The Secret Science Fiction & Fantasy on Oprah’s Book Club List

The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In his first novel, National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power, Between the World and Me, Marvel’s Black Panther) imagines a version of the Underground Railroad never before seen. Hiram Walker, a slave boy (known here as one of “the Tasked”) possesses a fabled gift for conducting—a power to assist people (including himself) in getting across water. He also has a perfect memory—yet he can recall nothing of his mother, whom he only knows through the stories others tell him, until the day he falls into a river and experiences visions of his ancestors, including a woman dancing in water: his mother, Rose. His visions inspire him to attempt escape, but when his initial attempt falls apart, he finds allies in the secret networks of the Underground, and, once free, vow to rescue his beloved Sophia, who remains in Virginia. This is the dark light of history fractured, cast through the prism of the speculative.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Interesting, the next most recent SF-nal Oprah selection treads similar narrative ground, but reveals an entirely different vision of the past: Whitehead’s novel only features one element of magical realism or fantasy, but it’s at the center of the story, transforming it into a speculative examination of the antebellum south and the institution of slaveryin America. Whitehead tells the story of Cora, an escaped slave who discovers that the famous Underground Railroad of history is literally a railroad underground, a steam engine pulling boxcars on steel rails laid deep below the surface. Cora’s journey aboard the railroad is a series of adventures in Southern and Northern towns and cities just one step to the left of their real-world historical counterparts, and she slowly discovers that there is no truly safe place for an escaped slave—or a black person in general—in this or any America. Whitehead’s always used elements of fantasy in his work, and in some ways this novel is least reliant on them. The choice to imagine just one element of history in a magically unreal way supercharges the book, making it perhaps his finest so far—which explains its selection by the Club.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy’s bleak, post-apocalyptic story of a man and his son attempting to survive in a world where food is almost as scarce as basic human kindness is harrowing and deeply affecting, a near-perfect hybrid of science fiction concepts and literary ambition. McCarthy’s famously sparse, direct prose is ideal for the blasted and hopeless setting. As the unnamed father and son make their way through the ruined world, evading cannibals and other threats and seeing any brief hope of respite snatched away almost immediately, McCarthy uses the familiar science fiction concept of a dying earth to a new and wholly unique effect. Snobs may argue that anything written by McCarthy is a “fable” and not science fiction, but we know better: it’s sci-fi, and really smart sci-fi at that

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
In any discussion of magical realism, inevitably one of the first and most common examples of the genre offered up is this 1967 classic. Telling the tale of the Buendía Family, and the city patriarch José Arcadio Buendía founds in the jungle, the novel compresses time and history, features frequent visitations by ghosts, and ends by clearly implying that all of the events described were preordained and inevitable. In-between, generations of Buendía family members struggle—and fail—to escape their past while significant events in Latin American history are mirrored and echoed, with the end result being the creation of a peculiar and unique reality that, like the city founded by José, reflect the real world back at us, forcing us to see it in a new and instructive way.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
The themes of magical realism in Love in the Time of Cholera are much more subtle than in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which makes Márquez’s achievement in this later book even more impressive. With precise control of small details and total command of his language, Márquez creates a universe that is subtly but definitively not the universe we live in. In the world of Cholera, a pet parrot can be almost supernaturally gifted, able to speak French with a fluency and portent beyond real-world animals. In this world, ghosts are quite real, and a widow might sense the presence and even characteristics of her deceased husband. Time flows differently, and elements that would be merely symbols in another novel are treated as solid features of the reality. The end result is an unreal world filled with subtle magic—and a story that couldn’t occur in a scrupulously “real” universe.

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
Follett’s career-redefining work of historical fiction is not, of course, an epic fantasy—it only feels like an epic fantasy in most every single way. Set in 12th century England during the succession crisis known to historians as The Anarchy, everything about this book would be familiar to fans of Game of Thrones: political intrigues, incestuous relationships, pervasive descriptions of violence, rape, and poverty. If you squint, and imagine the miracles perceived by some characters as actual magic, the whole book dances merrily into the fantasy genre while retaining a complicated and largely historically-accurate game of, well, if not thrones, then titles and lands that the real-life lords and knights of the time engaged in, often with bloody results. The characters could easily wander into Westeros, and no one would notice.