JL: Better Than Tolkien

Better Than Tolkien

The 28 Top Science-Fiction and Fantasy Works

JUL/25/14

I find myself corresponding and meeting with people a good deal younger than I who are involved in writing comics, video games, and prose fiction, and wonder out loud what came before.

Watch out LaFond, when you have become the oracle of cultural heritage that is the first foot on the banana peel of mortality.

My coauthor and Hemavore creator Dominick is digging up early science-fiction online and in used bookstores. Recently while we perused the science-fiction and fantasy aisle at Barnes & Nobles, I pointed out the Philip K. Dick section and noted that he is about the only author from my youth that is reliably represented on these shelves, particularly since, as a teen I bought off of mass market paperback racks.

We could not even find a Conan collection so lent him one of mine, and he said, “The really old open domain stuff, you can find that. But it seems like there is a half century of content that’s just not extant.”

That planted the seed for this article which I intend as a guide for searching out excellent speculative fiction. The fantasy and science-fiction authors of the second half of the 20th Century have not made it into the canon of Western Literature so will not be found at libraries. They are also no longer represented on the commercial bookshelf. I trust that their work can still be found through online sources and encourage readers to use this as a resource.

This article will form the first in a series of reviews, basically the master list. I have no desire to write a ‘LaFond’s 100 favorites’. After giving a couple weeks thought to this I decided to use J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy as the benchmark. Tolkien’s plotting skills were at about junior high school level. However, his creation of the Middle Earth ‘mythos’ via his knowledge of folklore, and his infusion of his dismay with the modern world into his otherwise thinly archetypical characters, resulted in the most influential and widely enjoyed speculative fiction of the 20th, and so far, the 21st Century. So, the benchmark is a setting conceived with at least an aspiration to Tolkien’s level of achievement, but carried by a story written at a professional level.

Keep in mind that I could not read all of the sci-fi published this year if I had the rest of my life. This is nothing more than my attempt to put forward those works that I have read which meet the ‘Tolkien criteria’. I am leaving out a lot which I liked quite a bit—hundreds of books by excellent writers, as well as thousands of books I have not read.

Bold-faced authors are those I have committed to reading and reviewing their entire body of work.

An anthology designation gives a title of a collection, and indicates the author’s entire body of short fiction is being considered as a ‘work’.

A novel designation refers to a single novel.

An epic designation refers to a series of cohesive interdependent novels that is in fact a single work.

A series designation refers to a collection of stories and/or novels that are linked by a common character or setting and that do not necessarily have to be read in order, or in full, to enjoy.

I will update this list as I read books which qualify. I’m writing this from memory, so apologize for the misspelling of any names and the omission of dates. I have a 250 page book to edit today.

28. Glory Season, David Brin, novel

27. Kull, Robert E. Howard , series

26. A World Out of Time, Larry Niven, novel

25. The Drey Prescott Saga, Allen Burt Akers, series

24. Riverworld, Phillip Jose Farmer, epic

23. Watership Down, Richard Adams, novel

22. Gor, John Norman, series

21. Blood Music, Greg Bear, novel

20. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Alice B. Sheldon/James Tiptree Junior, anthology

19. A Song of Fire and Ice, George R.R. Martin, epic

18. Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake, epic

17. Harmony, Orson Scott Card, epic