HOMER. The byline attached to two epic poems, probably dating from the eighth century B.C., the literary genius of which was loudly proclaimed as classical civilization came into flower, and which were to become foundation stones of modern literature. Legend represents Homer as a blind peripatetic singer, but that is an exercise in symbolism akin to the poet’s own appeal to the Muse. The Iliad, which describes the duel between Achilles and Hector during the siege of Troy, can pass for history embellished with allegorical intrusions by the gods of the classical pantheon, but the Odyssey, which describes Odysseus’s attempts to get home after the end of that siege, is manifestly a fantastic compilation of travelers’ tales; it serves as a model for the subgenre of Odyssean fantasies. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh is older, and the Indian historical epic the Ramayana is of comparable antiquity, but neither circulated so widely in written form or gave rise to so rich a sup-plementary literature.
HOPKINSON, NALO (1961– ). Jamaican-born writer resident in Canada since 1977. Most of her work is chimerical/science fantasy (refer to HDSFL). Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000) invoke the mythical elements of voodoo in exotic settings. The Salt Roads (2003) is a complex historical fantasy about the advent of a goddess; its characters include Charles Baudelaire. The varied collection Skin Folk (2001) includes several fantasies based in Afro-Caribbean
204 • HORROR
folklore. She edited the anthologies Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000) and Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003).
HORROR. A term used as a genre label in the commercial arena; unlike other genre labels, it refers to the intended effect of the work rather than thematic content. Supernatural horror fiction is more obviously a subcategory of fantasy than of sf, with which it is often combined in the critical and bibliographical literature under the blanket term “supernatural fiction.” Further confusion is added by critics who use “dark fantasy” or “Gothic fiction” as preferred synonyms for “horror fiction” because the latter seems to imply crude sensationalism.
The advent of genre fantasy occasioned determined attempts to draw fundamental distinctions between fantasy and horror fiction, although even the most dignified high fantasy is not entirely purged of elements of horror. Most commercial horror fiction is a subspecies of contemporary fantasy, and the largest remainder is a subspecies of historical fantasy, but there are good reasons for separating out the two for special critical consideration, because the relationship between their fantasy elements and naturalistic ones is distinctive. The sense of horror communicated by such exotic fantasies as William Beckford’s Vathek or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”—which echoes in a great deal of decadent fantasy—is more aesthetic than visceral or existential, and it makes more sense to consider such texts as “dark fantasies” than as supernaturalized thrillers. Horror fiction derives its generic status from the contrast between disturbing intrusions and “normality,” whereas fantasy is primarily conceived in terms of secondary worlds, leakage therefrom being on the margins of the genre rather than at the core.
HORWOOD, WILLIAM (1944– ). British writer best known for animal fantasies. The sequence comprising Duncton Wood (1980), Duncton Quest (1988), Duncton Found (1989), Duncton Tales (1991), Duncton Rising (1992), and Duncton Stone (1993) features moles; The Book of Silence (1992) collects related short stories. The Stonor Eagles (1982) and Callanish (1984) involve eagles; the Wolves of Time sequence comprising Journeys to the Heartland (1995) and Seekers at the Wulfrock (1997) features wolves on a world-saving quest. Skallagrigg (1987) is a messianic fantasy. The Willows in Winter (1993), Toad Triumphant (1995), The Willows and Beyond (1996), and The Willows at Christmas (1998) are sequels to Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows.
HOWARD, ROBERT E. • 205
HOUSMAN, CLEMENCE (1861–1955). British artist and writer. She illustrated some of the fantasies written by her brother Laurence Housman. Her allegorical erotic fantasy The Were-wolf (1896) was one of the most striking products of the short-lived English Decadent movement. The Unknown Sea (1898) similarly features an enigmatic femme fatale. The Arthurian fantasy The Life of Sir Aglovale de Valis (1905) is a mildly Quixotic homage to chivalric romance.
HOUSMAN, LAURENCE (1865–1959). British writer whose early work included numerous fairy tales, original items being collected in A Farm in Fairyland (1894), The House of Joy (1895), The Field of Clover (1898), and The Blue Moon (1904)—whose contents were recombined in Moonshine and Clover (1922) and A Doorway in Fairyland (1922)—
while What-O’Clock Tales (1932) offered more straightforward recyclings. All-Fellows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption (1896) and The Cloak of Friendship (1905)—also reprinted in an omnibus edition in 1923—are plaintive Christian fantasies cast in the form of legends.
