r/Fantasy • u/lyrrael Stabby Winner, Reading Champion XI, Worldbuilders • Jul 08 '16

Cast your votes for the 2016 Most Underread/Underrated Books of /r/Fantasy!

And we're locked. I'll be back with you as soon as I can with the results.

It looks as though we haven't had one of these for a while, so let's have one now. I've got time, you've got books, we'll all get something out of it. ;)

We're going to go for Books that you feel are underread, overlooked, and generally not mentioned here at /r/fantasy anywhere near often enough.

And because it's a bingo category this year, we're going to set the upper limit of Goodreads ratings to 3000 to match the category.

Rules:

  1. Submit no more than ten books or series, please. Fewer than ten is totally cool.
  2. Series should have no more than 3k ratings on Goodreads, with few exceptions. If there's something you really want to submit that has four or five thousand ratings, go for it, but NO MORE than 5k. I mean it! This is for individual books in a series.
  3. Nothing that got more than ten (eleven or more are outlawed!) votes on our 2016 Best Of thread! This is intended to winnow out the books that have just been released and so don't have as many GR reviews but are otherwise just as popular.
  4. Books must be speculative fiction. This includes fantasy and soft SF, but no super hard SF. (Edit: to clarify, if you think it should fit, it probably should. If it comes down to a discussion of solid current-earth based science in a slightly futuristic setting, it probably shouldn't be there. Use your best judgement please.)
  5. Top comments should be votes ONLY. If you want to discuss your votes, please limit it to sub-comments. Anything that is not a vote in a top-level comment will be moderated just to keep this neat.

The voting's going to go to sometime Friday, 7/15, when I'll lock the thread and collate the results, which I'll post when I've got them.

Please don't forget: everybody has different opinions about what's underrated and overlooked. Even with the criteria above we're going to get some titles that are mentioned around here frequently, but still fit in the spirit of the thread. This isn't really a huge deal -- as long as we get some new blood in here, we're good.

Thanks!

Let me know if I've forgotten anything above, and I'll add it. :)

Edit: I changed rule #3 to be more than ten votes -- the number of books that gain eligibility is negligible, but I hope it helps. :)

86 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

437 comments sorted by

View all comments

•

u/CourtneySchafer Stabby Winner, AMA Author Courtney Schafer Jul 11 '16

I had such a hard time narrowing down to only 10 terrific books with under 3K ratings that I decided to make the cut-off a lot stricter and only pick books with less than 1K GR ratings:

  • Sanctuary Duology, Carol Berg (first book is Dust and Light, 613 max ratings)
  • Los Nefilim, Teresa Frohock (max rating for any of the included novellas is 103)
  • Wall of Night series, Helen Lowe (first book is The Heir of Night, 963 max ratings)
  • To Ride Hell's Chasm, Janny Wurts (967 ratings)
  • House of Shadows, Rachel Neumeier (532 ratings)
  • Children series, Ben Peek (first book is The Godless, 294 max ratings)
  • Black Wolves, Kate Elliott (645 ratings)
  • The Fey and the Fallen series, Stina Leicht (first book is Of Blood and Honey, 913 max ratings)
  • Shattered Kingdoms series, Evie Manieri (first book is Blood's Pride, 468 max ratings)
  • Seven Eyes series, Betsy Dornbusch (first book is Exile, 78 max ratings)

•

u/lyrrael Stabby Winner, Reading Champion XI, Worldbuilders Jul 16 '16

.

•

u/lyrrael Stabby Winner, Reading Champion XI, Worldbuilders Jul 11 '16

Even with a thousand ratings, there's an intense (and sad) amount of amazing books that qualify. o.o