![]() Watchers of the Sullen Vigil patrol the boundary between the desert wastes ofĬamrinal and the rest of the world, trying to keep the supernatural evilĬontained, but they falter and dwindle, for no men can stand up to the evil A dour order of knights called the Order of the Monsters prowl the land, spilling out into the neighboring dominions to hunt ![]() Wasteland of magically irradiated, uninhabitable desert. Camrinal, once a vast imperial hub in the heart of Sarvaelen, is now a Landscape forever altered by the hideous magic of the emperor and his war In fact, the name is more one of lost hope the newĭawn of the lands of Sarvaelen have been met with endless danger and a The year now is 213 of the New Dawn (ND), a name which implies that theĬivil war led to a victory. If anyone has recommendations I welcome them.I can't help but notice, for example, that Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn is on the "reader's worst" list on the same site.sigh.Īgo. I have excellent "SF fiction" radar for what is good and what is not.less so for fantasy. If I dive back, I think now is the time for caution.my omnivorous reading habits from the pre-internet days need to be cultivated with a healthy sense of skepticism about what is out there. Recently I started reading Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, and picked up a few others as well (Sanderson's Mistborn, Bretts' The Warded Man and Rothfuss's Name of the Wind) and I have Joe Abercrombie on my to-get list. Outside of that, I gave up on fantasy fiction entirely for close to fifteen years now. My only saving grace was stumbling across A Game of Thrones when I was in the hospital getting my appendix removed.and a concerted binge-reading of Salvatore's first ten Drizzt novels, which I found compelling in a great soap-opera way. I was buying all the wrong stuff, reading all the wrong books, and in the end it killed my motivation to read more fantasy fiction. Then this list comes along and like a bolt from the blue I realize: I was on an unlucky reading streak, possibly for years. ![]() It goes on, but there was a period when the "good stuff I liked" was eclipsed by the growing pile of "stuff I couldn't get in to." But I tended to assume that if I wasn't "getting" it then it was probably because I was losing interest, or the genre was played out for me.or I had too little time to really appreciate it. Same with Feist and Brooks.and Douglass, and even Drake's Lord of the Isles, which I was sure I was meant to enjoy but I just couldn't. I was ranting about The Iron Tower Trilogy as a teenager, appalled at how unabashedly derivative it was.ĭragonlance? Never could get into it, even when I really tried. I tried on several occasions to get in to Terry Goodkind and figured I must be missing something because clearly this looked like a popular series. I remember trying to plow through the Fifth Sorceress and wondering where I had gone wrong. It's good to get some affirmation, I have to say.on the list as presented I disagree (only marginally) with two cases: I happen to like David Eddings but do agree his Belgariad series resonated much better with my young teen self, and I do like Salvatore but I'd never put his books up as pinnacles of exceptionalism.they're fun the same way comics are fun.īut.everything else on that list? I tried to read them all (well, except #1 which postdates my exodus from fantasy, plus I am very studious in avoiding shitty ebook fiction). So, enter this "worst of fantasy" list I found.to my surprise, I had read (or attempted to read) virtually every book on this list, and it is shocking to realize that it is entirely possible that my swearing off almost all fantasy fiction not written by GRRM or RAS back in the late 90's to early 00's may have been due to a poor random sampling on my part of what I was trying to read. One of the reasons I have otherwise avoided reading most fantasy out there? It seemed to be a vast field of terrible novels, and I couldn't figure out why, other than that most of the books in question seemed trite, derivative, overdone, juvenile, plain old crappy and occasionally professionally bad in that special way that only someone who can hash out a thousand-page epic can manage to achieve. Martin stint that ended a few years back and my persistent devotion to Salvatore's Drizzt novels, although I am still stuck in the Thousand Orcs era of that series. So recently I got back into reading fantasy.something I have largely avoided for years, with the only exceptions being my George R.R. He discusses his methodology and admits its his own list, but also makes cogent arguments for why he feels as he does about these novels. Over on there's a list of the blogger's 30 picks for Worst Fantasy Novels ever.
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