Fantasy: A Short History

by Adam Roberts

One of the most popular genres of modern times, fantasy literature has as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the magical worlds that so enrapture its readers. In this book, a concise history of the genre, Adam Roberts traces the central forms and influences on fantasy through the centuries to arrive at our understanding of the fantastic today.

Pinning the evolution of fantasy on three key moments - the 19th-century resurgence of interest in Arthurian legend, the rise of Christian allegory, and a post-Ossian, post-Grimm emergence of a Norse, Germanic and Old English mythic identity – Roberts explores how the logic of 'the fantastical' feeds through into the sets and trappings of modern fantasy. Tracking the creation of heroic and high fantasy subgenres through antiquarian tradition, through C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and into the post-Tolkien boom in genre fantasy writing, the book brings the manifestation of the fantastic beyond literature into art, music, film and TV, video games and other cultural productions such as fandoms. From Tennyson and Wagner, through Robert Graves, David Jones, Samuel Delany, Dungeons and Dragons, Terry Pratchett and Robin Hobb, to the Game of Thrones, Skyrim, The Witcher and The Lord of the Rings media franchises, the book digs into the global dissemination and diversity of 21st-century fantasy. Accessible and dynamic, wide-ranging but comprehensive, this is a crash-course in context for the most imaginative form of storytelling.

Genres: Nonfiction

294 pages, Hardcover

Published April 24, 2025

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.

He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have an interest in fantasy books, or where they came from, this is a must-read title. It’s not a popular history of the genre: this is Adam Roberts in professorial mode. He doesn’t make it too easy for the reader - for instance, in a section on Arthurian fantasy, he several times uses segments of ‘Rex quondam, rex futurusque’ without any explanation, and is perhaps unnecessarily liberal with academic lit crit terminology (though there is also the odd ‘Boing!’). As such, I’m probably not the ideal audience, but I still got a huge amount out of it.

The structure is broadly chronological, though there are occasional thematic leaps forward in time, with the paradigm shift coming post-war when the Lord of the Rings and its endless league of copycat stories changed the way fantasy was handled (though Roberts doesn’t ignore, for instance, Paradise Lost, the genius of Lewis Carroll or now largely ignored earlier fantasises such as The Water Babies). Although the strong British or European influence is obvious in much fantasy, apart from obvious allegory, such as in the Narnia books, I wasn’t aware how much Christian influence there was (including, of course, on Harry Potter - humorous given the anti-witchcraft backlash it received in some parts).

Inevitably in a book like this there will be plenty of omissions, including, I suspect, many readers’ pet titles. Roberts explicitly points out this is a short history (though this doesn’t mean it’s shallow), not a comprehensive encyclopaedia. However, I do think there is one significant omission, which is to my mind the best of fantasy - where it’s set in the ordinary, everyday world. (I refuse to use the term ‘magical realism’ which seems to me the same kind of weasel words as calling science fiction ‘speculative fiction’.) It’s not entirely omitted. There is reference, for example, to the wondrous Mythago Wood, but this does mean we miss out on so much.

For example, we don’t get Ray Bradbury’s beautiful Something Wicked This Way Comes. There is no mention of Robert Rankin. Although Alan Garner is included, no mention of his real world fantasy masterpiece, The Owl Service. When venturing into TV, we get the inevitable Game of Thrones, but not the ultimate TV fantasy show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And though Gene Wolfe gets a short section, it is only for his Sword and Sorcery ‘New Sun’ books, not the (to my mind) much better real or mixed world fantasies such as There are Doors (only a passing reference as a portal book), Free Live Free, Castleview and so on. And then, of course, we miss out on the hugely successful fantasy policing crossovers such as the Rivers of London series. A real shame.

One other moan is that the book was poorly edited: a considerable number of typos slipped through. But that doesn’t take away from the excellence of what we do get. I learned a lot and found the book full of insights. Recommended for fantasy fans.

