Fantasy - The 100 Best Books (Cawthorn and Moorcock, 1988)

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

Here's something I wanted to share. I've said before that I make and record various lists, so here's one of them.

From what I can gather (going from just the Wiki article), back in the late 80's, London publishing company Xanadu commissioned a short series of "100 Best" books compiling chronologically the most outstanding works in a specific genre, at least according to the editors. It began with science fiction, followed by crime/mystery, horror, and fantasy. This particular list was going to be composed by noted speculative fiction author Michael Moorcock, but as it became apparent that he would be taking more time with the list than anticipated, he and the publishers agreed to turn the project over to James Cawthorn. The resulting book is now out of print but can currently be found for reasonable prices on Amazon; the list itself is discussed more in the text entry by entry, but as I don't have a copy of it at this time, all I have are the names, thus I am unsure as to why certain choices are made. Still, it would be fun to discuss.


1.   Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift
2.   The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole
3.   Vathek (1786) by William Beckford
4.   The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
5.   Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
6.   Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin
7.   The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe
8.   A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens
9.   Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
10.   Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
11.   Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
12.   Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll
13.   Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott
14.   She: A History of Adventure (1886) by H. Rider Haggard
15.   The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
16.   The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888) by Richard Garnett
17.   The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) by William Morris
18.   The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde
19.   Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
20.   The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James
21.   The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G. K. Chesterton
22.   The House on the Borderland (1908) by William Hope Hodgson
23.   Black Magic (1909) by Marjorie Bowen
24.   Zuleika Dobson (1911) by Max Beerbohm
25.   A Princess of Mars (1911) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
26.   Tarzan of the Apes (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
27.   The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
28.   The Night Land (1912) by William Hope Hodgson
29.   Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
30.   The Citadel of Fear (1918) by Francis Stevens
31.   A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay
32.   The Worm Ouroboros (1922) by E. R. Eddison
33.   The Haunted Woman (1922) by David Lindsay
34.   Lady into Fox (1922) and A Man in the Zoo (1924) by David Garnett
35.   The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) by Lord Dunsany
36.   The Ship of Ishtar (1926) by A. Merritt
37.   The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) by Franz Kafka
38.   Witch Wood (1927) by John Buchan
39.   War in Heaven (1930) by Charles Williams
40.   Turnabout (1931) by Thorne Smith
41.   The Night Life of the Gods (1931) by Thorne Smith
42.   Dwellers in the Mirage (1932) by A. Merritt
43.   Zothique (1932-51) by Clark Ashton Smith
44.   The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore
45.   Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton
46.   Northwest Smith (1933-40) by C. L. Moore
47.   Jirel of Joiry (1934-9) by C. L. Moore
48.   The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) by Charles G. Finney
49.   Land Under England (1935) by Joseph O'Neill
50.   Conan the Conqueror (1935-36) by Robert E. Howard
51.   At the Mountains of Madness (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft
52.   To Walk the Night (1937) by William Sloane
53.   Roads (1938) by Seabury Quinn
54.   The Once and Future King (1939-77) by T. H. White
55.   Slaves of Sleep (1939) by L. Ron Hubbard
56.   Caravan for China (1939) by Frank S. Stuart
57.   Fear (1940) by L. Ron Hubbard
58.   Darker Than You Think (1940) by Jack Williamson
59.   The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941) by H. P. Lovecraft
60.   Land of Unreason (1941) by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
61.   Conjure Wife (1943) by Fritz Leiber
62.   The Book of Ptath (1943) by A. E. van Vogt
63.   The Dark World and Valley of the Flame (1946) by Henry Kuttner
64.   Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959) by Mervyn Peake
65.   The Exploits of Engelbrecht (1946) by Maurice Richardson
66.   Mistress Masham's Repose (1946) by T. H. White
67.   Adept's Gambit (1947) by Fritz Leiber
68.   The Well of the Unicorn (1948) by Fletcher Pratt
69.   You're All Alone (1950) by Fritz Leiber
70.   The Dying Earth (1950) by Jack Vance
71.   The Devil in Velvet (1951) by John Dickson Carr
72.   The Tritonian Ring (1951) by L. Sprague de Camp
73.   Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953) by Poul Anderson
74.   The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) by Leigh Brackett
75.   The Broken Sword (1954) by Poul Anderson
76.   The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) by J. R. R. Tolkien
77.   The Golden Strangers (1956) by Henry Treece
78.   The Great Captains (1956) by Henry Treece
79.   The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson
80.   Stormbringer (1963) by Michael Moorcock
81.   The Serpent (1963), Atlan (1965), The City (1966), and Some Summer Lands (1977) by Jane Gaskell
82.   The Crystal World (1964) by J. G. Ballard
83.   Black Easter (1967) and The Day After Judgment (1968) by James Blish
84.   Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin
85.   A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) by Ursula K. Le Guin
86.   The Green Man (1969) by Kingsley Amis
87.   Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1969) by Gordon Honeycombe
88.   The Philosopher's Stone (1969) by Colin Wilson
89.   The Pastel City (1971) by M. John Harrison
90.   The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (1972) by Angela Carter
91.   Red Shift (1973) by Alan Garner
92.   The Compleat Enchanter (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
93.   The Alteration (1976) by Kingsley Amis
94.   Our Lady of Darkness (1976) by Fritz Leiber
95.   The Drawing of the Dark (1979) by Tim Powers
96.   The Sending (1980) by Geoffrey Household
97.   The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic (1983) by Terry Pratchett
98.   The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984) by Thomas M. Disch
99.   Hawksmoor (1985) by Peter Ackroyd
100.   Expecting Someone Taller (1987) by Tom Holt


