Fantasy: The Genre That Remade Fiction
No genre has exerted more influence on contemporary popular fiction than fantasy. From the ancient mythological traditions that gave us Beowulf and the Norse Eddas to Tolkien's reconstruction of a specifically English mythology in The Lord of the Rings, fantasy has always been the mode through which cultures tell their most important stories.
Modern literary fantasy — the kind that wins the Hugo and Nebula Awards and appears on critic's best-of lists — is a far more sophisticated beast than its pulp origins might suggest. The best fantasy series deal with colonialism, grief, ecological collapse, gender, and power with a rigour and imagination that puts much mainstream literary fiction to shame.
The Greatest Fantasy Series of All Time
1. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
The foundational text of modern fantasy. Tolkien, a philologist, built Middle-earth from language outward — inventing Elvish before he wrote a word of narrative — and the result is an imaginary world of extraordinary depth and coherence. The trilogy invented secondary-world fantasy as a serious literary project. It won the International Fantasy Award and has been voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century in multiple reader polls. Our editorial score places it among the twenty highest-ranked books in our entire database.
2. The Broken Earth Trilogy — N.K. Jemisin
The first — and, to date, only — fantasy series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three consecutive years (2016, 2017, 2018, one for each volume). Jemisin's trilogy is set in a world of apocalyptic geological violence, narrated in the second person, and concerned centrally with race, power, and colonial trauma. It is the most critically decorated fantasy series of the twenty-first century and among the most formally experimental novels in the genre's history.
3. A Song of Ice and Fire — George R.R. Martin
Martin's unfinished epic rewrote the genre's conventions around protagonist immunity, heroic certainty, and clean moral binaries. The first five novels — particularly A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords — are major achievements in political fantasy, with a complexity of motivation among characters that rivals literary fiction. The series remains incomplete, with The Winds of Winter awaited for over a decade.
4. The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
Lewis's seven-volume children's fantasy series has never been out of print since the first volume appeared in 1950. The allegorical Christian symbolism is deliberate and pervasive — Aslan is explicitly Christ — but the world of Narnia transcends its theological scaffolding through the sheer warmth and vividness of its imagination. The BBC and TIME both place it among the greatest children's series in English literature.
5. His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman
The most intellectually serious fantasy trilogy of the 1990s, Pullman's anti-Narnia — a conscious answer to Lewis — marshals ideas from quantum physics, Gnostic theology, and William Blake into a story ostensibly for children. Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US) won the Carnegie Medal. The trilogy as a whole won the Whitbread Book of the Year, the only children's book ever to do so.
6. The Earthsea Cycle — Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's archipelago world, first explored in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), remains one of the most consistent and philosophically coherent fantasy universes ever created. The later volumes — particularly Tehanu (1990) — revisit the series' gender assumptions with a critical eye that makes the whole cycle richer for it. Le Guin is, for many critics, simply the finest prose stylist the genre has produced.
7. The Stormlight Archive — Brandon Sanderson
Sanderson's ongoing ten-volume epic is the most ambitious project in contemporary fantasy world-building. Four volumes complete, six planned — the series combines a hard-magic system of extraordinary intricacy with a cast of psychologically complex characters navigating a world of perpetual apocalyptic storm. Hugo Award winner twice, it is the defining fantasy series of the 2010s and 2020s for genre readers.
Emerging and Contemporary Series Worth Reading
The fantasy genre is in a golden age. Among the most critically acclaimed recent series: Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (standalone but pivotal), Seth Dickinson's The Masquerade trilogy, R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War trilogy (fantasy meets Chinese history in the Sino-Japanese War), and Travis Baldree's cosy fantasy Legends & Lattes — a counterpoint to the genre's default register of epic violence.
Where to Start
New to fantasy? The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings. Then A Wizard of Earthsea for something quieter and deeper. For contemporary fantasy at its most ambitious, The Fifth Season (volume one of The Broken Earth) is an ideal entry point.