.” Predictably, it has been published to howls of complaints about the makeup of the list and what works are missing. Normally you could dismiss such a thing as hyperbole (what’s wrong with “100 Pretty Good Fantasy Books?”) and the leanings of a single writer or blog, but in this case it is
– still an influential publication, especially in the United States – and the list was assembled by a panel of famous and well-known writers, at least several of whom are noted for their deep knowledge of the genre, so the spotty and confusing nature of the list feels particularly notable.
The panel was made up of Tomi Adeyemi, Cassandra Clare, Diana Gabaldon, Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, N.K. Jemisin, George R.R. Martin and Sabaa Tahir. Slightly oddly, every member of the panel had at least one book on the panel and several had more than one. Fourteen books – 14% of the “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time” – were written by people on the panel that nominated it, which is an extraordinary figure. Reportedly panel members did not nominate their own books, but instead seem to have nominated one another instead.
According to
Time, the original nomination shortlist had 250 books on it and this was whittled down by
Time’s editors based on key factors: originality, ambition, artistry, critical and popular reception, and “influence on the fantasy genre and literature more broadly.” Which is fine, but it does seem to remove the point of the panel in the first place, if
Time’s editors chose to then edit the list by criteria that seem nebulous at best and self-contradictory at worst.
The resulting list certainly is not terrible, but it is strange and doesn’t seem to fulfil the remit indicated by the title. It has a very heavy recency bias: two of the books were published this year (one in August, about eight weeks ago), a further twenty-four since 2015 and fifty-one in total since the turn of the century. This recency bias – which by its nature omits vast swathes of acknowledged classics of decades or centuries of standing in preference to the newest, shiniest flavour-of-the-month – makes one wonder why the panel didn’t put together a list of “The 100 Greatest Works of Fantasy of the 21st Century (so far).” The list would immediately become vastly more credible, and indeed, would be enhanced with the addition of forty-nine more books from this century.
Even the recency bias feels somewhat inconsistent, with the absence of several high-profile recent fantasy novels which have enjoyed both immense critical and commercial success:
Senlin Ascends (2013) by Josiah Bancroft,
The Goblin Emperor (2014) by Katherine Addison,
Under the Pendulum Sun (2017) by Jeanette Ng,
Gideon the Ninth (2019) by Tamsyn Muir and anything by Kameron Hurley all feel like major omissions in any consideration of recent fantasy works.
The list also seems to lack any of kind of rules regarding what are even technically considered “novels.”
The Lord of the Rings – planned, written and executed as one single novel and only published in three for cost and paper rationing reasons - is listed as three books, but
The Once and Future King – a series of four previously independent novels, sometimes now available in omnibus – is listed as one. If
The Lord of the Rings was also counted as one book, then that would have freed up two more slots for other books. There are also multiple entries for trilogies and series which feel like they could have been condensed into one, allowing the scope of the list to be widened to address the more egregious absences. The list also mostly avoids short story collections before randomly dropping a couple into the mix, which makes it feel like the criteria for the list was not strongly defined beforehand.
The list also has a baffling attitude to pre-modern works of the fantastic. Including
The Arabian Nights and
Le Morte D’Arthur makes one wonder why
The Odyssey and
The Iliad are missing, not to mention
The Aeneid,
The Ramayana and the
Mahabharata.
Beowulf feels like it should merit a mention, and perhaps the Finnish myth-cycle,
The Kalevala.
Gulliver’s Travels, a vital work of early fantasy, is notable by its absence, as are absolutely any works connected to Shakespeare. This part of the list feels very much like a sop to the fact that fantasy is an ancient genre and that a couple of pre-modern works should be slapped in to make it vaguely more credible before moving on to more recent material.
Even worse is the list completely side-stepping the foundational texts of much of modern fantasy:
The Rose and the Ring,
Phantastes,
The Well of the World’s End,
The King of Elfland’s Daughter,
The Worm Ouroboros and
Lud-in-the-Mist being completely ignored is remarkable. Two or three of them being skipped over might be expected, but all of them? The incoherence on whether short story collections count or not may also explain the absence of Robert E. Howard’s
Conan and C.L. Moore’s
Jiriel stories.
