Literary Wonderlands

September 15, 2016
A stroll through 98 of "the greatest fictional worlds ever created."Overseen by editor Miller (The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, 2008, etc.), longtime editor and critic at Salon.com, a host of writers contribute short essays on books ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up through Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015). Sidebars introduce factoids about the selections. The copiously illustrated volume is arranged chronologically and divided, rather arbitrarily, into sections titled "Ancient Myth & Legend," "Science & Romanticism," "Golden Age of Fantasy," "New World Order," and "The Computer Age." Aside from a brief opening essay by Miller, readers are left on their own to make sense of these varied fictional landscapes. Most will find some that are deeply familiar and others that are new: for every Nineteen Eighty-Four or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, there is an Egalia's Daughters, a feminist satire by Norwegian Gerd Mjoen Brantenberg, or a Lagoon, a work of science fiction by Nnedi Okorafor set in Nigeria. Children's literature is well-represented, and though the volume skews toward works written in the last half-century or so, the editor makes a noble effort to include earlier books. The entries in general follow a formulaic pattern, with a bit of historical context, an extensive summary of the book in question, a few quotations, a little literary analysis, and a paragraph about other books by the author and writers the book has influenced. The volume, often academic in tone, is best taken in small doses. The best essays, such as Abigail Nussbaum's quirky tribute to Tove Jansson's The Moomins and the Great Flood or Lev Grossman's salute to the "just slightly askew" world of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, transport the book out of the realm of the committee into that of personal passion. An encyclopedic look at literary landscapes featuring an encyclopedia's breadth and lack of depth.

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November 15, 2016

Miller (cofounder, Salon.com; The Magician's Book) edits this painstakingly researched and heartfelt exploration of fictional worlds created by writers including the anonymous author of The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, Jonathan Swift, William Gibson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Atwood. Unlike Andrew DeGraff's Plotted, this book takes readers far past the physical environments of well-known fantasy cultures to reveal the anxieties and ambitions underpinning those landscapes. The analysis the contributing biographers bring to the work can be illustrated in the quoting of Philip K. Dick's description in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream: "the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl," which is compared to the texture of the future San Francisco that the novel conjures. The book later explores the four cities in which William Gibson's Neuromancer plays out to reveal different ways "in which humanity relates to both technology and temporality." VERDICT Recommended for fans of fantasy and students of literature.--Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX

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