So what do you think? How many of these books have you heard of? How many have you read? Are there any that you've wanted to get to? What would constitute a fantasy novel in your opinion?

Keep a look out for a follow-up list coming soon.

[Raven]

This list is confusing to me. Wuthering Heights is #9 and Lord of the Rings is #76. It's been years since I've read Wuthering Heights  (and I've never read anything by the Bronte sisters that I've liked, and I limited my reading to just two books, as I have a bit of an aversion to those books, now), but it never occurred to me to call it a fantasy book. Additionally, to score it that much higher than Tolkien is mind boggling. So, the definition being used is obviously very broad, the selections have a definite lean towards "literary" selections. I.e., the kinds of books found in your Norton Anthologies and 200 level college English lit classes. 

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

It would seem that way.....except when you look at the list a little closer and take into consideration what I said about the editors "compiling chronologically." The list isn't a ranked one - it's presented by order of publication date, from 1726 to 1987. Yeah, I guess that threw me off the first time too.

[Raven]

Ah, I missed the chronological bit. Sorry, my mistake.
In that case, the list's ordering is far more reasonable, but they're still operating under a pretty broad definition. For example, A Picture of Dorian Grey, yes, I'll give it to them, and it's a good book to boot, but you'd have to make a good argument for me to accept Moby-Dick or Tarzan of the Apes as fitting my current conception of the fantasy genre.
And C.S. Lewis is not on this list. . .

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

Well, that I'll give you. I'm not entirely certain why these choices were made. You'd have to read the book to get their full reasoning. I'm sure there's some argument to be made about their contribution to fantastic literature. And if it at least gets you to read the books, then it's not a total loss.

Though I might not understand it, I personally like seeing those titles on the list. It signals to me that there's a broad definition of fantasy, that sometimes the Tolkien mindset is too narrow a confine.

Now having read both Tarzan and Moby-Dick myself, while I'm not entirely certain, perhaps it has to do with, for one, the fabrication of an Africa that never was with a fictional species of ape and a man who gains near-superhuman "natural" abilities, and, for the other, philosophical/metaphysical musings such as those found in Chapter 42 ("The Whiteness of the Whale") and the quasi-mystical character of Moby-Dick himself.