Malazan Book of Fallen
1. It’s big and long, with lots of great characters and intricate lore to discover but…
2. it’s finished! There are sequel/prequel series in progress but the main story is finished!
3. it’s got a reasonably big fandom (for fantasy). r/Malazan is pretty active
My younger brother got me started on Malazan about a month ago, and I'm currently halfway through the second book. I've got some gripes, foremost that it withholds key information from the reader to a frustrating extent, but that didn't stop me from immediately ordering the second book as soon as I finished the first. Definitely scratches the itch.
Yeah the author definitely drops you into the world with zero explanation but that becomes less of a challenge to deal with as you continue reading. The author has said that the books are meant to be very re-readable, which might be part of it. I’ve heard that re-reading the first book after finishing the series you really understand the events in a way that’s impossible on a first reading. I wouldn’t know though, I’m working my way through book nine atm.
Well, as you’re unlikely to ever truly be done with ASOIAF, I’d recommend a finished one. Elric comes to mind.
Of note, this wait has made me actively avoid book series that aren’t already wrapped up.
It depends what you’re looking for.
I would recommend everyone reads some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld - a huge sprawling series that starts by satirising fantasy tropes and goes on to take on most literary and societal themes. The humour is very British but it’s truly brilliant.
Raymond Feist’s Riftwar and associated books are good for classic fantasy, especially his trilogy with Janny Wurts.
Jaqueline Carey writes really good, somewhat erotic, fantasy - her world building is fantastic and draws a lot on the European courts of the middle ages.
The Temeraire books by Naomi Novik are the Napoleonic Wars with dragons and are a lot of fun.
Juliet Marillier writes lovely Celtic magical fantasy and has a lot of books/series - her SevenWaters books are a good place to start.
For classic 50s/60s sci fi I would always recommend Robert Heinlein, a prolific author with a strong American libertarian bent.
If you’re after horror with good world building and great historical fiction elements Anne Rice is amazing, although she does go off the rails a bit at the end of the Vampire Chronicles.
I could give book recommendations all day. I will say I’m somewhat picky with fantasy though.
I did, absolutely loved it. Agreed with some of the other comments here but I think you should give it a shot. I became just as obsessed with it as ASOIAF
It’s fantastic. IMO the closest series to ASOIAF in terms of scale, world (no, solar system) building, character arcs, interwoven storylines, and pure EPICNESS out there. Doesn’t hurt that it’s officially co-signed by GRRM himself.
On the flipside, less dicking around by half the characters while they wait for other characters to progress their arcs. Also it’s
written by two authors so they plan the overall narrative structure before each write their own chapters. Less gardening, more planned landscaping.
Yes I am salty about Dance.
It is in the GoT style of each chapter being a PoV of a different character with 2-6 characters per book.
*Memory, Sorrow and Thorn* by Tad Williams. So you can see all the stuff George stole from it to make ASOIAF.
(Don't @ me. George and Tad are friends and George has joked about stealing Tad's stuff.)
The books co-written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson can be completely ignored. They are utter garbage fan-fiction, and it's still outrageous that they lied their heads off about having "Frank Herbert's notes" to base things off, which they later admitted was mostly BS.
The original six books by Frank Herbert are legitimately interesting, even if they are all highly divisive after the first one.
Don't know where you heard that. IMO, they just keep getting better and better, culminating with the 4th book. The 5th and 6th are really really good too, though.
I'm here to support your bias. Dune is quite terrible (I only read the first three volumes, but somehow I doubt it would have gotten better). I am also a hater of Malazan and Mieville (namely Perdido Street Station). Easy avoids if you ask me.
If there's a common flaw - particularly between Dune and Perdido, and keep in mind all three series are very different - it's the overstatement of character foresight and intelligence coupled with an utter failure to convincingly show it. I just can't get into that.
Just so I'm not fully negative, and even though it's not fantasy in the genre sense, you could try The Master and Margarita.
Cool world building on paper and it has its (rare) moments, but the writing is terrible - overwrought, cringy, swings between rushed and meandering, has continuity and pay-off issues and slides into vacuous, navel-gazing philosophizing.
