SFFWorld's unofficial Top 20 Fantasy Series List

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In my opinion, in order to fully appreciate The Dark Tower series, it is extremely important to be very familiar with the vast majority of King's other work. That's what makes it so special. I have no clue what it would be like reading the entire series without having knowledge of (and/or the ability to reference) his other books.

If anyone has actually read just The Dark Tower and nothing else of his, I'd be curious to hear your opinions of it as a stand alone series.
 
Bmet said:
In my opinion, in order to fully appreciate The Dark Tower series, it is extremely important to be very familiar with the vast majority of King's other work. That's what makes it so special. I have no clue what it would be like reading the entire series without having knowledge of (and/or the ability to reference) his other books.

If anyone has actually read just The Dark Tower and nothing else of his, I'd be curious to hear your opinions of it as a stand alone series.
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That's me. My reading career has been 100% fantasy. So I have not read any of King's horror books. I know of some of the characters, and I looked up some things, but never read them. Most of the references are not that big and don't tie into the plot. Many are just cameos, references, or just things being hinted at. Flagg maybe being the exception. If you wanted the FULL EFFECT, then yes find a good reading order. But I don't think it's necessary.
 
Bmet said:
If anyone has actually read just The Dark Tower and nothing else of his, I'd be curious to hear your opinions of it as a stand alone series.
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chris777 did a quick reply just after I decided to write a more extensive one. Oh well, useless to remove it now...

If a small digression is allowed in this thread, I'll give you my opinion. I don't like horror at all. Stephen King has been a famous author for a long time and when I came across The Gunslinger and noticed it was not horror I gave it a go. I was immediately hooked to the series and did not read any other of his works. It was some years later when I read that there were references to other works that I tried a few, but only afterwards. I still am quite unknown about some references and characters from other works but you don't always need to know the whole backstory as there are plenty of novels with a mysterious stranger whose background remains mostly unclear. In fact, I found it actually quite thrilling to find such mysterious references, with all their baggage, in the story as they made the series into something much more.

The Dark Tower reads fine without having knowledge of all the references as many are of small importance. The only effect, as mentioned before, they had on me was that in some cases I read some of his other works afterwards, like Eyes Of The Dragon, The Talisman, Insomniac and Hearts In Atlantis (none of these are really horror either, to my surprise). I did not read the entire series before I picked up those books but it was after the fourth or later before I did.
 
when i think of a top ten, i always think of books which had a heavy impact on either my reading tastes, or my soul. like, they clearly mean a lot to me and even now when i think about the first time i read them, i get shivers. or i'm still in awe of the world which was built or the character which was brought to life. with that in mind, there's some novels which i might consider epic and awesome, but they didn't break my mind.

1: the lankhmar series - fritz leiber (beautiful writing)
2: malazan - steven erikson
3: the eternal champion - michael moorcock
4: the mirror empire - kameron hurley
5: the belgariad - david eddings (everyone loves to hate it, but dammit i read this every time i have a flu because it's so fluffy and comforting)
6: drenai - david gemmell (thankyou for making pulp classy)
7: the black company - glen cook
8: steel remains - richard morgan
9: gentlemen bastards - scott lynch
10: iron wolves - andy remic

notable choices which are moving me lately:
the darkslayer series - craig halloran
the bloodline trilogy - t.o. munro
gonji - t.c. rypel
the legend of vanx malic - m.r. mathias
 
Bmet said:
If anyone has actually read just The Dark Tower and nothing else of his, I'd be curious to hear your opinions of it as a stand alone series.
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EDIT: I realized I was mixing this with The Eyes of the Dragon.

I hated it. It was just a constant hashing of "I am evil. There is hate and evil festering inside of me. I am evil. I am full of hate. I am evil", and so forth. I couldn't finish it. Read about half of it and never again. I will never read anything by King, ever. It was just so overdone for me. I thought it was melodramatic and ridiculous.
 
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NickeeCoco said:
I hated it. It was just a constant hashing of "I am evil. There is hate and evil festering inside of me. I am evil. I am full of hate. I am evil", and so forth. I couldn't finish it. Read about half of it and never again. I will never read anything by King, ever. It was just so overdone for me. I thought it was melodramatic and ridiculous.
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I've never read the whole series -- but I remember reading the original Gunslinger story when it was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (yeah, I'm old). I was very struck by it at the time -- it was different than anything else I was reading at that time.
 
Contrarius said:
I've never read the whole series -- but I remember reading the original Gunslinger story when it was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (yeah, I'm old). I was very struck by it at the time -- it was different than anything else I was reading at that time.
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You know what? I realized I just mixed them up. I was thinking of The Eyes of the Dragon. I hated that.
 
