“It is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative.”
These words from Neil Gaiman, in his Foreword to the 1998 reprint of Lord Dunsany’s novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter, ring with a note of awful truth, and yet, I don’t think we can say fantasy is out for the count just yet. For a start, I also abide by Robert Silverberg’s profoundly optimistic sentiment, expressed in his introduction to the 2003 Legends II anthology, “Fantasy is inexhaustible. There are always new stories to tell, new writers to tell them; and no theme, no matter how hoary, can ever be depleted.”
Fantasy frequently becomes so tied up in its own conventions, and meeting genre expectations, that it fails to soar to the heights of imagination which are its very purpose. And yet, fantasy is also capable of limitlessly reinventing itself. And there are some works which seem to singlehandedly redefine the genre, redrawing the boundaries upon the mighty and sprawling map.
In this article, I want to discuss what I believe to be six of the most genre-breaking fantasy novels of all time. Naturally, my list accords with personal preference and is therefore highly subjective; some may disagree with certain inclusions or exclusions. My defence is that, as Robert Silverberg said, “fantasy is inexhaustible” and therefore no article can fully encompass its grandeur. The best we can do is explore our own corner of the map!
As a brief note on the selection criteria—I will not be including any epic poems on this list (as much as I would love to). To me, works such as The Odyssey, The Nibelungenlied, The Kalevala, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are undoubtedly foundational to the genre of fantasy, and fantasy owes them a titanic debt. However, in many ways, these works cannot truly be classified as fantastical, for they approach even greater status—myth. Therefore, it’s potentially a confusion of matters to discuss these epic works, however much modern fantasy authors may have drawn from them, and however much they may have shaped the genre as we understand it today.
That aside, let us examine our six picks.
LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE BY ROBERT SILVERBERG (1980)
Since Silverberg’s words have guided us here, it would be churlish not to include his seminal novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. Undoubtedly one of the most genre-breaking fantasy novels of all time, Lord Valentine’s Castle completely subverts the traditional fantasy tropes of war and military conflict as a means to an end.
The legendary Japanese author Kobo Abe once wrote, “The rope and the stick are two of humankind’s oldest tools. The stick to keep evil at a bay, the rope to bring that which is good closer, both were the first friends conceived by humankind. The rope and stick were wherever humankind was to be found.”
However, in the West especially, all of our narratives revolve around the “stick”—aka military action, conflict, and violence in order to achieve results. Virtually every fantasy novel of the last one hundred years involves a climactic battle to defeat evil. No matter how virtuous a hero purports to be, sooner or later they must get their hands dirty and kill in order to achieve their ends. It is ironic that this very same issue was explored by Thomas Malory in his Arthurian masterpiece Le Morte D’Arthur in 1485. In Malory’s epic, none of the knights of the Round Table are deemed worthy of finding the Grail except for Sir Galahad, the reason being that their hands were too stained with blood. Only Galahad, who avoids the taking of human life, is therefore pure enough to obtain the holy of holies.
Sadly, Malory’s lessons seem to have been forgotten, even by those that draw on Malory’s influence heavily. A Song of Ice and Fire is an all-too-obvious example of warmongering in fantasy, but even the charming works of Margaret Weiss and Tracey Hickman, and of the master of the craft R. A. Salvatore, succumb to this trope. Admittedly, in Salvatore’s work in particular, war is not treated with jingoistic glee but with a great sadness and a realistic portrayal of its horrors, but nonetheless, his heroes must kill their way to a better life. Ultimately, the ends justify the means.
Lord Valentine’s Castle drastically subverts this trope. Our hero, Valentine, is innocent at heart, a lover and not a fighter. Whilst he does defend himself at points throughout the book, at every possible turn he avoids loss of life, and even when he is forced into confrontation by the machinations of the evil imposter who has stolen the throne of Majipoor from him, he ultimately meets the weapons of his enemies with love. This is illustrated in a startling scene towards the novel’s conclusion where his nemesis throws a deadly weapon at Valentine. Valentine catches the weapon and begins to juggle with it, turning the act of aggression into one of comedy. Indeed, the 1995 edition of Lord Valentine’s Castle featured artwork by Jim Burns which depicts “Valentine the Juggler” clad in bright colours and with a smile on his face. It is hard to imagine a modern fantasy novel being released with a cover like that!
