TOP 10 FANTASY BOOKS (HONORABLE MENTION: CULT & PULP)

 

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of twenty special mentions.

Indeed, I also have two lists of honorable mentions for fantasy books – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the latter – for those fantasy books or works that don’t quite that iconic status or recognition within the genre ion of my classic honorable mentions but I like them anyway!

That or they’re an enduring influence on me despite (or perhaps because of) their “cult & pulp” status.

Unlike my top ten or twenty special mentions, I have no numerical limit or rankings on entries for honorable mention and list them in chronological order by date of publication, so I’ll include an index of entries at the outset.

 

(1977 – PRESENT) PIERS ANTHONY – XANTH & TAROT

(1983-1987 & 1993-1994) ALAN DEAN FOSTER – SPELLSINGER

(1987-1995) DAVID GEMMELL – JON SHANNOW

(1988-2024) TAD WILLIAMS – MEMORY, SORROW, THORN (OSTEN ARD)

(1991-1993) NICK BANTOCK – GRIFFIN & SABINE

(2008 – 2020) STUART SLADE – SALVATION WAR

 

 

 

 

(1977 – PRESENT) PIERS ANTHONY – XANTH & TAROT

 

Piers Anthony is something of a guilty pleasure for me, writing as he does in an adolescent style – a very horny adolescent, with a distinctively male gaze, but also contemplative and prone to wild ideas or flights of fancy. It is fortunate that I mostly read him as an adolescent, indeed an adolescent that might be described similarly.

TV Tropes aptly describes him as a writer “with pattern of starting a new series with a fresh innovative idea, and then never stopping it unless the publisher begs him to” – which is perhaps a little unfair, as he also tends to write with some striking images to go with those ideas. I wouldn’t quite go so far as Joe Lansdale’s description of Philip Jose Farmer as the man with the electric brain for Anthony but he comes close – and has more than a few points of comparison with Farmer.

And hot damn – most of those images and ideas still resonate with me now, cemented deep in my psyche, even with all the years with all the other fantasy or SF books I have read since, such that I remember them vividly.

He has several distinctive series, each with its own innovative idea or ideas for its premise. His most extensive and best known series is his Xanth series – set in the titular fantasy land of Xanth, a peninsula that resembles Anthony’s home state of Florida but can magically overlap with ones in our own world at different times and places, such as Italy when invaded by Carthaginians or Korea invaded by Mongols. Magic effectively becomes a force infusing everyone and everything in Xanth, with the key premise that every human born there has a unique magical ‘talent’, which vary in power and versatility. I’d suggest the consensus seems to be that anywhere from the first book to first three books are the best – after that, your mileage very much varies as where you draw the line reading further into the series if at all, particularly as the puns that started off as the occasional sly references begin to choke out the books as reflected by their titles.

The other series I would nominate – nominally SF but with a distinct fantasy feel to it – is his Tarot series, a prequel to his SF Cluster series (but also overlapping with it), but one that just resonated more with me. Partly that’s because the chapters follow the sequence of Tarot cards, albeit a greatly expanded Tarot, but mostly it’s the premise of a planet in which religious visions seem to take concrete – and dangerous – form and which the protagonist investigates on a quest to find the true religion.

 

 

 

 

(1983-1987 & 1993-1994) ALAN DEAN FOSTER – SPELLSINGER

 

Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger series is in a similar vein of pulp fantasy to the works of Piers Anthony (and the latter’s Xanth series in particular), or perhaps C. S. Lewis in a much more lighthearted vein. Again, the premise involves a magical world separate from our own, but with various magical links between them. That world is a world in which humans are only a small minority with other animals, mammalian or avian (larger than their equivalents on our world) that otherwise have the abilities or attributes of humans – walking upright, manual dexterity to make or use clothing and tools, sapience and speech. (They don’t eat each other – that niche would appear to be occupied by non-sapient reptiles, resembling the world of smaller dinosaurs).

Their antagonists are the giant intelligent insects or Plated Folk – the protagonist is mistakenly summoned from our world by a tortoise sorcerer to counteract his insect counterpart’s summoning of some mysterious source of power from our own world to aid their conquest of the other animals once and for all. Although the protagonist does not prove to be the ‘engineer’ sought by the wizard, he does prove to have a mysterious magical ability that may just be their salvation after all – a ‘spellsinger’ with the ability to conjure magic through music. The premise is best sustained in the first two books (essentially two halves of the one duology), but falters somewhat after that.

 

 

 

 

(1987-1995) DAVID GEMMELL – JON SHANNOW

 

Pure pulp fun.

David Gemmell was a prolific writer of heroic fantasy – “Gemmell’s works display violence, yet also explore themes of honour, loyalty and redemption. There is always a strong heroic theme but nearly always the heroes are flawed in some way.”

My favorite will always remain his Jon Shannow books, featuring the titular protagonist – the Jerusalem Man (also the title under which the first book was published in the US), named for his quest to find the fabled city of Jerusalem and hence God in a post-apocalyptic weird West future.

That’s not quite as weird as it sounds – the apocalypse three hundred years before the events of the first book remains mysterious and was so, well, apocalyptic, that people in the post-apocalyptic world believe not only that it was the Biblical apocalypse but recently after the events in the New Testament itself.

The Bible thoroughly imbues the book, reflecting Gemmell’s own Christian beliefs. The antagonist styles himself as Abaddon, leading the Hellborn. Shannow himself is a follower of the Book – prompting Abaddon to sneer whether Shannow is a Christian and will love Abaddon to death, to which the reply is that Shannow follows the old God, the God of vengeance in the Old Testament.

The world is weird, as the apocalypse seems to have flipped the poles and swapped the oceans with continents, if the wreck of the Titanic now on a mountain inland is anything to go by. There’s also magic, powered by the mysterious Sipstrassi Stones – which recur through Gemmell’s fantasy books.

The first book was originally intended as a standalone novel, as is clear from its epilogue in which Jon Shannow “finds” Jerusalem (with a twist) but was expanded into a trilogy – the three books were compiled into an omnibus volume in 1995.

 

 

 

 

(1988-2024) TAD WILLIAMS – MEMORY, SORROW, THORN (OSTEN ARD)

 

The Osten Ard high fantasy books by Tad Williams, named for its setting, was originally the trilogy known as the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, to which other books in the series have been added, notably the Last King of Osten Ard series

It’s essentially high fantasy in the vein of The Lord of the Rings, except that the Dark Lord – the Storm King – has more justice to his claims, as one of the elven Sithi that humanity has almost wiped out from Osten Ard.

 

 

 

 

(1991-1993) NICK BANTOCK – GRIFFIN & SABINE

 

A trilogy of epistolary novels – or more precisely epistolary visual novels, showcasing the author’s art as the narrative unfolds in the form of letters and postcards between the titular two characters. Narrative in the form of mystery, that is, as it unfolds that one or both of the postcard-crossed lovers may be more fantastic than they seem.

 

 

 

 

(2008 – 2020) STUART SLADE – SALVATION WAR

 

Yes – it’s cheesy and never evolved past its raw first draft as a playful tongue-in-cheek thread on an online forum (hence the wild-tier special mention) but I still have a soft spot for it. After all, what’s not to love about humanity taking on both sides of the apocalypse, heaven and hell? And winning!

Sadly, it remains unedited and unpublished as an actual book as it should have been – and also unresolved, as only the first two parts of a trilogy (although the war on heaven at least reached its conclusion), as the author firstly faced issues with its publication and then passed away as he was working on the third part. That author, Stuart Slade, did publish another series The Big One as self-published books – the title referring to its opening premise of the United States nuking the crap out of Nazi Germany in 1947 after Britain made peace in 1940).

The premise of The Salvation War is simple. What is humanity to do when God abandons Earth in the apocalypse, declaring it and everyone on it forfeit to the forces of Hell? Well, what else but declare war on both Heaven and Hell – and to kick ass doing it!

