Thinking about that last bit, I'm actually not sure if I agree... for the big fantasy series of the past decades, fans have spent impressive amounts of energy debating the merits of the various books in each series, complaining about new books in a series, and so on. In a series stretching beyond a certain amount of books, you're almost guaranteed to have weaker books in some places, that annoy the fans (though they generally don't keep most fans from reading on anyway, that much is true). Whereas there are enough authors, in SF/F or elsewhere, who can be relied upon to deliver a good book with every stand-alone effort they publish.

But anyway, yeah, can be helpful to have an extensive list of series, although your exclusion of trilogies still seems a bit odd to me, since it excludes renowned works like e.g. C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy (which I've read) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (which I haven't), both of which are probably rather more fleshed out than several longer series on your list.


The first two movies are remarkably faithful to the books (at the cost, so many have argued, of being not very good as movies go). Most of the later movies have their nice sides but mutilate and compress plot to a point that often left me wondering how people who hadn't read the books could follow at all, while those who had were annoyed by the changes and cuts.

So um, yeah, read the books, ignore the movies (with the possible exceptions of numbers 3 and 7.1, the only two movies in the series that one could call good).


In this case, her sexuality is an integral part of her character, and the sex scenes (many of which are part of the main plot, not any romantic subplot) are for the most part quite relevant and necessary. I suppose it's not for everyone, but since the heroine of the series is quite possibly my favourite character in any fantasy series, I tend to be rather enthusiastic in trying to convince people to read it.


Well, okay, I guess it was a trilogy, originally, with To Green Angel Tower being split into two books only for the paperback version. Being concise was never one of Williams' strengths, and in Otherland he isn't either, but I loved it. That series also has an amazing heroine, incidentally, this one perhaps more puritan and more to your taste.