[Johan Haneveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it's important that genre literature is also analysed and written about in an academic way, influences and trends pointed out and the underlying structures of thought and imagination teased out. As a reader of fantasy and science fiction and as an author, I want to appreciate and write in my favored genres with a clearer insight into their history, their possibilites and their often hidden assumptions, in order to add to the discourse and not unwittingly use cliché's (as I did in my first fantasynovels where I followed a trope and thus seemed to support a form of government that I ultimately don't think is beneficial). The unexamined genre is not worth writing, so to say.
I very much did enjoy Roberts work on the history of the SF-genre. It showed the same wit and depth of engagement as his fiction, with added academic depth and an impressive knowledge of the genre. Roberts has thought about his beloved genres a lot, delved into the reasons for their succes and manages to communicate his findings cleary, with a lot of wit (but with a bit of formal academic language which means that if you haven't read literary criticism before this could be a bit difficult to follow).
I learned a lot while reading this book, about the history of fantasy and the developments in the 19th century that influenced the first fantasy authors. I learned a lot about the thematic backgrounds of the first fantasy novels and how these worked their way in the follow ups - the discours of the genre so to say. Which is another way of saying: I learned about what fantasy does as a genre and thus in what way good fantasy can be distinguished from bad fantasy. I also learned about a lot of early authors that I haven't read yet, and clearly must add to my TBR-pile soon! And also there is a lot of deep analysis of individual authors and novels, that added to my appreciation, e.g. the extensive analysis of 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' that showed how the old theme of re-enchantment (the bourgeouis now being influenced by the heroic past) works through in modern fantasy.
This book is not perfect of course. There are some typological errors due to bad editing. The chapter on global fantasy is weirdly enough mostly focused on hollywood movies. Also, I found another review on Goodreads that pointed out several factual errors (one of which, namely that Toad from 'Wind in the Willows' is a character in 'Winnie the Pooh', I had spotted myself). This seems also to be a case of poor editing - I think Roberts wrote this quite quickly inbetween his other academic work (he has a busy life). Shame it wasn't take more seriously by his publisher.
Still, recommended for all who want (like me) to think more deeply about their beloved genre.

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd sort of book. I was enjoying it, and then the author would make a claim that just sounded patently untrue.

For example the bizarre statement, like: "Cabell’s illustrators – actually his aunt and uncle – based their visualizations on Tunbridge Wells, where they happened to live." Cabell's best known illustrator is Frank. C. Pape, and since the Cabells have lived in Virginia since the 17th century it feels awfully unlikely he would even have relations in Britain. (His mother also was born to a well-established American family). Perhaps he meant the illustrator's aunt and uncle ... either way, the book needs a better editor.

Or another odd moment: he implies that the term "shell-shock" is because "the scale and impersonality of high-explosive munitions shredded human subjectivity, shocked individual sensoria of the buffering of their ‘shells’." No, it's because the munitions themselves were called "shells" and the terror of being fired at shocked people, hence the term, not because one's own so-called shell felt shocked.

As I read it, I get increasingly less patient, with obvious errors of fact. He seems to think Toad (from The Wind in the Willows) is a character from Winnie-the-Pooh, which is an almost unforgiveable error. (Again, I don't know if it's an error of knowlege/memory, or an error of writing: perhaps he meant to distinguish the two, but as written, Toad's driving adventure is cited as an example of Milne's drawing from his own war experiences. Yikes). Both books were illustrated by the same artist, but they're very separate entities!

By the time I read that in The Midnight Folk, Kay Parker's pictures come to life and pull her into adventures, I was starting to suspect Adam Roberts was not a real person and is perhaps an AI creation, cobbling together slightly misunderstood accounts of these books. (Kay is a boy, for those of you who haven't read it, and the central character). I wondered if there is a Snopes.com for people, much as Snopes itself is a chance to double-check urban myths. Because it reads exactly like a 2025 AI text: grammatical, often interesting and helpful, largely correct, but occasionally completely looney-tunes.

