This whole rant about the fantasy genre market is to say that in between Tolkien and Martin, there was Glen Cook. Martin wrote Game of Thrones, the first in A Song of Ice and Fire series, and popularized the genre again to the masses, and with the TV show following a decade and a bit later, the genre then became oversaturated with fantasy books, that lacked fantasy, and were dreary books set in a medieval, European-esque world. So the market supplied more, until it became oversaturated with the same stuff, there were variants, sure, but most had the samey quality to it, lacking in much originality. Tolkien wasn’t the first to do heroic fantasy in a magical land, but he was the first to show it wasn’t a just niche thing to be enjoyed by children and nerds, and opened it up to the masses. No book genre is this more prevalent in than the fantasy genre. Fiction, like most things, goes through fades, you have the outliers which are a roaring success, both critically and financially, then years of copycatting will follow trying to capitalise on the original, to varying degrees of success.
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