Glop@nimby or anyone interested in fantasy. The Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson is fucking primo, I love it. The series is very detailed and is much more gritty than wheel of time. It might be discouraging because it's very complicated and has a shitload of characters.
Also I did finish WoT nimby, Sanderson did very well on the last few books; I couldn't even tell Jordan wasn't writing.
I hear so many good things about malazan, I haven't picked it up after finishing WoT because I wanted a break from these massive, complex fantasy series lmao. I hear the first book gives people trouble because it doesn't give much context, but it gets way better after that.
After I finished WoT, I finished the book of the ancestor series by Mark Lawrence, that series was super great, imagine if the world was freezing and humanity had to live on a fifty mile wide, long strip of land because the moon is focusing the suns rays or something.
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the world is now falling victim to an encroaching ice age. The remaining civilization lies in The Corridor, a strip of land about fifty miles across around the center of the planet. As the ice walls of the North and South close in, the different nations on the world get more desperate for land and resources, leading to the war that comes to its peak in this final book.
Then add warrior nuns and magic. It's like a blend of a little sci-fi, grimdark fantasy, and a magic/assassin school.
After that I went through a few series and popular releases:
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I liked everything a lot except for the licanius trilogy.
Children of time was really crazy. Earth is dying and humanity fucks up a terraforming project to make a planet inhabitable by bio engineering intelligent gorillas and inadvertently creates a race of intelligent spiders...
My favorite was the Book of Babel series by Josiah Bancroft. There isn't really some gimmick or quirk a lot of series depend on to hook readers or make them interesting, but it is still so different somehow. A man loses his wife during their honeymoon and goes on a journey to rescue her from this giant tower that is basically part continent (there are cities and "countries" controlling different sections of the tower, Bancroft calls them "ringdoms"), part world wonder, and part tourist destination.
The author actually doesn't waste words, I was constantly engaged. I can't think of another series that can change in tone and setting so quickly and flawlessly. The range of emotions and really, the depth and amount of possibilities in the world he built made the books kinda mind blowing .