Gods and Their Makers (1897) is an offbeat metaphysical fantasy exploring the relationship between humans and their deities.
Housman’s later works are lighter in tone, including numerous satires and fabulations; some were added as makeweights in Gods and Their Makers and Other Stories (1920); more are mingled with other materials in Odd Pairs (1925), What Next? (1938), Strange Ends and Discoveries (1948), and The Kind and the Foolish (1952). Several of his plays have fantasy elements, including Prunella; or, Love in a Dutch Garden (1904 with Harley Granville-Barker), Alice in Ganderland (1911), The Return of Alcestis (1916), and The Death of Orpheus (1921).
HOWARD, ROBERT E. (1906–1936). U.S. writer for the pulp magazines, prolific in several genres. He provided the guiding examples for the sword and sorcery subgenre in a sequence written for Weird Tales, begun with “The Shadow Kingdom” (1929), in which the hero, Kull,
has fought his way to a throne in a forgotten prehistoric era loosely based in theosophical/scholarly fantasy. Kull—whose adventures were showcased in King Kull (1967), edited and augmented by Lin Carter before the originals were collected in Robert E. Howard’s Kull (1985)—was soon replaced by an equally ambitious barbarian from
Cimmeria (probably Ireland) named Conan, whose recapitulation of
Kull’s rise to kingship was chronicled in 17 stories published between 1932 and 1936.
206 • HUBBARD, L. RON
Howard’s Conan stories were supplemented by previously unpub-
lished stories revised by L. Sprague de Camp when they were reprinted in a series of volumes comprising Conan the Conqueror (1950; aka, with text restored, as Hour of the Dragon), The Sword of Conan (1952), King Conan (1953), The Coming of Conan (1953), Conan the Barbarian (1954), and Tales of Conan (1955). De Camp also revised a novel written by a fan, Bjorn Nyberg, issued as an addendum to the series as The Return of Conan (1957; aka Conan the Avenger). In 1966–71, Carter and de Camp organized a paperback reprint series in 11
volumes, further padded by revisions of Howard fragments and pas-
tiches; they added a further six volumes of pastiches in 1977–80,
launching a sequence carried forward for another two decades by numerous other hands, including Robert Jordan and Roland J. Green, dramatically enhancing the hero’s cult following.
Howard’s other fantasies include a series of sword and sorcery stories featuring a British barbarian opposed to Roman conquest, Bran Mak Morn (1969; abr. as Worms of the Earth), and various oddments assembled in The Gods of Bal-Sagoth (1979). It was, however, Conan who became the paradigm example of the ultramasculine barbarian whose reserves of strength, courage, and sheer willpower are adequate to any situation, including assaults by sorcerous magic; he represents a power fantasy whose lack of inhibition exceeds that of the more decorous heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and who enjoyed a setting more appropriate than the metropolitan arenas inhabited by early comic-book superheroes.
HUBBARD, L. RON (1911–1986). U.S. writer for the pulp magazines, very prolific from 1932 to 1941. He wrote westerns before being instructed to offer his services to John W. Campbell, the editor of sf magazine Astounding Stories—who used him sparing
ly until the founding of
Unknown provided a much more suitable arena for his abilities, extravagantly displayed in the escapist fantasy “The Ultimate Adventure”
(1939), the Arabian fantasies Slaves of Sleep (1939; book 1948) and
“The Case of the Friendly Corpse” (1941), the posthumous fantasy Death’s Deputy (1940; book 1948), and the Thorne Smith homage Triton (1940 as “The Indigestible Triton”; exp. 1949). Typewriter in the Sky (1940), a humorous fantasy in which the hero is trapped in a hack writer’s story, struggling to avoid the fate reserved in such fiction for villains, was combined in a 1951 book with the strongly contrasted psychological fantasy Fear (1940). Fear’s representation of a man tor-
HUGHES, TED • 207
mented by repressed guilt in terms of “demons” laid the groundwork for the cult-founding scholarly fantasy Dianetics (1950), whose antipathy to contemporary psychiatric medicine is reflected in Masters of Sleep (1950) and which became the founding document of a remarkably successful lifestyle fantasy.
