I’m a huge fan of Janny Wurts and though Wars of Light and Shadow has one book remaining (out of 11), she’s nearly done with final edits. Song of the Mysteries should be out late next year.
In my opinion, this is is one of the greatest epic fantasy series’ ever written. Two of the volumes I consider top five books I’ve ever read. And multiple reads are a gift since you can see just how carefully she crafted every scene and character.
And older fantasy readers that skipped her works in the past are circling back to it and reporting being shocked. They thought they’d read every great fantasy epic.
But here comes Janny with an eleven book masterpiece.
They were planning on doing this, because Ty Franck was particularly driven to preserve the character diversity of the books. Apparently the two book writers had to actually fight pretty hard to achieve this—at least initially—because the casting team kept telling them that “looks cannot act”. Ty had to constantly make counterexamples by specifically searching for amazing actors from the same ethnicity as the book character, contrary to what the casting team had recommended. Eventually, the casting team finally got the memo, and changed their methods to fit the goals of the show, because it turns out that people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds can actually act quite excellently!
However, one major and persistent problem that allegedly kept coming up (especially with extras) was that a lot of tall people they approached had allegedly assumed it was a casting call for pornography, and the casting team wasn’t sure how to elevator-pitch their show to potential Belter extras, while also avoiding this misinterpretation.
I say “allegedly” because I can’t tell if this was a joke or not. However, this sort of misunderstanding isn’t exactly uncommon, mostly from past experiences I’ve heard from others.
So, the next issue they had was potentially having only the lead characters be super tall, while all the extras were average. This was apparently a major problem for the studio (dunno why), so the compromise they landed on was representing Belters with a specific hairstyle instead, and just casting really tall people as extreme stereotype cases.
The fact that it took 6 fracking years for a Dance of Dragons to come out, and then the way the tv series ended just soured me on Song of Ice and Fire, and the whole Winds of Winter debacle… Don’t get me started.
I haven’t even read the books, because I didn’t want to get hooked and then end up without any closure because the great bearded glacier decided to procrastinate until the end.
This is also the reason why I haven’t read the Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfus. Speaking of which, it doesn’t surprise me that the Doors of Stone didn’t come out in July. God, I’m glad I don’t get paid to write; my chronic procrastination disorder is bad enough.
Belated thought, sparked by you mentioning Shirley Jackson: have you read Helen Oyeyemi? Her early stuff is very Jackson-ish – White is For Witching is practically We Have Always Lived in the Castle fanfic (which is no bad thing by my lights) – and since then has been mining fairy tales as well, to productive results (Boy, Snow, Bird is my favorite of these). She’s got a great book of short fiction, too, which is not always my favorite but I think works well for her style; that one is What’s Not Yours is Not Yours.
As I was reading through I was watching for this recommendation. Definitely a fantastic series, sucks the hope from your bone marrow. Also, the original series was written in Chinese and then translated, so it avoids many western tropes and stereotypes by, well, not being western.
In the vein of the standalone recommendations, I would suggest Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines Trilogy (TV show was meh.).
And finally, if you haven’t read Hugh Howey’s Silo Series, you are being pointlessly cruel to yourself.
Not really my thing, usually, but I liked these a lot. I read these directly after the Three Body Problem trilogy, and they were a good antidote for the heavy gloom.
Just saw this thread again. Oh my god Recursion is AMAZING and would make a great movie. I just love the final bit with the hundreds of nuclear wars breaking out, and just repeated realisation that nothing has changed.