Despite the fact that Lord Valentine’s Castle is set up with the classic premise of a revenge tale in the vein of The Count of Monte Cristo—a royal dispossessed of his throne by dark magic—this is a red-herring, because Lord Valentine’s Castle morphs into a wondrous, uplifting, and grand adventure story in which friendship, love, forgiveness, and peace triumph over adversity in the most unexpected and startling ways. The name of our protagonist, Valentine, and its associations of love and romance is the key to unlocking the meaning of the book—love truly does conquer all by the end, andin a way that is neither insipid nor trite.
If you grow tired of grimdark fantasy and endless warmongering, then look no further than Robert Silverberg’s 1980 masterpiece Lord Valentine’s Castle. It manages to capture the epic grandeur we come to expect from fantasy, the dangers and perils of a lofty adventure, whilst never losing sight of the purity and heart of its hero, who is determined to win not through might, but through the power of his own unshakeable faith in goodness.
LUD-IN-THE-MIST BY HOPE MIRRLEES (1926)
You can be forgiven if you have not heard of this novel by Hope Mirrlees. Published in 1926, this novel languished in obscurity for nearly a century before interest in it was revived by Neil Gaiman, who described it as, “The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century…a little golden miracle of a book.”
Lud-in-the-Mist is a unique fantasy novel for several reasons. For a start, it manages to combine—successfully—a Jane Austen-esque comedic sensibility with the epic trope of katabasis, or hell-descent. Few books can claim to not only contain such a wide range but to successful integrate them. And indeed, integration is one of the main themes of the story. But I am perhaps skipping ahead.
The main action of Lud-in-the-Mist takes place in the Dorimarite town of Lud, which dwells beneath the magical blue mountains (called the Debatable Hills) which border Fairyland. No “intercourse” takes place between the realm of rationality and reason, which is embodied by Lud and its quotidian townsfolk, and the realm of creativity, sexuality, fantasy, and imagination which is represented by Fairyland.
Lud-in-the-Mist begins, in many ways, as an anti-fantasy novel, in that rather than focusing on the wonder of the imaginative realm (just think of star-struck Harry Potter, whisked off to Hogwarts, where every new sight fills him with awe), Mirrlees instead shows us the destructive, disruptive, maddening, and negative side of imagination and magic. As a case in point, Nathaniel Chanticleer, the Mayor of Lud, and the central protagonist of the story, is plagued upon occasion by the memory of a certain “note” he heard as a young boy which is “so plangent, so blood-freezing and alluring” that it awakens in him the presence of the irrational, magical, and imaginative and forever after haunts him.
“His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it would almost lie dormant—almost but never entirely.”
Hope Mirrlees flips the script and shows us the power of imagination, art, and creativity to terrify, corrupt, and even destroy. Creativity and sexuality are a threat to society, to order, and to sanity. This is echoed throughout the book in numerous different guises, from the seductions of the mysterious, fairy-touched Duke Aubrey who claims the virginity of brides-to-be, to the incursion of the forbidden fruit of Fairyland into Lud, driving its townsfolk into a frenzy.
But of course, the imagination is irrepressible. And Freud was right about one thing—that which we repress eventually returns, magnified in power. When Nathaniel’s own son is abducted and taken to Fairyland, Nathaniel—and the other townsfolk of Lud—have to confront the magic of Fairy. Mirrlees captures the terror and transformational power of facing that repressed imaginative force. And we are left asking, “What is going to happen to the life we had before once we touch the power of Fairy?”
Lud-in-the-Mist is about these two seemingly dispirit sides of human nature: logic and feeling, rationality and imagination, and how we need both in order to truly live. Not only does Lud-in-the-Mist completely subvert our expectations of what a fantasy novel should be, but it is also one of the most profound explorations of this inherent human duality ever written.
THE COURT OF BROKEN KNIVES BY ANNA SMITH SPARK (2017)
In fantasy, the conversation tends to revolve around concepts and ideas rather than style. In my view, this is not because fantasy writers “cannot” write in a literary way, but rather because if you are going to convey complex ideas, such as an intricate magic system, a new species of animal, or a totally unique ecology, it is rarely possible to convey the idea successfully while also lavishly adorning your prose. Fantasy writers must strike a balance between clearly conveying new concepts to the reader whilst still maintaining a degree of flair. It is easier to write in a highly “literary” way when you know that the concepts you are discussing—divorce, life at university, what you had for lunch—are familiar to your audience.
It would be wrong to assume there is no literary style in fantasy. The two writers we have discussed already, Robert Silverberg and Hope Mirrlees, both write gorgeous literary prose.
However, there is one writer who has taken things one step further and, in my view, completely changed the landscape of fantasy forever in doing so.
The Court of Broken Knives is the first book in the Empires of Dust trilogy by Anna Smith Spark. I have read the entire trilogy, and it is undoubtedly a unique masterwork. Whilst its settings and characters are vivid, its plotting bloodthirsty and exciting, the star of the show is the style. Anna Smith Spark has adopted an impressionistic form of prose, foregoing the rigour of traditional sentence structure in favour of a writing style that impresses sensations and synaesthetic experience upon the reader. The opening will suffice to illustrate this:
“Knives. Knives everywhere. Coming down like rain. Down to close work like that, men wrestling in the mud, jabbing at each other, too tired to care anymore.”
At no point in this sentence is there an “active” verb. Instead, the verbs are passive: wrestling, jabbing, coming. The subject and action are displaced (or maybe deferred would be more accurate), rather like in the George Herbert poem “Prayer,” so that we feel a sense of expectancy, like we’re waiting for something big to happen—and something big is about to happen.
The writing isn’t grammatically correct from the standpoint of an officious editor, but we’re entering the realm of poetry, in which the language is being bent and sometimes even broken to produce a magical spell that ensorcels us.
The decision to write a fantasy novel like this is extraordinary, and the fact that Anna Smith Spark pulls it off, producing one of the most epic, distinct, and hair-raising trilogies of the last few decades, is even more so. Whilst I appreciate that this level of styling may not appeal to all readers, The Court of Broken Knives is undoubtedly a genre-breaking work that will inspire a whole new generation of writers to set their inner poet free.
FRANKENSTEIN BY MARY SHELLEY (1818)
Fantasy largely arises from the age-old tradition of romance (in the old meaning of the word) and the gothic novel. Therefore, I think we are justified in including Mary Shelley’s magnum opus on our list. Whilst Frankenstein is often thought of as the first science fiction novel ever written, the theme of the “artificial man” dates back into the earliest antiquity of fantasy and beyond into the mythic roots of the genre, such as in the Greek myth of the metal man “Talos.”
However you look at the question of genre, which will forever be a sticky issue, Frankenstein is groundbreaking. And the primary way in which Frankenstein changed the fantasy genre forever is in its subversion of the concepts of protagonist and antagonist.
In romance, gothic, and fantasy stories predating Frankenstein, it was rare to encounter what we might now call an “antihero.” They do exist, for as King Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” but Mary Shelley takes this concept to the nth degree, creating a protagonist who is despicable yet sympathetic, completely and utterly immoral and yet still compellingly human. It is intriguing to note that another genre-breaking gothic novel which perhaps features the ultimate antihero of classical literature, Melmoth the Wanderer (written by the Anglican monk Charles Maturin), came two years after Frankenstein, and is almost certainly inspired by Shelley’s work.
So, Victor Frankenstein is a subversion of a traditional protagonist, an egomaniacal necromancer as fragile as he is horribly courageous. But the Creature, his creation, is also a complete subversion of an antagonist. Indeed, the Creature is not evil at heart at all, but is driven by circumstance, society, and his creator Victor Frankenstein himself to commit depraved acts. And furthermore, the Creature is also completely self-aware that he is being forced to play a role that is not in his nature: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” This level of self-awareness, not just from the “hero” of the story but also from its purported villain, is totally game-changing, and has arguably given birth to the entire subgenre of antiheroic characters that now predominate grimdark and epic fantasy novels. We are left at the end of Frankenstein unsure where our sympathies truly lie—with the intelligent creator who was blinded by his ambition or by the once-innocent Creature corrupted by a world he did not wish to be brought into.
