6 Standalone SFF Books That Earn Their Epic Pagecounts

Ash: A Secret History, by Mary Gentle
A towering, weird fiction answer to the legend of Joan of Arc, ASH is so big it had to be split into four books for release in the US (seems risky, experimental thousand-pagers don’t always promise blockbuster sales, David FOster Wallace and Neal Stephenson notwithstanding). In spite of its massive length, the book does everything it promises and more, fleshing out the intricate alternate history of a science-fantasy world similar to ours, and fully shading the compelling woman at its center—with more than enough deadpan humor and fantastic fight scenes to keep the reader entertained all the way through.

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Speak of the doorstopping devil… A complex medieval-flavored novel displaying clear influences from Walter Miller and Umberto Eco, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi epic tells the story of a “concent,” a kind of monastery for scientists, philosophers, and historians in a dystopian world that may be our own, centuries hence. The novel begins as they prepare to open their doors and venture into the outside world for a week-long celebration that only occurs once a decade. It only gets weirder from there, though to explain the exact nature of the oddness would be a spoiler, and finding out is (as the author’s note insists) a big part of the appeal. Adding to the unique style are appendices full of Socratic dialogues and notes on language, further driving home the philosophical ideas at work.

Imajica, by Clive Barker
Epics require a lot of breathing room. Epics spanning five dimensions, each with their own gods, monsters, cultures, and various systems, require a hell of a lot more than that. Clocking in at almost 900 pages, Imajica is definitely one of those epics. It needs every inch of every page, however, as Clive Barker’s lush, imaginative tale of love and magic in its many forms covers an astonishing amount of ground, and with a huge cast of characters to boot. While it may be as lengthy as any of the mythological and heroic epics it attempts to emulate, Barker’s style and control of the narrative means it moves at a pace that makes it feel half as long.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell bills itself as an exhaustive history of two prominent figures in English magic, and it delivers while firing on all cylinders. Since it’s a work that presents itself as a history, it only makes sense that it would rack up the same page count as any non-fictional account would. Clarke excels at putting both time and place to her fantastical history, using magic to subtly but significantly alter world events and then following those implications as they ripple across the past we know. The result is a dense, immensely readable tome full of footnotes, asides, and period-appropriate artist’s renderings about the rise and fall of English mages at a pivotal time in their history.

Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
Winter’s Tale is a gorgeous explosion of a book, delicately unwrapping the story of New York City over a century. Specifically, it’s the tale of Peter Lake, his angelic horse Athansor, and a cast of characters that includes a socialite who lives like a fairy-tale princess, a gang leader who feeds off of color, the townspeople of a village that borders on faerie, and even more besides. It’s a book of lyrical language and heartfelt romanticism that sometimes places itself more in the abstract, but remains always centered around the city and its surrounding environs.  This is a book to be explored, and the massive length gives the you every possible opportunity to do so.

Jerusalem, by Alan Moore
While most known for Watchmen and a host of other dark, sprawling comic book narratives, Alan Moore has never let his talents be confined to a single medium. His second novel, Jerusalem, is a massive mythology that takes the reader through the crumbling streets of Northampton, from a fate-deciding snooker game between four angels, to the tunnels under the city where the spectres of children run wild, at once encompassing the history of the family who shaped it and the labyrinthine streets in which they reside. Moore’s work combines multiple narrative and poetic styles and does its best to encompass almost everything it can—and therefore needs to be as massive a tome as it is, at well over a thousand pages.
What’s your favorite massive, single-volume standalone?