The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

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Mary Gentle

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-13

Mary Rosalyn Gentle, born March 29, 1956, is a British science fiction and fantasy author who began her writing career with the young-adult fantasy novel Hawk in Silver (1977). She first gained wide recognition for her Orthe duology, comprising Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987), science fiction novels examining first contact and colonialism on an alien world. Gentle went on to develop the loosely connected White Crow Sequence—including Rats and Gargoyles (1990), The Architecture of Desire (1991), and Left to His Own Devices (1994), later collected as White Crow (2003)—a series of interlinked novels following recurring protagonists across wildly different settings, from an alternate Renaissance England to a cyberpunk future. Her most acclaimed and ambitious work is Ash: A Secret History, a sprawling science-fantasy epic published across four volumes that reimagines an alternate medieval European history centered on a female mercenary captain; the novel won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2000. Within the same alternate timeline, Gentle also wrote the Ilario novels. Her 1992 novel Grunts! is a well-regarded comic fantasy parodying and subverting traditional sword-and-sorcery and Tolkienesque tropes from the perspective of orc soldiers. Gentle has also published erotic fiction under the pen name Roxanne Morgan. Across her body of work, she is known for rigorous historical research, unconventional structural ambition, and a persistent interest in blending hard science fiction concerns with fantastical or alternate-historical settings.

Universe(s)

Ash: A Secret History

  • Core Canon books: 4
  • Current rank: #944 in the official ranking
  • Weighted average: 3.77
  • Award recognitions: 3 won

Books

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