More information on Stephen Donaldson's new fantasy trilogy

Way back in 1977 Stephen Donaldson helped shape the modern fantasy genre with Lord Foul's Bane, the first book in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. He has completed three series in the same setting, totalling ten books, as well as an additional fantasy duology (Mordant's Need) and an excellent five-volume space opera, The Gap.

Donaldson is now working on a new fantasy trilogy, The Great God's War. The first novel in the series, Seventh Decimate, now has a cover blurb:

The acclaimed author of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles launches a powerful new trilogy about a prince’s desperate quest for a sorcerous library to save his people.
Fire. Wind. Pestilence. Earthquake. Drought. Lightning. These are the six Decimates, wielded by sorcerers for both good and evil. 
But a seventh Decimate exists—the most devastating one of all...
For centuries, the realms of Belleger and Amika have been at war, with sorcerers from both sides brandishing the Decimates to rain blood and pain upon their enemy. But somehow, in some way, the Amikans have discovered and invoked a seventh Decimate, one that strips all lesser sorcery of its power. And now the Bellegerins stand defenseless.
Prince Bifalt, eldest son of the Bellegerin King, would like to see the world wiped free of sorcerers. But it is he who is charged with finding the repository of all of their knowledge, to find the book of the seventh Decimate—and reverse the fate of his land.
All hope rests with Bifalt. But the legendary library, which may or may not exist, lies beyond an unforgiving desert and treacherous mountains—and beyond the borders of his own experience. Wracked by hunger and fatigue, sacrificing loyal men along the way, Bifalt will discover that there is a game being played by those far more powerful than he could ever imagine. And that he is nothing but a pawn...

The novel will be published on 14 November 2017.

Stephen Donaldson to publish major new fantasy trilogy

Stephen R. Donaldson has a good claim on being one of the fathers of modern epic fantasy. His novel Lord Foul's Bane, the first in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, was published in 1977 and is credited (along with Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara) with kick-starting the subgenre as we know it.

The Thomas Covenant series recently concluded with its tenth volume, but Donaldson is now back with a new fantasy trilogy, dubbed The Great God's War. The first volume, Seventh Decimate, will be a major hardcover release from Berkley Press in the autumn of 2017.

The trilogy will apparently chronicle a magical war and the quest by a prince to find a sorcerous library that holds the key to saving his kingdom. Knowing Donaldson, I suspect things will get radically more complicated than that before the end.

Donaldson has published fantasy outside of the Thomas Covenant series before, with his Mordan's Need duology, as well as a major space opera series, The Gap.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 9

If 1977 was the year that epic fantasy came of age, it took another couple of years for the genre to start unfolding in earnest.

 

Stephen Donaldson rapidly followed up on Lord Foul's Bane with two sequels, The Illearth War (1978) and The Power That Preserves (1979), completing The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. He then immediately launched into The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which attempted to answer the lingering questions from the first trilogy, such as whether the Land is real or not, by introducing a second major POV character, Linden Avery. The Wounded Land (1980), The One Tree (1982) and White Gold Wielder (1983) were also big sellers, establishing Donaldson as a successful author.

However, Terry Brooks took a bit longer to follow up on the success of The Sword of Shannara. He'd taken a decade to write the first book and was still writing around his law practice hours. This problem was magnified by his originally-planned sequel being rejected by Del Rey Books when it was three-quarters done (with Brooks struggling with the ending). This necessitated a page one restart and rewrite. This proved fortuitous, for although it delayed the publication of The Elfstones of Shannara until 1982 it also resulted in a rather stronger book than otherwise may have proven the case. The Elfstones of Shannara, although another classic quest narrative, was considerably different to its predecessor (and Tolkien) and was much more warmly received. It's still widely regarded as Brooks's best novel, and forms the basis for the first season of the Shannara TV series due to start airing in January 2016. In fact, Brooks was unusually slow (compared to some of his contemporaries) to exploit the Shannara brand. The third novel, The Wishsong of Shannara, did not appear until 1985 and it would be another five years before he returned to the setting with the four-volume Heritage of Shannara series, after a stint writing the Magic Kingdom of Landover comic fantasy series.

