CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
ANCIENT MYTH & LEGEND ANONYMOUS
The Epic of Gilgamesh, c.1750 BCE
HOMER
The Odyssey, c.725–675 BCE
OVID
Metamorphoses, c.8
ANONYMOUS
Beowulf, c.700–1100
ANONYMOUS
The Thousand and One Nights, c.700–947
ANONYMOUS
The Mabinogion, 12th–14th century
SNORRI STURLUSON
The Prose Edda, c.1220
DANTE ALIGHIERI
The Divine Comedy, c.1308–21
THOMAS MALORY
Le Morte d’Arthur, 1485
LUDOVICO ARIOSTO
Orlando Furioso, c.1516/32
THOMAS MORE
Utopia, 1516
EDMUND SPENSER
The Faerie Queene, 1590–1609
WU CHENG’EN
Journey to the West (Xiyouji), c.1592
TOMMASO CAMPANELLA
The City of the Sun, 1602
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote, 1605/15
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The Tempest, 1611
CYRANO DE BERGERAC
A Voyage to the Moon, 1657
MARGARET CAVENDISH
The Description of a New World, called The Blazing-World, 1666
SCIENCE & ROMANTICISM JONATHAN SWIFT
Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
LUDVIG HOLBERG
The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, 1741
CHARLES KINGSLEY
The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, 1863
LEWIS CARROLL
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865
JULES VERNE
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870
SAMUEL BUTLER
Erewhon, 1872
RICHARD WAGNER
The Ring of the Nibelung, 1876
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Treasure Island, 1883
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884
EDWARD BELLAMY
Looking Backward: 2000–1887, 1888
MARK TWAIN
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889
H. G. WELLS
The Time Machine, 1895
L. FRANK BAUM
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900
GOLDEN AGE OF FANTASY J. M. BARRIE
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Lost World, 1912
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
At the Earth’s Core, 1914
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Herland, 1915
CECILIA MAY GIBBS
Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: Their Adventures Wonderful, 1918
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We, 1924
FRANZ KAFKA
The Castle, 1926
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The Cthulhu Mythos, 1928–37
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World, 1932
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Conan the Barbarian, 1932–36
VLADIMIR BARTOL
Alamut, 1938
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1941
AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT
Islandia, 1942
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
The Little Prince, 1943
TOVE JANSSON
The Moomins and the Great Flood, 1945
NEW WORLD ORDER MERVYN PEAKE
Gormenghast, 1946–59
GEORGE ORWELL
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
C. S. LEWIS
The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950–56
ISAAC ASIMOV
I, Robot, 1950
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451, 1953
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Lord of the Rings, 1954–55
JUAN RULFO
Pedro Páramo, 1955
STANISLAW LEM
Solaris, 1961
ANTHONY BURGESS
A Clockwork Orange, 1962
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Pale Fire, 1962
PIERRE BOULLE
Planet of the Apes, 1963
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967
URSULA K. LE GUIN
A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968
PHILIP K. DICK
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968
PETER S. BEAGLE
The Last Unicorn, 1968
KURT VONNEGUT
Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld, 1970
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities, 1972
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
The Princess Bride, 1973
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren, 1975
GEORGES PEREC
W or the Memory of Childhood, 1975
GERD MJØEN BRANTENBERG
Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes, 1977
ANGELA CARTER
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 1979
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Kindred, 1979
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979
THE COMPUTER AGE STEPHEN KING
The Dark Tower series, 1982–2012
TERRY PRATCHETT
The Discworld series, 1983–2015
WILLIAM GIBSON
Neuromancer, 1984
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985
IAIN M. BANKS
The Culture series, 1987–2012
BERNARDO ATXAGA
Obabakoak, 1988
NEIL GAIMAN et al.
The Sandman, 1988–2015
NEAL STEPHENSON
Snow Crash, 1992
LOIS LOWRY
The Giver, 1993
PHILIP PULLMAN
His Dark Materials, 1995–2000
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones, 1996
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997
CHINA MIÉVILLE
The Bas-Lag cycle, 2000–04
JASPER FFORDE
The Eyre Affair, 2001
CORNELIA FUNKE
Inkheart, 2003
SUSANNA CLARKE
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 2004
DAVID MITCHELL
Cloud Atlas, 2004
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Never Let Me Go, 2005
NGUGI WA THIONG’O
Wizard of the Crow, 2006
MICHAEL CHABON
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 2007
SUZANNE COLLINS
The Hunger Games, 2008
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84, 2009–10
WU MING-YI
The Man with the Compound Eyes, 2011
ANN LECKIE
The Imperial Radch trilogy, 2013–15
NNEDI OKORAFOR
Lagoon, 2014
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2015
Contributor Biographies
Newsletters
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Of all the powerful spells that fiction casts upon us—absorbing plots, believable characters, vivid language—one of the least celebrated is its ability to make us feel transported to another time and place. Most avid readers have had the experience of setting down a book and needing to shake off
the sights, smells, and sounds of a world they haven’t actually been to, or that may not even exist. We may never have set foot in Victorian London, and we certainly haven’t hiked through Middle-earth, but the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and J. R. R. Tolkien have made those places seem more real, to millions of readers, than cities we’ve actually visited.
