F. G. Haghenbeck 282 pages Oceano (2018)

Read this if you like: Magical realism, Mexican culture, speculative non-fiction

tl;dr summary: Frida Kahlo’s life story, mostly.

See the book on Bookshop

In Game of Thrones they’re mounts and symbols of ancient power. In The Wheel of Time, it’s the title and symbol of the Chosen One. Then there’s Smaug from The Hobbit, the dragons of Pern, the various species encountered by Harry Potter—and so on.

It makes sense that dragons are one of the most popular mythical creatures in modern fiction because they’re just as common in folklore and myth. Just about every culture around the world has some kind of dragon in its ancient legends—and, interestingly, they’re often called a very similar thing. Drage in Danish, Drak in Czech, Ddraig in Welsh, Dreki in Icelandic, Draak in Afrikaans, Dragun in French, Drakon in Greek—you’re sensing a theme here. Then there’s the East Asian cluster, with names like Long (Chinese), Naga (Indonesia/India), and Rong (Vietnamese), which might not look as similar on the page but still bear the signs of a shared source.

Just about every culture has its share of monsters, and whether they’re slain by a hero or said to be still haunting the deepest, darkest, children-shouldn’t-go-there-iest parts of their landscape, these creatures can be excellent fodder for the storytelling imagination.

Part of my mission during my recent deep dive into world mythologies was to learn more about some of these lesser-known cryptids, critters, and beasties. Here are some of the ones that most tickled my fancy.

 

High fantasy has a long-standing tradition of borrowing from myth and religion, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of world mythology will see that right away reading Wheel of Time. I think I noticed some of this even when I read the books as a kid, but my current re-read coincides with a deep dive on world mythologies, making the familiar names and concepts stand out even more vividly than on my past reads through the series.

(Note: Thar be Wheel of Time book spoilers ahead—if you haven’t read the whole series and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now)

Last week’s post looked at the big-picture worldbuilding in the Wheel of Time: the magic system, the language, and how Robert Jordan established the physical and temporal reality. But every good worldbuilder knows reality is a product of specificity. You need to have rules for your world (and follow them), but the details you include are what bring the world to life.

Of course, in a world this size, there are a lot of details. In this post, I’ll focus on the ones that I see as the most distinctively Wheel of Time and the most interesting from a worldbuilding perspective.

(As with part 1, this post contains some spoilers for Wheel of Time books 1-7, so if you want to avoid those it’s best to stop reading now).

The Wheel of Time series was my introduction to epic fantasy as a child, and the first invented world I really sunk my teeth into when I decided to start building my own. Coming back to it as an adult always feels a bit like returning home.

Of course, re-reading it as an adult, I can also understand the common critiques about the series. Regardless of whether you enjoy the story or not, though, there is no arguing that Robert Jordan was a master worldbuilder, in my opinion on the same level as Tolkien. The bulk of this worldbuilding happens in the first half of the series (books 1-7), and if you’re thinking “how the hell can it take someone 7 books to build a world?”—well, that’s the scope of the lands and history that serve as the foundation for the story.

(Note: Thar be spoilers up ahead. If you haven’t read the first 7 books of Wheel of Time and care about such things, probably best to skip this post).

You can think of speculative fiction as a kind of super-genre. Stories that live under this broad umbrella all deviate in some way from the laws and rules of everyday reality. That could mean they’re set in an entirely invented reality or in a world mostly like our own with a few minor tweaks, or anywhere in between.

The term speculative fiction was first coined by Robert Heinlein in the late 1940s, so it’s hardly a new concept. Its associations have shifted over the decades, though, from a term mostly syonymous with sci-fi to one that’s more fluid. In today’s parlance, speculative also includes fantasy and most horror, as well as stories that exist between the borders of these genres. It’s become an especially popular term among those who write settings or tropes from fantasy and sci-fi  in a literary style.

Kerstin Hall 436 pages Tor (2021)

Read this if you like: Unique magic systems, religious dystopias tl;dr summary: Young Acolyte living on a floating city is caught up in the intrigue of her cannibalistic magic sisterhood.

Read the full summary on Bookshop

Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor 401 pages Harper Perennial (2015)

Read this if you like: The Hitchhiker’s Guide series, Borderlands, Terry Pratchett

tl;dr summary: The surreal world of Night Vale finally arrives on the page, in all its terrible, absurd beauty.

Read the full summary on Bookshop

Haruki Murakami 400 pages Kodansha International (1985)

Read this if you like: Unicorns, cross-genre experiments, simulated worlds

Tl;dr summary: Part surreal fantasy, part sci-fi detective story, all wonderfully bizarre—and masterfully constructed.

Read the full summary on Bookshop