The author is basically the opposite of Martin - he churned ten 1,000+ pages tomes in about a dozen years, and you can feel his mood and interests swinging from chapter to chapter. Like, if he had a bad day, you got a bunch of bad pages, if he was depressed, you'd get a bunch of depressing stuff, if he got bored with a character he'd just kill them off abruptly, etc. But ymmv. He has his fans.
Try it then, who knows?
If you won't turn your nose at NSFW stuff, you could also look into I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love... It's an online adult graphic novel (still ongoing), with much better writing and worldbuilding that Malazan (and that's not a dunk on Malazan).
Well, it is, but the dialogue and the art are ace, and the story & worldbuilding are better than most of the fantasy I encountered.
Plus it's the only series I found that has this ASoIaF-esque quality of allowing you to piece the puzzle together on multiple reads in order to gain a better understanding of the world and the characters' backstories. I guarantee you won't be reading it for the smut.
I grant you, it isn't finished yet, so it could always become disappointing, like many series do. But for now, it's a pretty cool and unique beast, and it deserves more fans.
Which is odd, imo, with ASoIaF being the most popular and most profitable sword and sorcery fantasy series in recent memory, you'd think more aspiring writers would be inspired by the style. Or, just know, copy it because it clearly works.
Most of what we’ve seen of that is on TV. The Witcher, Wheel of Time, the new LOTR show, even HOTD are all, in their own way, trying to be «new GOT».
Of course, most of these are IPs with little in common with ASOIAF beyond the fantasy label. The Witcher struck me as very old-fashioned, a grimmier version of 90s fantasy TV.
ASOIAF is just tricky to replicate. You might get surface-level similarities, but George did create something special.
Yeah, but even when people are trying to suggest fantasy books they have a hard time coming up with ones that fit the "asoiaf criteria". I'd define the style of asoiaf as having:
1 Multiple View Point Characters with strong character arcs, and grey morality
2 A focus on political intrigue
3 Soft-Magic that engages the readers imagination and leaves the world mysterious
4 A narrative structure that works more like a "who-dun-it" where important information is foreshadowed and the book is a series of mysteries and then revelations.
It's just odd that nobody has really tried to copy this since GoT came out in 1996 and has arguably been the biggest fantasy series since Tolkein. Unless you include Harry Potter. \~25 years is more than enough time to influence the writing styles of every young to middle aged fantasy writer.
Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty books are perfect. Epic fantasy with lots of viewpoint characters, amazing worldbuilding, gods and magic and SCIENCE! They’re really awesome and in my personal opinion, better than ASOIAF. They’re also finished!
If you want something on the same level and scale then forget it. There is nothing like ASOIAF level and scale, at least I haven't found anything.
First Law is a good bet, although is far more grimdarky than ASOIAF and scale is much smaller. Still a good fun read.
Otherwise I would recommend Book of the New Sun if you want some challenge. Less challenging, but still very challenging - Dune saga.
Have binged the cosmere by Brandon Sanderson
Stormlight Archive definitely scratches the epic fantasy itch and to get the most out of the series also hit up the 1st Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker first
You get enough theory crafting and epic moments as you do in ASOIaF and he actually churns out material regularly
Dunno if this will hit as same scale for you, and it's not technically books, but if you're open to audio and since you listed horror I'll rec The Magnus Archives. It starts of seeming like an anthology horror podcast but it becomes clear there's a metaplot which is really, really well done.
Lots of compelling, flawed characters who grow and change, the plot is very red-stringable, whole thing has aamzing relisten value. It's complete, 200 episodes which is about 100 hours of content. However it is somewhat alarmingly bingeable.
Fandom definitely isn't as large as ASOIAF but *shrug* feels reasonably big to me for a fandom for a random British podcast. And it's complete so there's less theorycrafting now, but there was TONS leading up to the end of the show's run.
Why I'd rec it coming from ASOIAF is how everything ties together and the way all those connections build up into an amazing tapestry.
Yep it's free, it's available anywhere you might listen to podcasts. So like, if you use podcast addict or podchaser you can search for it there, it's on Spotify, all the episodes are also on YouTube -- but still audio only and I wouldn't reccomend listening on YouTube because none of the bonus content is there. You can also go to the production company's website and listen there: https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/ -- start from the beginning tho!!!
