February's recommendation: the Continuing Time series, by Daniel Keys Moran. Individual titles are Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, The Last Dancer, and hopefully someday The AI War, with more to follow it.
There are some very, very cogent arguments against me recommending this series. Not because it's not fantasy (I've given up on maintaining that all the time), but because it's unfinished and will probably forever remain so, and on top of that, the books are rather difficult to get ahold of.
Background, before I get to the story itself: the first three books were originally published by, I think, Bantam, but according to rumor Moran had some massive disagreement with them and ended up buying the rights to them back. (If anyone out there has more genuinely concrete information than this, I'd welcome it.) You can now order reprints of them from Quiet Vision Publishing, along with his other, non-CT books, although The Last Dancer is the only one you can still get in hardcover. You cannot, however, order The AI War, even though it's listed in the front matter for the Quiet Vision editions, because apparently it still has not been (and maybe never will be) published. If, however, you would like to join the futile, Custerian, Thermopylean attempt to make that book see print, Quiet Vision has an online form where you can request they attempt to reprint an existing book; I've submitted a request for The AI War, mentioning in the "Title" field that it has "no publication date," in the hopes that such requests might convince them to talk to Moran and buy the thing. Apparently he's written it, and they sometimes do publish new works. So if you want to do me a very small and very easy favor, go request The AI War.
Having made my pitch on behalf of Daniel Keys Moran, let me now continue on to actually talking about his books.
A friend of mine said once that they are epic science fiction, in the same sense as we say "epic fantasy" (when we don't mean it as an insult). I think he may be correct, because there are two storylines going on throughout the existing books of these series, and one of them truly can't be called anything other than epic.
Sixty-two thousand years before the birth of Yeshua ha Notzri, whom later humans knew as Jesus the Christ, the Time Wars ended, for reasons which no sentient being now knows. With that ending, the Continuing Time began.
In the Continuing Time of which I write, nearly a thousand years after the birth of the man named Trent, mankind had spread to the stars, and attained a position of pre-eminence among the known sentient species of the Continuing Time. In that time, four humans had come to be legend, legend so great that even non-human sentients knew of them, of the dreams and myths that had accumulated about their names.
Those four were Trent; Daniel, who was the first November; Ola who was Lady Blue; and Camber Tremodian. It was said of Trent that he could walk through walls, and they called him the Uncatchable; it was said of November that he was insane even by human standards; and of Camber Tremodian that he was not human at all.
Of Ola Blue they knew only that she had once lived, and died; that she was death itself, and sorrow.
--The Name Historian, Looking Backwards from the Year 3000, published 3018 Asimov
Surface story first. It's the relatively near future, and Earth has been unified under a single government. (Which is run by the French. Go with it. Suspension of disbelief and all that.) Not everybody's happy with the Unification; the United States, for example, is now Occupied America, and is a hotbed of Johnny Rebs and Erisian Claw, constantly making trouble. The Unification employs a very large army of people called the Peacekeeping Force or PKF to keep things as sedate as possible; one of my favorite linguistic touches in the whole thing is the abbreviated term "Peaceforcers." Within this group, they also have the Peaceforcers Elite, cyborgs created on a space station in geosynchronous orbit, where the delicate surgical work of implanting their enhancements can be done without the interference of gravity. Other relevant organizations include DataWatch, a group whose job it is to police the world-wide InfoNet (Emerald Eyes was first published in 1988, so the InfoNet is not much like the Internet as we think of it today), and the Ministry of Population Control, whose job is self-evident. This is not a truly dystopian future, but neither is it sunshine and frolicking puppies.
