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WINTERSON, JEANETTE (1959– ). British writer whose literary fiction often includes fantastic motifs. Boating for Beginners (1985) is a transfigurative/biblical fantasy. The Passion (1987) is a historical fantasy about Napoleon. Sexing the Cherry (1989) embeds transfigurations of several well-known fairy tales in a sophisticated historical fantasy. The PowerBook (2000) is a postmodernist/
contemporary fantasy about the power of story. The short story collection The World and Other Places (1998) includes several fantasies.
WISH-FULFILMENT FANTASY. Narrowly defined, a wish-fulfillment fantasy is one in which expressed wishes are magically granted, often in sets of three; most such fantasies—which have deep roots in folktales and fables—are cautionary tales, and many are cast as Faustian fantasies. In a broader sense, any story that dramatizes a common daydream fantasy—such as becoming invisible, having a bottomless purse, or being able to fly—qualifies as a wish-fulfilment fantasy, especially if it examines the fulfilment of desire in a wryly sceptical fashion. Again, cautionary tales predominate, often using excessively literal interpretation of expressed wishes, after the fashion of Douglas Jerrold’s A Man Made of Money.
A strong children’s tradition of cautionary tales extends from E. Nesbit to Roald Dahl, although the indulgent element remains powerful in such examples as Enid Blyton’s The Adventures of the Wishing Chair (1937). Writers of wish-fulfilment fantasies for adults, from James Dalton, William Gilbert, and Joseph Shield Nicholson to Thomas Berger, tend to be far more critical of mere self-indulgence, although erotic variants like Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (1994) are often unrepentant.
A great deal of ingenious literary endeavor has been expended on the question of how best to employ a set of three wishes; Gerald Heard’s
“The Marble Ear” (1952) is a neat summary of problems to be avoided.
Ventures in wish-fulfilment fantasy usually keep abreast of current fashion, wish lists in contemporary texts often featuring rapid weight loss.
Notable recent examples include Franny Billingsley’s Well Wished (1997), Christy Yorke’s Magic Spells (1999), Daska Slater’s The Wishing Box (2000), John Vornholt’s The Witching Well, Ann Rinaldi’s Millicent’s Gift (2002), Sally Prue’s The Devil’s Toenail (2003), and Elyse Friedman’s Waking Beauty (2004).
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WITCH. A practitioner of magic, usually an informally educated female of relatively low status (unlike wizards). Some modern writers use
“warlock” to designate a male witch, although this is a recent coinage and warlocks usually take on the standard attributes of wizards, as illustrated by the works of Christopher Stasheff.
Although the official position of the Christian church has always been that witchcraft is implicitly evil, much that was thus condemned was folk medicine and divination practiced by “wise women” (including
midwives), so the term always had a fringe of ambiguity, which confused the persecution of witches in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.
The reckless use of torture in extracting confessions from those accused of witchcraft—often for spiteful or cynical reasons—eventually made
“witch hunting” a pejorative term and inhibited the use of witches as straightforward figures of menace in horror fiction.
Christendom inherited its witch images from pagan legends. Classical images are divided between femmes fatales like Circe and Medea and hagwives like Erichtho (in Lucan’s Pharsalia) and Ovid’s Dipsas; such images are parodied in the depiction of Pamphile in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. Witches in Northern European mythology and folktales are mostly hagwives, ceaselessly employed in mixing potions in their cauldrons. Both traditions are echoed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c1606), the former via the invocation of Hecate. The inquisitors
charged with rooting out heresy justified turning their attention to witches with a series of slanderous fantasies, charging them with making diabolical pacts and participating in active Devil worship at regular
“sabbats.” The myth of the sabbat was constructed by Pierre de Lancre in Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Demons (1612); notable literary dramatizations can be found in W. Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches (1849) and Valery Briussov’s The Fiery Angel (1908; tr. 1930).
