'Genre fiction' book meme

[philmophlegm]

Rather than repost the same book meme that everyone else has (which to my mind is dominated by lit crit 'classics' at the expense of what lit crit types would deride as 'genre fiction'), here's a list of 100 important books, each of which fits into a 'genre' other than 'arty-farty literature'. These books may have been well-reviewed, but probably

Comments

[louisedennis]

Lots of these series I have read the first and loved it and then experienced diminishing returns until I gave up somewhere around book four. Except for Dragonlance - the mind boggles - even the first book wasn't all that great I would say...

[philmophlegm]

Never read Dragonlance so I couldn't comment. Certainly a popular series though, and one of Amazon's top 5 fantasy books in terms of average customer review score. I was put off by Dave Langford's review in White Dwarf magazine which pointed out that White Dwarf's own guidelines for submitting fiction included the clause "No campaign write-ups!"

[wellinghall]

Oh, I remember that one!

[pellegrina]

Gyrfalcon?

[wellinghall]

Yes indeed. But this one isn't ;-)

[philmophlegm]

Fastest bird on the planet according to the falconer who gave me and bunn a falconry lesson, "whatever that prat Bill Oddie says, but then there's lots that Bill Oddie doesn't know..."

[wellinghall]

The Guinness Book of Records was founded after an argument as to which was the fastest game-bird.

[louisedennis]

I've only read one other blatant Campaign write up and, it has to be said, Dragonlance is far superior. It is probably a good example, therefore, of that particular sub-genre but I'd have thought some of its oddities (e.g. sometimes whole tracts of action occur off-stage - so you had to buy the accompanying modules to discover the details - and then are simply reported on return in a very cursory fashion almost at the level of "Oh, by the way, we popped off and recovered this artefact for you and fell in love while we were about it") would have prevented it getting rated as particularly good "chunky fantasy" in its own right.

Mind you I didn't read all of the Dragonlance books either so its possible they improved.

[philmophlegm]

I think there is a certain amount of snobbishness even among fantasy and SF critics against RPG designers who also write fiction. Raymond Feist would fall into this category too.