1973
William Goldman’s The Princess Bride celebrates the magnificent follies of recycled fantasy. Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy attempts a theoreticized account of the nascent commercial genre.
1974
The role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons is launched,
adding a new dimension to the commodification of fantasy.
1975
Pierre Kast’s The Vampires of Alfama and Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape pioneer revisionist vampire fiction.
1976
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire adds an intensely Romantic dimension to revisionist vampire fiction.
1977
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is published four years after the author’s death, as the closest contrivable approximation of his “lost epic”
of pre-Norman England. Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant demonstrate the best-selling potential of commodified fantasy. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Kingdoms of Elfin Balka-nizes Faerie in a spirit of modernization. Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman takes adversarial existentialism to a parodic extreme.
Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life introduces a new paradigm of the philosopher-wizard.
1979
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber adds a sharp feminist twist to transfigurations of familiar fairy tales. Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon brings a new sophistication to the sexual politics of heroic fantasy. Thieves’ World demonstrates the commercial potential of shared world fantasylands and encourages the proliferation of picaresque fantasy.
Jack Zipes’s Breaking the Magic Spell explores the political ideologies underlying fairy tales.
1980
Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer adds a new sophistication to messianic heroic fantasy.
1981
John Crowley’s Little, Big juxtaposes contemporary America with a distinctive version of Faerie. Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn achieves a new poetic fusion of innocence and experience.
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1982
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon provides a definitive feminization of the Arthurian mythos. The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is founded.
1983
Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale mythologizes the history of New York. Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic establishes a new milieu for serious humorous fantasy.
1984
Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood establishes a new means of making archetypal imagery manifest. Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume introduces modern America to Pan. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s
Dragons of Autumn Twilight demonstrate that the literary borrowings of Dungeons and Dragons can be recycled into textual form to produce the ultimate in commodified fantasy.
1985
Guy Gavriel King’s The Summer Tree begins the development of an exceptionally detailed secondary world.
1986
Freda Warrington’s A Blackbird in Silver demonstrates the potential of secondary world fantasy as a milieu for generic romantic fiction.
1987
John Crowley’s Aegypt launches an exceptionally extended project in historical fantasy.
1988
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses proves that religious fantasy is still capable of exciting murderous intolerance. Terri Windling’s contribution to a new Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series establishes an invaluable annual summary of the field. Tad Williams launches the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, intended as an ideological corrective to Tolkien.
1989
Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding testifies to the imaginative authority still possessed by the elements of occult fantasy. Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard introduces modern melodrama to the Romantic Agony.
1990
Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World sets out to take commodified fantasy to record lengths. James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter brings a combative skepticism to Christian fantasy. Harcourt Books establish Jane Yolen Books, appointing a new icon of American children’s fantasy.
1991
Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World enlarges the didactic ambitions of children’s fantasy.
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1992
Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula tests the limits of alternative history.
Tim Powers’s Last Call demonstrates the literary utility of esoteric scholarly fantasy.
1993
Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter explores the functions of modern fantasy literature. Laurel K. Hamilton’s Guilty Pleasures finds appropriate contemporary employment for a fey princess. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Snow White, Rose Red begins a series of anthologies demonstrating the contemporary relevance of transfigured fairy tales.
1994
Michael Bishop’s Brittle Innings explores the difficulties of becoming truly human. A. S. Byatt’s “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”
demonstrates the continued literary utility of traditional fabulation. James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah asks how far God would have to go to prove His irrelevance. Michael Swanwick’s “In the Tradition . . .” suggests that fantasy literature resembles an archipelago rather than a continent, even though no book is an island unto itself.
1995
Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights takes advantage of the booming market in children’s fantasy to embark on a bold experiment in theodicy.
Gregory Maguire’s The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West suggests that Oz was not as far removed from Kansas as Dorothy imagined.
1996
Richard Grant’s Tex and Molly in the Afterlife updates the tradition of posthumous fantasy.
1997
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sparks a worldwide fad of a kind never previously associated with a book.
1998
Patricia McKillip’s Song for the Basilisk demonstrates that a commodified genre can play host to extraordinary literary ambition. Sophie Masson’s The Lady of the Pool brings the work of Marie de France up to date.
1999
Jan Siegel’s Prospero’s Children revitalizes Atlantean fantasy. The boom in apocalyptic fantasies reaches its peak, demonstrating the awful extent of contemporary innumeracy.
2000
China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station provides a cardinal example of the “new weird.”
