The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

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The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 23

by Stableford, Brian M.


  The book that showcased the new line was Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara, which was quickly followed by Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (which had previously been rejected by every commercial publisher in the United States, including Ballantine) and Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon. All became best sellers, establishing key templates for the commodified fantasy to which Del Rey Books remained steadfastly committed even after Lester del Rey’s retirement in 1991.

  DELUSIONAL FANTASY. A delusion is an affliction that leads a people to believe that they are other than who they are, or that the world is other than it is. Delusional fantasy is akin to hallucinatory fantasy, but delusions may be permanent and are usually deep rooted, thus lending themselves to very different plot development. Whereas visionary fantasies often reveal some kind of truth, however elusive, delusional fantasies are intrinsically deceptive and often horrific, although they can sometimes be ironically life enhancing. The archetypal example is Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

  Literary representations of spontaneously generated delusions—ex-

  amples include Gaston Leroux’s The Man with the Black Feather

  (1904), H. G. Wells’s Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928), John Knittel’s Nile Gold (1929), Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Malllare, John Gardner’s Freddy’s Book, Robert Irwin’s The Limits of Vision, and Wendy Clarke’s Baudelaire’s Desire (1999)—are not considered to be fantasy fiction by some critics, but psychological fantasy of the kind pioneered by William Gilbert is interesting precisely because of its bor-derline situation. Accounts of deliberately induced delusion are more obviously fantastic, although those involving hypnotism—popularized by George du Maurier’s Trilby and often employed in humorous fantasy—are more ambiguous than those involving explicit magic.

  Delusion-inducing magic—sometimes called “glamor”—is routinely

  used by femmes fatales and wizards intent on deflecting heroes from their quests.

  The possibility that reading fantasy with the wrong attitude can generate delusions has haunted children’s fiction since its inception; Rona

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  Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters (1981) updates the anxiety by applying it to role-playing games. See also EROTIC FANTASY.

  DEMON. A spiritual being, usually possessed of powerful magic and often of an evil disposition. In Christian thinking, the word became synonymous with devil; although the Greek daimon and the Latin daemon are morally neutral, the English derivative was inevitably tainted by the insistence that all would-be rivals to God must be devils in disguise and that all magic, especially witchcraft, must involve their invocation. The Torah (unlike the folkloristic aspects of the Talmud) was purged by the monotheistic Jews of the demons to which its scriptures may once have referred, but residual Old Testament references to such probable demons as Lilith and Azazel were reconceived by Christians as evidence of agents of the Devil. Islamic folklore similarly retained a demonic hierarchy, headed by Iblis and staffed by djinn.

  Demons that are not recast as devils are frequently used nevertheless as antagonists—and sometimes as protagonists—in occult fantasy and sword and sorcery fiction. As modern fantasy writers have taken more interest in anthropological esoterica, the range of demons employed in fantasies has widened considerably.

  DETECTIVE FICTION. There is a fundamental incompatibility between the tacit assumptions of detective and fantastic fiction, clearly reflected in a subgenre of detective fiction in which seeming supernatural events are naturalistically resolved, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) and Eden Phillpotts’s Lycanthrope (1937). Calculated violation of the expectation of a naturalistic resolution—as in John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court (1937)—seems to many detective fiction fans to be narrative treason. Many early detectives confronted with occult or psychic phenomena were passionately zealous in proving them fraudulent.

  The first subgenre to resolve this fundamental incompatibility featured “occult detectives” whose mission was not to debunk but to provide metaphysical explanations rather than physical ones and exorcisms rather than arrests; much fiction of this type is horror fiction, although it intrudes upon the territories of spiritualist fantasy and theosophical fantasy. Its early protagonists were usually medical men presented with unusual cases, as in the Blackwood’s Magazine series collected in Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (3 vols. 1838), by Samuel Warren, and the delusional fantasies recorded by William

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  Gilbert, but these eventually gave way to freelance consultants like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, William Hope Hodgson’s Car-nacki, Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff, Dion Fortune’s Dr Taverner, and Margery Lawrence’s Miles Pennoyer. The tradition was carried forward into the modern era by Glen Cook and Mark Valentine’s In Violet Veils and Other Tales of the Connoisseur (1999). A few nonspecialist detectives were thrust into frequent contact with fantastic adversaries, most notably E. Charles Vivian’s Gees. A significant variant featured

  “psychic detectives” who solved ordinary crimes by extraordinary

  means, like J. U. Giesy’s astrologically talented “Semi-Dual” and Sax Rohmer’s Morris Klaw, who solves crimes by dreaming the solutions.

