Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

Anodos wakes in the palace to find everything to his taste. The palace is beautiful in every sense. His shadow is still with him but faint, and he hopes he might find some magic to dispel it permanently; the queen of Fairy Land may have the power to deliver him and send him home. He roams the palace, making out the shadows of other people, who seem to be living ordinary lives, but he cannot make them out clearly.

Discovering a library, he peruses books, finding that as he begins to read, he is propelled into the story and becomes a part and actor in it.

Anodos recounts one of the books that particularly stuck in his mind. It opens with a rumination on man’s role in the universe—that he is made of the same stuff as the stars and planets, and everything that man sees is interwoven with man.

Next comes a description of an ancient planet in Earth’s outer solar system that circles the sun so slowly that it came into being before the Earth formed. A single season may last an entire generation of its people. This world is similar to the Earth in many ways, but some of its people’s ways are mirror opposites.