Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Fantasy Books (Complete Top 10: Revamped)

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Theatrical release poster for the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film – still arguably the defining image of fantasy in popular culture, so much so that it is often dubbed the Conan pose (as originating in pulp fiction covers, particularly when combined with the leg cling trope not in this poster)

 

“Fantasy isn’t just a jolly escape: It’s an escape, but into something far more extreme than reality, or normality. It’s where things are more beautiful and more wondrous and more terrifying.” – Terry Gilliam

Exactly what it says on the tin – counting down my Top 10 Fantasy Books.

In effect, it runs parallel to my Top 10 Literature list, albeit there is quite the fantasy overlap in that list, in that this is my top ten list of fantasy literature. Comics tend to be fantasy or SF – at least the ones I like – but I have a separate Top 10 Comics list. Similarly, I like many fantasy or SF films or TV series, but they have their own top ten lists.

But what is fantasy?

Magic is often seen as or argued to be the defining feature of fantasy, not least by me.

Which prompts to mind this quotation from TV Tropes – “Fantasy: it’s stuff with magic in it, not counting psychic powers, or magic from technology, or anything meant to frighten, or anything strongly religious, or the technology behind the magic that is magitek, or — where did that clean-cut definition go?”

Fictional genres can be notoriously difficult to define or difficult to distinguish from other fictional genres, with the two looming largest – and closest – to fantasy being science fiction and horror, with all three often being classed within the category of speculative fiction.

Again as per TV Tropes – “While the core of the fantasy genre is clear enough, there is no succinct definition that encompasses it all. The boundary with science fiction is notoriously ambiguous and the boundary with horror is often no less fuzzy.”

Indeed, I will note where science fiction or horror loom large or close to the fantasy for my entries.

That core of the fantasy genre is often defined as high fantasy – fantasy set in a so-called secondary world or world other than our own, even if linked to or evolving into our own in some way. Hence the counterpart of fantasy set in our own world is often defined as low fantasy. These distinctions within the genre of fantasy, usually classed as sub-genres of fantasy, intrigue me even more than the distinctions between fantasy and other genres – and fantasy sub-genres are worthy of their own top ten.

Whether in its core of hard fantasy or in other sub-genres, fantasy tends to be defined as such by common features or themes. And yes – magic or supernatural elements is the primary feature or theme, but not always. There are fantasy works with low or no magic.

Secondary worlds are another common feature or theme, as are imaginary beings or creatures – here be dragons! – and what TV Tropes calls the appeal to a pastoral ideal.

Anyway, here are my Top 10 Fantasy Books – or my Top 10 Fantasy Literature.

 

Viking 2024 hardcover edition

 

(10) LEV GROSSMAN –

THE BRIGHT SWORD (2024)

 

As usual, this is my wildcard tenth place for most the newest entry of enduring interest, typically as best of the present or previous year – in this case published in 2024.

Lev Grossman isn’t a wildcard entry as I previously read The Magicians trilogy – 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 brings something of the same theme 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.

 

SF & HORROR

 

Not much SF overlap but perhaps just a touch of dark fantasy or horror in some of the supernatural antagonists (and Merlin!)

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(9) WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER –

RESUME WITH MONSTERS (1995)

 

Great Cthulhu in a cubicle!

Yes – we’re talking a light fantasy evocation of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

Spencer delightfully combines a playful comedic style and observational humor to fantasy themes, as in Resume with Monsters, which combines the Cthulhu Mythos with satire of the corporate cubicle drone workplace.

Philip Kenan may not be the most reliable narrator of his experience as a worker in dead-end office cubicle drone jobs – between bouts of therapy and his unrequited quest to win back his ex-girlfriend Amelia, although he saved her (and quite possibly the world) from some…thing at their mutual previous employment (“the Doom That Came to MicroMeg”). Now he is routinely alert to signs of otherworldly incursions at his workplace.

Or perhaps he is simply lapsing into mental breakdown or outright insanity, symptoms of his obsession with H.P. Lovecraft’s “monsters” (his therapist noting that Lovecraft “was not in the pink of mental health”). An obsession born of his father’s own obsessive narration to him of the stories of Lovecraft, identifying it with the ‘System’ – “don’t let the System eat your soul”. An obsession that Philip Kenan tries to keep at bay by the equally obsessive emotional talisman of his own Lovecraftian novel, “The Despicable Quest”, which he has been constantly rewriting over twenty years until it has swollen to two thousand pages. Or perhaps all of the above.

It has a special resonance for those, like myself, who have always suspected a connection – nay unholy collusion! – between the soul-destroying corporate workplace and the soul-destroying dark entities of the Cthulhu Mythos. In my own experience as corporate cubicle drone, I suspected that the mind-numbingly boring files simply could not exist for their own purpose but had to have a more substantial and sinister purpose in inducing a receptive state or lack of resistance to otherworldly invasion. Of course, I was too smart for them, as I simply didn’t do my files…

 

SF & HORROR

 

It’s the Cthulhu Mythos – of course there’s an overlap with SF and (cosmic) horror!

 

RATING: 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

 

 

(8) JAMES MORROW –

GODHEAD TRILOGY (1994-1999)

 

Religious and philosophical satire clothed in absurdist Vonnegutian fantasy – Morrow takes the Nietzschean theme that God is dead and makes it flesh, literally in the form of a two mile long corpse – or Corpus Dei – in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the premise of the trilogy as a whole – particularly the opening of the first novel, Towing Jehovah. God is dead and the Vatican charges Captain Anthony Van Horne to tow the Corpus Dei with a supertanker to the Arctic Circle, to preserve it from decomposition, for possible resuscitation or at least for time to ponder the theological questions of the Deity’s death.

My favorite is the second of the trilogy, Blameless in Abaddon, where theodicy is made flesh – theodicy being the theological study of the problem of evil or suffering in the manner of the biblical Book of Job. It turns out that there’s life in the old God yet – and He’s about to be prosecuted in the World Court for the suffering of His Creation.

In the third book, The Eternal Footman, the last remnant of the Corpus Dei, God’s grinning skull or Cranium Dei, is in geosynchronous orbit over Times Square and Western civilization is collapsing as a people become ‘Nietzsche positive’ with their awareness of impending death (literally embodied in their own double or ‘fetch’).

 

SF & HORROR

 

Not really – it’s pretty much pure absurdist fantasy, although that’s not uncommon in works that are nominally SF.

 

RATING: 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

2004 edition published by William Morrow & Company

 

 

 

(7) CHRISTOPHER MOORE –

PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING (1992)

 

Christopher Moore is a writer of comic contemporary fantasy, who has combined the narrative voice (and Californian geography) of John Steinbeck and the comic absurdist fantasy of Kurt Vonnegut.

