Ok, internet, recommend me an SFF novel with SPECTACLE. Big huge weird. Stuff like PERDIDO STREET STATION or GIDEON THE NINTH or the Craft Sequence or anything by Frances Hardinge. The sort of thing nobody would have had the budget to film until CGI got cheap and plentiful.
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Also, Parable of the Sower
Also, if you liked that, you should check out Chris Wooding's TALES OF THE KETTY JAY. Similar to above, but make it steampunk. Also a complete series
Also, the author's on here! @richardkadrey.bsky.social
A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name and The Thousand Eyes? Troubleshooters for a wizard. (One family is described as "all thin and sharp, like a box of especially smug pencils.")
Nathan Lowell?
(There might be kissing)
Little Thieves, Painted Devils, and Holy Terrors (upcoming) by Margaret Owen’s (fairytales, gods, and a thief who we be EVERYONE’s favorite problem)
If you fancy spectacle with a more YA flavour try Pat O'Shea's The Hounds of the Morrigan. It is a very safe book. A boy could cycle along it with his eyes shut. Or end up up the Amazon on a rubber duck.
... My college boyfriend borrowed my copy 22 years ago and never gave it back. I'm more mad about that than the cheating on me with two girls at once 😂
• "Archivist Wasp" by Nicole Kornher-Stace: Ghosthunter goes on quest through the ghostworld to escape her brutal town. Can't say more without spoilers. Very loose series but I think they work best in publication order (Wasp, Latchkey, Firebreak).
Plus? Kung-fu rooster.
Also, I haven't looked in a while, but the first one at least used to be in the Baen Free Library
https://www.baen.com/with-the-lightnings.html
Also a big fan of the alt-history BELISARIUS series he did with Eric Flint
Teixcalaan novels.
But I think the whole series is so interpersonal that it doesn’t take bleeding-edge CGI, you just need decent casting.
Civil campaign, on the other hand.
(I started these recently and have been pleasantly surprised.)
I really enjoy Michelle Sagara's Cast series. Megan Whalen Turner's Thief series doesn't have magic, other than the gods dropping in, but terrific characters. I also reread Lord Dunsany & James Branch Cabell, but I'm old.
Con: if you don't like the idea of Eurovison, you will probably not like this book.
The DARK ARTS series. Book 1 is a World War II war epic with black magic warfare; book 2 is 1950s nuclear cold war espionage with black magic assassination; and book 3 is 1960s conspiracy thriller with black magic guerrilla fighting. https://www.midnightfront.com/
Tip: Ignore "P'thok gets an ice cream cone" (Chapter 1) - that chapter will make a lot more sense if you come back after a hundred pages.
There are some spectacular setpieces in Patrick Samphire's Mennik Thorn books and they're also beautifully paced fantasy noir detective stories. Funny and hard to put down.
And really, it's a dense, strange read by a very odd duck of a English philosopher who was old enough to remember the reign of Queen Victoria.
But "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon is of mind busting scale.
Oath of Empire
God of Clay (well, not so much spectacle)
On earth as it is on television is probably the most insane SFF I’ve read this year. It’s more SF than F though.
The Spatterjay sequence might be in that line.
Mageworld by Debra Doyle were good.
The first Technomancer by g aliaksei was solid. (Engineer wakes up in a ringworld human preserve based on the tech he invented)
Superb, vivid prose; far-future science-is-magic stuff.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/transit-to-scorpio-dray-prescot-1/id490075056
It's a Barsoom yoink, lots of blood & thunder & banter (as I recall), & the ladies may not wear much but there are warrior orders with claw & whip & dagger (see: the love interest).
(Nobody needs to bring up steampunk and imperialism, I KNOW.)
The Book of the New Sun?
(Boy, are those two beasts that I've never considered in the same breath before...)
Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell
Old Man's War by @scalzi.com
Pretty much anything by Brando Sando
- It’s d&d shenanigans with friendship, magic and traveling between worlds?
and The Quantum Magician by Kunsken is space opera with bred humans, psychotic worshippers, and sneaking warships through a wormhole. I ugly cried at the end.
The second series was so obviously a carbon copy of the first that they made fun of it in universe.
