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Health & Fitness

Scranton Page Turner: SF Series

Science Fiction and Fantasy are important genres in the literary field, but I feel they sometimes are ostracized as juvenile. There are many luminaries in SF/F would disagree.

As with recurring character mysteries, trilogies and quadrilogies have special meaning for me because they are revisiting old friends who stop by to give me new details from their lives.  Science Fiction and Fantasy seem to lend themselves best to that theme.  The three series below are three of my favorite series books.

Galactic Milieu Series
Julian May
The books in this series in order of publication are:
Jack the Bodiless
Diamond Mask
Magnificat
With humankind on the brink of being accepted into a new world, the Remillards, a powerful family is leading humanity into this “Galactic Milieu.”  Before Earth can be accepted it must be seen that it is ready to be enveloped into the new world.  One of the alien races from outside Earth’s influence has been chosen to watch for any cracks in the armor so to speak.

One crack appears with the birth of the title character.  While there are many interconnected tales within this series and  the series may appear challenging to follow, remember what I said in one of my first columns here:
That I won’t recommend anything that I couldn’t follow along with and that I didn’t enjoy.
If you can recall that and step outside your comfort zone for a time, you may just discover something about yourself:
That you REALLY do enjoy other genres than your safe reads.
Fern Capel Series
Jan Siegel
The books in this series in order of publication are:
Prospero’s Children
Dragon Charmer
Witch Queen
The fabled lost island, Atlantis plays a key role in this series, as does a witch and a doorway to another world.  Another fantastic trip through the multiverse.

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Abarat
Clive Barker
The books in this series in order of publication are:
Abarat
Days of Magic, Nights of War
Absolute Midnight
The Price of Dreams
Clive Barker is one of my favorite authors and the Abarat Series is quite enthralling.  The story starts off in a fictional town in Minnesota with a young girl as the protagonist.  While out walking through town one day she stumbles across a portal that transports her into an imaginary archipelago of twenty five islands.  Each island signifies a time of day and one of the islands stands outside of time.  The young girl, Candy Quackenbush thinks she’s been to the archipelago before but she can’t recall.  She is going to play a role in saving the chain of islands but doesn’t know how.

Mr Barker is an accomplished painter and all the illustrations in the series were created by his hand.  The illustrations alone drew me into the series.  I stayed for the fantastic literary quality.
Until next time…
Turn the page.

Chris

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