Like other writers, Moore has constructed his own storyverse, with its focus in California (Moore himself lives in San Francisco) and particularly the sleepy town of Pine Cove. Sleepy that is, until invaded by supernatural or othe forces such as Godzilla (the fantastically named Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove) or near-miss zombie apocalypses (The Stupidest Angel).

As for which Moore novel is my personal favorite, there’s some tight competition – such as the Bloodsucking Fiends vampire love trilogy set in San Francisco, A Dirty Job psychopompic thriller also set in San Francisco (which crosses over with Bloodsucking Fiends) or anothe fantastically named novel, The Island of the Sequined Love Nun (stepping outside the main Californian venue of his storyverse to the Micronesian Island of the Shark People).

However, I’ll go with his debut novel, Practical Demonkeeping, in which Pine Cove is invaded by a demon and its weary summoner:

“The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and “roads” scholar Travis O’Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor facade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose.”

 

SF & HORROR

 

Not so much in this book and Moore predominantly keeps to fantasy but he occasionally dips a toe into SF in his books, as with the Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.

He dips more than a toe into horror or dark fantasy, as with this book and his vampire books.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

Cover of the complete Drive-In Trilogy, paperback edition published 2020 by BookVoice Publishing

 

 

(6) JOE LANSDALE – THE DRIVE-IN TRILOGY (1988-2005)

*

Joe Landsale is a genre-hopping self-branded mojo storyteller so Texan his books positively drawl. His fantasy is never purely fantasy, as he writes books and stories (and comics!) in a number of genres, often at the same time. Westerns, of course – although he is from east Texas – but often of the Weird West, horror or so-called splatterpunk, mystery, suspense and thrillers.

A good introduction to Lonsdale is his short stories, which are particularly difficult to pin down in genre. I mean, how do you classify “Bubba Ho-Tep” (subsequently adapted into film starring none other than the Chin himself, Bruce Campbell) – in which an aged Elvis Presley and a black JFK battle a soul-sucking mummy in a nursing home? (No, seriously – Elvis Presley, having swapped with a double to opt out of fame. Not sure about JFK though – he claims the Conspiracy swapped his mind into his present body. Even Elvis is skeptical). Or his post-zombie apocalyptic “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks”? “Frequent features of Lansdale’s writing are usually deeply ironic, strange or absurd situations or characters”. Indeed.

And perhaps none more bizarre than my introduction to Lansdale and still my favorite, although it is a little intense (if by intense you mean insane) – his 1988 book The Drive-In, or for its full title, The Drive-In: A ‘B’ Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas. It starts as a normal summer Friday night horror movie marathon at the Orbit Drive-In in Texas. And then it becomes the horror-movie marathon, as they are trapped by a demonic grinning comet in the drive-in, beyond time in an eternal night – seemingly at the whim of the dark gods of B-grade movie horror, who lend a hand to all the base humanity on show with a little (or a lot) of some monstrosity of their own, with the Popcorn King.

Don’t eat the popcorn. It’s watching you.

A sequel – The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels – followed shortly after in 1989, with a third book (Drive in 3: The Bus Tour) in 2005 rounding out the Drive-In Trilogy.

 

SF & HORROR

 

As I said, genre-hopping – so this trilogy and Lansdale in general straddle the lines between fantasy, SF and horror. This trilogy leans heavily into horror – or splatterpunk.

*

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(5) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY –

SHADOWS OF THE APT / TALES OF THE APT (2008 – 2018)

 

Like my previous entry, this entry particularly resonated with me as reflecting my own unwritten story idea involving the same premise – but then Adrian Tchaikovsky went ahead and wrote it. And it’s awesome.

I have always been fascinated by insects, so one of my unwritten story ideas involved high fantasy with insect-people. They were essentially human, but with the skin or hair coloring of their insect species, as well as other physical attributes that did not radically alter their otherwise human appearance – wings for example (in the style of the butterfly or other insect wings occasionally depicted on fairies), perhaps antennae and so on.

I imagined the insect-people as essentially divided up into realms according to the three great species of social insects – bees, ants and wasps, although there would be different realms of each (corresponding to different sub-species or types). Each of these realms would also include other thematically similar insect-peoples – for example, bee-kingdoms (or more precisely, bee-queendoms) would include other pollinating insects, such as butterflies.

As for antagonists, one was spoilt for choice – flies or locusts as marauding hordes (the Locust Horde!), various parasitic insects (fleas, mosquitoes and so on) as blood-sucking bandits or brigands, arachnids such as spiders or scorpions as monstrous figures. However, I imagined the most dangerous and recurring antagonists as the fourth great species of social insects – termites. In fairness, I didn’t get much beyond imagining the various insect-people societies, although I did imagine my main protagonist as a mantis warrior.

And then I found Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt series, which effectively does just that – a high fantasy set in a world of insect-‘kinden’, humans who have adopted some of the characteristics of their insect-types (or arachnid-types) through their magical Art from the dangerous and giant fantasy insects (or arachnids) of this world. Ant and beetle kinden dominate the so-called Lowlands (not surprisingly, given the sheer prevalence of those insect species in our world).

Even more intriguingly, it is a world in which magic is being replaced by science – an industrial revolution by the technologically Apt peoples of the title, matched by a political revolution, in which the more mundane but Apt ants and beetles have ousted the more magically-minded moths and mantises (although mantis warriors are still legendary). However, the antagonists are not termites, but the growing and ruthless Wasp Empire.

Of course, Tchaikovsky is a little too fond of spiders for my arachnopobia (even if spider girls are notoriously hot) – a fondness that extends across his fantasy or SF works, not just the spider-kinden in this series. Perhaps because Tchaikovksy is secretly a spider himself, or maybe a man-shaped swarm of spiders, without a shred of normal human arachnophobia to show for it.

So – damn you, Adrian Tchaikovsky, for conceiving and executing your insect fantasy first, in such an epic series! And I love it!

 

SF & HORROR

 

Tchaikovksy straddles both fantasy and SF genres – his Hugo Award-winning Children of Time series is an example of the latter but of course also features his beloved spiders.

For that matter, Shadows of the Apt has more than a touch of SF to it – and on occasions I almost thought it had a similar premise as the Children Time series with human (and arthropod) space colonists. Setting aside those thoughts, it was interesting to have a fantasy world increasingly eschewing magic for industrialization and technology.

And it wouldn’t take too much tweaking to adapt his premises to horror. Because, you know, spiders – perhaps not to Tchaikovsky who loves them, but to an arachnophobe like myself.

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

 

 

(4) GARTH NIX –

THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM (2003 – 2010)

 

Cosmic fantasy by an Australian writer.

Creation is coming undone – not just the universe, but the entire multiverse, is slowly falling apart into Nothing in the absence of its Creator, the Architect. And at the center of it all, the cosmic structure called The House, divided up into seven domains or worlds by its seven most powerful denizens, the Morrow Days.

