Bonus points for any books you believe are classics from that time period. Any language, but only fiction please.
I’m really excited to see what Lemmy has.
Terry Pratchett! The Discworld books have kept me busy for years now and I don’t even consider myself much of a reader.
A few years off from your criteria, but Ursula K. Le Guin released A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968. However, she had been pretty prominent in science fiction for the decade.
Important enough to inspire Pratchett and Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli).
She’s a hugely influential writer.
She used to teach writing courses at the university where I work. According to some of the old IT hands, whenever she came in with computer problems she was a delight to work with.
Any source on her influence on Miyazaki? My searches only return articles about the Earthsea adaptation fiasco.
Neil Gaiman. The man can write novels, YA novels, graphic novels, children’s books. And they all have such well crafted worlds that you just want to lose yourself in them.
I also think Neal Stephenson and Corey Doctorow deserve WAY more attention than they get.
I’d second all three.
Neil Gaiman is absolutely one of my favorite authors and from what I’ve seen, a pretty great human being as well.
American Gods and Neverwhere are classics. Neil Gaiman’s place on this list is assured and well deserved.
Absolutely. Anansi boys is my personal favorite of his, but I think highly of all his books.
I love it too, but American Gods is it’s wellspring.
Honestly, Stardust is probably my favorite of his.
Douglas Adams is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers of the period.
He is known for light, surrealistic science fiction comedy, not a genre generally considered “high art” but his mastery of language is superb. He is a master of analogies in a way that is both funny but also makes the reader think about the roles and conventions of symbolism in language.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
Oh wow I was legitimately surprised that Adams even fit in this thread. I’d have thought he was a mid-20th century author, writing at around the same time as Tolkien. But nope. The book of Hitchhiker’s Guide came out in '79…
Terry Pratchett.
Jim Butcher. He sits firmly and unapologetically in his fantasy niche, so if that’s not your thing you may be disappointed, but the man writes good dialogue and he can turn a phrase.
I was sad that he wasn’t mentioned yet. I cant think of books where the characters are so relatable as in Butchers works.
I have read through the Dresden Files multiple times, each time being emotionally hooked on whata happening.
Codex Alera is one of the greatest fantasy book series ever in my opinion
I haven’t seen Chuck Palahniuk mentioned, and he was very influential to a bunch of us millenials, I imagine. He is very good at writing about the nihilism of modern times.
Fight Club is the most popular example of his novels, and its a great read. I am also really particular to, Rant:The Oral Biography of Buster. Its such a weird story, and was one of the first books to really spark my interest in reading fiction. He has a bunch of other good novels I would recommend, like Snuff, Choke, and Lullaby.
Jesus, that dude shaped a lot of peoples worlds. I honestly don’t know if I was scared of the drain at the bottom of the public pool because of him, because I know that I didn’t read his short story until I was in college, but I wonder if it had already started spreading around in the secret and sly ways of the school hallways, before text messages were ever imagined.
This isn’t a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.
My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you’re familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you’d clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern “the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool” western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from ‘95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85’). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you’re likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.
His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I’ll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn’t anywhere near as potent as the novel and I’d suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it’s language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.
No Country for Old Men was great too, and it made a better transition to film than The Road, in my opinion.
I finished reading them in December, and I’m still obsessed with the genius in The Passenger and Stella Maris. I’ve read the books and listened to the audiobooks. The audiobook for Stella Maris is exceptional.
Terry Pratchett (first book 1971 so barely counts haha)
Neil Gaiman
He died in 1982 but his works are hugely influential:
Philip K Dick.Alan Moore
Saga of the Swamp Thing and Watchmen are two amazing runs of comics he wrote.
Huge fan of his recent-ish novel, Jerusalem.
deleted by creator
Stephen King.
King of Horror.
He has written hundreds if not thousands of stories over the last half century. So many of those have turned into Blockbuster movie, lame TV movies, Indie films, and TV shows. We can argue later about how “literary” many of those stories are, but his impact on popular culture today is undeniable.
Although he has occasionally written or said some cringey things out of touch with the current zeitgeist (who hasn’t?) and has struggled with his own demons, from what I’ve seen he has always demonstrated that at his core he’s a decent human being struggling, like we all do, in a scary world.
Vonnegut
I upvoted because Vonnegut is the GOAT and most definitely wrote some bangers after 1970, but his first well known books were published in the 1960s. So, he is pretty close to OPs cutoff for modern writers, I guess.
