Literary Wonderlands Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  ANCIENT MYTH & LEGEND ANONYMOUS

  The Epic of Gilgamesh, c.1750 BCE

  HOMER

  The Odyssey, c.725–675 BCE

  OVID

  Metamorphoses, c.8

  ANONYMOUS

  Beowulf, c.700–1100

  ANONYMOUS

  The Thousand and One Nights, c.700–947

  ANONYMOUS

  The Mabinogion, 12th–14th century

  SNORRI STURLUSON

  The Prose Edda, c.1220

  DANTE ALIGHIERI

  The Divine Comedy, c.1308–21

  THOMAS MALORY

  Le Morte d’Arthur, 1485

  LUDOVICO ARIOSTO

  Orlando Furioso, c.1516/32

  THOMAS MORE

  Utopia, 1516

  EDMUND SPENSER

  The Faerie Queene, 1590–1609

  WU CHENG’EN

  Journey to the West (Xiyouji), c.1592

  TOMMASO CAMPANELLA

  The City of the Sun, 1602

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  Don Quixote, 1605/15

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The Tempest, 1611

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC

  A Voyage to the Moon, 1657

  MARGARET CAVENDISH

  The Description of a New World, called The Blazing-World, 1666

  SCIENCE & ROMANTICISM JONATHAN SWIFT

  Gulliver’s Travels, 1726

  LUDVIG HOLBERG

  The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, 1741

  CHARLES KINGSLEY

  The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, 1863

  LEWIS CARROLL

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

  JULES VERNE

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870

  SAMUEL BUTLER

  Erewhon, 1872

  RICHARD WAGNER

  The Ring of the Nibelung, 1876

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Treasure Island, 1883

  EDWIN A. ABBOTT

  Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884

  EDWARD BELLAMY

  Looking Backward: 2000–1887, 1888

  MARK TWAIN

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

  H. G. WELLS

  The Time Machine, 1895

  L. FRANK BAUM

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900

  GOLDEN AGE OF FANTASY J. M. BARRIE

  Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  The Lost World, 1912

  EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

  At the Earth’s Core, 1914

  CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

  Herland, 1915

  CECILIA MAY GIBBS

  Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: Their Adventures Wonderful, 1918

  YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

  We, 1924

  FRANZ KAFKA

  The Castle, 1926

  H. P. LOVECRAFT

  The Cthulhu Mythos, 1928–37

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  Brave New World, 1932

  ROBERT E. HOWARD

  Conan the Barbarian, 1932–36

  VLADIMIR BARTOL

  Alamut, 1938

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 1941

  AUSTIN TAPPAN WRIGHT

  Islandia, 1942

  ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

  The Little Prince, 1943

  TOVE JANSSON

  The Moomins and the Great Flood, 1945

  NEW WORLD ORDER MERVYN PEAKE

  Gormenghast, 1946–59

  GEORGE ORWELL

  Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

  C. S. LEWIS

  The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950–56

  ISAAC ASIMOV

  I, Robot, 1950

  RAY BRADBURY

  Fahrenheit 451, 1953

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  The Lord of the Rings, 1954–55

  JUAN RULFO

  Pedro Páramo, 1955

  STANISLAW LEM

  Solaris, 1961

  ANTHONY BURGESS

  A Clockwork Orange, 1962

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  Pale Fire, 1962

  PIERRE BOULLE

  Planet of the Apes, 1963

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968

  PHILIP K. DICK

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  The Last Unicorn, 1968

  KURT VONNEGUT

  Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

  LARRY NIVEN

  Ringworld, 1970

  ITALO CALVINO

  Invisible Cities, 1972

  WILLIAM GOLDMAN

  The Princess Bride, 1973

  SAMUEL R. DELANY

  Dhalgren, 1975

  GEORGES PEREC

  W or the Memory of Childhood, 1975

  GERD MJØEN BRANTENBERG

  Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes, 1977

  ANGELA CARTER

  The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 1979

  OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

  Kindred, 1979

  DOUGLAS ADAMS

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

  THE COMPUTER AGE STEPHEN KING

  The Dark Tower series, 1982–2012

  TERRY PRATCHETT

  The Discworld series, 1983–2015

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Neuromancer, 1984

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985

  IAIN M. BANKS

  The Culture series, 1987–2012

  BERNARDO ATXAGA

  Obabakoak, 1988

  NEIL GAIMAN et al.

