Joe Abercrombie
The defining grimdark author after Martin: Abercrombie perfected the character-voice-driven, blackly comic register that dominates modern adult fantasy, and his fight scenes and moral hangovers are the subgenre's house style.
Fantasy
Fiction of the impossible made convincing: magic, secondary worlds, gods, dragons, quests and kingdoms. Runs from myth-soaked Victorian dream-tales through Tolkien's great rewiring of the field to today's sprawling epics and sharp-edged grimdark.
Sub-genres
- Steampunk
- Gaslamp Fantasy
- Science Fantasy
- Comic Fantasy
- Epic Fantasy
- Heroic Fantasy
- Sword and Sorcery
- Dark Fantasy
- Grimdark
- Urban Fantasy
- Mythic Fantasy
- Historical Fantasy
- Portal Fantasy
- Children's & YA Fantasy
- Weird Fiction
- New Weird
The authors (47)
Clive Barker
The most original British horror voice of his generation: Barker rewired the genre's relationship with the body and desire, founded the dark-fantasy register a generation now writes in, and gave horror cinema one of its…
Ray Bradbury
The writer who proved science fiction could be literature without apologising.
Terry Brooks
The author whose success built the commercial epic fantasy category: Del Rey's Shannara experiment created the market that Jordan, Eddings and everyone since sold into.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Among the most awarded novelists in the field's history and the writer who proved space opera could be character-driven comedy of manners without losing its nerve.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The father of planetary romance.
Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game is one of the most widely read SF novels ever published — a recruiting text for the genre itself, taught in schools and military academies alike — and its sequel's compassionate alien-understanding remains a…
C. J. Cherryh
The field's most rigorous builder of alien minds and interstellar economics.
Susanna Clarke
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the most acclaimed fantasy debut of its century — the book that made footnotes glamorous and English magic a serious literary subject — and Piranesi's labyrinth has already joined the genre's…
Glen Cook
The founding document of military fantasy and grimdark's true ancestor: the Black Company's grunt's-eye view is the most influential perspective shift in post-Tolkien fantasy, acknowledged as bedrock by Erikson, Abercrombie…
Stephen R. Donaldson
The first major post-Tolkien fantasist to weaponise the form against its own escapism: Covenant's anti-heroism opened the door through which grimdark, Abercrombie and every morally impossible protagonist since walked.
Lord Dunsany
The fountainhead of modern fantasy world-building.
David Eddings
The gateway epic fantasist for a generation of 1980s–90s readers: the Belgariad's chatty, character-first formula taught millions that doorstop fantasy could be comfort reading, and its fingerprints are on every found-family…
Steven Erikson
The Malazan Book of the Fallen is epic fantasy's most ambitious completed structure — the genre's standing answer to the question of how big, how deep and how uncompromising the form can go and still find a mass readership.
Raymond E. Feist
Magician is one of the defining epic fantasies of its era — a fixture of fantasy starter lists for forty years — and the Midkemia model (gaming world to publishing empire) prefigured the genre's whole relationship with…
Neil Gaiman
The defining mythic fantasist of his generation: Sandman legitimised comics as literature, American Gods codified the gods-among-us novel, and his fairy-tale register shaped two decades of fantasy, YA and screen storytelling.
Robin Hobb
The standard-bearer for character-driven epic fantasy: Fitz and the Fool constitute the genre's most sustained study of a single life, and her influence on the emotionally literate modern epic — from Rothfuss to romantasy's…
Robert E. Howard
Sword and sorcery begins with Howard, full stop.
Stephen Hunt
A significant figure in the steampunk and gaslamp revival — the Jackelian books were among the movement's defining commercial successes — and, through SFcrowsnest, one of online genre journalism's genuine pioneers: few people…
N. K. Jemisin
The defining SFF writer of the 2010s: the unprecedented Hugo three-peat marked the genre's centre of gravity shifting — formally, demographically and thematically — and the Broken Earth is already canon, taught from secondary…
Diana Wynne Jones
The bridge between the Inklings and modern fantasy's craft: her deconstructions anticipated and outwitted the genre's clichés decades before 'subversion' became a selling point, and her influence runs through Rowling's…
Robert Jordan
The Wheel of Time carried Tolkien-scale fantasy to its commercial summit in the 1990s — bestseller-list fixtures, ninety-plus million copies — and its systematised magic and multi-thread plotting set the template (and the page…
Guy Gavriel Kay
The master of historical fantasy as its own serious form: Kay's quarter-turn method created a genre lane that everyone from Jacqueline Carey to Ken Liu has driven in, and Tigana remains the standard text on memory, empire and…
Stephen King
Simply the most important horror writer who has ever lived, by reach: King made the genre a mass medium, trained generations of readers and writers, and his best books — The Shining, The Stand, It — are American literature…
Ursula K. Le Guin
The genre's most honoured writer and its moral centre of gravity: the standard demonstration that SF and fantasy can do everything literature does, plus things only they can.