But the Architect left his Will (in more than one sense of the word) and where there’s a will, there’s a way – for mortal Rightful Heir to the Keys to the Kingdom, the aptly named Arthur Penhaglion, who has to ascend all seven domains of The House to reclaim the Will and the Keys to the Kingdom from each Morrow Day – Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, Sir Thursday, Lady Friday, Superior Saturday and Lord Sunday.

Also somewhat reminiscent of the cosmic fantasy of one of my favorite webcomics – Kill Six Billion Demons

 

SF & HORROR

 

Definitely overlaps with multiverse SF – not so much horror, except perhaps for occasional elements.

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

 

(3) JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR –
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE (2012 – PRESENT)

 

“A friendly desert community, where the Sun is hot, the Moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.”

Surreal horror and humor podcast styled as a community radio broadcaster in an American desert town – although my familiarity with it is more from the novels, which served as my introduction to the Night Vale setting, a desert town where all conspiracy theories are real as well as other urban myths and other surreal fantasies.

In other words, a fantasy and conspiracy kitchen sink setting, where the laws of time and space and nature in general don’t apply, or at apply only spasmodically. The citizens of Night Value simply roll with it, accepting surreal fantasy side by side with mundane reality.

“The news from Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King”. Alternatively the Illuminatus Trilogy filtered through H.P. Lovecraft and crammed into one desert town. Or the surreal dream logic of David Lynch on crack or acid flashback (or both).

The Sheriff’s Secret Police along with all the other government surveillance agencies and spy satellites, Old Woman Josie surrounded by angelic beings all named Erika, the Glow Cloud (all hail the Glow Cloud!) and plastic pink flamingos that warp time and space.

And then you have the really dangerous entities and eldritch abominations – the car salesman loping like wolves through their yards, the mysterious hooded figures in the town’s forbidden dog park, the City Council (in the council building draped nightly in black velvet) and worst of all, the Library and its most dangerous part, the fiction section filled with lies…

 

SF & HORROR

 

As usual for fantasy kitchen sink settings, anything goes – even SF and horror.

 

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

 

Prince Caspian movie poster art

 

(2) C.S. LEWIS –
NARNIA CHRONICLES (1950-1956)

 

“He’s not a tame lion.”

Yes, we’re talking about Aslan – the famous talking lion (whose name is Turkish for lion), the King of Beasts, the son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Aslan – present in all seven volumes of the Narnia Chronicles and voiced by Liam goddamn Neeson in the films. (If only they could have worked in his famous Taken speech into the films. Stay with me here – it absolutely could have worked, over the phone to the White Witch cajoling her to return Edmund).

To paraphrase Bob Marley, Aslan is iron like a lion in Zion, aptly enough, given his religious imagery. And yes, I know, that Aslan is, in the words of Robot Chicken, the Jesus allegory lion. But quite frankly, I can more readily identify as Aslanist – after all, the dude’s a talking lion with magic coming out his mane. Who wouldn’t be an Aslanist?

Although there are any number of protagonists to choose for heroes from the seven volumes in The Chronicles of Narnia, notably the child protagonists who find themselves drawn from our world (specifically England) to Narnia through magic portals – hence the description of the Narnia Chronicles in Wikipedia as portal fantasy. (My personal favorite remains the native Narnian – or Archenlander to be precise – Shasta from The Horse and His Boy, albeit all native Narnian humans ultimately originate from our world in the first place).

But really if one character both embodies Narnia and rises above the others, albeit not so much as protagonist but as the moving force behind the world – from singing it into being in the beginning to literally closing the door on it in the end – it’s Aslan.

And Aslan embodies the spirit of Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, those seven fantasy books that continue to inspire readers and remain among the most popular fantasy books or series, strikingly so for children’s fantasy books and explicitly Christian ones at that, although many readers remain unaware of the Christian themes.

Indeed, as my second place indicates, C.S. Lewis might be considered second only to my top place entry – with whom he was a close friend and colleague – as founding father (and leading theorist) of modern fantasy literature.

The books were published in anachronic order – that is, not in sequence in terms of their in-universe chronology, albeit with two of the books out of place, most famously with the book of Narnia’s creation being the second last book (and effectively as prequel to all preceding books). Some publishers or collections place them in chronological order but I’m a publication order purist, particularly for the prequel book.

Narnia might lack the same grandeur as Middle-Earth but for me it will always have a charm and place close to my heart, with these books as something of a recurring source of familiar comfort even as an adult. And so enchanting that after reading its Chronicles, what young reader doesn’t search wardrobes for other worlds? (Or hot White Witches with Turkish delight? Except I’ll pass on the Turkish delight). I know I still do…

 

SF & HORROR

 

No SF – although C.S. Lewis did venture into SF with his Space Trilogy – but it’s striking how much classics of high fantasy, such as this one, leans into dark fantasy or horror.

 

 

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

 

The Return of the King cinematic poster art

 

(1) J.R.R. TOLKIEN –
THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1954)

 

One book to rule them all!

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings defined modern literary fantasy. Fantasy could well be classified as pre-Tolkien and post-Tolkien. Such is its influence that Tolkien has been identified as the father of modern fantasy literature or high fantasy, although of course there were many other writers of fantasy before (and apart from) Tolkien – perhaps most notably Robert E. Howard, writer of Conan. I particularly note Robert E. Howard, because I understand that Tolkien read and enjoyed the Conan stories – and because I couldn’t resist including 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”

Indeed, just as A. H. Whitehead stated that the western philosophical tradition could be generalized as being footnotes to Plato, so too might modern fantasy literature be generalized as sequels or epilogues to Tolkien – and Stephen King has done just that in his non-fiction study of horror Danse Macabre, attributing modern fantasy to a hunger for more stories about hobbits.

Much of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings is the depth of its world-building, or what Tolkien identified as his legendarium of Middle Earth. On the other hand, this can present as a flaw to more modern readers as a potential lack of pacing, or where world-building takes precedence to story. However, this is not surprising since the world-building was essentially Tolkien’s life hobby, from which the story revolved in recitations and into which Tolkien was not above shoehorning other ideas – the aforementioned Tom Bombadil for example, or The Hobbit itself to some extent, or as Hugo Dyson infamously exclaimed during one of Tolkien’s recitations, “Not another f…g elf!” (The same might have been said of yet another poem, song or verse).

However, I prefer the reaction of C. S. Lewis – “here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart”. Indeed, there are and it is. For me, I loved the depth of Tolkien’s world, one of the few fictional worlds I regard as real as our own (canonically, it is meant to be a mythic precursor of our own world) – or indeed, perhaps more real. Again, as George R. R. Martin wrote – “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real…They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle Earth”

As for the story, like George R. R. Martin, I was enchanted and entranced – but unlike George R. R. Martin, from the very start in the Shire. The story itself should be well known to any reader (or viewer) of fantasy, and in any event is too complex to discuss in depth here, but can be summarized as the Quest to destroy the One Ring, the source of the Adversary or Dark Lord Sauron’s power. Its themes are the themes of humanity in any world – life and mortality, the corruption or addiction of power, courage and compassion, triumph against adversity and at the same time the sense of loss for those things lost in battle or passing from the world.

