ADVANCED FANTASY AND SCI-FI BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

hi guys so today's video is going to be about some advanced fantasy series i recently did a video about some adult fantasy that is great if you are typically a young adult fantasy reader or if you haven't read fantasy in a while or maybe you're a beginner to the genre i have some recommendations and this is essentially the opposite of that i think that it's not really a matter of these books are so incredibly difficult and you have to be really smart to read them or anything like that but i would not necessarily recommend these to people as their first entry into fantasy however if you just want to dive into the deep end then you have a little bit more information about these books and you can do that if you so choose as usual i always am comfortable talking about books even if i didn't love them myself and that is true of the first series on this list and that would be malazzan book of the fallen by stephen erickson i read the first two books in the series there are a total of 10 along with some other ones that go with it and this is a series that a lot of people will say the author himself will say it's not necessarily delivered to you in a typical way meaning most fantasy worlds it's very obvious that it's different from our own and the authors take great care to introducing you to this world and they try to do it in a way that is organic they try to do it in a way where you're not overwhelmed and they don't want to just throw stuff at you that's not really what this series does you just are dropped into the middle of a very well realized well-fleshed out world that has so much to it so many characters so much with the politics a lot to do with war different cultures different places so you sometimes from one book to the next are being introduced to completely different characters magic the rules and limitations that a lot of times we crave with adult fantasy this one is just like here this person did this thing you don't really know what's going on and you slowly start to get bits and pieces here and there it leaves you not really knowing what is possible within this world you also have lots of god's goddesses and figures that you're wondering wait are these people human are these creatures what's who's this and you just that's kind of the whole experience what's this who's this where am i that's a lot of this series and the fans of this they love the challenge it's like going for a hike and a lot of people feel like once you get to the top meaning once you've read the entire series you get to fully experience everything but a lot of people really love that ascent up the mountain as well but for a lot of people that ascent to get to that view is not worth it and that's okay it's okay it is a big commitment a lot of people also compare it to a puzzle where you're getting parts of the puzzle at a time and then once you get all of it you put it together and you see everything together which in theory sounds so cool but i feel toward the series the way i feel about atonal music the concept of atonal music sounds really cool and then i hear it and i'm like just give me some tchaikovsky i want the thing that my ears like and are used to and is really pleasant and even though that other thing is really unique is maybe not for everybody next on the list we have the stormlight archive series by brandon sanderson each one of these books is over a thousand pages most you're probably very familiar with what the store my archive is this one is much easier to get into as far as being introduced to concepts to the magic it's extremely character driven and in a way that can actually make this one a little bit more difficult to get into than some of the other sanderson works out there by that i mean we have often with sanderson's works a huge character focus but with storm my archive the world is very big and the politics there's a lot to them and there's a lot to the magic there's a lot to the discovery the rediscovery of magic there's a lot to other cultures and there are some other figures that are god-like or possibly gods themselves and our characters are slowly starting to discover all of these things and you're discovering those things alongside them but the characters themselves and the time with the characters it's a very slow build each one of the books focuses in on a single character you get their whole backstory but i do feel like sanderson does kind of introduce you to everything in a way that is that you can digest when you first start stormlight you're gonna be pretty out of a fish out of water you're gonna get all these things at the beginning so many different characters so much is going on you're not gonna have any idea what's going on and then you start to get it and it's so good the characters are so they just feel so real the mental health rep in the store my archive is also amazing the world itself he thinks through the flora the fauna the weather the way buildings are built to accommodate the fact they have these constant hurricane crazy natural disasters that come through and sweep through the land they just he thinks through basically everything to the point where after a while it just feels like like another country that you're learning about that actually does exist because there's just so much to it there's so much history their beliefs their customs just it's so well realized but it takes a while next up we have wheel of time by robert jordan this one a lot of it has to do with its length there are 14 books in the series they're pretty long books and it is a slightly older series so the writing style is maybe not as accessible as you would get with something like brandon sanderson although branson sanderson did finish the series off i read the first four books in this series a lot of fans feel if you are gonna start it you gotta read at least the first four because once you get to the fourth you're not gonna wanna stop i apparently am the exception because i got to the fourth and i'm like this solidifies that i don't want to keep going but hopefully you will feel very different if you do pick it up the first one you're probably going to want to at least read past that one the first one it's a little bit more tropey it's a little bit more of what we're accustomed to what we've seen very often as a result it actually makes it a little bit on the easier side when it comes to some of the books on this list the basics of the magic are also pretty easy to understand you have some magic that women can use and that magic's good and then you have some magic guys can use and that magic is bad and any guy that has the ability to channel eventually goes crazy and has the potential to kill lots of people on accident but the chosen one is supposed to end up being a fella so we're kind of stuck in the situation like well this could either be somebody who goes crazy and hurts a lot of people or it could be the person to save us all what do we do and i really loved that setup that dilemma it seems generic at first the good and bad you have kind of ultimate evil and then the chosen one who's supposed to save everyone but then there's like a hierarchy of evil and there's a lot of complexity to the magic and the world and the relationships between men and women but the thing that makes it challenging not only is the length of the series but you will start to get a lot of different characters you will go to a lot of different places even like i said i only read the first four but you start to see it as you're reading those first four like oh okay this is gonna be a whole epic journey there's kind of a joke within the wheel of time community about how many named characters there are and on top of that it does kind of fall into that fantasy stereotype of having a lot of really crazy names names that are spelled really weird with lots of apostrophes so even though there are elements to this that