The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  War tends to stimulate the production of afterlife fantasy; the evolution of the genre can be measured by contrasting the boom in spiritualist fantasies produced by World War I with the more philosophically innovative fantasies produced by World War II, of which Beth Brown’s Universal Station (1944), Ketti Frings’s God’s Front Porch (1944), and C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce are notable examples. The broader

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  context of the 20th century is represented by such examples as Evelyn Underhill’s The Grey World (1904), A. E. Coppard’s “Clorinda Walks in Heaven,” Oliver Claxton’s Heavens Above! (1933), Marjorie Livingston’s The Future of Mr Purdew (1935), Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures (1929), Wyndham Lewis’s Human Age sequence (1928–55), Robert Nathan’s There Is Another Heaven, and Lady Saltoun’s After (1930). Satirical examples became more sarcastic in the latter years, as in Michael Frayn’s Sweet Dreams (1973), Stanley Elkin’s The Living End (1979), Robert A. Heinlein’s Job, Shere Hite’s The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter (1994), Mick Farren’s Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife (1999), and Cynthia Rylant’s The Heavenly Village (1999).

  Commodified fantasy took the subgenre aboard in the graphic shared world series begun with Heroes in Hell (1986) and Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s portal fantasy collection, comprising The Land beyond the Gate (1984), The Armlet of the Gods (1986), The Sorceress of Skath (1988), and The Scroll of Lucifer (1990). The establishment of genre fantasy assisted the imagistic diversification of such idiosyncratic works as Alex Shearer’s Great Blue Yonder (2002), Louise Cusack’s Destiny of the Light, Jeffrey Thomas’s Letters from Hades (2003), and Martin Chatterton’s Michigan Moorcroft, R.I.P. (2003). Characters in afterlife locations sometimes interfere with life on earth, as in Art Buchwald’s Stella in Heaven (2000), or are featured as detached observers, as in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002). Artificial afterlives are featured in numerous science-fantasies, notably Philip José Farmer’s “River-world” series.

  AIKEN, JOAN (1924–2004). British writer from a notable literary family, the daughter of Conrad Aiken and the sister of John Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge (all of whom made minor contributions to fantasy literature). Her novels for adults use fantastic motifs very sparingly and marginally, but her works for children, from The Kingdom and the Cave (1960) onward, make much freer use of such devices. Her short fiction for adults and children includes such horror stories (refer to HDHL).

  The series begun with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962) and Black Hearts in Battersea (1964) employs an alternative history to license vivid adventures in melodrama. Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966) and The Cuckoo Tree (1971) shift the focus from the original protagonists to their exotic helper Dido Twite, whose far-ranging exploits are continued in The Stolen Lake (1981), Dido and Pa (1986), Is (1992; aka

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  Is Underground), Cold Shoulder Road (1995), Dangerous Games (1999; aka Limbo Lodge), and Midwinter Nightingale (2003). Alongside this serie, Aiken produced the effective allegories of maturation comprising The Whispering Mountain (1968), Midnight Is a Place (1974), and The Shadow Guests (1980); a trilogy similar in spirit to the alternative history series, comprising Go Saddle the Sea (1977), Bridle the Wind (1983), and The Teeth of the Gale (1988); two plays issued in an omnibus as Winterthing and The Mooncusser’s Daughter (1973).

  Many of Aiken’s short story collections are dominated by horror stories, but those foregrounding fantasies include A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), A Small Pinch of Weather (1969), Smoke from Cromwell’s Time and Other Stories (1970), The Kingdom under the Sea (1971), A Harp of Fishbones (1972), More than You Bargained For (1974), Not What You Expected (1974), Arabel’s Raven (1974), A Bundle of Nerves (1976), The Faithless Lollybird (1977), Fog Hounds, Wind Cats, Sea Mice (1984), and The Last Slice of Rainbow (1985). The Winter Sleep-walker and Other Stories (1994), Shadows & Moonshine (2001), and the novella The Scream (2002) are more smoothly hybridized.

