The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

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The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 34

by Stableford, Brian M.


  HALLUCINATORY FANTASY. A subdivision of visionary fantasy in which the implication of revelation carried by more pretentious kinds of vision is much reduced and in which the dream experience is temporary and clearly confined (unlike the stubborn confusions of delusional fantasy). The literary device of justifying a fantastic narrative by revealing it as a dream is so elementary and intrinsically anticlimactic that it fell into disrepute in the 20th century, although it had earlier been fundamental to such subgenres as allegory. The suspicion that life itself might be a kind of dream and we mere figments of it is broached in such fantasies as Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The notion that a dreamer might become lost in a hallucinatory wilderness where all apparent awakenings are mere renewals, featured in Jan Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript, is dubbed The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin.

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  In the 19th century, when the opium-solution laudanum was the only available painkiller, its hallucinogenic effects influenced the literary works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Samuel Coleridge, Théophile Gautier, and others, while Jean Lorrain reconfigured hallucinations induced by drinking ether and synthesized hallucinations supposedly induced by hashish, in much the same way that some modern fantasists have tried to model trips induced by the fungal alkaloids psilocybin and muscarine, the plant derivatives peyotl and ayahuasca, or laboratory-purified LSD.

  As Charles Baudelaire pointed out in his study of Artificial Paradises, however, the aftereffects of such drugs are not at all conducive to literary endeavor.

  Showcase anthologies of hallucinatory fantasy include The Night Fantastic (1991), ed. Poul and Karen Anderson; Strange Dreams (1993), ed. Stephen R. Donaldson; and Perchance to Dream (2000), ed.

  Denise Little.

  HAMBLY, BARBARA (1951– ). U.S. writer. The Darwath series, comprising The Time of the Dark (1982), The Walls of Air (1983), The Armies of Daylight (1983), Mother of Winter (1996), and Icefalcon’s Quest (1998), uses a Californian portal to introduce its protagonists into a commodified fantasyland that quickly outgrew its formulaic origins.

  The enterprising trilogy comprising The Ladies of Mandrigyn (1984), The Witches of Wenshar (1987), and The Dark Hand of Magic (1990) features the travails of a wizard bereft of educational institutions that might teach him to control and develop his powers. The sequence comprising The Silent Tower (1986), The Silicon Mage (1988), Dog Wizard (1993), and Stranger at the Wedding (1994, aka Sorcerer’s Ward) is a convoluted chimerical/science fantasy that links California to a secondary world more securely and more ingeniously than does the Darwath series.

  The series comprising Dragonsbane (1986), Dragonshadow (1999), Knight of the Demon Queen (2000), and Dragonstar (2002) offers a humorous slant on draconian confrontation. Those Who Hunt the Night (1988; aka Immortal Blood) and its sequel Travelling with the Dead (1995) are revisionist vampire stories. The couplet comprising The Rainbow Abyss (1991) and The Magicians of Night (1992) is an ironic Odyssean fantasy. Bride of the Rat God (1994) is a historical fantasy set in 1920s Hollywood. Stranger at the Wedding (1994; aka Sorcerer’s Ward) features a female wizard’s return home. Magic Time (2001, with Marc Scot Zicree) is an apocalyptic/urban fantasy. Sisters of the

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  Raven (2002) is an ironic account of men losing magical power as women gain it in a quasi-Arabian setting.

  HAMILTON, COUNT ANTHONY (1646–1720). British writer re-

  moved to France in childhood when his parents went into exile with King Charles II. His fantasy stories were all published posthumously, the humorous Arabian fantasy The Four Facardins, the similarly extravagant Oriental fantasy “Story of May-Flower,” and the extravagant Faustian fantasy “The Enchanter Faustus” in 1730, and the incomplete

  “Zeneyda”—which introduces various mythical entities, including

  fairies, to contemporary Paris—in 1731. These were reprinted, with the chimerical “The Ram,” in 1749, in a collection that included comple-tions of The Four Facardins (which had probably been intended as a fragmentary text) and “Zeneyda” by M. de Levis; its English translation, Fairy Tales and Romances (1844), added a rival continuation of The Four Facardins by M. G. Lewis, who had arranged its earlier publication as an individual item.

