100 Books Like Lancelot

I have always loved stories about King Arthur–what’s not to love–Arthurian stories are about the underdog triumphing, destiny, knights and quests, swords (and stones, or lakes), great heroes and villains, and magic. My university studies made me into a military historian (among other things–including an opera singer and a historian of film), and I loved revisiting my love of Arthur in various guises. I have sung him on stage, played him in roleplaying games and miniature wargames, and I have written articles and books about him in film and history. I hope my list of recommendations provokes you to think about King Arthur in new ways!

Like any writer, I’m fascinated with what makes people tick and why they act the way they do. Naturally, this means I read a lot of history. I love reference reading; I love researching arcane questions for a tiny detail that will bring a character or their world to life. Creating epic fantasy is an extension of both my drives as a reader and a writer. Pouring myself into characters who inhabit different settings is a deeply satisfying exercise in both craft and empathy, and each history book has some small bit I can use to make my settings more compelling, more enjoyable for readers, and more real.

Children have vivid imaginations, and while mine was initially drawn to science fiction, I discovered my true passion for fantasy upon reading The Hobbit as a teenager. Since that day, escaping into fantasy worlds—whether it be through books, movies, TV, roleplaying, and video games—became my passion and hobby, leading me down many roads, including writing game reviews, a short story, a novel, and an extensive collection of fantasy-related replicas and statues. Ultimately, that endless feeling of wonder and exploration, adventure and danger is what convinced me to become an author; these five books sitting at the top of a long list that inspired me to reach that goal.

I discovered writing in my twenties when I was living alone in a hut in a remote village in Indonesia with no electricity. I began a novel to fill the lonely acres of time and found myself transported by my own imagination. I realised this interior world was one I could happily inhabit for life. It took me years to get there; I was a journalist for 15 years, and 44 before my first novel—Outlaw, about a gangster-ish Robin Hood—was published; but I haven’t stopped writing fiction since. I now have 17 novels under my belt, some of them bona fide bestsellers, and aim to keep writing till I drop. 

I fell in love with historical fiction when I was a child. Adventurous tales—especially if they had swordplay in them! And I was fascinated by young people having to choose whether to stand up for what they believed in or run away. Ordinary folk are forced by circumstances—and villains—to do the extraordinary. I empathized and felt like I could be one of them. So when I came to write, I wanted to tell those kinds of stories. I eventually realized what I wrote was 'the intimate epic'—showing how the minor historical players can have a major effect.

Living in Istanbul, I fell in love with glimpses of Ottoman life still visible there, not only the mosques and palaces but neighborhoods of old wooden houses, like the one where I lived on the upper slopes of the Bosphorus, the small villas and hidden gardens, and quaint customs that have disappeared in modern society. Beginning in my twenties, I spent many years as a social anthropologist in Turkey studying contemporary Turkish society, but I also read about the Ottomans, whose diversity, rich customs, and colorful lifestyles were tragically erased by nationalism and war. The books on my list will let you experience it all.

I fell in love with historical fiction when I was a child. Adventurous tales—especially if they had swordplay in them! And I was fascinated by young people having to choose whether to stand up for what they believed in or run away. Ordinary folk are forced by circumstances—and villains—to do the extraordinary. I empathized and felt like I could be one of them. So when I came to write, I wanted to tell those kinds of stories. I eventually realized what I wrote was 'the intimate epic'—showing how the minor historical players can have a major effect.

I fell in love with historical fiction when I was a child. Adventurous tales—especially if they had swordplay in them! And I was fascinated by young people having to choose whether to stand up for what they believed in or run away. Ordinary folk are forced by circumstances—and villains—to do the extraordinary. I empathized and felt like I could be one of them. So when I came to write, I wanted to tell those kinds of stories. I eventually realized what I wrote was 'the intimate epic'—showing how the minor historical players can have a major effect.

A certain idea kept cropping up in my reading, triggered perhaps by Richard Dawkins's conception in The Selfish Gene, of the “meme.” It seemed that the meme had a life of its own. Then I came across Richerson’s and Boyd’s Not by Genes Alone, and they laid it out: cultures evolve. And they evolve independently of the genes—free of genetic constraints in an idea or thought to contribute to its own survival. That is up to the multitude of people who happen to come across it. I now have a new book readying for publication: How Cognition, Language, Myth, and Culture Came Together To Make Us What We Are.

When I was a kid at school, I was told that I had no imagination. I wrote a short essay on what I did at the weekend and put my heart and soul into it. I handed in my homework, and I remember waiting one day, then two, then three, when finally my teacher said: “Mr Vernon, I have a bone to pick with you.” I did not know what the expression meant, but it terrified me. It was only years later that I discovered I could, in fact, write, and that the imagination was a friend, not an enemy. I want others to know the same.