The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  BAIN, F. W. (1863–1940). British writer whose experiences in India gave rise to a long series of lyrically meditative stories based in Hindu mythology, comprising A Digit of the Moon (1899), The Descent of the Sun (1903), A Heifer of the Dawn (1904), In the Great God’s Hair (1904), A Draught of the Blue (1905), An Essence of the Dusk (1906), An Incarnation of the Snow (1908), A Mine of Faults (1909), The Ashes of a God (191), Bubbles of the Foam (1912), A Syrup of the Bees (1914), The Livery of Eve (1917), and The Substance of a Dream (1919).

  BAKER, FRANK (1908–1983). British writer. Most of his works are marginal or ambiguous, but three are wholehearted fantasies: The Birds

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  (1936), which externalizes personal demons; Miss Hargreaves (1940), a humorous fantasy in which a fictional character comes inconveniently to life; and Sweet Chariot (1942), a philosophical angelic fantasy of identity exchange. Stories of the Strange and Sinister (1983) mixes lighthearted fantasies with horror stories.

  BALDRY, CHERITH (1947– ). British writer. Her early work was hybrid/science fantasy, including a planetary romance trilogy comprising The Book of the Phoenix (1989), A Rush of Golden Wings (1991), and Cradoc’s Quest (1994), which is a quest fantasy involving a phoenix and a book containing the word of God. The Reliquary Ring (2002), featuring a parallel Venice, is also a hybrid. Exiled from Camelot (2000) is an Arthurian fantasy, and her mystery novel The Buried Cross (2004) also makes use of Arthurian motifs. The Eaglesmount trilogy of animal fantasies, comprising The Silver Horn (2002), The Emerald Throne (2003), and The Lake of Darkness (2004), features pine martens. The Roses of Roazon (2004) is a religious fantasy with allegorical elements.

  BALLADS. Ballads are the poetic repository of folklore, parallel to that of fairy tales; the term links their origin to French lyrics parallel to those of verse romance, but English and Scottish ballads often deal with distinct materials. Many examples of unknown antiquity were collected in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which was much admired by leading members of the British and German Romantic move-

  ments, especially William Wordsworth, who borrowed the term for his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s collection of Lyrical Ballads, Walter Scott, who augmented it with Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), M. G.

  Lewis, Ludwig Tieck, and the Grimms. Similar collections of German ballads were compiled by Johann Gottfried Herder, Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano. Percy’s collection became the model for many subsequent projects, most notably Francis James Child’s five-volume edition of The English and Scottish Ballads (1882–98). The ballad that has served as the most significant taproot text for modern fantasy tells the story of Tam Lin; other modern fantasies transfigured from ballads include works by Dahlov Ipcar, Ellen Kushner, Geraldine McCaughrean, and Delia Sherman, and Deborah Grabien’s The Weaver and the Factory Maid (2003) and The Famous Flower of Serving Men (2004).

  BALLANTINE ADULT FANTASY SERIES. A line of paperback

  reprints edited by Lin Carter that attempted to follow up the success of

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  Ballantine’s 1965 edition of The Lord of the Rings by “rediscovering”

  other “lost classics” of a similar kind. Eric Rucker Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and Peter S. Beagle were among the earliest authors reprinted, in 1967–69, along with David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, after which the series was given its own logo. Carter’s showcase anthologies and nonfictional studies mapped out the field. Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, and Clark Ashton Smith became key exemplars, and new works soon began to appear from Joy Chant, Katherine Kurtz, and Evangeline Walton. Sales of these titles varied considerably, and the line viewed as a whole soon became unprofitable, with the result that the label was abandoned in 1974, although Ballantine played a leading role in developing commodified fantasy with its Del Rey imprint. The Adult Fantasy series was vitally important in determining the image of the fantasy genre and reconstructing its history; it also served as a series of experiments that determined which kinds of fantasy were commodifiable and which were not.