  HAMILTON, LAUREL K. (1963– ). U.S. writer. She followed up the revenge fantasy Nightseer (1992) with a highly successful series of detective thrillers set in an alternative history in which the United States has granted civil rights to vampires and werewolves; the heroine is a

  “fey princess.” It comprises Guilty Pleasures (1993), The Laughing Corpse (1994), Circus of the Damned (1995), The Lunatic Cafe (1996), Bloody Bones (1996), The Killing Dance (1997), Burnt Offerings (1998), Blue Moon (1999), Obsidian Butterfly (2000), Narcissus in Chains (2001), Cerulean Sins (2003), and Incubus Dreams (2004). A parallel series began with A Kiss of Shadows (2000), A Caress of Twilight (2002), and Seduced by Moonlight (2004).

  HAND, ELIZABETH (1957– ). U.S. writer whose early works were hybrid/science fantasies (refer to HDSFL). Waking the Moon (1994) is an elaborate contemporary fantasy about the reawakening of the long-dormant Goddess. Glimmering (1997) is a millennial science fantasy.

  Black Light (1999) is a contemporary fantasy set in a New York state artists’ community that had been featured earlier in some of the stories set in Last Summer at Mars Hill (1998). Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol (2000) is a transfigurative Dickensian/fantasy reprinted with three other novellas in Bibliomancy (2003). Mortal Love (2004) is a historical fantasy about a muse; it takes much inspiration from Victorian fairy painting and its Shakespearean influences.

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  HARD FANTASY. A term used in several different ways to construct analogies with hard science fiction (refer to HDSFL). The first tentative suggestion, made in the late 1980s by writers of historical fantasy, was that it might be used to refer to texts that are scrupulously faithful to historical and anthropological data save for the fantasizing device of assuming that the magical and mythical beliefs held by the cultures portrayed have an element of truth in them, as in the work of Christian Jacq. A 1994 essay by Michael Swanwick subtitled “A Cruise through the Hard Fantasy Archipelago in Search of the Lonely and the Rum . . .” wondered whether it was possible to unite a considerable number of the best fantasy texts in such a way that they might form a fundamental organizing structure similar to that provided for genre sf by hard sf; he concluded that the “hardness” of the fantasy genre is more akin to an archipelago of islands than a literary continent, because fantasy texts refuse to accept the logical bonds that tie hard sf texts together, thus being fundamentally resistant to assembly within the kind of common enterprise that unites hard sf texts in celebration of the mechanics of progress.

  In the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), by contrast, Gary Westfahl used the term to describe the kind of fantasy—popularized by

  Unknown—in which magic is regarded as “an almost scientific force of Nature . . . subject to the same sorts of rules and principles.” Paradigm examples include Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series (1967–81), set in a secondary world where James Frazer’s “laws of magic” are indeed laws of nature. This is probably the most useful application, given the recent proliferation of hybrid and chimerical works playing with such notions, including notable series by L. E. Modesitt, J. Gregory Keyes, and Rick Cook, Lyndon Hardy’s trilogy begun with Master of the Five Magics (1980), Andrew Crumey’s philosophical fantasies, Felicity Savage’s Ever, Sara Douglass’s Threshold, Ian Irvine’s Geomancer, and Eve Forward’s Animist.

  HARLAN, THOMAS (1964– ). U.S. game designer and writer. His Oath of Empire series is an epic/alternative history featuring a world without Christianity where sorcery thrives, and monotheism is popularized by Mohammed of Mekkah. It comprises The Shadow of Ararat (1999), The Gate of Fire (2000), The Storm of Heaven (2001), and Dark Lord (2002).

  HARMAN, ANDREW (1964– ). British writer specializing
in slapstick humorous fantasy, exemplified by The Sorcerer’s Appendix (1993),

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  The Frogs of War (1994), The Tome Tunnel (1994), Fahrenheit 666

  (1995), 101 Damnations (1995), The Scrying Game (1996), The Deity Dozen (1996), A Midsummer Night’s Gene (1997), and Beyond Belief (1998). It Came from on High (1998) is chimerical/science fantasy. In The Suburban Salamander Incident (2000), Titania and her “feyrie court” are holed up beneath a golf course. In Talonspotting (2001), an experiment in animal therapy goes awry.

