Couple of thoughts to add:
I've mentioned this one in the "just finished reading" thread, but I'll mention it here so the right audience sees it.
For bonus points, Dan Simmons sort-of recommends it in his own short story The Time Traveller.
I'd call it prrrobably science fiction though like a lot of time travel stories it sits somewhere on the edge between that and fantasy. It's Ken Grimwood's book Replay. In essence it's Groundhog Day done much, much better. You wake up in roughly your 18-year-old body (or earlier) with your present-day consciousness and you live through your life again. Unlike Groundhog Day, though, there are constraints, and twists to how this works ... and you're not the only one it's happening to.
It intrigued me because Simmons borrowed from the book in describing how time travellers of this kind try to contact one another: the traveller takes out public notice ads in roughly 1950s newspapers to the effect of "Do you remember Reagan, Challenger, Watergate, the Beatles? If so, call me at..."
In the fantasy aisle: The Wizard of the Pigeons, Megan Lindholm (that is, Robin Hobb under a pen name). A real prototype urban fantasy, but the joy of it is that it can be interpreted either as a hobo having magical powers and confronting a threat to his small alleyway world ... or it can be just as equally interpreted as a homeless Vietnam vet fighting to save his own sanity on the streets. You are never told precisely which way to take it, which is a hell of a ride.
And also in the fantasy aisle: The Sleeping Dragon, Joel Rosenberg. Takes the wish-fulfilment desire of many RPG nerds to actually be physically transported into their fantasy worlds and makes it literal, i.e. a party of players is thrown into the fantasy world, transformed into the very characters they play.
This book makes it a lot more dark-ish and gritty than you'd expect for novels of the period: the party of players are not Harry Potter kids, they're mostly twentysomethings some of whom have some real hangups and issues of their own. One of them gets killed roughly five minutes into arriving in the fantasy world. I'd skip the rest of the five book series, it doesn't have that big a pull, but the first is good stuff.
I've mentioned this one in the "just finished reading" thread, but I'll mention it here so the right audience sees it.
For bonus points, Dan Simmons sort-of recommends it in his own short story The Time Traveller.I'd call it prrrobably science fiction though like a lot of time travel stories it sits somewhere on the edge between that and fantasy. It's Ken Grimwood's book Replay. In essence it's Groundhog Day done much, much better. You wake up in roughly your 18-year-old body (or earlier) with your present-day consciousness and you live through your life again. Unlike Groundhog Day, though, there are constraints, and twists to how this works ... and you're not the only one it's happening to.
It intrigued me because Simmons borrowed from the book in describing how time travellers of this kind try to contact one another: the traveller takes out public notice ads in roughly 1950s newspapers to the effect of "Do you remember Reagan, Challenger, Watergate, the Beatles? If so, call me at..."
In the fantasy aisle: The Wizard of the Pigeons, Megan Lindholm (that is, Robin Hobb under a pen name). A real prototype urban fantasy, but the joy of it is that it can be interpreted either as a hobo having magical powers and confronting a threat to his small alleyway world ... or it can be just as equally interpreted as a homeless Vietnam vet fighting to save his own sanity on the streets. You are never told precisely which way to take it, which is a hell of a ride.
And also in the fantasy aisle: The Sleeping Dragon, Joel Rosenberg. Takes the wish-fulfilment desire of many RPG nerds to actually be physically transported into their fantasy worlds and makes it literal, i.e. a party of players is thrown into the fantasy world, transformed into the very characters they play.
This book makes it a lot more dark-ish and gritty than you'd expect for novels of the period: the party of players are not Harry Potter kids, they're mostly twentysomethings some of whom have some real hangups and issues of their own. One of them gets killed roughly five minutes into arriving in the fantasy world. I'd skip the rest of the five book series, it doesn't have that big a pull, but the first is good stuff.
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