Review by New York Times Review
I would never have expected such a beautiful, enchanting book to cause such an altercation in my home. One reader, for whom this book was surely written, opened it with the same glee with which he once, long ago, in his Dungeons & Dragons phase, greeted his copy of "Deities and Demigods." The other reader, perhaps immune to pleasure, wanted to throw it across the room. It goes without saying both readers were me. "Literary Wonderlands" is a compendium of fantastic worlds; Laura Miller, the editor, states that "the works described in this book all conjure lands that exist only in the imagination." This project has an honorable pedigree, most notably Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi's "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" and Umberto Eco's "The Book of Legendary Lands." Manguel and Guadalupi's "Dictionary" is encyclopedic in scope, covering more than 1,200 entries, while Eco takes an idiosyncratic approach, separating the lands into chapters that investigate the human desire to believe the impossible. Both are scholarly - but Miller is aiming for a different audience here. With about a hundred entries, "Literary Wonderlands" is by no means encyclopedic, and with dozens of contributors, it is the work of not one mind but many. It is lushly illustrated (I first opened to a two-page spread from "The Wizard of Oz" and quickly closed the book so that I would not spoil the pleasure of discovery), and it covers a wide variety of authors in only 300 pages. The intended audience, I'm guessing, is the ordinary book-loving nerd who, some chilly Sunday, might curl up under an afghan and wander at random through its pages. You now know something about me. For the most part, it does its job admirably: succinctly describing each work in detail and providing enough illustrations to inspire delight. The essays by Adam Roberts, John Sutherland and Andrew Taylor (which make up more than a quarter of the total) are excellent and informative. The book is strongest when the contributor's enthusiasm comes through, as in Jonathan Newell's captivating chapter on China Miéville : "There is Tesh, the City of Crawling Liquid, a place of 'moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince,' an economic rival and sometimes military enemy of New Crobuzon; High Cromlech, a macabre metropolis peopled by quick and abdead in intricate castes and ruled by the embalmed thanati; The Gengris, monstrous subaquatic realm of the grindylow, a place of limb-farms and bile workshops and unthinkable weapons; Maru'ahm, with its casino-parliament and cardsharp senators; the crocodile double-city of the Brothers; Shud zar Myron zar Koni, City of Ratjinn, the Witchocracy of the Firewater Straits." And so on. That kind of writing is thrilling enough to persuade a reader to pick up the author's work, and to persuade us the author belongs in this particular canon. Or take, in the entry about Douglas Adams, the explication of his talent: "The solvent is charm, a genuinely rare quality in literature, rarer in science fiction, and impossible to fake." A sentence so good I am tempted to tweet it. Perhaps because of the team effort here, however, some of the writing veers off tonally into strange lands of its own: murkily academic, narrowly biographical, insistently boosterish or downright bizarre. The entry on Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" ends by noting its "strong heteronormative, male perspective." Arguable, not exactly a selling point, but why wasn't this kind of reading given to Homer, Dante, Swift, Verne and so on? Rather than a detailing of Carroll's genius for invention, "Alice in Wonderland" gets an amateur session on the couch: "We do not need the aid of Freud to work out that this little girl, eight years out of it, is 'returning to the womb.'" Then there is this baffling sentence about Cervantes: "The trauma of windmills and what they represent is also powerfully and subtly expressed by the constant repetition of the word molidos (past participle of the verb moler, to grind), used to describe Don Quixote and Sancho's pitiful state almost every time they are beaten and battered - which they are frequently." That slightly indigestible sentence is tonally at odds with everything else in the book. This kind of dissonance occurs throughout, and because the entries aren't signed (it takes some sleuthing in the back to find attribution), it isn't made clear we are reading the work of different critics. It feels like a multiple personality disorder, with many of the personalities grad students. The deeper this reader went, the more these variations in tone began to grate, and the more obvious one question became: Why? Why one work and not another? Was there any criterion beyond "lands that exist only in the imagination"? Why, for instance, "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" and not "Peter Pan" itself, whose Neverland is featured in the cover art? Why Edgar Rice Burroughs's "At the Earth's Core" and not his Mars books? Why, for God's sake, Nabokov's "Pale Fire"? "Slaughterhouse-Five"? "Infinite Jest"? Why that masterpiece of speculative fiction, "Kindred," in which a woman time-travels to slave-era Maryland, a very much not-imagined land? In fact, once "Literary Wonderlands" gets past "The Lord of the Rings," "lands that exist only in the imagination" seems to mean simply "fiction." If the setting of "Infinite Jest" exists "only in the imagination," then surely so do the worlds of Roberto Bolaño, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz and Cormac McCarthy, So, for that matter, might those of Dickens. Or Proust. Or the Bible. You see how this book ended up across the room. But perhaps Miller is right: Every work of fiction contains people who do not exist, in purely invented places, to be enjoyed not as representation but as allegory and metaphor and delight. Perhaps the introduction should have simply said, "Here are books I love, with commentary by people I admire, and what they have in common is a genius for invention." For another kind of reader, all of that won't matter at all. "Literary Wonderlands" will simply be a companion for favorite places and a guidebook to new ones. Those people won't let some other reader inside them ruin all the fun. ? ANDREW SEAN GREER'S most recent novel is "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 11, 2016]
Review by Library Journal Review
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 © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A stroll through 98 of the greatest fictional worlds ever created.Overseen by editor Miller (The Magicians Book: A Skeptics 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 Rushdies 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 Philosophers Stone, there is an Egalias Daughters, a feminist satire by Norwegian Gerd Mjoen Brantenberg, or a Lagoon, a work of science fiction by Nnedi Okorafor set in Nigeria. Childrens 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 Nussbaums quirky tribute to Tove Janssons The Moomins and the Great Flood or Lev Grossmans salute to the just slightly askew world of David Foster Wallaces 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 encyclopedias breadth and lack of depth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