 

SF & HORROR

 

The Lord of the Rings is among the highest of high fantasies – but as the definitive work of modern literary fantasy has also proved highly influential for modern literary SF as well. And along with the Narnia Chronicles, it’s striking how much these two classic and definitive works of high fantasy also lean into dark fantasy or horror.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

TOP 10 FANTASY BOOKS (TIER LIST)

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

(1) J.R.R. TOLKIEN – THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Yeah – this is the big one, the book that defined modern literary fantasy AND shaped my world of fantasy forever.

(2) C. S. LEWIS – NARNIA CHRONICLES

(3) JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR – WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE

 

If Tolkien and Lewis are my Old Testament of fantasy books, then Welcome to Night Vale is my New Testament.

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(4) GARTH NIX – THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

(5) ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSY – SHADOWS OF THE APT

(6) JOE LANSDALE – THE DRIVE-IN TRILOGY

(7) CHRISTOPHER MOORE – PRACTICAL DEMONKEEPING

(8) JAMES MORROW – GODHEAD TRILOGY

(9) WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER – RESUME WITH MONSTERS

 

X-TIER (WILD TIER) – BEST OF 2024

 

(10) LEV GROSSMAN – THE BRIGHT SWORD

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Sacred Space & Chthonic Rankings)

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Artist’s impression of Utopia, painting by Efthymios Warlamis, Wikipedia subject category “Utopia” – licensed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

 

TOP 10 MYTHOLOGIES

(SACRED SPACE & CHTHONIC RANKINGS)

 

I don’t have a religion – I have a mythology.

Indeed, I have a top ten of them, ranked by my personal interest in them, albeit overlapping with their iconic status and enduring cultural or even religious influence.

But how do they rank by their sacred space and chthonic blues? That is, how do they rank by their mythic cosmology and geography – or by that most common chthonic denominator, their underworlds (and afterlifes – or is that afterlives – in general)?

Well, surprise! It’s the same rankings – at least in order of rankings, although with some slight shuffling of tiers – but perhaps not surprising that their sacred space and chthonic rankings coincide with my personal interest in them, given how definitive those features are for mythology in general.

 

 

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

(1) BIBLICAL – HEAVEN & HELL, BABYLON & JERUSALEM, EDEN & ARMAGEDDON

 

Biblical mythology tops my rankings for sacred space – mythic cosmology or geography – and chthonic rankings as it does for mythology in general.

After all, its cosmology of Heaven and Hell have become the default setting for mythic cosmology and the afterlife in popular culture and imagination, beyond any element of religious belief. Although ironically much of the detail of those settings comes not so much from the Bible but from its “fan fiction” – foremost among them Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly its Inferno.

And from mythic cosmology to geography, albeit of actual locations transformed into symbolic manifestations of Hell and Heaven on earth respectively, we have Babylon and Jerusalem. I was born again in Babylon and torn apart in Jerusalem.

Wrapping up our trinity of opposing poles of mythic cosmology and geography within Biblical mythology – Heaven and Hell, Babylon and Jerusalem – we also have two opposing poles that are much more mythic than historic, the paradise in the beginning of creation to the war at the end of the world, Eden and Armageddon.

 

(2) CLASSICAL – OLYMPUS & TROY (HADES)

 

Classical mythology ranks in second place for the enduring iconic nature of its mythic geography and underworld.

I say geography because its mythic geography tended to be actual locations in historical geography, particularly within Greece, albeit transformed with a heroic or numinous nature – with Troy as perhaps the most famous but even the realm of the gods had its portal at Mt Olympus

Best of all, you have classical mythology’s recurring tendency to populate virtually every geographic feature with a hot nymph – now that’s sacred space!

As for chthonic ranking, there’s the enduring iconic nature of Hades as underworld – with most of its features being adapted wholesale in Western culture and imagination. You could do a top ten just of those features, with perhaps the rivers Styx and Lethe being most prominent.

 

(3) NORSE – ASGARD & VALHALLA (HEL)

 

Norse mythology has one of the best known of all mythic cosmologies with its Nine Worlds. One of those is of course our own mortal world Midgard, which lent itself to the name of one of the most famous fantasy worlds, Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

However, while there is reference to the Nine Worlds in the original texts of Norse mythology, it is never clearly identified what those Nine Worlds are. Instead, scholars speculate what they are from references to various realms as they occur elsewhere – Midgard or the realm of humanity, the realm or realms of elves and dwarves, the realm of giants, and the realms of fire and ice.

The most famous mythic realm in Norse mythology is Asgard, the realm of the gods (or more precisely one of the two families or tribes of gods in Norse mythology, the Aesir, with the other, the Vanir, having their own realm) – which also has the even more famous Valhalla as afterlife abode of the heroic dead.

As for chthonic rankings, Norse mythology also has one of the most famous underworlds (sometimes reckoned as one of the Nine Worlds of itself, or as part of the mythic realm of ice) – named for the goddess of the dead who reigned there, Hel, and that lent its name to (or came from the same source as) that of an even more famous underworld.

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(4) CELTIC (ARTHURIAN) – OTHERWORLD (AVALON)

 

The Celtic Otherworld is perhaps one of the best known and most definitive concepts of the mythic realm in mythology – that realm of the deities or the dead, often overlapping, although the Celtic Otherworld “is more usually described as paradisal fairyland than a frightening place”, or more fey than infernal.

The Otherworld looms large in Arthurian legend in various guises – a recurring numinous presence depicted well in the film Excalibur. One guise is as the realm of fairies but even more so as that mystical place ranking among the highest name recognition for mythic worlds – Avalon, which overlaps with the underworld as King Arthur’s final resting place.

Celtic mythology in general and Arthurian legend in particular also have their distinctive mythic geography in our world, particularly in Britain with its historical sites as identified with locations in myth or legend.

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

(5) EGYPTIAN

 

Egyptian mythology may well be the most chthonic of mythologies – albeit not so much in name recognition of its underworld Duat in popular culture but more in terms of the afterlife in general. Indeed, ancient Egypt almost seems a necropolis, with its religion and ritual predominated by preparation for the afterlife – and its monumental statues or architecture, such that Egypt itself appears as its own mythic realm, with a mystique that has been a subject of recurring fascination in its own time and ever since.

 

 

(6) MIDDLE EASTERN – BABYLO-SUMERIAN

 

The concept and very word of paradise itself originates from the Middle East – Persia in particular – but the ranking of Middle Eastern mythology for sacred spaces and mythic worlds is more a matter of its enduring influence for the paradises and underworlds of subsequent mythologies, particularly Biblical mythology.

Speaking of underworlds, the Mesopotamian underworld was almost as influential as Persian paradise, not least for the descent of Inanna or Ishtar into it.