During this period another highly influential work appeared, although it is not epic fantasy in itself. Instead, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun (written as one novel but published in four volumes between 1980 and 1983) belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre of fantasy, being set on Earth in a remote future epoch when the Sun is dimming. Influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, the Book of the New Sun can be read as a sustained study of fantasy tropes. The "hero", Severian, is a torturer who has committed amoral acts and is only moved to a more repentant life when he falls in love/lust with one of his victims. As the story continues it becomes clear that Severian is some kind of "chosen one", but he is isn't necessarily a benevolent or kind one. In fact, Wolfe makes it clear that Severian is a liar, and the novel is riven with the inconsistencies and contradictions of a supremely unreliable narrator. Wolfe also equips Severian with a number of magical (or highly technologically advanced) weapons and items, such as the execution sword Terminus Est, but unlike many epic fantasies Severian is not dependent on such trinkets, and achieves his destiny by his own means. The Book of the New Sun and its sequel, The Urth of the New Sun, are both rationalised and revisionist fantasies, challenging the conventions of the genre but employing them to make their points. Two sequel series, The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun (the three series combined forming the 12-volume Solar Cycle), are more overtly SF.

More traditional epic fantasy had to wait until 1982, when two more important and influential books arrived within a few months of each other.

Pawn of Prophecy

David Eddings had been a frustrated writer for many years. He'd published an adventure novel, High Hunt, in 1973 but it had not been a big success. In his late forties he was considering his next writing project when he was surprised to see a copy of The Lord of the Rings on a shelf in a bookstore. His reaction was to say "Is that old turkey still around?" Then, leafing through the book, he was shocked to see it was on no less than its 78th printing. Realising there was money in them there epic fantasy hills, he went home, revised an old fantasy map he'd doodled a few years earlier and set to work.

Eddings did not write alone but collaborated with his wife, Leigh. Together they wrote a traditional (but not completely standard) epic fantasy trilogy and started shopping it around. Lester del Rey, searching for a follow-up to The Sword of Shannara, fell on it like a starving man and not only published it but blitzed it with ideas: the three books were chunky, so he divided them into five novels with slightly corny chess-inspired titles. He then decided that co-authored books would not sell (Weis and Hickman, two years later, would prove him wrong on that) so he had them credited to David Eddings alone, something that mildly irked the writers until they were able to change it a decade later. With some canny marketing and more maps than you can shake a stick at, the result was one of the key early works of epic fantasy: The Belgariad.

The Belgariad opens with a farmboy, Garion, discovering that Dark Forces are awake in the world and have taken a Special Interest in him. He is whisked away from his home by the Grumpy Mentor Wizard Belgarath and learns that he is the Chosen One who will both oppose the Dark God and is fated to rule as the High King of Riva. He reluctantly falls in love with a Feisty Princess, Ce'Nedra of Tolnedra, and eventually defeats the bad guys with the help of Prophecy.

The series is pretty standard, but has a few individual flairs. None of the standard fantasy races are involved, the tone is reasonably light-hearted throughout and the characters are all pretty damn reasonable. Sworn blood-enemies become best friends just by chilling with one another for a while and even the bad guys are treated with compassion. In fact, the sequel series (the considerably inferior Malloreon) is largely concerned with bringing in former enemies from the cold to work with them. There is a lot of humour, and although a lot of it is tired and repetitive there are some genuinely good ideas: the prophecy is semi-sentient and at times seems exasperated with the poor material it has to work with (less-whimsical echoes of this may be detected in The Wheel of Time). None of this is earth-shaking stuff, but it does make The Belgariad a little bit more interesting and bearable than it might be otherwise. The series has more recently been repackaged as a Young Adult series, which is a sensible move that has won it over a legion of new fans.

