TITLE: Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created
AUTHOR: Laura Miller (Ed.)
GENRE: Non-Fiction
PUBLISHED: 01/11/2016
RATING: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ (0 stars)
PURCHASE LINKS: I refuse on moral grounds to include a purchase link to this piece of crap.
MOBILISM LINK: N/A
Review: I can’t remember the last time I read a book that made me this angry.
I probably shouldn’t be quite so mad. As a whole, this is a fluff-piece, clearly not meant seriously; as amply demonstrated by the shallow blurb-like summaries of each ‘literary wonderland’. Few of the ‘essays’ even quote from the material, and when they do, it’s only once; none of the ones I read (in the spirit of honesty, I should tell you that I only made it halfway through the book before wishing I had a paperback copy to set on fire, so it is theoretically possible that the essays in the latter half of the book are better) discuss what makes each wonderland worthy of inclusion among ‘the greatest’, or what effect each had on the readers and society of its time. Few give any meaningful cultural or historical background, and then only in crumb-form.
A book like this is probably always a risk: it’s probably impossible to make a list of the ‘greatest’ without upsetting someone. Someone will always be confused or offended that their particular favorites didn’t make the cut. And I will freely admit that I am not a personal fan of most of the works listed in the first three sections of the book (ANCIENT MYTH & LEGEND, SCIENCE & ROMANTICISM, and GOLDEN AGE OF FANTASY).
But there are some very gaping exclusions that I find personally unforgivable; The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th century Japan, inarguably the world’s first/oldest attributed novel (there are older pieces of literature, but we don’t know who wrote those), is one. Instead, Literary Wonderlands claims that honor for Don Quixote, written centuries later. There is also no mention of the Kalevala, the Finnish legendary epic which inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is recognized as being the foundation of Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings; Tolkien’s love of and fascination with the Kalevala is well-documented. For that reason alone, I would think the Kalevala ought to have been included, and that’s without delving into what an incredible, and extremely old, epic piece it is. Mary Shelley, despite almost universal agreement that her Frankenstein constitutes the first science fiction novel, is nowhere to be found either.
Who is the Shakespeare of imaginative fiction? For many it's a debate between HG Wells and Jules Verne…
In fact, that’s what first set alarm-bells ringing for me; a quick glance at the table of contents shows very few female authors listed at all. THE COMPUTER AGE includes Lois Lowry, Margaret Atwood, JK Rowling, Cornelia Funke, Susanna Clarke, Susanna Collins, Ann Leckie, and Nnedi Okorafor – eight names out of the 22 authors included in the section. NEW WORLD ORDER, which precedes it, includes Ursula Le Guin, Gerd Mjøen Brantenberg, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler - and that's all. Four names out of the 21 in that section.
There’s no mention of Madeleine L’Engle. No Anne Rice. No Connie Willis. Doris Lessing is mentioned in passing, but none of her works are featured, despite her having won the Nobel Prize for Literature. There’s no Marion Zimmer Bradley, who, while a disgusting piece of human trash, nonetheless produced multiple groundbreaking works in the fields of speculative fiction. NK Jemisin, Jacqueline Carey, Martha Wells, Catherynne Valente, and Kate Elliott have all created breathtaking and mindblowing fantasy and science fiction worlds, but none are included here. Julie E. Czerneda, C.J. Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bujold, James Tiptree Jr, Jo Walton, Mercedes Lackey, Mary Stewart, Anne Bishop, Meredith Ann Pierce, Jane Yolen, Joanna Russ, Patricia A. McKillip, Nicola Griffith, DIANA WYNNE JONES, Elizabeth Bear, Suzette Haden Elgin - I could sit here typing names for hours and yes, of course not all of these authors could have been included if the editors wanted to keep this book as fluffy and short as they clearly did. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that so many of them are missing.
If I’m being kind, I’ll theorise that there were two ways the editors chose which authors/works to include. Either they wanted works that featured secondary worlds/societies that were intricate, impressive, and groundbreaking – so, demonstrations of immense literary craft on the part of the author – or they wanted works that precipitated literary or cultural revolution. By either standard, most of the authors I just listed should have been included. How can anyone make a list of ‘greatest fictional worlds’ and exclude Diana Wynne Jones? How can you talk about the history of speculative fiction and ignore James Tiptree or Marion Zimmer Bradley?
The lack of female-authored works is enraging, but that’s all without touching on the airy fluff pieces of the essays themselves. As mentioned above, each one mostly summarises the plot of the work; as someone who studied the Odyssey for two years at A Level, the banal three-page blurb written on it for this book makes me want to scream. For example, there’s no mention of the incredible cleverness of the very language used in the Odyssey, word-play and cultural jokes only intelligible with some understanding of the time period and Ancient Greek itself. There’s no mention of the fact that ‘Homer’ almost certainly didn’t exist, or that modern scholarship is leaning more and more towards the idea of both the Odyssey and the Iliad as having been written by a woman. There’s no real explanation as to why the Odyssey is so groundbreaking and impressive, or why it has resonated so strongly with readers throughout human history.
And every piece is like that. Even when, as in the essay on The Water Babies, some of the motifs used in the text are decoded for non-Victorian Age readers, no mention is made of why, how, or even if the literary wonderland in question affected readers so strongly as to make it into this book. The standard by which these fictional worlds were selected for this collection is entirely missing; nor is there any explanation of why so many major pieces of fiction by women have been overlooked.
All in all, this is a stupidly pretentious fluff-piece whose authors prove their very unsuitability for crafting such a collection by their ignorance of those genres they purport to have studied so carefully. This is not a list of ‘the greatest’ any genuine speculative fiction fan can support, and the essays on each work do nothing to explain why even those greats included are so great.
On bended knee, I beg you: PLEASE do not buy this as a neat Yuletide gift for the spec-fic fan in your family. They might well beat you to death with it.