  BALZAC, HONORÉ DE (1799–1850). French writer who wrote numerous pseudonymous Gothic potboilers in his early years (refer to HDHL), of which the most relevant is The Last Fay (1823; tr. 1996), but his most significant contributions to fantasy literature are in the “philosophical studies” section of the sprawling sequence comprising The Human Comedy. The classic Faustian fantasy is La Peau de chagrin (1831; tr. 1842, initially as Luck and Leather but more usually as The Wild Ass’s Skin or The Magic Skin), whose hero reaps spectacular rewards from the eponymous object but becomes paranoid as his capital shrinks inexorably. Louis Lambert (1832; exp. 1833; tr. 1889) and The Quest for the Absolute (1834; tr. 1844; aka The Philosopher’s Stone and Balthazar) are marginal, but Séraphita (1835; tr. 1889) features a mysterious androgynous quasi-angelic being. His short fantasies, including

  “The Elixir of Life” (1830), “The Unknown Masterpiece” (1831), and

  “Melmoth Reconciled” (1835) are didactic fabulations.

  BANGS, JOHN KENDRICK (1862–1922). U.S. writer. Except for the psychological fantasy Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887), all of his genre work is humorous. He wrote numerous comic ghost stories, including Toppleton’s Ghost; or, A Spirit in Exile (1893), and items in The Water Ghost and Others (1894), Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (1898), and Over the Plum Pudding (1901). His most successful works were the infernal comedies A Houseboat on the Styx (1895), The

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  Pursuit of the Houseboat (1897), and The Enchanted Type-Writer (1899), in which the great men of history engage in witty conversation.

  Similarly laid-back material is collected in The Dreamers: A Club (1899), Mr Munchausen (1901), and Olympian Nights (1902). Alice in Blunderland (1907), The Autobiography of Methuselah (1909), and the belatedly assembled Shylock Homes: His Posthumous Memoirs (1973) are more tightly focused parodies.

  BARCLAY, JAMES (1965– ). British writer of dark fantasy whose Chronicles of the Raven, comprising Dawnthief (1999), Noonshade (2000), Nightchild (2001), Elfsorrow (2002), and Shadowheart (2003), track the exploits of a mercenary band of warriors, providing a sceptical antidote to conventional heroic fantasy. The novella Light Stealer (2003) is a prequel.

  BARDIC FANTASY. Players of magical music are frequent protagonists of commodified heroic fantasy, often favored—like healers—by writers intent on avoiding the crude violence of swordplay. The strategy is particularly evident in the subgenre of Celtic fantasy, from which the term “bard” is borrowed. Although no clear boundary separates bardic fantasy from Orphean fantasy, the former usually features quests of a more conventional kind, undertaken without the necessity of journeying into an underworld. Although the subgenre was anticipated by Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John series, the definitive examples of bardic fantasy include series by Keith Taylor, Mercedes Lackey, Holly Lisle, Michael Scott, and Caiseal Mór. Notable individual works include Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The White Mists of Power, Patricia McKillip’s Song for the Basilisk, and Anne Kelleher Bush’s The Knight, the Harp and the Maiden (1999).

  BARHAM, RICHARD HARRIS (1788–1845). British writer who posed as Thomas Ingoldsby in the pages of Bentley’s Miscellany, for which he wrote a long series of humorous pseudo-folklorish stories, poems, and sketches that were collected in three series of The Ingoldsby Legends (1840; 1842; 1847). Hugely popular, they were frequently reprinted, providing a crucial exemplar for subsequent Victorian writers of comic fantasy, including Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold.

  BARING, MAURICE (1874–1945). British writer. The title story of Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches (1909) offers appreciative guests at a house party a glimpse of the underworld; several

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  other stories in the collection—which overlaps considerably with Half a Minute’s Silence and Other Stories (1925)—provide similarly wit
ty comments on aesthetic matters. The Glass Mender and Other Stories (1910; aka The Blue Rose Fairy Book) deploys a similarly sophisticated sensibility in fairy tale formats.

  BARING-GOULD, SABINE (1834–1924). British writer. His own fiction is mostly irrelevant to this taxonomy, although he produced A Book of Ghosts (1904), three volumes of (recycled) fairy tales, and the unconventional vampire novella (1884) that belatedly became the title piece of Margery of Quether and Other Weird Tales (1999). More significantly, his collections of medieval legends became useful source books for many other writers. They include The Book of Were-wolves (1865), Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866; second series 1868), Curiosities of the Olden Times (1869), and A Book of Folklore (1913).