  HARRIS, DEBORAH TURNER (1951– ). U.S. writer. The trilogy comprising The Burning Stone (1986), The Gauntlet of Malice (1987), and Spiral of Fire (1987) is set in a fantasized version of medieval Scotland, as is the trilogy comprising Caledon of the Mists (1994), The Queen of Ashes (1995), and The City of Exile (1997). She collaborated with Katherine Kurtz on the occult fantasy sequence comprising The Adept (1991), The Lodge of the Lynx (1992), The Templar Treasure (1993), Dagger Magic (1995), and Death of an Adept (1996), and on the historical fantasies The Temple and the Stone (1998) and The Temple and the Crown (2001).

  HARRIS, JOEL CHANDLER (1848–1908). U.S. journalist whose ventures into children’s fantasy include a long series of animal fantasies bylined “Uncle Remus,” featuring the long battle of wits between Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, based in Negro folklore. They began to appear in periodicals in 1879 and in book form in 1881, the most comprehensive omnibus being The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (1955).

  HARRIS, MacDONALD (1921–1993). Pseudonym of U.S. writer Donald William Heiney. A muted fantasy element emerges by slow degrees in the literary novels Bull Fire (1973) and Pandora’s Gallery (1979); Herma (1981), featuring an opera singer who can change sex at will, is more extravagant. Screenplay (1982) is a timeslip fantasy. Tenth (1984) is a metafiction with elements of Faustian fantasy. The Little People (1986) is a delusional fantasy involving Faerie. Glowstone (1987) is an ornate historical fantasy. His short fiction is sampled in Cathay Stories and Other Fictions (1988).

  HARRIS, WILSON (1921– ). Guyana-born writer resident in the United Kingdom from 1959. The sequence comprising Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1964), with the associated Heartland (1964), treats the history of his homeland in a manner similar to the way in

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  which Gabriel Garcia Márquez treated the history of Colombia in his definitive exercises in magical realism. The sequence comprising The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967), Tumatumari (1968), and Ascent to Onai (1970) is a further elaboration of the theme, as are Black Marsden (1972), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), and The Angel at the Gate (1982). The Sleepers of Roraima (1970) and The Age of the Rainmakers (1971) recycle native American folklore. Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns (1977) is an omnibus of two novellas; The Tree of the Sun (1978) carries forward the story of the painter Da Silva, launching a long meditation on the role of the artist that extends to The Mask of the Beggar (2003).

  The trilogy comprising Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990) extends from Dantean fantasy into Odyssean allegory. In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993), inmates of an asylum re-create historical figures and transfigured history in the process; Jonestown (1996) uses similar invoca-tions to draw comparisons between pre-Columbian and post-Columbian perspectives. In The Dark Jester (2001), an artist-cum-trickster engages in philosophical dialogue with the Dreamer, echoing a confrontation between the conquistador Pizarro and the Incan emperor Atahualpa.

  HARRISON, M. JOHN (1945– ). British writer in several genres (refer to HDSFL). Much of his fantasy is gathered into a loosely knit series set in the definitively decadent city of Viriconium, including The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), In Viriconium (1982; aka The Floating Gods), and the stories collected in Viriconium Nights (1984; U.S. and British versions differ). The psychological fantasy The Course of the Heart (1992) picks up themes from the later volumes while examining the troublesome relationship between the primary world and a constructed secondary world. His collaborative work as

  “Gabriel King” is markedly different in kind. Some fantasies are included in the collection Travelling Arrangements (2000).

  HAUFF, WILHELM (1802–1827). German writer associated with the Romantic movement whose art fairy tales, mostly cast as Arabian fantasy, were gathered into three volumes of Märchenalamanache (1826–28). Various translated samplers entitled Tales or Fairy Tales are less well known than an omnibus combining Hauff’s The Giant’s Heart with Adalbert von Chamisso’s The Shadowless Man (1814). Hauff’s untranslated satirical novels, heavily influenced by E. T. A. Hoffmann,

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  include Memoiren des Satan [“Satan’s Memoirs”] (1825–26) and Phantasien im Bremer Ratskeller [“Apparitions in the Bremer Inn”]

  (1827).

