DOUGLAS, NORMAN (1868–1952). British writer long resident on the island of Capri. His fantasies are wry celebrations of decadent mores.
Nerinda (1901 as by Normyx; separate pub. 1929) is a delusional/erotic fantasy about a mermaid. South Wind (1917) describes the healthy paganism of the inhabitants of the Arcadian island of Nepenthe. The Epicurean parable They Went (1920) transfigures the legend of Lyonesse.
The classical fantasy In the Beginning (1927) describes the allegorical adventures of a lusty demigod in the days before the gods inflicted the curse of morals upon mankind.
DOUGLASS, SARA (1957– ). Pseudonym of Australian writer Sara War-necke. The Wayfarer Redemption epic fantasy series, comprising Bat-tleaxe (1995; aka The Wayfarer Redemption), Enchanter (1996), Star-Man (1996), Sinner (1997), Pilgrim (1998), and Crusader (2000), describes the devastation of the world of Tencendor by demons. Beyond
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the Hanging Wall (1996) features empathic healers. The inventively exotic backcloth of Threshold (1997) includes mathematical Magi and the magic of frogs. The Crucible trilogy of historical fantasies comprising The Nameless Day (2000), The Wounded Hawk (2001), and The Crip-pled Angel (2002) describes an alternative Wars of the Roses involving Joan of Arc. The Troy Game series launched by Hades’ Daughter (2002) and Gods’ Concubine (2004) extends from the fall of Troy and the destruction of Atlantis to the 20th century. The Betrayal of Arthur (1998) is a nonfictional analysis of Arthurian mythology.
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN (1859–1930). British writer in various genres (refer to HDSFL and HDHL). The 1883 title story of The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales (1890) features a becalmed ship be-set by apparitions; the other fantasies include the identity-exchange comedy “The Great Keinplatz Experiment” (1885) and the animate
mummy story “The Ring of Thoth” (1890). The Mystery of Cloomber (1889) is a fantasy of supernatural revenge. The Parasite (1894) features a female psychic vampire. Round the Red Lamp (1894) includes “Lot No. 249” (1892), another account of a hyperactive mummy. Round the Fire Stories (1908) includes a cautionary spiritualist fantasy, “Playing with Fire” (1900), which acquired an ironic edge when Doyle became a convert; his credulous spiritualist fantasies include The Land of Mist (1926) and the title story of The Maracot Deep and Other Stories (1929).
DRAGON. A mythical creature usually envisaged as a giant winged rep-tile capable of breathing fire, although the alternative designation
“worm” emphasizes its kinship with flightless giant serpents. The symbolism of dragons differs significantly between cultures, the dragons of Oriental mythology being viewed in a kindlier light than the traditional dragons of European mythology, whose primary function was to be
slain, either in consequence of their predatory activities—often involving human female sacrifices—or their propensity for accumulating
plunderable hoards of gold and gems. Dragon slaying is the ultimate certificate of heroism in European legend, including such Christian legends as that of St. George. There has, however, been a conspicuous trend in modern fantasy toward their rehabilitation as high-minded creatures blessed with uniquely ancient wisdom.
This rehabilitation began in children’s fantasy, in some of the items in Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, and E. Nesbit’s Book of Dragons;
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further deflation occurred in ironic tales like Eden Phillpotts’s The Lavender Dragon and Max Beerbohm’s The Dreadful Dragon of Hay Hill (1928). Although J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit revived all the menace of the motif in the vivid depiction of Smaug, his later fantasies capitulated to the trend. An important model of the wondrously wise dragon was provided by Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series, launched in 1968, a year that also saw the launch of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, in which dragons enjoy a symbiotic relationship with human riders who employ them in aerial battles in defense of their world; the significance of these exemplars did not become obvious, however, until the launch of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons in 1974, which made a crucial contribution to draconian charisma, greatly assisted by the attraction of dragons as an item of illustration. The new cliché was solidly in place by the time the highly popular series of DragonLance Chronicles tie-ins, launched in 1984, placed dragons in the foreground, thanks to work done in the interim by such game-influenced writers as Raymond E. Feist.
