What Is Isekai?

Isekai (異世界) is Japanese for "another world." An ordinary person from our world gets transported, summoned, or reincarnated into a different one, usually a fantasy realm with magic, monsters, and rules the hero has to learn from scratch.

The setup isn't new. Alice fell down a rabbit hole in 1865, and Dorothy got swept away by a tornado. But modern isekai as we know it came out of Japanese web fiction and light novels, then spread through anime and manga before landing in Western publishing. Today it's one of the most popular genres in fantasy, full stop.

The classic flavours of isekai

• Summoned: the hero is called into another world, often to save it, sometimes by mistake.
• Reincarnated: the hero dies (usually hit by a truck) and is reborn in a new world, sometimes as a baby, a noble, a villain, or a monster, which is where evolution novels come in.
• Trapped: the hero is stuck inside a game world, which blurs into LitRPG territory with levels, quests, and system tables.
• Reverse isekai: the fantasy comes to us instead.

Why isekai resonates

It's tempting to write isekai off as wish fulfilment. New world, fresh start, cool powers. That's part of it, sure. But the fresh start is never free. Isekai protagonists show up with nothing: no family, no status, no idea how anything works. They have to rebuild from zero. That's why isekai pairs so naturally with progression fantasy, since the bottom of a new world's power ladder is the best possible place to start climbing. And underneath all that, there's a real question sitting in most of these stories: if you got to start over, who would you actually become?

My isekai novels

Reincarnation and world crossing show up all over my catalogue. A few highlights:

• Reborn as the Black Knight, reincarnated into the armour of a legend.
• Wolfmark, reborn as Fenrir himself.
• Respawn Condition, where you're not the hero of this world. You're the trash mob.
• And nearly every one of my dungeon core books, because being reborn as a dungeon is isekai taken about as far as it can go.

All of these belong to my interconnected Blackwater World. Each one stands alone, but together they form one long history. Pick a door and step through.