A Reader's Guide to Fantasy

by Michael Franklin, Beth Meacham, Michael Franklin

Robert E., Howard Philips, J.R.R. & Co.

Profiles of hundreds of authors whose works, both established classics and exciting new arrivals, are currently available.

Ayesha to Zimiamvia

Sequels, trilogies, tetralogies, and series - woven around characters, worlds, or universes.

Beyond the Fields We Know

The major categories of fantasy - from adventures in magical realms, to stories of magic in our everyday lives, to tales of the supernatural.

The 7 League Shelf

The best of the old and new from the finest writers.

Half My Daughter and the Hand of My Kingdom

A complete list of prize-winning fantasy fiction.

Who Goes to the Wood Beyond the World

An authoritative history of fantasy - the literary beginnings, today's golden age ... and things to come.

Journey across the reaches of imagination to discover the reading adventures you won't want to miss!

Genres: Reference, Fantasy, Books About Books

217 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Lisa (Harmonybites) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, this is dated. It was published in 1982, so you won't find JK Rowling's Harry Potter series or Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga or George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice cycle or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series or Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series or Terry Pratchett's Discworld series or Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy or Anne Bishop's Black Jewels books or Christopher Paolini's Inheritance cycle or books by Neil Gaiman, Brandon Sanderson, Mercedes Lackey, Louise McMaster Bujold, Jacqueline Carey or Naomi Novik.

Whew. Yeah, a lot not there because since the 70s the fantasy genre exploded. The other side of the coin is that a lot of the books recommended and listed in this book are going to be out of print. So would I recommend this to someone wanting a guide to fantasy today? Probably not. But it's staying in my library (with lost cover and taped and falling apart) because it was worth its cover price alone for the "Seven-League Shelf" of must-reads. Some even of those such as Jane Gaskell's Atlan Saga, H. Rider Haggard's She books and C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry stories might be hard to find. But oh, so much good here and it's this book that pointed me to them. Loses a star only because it badly needs updating.

[elissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Follow-up to A READER'S GUIDE TO SCIENCE FICTION. I've had this for years, but didn't use it as much as the SF one when I was a teenager. I actually picked this one up a few years ago, when I was obsessively reading many fantasy series (I read more SF as a teen, but have read more fantasy as an adult--since Golden Compass and HP). Their recommendations led me to some of the most breathtakingly beautiful writing that I've ever read (in Patricia McKillip's RIDDLE-MASTER trilogy, which was on the authors' "Seven-League Shelf" of cream-of-the-crop titles). The authors ran The Science Fiction Shop in NYC for many years.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reader's guide to fantasy up to 1982, when this book was published.

Good thing: This brought back many enjoyable memories of 'older' books/authors I've read: Riddlemaster of Hed, Lloyd Alexander, John Bellairs, Frederic Brown, Alan Garner, and on and on.

Bad thing: I'd love for someone to write a similar book spanning 1980 to present.

Pre-internet, this book would have been super useful (the chapter that lists all books in a series, for example). Now, it's a great walk down memory lane. I am putting "Finn Family Moomintroll" on my to read list due to this book.

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fantasy genre had just begun it's long climb to the high level of popularity it enjoys now when this book was published in 1982. I would date the real beginning of the ascension to 1977, when Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson published the first volumes of their lengthy (and in the case of Brooks, still continuing in 2019) series, and when the first of the many posthumous volumes of Tolkien's Middle-Earth histories, THE SILMARILLION, was released and became a huge bestseller. Fantasy had arrived! And it's only gotten bigger in the decades since.

So what's the point of taking a look at this long out-of-print, out-of-date volume? Well, primarily, to remind the curious reader that fantasy literature already had a rich and varied history over the decades - even centuries - prior to the 1970s; and perhaps to offer a corrective to the notion that we live in the greatest era for the genre. So much of what we've seen in the past few decades has been Tolkien-derived "epic" quest-fantasy - some of it great, some of it not so great - there's been other stuff of course, but the blueprint provided by LOTR has been a powerful and I think limiting one. In earlier years, this wasn't the case, and the variety of authors and works surveyed here, even in the limited space this book provides, is instructive to those who think that fantasy is - or should be - just dwarves and trolls and Dark Lords and such.

The book is divided into several sections; there's a "Seven League Shelf" of the authors' favorite books, a brief history of the genre from William Morris to the date of publication, a listing of series, a breakdown of various representetive books into subgenres such as "There and Back Again" (someone from the "real" world entering faerie, and returning) and "Bambi's Children" (animal fantasies), and most importantly and most space-intensive, a guide to the principal authors in the field, who are given anywhere from a paragraph to a couple of pages for their lives and works and importance to the field to be discussed. Because there are no other reviews here, and not much info on this book to be found elsewhere, I beg your indulgence as I list all the authors discussed:

