The essential authors of science fiction, fantasy & horror — and where to start reading them.
Book Entry · Fantasy
by Michael Moorcock · 1978
In an alternate Albion ruled by Queen Gloriana — her empire golden, her court a façade concealing a hidden palace-within-the-walls of spies and grotesques, her private unfulfilment a matter of state — the urbane assassin Captain Quire is commissioned to corrupt the queen and unpick the realm. Moorcock's tribute-cum-argument with Spenser and Peake (the book is dedicated to him) is his most richly upholstered novel, a baroque machine of intrigue interrogating whether a golden age can be built on buried crimes. The controversial climax was revised by the author in later editions; both versions still spark argument.
World Fantasy Award winner (1979) and the bridge between Peake's gothic tradition and the New Weird; Miéville and VanderMeer both point straight at it.
Hugo, World Fantasy and Mythopoeic winner, Booker-longlisted, a million-copy bestseller and BBC series: the book that demonstrated, once and for all, that the full apparatus of the literary novel and the full apparatus of fantasy are the same machine.
Widely held (by Lewis himself, among others) to be his best book: the proof that the Narnian apologist could write tragic, ambiguous myth for adults — a touchstone for literary fantasy's mythic-retelling tradition.
Hugo (tied), World Fantasy, Clarke and BSFA winner — a near-sweep — and the book that carried Miéville furthest into the literary mainstream; its 'unseeing' entered critical vocabulary as shorthand for trained urban blindness.