My Fantasy Bookshelf

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/fantasy-bookshelf.html

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After filing last week’s newsletter comparing “Succession” to a work of “Game of Thrones”-style fantasy, I recorded a podcast episode with Razib Khan in which we talked about our shared affection for actual fantasy novels, our experience as early George R.R. Martin adopters and other matters of deep nerd interest. It was a wide-ranging conversation, but one that stayed mostly with the big names of the genre — Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, a few others — rather than offering a detailed list of reading recommendations. So since we’re headed into a holiday weekend and everyone needs a true break from politics, I thought I’d offer a short list of novels for anyone interested in the kinds of things fantasy does well and looking for almost-summer entertainment.

To be clear, this isn’t a list of my all-time favorites or even a list of “fantasy novels that should be adapted for TV instead of making more seasons of ‘The Rings of Power.’” It’s just me turning a glance at my bookshelf into a newsletter. But one thing I said to Khan is that I think the great 21st-century fantasy saga is still to be written — one that uses the multivolume, fat-paperback architecture that developed in imitation of Tolkien to fit a lot of different ideas and characters and experiments inside the epic framework; one that achieves what Martin was clearly shooting for with “A Song of Ice and Fire,” but at a higher level of literary craft and without his HBO-mediated writer’s block. You can think of this list of novels, maybe, as various inspirations for that imagined perfection.

“The Goblin Emperor,” by Katherine Addison

This is a striking stand-alone novel, written in a controlled, almost Kazuo Ishiguro-an style, about a half-goblin prince suddenly elevated to the throne of a highly cultured elven empire. A pure novel of court politics, where the game of thrones barely leaves the palace, its main imperfection is that its youthful-emperor protagonist becomes a successful power player a little bit too easily and without much moral cost. But the style and setting and court language stay with you; they’re achievement enough. (Addison’s shorter, more novella-ish follow-ups, featuring a gay elven detective operating elsewhere in the same empire, are more Ishiguro-an still.)

The “Farseer” trilogy, by Robin Hobb

This is another story rooted in court politics and featuring an unwanted royal scion, but more expansive and closer to the standard architecture of high fantasy — multiple books, magical warfare, rumors of apocalypse and so on. Hobb’s hero, Fitz, is one of the most successful examples of character-building and compelling interiority in recent fantasy. The world around him is more unevenly constructed, with some brilliant core ideas surrounded by a certain amount of superficial sketch work and oddly cardboard villains for such psychologically focused storytelling. But I read not just the initial trilogy but also the six other books in the story, which for my teenage self wouldn’t have meant much but at this stage of my reading life counts as the strongest possible endorsement.

“The Crystal Cave” and “The Hollow Hills,” by Mary Stewart

I’m not an Arthurian-mythos obsessive, and there are a lot of fantasy novels working that particular seam without being distinctive. Stewart’s 1970s-era Merlin novels are exceptions, or maybe they’re just better for being a point of origin for later attempts at historically grounded Arthuriana — with the mystical elements rendered especially well, and likewise the story of kingdom-building after Rome’s decay. The subsequent installments, “The Last Enchantment” and then the Mordred-focused “The Wicked Day,” falter a bit by trying to shoehorn too much of the mythos into a plausible Britain-in-late-antiquity timeline. But the first two books, which carry the story from Merlin’s boyhood through Tintagel to Arthur’s ascent to the throne, were my favorites as a teenager and remained favorites when I came back to them more recently.

“The Heroes,” by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie has written a lot of novels that basically offer what Martin gets accused of delivering — a fantasy world ruled almost entirely by cynicism and violence, every romantic trope deconstructed, every piety undermined. He has a picaresque style that carries this off more entertainingly than that description might suggest — though eventually to diminishing returns. But his most interesting work is an attempt at genre-mixing, a trio of books doing, respectively, a Western, a “Count of Monte Cristo”-style revenge plot and a battle novel in the style of Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels.” “The Heroes” is the single-battle book, a fantasy-world Antietam told through shifting battlefield perspectives, and it’s probably his best.

“Spinning Silver” and “Uprooted,” by Naomi Novik

These are stand-alone novels but spiritual siblings, attempts to play with the mood and setting and rhythms of a fairy tale in a Slavic setting. “Uprooted” has the more winning main character and romance; “Spinning Silver” has the more successful plot and the fuller dose of fairyland. The latter also has a strong Jewish component, which was critiqued here by Michael Weingrad, author of the entertaining essay “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia.” I think his charge of anachronistic liberalism against Novik’s medieval characters has some bite, but those weaknesses are balanced by other storytelling virtues, a sense of Faerie’s mysteries above all.

“The Book of the New Sun,” by Gene Wolfe

This is just a classic at this point rather than a contemporary recommendation, but I’m including it as an excuse to link to Brian Phillips’s terrific essay on Wolfe, which sells his work better than I possibly could.

“Memory, Sorrow and Thorn,” by Tad Williams

Williams’s trilogy actually is the modern fantasy saga that I recommend to would-be fantasy adapters at HBO or Amazon. It has all the classic genre elements — the court politics and the supernatural backdrop, the world hovering between modernity and magic, even the commoner in love with a princess — held together and balanced more successfully than in almost any competitor. It’s realistic and plays around with Tolkienian expectations without being grimdark or tediously deconstructionist; it’s politically minded without being swallowed up by its intrigues; it’s derivative of the medieval world but self-aware about its sub-creation’s debt to our reality. And most important, it’s well written and carries off its ending without getting lost in world-building longueurs. Williams wrapped up the final novel when Robert Jordan was at his peak and Martin was getting going, and you can feel in his last book (big enough to be split in two for paperbacks) the expansionist temptations that prevented those two authors from finishing their sagas — but also a strong reeling-in impulse, a thus-far-and-no-further awareness, pulling his story inward and back to a successful ending.

May we all have such wisdom. Happy Memorial Day.

Rita Koganzon against Judy Blume.

Samuel Watling on why Britain can’t build.

Freddie deBoer on the false friends of the mentally ill.

Martin Gurri on the derangements of digital life.

Noah Smith against “degrowth.”

Helen Andrews defends Communist nostalgia.