Probably the single biggest absence on the list is that of
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, published in 1937. The absence of
The Hobbit is baffling, and if
The Lord of the Rings had been included as one book (as it should have been), then
The Hobbit could have also been included and another place freed up for another writer. As it stands, the list is YA and children’s book heavy but the biggest and most influential children’s fantasy novel of all time is missing. The absence of
The Silmarillion is less surprising, given it's (oft-overstated) reputation as a "difficult" work, but its absence in favour of decidedly more disposable, recent fare is interesting.
A major issue with any list of fantasy works is the propensity of the genre towards long series, often ones which cumulatively have a huge impact but singling out single novels is difficult or contentious. For this reason, most such lists will allow nominations for an entire series rather than individual titles, but this list does not permit that (well, apart from the
Once and Future King quartet, for unspecified reasons). This leaves the list in an awkward position where several times it appears to imply a place for the entire series using the first novel as an example (
The Eye of the World representing the entire 15-book
Wheel of Time, despite the book being middling in the quality level of the series as a whole), but in others it randomly picks a book from somewhere else in the series (
The Wee Free Men, a rather minor and very definitely nowhere near the best entry from the
Discworld series), or picks out the by-consensus best book of the series (
A Storm of Swords representing
A Song of Ice and Fire rather than the first book,
A Game of Thrones). Towards the end, the list seems to lose consistency altogether by picking out multiple books from very recent series which have not yet had a chance to withstand the test of time. With the exception of the two entries for N.K. Jemisin’s
Broken Earth trilogy (since all three won Hugo Awards and immense critical acclaim, there is some rationale for that), most of these feel bit over the top: R.F Kuang, Tomi Adeyemi, Ken Liu and Sabaa Tahir are all reasonable recent writers, but giving them two entries apiece feels like overkill when, say, established and important authors like Robin Hobb, Andrzej Sapkowski, Kate Elliott and Steven Erikson are missing from the list altogether.
Fantasy is of course a broad church, far broader than say “science fiction” or “detective novel,” with very elastic boundaries. The list goes for the broadest possible definition, meaning that epic fantasy, magic realism, children’s fantasy, modern YA, science fantasy, fairy stories and myths are conflated together. Even so, the list feels somewhat unrepresentative of the genre. The New Weird goes completely unmentioned (China Miéville or Steph Swainston are both notable by their absences), as does steampunk and, startlingly, urban fantasy: Kate Griffin’s
Matthew Swift series feels like it should have appeared from a literary perspective, or Jim Butcher or Charlaine Harris if you wanted to go for something wither more commercial clout.
The list also leans very heavily towards children's fantasy and YA. Again, if the list was specifically meant to reward books in that mode, that would be fine but it does say it is for the best fantasy books of all time, not the best YA fantasy novels of all time. YA and children's fiction is overrepresented to such an extreme that it's possible that someone looking at this list would conclude that fantasy is a juvenile genre unworthy of serious literary consideration; the absence of fantasy and magic realism's literary heavyweights like Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, Jorge Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, and Rushdie only getting on the list with a children's book, may reinforce this view. This is not to say that YA and children's fantasy should not be represented on the list - there are numerous classic works of fantasy that are YA or children's books in origin (and I previously noted the puzzling absence of The Hobbit) but the field on this list is overrepresented when other incredibly popular subgenres are wholly missing.
The list is clearly aiming for inclusion and fairer representation of non-white and non-male authors, which is great, but does brush against the elephant in the room. Much moreso even than science fiction, fantasy was very white and very male until comparatively recently: pre-1960 female fantasy authors are very thin on the ground, clearly a regrettable situation, but one that is a historical fact. The list seems to address this by simply minimising the importance all of early fantasy altogether, including those female authors who were influential and important (the aforementioned C.L. Moore, Hope Mirrlees of
Lud-in-the-Mist fame, science fantasy author Leigh Brackett, Ruth Thompson and Rachel Cosgrove of the later
Oz books and more), or throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The list’s criteria for inclusion also do not extend to works not originally published in English. Only three of the books were not originally published in English and the list leaves out other influential and important non-English works. The Dutch
De brief vor de koning (
The Letter for the King) by Tonke Dragt is missing and the Polish
Wiedźmin (
Witcher) series by Andrzej Sapkowski doesn’t even rate a mention, despite both being recently brought to a wider English-speaking language by Netflix adaptations.
Die unendliche Geschichte (
The Neverending Story) by Michael Ende is also MIA.
