I love how their second recommendation for people new to fantasy is The Simarillion. I mean, this is a pretty terrible flowchart in general, but jeezus
Iirc Stardust does, in fact, have pirates. This chart is lying to you! Airship Pirates are pirates too
Airship pirate awareness!
The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis. Basically, what if Napoleon's engineers had access to helium? Author does a fantastic job of 'building' the airship and giving her a crew.
mfw recommending Watership Down to bunny lovers 😈
I worked my way backwards from my favorite series: Assassins Apprentice (Realm of the Elderlings) and found that the path to this series is WAY off!
"Animals more your thing?" - NO!?!?!
The main character has the deepest relationship with animals I've ever read.
"Looking for an old-fashioned Trilogy?" - YES!?!?!?spoiler
He literally has a form of animal telepathy.
The series is 16 books long. If you want to make the argument that only the Fitz books count, there are nine of them...
Maybe I'm not looking hard enough but I don't see The Expanse on here.
Also no Three Body Problem. Must be outdated.
Is three body problem really that good? I was about halfway into it and just lost interest.
It's a tough read, but I thought it was worth it.
I feel like 'Dune' should have been there somewhere. Maybe I'm missing it.
It's in there as The Dune Chronicles. Just a little below the middle on the right-hand side.
I was expecting a lot more Discworld
Discworld really should be included in the sci-fi/fantasy combination section.
Is this generated from the 2011 article I find when I search? I would love to see an updated version.
Liked the LOTR branch:
"I am yet unfamiliar with the your tropes, do your worst" -> LOTR -> "No, not that new" -> Silmarillion
Anyone who doesn't think the dragon is the ideal pet, can debate me here please? (Without regards to which book is selected from the answer given)
Not as cute as cats, nuff said.
That would mean waterbears are better pets than cats?
Also cuteness factor can be overcome with a dragons horde of gold, see Hugh Hefner.
Discworld dragon, LOTR dragon, or Pern Dragon?
In my head I had lotr dragon.
Well, if it's an LOTR dragon, and you're Sauron, then sure. Otherwise, good luck being charcoal.
I mean, they are not really handy to walk
So are cats! Or horses, or (theoretical as to this list and discussion) unicorns. Horses and unicorns you can ride, as you could a dragon! Riding > walking 95% p value.
You'd have problems taking a very sick dragon to the vet. I mean, if it can at least walk under its own power that's one thing, but you'd need a Very Large Truck for one that's out cold. And a crane to put it on the trailer. Then you have to find a vet who's willing to look at it. Not all of them will treat reptiles, or large animals of any sort. Also, they have to have a parking lot that will take your truckload of dragon (ours doesn't).
Also, the food bill would be prohibitively large. Can you imagine how much meat you'd need to feed a dragon for a year? Now think about current grocery prices. The dragon won't pay out of its hoard (by definition—you hoard a hoard), so it's all on you.
Don't even try to think about cleaning up what comes out of the other end.
Very realistic points. It's like you had an option to adopt either a cat or a dragon, so made a pros and cons list.
A few interesting picks and one just bleeehhhhh pick in the Drizzt series. There are ever so many better PnP based books, right off the top of my head the OG dragon lance series by Weiss and Hickman.
Also, I’m stoked that Furies of Caulderon was listed. That might be in my top three, and sadly it looks to have been abandoned by Jim Butcher.
I quite liked the rest of the Furies series. Didn't you enjoy them?
I like to see my boy John Scalzi made the list
Not impressed. I've read a good half of what's on there if not more, and I saw several books that I would emphatically disrecommend to anyone who asked about them. The science fiction seems to emphasise "classic" over "entertaining"—the only thing on that side that I would feel happy recommending is the Bujold—and the fantasy isn't much better.
What was missing for you?
There were only a few disreccomnded items for me. There were more "this wasn't for me but it's very popular."
My strongest disrecommendation would be A Spell for Chameleon, because Anthony is a real creeper and while Chameleon itself is just mildly sexist, I'd be afraid of whoever I was talking to picking up Firefly on the assumption it would be more of the same. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant is also a strong absolute nope for me because the protagonist is an unrepentant rapist (also a self-absorbed whiner, IIRC—just not a fun person to spend hundreds of pages with). Several other books on the chart I would class as "popular but lousy" and two as outright boring. Some others I would only recommend to certain people, or with caveats.
One thing that there isn't a lot of here is racial or cultural diversity—all of the authors whose backgrounds I know are white people from the US, the UK, or Canada. Even if we assume this was issued 10+ years ago, I'd expect to see Samuel R. Delaney and possibly Octavia Butler over on the SF side. For an up-to-date chart, I'd expect to see Cixin Liu (I didn't like The Three-Body Problem, but it's substantial enough that I'd have no issues recommending it), Yoon Ha Lee, and possibly Nnedi Okrafor on the SF side, and N.K. Jemisen and maybe Zen Cho on the fantasy side. Are only white people expected to ask for recommendations?
The other thing I noticed about the SF side of the chart is that there's very little there that I'd consider fun to read—too much old hard SF and dystopian fiction. It looks like a reading list for a university course on history of SF. Where's the Liaden Universe? Kirstein's The Steerswoman? Melissa Scott's Five-Twelvths of Heaven? James White's Sector General stories? All the other interesting and quirky books that are loved within the genre but were never bestsellers outside it? For that matter, if we're doing older hard SF, where are Hal Clement, Harry Harrison, and C.J. Cherryh? Anne Leckie's Ancillary trilogy should also be on any current version of this thing.
Now we get to the fantasy side. Notable missing stuff that I haven't already mentioned: anything by Naomi Naovik, Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor, Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy (Moon is conspicuously missing from both sides of the chart), Brust's Jhereg, P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk. (Twenty years ago, I would also have included Hughart's The Bridge of Birds, but that might get accusations of cultural appropriation leveled at it now.) I'd also double down on Bujold with Curse of Chalion rather than recommend Brian Sanderson twice—he's good, but not that good.
Instead of these authors and series, we get extruded fantasy product like Sword of Shannara, one of the most derivative fantasy novels I've ever read. Bleh. (I find it interesting that Lackey's Valdemar and Modesitt's Recluce novels are missing, although that's because they were popular at the same time as Brooks, Eddings, Feist, and Goodkind rather than because I would recommend them.)
All good points! Thank you for expanding.
Other disreccomnds: Terry Goodkind and David Weddings. Also Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, because their respective series are likely to remain unfinished. Joe Abercrombie's First Law might be a reasonable low fantasy substitute for ASOIAF.
There was also a lot of Neil Stephenson. I would recommend most of his work with caveats.
In addition to your missing list: where are the alternate histories? The Yiddish Policeman's Union seems like a good fit.
I haven't read Goodkind (a highschool friend warned me off, and the commentary on Usenet did so again a few years later) so I can't speak to how bad his work is. Eddings I wouldn't recommend to anyone over 16, I agree. He's the kind of author you age out of pretty fast.
In GRRM's case, I might recommend Fevre Dream—his older standalone novel about vampires on the 19th-century Mississippi—rather than aSoIaF.
I'm lost. How do I get to Hyperion?
Bottom middle, you'd rather not choose only sci-fi or only fantasy branch.
Big eyebrow raise at having Piers Anthony on there. Loved his books as a teen but looking back they are just gross. The Xanth books are relatively tame compared to some of his stuff but I would still never recommend them.
I love that Jonathan Strange is on there though, what a fantastic book.
Anything related to the fantasy genre