2001
Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl suggests that Faerie’s technological de-
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velopment may have been more rapid than ours. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods examines the fate of traditional icons in modern America.
2002
Lisa Goldstein’s The Alchemist’s Door reassesses the significance of John Dee’s expedition to Rabbi Loew’s Prague.
2003
K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City offers a new iconic image of decadent civilization. Robin McKinley’s Sunshine examines the social aftermath of the Voodoo Wars. Catherine Webb’s Waywalkers considers the education of the Son of Time.
2004
Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love explores the work of the Muse during the last two centuries. Gene Wolfe’s The Knight and The Wizard reassess the crucial roles of modern heroic fantasy. Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell tracks a heroic attempt to reintroduce magic into 19th-century England for the benefit of generations to come.
Introduction
ONCE UPON A TIME
Fantasy is the faculty by which simulacra of sensible objects can be reproduced in the mind: the process of imagination. What we generally mean when we speak of “a fantasy” in psychological terms is, however, derived from an exclusive rather than an inclusive definition of the term. The difference between mental images of objects and the objects them
selves is dramatically emphasized by the fact that mental images can be formulated for which no actual equivalents exist; it is these images that first spring to mind in association with the idea of fantasy, because they represent fantasy at its purest.
For this reason, Geoffrey Chaucer, the first writer known to us who worked in a language recognizably akin to modern English, uses the word fantasye to refer to strange and bizarre notions that have no basis in everyday experience, and this is the sense in which it is usually used today when one speaks of “fantasy literature.” Nor is the word a mere description in Chaucer’s usage; it has pejorative implications. Any dalliance with “fantasye” in the Chaucerian sense tends to be regarded as self-indulgent folly, whether it is a purely psychological phenomenon (a fanciful aspect of
“daydreaming”) or a literary one.
This attitude is peculiar, if not paradoxical. There is no thought without fantasy, and the faculty of fantasizing may well be the evolutionary raison d’être of consciousness—and yet, the notion of “fantasy” comes ready-tainted with implications of unworthiness, of a failure of some alleged duty of the human mind to concentrate on the realities of existence. It is partly for this reason that the notion of “fantasy” as a literary genre is so recent.
Before 1969, the description “fantasy,” with respect to literary works, was usually only applied to a variety of children’s fiction, the implication being that the folly of fantasizing was something that adults ought put away with other childish things.
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xxxviii • INTRODUCTION
The paradoxicality of common attitudes to fantasy is powerfully reflected in the idea of fantasy literature. Although it is the most recent genre of literature to acquire a marketing label, it is also the most ancient genre that is readily identifiable. Storytelling is much older than literature—
although, by definition, it has no history other than its literary history—
and the overwhelming majority of the stories that became visible to history once writing had been invented were fantasies in the Chaucerian sense: strange and supernatural. Anthropological observations suggest that all human cultures are alike in this respect. The stories that cultures possess before acquiring the faculty of writing, and the stories that provide the foundations of literary culture when they do acquire it, are almost all fantastic.
Before anthropologists had refined their scientific stance, they often took the inference that the fantastic aspects of preliterate culture implied that preliterate cultures were in some sense “childish” or “primitive,” having not yet evolved to a state of mental maturity—but those early anthropologists were contemporaries of many other men who believed that “Enlightenment” would surely banish “superstition” from the world and that there would be no such thing in the future (which is to say, our present) as false belief, let alone fantasy literature. We know better now.
The prehistory of stories retains a good deal of its mystery, but we can now understand the situation of stories in preliterate societies. We understand that stories seem to exist in oral cultures independently of their tellers; their tellers inevitably seem to be “passing them on,” or “handing them down.” We understand that many tellers must have routinely modified the stories they told and that some must occasionally have made up new ones—but that when they did, they posed as mere transmitters, surrendering all their “authority” to the story itself, which had to take on an independent existence if it was to survive within the culture from day to day, let alone from generation to generation.
One corollary of the logic of this situation is that almost all of a preliterate culture’s stories would be heard for the first time in childhood; their acquisition would be part and parcel of the process of growing up. That is one reason why the kinds of story preserved and maintained by oral transmission are commonly seen as “children’s stories.” Another corollary is that all of a preliterate culture’s stories are set in the past. Their authority and value is often intricately bound up with their seeming antiquity; that is, the apparent guarantee of their independence and power.
