Writing Good fantasy/sci-fi books

[Shinmaru]

[QUOTE=Boba Fett][color=green]Call me biased, but I?d recommend the [u]Thrawn Trilogy[/u] by Timothy Zhan.

It?s a series of three Star Wars novels that take place after the events in [u]Return of the Jedi[/u]. Not only is this series considered to be the best written of all Star Wars novels, but there is a serious and powerful lobbying group within the Star Wars community to have these books made into Episodes VII-IX.[/color][/QUOTE]

I agree with Boba, these are easily the three best Star Wars books I've read and are up there with the original Star Wars trilogy in terms of enjoyability. I had an absolute blast reading those three books.

I don't read as often as I'd like to anymore (ironically, school is what keeps me from reading most of the time *twitch*), but over the past year or so, I've become fondly acquainted with The Dark Tower series by Stephen King.

The first five books in the series are absolutely incredible and wholeheartedly recommended if you're looking for an epic read. The books are as follows:


[list=1]
[*]The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
[*]The Dark Tower II: Drawing of the Three
[*]The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
[*]The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
[*]The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
[*]The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (to be released this year)
[*]The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (also to be released this year)
[/list]

I recently finished Wolves of the Calla and it's definitely the best in the series, I'd say. After that, I like Drawing of the Three, then The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass and, finally, The Gunslinger. They're all top-notch books and well worth a read. The main focus of the books is the journey of Roland, a gunslinger, to the Dark Tower where he hopes to slow or even halt the slow disintegration of his world.

There's much more to the series, but I'm not about to give that away, heh. What's really cool about the series is how pop-culture is integrated into the story in order to [spoiler]juxtapose Roland's world to our world, since Roland's world is basically a twisted mirror image of our own.[/spoiler]