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Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.
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“The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn’t grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring—a sort of green bean thing that buzzed—led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider.”
– Sourcery,
Terry Pratchett
The Light Touch in Science Fiction and Fantasy
(Returning visitors will notice that the title of this page has changed—the category “humor” seemed too limiting for what I wanted to catalogue: I think the designation “light-hearted” captures the idea better. In essence, these are books you turn to when at the end of a dismal day you want to just prop your feet up and put it all behind you.)
Science fiction long was grim stuff. While the occasional book might have the occasional light character or scene, by and large it was all deadly serious business, right from Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus on through the early pulps. With the usual disclaimers about generalities, one may say that it was not until the 1940s that “light-hearted” science fiction began to emerge (with, for example, L. Sprague DeCamp’s Incomplete Enchanter) and not until the ’50s that it began to blossom, with the Gallagher books by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym of the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore) and Frederic Brown’s Martians Go Home as samples.
Fantasy, born as a branch of “real” literature, had a streak of light-heartedness right from the get-go (as, for example, Lord Dunsany’s work shows); by the time “fantasy” ceased being a kind of literature and became instead a publishing category, the by-then established acceptability of the light touch in the science-fiction category carried over; nowadays, both fields have many writers who can employ that light touch deftly.
In assembling this category from the main listings, I found that there seemed two reasonably distinct classes of tale belonging here. One class is overtly comedic books: ones in which the author has set out to make us laugh. The other class is less easily labelled, and is why I changed the label of this page to “light-hearted”: the tale is told with a light touch, perhaps with some humor, but is not expressly designed to make us laugh (I say that with no implied derogation—making us laugh is a task both worthy and, when done right, toilsome). An example of the first class is any Terry Pratchett “Discworld” book; of the second, The Circus of Dr. Lao.
Those familiar with that second will realize at once that, as I use the terms, “light-hearted” is very far from synonomous with “frivolous”: a good many books with a touch or more than a touch of wit (often sarcastic) deal with issues that are large and serious—it is only that this or that author has managed to come at those issues with a grin that makes the books “light-hearted”.
This text is meant only as a short introduction to the list, but there are two further points that do need to be made. One is that there are several authors who regularly write books that overall are neither comedic nor warm-hearted, but in which can be found clear threads of humor; such humor is often—but by no means invariably—dry or even acid (a fine example of such authors is Jack Vance, and another is Flann O’Brien ). On occasion, such authors write books that are wholly comic, and those of course are included below; but I have tried with the entry notes to indicate those authors’ wider tendencies as well. (Or, turning the thought round, there are authors who write seemingly comic tales in which grim and serious passages abound—at some mix ratios, it’s hard to sort the one kind from the other.)
I have, as I usually do, tried to be expansive rather than limiting. I included most of Cabell, all of Lafferty—who can find a Lafferty tale not brimming over with humor, however dire its deeper meaning?—Warren Norwood’s peculiar little collection, all of Flann O’Brien (even the rather horrific Third Policeman), and so on.
The last point, a crucial one, is that as I suggested just above, “light-hearted” books of enduring quality very often do more than make us smile or laugh: they can also introduce, under cover of the humor, ideas every bit as serious and important as those carried by their more sober kin. When we finish a Discworld novel, we may not be conscious of having been treated to much besides a lot of laughing, but we have nevertheless also undergone one or more small but significant attitude adjustments; and such will be the case with a reading of many of the works listed here.
(I wouldn’t say that the following list—even limiting choices to works on the main list—is an accurate or complete list of the light-hearted works: I may have omitted a few that belong or included a few that don’t. In part, the problem is what I mentioned above: mixes of humor and seriousness—what does one say of, for example, Blaylock’s Land of Dreams?)
To repeat, the bottom line here was that these be books you can turn to when at the end of a dismal day you want to just prop your feet up and put it all behind you.
(The link above is to the preferred-edition one-volume omnibus; the links below are to the individual books.) The character “Peter Pan” first appeared in an 1902 adult novel by Barrie titled The Little White Bird, in which Peter Pan is described in a story told to a child. In 1904, Barrie wrote the famous play, “Peter Pan”; in 1906, a prose text—like the original description but quite unlike the play—was published under the title Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens; in 1911, he turned the play into a book called Peter and Wendy, which is now usually just called Peter Pan and is the widely known form of the tale. As with most “children’s books”, publishers repeatedly show their veneration for a classic by chopping it up or dumbing it down, or both; don’t ask me how, or why, you “dumb down” a book meant for, and very successful with, small children—ask a publisher.)
The Oz Books:
(The link above is to a single-volume 15-book omnibus of all of Baum’s own Oz tales; if you prefer individual copies, the list below links to the preferred Dover editions. But I also much recommend The Annotated Wizard of Oz.)
» The full cycle is a mix of fantasies, historical romances, essays, verse, and plays. Although some of the component works are, in and of themselves, not exactly in our fields, they are integral parts of a larger whole that most assuredly is, and so are all duly noted in the list.
» The “Storisende Edition”, a nicely bound integral set of the Biography—published over the years 1927 to 1930—had special introductions and notes, and the volumes were each individually numbered and signed by Cabell. A complete set today—when available at all—costs into the high three figures (click the link), but individual volumes of it—signed, remember!—can be had for as little as $20.
» In the list below, the number after a title shows the volume of the Storisende set in which that title appeared (a number of the form 4a means the title was one of two or more published as one volume in the set). The links are to all available copies of the given title, but among those you will often find one or more copies of the Storisende volume containing that title; if you can stand the cost, those are by far the best editions available.
