Dick Francis is a thousand years old and his son is turning out mediocre books under his name. Robert Parker passed away, Robert Jordan and John D. MacDonald likewise. Louis L'Amour is long gone, Alistair Maclean, the list goes on and on. All prodigious writers of entertaining fiction in various genres. I've read all their books, many of them several times. Have to find new authors to entertain me. Over the past couple years, these three have stood out.
Brandon Sanderson
I first heard of him when I picked up the
Mistborn novel, The Final Empire. Couldn't put them down. Sanderson created a whole new magic system for his world, and it is both consistent and interesting. The story is fascinating and well worth the read. He followed the trilogy up with a fourth book, set several hundred years later, in which he took the unusual step of having technology advance within the world, rather than creating the typical fantasy world where nothing changes for thousands of years. Sanderson also recently finished writing the last three books of Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time after Jordan passed away with the series unfinished.
Michael J. Sullivan
Self published six books in
The Riyria Revelations, the story of two "adventurers", Royce and Hadrian, a thief and an ex-mercenary who take on a variety of dangerous assignments for nobles until they become scapegoats in a plot to kill a king. Sullivan sold quite a few as e-books before this great series of stories was finally picked up by a publishing house and printed as a trilogy. Looking forward to his next project.
Naomi Novik
Imagine the Napoleonic wars with dragons. If you are going to fight with dragons, you'd better have tactics, and Novik does a fine job of distinguishing between different types of dragons and what they can do, as well as going into some detail about how the dragons affect the fighting. The
Temeraire series starts with His Majesty's Dragon, when the captain of a line ship inadvertently bonds to a captured French dragon, making him too valuable as a dragon flyer to continue in the Navy.
Still three unread books between the three of them, and with a bit of luck they'll be cranking out quality reads for years to come.
S.M. Stirling
Harry Harrison had this to say about him. "Stirling can wreck a world better than anyone I've ever read". It's true. His Emberverse series, consisting of two independent series of books, envisions a time when technology stops working, the vast majority of the human population dies in disaster and famine, but the remainders build new societies without technology based on their knowledge of their favorite time period. The successful societies that spring up include a Celtic, feudal, Roman, Norse, and combinations of the aforementioned. Absolutely excellent. The second series "Nantucket" has the island of Nantucket being transported into the distant past. The stories are independent but related.
