One notable difference between romantic fantasy and most of the other sub-genres is that magic is seen as a consequence of the natural order of the world. It’s not some demonic force from outside, as is often the case in Sword & Sorcery, or a highly arcane science that isolates its practitioners, as frequently depicted in high fantasy. In romantic fantasy, magic is a simple talent, an inborn channel of mystical self-expression. The key difference is that magic here is a wholesome force, in tune with the world. For the heroes, anyway.

The heroes of romantic fantasy are typically either young, recently bereaved, or otherwise just now finding themselves pushed into the wider world. In fairly short order, they discover dread plots against the world they live in, their own burgeoning talents, a group of talented companions who become close friends, and a life-partner-in-waiting. Companions are frequently titled nobles or other persons of responsibility and influence; the hero may be too. By the end of the story, the hero will have gained victory, magical power, true love and a place to call home. This is a shamelessly feel-good sub-genre, not a challenging one. The most influential romantic fantasy series remains David Eddings’ charming “Belgariad”.

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

There are as many subdivisions as there are mythologies of course, but not all of them generate the same amount of mythic fantasy. Although the Norse and Greek myths have probably been the most influential in contributing to the flavour of modern fantasy, they are not particularly common settings for modern works. Perhaps they’re the victims of their own success, too familiar in terms of general fantasy to be appealing as a mythic story venue.

Other mythic cycles seem to be more attractive to fantasy writers. The Arthurian legend cycle of western Europe remains one of the most popular mythic fantasy settings. The historical origins of the ‘real’ King Arthur remain obscure. There are some mentions of a 5th-century British war-leader in some of the ancient chronicles, but they are tantalisingly slight, and generate a lot of debate. Anyhow, whatever the truth is, it certainly bears precious little relation to the mythic figure.

King Arthur's Domain, Tintagel by IDS

King Arthur’s creation in the sense we know him now dates from 1136, in the “Historia Regum Britanniae” (The History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Although it claimed to be a historical account, Geoffrey’s manuscript was highly coloured, and devoted a large part of its text to the story of Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin the magician and the traitor Mordred – quite probably drawing its inspiration from older cycles of Welsh mythology. Despite its factual implausibility, the Historia was a big success amongst the nobility of England and France, and Arthur quickly became a favourite subject of medieval romances all over Western Europe.

Robert Wace added the Round Table in 1155, with the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot arriving some twenty-five years later through Chretien de Troyes. Many others contributed, until the whole cycle was broadly cemented in its current form by Thomas Malory in Le Morte D’Arthur, around 1470. The definitive modern Arthurian fantasy – so far, anyhow – remains TH White’s “The Once and Future King” (1958). Although the text makes use of anachronistic comparisons and similes, and the story itself is considerably more overtly magical than most, this is still the most influential piece of Arthuriana.

Ancient China is another common setting for mythic fantasies. China has a unique depth of continuous cultural history to draw on, and its own self-image of its mythological past is enthusiastically magical. There are many domestic Chinese fantasies of course – in the West, the best known are “Outlaws of the Marsh”, by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (c. 1380), and “Journey to the West” by Wu Ch’eng-en (1592), better known as “Monkey”. Both of these epics are boisterous, highly magical and, like Homer’s “Odyssey” and “Iliad”, highly repetitive, at least in their original forms.

Yangtzi Gorge by Britrob

A much more contemporary example of the same sort of mythic tale is “Blades from the Willows” by Li Shanji (1946), which was serialised in Chinese newspapers in the same way as the Sword & Sorcery stories originally were. Although it only made it into print in English n 1991, “Blades from the Willows” was hugely influential in establishing the Wu Xia story style – the oriental analogue of Sword & Sorcery that most of the Hong Kong magical martial arts movies fit into. These movies – and the comics and books that they have inspired – remain the true inheritors of Chinese mythic fantasy, and they have become hugely popular all around the world.

It should be no surprise to hear that plenty of western authors have turned to Chinese myth for inspiration. Many have met with reasonable commercial success, in the west anyway. The most important was Ernest Bramah, who created a series of wryly humorous books about the mannered wandering story-teller Kai Lung and the tall tales he span. The first of these, “The Wallet of Kai Lung”, was published in 1900. A more recent master of the same charmingly humorous ‘Chinoiserie’ is Barry Hughart, who produced a delightful trilogy of novels about the mystery-solving sage Li Kao and his assistant Number Ten Ox, starting with “Bridge of Birds” in 1984.