 

 

TOP 10 FANTASY BOOKS (HONORABLE MENTION: CLASSIC)

 

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of twenty special mentions.

Indeed, I also have two lists of honorable mentions for fantasy books – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the former – for those classic fantasy books or works that have iconic status or recognition within popular culture or imagination.

Unlike my top ten or twenty special mentions, I have no numerical limit or rankings on entries for honorable mention and list them in chronological order by date of publication, so I’ll include an index of entries at the outset.

 

(1912 – PRESENT) EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS – TARZAN

(1919) JAMES BRANCH CABELL – JURGEN

(1950 – 1984) JACK VANCE – DYING EARTH

(1961 – 2023) MICHAEL MOORCOCK – ELRIC OF MELNIBONE

(1964 – 1977) THOMAS BURNETT SWANN – DAY OF THE MINOTAUR

(1968 – 1970) JAMES BLISH – BLACK EASTER / THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT

(1972) RICHARD ADAMS – WATERSHIP DOWN

(1977 – 2013) STEPHEN DONALDSON – THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT

(1980 – 1987) GENE WOLFE – THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN

(1996 – 2001) NEVERWHERE & AMERICAN GODS

(1996-?) GEORGE R.R. MARTIN – A SONG OF ICE & FIRE / GAME OF THRONES

 

 

 

 

 

(1912 – PRESENT) EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS – TARZAN

 

Tarzan is the most iconic hero of fantasy and science fiction – the archetypal jungle hero (or perhaps modern barbarian hero), in a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The start of the series is easy to date to “Tarzan of the Apes” in 1912. The end of the series less so – Burroughs died in 1950 but “Tarzan and the Valley of Gold” in 1966 was authorized as the 25th official Tarzan novel by the Burroughs estate. However, I’m prepared to continue this entry through to the present to reflect the enduring popularity of the character – or at least to include Philip Jose Farmer’s books featuring Tarzan or versions of him.

Born John Clayton and heir to English aristocracy as Lord Greystoke (or more precisely Viscount Greystoke), Tarzan was marooned with his aristocrat parents and ‘adopted’ after their deaths by a maternal female ape within a ‘tribe’ of great apes – indeed, Tarzan is his name in the ape language.

Philip Jose Farmer condensed Tarzan’s fictional ‘biography’ from the series by Edgar Rice Burroughs into his book Tarzan Alive, which is essentially my central reference to Tarzan (and exclusively so after the first two books). Farmer was an enduring fan of the character and wrote of Tarzan (or his world) in a number of books – most infamously in A Feast Unknown, featuring a thinly veiled pastiche of Tarzan and Doc Savage, or most famously, in his so-called Wold Newton Universe, where he linked together a number of fictional superheroes to the effect of a meteorite.

And I say superheroes as Tarzan has virtually superhuman abilities. After all, we’re talking someone who has wrestled virtually every animal, including full grown bull apes and gorillas. In short, he easily out-Batmans Batman and is the Superman of the jungle.

He is also of superhuman intelligence – a feature not readily discerned from the unfortunate monosyllabic and broken English of his screen adaptations. In the books – indeed, the first book – he could read English before he could speak it, having taught himself to read from the children’s picture books left in his parents’ log cabin and deducing the symbols as a language, in complete isolation from humans. He also spoke French before he spoke English, learning it from the first European he encountered. He readily learns to speak English – as well as thirty or so languages after that. So much for “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.

Despite a certain lack of plausibility, he remains an enduring hero – a “daydream figure” who obviously appeals to our continuing fascination for an animal or nature hero (and perhaps less fortunately to a ‘white god’ figure).

 

 

 

 

(1919) JAMES BRANCH CABELL – JURGEN

 

Sadly obscure these days, even for this as his best known book and subject of an obscenity trial – a golden advertisement if ever I saw one.

“The eponymous hero, who considers himself a monstrous clever fellow, embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven. Everywhere he goes, he winds up seducing the local women, even the Devil’s wife.”

Makes a lot of use of double entendre for everyone admiring his sword. I like the nod to the need for every hero to descend into the underworld. Also that hell is a democracy, just having suspended elections for its government while in war against heaven, an authoritarian monarchy.

 

 

 

 

(1950 – 1984) JACK VANCE – DYING EARTH

 

Undeniably classic work of fantasy – and one that has had a huge influence on fantasy, not least in the adaptation of “Vancian” magic or ‘fire-and-forget’ spells as the game mechanic for magic in Dungeons and Dragons.

Otherwise, a fantasy setting in the far future of the titular dying earth with Vance’s tongue very much in his cheek – so far in the future that the world has gone all the way back from science to magic in its senility, albeit magic that actually works. Oh – and the sun is about to going out, something the characters frequently invoke with a superstitious glance at it every now and then, hoping that this isn’t the moment it does.

Four Dying Earth books were written by Vance – the first an anthology of short stories, the second and third picaresque adventures revolving around the confidence trickster Cugel the Clever, and the fourth reverts to something of an anthology centered around a conclave of magicians including the titular Rhialto the Marvelous.

Vance’s prose is a delight to read – a particularly memorable passage is the increasing degrees of lucidity you get from an oracle the higher the payment.

 

 

 

 

(1961 – 2023) MICHAEL MOORCOCK – ELRIC OF MELNIBONE

 

Undeniably classic work of fantasy – and one that has had almost as huge influence on fantasy as Vance’s Dying Earth, again not least in Dungeons and Dragons with the Law-Chaos axis of character alignment. Also the multiverse and the Eternal Champion, the latter often accompanied by the Eternal Sidekick and “has a (typically doomed) love interest, the Eternal Consort” as well as an Eternal Enemy.

Moorcock has been a prolific writer of fantasy and SF, virtually all of which he has shoehorned into his Eternal Champion mythos in one way or another, but most people know him for the Elric Saga, itself a prolific collection of stories and novels as well as multimedia franchise from 1961 through to the present.

At least one fantasy & SF critic, John Clute, considers Elric a deliberate parody of Conan and it’s not hard to see why – a sickly sorcerer as heir to a decadent empire and owing his power or prowess to his soul-sucking sword Stormbringer. (Clute also proposes that Moorcock’s character Jerry Cornelius is a parody of Elric).

 

 

 

 

(1964 – 1977) THOMAS BURNETT SWANN – DAY OF THE MINOTAUR

 

I’m dubbing this Arcadian fantasy – Thomas Burnett Swann’s Day of the Minotaur, published in 1966 but previously serialized in 1964-1965, was Cretan in setting but Arcadian in theme, a recurring one for the author.

And by Arcadian, I mean in the sense of paradise lost – not Biblical Eden but classical Arcadia, a literally “mythological, idyllic, pastoral paradise of natural harmony and simplicity”, populated by the demi-humans of classical mythology as fabulous Beasts and presided over by the benevolent Great Mother.

In Day of the Minotaur, we see the vestiges of Arcadia clinging to the forests of Crete, in full retreat from humanity. Relations are strained even with the Minoan civilization with which it has relatively close affinity, but both are under attack from the invading Achaeans.  Both survive what seems a last stand, but both know they are ultimately doomed. Like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, the Beasts sail west to return to their mystical homeland, the Isles of the Blessed.

As I said, this theme of Arcadian retreat was a recurring one for the author – “The bulk of Swann’s fantasy fits into a rough chronology that begins in ancient Egypt around 2500 BC and chronicles the steady decline of magic and mythological races…The coming of more “advanced” civilisations constantly threatens to destroy their pre-industrial world, and they must continually seek refuge wherever they can. They see the advent of Christianity as a major tragedy; the Christians regard magic and mythological beings as evil and seek to destroy the surviving creatures, although some manage to survive and preserve some of their old ways through medieval times down to the late 19th century and perhaps even the 20th.”

