1977, when the Tolkien-based Adventure was created, played as a text dialogue; by the early 1980s, there was an expanding genre of “interactive fiction.” Graphic representations were added in 1984 to The Hobbit. A theory of interactive narrative developed by Brenda Laurel in 1985 proposed a system of plot generation based on Aristotle’s Poetics.
In the meantime, rapid progress was being made in iconic computer
games that involved shooting space invaders, asteroids, and other miscellaneous adversaries, promising an eventual fusion. The first commercial computer-based RPG was Ultima (launched 1980), but its evolving series was overtaken in 1988 by Heroes of the Lance and Pools of Radiance, which borrowed the scenarios of TSR’s two best-selling tie-in series. These were, however, individual adventure games; collective play on the nascent Internet required the development of “Multi-user dungeons” (MUDs); these were developed on an amateur basis during the 1980s for use in connection with Ultima On-Line.
Shooting games began a rapid evolution toward action-adventure ex-
cursions in ever more elaborate virtual realities, their scenarios benefiting from successive generations of new special effects. The arrival of the mouse in the late 1980s killed off text-based interactive fictions and prompted the rapid evolution of graphic versions. The most significant fantasy example was Myst (1993), with an introduction describing it as a “book” that the player was “entering”—immersive fantasy in a new form. As game consoles marketed by Sega and Nintendo evolved rapidly in the early 1990s, the imagery of fantasy was exploited by such shooting games as Doom (1993), designed by a former RPG player. By 1999, development budgets, such as for Final Fantasy VII, were exceeding those of Hollywood movies.
MUD-assisted clones of Ultima On-Line—including Neverwriter and Lords of Empyria—made steady progress in the 1990s, eventually spawning Everquest (released 1999), with a fantasyworld, Norrath, that expanded rapidly. By 2004, Everquest was held on multiple servers, each one capable of hosting up to 3,000 simultaneous players. Sony reported that the game had 450,000 subscribers in 2004—greater than the annual sales of any but the best-selling books—while the global leader
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among such online RPGs, the South Korea–based Lineage, had more than a million. As with immersive fantasy books, the plotlines developed in online RPGs were initially formularistic in the extreme, but Everquest2 and Lineage2, both launched in 2004, explored the potential for greater flexibility. In the meantime, cyberspatial “game spaces” have become increasing popular as locations for secondary worlds, assisting the growth of hybrid/science fantasy in which a science-fictional frame holds a magical scenario; notable examples include Tad Williams’s Otherworld series, Will Shetterley’s The Tangled Lands, and Vivian Vande Velde’s User Unfriendly.
GARCIA MÁRQUEZ, GABRIEL (1928– ). Colombian writer who be-
came famous as the popularizer of magic realism, leading the way into the Anglo-American market for many other Latin American writers. His first publication in 1947 was a posthumous fantasy, but much of his early work was naturalistic; the intrusion of fantastic materials is trace-able in the omnibus Collected Stories (1984), and the subsequent collection translated as Strange Pilgrims (1992; tr. 1993) is heavily biased toward fantasy themes, especially afterlife fantasy. The novel translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; tr. 1970) is set in the town of Macondo, first introduced in the naturalistic “Leaf Storm” (1952; tr.
1979), where the history of the exemplary locale is seamlessly confused with all manner of fantastic intrusions, which perform various allegorical and satirical functions in assisting the story of the town and its inhabitants to become a politically judgmental account of Colombia and its people. The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975; tr. 1976), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985; tr. 1988), and The General in his Labyrinth (1989; tr. 1990) are more restrained, but their narrative methods are similar. In Of Love and Other Demons (1994; tr. 1995) a young priest is seduced by an exotic girl.
GARDNER, CRAIG SHAW (1949– ). U.S. writer most of whose work is humorous fantasy. The series comprising A Malady of Magicks (1986), A Multitude of Monsters (1986), A Night in the Netherhells (1987), A Difficulty with Dwarves (1987), An Excess of Enchantments (1988), and A Disagreement with Death (1989) converts stereotypical genre materials into pun-laden pantomime comedy. The trilogy comprising Slaves of the Volcano God (1989), Bride of the Slime Monster (1990), and Revenge of the Fluffy Bunnies (1991) is more enterprising in its conversion of concatenations of movie clichés into secondary
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worlds. The Other Sinbad (1991), A Bad Day for Ali Baba (1991), and Scheherazade’s Night Out (1992, aka The Last Arabian Night) employ the background of Arabian fantasy for the same kind of slapstick, but Gardner appeared to tire of it thereafter; Raven Walking (1994; aka Dragon Sleeping), Dragon Waking (1995), and Dragon Burning (1996) are straightforward accounts of displaced humans working out their issues in a stereotyped secondary world. As “Peter Garrison,” he wrote the chimerical series comprising The Changeling War (1999), The Sorcerer’s Gun (1999), and The Magic Dead (2000).
