Looking for new worlds

[Cam]

Hi all!

I was hoping for some recommendations to help me find something new and different. I love classic Tolkien fantasy and Niven style sci-fi, but I am hoping to discover some less trodden grounds. Something... unpredictable.

Any and all input would be most welcome!

[Leonie]

Cam wrote: "Hi all!

I was hoping for some recommendations to help me find something new and different. I love classic Tolkien fantasy and Niven style sci-fi, but I am hoping to discover some less trodden grou..."

Have you read anything by Brandon Sanderson? Or perhaps Brent Weeks?

[Tara]

Leonie wrote: "Have you read anything by Brandon Sanderson? Or perhaps Brent Weeks?"

To elaborate a bit, some of the best world building by these authors I recommend are The Way of Kings, Mistborn: The Final Empire, and The Black Prism
Also, you can try the Dark Tower Series by Stephen King

[Mayank]

Try Fables by Bill Willingham if you're not averse to graphic novels. He is also the writer on a video game "The wolf among us" and the game itself is set in his Fables universe. I'd also recommend "Sandman" by Neil Gaiman.

[DavidO]

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms since you are looking for something a bit different

[Ken]

Something foreign with both fantasy and sci-fi elements, with the literary backbone to stand among those you mentioned:

The Shadow of the Torturer & subsequent parts of Book of the New Sun,

Gene Wolfe

[Kyra]

The Emperor's Edgeseries and related books by Lindsay Buroker combines fantasy, steampunk, and science fiction in an original world.

Also thirding Brandon Sanderson.

[YouKneeK]

I recently read the science fiction series Wool by Hugh Howey and found it to be unique and unpredictable. At first you rather think you know what’s going on, or at least you think you know where things are headed, but there’s always a new twist and new questions. I don’t want to talk too much about the plot because it really keeps you guessing from the beginning if you go into it blind and that’s half the fun. Basically, it’s a post-apocalyptic series in which people have been living in a very large underground silo for generations because the world outside is inhabitable.

If you think that sounds interesting, then I would recommend not reading any reviews. Since reading the books, I’ve seen a lot of reviews on Goodreads with major spoilers and no spoiler tags. The series started off as a series of closely-connected novellas. The first story (Wool – Part One) is very short (about 60 pages) and it’s available on Amazon’s U.S. site as a free e-book. So you could try that and see if you like the style. The entire series is comprised of two omnibuses and one single book, beginning with Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1).

For fantasy, I would “fourth” Brandon Sanderson’s books. The ones I’ve read were very good and reasonably different from other books I’d read.

This isn’t a series that everybody would like, but I found The Godspeaker Trilogy by Karen Miller to be a unique fantasy series. The first book, Empress, was unique anyway. Things start to get more “traditional” in the second book, but in a way that made the first book seem all the more worthwhile. It’s been years since I read it, so I find it difficult to give any sort of a helpful synopsis, but a couple of the characters have stuck in my head after all this time. The main character in the first book is pretty hateful, and you’ll hate pretty much everybody by the end of the book. So this is not a book to read if you have to like your main characters.

Another fantasy series I found somewhat unique, that I don’t see mentioned often, is the Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham. The magic system was definitely unique – you have poets who, at great danger and cost, can create magical beings by weaving words and ideas together. The series has a lot of political intrigue in it and a culture that I found somewhat different from the standard fantasy culture. The first book is A Shadow in Summer.