Fantasy books of the 1970s
The boom begins. Series fantasy takes over the shelves.
If the sixties opened the door, the seventies kicked it off the hinges. Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara in 1977 proved that post-Tolkien epic fantasy could be a bestseller. Stephen R. Donaldson started the Thomas Covenant Chronicles in 1977 with Lord Foul's Bane, introducing one of the genre's most controversial antiheroes. Patricia A. McKillip published The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and the Riddle-Master trilogy. Le Guin continued Earthsea. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, sitting on the fantasy-SF border, hit full stride. The multi-volume epic became the dominant commercial form.
Readers today find the seventies shelf richer and more uneven than its reputation suggests. Content was beginning to push harder — Donaldson in particular dealt with deeply uncomfortable material — while McKillip and Le Guin kept the lyrical tradition alive. Violence began to be rendered with more weight. This is a decade for readers who want the moment series fantasy became the genre's beating commercial heart, alongside more literary work that refused to follow the trend.
- Series fantasy boom begins
- First major antihero protagonists
- Range from lyrical to grim
- Lengthier worldbuilding ambition