GARDNER, JOHN (1933–1982). U.S. scholar—not to be confused with the British thriller writer of the same name—whose academic work included studies of Arthurian romance and a translation of the epic of Gilgamesh. His early fiction recycled the legends of Beowulf, in Gren-del (1971), and Jason and Medeia (1973) in an epic poem. The stories collected in The King’s Indian (1974) are mostly fabulations, and In the Suicide Mountains (1977) incorporates similar materials. Freddy’s Book (1980) is a complex delusional fantasy whose protagonist uses fantasy imagery in self-therapy; Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982) and the incomplete Shadows (in Stillness and Shadows, 1986) are similar but darker.
GARFIELD, LEON (1921–1996). British writer best known for vivid historical fiction set in the 18th century, marketed for children. The title novella of Mr Corbett’s Ghost and Other Stories (1968) is a phantasmagoric Christmas fantasy. The Ghost Downstairs (1972) is a graphic Faustian fantasy. The Wedding Ghost (1985) is a stylish sentimental fantasy ingeniously transfiguring a fairy tale. Empty Sleeve (1988) is also a ghost story. Garfield recycled two classical fantasies, The God beneath the Sea (1970) and The Golden Shadow (1973), both in collaboration with Edward Blishen; his Shakespeare Stories (1985) includes prose versions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
GARNER, ALAN (1934– ). British writer best known for children’s fantasies. The couplet comprising The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) feature increasingly insistent intrusions of apparatus from Celtic, Arthurian, and other mythical and legendary sources into the landscapes surrounding Alderley Edge in
Cheshire, which cannot in the end be confined. Elidor (1965) is an elaborate portal fantasy in which sacred objects recovered from a secondary world cause havoc until they can be used to redeem the version of
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Faerie, whose key they hold. The Owl Service (1967) recycles a Celtic legend in a present-day setting with remarkable intensity, and the same theme of bondage by eternal recurrence recurs in Red Shift (1973). His work changed direction thereafter, although he published numerous collections of straightforwardly recycled fairy tales and eventually revisited his old territory, albeit tentatively, in the historical fantasies Strandloper (1996) and The Well of the Wind (1998). The mystery Thursbitch (2003) has visionary and fabular elements.
GARNETT, RICHARD (1835–1906). British writer and scholar. His delicately humorous and decadent fantasies were collected in The Twilight of the Gods (1888; exp. 1903); they recruit motifs eclectically from various mythologies, many of them sarcastic Christian fantasies with sensibility that extends into literary satanism in “The Demon Pope,”
“The Bell of St. Euschemon,” and “Alexander the Ratcatcher.” The title story, which tracks the career of Prometheus after his liberation, is an archetypal account of thinning, and the ot
her classical fantasies included are similarly elegiac in spite of their caustic wit.
GASKELL, JANE (1941– ). British writer. Strange Evil (1957), written when she was 14, is a portal fantasy featuring an unusual version of Faerie. King’s Daughter (1958), about an exile from Atlantis, prepared the way for a trilogy of Atlantean fantasies comprising The Serpent (1966; 2-vol. version as The Serpent and The Dragon), Atlan (1966), and The City (1966), to which Some Summer Lands (1977) was a belated sequel. The Shiny Narrow Grin (1964) is an early revisionist vampire novel. Sun Bubble (1990) has some marginal fantastic content.