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(1968 – 1970) JAMES BLISH – BLACK EASTER / THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT

 

Black Easter essentially reads like a joke – an arms dealer, a black magician and a priest walk into a bar…

Well, not quite a bar but the arms dealer does a deal with the black magician to release all the demons from Hell on Earth for a single night. The reason – partly for the lulz but mostly to drum up business for arms. The priest comes in due to a pact between white magicians (from the Vatican!) and black magicians to monitor each other – incredibly, the priest does not attempt to interfere with the deal but is simply there to ensure the black magician sticks to the rules of the pact.

It’s a slow burn – dare I say it, something of a shaggy dog joke, or is that shaggy God joke? – a short story premise expanded to novel or novella and mostly focused on the details of the black magic involved, but like any good joke it’s all set up for the punchline.

And that punchline is (spoiler alert) that they have unleashed the apocalypse on the world, except that God is dead and there is no power to return the demons to Hell. (One wonders why the demons didn’t break out on their own before if that was the case.)

The sequel novel doesn’t quite have the same wham effect for its punchline. The characters from the first novel as well as everyone else in general deal with hell let loose on Earth in – where else? – California and Las Vegas.

The punchline arises from the apparent premise that God may not be so dead after all as something seems to be restraining the force of Hell. The punchline, delivered with Miltonian effect by the Devil himself, is that something turns out to be Satan, who now has to assume the role of God – something he now realizes he never really wanted and so is undone by his own Pyrrhic victory.

It might seem a fantasy duology based on one or two theological punchlines (depending on whether you like the second as much as the first) but it has continued to endure as an influence on my imagination and psyche.

 

 

 

 

(1972) RICHARD ADAMS – WATERSHIP DOWN

 

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

The classic animal fantasy – Lord of the Rings with rabbits instead of hobbits and if the plot was that the hobbits had to find a new Shire.

On the one hand, “these are not humans in rabbit form” – “They live and think like fragile prey animals. Caution is a way of life because death is a moment-to-moment possibility”.

On the other hand, the rabbits have “their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology”. Not surprisingly, the last is my favorite, focusing on their trickster folk hero, the first rabbit – El-ahrairah, the Prince With a Thousand Enemies.

Although I also have a soft spot for “going tharn” – when a rabbit becomes “frozen in a state of instinctive terror”.

 

 

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(1977 – 2013) STEPHEN DONALDSON – THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT

 

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant might seem a lot like The Lord of the Rings and indeed it is to a point. It has a similar fantasy secondary world – the Land instead of Middle Earth – menaced by a similar Dark Lord, Lord Foul the Despiser, who if anything is even darker than Sauron, as his name indicates. It even has a Ringbearer in its titular protagonist, albeit that ring is a mundane object in our own world – Covenant’s white gold wedding ring – but the ultimate ring of power in the Land.

At a certain point, however, the reader becomes aware that the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a profound deconstruction of The Lord of the Rings. Typically, that point is a plot point soon into the first book of the first trilogy, Lord Foul’s Bane, where Covenant is overwhelmed by the sensory overload of the Land and commits a crime that has consequences through the first trilogy. If not that point, it is typically a point in the second book of that first trilogy, The Illearth War, where the leader of the military forces against Lord Foul fails despite his best efforts and must resort to a self-sacrificial Pyrrhic victory.

Or that point may be the overarching nature of its titular protagonist – where The Lord of the Rings had three Christ-like heroic figures (Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragon), Thomas Covenant is the Land’s literal leper-messiah. Worse, because of his leprosy in our world, he has spent a lifetime of managing the disease to the effect of rigorous mental discipline that he cannot believe in the false hope of any magical cure or else he will succumb to the disease – his survival depends on such things as his habitual VSE or visual surveillance of extremities. Hence, when he finds himself transported to a world in which there is a magical cure, it goes against a lifetime of literally life-saving mental discipline and so he cannot believe in that world, becoming Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

And yet after the deconstruction comes reconstruction, as the series ultimately returns to something like The Lord of the Rings after all – with the heroic resistance of the Land against Lord Foul and Covenant finding some balance between unbelief and doing the right thing, even in a dream, because as he himself says, Lord Foul laughs at lepers.

And between the deconstruction and the reconstruction falls the resonance – a resonance of phrase and fable that lodges in the psyche long after reading it and refuses to go away. Phrases such as Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Lord Foul the Despiser, and my personal favorite – the Ritual of Desecration, the original sin that almost destroyed the Land in the distant past.

 

 

 

(1980 – 1987) GENE WOLFE – THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN

 

“He’s not an easy read” – or alternatively, what the hell is going on?!

The former was Sterling Archer on Bartleby the Scrivener – “Anyone? Not a big Melville crowd here, huh?” – but it applies also as much if not more so to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, probably with the latter being a common exclamation on reading it.

Sure, I “got” a lot of it, but I’m also sure that I missed a lot more in the mind screw narrative of its unreliable narrator protagonist set in a feudal dying Earth in the far future, about a million years or so (such that a picture of the first moon landing is an incredibly ancient artifact in the book’s signature scene).

It doesn’t help that there are characters apparently jumping back and forth through time that I still haven’t worked out, although I like the “green man” – a time traveler who has been genetically engineered to extract energy from photosynthesis and is held captive in a carnival sideshow “predicting” the future.

There’s also bizarre aliens or alien animals loose on Earth – such as the unforgettable alzabo, an alien predator that absorbs the memories of its victims and then can speak with their voice to lure in further prey. The alzabo gland that allows it to do this is an important plot point.

As you can tell, the parts you get tend to be unforgettable by how bizarre or striking they are.

 

 

 

 

(1996 – 2001) NEVERWHERE & AMERICAN GODS

 

“So do you have mighty bacchanals in her honour? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candle holders? Do you step naked into the sea foam chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

 

I had quite the quandary with this entry, which I ultimately resolved by separating the art from the artist by effectively featuring the works anonymously, without reference to their author, as I can’t deny the enduring influence of these two works on me. Also, as I understand it, the author seems to have retired from writing, possibly due to the same reasons for which I separate the art and the artist. And in a sense, these two works exist independently of their author in other media. Indeed, a little like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Neverwhere began as a BBC TV series, albeit also written by the author. Apart from the novelization of it, it has also been adapted to nine issue comics series (written by Mike Carey) as well as a radio play, although I anticipate it’s unlikely to see further adaptations. American Gods has seen an adaptation as a TV series – I liked the first season, although it went in some very different directions from the book. The second season apparently fizzled with the departure of the showrunners for the first season, although it may have bounced back in its third and final season. The book has also had a sequel novel (or more precisely a novel set in the same world with the same premise) and two sequel short stories (that are indeed sequels to the book), as well as an adaptation as a series of comics.

Of the two, my favorite is American Gods and its premise is also more straightforward to explain. Essentially its premise is that all myths are true, to the extent that people believe in them. However, that is not as good as it might sound for the myths in question. Yes, all the old gods of all the people that came to America still continue to exist but eke out that existence on the dregs of whatever belief in them that remains, even if half (or completely) forgotten and even if only as symbol or metaphor. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re squaring off against the new gods, such as the god of Media, who are very much coked up to the eyeballs on belief in them. It also has one of my favorite protagonists of fantasy, Shadow Moon – who wants nothing more than to return to his wife and a job with his best friend after release from prison, but the gods have other plans for him. Literally.

Neverwhere has a similar premise, not quite all myths are true but that there is a magic – not unlike megapolisomancy in Fritz Leiber’s literal urban fantasy novel Our Lady of Darkness – formed from large cities and that takes shape in their magical underground equivalents, such as London Below. I particularly like how each city has its mystical Beast at its heart.

