Hope you don't mind me joining in, really enjoyed reading this thread, also to see some of my favourite authors being mentioned.....I'm an avid Sci-Fi and Fantasy fan...but have read over the years all sorts of books........anybody ever read Stranger in a Strange Land, think that was Heinlein, not so sure now, how about The Synthetic Man by Theodore Sturgeon...I loved that, it was also published under the title of The Dreaming Jewels...it was a really good story...the jewels were little alien creatures who liked to dream and when they did, they created something beautiful, if they dreamed near a tree, they copied the tree, that was fine, then a rather nasty character found out about these little creatures and caught some and started torturing them........and the story starts to get more complicated, loads of twist and turns, lots of strange characters in it, as it takes place in a carnival traveling around America, one of my favourite authors now is Robin Hobb....The Farseer Trilogy, The Tawny Man all six books follow on...The Madship Traders is set in the same land, but a different story, but all these three trilogies I can really recommend....The first..The Farseer Trilogy is about a little boy called Fitz with an ability to communicate with animals, which is looked on as evil, and if found out he will be executed, he is of royal blood of the house of Farseer, and is taken in by them and brought up by one of them and trained to be an assassin.....and so on...all sorts happen in it, dragons, war, a lovely character called Nighteyes who's a wolf, and Fitz's companionship with this animal and also loads of royal intrigue, these books are well worth reading....The Madship Traders, is brilliant......a very unusual story that will never bore you, right through the three books, I didn't want it to come to an end, so I read all of them again, and I won't part with them