GAUTIER, THÉOPHILE (1811–1872). French writer, a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Many of his works—including the lush
erotic fantasy Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), the blithely decadent Fortunio (1837), the historical extravaganzas “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” (1838) and “King Candaules” (1844), and the mock-chivalric romance Captain Fracasse (1863)—are self-consciously exotic but sparing in their use of explicit supernaturalism. The two shorter items were included with other classic erotic fantasies—the vampire story
“Clarimonde” (1836), the timeslip fantasy “Arria Marcella” (1852), the humorous ghost story “Omphale” (1834), and the hallucinatory fantasy “The Mummy’s Foot” (1840)—in Lafcadio Hearn’s collection One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882)
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in advance of their appearance in F. C. Sumichrast’s 24-volume translation of The Works of Théophile Gautier (1900–1903).
Gautier’s other fantasies include the doppelgänger story “The Dupli-cated Knight” (1840); the identity-exchange story Avatar (1856); Jet-tatura (1857), about a man cursed with the evil eye; Spirite (1866), a sentimental fantasy in which love transcends death; and the playful
“Mademoiselle Dafné” (1866). Although Gautier represented the zenith of French romanticism, he was also the first to recognize its obsolescence; his memorial introduction to the third edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal echoed the regretful note of his own fantasies, whose wish-fulfillment aspect was consistently bittersweet. His most often reprinted tales are frequently retitled, including all the items in My Fantoms (tr. by Richard Holmes, 1976). The formula of his erotic fantasies continued to recur in such pastiches as Pierre Bessand-Massenet’s Amorous Ghost (1955, 1957).
GEARY, PATRICIA (1951– ). U.S. writer. Living in Ether (1982) is a contemporary fantasy set in California. Strange Toys (1987) is an account of a magically complicated sibling relationship. The sensitive heroine of The Other Canyon (2002) exercises her talent on a Native American artifact.
GEMMELL, DAVID (1948–). British writer specializing in action-adventure fantasy, whose work echoes the fierce narrative drive and resolute masculinity of Robert E. Howard. The Drenai series, comprising Legend (1984; aka Against the Horde), The King beyond the Gate (1985), Waylander (1986), Quest for Lost Heroes (1990), Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf (1992), the collection The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend (1993), The Legend of Deathwalker (1996), Winter Warriors (1997), and Hero in the Shadows (2000), is set in a disintegrating quasi-medieval empire. A new Druss the Legend series began with White Wolf (2003) and Swords of Night and Day (2004).
A more loosely knit sequence includes a post-holocaust trilogy, comprising Wolf in Shadow (1987; aka The Jerusalem Man), The Last Guardian (1989), and Bloodstone (1994); a quasi-Arthurian couplet, comprising Ghost King (1988) and The Last Sword of Power (1988); and two historical fantasies set in ancient Greece, Lion of Macedon (1991) and Dark Prince (1991). Ironhand’s Daughter (1995) and The Hawk Eternal (1995) are portal fantasies with female heroes. The Rig-
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ante series comprises Sword in the Storm (1998), Midnight Falcon (1999), Ravenheart (2001), and Stormrider (2002).
Gemmell’s other works include Knights of Dark Renown (1989), about a company of displaced medieval knights; The Lost Crown
(1989), featuring a child warlock and a conceited owl; Morning Star (1992), which transfigures the legend of Robin Hood; the heroic fantasy Dark Moon (1996); and the planetary romance Echoes of the Great Song (1997). He wrote White Knight, Black Swan (1993) as “Ross Harding.”
GENTLE, MARY (1956– ). British writer. A Hawk in Silver (1977; rev.
1985) is a contemporary fantasy in which survivors of Atlantis are manifest as fairy folk. Some of her later work is a hybrid/science fantasy, but the sequence comprising Rats and Gargoyles (1990), The Architecture of Desire (1991), and the lead story in the collection Left to His Own Devices (1994)—to which two of the stories in the earlier Scholars and Soldiers (1989) are also related—offers a complex account of a god-governed city in a secondary world ruled by rats, the apparatus eventually leaking into the primary world; White Crow (2003) is an omnibus. Grunts! (1992) is a satire of commodified fantasy seen from the viewpoint of mercenary orcs unaware that they have signed up on the side of Evil. Ash: A Secret History (2000; in the United States 1999–2000 in 4 vols., A Secret History, Carthage Ascendant, The Wild Machines, and Lost Burgundy) is an elaborate historical fantasy about the exploits of a female warrior in 15th-century Burgundy. The book 1610: A Sundial in a Grave (2003) is similar in kind, as is the novella Under the Penitence (2004). More short fiction is collected in Car-tomancy (2004).
