The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  HEARN, LAFCADIO (1850–1904). Greek-born U.S. writer resident in Japan from 1891. The lapidary style he honed in his 1882 translations of

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  Théophile Gautier’s nouvelles and the early prose-poetry posthumously assembled in Fantasies (1914) was well suited to the Oriental fantasies in Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). His later works in that vein, including those collected in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), benefit from his intimate association with their cultural context; a few others are included in In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadow-ings (1900), The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories (1905), and Karma and Other Stories (1921); much of this work is reprinted in The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1949).

  HECHT, BEN (1893–1964). U.S. writer best known as a playwright and screenwriter. A decadent sensibility held in check in his commercial work gained expression in the blithely excessive delusional fantasy Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922) and its phantasmagoric sequel The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare (1924). The stories in A Book of Miracles (1939), most of which were reprinted in The Collected Short Stories of Ben Hecht (1945), include the humorous fantasy “The Heavenly Choir,” the theriomorphic satire “The Adventures of Professor Emmett,” and two striking religious fantasies, “Death of Eleazer” and “Remember Thy Creator,” the latter being an intense exercise in literary satanism. The sentimental fantasy Miracle in the Rain (1943) presumably originated as a treatment for the movie it eventually became.

  HEINLEIN, ROBERT A. (1907–1988). U.S. writer, a central figure in the evolution of sf (refer to HDSFL). His early fantasies, mostly written for Unknown, include “The Devil Makes the Law” (1940; reprinted with a new title in Waldo and Magic Inc, 1950), which describes an alternative history in which workable magic is regulated by law; the solipsistic fantasy “They” (1941); “Waldo” (1942), in which a high-tech future is disturbed by anarchic magic; and the offbeat hybrid The Un-pleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942; book 1959). All of these are collected in The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein (1999). He returned to the genre in the robust heroic fantasy Glory Road (1963). Job: A Comedy of Justice (1983) is a satirical/afterlife fantasy.

  HELPRIN, MARK (1947– ). U.S. writer. Winter’s Tale (1983), a spectacular urban fantasy with messianic elements in which New York becomes symbolic of a 20th-century civilization in need of re-enchantment and repair, is akin to John Crowleys Little, Big in its outlook and literary method. The trilogy comprising Swan Lake (1989), A City in Winter

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  (1996), and The Veil of Snows (1997) is a children’s quest fantasy, whose first element recycles the story of the famous ballet. The early short fiction in A Dove in the East and Other Stories (1975) occasionally employs marginal fantastic devices.

  HEROIC FANTASY An alternative term routinely used by critics who thought sword and sorcery sounded too downmarket while fantasy was struggling to assert its independence as a commercial genre. It had the advantage of a wider range of reference, being more readily applicable to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and such children’s fantasies as Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, thus embracing all the overlapping fields specified by the other terms bandied about in the same era for the same reason: high fantasy, quest fantasy, and epic fantasy. Because the commercial genre eventually expanded to cover an even wider territory, “heroic fantasy” remains useful mainly as a description of those texts in which the primary focus is replication or calculated variation of the recipe for hero myths detailed by Joseph Campbell.

  The heroes of classical mythology have analogues in every culture, thus licensing Campbell’s insistence that the hero is an elementary archetype. The earliest proto-English epic poem Beowulf, probably first recorded in the early eighth century, is a significant taproot text, as are two imaginary histories of Britain written around 1135 to provide English Norman barons with appropriate accounts of their new heritage, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and Geffrei Gaimar’s History of the English, which recorded (and almost certainly invented) the seeds of the medieval hero myths of King Arthur and

  Havelok the Dane. The manufacturers of chivalric romance elaborated these exemplars and added many more; the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn (c1170, credited to a cleric named Thomas) pioneered a much-imitated template in which an unjustly dispossessed aristocrat undergoes various errant exploits before returning to reclaim his birthright; Horn’s story was recycled in ballads and tales, but the formula far outlasted the name. The enormously popular Amadis of Gaul—its earliest surviving version is a Spanish manuscript from the beginning of the 16th century—was altered and expanded by many of its recyclers, providing a key template and inspiring numerous sequels, including

  Palmerin of England (tr. 1596).

  Arthurian fantasy provides a key venue for modern heroic fantasies; other notable examples include Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road, the works of P. C.