It is the mark of a true masterpiece when they only become more relevant to contemporary discourse as time passes.
PERDIDO STREET STATION BY CHINA MIEVILLE (2000)
China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is dedicated to Mervyn Peake, the author of the acclaimed Gormenghast trilogy. And whilst it’s undoubted that every atom of Perdido Street Station’s makeup owes a debt to Peake’s churrigueresque world, it is also in its own right a completely genre-breaking work of fantasy.
There are many aspects of Perdido Street Station that set it apart: the scope of the world-building and plotting, the lavish baroque prose, and the simmering political discourse, but I would argue its most significant transformation of traditional fantasy elements is, fittingly, its very theme of transformation.
One of the problems most fantasy novels encounter is that in order for the world to remain cohesive they must remain technologically, and to an extent evolutionarily, static. Even Tolkien, rightly considered one of the greatest world-builders ever to have lived, runs into this problem. Middle Earth has in reality changed very little during the course of its five distinct ages and circa 9,000 of years of history. If we consider that in the real world the Roman Empire ended less than 2,000 years ago, you will see the issue with this!
Some fantasy authors, such as Robert Silverberg, cleverly circumnavigate this problem by having their worlds set in the far-flung future where technology and magic are fused, and also where great swathes of technology are lost through war, disaster, and neglect. Others, such as R. A. Salvatore in his Spearwielder’s Trilogy, fix their fantasy worlds in a pocket-bubble of time that moves differently to our modern world. Hence, the fantasy world is slower to advance technologically than ours even though time is passing.
But Mieville takes a different approach in having his fantastical world of Bas-Lag, and specifically the city of New Crobuzon (which is the setting of Perdido Street Station)in a state of constant evolution. This evolution, or transformation, is threaded and embedded through every element of the book, but perhaps most encapsulated by the slake-moths, the deadly creatures feeding on dreams who have become a threat to the city of New Crobuzon. Throughout the book we follow their uncanny period of gestation and transformation from grubs to caterpillars to fully-fledged and monstrous butterflies. Likewise, as they transform, so too do our heroes, villains, and the city itself. Nothing is static in Perdido Street Station. Everything is the process of transformation into something else. This gives the novel, and the world, a feeling of unparalleled vitality. This is a real place, where change is constant, and nothing remains fixed. Even the sundry moments and descriptions of the book are laden with this quality of change, “Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.”
All of this change culminates in one of the most memorable—and also, it must be said, highly controversial—endings of all time, one that raised every hair on my arm and left me reeling from its sheer grandeur.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS BY J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1954)
There is a reason why Tolkien is regarded as the grandmaster of fantasy. The Lord of the Rings in one sense cannot be regarded as genre-breaking because it has become genre-definitional, an arguably even greater claim. Such is the colossal influence of Tolkien that we are still reading imitators of him to this day, and every work of fantasy, no matter how esoteric or cross-genre or experimental, must ultimately stand up to comparison with his masterwork. I won’t wax any more lyrical than that, but suffice to say The Lord of the Rings forever changed the face of fantasy and what is surprising is that many elements of the book remain genre-breaking still.
For example, Tolkien’s creation of the Hobbits, and the focus of the narrative on these small, innocent, diminutive creatures, is highly subversive of the epic fantasy trope of the sword-wielding hero. Yes, Aragorn plays his part in the story, but it is Frodo and Sam—and Merry and Pippin too—who are the real heroes, a sentiment which is expressed most eloquently by Lord Elrond when he says, “The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
Ultimately, I have to agree with both Neil Gaiman and Robert Silverberg that fantasy is undoubtedly the most imaginative of genres and also totally inexhaustible. However, in order to depart from the established moulds, one has to—like Nathaniel Chanticleer in Hope Mirrlees’s novel Lud-in-the-Mist—be bold enough to face the seductive, destructive, and transformational force of creativity itself.
And who knows what you might become once it has touched your soul?