  ALCHEMICAL FANTASY A subgenre of occult fantasy. Alchemy was the name given in Western Europe from the 12th century to a mystical proto-chemistry whose traditions were allegedly handed down from antiquity, although its earlier history is almost entirely an artifact of scholarly fantasy. Its central quests for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone (the secret of transmuting “base metal” into gold) have been considerable inspirations to literary fantasists. Alchemical writings of the Renaissance tend to be couched in elaborate symbolism, encouraging later commentators, especially Rosicrucian/lifestyle fantasists, to argue that alchemical endeavor is best regarded as a quest for spiritual enlightenment, whose confusion with hopes of vulgar gain was unfortunate—a notion avidly taken up by such alchemical fantasists as

  Vladimir Odoevsky.

  Alchemists were initially featured in literature as confidence tricksters, as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale” and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), and they proved useful as mistaken pursuers of futile dreams in moralistic fantasies like William Godwin’s St.

  Leon (1799) and Honoré de Balzac’s Quest for the Absolute. Even when they were not mistaken, early literary alchemists were usually frustrated in their quests—as in Balzac’s “The Elixir of Life,” Alexandre Dumas’s Joseph Balsamo, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange

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  Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr Heidegger’s Experiment” and Septimius, Alexander de Comeau’s Monk’s Magic (1931), and Vincent Starrett’s Seaports in the Moon—but the 19th-century occult revival inspired a more reverent interest, widely reflected in the work of such writers as Arthur Machen, Gustav Meyrink, John Cowper Powys, and Charles Williams and such individual items as Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes (1961) and Avram Davidson’s The Phoenix and the Mirror.

  The alchemist who had the greatest influence on fantasy literature was Theophrastus von Hohenheim (c1493–1541), nicknamed Paracelsus, who is the central figure in a philosophical fantasy by Robert Browning. Paracelsus recorded a recipe for manufacturing a ho-munculus—an artificial man in miniature—whose successful applica-

  tion is imagined in such works as John Hargrave’s The Artificial Man (1931) and David H. Keller’s The Homunculus. Histories of alchemical scholarly fantasy such as Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible (1956; tr. 1962) and Frances Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) provided further inspiration, extrapolated in such works as Annie Dalton’s Night Maze, Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding, Margaret Yourcenar’s The Abyss, John Crowley’s series begun with Aegypt, Neal Barrett, Jr.’s The Prophecy Machine (2000), Kate Thompson’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice (2002), and Lisa Goldstein’s The Alchemist’s Door. Alchemists are frequently integrated into the secret histories featured in conspiracy theory novels; Neal Stephenson’s trilogy begun with Cryptonomicon (1999) features John Milton as a alchemist.

  The failure of alchemy to inspire 20th-century lifestyle fantasy has limited its appeal mainly to the field of historical fantasy, although Ian Watson’s science fantasy The Gardens of Delight (1980) and Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius; or The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1990) are conspicuous exceptions to the rule. Chinese alchemy—with an ancient tradition better documented than any Western equivalent—is featured in Frank Owen’s “Dr Shen Fu” (1938). Science fiction stories featuring technologies that emulate alchemical gold manufacture sometimes retain an ironic fantasy element, as in Charles Harness’s “The Alchemist” (1966). The wizards of modern commodified fantasy often have alchemical apparatus in their workrooms, and alchemy is usually on the syllabus of their educational institutions. Anne McCaffrey’s Alchemy and Academe is a showcase anthology. See also IMMORTALITY.

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  ALDISS, BRIAN W. (1925– ). British writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL). There are elements of fantasy in some of his planetary romances, but his purest fantasy novels are the decadent fantasy The Malacia Tapestry (1976) and the humorous fantasy Affairs at Hamp-
den Ferrers: An English Romance (2004). His relevant short fiction is mostly assembled in A Romance of the Equator: Best Fantasy Stories (1989), although most of his later short fiction shows the influence of magic realism. He edited the early showcase anthology Best Fantasy Stories (1962).

