Carl's comments (member since Sep 11, 2007)

Carl's comments from the Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library group.

Just came back to this thread, and realized that Stephen Lawhead's Empyrion duology would fit this genre. Haven't read it for ages myself, but liked it as a teenager.

How sad-- I really enjoyed his Belgariad books. They work really well as YA fantasy, I think-- I'm hoping to get at least one of my nieces interested in them when they get older.

Done in one? I had a harder time coming up with examples than I expected, but here are some:
Stone and Flute, by Hans Bemman (trans from German)
Til We Have Faces, CS Lewis
The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King (been ages since I've read it though)
Gene Wolfe's duology "The Wizard Knight" was supposed to be a single book originally, I hear, so maybe that counts? Well, maybe not.
I'm not sure if Stephen Lawhead's "Byzantium" counts-- reads a bit like a fantasy since that is what he was known for at the time, but it's a historical fiction (with Vikings, which are kinda fantasy-ish)
Kage Baker's The Anvil of the World, Neil Gaiman's Stardust, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, and Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter are all books I've started and have enjoyed so far, but never finished because 1) my dissertation reading takes priority and 2) I have an awful habit of starting a new book every few weeks. But they are all "done in one", I believe.
Patricia McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld was fun (her first, I think), and I believe she usually writes stand alones.
Guy Gavriel Kay does tend to write stand alones, from what I've seen, but I've only tried reading his pseudo-norse novel (The Last Light of the Sun) and haven't been able to get into it.
I have to admit, that's about all that comes to mind (or that I can find on my shelves)-- I've got a lot of stand alone Sci-Fi, but for Fantasy it's mostly two or more in a series.

Heard today that Arthur C. Clarke died. Age 90, if I remember correctly. I'd thought he was older, to be honest. In any case, he's been a favorite of mine since I started reading SF. My favorites of his (I haven't read them all by far!):
Rendevous with Rama
Imperial Earth
2001 (I liked the next two sequels as well, I have to admit)

As far as Arthurian, one of my favorites for 15 years or so has been Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur-- though just the first three books (after that it feels like he's just milking the characters for more money). He is also a "Christian author", so if the Christian parallelism in Lewis bugs you this might too, but these are written as historical/fantasy fiction, so the effect would be different. Been a while since I read them. I also like his other work later than the Pendragon cycle, though I haven't read it all.

With Lewis I enjoyed his Till We Have Faces. You won't escape the "Christian" element, of course, but as long as you are willing to take it as an interesting part of the author's perspective, I say go for it. I had the impression reading this that he had gotten less belligerent about his faith in his old age (I think it was written after the Narnia books?), but it is still very much a Christian book. Just a more adult one.

I didn't get into George RR Martin when I first tried him, but everyone tells me to try again. I am working through (slowly because also working on my dissertation) Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, the first in another series of the dynastic/political sort that I understand Jordan and Martin as being a part of. It seems really interesting, and I would think those people who like this sort of thing would really get into it-- I'm not as huge a fan of this sort, but I would like to eventually finish the series.

Though not entirely Tolkienian, my second favorite after Tolkien for the last 20 years has been Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World Trilogy, starting with the Anvil of Ice. Tons of references to Norse and Finnish myth/folklore, and probably to lots of other cultures that I'm not familiar with, and a very interesting take on magic and smithcraft, plus a fantastically built setting during one of the Ice Ages.

I want to recommend Hans Bemman's Stone and Flute to you, an 800 page monster translated from the German, but I'm not sure it really fits the ideas you put above. I second the recommendation of David Eddings' Belgariad, though I would suggest you take it as written for a young adult audience.

Sorry I haven't posted links to the books-- I don't really know how, and am supposed to be writing a conference paper right now in any case, so I'd better say good bye. Hope some of these rec's help!

I think that Speaker for the Dead dealt with issues that were more interesting for me, but that Ender's Game was a bit better "contained" as a story-- kind of like a sonnet (Ender's) vs a free verse ramble. Except that comparison doesn't really work, since Speaker is very carefully constructed with the mystery and all. But I think that is what many of my friends said about it (well, that's how I translate what they said-- and it's been about 5 years since I discussed it with them). They thought that Ender's was too perfect to mess up with a sequel, and I don't think they liked following a story so powerfully about the transformation of a child into a military "monster", a tragedy of sorts, with something with a very different flavor, however rich it was in itself. And to be honest, none of my friends at the time were into the whole cultural-anthropological side of things like I was/am.

Ursula LeGuin's Hainish books (which I've only read a handful of) should qualify, I think. Left Hand of Darkness being perhaps the most famous. She also writes some interesting essays-- I like her essay on oral vs print culture (taken largely from Walter Ong's work) where she gets into the way in which we "get in synch" with each other-- can't remember the title of the article but it was in her collection "The Wave in the Mind". Not quite an academic caliber article, but she does a good job at bringing some quality ideas to more of a "lay" milieu, and I've had my reading and composition students read that article at the beginning of the semester to help us start talking about orality, literacy, and human interaction both in life and more specifically in narrative performance.
Also, I want to heartily second both the Ender books (I may be the only one of my friends who enjoyed Speaker for the Dead) and The Sparrow. The other suggestions I've yet to read.
Oh, and Kathy Tyers' "Shivering World" should qualify for "sociological sci-fi" as well.