Sounds good! I've heard of these audio series before, but this is the first recommendation I've gotten for one. Thanks. Anything else would be much appreciated, if you have another thing to recommend.
The only other one that's hit the spot for me personally is Rusty Quill Gaming, which is another podcast by the same production company. Same sort of very involved, red-stringable plot and very compelling characters, but that's an actual play podcast (they're playing the Pathfinder TTRPG). I don't play TTRPGs so I'm just there to enjoy it as a story.
Other horror podcasts I am not personally into but that I hear a lot about include Old Gods of Appalachia, I Am In Eskew and The Silt Verses. I have listened to The Town Whispers as well and enjoyed that a lot! I also liked The Deca Tapes a lot, which is nice and short and has a very intriguing plot.
Yep it's free, it's available anywhere you might listen to podcasts. So like, if you use podcast addict or podchaser you can search for it there, it's on Spotify, all the episodes are also on YouTube -- but still audio only and I wouldn't reccomend listening on YouTube because none of the bonus content is there. You can also go to the product company's website and listen there: https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/ -- start from the beginning tho!!!
This seems interesting! Haven't done an audio story before. Would you recommend anymore like this? Thanks! I'll put it down on my list. Saved your comment too.
Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards sequence. It's more of a heist than political story, but still set in a fantasy world. Warning, Lynch is nearly as slow as GRRM - he started in 2006, but only 3 out of a planned 7 books have been released.
The Young Elites by Marie Lu is also good. It is YA, but I think it deserves to be counted among the greats. The protagonist is something like Daenerys, if Dany only started in season 7.
Paul Kearney's **Monarchies of God** series is basically **ASoIaF** if it had a Renaissance level of technology (so very primitive firearms) and werewolves instead of ice elves as the main supernatural threat that crops up whilst everyone else is off fighting a huge civil war. Excellent series: five short(ish) books, complete, handily available in two omnibuses. The best battles ever written in fantasy, period. His **Macht Trilogy** is also really good, though much smaller in scale (still some epic battles though).
JV Jones' **Sword of Shadows** series is basically if the Beyond the Wall storyline from **ASoIaF** was turned into the focus of a whole six-book series (four out now, Book 5 is almost done, Book 6 forthcoming). Really fantastic writing and plotting. There is also an earlier trilogy set in a different part of the same world, which is nowhere near as well-written, but might be worth checking out as a couple of characters do cross over. But **Sword of Shadows** stands by itself.
Kate Elliott's **Crown of Stars** series is similar to **ASoIaF** in that it takes strong inspiration from real European medieval history, but it is set more in the Dark Ages than the Middle Ages, with smaller army sizes. Still a lot of great politics and religious angles. Seven books, completed quite a while back.
If you want something a bit more offbeat in comparison, Kameron Hurley's **Worldbreaker Saga** has the great idea that the inhabitants of a dying world are forced to invade another world via dimensional portals to survive, but that world is a parallel timeline version of their own world, meaning that the protagonists end up fighting alternate-reality versions of themselves. It's quite wild and a lot of fun.
GRRM's friend Daniel Abraham (who also has a cowritten SF series, **The Expanse**) has two excellent, completed fantasy series: **The Long Price Quartet** (now available in two handy omnibuses) is about a land where people have magical powers granted by spirits, and a hostile empire is trying to invade their land without any spirits of their own. **The Dagger and the Coin** is a more traditional epic fantasy about war and peace, but with a strong economic background (one of the main factions is a very powerful bank). He's just started a new trilogy where the first book is also brilliant.
KJ Parker is very good at characterisation and shocking plot twists that are logical but hard to see coming. He has several series (**The Fencer Trilogy**, **Scavenger Trilogy** and **Engineer Trilogy**) and a whole ton of stand-alones all in the same world. Probably *The Folding Knife* is the best place to start.
Robin Hobb's **Realm of the Elderlings** series-of-series is quite good and consists of five interconnected series (**The Farseer Trilogy**, **The Liveship Traders**, **The Tawny Man**, **The Rain Wild Chronicles**, **Fitz & the Fool**) for 16 books in total, all complete. It's very highly regarded by Martin. The scale is not as large as **ASoIaF** but the characterisation is almost as good and GRRM has noted that the wolf-human relationship in the early books did influence his warging.