Magician

One of the curses of epic fantasy, and indeed any author who opens with a massive hit, is that authors often find it hard to achieve that success again with another work. The preponderance of long series in fantasy is partly down to this issue. Stephen Donaldson found that his sales more than halved when he completed the then-six volume Thomas Covenant series in 1983 and moved on to Mordant's Need, a less serious, more Zelazny-influenced duology. When he moved on again to space opera, with the brilliant Gap saga, his audience more than halved again. It wasn't until he returned to the Land with The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant in 2004 that he found his sales shooting back up again. Frank Herbert experienced the same issues when he moved away from his Dune series.

Raymond Elias Feist's experience is a bit odder. He's sold somewhere in the region of 30 million copies of his thirty novels, which is impressive. However, apparently between one-quarter and one-third of those sales have come from his debut novel alone: Magician.

Feist started writing Magician in 1977, when he was 32 years old. He was a mature student at the University of San Diego and, whilst studying, played roleplaying games with some of his fellow students, initially on Thursday nights and later on Friday nights. One of the other guys in his gaming group, Stephen Abrams, had created his own fantasy world complete with a detailed geography and history. The group collaborated on producing materials for this world, which was dubbed Midkemia. With their permission, Feist started writing a novel set 500 years before the "present" of the setting.

Magician was published by Doubleday in 1982 and was an immediate success, winning some laudatory reviews and soon some big sales. As a debut novel, it has some problems in prose and dialogue, but for the most part it is a fast-paced, action-packed and rather unusual fantasy novel which disposes of many of the key features of the genre.

The book opens with two young boys, Pug and Tomas, living and working in the castle of Crydee, the administrative capital of the lightly-settled Far Coast of the Kingdom of the Isles. This remote, largely-neglected area is thrown into chaos when a strange ship washes up on the nearby rocks and mysterious invaders are soon spotted in the nearby forests and mountains. It is soon revealed that a magical portal has been discovered, linking Midkemia to the world of Kelewan. Kelewan is light in metals and the powerful Tsurani Empire wants to establish a foothold on Midkemia to strip-mine its resources. The Kingdom, allied with the local elven and dwarven kingdoms, soon launches a military campaign against them and the result is a desperate struggle, with the Kingdom's numerical superiority threatened by the Empire's more devastating and powerful use of magic in war. Tomas inherits the magical powers of a long-vanished race and is able to turn the tide against the Tsurani at the risk of his own soul, whilst Pug is captured and taken to Kelewan.

Magician is a novel that pays homage to standard tropes: Pug is an orphan boy with a great destiny, there is a desperate journey through an ancient mine which splits the party of the heroes and there are numerous, large battles. However, the book also dispenses with other cliches: Pug's parentage is utterly irrelevant (they were just peasants and Pug has no bloodline-related fate; sometimes a spade really is just a spade), the ancient magical spirit in the mine is friendly and, very weirdly, there is no main bad guy. There are antagonists, such as the Tsurani Warlord and Guy du Bas-Tyra, but one of them is merely an opportunist and the other is redeemed in one of the sequels. The characters are instead all at the mercy of circumstances. There are no prophecies and no dark lords.

Magician is also, refreshingly, a stand-alone novel. It ends fairly decisively and the narrative is self-contained. Feist did write more material setting up sequels, but this was cut by the editors; his revised edition of the novel, published in 1992, reinstated these elements but the book remains very readable on its own terms. In fact, Feist did such a good job of wrapping up the story that only a relatively small number of readers moved onto the sequels, although still enough for them to sell very, very well.

Magician's impact on the genre can be seen in several key ways. It was the first epic fantasy novel to be spun directly off a roleplaying campaign. It was the first epic fantasy book to be built around collaborative worldbuilding. It also took on board elements of travel between multiple worlds and realities, bringing in both a second planet to serve as a location as well as different planes of reality. Sword and sorcery had dabbled with this (such as in Moorcock's own multiverse) but Feist's version was more orderly and less chaotic.

