Fat Fantasy

Morat takes a break from politics to list some Fat Fantasy books he likes. I've only read a couple of the series that he recommends, but I'm very glad that he doesn't attempt to recommend Robert Jordan or Terry Brooks! The term "Fat Fantasy" refers to that subset of Fantasy books which most people, being either lit-snobs or just plain doofuses, think comprises all fantasy: series, once usually trilogies but now commonly more than three books, consisting of nice, thick books, hence the "Fat" appellation.

I've written here before about George R. R. Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire, the fourth book of which is now criminally overdue. (Harumph.) This series, as Morat notes, sets up expectations that experienced readers of fantasy will peg almost immediately -- and then he trashes them by killing off characters unexpectedly, taking his plots in different directions, setting up unforeseen alliances, and generally ratchetting up the "unpredictability" to levels which, by the time of A Storm of Swords, are simply amazing. This series isn't for the squeamish, with many scenes that are the literary equivalent of the battle scenes in Braveheart, but if you like characters who are so three-dimensional that you can't even really be certain just who the good guys are, then this series is for you. (Morat only cites the first book in the series, so he hasn't even come to what I consider to be Martin's greatest achievement, when he conditions the reader to hate a certain character and then has us feeling sympathetic toward that character by the third book.

The other of Morat's series that I've read is the Tad Williams trilogy, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. This is also a good one, although it really is quite bloated, with hundreds of pages of subplots that occasionally seem to go nowhere. Much of it does end up going somewhere, but the going gets really tough because Williams tends to withhold his payoffs until as late a moment as humanly possible. I bounced off the first volume, The Dragonbone Chair, because it starts off with about 150 pages in which nothing happens while Williams lays in his backstory. Once things finally get moving, though, it's a decent read, even if it does take too long to get where Williams wants to go.

Morat also solicits some recommendations along this line. I'm an admirer of Stephen R. Donaldson's work, both the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (both trilogies, although the second isn't as good as the first) and the duology Mordant's Need. The Covenant books famously involve an "antihero": Thomas Covenant is not a sympathetic protagonist, and early on he commits an act that may have the reader toss the book against the wall. In my experience, the Covenant books are "love them or hate them" affairs.

And of course, there is Guy Gavriel Kay, who in my literary universe is second only to Tolkien. If traditional fantasy is your thing, GGK's trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry is wondrous (although, being GGK's first published work, a little hard to get into -- give it a couple of hundred pages). After that trilogy, GGK tracked away from traditional fantasy for stand-alone books (except for his most recent work, a duology called The Sarantine Mosaic) that blend fantasy with historical fiction, with the magical elements becoming more muted with each successive work.

I also view T.H. White's The Once and Future King as required reading for any lover of fantasy. Also excellent in the Arthurian vein is Stephen Lawhead's trilogy consisting of Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur (although, to be honest, the ending of this series is one of the most disappointing endings I've ever read). Even better is Mary Stewart's Arthurian trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) to which a fourth volume, The Wicked Day, was later added. Gillian Bradshaw wrote an Arthurian trilogy years ago, that I am certain is out of print and hard to find, but it's very well written and very emotional. I believe the first volume is Hawk of May, but I don't recall the other titles.

Feel free to toss some titles my way, and Morat's as well!