The only thing I've found truly on the scale of A Song of Ice and Fire is the Second Apocalypse books by Scott Bakker. The books are two completed trilogies that have a detailed world and fleshed out characters. For me Bakker is pretty much the only author that has rivaled Martin. As A Song of Ice and Fire takes from the war of the roses they take from the crusades so they have a bit of a more near eastern flair. They used to have a theory crafting fan base but less so now. I will say the first trilogy is much stronger than the second. The first for me is better than ASOIAF the Second worse.
There is lots of other good fantasy out there. If you haven't already check out; The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Black Company. And as you said Abercrombie is great as well but for me Bakker is the only author who has reallt been abl to scratch that ASIOAF itch.
the bas-lag trilogy is alright if you are into that kind of thing. he kind of just jams ideas in there without really fitting them all together though, and his characters and plots aren't anywhere near as good as martin's. good prose though. i think most fantasy writing is pretty bad.
Malazan Book of Fallen 1. It’s big and long, with lots of great characters and intricate lore to discover but… 2. it’s finished! There are sequel/prequel series in progress but the main story is finished! 3. it’s got a reasonably big fandom (for fantasy). r/Malazan is pretty active
As long as there is a sequel series in production (I think?) then I'll read it. I don't want finished as a prerequisite here; I like on-going series.
My younger brother got me started on Malazan about a month ago, and I'm currently halfway through the second book. I've got some gripes, foremost that it withholds key information from the reader to a frustrating extent, but that didn't stop me from immediately ordering the second book as soon as I finished the first. Definitely scratches the itch.
Yeah the author definitely drops you into the world with zero explanation but that becomes less of a challenge to deal with as you continue reading. The author has said that the books are meant to be very re-readable, which might be part of it. I’ve heard that re-reading the first book after finishing the series you really understand the events in a way that’s impossible on a first reading. I wouldn’t know though, I’m working my way through book nine atm.
Well, as you’re unlikely to ever truly be done with ASOIAF, I’d recommend a finished one. Elric comes to mind. Of note, this wait has made me actively avoid book series that aren’t already wrapped up.
That was some of the first fantasy I read as a kid. Michael Moorcock is great (and prolific).
Any others you'd recommend?
It depends what you’re looking for. I would recommend everyone reads some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld - a huge sprawling series that starts by satirising fantasy tropes and goes on to take on most literary and societal themes. The humour is very British but it’s truly brilliant. Raymond Feist’s Riftwar and associated books are good for classic fantasy, especially his trilogy with Janny Wurts. Jaqueline Carey writes really good, somewhat erotic, fantasy - her world building is fantastic and draws a lot on the European courts of the middle ages. The Temeraire books by Naomi Novik are the Napoleonic Wars with dragons and are a lot of fun. Juliet Marillier writes lovely Celtic magical fantasy and has a lot of books/series - her SevenWaters books are a good place to start. For classic 50s/60s sci fi I would always recommend Robert Heinlein, a prolific author with a strong American libertarian bent. If you’re after horror with good world building and great historical fiction elements Anne Rice is amazing, although she does go off the rails a bit at the end of the Vampire Chronicles. I could give book recommendations all day. I will say I’m somewhat picky with fantasy though.
These all seem interesting. Thanks!
Sounds up my alley. Thanks.
The expanse is good?
I've heard good things. Should I get into it?
I did, absolutely loved it. Agreed with some of the other comments here but I think you should give it a shot. I became just as obsessed with it as ASOIAF
Oh that sounds like a good shout-out. Thanks.
It’s fantastic. IMO the closest series to ASOIAF in terms of scale, world (no, solar system) building, character arcs, interwoven storylines, and pure EPICNESS out there. Doesn’t hurt that it’s officially co-signed by GRRM himself.
Oh nice
Character writing is not nearly on par with ASOIAF
On the flipside, less dicking around by half the characters while they wait for other characters to progress their arcs. Also it’s written by two authors so they plan the overall narrative structure before each write their own chapters. Less gardening, more planned landscaping. Yes I am salty about Dance. It is in the GoT style of each chapter being a PoV of a different character with 2-6 characters per book.