make it easy to start it is quite the commitment if you plan on continuing the next book on this list i feel like in a strange way i could have also said that this book is good for beginners because there are different elements to this book and that would be sunlit ascends by josiah bancroft the thing that would make it kind of easy for some people is this has a very literary feel if you read a lot of literary fiction then i think this would be a great book for you to start your fantasy journey on but if you're if you're used to why a fantasy or if you're somebody who reads a lot of contemporary i don't know that this is the best one to get into it's weird when i did my dedicated review for it i kind of teased myself about the amount of times that i said the book was weird apparently the series just continues to get even weirder the pros it's very accessible and it's quite elegant as the story progresses i feel like the prose gets better but a lot of it feels my friend read it recently and felt like it was alice in wonderland but for grown-ups and kind of on drugs even more so than just alice in wonderland is it's very bizarre it follows a character who loses his wife at the tower of babel and then is ascending the tower and each of the levels is different and is strange in their own way and just so much about the story feels very metaphorical so the reason i have it on here is because i think you have to take your time with this one and not necessarily literally you have to read it slow but it's not a page turner action-packed it's kind of a quieter book and it's really good but if you want to really experience the fun of fantasy this one it's a little more it's both formal and weird and cheeky and not taking itself too seriously it's a very weird book might not be the best one to start with but maybe it is depending on your tastes next up we have ninth rain by jen williams this one i had to put it on this list because every time i go to talk about this book which by the way i think is fantastic and extremely underrated and i want way more people to read it but every time i talk about it it just sounds like somebody took a bunch of random concepts from a bunch of other fantasy books and then threw them all together and melted them together in a pod or made a quilt out of all these random patches of fantasy because it's like okay well here's this sort of vampire-like group of people that are also somewhat elven-like and then here's a magic tree they eat the sap they eat the sap of this tree that's how they get their abilities of immortality basically but then also there's like these weird abandoned sites of technology where these ghost-like spirits hang around and they can turn you inside out basically so it's real dangerous and also i guess there used to be alien invasions i don't know it's so weird but every time every time i'm like man i swear this book is good but it sounds so weird so much of the book is you figuring out what the heck is going on i do think the author writes it in a way that is very engaging i think the characters are fun i think the story itself is a lot of fun but if you are not used to fantasy all these different things can be a little difficult to keep track of so i would say go for it if it sounds cool to you just know you might have to take a step and be like wait i had to tab a part where i was like okay i'm tabbing this with a special certain color because i'm like this is where it explains stuff right here and i need to reference this occasionally because i'm probably gonna forget and it's i i just it's i need almost to take notes and be like okay wait okay so this is what these things are this is what these people are this is why these people don't like these people but it's so good next up we have a science fiction book i feel like people who really like classic sci-fi are gonna be like what this is like the best i would highly recommend this to everyone and that's fine but that would be hyperion by dan simmons it is more classic sci-fi and i find that classic sci-fi is much more difficult for people nowadays to get into i do think science fiction it examines what it is to be a person and what is life it examines those sorts of things in a way that i think is perhaps more philosophical on average than maybe what you see in fantasy not always but in this one in hyperion i feel like this one is delivered in an interesting way basically you have a bunch of individuals who get their own story as to why they're going to a certain place and the each story is told in a format that is reminiscent of a different genre or a different means of storytelling one of them is a bunch of journal entries that one's really weird and kind of creepy one of them is more like an action adventure type sci-fi one of them is more like a soldier's account of something in general all them have a very different way of telling their own story and they're all connected because they're all going to the same place and if that sounds really cool to you i would definitely pick it up but it is a more dense writing style than i think you find with a lot of other modern science fiction and fantasy and for that alone it might not be the easiest one to jump into the last one on this list perhaps a lot of you will disagree but that would be the first law trilogy by joe abercrombie the reason that i think it's not the easiest one to pick up first is because it is so incredibly character driven that if you aren't used to fantasy i think you're going to want a little bit more explanation a little bit more motivations from the characters to have a clearer picture of where you're going because you're not really going anywhere you just follow these characters around one of which is a torturer one of them is just such a tool bag one of them is a chick that's introduced way later in the book that's got a lot of rage issues and wants revenge and then the other one is this guy who's like i'm a really bad person i'm a northerner and then you're like are you a bad person you kind of seem like a big teddy bear and then you find out like oh maybe you are i don't know there's some you got an interesting past here so you just follow these characters as they're doing stuff and they're really fun to follow it takes a while though because you don't know them at first so you have to get to know these characters and there's not i would say much else initially that pulls you in so you just kind of have to wait until you're entertained by these people and you know them well enough to be curious about what's going on and then it starts to move forward i think really really well and after that it's a lot of fun but it takes a while and i think you just have to have some patience that's it for some advanced adult science fiction and fantasy i'm very curious what are some books that you think are great that you absolutely love but wouldn't necessarily recommend somebody who's just getting into it if you are interested in seeing the one from before that is for newbies feel free to jump over to that one i'll have it linked you can leave your recommendations for that and if you want to see some why a books that are good for people who typically read adult fantasy i'll have that linked as well but anyway thanks so much for watching i hope you all have a lovely rest of your day and i'll see you later bye

Channel: Elliot Brooks

Views: 26,083

Rating: 4.9494681 out of 5

Keywords: elliot brooks, elliot, brooks, booktube, booktuber, fantasy, beginner to advanced fantasy, advanced fantasy, advanced fantasy books, difficult fantasy books, advanced sff, malazan, gardens of the moon, malazan book of the fallen, stormlight archive, brandon sanderson, way of kings, cosmere, senlin ascends, ninth rain, hyperion, wheel of time, first law, joe abercrombie, first law trilogy, adult fantasy book recommendations, beginner to advanced fantasy books

Id: WOym-YP51qc

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2021