The Best Fantasy Novels of the Past Decade

Let’s start with the trilogy that won three successive Hugos from 2016 to 18, and the 2018 Nebula too – the Broken Earth trilogy by N K Jemisin, beginning with The Fifth Season. 

The world of these books is so unsettling and compelling, really brilliantly drawn. We’re on a planet disrupted periodically by its climate, a harsh period known as ‘the fifth season’. People live within comms; a special sort of person, an orogene, should not stay in a normal comm, and should instead be sent to the Fulcrum and trained by Guardians. They have supernatural control over energy, particularly the seismic, and can be dangerous if uncontrolled.

We follow three orogenes with different relationships to this system of governance. It’s deeply unnerving. There’s an image early on in the book, where one of our three protagonists is being taken from her home by a Guardian as a child, and he is telling her a story as they ride. His strong hands are wrapped around hers, and she is starting to feel soothed. Then, at the relevant point in the story, he breaks her hands.

This is Jemisin’s gift – finding the unpredictable, creating a fascinatingly uncertain world that will force you not to look away. All three books won the Hugo, one after the other, three years in a row.

That must be a rare honour?

It’s the only trilogy to win a Hugo for all three books, and Jemisin is the only writer to win it three years back-to-back. It’s a big deal!

Meanwhile in 2016 and 2017, the Nebula prize also went to fantasy novels.  First there was Naomi Novik’s Uprooted – could you introduce us?

Yes! I adore this book! A wizard known as the Dragon takes a girl once every ten years from the villages in a valley; in return, he protects the valley from the Wood, a forest that occasionally corrupts livestock or lost humans with violent madness, and is constantly trying to encroach on more territory. Our hero Agnieszka is an unlikely choice for the Dragon, so of course she is chosen. In his castle she discovers and begins to develop her magical talents.

Thus far the book is folkloric and unsurprising, although beautifully told. But as the Wood steps up its strategies in this slow war, the story becomes incredibly gripping and strange. It is impossible to be quite sure who is in the grip of the Wood, and therefore who is safe to trust. The exact nature of the Wood itself is slowly, beautifully revealed. You read on because of genuine fear for everyone involved, and because of the beauty of the magic – the good magic and the evil – which is truly entrancing.

In the 2017 Nebula winner, All The Birds In the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, witchcraft is again associated with nature…

Yes – Anders plays with the trope very explicitly. There are two children: one can (frustratingly infrequently!) speak to animals. One is a scientific genius. The two are on course to represent fantasy and sci fi archetypes, and – according to a vision seen by a morose and largely inept assassin – eventually destroy the world.

This book is so much fun. From the moment Patricia, our witch, talks to a bird who introduces himself as Dirrpidirrpiwheepalong, you know you are in the hands of a capable entertainer. It’s pacy, it’s unpredictable, it’s inventive. And it is very playful about the tropes of nature and magic going hand in hand – very intelligently playful, questioning this separation of ‘nature’ as its own other realm.

Then in 2019, 2020 and 2021, both awards went to sci fi novels…

Yes! The next fantasy winner was in 2022, for the Nebula.

Tell us about it – this is P Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn.

This follows on from the short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo. We’re in 1912 Cairo. All the global politics of the real world is underway there, but inconveniently, djinn are real and rampaging around the city. Phatma is part of the government ministry responsible for keeping them under control. She’s sassy, she’s excellent at her job, she gets herself in trouble. It’s a great ride.

Djèlí Clark is a historian as well as a writer, and this shows. In an interview for Five Books, he said he wanted to use the full richness of Cairo as a crossroads, as an ancient city, and as a modern seat of great events – ‘I think so many times when people do Egypt’, he told me, ‘they go immediately back to ancient Egypt’. There’s some fun had with the ancient Egyptian gods, but it’s a treat to read a novel taking a broader scope, and using the rich mixing of cultures that Cairo represents. A really enjoyable read.

The next year, in 2023, a historical fantasy won the Nebula again: R. F. Kuang’s Babel…

Yes! There’s such an original magical concept at the heart of this book. A silver bar is engraved with the ‘same’ word in two different languages. However, the translation can never be direct, and whatever is lost in translation is produced magically by the silver. For example, gardens can be made magically tranquil if the word in one language conveys this tranquillity, and the other word does not.

The engraving must be done by a native speaker. The romance languages have been plundered for all they can offer at this stage, so Britain is looking for native speakers of other languages further afield, bringing them to work on silver in a prestigious department of Oxford University. So this fantasy device provides a neat, graspable stand-in for the extractive nature of empire, and puts the choice of perpetuation or rebellion in just a few people’s hands. Will you translate for Britain? Will you do so if the distribution is unjust, and worse injustices are being perpetuated?

This is the dilemma facing our heroes. There’s a little band of them, so this gives scope for you as a reader to worry about everyone’s choices – the possibility of betrayal is real, as is the possibility of a violent end for any one of them.

The story is on an epic scale then – on the scale of global politics.

Yes, and at the same time it’s beautifully personal. You spend a lot of the book eating the delights of Oxford’s cafes and working late in student dorm rooms and admiring libraries. You want our heroes to just be allowed to ignore the wider problems, and belong, and have a nice time. And that’s the whole dilemma.

That same year a fantasy book also won the Hugo: T. Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone.

Yes. I love this book! It’s completely original, but also completely captures the classic spirit of fairy tales. Marra is trying to rescue her sister, who has married into powerful royalty, and is being terribly abused. So there’s a quest, and there are three tasks, and a fairy godmother, and the goblin market; and all the magic has the haunting, under-explained quality of true fairy tales.

The images in this book are so striking. There’s a wheel full of the dead that chases you around an underground labyrinth of tombs, trying to crush and subsume grave robbers. There’s a woman being controlled by a sadistic puppet that sits on her shoulder, but she can’t bear the thought of being cut free from its power. And there’s humour – a particular favourite of mine was a chicken that is really a demon, but at the same time, emphatically a chicken.

It isn’t based directly on any fairy tale. Ursula Vernon (that’s T. Kingfisher’s real name, which she also writes under) told us that The Princess and the Pea was a jumping off point: ‘It’s a very lighthearted fairy tale on the surface: and then you start to ask questions like, why does the prince want a princess who bruises that easily, and is that sensitive? And it gets really unpleasant really fast…’

Finally, tell us about the most recent Nebula winner: The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

This is easily the book I’ve recommended to friends most often this past year – I think it’s one of those rare books that will please fantasy readers while also winning over non-fantasy readers. A real pleasure.

Fetter is the son of a god. His mother wants him to commit patricide. He is not so keen. After an introductory look at his childhood, we meet adult Fetter, who wants to live in the nearest cosmopolitan city, go to a support group for the children of deities, and move on with his life.

This is complicated by the inconvenient side effects of his legacy. He has no shadow, floats if he doesn’t concentrate, and can see the unsettling hoards of demons that cling to the sides of buildings and shuffle along ordinary streets. Other than this, he is getting on alright, to begin with – until his father comes to town.

His world feels utterly real. Magic is mostly present in the form of minor unexplained phenomena, or religion; its creeping intrusion into Fetter’s life happens in a dreamlike way, and we are led expertly from magic-as-everyday to magic-as-numinous. A real masterclass in fantasy writing, and a joy to read.