Can't afford the gas to take a road trip this summer? Not willing to spend a month's rent flying somewhere that's probably overcrowded and rainy anyhow? Empty pockets forcing you to embark upon that unholy phenomenon — gulp — the staycation?

How nice, then, that even if you're stuck at home, you possess, for free, in your very own brain, a truly amazing capacity to escape. You can lose yourself in other worlds without leaving the house and certainly without shelling out to stand in a security line. And you can find a cheap passport to those other worlds in the pages of any good fantasy novel.

Do you fancy hunting djinni through the winding alleys of a mystery metropolis? Or perhaps you'd like to try on the skin of an immortal cyborg who's pretending to be Rudolph Valentino's stunt man? Or maybe you'd like to take to the sky and fight the forces of Napoleon — yes, Napoleon — aboard a friendly dragon? Here are six of this summer's best tickets to otherworldly adventure.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.