Fantasy: Where World-Building Becomes Literature
Fantasy is the genre of the impossible made believable. Its roots run deep — through myth, folktale, and epic — but the modern genre was largely invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, who built Middle-earth from language outward and gave millions of readers a secondary world to inhabit. Since then, fantasy has evolved from a niche enthusiasm into one of the most commercially and critically important genres in fiction.
This guide focuses specifically on fantasy series — multi-volume works that build sustained worlds across hundreds of thousands of words. The rankings are drawn from our editorial consensus methodology, which scores every title against 40+ independent critical sources.
The 10 Greatest Fantasy Series
1. The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
The foundational text of modern fantasy. Tolkien invented secondary-world fantasy as a serious literary project, and the result is an imaginary world of extraordinary depth and coherence. Voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century in multiple reader polls. Our editorial score places it among the twenty highest-ranked books in our entire database.
2. The Broken Earth Trilogy — N.K. Jemisin
The first and only fantasy series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three consecutive years. Narrated in the second person, set in a world of apocalyptic geological violence, and concerned with race, power, and colonial trauma. The most critically decorated fantasy series of the twenty-first century.
3. A Song of Ice and Fire — George R.R. Martin
Martin rewrote the genre's conventions around moral certainty and heroic immortality. The political complexity rivals literary fiction, and the first three novels are major achievements in their own right — regardless of whether the series is ever completed.
4. His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman
The most intellectually serious fantasy trilogy of the 1990s. Pullman marshals ideas from quantum physics, Gnostic theology, and William Blake into a story that won the Whitbread Book of the Year — the only children's book to do so.
5. The Earthsea Cycle — Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's archipelago is one of the most philosophically coherent fantasy universes ever created. The later volumes revisit the series' gender assumptions with a critical eye that makes the whole cycle richer. Le Guin is, for many critics, simply the finest prose stylist the genre has produced.
6–10: The Essential Series
The rest: The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), Harry Potter (Rowling), The Stormlight Archive (Sanderson), The Wheel of Time (Jordan/Sanderson), and The First Law (Abercrombie).
Contemporary Fantasy Worth Starting
R.F. Kuang's The Poppy War trilogy fuses fantasy with the Sino-Japanese War. Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes invented "cozy fantasy." Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree delivers epic world-building without the 10-volume commitment. And T. Kingfisher writes darkly comic fantasy that appeals to readers who find most epic fantasy exhausting.
For the full ranked list, visit our Fantasy category page.