The “past” of a preliterate culture is not, however, the past of history; by definition, preliterary cultures have no history. The “past” in which a pre-
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literate culture’s stories are set is a construction of myth and legend: a past that was different in kind and quality from the present. It is, invariably, a magical past, which imagines the world in the process of creation and ordering—in a time when its present conformation was still in the process of being worked out. Only a minority of a preliterate culture’s stories are explicitly concerned with processes of creation and ordering, but even those that are not partake of the processes of origination and organization.
It is intrinsic to the nature of preliterate storytelling, therefore, that stories should be set in a world that is not the everyday world of the present day but in a world of myth and magic: the world of “once upon a time.” Even stories in which no magic is worked and nothing supernatural occurs must, if the illusion of antiquity is to be retained, have such possibilities as a context.
We understand all this partly because we can still observe something similar, insofar as a vestigial oral culture survives alongside our literary culture.
The traditional tales we still possess—and that “everybody knows”—include a considerable number that are among the oldest ever to be written down and may well have the most extended prehistories. These are the deepest roots of modern fantasy literature. Now, as always, the tales are frequently altered in the retelling—“transfigured,” as the analytical language of this dictionary has it—but the process and perception of transfiguration depends on the notion of there being something underneath that is definitive, ancient, and eternal: something that is endlessly “recycled”
without ever being fundamentally transformed.
We can also observe the processes of recycling and transfiguration in what remains to us of writing, whose early preservation depended on ceaseless copying. We can see that certain items of writing were preserved as faithfully as possible because they were considered sacred and unalter-able (although that did not prevent variant versions of scriptures being generated). We can also see that items treated with less reverence—or a different kind of reverence—were routinely modified and often expanded by many of the copyists through whose hands they passed. The modifications made to some of the early classics of fantasy literature produced for amusement—the chivalric romance of Amadis of Gaul, for instance, as it migrated from Portuguese into Spanish, French, and English—were truly prodigious; extant versions are sometimes the result of inordinately complex serial collaborations.
The complex combination of the processes of recycling and transfiguration gives rise to confused perceptions. The fact that fantasy literature continues to recycle stories that have been told for countless generations
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makes it seem repetitive and unoriginal as well as unrealistic—but it is the implication of “deep-rootedness” that gives fantasy literature its unique qualities and utilities, both culturally and psychologically. The fact that fantasy literature deals with the fictitious past of “once upon a time” makes it seem quaint and old-fashioned by comparison with stories that deal with the experienced world or the past of history—but our perceptions of who and what we are, and ought to be attempting to become, owe at least as much to our notions of that fictitious past as to our theories regarding the actual one.
In the days when anthropologists thought that preliterate cultures were
“primitive,” some of the people who thought that Enlightenment would ex-terminate Chaucerian “fantasye” in all its forms and manifestations also thought that traditional notions of “once upon a time” would be replaced by modern equivalents—that the imaginary past of myth and magic would be replaced by the “real” past of history, archaeology, paleontology, and geology. The notion
also emerged, albeit somewhat belatedly, that writers might, and perhaps ought to, manufacture a new kind of Chaucerian fantasye, one that would draw its wonders from hypothetical futures and alien worlds rather than imaginary pasts. The proposal was therefore put about that the old kinds of fantasy literature might be replaceable by a new and distinctively modern kind: “science fiction.”
This is significant, because one of the reasons why “fantasy” took so long to appear as a commercial label was that the market space it might have occupied had already been colonized by something that seemed more
“advanced.” We can now see easily enough that this was an illusion, although it is understandable that many early observers of science fiction thought that the development of that genre was the sensible way to free fantasy literature from its dependence on the assumption of a mythical past—the ideative prison of “once upon a time.” The history of modern fantasy literature demonstrates, however, that the themes and mannerisms of naturalistic fiction (including historical fiction) and science fiction were not the only escape routes that storytellers could follow in wriggling free of the restraints of the mythical past.
Modern fantasy literature has evolved numerous strategies that allow fantasy literature to deal with the historical rather than the mythical past, and the present (or future) rather than any kind of past. In the process, writers who have expanded the scope and ambition of fantasy literature have continued to recycle as well as transfigure the material they inherited from literary prehistory. Their extensive adventures in fabulation and metafic-
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tion have celebrated the continuation of recycling and transfiguration as well as pointed out that neither naturalistic fiction nor science fiction ever really escaped the necessity of recycling and transfiguring old stories.
These same adventures also serve to remind us that the distinction between the mythical and historical pasts has never been clear and that much of what passes for history is, in fact, merely a concatenation of legends that we have chosen, for one reason or another, to believe.
FANTASY VERSUS THE FANTASTIC
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 4