The works described in this book all conjure lands that exist only in the imagination. Some of these places—the America of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996, here), the Japan of Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 (2009–10, here)—closely resemble the world we live in. Others—the Alaska of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007, here) and the New England of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, here)—show us how very different our own world might have been, or could become, with only a few tweaks to the course of history. Some of these books, like Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013, here), speculate about what life might be like in the distant future, while other works, like Robert E. Howard’s original Conan the Barbarian story series (1932–36, here), postulate a thrilling past that has since been irretrievably lost. Stanlisław Lem’s Solaris (1961, here) challenges readers to contemplate a form of intelligent life almost inconceivably alien from ourselves. Satirists like Jonathan Swift and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o concoct bizarre yarns about talking horses and child-bearing corpses to confront us with a pointedly familiar reflection of our own behaviors. Then there are those unfettered fantasists, ranging from Italo Calvino to Neil Gaiman, whose great gift is to offer us visions in which the imagination can be set free to roam wherever it desires.
The roots of all these books lie in humanity’s oldest stories: myths, fables, and folklore—the tales people made up to explain how the world came to exist and why it is the way it is. While literary criticism tends to valorize the new and the innovative, the literature of the fantastic seeks a connection to tradition, to what persists even as the world changes. The texts in the first section of this book, “Ancient Myth & Legend,” are, themselves, often attempts to preserve a fading storytelling culture; Beowulf (c.700–1100, here) and the Prose Edda (c.1220, here) were the works of Christian authors who sought to safeguard a portion of their pagan past. These books have survived in no small part because of their ability to reach across a span of centuries and speak to the inhabitants of new ages and worlds. The messy love lives of Ovid’s gods and goddesses; the questing courage of Malory’s Arthurian knights; the dauntless faith of Wu Cheng’en’s Xuanzang—all remind us of the worst and the best of ourselves. But, along with much that is recognizable, these stories also bewitch us with the rich and strange, the miraculous, the astonishing, and the awe-inspiring. The first tales human beings told each other, the ones that survive from our unrecorded past, were not about everyday life, but about the extraordinary: talking animals, wicked sorcerers, terrifying monsters, and cities built of gold and jewels.
Fantastic literature has always conducted a complex dialogue with the real world. Many of us read it to escape from that world but, more often than not, this fiction aims to make us see our own lives in a new light. Allegories like The Faerie Queene (1596, here) and epics like The Divine Comedy (c.1308–21, here) offer their readers moral instruction, even if some of those readers prefer to attend only to the lush spectacle that cloaks the lesson. In Don Quixote (1605/15, here), Miguel de Cervantes impishly used the structure of a chivalric romance to mock the conventions of the “romance” itself, a literary genre that specializes in the wondrous. But with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, here), the most overtly didactic species of literary wonderland came into its own. In the five hundred years since it was published, utopian tales have used invented worlds and nations to critique and exhort readers to change the world. The utopian strain of fantastic literature springs not from myth but from the great age of exploration, when Europeans set out to discover (and, alas, exploit) previously unknown and unmapped parts of the globe. Travel narratives like Marco Polo’s account of his journeys in Asia (c.1300) became immensely popular, starting in the fourteenth century, and travelers’ encounters with other cultures naturally encouraged wandering Westerners to contemplate what foreigners did better or worse than the folks back home.
Utopian fiction also arose from Enlightenment thinking itself. If reason and science proved themselves to be superior tools for understanding and mastering the natural world, why not apply them to the engineering of society as well? Writers would continue to produce utopian tales into the twentieth century; women, in particular, wanted to picture what a culture founded on gender equality or even female dominance might look like and, in a sense, Marxism is a utopian dream. By the nineteenth century, however, authors like Samuel Butler had turned to parodying utopian idealism. Utopias, arguably, make for dull reading, but dystopian fiction has demonstrated again and again—right up to The Hunger Games (here), a 2008 blockbuster intended for teenaged readers—its power to enthrall. Some dystopias, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924, here) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, here), are essentially works of social or political criticism—attacks on the dominant ideologies and obsessions of the modern world. Many more simply depict the age-old dilemma of a restless individual at odds with the society into which he or she was born.
