The three major medievalist writers of the 1990s are Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, and George R.R. Martin. Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time sequence began in 1990 with the publication of The Eye of the World. Jordan was still writing the twelfth book in the series - none of them less than eight hundred pages - when he died in 2007. The Wheel of Time sequence is an eternal champion tale set in a classic Fantasyland™: in order to defeat Shai'tan (Satan) the wheel of time periodically spins out a champion called the Dragon. The sequence itself concerns one such champion. The Eye of the World proceeds in archetypal quest fantasy fashion, in that we first meet the young man who is going to save the world (at least temporarily) at home in his small village. The story then proceeds by gathering companions, with various attributes and fates, who then travel across the world accepting much of what they are told as gospel, until something else they are told supersedes it, when that becomes gospel. The characterization is thin, with most characters having one trait, continually referred to in order to tell them apart (our red-haired priestess, for example, continually pulls her braid). Even some of the die-hard fans of the series (and there are millions) had begun to tire of the endless travels back and forth across the world and the continually delayed climax.

Terry Goodkind has his medieval world too, in the series called The Sword of Truth (Wizard's First Rule, 1994), and his Dark Lord and a characterless hero suitably called Richard Cypher (suggesting that he is not unaware of what he is doing). For the first few hundred pages (of 836) we follow the story of a young male and his love for a teenage girl and we might be persuaded that we are in a young adult fantasy as written by David Eddings. However, in chapter 40 Richard encounters a Mord'Sith, one of the Dark Lord's torture maidens. Naturally she is dressed in red leather, the better to hide the blood stains and she proceeds to torture him over a period of several months in order to render him her submissive sex slave. In 2007, the eleventh in the series was published, Confessor (which went ot number two on the New York Times bestseller list), by which time Richard has discovered that his real father is the Dark Lord, has been elevated to head of the empire, and opens up a new, non-magical world, for people who so desire to emigrate to. The intervening plots are extremely tangled and involve things characteristic of these kinds of fantasy, a great deal of travelling and a certain amount of ritualizing of the unpleasant: torture is rarely about securing information, and almost always about satisfying the lusts of a Dark Lord. One of the interesting idiosyncrasies about these is the presence of North American fauna (chipmunks) in an otherwise staple European fantasy world: as Richard gives them to the torture maidens in an attempt to humanize them, this may be an oblique statement about the New World's civilizing role in relation to the Old. Or maybe not.

George R.R. Martin has the highest critical reputation of the three authors considered here, deservedly so, and has won both juried and popular voted awards. Martin was already established as a science-fiction writer when in 1996 he published the first novel in the The Song of Ice and Fire sequence (A Game of Thrones); the fifth, A Dance with Dragons is due in 2009. What distinguished Martin from Jordan and Goodkind (and many other medievalist writers) is that he depicts a plausible and internally coherent medieval world largely free from the clichés that Jones satirized in her Tough Guide. The fifteenth-century War of the Roses are probably what inspired Martin, and there is certainly much more detailed politics and warfare in these books than there is of magic and sorcery. George R.R. Martin's more realistic and hardcoare mode has influenced a number of new writers including the Canadians Steven Erikson and Scott Bakker. (pp. 145-146)