It also established a slightly iffy precedent for the publishers of epic fantasy to split up novels into smaller volumes for financial gain. Magician is not a very large book (under 300,000 words, maybe even shorter than The Sword of Shannara) but the paperback was split into two volumes for the US paperback, entitled Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master. The UK edition remained in one volume. Annoyingly, many later and more recent books have suffered from this as well, with a lack of coherence on what makes a book too big for one volume. Obviously Tad Williams's To Green Angel Tower (at 520,000 words) was too big for one volume but it's also clear that George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons (both 420,000 words) - both split in the UK - could have both been one volume each in paperback, and in fact were in the USA. More recently, the UK edition of Pat Rothfuss's The Wise Man's Fear was published in one volume but Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings and Words of Radiance were both split, despite the books being all the same size and the publisher being the same (Way of Kings has since been reissued in one volume, suggesting that Sanderson's sales are now high enough to justify the one-volume treatment).

Magician was a solid book with some nice humour in it, but epic fantasy as a whole remained a fairly serious field at this point. But fortunately there had already been some attempts to make a funny epic fantasy, and the biggest fantasy series since Tolkien was about to begin with a warm satirising of the genre.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 8

Lester del Rey (1915-93) was a science fiction writer and the editor of the old school. He began his career in the 1930s, during the first golden age of science fiction, writing and editing for several magazines and working alongside such luminaries as John W. Campbell and, later, Damon Knight.

In the 1970s, del Rey went to work for Ballantine Books. His fourth wife, Judy-Lynn, was already working for them and had built up a stellar reputation as an editor, with both Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick (giants of the SF field) singing her praises at length. Judy-Lynn had a canny business sense, and in 1976 had heard of a pulp science fiction movie being shot in England by George Lucas (then still riding high on the success of American Graffiti). Despite doubts from the publishers, she successfully negotiated for Ballantine to release a tie-in novel and drafted in Alan Dean Foster to do the job. The novel, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, was released in November 1976 - six months before the movie was released - and became an instant bestseller, playing a key role (though now largely forgotten) in building up hype for the film.

The successful work of the del Reys at Ballantine convinced the publishers to give them their own imprint. The imprint started off by reprinting earlier books: a new edition of Arthur C. Clarke's Prelude to Space was the first book published under the imprint in December 1976, followed by the Star Wars paperback in February. That paperback would go on to sell over a million copies over the next year or so, formidably boosting the reputation and negotiating power of Del Rey Books.

Still, these were reprints of other people's work. The del Reys wanted some books of their own to give their new imprint a big boost. Judy-Lynn had been working with an author named Terry Brooks for a couple of years on his debut novel, a large, Tolkien-esque epic fantasy complete with huge battles, elves, dwarves and callow heroes from a rural background searching for a magical talisman of huge power to defeat a dark lord. Brooks had written the novel between 1967 and late 1974, at which point Judy-Lynn had provisionally accepted it for publication. However, the rewriting and editing process took over two years. The unusual amount of work that went into the novel was down to the del Reys' confidence that the novel had enormous commercial potential (despite Lester's preference for science fiction to fantasy) if Brooks could get it just right, in their estimation.

The Sword of Shannara was published at the start of 1977 (with the precise date appearing to be between March and May of that year), preceded by significant advertising and marketing hype. The book immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list (the first work of fantasy to ever do so) and sold tens of thousands of copies in both hardcover and paperback - the novel was, unusually, simultaneously released in both formats. The book also had the phrase "epic fantasy" on the cover, giving the subgenre its defining (if still debatable) name.

The del Reys scored a second major success within a matter of weeks when they released the paperback edition of Lord Foul's Bane, the debut novel by Stephen R. Donaldson. The book had been published at the start of the year in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart & Winston but, as was not uncommon in those days, the paperback reprint rights were put up for sale. Del Rey snapped them up quickly.

The two very different novels, by two very different authors but published by the same company within weeks of each other, pretty much defined the epic fantasy subgenre as we know it and showed that a surprising degree of variation was possible in a genre that would appear, at least initially, to be limited in its scope.

The Sword of Shannara 

Of the two books The Sword of Shannara was the bigger immediate success, despite being critically derided. The novel is very similar to The Lord of the Rings, starting in the pastoral landscape of Shady Vale were a group of callow youths are recruited by the druid Allanon to help fight against the machinations of the Warlock King. An elaborate backstory extending back over thousands of years is revealed, whilst the book features a map depicting the area covered by the story. The book is very similar to The Lord of the Rings, with the exception that the heroes are attempting to find the titular sword rather than already possessing it (as with the One Ring). At a key moment the heroes are separated, with the main character Shea having to proceed into the Northland alone to recover the sword and defeat the enemy. His comrades, meanwhile, lead the defence of the extremely Minas Tirith-esque city of Tyrsis against the invading armies of the Warlock King.