 

 

 

(1996-?) GEORGE R.R. MARTIN – A SONG OF ICE & FIRE / GAME OF THRONES

 

A Song of Ice and Fire needs little introduction, due to its own popularity and even more so that of its TV adaptation in A Game of Thrones.

Due to that popularity, its high fantasy setting – the two continents of Westeros and Essos – are one of the most well known fantasy settings in popular culture and imagination. Of the two continents, Westeros has the more focus – Essos mostly seems to be there to throw in something bizarre or weird, usually imported into Westeros. As for Westeros, it’s essentially the War of the Roses as Battle Royale, with Starks substituting for York and Lannister for Lancaster, crossed with Hadrian’s Wall – except the latter is to keep out an icy apocalypse of death as well as the Picts. That apocalypse is part of a general trend of old magic that people had thought long gone coming back.

What also needs little introduction is how A Song of Ice and Fire stalled without conclusion – and worse, how Game of Thrones had a conclusion but one so bad that it undermined the iconic status and popularity of the entire series. Both are offset somewhat by prequel series – obviously there can’t be any sequel series as one didn’t end and one ended so badly.

 

 

 

 

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books.

That’s right – I don’t just have a top ten fantasy books, I have a whole host of special mentions. My usual rule is twenty special mentions for each top ten, where the subject matter is prolific enough, as it is here – which I suppose would usually make each top ten a top thirty if you want to look at it that way. My special mentions are also where I can have some fun with the subject category and splash out with some wilder entries.

And here they are.

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

(1) FAIRY TALES

 

“Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already…What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of (evil). The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon” – G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, the term fairy tale tends to be used dismissively for stories only for children – although the best children’s literature arguably speaks to all ages – or even pejoratively for obvious fanciful falsehoods or “happily ever after” wishful thinking.

To that, one could argue that such preconceptions don’t even apply to those stories commonly called fairy tales, except in their modern incarnations, particularly their modern cinematic and television adaptations. Perhaps such preconceptions might be avoided by one of their alternative names – of which my favorites are wonder tales or the German term marchen – but the term fairy tale is too deeply ingrained in popular consciousness or imagination.

Whatever the name, a fairy tale is a “short story that belongs to the folklore genre” or a “specific type” of fantastic folktale. Ironically, not many fairy tales actually feature fairies – the fairy in the name of fairy tale refers more to fairy as a place or setting, the fairy lands or otherworlds of folklore and mythology but taking on a more generic meaning as a place of magic. Such stories do indeed typically feature magic and enchantments as well as “mythical or fanciful beings”, fairies or otherwise, although some stories such as Bluebeard don’t have any explicit magic or supernatural elements.

“Fairy tales were originally intended for all ages, but for a long period of time, they were only written or presented as children’s stories”, particularly in their cinematic adaptations by Disney. Many fairy tales were extraordinarily dark in their original form – some to the point of verging on horror – and some remain so in their modern versions, even if only by way of lingering hints or subtext. Ironically again, there is a countervailing trend within popular culture to revert fairy tales to their darker and edgier roots – or to subvert them as more adult deconstructions (or reconstructions), as well as parodies or satires (or the trope of “fractured fairy tales”).

The demarcation between fairy tales and legends or fables can be fuzzy. Fairy tales tend to be distinguished from legends by some degree of belief in historicity or veracity for their events, location or people. By contrast, fairy tales tend to be more timeless – “once upon a time” – and set in their own space distinct from our own world. Fables tend to focus more on the moral of a story as their definitive element.

“Fairy tales are found in cultures all over the world” and with “widespread variants”, but “only a tiny handful of them are widely known in modern culture”. They have a span to match their geographic scale – “many of today’s fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared with variations, in multiple cultures around the world”. Fairy tales in literary form are relatively modern, mostly evolving from their predecessors in oral form or tradition. This makes “the history of the fairy tale…particularly difficult to trace because often only the literary forms survive”, but even so some fairy tales may date back thousands of years to the Bronze Age or the beginnings of civilization and writing itself.

“What fairy tales do share is a distinct and consistent set of narrative conventions. They usually take place “once upon a time”, in a setting that’s familiar but usually broadly generic, with few (if any) references to real people, places or events…typically told in an extremely spare and laconic style, using archetypical characters and locations”. That style was cited by Italo Calvino as a prime example of “quickness” in literature.

JRR Tolkien famously used the term for literary fantasy, including his own, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” – an essay well worth reading for its philosophy of literary fantasy and Tolkien’s own writing. Like others who have pointed out that even traditional fairy tales tended not to involve fairies as such, Tolkien defined fairy tales as “stories about the adventures of men in Faerie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only magical species but many other marvels”. However, by either definition of fairy tale, it is worth remembering that Tolkien’s definitive literary fantasy, “The Lord of the Rings” (and even more so “The Hobbit”), would qualify as (extended) fairy tales – with elves, dwarves, goblins and trolls that have all been regarded as types of fairies.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT ONCE UPON A TIER?)

 

 

 

 

(2) H.P. LOVECRAFT –
CTHULHU MYTHOS (1928 – PRESENT)

 

Does any other literary fantasy or SF mythology have the pre-eminence, or even more so capture the paranoid modern zeitgeist, as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?

Lovecraft took the worldview of modern science and turned it into a source of cosmic horror, creating that genre of fantasy or SF horror.

“His famous cosmology, created almost single-handedly, did not celebrate science and progress, but was instead full of otherworldly monsters and blind, raving deities…all of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe…Einstein’s theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, and alien geometry, and radically altered peoples’ notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener’s then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed…All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft’s stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time”.

Our science and technology are but a candle held up to the storm – worse, as developed by writers using the Cthulhu Mythos such as Charles Stross, they may actually draw the notice of entities that were best left not noticing us (and tend to drive us mad if we notice them). Or, as Stross observed elsewhere, it was a potent metaphor for such terrors as Cold War fears of nuclear warfare – as almost otherworldly forces of destruction lurking beneath the surface ready to be unleashed by unfeeling beings.

Although in fairness, Cthulhu is taken out by a steamship to his head in his original appearance in The Call of Cthulhu. Try doing that with pre-industrial technology.

TV Tropes observes how Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is an inversion of the philosopher Leibniz’s optimism “that the entire world could be described by reason, and that this is the best of all possible worlds”. For Lovecraft, “each new discovery only increased humanity’s knowledge of its own ignorance and insignificance, encouraging a nihilistic atmosphere, and this is perhaps the central theme of Lovecraft’s incisive fiction”. Interestingly that same comparison between Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” and Lovecraft’s horror in James Morrow’s Blameless in Abaddon.

Lovecraft didn’t coin the term Cthulhu Mythos for his mythology – for that matter, I’m not sure how consistent or systematic his mythology was throughout his works. He was all about the vibe of it, with details changing between individual works. However, aptly enough, his creation had a life of its own, as developed and used by other writers, as encouraged by Lovecraft himself.

TV Tropes stated the premise of the Cthulhu Mythos best – “Humanity exists within a small flickering firelight of sanity and reason in a cold and utterly senseless universe full of ancient and terrible things with tentacles and too many eyes. Our science doesn’t properly describe the workings of the universe – ignorance really is bliss because even trying to understand the horrid truth of reality will surely drive you to madness. Our planet was owned by all manner of unknowable alien beings long before we crawled out of the primordial muck, and guess what? They want it back, which means doing a little pest control…”

It is for this mythology that Lovecraft ranks the second top spot of my special mentions – and more generally that he is “is considered perhaps both the greatest and most notorious of all American horror fiction writers, rivalled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe”.

Fortunately, his mythology transcends Lovecraft himself, as there’s the matter of that notoriety – which remains for somewhat problematic reasons. There’s also the quality of his writing, with the style or execution of his prose often falling short of the dark grandeur of his cosmic horror – Lovecraft was notorious for his purple prose, and enthusiasm for more archaic expressions such as eldritch.

