6 Fictional SFF Authors Whose Work is as Good as the Real Thing

Christy Peller, The Race, by Nina Allan
Sometimes things get so terrible in your real life, you just need a fictional world to curl up in. Barry Hughart had his fantasy version of China. Spider Robinson had Callahan’s. And Christy Peller, one of the protagonists of Nina Allan’s stunning, metafictional SF mind-bender, had the town of Sapphire, which she created through numerous journals, sketching out not just the town, but the history, religions, and cultures of the world it exists within. While Sapphire may exist as mere stories, the world clearly takes on a life of its own: Christy’s writing, presented within The Race as one of four nested narratives, is compelling enough that it transcends the novel’s framework to stand on its own as a rich interior world, one with sapient whales, illegally modified greyhound racing, ecological disasters, and psychic powers, eventually giving the author an escape from her nightmarish, depressing reality.

Jeff Lint, Lint, by Steve Aylett
Jeff Lint is possibly the most influential writer on Earth—at least in the universe of Steve Aylett’s abrasively absurd satire of science fiction history. A tall, gangly, nonsense-spouting lunatic who seems unaware of the world around him or his place in it, Lint fails upward through a history as strange as he is, from his start writing stories under the pseudonym “Isaac Asimov” (while the real Asimov was actively writing), to his eventual (and highly disputed) death. Along the way, he confounds almost every major historical figure from the 1940s to the 1990s, writes an unfilmable Star Trek episode full of hallucinatory images, traumatizes children with a cartoon bordering on cosmic horror, gives a psychedelic band a nervous breakdown worthy of Captain Beefheart, and accidentally starts a cult of cab drivers with his bizarre method of navigation.

Marshall France, The Land of Laughs, by Jonathan Carroll
Marshall France, the reclusive writer at the center of The Land of Laughs, lived most of his life in the small town of Galen, writing children’s books that readers cherished the world over. France definitely left his mark on Galen, too, as many of the townspeople and their pets were the inspiration for the fantastical characters of his books. His odd, reclusive life and the intertwined nature of the town only serve to confound his biographer, a man by the name of Thomas Abbey. France’s work, as seen in Carroll’s novel, is hypnotic, and his characters tend to leap off the page and into the hearts of the readers almost at first glance. Equally impressive is France himself, a magnanimous figure whose hometown is possibly a little too devoted to their most famous (and sadly deceased) resident.

E.A. Jones, Dark Cities Underground, by Lisa Goldstein 
Another children’s author, this one with shades of A.A. Milne and C.S. Lewis, E.A. Jones wrote a series of novels starring her son Jeremy about his adventures in the world of Neverwas. The books are a massive success, catapulting E.A. Jones to stardom and universal acclaim. If only she’d spared a moment to think about her son before putting him in the books, as it turns out having your bowdlerized nightmares turned into bestsellers has a permanent and detrimental effect on the psyche. Worse still, the plot of Dark Cities Underground reveals that perhaps the nightmares might have been something horrible Jeremy actually witnessed while awake, tying together the London Underground, Egyptian mythology, and ritualistic serial murder into one terrifying combination.

Christopher Plover, The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
From what we can gather of the work of beloved C.S. Lewis-ian children’s author Christopher Plover, a revered figure within the meta world of Lev Grossman’s breakout trilogy, he’s a fantastic fantasist with the power to entrance his readers into believing a magical world is real. OK, never mind that the land he’s writing about is real, making the “invention” of his “imagined” creations (from the Watcher Woman, to the Questing Beast, to the Cozy Horse) a bit less “creation” and a little more “reporting.” And OK, Grossman’s trilogy eventually reveals Plover to have been quite the despicable dude, fulfilling all the whispered rumors you’ve ever heard about the unsavory relationships between children’s authors and their muses. But something about his writing in the five Fillory novels was enough to bewitch the mind of a young boy who would grow up to be Quentin Coldwater, the jaded magician who would one day travel to Fillory—and save it.

Montese Crandall, The Four Fingers of Death, by Rick Moody
Montese Crandall was best known for his baseball card collection of cybernetically enhanced players, rather than the ruthlessly edited single-sentence short stories that he published on the internet for free. That was, until a chance meeting with a chess partner who thought he was a tyrannosaur, a little luck, and a few lies landed him the unenviable gig of writing a novelization based on a remake of perennial MST3K favorite The Crawling Hand. The Four Fingers of Death is presented as Crandall’s novel in its entirety, and the thing reads like the most deranged literary SF imaginable, a picaresque about a severed arm traveling through a dystopian America. Crandall himself comes off as a pompous ass, but not unsympathetic, as the novel represents his attempt to overcome his failings and change.
Who’s your favorite nonexistent SFF author?