The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell
A. E. Marling
If you want your Arthurian legend splattered with mud and blood, read The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell. I love Arthurian tales for the nobility, the tragedy, the love that…
classic SFF
Foundations of Fantasy: The Odyssey
Ryan Howse
More than any other genre, fantasy tends to examine ancient epics. Whether it’s the study of archetypes and ectypes, a historical understanding of narrative itself, or simply a desire to…
The Aeneid by Virgil
CptNemo
The Aeneid is The Iliad’s lesser-known younger brother. It was written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, 800 years after Homer. The story begins directly after…
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Alister Davison
The Hobbit is a book that needs little introduction. It’s assumed that all fantasy fans have read it – sometime before our teenage years – before moving on to The…
Oath of Gold by Elizabeth Moon
KJ Braxton
The Deed of Paksenarrion has been a little hit and miss throughout but at the end of the second instalment my confidence had been restored. The first few chapters of…
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Tigana is a book that came highly recommended. The back cover claims that it ‘is breathtaking in its vision, and changes forever the boundaries of fantasy fiction.’ It has many…
Sci-Fi Book Club – April 2013: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Lisa Taylor
In April, our Science Fiction book club will be reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov, which won Hugo Award for Best all time novel series (1966). “One of the great masterworks…
The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea
Hierath
A hambone is sweet, but a pot of jam is the supreme comforter… Mythology Thirteen years in the writing, The Hounds of the Morrigan was finally published in 1985, one…
Fantasy Book Club – February 2013: The Black Company by Glen Cook
February marks the first month of our new themed and subgenre based book club selections. Since we did a very different steampunk book for December and vampires in January, I…
Lost Worlds by Clark Ashton Smith
Nyki Blatchley
The golden age of pulp fantasy is often considered to be the years when the American magazine Weird Tales was being published (1923-1954) and particularly the decade when it was…
The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock
Sword and Sorcery had its first heyday in the 1930s, with Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and their successors – most more or less Conan clones, although C. L. Moore…
A Moratorium On The Monomyth
Of all genres, fantasy is generally closest to mining the heroic journey archetypes for its inspiration. For some authors, the intent is to uphold these ideals; others wish to subvert…