 

(7) HINDU

 

Hindu mythology has its sacred spaces and mythic worlds, including a number that would be described as hells or underworlds but without widespread name recognition beyond Hinduism.

For that matter, the world itself seems mythic in Hindu mythology, as “maya” or illusion (personified as the goddess Durga) – or as “lila” or divine play. India itself has its own mythic or sacred geography in Hinduism but I don’t know as much about it as I do for Western mythologies.

 

(8) MESO-AMERICAN – AZTEC

 

One of the most chthonic mythologies, since the Aztecs had nine levels of its underworld known as Mictlan – although it sometimes seems hard to distinguish the Aztec underworld from Aztec history, what with those pyramids slippery with blood and hearts from human sacrifice.

 

(9) NATIVE AMERICAN – LAKOTA

 

I don’t know much about the mythic worlds of Native American mythology other than references to their belief in an afterlife as “the happy hunting ground” that is attributed to them, although that probably originated in the interpretation by British settlers. Apparently the phrase first appeared “in 1823 in The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper”.

 

(10) AFRO-AMERICAN – VOODOO

 

To be honest, I don’t know too much about the mythic worlds of Afro-American mythologies or voodoo within and beyond our own. I was not surprised to learn upon looking it up that there is a realm of ancestral spirits – but I was surprised to learn that Haitian vodou does have its holy sites of pilgrimage that overlap with Christian sites in Haiti.

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Fantasy Books (Revised Entry) (8) Joe Lansdale – The Drive-In

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Cover of the complete Drive-In Trilogy, paperback edition published 2020 by BookVoice Publishing

 

 

(8) JOE LANSDALE – THE DRIVE-IN (1988-2005)

Joe Landsale is a genre-hopping self-branded mojo storyteller so Texan his books positively drawl. His fantasy is never purely fantasy, as he writes books and stories (and comics!) in a number of genres, often at the same time. Westerns, of course – although he is from east Texas – but often of the Weird West, horror or so-called splatterpunk, mystery, suspense and thrillers.

A good introduction to Lonsdale is his short stories, which are particularly difficult to pin down in genre. I mean, how do you classify “Bubba Ho-Tep” (subsequently adapted into film starring none other than the Chin himself, Bruce Campbell) – in which an aged Elvis Presley and a black JFK battle a soul-sucking mummy in a nursing home? (No, seriously – Elvis Presley, having swapped with a double to opt out of fame. Not sure about JFK though – he claims the Conspiracy swapped his mind into his present body. Even Elvis is skeptical). Or his post-zombie apocalyptic “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks”? “Frequent features of Lansdale’s writing are usually deeply ironic, strange or absurd situations or characters”. Indeed.

And perhaps none more bizarre than my introduction to Lansdale and still my favorite, although it is a little intense (if by intense you mean insane) – his 1988 book The Drive-In, or for its full title, The Drive-In: A ‘B’ Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas. It starts as a normal summer Friday night horror movie marathon at the Orbit Drive-In in Texas. And then it becomes the horror-movie marathon, as they are trapped by a demonic grinning comet in the drive-in, beyond time in an eternal night – seemingly at the whim of the dark gods of B-grade movie horror, who lend a hand to all the base humanity on show with a little (or a lot) of some monstrosity of their own, with the Popcorn King.

Don’t eat the popcorn. It’s watching you.

A sequel – The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels – followed shortly after in 1989, with a third book (Drive in 3: The Bus Tour) in 2005 rounding out the Drive-In Trilogy.

RATING: 4 STARS****
B-TIER (HIGH-TIER)

Heart of Starkness – Eightfold Path 3: I believe in all the gods (pagan catholicism)

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Screenshot from the music video of Kanye West’s 2010 single “Power” – one of my favorite music videos and best depictions of polytheistic pagan imagery in modern popular culture, a “moving picture” or “modern art montage” drawing from Egyptian mythology and Renaissance art of classical mythology

 

 

I believe in all the gods

especially the goddesses

(pagan catholicism)

*

*

I believe in all the gods

especially the goddesses –

I believe in L-A Woman & Mr Mojo Risin’

*

Top Tens – Poetry & Literature: Top 10 Poetry (Honorable Mention)

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A question even better than “To be or not to be”, although I think the better question would be how zombie Shakespeare ended up in a Springfield school locker – one of the finest moments in a Simpsons Halloween episode in Dial Z for Zombies, the third story in Treehouse of Horror III, Episode 5, Season 4, The Simpsons

 

 

TOP 10 POETRY (HONORABLE MENTION)

 

I live in a poetic world – and I have my Top 10 Poetry, by poem and poet, as well as twenty special mentions

But wait – there’s even more!

There’s enough poems and poets out there that I like exceeding my Top 10 Poetry and my twenty special mentions, so it’s time for honorable mentions. I rank them by chronological order (as I’d otherwise rank them all in B-tier or high tier) – by the year of publication for their standout poem, for which I like and include them in my honorable mentions.

 

 

Yeah, that’s the look of a man I’d imagine to use metaphysical pick-up lines – Bust of John Donne photographed by Matthew Black, Wikipedia “John Donne”, license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

 

 

(1654) JOHN DONNE – TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED

 

One of the metaphysical poets. I don’t recall what makes a poet metaphysical but this poem would suggest that it’s being pretty raunchy.

 

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d”

Now that’s metaphysics!

I don’t know how it would go down standing over your mistress and declaring her to be your America as saucy foreplay these days. It’s time to manifest your destiny, baby!

I do like how the poem finishes off (heh) with its version of that cheesy pick-up line – “You know what would look good on you? Me!”

 

To teach thee, I am naked first; why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.

 

 

 

 

Portrait of Andrew Marvell by unknown artist in 1655 – Wikipedia “Andrew Marvell”, public domain

 

 

(1681) ANDREW MARVELL – TO HIS COY MISTRESS

 

“Had we had but world enough and time

This coyness, Lady, were no crime”

 

Carpe diem as a pick-up line to get in her pants.

No, seriously, that’s the poem – and why I like it.

That and the worms that makes it a favorite among adolescent students everywhere –

 

“then Worms shall try

That long preserv’d Virginity”

 

Like John Donne, Andrew Marvell is another surprisingly raunchy 17th-century ‘metaphysical’ poet.

Ultimately, he’s something of a one-poem wonder for his most famous and celebrated poem “To His Coy Mistress” – but what a poem! In the word of TV Tropes, it “is pretty much the trope codifier for the more philosophical sort of seduction lyric and contains a bunch of phrases that are hugely quotable, forever appearing in titles and epigraphs”. That seduction lyric is the persuasion of the speaker’s prospective lover by means of a carpe diem philosophy – or YOLO in modern internet slang. Seize the day, baby.

