Classic Fantasy Books

We begin classic fantasy at Tolkien, but we could also have begun with Victorian fantasy, or indeed with the ‘taproot stories’ that you trace in An Introduction to Fantasy. What major developments are we skipping over by starting our list with Tolkien?

Quite a lot. There’s a really helpful division in Brian Attebery’s book, Strategies of Fantasy. On the one hand, fantasy is a mode that operates throughout time – a means of making arguments about the way the world is by imagining the ways it can’t be. It’s a playful thing. This kind of fantasy is partly a capability of language: you can speak things that don’t exist, and fantasy comes from that capability. Fantasy in this sense arises with culture, and it’s there in a lot of early literature.

Then there’s an argument that fantasy developed with – or against – the idea of scientific realism. Fantasy was the stuff that didn’t quite fit in a strict rationalist box, preserving other ways of thinking. So there’s an 18th or 19th century sharpening of distinctions, and Attebery calls that the emergence of fantasy as a genre. He argues that fantasy as a formula, as a bookshop category, arises after Tolkien.

This list is fantasy in the bookshop category sense, but there’s definitely a broader, longer history of fantasy. That’s important even if you’re only focusing on 20th- and 21st-century books, because fantasy is obsessed with older literature in all sorts of ways. The modern books that are most obviously responding to poets like Edmund Spenser and John Milton, or to medieval romance, are fantasies, rather than literary fiction.

I’ve chosen more recent books partly to get the list down to five, which was already difficult. But I think I’ve also chosen books which look back to older forms. There’s a lot of pre-fantasy and earlier fantasy that’s really interesting: knowingly describing the world in a way it isn’t to say something about the way it is.

You’ve written about your preference for a flexible, community-based model of fantasy rather than a canon of monuments – so it seems cruel to ask you to choose five books. What were your criteria?

Oh, it’s fine, you can still have a reading list. I hung my selection on the word ‘classic’. I have quite an ambivalent relationship with that word, because it carries the sense of a book that gets held up and used to say that all other books are less good. I don’t think that’s a helpful definition of classic. I prefer the idea that a classic is a book that enables other kinds of books to be written; it opens new discussions and ways of seeing. So The Iliad is a classic, not because it’s old and has been respected for a long time, but because it provides really good ways of talking about war and human frailties, and it’s been endlessly generative. So I’ve chosen books that I think have facilitated later fantasy writing, or which have that potential.

The books I’ve chosen are also weird and distinct in themselves. I think sometimes people think of classics as being the mainstream books – the obvious monuments – but often they’re strange books that are so interesting that you can’t ignore them. I think all the books I’ve chosen do something very distinctive extremely well. So they are also classics in the sense of a really accomplished piece of work.

Your first choice certainly meets all those criteria: let’s begin with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Please tell us about it.

I was unsure whether I wanted to put Tolkien on this list, because if you’re looking at a list of fantasy classics, you probably already know about The Lord of the Rings. It’s an obvious book to recommend, it starts modern bookshop fantasy. Once it became really popular in the 1960s, publishers started assembling other older books for people who liked Tolkien, producing initiatives such as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. And then people started producing new works in response – so it’s a generative book. In that sense, anyone who knows fantasy will know it.

I wanted to put it on the list regardless, because I think it’s also a really good book in ways that people don’t necessarily recognise. We sometimes forget how accomplished and how strange Tolkien is, because he is such a monument. His classic status can sometimes block us from seeing what he’s actually doing. For example, people often describe The Lord of the Rings as a simple struggle, good versus evil – but while there are definitely evil forces and good forces in Tolkien, it’s not a book where the good guys win uncomplicatedly. There’s a lot of suffering and a lot of loss. It’s a book where certain ways of existing are slowly slipping out of the world and being replaced. And it’s a book that’s pretty sharp on the ways people can delude themselves. Saruman is a good example there: he wants to create an orderly, lawful world guided by right-thinking people. He just thinks that it’s pragmatic and justified to ally with Sauron for a bit to do that, so that you can then overthrow him. So he gets onto that slippery slope of pragmatic, lesser-of-two-evils decision-making.

