Who reads epic fantasy?

[rachelmanija]

This post was not only prompted by a remarkably stupid NY Times review of the "Game of Thrones" TV series, in which the reviewer thought the story was a polemic against global warming, claimed that women don't like fantasy, and further claimed that women do love sex, so the sex was gratuitously crammed in to please them

Comments

[lenora_rose]

Carol Berg fits, not a bestseller but somewhere in the higher end of the midlist (Her Bridge of D'Arnath and Rai-Kirah series' are definitely epic, and an argument could be made for the Cartamandua Legacy duology. The current project is less epic but still strongly secondary world). Very dark in places, but not bleak.

Hmm. I think Martha Wells has definitely gone epic in scope and mood (City of Bones, the Fall of Ile-Rien) along with several other subgenres, but the time period in the Fall of Ile-Rien, for at least one of the worlds involved, is most similar to early 20th C, which tends to disqualify it in peoples' eyes.

Lynn Flewelling? Naomi Kritzer? No question they're doing high fantasy, I'm really not sure which side of Epic they fit on.

Nancy Springer's epic fantasy is probably decades too old now, since she's mostly doing urban and YA these days (And has been doing both since well before the big boom). Ditto Ru Emerson.

I've argued before that while I read a ton of fantasy, favour secondary world fantasy, and read proportionally more female authors than male, Epic Fantasy in its fullest incarnation is probably the subgenre I read LEAST.