McCaffrey was following in the footsteps of fellow sf writers like Jack Vance and Avram Davidson in making use of “rationalized” dragons, further analogues of which were developed by Melanie Rawn and Samuel R. Delany, although the difficulties in making the mythological image plausible were made abundantly clear by Peter Dickinson’s tongue-in-cheek The Flight of Dragons. Even so, dragon fantasy of the McCaffrey/Rawn variety became an important sector of commodified fantasy, whose prominent contributors include Robin Wayne Bailey, Graham Edwards, Barbara Hambly, Irene Radford, Jo Walton, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jane Welch, Patricia C. Wrede, Charles Ashton (author of the trilogy launched by Jet Smoke and Dragon Fire
[1991]), Christopher Rowley (in the series launched by Bazil Broketail
[1992]), Marjorie B. Kellogg (in the series launched by The Book of Earth [1995]), David Cladeer (in The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice
[1997]), Joanne Bertin (in The Last Dragonlord [1998]), Jonathan Stroud (in Buried Fire [1999]), and Chris Bunch (in the series launched by Storm of Wings [2002]).
Interesting variants of dragon fantasy include the Oriental dragon fantasies of Laurence Yep and S. P. Somtow; R. A. MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon; Elizabeth Kerner’s Song in the Silence (1997), in which a quest for the land of true dragons reaches an unexpected conclusion, further complicated in The Lesser Kindred (2000) and Redeem-ing the Lost (2004); Carol Berg’s Song of the Beast (2003), in which the
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dragon riders are villains; and Lucius Shepard’s sophisticated account of the dragon Griaule. Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter uses dragon fantasy as a paradigm of the commercial genre. Showcase anthologies include Dragons of Light (1980) and Dragons of Darkness (1981), ed. Orson Scott Card, and The Dragon Quintet (2003), ed. Marvin Kaye. Dragons of Fantasy (2004) by Anne C. Petty is a selective guide.
DRAKE, DAVID A. (1945– ). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL). His strong interest in military history informs such works as the Arthurian fantasy The Dragon Lord (1979) and the stories collected in Vettius and His Friends (1989). The Sea Hag (1988) is a far-futuristic fantasy with fairy tale elements. Old Nathan (1991) is a historical fantasy about a 19th-century American wizard. The sword and sorcery series comprising Lord of the Isles (1997), Queen of Demons (1998), Servant of the Dragon (1999), Mistress of the Catacombs (2001), Goddess of the Ice Realm (2003), and Master of the Cauldron (2004) is influenced by the work of Clark Ashton Smith. Drake has also contributed to several shared world projects, including the Thieves World and Hell series.
DRAKE, NATHAN (1766–1836). British scholar whose curious patchwork of essays, poems, and tales Literary Hours (3 vols., 1798) includes a notable analysis of the Gothic imagination that draws a distinction between the “terrible” and “sportive” strands of Gothic literature—whose central motifs are, respectively, the spectre and the fairy. The tales exemplifying his argument include “Henry Fitzowen,” culminating in a mission statement by the fairy queen.
DREAM. A fantasy arising spontaneously in the mind during sleep.
Many dreams are vividly strange, and some—nightmares and “night
terrors”—are profoundly disturbing. Diviners have long sought omens and premonitions in dreams, treating their imagery as symbolic, a trend continued into modern scholarly fantasy by such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, who worked from the premise that dreams are wish-
fulfilment fantasies filtered by a mental censor determined to disguise their sexual content and resentful amorality. In spite of these endeavors, the available evidence lends itself to a variety of contradictory theories. Repr
esentations of dreams in literary works always load them with meaning (there would otherwise be no purpose in reporting them), usually drawing upon some preexistent theory, although hallucinatory fantasies take them less seriously than do visionary fantasies.
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Many earnest writers oppressed by the naturalistic conventions of
19th-century fiction felt obliged to present fantastic materials as dreams in order to conserve their irrational plausibility, and the strategem of
“excusing” flights of fantasy by writing them off as dreams persisted well into the 20th century in the works of such writers as John Masefield, despite its increasing lameness as a method of narrative closure.