  John Dickson Carr founded a new hybrid genre of timeslip crime stories in The Devil in Velvet (1951), Fear Is the Same (1956 as by Carter Dickson), and Fire, Burn! (1957), following a precedent set by Bruce Graeme’s Epilogue (1933), in which timeslipped detectives solve the Dickensian mystery of Edwin Drood, but it remained fugitive. A more spectacular breakthrough was achieved when chimerical texts began to displace hybrids, enabling the establishment of alternative histories involving all manner of exotic detectives whose investigation of exotic crimes is methodical and rational within the exotic narrative framework.

  The boom in this kind of fiction quickly produced such best sellers as P. N. Elrod and Laurel K. Hamilton; other notable examples include works by Simon R. Green, Rosemary Edghill, Tanya Huff, “Martin Scott” (Martin Millar), Lillian Stewart Carl’s Time Enough to Die (2002) and Lucifer’s Crown (2004), and Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking (2004). Such works provide key examples of earnest chimerization, although the subgenre was inevitably infected by humor in such series as Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, extending from Storm Front (2000) to Blood Rites (2004).

  THE DEVIL. When used as a proper noun, the anti-God of Christianity, also known as Satan or Lucifer; as a generic noun the term refers to one of his followers from the ranks of the fallen angels, to whose company many pagan gods and demons were also consigned by Christian scholars, the term “demon” thus becoming synonymous with “devil” in that context. In Christian art, the Devil is usually represented as a monstrous figure with a bestial face, horns, a tail, and sometimes cloven feet, borrowed from the Greek god Pan.

  The Devil is the explicit or implicit adversary of much horror fiction (refer to HDHL), but his role in fantasy has been complicated by

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  the refinement of Faustian fantasies as ingenious contests of wits, the apologetic tradition of literary satanism, and the burlesque tradition of infernal comedies. He is occasionally featured in apocalyptic fantasy, and the Christian reinterpretation that equates him with the serpent in Eden gives him a key role in some biblical fantasies as well as many Christian fantasies, but his most interesting appearances outside the cited subgenres are in contes philosophiques that employ him in considerations of the problem of evil (theodicy).

  The allegation that the serpent in Eden was actually Satan prefigures his reputation as a master of disguise, exploited in fantasies ranging from Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in Love to Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Fair to Middling (1959), but his most familiar modern form is an urbane man of the world, as in works ranging from Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan to Stephen King’s “The Man in Black” (1994). Minor devils are usually weaker carbon copies, although some co-opted

  demons
have distinct identities, notably the amiable Asmodeus featured in Alain René Lesage’s The Devil on Two Sticks (1707; tr. 1708) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Asmodeus at Large.

  Notable fantasies in which the Devil plays a significant role—al-

  though he is often under threat of losing his power and influence to a thinning process—include Ferenc Molnar’s play The Devil (1907; novelization by Joseph O’Brien from Henry W. Savage’s English version, 1908), Carl Heinrich’s Orphan of Eternity (1929), Murray Constantine’s The Devil, Poor Devil!, Sherard Vines’s Return, Belphegor! (1932), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Robert Nathan’s The Innocent Eve, Natalie Babbitt’s two story collections, Jeremy Leven’s Satan (1982), and Catherine Webb’s Waywalkers.

  DEXTER, SUSAN (1955– ). U.S. writer. The series comprising The Ring of Allaire (1981), The Sword of Calandra (1985), and The Mountains of Channadran (1986) is a humorous account of the tribulations of a trainee wizard. The Wizard’s Shadow (1993) employs the same secondary world but puts more emphasis on heroic adventure. The trilogy comprising The Prince of Ill Luck (1994), The Wind-Witch (1995), and The True Knight (1995) reverts to the humorous pattern. Moonlight (2001) is another account of the exploits of a young wizard-to-be.