Then they wrote a parody of King's 'On Writing' about how to dash off crap and make money out of it.
For me it’s Shannara.
But having Googled the guy, there are details of his life I find really confusing. Like where did he get the $20 million he donated to his alma mater? https://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/spring2009/features/centennial_campaign/4.html
There's this multi-author collection called MIRRORMAZE, and a follow-up called SOMNISCOPE is coming out.
https://cliffjonesjr.com/mirrormaze
Spectacle over epochs: Noumenon.
Or Martha Wells' "Wheel of the Infinite." Angkor Wat, but alive, and more more-ness.
Not Recent: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry, anything by Tad Williams
And I KNOW you’ve read The Hero and the Crown, but if you haven’t reread it recently, it holds up.
In which workers risk drowning in ichor at every heartbeat? Unless their carve holds true?
Where everything is described in such meaty g(l)ory world building?
Well!
Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden is for you!!
Alastair Reynold's Revenger/Shadow Captain/Bone Silence. Two upright sisters turn space pirates in an interplanetary sailship.
Or Martha Well's Raksura series?
Galactic conflict, spaceship crashes, telepathic alien dogs battling in medieval combat… yep, it has spectacle
-The Rediscovery of Man series by Cordwainer Smith
-A Garden of Salt series by Felicity Savage
All three are full of expabsive vast world building. Fantastic work!
https://www.somtow.com/inquestor
"What a spectacle!" was his catch-phrase after Light on the Sound came out. Fun times
Humans living in the gigantic and unfathomable ruins of their own earlier civilizations in the Rediscovery stories was a fascinating idea.
Weird? Well, there are flying trees. /2
And blowing up bureaucracies, very slowly. /3
https://www.victoriagoddard.ca/
Also John Varley’s Titan, Wizard, Demon series.
Truck drivers, kung fu, mimes, love, an inventive weapon-to-end-all-weapons, and true friendship.
1 Dragon Prince Trilogy by Melanie Rawn. Enormous cast, *very original* magic system, lots of fights & explosions. There's also a sequel trilogy, about a war a few years later.
It is the kind of book (plus sequels) you can’t stop thinking about for weeks.
A Fire Upon the Deep
Noon Universe
The Quantum Thief
Culture series
Vorkosigan series
The Final Architecture
Ancillary Justice
A Memory Called Empire
Mordew by Alex Pheby. Definitely weird, and it'd be a challenge to do justice to it visually even with CGI.
Ruthanna Emrys's _A Half-Built Garden_
Martha Wells entire Raksura series.
I would imagine you've read all of NK Jemison. There's a new Hundred Thousand Kingdoms book, a lovely little novella. Gods are real! The whole universe! I love all of them.
P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath books. The first, God Stalk, is just ::chef’s kiss::
Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen
Julie Czerneda’s “Species Imperative” trilogy
The “Mage Worlds” series by Debra Doyle and James McDonald
I don’t know the Mage Worlds series. But given all the other excellent recommendations in your list, I’ll definitely be reading them.
This is How You Lose the Time War - by Gladstone
Amber is phenomenal, too; it plays this the nature of reality so skillfully, I can’t even tell you if either MC is a hero or villain!
OMG, I love Borne so much.
THE ARCHIVE UNDYING by Emma Mieko Candon
THE TIGER FLU by Larissa Lai
THE BONE SHARD DAUGHTER by Andrea Stewart
NINEFOX GAMBIT by Yoon Ha Lee
RADIANCE by Catherynne M. Valente
lol
It's the second in a loose trilogy, but it's loose enough to make any one of them a suitable entry point.
(Must be logged in to read.)
McKinley’s also done some great fairy tale retellings: The Outlaws of Sherwood, Rose Daughter, Beauty, Spindle’s End, Deerskin, and The Door in the Hedge. And there’s also her vampire book, Sunshine.
Also to answer your original question, Rachel Bach's Paradox Trilogy starting with FORTUNE'S PAWN.
The Gathering of Heroes prequel edges into the kind of over the top epic you find in European fantasy comics or anime.
Other options include Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh or Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane which both give epic spectacle.