The Archives of Anthropos was still being written when I first took over Exodus; the last book was released in 2001, four years later. It's a Christian series of six fantasy novels for children by British author John White. Written in the tradition of C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, children from Earth are magically transported to another world where they are called by a Christ-figure to play key roles in that other world's history. The series presents a fantasy world of kings, sorcerers and goblins and is more blatantly theologically allegorical than the Narnia books. Very popular 20-30 years ago, it fell out of print for a while, but we're happy to see that it is available again!
John White, the author, admitted having modeled the series after Lewis' own. He writes in the appendix of his fifth book, Quest for the King:
"My own children ganged up on me and came with the request that since I wrote books for adults, I could write them for children too. (Of course their assumption was incorrect!) "We won't bug you any more," they said, "if only you'll write a book for us. But it has to be just like Narnia!" So, intrigued, I decided I'd have a crack at it ... I wrote, and then read them my opening chapter of what eventually turned into The Tower of Geburah."
Responding to the criticism that he was merely copying Lewis' work, he writes "People said (quite accurately), 'He's just trying to copy Lewis.' I was. This was what my children wanted. That is, I was trying to copy Lewis at first, but I soon ceased to. Copying gets you nowhere. You have to make any genre your own for it to work."
Reading order:
As John White explains in the appendix of Quest for the King, he wrote The Tower of Geburah and The Iron Sceptre first, but felt compelled to write the prequel novels to explain parts of the prior history of Anthropos, such as "Where did the tower of Geburah come from?" In regards to the published vs. chronological order of the books, he writes: "if you wish to read them in the least confusing arrangement, follow the [chronological] sequence." But, like the controversy surrounding Narnia's sequence, some readers disagree.
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