Fantasy Book Reviews
If you read and review genre fiction long enough you start to be able to tell what the trends are in current fiction. Some of these trends will come and go, whilst others will stick around as their own subgenre. Is Romantasy a keeper? I am not convinced myself, but I do like its cousin the Cosy...
I think we can all agree that throughout history, and the present, we have had some leaders who are not always the best. Leaders that make their horse a senator, leaders who kill huge swathes of their population to keep control. Despite the madness of our own despots, we have not had a leader...
I first met RJ Barker some years ago at FantasyCon in Glasgow, on an interactive panel about public speaking, which is roughly the worst possible context in which to take the measure of another writer. Public speaking panels at conventions tend to attract people who are either visibly terrified...
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
There is something magical about childhood, you do not need a genre novel to tell you this. Everything is new, experiences that will map the person that you are going to be and stay with you for a lifetime. If you are lucky, these will be good experiences and not bad ones. In the case of Jeff...
Before we get started, given that this book is number 18 in the series, the review inevitably has spoilers for what's happened previously. This is unavoidable, but if you haven't read Battle Ground or indeed the 16...
I do not think of myself as a person of culture, but when I stop to think about it, I have likely been to more theatre productions, museums and Stately Homes than most people. I can thank my mother for this as being forced to go as a youth has made me appreciate them and want to go as an adult....
There's a shape of epic fantasy that a lot of us have grown up on. A sleepy village in the back of beyond, a clutch of young people on the edge of adulthood, a once-a-year ritual that lifts one or two of them out into...
I am not sure if readers have noticed, but we have quietly entered a new Golden Era of Fantasy writing. There is a handful or more of established fantasy authors who have the experience and skill to be writing at the top of their game. Fantasy novels that are not just simple retellings of old...
Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
A brief admission to start. I've just finished Twelve Months and realised, slightly to my embarrassment, that I never actually got round to writing a review for Battle Ground. So here, six years late, is that review. I will keep this one largely spoiler-free; the events of Battle Ground are by...
A short warning before the review: Peace Talks is the first half of a single story that concludes in Battle Ground, and certain late-book events spill across both volumes. I have kept the major plot resolutions and the...
A small note before the review: Skin Game is the kind of book that hides a lot of its best work in its second half, and to talk about it usefully I will need to touch on a few of the setup beats from the opening...
Twas in a café they first met, Romeo and Juliet. And twas the first day they fell into debt, because Rome-owed and Juli-eat. It feels to me that the entire system is rigged so that you never have quite enough money to escape, you work to live, and if you do not work, you do not eat. It is...
Find the latest Fantasy book reviews here. Fantasy as a genre can be very difficult to define but is usually said to encompass stories set in an alternative reality based on imagined fantastical elements like magic or the supernatural. This is the defining difference between science fiction and fantasy, science fiction deals with elements that are theoretically possible while fantasy deals with the improbable or impossible.
Fantasy can be most commonly associated with sword and sorcery stories however the genre can include contemporary (Harry Potter) and humorous (Tom Holt) tales. Fantasy, science fiction and horror can occasionally overlap and generally the term used to describe these novels is speculative fiction.
Fantasy fiction can trace it's roots all the way back to ancient mythology, especially Homer's Odyssey which was written in the 9th century BC. Homer's Odyssey chronicles the fictional adventures of a hero returning to Ithaca after the capture of Troy. The earliest surviving English text of fantasy origins is the poem Beowulf which dates back to 700 AD.
The most recognisable to modern audiences is perhaps the Legends of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. These stories have been told many times from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur (around 1485 AD) to T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1982) and Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle (1987).
The series that could be said to bring fantasy into the mainstream has to be Terry Brooks Sword of Shannara series, written in 1977 it was one of the first modern fantasy books to become a new york times best seller. Since then this has been repeated by David Eddings, Robert Jordan, Terry Good Kind and Terry Pratchett.
Here you can find fantasy book reviews from the big name authors to the self published and independant, it's the story that's always the star here.
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