100 Must-read Fantasy Novels

Nick Rennison, Stephen E. Andrews

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781408114872
• eBook ISBN: 9781408136072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Fantasy is one of the most visible genres in popular culture - we see the creation of magical and imagined worlds and characters in every type of media, with very strong fan bases in tow.

This latest guide in the successful Bloomsbury Must-Read series covers work from a wide range of authors: Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Michael Moorcock, Rudyard Kipling and C.S Lewis to very contemporary writers such as Garth Nix and Steven Erikson. If you want to expand your range of reading or deepen your understanding of this genre, this is the best place to start.

A–Z OF ENTRIES

RICHARD ADAMS (b. 1920) UK

WATERSHIP DOWN (1972)

For much of his working life Richard Adams was a civil servant whose storytelling was restricted to tales he told his daughters as they travelled on long car journeys. Among these tales were the adventures of a group of rabbits. Adams’s daughters loved the rabbit stories so much that they insisted that he write them down. The result was Watership Down. Adams’s narrative focuses on two young rabbits who are brothers. Fiver is a visionary who foresees the destruction of the warren in which the rabbits live; Hazel is the courageous pioneer who, when the older rabbits of the warren refuse to listen to his brother’s warning, leads a small band of refugees in search of a new home. After a perilous journey they arrive in Watership Down where they establish a warren. Their troubles, however, are not yet at an end. They come into conflict with a neighbouring warren, ruled by the despotic Woundwort, and are forced to fight a desperate battle to retain the freedom they have gained.

The pitfalls facing an author writing the kind of anthropomorphic adventures Adams was attempting to produce are clear enough: the dangers of descending into tweeness are ever present. However, Watership Down is not some kitsch fable about cute bunnies. Rooted in exact observation of the British countryside and of the behaviour of rabbits in the wild, it is a story that packs a real punch. Adams has always denied that he intended his book to be read as allegory or parable and that may well be true, but much of its power stems from its adoption of themes and motifs from some of the oldest and most basic of stories. Like Homer’s Odyssey, it is a story of quest and heroism. It just happens to be about rabbits, not Greek warriors.

Film version: Watership Down (1978, animation)

Read on

Tales from Watership Down (a collection of short stories published a quarter of a century after the original book); Shardik; The Plague Dogs Aeron Clement, The Cold Moons; Gary Kilworth, Frost Dancers; » Tad Williams, Tailchaser’s Song

BRIAN W. ALDISS (b.1925) UK

THE MALACIA TAPESTRY (1976)

Malacia: a city in decay, as breathtaking as Renaissance Florence at her apogee, but with immense saurians toddling around her streets, winged citizens flapping overhead and archaic gods sitting around piazza cafés sipping espresso. Unchanging and yet always seeming at risk of final evanescence, Malacia is the playground of Perian and Guy, who are more refined variants of Withnail and I, ‘resting’ actors apparently more interested in the pursuit of noble maidens than delivering soliloquies. Insouciantly relaxed, the duo are perfect ambassadors for our exploration of the city.

Enter Otto Bengtsohm, inventor, who rouses Perian into starring in his first zhanoscopic production, which involves a novel device that records and creates a new form of art lying somewhere between a live action movie, a play and an animation. But as this is Malacia, the eternal city of stasis, unforeseeable implications arise from such experimentation, and it transpires that Perian will have to take the kind of unexpected risks endured by knights of yore.

When SF writers holiday in Fantasyland, the results are more often than not special. So when Brian Aldiss (long regarded as one of the finest SF writers ever) created Malacia, heads were turned and then some. Although his magnificent book Hothouse is nominally SF, its fervid depiction of a distant future Earth spoke of a potentially great loss to Fantasy given Aldiss’s concentration on rationalist speculation and general fiction. Luckily, Malacia (and some immaculate short stories) made up for his general absence from Fantasy, giving us one of the most entrancing cities ever to grace a genre that already suffers from an embarrassment of urban riches, describing his invention in the sophisticated, lush and amusing prose such a tangy edifice demands. Aldiss has been writing since the 1950s and has produced over one hundred books of consistently outstanding quality, earning him literary awards, an OBE and a global legion of admirers.