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elvraie said:
Here are my ten favourites series, so far and in author's alphabetical order:
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Since the premise of the thread is to make a sorted list and the first in each voter's list gets 25 points while the last one gets only 1, you might want to try to sort them by preference instead of alphabetically (although I think that in a top-ten list it does not make sense to have such a huge difference because of the position).
 
phil_geo said:
Well in the top 10, the only series I haven't read is The Dark Tower, which I never considered reading until now.
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I'm a King fan, but I read the first Dark Tower novel and it did not really interest me. If you are not familiar with King, I'd recommend something like The Stand, or some shorter fiction like the novella "The Body".
 
farseer2 said:
Since the premise of the thread is to make a sorted list and the first in each voter's list gets 25 points while the last one gets only 1, you might want to try to sort them by preference instead of alphabetically (although I think that in a top-ten list it does not make sense to have such a huge difference because of the position).
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I see what you mean... My own criteria would be how many times I read the books and if I want to reread them.

1- Lord of the Rings (I read it four times)
2-Tales of the Flat Earth (twice)
3-The Dying Earth (Read it quite recently, would read it in a few years.)
4-Lankhmar (same as 3)
5-Earthsea (same as 3)
6-Liveship Trilogy (Would reread it before reading Rain Wilds Chronicles)
7-Bas-Lag
8-Amber
9 -10- Book of the New Sun and Riyria Chronicles.
I read the first volume of the Fantasy Masterworks of the Book of the New Sun and read also the Riyria Chronicles. I intend to read the Riyria Revelations and the rest of the New Sun. The first books are so good that I could not help to put them in the list.
 
Thanks for the Dark Tower advice. I have probably read a dozen King novels, so I'm pretty familiar with his style and world. Honestly after so many his books seem almost formulaic, but I will give Dark Tower a try seeing my fondness for Westerns.
 
TO each their own, but to me, The Dark Tower is a masterpiece of the imagination and what makes it so much so is it's part in King's universe/bibliography. I personally don't get how someone could hate King or hate horror and still love The Dark Tower. Stephen King to me is the master storyteller of the last 50 years. That is why I can't imagine enjoying the series (as badass as it is) without being able to enjoy all the connections of it's characters and goings -ons with the rest of his bibliography. Sure, some are small, but their subtly is what makes them so amazing (like the connection Insomnia makes to Pet Semetary, thus tying the latter to the main universe/series [no one ever seems to talk about this one])... but others, like The Stand, IT, Insomnia, Hearts... Salem's Lot, The Eyes of the Dragon, Talisman/Black House, are massive and extremely important to the reading experience if you ask me.

I'm sure it reads just fine on it's own, as it is a wonderful series (including The Wind Through the Keyhole, which i thought was beautiful and the best book of that year), but I promise you, you are missing out on some sweet surprises and 'oh cool!' or 'a-ha!' moments by avoiding so many of his other books. But I guess this comes back to how much of a King fan you are, as opposed to being no more than a Tower fan. But again... with me, that possibility does not compute. Lol.

Also, I am not a fan of 'reading orders'. As far as I'm concerned, the only order anything should ever be read in is 'order of publication' unless explicitly suggested otherwise by the author because there was some screw up in when his books were published compared to written or something. I suppose when it comes to The Dark Tower, even though I only started reading King in the mid 90's as a teen, I was fortunate enough to make the decision to read the majority his books in order of publication, so I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything.

All that being said, I really need to get caught up on some of his 'recent' work... recent being stuff written post-Tower.
 
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So...I was thinking of turning this thread into an article for the main site. Would you all be okay with that?

@chris777 - would you want to write it or just let me do it?
 
N. E. White said:
So...I was thinking of turning this thread into an article for the main site. Would you all be okay with that?

@chris777 - would you want to write it or just let me do it?
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Go ahead. Let me tally the latest results though before you do. I will try and get that done today.
 
chris777 said:
Go ahead. Let me tally the latest results though before you do. I will try and get that done today.
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No rush. I was thinking of posting it sometime next week. I'll have to check the calendar of scheduled posts. It could even be the week after.

EDIT: I just scheduled it for the 28th of May.
 
Just wanted to post some of the interesting things so far. These are listed on the link of the original post, but I'll paste them here too.

  • LOTR and ASOIAF are always #1 and #2 in any order on our lists.
  • Lots of authors have 2 series in the entire list. David Gemmell & Robin Hobb are the only with 3 .
  • Lyonese ranked 22nd with 3 votes and Sword of Truth ranked 79th, also with 3 votes.
  • Brandon Sanderson has 2 in the top 20.(3 of you count Wheel of Time!!)
  • Only 4 books have more than one 1st place vote: Lord of the Rings, As Song of Ice and Fire, First Law, Malazan

(post #92 was last one to be updated)
 
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1. Sword of Truth - Terry Goodkind
2. A Song of Fire and Ice - George R. R. Martin
3. Richard and Kahlen series - Terry Goodkind
4. Dark Disciple - Margaret Weiss
5. Chronicles - Margaret Weiss
6. Lost Chronicles - Margaret Weiss
7. Darkwar Saga - Raymond Feist
8. Riftwar Saga - Raymond Feist
9. Lengends - Margaret Weiss
10. Ineritence - Christopher Paolini
 
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