If you are looking for reliable, prolific authors specializing in various forms of fantasy, Hickman and Weis are a writing team you need to know about. First establishing their credentials by creating the Dragonlance campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons — back in the Wild West days when D&D was owned by TSR — and writing novels based in that world, Hickman and Weis are expert story tellers. While the quantity of their work is impressive, it’s the reliable quality — ranging from “Hey That Was Pretty Darn Good” to “Heaven Does Exist and it’s Populated by Elves” — that makes them required reading.
If you are already a big D&D or Dragonlance fan, then by all means go chronologically by what they published when. In that case, start with Dragons of Autumn Twilight. This is the novel that started the whole thing. Like I said, though, this is only a good starting point if you are already into D&D. Not because you have to know about D&D to undertstand the world. In fact, you don’t need to know anything about D&D to enjoy D&D novels. But this was their first effort together, and they were still mastering their craft.
So, if you are into D&D, you’ll get a kick out of it, but this is not their masterpiece. In fact, Wizards of the Coast (which now owns D&D) has released a compilation of their first three novels: Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Winter Night, and Spring Dawning. It’s a lot of fun to watch the quality of their work progress. But this should be the third trilogy you check out.
Setting aside the “already a fan of D&D” caveat, I recommend you start with The Rose of the Profit Trilogy. Set in a vaguely Arabian Nights inspired world full of contrasting cultures, jealous gods, conniving genies, and more misunderstood love triangles than you can shake a bare chested barbarian at, this is a solid piece of story telling.
Next, move on to the Darksword Trilogy. These three books form the basis of another table top roleplaying game that Hickman and Weis had cooked up (although not for TSR). I don’t know if the game went anywhere. The trilogy, however, will make you look forward to your bedtime (assuming, like most self respecting bookworms, that you like to read in bed before you go to sleep). This trilogy asks the question: what if everyone was born with magic? How would society function? How would the few people born without magic be treated? Then, for the totally killer question that brings it all into the Best of Class category: What if the savior from the prophesy was one of those guys born without magic?
Now that you have seen Hickman and Weis’s wide ranging skills of Fantasy inspired imaginationings, it’s time to move back to their first offering: the Dragonlance novels I mentioned above. That is, unless you’ve already read those novels. In that case, I recommend you check out their respective websites. They haven’t slowed down since those first novels appeared. They’ve branched out. So, now that you’ve drunk in some of their stuff spanning the last 30 years, it’s time to contend with the new stuff.
