Fair points all. I don't have an axe to grind against quest or "conventional" novels; I like them quite a lot. When they're well done. I thought The Summoner was poorly executed in every respect (apart from its gorgeous cover design; Solaris does some fantastic covers), so it's mystifying to me that it should sell well. I understand that many readers aren't bothered by clunky writing, the use of "grated" as a dialogue tag three times a page (what, you may ask, did they grate on? Answer: My last nerve), or characterization so leaden you could melt bullets from it, but even then what you're left with is not much in the way of worldbuilding and a plot that a first-grader could call from Page 10. So I remain baffled, and will continue to wonder whether maybe it could be explained by the fact that a fair amount of fantasy is bought by parents for their kids, and while those parents might be turned off by the amount of cursing in Abercrombie and Lynch, Martin's work is at least a lot less profane... ...because there must be some rational explanation here and I remain at a loss. Back on-topic... uh... well, I'm much less plugged in for book news than you guys are, so I don't have anything relevant to say. Shutting up now.
Whaaaaaat??? Gail Martin sold more copies of her debut novel than Scott Lynch. I would never, ever have guessed that. Where do those figures come from btw? I wont believe it until I see the source of your statistics=) Gail Martins "summoner" was actually one of my "worst debut ever" experiances. In my opinion she definatly doesn't have the writing skill to pull of a formulaic fantasy like Mr Greg Keyes does in his newest series. I had to put the summoner down after 50 pages. It is worth mentioning that I've finished books as David Drakes "Lord of the isles" and Paul Kecks "The eye of god" (atleast I think that's it's name).
This, more than anything else, tells me that the human race is no longer fit to survive. The Orcs books are appalling tripe of the first order.
This debut is on horror genre actually. Bill Hussey's debut novel, "Through a Glass, Darkly", is a very good one. The book will be published on 17 July on the UK. I just posted my review of this book on my blog: "In my horror reading experience I never read a debut novel of the genre, every time I read authors that had made a name for themselves. When I picked up „Through a Glass, Darkly” I didn’t know what to expect, but I found the debut of Bill Hussey an impressive one."
What about more thoughts on Gone Away I still have not decided if I order it from the UK now or wait to check it out in our US stores in September...
No longer fit to survive? I don't think the human race was ever fit to survive. We doomed ourselves when the first Mercedes Lackey novel was published.
Nah, Lackey readers all know that it is simple to find a "life-bonding" partner, usually as love at first sight. And if they die, it just takes a few days to get over them and start the process again. They are far more likely to outbreed us all, which is the true measure of fitness to survive.
A relatively new blog Fantasy Debut http://fantasydebut.blogspot.com/ covers just what it says - debut fantasy novels. Another novel I saw (on fantasybookcritic) was Mad Kestrel - by Misty Massey. I haven't seen much more about the book but it is about pirates.
Thanks for the link, Rob! You have successfully lured me to these forums. I'm seeing a lot of urban/dark fantasy debuts so far, and not so much epic. I follow some agent blogs, and this agent says epic is dead, while this agent says in a newsletter that thanks to Rothfuss, epic will very soon be hot. I looked through my 2008 debut announcements, and the only ones I would classify as epic so far is Seekers of the Chalice by Brian Cullen (which I have, and I'm having trouble getting into) and The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick, which someone already mentioned. Tia Nevitt Who is So New She Doesn't Have a Signature for this Forum Yet
I gave up on it around page 50. The book was spectacularly annoying. Reading the overwritten prose was like wading through treacle and not making any headway I'm reading Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light instead, which is awesome. I may go back to Gone-Away World afterwards if I can muster the willpower.
Firstly: welcome Tia! Epic's not dead by any stretch of the imagination. For as long as GRRM, Erikson, Bakker and the like are selling well, there's nothing to fear. Some people have suggested that publishers are unwilling to take on new epic fantasy authors, which again is untrue. Pan Macmillan recently took on Mark Charan Newton and will be publishing his epic fantasy debut next year. The genre is alive and well. Red Wolf Conspiracy was a big disappointment. As usual the Gollancz hype machine was in full motion, and not for the first time the book didn't match the buzz. You can't have sigs here, so no need to worry!
Hearing that Epic Fantasy is dead, no matter how much of an industry insider is making the proclaimation is a bit like hearing yet again from some Television Programming Pundit that Reality Television is on its way out. I'm not sure that I would classify Cullen as epic. It falls somewhere in the crack between Epic Quest and what I tend to call Mythic Fantasy because of its Celtic base. It also falls between horrifically bad and amusingly terrible. While Massey may pull a Gail Z. Martin, Myself, I didn't find it anything worth talkingg about. Bare bones plotting and worldbuilding...then again that is Gail Z. Martin to a 'Gail Z. Martin'. The expansion of Orbit I think is a good indicator at how strong epic fantasy is and will likely continue to be. Urban fantasy is growing at a rabid rate and probably will always be at a greater rate than epic or other sub-genres. Mainly, I think, because it is probably the easiest to adapt tropes that florish in the mainstream. With urban fantasy there seems to be a much broader simplistic approach. Some are nothing more than romances with fangs. Or mysteries with wands. Or westerns complete with loners and showdowns mixed with fairy dust and ghosts. More "epic" fantasies have tried that route but never seemed to catch on. Tamara Siler Jones' rather poorly executed series tried so hard to be CSI: Middle Earth but it just wallowed in its own implausibility and poor plotting. Lynch adapted the light shallow summer action movie mixed with faux-witty cleverness of Ocean's Eleven (and came up with an overly glib, contrived but crowd pleasing novel that for me was essentially Hudson Hawk Goes to Waterworld) to much better results in terms of reader acclaim and sales. And pirates seem to be the newest current theme following movie success (a few years back everyone was going to Troy thinking Pitt's movie was going to be the new Gladiator) that won't quite go away but never seems to really pop. Though Lynch went there to sophomore success with Red Seas Over Red Skies morphing his lead from smarmy George Clooney to stumbling snarky Johnny Depp with what was supposed to be 'just a three hour tour'. Still, urban fantasy seems to have a better hold on using pop culture tropes and mixing in a little or a lot of hocus pocus. Whether it is the "Sex and the City" retail approach in what serves a world building in the new crop of sassy stilleto'd paranormal butt kicking beauties who always have at least three hot guys just desperate to jump in their designer label mini skirts that go fabulously with their too-die for Jimmy Choo's. Or taking that lone wolf, brooding, bleak and loaded with tragic backstory scruffy but self-deprecatingly studly noble but flawed hero and dragging his trenchcoated surly butt into Law and Order scenarios that go bump in the night. I guess the real point though is that a rise in urban fantasy is not exactly a death knell for epic or others. It merely means that urban fantasy is reaching new audiences. Epic fantasy readers. Non-epic fantasy readers. But looking at the publishing lists for the near future, it doesn't look like those epic fantasy readers are deserting the sub-genre so much as simply expanding out into others more.