HUDSON, W. H. (1841–1922). Argentine-born British naturalist and writer. There is a strong element of Arcadian fantasy in his mystical Utopian novel A Crystal Age (1887) and the best-selling Green Mansions (1904), whose success cleared the way for belated publication of his allegorical children’s fantasy A Little Boy Lost (1905).
HUFF, TANYA (1957– ). Canadian writer. The couplet comprising Child of the Grove (1988) and The Last Wizard (1989) is a feminized/quest fantasy. Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (1989) is an urban fantasy set in Toronto. The sequence Blood Price (1991), Blood Trail (1992), Blood Lines (1993), Blood Pact (1993), and Blood Debt (1997) comprises detective stories in which the heroine is assisted by a vampire; it resumed in Smoke and Shadows (2004). The Fire’s Stone and the series comprising Sing the Four Quarters (1994), Fifth Quarter (1995), No Quarter (1996), and The Quartered Sea (1999) are elaborate quest fantasies, the final two items featuring awkward identity exchanges. In the series comprising Summon the Keeper (1998), The Second Summoning (2001), and Long Hot Summoning (2003), a boardinghouse is host to a portal to hell. Huff’s short fiction is sampled in What Ho, Magic!
(1999), Stealing Magic (1999), and Relative Magic (2003).
HUGHES, MONICA (1925–2003). British-born Canadian children’s writer, best known for westerns and sf (refer to HDSFL). In Where Have You Been, Billy Boy? (1995), a timeslip is precipitated by a carousel.
Castle Tourmandyne (1995) features a magical Victorian dollhouse. In The Seven Magpies (1996), World War II evacuees tamper with ancient magic. The Story Box (1998), set on an island where fiction is banned and dreams are suppressed, is a heartfelt moralistic fantasy.
HUGHES, TED (1930–1998). British poet who branched out into children’s fantasy in the Kiplingesque How the Whale Became and Other Stories (1963); further fantasies of origination are featured in Tales of the Early World (1988) and The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales (1995). The Iron Man (1968; aka the Iron Giant) is a fervent moralistic fantasy with a sequel, The Iron Woman (1993), which
208 • HUMOROUS FANTASY
tackles different political issues. The animal fantasies What Is the Truth? (1984) and Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth (1986) are equally moralistic but more lighthearted. His plays for children, collected in The Coming of the King and Other Plays (1970; exp. as The Tiger’s Bones and Other Plays for Children 1973), include transfigurations of Beauty and the Beast and the story of Orpheus. His scholarly fantasy Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) reinterprets the bard’s work in the context of modern theories of the primal Goddess.
HUMOROUS FANTASY. The supplementation of trilogies of Greek tragedies with comic relief in the form of “satyr plays” launched the subversive traditions of satire and parody, carried forward by Aristophanes, Lucian, and Apuleius. There is also an important element of humor in Aesopian fables. The revival of humorous fantasy after the Renaissance was slow, but once there were models to be mocked it was only a matter of time before writers like Rabelais and Cervantes obliged. Eighteenth-century French fantasy was steeped in conde-scending wit, although the advent of the Romantic movement set such irreverence firmly aside for a while.
Modern Anglo-American humorous fantasy is rooted in parodic
ghost stories, the Christmas fantasy tradition launched by Charles Dickens and the grotesque comedies of Edgar Allan Poe. Douglas Jerrold’s A Man Made of Money demonstrated the literary potential of literalized puns. As Victorian attitudes hardened, they called forth anarchic opposition in the form of the “nonsense” promoted by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and W. S. Gilbert, and the subversive intrusive fantasies of F. Anstey. As Victorianism began to decay, its absurdity was widely celebrated—although the inevitable backlash ruined Oscar Wilde—and the Edwardian era became much more hospitable to the stylishly urbane wit of such writers as Max Beerbohm and Ernest Bramah.
Anstey’s work was paralleled by American humorists like Frank
Stockton and John Kendrick Bangs, but it was not until American attitudes hardened in the era of the Volstead Act that the way was opened for a defiant championship of the potential of alcohol as an agent of re-enchantment by Thorne Smith, while James Branch Cabell, George S. Viereck, and others fought the prudishness that had taken new heart from Prohibition. Although the relevant repressions abated, the comedies they had inspired became foundation stones of rich traditions in
HYBRID TEXTS • 209
both Britain and the United States, carried forward by such writers as John Collier, T. H. White, James Thurber, and the suppliers of Un-
known.
