The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is the John Clute and John Grant 1997 reference work that did for fantasy what the earlier Encyclopedia of Science Fiction had done for SF: established a working scholarly vocabulary, mapped the genre's major traditions, and indexed the writers and texts that the academy and the fan community had previously failed to catalog with seriousness.

The taxonomic terms Clute and Grant introduced (thinning, water margins, polders, equipoise) have become standard analytical vocabulary in fantasy criticism. The individual writer entries are extensive and unusually opinionated for a reference work; Clute in particular is willing to make explicit judgments about a writer's significance that most encyclopedias prefer to leave implicit.

The book is now nearly thirty years old and predates several major developments in the form (the urban-fantasy boom, the GrimDark turn, the post-Game of Thrones expansion). The foundational mapping has aged remarkably well.

Five stars. The right starting point for anyone studying fantasy as a literary tradition. Recommended without reservation as a reference and as a sustained piece of genre criticism in its own right.