The Unification, as of the beginning of the first book, has been trying to genetically engineer super-soldiers. What they get is a telepath named Carl Castanaveras. Powerful, yes, and very very capable of Blowing Shit Up if you get him mad, but the problem is that he gets mad just a wee bit too easily, and all too often he's mad at them. But they continue onward, engineering more telepaths, and manage to stabilize the pattern a little, so that nobody's a walking bomb quite like he is. Emerald Eyes is the story of Carl; The Long Run is about Trent Castanaveras, who could most easily be called Carl's adopted son, and The Last Dancer is about Denice Castanaveras, Carl's biological daughter. The story, stepping its way across the years, is about these individuals and their struggle against the Unification, more often in its specifics than in its whole, but you get the sense that a move against the whole of the Unification might be out there somewhere, in the books we don't have.
That's the surface story.
There's a moment -- I think it's in Emerald Eyes -- when one of the characters turns to another and basically says, we didn't make Carl. There's no way we could have. The second telepath was essentially made by cloning him; the techniques we were trying to use when we got Carl didn't work until the third or fourth telepath we made. We really have no idea how the hell he happened. He shouldn't have. He couldn't have.
We the readers know this already, because we saw how and why Carl came to be.
There are two characters chasing each other around through these three extant books, popping up here and there, doing stuff, then vanishing again. They are Camber Tremodian and the Name Storyteller (who, for the record, refers to himself at one point as "the god Named Storyteller," which tells you a bit about him). The two of them are, as near as I can tell from their brief appearances, pursuing each other through time, mucking around with history to an end that we don't really get much information about, and it's a mark of how much I love these books that I'm okay with not understanding what the hell is going on. The Name Storyteller is the one who makes Carl, interfering with the lab so that one embryo comes alive when it should not have. He's doing this because, if I understand correctly, Denise's son or some other male descendent of hers will be Daniel November, and the House of November are Really Bloody Important a few hundred years down the line. (The series is, in theory, supposed to get there eventually. I would love it if it did, but I hold out no particular hope.)
So we have gods of the Zaradin Church chasing each other around, not that you're real sure what the Zaradin Church is, or how one gets to be a god of it, since apparently Trent ends up being one somehow. Nor even if the word "god" means in this context what we tend to assume it does. This layer of the story is not integral to the overt layer, which is why I'm okay with not understanding it; mostly we spend our time with Carl and Trent and Denise, not Camber Tremodian or the Name Storyteller, and their stories for the most part hang together without interference from time-travelling something-or-others. Although it's damn funny when one of them shows up, rants briefly at Trent, and then vanishes again, leaving poor Trent staring around and going, "did anybody else hear that . . . .?"
Trent is my main reason for loving this series. Carl is interesting, but a hard man to like; he's too scary. Denise is also interesting, but like her father, she's weird in her own way, and not just because she's a telepath. Trent is not a telepath; he's a Player, the setting's term for a high-level hacker. He's also a thief. A very, very good thief, with a sense of humour, and also a reluctance to hurt anyone, for reasons I shan't give away. Suffice to say, his weapon of choice is a squirt gun filled with a chemical called fadeaway that will knock people out, and he can wreak more havoc with that than most people can with rocket launchers. The Unification, after several years of failing to capture him, starts calling him Trent the Uncatchable, and as for the bit above, about walking through a wall . . . well, I'll let you find out about that in your own time. ^_^
I actually read these books in reverse; a friend picked up The Last Dancer, read it, and passed it on to me. Then we unearthed The Long Run and read that, and only some time later did we find any copies of Emerald Eyes, as this was before they got reprinted by Quiet Vision. Strangely, that works, so if you find yourself encountering the books out of order, don't worry. It just means that you hear about certain events as past history in TLD, and then hear them discussed in TLR, and then see them happen in EE. Which rather gives them the flavor of a Shakespearean tragedy, by the time you get that far; you know what's going to happen, but you're curious to see how and why.
If you live near me, I will lend you these books, provided you swear on your immortal soul or suitable substitute that you will treat them well. But I'd prefer you to buy them, if you can afford to, because the more of them Quiet Vision sells, the more likely they are to think it would be worth their investment to publish The AI War. And based on some exceprts from that novel Moran once posted online . . . .
I need that book.
So get reading, and get buying, and let's hope Quiet Vision gets publishing.