Is this the real life...

[xthread]

britgeekgrrl was posting the other day that she didn't really care for Fantasy, which surprised me, since she seems to channel a bunch of classic Fantasy archetypes without too much effort. So I asked her what she'd read, and was very surprised when we had almost exactly no overlap (or maybe not so surprised, since I rather like a lot of Fantasy, but care almost not at all for a lot of the formula fantasy published in the last decade and a half or so). So I went to my bookshelf and took down a list of all the fantasy, to find out what I expect people to have read, or at least encourage them to read. Some of this you'll probably like, some of it is barely readable canon.


Fritz Lieber - The Lankhmar stories (Swords and Deviltry, Swords against Death, Swords in the Midst, Swords against Wizardry, The Dwords of Lankhmar, Swords and Ice Magic, and The Knight and Knave of Swords) - The Grey Mouser is the point source for modern fantasy gaming's notion of the Thief class, and Fafhrd contributed almost as much as Conan to our notion of the Barbarian. The books are really two or three combined novellas each, and the stories are also wonderful. Oh, and White Wolf put out a reissued set of these in 1995 that are quite a nice edition.

Edgar Allan Poe - Ok, arguably not Fantasy. However, he is a point source for both the modern Horror genre and the modern Murder Mystery (although he has to share that honor with Arthur Conan Doyle, properly the father of Victorian Adventure fiction)

Terry Pratchett - Discworld, both Adult and Juvenile books - Arguably the Juveniles are better, although all of them are working quite respectably to make the jump from Comic Fantasy to simply Literature.

Bob Asprin - Myth Adventures et al - This infamous set of Comic Fantasy stories are also a basic grounding in a raft of business principles and, frankly, good career advice. Oh, and you should read them if you plan to play a spellcaster in any fantasy role-playing game. Your DM will thank you.

Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey - Sanctuary and Thieves World et al. Well, maybe only the first four or so books, but these stories, published in the early eighties, are both good reads with a variety of fantasy story styles, but very good inspiration for fantasy gamers and DMs.

Emma Bull - War for the Oaks - Modern fantasy, also the point-source for all of the Elves, Motorcycles, and
Rock'n'Roll books of the late '80s. Emma Bull is excellent anyway.

Steven Brust - Jhereg, et al. Brust liberally liberated Hungarian folk tales and mythology in writing these, but they're still wonderful, and why we have psuedo-dragons. Brust is on something of a historical romances kick at the moment, which makes my teeth itch some days, but the core Jhereg books are all delightful, beginning as somewhat comic thieve's tales and graduating to more court intrigue and high fantasy.

CS Friedman - Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows (also called The Coldfire Trilogy) - an alternative take on science fantasy and the classic high fantasy themes, these books have elements of both Bradley's Darkover and Moorcock's Eternal Champion.

Michael Moorcock - Count Brass, The Champion of Garathorm, The Quest for Tanelorn - these form the shortest complete Eternal Champion story, introducing you to almost all of the elements of Moorcock's milieu. Oh, and you'll find some of my own personal mythology in here. I lifted Tanelorn fair and square.

Michael Moorcock - The Elric stories - this is a harder stretch. There are lots of them, they're really all excerpts from his Eternal Champion saga, and really if you've read the Castle Brass books then you've got all of the important bits, although you won't know about any of the Elric-specific mythos.

Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens. Definitely comic fantasy, and comic fantasy in a modern setting at that, but even non-f&sf readers will love this book. Mel Brooks does the Apocalypse. You know you want to read it.

Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere - One of the few pieces of modern setting fantasy on this list (well, I suppose you can make a case for His Dark Materials being modern fantasy as well, but... ish), Neverwhere is an excellent way to get a sense of the map of London. Well, a fantastic map of London that is more than a touch incorrect, but still. Work with me on this one...

Phillip Pullman - His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) - Pullman wanted to counterbalance, or even refute, Narnia, some readers can't deal with Pullman because it's too rabidly anti-religion. I think they're quite good, however. Hopefully they won't break the story too badly in the current attempt to adapt it to film.

Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Hashish Man - another one of the point sources of modern fantasy, Dunsany was an inspiration to both Lovecraft and Poe, and is absolutely amazing. I've got a rather large Dunsany collection, actually, but the only things that are still in print are these two books. The Hashish Man is more accessible, because its all short stories. When I read stories to adults, I often read from Dunsany.

