The best novels for fantasy worlds that will blow your mind

The richness and depth of Cornish’s Half-Continent world are just amazing! I get the feeling that, like Tolkien, the author has spent a whole lifetime developing and living in this world before he ever thought of turning it into a novel.

Skolds, fulgars, the dark trades, gastrines, rever-men, gaulding, cruor, Cathar’s Treacle–the inventions just keep coming and coming. As real as if they’d always been there! And the language that goes with them is equally wonderful—Cornish’s love of words is on a par with Tolkien! For the sake of the story, Book 2, Lamplighter is a must-read—I loved the big reveal the whole story’s been leading up to.

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!

A short fantasy, utterly wild and utterly outrageous! It’s not a single coherent world like the others on this list, more a series of surreal scenes, each one a lightning raid into the depths of the human psyche.

The Freudian unconscious turned into real settings and characters! It’s also more cerebral than other books on this list—Carter is playing with ideas, but a kind of play that’s just so much fun. A workout for the imagination that also stretches the mind!

Traditional fantasy, it ain’t! An algorithm for turning up ‘More Books Like This’ doesn’t have a hope (though they’ll try). This book’s an algorithm buster! 

This is a one-off, and as far as I know, Wangerin never wrote anything else on the same level. It starts out like an animal fable—the main characters are animals—but gradually takes on a cosmic dimension. By the time I finished, I was gasping for breath and wondering, what was that?!

The three forms of darkness threatening the animals are each more tremendous than the last. They’re genuinely threatening, and the world seems inescapably doomed. Wangerin, like all the best fantasy writers, takes his world very, very seriously—he never belittles his creation as a mere game. In another lifetime, I used to be a university professor (when living through 25 years of writer’s block!), and I’m proud to remember how many students I turned on to this and other fantasy novels.