  DICKENS, CHARLES (1812–1870). British writer who made a crucial contribution to the evolution of Victorian fantasy by inventing and shaping Christmas fantasy and arguing in favor of the necessity of retain-

  DISCH, THOMAS M. • 111

  ing a component of enchantment in children’s literature. Some anecdotal humorous/ghost stories are included in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–37), including “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton,” the first of his Christmas stories. The similarly moralistic A Christmas Carol in Prose (1843) was followed by The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), the nonfantastic allegory The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848). The Chimes works up a fine pitch of indignation regarding the plight of the poor, and The Haunted Man is a profound

  conte philosophique. His later ghost stories are orthodox horror fiction.

  A Christmas Carol became a modern myth, extensively recycled and imitated; echoes of it form the core of a small subgenre of “Dickensian fantasy.” It was carbon-copied by Tom Gallon’s The Man Who Knew Better (1902) and Marie Corelli’s Strange Visitation of Josiah McNason; Connie Willis’s “Adaptation” (1994), Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge (2001), and Louis Bayard’s Mr. Timothy (2003) are notable sequels; Mark Hazard Osmun’s Marley’s Ghost (2000) is a prequel.

  DICKINSON, PETER (1927– ). Zambian-born British writer of wide-ranging children’s fiction. In the Changes trilogy comprising The Weathermonger (1968), Heartsease (1969), and The Devil’s Children (1970), a retreat from civilization is revealed to have been caused by Merlin. Emma Tupper’s Diary (1971) records an encounter with the Loch Ness monster. The Blue Hawk (1976) is a historical fantasy set in Egypt. The mock-scholarly fantasy The Flight of Dragons (1979) offers a humorous account of draconian biology. Touch and Go (1997) is a timeslip fantasy. The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (1999) is a doppelgänger story. The Ropemaker (2001) is a sophisticated quest fantasy.

  The Tears of the Salamander (2003) is a historical fantasy set in 19th-century Italy. Inside Grandad (2004) features selkies. Dickinson’s work for younger children mostly consists of quirky fairy tales, including The Iron Lion (1972), Giant Cold (1984), A Box of Nothing (1985), and Time and the Clockmice, etcetera (1993). He has also worked in collaboration with his wife, Robin McKinley.

  DISCH, THOMAS M. (1940– ). U.S. writer in various genres (refer to HDSFL and HDHL). His fantasies include the mock-children’s stories The Brave Little Toaster (1981; book 1986) and The Brave Little Toaster

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  Goes to Mars (1988), which substitute household appliances for the stock characters of Disneyesque animal fantasy. The sf novel On Wings of Song (1979) makes much of the allegorical connotations of flight.

  The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991) is a moralistic fantasy in which a doctor receives a double-edged magical healing gift. The Silver Pillow (1988) is a dark fantasy. The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999) has elements of theriomorphic/animal fantasy. His short fiction includes numerous surreal fantasies and Swiftian satires.

  DISKI, JENNY (1947– ). British writer whose literary fiction sometimes employs fantasy motifs. Rainforest (1987) has a marginal element of surreal fantasy. Like Mother (1988) is narrated by a brainless child.

  Then Again (1990) is a timeslip fantasy. Monkey’s Uncle (1994) features an intelligent ape. Only Human: A Comedy (2000) is an irreverent biblical fantasy; After These Things (2004) is a sequel. Some satirical fairy tales are included in The Vanishing Princess (1995).

  DISRAELI, BENJAMIN (1804–1881). British statesman and writer. The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828) and the classical fantasies “Ixion in Heaven” (1832–33) and “The Infernal Marriage” (1833–34) are political satires. The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, and the Rise of Iskander (1833; aka Alroy) is a historical fantasy.

  DJINN. A kind of demon featured in Arabian fantasy; the word is both singular and plural, but an alternative singular form, djinni, is often Anglicized as “genie” in children’s fiction. The transition of the Arab world to monotheistic Islam is portrayed in a legend that the djinn were imprisoned in bottles by Suleiman (the biblical Solomon), making them conveniently available for rediscovery in intrusive fantasies, especially in echoes of one of the tales in the Arabian Nights that constitute a common formula of wish-fulfillment fantasy; examples include Max Adeler’s “Mr. Shelmire’s Djinn” (1883), F. Anstey’s The Brass Bottle, and Susan Alice Kerby’s Miss Carter and the Ifrit (1945).