Such dream fantasies provided a model for portal fantasies, the
“world” of dreams being a significant prototype of literary secondary worlds. Secondary worlds formulated as dreams include the allegorical landscape of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Branch Cabell’s trilogy Smirt, Smith, and Smire, and the Arabian fantasy milieu of L. Ron Hubbard’s Slaves of Sleep. The notion that dreams might be more useful portals if they were subject to practiced mental discipline is promoted by such works as Joseph Shield Nicholson’s A Dreamer of Dreams and George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson.
Many writers attempt to mine dreams for inspiration and to adapt
them into fiction; real or pretend opium dreams are featured in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, and Claude Farrère. Surrealists tend to be particularly fond of the strategy, sometimes applying it with considerable assiduity—as in Dennis Saurat’s Death and the Dreamer (1946)—but it was also employed by Lord Dunsany. Roderick Townley, whose Night Errands (1998) is a nonfictional study of how poets use dreams, demonstrated his own use of
them in the novels The Great Good Thing (2001) and Into the Labyrinth (2002). Literary fantasies based on actual dreams include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
DRUID. A chief priest of pre-Roman pagan religion—and hence a central motif of Celtic fantasy. Druids are mentioned in a few Roman documents, including Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and they figure in collections of Welsh legends made long after their extinction. Very little, however, is reliably known about the rites they practiced or the objects of their worship—thus leaving a wide-open field for such scholarly fantasists as Lewis Spence and such literary accounts as J. W. Brodie-Innes’s Old as the World (1909), Maurice Leblanc’s Coffin Island (tr.
1920), Neil Gunn’s Sun Circle, and Margaret J. Anderson’s The Druid’s Gift. As Celtic fantasy has flourished and diversified so has druidic imagery, as evidenced by exemplary works by Gunn, Richad Monaco, Fay Sampson, and Juliet Marillier. In Sarah Isidore’s
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Daughters of Bast series (launched 1999), a girl is guided by a cast from her Druid-ruled homeland to a temple of the Egyptian goddess Bast.
Douglas Niles’s Seven Circles trilogy, comprising Circle at Center (2000), Worldfall (2001), and The Goddess Worldweaver (2003), features otherworldly druids.
DRYASDUST. The pseudonym of an unknown British writer whose first venture into fantasy was Tales of the Wonder Club (3 vols., 1899–1900); the first two volumes consist of humorous fantasies formulated as tall stories. The Wizard’s Mantle (1902) is a similarly humorous account of a cloak of invisibility. These works were reprinted under the byline “M.
Y. Halidom,” under which name the author went on to publish several horror novels, including the Shakespearean fantasy The Poet’s Curse (1911).
DUALISM. The notion that the universe is a battleground of more or less evenly balanced forces of Good and Evil. Within Christendom, it is often associated with Manicheism, a syncretic doctrine founded in third-century Babylonia that fused Judeo-Christian and Buddhist ideas with the dualist tradition of Zoroastrianism, and was early condemned as a heresy—although the Church’s increasing preoccupation with the Devil subsequently drew its own doctrines in that direction. Variants of dualism recurred in the doctrines of such sects as the 13th-century Albigen-sian Cathars, who asserted that the universe of matter is a diabolical creation while God’s creation is purely spiritual.
Much fantasy literature adopts a tacitly dualistic position, encouraged by the melodramatic potential contained within the thesis as well as its obvious attraction as a solution to the problem of the persistence of evil in a universe ruled by an allegedly omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenev-olent God—the discourse of theodicy. John Milton’s attempted use of Paradise Lost to “justify the works of God to men” prompted many literary exercises in theodicy, giving rise to the opposed tradition of literary satanism as well as to earnest extended contes philosophiques like James Morrow’s Blameless in Abaddon, and John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance, in which the acceptance of Manicheism had been forehadowed.
The Zoroastrian opposition of Ormazd and Ahriman, symbolizing
Light and Darkness—recycled in Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets (1957) and transfigured in such works as Patricia McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow and H. L. McCutchen’s LightLand (2002)—is echoed in so
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many other Light/Dark oppositions that the adversaries of commodified fantasy are often collectively designated as “Dark Lords.” Sword and sorcery fiction, influenced by the key example of Michael Moorcock, routinely substitutes Order and Chaos for Light and Darkness.