Ursula K Leguin - A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore - some of LeGuin's oldest work, these books are still some of the best. In some ways they verge on Juveniles, but they're quite good. Recently Sci-Fi made a miniseries of the same name, which LeGuin has disavowed almost all knowledge of.

Barry Hughart - Bridge of Birds, The Story of the Stone, Eight Skilled Gentlemen - Best faux Chinese mythology ever. Another one of my preferred stories to read aloud to adults.

John Barnes - One For The Morning Glory - my absolute favorite fantasy story. I still buy copies of this in hardcover for friends. I've not read it to children, I'm fairly confident it works.

JK Rowling - Harry Potter et al - You knew I wasn't going to leave these out, right? I'll just assume that you haven't been living under a rock over the last decade, and I don't need to tell you what these are.

Sherri Tepper - The True Game - These books from early in Ms Tepper's career have sadly long been out of print until quite recently. They initially made her career, but she sadly turned away from her original fantasy work, which was both original and engaging, to feminist science fiction, which I'm sad to say has never spoken to me nearly as much.

Randall Garrett - The Lord Darcy stories - bridging the world of locked-room murder mystery, fantasy, and victorian adventure, it's quite sad that we only have two volumes of Mr Garrett's work before he came down with brain cancer in the mid eighties.

PC Hodgell - The Kencyr stories - These are very good and very unlike most high fantasy. In particular, the Kencyr stories describe a world that is absolutely permeated by magic and the power of time and the gods, but it is a magic that is wildly unpredictable and gods that act with their own logic and their own reasons. It has at times a feel that is quite similar to Thieves World or the Lankhmar books (though its quite possible that Hodgell inspired Asprin and Abbey, come to think of it). It also features a Lawful Good Thief. Top that.

CS Lewis - Narnia. Ok, so its Christian allegory, but if you're a munchkin you don't know and you may not care. I hold The Magicians Nephew and A Horse and His Boy in the highest regard; in addition to the movie just released, the BBC did productions of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, The Silver Chair, and Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the late eighties, starring Tom Baker as Puddleglum in the middle film.

JRR Tolkein - The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion - Another point source for modern fantasy roleplaying games, in particular where we get our notions of Elves, Dwarves, and HobbitsHalflings. Do read The Hobbit (its the easiest read of all of Tolkein's work), I also recommend The Silmarillion. Its the only one of the extended Middle Earth books that I could ever make it through, but it does give both a lot of the overarching history of Middle Earth and the history specifically of Sauron. Do not feel guilty if you feel compelled to skip a hundred pages of scrabbling through the Shire in Fellowship of the Ring or a hundred and fifty pages of scrabbling toward Morder in The Two Towers.

Eric Nylund - A Game of Universe - This is a stretch, because its really science fantasy, but it's a romp with a lot of fantasy conceits that I'd love to see played out further. I also wish his wife, Syne Mitchell, would write some fantasy, just to see how it would turn out. More on Eric Nylund in the SF post.

Larry Niven - The Magic Goes Away - This story inspired a magic card, and is also interesting because he poses some of the more interesting magic-as-tech questions, and plays with the fall from a high-magic world to a low-magic one. A nice read, and quite interesting as a gamer.

Marion Zimmer Bradley - Darkover, in particular Two to Conquer and Stormqueen. Because High Fantasy needed rabid feminist warrior paladins. Oh, and I class Darkover Landfall as straight up SF, albeit with a magic twist.

Katherine Kurtz - The Deryni novels - More point source for modern high fantasy, all of these books have been written since the seventies, and they contributed heavily to the noblewomen in furs side of the genre. You might expect this to be where a lot of modern fantasy gaming's notion of Clerics came from, but I'd almost argue that the Deryni books are really Church Fantasy. On the other hand, if you need to whip up a neo-pagan ritual in a hurry and you're not going to rip off the Catholic Church directly, she's a great place to start, complete with Too Many Candles To Count. I will now go into the neo-pagan basher's witness protection program, maybe Roland will let me hide out at his place.