  BARKER, CLIVE (1952– ). British writer best known for graphic horror fiction (refer to HDHL) and work in various visual media. His first venture into genre fantasy was Weaveworld (1987), which miniaturizes its secondary world within the pattern of a carpet. His work in this vein—including items marketed for younger readers like The Thief of Always (1992) and the couplet comprising Abarat (2002) and Days of Magic, Nights of War (2004)—retains enough horrific material to make it virtually definitive of dark fantasy, albeit on an epic scale. His other relevant works include the contemporary/metaphysical fantasy The Great and Secret Show (1989) and its sequel Everville (1994), about the threat of the magical Quiddity, and the quest fantasy Imajica (1991; reprinted in two volumes as The Fifth Dominion and The Reconciliation). Incarnations (1995) and Forms of Heaven (1996) each collect three plays, the first forming a trilogy consisting of “Colossus,”

  “Frankenstein in Love,” and “The History of the Devil,” the latter items in a humorous vein.

  BARRIE, SIR J. M. (1860–1937). Scottish writer best known as a dramatist. His semi-autobiographical fantasy The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens (1902) includes an interpolation—published separately as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906)—about a magical boy who can fly and never grows older. A modified version of this character became the hero of the classic play Peter Pan (1904; novelized as Peter and Wendy, 1911), whose seduction of the Darling family children became a significant modern myth. Dear Brutus (1917)

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  sends its cast into a magic wood so that they may sample the lives they would have led had they made crucial choices differently. A Kiss for Cinderella (1920) is a sarcastic farce. Mary Rose (1924) is a poignant timeslip fantasy. The novella Farewell, Miss Julie Logan (1931), issued as a Christmas supplement to The Times in memory of Charles Dickens’s Christmas annuals, features an ill-fated relationship between a young minister and a female ghost.

  Spinoff from Peter Pan includes Toby Forward’s Neverland (1989), Penelope Farmer’s The Summer Birds, Jane Yolen’s “Lost Girls”

  (1997), and Laurie Anne Fox’s The Lost Girls (2004), which tracks later generations of Darling women.

  BARRON, T. A. (1952– ). U.S. writer. His fantasies include an Arthurian series chronicling the Lost Years of Merlin, comprising The Lost Years of Merlin (1996), The Seven Songs of Merlin (1997), The Fires of Merlin (1998), The Mirror of Merlin (1999), and The Wings of Merlin (2000). The Great Tree of Avalon series begun with Child of the Dark Prophecy (2004) carries forward its themes, focusing on ecocat-astrophic threats to the “universal tree” that grows from Merlin’s magical seed.

  BARTH, JOHN (1930– ). U.S. writer. His early novels achieved their metafictional objectives without recourse to supernatural apparatus, as in the allegory Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), but the shorter stories collected in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novellas making up Chimera (1972) used fantasy devices more liberally.

  Sabbatical (1982) began a long sequence of carefully framed celebrations of the power of story, continued in Tidewater Tales (1987)—its echoes of Scheherazade were given more explicit expression in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991)—the timeslip fantasy Once upon a Time (1994), On with the Story (1996), the conscientiously postmodern Coming Soon!!! (2001), and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004).

  BARTHELME, DONALD (1931–1989). U.S. writer who dabbled extensively in conspicuous fabulation in short stories collected in numerous volumes, beginning with Come Back Dr Caligari (1964), whose contents were reassembled and further augmented in the omnibuses Sixty Stories (1981) and Forty Stories (1987). Snow White (1967) is a complicated transfiguration of the fairy tale. The Dead Father (1975) is a metafictional commentary on fantastic quests. The King (1990) is an

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  Arthurian fantasy that reverses Mark Twain’s timeslip strategy to bring legendary characters into World War II.

  BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES (1821–1867). French poet. Théophile Gautier identified Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; exp. 1861) as the definitive example of “Decadent” literary style; its indulgent dealings with the macabre and various paeans to escapism were a great inspiration to later writers. Baudelaire was deeply influenced by the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he began translating in 1848. His versions of Poe’s tales became enormously influential in France, and a Poesque imagination is manifest in the prose poems Baudelaire intended to collect in Le Spleen de Paris (issued posthumously in volume 6 of Oeuvres complètes, 7 vols., 1868–70); the most striking include languidly mournful

  “Anywhere out of the World” and those translated as “The Double

  Room,” “The Fairies’ Gifts,” and “The Temptations: Eros, Plutus and Fame.” They played a crucial role in establishing the genre of contes

  cruels.

  BAUDINO, GAEL (1955– ). U.S. writer. Her fantasies are informed by her devout neopaganism, although the portal fantasy trilogy comprising Dragonsword (1988), Duel of Dragons (1991), and Dragon Death (1992) is less propagandistically inclined than the alternative history series comprising Strands of Starlight (1989), Maze of Moonlight (1993), and Shroud of Shadow (1993). The latter extends into contemporary fantasy in Strands of Sunlight (1994); the novellas in Spires of Spirit (1997) are closely related. The timeslip fantasy Gossamer Axe (1990) is a transfiguration of Tam Lin. The Water trilogy, comprising O Greenest Branch! (1995), The Dove Looked In (1996), and Branch and Crown (1996), is a further exercise in alternative history, and The Borders of Life (1999 as G. A. Kathryns) another contemporary fantasy.

  BAUM, L. FRANK (1856–1919). U.S. writer best known for his children’s fantasies, especially the long series begun with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and continued in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), The Road to Oz (1909), The Emerald City of Oz (1910), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Rinkitink in Oz (1916), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), and Glinda of Oz (1920), as well as in the short stories for younger readers reprinted in the omnibus Little Wizard Stories of Oz (1914). The first six items constitute an unusually en-

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  ergetic and unrepentantly escapist fantasy, which begins as portal fantasy but is gradually transformed into precedent-setting immersive fantasy.

  Other writers continued the Oz series after Baum’s death, notably

  Ruth Plumly Thompson and illustrator John R. Neill. The centenary of the series brought forth a new flock, including Donald Abbott’s The Amber Flute of Oz (1998), Edward Einhorn’s Paradox in Oz (2000), Roger S. Baum’s The Green Star of Oz (2000), and Eloise McGraw’s The Run-delstone of Oz (2001). Further works inspired by the series include Geoff Ryman’s Was and Gregory Maguire’s The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Baum’s other works, which are more satirically inclined, include

  American Fairy Tales (1901), Dot and Tot in Merryland (1901), The Master Key (1901), the Christmas fantasy The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903), Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), and the couplet comprising The Sea Fairies (1911) and Sky Island (1912). The
Purple Dragon (1976) is a sampler of his short fiction.

  BEAGLE, PETER S. (1939– ). U.S. writer. The elegiac A Fine and Private Place (1960) is a stylish sentimental fantasy akin to the work of Robert Nathan, to whom “Come Lady Death” (1963) and Tamsin (1999) are more overt homages. The Last Unicorn (1968) is a quest fantasy splicing elements of medieval allegory into a humorously edged adventure story. The novelette Lila the Werewolf (1969; book 1974) brought the first phase of his career to a close; it resumed with the dark fantasy The Folk of the Air (1986), in which the lifestyle fantasists of the League for Archaic Pleasures conjure up dangerous forces.

  The Innkeeper’s Song (1993) is a lyrical quest fantasy with a background that is further explored in the stories in Giant Bones (1997). The Unicorn Sonata (1996) is a portal fantasy revisiting a fascination further extrapolated in the anthology Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn (1995), coedited with Janet Berliner and Martin H. Greenberg. A Dance for Emilia (2000) is an offbeat animal fantasy. The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances (1997) mingles stories and essays.

  BEARDSLEY, AUBREY (1872–1898). British artist whose illustrations, including famous series for Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Oscar Wilde’s Salome, encapsulated the decadent spirit of the Aesthetic movement. An erotic fantasy novel Under the Hill (1896–97;

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