And then there is the fact that “much of his work is informed by a powerful fear and disgust for anything outside the limited sphere of an urban White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of his time” – or more bluntly, he “was “afraid of everything that wasn’t his home town of Providence, Rhode Island”.

Even so, his Cthulhu Mythos remains definitive for me of fantasy in general. If I was to simply fantasy down to just two elements, it would be a fusion of fairy tale and the Cthulhu Mythos. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description or tagline for The Lord of the Rings – fairy tale meets Cthulhu Mythos. If only Tolkien had written that essay…

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER – OR IS THAT CTHULHU-TIER?)

 

 

 

 

(3) DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (1974 – PRESENT)

 

Although I do have a special mention entry for an actual Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons remains the best de facto encyclopedic treatment of fantasy themes and tropes- which is not surprising for something that strives to systematically codify the genre of fantasy for obsessive-compulsive rules-lawyering geeks to play as a game.

Of course, the standout is its holy trinity – the three enduring core rulebooks of The Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and The Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Dungeons and Dragons essentially kills two birds with one stone – a twenty-sided stone. As the fantasy game, it set out to codify both fantasy and games – fantasy tropes or themes for use in play, and the mechanics of role playing games to play them. And its achievement is unparalleled in both.

Firstly, it is THE tabletop role-playing game – “While Dungeons & Dragons may not have created tabletop roleplaying games, it codified many of the mechanics and tropes associated with them, is what most people picture when they think of a tabletop RPG (even if they’ve never played one), and is by far the most popular tabletop RPG of all time”.

My interest in it, however, is more for its codification of fantasy tropes or themes, reflecting my use of it more as comprehensive reference work rather than game – “Dungeons & Dragons is one of the trope codifiers of the modern era, having single-handedly mashed swords and sorcery and epic high fantasy into the fantasy genre as we know it today”

And even more so than entries from the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I (and probably most contemporary readers of fantasy) tend to default to descriptive terms or codified tropes used by Dungeons and Dragons when I think of fantasy – its distinctive character classes, alignments, schools of magic and so on.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
(S-TIER: GOD TIER)

 

 

 

(4) JOHN CLUTE & JOHN GRANT –
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY (1997)

 

The best single reference work concerning fantasy fiction in all media – even better now that it is online, although sadly, not updated like its companion and predecessor The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

However, that it is not updated does not detract from its greatest strength as a reference work and influence on me personally, which is not so much its entries for individual authors or works, but its compilation of fantasy themes and tropes, including its classification of fantasy subgenres. Many of these are compiled as entries under an evocative or striking phrase, many of which in turn were invented by the editors – one notable example being ‘thinning’, for the gradual loss of magic or vitality from the world.

Others include the descriptive term for one of my favorite subgenres of fantasy – posthumous fantasy, a fantasy set in the afterlife. The latter is more usually styled as Bangsian fantasy, named for John Kendricks Bangs who arguably codified or pioneered it as a modern fantasy subgenre – but often leads to confusion with its more conventional use for fiction or in this case fantasy published after an author’s death when I casually use the term posthumous fantasy elsewhere.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

 

 

(5) DIANA WYNNE JONES –

THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND (1996)

 

Following on from Dungeons & Dragons and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, this is the third of my top three or god-tier entries that are all effectively encyclopedic reference works for the genre of fantasy, whether informally as for the rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons or formally as for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland leans more to the formal reference work of the latter arranged in alphabetical order, but with a twist – its meta-fictional premise that it is a tour guide to “Fantasyland” as the generic setting of pretty much all fantasy. The creators of fantasy stories are the “Management” of Fantasyland and their stories are “tours” for their audiences, so the book is in the style of a tourist guidebook, albeit a fictional parodic one – hence the title, adapted from the popular Rough Guide series of tourist guidebooks at the time.

The end result is a Devil’s Dictionary deconstructing the tropes or cliches of the fantasy genre – such as entry on elves, which has lodged itself deep in my psyche ever since such that I have never quite been able to look at the elves in The Lord of the Rings the same way again.

“Elves appear to have deteriorated generally since the coming of humans. If you meet Elves, expect to have to listen for hours while they tell you about this – many Elves are great bores on the subject – and about what glories there were in ancient days. They will intersperse their account with nostalgic ditties (songs of aching beauty) and conclude by telling you how great numbers of Elves have become so wearied with the thinning of the old golden wonders that they have all departed, departed into the West. This is correct, provided you take it with the understanding that Elves do not say anything quite straight. Many Elves have indeed gone west, to Minnesota and thence to California, and finally to Arizona, where they have great fun wearing punk clothes and riding motorbikes”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

*

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(6) LEWIS CARROLL –
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND / THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1865 – 1871)

 

“Curiouser and curiouser”…

Few fantasies are as iconic as Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (although the two books are often merged in popular culture) – which for simplicity I’ll conflate with their protagonist, Alice.

Through the vivid imagery or encounters of her adventures, as well as their potential symbolic allusions, Alice has lent herself readily to adaptation and popular imagination.

Allusions to Alice have earned their own trope on TV Tropes, which notes that the original novels can be associated with surreal or psychedelic fantasy, drug imagery (as in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit), gothic horror and other aspects of Victorian England, such as steampunk.

As TV Tropes notes, “the name ‘Alice’, when used in a reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll” (or Liddell – but more about that later). Other frequent references include white rabbits or going down the rabbit hole (as in The Matrix) – into a world of the hero’s journey that doesn’t conform to real world logic (and in which our heroine has to use intuition, a good heart, and an ability to acquire allies).

Not to mention white rabbits, cats and tea parties – or Mad Hatters. While we’re here, I should also note cards and chess as the premise for each of the settings in Wonderland and beyond the looking-glass respectively.

As for Alice herself, Lewis Carroll described her (when writing on her personality in “Alice on the Stage”) as “wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!”. I can’t think of a better – or more endearing – description than that.

For Carroll, there was, at least to some extent, a real Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she asked Carroll to tell her a story on a boating trip in Oxford. The extent to which his character can be identified with Alice Liddell is not clear (and the brunette Liddell certainly did not resemble the blonde illustrations in the original book by cartoonist Sir John Tenniel). However, there are direct links to Liddell in the books – they are set on her birthday and her half birthday six months later (with the corresponding age), they are dedicated to her and the letters of her name are featured in an acrostic poem in the sequel.

As Catherine Robson wrote in Men in Wonderland – “In all her different and associated forms—underground and through the looking glass, textual and visual, drawn and photographed, as Carroll’s brunette or Tenniel’s blonde or Disney’s prim miss…in novel, poem, satire, play, film, cartoon, newspaper, magazine, album cover or song—Alice is the ultimate cultural icon, available for any and every form of manipulation, and as ubiquitous today as in the era of her first appearance.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

(7) BRAM STOKER –
DRACULA (1897)

 

Dracula is THE vampire, synonymous with vampires and vampirism in popular culture and imagination.

My love of vampire fiction – in literature, in film or television, in comics and in every other media in which vampires appear – originates directly from Dracula, as I read it in early childhood. It may be tame by standards of modern cinematic horror, particularly given its style as an epistolary novel, but it literally gave me nightmares as a child. Of course, it probably didn’t help that I read it when I was home from school sick with fever – and I still remember it in terms of fever dream.

There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond, as well as an incredible dense “folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe”.

And yet almost all of it pales (heh) in comparison to the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which effectively supersedes its predecessors in folklore, except to the extent it adapted them – and even then most people remember it by Dracula rather than the original folklore.

