• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Our perfect fantasy book will have...

direstraits

direstraits

Well-Known Member
What does your perfect fantasy book has to have to make you meow like a contented cat? What characters, environ, places, villain and plots has to exist?

Fill this in with me will ya?

My perfect fantasy book stars an orphaned teenager of incredible intelligence. She is beautiful - everyone ogles at her, but she's too carefree and streetsmart to let that ruffle her. Her friends include...

ds
 
Although I dont believe in the concept of the perfect book that last books that I have come out that I'd give the 9.5 rating are:

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguru

Secret Life - Jeff VanderMeer

Fourth Circle - Zoran Zivkovic
 
Like Ainulindale, I do not believe in the concept of a perfect fantasy book. However, one thing it does have to be is traditional fantasy rather than modern :)
 
Like Ainulindale, I do not believe in the concept of a perfect fantasy book. However, one thing it does have to be is traditional fantasy rather than modern
Click to expand...

IMHo there hasn't been a meaningful stand alone work in epic fantasy since Tolkien's Silmarillion.

Gene Wolfe came close with his Wizard/Knight duology, that was suppsoed to be one book.

The majority of traditional epic fantasy writers just seem incapable of writing a quality single volume book.

IMHo the last great book that had elves in it was written 12 years ago, and was Michael Swanwick's Iron Dragon's Daugther.

The best epic fantasy being written right now is George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire , and nothing is even remotely close IMHO.
 
Aiyah, this is supposed to be a fun! :eek: Not very clear, am I? :) It's supposed to be an exercise where you put in your favourite bits in whatever the person before you has already written.

"She is beautiful - everyone ogles at her, but she's too carefree and streetsmart to let that ruffle her. Her friends include..."

"... an half-retired barbarian with a penchant for poetry, and a familiar in the guise of a house rat that can speak only in riddles. She..."

"... is of uncertain parentage, but her skills in magic suggest an uncommon lineage, maybe of a race long since perished. Her nemesis..."

"...loves to play chess and is good at insidious politics, hindering our heroine's every move."

The end result will probably not be the perfect fantasy book, but there are bits of it you really like, and hopefully you laugh along the way...

ds
 
Hard to say - it'd probably just be Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, but if he'd been able to complete it and with just a little more magic - along the lines of Graham Joyce.
It'd require:
A Machievellian antihero - perhaps villain would be a better word than anti-hero, but someone along the lines of Steerpike, who's the protagonist.
A huge array of grotesques.

Or perhaps stealing Charles Stross' ideas - "... is of uncertain parentage, but her skills in magic suggest an uncommon lineage, maybe of a race long since perished. Her nemesis..." - is the Creator of the world, as she grows up to be the dark lord.
 
DS, I don't think they are listening.

I'll try to play your game tho' I won't be very good as i don't read much fantasy.

Her friends include ..... a flighty fairy (that looks like Ruby's avatar - so cute), a large reptilian beast with a very gentle nature and a wombat with magic powers. Together ......
 
the magician has to be strong and smart and not too old and doddery, have a dry sense of humour and live in an old stone tower with lots of books and cobwebs....
 
But since she is neither old or doddery, she is perfectly happy living in a fishing village with her elder brother, whom she loves above everything. In their idylic lives, where everyday is spent working hard to make ends meet, nothing could have prepared them for...

(poppy... :) "Wombat with magic powers" I laughed at that... it sounds so... funny!)

ds
 
...the shadows sneaking across the land, coming closer and closer, planting darkness in people's hearts. When rumour of these shadows reach our heroine and her brother the immediately decide that their only chance of survival is to...
 
set forth on an epic journey, crossing ogre inhabited mountains, deathly soul-sucking swamps and battling thirsty vampires, wacky werewolves,greedy goblins and many other ........
 
Nasty beasties... The heros combat the evil tide of darkness with a magical box of cornflakes and the mighty spatula of the undead badger king!
 
...let the wombat wizard save Snuffles's soul into the body of an armadillo, whose strong hide will protect him. This gives the armadillo the unexpected power of...
 
speech, with which it uses at every opportunity to confound and irritate our dear heroine. Believing itself to be extremely hilarious, it...
 
...tries to turn him back, but fails so that they end up with a rather miffed large hamster with armadillo armour. The conflicting outbursts of magic, however, have the unfortunate effect of...
 
causing the heroine to ask in every tavern she comes across in her travels to ask for meanings of strange-sounding words like 'PETA'. By now an advanced magic user with an imposing reputation of 'The One with the Large Hamster With Armadillo Armour', she resolves to put wrongs to rights wherever she travels, much like Caine in Kungfu (but of course, she doesn't know that, because magic users don't watch TV).

However, during one routine stop at a tavern, she meets a...
 
wizened old crone,who beckons her over with a gnarled finger and whispers the secret meaning of the mystical word PETA. "Beware, beware," she hisses, "do not go near the Peanut-butter Eating Tribe of the Amazon. You and your Armidillo-shelled Hamster will be no match against their formidable powers." With these terrifying words ringing in her ears .......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top