I'm glad someone mentioned Mary Doria Russell-- read the Sparrow ages ago, and also haven't have the nerve to go back for the sequel, but I thought it was a great sci-fi tale which did not feel like every other sci-fi novel out there.

Kathy Tyers-- though I mention her primarily for her book "Shivering World". The others are good, but don't hit me as hard.
From Sweden, Karen Boye's Kallocain is a classic, but I've only read excerpts myself.
I read something by CS Friedman once that was good, but for some reason haven't gone back to it.
I also am getting into Bujold, though I'm not enjoying her two prequels as much as I'd like. I also second Butler and L'Engle
And if you don't mind going really far back, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein-- foundational for so much of the genre, and so much more interesting than I expected when I finally read it.

Just a quick note about www.fables.org-- the section on fairy tales ("The Crown and Thistle Inn") is only literary retellings of fairy tales, often times with quite a few liberties taken-- which is fine, as long as I don't end up finding any of my students using the fables account of the binding of Fenrir in a paper!
By the way, does any one out there know why Fables ended up stopping? They were supposed to come out with a best of collection in 2005 (and my story was going to be in it!) but then they stopped putting up new issues with Winter 2004, and I've never been able to find any info on what happened ever since.

For far future hard SF I've enjoyed Iain M. Banks' work. Arthur C Clarke is maybe too obvious a choice, but I enjoyed his lesser known "Imperial Earth" quite a bit-- but Rendevous with Rama will always be my favorite. Haven't attempted the sequels for years though. Charles Sheffield's "Cold as Ice" was fun, but maybe edging a tad towards YA, and I haven't enjoyed the one other book of his that I've read as much. Ursula LeGuin's SF is good, but may not be nuts'n'bolts enough to fit what you're looking for. If I can plug some friends of mine, John Olson and Randy Ingermanson's "Oxygen" is about as hard (yet character driven) as it gets, but so near future that it might not feel "sci-fi" enough. Kathy Tyers' "Shivering World" is one of my favorites and I wish it were still getting attention (I believe it was on a preliminary nebula award list or something like that). I recommend the original edition if you can find it, but the new one is also good, and not drastically different. I hope she's going to be getting into writing again-- I believe she's been on a break for quite some time.
Wish I had more suggestions, but I'm not as widely read anymore as I'd like and things aren't coming to mind.

I reread tons as a kid, but now, especially since grad school and all the reading I've got to do for that, I just don't have time. Some of my favorites, from LOTR to Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World trilogy, I think I've read in the double digits. I tend to need to read something at least twice to really "get" it all, like reading a poem-- but that gets me into trouble now, as there are so many academic books I need to get through that I don't have time to read them all twice! I think I missed out when I was younger, because I ended up not having time to get to new books-- probably 3x through is time to leave a book behind, unless it's an all time favorite.

Interesting article about "The Last Book in the Universe"-- I'll have to try to read it myself sometime. One of my friends says he hopes someone condemns or even burns his own books one day, because there is no better way to get people interested!

Good point, the first two should be fairly accessible for YA age readers, though I can't remember how well THS would work-- it was never my favorite for some reason. And depending on the perspective of the magazine these reviews are being written for, Perelandra could be considered a bit risque, what with a naked woman running around. Not that I minded it too much when I was in Jr Hi.

I also loved and recommend Ender's Game, but I've got a friend who said that he was really depressed by the book because of what they did to these little kids, forcing them to be soldiers and all that-- but just because it is a bit "grown up" in that way doesn't mean kids can't handle it.

If this is for a religious magazine, I guess I could recommend my friend John Olson's cowritten book "Oxygen" and it's sequel "The Fifth Man"-- written for the Christian market (a market I'm a bit ambivilant about, though I've got a lot of friend published there) and not as YA, but the first one was listed in some major library's YA reading list (I think it was New York Public library?) and won a Christy award-- I think it's pretty appropriate for YA level, though you'd have to read it yourself to decide. About a trip to Mars with a lot of Apollo 13 problems thrown in. Really good science (both authors have PhD's, one in computational physics and the other in biochemistry), and also really suspenseful and entertaining, likable characters. John's also got a "female Indiana Jones" type novel coming out this year called "Fossil Hunter", also science-heavy, but I don't know if that fits what you want.
I also like Stephen Lawhead's work-- his earlier stuff isn't as good (I like his late 80s-early 90s work best), but his book Dreamthief is sci-fi and I think marketed as YA-- but it's been years since I've read it and I can't remember how adult the themes are. His Empyrion duology is great, in my opinion, but does have some stuff in it that, for many conservative religious parents, would be too "adult" for their children.
Oh, and another author-- Kathy Tyers. I actually like the first editions of her works best, and my favorite book (Shivering World) is not really YA (maybe it could work as it-- I'm not sure), but her Firebird trilogy was originally two YA books, before being reworked for the CBA. Very Star Wars-ish, and in fact, I recommend her Star Wars novel Truce at Bakura for YA reading. Sharon Hinck's The Restorer has aspects of scifi, but is basically a fantasy, and it's been so long since I read a complete draft of it (and that was an early draft) that I don't know how suitable it would be for YA.
Don't think I know of anything else-- the little YA reading I've done has been in fantasy (like LeGuine's Earthsea novels).
Do you mind saying what magazine it's for? I've got some friends who would like to check it out (including some of those listed above)