  ALEXANDER, LLOYD (1924– ). U.S. writer for children who published Time Cat (1963) before embarking on his major fantasy project, the Celtic fantasy Chronicles of Prydain, comprising The Book of Three (1964), The Black Cauldron (1965), The Castle of Llyr (1966), Taran Wanderer (1967), and The High King (1968); associated short fiction is collected in The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain (1973). Like T.

  H. White’s Once and Future King, the Prydain series matured along with its hero, and it became a significant model for subsequent heroic fantasies designed for the young adult market. The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1970), The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man (1973), The Wizard in the Tree (1975), and The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha (1978) are in a lighter vein. Many of Alexander’s later works moved their fantastic devices to the margins of adventure stories, but the Oriental fantasy The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen (1991), the Arcadian fantasy The Arkadians (1995), and the Hindu myth–based The Iron Ring (1997) form a set with backgrounds that are calculatedly far-ranging. The Rope Trick (2002) describes a frustrating quest for the eponymous secret.

  ALLEGORY. A narrative with a sequence of events that encodes or symbolizes a distinct pattern of ideas. The most famous classical example is the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic. Religious allegory was popular in medieval times. In 1225, Guillaume de Lorris began work on Le Roman de la Rose [ The Romance of the Rose], an allegorical visionary fantasy whose completed version by Jean de Meun (c1275) was the most widely copied work of medieval French literature. It was highly influential partly because of its erotic content and partly because it lent itself to different interpretations—it was probably the inspiration of the Rosicrucian rose—although its significance as a model for Christian fantasy was eventually surpassed by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

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  Chrétien de Troyes’s allegory in Le Conte du Graal—whose lack of an ending left it undecoded—has been enormously influential in scholarly fantasy and has provided the most important archetype of quest fantasy.

  Allegorical short fiction was still popular in the 19th century, exemplified in the moralistic fantasies of writers as various as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Hans Christian Andersen. George MacDonald’s of allegorical form as a medium of philosophical and spiritual exploration was carried forward by William Morris and Henry Newbolt’s Aladore (1914).

  Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling” exemplifies the manner in which ani-

  mal fantasy routinely employs animal life as an allegory of human life; the C

  âpek brothers’ Insect Play and George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945) are modern examples, the latter being cleverly transfigured in Scott Bradfield’s Animal Planet (1995) and John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance (2003). Gerald Heard’s Gabriel and the Creatures (1952; aka Wishing Well) employs animal fantasy to allegorize unorthodox ideas about evolution. In much the same way, modern recyclings and transfigurations of myths and fairy tales often employ their characters as allegorical representations of modern types, in the satirical manner of John Erskine and Osbert Sitwell. Apart from the convenient improvisations of routine transfiguration, and literary dreams that embed brief but ingenious allegorical sequences within longer works, the construction of elaborate allegorical schemes is rare in 20th-century fiction; notable exceptions to the rule include Wyndham Lewis’s The Enemy of the Stars, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Brian Moore’s The Great Victorian Collection (1975), Robert Silverberg’s Son of Man, and Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels (1994).

  ALLENDE, ISABEL (1942– ). Peruvian-born writer resident in the United States. The novel translated as The House of the Spirits (1982; tr. 1985) is a key example of magic realism. Eva Luna (1987; tr. 1988) is a celebration of the transformative power of storytelling. City of the Beasts (2002) and its sequel Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004) launched an elaborate Odyssean fantasy series aimed at younger readers.

  ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. An account of a hypothetical past or present that might have been actualized had a crucial historical event worked out differently, or a false belief had an authentic foundation in reality.

  Exercises of the former kind are usually categorized as sf (refer to

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  HDSFL) but historical fantasies in which workable magic is introduced into a variant of recorded history routinely break free from the confined narrative spaces of secret history to create alternative worlds.

  Modestly reconfigured alternative histories make a convenient frame for mildly fantasized texts, as in Joan Aiken’s series begun with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but those more central to fantasy literature use magic much more decisively to modify the pattern of historical development, as in the series by Orson Scott Card and Sara Douglass.

