10 Amazing Fantasy Authors part 3

Posted by on Oct 6, 2011 in Book History, Booking the News, Featured | 38 comments

This is part 3 of 3: to read part 1 click [ here ] and part 2 click [ here ]

Part 1 and part 2 showed us some really great authors to check out if you like fantasy books. Part three will show you the remaining 3 authors of the ten. Last but not least the last three are…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - Science Fiction’s Tolkien meets Dante Alighieri.

Jerry is one of those writers that has great books that came out in the wrong time. I’m sure that if “Inferno” or it’s sequel “Escape from Hell” came out with the force that it did in the 70s then he would have his own movies as well. There are many books written about or spun from “Dante’s Inferno” that I enjoy but Jerry and his writing partners did it for me. They recaptured the greatness of Dante while keeping the modern look and change of morals over time. Nothing beats the view of hell that changes as time goes on. Good and Evil. Right and Wrong. None of it really makes a difference anymore when you are already in hell. Right? Read and find out.

 

Richard Matheson – The original twisted mind.

Just about everyone knows about the “I am Legend” movie that just came out with Will Smith as the star. Well that movie was done twice before by others. Those movies as well as “Night of the Living Dead” and several “Twilight Zone” episodes were all based off of Matheson’s stories. I came into I am Legend years before the movie came out when they did a reprint of the original that included many of his short stories. I was captivated by the suspenseful and horrifically captivating stories. Dracula, eat your heart out. When he took Vampires to a new level and made not a curse or a sparkly wonder creature; but zombie-ish and strictly disease created, I became interested. When he took a military man that taught himself how to use a microscope to find out what he was dealing with, made him rock himself to sleep every night, and delved further into the psyche of a mental beaten man…I loved it. That book is the only reason I like out there kind of, well, anything really. If only they were longer. You can finish his short novel and other short stories in about a week of procrastination or a day of actually reading.

 

Terry Brooks – Generations of stories.

Terry Brooks has an interesting way of proceeding with his stories. Many people will start a story and then tell you in the story that umpteen thousand years ago there was a war and it changed the way the world was forever but they never write about the war itself. Not Brooks. He starts in the beginning and each book builds on the world of the last. When they reference any event or war you know what it was and how it unfolded. There is an untold back story to get you started in the first one but even that is a story of ourselves. The more you read Brooks the more you see that the world he is writing about is just like us hundreds or even thousands of years in the future. Kind of like civilization resets itself and mutated to fit the scenario. It is a very interesting take on how to write.