That always bugged me too-- especially since when I started reading the genres as a kid I thought they were "grown-up" books! Well, I still think they are, but I do think that there is a larger amount of overlap in interest when it comes to fantasy/scifi than with other genres, or "mainstream". Also, there is the fact that since the Victorian era (or so? I study folklore, but not really literary adaptations of folklore) fairy tales have been thought of as children's literature, and the fantastic in general, or anything that smacks of more blatant wish-fulfillment, is general considered unserious and therefore childish. My impression when I'm in Sweden is that Fantasy is almost solely considered juvenile, while science fiction doesn't seem to show up as its own genre so often, but somehow creeps into "high literature"-- for example, Karin Boye's Kallocain, Harry Martinson's Aniara (an epic poem about a doom space migration-- and by a nobel prize winner!), or Lars Gustafsson's Det sällsamma djuret från norr (=the strange creature from the north-- though I'm only guessing that this is by the same Lars Gustaffsson who is talked about all the time at the annual scandinavian studies conference). But I'm not as familiar with current Swedish lit as I'd like to be, so it could be the situation is a bit different
As for why readers of these genres are more willing to browse the YA sections, I think it's just because they know that the boundary in this area is a bit permeable-- there is plenty of "adult" fantasy/scifi which is at the same level as YA fiction, and vice-versa, and the importance of genre outweighs that of "reading level".
It's been ages since I've read YA fantasy/scifi-- there seems to be so much coming out now, I hope I can find some time to dig into it.

Honestly, when I read Feist's first two books back in college I couldn't stand them and haven't been willing to give him a try since-- I just thought the writing was bad. As with some other books that turned me off (like Brooks' work), it may be time for me to revisit them and see if I can be a bit more sympathetic in my reading. After all, these authors sell well-- though that isn't always an indicator of quality.
Wish I could remember exactly what I didn't like about the writing-- I just remember that I felt it was amateurish, maybe overwrought or maybe just breaking all the "rules" I learned at writers conferences-- though this also was shortly after I took a couple of short story writing classes, so it could be my tastes were leaning towards more succinct styles.

I find the genre of cyberpunk interesting, but I'm not very well read in it. On the more academic side of things, I recommend Hubert Dreyfus' work ("On the Internet" and "What computers still can't do" would be relevant here I guess, though the later demands much more familiarity with computer science that I have), which argues against the possibility of reducing one's consciousness to "digital data"-- I'm not very familiar with computer science and have only dabbled in cognitive linguistics (not even "real" cog science) so my recommendation has to be qualified a bit, but I think Dreyfus makes a convincing case against the popular understanding (as well as certain approaches within AI research itself) of consciouness and AI (he did a talk on the matrix here at Berkeley, but I wasn't able to make it to that). Which would be an interesting topic to take up in cyberpunk, I guess-- I don't know to what extent it has been taken up. Wish I could help with other sci-fi authors, but I just don't have time to read for fun these days.

If anyone is foolhardy enough to try to read an 800 page academic book on fairy tales in their rural context, I would suggest Bengt Holbek's "Interpretation of Fairy Tales"-- focuses on Danish fairy tales, but the conclusions are pretty widely applicable across Europe. As for non-european fairy tales, I believe there is a debate about whether or not the "fairy tale" or "märchen" as a genre exists outside of Europe and Russia, but that mean being really nitpicky about what exactly we mean by "fairy tale", and certainly a lot of tale-types and motifs are found around the world (I think Cupid and Psyche, Cinderella/Ashboy, and the Swan Maiden, are the most widespread, with variations of course).
I just remembered, Kvideland and Sehmsdorf (sp?) have a collection of Scandinavian Fairy Tales out which is organized as a sampling of the repetoires of specific story tellers which were interviewed by collectors back in the heyday of folklore collecting-- a cool way to do it, but I don't know if I can wholeheartedly recommend their work, as my professor has complained about their sloppy work in the past.
Okay, sorry for the academic stuff! I know that's not what the thread was supposed to be about. As far as old school literary retellings of fairy tales, has anyone recommended Andrew Lang's books yet? And did William Morris do some of that?