I also think people have a sense that The Lord of the Rings has a single tone – that it’s generic fantasy writing. One of the brilliant things about it is how carefully it guides you into its world. If you read the first couple of chapters and then jump to, say, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the language sounds completely different, but you don’t really notice that when you’re reading the book, because Tolkien’s carried you into his world so carefully.

And you mentioned that they’re strange books too – that really struck me – they are, but it’s easy to overlook now.

Yes. Because Tolkien worked on the books for so long, they have a sense of strangeness, with older ideas that he can’t quite give up remaining in there alongside later influences. The Lord of the Rings has been carefully shaped, but it’s the product of a substantial chunk of Tolkien’s life, and I think that carries across. I don’t think many writers have had the chance to keep something in their head for so long. It’s such a difficult thing to devote time to, but Tolkien’s work really benefits from that commitment and idiosyncrasy.

The Lord of the Rings also benefits from the ways that it’s not like certain kinds of earlier romance. Another thing that people sometimes reduce The Lord of the Rings to is Aragorn’s story. But you’re repeatedly told, including by Aragorn himself, that it’s not principally Aragorn’s story: it’s Frodo’s story. It’s the story of the hobbits. Aragorn cannot win against Sauron. The only way you can win is through this weird subterfuge mission done by seemingly entirely unsuitable people. A lot of later fantasies end up bundling Aragorn and Frodo back into the same character in a far less interesting manner. It’s a book about needing a community to assemble, and that’s something that people sometimes neglect about it –  it’s about a coalition of diverse peoples coming together, perhaps to try and preserve the world the way they like it, or perhaps to try and make a better world.

It has such great set-pieces as well. I always come back to the terrible flowers by the bridge that Frodo and Sam encounter, the Watcher in the Water, the blindfolded journey into Lothlórien, the Barrow-wight scene… There are a lot of really great fantasy moments in The Lord of the Rings.

You mentioned people bundling Aragorn and Frodo together… There is a lot of criticism of fantasy that’s ‘derivative’ of The Lord of the Rings, but in An Introduction to Fantasy, you make the case – very convincingly – that iteration in fantasy is positive. What was the legacy of The Lord of the Rings for books that followed?

The books that take things up from The Lord of the Rings nearly always change them in various ways. It’s almost inevitable. I don’t believe there are many direct copies in the way that people sometimes suggest. The book that usually gets bashed for being a scene-for-scene imitation is Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara. But The Sword of Shannara is half the length of The Lord of the Rings. If you compress the action like that, you’re making it into an adventure. And there are ways in which Brooks does more interesting things than Tolkien… Brooks doesn’t have wholly evil races, for example, in the way that Tolkien does. Even by that point, authors had picked up that that might not be the best route to go down. A lot of later writers have picked up various things from The Lord of the Rings while rejecting others.

There are a lot of positive things that people have drawn from The Lord of the Rings. It’s a resource that you can do all sorts of things with – I mean, it’s slightly disturbing that people love naming arms and surveillance companies after things from Lord of the Rings, for example – but it’s influential in all sorts of directions. But there are also bits of The Lord of the Rings that have been less drawn upon. There’s still a lot there that can be used or productively questioned.

It’s created a space for fantasy on bookshelves, but it doesn’t determine everything that can be done in that space. The space it’s opened up is facilitative. I think people could probably do with paying a bit less attention to The Lord of the Rings and a bit more attention to the interesting things that other fantasy writers are doing. But, still, The Lord of the Rings is pretty great, and I don’t think it’s a problem that people build substantial parts of their lives around it. The fact that people find so much in it is a testament to that enabling aspect of its classic status.

There are also a lot of great fantasy writers who don’t like The Lord of the Rings very much and who’ve picked other touchstones. We’ll talk about Mervyn Peake later. One of the reasons I put Peake on the list is that he’s often held up by people who don’t like Tolkien very much as an alternative fountain for fantasy to flow from.

I really enjoyed the defence of iteration in your book.