The list also has a hesitant attitude towards controversy. The glaring absence of H.P. Lovecraft is likely down to his racist viewpoints despite the immense influence of his work over the modern genre, and I suspect Robert E. Howard’s absence might also be down to the perceived racism in his works (although Howard’s attitudes towards race were vastly more progressive than Lovecraft’s, or indeed most people of his time, and improved remarkably over his short lifetime) as well. The entry for
The Eye of the World makes the interesting choice of accusing the author of sexism (the entry has a whole seems apologetic for including the book, making one wonder why they did) and even
A Storm of Swords gets a non sequitur side-line where George R.R. Martin’s recent clumsy handling of the 2020 Hugo Awards is noted. However, the mention of controversy is seemingly limited to older authors: Cassandra Clare’s multiple brushes with plagiarism accusations and lawsuits are cheerfully ignored and Tomi Adeyemi’s online meltdown over an author with a similar book title to her own goes resolutely unmentioned.
When it comes to individual works that should have been mentioned but are not, there are too many to mention and of course the fact that 100 positions is far too few to accommodate any kind of broad overview of the genre. However, the absence of both Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast trilogy and Gene Wolfe’s
Book of the New Sun, often cited and indeed voted the greatest SFF work of all time, is ridiculous, and the absence of any of Robin Hobb’s work which distils the sometimes-high ideals of fantasy down to the level of human experience is glaring.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell's baffling absence may make some consider if the list has, in fact, gone out of its way to be contrarian.
Ultimately the list can be seen as a form of clickbait to engender greater discussion of the genre, but it feels like
Time deliberately misrepresented the list by calling it the “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” They should have divided the list in three, publishing perhaps a pre-20th Century list, a 20th Century list and a 21st Century instalment, which is really the only way of doing such an enormous concept justice. As it stands, the list is too incoherent to be of much worth. If this was a Buzzfeed list aimed at new readers, it’d be one thing, but I generally expect better of
Time.
- The Arabian Nights (c. 8th Century)
- Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Malory (1485)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
- Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)
- Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902)
- Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1907)
- Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers (1934)
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)
- The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola (1952)
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis (1952)
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)
- My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola (1954)
- The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)
- The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)
- A Hero Born by Jin Yong (1957)
- The Once & Future King by T.H. White (1958)
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (1961)
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (1961)
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962)
- The Wandering Unicorn by Manuel Mujica Lainez (1965)
- Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey (1968)
- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
- The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart (1970)
- The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin (1970)
- Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)
- The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper (1973)
- The Princess Bride by William Goldman (1973)
- Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (1975)
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle (1978)
- The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979)
- The BFG by Roald Dahl (1982)
- Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce (1983)
- Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (1986)
- Redwall by Brian Jacques (1986)
- Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (1987)
- The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones (1988)
- The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (1990)
- Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (1990)
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (1990)
- Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (1990)
- Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (1991)
- The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (Northern Lights)
- Neverwhere by Nail Gaiman (1996)
- Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine (1997)
- The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (1997)
- Brown Girl in the Ring by Naolo Hopkinson (1998)
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling (1999)
- Spindle’s End by Robin McKinley (2000)
- A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin (2000)
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2001)
- The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (2003)
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (2005)
- Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (2006)
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007)
- City of Glass by Cassandra Clare (2009)
- Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin (2009)
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (2010)
- Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (2010)
- Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (2011)
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011)
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011)
- Angelfall by Susan Ee (2011)
- A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (2013)
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (2014)
- The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)
- An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir (2015)
- The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)
- The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu (2015)
- Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older (2015)
- Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (2015)
- The Wrath and the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh (2015)
- Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope (2015)
- Get in Trouble by Kelly Link (2016)
- All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (2016)
- A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir (2016)
- The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu (2016)
- Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi (2017)
- The Blade Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang (2017)
- The Changeling by Victor Lavalle (2017)
- Jade City by Fonda Lee (2017)
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (2017)
- Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Choskshi (2018)
- Blanca & Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore (2018)
- Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (2018)
- Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
- Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri (2018)
- The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (2018)
- Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (2018)
- Witchmark by C.L. Polk (2018)
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (2019)
- Children of Virtue and Vengeance by Tomi Adeyemi (2019)
- The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang (2019)
- Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2019)
- Pet by Akwaeke Emezi (2019)
- Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender (2019)
- Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter (2019)
- We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal (2019)
- Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger (2020)
- Woven in Moonlight by Isabel Ibañez (2020)