Tanith Lee
The great sensualist of fantasy and a key architect of its dark, eroticised register — the bridge between Moorcock's generation and modern dark fantasy and paranormal fiction.
Fritz Leiber
The bridge between Howard and modern fantasy, the founder of urban supernatural horror, and sword and sorcery's official christener.
C. S. Lewis
Narnia is one of fantasy's two great gateway drugs (the other being The Hobbit) and the model for every portal fantasy since; with Tolkien, Lewis made Oxford the unlikely engine room of the modern fantastic.
George R. R. Martin
The defining fantasist of the twenty-first century so far: ASOIAF normalised moral consequence and political realism in epic fantasy, created the grimdark mainstream, and via HBO made the genre a global mass medium.
Anne McCaffrey
The bridge between SF and fantasy readerships and the genre's great gateway author for young readers — particularly girls, whom the field had largely ignored.
China Miéville
The central figure of the New Weird and the most formally restless major fantasist of his generation: Miéville re-opened the weird tradition for the twenty-first century and made genre hybridity itself a respectable literary…
Michael Moorcock
Twice a revolutionary: as editor he made the New Wave happen, and as writer he rewired heroic fantasy with Elric, whose shadow falls on every brooding anti-hero with a cursed weapon since.
Andre Norton
Quietly one of the most influential figures in the field: she trained the readership.
Mervyn Peake
The proof that fantasy needs neither magic nor maps to be vast.
Terry Pratchett
The most beloved British writer of his generation and comic fantasy's permanent summit: Discworld proved a fantasy series could be a complete satirical instrument, and characters like Vimes, Granny Weatherwax and DEATH have…
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials raised the ceiling of children's fantasy permanently — Carnegie Medal, Whitbread Book of the Year (the first children's book to win it), and the proof that a bestselling YA epic could carry Milton, Blake and…
Patrick Rothfuss
The Name of the Wind is among the most beloved fantasy debuts of the century — the book that proved lyrical, interior, single-voice storytelling could sell at blockbuster scale and that brought a vast non-genre readership…
J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter is the bestselling book series ever written and the single largest recruitment event in the history of reading: whatever the field's arguments about craft or author, modern fantasy's mass audience was…
Brandon Sanderson
The bestselling epic fantasist of the current era and the architect of the systematised-magic school that dominates it; finishing the Wheel of Time and building the Cosmere made him both the bridge from the Jordan age and the…
Andrzej Sapkowski
The most successful fantasy export in any translation since Tolkien's heyday: the Witcher saga brought Slavic folklore and Central European irony into the genre's mainstream and, via its adaptations, reshaped fantasy's global…
Robert Silverberg
The field's great professional, whose 1970s novels proved commercial SF writers could retool into literary ones.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The founder of modern fantasy as a publishing category and a worldbuilding discipline: the maps, the appendices, the invented languages, the trilogy format and the entire epic-quest architecture descend from him.
Jack Vance
The genre's supreme stylist and a double founder: of the Dying Earth subgenre (Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is its godchild) and of anthropological planetary adventure.
T. H. White
The Once and Future King fixed the modern image of Arthur, Merlyn and Camelot, fed directly into Disney's Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot, and taught later fantasists — Gaiman and Rowling included — that whimsy and…
Tad Williams
The crucial bridge between Tolkien's epic and Martin's: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is the acknowledged direct inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire, and Otherland anticipated the metaverse novel by a generation.
Gene Wolfe
The genre's most acclaimed pure writer: the standard demonstration that SF can sustain — and reward — the closest reading literature allows.
Roger Zelazny
The New Wave's mythographer, who fused literary technique with pulp velocity and made it look effortless.