Beyond Life, #1 [nominally fiction but essentially an essay on life and fiction-writing]
Taboo, #18e [a thinly veiled fantasy-style recounting of the Jurgen obscenity trial;
the #18 Storisende volume also contains several more essays and appendices.]
The “Heirs and Assigns” Trio: (These are nominally related to the “Biography of Manuel”, though how is not obvious.)
The Nightmare Has Triplets (The link is to an omnibus edition of the three books listed below; but it is very scarce, usually expensive, and often impossible even to find at a given moment, so I also link the three individual novels separately.)
The Jorkens Sextet: (These are all collections of “club story” short stories featuring Jorkens. There is also The Complete Jorkens, a deluxe three-volume preferred edition; it is now quite expensive, so I also link the individual Jorkens books below, but some are very hard to find outside the set, and even the individual volumes tend to the pricey.)
Good Omens[co-authored with Terry Pratchett] (There is also a so-called “Definitive” edition that corrects some typos and errors and adds some illustrations.)
Wind in the Willows (Even discarding any edition that is at all abridged, one is still faced with a tsunami of editions that differ significantly only in their illustrator. The original was E. H. Shepard, and many still think him the best; but there are Arthur Rackham, Michael Hague, Nancy Barnhart, Charles Van Sandwyk, and virtually countless others. Also, since there is in general very little difference in price between softcover and hardcover editions, the latter would be the clear choice. There are still numerous candidates even after all that filtering, but after hours of research, I opted for the “preferred edition” linked above.)
Lafferty, R. A. *****
(Some Lafferty notes:
» Lafferty, like other prolific yet under-appreciated authors, is hard to sort into a coherent bibliography—this is the best I could do.
» The occasional “series” listed below don’t fully convey Lafferty: certain characters—like “the eminent scientist Willy McGilly”—recur, often as “cameos”, throughout his tales.
» The world is not always ready for genius: a shockingly high fraction of Lafferty’s published works were never printed in more than a few hundred copies each and remain shamefully rare, and correspondingly expensive; Centipede Press is now re-issuing all of Lafferty’s short stories, though sad to say the printings are limited and have thus themselves become inordinately expensive.
» Lafferty is hard to categorize: all or almost all his works are overlooked, are thoroughly—if not always obviously—religiously powered by his devout Catholicism, and are weirdly light-hearted.)
The Argo Mythos (This a complex, sprawling work with several subsets. The cycle also includes a few scattered short stories, not listed below. Be aware that many—most—component books of this cycle are now either very rare and correspondingly expensive, or, more commonly, absolutely unfindable.)
More Than Melchisedech: (This novel was published in three volumes; the link above is to a very rare and very expensive set of all three. The three individual volumes are each also rare—often unfindable—and quite expensive when found at all.)
Argo[rarest of the 3, normally unfindable at all—try an inter-library loan; also, do not confuse this book with “Episodes of the Argo”, below]
Episodes of the Argo[rare; often unfindable] (Also contains some material erroneously omitted from The Devil is Dead, but not the “interglossia”; the main story, a part of the Argo mythos, should have been subsumed into the novel Argo, but wasn’t.)
How Many Miles to Babylon?[rare; often unfindable] (Includes the “interglossia” from the novel The Devil is Dead, not printed in that book, plus a short tale in the Argo mythos cycle.)
The Centipede Press Short-Story Omnibuses: (A series still being issued, volume by volume; these are already scarce—sometimes unfindable—and expensive.)
Milne, A. A. ****
(Children’s books. There are countless bastardizations and chop-ups of the original tales; seek out only authentic, unedited versions of Milne’s actual works—no more, no less—preferably with the original illustrations.)
The World of Winnie-the-Pooh (The link is to the preferred omnibus edition, containing the two works listed below.)
The Zamonia Books: (All the Zamonia books are presented as if written by “Optimus Yarnspinner“, a dinosaur-like inhabitant of the Zamonian sub-continent.)
(Nesbit’s books are all “children’s books” as Oz or Pooh or Alice are “children’s books”. Much of Nesbit’s work is not truly fantasy but reads much like it; her several delightful mainstream works were omitted here with regret.)
The Five Children (an omnibus of the three novels linked separately below)
Oz, others **
(These are “canonical” Oz books (aka “The Famous Forty”, but see below) by authors other than L. Frank Baum or Ruth Plumly Thompson; there are numerous further Oz works that are “non-canonical” but close to the canon, plus a host of others ranging from well-meant but ill-made tributes to outright travesties.)
McGraw, Eloise Jarvis & Wagner, Lauren McGraw: Merry-Go-Round in Oz(The following three books by Sherwood Smith have been endorsed by the L. Frank Baum Family Trust as canonical, but are 21st century additions to the canon; some do not like them. The reviews suffice to greatly discourage me: modern teens with dysfunctional-family issues? In Oz? Really?)
The Anthony Villiers Quartet: (Only three books in this obviously incomplete series were ever published. The needed fourth book, listed below, had a title, but whether it, or the putative fifth and sixth books, were ever more manuscript than idea is not now much known outside the Panshin household. That fourth is listed here with the feeble hope that Panshin might someday come out of his stupefaction and return to writing what he writes well—a hope that the years have reduced to nearly zero).
Pinkwater, Daniel **
(Because Pinkwater’s several YA novels—screamingly funny—are short and are collected in omnibus works, I list only those omnibus volumes—but there’s a lot more Pinkwater out there.)
5 Novels (an omnibus containing the novels listed below)
Roberts, Keith **
(Many of Roberts’ books comprise a series of linked short stories, and are so tagged below; but they are generally classed “novels”.)
The Complete Magnus Ridolph (this has all 10 Ridolph tales—do not confuse it with The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, which had 6, or the “expanded” Many Worlds, which had 8)
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