20 books to read while you wait for The Winds of Winter

Fantasy and sci-fi are extremely robust genres, with something to fit just about any taste. Here are 20 epic series to dive into!

Game of Thrones is over, but its influence will be felt for years. The show was a media phenomenon, and immensely influential in breaking down the misconception that fantasy and science fiction could not be used to tell impactful, adult stories. Mainstream media is now playing catch up to what fans the world over have known for decades: fantasy and sci-fi are awesome!

The same could be said of A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series on which Game of Thrones is based. But while the show has wrapped up, Song of Ice and Fire fans have been waiting for author George R.R. Martin to finish The Winds of Winter — the sixth book in the series — since 2011. What do we read to fill the time until then?

Well, for starters there’s a little series called The Lord of the Rings. Really, that should almost go without saying. It’s probably the best known fantasy saga out there, and with good reason. But beyond the mega famous and well known tales, there’s still a wealth of other great stories out there.

To make things a bit easier, I’ve rounded up some of the best the genre has to offer to make it easier for you to find your next SF/F book obsession. Some of these are classics, and some are cutting edge stories that are still being told — and don’t worry, I’ll cover release timetables, if you don’t want to risk getting invested in a story and then having to wait a long while for it to continue.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. There are far more excellent books in the genre than we could ever cover in just one article. We’d need a library the size of the Citadel in Oldtown to hold them all! Fantasy and science fiction are extremely robust genres, with stories for every taste. Let’s look at 20 of the best!

1. The First Law

If there’s one author out there who comes close to GRRM in terms of tone, themes, and fascinatingly gray characters, it’s Joe Abercombie. The First Law trilogy is hands down one of the best dark fantasies of the past 20 years, and probably the closest thing to A Song of Ice and Fire out there.

The story follows “thinking man’s barbarian” Logen Ninefingers as he’s drawn away from the north (where he has a really bloody reputation) and given a second chance at life by assisting a wizard to regain a lost relic and set the Union to rights. Their quest takes them not only to the far reaches of the world, but into the corrupt society of the capital as well. It’s there that we meet the series’ other two main characters: Jezal dan Luthar, a spoiled brat of a nobleman if ever there was one (with a fantastic character arc) and Sand dan Glokta, a crippled ex-soldier who acts as an inquisitor, which basically means he’s a government-employed torturer. Glokta is cut from the same cloth as Tyrion Lannister: darkly cynical with a wit too sharp to contain and an inner turmoil that keeps him magnetically sympathetic and revolting by turns.

This series is loaded with dark humor, and features some of the only fight scenes that have made me outright cringe since I read about the Mountain squishing in Oberyn’s head almost 14 years ago. The descriptions are absolutely brutal, in the best way.

If you read the First Law trilogy and love it, there are also three stand-alone books set afterward. Best Served Cold is an old-fashioned revenge tale, The Heroes is a thematically powerful account of a battle (the entire book is one battle. If you’re not into military fantasy, you might not be crazy about this one…but if you are, then this is a must read), and Red Country is a frontier story.

And now there’s a sequel trilogy coming out as well! A Little Hatred, the first of the new books, hit shelves this past September. It sees the world of First Law advancing into the industrial age. It was one of the biggest fantasy releases of 2019, and has gotten a ton of hype.

Best of all, Abercrombie is one of those exceedingly rare authors who finishes a draft of his entire trilogy before releasing the first book, which means you won’t need to wait half a decade to get the next volume.