Welcome to the Fantasy Literature poll! Where we're going to start with 96 entries and eventually arrive at the Escape Artist's Forum's single favorite work of Fantasy Literature.
I'd like to just say "fantasy novel", but let's face it - much more than in SF, Fantasy tends to come in huge series. I mean sure many great Science Fiction stories have sequels, but they tend to be tacked on to what are otherwise stand-alone books. Dune and Ender's Game didn't
need sequels, and the readership tends to view the first books in a very different light than the series as a whole. Whereas Fellowship of the Rings was always meant as part of a trilogy, and stands on the shoulders of The Hobbit as well. Fantasy authors tend to create their whole huge worlds and write long spanning epochs through them. So for the poll any books that even hint at being in the same universe will be grouped together.
I often use the notation of "first book / series name by author". Or sometimes first book / second book. Sometimes, like for Charles de Lint, almost any of their works qualify as in a single world, so we're really voting for the author. Of course some fantasy novels do stand alone. In this first poll we have... uh, Good Omens. Ya, most these are going to be series.
Full rules for how the poll will go down were posted over at the
Fantasy Board.
For the first group stage, vote for any series you like. Even if you've only read one book, or only *like* one book from a long series, go ahead and vote for it. And more importantly, talk about it! This poll is meant to inspire discussion!
And we have some great stuff here! This group alone proves there's more to fantasy than just Swords & Sorcery. Tazan is classic pulp fantasy without either swords or spells. The wonderful Bridge of Birds features a kind of immoral Sherlock Holmes of ancient China. You've got an angel and a demon teaming up to prevent the apocalypse in Good Omens. The modern children of Greek Gods in Percy Jackson. Magical Realism by Charles de Lint. A King Arthur retelling by Stephen Lawhead. I haven't read Gormenghast, but apparently it's a gothic story with no overt magic. And of course you have Wonderland with it's surrealism, word play, and logic jokes.
None of them are the classic image of High Fantasy. But then it's a broad genre, as Podcastle regularly shows.