photo by: Hadnagy Photography, Butte Montana

Patricia Briggs lives in Washington (the state) with her husband, children, and a small herd of horses.  She hates biographies, but loves writing interesting stories.

I have a few different categories for authors I read.  There are some who have one or two good stories, but never seem to produce anything else worth reading.  There are others who come up with one good setting or world that I like, but none of their other settings strike the same chord.  For both of these groups, I’ll read the synopsis on the back of the book or inside the dust jacket and sometimes try out the first chapter before deciding whether or not I want to buy it.  Then there is the third group which includes Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs.  If I see a new book of theirs on the shelf, I buy it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a new installment in a series or something brand new.  I know it’ll be good.

Her first book was Masques, published in December of 1993 by Ace.  It was the first book she attempted and according to her site, she’s planning to revisit the novel with a sequel in order to do the characters justice.

Patty followed her first book with two more set in the same world of Sianim: Steal the Dragon in November 1995 and When Demons Walk in June 1998.  Each book is a self-contained story with an independent cast of characters featuring a strong female lead.  Patty’s characters in each are well-written and complicated.  The plot often contains surprises, but the actions and words of the characters are never out of place with their background or motivation.

Patty’s third book The Hob’s Bargain was published in March 2001, and was set in a different world where magic had been banished but was slowly returning.  Again featuring a strong female, she also added the Hob as a non-human main character viewpoint that’s both human and alien.

Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood from March 2002 and January 2003 mark two changes in Patricia’s style, her first duology and her first male lead.  These books follow the adventures of Ward of Hurog whose father dies soon into the book and must take over his kingdom.  Simple except that he’s been pretending idiocy since a beating his father gave him as a child.

Her next two books were Raven’s Shadow and Raven’s Strike in 2004 and 2005.  Another duology set in their own unique world, these books follow Seraph a Raven mage and among the last of the Travelers and Tier as retired soldier in their struggles against a power called the Shadowed that’s trying to wake up an ancient dark god.

This brings us to February 2006 when Moon Called was published.  This is the first book in the Mercy Thompson series about a Skinwalker, a Native American coyote shape shifter, and mechanic living in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State.  This series is set in the modern day but one where there are vampires, werewolves, and witches, and where the Fae Folk have “come-out” to the world at large and are living on reservations.  Moon Called has been followed by three more books in the series, so far, Blood Bound, Iron Kissed, and Bone Crossed.  The series deals with Mercy’s life and adventures in Tri-Cities as well as her relationships with the local werewolf pack Alpha and her friends Zee the gremlin and Stefan the vampire.  Each book in the series is a separate and self-contained plot, but most of the characters do have recurring roles in each book.  I’ve been especially impressed with how the Fae, Vampire, and Werewolf cultures are built around a nice mix of standard mythology and unique twists.  According to Patty’s website, Ace has contracted for a total of seven novels so we can expect at least three more great books.

In 2008, Patty published Cry Wolf which starts a new series entitled Alpha and Omega which is set in the same world as the Mercy Thompson series but focuses on werewolves, specifically a wolf named Charles who is from the pack which fostered Mercy and a new character named Anna, who is a werewolf from Chicago.  The series title comes from the names for special members of a werewolf pack.  The Alpha is the pack leader, not just the strongest wolf, but the one with the most dominant personality.  The Omega is the opposite from the Alpha; this is the most submissive wolf in the pack.  Where the Alpha is the leader, the Omega role is just as important because an Omega is capable of calming a werewolf who’s lost control.  Cry Wolf is a great read and interesting both for the plot involved as well as the more detailed view of the werewolf culture that Patty developed in the Mercy Thompson series.  The second book in the series is Hunting Ground and is due out in August of 2009, and she’s mentioned on here website that a third book is planned as well.

I found Patricia Briggs by accident.  I had picked up the first few Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher and been surprised at how much I’d enjoyed them, previously I’d always preferred Tolkien-style fantasy.  I bought Moon Called based on an Amazon recommendation and loved the book so much that after I caught up on the series I went back an read her previous works.

If you like deep and convincing characters, lifelike settings, and surprising plots I can’t recommend a better author.  Also head on over to http://www.patriciabriggs.com where you can see sample chapters from her novels, author’s comments, an interesting story about making silver bullets, forums, and more.

Fast forwarding a few years Jim had made a number of attempts to break into the traditional fantasy genre. During these attempts he took some writing classes and in one of these he wrote the first book in The Dresden Files which was originally titled Semiautomagic. As an exercise! Prompted by his teacher and after much casting about for a publisher, we now have a monster of a series on our hands. Not one to forget his dreams though, Jim has also penned a traditional fantasy series; The Codex Alera.