So I asked Google Gemini, and it said Adam Roberts is a real person, and the story checks out: apparently he's a department head at Royal Holloway English Dept. at University of London. Which doesn't completely rule out his using AI to plump up some chapters, thought he show know better.

There are other odd choices, like how the book begins as a survey of written fantasy (which I expected), only to take an abrupt turn near the end and begin discussing film and TV and video games. There was little discussion of "fantasy in other media" until this point. Sure, video games may be recent, but we've had paintings, plays, opera for quite a long time, and film for well over a century, so if you're going to broaden your scope, why wait until the 21st century section to do so?

That said, it's a relatively good survey, and it touches on some antecedents often neglected in such a work. But the further it goes, the more it turns into vast book reviews: if you intend "a short history," don't delve into an in-depth discussion of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell lasting over 3,000 words.

Ultimately I skimmed. Sorry. I recommend it for the earlier chapters. For the later chapters, you're honestly probably just as well off asking ChatGPT or Poe or Gemini or CoPilot to tell you about recent Fantasy books.

(My subjective rating scale: 5* = amazing, terrific book, one of my all-time favourites, 4* = very good book, 3* = good book, but nothing to particularly rave about, 2* = disappointing book, and 1* = awful, just awful.)

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The early chapters of this book are great and thoughtful, though the whole thing is maybe the worst-edited book I’ve ever read. The sheer frequency of grammatical errors and misspellings is incredibly distracting, not to mention the places where Roberts gets basic facts wrong. Still, all of that is manageable because the content is worth persevering.

The last several chapters are a bit of a mess, though. There’s one called “Global Fantasy” which is entirely about 21st century movies (despite earlier movies being rarely discussed anywhere else in the book). Then there’s a video game chapter that briefly discusses three or four games at a very superficial level. The grimdark and actual global fantasy chapters are better, though it doesn’t seem like Roberts has really read and thought about the newer stuff with all that much care. Overall, these chapters feel a bit like he needed to finish the book by getting all the way to the present and he just dashed them off to get it over with.

Maybe this reads more harshly than I intend, because there’s a lot to like here. A revised edition that cleaned up the alarmingly prodigious errors would probably even paper over most of its other flaws.

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Roberts at his best is a very fine and insightful critic. What he isn't, is a good historian. This book showcases both.

First of all, this isn't a history. It's unrelated essays about periods of fantasy: sorry, but that's not the same as 'a history', a history has a narrative arc, and argument, and evidence selected to hang together. There is just too much cherry picking in the essays for that. There are also real problems of method which I'll come to.

This began I gather as blog posts and it shows: we have the insight of texts read, the irascibility which I enjoy a great deal, and the unlikely connections. The structure of the arguments are often the classic spiral of the Essay in its formal journalistic sense. All very enjoyable. The best of the book is the first section on the roots of modern fantasy. I enjoyed the sections on Bunyan, Wagner and Morris particularly. In the second section, the chapter on adult fantasy is very interesting.

But....

This is just some points, there are others raised by other commentators here.

The book authored by myself and my partner is consistently credited to just me--there are other mistakes but that one of course jumped out.

The chapters on children's fiction are very narrow; there are some really good monographs on children's fantasy that could have been used to get a feel for the field and also to think about it in terms of the ideas about the fantastic that were later adopted by the writers for adults (and it's not just the portal). Fantasy for children has been enormously successful and long lasting in ways other forms of writing for children have not been, and there are reasons for that.

When we get to the modern sections a really sexist tendency jumped out in which women writers, of which there were many in the 1970s and 1980s, are afterthoughts. Its not quite as bad as It's the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of (2020) which was basically about the fears of white men, but I also started to notice that women were most likely to be discussed disparagingly. Robin Hobb for example is described as writing a bit better than Terry Goodkind, which is first, dismissive, and second omits to mention her bloody amazing books under the name of Megan Lindholm--but then Roberts doesn't talk about Lindholm type fantasy at at all, urban, weird, quiet--because although he doesn't say this, he's decided one type of fantasy more or less defines each decade and in the 1980s its going to be Big Fat Quest Fantasies. There is no question it dominates but it's also the period in which urban folk fantasy moves from children's books to adult books.