Vampires tend to be superpowered by nature and Dracula even more so, as his book codified the definitive vampire tropes in fiction. In adaptations, he has also been freakishly hard to kill, at least permanently. He can shift shape, most impressively into mist or dust in moonlight – passing through the smallest cracks and virtually teleporting. He can also command animals – and the elements. In short, he was potentially a Dark Lord to rival Sauron – indeed, it wouldn’t be too hard to recast Dracula as The Lord of the Rings, substituting Transylvania for Mordor and the Brides for the Black Riders (only much s€xier). Kim Newman did something of the sort with his Anno Dracula series, where Dracula bests Van Helsing and vampirizes Queen Victoria to rule the British Empire. Or at least, he might have done if he’d had any sort of plan in Stoker’s book beyond picking up British chicks – but then that’s just how he swings, baby.

Speaking of the Brides, they’re never referred to as such or the Brides of Dracula in the novel itself – that came later in other media and popular culture – but instead are referred to as the sisters. Nor are they portrayed as married to him or in any other relationship to him – their names as well as “the origin and identity of the Sisters, as well as the true nature of their relationship with Count Dracula, is never revealed”.

They were, however, written as hot, and they have been portrayed that way ever since in imitations or adaptations, something they use to bewitch their victims such as Jonathan Harker or those who seek to stake them such as Abraham van Helsing, albeit both narrowly survive or resist their bewitchment. One wonders why Dracula even leaves his castle at all, let alone for England, when he could just hang with the Brides – although in fairness it seems that his grand plan in England was to replicate the Brides. It amuses me that Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England ultimately involved not much else.

“Dracula is one of the most famous works of English literature and has been called the centrepiece of vampire fiction…the novel has been adapted many times. Count Dracula has deeply influenced the popular conception of vampires; with over 700 appearances across virtually all forms of media, the Guiness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.”

And then you have all the themes, above and below the surface. I’ve already referred to Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England – which sees Dracula as an example of the invasion literature at the time, albeit the latter tended towards more mortal and mundane enemies. Dracula’s invasion also bears parallels to disease or plague – something made more explicit in the various films of Nosferatu, which was essentially Dracula with the serial numbers filed off. Throw in ethnicity (including Stoker’s Irish nationality), sexuality, religion or superstition, and science – and now we’re just getting started.

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

 

(8) ROBERT E. HOWARD –
CONAN (1932-1936)

 

The Lord of the Rings may have defined modern literary fantasy – fantasy could well be classified as pre-Tolkien and post-Tolkien. And yet…there were of course other writers of fantasy before (and apart from) Tolkien, most notably Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories from 1932 to 1936. I understand that Tolkien read and enjoyed the Conan stories – and I can’t resist quoting George R. R. Martin, who came to The Lord of The Rings from those very different Conan stories:

“Robert E. Howard’s stories usually opened with a giant serpent slithering by or an axe cleaving someone’s head in two. Tolkien opened his with a birthday party…Conan would hack a bloody path right through the Shire, end to end, I remembered thinking…Yet I kept on reading. I almost gave up at Tom Bombadil, when people started going “Hey! Come derry do! Tom Bombadillo!”. Things got more interesting in the barrow downs, though, and even more so in Bree, where Strider strode onto the scene. By the time we got to Weathertop, Tolkien had me…A chill went through me, such as Conan and Kull have never evoked.”

On the other hand, Conan would have made quick work of the Quest, while making off with an elf girl or two…

Conan embodies heroic fantasy in his setting of the Hyborian Age – an age of our own world after “the oceans drank Atlantis” that conveniently predates all surviving historical records. Translation: a setting for which Howard didn’t have to do any of that pesky research for his quick pulp fantasy stories but which could still invoke or have historical vibes as the precursors of civilizations in recorded history.

“Know, o prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian; black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

That pretty much sums up Howard’s stories of his best known hero Conan which often invoke for me Conan as a Hyborian Bond – or is that barbarian Bond? – with similar vibes as James Bond with the different Bond girls for each story, as well as the different monstrous or sorcerous antagonists.

Due to his friendship with H.P. Lovecraft, “the original Conan stories are actually a peripheral part of the Cthulhu Mythos” – and perhaps that friendship also accounts for the huge “loathsome serpents” that recur throughout the stories. They are also canon to the Marvel Universe, thanks to their adaptation to comics by Marvel.

 

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

*

 

 

(9) SHIRLEY JACKSON –
“THE LOTTERY” (1948)

 

Like the Awards named after her, Shirley Jackson is known for stories of psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy, ever so subtly bubbling to the surface of our world. This is amply demonstrated by her most famous story “The Lottery”, and indeed, in her collection of stories, named for it – The Lottery and Other Stories. One might consider the nature of her stories as fantasy to be arguable, but as I said, the fantasy in her stories is a subtle intrusion into our world – maybe mundane, maybe magical. The Lottery and Other Stories bore the subtitle The Adventures of James Harris, for a recurring figure in the stories of that collection, who may or may not be supernatural – he certainly seems to be a daemon lover or Dionysian force, complete with his retinue of maenads (who can then take over people’s apartments by sheer force of persuasion).

As for “The Lottery”, it has an ambience of dark fantasy to it – set, it seems, in an alternative United States. One in which small American towns casually celebrate an annual festival in much the same way as any other annual event – a lottery which the winner does not seem eager for the prize (and indeed vociferously protests its unfairness), but which the townsfolk insists on giving to her. Because, you know, the crops and harvest depend on it. Cue the stones…or in the words of John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn – “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?”

Of course, the story’s power is in its symbolism, resonant of so many images of the dark underbelly of American society, or the American Dream. After all, it doesn’t take too much to imagine something like the Lottery – perhaps not so blunt of course, but still, you know…

As newscaster Kent Brockman referred to it in an episode of The Simpsons, it is a chilling tale of social conformity – and not, much to Homer’s disappointment on checking it out of the library, a guide to winning the lottery.

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(10) FRITZ LEIBER –

“THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES” (1949)

 

Fritz Leiber rocked my fantasy world, as he did the world of literary fantasy in general, even if he is sadly overlooked in the genre now. I guess that’s the fate of most fantasy writers that aren’t the current thing or aren’t named Tolkien. There’s also Leiber’s love of cats, chess, and theater – which are all fun to see pop up in his stories like playing the fantasy nerd equivalent of a drinking game.

Anyway, there simply is too much Leiber to choose from for its influence on me or the genre. There’s his novels, of which the standout is The Big Time – an SF novel of time war, as in two sides fighting a mysterious cosmic war against each other across time and space by changing history on each other (or the Change War as they call it). It’s even more intriguing as much of the vast cosmic backstory is only dropped in hints or remains mysterious (even when Leiber set a few other stories in the same universe). Indeed, the entire novel is set in a kind of cosmic waystation (in the titular Big Time, outside Little Time or the space time of our universe constantly being changed by the war), once again evoking Leiber’s love of theater both in the story (as the waystation is for rest and relaxation) and for the story itself as it is easy to imagine it as a stageplay. It is strikingly multi-layered, as the story extends through time and space as a cosmic backdrop yet effectively takes place entirely within the one “room”, albeit a room somewhat like the Tardis.

However, it’s his stories that effectively made his reputation as well as his influence for me or the genre – stories that largely created or inspired at least two sub-genres of fantasy. There’s his most famous creations, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, an adventuring duo of unlikely heroes in the world of Newhon (or “no when” backwards) and the city of Lankhmar – defining many of the tropes of the so-called sword-and-sorcery or heroic fantasy subgenre. However, it is his short stories that largely created or inspired the genre of contemporary fantasy – that is, adapting fantary or horror tropes to the setting of our contemporary or modern world.

It was a close call for this entry with my runner-up story – “The Man Who Never Grew Young”. This story is not so much contemporary fantasy but a parable all of its own, although not unlike the time changing science fiction of The Big Time – the narrator lives in a world recognizably our own, but one in which history and time are now running in reverse, such that people do indeed grow younger, “born” into existence from the grave and ultimately going back to the womb before disappearing into time. Although as the title suggests, the narrator himself is mysteriously unaffected by this part of the time reversal – never growing younger although history is still going backwards all around him. I particularly like the hints, at least in my perception, that this has come about from some terrible weapon deployed in a war in the future – which has of course become the distant past to the narrator – such that time itself was broken and reversed.