It’s also a popular poem in schools – well, as popular as poems get in schools – where it certainly is fertile ground for lowbrow humor for perpetually adolescent minds like mine. There’s the two hundred years the poet would spend on each of his lover’s breasts, if only they did have eternity. Not to mention, the ages he would devote to every other part, which prompts thoughts of an ass age – heh

And of course there’s the worms (“Can we do the one with the worms again, Miss?” – actual quote reported by teacher).

All lowbrow locker room humor aside, there is something powerfully evocative in Marvell’s vibrant imagery and command of rhyming couplets, particularly in the last stanza where the speaker urges the woman to seize life by the, well, horns.

 

“Let us roll all our Strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one Ball:

And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,

Thorough the Iron gates of Life.

Thus, though we cannot make our Sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

 

 

 

Posthumous portrait of Shelley writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy, painting by Joseph Severn, 1845 – Wikipedia “Percy Bysse Shelley” (public domain image)

 

 

(1818) PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY – OZYMANDIAS

 

I have a soft spot for the English Romantic poets. Yes – that’s capital-R Romanticism, for the cultural and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late eighteenth century and which still arguably holds sway in Western culture even today. Two of them – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats – feature in the Top 10 itself. Two others – William Blake and Lord Byron – feature as honorable mentions. That leaves the last two of the big six – William Wordsworth and Percy Bysse Shelley.

Shelley may now perhaps best be known as the husband of Mary Shelley, author of the iconic Frankenstein. However, he has at least earned his place in my special mention cult and pulp entries, largely off the back of this poem.

Yes – there is other poetry by Shelley I enjoy, such as “To a Skylark” – even if it starts in a weird way to modern ears:

 

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert”

 

Yeah…what? But I can’t say mad at a poem that features these lines:

 

“We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

 

However, it is his sonnet Ozymandias, often anthologized and commonly taught in schools, that ranks as my favorite for this entry. And as it is a sonnet and hence short (sixteen lines), I can quote it here in full:

 

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharoah Ramesses II – or Ramesses the Great, who reigned in 1279-1213 BC. The theme is obvious – human hubris in the face of time. Decline and fall – even for the greatest rulers and the empires they forge (although of course Shelley with his radical political views was quite happy to speed them along). Ramesses now reduced to empty ironic words on a statue, the statue itself fallen into pieces and ancient Egypt itself, known mostly for its giant tombstones and broken statuary.

 

 

 

Robert Browning, portrait by Herbert Rose Barraud 1888 – Wikipedia “Robert Browning” (public domain image)

 

 

(1842) ROBERT BROWNING – MY LAST DUCHESS

 

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive”

And so begins Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue – and one of my favorite villainous dramatic monologues at that. Make no mistake – the Duke (prefaced as Ferrara) is a villain. Indeed, his monologue unveils himself as a narcissistic sociopath – and particularly chilling in its calm and casual delivery, even potentially charming in its eloquence but for what it unveils (as perhaps with all the best villainous monologues).

The Duke introduces his last Duchess, not in person but in her painting – which he keeps curtained off for his gaze only (or that of his select guests, including the one to whom he’s speaking in the poem), a detail easy to miss in first reading but which acquires significance as the poem advances.

He then introduces her transgressions:

 

“She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”.

 

At first, this seems to insinuate a roving eye, until he reveals what the sort of things that made his young naïve bride glad – a sunset, the gift of a cherry bough, even perhaps a compliment from the portrait artist himself. Indeed, most of the supposed “transgressions” seem to take place in his own mind – or his own narcissistic need that she pay him the proper attention.

 

“She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift”

 

And then come the lines that I always find so chilling in its cold detachment – and so heartbreakingly tragic for his last Duchess

 

“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together”

 

And so the Duke unveils himself as akin to a mafia don who took out a hit on his wife. Because she smiled too much.

It’s even more heartbreakingly tragic as it is based (loosely – or perhaps not) on real historical figures – the fifth Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso Il d’Este) and his wife, the teenaged Lucrezia de Medici, dead at the age of seventeen. Browning had more in mind than simply recreating a historical character. The Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for the juxtaposition of artistic and intellectual heights with the ruthlessness of its aristocratic elite that did indeed resemble mafia families.

Heart of Starkness – Eightfold Path 2X: Apocalypse

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William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, 1805-1810, the second painting with that title (of the same subject but from a different perspective from that in the more famous first painting, which featured in the book and film of Red Dragon best known for Hannibal Lecter), second of a series of four Great Red Dragon paintings, and part of a series of paintings illustrating the Book of Apocalypse

 

 

In my end of the world,

the sun is black,

the moon is red,

and the stars fall screaming from the sky.

Dark enough for you?

*

I was gored by the horns of God.

His left horn was death,

His right horn was the devil,

and in between where there should have been a face

there was only an abyss.

*

We were all judged –

many were sacrificed

and no one was saved.

*

There were visions in those days.

Heart of Starkness – Eightfold Path 2: I have a mythology (apocalypse)

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Sir Galahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail by Arthur Hughes, 1870 – Wikipedia “Holy Grail” (public domain image)

 

 

I don’t have a religion

I have a mythology –

for mine is the passion play

grail quest

ghost dance

and mojo risin’

*

I don’t have a religion

I have a mythology –

for mine is the mythos

ethos

eros

and hieros gamos

*

I don’t have a religion

I have a mythology –

for mine is the cult of passion

code of honour

sense of humour

*

For mine is the grail quest –

round table and siege perilous

fisher king and waste land

bleeding lance and dolorous stroke

adventurous bed and questing beast

*

*

I don’t pray

I write –

I write to save myself

*

*

The gods speak in verse

and move in dance.

 

 

Top Tens – Poetry & Literature: Top 10 Poetry (Honorable Mention) (1842) Robert Browning – My Last Duchess

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Robert Browning, portrait by Herbert Rose Barraud 1888 – Wikipedia “Robert Browning” (public domain image)

 

 

(1842) ROBERT BROWNING – MY LAST DUCHESS

 

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive”

And so begins Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue – and one of my favorite villainous dramatic monologues at that. Make no mistake – the Duke (prefaced as Ferrara) is a villain. Indeed, his monologue unveils himself as a narcissistic sociopath – and particularly chilling in its calm and casual delivery, even potentially charming in its eloquence but for what it unveils (as perhaps with all the best villainous monologues).

The Duke introduces his last Duchess, not in person but in her painting – which he keeps curtained off for his gaze only (or that of his select guests, including the one to whom he’s speaking in the poem), a detail easy to miss in first reading but which acquires significance as the poem advances.

He then introduces her transgressions:

 

“She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”.

 

At first, this seems to insinuate a roving eye, until he reveals what the sort of things that made his young naïve bride glad – a sunset, the gift of a cherry bough, even perhaps a compliment from the portrait artist himself. Indeed, most of the supposed “transgressions” seem to take place in his own mind – or his own narcissistic need that she pay him the proper attention.

