The Winged Histories

"The final choice was a tricky one. I picked this one partly because it’s one of my favourite books of the past ten years or so. People can get hung up on the idea that ‘classics’ can only be older books, but I think there are still fantasy classics being written at a pretty steady clip. I think this book is a good candidate for classic status, partly because it’s in a loving-but-critical conversation with other fantasy, and partly because the writing is so good. It’s a book about a rebellion, sort of, although it’s actually stories told around that conflict: not much time is spent on the conflict itself. It’s a story told through the voices of women who are usually pushed aside in epic fantasy stories. The principal characters are a soldier, a scholar, a singer and a socialite, all very different people, each of whom gets about eighty pages to tell their story in their own way. It’s a book about loving epic fantasy, but also about the problems with it. The world building is really good, the character writing is really good, but it’s also about what happens after conflicts, and what happened before. We end with the socialite character who, in some of the other stories, appears like she’s a little bit shallow – although you’re always led to believe that you’re probably judging her wrong – and then when you get to her section, you realise that she’s been part of a wholly different kind of story that you haven’t really understood until quite late in the book. It’s a great book for having a whole series of stories intersecting in ways that throw light on one another. So the scholar has this very complicated relationship with her overbearing father, which determines her life. The singer’s story is about a romantic relationship with the soldier, but after terrible things have happened to them. It’s telling an epic fantasy narrative, but through a series of different perspectives, building out a world. Sofia Samatar is a really good shaper of prose. I think I’d apply that to all of the writers I’ve selected in their different ways. Samatar is definitely a lusher writer than someone like Le Guin, although there’s a lot of depth in Le Guin’s ostensibly pretty simple prose… The Winged Histories is just a wonderful book, and one that is not read as widely as it should be. So I wanted to put it on this list to draw more attention to it. There are lots of other brilliant recent books. I would have liked to add Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which is another book that is astonishingly brilliant in what it does, and not as widely known as it should be. I loved C. S. E. Cooney’s Saint Death’s Daughter recently; I think that’s the book that’s come closest to evoking some of the pleasures I used to get from reading a new Pratchett. Saying that, I cannot believe I haven’t put Terry Pratchett on this list. My favourite Terry Pratchett is Witches Abroad, but you can pick almost any Discworld book – they’re pretty consistently good. I feel slightly guilty for not having put a big fantasy series on the list. If people would like a big series, the two I enjoy most are two quite different ones. I really like Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings books : she builds a world with geopolitical crises, but it’s tightly focused on the growth of its characters. It’s also about the slow return of dragons and various other things. She’s an incredible writer of first-person perspectives. The other series I think is a really impressive achievement is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen , which is completely different in that it has an enormous cast and a vast geographical range – twice he hops you to an entirely new continent for a new book. It’s a brilliant feat of scale. Erikson generally doesn’t spend a lot of time sitting in one character’s head, but his writing never surrenders its keen eye for human idiosyncrasies. It’s ostensibly a military fantasy, but it rapidly becomes about the value of compassion. It’s always so tricky to choose. I’ve gone with Anglophone fantasy, but there’s a lot of great fantasy you could talk about in other languages. In my Introduction I spend quite a lot of time talking about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita , which I genuinely think is one of the best books ever written. I think a lot of people who like fantasy will get the things that it’s doing, and will really love that book. And there are just so many more… I love E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros , which is a strange book and will not be to everyone’s taste, and Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist is another wonderful 1920s book with a strong line of influence. N. K. Jemisin , of course. Kelly Link, especially the short stories, and especially ‘Magic for Beginners’. I’m sure some people will be annoyed that I didn’t put Gene Wolfe on this list… I’ve been really enjoying Adrian Tchaikovsky recently. I have no idea how he writes so fast yet so consistently. City of Last Chances is the one I would recommend to fantasy fans, although he has a wonderful Jane-Austen-crossed-with-low-fantasy war novel called Guns of the Dawn, which I also really liked. I’m very fond of Joe Abercrombie – my favourite is Best Served Cold – and I think a lot more people will be reading him, because it appears that James Cameron has just picked up his most recent book… We already talked about the value of iteration, which is an argument I wrote because people interested in fantasy are often asked, “Isn’t it all just the same?” – so it’s useful to have a good answer to that question in your back pocket. The other argument that’s important to me in that book is about fantasy as a community, rather than as a series of Great Books. What I want in a fantasy classic is a story that people feel they can live in, and can take things away from and expand on. They might have critiques or concerns, but a good fantasy can accommodate those sorts of expansions and dissensions. There’s an openness to fantasy that I think is really important. A good fantasy invites you to collaborate in making a world, and that’s a powerful thing. Fantasy’s not a closed book that you just admire. It’s a living genre that teaches you how to do it. All these books do that. It’s very clear that lots of people have learned from Tolkien, but I think most writers could learn a lot from Samatar. Lots of people have drawn on McKillip, and Peake gets used in that way. Le Guin has a brilliant book, Steering the Craft, where she gives her advice on writing. She believes utterly in the power of art, but she also believes pragmatically that you can learn to write better by doing it and by thinking about process. She has high ambitions for the things that literature can achieve by making us see different worlds, but she also drives home the idea that you can’t just do that without learning how from others. I think that’s a really good way to approach fantasy, and it’s something that all of these writers do. For me, these are wonderful books because they’ve been worked at by people who care about them, people who wrote them in order to show new worlds to their audiences, to make them think and feel, but perhaps also act and change."