The House of the Stag, Kage Baker Soldier of Sidon, Gene Wolfe
Range of Ghosts was definitely the stand out book of the year for me, the other three I'm sure I will reread. (Actually this time around was already a reread for Soldier of Sidon.) I'm pretty sure there were a couple of other books I read and quite enjoyed that I've forgotten now. No science fiction books come to mind at all, which makes me kind of sad.