  The Sandman, 1988–2015

  NEAL STEPHENSON

  Snow Crash, 1992

  LOIS LOWRY

  The Giver, 1993

  PHILIP PULLMAN

  His Dark Materials, 1995–2000

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  A Game of Thrones, 1996

  DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  Infinite Jest, 1996

  J. K. ROWLING

  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997

  CHINA MIÉVILLE

  The Bas-Lag cycle, 2000–04

  JASPER FFORDE

  The Eyre Affair, 2001

  CORNELIA FUNKE

  Inkheart, 2003

  SUSANNA CLARKE

  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, 2004

  DAVID MITCHELL

  Cloud Atlas, 2004

  KAZUO ISHIGURO

  Never Let Me Go, 2005

  NGUGI WA THIONG’O

  Wizard of the Crow, 2006

  MICHAEL CHABON

  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, 2007

  SUZANNE COLLINS

  The Hunger Games, 2008

  HARUKI MURAKAMI

  1Q84, 2009–10

  WU MING-YI

  The Man with the Compound Eyes, 2011

  ANN LECKIE

  The Imperial Radch trilogy, 2013–15

  NNEDI OKORAFOR

  Lagoon, 2014

  SALMAN RUSHDIE

  Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2015

  Contributor Biographies

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Of all the powerful spells that fiction casts upon us—absorbing plots, believable characters, vivid language—one of the least celebrated is its ability to make us feel transported to another time and place. Most avid readers have had the experience of setting down a book and needing to shake off
the sights, smells, and sounds of a world they haven’t actually been to, or that may not even exist. We may never have set foot in Victorian London, and we certainly haven’t hiked through Middle-earth, but the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and J. R. R. Tolkien have made those places seem more real, to millions of readers, than cities we’ve actually visited.

  The works described in this book all conjure lands that exist only in the imagination. Some of these places—the America of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996, here), the Japan of Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 (2009–10, here)—closely resemble the world we live in. Others—the Alaska of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007, here) and the New England of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985, here)—show us how very different our own world might have been, or could become, with only a few tweaks to the course of history. Some of these books, like Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013, here), speculate about what life might be like in the distant future, while other works, like Robert E. Howard’s original Conan the Barbarian story series (1932–36, here), postulate a thrilling past that has since been irretrievably lost. Stanlisław Lem’s Solaris (1961, here) challenges readers to contemplate a form of intelligent life almost inconceivably alien from ourselves. Satirists like Jonathan Swift and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o concoct bizarre yarns about talking horses and child-bearing corpses to confront us with a pointedly familiar reflection of our own behaviors. Then there are those unfettered fantasists, ranging from Italo Calvino to Neil Gaiman, whose great gift is to offer us visions in which the imagination can be set free to roam wherever it desires.

  The roots of all these books lie in humanity’s oldest stories: myths, fables, and folklore—the tales people made up to explain how the world came to exist and why it is the way it is. While literary criticism tends to valorize the new and the innovative, the literature of the fantastic seeks a connection to tradition, to what persists even as the world changes. The texts in the first section of this book, “Ancient Myth & Legend,” are, themselves, often attempts to preserve a fading storytelling culture; Beowulf (c.700–1100, here) and the Prose Edda (c.1220, here) were the works of Christian authors who sought to safeguard a portion of their pagan past. These books have survived in no small part because of their ability to reach across a span of centuries and speak to the inhabitants of new ages and worlds. The messy love lives of Ovid’s gods and goddesses; the questing courage of Malory’s Arthurian knights; the dauntless faith of Wu Cheng’en’s Xuanzang—all remind us of the worst and the best of ourselves. But, along with much that is recognizable, these stories also bewitch us with the rich and strange, the miraculous, the astonishing, and the awe-inspiring. The first tales human beings told each other, the ones that survive from our unrecorded past, were not about everyday life, but about the extraordinary: talking animals, wicked sorcerers, terrifying monsters, and cities built of gold and jewels.

  Fantastic literature has always conducted a complex dialogue with the real world. Many of us read it to escape from that world but, more often than not, this fiction aims to make us see our own lives in a new light. Allegories like The Faerie Queene (1596, here) and epics like The Divine Comedy (c.1308–21, here) offer their readers moral instruction, even if some of those readers prefer to attend only to the lush spectacle that cloaks the lesson. In Don Quixote (1605/15, here), Miguel de Cervantes impishly used the structure of a chivalric romance to mock the conventions of the “romance” itself, a literary genre that specializes in the wondrous. But with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, here), the most overtly didactic species of literary wonderland came into its own. In the five hundred years since it was published, utopian tales have used invented worlds and nations to critique and exhort readers to change the world. The utopian strain of fantastic literature springs not from myth but from the great age of exploration, when Europeans set out to discover (and, alas, exploit) previously unknown and unmapped parts of the globe. Travel narratives like Marco Polo’s account of his journeys in Asia (c.1300) became immensely popular, starting in the fourteenth century, and travelers’ encounters with other cultures naturally encouraged wandering Westerners to contemplate what foreigners did better or worse than the folks back home.