There’s an assumption that people have inherited from Romanticism that good literary work is made by geniuses doing things that people have never done before. But people are always using existing resources. No one invents language or culture from the ground up when they start writing. A nicer way to think about culture is that we have a common stock of stuff that we’re interested in, that we agree is good, but that we’re also prepared to critique: a toolbox that we take things out of so we can modify them and put them back. We’re able to make old stories and tropes do things that they weren’t doing before, making them new and fresh again. And I think fantasy is the genre that most clearly models that. Perhaps fairy stories are the obvious example: people pick up a fairy story and think, “What about this character who’s been pushed to the side?”, or, “I don’t really like the passivity of this character. Let’s write it with them doing a bit more…”, or, “This character resonates with this experience that I have with my sexuality, or with neurodivergence, or something else… Let’s take the story and play with that”. So stories become facilitative means of talking about our lives, rather than closed systems that you can only look at and say, “Oh, that’s great, but I could never do something like that.” I think the best thing about fantasy is that it teaches you how to construct fantasies of your own, empowering you to tell your own stories.

You already mentioned Mervyn Peake – could you introduce us to your second choice, Gormenghast?

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast comes out at a pretty similar time to Tolkien. It’s a book that fantasy writers who are less keen on Tolkien often hold up as the one that inspires them. Michael Moorcock, who famously thinks Tolkien is deeply conservative and unpleasant in all sorts of ways and limits what fantasy can be; China Miéville similarly – they’re both big Peake fans. I don’t think you have to choose between Tolkien and Peake, necessarily, but I think Peake is doing something that’s a bit different.

There’s no real magic in Peake; there are no wizards as such. Instead, there’s this enormous castle – that’s what he usually calls it – which is Gormenghast. It sprawls over vast distances and is inhabited by deeply weird people living by strange rituals. It begins pretty Gothic in the first book. The second book opens out and is a bit sunnier. In the third book, Titus Alone, the principal character leaves Gormenghast and travels into a strange city, which is surprisingly modern based on what you’ve come to expect from the first book… Peake was unwell when he was writing the third book, and sometimes the difference has been attributed to that. I’m less sympathetic to that argumen because if you look at the drafts, which are in the British Library, it’s very clear that he’s trying to change his writing style when he’s writing the outside-Gormenghast stuff, trying to go for something more like Samuel Beckett. Titus Alone makes you really disappointed that it’s not set in Gormenghast, but that’s by design. It’s about missing Gormenghast and being somewhere else.

One of the things Peake does really well is write about his weird characters in deeply sympathetic ways. Gormenghast is about a community of people who can’t quite connect or communicate with each other, and who rely on rituals to set the boundaries of their lives. That’s the environment in which the central character, Titus Groan, grows up; and the environment that Steerpike, who starts seeming heroic but becomes more villainous, takes advantage of – because Steerpike is a brilliant manipulator of people, and the fact that people in Gormenghast don’t talk to each other very well makes it easy for him to manipulate them. It’s a weird book to read, because you can admire Steerpike as the most active character, the one who’s trying to change things, but he’s ripping apart the world of these people who you’re also quite sympathetic towards. It’s interesting.

Peake is a brilliant prose stylist in all sorts of ways. He writes very beautifully about the castle, and he really conjures up its slow rhythms. It’s a book that will stop you from reading it fast. If you’re someone who’s used to being able to go through books quickly, you will lose the thread, because the prose is deliberately quite labyrinthine and lumbering. It’s designed to slow you down so that you feel the weight of Gormenghast itself, and you need to let the prose do that work on you. But its enchantment is a very powerful one. People who can slow down to its pace usually get drawn in.

It’s a key example for fantasy world-building, right?

Yes. It gives this incredible sense of place. That’s partly through the prose. Peake’s also a very effective stager of scenes. He has a really brilliant bravura scene at the beginning where Steerpike is climbing over the roofs of Gormenghast, looking through windows and dropping in and out, and is in danger of various kinds…

Peake is prepared to skip periods of years where not very much happens. He puts you next to lots of different characters, so you can see how they see the world. At the same time, he denies you access to certain characters’ minds. So the world building is done through glimpses of this strange society, being put next to different characters, through the tone of the prose, and through providing strange but believable interactions.