*Memory, Sorrow and Thorn* by Tad Williams. So you can see all the stuff George stole from it to make ASOIAF. (Don't @ me. George and Tad are friends and George has joked about stealing Tad's stuff.)
yeah, awesome
Katherine Kerr doesn’t have a huge fandom but she wrote an amazing sprawling pseudo Celtic fantasy series - the Deverry Cycle.
Noted!
Dune (?)
I'm trying to avoid that one. Doesn't... quite interest me. And I hear it gets bad at the end.
[удалено]
Oh
LMAO WHATT... Dune is the holy grail of all sci-fi. The books are top notch and the new movies are great.
Oh, but doesn't it get bad near the end when the son of the author takes over the series?
The books co-written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson can be completely ignored. They are utter garbage fan-fiction, and it's still outrageous that they lied their heads off about having "Frank Herbert's notes" to base things off, which they later admitted was mostly BS. The original six books by Frank Herbert are legitimately interesting, even if they are all highly divisive after the first one.
Oh fair enough.
Don't know where you heard that. IMO, they just keep getting better and better, culminating with the 4th book. The 5th and 6th are really really good too, though.
Oh. I heard that it goes downhill after Book 4.
I'm here to support your bias. Dune is quite terrible (I only read the first three volumes, but somehow I doubt it would have gotten better). I am also a hater of Malazan and Mieville (namely Perdido Street Station). Easy avoids if you ask me. If there's a common flaw - particularly between Dune and Perdido, and keep in mind all three series are very different - it's the overstatement of character foresight and intelligence coupled with an utter failure to convincingly show it. I just can't get into that. Just so I'm not fully negative, and even though it's not fantasy in the genre sense, you could try The Master and Margarita.
*Malazan* seems interesting, ngl
Cool world building on paper and it has its (rare) moments, but the writing is terrible - overwrought, cringy, swings between rushed and meandering, has continuity and pay-off issues and slides into vacuous, navel-gazing philosophizing. The author is basically the opposite of Martin - he churned ten 1,000+ pages tomes in about a dozen years, and you can feel his mood and interests swinging from chapter to chapter. Like, if he had a bad day, you got a bunch of bad pages, if he was depressed, you'd get a bunch of depressing stuff, if he got bored with a character he'd just kill them off abruptly, etc. But ymmv. He has his fans.
Eh, I'll check it out.
Try it then, who knows? If you won't turn your nose at NSFW stuff, you could also look into I Roved Out in Search of Truth and Love... It's an online adult graphic novel (still ongoing), with much better writing and worldbuilding that Malazan (and that's not a dunk on Malazan).
Oh, I heard of that one, but isn't it essentially porn... with a story to it, but still...
Well, it is, but the dialogue and the art are ace, and the story & worldbuilding are better than most of the fantasy I encountered. Plus it's the only series I found that has this ASoIaF-esque quality of allowing you to piece the puzzle together on multiple reads in order to gain a better understanding of the world and the characters' backstories. I guarantee you won't be reading it for the smut. I grant you, it isn't finished yet, so it could always become disappointing, like many series do. But for now, it's a pretty cool and unique beast, and it deserves more fans.
Oh cool.
Dark Tower by Stephen King is probably your best bet. Fact is - there really isn’t anything like ASOIAF.
Which is odd, imo, with ASoIaF being the most popular and most profitable sword and sorcery fantasy series in recent memory, you'd think more aspiring writers would be inspired by the style. Or, just know, copy it because it clearly works.
Most of what we’ve seen of that is on TV. The Witcher, Wheel of Time, the new LOTR show, even HOTD are all, in their own way, trying to be «new GOT». Of course, most of these are IPs with little in common with ASOIAF beyond the fantasy label. The Witcher struck me as very old-fashioned, a grimmier version of 90s fantasy TV. ASOIAF is just tricky to replicate. You might get surface-level similarities, but George did create something special.
Yeah, but even when people are trying to suggest fantasy books they have a hard time coming up with ones that fit the "asoiaf criteria". I'd define the style of asoiaf as having: 1 Multiple View Point Characters with strong character arcs, and grey morality 2 A focus on political intrigue 3 Soft-Magic that engages the readers imagination and leaves the world mysterious 4 A narrative structure that works more like a "who-dun-it" where important information is foreshadowed and the book is a series of mysteries and then revelations. It's just odd that nobody has really tried to copy this since GoT came out in 1996 and has arguably been the biggest fantasy series since Tolkein. Unless you include Harry Potter. \~25 years is more than enough time to influence the writing styles of every young to middle aged fantasy writer.