The Sword of Shannara was successful for several reasons. First of all, it was written in a very easy-to-read, comfortable and laidback style, especially when compared to The Lord of the Rings. It is a very approachable story. Secondly, no book quite like this had appeared since The Lord of the Rings (excepting, possibly, A Wizard of Earthsea, and that had very different goals). Fantasy fans wanting more of the same had gone without for over twenty years, so the book, despite its faults, satisfied that hunger. There was also the marketing, with substantial numbers of adverts appearing and the del Reys trading on their reputation in the field to help bring readers on board. The simultaneous paperback publication play a big role as well, encouraging readers to jump on board immediately rather than having to wait a year or more for the paperback.

Also a key fact was that The Sword of Shannara was a stand-alone, rather than the first chunk of a longer story. Sequels (eventually) followed, but The Sword of Shannara was a complete story with a beginning, middle and an end.

That the novel is enormously flawed is of course obvious: the book is far too similar to The Lord of the Rings in structure and in many of the particulars of the plot and characters, with numerous one-to-one correlations possible. The biggest difference also contributes to the novel's problems: the language and dialogue are extremely simplistic, there is limited thematic development and the book really doesn't succeeded in being anything more than a disposable popcorn read. To his credit, the author admitted and acknowledged these flaws, taking the later books in a very different direction to just being Tolkien clones. The later novels also play more with the one really good notion that Brooks inserted in the novel: that the Four Lands are actually a far-future, post-apocalyptic version of the Pacific North-West, with occasional ruins from our age being visible.

What the book did do was that it established that epic fantasy was a commercial genre with legs and tremendous commercial potential.

Lord Foul's Bane

Lord Foul's Bane was a very different book. It centres on the story of Thomas Covenant, a man from our world suffering from leprosy who must undergo a vigorous daily routine of self-checking and medication. His life is appalling. When he wakes up in a fantasy realm called the Land, healed and free from leprosy, he immediately concludes that he has gone mad and is hallucinating. Controversially, he sexually assaults a woman who appears to give him guidance and help; his guilt over this incident comes close to undoing him. As the story continues familiar tropes appear: Covenant and a party of companions must journey across the Land to Mount Thunder to thwart the machinations of Lord Foul the Despiser. Eventually Covenant succeeds, but then finds himself awakening in the real world, once again suffering from leprosy.

Whilst The Sword of Shannara was purely an entertaining romp, Lord Foul's Bane has allusions to literature and is a considerably darker, more controversial work. The book operates on a number of levels, with Covenant serving as an unreliable narrator and the reader unable to be certain that what's happening is real or a fantasy of Covenant's, created to keep him sane. The book keeps asking questions about reality and fantasy, with events in the Land apparently mirroring those in Covenant's "real" life.

The book also foreshadowed the later rise of the so-called "grimdark" movement. The Sword of Shannara had moments of danger and darkness, but generally speaking was a PG affair. Lord Foul's Bane is a colder, more brutal novel. Covenant himself is not a heroic figure and could even be called an antihero at times. His rape of Lena just a few chapters into the novel was hugely shocking and turned off a large number of readers (fewer fantasy novels have been bought in such numbers and then abandoned after a few chapters due to this). The book was also planned as part of a series from the off; although the primary action of the novel is resolved within the book, Lord Foul remains an extant threat at the end, setting the scene for the sequels, The Illearth War and The Power That Preserves (jointly known as The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever).

Of the two books, Lord Foul's Bane is the more challenging and difficult to parse. Despite this, it had much greater staying power than The Sword of Shannara. By 2004 more than 10 million copies of Lord Foul's Bane by itself had been sold, almost certainly a significantly higher number than Sword (Brooks has sold about 50 million copies in total of more than thirty novels, with Sword being a relatively small number of them). It dominated the sales of Donaldson's work, with the later books selling less (although still enough to hit the bestseller lists) and his non-Covenant novels selling negligibly in comparison.