I think my personal favourite scene is when Titus has rebelled and is being kept imprisoned in a place called the Lichen Fort. His headmaster, Bellgrove, turns up to try and scold him. He’s terrible at scolding, so they end up playing marbles instead. After a while, another quite sympathetic character arrives, and the headmaster looks up, embarrassed… But they just all end up playing marbles for ages. It’s the kind of weird, trivial thing that a lot of writers would not have thought to put in their fantasy. It’s a really wonderful little scene, in this world where people often can’t build bridges of sympathy to one another, but it does happen for a moment. Peake’s great at that kind of variation: he writes characters who feel like believably weird and dysfunctional people, and then he puts them together and wonderful things ensue.

Speaking of weird and dysfunctional, let’s talk about your third choice for this list of classic fantasy books. Please tell us about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan, from The Earthsea Cycle.

I would put Le Guin beside Tolkien as another great example of what fantasy can be. Le Guin is brief, where Tolkien verges on the prolix. Le Guin writes beautifully clear, well-defined prose. She is a brilliant ethical thinker. I could have chosen almost any of the Earthsea books here. I chose this one just because it’s my favourite. The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, is the story of the male protagonist Ged, who is proud and has his pride rebuked, and then goes on an island-to-island journey where he is first fleeing from, and then trying to reckon with, a shadow that he has raised. Then you read the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, and you expect it to be the further adventures of Ged… and it is absolutely not that.

You are on an island on the edge of the world that you encountered in the first book, and you spend most of the time with a fairly young girl, Tenar, who has been made the high priestess of terrifying underground powers. It’s mainly about her very restricted life in this temple community. And it’s wonderful in a completely different way to the first book, really spooky and worrying. There are points where it verges into genuine horror. But in the end, it’s a hopeful book about the ways that, although our upbringings will never quite leave us, we can move beyond them.

Eventually, Ged does wander into the story, but it takes quite a long time, and you stick with Tenar throughout. Like Gormenghast, it’s about a sense of place – although the Tombs are not as big and sprawling as Gormenghast is. This is a tight and defined community, with a very small number of powerful people in it. It’s about intense loneliness, in a lot of ways. Le Guin writes that really well. She’s very good at writing sympathetic, believably adolescent adolescents.

Unlike Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings, it’s a short book. I think it’s always nice to see that you don’t have to have a lot of words to do really good things in fantasy, and Le Guin is a great example of that. I read it very young, and it has haunted me ever since. When I return to it and think I remember it very well, there are always more things in it that I’ve forgotten.

You’ve written about how often language and magic are tied together in fantasy; that’s certainly true here.

Yes – that goes back to the way that genre fantasy relates to the larger sense of fantasy as a form that loves the ability of language to create new things. So in Earthsea, there’s a form of language called the True Speech, which wizards use. If you name something in the True Speech, you have power over it. This becomes more complicated as the series goes on.

It’s a power with very definite limits, which has to be used responsibly. It’s tied up with the idea of a balance. One of the interesting things in Tombs of Atuan is that Ged is denied most of his magic for most of the book. Le Guin has spent the whole of the previous book getting him to the point where he can use his power responsibly, but in fact, what he needs to use in Tombs is his capacity for sympathy. The thing that makes him succeed in that book is his ability to reach out to this very scared, very lonely person, and help her rebuild her sense of herself as an individual, rather than as a servant of the powers underground. Le Guin’s wizards aren’t good because they have magic. They’re able to use their magic in good and interesting ways because of the ways they think as people. They build up experiences, and they learn from their mistakes.

I think the other brilliant thing about Earthsea as a series is that Le Guin looks back at the first three books later on in her career and realizes, “Hang on, I’ve messed up various things. If I’m building a fantasy world that is equitable in the ways that I want the world to be equitable, I need to acknowledge women’s agency in different ways. I need to think more about what my dragons should be doing…” And then, without invalidating anything in the first three books, she writes two more novels and a short story collection that make Earthsea better and richer.

Since we’ve brought up women’s agency in fantasy, let’s talk about your next choice: Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Patricia McKillip is consistently brilliant and does not seem to be read as much as she should be. You can pick up almost any Patricia McKillip book and have an amazing time. She’s a brilliant writer sentence-by-sentence. I picked this one, which is quite an early McKillip, partly because it has that status as a classic: it’s been reprinted in the Fantasy Masterworks, it won the first World Fantasy Award… In some ways, it’s a book written with the purpose of expanding what fantasy can do. If you read interviews with McKillip, you learn that she wrote it very deliberately with a female protagonist, because that was something she wasn’t seeing in fantasy. There’s an important strand of writers doing that, including Le Guin and Tamora Pierce, but McKillip was thinking about writing believable, interesting, active women in fantasy pretty early.