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  Hodgell, Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Touched by the Gods, Kim Hunter’s trilogy comprising Knight’s Dawn (2001), Wizard’s Funeral (2002), and The Scabbard’s Song (2003), and Gene Wolfe’s The Knight. “Anti-heroic fantasies” like Peter David’s Sir Apropos of Nothing are variants rather than contradictions.

  HESSE, HERMAN (1877–1962). German-born writer who became a

  Swiss citizen. His early work, from 1900 on, included numerous art fairy tales, translations of which are collected in Strange News from Another Star (1972) and Pictor’s Metamorphoses (1982), most of whose contents are reproduced in The Fairy Tales of Herman Hesse (1995), ed.

  Jack Zipes. His later work includes several exotic existentialist fantasies yearning for some kind of transcendence of the human condition: Demian (1919; tr. 1965) and Siddhartha (1922; tr. 1954) explore relatively orthodox paths, but the painstakingly allegorical Steppenwolf (1927; tr. 1929) is more ambitious.

  HIGH FANTASY. A term used by Lloyd Alexander in a 1971 essay on

  “High Fantasy and Heroic Romance” and subsequently developed by

  Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer in an attempt to develop a terminology with which to deal with genre materials. In Zahorski and Boyer’s taxonomy, high fantasy consists entirely of fiction set in secondary worlds, while the “low fantasy” with which it is immediately contrasted consists of fiction set in the primary world, into which magical objects and entities are introduced piecemeal (i.e., intrusive fantasies). Not all immersive fantasies qualify as high fantasy, however; the category as defined by Zahorski and Boyer excludes humorous fantasy, animal fantasy, “myth fantasy” (of the recycled variety), fairy tales, gothic fantasy, science fantasy, and sword and sorcery. The term never thrived, partly because it was difficult to establish dividing lines between high fantasy and some of these other subgenres, and

  partly because of the difficulty of accommodating portal fantasies to the scheme.

  HINDU MYTHOLOGY. Despite the popularity of “Eastern mysticism”

  in the 19th-century occult revival, especially in connection with

  Madame Blavatsky and her followers, only a few of the ideas contained in the Vedic sacred writings are frequently echoed in Western fantasy literature, usually fused with notions drawn from other religious traditions. Fantasies of reincarnation tend to borrow more heavily from Buddhist ideas—thus qualifying as karmic romances—but Hindu no-

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  tions of transmigration are also reflected there, often without distinction.

  Richard Francis Burton, who translated Antoine Galland’s Arabian Nights into English, produced a similar exercise of his own using a Hindu source, in Vikram and the Vampire (1870).

  The motif from Hindu myth that crops up most frequently in fantasy is the notion of an avatar, one of a series of incarnations of a god; it is adapted to apply to all deities in Edgar Jepson’s The Ho
rned Shepherd and The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (1933) by “A.E.” (George W. Russell) but applied narrowly in Sonia Singh’s Goddess for Hire (2004), which features a Californian avatar of Kali. The folkloristic notion of the world as Brahma’s dream—which would be ended if he awoke—is

  sometimes cited in hallucinatory fantasies. The broadest range of such motifs is found in the works of F. W. Bain, although Ashok K. Banker’s series begun with Prince of Ayodha (2003) and Siege of Mithila (2003) promises to be comprehensive. Notable Western stories based in Hindu myth include various works by Nigel Frith and Tanith Lee, Paula Volsky’s The Gates of Twilight, and Suzanne Fisher Staples’ Shiva’s Fire (2000), but the cultural background is used more innovatively in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), about a magic-dealing grocery store, and The Conch Bearer (2003), which features a magical seashell. Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi’s The Last Song of Dusk (2004) is an example of Indian magic realism.

  HISTORICAL FANTASY. A term applied to fantasies in which the actual history of the primary world is conscientiously reproduced, save for limited infusions of working magic located within a secret history—but no clear boundary separates such carefully disciplined works from alternative histories, or from stories set in “histories” that are themselves fantastic. The Clute/Grant Encyclopedia calls the latter “lands-of-fable”; the worlds of Arthurian and Arabian fantasy are notable examples.