  HAUPTMANN, GERHART (1862–1946). German writer best known as a playwright. One act of the play translated as Hannele: A Dream Poem (1893; tr. 1894) is couched as a delusional afterlife fantasy, but The Sunken Bell (1896; tr. 1898) is a more wholehearted hallucinatory moralistic fantasy based in Teutonic folklore. And Pippa Dances (1906; tr. 1907) is similarly hallucinatory, but The Bow of Odysseus (1914; tr. 1917) recycles the myth in meditative fashion. The novel translated as The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint (1910; tr. 1911) is a Christian fantasy. Phantom (1923; tr. 1923) is a delusional fantasy. The Island of the Great Mother (1924; tr. 1925) is an exotic robinsonade. In the verse epic Till Eulenspiegel (1928), the borrowed hero undertakes far-ranging explorations of European myth and legend.

  HAWTHORNE, JULIAN (1846–1934). U.S. writer, the son of

  Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was long resident in London, often retitling and rewriting his works for separate British and U.S. publication. Much of his short fiction is horror (refer to HDHL), but the visionary fantasy

  “The New Endymion” (1879) transfigures a Greek myth, and the four items collected in Yellow-Cap (1880), including the allegory

  “Calladon,” are art fairy tales. Archibald Malmaison (1879) is a psychological fantasy. He cobbled together an alchemical fantasy, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret (1882), from miscellaneous documents left behind by his father, which had earlier been organized by other hands into the rather different Septimius (1872) and The Dolliver Romance (1876).

  The Professor’s Sister (1888; aka The Spectre of the Camera) is a fantasy of suspended animation. His work for the pulp magazines included a series of spiritualist fantasies comprising “Absolute Evil” (1918),

  “Fires Rekindled” (1919), and “Sara was Judith?” (1920). His daughter Hildegarde wrote a few sentimental/ghost stories, assembled by Jessica Amanda Salmonson in Faded Garden: The Collected Ghost Stories of Hildegarde Hawthorne (1985).

  HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864). U.S. writer, one of the central figures of 19th-century American literature. Most of his fantasies embody the conviction summed up in the title of Twice-Told Tales (1837; exp. in 2 vols., 1842) that human lives inevitably fall into long-established patterns formulated by myth, history, and ancestry. Many

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  shade into horror fiction and a few into sf. His classic allegories and moral fantasies include “Young Goodman Brown” (1935), in which an injunction disobeyed leads to unwelcome revelations; “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843), about a “stock exchange” of fanciful ideas; the enigmatic

  “Ethan Brand” (1850), about a quest for the unpardonable sin; “The Snow Image” (1851), in which parental refusal of credulity injures childhood imagination; and “Feathertop” (1852), about a scarecrow

  who can pass for human as long as he does not catch sight of his image in a mirror. A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls (1852) and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1852) recycle classical myths.

  Hawthorne’s Gothic-tinted novels (refer to HDHL) re
legate fantastic elements to ambiguous margins, as in The Scarlet Letter (1850). At his death, he left several incomplete drafts of an alchemical fantasy about the quest for the elixir of life, different compounds of which were published as Septimius (1872), The Dolliver Romance (1876), and Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret (1882), the last-named constructed by his son Julian Hawthorne.

  HAYDON, ELIZABETH (?– ). Pseudonymous U.S. writer. The Sym-

  phony of Ages trilogy, comprising Rhapsody: Child of Blood (1999), Prophecy: Child of Earth (2000), and Destiny: Child of the Sky (2001), is an epic fantasy featuring magical music. The series continues in Requiem for the Sun (2002) and Elegy for a Lost Star (2004).

  HEALER. Magical secondary worlds rarely play host to scientifically trained physicians, medical care usually being the responsibility of herbalists and gifted individuals who bring about cures by psychic effort or the grace of the Goddess; similar figures often crop up in fantasies set in the primary world, where they are routinely persecuted as witches, although they usually fare better in contemporary fantasies like Elizabeth Scarborough’s The Healer’s War.

  Healers are popular heroes of nonviolent feminized fantasy, particularly tales of difficult apprenticeship. Notable secondary world fantasies featuring healers include series by Nick O’Donohoe and Judith Merkle Riley, Alice Hoffman’s Green Angel, Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, Sherryl Jordan’s Secret Sacrament, Sara Douglass’s Beyond the Hanging Wall, and Victoria Hanley’s The Seer and the Sword (2001).

 

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