Not a terrible surprise, no. You can't expect Logan's return to have gone unremarked here.
Most of the members who frequent the SF forum are not going to be voting on this thing and the core group of members in fantasy tend to like one particular type of secondary world fantasy and not much of anything else. I would not call this brand of fantasy grim/dark as its defining factor, as there are tons of grim dark fantasy writers, including women, who don't get a lot of notice here, and in fact in the official dark fantasy sub-category, which is more in line with horror, women authors have at times outnumbered the men. Instead, I would term it epic battle fantasy -- bleak aspects of war with crows pecking out the eyes of corpses on the battlefield as kingdoms clash and spies spy. Sanderson, Erikson, Abercrombie, etc. form a solid block of authors writing in the tradition of David Gemmell, Glen Cook, Michael Moorcock and Guy Gavriel Kay. Women write those stories too and in times past some female authors like Robin Hobbs have been of interest, but the reality is we have about half the core members reading women and male titles and the other half avoids women authors like the plague because they don't think they can do battle fantasy. Contemporary fantasy authors are way larger in the market, as they mix fantasy and suspense audiences, and do sometimes get discussed here, but by and large, most of our regular participants don't read much contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy or thriller secondary world stories, preferring battles to mystery thrillers, and some of those who did keep more tabs on contemporary fantasy aren't around as much anymore. So it's nice to see The Troupe on the list representing horror and Cole's debut, though again, Cole's work is battle fantasy. And King's entry is his Dark Tower series, which is a multi-dimensional setting and is battle fantasy, western style. (As was Red Country as Abercrombie cycles through a wonderful array of story concepts. I'm waiting for his battle fantasy version of Pride and Prejudice.)
Our Mr. Sullivan is an interesting case. When he came here, he ventured that he was writing somewhat comic adventure fantasy of the sort nobody did anymore. And of course, he was wrong. Lots of authors do it, many of which we've discussed here, though I never did manage that whole list for him. But Sullivan's work is also plenty dark (I'm working on the second compilation at the moment,) and it is also less caper than battle fantasy. It is about clashing kingdoms, various types of battles, spy skullduggery, crows pecking eyes, etc. He has much in common with Mr. Lynch and a number of other current authors, he has antecedents of Mr. Kay and more than a touch of descent from Mr. Cook et. al., both Garrett and Black Company. So he fits right in. That leaves us with only The Troupe as the one non-battle fantasy on the list of top ten. So clearly, there's a preference in our most motivated of the crowd.
That being said, I have seen a noticeable increase this year in discussion of female writers coming up in the Fantasy/Horror forum. The discussions are smaller, true, but more people are asking what about this series and what about this one, on female writers, contemporary fantasies, and odder not-battle fantasy stories, etc. So discussion is going on; it's just we are the home of the unofficial Joe Abercrombie fan club, which just sort of happened, and the Steve Erikson club is still fairly strong, and many wait for George and enjoy the t.v. show meanwhile. Whereas our China Mieville fan club (Railsea,) Robin Hobb fan club (City of Dragons just came out this year so she missed the deadline,) and Jim Butcher fan club (Cold Days -- our contemporary fantasy one) have somewhat declined.
Some authors who are also getting a lot of attention: Elspeth Cooper, Douglas Hulick, Sam Sykes, Carol Berg, Anne Lyle, Stephen Deas, Paul Hoffman, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, N.K. Jemisin, J.M. McDermott, Daniel O'Malley, Saladin Ahmed, G. Willow Wilson, Kevin Hearne, Stacia Kane, Ilona Andrews, and Ben Aaronovitch.
This is not to detract in any way from the authors who got the top ten in our survey. The battle epics have always been the flagship of fantasy fiction and these authors have built their fanbases over time, sometimes exploring controversial and horror riven subject matter. There are a lot of battle epics out there, but these clearly resonated in character, setting and style with many people. Some of them are newer and did not get there through a simple trick of novelty, and others are icons or becoming the next venerated statespeople. Plus, you know, crows pecking out corpses' eyeballs. Fun stuff.
