OT-Black Company

[Endoperez]

Renojustin said:
The Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy by Elizabeth Moon.

How do the two latter books compare to the first?

I rather liked the first one, but I put down the second one because it kept head-shotting my suspension of belief. Okay, she's not happy, okay, she's going through a mountain range, she has a magic item?, what does this magic elf-place have to do with her?, there is a magic what hunting them?, etc. It felt like a tacked-on sidequest, in a bad way.

[Edi]

I liked Black Company all through the Books of the South, but it was the Books of Glittering Stone where it started to go into the really weird stuff, especially the Murgen book.

Glen Cook's new series, Instrumentalities of the Night is great. It's set in an alternate Europe, though it could use a good map or otherwise you have to guess what is where, which is frustrating. You know it's good when I recommend a book which is set in an alternate real world based setting, because normally I absolutely detest them.

As far as SoIaF, bleh. Started out good and had a lot of good ideas whose execution is all over the place, rambling around and too many characters are killed off simply on a whim, leading to the story to going nowhere. Certain other aspects of the books I find rather distasteful, as I have said in the past.

I much prefer stuff by J.V. Jones, Janny Wurts, Chris Bunch, Gail Z. Martin, David Farland, Sarah Ash and others.

[Tuidjy]

Edi beat me to it. The Instrumentalities of the Night are easily the equal
of the very best books of the Black Company.

[Wrana]

Well, I can only say that Black Company series is great. Of course, Book of Murgen IS weird - after all, it's supposed to be written by a man who "was mad almost half the time"! And Book of The Lady contains discrepancies with other ones - of course! Actually, the way Glen Cook makes different characters tell about the same occurencies differently is what marks him as good writer - one among the best in the genre, from my point of view. It is also very similar with real war memoires... Of Instrumentalities, I've read only the first one, so don't currently know how well it develops further. His old Dark Empire cycle is surely good enough - a pity it wasn't finished.
Gerge Martin, relative to this, is just boring. It's much more interesting to read actual chronicles on which his novellization is based - and this speaks a lot, as chroniclers didn't aim at being amusing...
I would recommend Robin Hobb for "those who like their fantasy dark". Plus Barbara Hambly, of course. Plus some Russian writers, but they probably won't be translated into English soon...

[Endoperez]

Wrana said:
one among the best in the genre, from my point of view.

That reminds me.

Gene Wolfe. Knight. And Wizard.

That's a strange pair of books. They aren't dark, exactly. At times, it's sweet and sappy. At times, it's more like horror, except it made me uncomfortable unlike any horror book I've read. Not afraid, but uncomfortable - I didn't know if I wanted to read what would happen, because if it went wrong, it would go bad.

A knight must be able to do more than most men, and so he does, because his name is Able, and he is a Knight. A princess is sacrificed because she knows she is a Princess.

Everything is absolutes.

It's like a legend that's grown in uncountable retellings, except it all happened like in the story. The legends just left out that everyone was afraid, all the time, but still did what they had to do; and that even though things might work out in the end, things didn't go as planned, not at all.

[Wrana]

Yes!!! Possibly the best among now-active authors. I don't know why I forgot to mention him - probably because he's really not exactly of the same genre. I use for such cases as this a term coined by Michael Moorcock: "epic fantasy". The definition is about as you have given.
His earlier books were also great - both Arete and Torturer cycles.