 

“She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift”

 

And then come the lines that I always find so chilling in its cold detachment – and so heartbreakingly tragic for his last Duchess

 

“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together”

 

And so the Duke unveils himself as akin to a mafia don who took out a hit on his wife. Because she smiled too much.

It’s even more heartbreakingly tragic as it is based (loosely – or perhaps not) on real historical figures – the fifth Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso Il d’Este) and his wife, the teenaged Lucrezia de Medici, dead at the age of seventeen. Browning had more in mind than simply recreating a historical character. The Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for the juxtaposition of artistic and intellectual heights with the ruthlessness of its aristocratic elite that did indeed resemble mafia families.

Top Tens – Poetry & Literature: Top 10 Poetry (Honorable Mention): (1818) Percy Bysse Shelley – Ozymandias

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Posthumous portrait of Shelley writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy, painting by Joseph Severn, 1845 – Wikipedia “Percy Bysse Shelley” (public domain image)

 

 

(1818) PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY – OZYMANDIAS

 

I have a soft spot for the English Romantic poets. Yes – that’s capital-R Romanticism, for the cultural and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late eighteenth century and which still arguably holds sway in Western culture even today. Two of them – Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats – feature in the Top 10 itself. Two others – William Blake and Lord Byron – feature as honorable mentions. That leaves the last two of the big six – William Wordsworth and Percy Bysse Shelley.

Shelley may now perhaps best be known as the husband of Mary Shelley, author of the iconic Frankenstein. However, he has at least earned his place in my special mention cult and pulp entries, largely off the back of this poem.

Yes – there is other poetry by Shelley I enjoy, such as “To a Skylark” – even if it starts in a weird way to modern ears:

 

“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert”

 

Yeah…what? But I can’t say mad at a poem that features these lines:

 

“We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

 

However, it is his sonnet Ozymandias, often anthologized and commonly taught in schools, that ranks as my favorite for this entry. And as it is a sonnet and hence short (sixteen lines), I can quote it here in full:

 

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharoah Ramesses II – or Ramesses the Great, who reigned in 1279-1213 BC. The theme is obvious – human hubris in the face of time. Decline and fall – even for the greatest rulers and the empires they forge (although of course Shelley with his radical political views was quite happy to speed them along). Ramesses now reduced to empty ironic words on a statue, the statue itself fallen into pieces and ancient Egypt itself, known mostly for its giant tombstones and broken statuary.

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Ice Ages / Ice Age Iceberg (Special Mention)

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Iceberg in the Arctic with its underside exposed as photographed by AWeith – Wikipedia “Iceberg” licensed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

 

TOP 10 ICE AGES / ICE AGE ICEBERG (SPECIAL MENTION)

 

Alright stop, collaborate, and listen – ice is back with a brand new invention.

There’s even more Ice Age iciness, with the usual twenty special mentions for my Top 10 Ice Ages.

As usual, these special mentions are, dare I say it, more of an Ice Ace iceberg, as I stretch the category of ice age well beyond any geological or scientific classification to all things ice or icy whether scientific, historic, cosmic or mythic – getting weirder and wilder the deeper I go…

 

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

(1) IMPACT WINTER

 

“The hypothesized prolonged period of cold weather due to the impact of a large asteroid or comet on the Earth’s surface”.

Obviously, the immediate impact is very hot – at the point of impact. We’re talking the “enormous amount of dust, ash and other material” thrown up into the atmosphere from the impact and its aftermath (including firestorms or widespread fires from the impact), which then blocks out heat and light from the Sun, causing temperatures to drop dramatically.

Perhaps the most famous (and probable) impact winter is hypothesized as that from the “dino-buster” asteroid impact in the K-T extinction event that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. And yes – I know it’s called K-Pg now but you’re going to need another one of those before you pry the name K-T from my cold, extinct hands.

 

(2) VOLCANIC WINTER

 

As for impact winter but this time the impact is coming from inside the Earth! That is, from “a reduction in global temperatures caused by droplets of sulfuric acid obscuring the Sun and raising Earth’s albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a large, sulfur-rich, particularly explosive volcanic eruption”.

There’s been quite a few of these – they are hypothesized to lie behind the Late Antique Little Ice Age and Little Ice Age, at least in part – but again perhaps the most famous was that from the Toba supervolcanic eruption 74,000 years ago, sometimes hypothesized as the Toba catastrophe event to have pushed humans to the brink of extinction reduced to potentially as few as 1,000 members of their species.

 

(3) FIMBULWINTER

 

In Norse mythology, the winter of the end of the world – the immediate prelude to Ragnarok.

“Fimbulwinter is three successive winters, when snow comes in from all directions, without any intervening summer. Innumerable wars follow.”

Apparently, the myth might originate in the volcanic winter of 536 AD (part of the Late Antique Little Ice Age) or even earlier climate change at the end of the Nordic Bronze Age.

More broadly, I use Fimbulwinter as representative of mythic winter – and winter in mythology or religion.

 

(4) FANTASY WINTER

 

Ice Ages or worlds of ice in fantasy & SF, including fantasy or SF set in the Ice Age or ice ages proper (although let’s face it, we’re talking the Pleistocene rather than any other ice age on our planet) – which are surprisingly prolific.

Narnia’s perpetual winter enchanted by the White Witch. Winter is coming in A Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones – as well as the White Walkers as the embodiment of ice or an ice age.

Worlds of ice in SF, perhaps most famously Hoth in Star Wars – although my personal favorite remains Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air, where our own world is utterly frozen after it has become a rogue planet after being torn away from the Sun by a passing “dark star”.

 

(5) GENERAL WINTER

 

General winter sounds like a good term for an ice age but no – I’m referring to General Winter, the nickname given to the personification of winter as a factor in military history or war, typically as a defensive buffer or force multiplier and particularly in Russia.

Winter famously contributed “to military failures of several invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union” – perhaps most famously in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the Second World War, albeit often overstated for the latter with the common adage that Germany was defeated by the Russian winter.

Ironically, General Winter may be outranked in Russia or the Soviet Union by General Mud, albeit closely related, from the muddy season or “rasputitsa” of autumn rains and spring thaws – an irony best illustrated by the German armed forces initially welcoming the onset of winter in 1941 for ending the rasputitsa season.

More broadly, I use General Winter as representative of winter warfare or winter war, including the Winter War called as such between Finland and the Soviet Union, as well as the impact of winter or cold weather on military history in general. The infamous Crossing of the Rhine for the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire on 31 December in 406 AD – although that the Rhine was frozen, making the crossing easier, is a hypothesis.

 

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

 

(6) SNOWBALL EARTH

 

Okay, this is something of a cheat as Snowball Earth is a hypothesis that during one or more of Earth’s glacial periods, the Earth’s surface was “nearly entire frozen with no liquid oceanic or surface water exposed to the atmosphere”. I just like the name so couldn’t resist it for its own entry in my Top 10 Ice Ages.