Thanks for all the welcomes! I'm afraid I'll be something of a sporadic poster. I keep trying to get a loan from the Time Bank, but they keep denying my application. Something about how I live too much from Timecheck to Timecheck, and I have no means by which to pay back the loan. Although I'm now reading a fun YA historical fantasy, I can't say I have read any standouts since the first of the year. I enjoyed Across the Face of the World, but that didn't release this year and I know it had mixed reviews. I'm having trouble with In the Eye of Heaven, but I haven't given up on it yet. I think I just need to get past this point in the second chapter that's giving me fits. I read Mad Kestrel, and had mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed The Thirteenth Reality by James Dashner, which is another YA--or maybe even MG--fantasy. (And no, I usually don't read much YA; it's just working out that way so far.) And yes, when I read that epic fantasy was "not hot," I thought, "But I love epic fantasy! Surely I'm not the only one left!" And I know I'm not. I really just cannot get into urban fantasy, although there are a few novels I want to try. tia
"Misty Massey" was decent entertainment, but nothing spectacular. Other recent debuts I enjoyed was Nicholas Pekearo's "The Wolfman" and "The Mirrored Heavens" by David J. Williams. The former I think had a Charlie Huston though going and would have been a cool urban fantasy-like series if the author was still with us. The latter is an explosive mix of military sf, cyberpunk and espionage and reminded me of a cross between William Gibson, Neal Asher, Richard K. Morgan and Halo It suffers from some problems, but I think Williams will be an author to watch in the future... I'm looking forward to checking out Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Empire in Black & Gold" as well as "The Magicians and Mrs. Quent" and "Havemercy". There's a few other debuts I'm excited about reading, but for the most part, 2008 is about sequels and new books from established authors
Mithfanion Wrote: Just to be obnoxious or to save someone else some money, I'll note that Tom Lloyd's Stormcaller was just really, really bad, and David Keck's first book impossible to finish for even a hardened Fantasy reader. It's the sort of stuff you would expect to see self-published. I'm slightly worried about Pyr's decision to import Lloyd. [I'll note that I haven't read Stormcaller, though I notice that my local library has it and so I will probably check it out at some point. My burning drive to find decent traditional fantasy has taken me into dark, dark places before this.] I mean, sure not everything put forward by an imprint can be absolutely top notch. However, so far as I'm concerned, Pyr has a very, very good track record. Pretty much every book of their's that I have read in its entirety has been incredible or close to it thus far. First of all, Lloyd is another import. don't get me wrong, I love Pyr's imports -- [if Pyr didn't import books people in NA wouldn't have Joel Shepherd's Kressnov books, and I'm pretty sure that would count as a crime against humankind.] But they haven't been picking up many new authors lately and I wish they'd get some more. Also, like Mith suggested, I'd hate to think that Lou Anders' decision to pick up The Twilight Reign stems solely from a realization that there's gold in them there epic hills. That would be too bad. Shame about Gone-Away World. It sounded quite original. I agree with the general consensus that there's no real debut that's being pushed as any kind of grand OMG reading experience this year. [By the demon gods of the interwebs! I just used "omg". I will never do it again.] As several have said, Gollancz were pushing Red Wolf, but it doesn't seem to have caught on. Perhaps it'll get another go when it hits the States. As for authors like Z Martin and Miller selling boatloads without generating a lot of discussion, it doesn't surprise me that much. Only really sad thing about trends like this, so far as I'm concerned, is that it turns the more jaded and cynical fantasy readers, [the ones who need their epics one hundred percent dark-moody or they can't have fun], away from the more traditional stories that got lots of us in to the genre. They see it done poorly, and they see that rendition of it sell, and they forget what it, [the "traditional" stuff], can be when an author does a good job of it. ________ Suzuki stratosphere
I'm looking forward for Adrian Tchaikovsky and "Havemercy" too. I'm also curious about David J. Williams' "The Mirrored Heavens", which I received today in the mail, and Dorothy Hearst's "Promise of the Wolves".
I hear good things about Tim Stretton's The Dog of the North. It's a debut novel with Macmillan in the UK. It's supposed to be reminiscent of Jack Vance, and while that's probably hype, anyone who's influenced by Vance has to be worth a read. There's more about the book on the publisher's website. The author himself has a blog. Looks like he's keeping busy! Looks to me like this one is worth a read.
