Greg Bear’s
The Unfinished Land is not your standard-issue fantasy adventure, even if it does feature a young naïf who travels across a magical, quasi-living landscape, guided by and encountering a range of strangely powered beings, all on the way to a series of revelations about the true natures of said landscape, beings, and naïf. There are also, to be sure, swords and soldiers, mobile forests, dragon-equivalents, a wizard, and conflict among gods or godlike entities for the highest of stakes. The quest-journey and the conflicts are mostly a framework to support something else, a kind of puzzle: what exactly is this land, what is its relationship to ours – the recognizably actual-historical world beyond its shores?