  Utopian fiction also arose from Enlightenment thinking itself. If reason and science proved themselves to be superior tools for understanding and mastering the natural world, why not apply them to the engineering of society as well? Writers would continue to produce utopian tales into the twentieth century; women, in particular, wanted to picture what a culture founded on gender equality or even female dominance might look like and, in a sense, Marxism is a utopian dream. By the nineteenth century, however, authors like Samuel Butler had turned to parodying utopian idealism. Utopias, arguably, make for dull reading, but dystopian fiction has demonstrated again and again—right up to The Hunger Games (here), a 2008 blockbuster intended for teenaged readers—its power to enthrall. Some dystopias, like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924, here) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, here), are essentially works of social or political criticism—attacks on the dominant ideologies and obsessions of the modern world. Many more simply depict the age-old dilemma of a restless individual at odds with the society into which he or she was born.

  Often enough, industrialization and the rise of the mass media provoked this dissatisfaction, and writing a dystopian novel was not the only way to respond to such forces. The “Golden Age” of fantasy, during the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, was largely a reaction to the wholesale destruction of deeply rooted ways of life in which human beings lived in intimate relation to the natural world. Another source of anxiety was the perceived loss of long-standing folk traditions. (The Brothers Grimm first began collecting fairy tales in the early 1800s, not to compile a book for children, but as an act of ethnographic conservation.) The great, genre-defining fantasies of this period, from The Lord of the Rings (1954–55, here) to The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56, here), were fundamentally nostalgic, celebrating a vanishing, idealized world that existed before machines and market economies defined our lives. This was also a fertile time for children’s fiction, and many of the masters of the period, from J. M. Barrie to Tove Jansson, either incorporated the longing for a simpler, Arcadian idyll into their work or saturated everything they wrote with a melancholy lament for the lost innocence of childhood. Meanwhile, literary modernists like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges deployed surreal, uncanny, and absurd elements in their writings as the ideal tools for portraying the metaphysical paradoxes inherent in a post-religious culture.

  The last half of the twentieth century was all about questions, and few literary forms are better suited to fermenting questions than the fantastic. The wonderlands devised by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel R. Delaney, and Octavia E. Butler interrogated long-held assumptions about, respectively, the primacy of European culture, modern warfare, the novel, sexuality, and race. Angela Carter took perhaps the most orthodox of literary forms, the fairy tale, and turned it inside out to reveal the unspoken desires and power of women hidden within. Science fiction became more than just a vehicle for technologically enhanced adventure and began to challenge the rapidly evolving postindustrial world, and to warn us about where it is heading. A few prescient writers—William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, first and foremost—succeeded, largely, in anticipating the central role that linked computers would play in the twenty-first century. Most strikingly, by coining the term “cyberspace,” Gibson recognized that our best mental model for understanding the vast and immaterial web of communications perpetually humming all around us is spatial. The Internet, we collectively decided, is a place. Much of it is made up of words. It just might be the ultimate literary wonderland.

  We still haven’t tired of books, though, even when they come to us via a medium constituted of bits and pixels. The wonderlands being created today and waiting to be created tomorrow will also be the work of graphic novelists, filmmak
ers, and video-game designers, and they, in turn, will influence the many writers who have stuck with prose text in all its unadorned glory. Novelists like Salman Rushdie, Murakami, and Nnedi Okorafor have raided the toolboxes of science fiction and fantasy in order to tell new stories of their own homelands. A generation of children has grown up saturated in the imaginative liberty exhibited by J. K. Rowling, as well as the trenchant social criticism of Suzanne Collins. They could not be better equipped to build the fictional ships in which all of us will sail off into the unknown, seeking the far horizon and fresh discoveries that will surpass our most extravagant dreams.

  Laura Miller

  New York City

  UP TO 1700

  1 ANCIENT MYTH & LEGEND

  These legends of kings, knights errant, and epic adventure were the historic and poetic precursors of modern genre fiction.

  ANONYMOUS

  THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH (c.1750 BCE)

  One of the earliest known works of great literature, this Babylonian poem, which first emerged c.1750 BCE and found a stable form around 700 BCE, details King Gilgamesh’s feats of valor and vain quest for immortality.

  To the Babylonians, the legendary Gilgamesh was the mightiest hero and greatest king of old. In telling his story the poem touches on many existential questions, such as what it means to be mortal in an eternal world, how human nature differs from animal and divine, and the ethics of political power and military force; these and other universal themes are what make the poem an enduring masterpiece. The poem begins in the ancient Babylonian city of Uruk, where Gilgamesh rules as king, but the narrative shows us imaginary landscapes on the fringes of the known world.

  Gilgamesh befriends the wild man Enkidu, and they go on an adventure in search of fame and glory. They run for many days to the Cedar Forest, the realm of the gods, to slay its guardian, the powerful ogre Humbaba, and plunder its timber. There were no forests in Babylonia and the landscape is wholly imaginary—a dense and terrifying jungle that exerts a crushing force on the heroes’ strength and will. A piece of the epic reconstructed only in 2012 contains a lively description of the deafening noise that filled the forest canopy: the squawks of birds, buzz of insects, and yells of monkeys form a cacophonous symphony to entertain the forest’s guardian.