1871 THROUGH THE
LOOKING-GLASS
BY LEWIS CARROLL
Decades of adaptation and
consolidation have jumbled
Carroll’s two Alice books in our
collective memory, with Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland largely
subsuming its 1871 sequel.
But it was Looking-Glass that
introduced indelible English
nursery-rhyme characters like
Humpty Dumpty and twins
Tweedledee and Tweedledum
into Alice’s world.1902 FIVE CHILDREN
AND IT
BY E. NESBIT
After moving into their summer
home in the English countryside,
five brothers and sisters go
digging in the local gravel pits and
make a curious discovery: at the
bottom of a hole, the children find
a strange furry creature. Nesbit
describes their subsequent
adventures in witty prose without
patronizing her younger audience.
Instead, she invites her readers
to understand the realities of
living in a grownup world—which
has its difficulties, no matter the
level of magic involved.1907 OZMA OF OZ
BY L. FRANK BAUM
After the success of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
published in 1900, Baum
wrote a whole series of wildly
inventive Oz books—14 in all,
most of them featuring the
young heroine he introduced
in the first, Dorothy Gale of
Kansas. Nearly all are terrific,
but the third may be the most
memorable: Ozma of Oz finds
Dorothy en route to Australia
by ship. After being blown into
the drink during a massive
storm, Dorothy lands not in
Oz but in a kingdom called the
Land of Ev, where she meets a
princess who keeps a closet of
interchangeable heads.THE POWER OF FANTASY
By N.K. Jemisin
9TH CENTURY
THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
This collection of folktales, also
known as One Thousand and
One Nights, has an infamous
framing device: Scheherazade,
the vizier’s daughter, is set to
be married then killed by the
king; she forestalls this fate by
persuading him to hear a story,
which she draws out for 1,001
nights by ending each on a cliff-
hanger. These short stories are
deeply misogynistic. They’re also
tremendously influential, having
shaped storytelling far beyond
the Islamic golden age when
they were initially compiled—the
earliest known printed page
dates to the 9th century.1485 LE MORTE D’ARTHUR
BY THOMAS MALORY
One of the earliest printed works
of the genre can be found in Le
Morte d’Arthur, French for “the
death of Arthur,” which has gone
on to inspire everyone from
Monty Python to Stephen King.
The 500-year-old text mixed and
matched its parts from the work
of many, all while inventing new
perspectives and themes—much
as the genre still does today.1865 ALICE’S ADVENTURES
IN WONDERLAND
BY LEWIS CARROLL
The tale of a curious girl who
falls down a rabbit hole into a
magical world never ceases to
ignite children’s imaginations.
The book helped to replace stiff
Victorian didacticism in children’s
literature with a looser, sillier
style that reverberated through
the writing of 20th century
authors as different as James
Joyce and Dr. Seuss. Amid
hundreds of derivative works (and
that’s a conservative estimate) in
mediums ranging from opera to
amusement-park rides to video
games, Disney’s 1951 animated
feature has become a classic
unto itself.Books
THE PANELISTS
TIME recruited eight best-sellingauthors to help nominate topworks and rate the contendershe world is stories.
Consider the “flat-earther” who
constructs elaborate chains of causa-
tion and meaning from facts that have
little to do with each other. Consider
bigotry, which does the same—and
yet we have built entire school cur-
ricula, legal systems, infrastructure
and industries around such ideas as “women can’t handle
pressure” and “poor people are lazy.” Why do we believe
one set of paranoid, questionable hypotheses and not an-
other? Why do we designate some people as “heroes” and
others as “villains,” and why are we so loath to change
those designations when the people in question turn out
to be just... people? How is it that we lately seem to have
become a society that cares more about compelling non-
sense than about boring rationality? Or were we always
that kind of society, and we just care more now because
the nonsense is hurting a broader swath of people?
These are fraught times—but there have always been
fraught times for someone in the world, somewhere. And
there have always been those whose mastery of the art
of storytelling has helped us understand how powerfully
stories shape the world. C.S. Lewis sought to comfort
children with faith. Philip Pullman disturbed them with
warnings of encroaching fascism. There are many stories
aimed at children on this list, possibly because we’re still
openly hungry for stories in childhood, and thus the ones
we absorb then have a lasting effect. That hunger doesn’t
really change when we grow up, however; the need is
still there, acknowledged or not—especially if the stories
we’ve been given up to that point don’t encapsulate real-
ity. Thus it’s fitting that some of the most powerful story-
tellers on this list, such as Victor LaValle, engage with
adult concerns like parenthood instead of myth.
Is it comforting to see how many of the stories on this
list wrestle with the need to reform institutions and lead-
ership? It could be. Yet the newer storytellers here, many
of whom hail from colonized cultures and thus have
vastly different backgrounds from those of “classic” fan-
tasy authors, also warn us of the realities of societal strife.
The good guys don’t always win, the bad guys don’t al-
ways lose, and either way, the ones who suffer most will
be the people who were already struggling to get by.
This is what both classic and modern fantasy teach us,
however: that you have to fight anyway. That sometimes
it is the journey, and not the final battle against some
Dark Lord or another, that defines who we are. That our
happy ending might very well depend on how loudly and
powerfully we tell our stories along the way. Don’t think
of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to
train for reality. It always has been, after all.