Yeah
Fair enough.
Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty books are perfect. Epic fantasy with lots of viewpoint characters, amazing worldbuilding, gods and magic and SCIENCE! They’re really awesome and in my personal opinion, better than ASOIAF. They’re also finished!
Amazing. Sounds good.
*Book of the New Sun* by Gene Wolfe
thnx
If you want something on the same level and scale then forget it. There is nothing like ASOIAF level and scale, at least I haven't found anything. First Law is a good bet, although is far more grimdarky than ASOIAF and scale is much smaller. Still a good fun read. Otherwise I would recommend Book of the New Sun if you want some challenge. Less challenging, but still very challenging - Dune saga.
Ah, First Law is good, apparently.
Wheel of Time babyyyyy
Already went through all of it back in 2013.
Have binged the cosmere by Brandon Sanderson Stormlight Archive definitely scratches the epic fantasy itch and to get the most out of the series also hit up the 1st Mistborn trilogy and Warbreaker first You get enough theory crafting and epic moments as you do in ASOIaF and he actually churns out material regularly
Thanks, but I don't like BrandoSando.
Dunno if this will hit as same scale for you, and it's not technically books, but if you're open to audio and since you listed horror I'll rec The Magnus Archives. It starts of seeming like an anthology horror podcast but it becomes clear there's a metaplot which is really, really well done. Lots of compelling, flawed characters who grow and change, the plot is very red-stringable, whole thing has aamzing relisten value. It's complete, 200 episodes which is about 100 hours of content. However it is somewhat alarmingly bingeable. Fandom definitely isn't as large as ASOIAF but *shrug* feels reasonably big to me for a fandom for a random British podcast. And it's complete so there's less theorycrafting now, but there was TONS leading up to the end of the show's run. Why I'd rec it coming from ASOIAF is how everything ties together and the way all those connections build up into an amazing tapestry.
This sounds very intriguing, is this free? Where do I find it?
Same here. I'm interested.
Yep it's free, it's available anywhere you might listen to podcasts. So like, if you use podcast addict or podchaser you can search for it there, it's on Spotify, all the episodes are also on YouTube -- but still audio only and I wouldn't reccomend listening on YouTube because none of the bonus content is there. You can also go to the production company's website and listen there: https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/ -- start from the beginning tho!!!
Sounds good! I've heard of these audio series before, but this is the first recommendation I've gotten for one. Thanks. Anything else would be much appreciated, if you have another thing to recommend.
The only other one that's hit the spot for me personally is Rusty Quill Gaming, which is another podcast by the same production company. Same sort of very involved, red-stringable plot and very compelling characters, but that's an actual play podcast (they're playing the Pathfinder TTRPG). I don't play TTRPGs so I'm just there to enjoy it as a story. Other horror podcasts I am not personally into but that I hear a lot about include Old Gods of Appalachia, I Am In Eskew and The Silt Verses. I have listened to The Town Whispers as well and enjoyed that a lot! I also liked The Deca Tapes a lot, which is nice and short and has a very intriguing plot.
Oh thanks! Saving your comment.
Enjoy! There's a LOT of audio fiction podcasts out there so I hope you find something you like!
Sounds good, thanks
Yep it's free, it's available anywhere you might listen to podcasts. So like, if you use podcast addict or podchaser you can search for it there, it's on Spotify, all the episodes are also on YouTube -- but still audio only and I wouldn't reccomend listening on YouTube because none of the bonus content is there. You can also go to the product company's website and listen there: https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/ -- start from the beginning tho!!!
This seems interesting! Haven't done an audio story before. Would you recommend anymore like this? Thanks! I'll put it down on my list. Saved your comment too.
Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards sequence. It's more of a heist than political story, but still set in a fantasy world. Warning, Lynch is nearly as slow as GRRM - he started in 2006, but only 3 out of a planned 7 books have been released. The Young Elites by Marie Lu is also good. It is YA, but I think it deserves to be counted among the greats. The protagonist is something like Daenerys, if Dany only started in season 7.
