Cover art of the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – I think from the 1996 Harper Voyager paperback editions but certainly the editions I own

(12) STEPHEN DONALDSON –

THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT (1977-2013)

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.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Promotional art for the Amazon Kindle edition

(11) JAMES BLISH –

BLACK EASTER / THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT (1968 / 1970)

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.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Cover leatherbound Arabian Nights edition published in 2011 by Canterbury Classics

(12) ARABIAN NIGHTS

Also known as One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabian Nights are essentially Middle Eastern fairy tales or folk tales compiled from Arabic. The Arabian part of Arabian Nights is a bit of a misnomer – as the stories originate from the Middle East, central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa (as well as some with origins back to Persian or even Mesopotamian stories). Heck – Aladdin is even ostensibly set in China!

And there’s another heck right there. The three most well known tales of the Arabian Nights – Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad – were not part of the original Arabian Nights but were added to it by European translators and I understand Sinbad even traces its influences back to Homer’s Odyssey.

What is part of all variations of the Arabian Nights is the framing device of Scheherazade, one of the most tongue-twisting names (and most mind-boggling to spell), at least for those from Anglophone nations, which is why I prefer the Persian variant of Shahrazad. You may know her as simply the most famous and significant female character of the Arabian Nights, indeed without whom they wouldn’t exist according to their own narrative – the plucky heroine and narrator in the frame story, who told all one thousand tales in the titular one thousand and one nights.

As the story goes, the monarch Shahryar discovered his first wife was unfaithful to him and resolved upon the monstrously misogynistic plan to marry a new virgin every day and behead her the following day to avoid betrayal or dishonour. Betrayal or dishonour by her to him, that is – I’m not too sure that executing your wife the next day is quite in the spirit of marriage and certainly had the bride gagging in her wedding vows for death to do them part.

Anyway, the vizier ran out of virgins of noble blood and so Shahrazad, the vizier’s own daughter, volunteered to be the next bride, against her father’s wishes. Fortunately, Shahrazad had a plan – which was to tell the monarch a story on that first night, but leaving it on a cliffhanger at dawn, so the monarch postponed her execution until the next day for her to finish that story – which she did the next night, but started an even more exciting story, leaving that one too on a cliffhanger. And so on for a thousand nights or about three years, until she finally ran out of stories but the monarch had genuinely fallen in love with her, decreeing her to be his wife for life rather than execution the next day – although it might be noted that she had borne him three sons as well in this time. And so they lived happily ever after.

Or not, because I have difficulty imagining that Shahrazad did not have post-traumatic stress disorder after that – or why the monarch Shahryar deserved to live happily ever after executing so many innocent women. Indeed, one woman each day for three years, or approximately 1,100 women – at least according to British adventurer Sir Richard Burton in his translation, which makes Shahrazad’s heroism a little less impressive, given she sat on her plan for that time. Also the similarity of her name with that of the monarch suggests it was an honorific, either named as such after she was married to him – or named for him by her father, the monarch’s vizier.

But I prefer to overlook these things, as what’s not to love about her? Beautiful, intelligent, heroic and she tells a good story – indeed, a thousand of them.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of hardcover Aesop’s Fables Classic Edition illustrated by Charles Santore (New York Times bestselling illustrator) published by Applesauce Press in 2018. Aesop’s most famous fable character, the tortoise (from The Tortoise and the Hare) is front and center winning the race!

(11) AESOP’S FABLES

The most famous anthology of fables – notably beast fables – in European culture, attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave and later freedman, “living somewhere in Asia Minor in the sixth century BC”, if indeed he existed at all. There was a tendency for subsequent European fables to be attributed to him as well – or at least added to collections of his fables.

And the most famous of Aesop’s fables would have to be The Tortoise and the Hare – slow and steady wins the race, illustrating the moral of the story as characteristic of fables, usually but not always explicitly pointed out at the end. Indeed, TV Tropes has dubbed the use of the moral of the story an “aesop”.

Of course, there’s a lot more fables by (or attributed to) Aesop – more than enough for a top ten Aesop’s fables many times over.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

(10) 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:

X-TIER (TOP TIER)

O yes – he’ll be showing her his savage sword! Classic Conan pose (or leg cling) in The Savage Sword of Conan cover art by Earl Norem for “The Treasure of Tranicos”, issue 47, 1 December 1979, Marvel Comics (fair use)

(10) ROBERT E. HOWARD –

CONAN (1932-1936)

“As Dracula is to vampires, Sherlock Holmes is to private detectives, and Superman is to superheroes, so Conan is to barbarian heroes”.

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)