Because fantasy was long considered an annex to the sf genre in the commercial marketplace, and there was a widespread editorial belief that humorous sf was difficult to sell, comic fantasy led a slightly fugitive existence in the 1960s; the initial dominance of the nascent commercial genre by high fantasy did not immediately encourage experimentation. Once key exemplars had been put in place by Terry
Pratchett and Piers Anthony, however, humorous fantasy was quickly commodified by such writers as Craig Shaw Gardner, Robert Asprin, Esther Friesner, C. Dale Brittain—whose Wizards of Yurt series extended from A Bad Spell in Yurt (1991) to Is This Apocalypse Necessary? (2000)—and New Zealander Hugh Cook. A British boom led by Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt included the works of Andrew Har-man and Robert Rankin, Martin Millar’s pseudonymous Thraxas series, Colin Webber’s Merlin and the Last Trump (1993) and Ribwash (1994), James Bibby’s Ronan series (1995–98) and Shapestone (2000), Peter Chippindale’s Laptop of the Gods: A Millennium Fable (1998), Gordon Houghton’s The Apprentice (1999), Matthew Thomas’s Before
& After (1999), and Debi Gliori’s trilogy comprising Pure Dead Magic (2001), Pure Dead Wicked (2002), and Pure Dead Brilliant (2003).
Showcase anthologies of humorous fantasy include Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves (1991) and Betcha Can’t Read Just One (1993), ed. Alan Dean Foster, and two “Mammoth” anthologies edited by Mike Ashley.
HUNEKER, JAMES (1860–1921). U.S. writer best known as a music critic. The short fiction collected in Melomaniacs (1902), strongly influenced by the French Decadent movement, includes several fantasies celebrating the visionary effects of music. A few more are in Visionar-ies (1905). The stories appended to the essay collection Bedouins (1920) include two exercises in literary satanism, “The Supreme Sin” and
“The Vision Malefic.”
HYBRID TEXTS. Texts in which elements drawn from different sources are combined in such a way as to harmonize their content. Hybridization of other types of fantasy with sf entails providing speculative “rational explanations” for motifs that would be seen as magical or supernatural in other contexts. Another kind of hybridization widely practiced within the field of fantasy is a process of syncretic amalgamation founded in
210 • IBBOTSON, EVA
the view that rival myth systems are merely different interpretations of the same underlying metaphysical reality. Theosophical
syncretism, Joseph Campbell’s argument that all hero myths are versions of the same “monomyth,” and the claim that all goddesses are more or less distanced representations of Mother Earth are its most familiar manifestations. Syncretic hybridization has a significant effect on the processes of recycling and transfiguration, not only on the way such work is carried out but on the way its produce is seen by critics and writers. See also SCIENCE FANTASY.
– I –
IBBOTSON, EVA (1925– ). Pseudonym of British writer Maria Wiesner, whose children’s fiction includes several lively fantasies involving ghosts or witches, notably The Great Ghost Rescue (1975), Which Witch? (1979), A Company of Swans (1985), The Haunting of Hiram (1987; aka The Haunting of Granite Falls), Not Just a Witch (1989), The Secret of Platform 13 (1994), and Dial-a-Ghost (1996). The protagonists of Island of the Aunts (1999) are kidnapped to a magical island. The Worm and the Toffee-Nosed Princess (1983) collects shorter fantasies.
IDENTITY EXCHANGE. One of the functions of human consciousness, which makes social life—and, as a side effect, literature—possible is the ability to identify with others by placing ourselves imaginatively “in their shoes.” Literalizing extrapolations of this faculty inevitably crop up routinely in fantasy fiction. Although the term implies a mutual exchange, it may also be applied to cases of displacement whereby a single personality exchanges one body for another; some such device is often invoked in timeslip fantasies and accounts of doppelgängers.
Accounts of identity exchange that aspire to existentialist depth include John Sterling’s The Onyx Ring, Théophile Gautier’s “Avatar,”
Walter Besant’s The Doubts of Dives, Ignatius Donnelly’s Doctor Huguet (1891), Robert Hichens’s Flames (1897), Horace Newte’s The Ealing Miracle (1911), Charles de Lint’s Trader, Seabury Quinn’s Alien Flesh, and Laurel Marian Doud’s This Body (1998). Mrs. Craik’s
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 36