title says it all! let me know your favourite fantasy that isn’t really in the eye of the public right now. feel free to let me know what sub-genre it it also ie. romantasy, grim-dark, high/casual fantasy etc.
thanks in advance! love looking at what people suggest
by teriyakitakeshi
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anything by China Meiville
I’ve never seen anyone talk about this:
*The Long Price Quartet*- It’s a fantastic “experiment” with a very unique magic system as well as an entirely new ‘language’ system. Basically:
* Magic exists in the form of what’s called an “andat”. Basically someone called a poet captures the essence of something by describing it and conducting a ceremony in an ancient magic lanugage. So for example, a poet captures an “andat” specifically regarding Fertility. This andat is named Seedless and he is able to make crops grow, crops wither, abortions, etc. The andats HATE being bound and are always trying to escape their poet
* Language- The main area has a language of “poses”. So for example, it’ll say “Otah took a pose of query, as if from a student to a teacher” so it’s got this grammatical hierarchy in just a pose they take with their hands. Adds some cool subtext to scenes and world building
* **FINALLY THE EXPERIMENT**- Basically, each of the four books takes place with 15 years between them. So you’ll see characters who are like 20 in book 1, be 35 in book 2, so on and so forth. If they live. Not every character makes it to old age. But you’ll see youths turn to adults. Adults turn to middle age. Middle age turn to elderly liver spotted white hair people. You’ll see kids turn into adults between books. You’ll have 15 years worth of storylines (a great plague, an affair, an economic crisis) that take place between books sometimes that they reference.
Overall, it was great seeing the characters age up and gain experience/wisdom or still making the same mistakes their young characters made. It was cool seeing a new form of magic that was still crazy powerful. And it was cool having this world with its own additional body language.
As a young adult fantasy, Cynthia Voigt’s *The Wings of a Falcon*. The book starts out like a typical hero’s journey: Young man escapes captivity and starts to rise in the world. Only the young man in question is seriously flawed: callous, thoughtless, and absolutely convinced that the rest of the world will fit together the way he imagines it should. At the same time, though, he *does* do good and makes his world a better place.
The tension between his personal flaws and his noble actions drives much of the novel, particularly the second half. I’ve read the book multiple times at different stages of my life, and always found it fascinating.
The Golden Age and The Other City, both by Michal Ajvaz. Both probably qualify as Magical Realism, but the first is a series of nested stories told as part of a fictional travelogue, and the second is like Pynchon wrote Alice in Wonderland.
Land of the undying Lord. Litrpg basically.
Katherine Addison’s “The Goblin Emperor.” The exiled and least favored half-goblin son of the emperor of the Elflands finds himself ascending the throne after his father and his older brothers are all killed in an airship crash.
It sounds like the start of a palace drama – and there’s a little of that – but mostly it’s about a kind young man trying his best to become a good leader while dealing with a rigid, hierarchical court and aristocracy that isn’t particularly amenable to him. It’s a surprisingly quiet, elegant, and gentle book about growth and self-awareness and not letting your past trauma come to rule you while still accepting it as a part of you.
Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater – funny urban fantasy
Jack Vance, Lyonesse trilogy
The Orphan’s Tales duology by Catherine Valente, The Divided by Katie Waitman, and the Queen of the Tearling Trilogy by Erika Johansen
Forgot The Tyrant Philosophers trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky- halfway through and loving it!