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Discussion on: Your favourite non-technical books?

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Austin S. Hemmelgarn •

A few of mine:

  • David Brin's Uplift Trilogies: A somewhat different take on one possible future, and one I personally feel is more realistic than most. Not all sapient species are humanoid, those that aren't aren't automatically hostile or misunderstood, most races can't really figure out what to make of humans, and you don't have as much of the 'everyone mostly gets along fine' crap that you see in a lot of Sci-Fi stories.
  • Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: Good British satire plus unconventional high fantasy makes for a great collection of stories. Part of what makes this series so interesting in my opinion is how well Pratchett handled multiple intertwined story-lines across so many books. Most of the books stand just fine on their own as an isolated story, but they also make regular callbacks to previous books in the chronology in universe, and even the isolated 'one-shot' stories that are only seen in one book feel like they fit properly with the rest of the series.
  • Isuna Hasekura's Spice & Wolf: This one's a Japanese light novel series. I like it quite simply because of how 'different' it is compared to most of the other things I've read. The story is set in a world heavily influenced by the European middle ages, but instead of the conventional high fantasy you normally would expect from such a setting, it follows the life of a traveling merchant and a supernatural being who becomes his traveling companion. The story taken as a whole is largely a romance, but that isn't always immediately evident while reading through any given book in the series. It's entertaining and sometimes quite witty, but manages to be far more 'down to earth' in a lot of cases than stereotypes of Japanese literature would suggest.
  • Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions: One of Anderson's less common high fantasy works, this one takes heavy inspiration from the historical 'Matter of France' (Charlemagenian legend). It's well written and an interesting story, and was also a significant influence on the development of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPG (trolls, paladins, and the original law versus chaos alignment system were all derived from this story).