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For his important short fiction, Starlight (1976) [Amazon|Powell's].

CADIGAN, Pat. Synners [Amazon|Powell's] won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award, Fools won the 1994 award for this author who won her first acclaim as the only female cyberpunk author at the time; soon after considered the "Queen of Cyberpunk." Patterns (1988) [Amazon|Powell's] was her first major collection of short works, and Mindplayers (1987) [Amazon|Powell's] was her breakout novel.

CAMPBELL, John W. The Best of John W. Campbell (1976) [Amazon|Powell's]. Influential, longtime editor of Astounding/Analog, Campbell began as a writer of space epics and then turned to writing the more subtle psychological, philosophical stories collected here.

CHARNAS, Suzy McKee. Walk to the End of the World (1974) [Amazon|Powell's] was one of the early post-holocaust feminist dystopias, followed by Motherlines (1978) [Amazon|Powell's], a feminist utopia. "Boobs" won the 1989 Hugo.

CHERRYH, C. J. Downbelow Station [Amazon|Powell's]. Hugo, 1982. This former high school Latin teacher writes about carefully designed future civilizations and alien societies, as well as fantasy novels, such as her Rusalka trilogy.

CLARKE, Arthur C. Childhood's End [Amazon|Powell's] (1953). A visionary, eschatological novel about Earth's children changing into pure mentality and joining the Overmind. Clarke is one of the three best-known contemporary science-fiction writers of his time (the other two were Asimov and Heinlein) and worth reading in any of his three moods: extrapolative, poetic, philosophical. Other important books: The City and the Stars (1956) [Amazon|Powell's]; Rendezvous with Rama [Amazon|Powell's], Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, 1974; The Fountains of Paradise [Amazon|Powell's], Hugo, Nebula, 1979; and the novelization of the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) [Amazon|Powell's].

DICK, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle [Amazon|Powell's]. The United States has lost World War II, and Japan and Germany have divided it up, except for the Rocky Mountain states, where a novelist is writing a book in which the United States won the war; one of the best of the alternate-history novels. Hugo, 1963. Dick, who died in 1982, was a prolific author whose books, all of interest, dealt often with the nature of reality: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [Amazon|Powell's] (upon which the film "Blade Runner" was based, 1968); Ubik [Amazon|Powell's] (1969); Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Campbell, 1974) [Amazon|Powell's]; and Valis (1981) [Amazon|Powell's].

DOCTOROW, Cory. Doctorow is an SF author, blogger, and technology activist. He co-edits Boing Boing and contributes to many other publications. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His fiction has been nominated for all the major awards and won the Locus Award and the Sunburst Award. Doctorow speaks frequently about copyright, technology, and post-scarcity economics. His Little Brother [Amazon|Powell's] won the 2008 John W. Campbell Award.

FARMER, Philip José. To Your Scattered Bodies Go [Amazon|Powell's]. The first novel in Farmer's Riverworld series, in which all past human beings are revived to find themselves living along the banks of a long river. Hugo, 1972. The first had Richard Burton as its hero, the second, The Fabulous Riverboat [Amazon|Powell's] (1971), Mark Twain. Farmer is prolific, and delights in reviving old heroes in fiction or fictionalized biography such as Tarzan Alive [Amazon|Powell's] (1972) and Venus on the Half Shell [Amazon|Powell's] (1975).

a reasonable type of character

It's impossible to write something completely and utterly without tropes

stories often gain something by having ties to other works

Every story is influenced by what came before it

Fiction isn't necessarily supposed to be realistic.

Much fiction seeks to show not what is, but what could be, or what should be.

All tropes can be written badly.

All tropes can be overused.

The important thing when writing a story is that it's believable

How we read and how we write will always have moral and political implications. The only choice we’ve got is whether they’re unconscious or considered.

best self

authentic self

reading projects that pull you out into different kinds of authors and stories are wonderful so long as the moral aspects of your reading list don’t become more important than the joy you take in reading

We see this character grow up and become someone great, defeat the odds, and challenge the evil and corrupt.

The hero may not always succeed at first try, but they will find means either within themselves or from outside sources to continue on their quest, which if they fail, would have world-reaching consequences.

a completely developed secondary world

a portal into another world

the “world within a world”

series

episodic installments

high fantasy is often based on myth or legend

a hero’s tale

Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Echoes of these stories have been passed down through the ages and were at one point rooted in local myth, tradition, lore, or legend.

These stories still stir imaginations today and influence epic literature by their fantastical nature.

High fantasy has roots as far back as fairy tale; they are human stories passed down, aggrandized and lasting.

wizard

antihero

rough around the edges, has a haunted past, and isn’t afraid to do what must be done to achieve his goal

may be acting on the “good” side, but he’s not a “good” character even if he does grow in that direction

it is possible to bring high fantasy into a more modern setting

subgenres are not mutually exclusive

medieval type setting

how fantasy and the fantastical elements affect the world

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin