Fantasy – Interesting Literature

10 of the Best Fantasy Short Stories Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

As a literary genre, fantasy is one of the oldest and most recent. Although modern fantasy only began to be recognised as a distinct genre in the late twentieth century, thanks largely to the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien and his imitators, its roots can be traced back millennia. Indeed, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, often regarded as the foundational texts of western literature, are ‘fantasy literature’ in their incorporation of magical or supernatural elements and their focus on epic stories, perilous journeys, and mighty battles.

10 of the Best Fantasy Poems

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Fantasy is at once a relatively recent and extremely ancient genre. Although it only became recognised as a distinct genre in the twentieth century thanks to writers like J. R. R. Tolkien and his followers, there’s a case for calling some of the oldest literature in the world – from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Homer’s Odyssey to the fairy tales we first encounter in early childhood – ‘fantasy literature’, because of their incorporation of supernatural elements, their emphasis on quests, and (in some cases) their delineation of the fight between good and evil.

A Summary and Analysis of Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Rule of Names’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Rule of Names’ is a 1964 short story by the American science-fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). Le Guin’s literary style is rightly praised as being several rungs above the usual style found in science fiction, and ‘The Rule of Names’ is an early example of her then-burgeoning talent. It’s a fantasy story in which people never reveal their true names, because they believe that to know someone’s name is to possess power over the person who owns that name.

The First Dark Doorstop Epic: J. V. Jones’s The Baker’s Boy

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy

It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use the same tropes, character types, or plot structures, and either rewrite them from within or poke fun at them (as Pratchett himself did in the early Discworld books). So the quest gets subverted, the avenging hero never gets the chance to achieve his revenge, the handsome prince turns out to be a nasty piece of work and the deformed magician is the good guy, and so on.

The Dark Side of Fantasy: David Gemmell’s Wolf in Shadow

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle salutes the master of heroic fantasy and one of his most curious novels

Like many people, I came to David Gemmell through Legend, his 1984 debut which would go on to become a classic of modern fantasy literature, and one of the most definitive novels in the subgenre of heroic fantasy. Unlike most, though, as I read my way through David Gemmell’s entire back catalogue, I found myself rating other novels far higher than Gemmell’s debut. Legend has heart, and it signalled the arrival of a distinctive new voice in fantasy, but, as Gemmell himself admitted, the writing wasn’t always perfect. He learned a lot in the years that followed, and, to my mind, the prequel he wrote nearly a decade later, The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, is his most perfectly crafted piece of storytelling.

In between these two ‘Legend’ books, though, David Gemmell wrote a great deal: among much else, he produced Waylander, which introduced readers to the crossbow-carrying assassin who many readers rate superior to Druss the Legend; the standalone Knights of Dark Renown; and Wolf in Shadow, the first in a trilogy of novels centring on the gun-wielding Bible-reading Jon Shannow. The last of these had a curious origin in an especially dark time in Gemmell’s life, and the result was one of his most unusual and intriguing novels.