The impact of Lord Foul's Bane was that epic, secondary world fantasy could be darker, grittier, more challenging and more difficult than the likes of Tolkien or Brooks, and used as a vehicle to tell other kinds of stories.

Star Wars

Of course, both Lord Foul's Bane and The Sword of Shannara were published in the same year that the original Star Wars movie was released. Although apparently science fiction, Star Wars had many of the familiar trappings of the traditional fantasy story: a young farmboy is taken off for a grand adventure by a sorcerer-mentor figure (who teaches him magic and badass swordfighting), linking up with an unlikely band of companions and then defeating the bad guys in a huge battle at the end (although of course key villains survive to ensure a sequel). The fact that the story was set in space with starships and lasers was almost incidental. More important was the central structure, which other films would borrow in a fantasy context. Films like Hawk the Slayer and Krull could almost be Star Wars movies, except for budgetary reasons it was easier to film them in forests and quarries and just have ordinary swords rather than lightsabres.

The direct impact Star Wars had on fantasy literature was more questionable, but certainly the frequent evocations of the same themes didn't hurt the commercial success of later fantasy writers at all. Indeed, George Lucas himself would attempt to remake Star Wars as a traditional epic fantasy with his 1988 movie Willow; when the movie did badly at the box office, scuppering plans for sequels, Lucas collaborated with X-Men comic writer Chris Claremont on a series of novels continuing Willow's story.

1977 established that there was a hunger for epic fantasy, as exemplified by The Sword of Shannara, Lord Foul's Bane and Star Wars. The long-awaited and posthumous publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion in the same year also contributed towards this. These books had opened the floodgates, and it was now up for other authors to follow through.

Stephen Donaldson delivers last-ever THOMAS COVENANT novel

Stephen Donaldson has delivered the third and final draft of The Last Dark, the fourth and concluding novel in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. This will be the tenth Thomas Covenant novel overall, and is planned to conclude the entire series.

According to Donaldson:

I have just delivered the third draft of THE LAST DARK. Under the circumstances (the circumstances being that Putnams has already put the book on their schedule for October), I have no doubt that this will constitute D&A. For me, the next step will be copyediting; but of course my  publishers have a variety of things that they need to get done.

Just to provide a frame of reference: this draft is 932 pages (not counting WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE and the Glossary). I've done some rather draconian cutting, all of which I believe was necessary. I deliberately wrote the first draft *long* because I wanted to be sure that I didn't leave anything out. But the result was an unusually high number of repetitions and digressions; and weeding them out--while creating more effective or at least more efficient alternatives--has been a very long and arduous challenge.

The novel will be published in November 2013, thirty-six years and six months after the publication of the first novel in the series, Lord Foul's Bane.

Famous for the wrong book?

The Guardian has an interesting topic asking if novelists' most famous works are their best. Their list examines literary fiction, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the SFF field.


Stephen Donaldson
Most famous work: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever.
Best work: The Gap Series.

Stephen Donaldson became one of the founders of the modern epic fantasy movement in 1977 with Lord Foul's Bane, the first in his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series (originally a trilogy but now nine books, with one more to come). It's his biggest-selling and most famous work, and certainly a laudable attempt to bring more adult and literary techniques to bear on the subgenre, but for me it's outclassed by The Gap Series. The Gap starts with a short, lyrical novella about perspective and truth before suddenly exploding into a colossal SF reworking of Wagner's Ring Cycle, filled with complex clashes of characters and cultures and delicious political intrigue. The best thing Donaldson's written. No-one bought it though, hence the return to the Covenant books.


Arthur C. Clarke
Most famous work: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Best work: Childhood's End

Thanks to the era-defining movie version, 2001 is easily Arthur C. Clarke's best-known work. However, the novel is actually among his less impressive books, rich in atmosphere but lacking in overall incident. In fact, purely on a novel basis, I'd rate its sequel 2010: Odyssey Two as being a much stronger book. Childhood's End, on the other hand, is for its day visionary, transcendent and mind-blowing, with a stunning finale marking the end of the human race (or rather our current stage of existence) and doing so in an unforgettable way.