Stephen R. Donaldson’s characterization of Lord Foul associates Darkness/Chaos with disease and Light/Order with health, while
Terry Brooks’s series begun with Running with the Demon relabels the opposing forces the Word and the Void. Although chaos attracts some support from writers who fear the sclerotizing effects of too much order, such straightforward substitutions usually make little difference. Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity is exceptional in featuring a quest to restore balance to a world in which Light has triumphed, although the hero of John C. Wright’s The Last Guardian of Everness (2004) decides that the agents of Light are best left to sleep while the humans fight the forces of Dark.
Fundamental oppositions between day and night are confused in
mythological terms by the role of the moon, and similar confusions attend many other oppositions symbolized by pairs of deities, especially when one is male and the other female, as in Jenny Jones’s Fly by Night. In spite of the example of sexual differentiation, notions of “co-operative dualism”—which see oppositions in terms of complementary partnership, as in Eastern notions of yin and yang—are relatively rare in Western fantasy literature; such oppositions as Ishtar and Nergal in A. Merritt’s The Ship of Ishtar and Yahweh and Ashtaroth in Thomas Burnett Swann’s biblical fantasies tend to polarize, although even these male authors tend to equate virtue with the female pole. Such fruitful balances as those implied by Michael Cobley’s Earth Mother and Fathertree or Victoria Strauss’s Mind and Hand usually come into focus only when they go awry. Alternating distinctions, like the one drawn by F. W. Nietzsche between “Apollinian” and “Dionysian” cultures—and dramatized by Eden Phillpotts—are also uncommon in fantasy literature.
DUANE, DIANE E. (1952– ). U.S. writer. The trilogy comprising The Door into Fire (1979), The Door into Shadow (1984), and The Door into Sunset (1992) is an early example of feminized sword and sorcery. The series comprising So You Want to Be a Wizard? (1983), Deep Wizardry (1985), High Wizardry (1990), A Wizard Abroad (1993), The Wizard’s Dilemma (2001), A Wizard Alone (2002), and The Wizard’s Holiday (2003) is an inventive humorous fantasy, which spun off an animal
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fantasy couplet comprising The Book of Night with Moon (1997) and On Her Majesty’s Wizardry Service (1998, aka To Visit the Queen).
Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses (2002) envisages a set of seven parallel worlds, only one of which is a setting for workable magic. Duane has contributed to various shared world enterprises, sometimes in collaboration with her husb
and, Peter Morwood.
DUCORNET, RIKKI (1943– ). U.S. writer and artist who used the byline “Erica Ducornet” on her early children’s fiction, including a version of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1970) and the wish-fulfillment fantasy Shazira Shazam and the Devil (1970 with Guy Ducornet). Her earliest adult novels, retrospectively represented as an “alchemistic quartet” comprising The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune (1992), and The Jade Cabinet (1993), feature ingenious chimerical combinations of fairy tale and other traditional motifs with vivid erotic fantasy in a variety of historical settings. The relatively moderate Phosphor in Dreamland (1995), set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland in the 17th century, describes an artist’s infatuation with extravaganza. The Fan Maker’s Inquisition (2000) describes the Marquis de Sade’s creation of an imaginary world. The Word “Desire” (1977) was the first of several collections whose contents were sampled in The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1994), which assembles 60 fabulations. Gazelle (2003) is an occult fantasy about a perfumer in 1950s Cairo. The Monstrous and the Marvelous (1999) is nonfiction.
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE (1802–1870). French writer whose serial novels—especially The Three Musketeers (1843–44) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–45)—were foundation stones of popular literature.
Although neither is fantasy, they both provided significant exemplars for fantasy literature; explicit tribute is paid to them in commodified fantasies by Stephen Brust and Joel Rosenberg and by Arturo Perez-Reverte’s literary occult fantasy The Dumas Club (1993 in Spanish; tr.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 24