> My point is more that as a middle aged dude that grew up reading, the current publishing industry feels awfully hostile to me.

I too am a middle aged dude who grew up reading and I think there's a simple explanation for that feeling: we got old. The market has moved on and left us behind. It happened to the ancients, and it will happen to the young.

> Nowadays they would probably be criticized

I don't know who Troy Gibson is, and Redwall generally got a pass because of the target audience, but all the rest certainly got tons of criticism from readers at the time. Riftwar was too generic and RPG-like. Dragonlance was also generic and the RPG elements were only barely pasted over. Mercedes Lackey was repetitive, you read one you've read them all. (Did I read all three of those in my teens and enjoy them a bunch? I certainly did).

> Nowadays I feel I pick up a fantasy book and it's always a 3-5 book series following one particular person and I'm just so much less interested in it.

We had those back in our youth as well, most notably the now-almost-forgotten Thomas Covenant books.

> All of the big ones I mentioned were about worlds. The individual books often introduced different and new characters and parts of the world. Time passed in the settings.

Glancing over at my bookshelf, you might like the trilogy starting with "Range of Ghosts" by Elizabeth Bear (the 2nd trilogy is fine, the third book kind of fizzles out, and its biggest sin is establishing a character who's basically "Miles Vorkosigan, except a villain" and then not leaning hard into that).

Ultimately tho this plus "dudes and ladies with huge swords and magic killing dragons and conquering kingdoms" means you really should start reading Malazan. It's not perfect (parts of it are rapey, and the later books, especially Toll the Hounds, can be really pretentious) but it is the sprawling epic fantasy with a cast of thousands.

Dudes and ladies with huge swords? Check. And magic? Check. Killing dragons? Check. Conquering kingdoms? Well, there's a lot of attempts to reverse previous conquests and stop ongoing conquests, so I'll give that a chek.

Thank you for the recommendations.

And I somehow warped "Larry Dixon" into "Troy Gibson" in my brain

Absolutely embarrassing. I dislike getting old :)

I asked my wife to put some of those books on hold at the library for me though. I'll check them out. :)

[dead]