2018 comedy, a guide your travels in the worlds of bad speculative
fiction.
Which of course puts it squarely trying to fill the shoes of The
Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and Crowley is no Diana Wynne Jones.
However, he's trying to stick more firmly the the travel guide format
(with sections like "When to Visit" and "Can't-Miss Experiences"), and
he covers several worlds: Mittelvelde the genre fantasy, Eroica City
where the superheroes are, Spume the pirate world, Chugholme (which
would have been the steampunk world but is cut short because of its
recent collapse), Grondorra the planetary romance world, Mundania and
Whimsicalia the Harry Potter clone, and Wasteland the generic
post-apocalypse (including Mad Max, The Terminator and The Hunger
Games, as well as the halo of imitations of each).
Each in turn has fun poked at it more or less successfully. Sometimes
it's heavy-handed:
Fysteros is a grim, dark land isolated from the rest of Mittelvelde,
comprising seven human-only kingdoms, whose inhabitants spend all
their time squabbling over a metal chair. And with the coffers of
the ruling houses so exhausted by constant war, you can be sure
it's packed with tourist-traps.
Sometimes it's rather more engaging, as when the conversation in
footnotes between Floyd Watt the happy-go-lucky writer and Eliza Salt
his editor makes it clear that, for example, the Bison King only won
the last war with the Orcs thanks to Floyd's shipping him a load of
assault rifles, and the orcs are now evidently enslaved, though in
ways that won't impact the tourist trade. Similarly, the "heroes" of
Eroica City are the ones with corporate sponsorship, and anyone who
tries actually to help the poor is a villain; and the real conflict in
Mundania/Whimsicalia is between the wizards who are determined to keep
all the benefits of magic to themselves and the mundanes who will do
anything to get the secrets from them. And of course there's the whole
question of what the elves are up to.
As a result there are many tonal shifts and this doesn't fit easily
into either comedy or serious fiction. Perhaps it might have worked
better as one or the other. As it is I found it a slightly odd reading
experience.
Some of the parodies work better than others for me: for example
Mittelvelde is an effective parody of many sorts of bad fantasy, while
Mundania/Whimsicalia is pretty much tied to Harry Potter specifically,
which I only know about by others talking about it.
Slight but fun; it holds out the occasional promise of being something
rather more, but rarely follows through.