By the end I felt that Roberts was confusing "I don't like this" with "I don't think this is good". It's not an uncommon or problematic issue in literary criticism but it's a problem in a history book (note that he mentions I call Dragonlance writers "hacks"--he is correct, but as I love pulp writing, it wasn't a complaint, just a reference to an approach).

The other issue is that Roberts keeps citing things out of order: I know it seems minor but historians just don't do this. If you are going to be writing about a set of books in a paragraph, there has to be a damned good reason to discuss them out of order, and any implication that the latter influenced the former has to be carefully avoided.

One other small thing: Eddings' child abuse conviction is mentioned, but the accusations against Zimmer Bradley are not. And the section on Rowling that goes into far more plot detail than is needed fails to note the really interesting thing about the phenomenon around Harry Potter: that the online fandom has more or less divorced the author, producing endless fiction that 'fixes' the problems, and challenges her politics.

--

So after all that why a four? Because at his best Roberts is always worth reading and even at his weakest (and his histories are his weakest works) he makes me think. It had never occurred to me before that Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer series is a Catholic version of Pilgrim's Progress.

[Captain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roberts has managed to produce a fun, creative, and often biting critique of the development of the fantasy genre. In many ways, I found this book even more successful than his History of Science Fiction (2006, 2016), a work I also thoroughly enjoyed. Whether his skill in large-scale analysis has become even sharper, or the genre somehow lends itself better to this kind of historical treatment, I found his arguments and creative connections regarding different periods of literary production to be even more convincing this time around.

Despite my overall enjoyment of the book, there is certainly room for improvement if the publisher and author decide to produce a second edition in the future. Like with his history of SF, Roberts lauds novels of the 60s and 70s with well-deserved praise and derides novels of the 80s and 90s with a large degree of scorn. To be clear, I don’t entirely disagree—I share similar sentiments and find myself drawn more to the 60s and 70s as time goes by—but to paint such a clear distinction between those time periods requires not only a broad brush but a willingness to forget a great deal of bad fantasy that was published in the 60s and 70s that could (and probably should) receive at least some degree of similar critique. On a deeper level, I am still pondering why it is that works toward the end of the century are valid targets for the harshest kind of takedowns while those of a couple decades earlier are not. It almost feels like the gloves are allowed to come off once we pass a particular point in time, before which authors are absolved of trespasses because of their historicity. I don’t want to make too much of this—again I agree largely with the arguments about the changing publishing market and the critiques of individual works, but the unevenness of the application of critiques doesn’t quite sit right with me.

A second, more easily remedied quibble is related to the brief section on video games. I really loved the exploration of the ludic nature of fantasy and the ways in which games like D&D and Dragonlance interact with and generate literary fiction. The Fighting Fantasy bit was a great inclusion. But the chapter on video games should probably either be left out of a possible second edition or expanded and revised heavily. I would like to believe that Roberts is a video game fan and has played through the games he mentioned, but given the somewhat odd and limited selection of fantasy games mentioned, not to mention the rather shallow treatment of those games, the chapter came off as the least authentic and least developed in the book. I don’t mean for this to sound too harsh—I can’t imagine even attempting to write such a well-crafted treatment of the development of a genre of fiction that comes anywhere close to what Roberts has achieved. But this was the only chapter that felt like it fell short of the high bar set by the rest.

All that said, this volume succeeds where it really counts. I learned a great deal, discovered many novels I can’t wait to read, and changed the way I think about many of my favorite (and not so favorite) books. I even laughed aloud at some of the barbs thrust at many of the late 20th century best-sellers. If you are looking for simple affirmation regarding your most beloved works of fantasy, I would say to look elsewhere. But if you want a smart, insightful, and argumentative introduction to the historical development of the genre, give this book a read!

[Sandra4444]

*DNF:d at chapter 4*