Isaac Asimov
Most famous work: The Robots/Foundation universe
Best work: Nightfall

Picking out Asimov's most famous work would have probably involved some elaborate Twitter polling on whether I, Robot or Foundation was up there, but fortunately Asimov solved this problem by, somewhat unconvincingly, retconning them into the same universe. However, for me his strongest work is the short story Nightfall, in which some scientists on a planet with six suns in its sky discover that for the first time in recorded history there's going to be an eclipse with only one sun visible, meaning that for the first time in thousands of years, night will fall. A simple story based on a rudimentary scientific premise with tremendous ramifications for society and the individual people involved. Terrific and, rather unlike the 15-book Robots/Foundation/Empire universe, straight to the point. The novel version (with Robert Silverberg) is interesting but lacks the short story's punch.


Paul Kearney
Most famous work: The Monarchies of God
Best work: A Different Kingdom

Possibly a bit of a stretch, given that Paul Kearney is still chronically under-read and even the splendid Monarchies of God fantasy series is still reasonably obscure (though now rising, with the recent reissuing of the series in two omnibus volumes). However, when people talk about Kearney, it's his epic fantasy series which are always mentioned (Monarchies, Sea-Beggars and the current Macht trilogy). His finest work for me is A Different Kingdom, which starts out as a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in rural Northern Ireland before fantastical events start taking place. The protagonist finds himself drawn into the woods neighbouring his farm, and finds a different world waiting. Rich and mythic, A Different Kingdom can be summed up as an Irish Mythago Wood, whilst also being totally different to Holdstock's masterwork. Overdue a re-release.



Christopher Priest
Most famous work: The Prestige
Best work: The Separation

Thanks to Chris Nolan, Priest's very fine novel about battling 19th Century magicians is now quite well-known. However, for me his finest novel remains his most recent, The Separation. Almost killed at birth by uncaring publishers, the book was rescued by Gollancz and is a staggering achievement. A pair of twins become embroiled in the Second World War, but not necessarily the war we are familiar with. With dizzying shifts in perspective and constant evolution of the backstory, the book is mind-blowing and will invite constant re-reads and analyses to tease out its secrets.


George R.R. Martin
Most famous work: A Game of Thrones
Best work: Fevre Dream

After HBO's great adaptation of A Game of Thrones, it's easily currently Martin's best-known work. But it's not his best. In the context of A Song of Ice and Fire itself, my favourite piece of writing is The Hedge Knight, the novella set 90 years before the novels and introducing the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, which uses Westeros' rich backdrop for a much simpler, much more concise story than the expansive novels. However, even beyond that, Martin's 1982 horror novel Fevre Dream has something going for it his fantasies don't (so far): an ending. Martin's story about vampires on the Mississippi trying to develop a drug to wean them off blood is dark, gripping, rich in atmosphere and tragic. Someone needs to make the movie (and cast Ron 'Rodrik Cassel' Donachie as Abner Marsh!) yesterday. And resist the urge to turn it into a True Blood prequel.


Tad Williams
Most famous work: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
Best work: Otherland

Tad Williams exploded onto the scene with his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in the late 1980s, which was hugely influential and set the scene for many of the authors who followed. Whilst overall a fine work, the trilogy skews very much to the traditional and has a somewhat annoying ending. Otherland, on the other hand, is much more original, being a cyberpunk-fantasy crossbreed. Williams uses the SF backdrop to explore a lot of excellent and fantastical ideas. Whilst the saga is still too long, its episodic structure makes it fun to read and the premise makes for a rich vein of story ideas which could sustain entire series (the reverse-Aztec invasion of Spain is particularly interesting). Overall, a strong series which has now spawned an MMORPG and a particularly large fanbase in Germany.

Any other thoughts and suggestions? On Twitter I've already had Gene Wolfe nominated, for Soldier of the Mist over The Book of the New Sun.