Why read fantasy? What’s so special about it? Why has it endured so long in modern times? After a hundred books, I may be no closer to understanding the mysteries of this most mysterious of genres. Fantasy still appears to my mind’s eye as a vast, impenetrable jungle. Just as it’s impossible for the eye to take in a jungle at a glance, it’s hard to write about fantasy in general.
One thing is certain: the blog series changed me. I mention this not to turn the camera on myself, but to offer myself as a test subject, a proxy for gauging the effects of reading so much in a single genre. I’ve been glutted with fantasy, as the director of Supersize Me was glutted with McDonald’s. What gastrointestinal damage has this orgy of imagination wrought on my system? Am I a less grounded person now than in 2019? Have I extended my immaturity by feasting on tales of witches and dragons? Have I Don Quixotified myself?
The answer appears to be a firm “No”. On the contrary, binge-reading fantasy implanted a hunger for facts and evidence that could be described as ravenous. I took an interest in comparative economics and politics. I listened to podcasts on the world system from the Roman financial crisis of AD 33 to the present. I read Acemoglu and Robinson (Why Nations Fail), Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now), Michael Pettis and Matthew C. Klein (Trade Wars are Class Wars), Thomas Sowell (Race and Culture), and maybe a hundred books about contemporary China (including ones by Willy Lam, Dinny McMahon, Michael Pettis, Roger Garside, Thomas Orlik, Lee Kuan Yew, George Magnus, Leta Hong Fincher, Minxin Pei, Henry Kissinger, Doh Chull Shin, Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, Jiwei Ci, Ho-fung Hung, Peter Martin, Matthew Kroenig, etc.). This may sound like bragging but it was closer to a rabid tic, even an addiction.
Clearly, I yearned for solid, salty fare after so many bottles of fairy nectar.
The lesson here is simple – don’t be afraid of going off the fairy tale deep-end. When you immerse yourself completely in some faraway realm, you will naturally bounce back. You will discover an appetite for dry stuff like graphs and statistics. The leaden thump of an econ textbook will feel nicer than the ambrosial perfume of an epic manga.
So, the first consequence of reading a hundred fantasies was a deep craving for reality. The second consequence – the mirror-image of the first – was a sort of hyper-sensitivity to the use of myth in everyday life. A fantasy author takes a pinch of fairy dust – a zombie, a god, a golden citadel – and sprinkles it into some literary structure, either preexisting or invented. Yet the same process is going on all the time, in advertising, on social media, in public discourse. The “Mexican rapist” of Trumpographic lore is no more real than the zombie: he is a pure myth, all the more dangerous because of his tenuous connection to fact (there are a certain number of rapists and a certain number of Mexicans, so obviously Mexican rapists exist – but illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than native-born Americans, and in any case the trope is an ugly piece of propaganda). In truth, almost everyone is making and transmitting mythology, almost all the time. At least the fantasy writer is honest about it.
So by about #50 I was craving facts like so many jolts of caffeine. I was suspicious of casual mythmaking (being steeped in the non-casual kind). Not surprising, when you think about it. Immersion breeds suspicion – when you know the real thing, you hate the cheap knockoff. A soldier, learning how actual violence works, scoffs at the cartoon fistfights in movies. A musician, loving Beethoven, hates the latest jingle that rides on Ludwig’s coattails. Likewise, a lover of fantasy notices the vivid monsters created for instrumental purposes in real and is annoyed (or horrified) at the misuses of this ancient skill.
Respect for facts + respect for myths = Some pretty weird outcomes. For example, my political homelessness has reached new extremes: I’m now a pro-immigrant, pro-working class, pro-market, pro-fun, anti-communist, anti-neo-racist capital-L Liberal. I’m happy to explain, in a sidebar, any of those terms. Besides my altered stances, I’m tired of politics invading every domain and becoming a new religion, and wholeheartedly recommend old religions (including scientific rationalism) as humane alternatives. My life is becoming (or trying to become) a union of the dry and the juicy, the boring and the ecstatic, the true and the hyper-true. I trust it will gel. Somehow.
Now on to fantasy itself.
Happy to report, the genre is as vibrant as a 1990s NBA all-star game. You have your ball-handlers, your generalists, your big men, your outside shooters, your Shawn Kemp-style slashers. Or maybe a better metaphor is Chinese philosophy in the Warring States period. You have your post-Tolkien Confucianists (Eragon) and anti-Tolkien Daoists (Perdido Street Station). You have your delightful pre-Tolkien Mencians (American Gods). Modernism, in the hands of a few Zhou Dynasty loyalists, inhabits a tiny, ritualistic corner (Little, Big). Various strains of cynical postmodern Legalism flourish – from the whimsy of Princess Bride to the vulgarian skepticism of Game of Thrones and The Witcher and on to the extremes of “grimdark”. Anything good that isn’t set in Europe is fresh and welcomed in the publishing industry (so long as it caters to Western affluent tastes – many are the fantasy equivalents of Pok Pok, few the Americans who know the ins and outs of the Chinese internet novel; which is nothing to be ashamed of, but something to keep in mind when you hear the latest humblebrags about diversifying the genre). “Hard” fantasy, with complicated magic systems and a D&D feel, gives you a wonky, wise, Art of War-type vibe (Elantris). The multi-dimensional virtual reality fantasy/sci-fi fusion bestseller (Ready Player One, Dark Matter) sneaks in eccentrically, like an acolyte of Zhuangzi. Fantastic themes leak into prestige fiction (The Underground Railroad), and reclaim their old place in thrillers and adventure yarns (Uncharted 3). You find resonant new myths in comics and videogames and TV and movies and theme parks and haunted houses and podcasts and all the rest. A would-be megalomaniac Qin Emperor, Jeff Bezos, is spending a billion dollars to film the Silmarillion. Safe to say that fantasy isn’t dying out.
In my opinion, the greatest challenge for fantasy in the future will be the oldest one: how to handle the supernatural. Portraying supernatural good and evil requires a certain ability to believe in the same – at least for artistic purposes. Tapping into those primitive impulses seems, anecdotally, to be becoming more and more difficult. Yet they remain to be tapped, and surely many artists will strike new veins in this century and the next. We will surely see more ecological fantasies from those who organize their spiritual lives around the natural environment. The explosion of Evangelical Christianity in the developing world, combined with indigenous traditions, may bear new fruit, as may the growth of Islam in Europe. Countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, achieving middle income status at long last, may find new (or old) stories to tell. The maturation of the American experiment may reveal some arresting visions. But it’s pointless to predict something as mercurial as the growth of mythology.
So that’s all I wanted to say. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Oh, I almost forgot. Time for the top 10 and bottom 2. The Top 10 are the books I still remember vividly, in detail – not necessarily the best, but the ones that made the deepest impressions. I actually couldn’t manage a “bottom 10” – there were some books I didn’t understand or appreciate, but only two that I actively disliked.
Top ten (in order of when they appeared on the blog):
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#1)
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (#17)
Richard Matheson, Hell House (#18)
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (#20)
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (#35)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (#52)
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (#57)
Hideaki Sena, Parasite Eve (#60)
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (#71)
Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (#74)
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Bottom two:
Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon (#13)
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (#39)
The Door Without a Key 
Many thanks for the ride. I loved it!