However, I have to give this special mention entry to the story that has remained and resonated with me ever since I read it – which definitely is one of his stories of contemporary fantasy – and that is his modern vampire story with a twist, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”.

“She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl”.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(11) STEPHEN KING –

IT (1986)

 

Hail to the King! Stephen King, that is. One of the most iconic and prolific writers of our time, hence his inclusion in my classic special mentions. Lines and scenes from his work reverberate throughout popular culture, albeit particularly driven by cinematic or screen adaptations. His prose is vivid and visceral – indeed, the only books that have given me bad dreams, something which generally only occurs from the direct visualization of movies. In short, I am that Constant Reader to which King addresses his Author’s Notes.

As for which book to select for this entry, I chose It – not the pronoun but the book of that title , a book that not only has its own individual mythos and is an important part of King’s overarching mythos, but also encapsulates and symbolizes King’s mythology. It traces its shapeshifting eldritch entity of evil in its favorite shape of Pennywise the Clown, as well as its lair and hunting ground, the town of Derry in Maine, and its opponents, the Losers’ Club through multiple and overlapping layers.

Arguably Pennywise is King’s most iconic villain – thanks to its distinctive appearance as a clown and screen adaptations of the novel. Hence my choice of It above King’s other novels (or short stories) for this classic special mention, even if that requires me to mentally omit one scene from the novel. What scene? It doesn’t exist.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

(12) TERRY PRATCHETT –
DISCWORLD (1983 – 2015)

*

Discworld needs little introduction to fans of fantasy – a literal flat-earth (hence its name) balanced on the back of four titanic elephants in turn on the back of the cosmic turtle, Great A’Tuin. This world is the setting for a fantasy comedy series (spanning over 40 books and a similar number of years) which is a parody or satire of virtually every trope within fantasy and many outside it, as well as virtually every major work of fantasy – from Lovecraft through Conan to Tolkien and even the bard himself, Shakespeare.

Books in the series follow different story threads or characters within it – with my favorite being those that follow the cowardly ‘wizard’ Rincewind, “a wizard with no skill, no wizardly qualifications, and no interest in heroics”, ever since his role as the protagonist in the first two books (escorting the naïve tourist Twoflower and his Luggage). Sprawling in some degree through most of the books is the city of Ankh-Morpork (and its City Watch, the protagonists of their own story arc or thread of books within the series) – a city clearly influenced by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, and like that city, a city which somehow survives despite itself.

*

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

*

 

 

(13) SIMON R. GREEN –

NIGHTSIDE (2003-2012)

 

“The Nightside. That square mile of Hell in the middle of the city, where it’s always three AM. Where you can walk beside myths and drink with monsters. Where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible.”

Simon R. Green is the author of one of my favorite of the ‘trenchcoat brigade’ of occult detectives following in the footsteps of Hellblazer’s John Constantine – John Taylor of the Nightside. The Nightside itself is an eldritch and extra-dimensional suburb of London, except of course that it is not so much a suburb as a hidden world inside London. And in it is all manner of beings, gods and eldritch abominations. As for John Taylor, he has a magical gift or ‘inner eye’ for finding anything, or would if it generally didn’t find him trouble first – or worse, allow trouble to find him.

What I particularly enjoy about the Green’s writing in general and the Nightside series in particular is that it has the tongue-in-cheek sensibility of writing in comics – indeed, the Nightside series often feels like a prose comic, particularly in its vivid characters with matching names or titles. Protagonist John Taylor is of course somewhat nondescript in his name, but then there’s his colleagues like Shotgun Suzie, Razor Eddie, Sinner (and Pretty Poison), Madman, Dead Boy and the Oblivion brothers. Not to mention antagonists or abominations like the Harrowing, the Lamentation and Kid Cthulhu.

The highpoint of the series is the first half of it, with its longer story arc through the individual books in which John Taylor confronts the mystery of his mother – a mystery which was best left unsolved, particularly as it involves his apparent destiny in ushering in the Apocalypse (and the source of the Harrowing which pursues him), a destiny even more disturbing because he has seen it for himself in the future…

Close runner-up is his standalone novel Shadow’s Fall, although it has a similar premise (and was ultimately interconnected with) the Night Side series – “a town, where legends, human and otherwise, go out to live their lives as belief in them dies” on the brink of apocalypse (or apocalypses)…

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

 

(14) RICHARD KADREY –

SANDMAN SLIM (2009 – 2021)

 

How could I resist a hero – or anti-hero – named Stark? No simple revenant clawing his way out of the grave – James Stark or the titular Sandman Slim is a revenant who claws his way like a badass out of hell. Literally. The first book (and series) had me at hell – I have a soft spot for heroes back from the dead, or even better, gone to hell and back. Stark is a naturally talented magician (not wizard, because wizarding is for wimps like Harry Potter) in the secret magical underworld of Los Angeles and falls afoul of one of his colleagues, who sends him straight to hell, before stealing the keys to the universe to return to our world for revenge on those who dealt out his damnation. And that’s just where the first book starts!

The other books in the series up the ante even more – from hell coming to Los Angeles and Los Angeles going to hell…

The series might well be described as dark fantasy noir or occult detective fiction, sharply written with an engaging cast of characters, not least Sandman Slim himself (whom I can’t help but picture as author Richard Kadrey). If you read contemporary fantasy, you must read Sandman Slim. Where the hell is the screen adaptation?

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

*

*

(15) JAMES LOVEGROVE –

PANTHEON (2009 – 2019)

 

“Watch closely, everyone. I’m going to show you how to kill a god”

That’s not from James Lovegrove’s Pantheon series – it’s from the film Princess Mononoke – but it captures much of the same spirit (heh).

The premise of his Pantheon series is straightforward – each is a standalone story with a human military or paramilitary protagonist reacting to or resisting one of the titular pantheons of gods (and goddesses) literally returning to the modern world to rule it. Note that standalone as each story features only one pantheon at a time – they don’t return in combination or all at once, although that would make an interesting premise of competing pantheons. Obviously the titular pantheon in the first book The Age of Ra is the Egyptian one – the series continues through The Age of Zeus, The Age of Odin, and so on.

The premise of these series particularly resonates with me because it reflects my own unwritten – and let’s face it, only partly baked – story ideas involving the same premise, both for single pantheons and multiple pantheons returning in combination. So kudos for Lovegrove for actually baking the cake and icing it – although I suppose there’s still room for competing pantheons.

It’s a similarly dark premise to David Brin’s Thor Meets Captain America (and even more so its sequel The Life Eaters) – hence why I also like those works as well. And it’s a somewhat parallel premise to that of a higher entry on this list.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

*

 

 

(16) SEAN STEWART –

RESURRECTION MAN TRILOGY (1995-2000)

 

Stephen King meets Ibsen. Trust me.” – Neal Stephenson.

Contemporary fantasy or magical realism in which magic comes bubbling back into our world as a wild and uncontrollable elemental force, coalescing as beings from the force of Jungian collective unconscious.

And it is very much Jungian collective unconscious, pointed out in exposition by way of a stand-up comedy routine (a device of exposition I have not encountered elsewhere) – as opposed to Freudian, although I would like to have seen a fantasy based on the elemental forces of magic bubbling out of our Freudian unconscious.

Admittedly, I found the world-building more intriguing than the actual story in Resurrection Man, which doles out that world-building in fragments and hints – a world “profoundly altered by WWII and the increasingly monstrous magic it unleashed’, first as golems from the camps and then as minotaurs from the American ghettoes. A world in which China is superpower – not through economics as in our world, but through geomancy or feng shui.