  The humorous potential of djinn has been extensively exploited by such writers as Robert Lynn Asprin, Craig Shaw Gardner, Elizabeth Scarborough, and Tom Holt, but they are equally useful in commodified fantasy as adversaries. In Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series, extending from Ill Wind (2003) to Heat Stroke (2004), the heroine is eventually resurrected as a djinn. Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series, begun with The Amulet of Samarkand (2003) and Golem’s Eye (2004), features a djinn associated with an apprentice magician.

  DOPPELGÄNGER • 113

  DONALDSON, STEPHEN R. (1947– ). U.S. writer whose first trilogy in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant—consisting of Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War, and The Power That Preserves (all 1977)—became a spontaneous best seller after being rejected by 47 publishers, demonstrating the absurdity of editorial prejudices against fantasy. Covenant, afflicted by Hanson’s disease (leprosy), is translocated into a secondary world where history, geography, and metaphysics reflect his plight, thus transmuting his struggle for survival into a mission to save an entire world from the ravages of Lord Foul the Despiser. The second trilogy, comprising The Wounded Land (1980), The One Tree (1982), and White Gold Wielder (1983), undermined its status as delusional fantasy by sending a second character into the milieu. Gilden-Fire (1981) is a fragment detached from the first trilogy. The series continued in The Runes of the Earth (2004).

  The immersive fantasy title story of the collection Daughter of Regals and Other Tales (1984) and the portal fantasy couplet Mordant’s Need, comprising The Mirror of Her Dreams (1986) and A Man Rides Through (1987), employ female protagonists well suited to emotionally agonized victim roles. Two of the stories in Reave the Just and Other Tales (1998) feature a quasi-messianic champion whose willingness to be victimized in others’ stead shames them into heroic resistance. Donaldson, a more distinctive writer than Terry Brooks, revealed that commodified fantasy need not be restricted to cloning the works of J. R. R.

  Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, and that there is more raw anguish in the popular demand for escapism than anyone had dared to imagine.

  DONNELLY, MARCUS (?– ). U.S. writer. Prophets for the End of Time (2000) is a spirited apocalyptic fantasy deftly combining satirical humor and sentimental
ity. Letters from the Flesh (2004) is a religious fantasy about the conflict between evolutionary theory and creationism, featuring possible alien influences on early Christianity.

  DOPPELGÄNGER. A German term, roughly translatable as “walking double,” signifying an elaborated shadow or mirror image. Such figures are of considerable importance in fantasy literature, often dramatizing the notion that human identity is wrought by an existential compromise between reason and emotion, good and evil impulses, or (in Freudian terminology) superego and id. The common ploy of disowning responsibility for regrettable acts by insisting that the actor was

  “not himself” at the time is easily extrapolated into the psychological

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  fantasy of multiple personality, as in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” Claude Houghton’s Neighbours (1926), and Nancy Springer’s Larque on the Wing. It is often employed in moralistic fantasies, as in Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, Mrs. Craik’s “The Self-Seer” (1853), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, James Branch Cabell’s There Were Two Pirates, and Italo Calvino’s The Cloven Viscount. Humorous variants include J.

  Storer Clouston’s Two’s Two (1916) and William Garrett’s The Man in the Mirror (1931).

  Alter egos often crop up in alternative histories, especially those set in parallel worlds, as in Gerald Bullett’s Mr. Godly Beside Himself and Vernon Knowles’s “The Shop in the Off-Street” (1935). They also arise in timeslip fantasies with an element of karmic romance, as in Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lepidus the Centurion (1901).

  Existentialist fantasies involving doppelgängers include Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908), Robert Hichens’s “The Man in the Mirror” (1950), Elizabeth Sewell’s The Dividing of Time (1951), Nicholas Royle’s Counterparts (1993), Alice Thompson’s Justine (1997), and Peter Straub’s Mr. X. (1999). Natural doppelgängers—identical twins—are featured in many fantasies of coincidental destiny, including Alexandre Dumas’s “The Corsican Brothers” (1844), Lois Duncan’s The Stranger with My Face (1981), and David Ambrose’s Coincidence (2001).

 

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