The best gaslamp fantasy books to read by the dragon-fire

It’s in my Rereads Club, what I return to when I need to escape to a fantastical yet familiar world. This is also the driving force behind my love for the genre. 

Set in an alternate-history Edwardian London where magic is something you specialize in like any other skill, Ceony’s arc was the first time I read about what happens after one leaves magic-school. And the directions a post-graduate magician can head in when they’re assigned something that, at first, appears to ruin their dreams, but instead opens up new opportunities and drives home why you should take a chance on the unexpected.

Ella Enchanted is a reimagining of Cinderella that expanded her world and filled in the gaps of her story, so to speak and inspired my approach to my own series. 

Everything from how Ella’s lot in life was explained, to the ‘anachronistic’ setting, how her world connects her to later spins on fairy tales, and her relationship with her prince opened my mind to the directions I could take my work in. Adapting these tales didn’t need to be beat-by-beat the version we knew and loved, it could go in many different directions as long as it reached that beloved destination in the end.

This captures more of the alternate history aspect of the genre than my other recommendations, it feels more grounded in a sense, written in the style of 19th Century novels to invoke the time period in the best way. 

Here magic is widely acknowledged, having been common in the past but is now with limited practitioners, namely the title characters. It is a fascinating exploration of how differently recent history would have gone under the influence of magic, and how those who wield it would have been viewed in society.

It bridges my love of historical fiction and fantasy, blending both into an intriguing experience where, no matter the liberties the story takes with logic and fact, you can almost say ‘This could have happened.’

Stardust is, in essence, a modern fairy tale, with the concept of ‘the magical world next-door’ I always wished to discover as a child. As with my previous recommendations, it isn’t a secret to be stumbled upon, but a known world to venture into if you dare. 

What I love about these settings is how you go in thinking that they’d seem mundane and easier to navigate compared to stumbling into hidden worlds, but the catch is that the laws of everything—including reality—differ there. It heightens the excitement and how the plot can surprise you with those new twists!

This is among the novels that broke the ground in my mind on what was possible in fiction, and how a concept being niche shouldn’t discourage me from tackling it, because people will want to explore it along with me, even if it is deemed unpopular or ‘too difficult’ by some. 

Lyra’s arc travels a multiverse on a limited scale, showing us worlds like our own but not quite, which has become among my favored tropes. Across the His Dark Materials series we travel the overlapping worlds starting from the gaslamp fantasy of Lyra’s Oxford to the England of our own world and continuity, and beyond.