The 10 Best SFF Series? 2) Fantasy

Continuing on from the SF series, now Fantasy:

Ben Aaronovitch: Rivers of London

Magic has faded since the great deeds of WWII, but one British wizard is still active, and he's about to get an apprentice. Very junior police constable Peter Grant isn't too surprised to get stuck with minding a crime-scene, but the ghost is a surprise, and DCI Thomas Nightingale, last wizard on the books of the Metropolitan Police is possibly moreso. So Peter finds himself with a new assignment, a new boss, and a whole new set of crimes to contemplate. I really like these for their feel for multi-cultural Britain - Peter's parents are West African, and the goddess of the Thames and her family of tributaries have similar origins, leading to occasional tensions with the original powers of the river. The other thing that really impresses me is the police procedural aspect, Aaronovitch gets this note perfect. I'm more troubled by the plot around Peter's friend and colleague Leslie, who is badly injured in the first book. I called what he was going to do with her several books in advance, and I'm annoyed that I was right.  I'm a little behind on reading these, so maybe it's time to catch up.

Patricia Briggs: Mercy Thompson series

With a degree in history it was either teach, sling hamburgers, or fix cars. Mercy chose fixing cars. Also annoying werewolves and pissing off vampires. She says she just wants a quiet life, but she's constitutionally incapable of not trying to fix problems, and living next door to the really hot werewolf Alpha doesn't help keep her out of things. She actually did make a serious try at staying out of supernatural affairs, but when you've been raised by the king of the werewolves, and it turns out your father was that Coyote, stuff's gonna happen. And if your major talent is turning into a 20lb coyote, you're going to get hurt some of the time. I like these a lot, Mercy's a protagonist with an overdeveloped sense of duty, but Briggs doesn't shy away from the fact she's going up against protagonists who are a lot more dangerous than she is (admittedly she has invoked a deus ex machina fix at least once, but Coyote's going to cheat, there's no surprise in that).

Lois McMaster Bujold: World of the Five Gods

It started as a partial re-telling of the Reconquista, with two novels featuring damaged and world-weary protagonists finding themselves tools of the world's five familial gods - The Lady of Spring, The Lady of Summer, the Son of Autumn, the Father of Winter, and the Bastard, the God of everything left over, then wandered back a few hundred years to the more anglic Weald, where the hurts of an ancient battle needed healing of the efforts of the soul-manipulating shamen, then split the difference with the tales of a demon-bearing priest of the Bastard's Order who is sometimes a surgeon, sometimes a detective, and sometimes a spy. It's an interesting theology, and the Bastard is a particularly interesting god. but I'm less certain about a geography that casts the Muslim-analogues as the bad guys, though that's really only  a feature of the first two books.

C J Cherryh: Fortress series

Although mainly known as an SF writer, Cherryh has written a lot of really good fantasy over the years, often delving back to myth, whether Celtic as in Arafel's Saga, or Slavic as in the Rusalka series (which she's apparently revised and re-released), or China in the almost non-fantasy The Paladin. But the Fortress series seems to be a myth of her own. Western influenced, surely, but it almost seems to owe as much to the ruined pseudo-medieval civilizations of her SFnal Book of Morgaine. Into the slumbering kingdom of the Marhanen stumbles Tristen, the amnesiac, confused tool of Mauryl the wizard, once Mauryl Kingmaker, one last cast of the dice to turn back the fall of man. But Tristen may be more than he seems, and less human than he looks.

Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood.

Nicola Griffith just came up with the perfect description for Mythago Wood and the sub-genre it spawned: English landscape fantasy. The eponymous wood is an area where the myth of the greenwood, and more, has persisted, where a wrong turn can find you caught amidst the myth-imagos and the narrative force of their stories. So long since I read them, but so impressive.

Terry Pratchett: The Discworld

If Pratchett had written mainstream, would he have been even better feted? Or was his success a feature of the freedom that fantasy gave him to use it as a mirror on the world, and Pratchett clearly cared deeply for the world around him. You just need to look at books like Jingo, with its savage excoriation of war waged for no better reason than national honour, or at his repeated return in the Watch books to the theme of equality, the Watch's net cast ever wider. While others will argue for Granny Weatherwax, for me, Captain, later Commander, Vimes is his greatest creation, transcending the drunken copper archetype to become an incarnation of justice (if occasionally thwarted, redirected, or downright having his string pulled by Lord Vetinari, the Patrician).

Jennifer Roberson: Sword-Dancer/Tiger and Del novels

These did something different when fantasy was largely stuck in a Medieval European rut, going for something much more sandy - I hesitate to say Arabian influenced, because I don't think there was that much of it, most of the influence was probably Western Arabian cliches. But within that caveat these were really well done. Tiger is gutter-trash who got lucky enough to find a teacher and now is at the top of his art, the elite sword-dancers who fight bouts for money, whether from the betting in the crowd, or for prize pots offered by local potentates. And then he meets Del, who is two things that are unheard of in the desert - a blonde, and a female sword-dancer.  This is the stereotypical opposites attract, when they aren't fighting. Tiger thought he was content with his life, but Del's running from something, and he's going to go with her, at least until they can work out which of them is actually the better Sword-dancer. It's long enough since I read them that I'm grasping for the overall arc, though I think there really two that segue from one to the other, first who and what Del is running from, and then who and where Tiger came from. But these are books where the overall arc sits largely in the background, and it's the immediate story, and their relationship, that dominates.

Michael Scott Rohan: The Spiral Trilogy

I'd thematically link Scott Rohan's Spiral to Holdstock's Mythago Wood. Both offer landscapes in which you can slip from the contemporary world into a more myth-ridden one, but Scott Rohan's trilogy (plus one semi-connected standalone), has a single core character in import-export exec Steve Fisher, wavering between becoming just one more faceless city slicker, and a hero out of myth. The settings for the three books wander - the mythic Caribbean, with pirates and zombies; Bali, with monkey gods and puppet-shows; and finally back to Europe, and the Grail. It's a pity illness meant Scott Rohan, who died last month, never really wrote much more after these.

Charles Stross: The Laundry Files

All Bob Howard wanted to do was some fancy computational hacking for his PhD, instead he nearly landscaped Wolverhampton and found himself shanghaied by the Laundry, formerly Department Q of the Special Operations Executive, and Britain's last line of defence against things that go bump in the eternal darkness of non-linear dimensions. You have to give Stross every credit for these. He's taken what could have been a one-shot joke, a hacker who ends up hacking demons, and run it right through to the logical conclusions. Other people might talk about their equivalent of Case Nightmare Green, when the Stars are Right and Cthonic deities walk the Earth, Stross hasn't just trailed it, he's taken us there. And along the way he's given us brilliant pastiches of a bunch of spy novel standards, and then started in on the fantasy standards - Stross's elves are possibly even nastier than Pratchett's! (YesYes!!! says the All Highest). They're still theoretically humorous, but it's the kind of grim, situational humour you get from protagonists who've decided they're not having children, because they know what's coming.

JRR Tolkein: The Lord of the Rings

Nuff said! This is where we came from, and it did it better than 99% of the stuff that came after.