My Top 5 Epic Fantasy Authors
And no they're not who you're thinking ;-)
My Top 5 Epic Fantasy Authors
Hey folks! I’ve been wanting to write this little piece for a while now and finally got around to putting thought to paper. I know there’s a lot of blog posts out there about the ‘best’ fantasy authors - they look something like this: GRR Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Tolkien, Robert Jordan, and so on. And don’t get me wrong, those guys are all awesome. But they’re also not the fantasy authors I grew up reading. So I thought I’d share a few of my favourites that I think have stood the test of time (ie. me growing up).
5. Terry Brooks
First on the list is Terry Brooks, a pretty prolific author with an absolutely sprawling collection of work now - especially in the world of his Shannara chronicles. But that’s okay, because I absolutely love how his world actually changes depending on what period of time they’re in. One age they might be full fantasy, with elves and trolls and wizards battling the forces of darkness, and another the characters find themselves in a post apocalyptic wasteland just struggling to survive. He even at one point linked his Bearers of the Black Staff stories, which were almost urban fantasy/immediate apocalypse, and told the story of how those events led to the creation of Shannara.
His magic systems are also particularly interesting, as while they don’t follow the strict mechanical like rules of a magic system like Sanderson’s, magic does come at a cost. It can corrupt, and change people, create demons and even require characters to make the ultimate sacrifice—which is another feature of Brooks’s work. His characters can die. So beware if you chose to leap into the pages of his work, they’re not for the faint hearted!!!
4. Anne McCaffrey
Next up we have the late, great Anne McCaffrey (and her son who followed on her Pern series). I haven’t read much of her scifi, but once I’d gotten into her Dragon Riders of Pern, it became a series I just had to hunt down every single last book to read. This was a dragon rider series before dragon riders were even really a thing as far as I’m aware, and I found I absolutely loved the relationships between her riders and her dragons and the sacrifices they were prepared to make in order to defend humanity. The twists she works in throughout the series are also fantastic, and after you’ve gotten into your first of her books I doubt you’ll be able to set down her books any more than I was!
3. Phillip Pullman
Ah yes, His Dark Materials. I think the Northern Lights might have been the very proper fantasy book I ever read—and at the behest of my English teacher in middle school at that. But I can assure you, this is no boring novel set by English teachers to make us suffer. The story of Lyra and her adventures through her own world—and later the multiverse—were what drove me to read and discover more of fantasy from a young age. The only downside is that there is only really the one trilogy to read (although I hear there’s a few novellas I should probably check out sometime). Oh, and the HBO series is a pretty true adaptation as well!
2. Ian Irvine
Probably the only name most of you have probably never heard of before, Ian Irvine is an Australian author I discovered in my local library and promptly had to buy every single one of his books since most of the rest of his series wasn’t available in my small NZ town. By his own words, Irvine spent twenty years creating the map, history and political structure of his world before writing A Shadow on the Glass, and it shows in the depths of his stories and the interactions between characters. This is a world where you can’t help but believe the cultures and shared histories of the different characters and humans is real, and by the end of his first series you’ll realise there was never really a good guy or a bad guy to begin with—just a group of deeply floored men and women fighting for their survival.
1. David Gemmell
The absolute master of heroic fantasy, David Gemmell is an author you’ve probably heard me mention a few times if you’ve my journey over the years! An old history professor, David Gemmell wrote his first novel while battling cancer, and then wrote a dozen more over the next ten years to become a well known name in epic fantasy/heroic fantasy. His works focus on character and how one man or woman prepared to stand up and do the right thing can change the course of history. While my favourite will always be Druss the Legend, I was first introduced to his work by A Sword in the Storm, the story of a young man who sets out to conquer his fear and the shadow of his father’s failure.
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