3. Neil Gaiman
While he might be the biggest rockstar of the writing world right now, Neil Gaiman is also probably the biggest stretch on this list in terms of content. You won’t really find any knights and swords or castles and dragons between his pages. No, Gaiman is king over the domain of urban fantasy, where magic, folklore, and mythology are infused in our own modern reality. It seems as though all of Gaiman’s fiction involves the fantastic and romantic elements of classic storytelling clashing with the values and motivations of real people in the real world. This inversion of classic elements of fantastic storytelling is something that GRRM strives for as well, with ASOIAF doing away with the notion of impervious heroes defeating vile villains as many expect from the fantasy genre. If that inversion is something you appreciated in ASOIAF, then I recommend picking up Gaiman’s American Gods, where classic deities from a variety of religions find themselves in a struggle against the new sources of modern worship, like Media and Information Technology.
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