GERMAN FANTASY. German fantasy is rooted in such extensions of French chivalric romance as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal (c1210), which co-opted the legend of Prester John into the story of the grail and gave Chrétien de Troye’s hero a son named Lohengrin. The tradition was revived by the Romantic movement, whose Gothic component—at its
most extreme in the schauerroman [“horrid novel”]—was considerably darker than the English Gothic novels and French romans frénétiques it helped to inspire.
Although the schauerroman is the foundation stone on which modern horror fiction is built, many German examples retain enough of the substance of chivalric romance to give them a chimerical quality
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carried over into the kuntsmärchen [art fairy tales] of J. K. Musäus, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, the Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Wilhelm Hauff, and Adalbert von Chamisso; Johann Apel’s often-recycled Faustian fantasy about a magic bullet, “Der Freischutz”
(1810), is an archetypal example. The delusional fantasies of E. T. A.
Hoffmann also edge from ambiguity toward chimerical status. The German Romantics and the linguistic theorist Jacob Grimm seemed perfectly happy to accept the inference that if märchen really did embody the German volksgeist, there must be an element of violent perversity therein—a notion that persisted long afterward in such cultural products as Nazi mysticism.
Romanticism faded away in the 1820s, but collections of old and new märchen continued to appear in the work of such writers as Ludwig Bechstein and the Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg, supplemented by the Christian fantasies of Gottfried Keller (1819–90). The most remarkable extensions of German fantasy in this period were in the theater and concert hall, initially in the work of Richard Wagner and later that of Richard Strauss, whose chief librettist Hugo von Hoffmannstahl continued the tradition of art fairy tales in Four Stories (1905; tr. 1968) and wrote nonmusical fantasy plays along with Gerhardt Hauptmann.
The literary fantasy written in the late 19th century by such writers as Oscar Panizza and Karl Strobl retained a strong component of horror, carried forward into the 20th century by the surreal fantasies of Alfred Kubin and Leo Perutz; the historical fantasies of Paul Busson, notably The Man Who Was Born Again (1921; tr. 1927) and The Fire Spirits (1923; tr. 1929); the occult fantasies of Gustav Meyrink; and the decadent fantasies of Hanns Heinz Ewers. Exceptions to the rule included Manfred Kyber’s animal fables.
Hoffmanstahl, Meyrink, and Perutz helped to build a distinctively
Austrian school of German-language fiction, showcased in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: The Meyrink Years 1890–1930 (1993; ex
p. as The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy 1890–2000), ed. Mike Mitchell; it suffered even greater disruption by the realism-favoring Nazis than did the domestic tradition, but it survived; its subsequent contributors included Alexander Lernet-Holenia, author of The Resurrection of Mal-travers (1936; tr. 1988) and Count Luna: Two Tales of the Real and Unreal (1955; tr. 1956), and Christoph Ransmayr, author of The Last World (1988; tr. 1990) and The Dog King (1997).
German fantastic fiction was slow to recover after World War II, although significant exemplars were provided by Günter Grass, whose
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first quasi-allegorical novel, The Tin Drum (1959; tr. 1962), is centered on a mute boy who refuses to grow up. As in other European nations, fantasy made a greater impact in children’s fiction before 1980, in the work of such writers as Michael Ende—a success carried forward into the work of Cornelia Funke—but the critical success of Herbert Rosendorfer and the commercial success of Hans Bemmann created influential precedents thereafter. Other notable works originated in German include Gert Hoffman’s Balzac’s Horse and Other Stories (1988), Reinhardt Jung’s Dreaming in Black and White (1996; tr. 2000), and Eugen Egner’s Androids from Milk (1999; tr. 2001).
GHOST. The visible relic of a dead person, usually insubstantial and often elusive. Accounts of revenant spirits are common elements of folklore in many cultures; such restless spirits are often featured as deman-ders of justice or bringers of warnings, with the result that the great majority of such stories carry a frisson of horror; this allowed the ghost story to become a central subgenre of horror fiction (refer to HDHL) from the Gothic novel onward. Some spirits, however, return to offer reassurance that death is not the end for those who are loved and lost, so the idea has a consolatory aspect that allows accounts of ghostly visitations to form a substantial part of the subgenre of sentimental fantasy, as reflected in such works as Théophile Gautier’s Spirite and Robert Nathan’s So Love Returns.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 31