This is a thing I often see coming up on forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the fantasy genre. When one thinks of fantasy you tend to think of trilogies like the iconic Lord Of The Rings, big expansive series like The Wheel of Time, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Malazan The Book of The Fallen or even CS Lewis’s Narnia books which run to seven books. For people brought up on the genre who love it there’s nothing better than plugging your mind into someone else’s for an extended period of time, watching the world building unfold and getting nerdy about the lore. For many people though these big commitments are a little much of an ask, newer readers who might just be feeling their way into the genre, people who might not have as much reading time and many other people might just legitimately want a good stand alone book that can show off what the genre can do.
So the question does often come up, and I’ve answered it enough times that I’ve settled on a list of ten solid rec’s that at least one of them should appeal to anyone who just wants a “one and done”. Some of these might be part of larger series or share universes and characters with other novels by the same author but are perfectly fine to read in isolation or out of sequence. I’m also going to give a short explanation of each, what people are looking for from a novel is going to vary so this is in the spirit of a fair heads up and much as why I rate them.
Some of these books are in my opinion among the best writing of any genre. They’ve ideas that will fire the imagination, prose writing comparable to the best of any literary fiction and some contain a sophisticated commentary on fantasy and the world in general.
So, in no particular order these are the first five:
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.
This book is one cited by the noted fantasy author Michael Moorcock as Better Than Tolkien. In the context of the 60s when that statement was made, performatively dunking on the undisputed king of the genre was a spectator sport indulged in by the young revolutionaries working in the field who wanted to kick against the thing that very much defined the genre. It was a provocative statement then and will have many up in arms to this day, think Jonny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” T.
But actually, the man has a point. Its interesting to compare with The Lord Of The Rings since they’re contemporaneous, the first editions of it and The Lord Of The Rings each dropping the same year, and they’re both original works of fantasy fiction that draw from the same well, the western European mythological canon and dark ages history. Whereas Tolkien takes inspiration from these works to create the complete world of Middle Earth with its own mythos, history, languages and even geology, what Anderson does is to read The Book of Invasions, Ulster Cycle, Mabinogion, Norse Mythology, the Sagas, Fairy Lore, The Tales of King Arthur etc. and treat them as a consistent and co existing Extended Universe and writes his own new story set at the end of the dark ages. As someone brought up on this stuff, to me it rings very authentic, it has the style, the feel and inhabits the morally ambiguous universe as the old pagan sources. Its also just a cracking read, much tighter than The Lord Of The Rings and many another which would try to imitate it.
It’s also of a certain historical significance in that it
might be one of the earliest of the seminal genre works to be inspired by Joseph
Campbell and Carl Jung, we’re talking a good decade before Earthsea and two
before Star Wars. I’m not quite sure if those were direct conscious influences
or just convergence from working with similar resources along the same lines
but if you are familiar with The Heros Journey, the idea of archetypes and
specifically The Shadow Self from Jung you’ll see that in it.
So yes, if you’re getting into fantasy and have read and
enjoyed Tolkien and looking something else that might scratch that itch, maybe
give it a go and see if you come to the same conclusion as Moorcock and myself.
Conversely if you have read Tolkien and maybe weren’t so fussed and would
prefer something similar that’s a bit darker and spicier this could be something
you’ll enjoy.
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
This is some peak mid 20th century Irish literary fantasy by one of the great unsung heroes of Irish literature. Flann, real name Brian Nolan, was a Dublin man who ran in the same literary and drinking circles as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Though overshadowed by them in posterity in terms of the quality and brilliance of his writing he was very much their equal, arguably Joyce’s true heir. The problem is that he didn’t have such an expansive literary output, or not for his fiction anyway, as he was a journalist and wrote a daily column under the name Myles Na Gopaleen which took up most of his creative energies and was in all fairness one of the most popular and widely read in its day. He did leave us with a couple of short but excellent books and The Third Policeman is the one I would consider the most accessible. It’s a novella length story of a strange young man who is what we might today term a sociopathic incel that after plotting and carrying out a robbery with an associate finds himself in circumstances stranger than himself as he wanders into a distorted surreal version of the Irish countryside. Its kind of funny but also kind of horrifying. I’m not sure how appealing that sounds but I think the best way I could sell it is that it is beyond trippy, a fairy story for adults that will do things to your head you would normally need chemical assistance for, which is interesting since as far as we know O’Brien never indulged in anything more psycho active than the sup, which he was very into by all accounts. It counts amongst its fans Alan Moore and Blindboy Boatclub, the latter of who’s mother prays to the shade of O’Brien’s brother on his behalf for his continued literary success. It’s a short enough and quick enough read that I don’t want to give up the goods re the plot beyond what I have but lets just say that one of the most memorable sequences involves a dialectic of fractal infinity in the form of a series of little boxes each a perfect copy of the other and each fitting into the other perfectly until we reach the material limitations of the tools by which reality is perceived and manipulated. I mean if that alone isn’t appealing, I don’t know what to tell you.
