Your Favourite SF & Fantasy Series

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Given some of the stories I've heard about publishing, I can't help wondering whether they let the rights lapse because they'd forgotten they had them.

Probably, and just as well, to my mind. An organization that isn't doing anything with a work shouldn't be allowed to hang onto the rights and prevent others from doing something with it, in my opinion.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Probably, and just as well, to my mind. An organization that isn't doing anything with a work shouldn't be allowed to hang onto the rights and prevent others from doing something with it, in my opinion.

Ace had previously republished a lot of Piper's work, save the collaborations with John J. Macguire.

I was hoping to see returns to print, like a new anthology edition of the Fuzzy books. (The SFBC hardcover I have doesn't include _Fuzzies and Other People_, because that hadn't re-surfaced at the time the book was issued.)

Some years ago, I was at a talk given by Dave Hartwell, who is a Senior Editor at Tor these days. At the time, he was consulting for the Signet imprint of NAL, helping revise their SF line. He described it taking 7 months simply to find out what all they had under contract, and another 5 to cross I's, dot T's, and get contracts renewed. At that, they lost properties because they'd forgotten they had the rights but the author or author's agent hadn't, and promptly sent a letter asking that the rights be reverted as soon as they lapsed.

I haven't seen a lot that indicates publishing has gotten any better in the intervening years.
______
Dennis

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's a new one on me - what are they about, Jon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollows_(series)

There are maybe some spoilers there.

[Moe The Cat]

Originally Posted by WDecraene

Richard Morgan (the Kovacs novels)

I agree with you completely on Richard K. Morgan's Kovacs series.

[haridasi]

Robin Hobb - All the triologies are great !
Trudi Canavan - Magicians Guild
Mercedes Lackey - Valdemar series (which is as far as I've gotten so far, but I will continue reading)
Peter F. Hamilton - The Night's Dawn Triology
Terry Goodkind - Sword of Truth series

[Moe The Cat]

Has anyone mentioned James Alan Gardner's League Of Peoples series?

[BlackVoid]

The Snow Queen trilogy by Joan D. Vinge is very good.

[krighton]

if you like alternate history type stuff, William Forstchen (civil war ship gets sucked into a universe where cannibals use humans as cattle...

Patrick Rothfuss Name of the Wind (check out his blog, search rothfuss blog on google, good stuff)

Scott Lynch Lies of Locke Lamora

George R R Martin

Steven Erikson

[bakerjw]

Larry Niven - all of the Ringworld books. I've reread them many times
Dan Simmons - The 4 book Hyperion set. Although I can never read Rise of Endymion again.

[MoSo]

Originally Posted by krighton

Patrick Rothfuss Name of the Wind (check out his blog, search rothfuss blog on google, good stuff)

I thought I once saw Name of the Wind on one of the ebook sites (for around $20, which is why I passed on it at the time), but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone seen it?

Likewise Simmons Hyperion?

[seajewel]

I have to add Mistborn from Brandon Sanderson, and I'm also recently reading Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci series and it is very very good as well. I keep falling in love with characters in the Chrestomanci series, her characterization is that good. Previous recommendation of A Song of Ice and Fire still stands, of course.

[AlexBell]

Lois McMaster Bujold's SF Vorkosigan series has already had a mention, and I second that.

And I like her two fantasy series - Curse of Chalion et al and the Sharing Knife (Beguilement, Legacy, Passages) even more.

Regards, Alex

[cush]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

So, most favories would be:

Terry Brooks
Swords of Shannara series
Magic Kindom of Landover series (on of my first Fantasy reads)

David Eddings
The Belgariad

Asimov's Robot Series
(still have foundation on the book shelf to read, believe it or not)

Other great ones...

Harry Potter (yes, I really enjoyed it)
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien of course)
Voyage of Jerle Shannara (Brooks)
Sword of Truth (Goodkind, some later ones not as good as the first 4)
Star Trek: The Captian's Table (mini sub-series)
The Mallorean (Eddings)

BOb

The Belgariad is one of my all time favorites. Researching the series' availability in Kindle format once again leads to frustration with the series' publisher (Del Rey) who have released the second volume but not the first!

What possesses these publishers to do this? Time and again publishers omit the first book or books in a series when releasing the digital versions. I can understand, somewhat, this happening when a new title in a series has just been released and they want to capture digital sales to those who have read the previous titles in paper books but this series has been long in print.

Wouldn't you suppose that the publisher would realize that those starting the series now, who most probably are new to Eddings and the Belgariad and have never read the paper book versions might want to start at the beginning? Duh!

This, of course, is not Amazon's fault. Perhaps the ability to click on the Kindle request "button" will have an impact on this problem.

[nekokami]

The most optimistic interpretation I can think of is that the publishers are all planning to jump onto the Baen first-taste-is-free bandwagon, so the first books aren't for sale because they're going to be given away, but the plans are a little slow getting started.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nekokami

The most optimistic interpretation I can think of is that the publishers are all planning to jump onto the Baen first-taste-is-free bandwagon, so the first books aren't for sale because they're going to be given away, but the plans are a little slow getting started.

We can hope...

Ballantine/DelRey are a unit of the Random House Publishing Group, which includes Ballantine Books, Ballantine Reader's Circle, Del Rey, Fawcett, Ivy, Modern Library, One World, Presidio Press, Random House, Random House Trade Paperbacks, and Villard.

Random House is in turn a unit of Bertelsmann, which is active in an assortment of media areas:

* RTL Group, Europe's biggest broadcaster
* Gruner + Jahr (a magazine publisher, the biggest in Europe)[4]
* Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG)
* Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher
* Direct Group, the world's largest book and music club group
* Arvato AG, an international media and communications service provider

(The Direct Group includes US book club operations like the Science Fiction Book Club)

My impression is that Random House (and Bertelsmann in turn) is one of the publishers that simply doesn't get it in regards to ebooks.
______
Dennis