She’s also a good representative of the fantasy tradition that draws more strongly on fairy tale, which I think sometimes gets blocked by the epic or romance-inflected tradition that was more important to Tolkien. But there’s a long line of fairy-tale fantasy going back through people like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Hope Mirrlees to Victorian writers, and forwards to modern fantasy through writers like Terri Windling and Robin McKinley, and works such as John Crowley’s Little, Big. That line often gets subsumed beneath the epic books following Tolkien, but it’s equally interesting and important.

Like a lot of fairy story writing in the 1970s and 80s, McKillip’s work applies quite a critical lens. The central character, Sybel, has very powerful magic, but she’s grown up with her forgotten beasts and her almost silent father in the woods, and has the social skills you would expect from that. One of the things she has to do is learn how to operate with other people in ways that will make her comfortable. She’s the child of a coercive relationship, and there are some really serious questions raised about coercive relationships in the book.

McKillip writes great magical beasts. The greedy dragon, the amazing falcon, the wise boar…. While they’re all called and bound to Sybel, they have goals and ideas of their own. They’re not resenting service necessarily – you get a real sense of how the relationships Sybel builds with them become her ethical compass in a rather wonderful way towards the end of the book. It has the stuff of epic fantasy – kings and princes and magic – but it’s also about the building of weird communities between unusual people, and I think McKillip’s very good at that.

Sounds like it’s doing some interesting subversive storytelling.

Some later McKillips are perhaps more deliberately subversive. I really love Alphabet of Thorn, which is about people who live in a magical school and a library, and which feels like it’s building to a military crisis – but McKillip’s not really that interested in military crises, so it goes in a completely different direction. Or The Bards of Bone Plain, which is about a world where magic seems to have slipped away, but you realize as you move through that magic is always working subtly, woven through everything. McKillip is really wonderful at writing about consequences, and about characters building genuinely interesting connections. She doesn’t just rely on romance to create meaningful bonds. Often, there’s quite a complicated webbing together of her characters for different kinds of genuine reasons. Like Le Guin, she doesn’t usually write enormously long books; Ombria in Shadow is quite chunky, but most of them are 200 to 300 pages. If you’re a fast reader, you can read one in an evening or a couple of days, and you will have a great time doing so.

We’ve come to your last choice. Could you introduce us to Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories?

The final choice was a tricky one. I picked this one partly because it’s one of my favourite books of the past ten years or so. People can get hung up on the idea that ‘classics’ can only be older books, but I think there are still fantasy classics being written at a pretty steady clip. I think this book is a good candidate for classic status, partly because it’s in a loving-but-critical conversation with other fantasy, and partly because the writing is so good. It’s a book about a rebellion, sort of, although it’s actually stories told around that conflict: not much time is spent on the conflict itself. It’s a story told through the voices of women who are usually pushed aside in epic fantasy stories. The principal characters are a soldier, a scholar, a singer and a socialite, all very different people, each of whom gets about eighty pages to tell their story in their own way.

It’s a book about loving epic fantasy, but also about the problems with it. The world building is really good, the character writing is really good, but it’s also about what happens after conflicts, and what happened before. We end with the socialite character who, in some of the other stories, appears like she’s a little bit shallow – although you’re always led to believe that you’re probably judging her wrong – and then when you get to her section, you realise that she’s been part of a wholly different kind of story that you haven’t really understood until quite late in the book. It’s a great book for having a whole series of stories intersecting in ways that throw light on one another. So the scholar has this very complicated relationship with her overbearing father, which determines her life. The singer’s story is about a romantic relationship with the soldier, but after terrible things have happened to them. It’s telling an epic fantasy narrative, but through a series of different perspectives, building out a world.