  Historical fantasies dovetail neatly with the notion that the world used to be more magical than it is now, having been subject over the centuries to a thinning process. Fantastic devices are routinely used to contain and organize panoramic views of human history, as in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Flaxius, Katharine Burdekin’s The Rebel Passion, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928).

  Historical fantasies tend to cluster in particular periods and locations; those of conspicuous recent fashionability include renaissance Italy, as in R. A. MacAvoy’s Damiano and Midori Snyder’s The Innamorati, and 19th-century England, especially London. Such works usually draw

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  their inspiration from other literary works, many London examples

  echoing Regency romances or Dickensian eccentricities, as in Jeffrey E.

  Barlough’s Western Lights series launched by Dark Sleeper (2000) and The House in the High Wood (2001), Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The history of France has a particular resonance because of its association with chivalric romance, as reflected in C. Dale Brittain’s Count Scar (1997) and L. Warren Douglas’s series begun with The Sacred Pool (2000). The subgenre is frequently employed for revisionist exercises like Ann Chamberlin’s feminist Joan of Arc Tapestries

  (1999–2001).

  HOBAN, RUSSELL (1925– ). U.S. writer and illustrator. His picture books for younger children include numerous animal fantasies; the more enterprising examples include The Mole Family’s Christmas (1969) and The Dancing Tigers (1979). His work for older children, including The Mouse and His Child (1967), The Sea-Thing Child (1972), and The Trokeville Way (1996), is mildly allegorical and deftly sentimental. His adult novels are usually more discreet in their deployment of fantasy motifs, as in the quest fantasy The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), the delusional fantasy Kleinzeit (1974), and the dark historical fantasy Pilgermann (1983), but The Medusa Frequency (1987) is a hallucinatory/metafiction with elements of Orphean fantasy. Similar themes are echoed in Angelica’s Grotto (1999) and Amaryllis Night and Day (2001). In Her Name Was Lola (2004), a writer loses his memory when a girlfriend casts a spell on him. Some of the stories in The Moment under the Moment (1992) are fantasy.

  HOBB, ROBIN. Pseudonym employed by Megan Lindholm on an elaborately detailed epic fantasy series made up of three trilogies. The first comprises Assassin’s Apprentice (1995), Royal Assassin (1996), and Assassin’s Quest (1997); the second Ship of Magic (1998), Mad Ship (1999), and Ship of Destiny (2000); and the third Fool’s Errand (2001), Golden Fool (2003), and Fool’s Fate (2003).

  HODGELL, P. C. (1951– ). U.S. writer. The sequence comprising God Stalk (1982), Dark of the Moon (1985), Seeker’s Mask (1994), and various items of short fiction—including those in Blood & Ivory (1994; exp. 2002 as Blood & Ivory: A Tapestry)—is a detailed account of the career of a female hero, which questions the norms of feminized fantasy and masculine heroic fantasy.

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  HODGSON, WILLIAM HOPE (1877–1918). British writer, most of

  whose work lies in the borders of horror and sf (refer to HDSFL and HDHL). His importance to the fantasy genre derives from his use of parallel worlds in The House on the Borderland (1908) to model the division of the human psyche, and his provision in The Night Land (1912) of a crucial exemplar of far-futuristic fantasy that is decadent in style, sentimental in substance, hallucinatory in method, and spectacularly phantasmagoric in its decor. William Hope Hodgson’s Night Lands, volume 1: Eternal Love (2003), ed. Andy W. Robertson, is a derivative anthology.

  HOFFMAN, ALICE (1952– ). U.S. writer of great versatility. The elements of fantasy in her work are usually muted, as in Illumination Night (1987), which features a modest giant, and Second Nature (1994), about a mysterious stranger. They are more extravagantly developed in Practical Magic (1995), an account of domestic witchcraft; The River King (2000), an exotic murder mystery with fugitive ghosts; and Aquamarine (2001), which features a mermaid. In Indigo (2002), characters with webbed fingers search for their origins. Characters in Green Angel (2003) and The Probable Future (2003) possess healing gifts. Blackbird House (2004) collects twelve linked stories about a haunted house.

  HOFFMAN, NINA KIRIKI (1955– ). U.S. writer. Child of an Ancient City (1992, with Tad Williams) is an Arabian fantasy. The Unmasking (1992) is a dark-edged moralistic fantasy. The contemporary fantasy sequence comprising The Thread That Binds the Bones (1993), the stories combined with it in Common Threads (1995), A Red Heart of Memories (1999), and Past the Size of Dreaming (2001) features a family of magically talented individuals struggling to maintain their secret situation in a changing world; A Stir of Bones (2003) is a prequel, and The Silent Strength of Stones (1995) is set in the same milieu. A Fistful of Sky (2002) features an adolescent witch. A few fantasies are mingled with other materials in the collections Legacy of Fire (1990), Courting Disasters and Other Strange Affinities (1991), Common Threads (1995), and Time Travelers, Ghosts, and Other Visitors (2003).

  HOFFMANN, E. T. A. (1776–1822). German writer and composer, a central figure in the Romantic movement. He made a crucial contribution to the evolution of psychological horror fiction (refer to HDHL), much of his pioneering work taking the form of vivid hallucinatory fantasies drawing on the inspiration of märchen collected by Musäus and the

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  Grimm brothers. Hoffmann preferred to describe them as “stories in the manner of Jakob Callot” (Callot was a pioneering caricaturist);

  “The Golden Pot” (1814; tr. 1827) is a cardinal example. His art fairy tales include “Nutcracker and the King of the Mice” (1816), the untranslated “Klein Zaches gennant Zinnober” (1819), “Princess Bambi-illa” (1820), and “The King’s Bride” (1821). The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr (1820–21; tr. 1969) is a parodic bildungsroman with a cat for protagonist.

  HOGG, JAMES (1770–1835). Scottish writer caricatured by Blackwood’s contributor Christopher North (John Wilson) as “the Ettrick Shepherd,” whose nickname was frequently attached to posthumous

  collections of his work. The most comprehensive is Tales and Sketches of the Ettrick Shepherd (6 vols., 1837). His many tales based in Scottish folklore include three novellas collected in The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818); the title story is a historical fantasy, and “The Hunt of Eildon”

  is a theriomorphic fantasy whose protagonists end up in Faerie. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is often categorized as a late Gothic novel (refer t
o HDHL) but is better regarded as an intense psychological fantasy and a key example of the doppelgänger motif.

  HOLDSTOCK, ROBERT (1948– ). British writer whose early work was mostly sf and horror (refer to HDHL); some commodified sword and sorcery was bylined “Richard Kirk” and “Chris Carlsen.” The series comprising Mythago Wood (1984), Lavondyss (1988), the title piece of The Bone Forest (1991), The Hollowing (1993), the stories in Merlin’s Wood (1994), and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn (1997, aka Gate of Ivory) is about a magical wood where archetypes of the collective unconscious of British and Breton folklore—including Arthur, Robin Hood, the Green Man, and the Wild Hunt—are systematically manifest. The Fetch (1991, aka Unknown Regions), “The Ragthorn” (1991 with Garry Kilworth), and Ancient Echoes (1996) are further dark fantasies based in a similar metaphysical system. The Merlin Codex series begun with Celtika (2001) and The Iron Grail (2002) is a hybrid of Celtic and classical forms.

  HOLLAND, TOM (1947– ). British writer whose works include several dark/historical fantasies. The couplet comprising The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon Sixth Lord Byron (1995, aka Lord of the Dead) and Supping with Panthers (1987, aka Slave of my

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  Thirst) is revisionist vampire fiction. Deliver Us from Evil (1997) is similarly set in the 19th century. In The Sleeper in the Sands (1998), the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb reveals the truth behind conventional Arabian fantasy.

  HOLT, TOM (1961– ). British writer who produced a long sequence of humorous fantasies deftly recycling and chimerically combining mythical motifs, borrowing most copiously from Nordic, classical, and Arabian sources: Expecting Someone Taller (1987), Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (1988), Flying Dutch (1991), Ye Gods! (1992), Overtime (1991), Here Comes the Sun (1993), Grailblazers (1994), Faust among Equals (1994), Odds and Gods (1995), Djinn Rummy (1996), My Hero (1996), Paint Your Dragon (1996), Open Sesame (1997), Wish You Were Here (1998), Only Human (1999), Snow White and the Seven Samurai (2000), Valhalla (2000), Nothing but Blue Skies (2001), Falling Sideways (2002), Little People (2002), A Song for Nero (2003), The Portable Door (2003), and In Your Dreams (2004).