Wizard Of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm
This is an urban fantasy (and one of the seminal works that brought that subgenre into popularity) by the author who is much better known for writing epic high fantasy under her other pen name Robin Hobb. As Hobb she’s one of the big dogs of the modern fantasy genre along with George R R Martin, her Realm Of The Elderlings series in particular being one of the ones rec’d to people who liked ASOIAF and want something else to get stuck into, and its actually finished. This earlier work is as good as any of her better known stuff and has many of the qualities that make her epics great. She’s a great world builder and in this instance she captures her home city of Seattle of the early 80s.
If you’re familiar with the Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King you’ll be in familiar territory (like “very familiar” to the point where I’m surprised that no legal action was taken or even mooted) in that it’s an ambiguous fantasy whose phantasmagorical elements might just be the hallucinatory subjectivity of a psychotic unhoused person. The character writing is strong, the titular Wizard is a compelling and tragic figure who we feel and suffer along with as he uses his “cunning insight” (making him a true Wizard in the original sense of the word, a “Wise-ard” / wise man rather than someone in a pointy hat who can cast spells) to navigate the urban jungle much as you do with Hobb’s protagonists over the much longer stretches of her blockbuster series. There’s a strong anti-war subtext in that the wisdom the character has was hard won through being away to a traumatising war experience, a life hard lived ever since and deep connection to the psychogeography of the city.
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay started his career in fantasy at the top as an associate of and worker for the Tolkien estate who would become with his own work one of those along with Tad Williams who would quietly revolutionise the genre in the 80s by bringing a critical and modernist sensibility into high fantasy. This particular story inspired by IRL cultural genocide (Kay cites Translations by Brien Friel, a play about the culture wars over the Irish language) it has one of the great central premises in the genre. An evil wizard – conqueror casts a spell to erase the name of an entire people from the collective cultural memory in a fit of pique after a particularly bloody act of defiance by them sees his son die in battle. Our heroes are essentially nationalist revolutionaries on a quest to rise the people in rebellion and break the spell so that the name of their country; ‘Tigana’, can be heard once again. You cannot tell me that if Bibi had wizard powers he wouldn’t be pulling this type of shit, like the Zionist lobby are doing essentially this with their insistence that “Palestine” was made up by the USSR in the 1960s. It’s a good rollicking fantasy yarn but this premise gives it thematic heft often lacking elsewhere in the genre. It is complex. Our “heroes” will sometimes do things that are of dubious ethicality for the cause, make great sacrifices of themselves or just fuck other people over. One of our POV characters becomes tragically enamoured with the antagonist, as some subjugated people do with their oppressors. Also, as someone who has studied modern history and was introduced to Carlo Ginzburg’s work in my 101 class at uni the bit where it segues into The Night Battles for a little bit was just *chef’s kiss*.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Micheal Swannick
A human child called Jane is taken to the land of faerie. A changeling, she becomes a child slave labourer in a place that makes the titular Iron Dragons. She will escape and eventually pose as a student in the faerie high school, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern high school of the late 1980s, gets a bit into some bad habits, as you do at that age, sex, partying, shoplifting, you know, typical teenage stuff. She’ll even go beyond that to Faerie university to do STEM (Alchemy) all guided by the ineluctable and sinister force of the Iron Dragon.
We’re into some very deep and for my money well executed 'fantasy as social-commentary' here along the lines of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The Dragon factory is a shitty ununionized
sweatshop, not unlike the “Special Economic Zones” in China or labour conditions
in general in the tiger economies of South East Asia that were coming into
greater public knowledge at the time, the high school beauty queen gets to be
the top girl in her year before being Wickerman’d at homecoming, The Iron Dragon
becomes the ambient corruption and environmental degradation innate to capitalist
development, he has the local pixies doing their own Guerra Sucia at one point
just so he can stock up on his fossil fuel reserves.
So this is clever stuff and as with the other books I’ve recommended, the clever
world building is only there to add to and accentuate what is a cracking story
and a good read. Taking Jane past the usual fantasy-bildungsroman trappings
into adulthood is a nice touch, the relationship between Jane and the Dragon Melanchthon
is one of the most interesting and memorable in literature. Its one I would be
judicious in who I would recommend it to since it appears as a YA / kids book
at first but really isn’t. What it is is extremely compelling and sometimes challenging, I don't want to give away the ending or anything but lets just say that there's a sequence late on which is reminiscent of the end of 2001 in being pointedly abstract and "trippy" in both the literal transportative sense and the other.
This book is also typically my answer to "if you could see any novel made into TV or a film what would it be". I would personally love to see it done with a load of animatronic puppets representing the faeries, like literally getting Jim Henson's creature workshop and Cosgrove Hall in on the production and shooting it on the sort of analogue video tapes they did all the latter's Narnia and The Borrowers adaptions to give it that '80s kids TV retro feel with only Jane and maybe the various incarnations of Testigus and the Baldwynn played by actual people. At least that's the way it comes through in my head when I'm reading it and maybe yours too if you think that sounds at all cool or interesting.
………………………………………
So that is all for the time being. The next one of these will include my
favourite living author’s masterwork along with more of the best fantasy
writing of modern times.