A third important source of mythic fantasy is the “Alf Layla-wa-Layla” (literally ‘A Thousand Nights and a Night’), commonly known in English as the Arabian Nights. It is one of the world’s greatest compendiums of stories. It contains an immense cycle of tales that Scheherazade supposedly told to her cruel husband, the King, on a nightly basis, in order to keep him from having her killed. The contents are very varied in origin. Tales seem to have come from Arabia, Persia, India and even Egypt, and there is much dispute as to exactly when they took their ‘final’ form. The rough consensus seems to be that they took shape between about 900 AD and the year 1400. Many probably started as professionally written stories, rather than as folk tales; Arabic Middle Age culture was highly civilized and literate.

Not all of the stories of the Arabian Nights are fantasies, but the role-call of tales found within its pages is impressive: “Aladdin and His Magic Lamp”, “The Ebony Horse”, “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad”, “The City of Brass”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, “Julnar the Sea-Born” and many others. The first printed edition of the book was produced in France at the start of the 18th century, translated and edited by Antoine Galland. None of the earlier, hand-written manuscripts survive, and there is considerable controversy as to how much of the content Galland actually created himself.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, though. The origins of myth are lost in history, like the seeds of truth that may have given rise to them. That doesn’t change the vital role that that the world’s mythologies have played in shaping modern fantasy.

High fantasy is also referred to as epic fantasy or heroic fantasy, and these names give a clue as to its real nature. Tales of high fantasy are epic in scope, heroic in the breadth of their vision. There may be a main hero, but he or she will encounter a whole cast of other characters, and their actions and interactions form a web spanning both story and land. The world itself has a specific culture, history, geography and bestiary, and the story would fall apart without it.

High fantasy usually comes in big packages. Novels of 500 pages and more are common, and frequently form part of a trilogy  – or more; some core sequences have run to a dozen books. At some point though, the nature of the epic story requires a resolution. Even the longest high fantasy series must eventually come to a recognisable end. For a while, anyway. It’s not uncommon for an author to follow a core trilogy with a sequel trilogy, a prequel trilogy, or even a parallel ‘sidebar’ trilogy.

The Well at the World’s End

Although JRR Tolkien is the author who made modern fantasy what it is, the father of high fantasy is generally agreed to be William Morris. “The Well at the World’s End”, written in 1896 and running over 500 pages in the 1975 reprint, is a fantastical quest-romance written in archaic style. It was not particularly popular when released, but it inspired great devotion in a number of younger writers. These authors – people like Lord Dunsany, ER Eddison, and CS Lewis – went on to give fantasy its form.

These early works provided vital service preparing the ground for the 20th century’s greatest fantasy novel, JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”. It was first released in three volumes from 1954-55, but it is not a trilogy so much as one long novel with six sub-sections. Tolkien himself fought hard to have the book published as one piece. At first, the Lord of the Rings seemed destined for the same sort of obscurity as Morris’s and Eddison’s romances, and it took over 10 years to gain wide acceptance.

It was with the controversial publication of the American paperback editions, in 1965, that The Lord of the Rings finally took off. The row over the pirate edition probably helped draw the attention the book deserved, and it became one of the soaring bestsellers of 20th-century fiction. Its immense success stemmed from the incredible richness of Tolkien’s grand narrative, and the sheer power of the land of Middle Earth.

Readers who made it past the first chapters – which are really just cozy – soon found themselves succumbing to the spell of the grander narrative. It is as a timeless quest that the book really succeeds. The mysterious portents, the hard travelling, the stunning landscapes, the encircling foes, the urgency of the task in hand, the magical revelations – all are handled with a superb sense of story-telling rhythm. It is a slow rhythm, for it is a very long novel, but in its leisurely way it builds an almost tidal power.

The Kinslaying at Aqualonde by and (c) Ted Nasmith

Tolkien continued to work on detailing Middle-Earth throughout his long life, and the results have been published in “The Silmarillion” (1977) and many other posthumous volumes edited by the author’s son. Whatever their scholarly brilliance though, these later works are missing the central quality which vitalizes The Lord of the Rings – that sense of raw story, in all its glorious force.

Tolkien became a huge seller in the 1960s. His work cleared a space for all forms of fantasy to take root in the marketplace. It took twelve more years before Tolkien’s direct legacy became apparent, though. The year 1977 marked the turning point – not “The Silmarillion”, but the first appearance of two big new instant bestsellers by previously unknown American writers. Both would have been inexplicable, and probably unpublishable, if Tolkien hadn’t gone before.

Terry Brooks’s “The Sword of Shannara” was condemned by some reviewers as a ‘rip-off’ of Tolkien, but it still sold spectacularly well and set a pattern for many more novels to come. Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” was a more original and interesting work. There is no doubt that it was inspired by Tolkien’s example. Donaldson offered a detailed secondary world – the Land, where the hero, magically displaced from our Earth, embarked on a mighty quest to defeat the corrupting powers of evil. Although the Land bore a hint of resemblance to Middle-Earth, Thomas Covenant himself was a very different character to any hero of Tolkien’s. A depressive, frequently hostile loner who suffers horribly with leprosy, Covenant cannot bring himself to believe in the Land. The alienation and resentment of this denial makes him do some terrible things, and tragedy piles on tragedy as he leads the Land to the very edge of ruin before finding the strength to let himself truly engage.

With the arrival of Brooks and Donaldson, high fantasy entered an era of commercial acceptability, becoming a type of novel which has made its authors and publishers rich. This was a vast change from the earlier part of the century, where works such as “The Worm Ouroboros” did well to sell a few hundred copies on first publication. It leads the field, now: it is simply what fantasy means to most people. If current trends are anything to go by, it will continue to give a great deal of pleasure to millions of readers for years to come.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here; the Malazan Book of the Fallen is some of the best high fantasy ever written.

The first thing that hits you is the sheer scope. The books are set in a vast world, layered throughout with history, texture and gritty realism. Erikson trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist, and it shows — he knows how cultures work, and clearly wasn’t afraid to put in the huge time investment required to ensure that every part of his world made sense long before he began writing about it. The setting began as the backdrop for a role-playing campaign in fact, back in the ’80s, and Gardens of the Moon was initially conceived as a movie script.

This leads me to another outstanding element of the sequence: its freshness. Erikson takes great pleasure throughout his work in overturning cliches and avoiding tired fantasy tropes. There are no cookie-cutter kingdoms, no wise wolves, no thinly-disguised elves or dwarves or orcs, no mystical objects of overwhelming dark power. Instead, Erikson offers a stunning array of  unique creations. Wherever there’s an easy, familiar path, Erikson turns away from it. Nothing is hard and fast, nothing is black or white. There are no moral absolutes to be found — just wonders, mysteries and evocative questions.

The characters are just as varied, innovative and flexible. You’ll find a psychopath who can turn into a horde of rats, a renegade priest with hands of pure chaos, a noble barbarian on a quest to destroy all of creation, and a dazzling array of lunatics, charmers, soldiers, schemers and godlings — and that’s just amongst the secondary cast. They’re complex, flawed, and vibrantly real. All of them. And that’s a hell of a lot of different people. Forget any notions you might have of one primary hero, one group of heroes, or even one set of heroes working on the same side. Over the series, Erikson creates a tapestry of different characters, situations and interests, each of them following their own logic and beliefs. They range from the lowliest grunts and paupers up to the very primal powers of creation itself. No one is totally virtuous or totally wicked. They co-operate and clash, ebb and flow, and the story dances with them.

But although it may all sound chaotic, impossible to follow, Erikson’s real genius lies in welding all of his boundless inventiveness into a compelling whole. He’s a masterful builder of tension. The story may move between a range of people, but they’re each faced with different aspects of the same rising tide. Each has a part to play, and as events move toward their inevitable, shattering climax, the different pieces slot into position. The end result is breath-taking in its power.

The single greatest flaw with the series lies in its first seventy pages or so. It’s just not easy to get into, initially. Something is off — the characters just don’t gel with the reader to start with — and quite a few people find themselves giving up in the first fifty pages. I was one of them; I tried Gardens of the Moon shortly after it appeared, gave up on it quickly, and only returned in 2008. Persevere, I beg of you, and commit to reading the first hundred pages. By that point, you’ll be hooked almost without noticing, and the rewards are greater than you would imagine.

The Conan stories first appeared in the pulp magazine “Weird Tales”. They were gloriously uninhibited, explosions of adventure, heroism and machismo as embodied by mighty Conan himself. Conan was everything a hero ought to be – lethal swordsman, master thief, cunning general and ferocious lover, with the body of a titan and a fierce distrust of magic. Howard’s stories were packed with action, and punctuated with buxom damsels in various states of distress. Although Howard killed himself at a tragically young age, he produced enough short stories and novellas (and a novel) to establish Conan as one of the mythic legends of western culture. Others soon followed – and the most effective of these was Fritz Leiber.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser

Leiber began writing his good-humoured, roistering tales of the barbarian Fafhrd and his sneak-thief companion the Gray Mouser in the late 1930s. Cheerfully described as the greatest swordsmen in any plane of existence, the two made their way through a dazzling array of villains, crises and compliant lovers. Somehow they always found the time to engage in some good-natured banter, deflate some pompous egos, and repeatedly save the city of Lankhmar. As with Conan, most of the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tales are short stories, and just one is a full-length novel – “The Swords of Lankhmar”, from 1968. As usual for the twosome, it is delightfully extravagant fun.

Sword & Sorcery was taken in a different direction by the British writer Michael Moorcock. He created a red-eyed, albino anti-hero, Elric of Melnibone, for “Science Fantasy” magazine in 1961. Moorcock’s brand of Sword & Sorcery is dark and ironic. Elric is crippled by his albinism, a lethargic weakling given incredible strength and stamina by his sword – the half-sentient “runeblade” Stormbringer. The demonic blade consumes the souls of its victims, passing a portion of the stolen life-force to its wielder. Elric dislikes his proxy vampirism, and hates his weapon, as it apparently hates him, yet the two are inseparable. It’s not moral outrage on Elric’s part, however; he’s quite evil most of the time. His feelings for Stormbringer are more the product of resentment at his own weakness – and the blade’s habit of eating the souls of everyone that Elric actually cares about.

As with other Sword & Sorcery works, most of the Elric stories are short, and many were first published in magazines. Moorcock later expanded his universe to encompass many different incarnations of Elric’s soul in different worlds and times, almost all in the same gleefully inventive vein as his early stories. He remains the dominant author of the sub-genre in modern times.

Sword & Sorcery owed absolutely nothing to J. R. R. Tolkien. It was a pulp-magazine form, suited to shorter lengths, and it appealed for the most part to male readers. As a genre, it was accused of fascism, sexism and all manner of sins, but in the hands of its best practitioners it had wit, imagination, an interesting darkness, and above all excitement.

“Mythago Wood” was British writer Robert Holdstock’s artistic and commercial breakthrough, and won him the first of his two World Fantasy Awards. Richly deserved it was, too; this is beautiful, eerie, entrancing work.

A portmanteau word compounded from ‘myth imago’, a mythago is the idealised embodiment of a mythic being or place, its archetype. Holdstock’s masterpiece deals with a mysterious woodland realm, Ryhope Wood. In the novel and its later follow-on works, Ryhope Wood is a sort of sinkhole into the collective unconscious which can manifest mythagos drawn from the minds of the people who live around it. Figures such as King Arthur and Robin Hood mirror superficial awareness of the British mythology layered into the nation’s collective unconscious, while the Green Man and the Wild Hunt represent deeper, darker layers of the mind.

Mythago Wood by Chris J Fry

The wood is peculiar in other ways, too. It is much, much larger inside than out, with barriers and defences to turn back the voyagers. In fact, it can even prevent aircraft from flying overhead. The main character of the story, Steven Huxley, finds himself desperate to penetrate the Wood to rescue both the mythago girl he loves, and his own brother. It’s a journey on several different levels, dense with symbolism and meaning.

The mythagos that the wood creates are fully physical and – when living beings – sentient. Their personalities and drives reflect aspects of the archetypal character they represent, as conceived of by the mind that brought them into existence. They can only survive over time within the wood, however. Their natures are as varied as the characters of myth, but, like most genuinely mythic figures, the humans that interact with them seldom find a happy ending to their stories.

