Huh, I'd wondered what happened to Melanie Rawn. I was afraid it was something tragic. Her books were a definite guilty pleasure for me.

One of our closest family friends is an Oxford don from Cornwall, and having known him for years I'd be terrified to write Cornwall. The Cornish are fierce and proud and very much have their own ideas about How Things Are. I asked him to read Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle (and hey, YA ghost story!), and he was moderately accepting of it, but felt it didn't get near the truth of the country.

Mary Gentle doesn't have any series waiting on closure. Of her past series, all the books stood alone, except for Ash, which was released as one novel in the UK and as a series of four in quick succession in the UK.

Possibly you're thinking of Kate Elliott, Deb? I don't think we're ever going to get another Jaran book.

Tanith Lee has spoken freely and bitterly in interviews about publishers not being willing to pick up a new Blood Opera book, although from my perspective out in here in the bleachers it sounds like for a while she wasn't willing to take a lower advance in spite of falling sales and sell-through.

The maze book sounds like William Sleator's House of Stairs.

I like The Changeover a lot, but my favorite Mahy is The Tricksters, and not just because the fantasy novel the teenage protagonist is writing is bad and good in exactly the way a sixteen-year-old's novel should be--purple and exotic and full of not-terribly-sublimated eroticism. (*cough* It may have borne some slight resemblance to what I was writing at that age.) The novel-within-the-novel also reminded me a bit of bad Tanith Lee.

Which brings me to Tanith Lee, whose works are extremely variable. She can be very, very good and very, very bad. I agree with a lot of the suggestions people have made, especially the Flat Earth books and The Silver Metal Lover (except for the ending). I'm also fond of Don't Bite the Sun/Drinking Sapphire Wine (recently published in an omnibus as Biting the Sun), a pair of weird sf novel set in a future where everyone is effectively immortal and body modification, recreation, and gender-switching are really common, and I have a grave weakness for Sabella, which is about a vampire on Mars. Of her kids books, my favorite has always been her charming wry fairy tale, The Dragon's Hoard. If your library has it, or a good interlibrary loan program, I strongly recommend checking out her collection Dreams of Light and Darkness, which has a lot of her best short fiction.

I will pause to breathe now.

No, I won't.

I haven't read him yet, but y'all who liked Moorcock and his heirs may want to check out China Mieville--his books keep being mentioned, approvingly, as being in that line. Influenced by Moorcock and Peake and M. John Harrison.

I'm about 9 chapters into Mieville's Perdido Street Station, and I just can't make myself go any further for now. I will have another go at it shortly. It reminds me most of Gene Wolfe for those who like his stuff. It is dense and chewy and there's lots going on, but I just can't make myself like it yet. Paul Park is another who comes to mind (Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, The Cult of Loving Kindness, etc.). I found Park's stuff to be a bit more accessible and I made my way through, and enjoyed it.

I really like Mieville's King Rat, kinda Neverwhereish. Haven't read Perdido Street Station yet

Moorcock fans should also check out Jack Vance's Dying Earth for the best in lush, louche, doomed, decadent sf/fantasy.

Today I hit the Greek mythology tangent in Cryptonomicon. Mmmm.

The first was about a group of kids that were isolated in this weird labyrinth thing. I seem to remember all the walls being white. They were conditioned - I feel like it was a Pavlov type experiment or something. They were forced to eat these synthetic food pellets, they did odd movements when they saw red or green lights. The only reason I remember that is because at the end they somehow escaped, but when they were on the street they saw a traffic light and they all started doing the movement....creeeeepy.

Micole is right, this is William Sleator's House of Stairs. Sleator is one of my very favorite YA scifi writers, and HoS is brilliantly creepy. I also love his memoir about his childhood, Oddballs.

The Mists of Avalon started me on a long obsession with Arthurian legend that is still going strong today. I read it a couple times in high school and haven't gone back to it since, but I remember it very fondly. I think I liked The Firebrand more, though, since I was a HUGE Greek mythology geek when I was younger. The Firebrand tells the story of the Trojan War through the eyes of Cassandra.

Adoring Micole's post.

Micole, I didn't mean Gentle had a series dangling - I was remembering (or partially remembering) a phone conversation with Roz Kaveney, and I do seem to recall she said something along the lines of a standalone that had been in the works forever, and that a lot of people were waiting for.

And truth to tell? Weirdassed as this may sound? If Tanith Lee wants to keep pulling in big advances, she may be out of luck. I'm not a huge fan of them anyway, and frankly, when I come across a big advance, I think uh-oh, that thing had better sell, because one way or another, you owe the money to the publisher. I'd like to see reasonably-sized advances spread among (between?) more good writers, but the market is the market, and if the books don't sell, things get adjusted. C'est la guerre.

Raquel, my mama in law (who posts here occasionally) knows Melly Rawn far better than I do; I've only met her a few times. But yes, she had a very unexpected death in the family a couple of years ago and it threw her badly. I last saw her at WorldCon, in 2002, and she was in a fog.

I just finished reading Empire of Light by David Czuchlewski? Has anyone else read it? I loved his first book, The Muse Assylum, and I was really hoping to love this one as well, but I found it very unsatisfying and scattered. Especially the ending.