A Tour of the Fantasy World of the Books of My Childhood and Adolescence
A nostalgic piece about the fantasy books of my childhood that might help writers understand what it is about fantasy worlds that can be so appealing:
- Lone Wolf gamebook series by Joe Dever
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
- Dinotopia by James Gurney
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Imajica by Clive Barker
- The Gunslinger by Stephen King
Selections:
A fantasy map was often a book’s best advertisement, which is why Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea was such a tantalizing prospect when I came across it in middle school. To gaze upon a map of Earthsea was to understand it immediately. There are desert planet and ice planets and even forest planets, but it is ocean worlds that are the most pleasantly evoked in map form. There is nothing as satisfying as the sight of so many coastlines, cragged and fractal, representing bits and bobs of islands and nations and empires.
I found the cover of James Gurney’s Dinotopia to be indescribably lush when I saw it for the first time in third grade. A high-romantic painting of a procession of dinosaurs parading through a marble-clad European city, complete with a triumphal arch and flower girls tossing rose petals before the procession.
Dune is, of course, the book that invented modern world-building, the great forerunner of Game of Thrones. Its dense network of factions and competing political powers (the Spacing Guild, the Landsraad, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, Houses Atreides and Harkonnen, the Emperor, the Fremen), its psychedelic technologies (mentats, Guild steersman, the Bene Gesserit’s weirding way, Ixian machines), its stark, interplanetary geographies, these comprise the gold standard for a fully realized fantasy world.
There is the mythic quality that was so important to me when I was young: in this case, Roland Deschain’s exile from the fallen kingdom of Gilead and his quest to the Dark Tower. The Gunslinger is made up of equal parts Arthurian legends, Mad Max, and Sergio Leone Westerns. If it sounds like a fever dream, that’s because it was, partly, conceived, as King tells us in the afterword, during a lonely winter inter-semester at the University of Maine and typed up on “magic paper.”