That world formed the setting for two other books by Stewart with more intriguing stories, Night Watch and the World Fantasy Award winning Galveston. In the latter, the Texan city has been isolated and divided by the flood of magic, literally into a normal ‘non-magical’ half, scraping and scavenging its living from the increasingly derelict remnants of science or technology, and Carnival, an endless magical Mardis Gras celebration.

His novel Mockingbird had a similar theme, but on a family rather than world scale.

Sadly, after this creative flurry of novels in the nineties and noughties, Stewart moved from writing novels to writing interactive fiction or games.

*

RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

*

 

 

(17) MARK CHADBOURN –

THE AGE OF MISRULE (1999 – 2009)

 

The magic goes away…and the magic comes back.

Those two tropes – two of my favorites in fantasy – pretty much sum up the premise of this trilogy, or more precisely trilogy of trilogies with The Age of Misrule as the first trilogy (followed by The Dark Age as second trilogy and The Kingdom of the Serpent as third trilogy).

It’s not an analogy used by the books but the magic struck me as like the Ice Age we are still in, with the magic going away corresponding to the interglacial period on which the rise of human civilization depended – and precariously rests. Just as the return of Ice Age glaciation would threaten to overwhelm our civilization, so too with the return of magic in these books – except less threatening to do so than actually doing so.

Give or take just a little, the series matches up with the trope description for The Magic Comes Back in TV Tropes:

“The past was an exciting time to live in: Magic was real, mythological creatures roamed the Earth, and humans lived side by side with elves, dwarves, hobbits and the rest. Such a shame that it didn’t last and we’re stuck with plain, old boring mundane life. But wait, reports are coming in that something strange is happening all over the planet: Mysterious creatures thought only to exist in storybooks have been sighted in isolated areas and their numbers are increasing with each passing day. Some humans are starting to exhibit fantastical powers that science can’t explain…What’s going on? Why, the exact opposite of The Magic Goes Away. Maybe it completely disappeared at one point or maybe it didn’t exist at all. Regardless of the past situation, however, magic is back and, as a result, can often pave the way for an urban fantasy setting. If magic and science are inherently opposed then certain areas of civilization may revert to a primitive form.”

Yeah – you can check off almost all those points in Age of Misrule. In this case, the titular magic apocalypse is a fairy apocalypse. No, not fairies as in cute little gossamer-winged pixies like Tinkerbell. We’re talking the older fairies of British and Irish folklore – most aptly styled as the Fair Folk, itself a euphemism for things that would flay you and walk around in your skin. In fairness (heh), only one of the two warring groups of fairies – the Fomorians – is so extreme as to literally flay you and walk around in your skin. The other group, the Golden Ones or Tuatha de Danaan, aren’t as extreme – or least more indifferent to wanting to flay you and walk around in your skin.

Fortunately, one effect of the magic coming back is that there are humans who can use it to save the day – the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.

“You can’t bring back the gods and demons of Celtic mythology without a few side-effects, though. Cue rolling blackouts, alien abductions, lycanthropes, spooky visitations, psychopathic goblins…”

 

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

 

 

(18) LEV GROSSMAN –

THE BRIGHT SWORD (2024)

 

I previously read his Magicians trilogy (and also saw its adaptation as TV series) – which in a nutshell, combines a dark adult version of Hogwarts with a dark adult version of Narnia, Brakebills University and Fillory respectively.

In The Magicians, magic is dangerous. And it costs, usually in sacrifice or profound loss. That’s whether it’s the curriculum of spells in Brakebills University or other sources of magic elsewhere. To paraphrase Hemingway, magic tends to break everyone (although most of the magicians are somewhat broken in the first place) – but those that will not break, it kills.

The Bright Sword does something similar to Arthurian epic – or more precisely post-Arthurian epic:

“The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, complete with duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It’s also a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, trying to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves”.

Aspiring knight Collum arrives at Camelot to prove his quality for the Round Table – two weeks too late, as King Arthur has died at the Battle of Camlann with only a handful of Arthur’s knights left, the self-professed dregs of the Round Table.

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(19) HOOKLAND & NEOLTITUDE

 

Hookland is reminiscent of my top 10 entry for Night Vale, similarly an eldritch fantasy kitchen sink setting – but where Night Vale leans more to conspiracy theory and urban myth (as well as outright Lynchian surreal fantasy), Hookland leans more to English folklore, ghosts and the fair folk.

The key distinction – by which Hookland ranks as wild tier special mention rather than a top 10 entry as for Night Vale – is that where Night Vale has spread from its original podcast to books, Hookland remains in its original form as a ‘web original’ project on social media, primarily (at least for this reader) through the Hookland Guide Twitter profile (which dates back to 2014). Indeed – I yearn for books from Hookland, although it is perhaps apt that Hookland Guide is almost as elusive as Hookland itself, teased though gossamer strands and tantalizing threads on Twitter. I understand that it is a collaborative project, with its origin (and prime mover) in author David Southwell.

Another key distinction, albeit not to my fantasy rankings, is that where Night Vale is primarily narrated through the town’s community radio broadcaster, Hookland is narrated through a number of voices – dramatis personae teased out through threads across time, from witches to police detectives. Despite the consistency of narrator in Night Vale, Night Vale and Hookland – like the best fantasy or SF in general – doles out their mythos or world-building in doses, mostly hints and oblique references. For Hookland, however, these are in sore need – at least to this reader – of compilation in more formal reference, such as an encyclopedia or wiki, even as pages in Wikipedia or TV Tropes (from which it is sadly absent). The closest thing is the working map of Hookland posted

Despite Night Vale being an American desert town and Hookland an English county, both are similarly amorphous – not quite fixed in time and space, although remaining within the confines of their respective nations (albeit as quasi-independent entities), and dotted with distinctive landmarks.

As I said, Hookland leans more to English folklore, notably ghost and fair folk – but has many more elements in its fantasy kitchen sink setting, all the way to technofantasy or SF, such as the Hum, electricity pylons as latter day ley lines and mystic transcendence.

 

Neoltitude is evocative magical realist short-form poetry or surreal fantasy micro-fiction on Twitter, hence its joint entry in this wild tier special mention.

Like haikus – but, you know, instead of the formal structure of three phrases and seventeen syllables, it’s a limit of 240 characters, as each tweet is its own embedded story.

I’ve encountered quite a bit of microfiction on Twitter but Neoltitude is the one to which I keep coming back. Of course, that’s because I follow them, so it would be more accurate to say they’re the one I stuck with or never left in the first place.

That’s because they’re good – always evocative, often haunting or beautiful images that burn themselves into your psyche. Much like the angels or gods that are their frequent subject.

And because they’re fun – leavened with wit and humor.

 

RATING:
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(20) FANTASY ART

 

On the face of it, this may not appear to be my usual kinky entry I throw in among my wilder special mentions as my final or twentieth special mention – but it is, o yes, it is.

Fantasy art – the art illustrating subjects from cinematic or literary fantasy, whether as art of itself or book covers and film posters or promotional art.

You know the ones – the ones from about the 1970s onwards, particularly in the pulpier book covers. Conan books as well as comics, particularly in the archetypal Conan pose with leg cling – the leg cling of course being the scantily clad damsel clinging to the warrior’s leg.

And that reference to the Conan pose alone shows where the kink comes in – that fantasy art tends to default to pinup art, for both male and female subjects.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – we’re talking Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo among others.

Perhaps the pinnacle of fantasy pin-up cover art is for Gor – the book covers for the Gor series, the best of which was by Boris Vallejo. The books may be pure pulp in content – I’ve never read them, but I know the basic premise – but that content, which I understand to be increasingly of female bondage and submission as the series goes on, is perfect for for pinup fantasy art.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)