Sofia Samatar is a really good shaper of prose. I think I’d apply that to all of the writers I’ve selected in their different ways. Samatar is definitely a lusher writer than someone like Le Guin, although there’s a lot of depth in Le Guin’s ostensibly pretty simple prose… The Winged Histories is just a wonderful book, and one that is not read as widely as it should be. So I wanted to put it on this list to draw more attention to it.

I know you had a lot of candidates for this classic fantasy list… Could you tell us a few of the contenders?

There are lots of other brilliant recent books. I would have liked to add Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which is another book that is astonishingly brilliant in what it does, and not as widely known as it should be. I loved C. S. E. Cooney’s Saint Death’s Daughter recently; I think that’s the book that’s come closest to evoking some of the pleasures I used to get from reading a new Pratchett. Saying that, I cannot believe I haven’t put Terry Pratchett on this list. My favourite Terry Pratchett is Witches Abroad, but you can pick almost any Discworld book – they’re pretty consistently good.

I feel slightly guilty for not having put a big fantasy series on the list. If people would like a big series, the two I enjoy most are two quite different ones. I really like Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings books: she builds a world with geopolitical crises, but it’s tightly focused on the growth of its characters. It’s also about the slow return of dragons and various other things. She’s an incredible writer of first-person perspectives. The other series I think is a really impressive achievement is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, which is completely different in that it has an enormous cast and a vast geographical range – twice he hops you to an entirely new continent for a new book. It’s a brilliant feat of scale. Erikson generally doesn’t spend a lot of time sitting in one character’s head, but his writing never surrenders its keen eye for human idiosyncrasies. It’s ostensibly a military fantasy, but it rapidly becomes about the value of compassion.

It’s always so tricky to choose. I’ve gone with Anglophone fantasy, but there’s a lot of great fantasy you could talk about in other languages. In my Introduction I spend quite a lot of time talking about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which I genuinely think is one of the best books ever written. I think a lot of people who like fantasy will get the things that it’s doing, and will really love that book. And there are just so many more… I love E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, which is a strange book and will not be to everyone’s taste, and Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist is another wonderful 1920s book with a strong line of influence. N. K. Jemisin, of course. Kelly Link, especially the short stories, and especially ‘Magic for Beginners’. I’m sure some people will be annoyed that I didn’t put Gene Wolfe on this list… I’ve been really enjoying Adrian Tchaikovsky recently. I have no idea how he writes so fast yet so consistently. City of Last Chances is the one I would recommend to fantasy fans, although he has a wonderful Jane-Austen-crossed-with-low-fantasy war novel called Guns of the Dawn, which I also really liked. I’m very fond of Joe Abercrombie – my favourite is Best Served Cold – and I think a lot more people will be reading him, because it appears that James Cameron has just picked up his most recent book…

That’s a great list. We’ve covered a lot of the ideas from An Introduction to Fantasy in the course of this chat. Do you want to mention any of the other points you make there, for anyone embarking on fantasy reading?

We already talked about the value of iteration, which is an argument I wrote because people interested in fantasy are often asked, “Isn’t it all just the same?” – so it’s useful to have a good answer to that question in your back pocket.

The other argument that’s important to me in that book is about fantasy as a community, rather than as a series of Great Books. What I want in a fantasy classic is a story that people feel they can live in, and can take things away from and expand on. They might have critiques or concerns, but a good fantasy can accommodate those sorts of expansions and dissensions. There’s an openness to fantasy that I think is really important. A good fantasy invites you to collaborate in making a world, and that’s a powerful thing. Fantasy’s not a closed book that you just admire. It’s a living genre that teaches you how to do it.

All these books do that. It’s very clear that lots of people have learned from Tolkien, but I think most writers could learn a lot from Samatar. Lots of people have drawn on McKillip, and Peake gets used in that way. Le Guin has a brilliant book, Steering the Craft, where she gives her advice on writing. She believes utterly in the power of art, but she also believes pragmatically that you can learn to write better by doing it and by thinking about process. She has high ambitions for the things that literature can achieve by making us see different worlds, but she also drives home the idea that you can’t just do that without learning how from others. I think that’s a really good way to approach fantasy, and it’s something that all of these writers do. For me, these are wonderful books because they’ve been worked at by people who care about them, people who wrote them in order to show new worlds to their audiences, to make them think and feel, but perhaps also act and change.