The Dresden Files, for those of you who do not know, are an ongoing series about a professional wizard in modern-day Chicago. They came about from a fusion of the hard boiled detective genre and regular fantasy, when working on an exercise in a writing class. Since then they’ve been adapted into a television series, audio books, an upcoming rpg and two graphic novels. This reminds me, I really must buy the second. The Dresden Files book 12 “Changes” is slated for release in April of next year.

One new novel every year isn’t enough for some, and thankfully at the moment we actually get two. December sees the launch of First Lords Fury, Book 6 in the Codex Alera series. The Codex Alera follows the adventures and life of Tavi. From his simple life as an apprentice Shepard to … well it’s somewhat given away by the title. All in all a very enjoyable fantasy series.

Now then, time for a suggestion. If you fancy swords and sorcery, Codex Alera is best read in order, so go and grab a copy of Furies of Calderon. As for Harry Dresden, if you want a novel (sorry, couldn’t resist) way of breaking into the series, Storm Front is available as a paperback, an audio book and a brand spanking new comic.

C.S. Friedman

C.S. Friedman was born in 1957 and soon proved to be a precocious child, reading and writing well above her age level. She discovered Isaac Asimov’s writing at the tender age of twelve (and if you are familiar with Asimov, you know he’s well capable of blowing the mind of adept adults…you can imagine the effect on a twelve-year-old), and decided that science fiction was the ultimate literature. (She changed her mind at some point to include fantasy, which I will get to in good time.)

Before publishing her first novel, In Conquest Born, Friedman studied costume design and earned an MFA in that skill from the University of Georgia. She also learned the joy of groups like SCA (The Society for Creative Anachronisms) and the League of Renaissance Swordsmen. She enjoyed creating and wearing period costume and found theater and costume design a natural fit.

During all of this, she also managed to build a considerable amount of background material which she used to write her first novel about the societies of the Braxi and Azeans. This first book, In Conquest Born, was published in 1986 and kicked off a strange and fertile career.

The Cold Fire trilogy followed In Conquest Born. Technically, it’s a sci-fi story because it takes place on a planet colonized by humans. In practice, however, it is largely a fantasy series as the forces of the planet force the humans into a more medieval existence, and they are capable of using those same fae forces like magic. This story is also the first glimmer of Friedman’s interest in the idea that the use of magic can eat at the minds and souls of its users. Many people were initially drawn to Friedman through this series, not In Conquest Born, and it has a devoted following. I was enthralled with In Conquest born myself (thanks to the newsletter, Xignals, published by Waldenbooks at the time, and Michael Whalen’s fantastic cover art), and the Cold Fire series kind of turned me off. I never read further than the first book. But the Cold Fire series is definitely an epic story. If you enjoy it, you will find yourself in the company of a core of enthusiastic fans.

Several science fiction books later and we find Friedman’s latest foray into fantasy published in 2007. Feast of Souls once again revisits the idea that magic can, and does, have a serious consequence: witches burn away the energy of their own souls to practice magic. This idea is the foundation of the story, but the world Friedman builds has many layers, and through Feast and the second book, Wings of Wrath, she puts together a cast of deep, complex characters–some of which she is not afraid to kill–and introduces us to a rich land with an engaging history.

Although I have not read everything of hers, I can say that just about any book would be a fine place to start in her bibliography. As it’s the newest series and also my current favorite of hers, I would suggest the new Magister Series of Feast of Souls and Wings of Wrath. She writes deep, thick books at a ponderous production rate, but with a twenty-five year backlog of books, you’ll have a lot to digest.

When writing this first sentence I checked out Robert Jordan’s biography to see when he was born, so that I could scare you by drawing some parallels between unfinished epic fantasy series and old age. Uncanny as it might seem, Jordan and Martin were born on the same year, with only one month between them. Jordan, however, has already unfortunately passed away, and although his epic series The Wheel of Time is being finished by Brandon Sanderson, I guess I’m not the only one to think that it’s just not the same.

So fans of Ice and Fire ought to be slightly concerned, because Martin has become notorious for delaying the books. Although it was only two years delay between the first three books it was five years between the third and fourth, and the delay between the fourth and fifth is to be of the same span (four years so far). The books are very large – seven hundred up to a thousand pages – but readers become more and more frustrated with each delay, and the prospect of waiting five years between the last books (the series is planned to be seven books) is not enjoyable.