Anne McCaffrey - Pern - Relatively friendly telepathic sentient riding dragons. 'nuff said. Stop after the original three or four and maybe the first Harper's trilogy because then they just started getting silly. Ms McCaffrey's paid for her house, now, I'm pretty certain that Misty Lackey has too, and you'll only be encouraging them. Besides, if they write any more of these things, Scotland might run out of the index cards McCaffrey allegedly scatters around the floor to keep track of characters and plot.

Larry Niven - Dream Park - Sure, its modern science fantasy and a murder mystery, but it's one of the best Gamer books ever!

Edgar Rice Burroughs - The Barsoom Novels - arguably not fantasy, but still part of the classic canon, and deserving of at least honorable mention. And, my god.. Burroughs.. I mean, this is part of where epic sword and sorcery came from! Oh, and reading at least one Tarzan book probably wouldn't kill you either.

Piers Anthony - Incarnations of Immortality - No longer on my Recommended shelf, these are modern fantasy and only a couple of them are really noteworthy. That said, On A Pale Horse, With A Tangled Skein, and For Love of Evil are all three a romp

Terry Brooks - Sword of Shannara - How can you not love the original Tolkein ripoff? Terry Brooks was the author who made ripping off Tolkein Cool. (Although apparently he swears a blue streak that he didn't). For what its worth, generalist pulled the name for his rogue character from these books.

William Goldman - The Princess Bride - Ok, maybe you think this isn't fantasy, but Del Rey thought it was fantasy when they published it. And where else do you want me to put it?

I'm strongly tempted to put all of Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories into the 'fantasy' category, but that's just too easy a cheap shot, even for me.

Dishonorable Mention -

Stephen Donaldson - Thomas Covenant - Because whining about how bad your life is just never seems to go out of style. Every fifteen years or so I try to make it through these, and I just can't stomach them. Apparently a lot of other people's mileage varies, though, because these books have sold an absolutely stupid number of copies.

Things I've somewhat surprisingly never read -

Mervyn Peake - The Gormenghast trilogy - I've never read these, they're properly anti-fantasy, because where fantasy aspires to affirm the status quo, Gormenghast is widely regarded to be an industrial rejoinder to traditional fantasy, in that it deals with the tearing down of the established High Fantasy order. There's also a quite good BBC production of the first book, Titus Groan starring Christopher Lee and others.

Gene Wolfe - The Book of the New Sun - really future fantasy, but I've still not read it. I just never quite got off on the whole 'bad d00d with sword' part of the genre, and post-apocalyptic fantasy mostly didn't do it for me either (I liked the John Christoper The Prince in Waiting Juveniles, but that was really the limit).

Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber - This is the inspiration for the original D&D magic system. Loathe spell slots and having to prepare spells beforehand? It's all Zelazny's fault. (More about Zelazny in the SF post, by the way)
Robert Howard and L Sprague De Camp- Conan - the classic point source for modern low-magic fantasy milieu. And Barbarians. And Cerebus. Don't forget Cerebus. Jaka won't dance for you if you forget Cerebus. (Of course, Jaka won't dance for you if you help Cerebus find Jaka, but that's another story)

H Rider Haggard - She - this is also a classic, and the fact that I've never read it is, well, appalling. I've also never read King Solomon's Mines or any of the other Allan Quartermain stories, and had not really encountered them until I started looking around more after reading Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Bad Me. Luckily its not like I didn't read Burroughs Mars books until Heinlein hacked them in Number of the Beast. Oops. Out loud fingers.

Bram Stoker - Dracula - Ok, so its technically Horror, and Gothic Horror at that, but its still part of our formative canon. I'll go hide in my library now.

Mary Shelly - Frankenstein - Properly on the edge between Science Fiction and Fantasy, I really ought to read this too. Meh.


I'll do Science Fiction in another post.

Comments

another quarter heard from...

[jacob11.livejournal.com]

A pretty good list, though I wouldn't recommend all of it.

Nobody so far has mentioned Glen Cook? His Black Company trilogy is a classic! Other stuff varies in quality from comparably good to unreadable.

Another favorite I don't think has been mentioned is Tim Powers, especially The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

I tried to read Frankenstein once. Life is too short.

About a million children's books are worthy fantasy stories. Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron comes to mind, but there are many.

I didn't notice any mention of Lovecraft (wrong genre?) or Howard.

I just read John Ford's The Dragon in Waiting (historical fantasy) and Casting Fortune... great writer.

John Crowley, too.