This summer I'll be going on a long holiday with no video games. I love playing Skyrim (in which I have to outwit Alduin, a dragon who is prophesied to destroy the world) and Assassin's Creed on my PS3 – and I find it difficult to find books that can beat the thrill and the immersive power of video games. I do love The Hobbit but I've read that now – what other really brilliant fantasy books can you recommend for a 12 year-old-boy, ones that can really take me into their world and really thrill me like Skyrim can?
The quest at the core of any good fantasy novel should be enough to set the heart of any video game fan racing. While, as in a good game, the amazing worlds which authors create provide a fantastic magical playground for adventure – with scope for exactly the same kinds of terrors and triumphs to be navigated.
The difference is that the pace is set by the reader's curiosity rather than by the click of the controller and the imaginative scope of the world is more expansive as it depends on the combination of the writer's words and the reader's imagination.
Before computer games, the stories in books such Jules's Verne's nineteenth century classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth offered the same pumped up excitement. In Verne's story, a young boy and two adults break the runic code of an Icelandic saga which leads them to the secret passage to the centre of the earth. Heading down it, the trio risk all in a subterranean world filled with terrifying creatures and people from the past.
Almost a century later, Ursula le Guin's The Wizard of Earthsea created a new fantasy playground: the richly detailed fantastical and watery world with its own language and mythology which provide the backdrop for the Earthsea Quartet. Ged, the hero of the story and a prototype for Harry Potter, is as heroic as any character in a contemporary computer game and his mission is serious: he has to save his own world. To do so he is sent off to School of Wizards on the Island of Roke where his magical powers are honed and trained. Ged learns the extent of his magical powers, their dangers and how to control them in a fabulous world packed-full of legendary creatures including dragons.
Fighting a dragon is at the heart of JRR Tolkien's epic The Fellowship of the Ring trilogy, an obvious next choice for anyone who has enjoyed The Hobbit. Frodo's epic quest to get the Ring from the evil Sauron in a brilliantly imagined and vividly described world filled with extraordinary creatures is a blueprint for all subsequent fantasies.
Christopher Paulini's draws deeply from Tolkien for Inheritance Cycle, his quartet of titles which begins with Eragon. The book's hero, Eragon, finds a mysterious stone on a mountain from which a dragon whom he names Saphira hatches. Drawing from a wide range of mythological sources, Inheritance Cycle is action packed in a vividly created world.
Dragons and mythological creatures are not the only dangers fiction can throw up. Dystopian worlds provide terrifying landscapes for adventure and need powerful heroes to bring them back to some kind of hopeful future. While the messages may be more overtly political, the action is just as gripping. In Malorie Blackman's Noble Conflict, Kaspar joins the Guardians to protect his world from rebels who are threatening to destroy it. Kaspar soon finds that the Guardians are not as "good" as he had been led to believe and the stories about the rebels are very far from the truth. Kaspar needs courage and intelligence to outwit the system he has always trusted in a story crackling with danger.
In The Reluctant Assassin, the first in the WARP series, Eoin Colfer uses time-travel to whisk his orphan hero between the 19th and 21st centuries in a roller-coaster adventure that sees him fleeing from a terrifying assassin who is so eager to catch him.
Darren Shan's The Demonata series, starting with Lord Loss, is no holds barred in terms of the thrills, the blood and the daring that propel each exciting adventure. Totally gripping - and it is all done with words!
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