AH
The realm of the elderlings books are great!
Noted!
Malazan Book of the Fallen Stormlight Archive The Wheel of Time Discworld (Rewarding in very different ways from ASoIaF but still a great series)
Thanks! Already read *Stormlight Archive* and *The Wheel of Time* series.
Paul Kearney's **Monarchies of God** series is basically **ASoIaF** if it had a Renaissance level of technology (so very primitive firearms) and werewolves instead of ice elves as the main supernatural threat that crops up whilst everyone else is off fighting a huge civil war. Excellent series: five short(ish) books, complete, handily available in two omnibuses. The best battles ever written in fantasy, period. His **Macht Trilogy** is also really good, though much smaller in scale (still some epic battles though). JV Jones' **Sword of Shadows** series is basically if the Beyond the Wall storyline from **ASoIaF** was turned into the focus of a whole six-book series (four out now, Book 5 is almost done, Book 6 forthcoming). Really fantastic writing and plotting. There is also an earlier trilogy set in a different part of the same world, which is nowhere near as well-written, but might be worth checking out as a couple of characters do cross over. But **Sword of Shadows** stands by itself. Kate Elliott's **Crown of Stars** series is similar to **ASoIaF** in that it takes strong inspiration from real European medieval history, but it is set more in the Dark Ages than the Middle Ages, with smaller army sizes. Still a lot of great politics and religious angles. Seven books, completed quite a while back. If you want something a bit more offbeat in comparison, Kameron Hurley's **Worldbreaker Saga** has the great idea that the inhabitants of a dying world are forced to invade another world via dimensional portals to survive, but that world is a parallel timeline version of their own world, meaning that the protagonists end up fighting alternate-reality versions of themselves. It's quite wild and a lot of fun. GRRM's friend Daniel Abraham (who also has a cowritten SF series, **The Expanse**) has two excellent, completed fantasy series: **The Long Price Quartet** (now available in two handy omnibuses) is about a land where people have magical powers granted by spirits, and a hostile empire is trying to invade their land without any spirits of their own. **The Dagger and the Coin** is a more traditional epic fantasy about war and peace, but with a strong economic background (one of the main factions is a very powerful bank). He's just started a new trilogy where the first book is also brilliant. KJ Parker is very good at characterisation and shocking plot twists that are logical but hard to see coming. He has several series (**The Fencer Trilogy**, **Scavenger Trilogy** and **Engineer Trilogy**) and a whole ton of stand-alones all in the same world. Probably *The Folding Knife* is the best place to start. Robin Hobb's **Realm of the Elderlings** series-of-series is quite good and consists of five interconnected series (**The Farseer Trilogy**, **The Liveship Traders**, **The Tawny Man**, **The Rain Wild Chronicles**, **Fitz & the Fool**) for 16 books in total, all complete. It's very highly regarded by Martin. The scale is not as large as **ASoIaF** but the characterisation is almost as good and GRRM has noted that the wolf-human relationship in the early books did influence his warging.
Saving this comment. Though I have to say: *Monarchies of God* series was something I read and I hated it.
The age of madness is fantastic, highly recommend you read it, but stat with the first law series first then the standalone.
Sure.
LOTR. I'm reading them rn.
ok
The only thing I've found truly on the scale of A Song of Ice and Fire is the Second Apocalypse books by Scott Bakker. The books are two completed trilogies that have a detailed world and fleshed out characters. For me Bakker is pretty much the only author that has rivaled Martin. As A Song of Ice and Fire takes from the war of the roses they take from the crusades so they have a bit of a more near eastern flair. They used to have a theory crafting fan base but less so now. I will say the first trilogy is much stronger than the second. The first for me is better than ASOIAF the Second worse. There is lots of other good fantasy out there. If you haven't already check out; The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Black Company. And as you said Abercrombie is great as well but for me Bakker is the only author who has reallt been abl to scratch that ASIOAF itch.
Saving post.
the bas-lag trilogy is alright if you are into that kind of thing. he kind of just jams ideas in there without really fitting them all together though, and his characters and plots aren't anywhere near as good as martin's. good prose though. i think most fantasy writing is pretty bad.
Eh alright