Up until recently my world of George R.R. Martin consisted of Ice and Fire, and only Ice and Fire. So he had written some other stuff, but that was [cue twitching eyebrows and a sneer] science-fiction. Or so I had heard. Luckily I came across a book with Martin’s name on it – called Dreamsongs – which included the short story Hedge Knight that takes place before the Ice and Fire books. It was the only reason I picked up the book, even though Hedge Knight is only a fifty page story of a book that is twelve hundred pages. Silly, I know.

The book is a collection of selected short stories, novelettes and novellas, with some commentary in between where Martin explains what happened in his life. What becomes clear is that Martin isn’t afraid to let personal emotions influence his writing and a lot of the mood in stories is explained by what happened in Martins life at the time of the writing. It’s an interesting behind-the-scenes tour of a writer’s mind as he leaps from superheroes to science-fiction to horror to TV scripts to fantasy, and mixes of all those. Martin shows an incredible talent to tell a deep and intriguing story no matter what the setting might be – the “furniture rule” as he calls it.

Another of Martin’s rules is to “never throw anything away”. Although it make sense never to throw away something you worked on but could never finish, it make less sense to keep something so bad that it would never be published. Like the quite dull story The Fortress which tells the fall of the Swedish fortress Sveaborg in 1808. Or so I thought, until I later in the volume came across The Siege. It was the exact same story, with the exact same characters, but with just one twist: mutated time-travelling Americans journeyed back in time from a war-torn world to stop the Soviet before it was even created. It was a brilliant story that really shows the kind of imagination that Martin has. And the rule to never throw anything away suddenly makes so much sense.

The volume is full of fantastic stories like the Hugo and Nebula Award winning horror/science-fiction story Sandkings (and I don’t even like horror), or the incredible deep and tragic A Song for Lya or… the list can go on for a while. But in the end it comes back to A Song of Ice and Fire, which has become the pinnacle for Martin. Maybe not the pinnacle of writing, because as much as it hurts to say, some of the stories in Dreamsongs slaps Ice and Fire around with a large trout any day. But it’s definitely the pinnacle for success, epic scale, and a step in the right direction for the fantasy genre.

Ice and Fire is a gruesome story in a world which resembles our own world in very unflattering way. It is ruthless, vulgar and dark world, filled with people capable of both the noblest and gruesome of acts. Gone are the cliché heroic warriors rescuing fair maidens. Here the heroic warriors get stabbed in the back by their best friends and the fair maidens raped before their families. It is an adult story, and Martin is not afraid to use vulgar words, detailed sex scenes, torture, severed limbs, incest, and all kinds of things that at first seems a bit over the edge, but a bit more understandable when you come to the realization that Martin is not exactly creating his own world as much as mirroring our own.

We see things from a lot of perspectives – even those that opposite each other’s – and just because someone is working against a main character does not mean he is any way evil, although the characters might see it that way; it’s all a matter of viewpoints. And speaking of viewpoints, there is a lot of them. In the four books there are a total of twenty-five characters points of view we get to follow. It creates a wide understanding of the happenings, on both sides of conflicts, so it’s hard to see anyone as purely good or evil.

If you want to start reading books by George R.R. Martin I recommend A Game of Thrones, the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire series. But when you are finished reading the series and are sitting and waiting for the next part like everyone else you should pick up Dreamsongs and be dazzled by the stories found there.

She has a Masters in Medieval History and spent a year in Bordeaux as a part of her work for that degree. In the time between that and writing fulltime, she worked as a high school teacher, model, waitress, technical editor (which shows up a bit in her inside knowledge of mainframe computers in one of her series), all-night liquor store clerk, and Shotokan karate instructor.

I first discovered her writing with The Silicon Mage. It’s actually the second book in a loose trilogy, but at the time, that didn’t stop me, and I’m rather glad it didn’t. Antryg Windrose, who is more or less the hero, although not the protagonist, has since made himself comfortably at home in my mind, and his crazily sane points of view creep out at the oddest of moments. Hambly writes brilliant characters, each with their own flaws and virtues, who spring off the page fully formed, and she’s not afraid to make their lives difficult. The Winterlands series are particularly notable for this, with prosaically named John and Jenny going through trauma after trauma, in search of what’s right for the world – or their little part of it – and what’s right for them.

Hambly is also a master world-builder. Stranger at the Wedding (also known as Sorcerer’s Ward), is a very fine example of this, arriving at a complete picture of a developed, complex world with never even the slightest indication of an infodump. And yet, it’s the characters that keep drawing me back to her work, and mean that the copy of Dog Wizard I own is the third one I’ve bought, having worn out the previous two.

I can’t recommend her writing highly enough, and choosing a book to recommend as the first to read has been really difficult. However, after much consideration, I’d say to start nearly where I did, but with the first book in that set: The Silent Tower.

You can read more about Barbara Hambly on her official website.