There’s a less frozen version proposed as Slushball Earth “with a thin equatorial band of open (or seasonally open) water”.

Usually proposed for the Sturtian glacial period in the Neoproterozoic Era, as well as the Marinoan glacial period – both aptly enough within the period in that era called Cryogenian.

 

(7) LATE ANTIQUE LITTLE ICE AGE

 

A cooling period in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, hypothesized as a “volcanic winter” (more about that in special mentions) coinciding with three large volcanic eruptions and contributing to the decline of the Roman Empire – contrasting with the Roman Warm Period. So the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was caused by…global cooling?

 

(8) LITTLE ICE AGE – GREAT FROST & YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER

 

A period of regional cooling, particulary in the North Atlantic, variously proposed from the 16th century (but also as early as 1300) to the 19th century (about 1850) with several causes proposed for it – contrasting with the Medieval Warm Period.

Within the Little Ice Age, there’s the Great Frost – for the winter of 1708-1709, the coldest European winter for the past 500 years.

Also within the Little Ice Age, albeit towards the tail end, there’s the Year Without a Summer in 1816 – which was exactly what it says on the tin with the coldest summer temperatures on record in Europe between 1766 and 2000, usually identified as a volcanic winter event from the eruption of Mount Tambora (located in modern Indonesia) in 1815.

 

(9) NUCLEAR WINTER

 

As for impact or volcanic winter but this time we do it, almost making you proud of human achievement – “the severe and prolonged global climactic cooling effect that is hypothesized to occur after widespread urban firestorms following a large scale nuclear war”.

 

(10) BIG FREEZE & HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

 

Yes, there’s an Ice Age for the entire universe – the Big Freeze or Heat Death of the Universe, “a scientific hypothesis regarding the ultimate fate of the universe” – with the universe approaching absolute zero (or alternatively maximum entropy) over a very long timescale (so long as to be almost eternity).

Speaking of absolute zero…

 

(11) ABSOLUTE ZERO

 

The ultimate Ice Age state of reality – and by ice, we’re talking the solid state of gases, not water. Water freezes to ice at 0 degrees Celsius – absolute zero is 0 degrees Kelvin or -217.15 degrees Celsius.

It’s also impossible – while absolute zero can be approached, it can never be reached, although modern science can come pretty damn close (in units of picokelvin or one trillionth of a kelvin).

 

(12) SPACE

 

We already live in a cosmic Ice Age so to speak – space, which has an average or baseline temperature only slightly above absolute zero at 2.7 degrees Kelvin, apparently from the background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. Talk about running on fumes!

However, the actual temperature of space can vary depending on neighboring bodies, obviously such as stars.

 

(13) ASTROPHYSICS ICE LINE

 

Even our immediate stellar environment – the solar system, albeit itself incomprehensibly vast compared to Earth – is mostly an ice age, outside the so-called ice line (or frost line or snow line) in astrophysics.

It always strikes me how narrow the sweet spot or temperate habitable zone around our Sun (or any star) is – with our planet’s orbit obviously in it and even then it gets ice. In fairness, Mars is also in it – as the only other such planet “where liquid water can exist on the surface”. Otherwise, the ice line kicks in at 5 astronomical units – 1 astronomical unit is the average distance of Earth from the Sun – from Jupiter onwards.

Speaking of ice lines (or snow lines or frost lines)…

 

(14) POLES & MOUNTAINS

 

The ice line in astrophysics is borrowed from the similar ice line on Earth itself – or rather ice lines, as the ice lines for both poles (north and south, Arctic and Antarctic) and for sufficiently high mountains which have the same effect (through their height to where our atmosphere is thinner).

And yes – the ice lines mark the parts of our planet that are in an ice age, or rather the areas of glaciation for our present ice age, while the rest of the planet is in an interglacial period of the ice age.

That’s essentially the defining characteristic of an ice age – that parts of the planet are in glaciation – sometimes stated as icehouse Earth, as opposed to greenhouse Earth for which there is no glaciation, as in other geological periods (and as the argument goes, increasingly for our own with global warming).

 

(15) POLAR DESERTS & OCEANS

 

It’s always fascinated me that those regions of the Earth that fall under an ice cap climate – where no monthly mean temperature exceeds 0 degrees Celsius – have rainfalls low enough to qualify as deserts, although they usually are distinguished from true deserts. Hence, most of the interior of Antarctica is polar desert and it is the driest continent on Earth, even more so than the usual suspect (and next driest continent) Australia. I would have thought that polar deserts are relatively more common during ice ages.

Equally, it’s always fascinated me that the biome of Antarctica is predominantly marine – while the continent itself is mostly dead, its seas and coastline. The same can be said of the Arctic proper, only more so as it is entirely marine – such that the polar bear is classified as a marine mammal.

For that matter, there’s the deep sea or 90% of the volume of the ocean – effectively a oceanic ice age of itself, with consistent temperature of 0-3 degrees Celsius.

 

X-TIER (WEIRD / WILD TIER)

 

(16) GREAT FLOOD

 

Or as it might be called, the Great Thaw.

After the ice comes the thaw. Flood or deluge myths – including that of Atlantis – are sometimes attributed to the rise of sea levels from melting glacial ice at the end of the Last Glacial Period about 11,700 years ago

 

(17) FROZEN UNDERWORLD – HEL & HELL

 

The eternal ice age!

It’s not surprising that the underworld of Norse mythology – Hel or Helheim – was depicted as cold or frozen.

What is more surprising is for the Hell we’re more familiar with from Christian belief and popular imagination to depicted as cold or frozen rather than the usual archetype of the fires of hell. For hell to be frozen seems an oxymoron – after all, it’s where we get idioms like it will be a cold day in hell or when hell freezes over (invoking impossibility) and people wanting ice water in hell.

And yet that is how Dante, in the Inferno part of his Divine Comedy, depicted the deepest level of hell, reserved for traitors as the worst sinners and including Satan himself.

Not sure if that’s related to the supernatural cold spots – often causing breath to frost – associated with ghosts or worse.

 

(18) WINTER

 

Now is the winter of our discontent.

The seasonal ice age we have every year – and as such used as a metaphor, usually with associations with such things as discontent or the end of life with old age or death.

Speaking of which…

 

(19) PERSONAL ICE AGE

 

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

It’s everyone’s personal ice age, where everything gets frozen over – old age and death, for example, or depression and dark periods in life for which there is some possibility of a thaw.

And speaking of which

 

(20) S€XUAL ICE AGE

 

Yes – it’s time for my usual kinky entry as my final or twentieth special mention where the subject permits. I wouldn’t have thought that the subject of ice ages would have been open to kink – or in this case an absence of kink – but I just can’t resist the common usage of frigid for lack of sexual response (particularly in women) for the wider connotations of one’s own private s€xual ice age for lack of activity or response.