Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created

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."