  The popularization of the chimerical “steampunk” subgenre of science fantasy in the 1980s encouraged a dramatic increase in extravagant alternative histories accommodating practical magical disciplines; notable examples include the series by J. Gregory Keyes and Kelley Armstrong and such works as S. Andrew Swann’s Broken Crescent (2004).

  A popular variant of the strategy of adding workable magic to the pattern of history is to confer actual existence on fictitious characters, as in many relatively modest examples of metafiction.

  Many secondary worlds mirror their primary model closely enough to qualify as alternatives of a sort, especially if they feature transfigured versions of actual cities or nations; notable examples include Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, various works by John Whitbourn, and Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series (launched 2003), set in alternative Englands, and Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series (launched

  2002), set in an alternative Italy.

  AMAZON. A member of a mythical tribe of warrior women featured in classical fantasy. Heracles and Theseus engaged them in battle, and they featured in Homer’s Iliad as allies of the Trojans. They became significant emblems of female independence, acquiring iconic status in lesbian erotic fantasy, although the tenor of their representation differs markedly in such proto-feminist historical fantasies as Maude Meagher’s The Green Scamander (1934) and male equivalents like Ivor Bannet’s The Amazons (1948).

  Modern fantasies featuring the orignal Amazons include Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris’s Hippolyta and the Curse of the Amazons, Theresa Tomlinson’s The Moon Riders, and Judith Tarr’s Queen of the Amazons, but by the time commodified fantasy was established in the marketplace the term had been promiscuously broadened to refer to any violently inclined female. That usage was promptly redeemed by its

  application to female heroes of sword and sorcery, such as those featured in Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s Amazons anthologies, various

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  works by Sharon Green, and Megan Lindholm’s Harpy’s Flight. In spite of the key example provided by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, many of the stories in her Sword and Sorceress series featured feminized models of female heroism, and those in Esther Friesner’s Chicks series are mostly parodic. Salmonson’s Encyclopedia of Amazons (1991) is a thoroughgoing analysis of the history of the idea.

  AMBIGUOUS TEXTS. Texts whose generic status is difficult to determine because the status of the premises they employ is unclear or calculatedly obscured. Many stories attempt to boost the plausibility of their fantastic devices by claiming that what seems to be magic actually consists of natural mental powers not yet understood by science or admitted as realities by sceptics. Such rationales can draw on a prodigious legacy of scholarly fantasy in the field of the “paranormal,” which allow many occult fantasies to claim ambiguous status. Tzvetan Todorov made the refusal to resolve ambiguities between literal and delusional interpretations of di
sturbing events the definitive feature of his genre of the fantastique, and ambiguity is also crucial to the French-originated genre of surrealism.

  Far-futuristic fantasies routinely excuse magical devices as relics of decadent superscience but rarely trade on the ambiguity. Chimerical and hybrid texts are more common nowadays across the entire spectrum of fantasy literature, partly because fantastic devices no longer require the kind of apologetic disguise to which they are subject in such conscientiously ambiguous accounts of exotic intrusion as Paul Féval’s The Vampire Countess and Jerome K. Jerome’s “The Passing of the Third Floor Back” or accounts of witchcraft like Ethel Mannin’s Lucifer and the Child (1945) and Frank Baker’s Talk of the Devil (1956), but mainly because hybridization and chimerization lend themselves to

  more dramatic narrative effects.

  ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN (1805–1875). Danish writer. He produced six novels—including an account of the Wandering Jew—and several volumes of autobiography in addition to the synthetic fairy tales that secured his reputation, which he began to write in 1829 and to publish in 1835. He recycled a few items, including “The Princess and the Pea” (1835), but the vast majority of is works were original. Some, like

  “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837), are satirical; others, like “The Little Mermaid” (1837) and “The Little Match Girl” (1848), are sentimental; several, like “The Ugly Duckling” (1845) are allegorical. More

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  earnest philosophical allegories like “The Nightingale” (1845) and “The Shadow” (1847) are sometimes omitted from child-oriented collections, although critics often rate them very highly. “The Snow Queen” (1846) is the most extended. A 20-volume Hans Andersen Library issued in the United Kingdom between 1869 and 1887 is nearly complete; the most