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.