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They're in the same subgenre - Erikson and Bakker are a lot closer to Feist than Mieville or Harrison. Erikson has the same kind of high magic, inventive setting as Feist - particularly of the Kelewan setting, but I admit Erikson is a huge amount more complex than Feist and not as similar as...

I'd suggest first looking at the main influences on Feist: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber - Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance - These form a lot of the basis for Krondor in particular as well as the character of Jimmy the hand. Both are excellent authors, often...

The Wheel of Time certainly is. As for the others I don't know. What I've heard of the Sword of Truth series is that after the first couple of books it gets very bad, very fast, and each book is apparently a repetition of the last, with more philosophy in it though. Raymond E Feist's just using...

I personally loved the novels - particularly the first two, but Titus Alone wasn't anything like as bad as I expected, it was actually an excellent novel, but just not comparable to the first two. Strange, I didn't think that at all. That is what I expected it to be, but I found it...

I haven't read it yet - I'm waiting for the Fantasy Masterworks edition to be published. It won both World fantasy award and British Science Fiction Award, so it's pretty much a must read for me.

Actually, they get worse later on. Crossroads of Twilight, book 10, is one of the worst fantasy novels ever written. You gave up reading it at a sensible point - where it was still worth reading. For some reason I still can't work out, I read all the way up to book 10 before giving up.

I think you misunderstood my post - all the names I listed were authors since Tolkien who weren't influenced by him. There were many others before him, but I didn't see the point in listing them, because it was obvious they wouldn't be influenced by him. A few fantasy authors before Tolkien...

I agree with Scooter - an excellent novel with brilliant prose, and Chabon made the characters all very interesting. It was also very subtly done - not a traditional murder mystery (which I'm not a great fan of), and the context of the Second World War makes the setting even more interesting.

Try looking on Amazon. It's where I got mine (though my bookshop did have one copy. Literally).

Everyone, excluding all those who wrote before him, and excluding authors such as Mieville, Vandermeer, Harrison, Moorcock, MacLeod, Joyce, de Lint and many others. Perhaps that's unfair - even Mieville's been influenced, as he wanted to write something completely different to Tolkien because of...

Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory is a masterpiece - I'm not sure how far you can call Frank Cauldhame a serial killer, because by the start of the novel he's more or less given up (it was a phase he was going through) - but he's one of the most interesting characters in fiction. As are most of his...

I'm not particularly well read - I've only read about 500 books in total - of which nearly half I've read in the last four years, and of the "classics" I've read barely any (though by the time I'm 23 I'll have read quite a few more)

I know what Gilgamesh is, sorry, I just wasn't certain if it's the oldest written fantasy (though it seems very likely it is)

Gilgamesh? For more modern fantasy, William Morris, Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany are some of the great late 18th/early 19th century fantasists. This article is good on the origins of fantasy.

Salvatore's novels are dark? I haven't read any of his, but I hadn't heard before that anything he had written was particularly dark. Perhaps try: The Compleat Enchanter by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber...

You've said it all - though I've still got to find a copy of Whittemore's Jersualem Quartet and stop getting distracted by seeing other books that I want.

Oops - missed that sentence. Peake is king! I just wish he'd been able to complete the series. On a sidenote, that new JG Ballard book, Kingdom Come, looks very interesting. That's the problem with the internet - I keep finding out about books I want to read, and I can't keep up with the...

What, no Mervyn Peake? He may not still be writing, but any list of the best fantasy authors must include Mervyn Peake - though I understand that you're hugely limiting it to just 20 authors (all of whom I've read I'd rate equally highly). Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Italo...

Sounds like a difficult choice. I've only read A Game of Thrones, but I have Ash: A Secret History on my to read pile. A Game of Thrones is excellent epic fantasy, but it's the start of a long, uncompleted series and it's not quite at Martin's best, but it's quite easy to read and shouldn't...

If its any consolation, Feist and Wurts' Empire series far surpasses anything they've written on their own. It isn't brilliant, but at the very least its competent - ie not Erikson, Martin, Bakker level epic fantasy or even close, but roughly as good as efforts like Greg Keyes' Kingdom of Thorn...