Often enough, industrialization and the rise of the mass media provoked this dissatisfaction, and writing a dystopian novel was not the only way to respond to such forces. The “Golden Age” of fantasy, during the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, was largely a reaction to the wholesale destruction of deeply rooted ways of life in which human beings lived in intimate relation to the natural world. Another source of anxiety was the perceived loss of long-standing folk traditions. (The Brothers Grimm first began collecting fairy tales in the early 1800s, not to compile a book for children, but as an act of ethnographic conservation.) The great, genre-defining fantasies of this period, from The Lord of the Rings (1954–55, here) to The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56, here), were fundamentally nostalgic, celebrating a vanishing, idealized world that existed before machines and market economies defined our lives. This was also a fertile time for children’s fiction, and many of the masters of the period, from J. M. Barrie to Tove Jansson, either incorporated the longing for a simpler, Arcadian idyll into their work or saturated everything they wrote with a melancholy lament for the lost innocence of childhood. Meanwhile, literary modernists like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges deployed surreal, uncanny, and absurd elements in their writings as the ideal tools for portraying the metaphysical paradoxes inherent in a post-religious culture.
The last half of the twentieth century was all about questions, and few literary forms are better suited to fermenting questions than the fantastic. The wonderlands devised by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel R. Delaney, and Octavia E. Butler interrogated long-held assumptions about, respectively, the primacy of European culture, modern warfare, the novel, sexuality, and race. Angela Carter took perhaps the most orthodox of literary forms, the fairy tale, and turned it inside out to reveal the unspoken desires and power of women hidden within. Science fiction became more than just a vehicle for technologically enhanced adventure and began to challenge the rapidly evolving postindustrial world, and to warn us about where it is heading. A few prescient writers—William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, first and foremost—succeeded, largely, in anticipating the central role that linked computers would play in the twenty-first century. Most strikingly, by coining the term “cyberspace,” Gibson recognized that our best mental model for understanding the vast and immaterial web of communications perpetually humming all around us is spatial. The Internet, we collectively decided, is a place. Much of it is made up of words. It just might be the ultimate literary wonderland.
We still haven’t tired of books, though, even when they come to us via a medium constituted of bits and pixels. The wonderlands being created today and waiting to be created tomorrow will also be the work of graphic novelists, filmmak
ers, and video-game designers, and they, in turn, will influence the many writers who have stuck with prose text in all its unadorned glory. Novelists like Salman Rushdie, Murakami, and Nnedi Okorafor have raided the toolboxes of science fiction and fantasy in order to tell new stories of their own homelands. A generation of children has grown up saturated in the imaginative liberty exhibited by J. K. Rowling, as well as the trenchant social criticism of Suzanne Collins. They could not be better equipped to build the fictional ships in which all of us will sail off into the unknown, seeking the far horizon and fresh discoveries that will surpass our most extravagant dreams.
Laura Miller
New York City
UP TO 1700
1 ANCIENT MYTH & LEGEND
These legends of kings, knights errant, and epic adventure were the historic and poetic precursors of modern genre fiction.
ANONYMOUS
THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH (c.1750 BCE)
One of the earliest known works of great literature, this Babylonian poem, which first emerged c.1750 BCE and found a stable form around 700 BCE, details King Gilgamesh’s feats of valor and vain quest for immortality.
To the Babylonians, the legendary Gilgamesh was the mightiest hero and greatest king of old. In telling his story the poem touches on many existential questions, such as what it means to be mortal in an eternal world, how human nature differs from animal and divine, and the ethics of political power and military force; these and other universal themes are what make the poem an enduring masterpiece. The poem begins in the ancient Babylonian city of Uruk, where Gilgamesh rules as king, but the narrative shows us imaginary landscapes on the fringes of the known world.
Gilgamesh befriends the wild man Enkidu, and they go on an adventure in search of fame and glory. They run for many days to the Cedar Forest, the realm of the gods, to slay its guardian, the powerful ogre Humbaba, and plunder its timber. There were no forests in Babylonia and the landscape is wholly imaginary—a dense and terrifying jungle that exerts a crushing force on the heroes’ strength and will. A piece of the epic reconstructed only in 2012 contains a lively description of the deafening noise that filled the forest canopy: the squawks of birds, buzz of insects, and yells of monkeys form a cacophonous symphony to entertain the forest’s guardian.