1000 novels everyone must read: Science Fiction & Fantasy: Susanna Clarke on the best fantasy books | Books | The Guardian
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- )
Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
The children's author Anthony Horowitz recently pointed out that all books are doors - when we open them we expect to be somewhere else. All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes. In mid-20th-century Oxford, CS Lewis took us through the wardrobe to Narnia; in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his friend JRR Tolkien gave us Middle-earth, which became the template for other worlds. Lewis combined Norse landscape, beings from Greek mythology and the Belfast of his childhood to create Narnia. Regardless of what his critics tell you, it's a place of robust physical pleasures and pains - there's dancing, feasting and Bacchanalian revels - but I've been more drenched, cold and miserable in Narnia than in Middle-earth.
Fantasy purists get very concerned about the coherence of other worlds; they approve of Tolkien's careful use of Germanic cultures and languages, but are indignant that Lewis allowed the Narnian beavers and fauns to have books and sewing-machines. This misses the point. These things represent homeliness, warmth, safety, goodness. In imagined worlds we meet our own fears, joys and needs, transformed into solid creatures, objects and landscapes. We touch symbols and do battle with them. Because of this, imagined worlds often feel more complete than this one. There's that strange feeling of recognition: yes, this is how the world is meant to be. How many children have felt that in their hearts they were more Narnian than Scottish or English or Californian?
In wild, empty landscapes we look for dragons to embody all the fierce, soaring emotions the place inspires; in Middle-earth and Earthsea we find them. In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, we find a world in which every person has a daemon, a creature like a heraldic symbol made real, whose outward shape subtly represents who that person really is. There's something so natural about this that on closing the book it seems strange to find no daemon at our side.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld is an oddity. It began life as a satire on other fantasy worlds, but it's become a testament to how imagined worlds expand to deal with, well, everything. Through Discworld's wry lens, Pratchett can view racial identity, gender equality, guns, ethnic conflict, pressures faced by policemen and the responsibilities of reading Where's My Cow? to small children. Oh, and the books are also very funny.
Ursula Le Guin's world of Earthsea is a tangled skein of tiny islands cast on a vast sea. The islands' names pull at my heart like no others: Roke, Perilane, Osskil ... In The Farthest Shore, her heroes sail to the westernmost island, Selidor, an unpeopled place of low brown hills and sand dunes. "Beautiful and desolate was Selidor." This is the strange paradox of other worlds: I know the salt taste of the wind on Selidor and its peculiar melancholy as well as any place I've actually been.
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