Time Magazine's 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time

Picked by a Panel of "Leading Fantasy Authors"

A friend of mine sent me a message this week about Time Magazines “100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.” I don't watch or read mainstream “news” media so was completely unaware of this list. I quickly found it.

The list is from late 2019 or early 2020.

“With a panel of leading fantasy authors—N.K. Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, Sabaa Tahir, Tomi Adeyemi, Diana Gabaldon, George R.R. Martin, Cassandra Clare and Marlon James—TIME presents the most engaging, inventive and influential works of fantasy fiction, in chronological order beginning in the 9th century”

The list is chronological with The Arabian Nights as the first entry. Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur is #2. Then you have Lewis Carroll, Edith Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, two from C. S. Lewis, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Two entries by Amos Tutuola (?). T. H. White, Roald Dahl, Madeleine L'Engle, Peter S. Beagle, Mary Stewart. Two from Ursula K. LeGuin. Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner? Come on. It is competently written but I don't remember much about it.

Robert Jordan, Diana Wynne Jones, Diana Gabaldon, Guy Gavriel Kay, Neil Gaiman, J. K. Dowling, Philip Pullman. Our buddy George R. R. Martin. Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss. Three entries by N. K. Jemisin (!).

56 titles from around 2000 (A.D.) to the present. I am not familiar with Rebecca Ronhorse, C.L. Polk, Marlon James, Tomi Adeyemi, R. F. Kuang, Tasha Suri, Anna-Marie McLemore, Roshani Chokshi, Fonda Lee, Victor Lavelle, Neon Yang, Renee Ahdieh, Sabaa Tahir, Leigh Bardugo, Kelly Link. You get the picture. Maybe there is something of interest to me but I doubt it. The list looks like something a United Nations committee put together.

Conspicuously missing:

Robert E. Howard

A. Merritt,

H. P. Lovecraft

Clark Ashton Smith

Michael Moorcock

Jack Vance

Poul Anderson

Andre Norton

C. L. Moore

Alan Garner

E. R. Eddison

Lord Dunsany

Fritz Leiber

Tanith Lee

H. Rider Haggard

George MacDonald

Mervyn Peake

I would even throw in Michael Shea and Fletcher Pratt.

Interesting to see the panel of “leading fantasy authors” include their own books while excluding Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance.

This list does not surprise me. It is another symptom of people having no sense of historical perspective and general ignorance of anything more than 20 years old. My reading is on a sliding scale. I read very little published after 1990 and a good portion of my reading was originally published before 1950. I started reading fantasy about the time Del Rey Books got revved up with Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson. You could cover foundational fantasy without too much time and effort. The dreck had not buried the genre yet.

How can you not include Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword?