“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, / ‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax — / Of cabbages — and kings — / And why the sea is boiling hot — / And whether pigs have wings.’”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”
—Lloyd Alexander

Speculative fiction—a genre that includes fantasy, science fiction and horror—subverts the normal. But whether it does that by creating an entirely new universe or by using our own world but rendering it slightly askew, speculative fiction provides a fresh way of looking at ourselves.  In this piece, I’m going to take you on a journey through some of these books.

Fantasy conjures up strange worlds. Worlds where magic is normal, where hobbits mix with elves, and where animals speak. A work of fantasy can transport you to an unfamiliar place, but a place that, through skilful world-building, can start to seem familiar.

One of the great world builders is, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy are books that many of us grew up with, and now, thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, have become even more entrenched in popular culture.

Mervyn Peake is another master world builder. A contemporary of Tolkien, but not as well known, he is the author of the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone). His books are about a castle called Gormenghast, which is governed by strict rules and rituals. There is no magic or anything supernatural—just some very skilful writing that brings this strange place, with its very odd humans, to life.

Another world builder I admire is Susanna Clarke. Her two novels, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Piranesi are very different but vividly written. The first is a historical novel, set in 19th century England during the Napoleonic Wars. Practical magic has been outlawed but two men practice it: Mr. Norrell, and his protégé and rival, Jonathan Strange. Things start to go wrong when Mr. Norrell summons the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair—an old and dangerous creature—to bring a woman back from the dead.

In Piranesi, the protagonist lives in a vast labyrinth of halls that is filled with statues, with an ocean in the basement and clouds in the attic. That is his entire world. He lives on fish and seaweed and spends his days wandering through the labyrinth. This is a strange and compelling book, made real by the way Clarke describes the House.

And then there is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, about a circus that seems to appear out of nowhere and disappears just as suddenly, a magic circus where everything is in black and white. It is captivating, and I wish the circus really existed.

Science fiction also takes us to different worlds, including to dystopian futures. In Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World, a black fog has destroyed the earth, killing everything in its path—except for a small island with half a mile of ocean surrounding it, around which scientists have created a protective layer. The people on the island seem to be happy. But why do the islanders wake up with cuts and bruises that they did not have when they went to bed?

N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is set at a time when the continents have merged into a single whole, ironically known as The Stillness. It is a land in constant flux, subject to regular cataclysms. The Stillness is populated by different species, with a caste system in place. The book tells three interlinked stories about women who defy the system.

There are books that take place in a world much like our own but where something is not quite right. In The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier writes about a flight from Paris to New York in March 2021 that runs into turbulence. It eventually lands. Three months later, the same flight lands in New York—with an identical crew and passengers. So now there are two versions of the same people. What really happened on the flight?

One of my favourites is Rian Hughes’s XX, a tour de force of imagination and inventiveness. A radio telescope detects a signal from outer space, a signal that is leaked online and goes viral. This is the beginning of a book that is hard to describe: Hughes interweaves astronomy, history, technology, ideas, and science fiction into a complex whole, using graphics, typefaces, magazine pages, emails, and much more to tell his story.

Some authors use fantasy as a way to look at real events. In Glory, NoViolet Bulawayo uses the premise of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, setting it in Zimbabwe during the last days of Robert Mugabe’s rule. The Old Horse (Mugabe) is on his last legs, and the pit bulls, led by the Old Horse’s rival, are closing in. A biting satire that does not gloss over the brutality of the regime.

Ahmed Sadaawi also bases his novel on a classic: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein in Baghdad takes place in the early 2000s. Hadi, a junk dealer, worries that people blown up by bombs do not always get a decent burial. He tries to help by collecting bits of bodies and stitching them together to make a whole. But then Hadi himself is blown up, and his soul slips into the body he has created. He sets out to wreak vengeance on those responsible for the deaths. A book with plenty of black humour.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka takes us to Sri Lanka, where a gay war photographer is murdered because he has taken damning photographs of the civil war. Maali Almeida’s soul, stuck in the In Between, wanders around Colombo, trying to convey the location of his photos to his lover and his best friend so they can expose war crimes. In his wanderings, he eavesdrops on conversations and bumps into the souls of the murdered. A powerful and angry book about the costs of war.

Lithuanian writer Jaroslavas Melnikas and Brazilian writer Lula Falcão use short stories to criticize the regimes in their countries. The stories in Melnikas’s The Last Day have echoes of the totalitarian state, which would take care of you as long as you did what you were told and never questioned it. The protagonists tend to lack agency, merely accepting whatever befalls them. Falcão’s Vultures in the Living Room is a collection of surreal stories about dictators, the diminishing middle class and environmental catastrophe. I should also include Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia here, a collection of dreamlike stories written during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime.

And, of course, there are ghost stories: the eerie, disconcerting tales of M.R. James and E.F. Benson, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House about a group of people researching paranormal activity, and Guyanese writer Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute about a man pursued by the ghost of a flute-playing Dutchman.

Authors sometimes use ghosts to write about social mores. The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke, set in England and Scotland during the 1950s and 60s, is about a stately home where unmarried pregnant women are sent to have their babies. But the home is near a mysterious forest, said to be haunted by an evil presence. Many of the women here defy convention and have to pay the price. An unmarried mother is also at the centre of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. A young lawyer is hired to sort through the papers of a dead woman in her home, where he is besieged by an angry ghost. In The Hacienda, which is about a young woman moving to her husband’s haunted hacienda, Isabel Cañas writes about the position of women during the early years of Mexico’s independence.

I could go on: David Liss’s The Pecularities, about magic in London at the turn of the 20th century; Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, where you can slip into an alternative world by taking an emergency exit off a highway; Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G.—The Vanishing, where a man wakes up to find he is the only human left; and Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, where an ex-Detective on the trail of a runaway wife finds herself in the Russian taiga, while strange things happen around her.

There are fantasy books that draw on folk tales: Amos Tutola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard that uses Yoruba mythology; Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf for which James uses African mythology (he calls it an African Game of Thrones), and Wu Cheng’en’s Monkey King: Journey to the West, a Chinese classic written in 1592.

Finally, two very different books that I love: The Shining by Stephen King, about a malevolent hotel that feeds off weakness. Jack Torrance is hired to look after the Overlook Hotel when it closes in winter. This is more than just a horror story: it is about the darkness we carry within us. Jack and his wife Wendy are far more nuanced in the book than in the film, which makes the story more disturbing.

The second is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, which I think is a subversive masterpiece. Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon, have been living on earth as representatives of Heaven and Hell. But when the Anti-Christ is born and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse come calling, they have to join forces to save the Earth.

I love speculative fiction and the way it twists reality to reveal truths. It is an alternative way of looking at our world, and by changing our perspectives, it gives us a fresh look at things that we take for granted.

You can find more books under Fantasy/Sci-Fi and Ghost stories/Horror. However, I hope you will do more than that: I hope you will read the books and allow yourself to be transported to strange new (but oddly familiar) worlds.

You can also read the Talking About Books interviews with Stuart Turton, Rian Hughes and David Liss.

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This is my last post for 2025. I will be back in mid-January. Happy holidays!