Read on

A Romance of the Equator

Mary Gentle, Rats & Gargoyles; » China Miéville, King Rat; » Michael

Moorcock, Mother London; Lucius Shepard, The Golden

POUL ANDERSON (1926–2001) USA

THE BROKEN SWORD (1954)

Our first S&S selection is a book published at the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring, drawing upon the same mythology, but of a very different character. For while » Tolkien’s classic is lengthy, dripping with virtuous light, The Broken Sword is brief, dark and unremittingly savage, a surging story as sharp as the dragon prow of a Viking longship cleaving icy waves.

Anderson’s debt to and understanding of Norse cosmology is undeniable – he was of Danish descent and his northern heritage shows in his sinewy, poetic prose. His pagan tale reveals the ancient conflict between two Faerie peoples – Elves and Trolls. These are not childish beings, but ruthless, eldritch inhumans worried about the growing dominion of man. Siring a changeling on a hideous Trollwoman, scheming Elf Imric secretly switches the warlock babe of the union with the son of a Viking settler in England. Imric then raises Skafloc (the human child) as an Elf, planning to use him against the Trolls, as (unlike the Faerie) the boy can handle iron without being burned and is unaffected by the magic of Christian symbols, thus giving his Elvish masters an advantage in warfare. But a vengeful Witch has plans for the changeling Valgard, a clandestine cuckoo in the nest of his human family, plans that involve his becoming Troll champion. When Skafloc and Valgard clash, there is a tempest such as the world has never known. Only one of these pawns is destined to transcend his fate by ending their enmity and mending the broken sword.

An acknowledged and massive influence upon » Moorcock’s Elric stories with its bleak Euro-centric romanticism, cursed armoury and unwitting brother– sister incest, this is the most authentically Nordic heroic fantasy novel of modern times, outstripping even » Howard’s Conan in its berserker fury. The Broken Sword remains a terse landmark in the history of S&S that everyone interested in Fantasy simply must experience.

Read on

Three Hearts and Three Lions; Hrolf Kraki’s Saga; The Merman’s Children

Anonymous, Beowulf; » Michael Moorcock, The Knight of the Swords

CLIVE BARKER (b. 1952) UK

WEAVEWORLD (1987)

The magic carpet is, of course, a staple of Middle Eastern folklore, but it took a British writer to really pull the rug of expectation out from beneath the feet of Fantasy readers at a time when the genre seemed to consist of little but ponderous Tolkien-derived epics or bloated S&S sagas. Clive Barker’s weighty tome Weaveworld was a substantial hit that (along with Hellraiser, a film version of his novella The Hellbound Heart) propelled this gifted writer, already acclaimed for his Horror writings, into further fame and fortune.

The novel follows Cal and Susannah, two seemingly ordinary people, who are sucked into a multi-faceted dimension called The Fugue via a portal hidden in the fabric of a carpet. The inhabitants of this fascinating domain, the Seerkind, are therein concealed from the Scourge, a destructive force bent on rending the weft and thread of the carpet and destroying them. But the Scourge is not the only threat to menace the Seerkind, for Immocolata, a ravishing but twisted exile from the Weaveworld, accompanied by the repulsive Shadwell (who can sell anything to anyone) and Hobart, a fascistic police inspector, has plans of her own for the region within the rainbow textile. Weaveworld is both painstakingly crafted and astonishingly original. After this triumph, Barker’s prose took on more of the hollow sheen of the transatlantic blockbuster, as he aimed for mass sales in the USA, and he lost some of his peculiarly English (yet never parochial) lyricism. Weaveworld was a major factor in propelling Barker to international fame, but he has never topped its awesome tapestry of invention and adventure. It is a work that never seems shallow and is consistently diverting across seven hundred pages which flicker through a spectrum of emotions and concepts to put many other so-called Fantasy writers to shame.

Read on

Cabal; The Great and Secret Show

Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle; Stephen King & Peter Straub, The Talisman; » Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People

L. FRANK BAUM (1856–1919) USA

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (1900)

Lyman Frank Baum had already had a chequered career as a largely unsuccessful magazine editor, travelling salesman, playwright, children’s author and storekeeper when he finally hit the big time with the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of the most enduringly popular of all America...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• About this Book
• Introduction
• A–Z List of Entries by Author
• A–Z of Entries
• World Fantasy Award Winners
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Imprint