als ge nu achter SF vroeg kon ik beter helpen, ik lees namelijk vooral engelstalige SF ((post-)cyberpunk, space-opera, hard/dark/gothic-SF, ...), maar de onderstaande fantasy verhalen vond ik gewoonweg fantastisch. is wel niet your basic elves & goblins fare.
---
Gene Wolfe:
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow and Claw contains the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula awards.
This is the first-person narrative of Severian the lowly apprentice torturer, blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future "Urth", and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colourful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book two do we realise what saved Severian's life in chapter one.) For lovers of literary allusions, they're here in plenty: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges and familiar fables changed by aeons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much restored painting of a golden-visored "knight" who is an astronaut standing on the Moon; an ancient citadel of metal towers which are grounded spacecraft. Even the Sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a New Sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heart-breakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece and strongly recommended.
The Book of the New Sun: Shadow and Claw
The Book of the New Sun: Sword and Citadel
---
China Mieville:
Like the author's 1998 debut book King Rat, this is an urban-gothic novel full of rich city squalor--but this time the setting isn't London but the grimy fantasy metropolis of New Crobuzon. The city sprawls like a mutant Gormenghast, contains strange ethnic minorities such as the khepris (women with huge scarab-beetles for heads), and seethes with seedy technology and thaumaturgy. There are Babbage engines, coke-powered robot "constructs", and an underclass of biomagically "Remade" victims of cruel justice who may be part-machine, part-animal or wholly nightmarish. A visiting garuda--a winged being now stripped of his wings--approaches the overweight, eccentric amateur scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in hope of buying back the power of flight, and the resulting research programme has accidental but monstrous consequences. Something appalling is loosed, a horror whose deadliness is underlined when New Crobuzon's corrupt government begs help from the Ambassador of Hell ... who refuses, because even the demons are frightened. Dealing with the flying terror becomes a job for Grimnebulin and a much-harried group of cronies--including his khepri lover, the garuda, a reporter for a brutally suppressed subversive newspaper, the group mind of New Crobuzon's constructs, a secret traitor, and one of the strangest giant spiders in fiction. A big, powerful, inventive, mesmerising and memorably horrid novel. --David Langford --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers, spies, magicians, and junkies. Now a stranger has come with an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. A reckoning is due and it is too late to escape.
Perdido Street Station
---
en alles van Jack Vance (schrijft science-fantasy en volbloed fantasy)
want het klinkt goed!
Ik lees graag fantasie boeken en lotr vond ik zeer goed. Aangezien de hobbit toch ook redelijk bekend is en aangezien het van tolkien is... 
Maar ik kwam het toch even vragen