The premise behind “Night Watch” is that our world is inhabited by Others, supernaturally gifted people and other beings, mostly living amongst us as human. Every other belongs either to the Light or the Dark, a choice that cannot be revoked once made. The two sides have fought for millennia, but have come to a historic accord – rather than utterly destroy each other, they maintain an uneasy peace, each letting the other side indulge in a certain amount of activity unopposed.

Series protagonist Anton is a mage and a member of the Night Watch, working on the side of the pro-human Light to monitor and regulate the forces of the Dark. Anton sits uneasily in the Light, but it’s an either-or choice, and the Dark are predatory, callous and prone to breaking the rules. A new, untrained Grand Sorceress is just starting to discover her talent, and the magical repercussions threaten all of Moscow. Meanwhile, a significant intrigue is starting to unfold around a young boy whose fate, uniquely, is entirely in his own hands – he may have the power to tip the balance one way or the other. An interesting premise and fast-paced action are blended well with a starkly realistic look at modern Moscow, and there’s a strong streak of darkly fatalistic humour. There’s also a hell of a lot of moral ambiguity — despite the set-up, there’s no nice, easy heroes and villains in this world.

The ‘Night Watch’ book was also turned into a pair of movies, Night Watch and Day Watch. They’re fun, and capture Moscow beautifully, but they’re not as engaging as the book. Lukyanenko has also done a number of sequels to his original book — Day Watch (yes, I know, but it’s not my fault), Twilight Watch and The Last Watch. They retain the trifurcated but thematically linked structure of the first book, although The Last Watch is closer to being a regular novel. They’re well worth getting hold of.

A Mary-Sue character is usually the mark of a naive or inexperienced writer. The term originates from fan-fiction, in which enthusiasts write amateur stories based in the worlds they love. There’s plenty of great fan-fiction of course, but many Mary-Sue characters literally are the author as she dreams of being, dropped into the pre-existing cast of a story setting. The name comes from Paula Smith’s cutting 1973 parody of bad Star-Trek fan fiction, “A Trekkie’s Tale”.

Oh, Mary-Sue, we've been looking all over for you.

Note that despite the origins, some professional original fiction characters have been criticised as being Mary-Sues. The most notable in fantasy are widely held to be Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake of the “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter” series, particularly as she appears in later books, and Eragon, from Christopher Paolini’s “Inheritance” trilogy. Outside the genre, Wesley Crusher from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (Wesley was even creator Gene Roddenberry’s last name) and Dagny Taggart from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” are often considered two of the most egregious examples.

“A Night in the Lonesome October” was one of Zelazny’s last and finest works. It is a crazy blend of bits and pieces from the Cthulhu mythos, Victorian horror/fantasy/melodrama, demonology, and even quantum mechanics, all lightened with a dash of satire and some rather dark humour.

A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

When the full moon falls on Halloween – which happens 3 or 4 times a century – then the stars are right for the Great Old Ones to return. Cultists and occultists, each accompanied by their very own demonic familiar, are drawn to a certain spot. Their goals are diametrically opposed — to either help open the way for ancient ones to return and scour the Earth of human life, or to help keep it closed, saving the world for another turn. The losing side gets killed in the backlash either way. Matters are complicated by the fact that none of the assembled maniacs knows exactly where the ceremony is to take place, nor which of them is on which side, so things kick off with a tense stand-off period whilst everyone makes preparation and tries to work out who is a friend and who is an enemy.

Snuff is Jack the Ripper’s familiar, bound into the form of a mongrel dog. He is also the book’s viewpoint and narrator, giving us a familiar’s-eye view of the bizarre events as they unfold. He’s an engaging companion for the events, which rattle along at a grippingly fast pace. The end result is a gripping, slyly humorous, highly imaginative novel, with a delightful dark streak and a surprising amount of charm, and it deserves to be much better known than it is.

Also highly recommended novels by Zelazny: “Isle of the Dead”, “Lord of Light”, “Doorways in the Sand”, “To Die in Italbar”, and, hell, just about anything else he wrote. Zelazny died in 1995 of colon cancer, at the age of 58. We were robbed.