Lynn Abbey - Richard Adams - Joan Aiken - Lloyd Alexander - Hans Christian Anderson - Poul Anderson - Piers Anthony - Robert Asprin - J.M. Barrie - L. Frank Baum - Peter S. Beagle - Charles Beaumont - John Bellairs - Stephen Vincent Benét - Algernon Blackwood - James Blish - Robert Bloch - Hannes Bok - Jorge Luis Borges - Ray Bradbury - K.M. Briggs - Terry Brooks - Fredric Brown - Mildred Downy Broxon - John Brunner - James Branch Cabell - Moira Caldecott - Ramsey Campbell - John Dickson Carr - Lewis Carroll - Lin Carter - Robert W. Chambers - Joy Chant - Vera Chapman - B.J. Chute - Susan Cooper - Basil Copper - Juanita Coulson - Aleister Crowley - John Crowley - Avram Davidson - L. Sprague DeCamp - Samuel R. Delany - August Derleth - Graham Diamond - Peter Dickinson - Gordon R. Dickson - Stephen R. Donaldson - Lord Dunsany - Edward Eager - E.R. Eddison - Phyllis Eisenstein - Harlan Ellison - Charles G. Finney - Jack Finney - E.M. Forster - Gardner F. Fox - Paul Gallico - Alan Garner - Jane Gaskell - Elizabeth Goudge - Kenneth Grahame - Roland Green - H. Rider Haggard - Isidore Haiblum - Linda Haldeman - Neil Hancock - Paul Hazel - Robert A. Heinlein - William Hope Hodgson - E.T.A. Hoffmann - Robert E. Howard - Dahlov Ipcar - Eric Iverson - John Jakes - M.R. James - Tove Jansson - Diana Wynne Jones - Carol Kendall - Stephen King - Rudyard Kipling - Richard Kirk - Katherine Kurtz - Tanith Lee - Sheridan LeFanu - Ursula K. LeGuin - Friz Leiber - C.S. Lewis - David Lindsay - Hugh Lofting - Frank Belknap Long - H.P. Lovecraft - Brian Lumley - George MacDonald - Arthur Machen - Patricia McKillip - Robin McKinley - John Masefield - Richard Matheson - William Mayne - A. Merritt - Hope Mirrlees - Richard Monaco - Michael Moorcock - C.L. Moore - John Morressey - William Morris - H. Warner Munn - Robert Nathan - Edith Nesbit - Larry Niven - Diana Norman - Elizabeth Norman - Joan North - Andre Norton - Andrew Offutt - Alexi & Cori Panshin - Mervyn Peake - Edgar Allan Poe - Tim Powers - Fletcher Pratt - E. Hoffman Price - Richard Purtill - Seabury Quinn - Hugh C. Rae - Tom Reamy - Joanna Russ - Fred Saberhagen - Felix Salten - Robert Silverberg - Clark Ashton Smith - David C. Smith - Thorne Smith - Nancy Springer - Robert Stallman - James Stephens - Mary Stewart - Bram Stoker - Peter Straub - Theodore Sturgeon - Thomas Burnett Swann - Ruth Plumly Thompson - James Thurber - J.R.R. Tolkien - P.L. Travers - Karl Edward Wagner - Hugh Walker - Evangeline Walton - Manly Wade Wellman - H.G. Wells - Robert Westall - T.H. White - Leonard Wibberly - Oscar Wilde - Charles Williams - Austin Tappan Wright - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Roger Zelazny

Whew! As you can see, it's a pretty huge and inclusive list, with room made for many writers better known in other fields and genres (Wells, Masefield, Crowley for example), writers of primarily children's fantasies (Barrie, Grahame, etc) and a few authors not writing in English (Borges). There are certainly lapses and surprising omissions - those that seem particularly notable are Mikhail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino, G.K. Chesterton, John Gardner, Franz Kafka, John Myers Myers and Isaac Bashevis Singer; though to be fair only Calvino and Chesterton strike me as among the very most important writers in terms of their contributions to this genre alone (Kafka is arguable I guess). It's also not stated, but apparent that the authors weren't interested in reaching back further than the mid-19th century, so none of the gothics from the Georgian era are represented, nor is Jonathan Swift here.

But these are minor quibbles. This remains a valuable book for the coverage of many still-very-obscure writers, and for the passion and enthusiasm that principal author Baird Searles and his cowriters Beth Meacham and Michael Franklin brought to the project. Searles I know is dead now, and it seems that in this Internet era there is less interest and less obvious for such a volume, but I'd still be happy to see an updated and expanded edition. There's no replacing scholarship and the knowledge of professionals in projects as large as the cataloguing of a whole genre, and there are always plenty of great obscurities from the past that are waiting to be unearthed - and are more likely to be by the readers of works like this.

I'd also highly recommend the same writers' A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction - also, like this book, long out of print and out of date, but still useful for those exploring the less-traversed byways of the genre's long history.

[Apocryphal Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this is a pretty good overview of fantasy authors and series up to 1982. It seems quite comprehensive, though it misses some of the older stuff that can be found in Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels by Cawthorn & Moorcock. The Reader's Guide also has decent, brief history of fantasy, with some discussion of categorization.

The main issue with the book is the lack of critique - it tends to mention only the good qualities of the authors, as if the authors were afraid of insulting anyone. So, for the most part, I felt a number of authors were oversold - though a few were damned with faint praise, I suppose. There is a 'best of the best' list toward the back of the book - these are the works the authors thought most noteworthy. That's really the only qualitative analysis in the book.

Overall a fun read, though, and some rather obscure authors and their books are mentioned - like Hugh C. Rae's Harkfast, and Stallman's Captive, Orphan, Beast trilogy. But you'll have trouble using this book to separate the wheat from the chaff, I'm afraid, and some authors were not mentioned (Jane Yolen, Charles Saunders, and Janet Morris jump to mind - and Gene Wolfe didn't get an entry, though he was mentioned in the essay - possibly because they felt his work was entirely SF up to that time).

[Pachyderm Bookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in 1979, this companion volume to "A Reader's Guide To Science Fiction" takes up where this book leaves off, with roughly half the number of entries on half the number of pages as Mr. Searles' first book.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superior pocket guide to fantasy that is sorely in need of an updating.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A keeper. Handy reference book looking at older Fantasy. Fun and informative browsing.