Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

I'm 95% sure I'm going to read the Elric Saga next year. Been wanting to do that for ages. While its hard to sort out what books I need to own to do that since they were short and were collected multiple times over sometimes with different titles depending on country they were published in, I'll never know if I've got them all sorted out if I don't actually read them.

That said, I usually do a yearly theme and the Elric books alone won't fill a year. Seeing as "brooding albino protagonists" is just a teeny tiny bit too restrictive, I couldn't think of anything else that the Elric Saga would represent other than "Classic Fantasy"

Classic Fantasy seemed like a pretty good theme, filling in my reading gaps with all those fantasy books that were really great....or were great at the time but maybe didn't age that well but still represented something important in fantasy at the time it came out.

So I need suggestions of what you thought was good fantasy from say the 60-80's timeline-ish. Other books/series you think of when someone says "Elric". As in the blurb for the first Elric book - a "hard fantasy canon, a book no fantasy fan should leave unread"

It can be recent too, if its got the same kind of feel, I'm not fixated on when it was published.


Looking at what Goodreads say other readers have read:

- Vance's Dying Earth (read)
- Conan (read)
- The Book of the New Sun (read)....maybe I should follow up with the Book of the Long/Short Sun

Haha, looking at the reviews of the second book I saw this:

Holy crap! I, *insert your name*, have read an entire book in 4 hours!

Admittedly I picked it up after discovering that it was only 24,000 words long, or 1/20 th of a George Martin epic.

So yep, gonna need a few more books to fill out the entire year ;)

I'm not sure if you've already picked up a bunch of the Elric books or not, but the newest Saga Press omnibuses published over the last few years are very convenient and contain the entire series in internal chronological order.

Maybe add Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Kane books by Karl Edward Wagner, the Imaro trilogy by Charles Saunders (hard to find though), and some Andre Norton Witch World to your list?

NekroRider's suggestions of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and the Kane series are both excellent. I would add Barbara Hambly's Darwath trilogy and Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series. Richard Kirk's Raven series is not bad, although it is certainly a product of its time and perhaps hasn't aged as well as some other series.

Elric was part of Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, and there are other books in that series that fit the fantasy genre - the two Corum trilogies, and some standalone books like The Ice Schooner.

I was certainly reading and enjoying Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser Lankhmar books around the same time as I was enjoying the Elric Books, so that is a good shout from Nekrorider as is Andre Norton's Witch World.

Conan yes.

And as Tony points out, Elric was one aspect of the Eternal Champion and other manifestations are also Fantasy. I have always held a real soft spot for the Corum books, which I think are among Morecock's best.

There is Lin Carter's stuff... though to be honest I never really liked his work.

I have no idea how it has aged, pretty badly I suspect, but Kenneth Bulmer is a name that memory throws up about now? Sword's of the Barbarians? Kandar?

John Brunner's The Traveller in Black really impressed me at the time but I haven't read it in years

The Earthsea books of course...

Memory is a funny thing, I am likely missing some obvious stuff. Undoubtedly, names will start popping into my head in about three days time while I am doing something utterly unconnected, like the weekly shop.😁

Should that occur I will add to this, eh?🙂

L Sprague de Camp... but my tired old brain can't remember a single title... something about kings? Doubtless someone who knowsows more about this stuff than me can help out there🙂

There was a book called 'Day of the Minotaur ' by Thomas Burnett Swan, which I can remember loving back in the day and being surprised no one else seemed to have heard of it a5 the time🤔

Caveat to all of my contributions is that I haven't read any of these books since 1970 something as far as I can recall. I could be recommending a vast pile of appalling tosh for allI I know now🫣🤭🤣🤣🤣

Some other suggestions - Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword, and The High Crusade, all by Poul Anderson; Edgar Rice Burroughs - the Barsoom series, the Venus series, and the Pellucidar series; L Sprague de Camp, Manly Wade Wellman, Gardner Fox, and August Derleth. Some of those, like ERB, might actually be SF (since there's no magic), but they are functionally fantasy novels.

Let's see

- Witch World and Deryni series are pretty long. I have all but one Deryni book so they might be a different year's challenge....or maybe do that AND Elric...hmm

- Elric was part of Moorcock's Eternal Champion series - interesting, I thought Elric was the Eternal Champion and that was that, didn't realize there was more in the same...world/series/whatever. I'll have to look into that, I have an omnibus with a few of the Corum books so I'm already partway there.

- I haven't read any of these books since 1970 something - understood! Never know when the Suck Fairy hits, or just because I'm of an age group who wasn't even old enough to read in the 70's I've grown up with different reading tastes. It was a bit like when we read The Riddlemaster of Hed as a group here, we were all a bit underwhelmed. But its still interesting to experience these different books that are considered classics anyway.

Makes me think of that other thread where we were discussing classics we had to read in school that didn't always turn out so well :)

Earthsea I've read though I think there's a short story and also a recent-ish addition I haven't read. My internal completionist is shouting at me to include those. OpenLibrary might help me located that one short story that's otherwise hard to find.

Barsoom I've read but not Venus. I have those on my eReader from Project Gutenberg I think. Virtually anything that takes place on Venus would now be considered fantasy since science-wise would be hard to invent something that doesn't result in you being incinerated and squashed after just a few seconds ;)

I'll research more of these over the next month (so more recommendations are welcome). I'm probably going to get some gift cards so can pick out what to add to my collection. For example, I've got part of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series already, just need to nab a couple more.

There's definitely some authors on your lists I haven't read yet (and few I've never heard of) so that's always interesting.

In the dedication to the first Elric book in the abovementioned omnibus Vol 1, Moorcock writes:
"To the late Poul Anderson for The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions. To the late Fletcher Pratt for The Well of the Unicorn. To the late Bertolt Brecht for The Threepenny Opera which, for obscure reasons, I link with the other books as being one of the chief influences on the first Elric stories."

I think Earthsea is very very different. Moorcock is dark, cynical, anti-Tolkien (his own description). Earthsea is hopeful, Jungian. I think a year of pure Elric themed lit would be depressing. Certainly, though Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser would keep things light and fun. Maybe throw some Asian flavored tragic epics in with A Hero Born and the subsequent books?

Poul Anderson... there, I said I would forget someone important, good catch Tony/Dean.

You are likely correct about Earthsea Dean... it's just that 8 read them around the same time as I read Elric and they are both fantasy classics, so I connect them in my mind.🙂 But objectively you are right I think.

My Traveller in Black rec would be a better fit for sure, since it is quite dark and cynical. (probably, as per my previous caveat😁)

Robin wrote: "My Traveller in Black rec would be a better fit for sure, since it is quite dark and cynical. (probably, as per my previous caveat😁)"

Haha, nice!