Fantasy Novel

With Emperor of the Eight Islands, Lian Hearn delves into the mythic past of the world she crafted so perfectly in the Tales of the Otori series ...

A young man wakes up in an unfamiliar world, with almost no knowledge of his previous life. He remembers committing suicide, but doesn’t remember why. This isn’t heaven or hell, though: as Aden explores his new surroundings, he soon realises that he has ended up in the fictional world created by his grandfather, an aspiring but unpublished author of epic fantasy.

There is an unfortunate tendency in contemporary fantasy for plots to become elongated, ungainly and unmanageable, much like teenage boys. Thankfully, Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series is an exception, perhaps because the protagonist, Arthur Penhaligon, is not yet a teen-ager himself.

Much science and fantasy fiction is written in a predominantly realist mode. This is the most economical means of signifying the internal truth of its fictional worlds, no matter how strange its aliens, or how superhuman the powers of its heroes. So, for example, Tolkien writes, ‘Holding the hobbits gently but firmly, one in the crook of each arm, Treebeard lifted up first one large foot and then the other; and moved them to the edge of the shelf.’ Whatever his nature – half-Ent, half-tree – Treebeard comfortably occupies the grammatical subject position.

This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.

Kenneth Cook’s latest book is a parable for adults. At the end of the second millennium A.D., God remembers the duty he has overlooked at the end of the first, destroys life on earth. However, no doubt due to his advanced age, he is a little careless, and in a valley in the in the middle of the United States, two mice survive. They and their rapidly multiplying descendants inherit man’s civilization, including thought and speech, but otherwise not memory. They have to develop theory and institutions from scratch, guided by reason and reading.