Notable literary works inspired by the Christian witch hunt include Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (c1620), one of several works produced in the wake of a 1612 trial, of which other fictional representations include Thomas Shadwell’s play The Lancashire Witches (1681) and Ainsworth’s novel. The fascination such trials exert is reflected in the fact that the only significant witch trial ever held in America (in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692) gave rise to numerous literary works, ranging from Esther Barstow Hammond’s credulous Yesterday Never Dies
(1941) through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ambiguous “Young Goodman
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Brown” (1835) to Arthur Miller’s scathingly sceptical play The Crucible (1953). Other dramatizations of actual cases include several versions of the 1634 trial of the French priest Urbain Grandier—including Eyvind Johnson’s Dreams of Roses and Fire (1949), and Aldous Huxley’s play The Devils of Loudun (1952), William Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress (1848), Thomas Wright’s The Blue Firedrake (1892), J. M. Brodie-Innes’s The Devil’s Mistress (1915), and the third novella in Françoise Mallet-Joris’s The Witches (1969). Intensively researched representations of fictitious witch prosecutions include Meinhold’s The Amber Witch (1843), Edith Pargeter’s By Firelight (1948), and Leslie Wilson’s Malefice (1992). The near-unanimous judgment of fantasy literature is that witch hunters are infinitely more dangerous than witches ever have been or could be.
The image of the witch underwent a drastic overhaul following the
publication of Jules Michelet’s scholarly fantasy La sorcière (1862), which argued that the church’s malicious slanders uttered against innocent midwives and practitioners of folk medicine might easily have generated a counter-religion of justified pagan protest. Michelet’s regret that no such counter-religion actually arose was echoed by others, including Charles Godfrey Leland, before Edgar Jepson and Margaret Murray used fertility cults described by James Frazer as models for
“covens” of witches—redefined as practitioners of a pagan religion often called “wicca”—whose “sabbats” were entirely innocent of satanic involvement or intent. The model was extravagantly taken up by
lifestyle fantasists eager to practice what Michelet had preached; pagan witchcraft became the most popular lifestyle fantasy of the late 20th century, often taking aboard feminist and environmentalist ideals in the cause of a more rounded opposition to and protest against the inheritors of clerical hegemony. The image of the unjustly victimized pagan witch has had a huge impact on modern genre fantasy, most witch images in which—including those of the witches inhabiting secondary worlds—
are modeled on some version of this thesis.
Contemporary literary witches are extraordinarily various, as dis-
played in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, John van Druten’s play Bell Book and Candle (1956), Mary Savage’s A Likeness to Voices (1963), Keith Roberts’s Anita, Roald Dahl’s The Witches, Terry Pratchett’s novels featuring Granny Weatherwax, John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Martin H.
Brice’s The Witch in the Cave (1986), Rebecca Ore’s Slow Funeral
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(1994), Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, Judith Hawkes’s The Heart of a Witch (1999), Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird, Anne Bishop’s Tir Alainn trilogy, Sandra Forrester’s The Everyday Witch (2002), and Anna Dale’s Whispering to Witches (2004). The success of such TV representations as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed has generated a good deal of spin-off in addition to tie-ins, including Jean Thesman’s The Other Ones (1999), Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three series (15 vols., 2001–2002), and Cate Tiernan’s Wicca series (15 vol
s., 2001–2003).
Showcase anthologies include Hecate’s Cauldron (1982), ed. Susan Shwartz, and Witches’ Brew (2002), ed. Yvonne Jocks.
WIZARD. A practitioner of magic, usually a male of considerable academic attainment and social status (unlike witches). The term derives from the Middle English wysard (“wise man”), by which route it became associated with “cunning men”—whose exploits in divination and folk medicine often made them targets of witch hunters—and the prestidiga-tors who were ancestral to modern stage magicians; more crucially, however, the term also became associated with scholarly practitioners of ritual magic (the term magus has parallel etymological roots and similar implications), astrologers and alchemists. These categories are conflated in literary images such as Walter Scott’s influential depiction of his alleged kinsman Michael Scott in “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”
The wizards of modern fantasy literature are usually figures of great pretension, who maintain a quasi-aristocratic bearing while dressing like medieval monks. The archetypal model for most modern representations is Merlin, although Shakespeare’s “enchanter” Prospero is also a significant paradigm. Despite J. R. R. Tolkien’s resentment of Norman impositions, his Gandalf—the archetypal wizard of commodified fantasy—is little more than a carbon copy of Merlin, as are Diana Wynne Jones’s Chrestomanci and Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard. Such wizards usually remain behind thrones, but they occasionally exercise direct rule, as in Robert Newcomb’s epic series.
The pretentiousness of wizardry inevitably attracts parody, as in
Terry Pratchett’s representation of Discworld’s Unseen University and Vivian Vande Velde’s Wizard at Work, while feminist protest against the blatant discrepancy between the images of wizard and witch is partly expressed in mockery and partly in the extension of the term to embrace both sexes, as in Barbara Hambly’s Stranger at the Wedding, Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard, and J. K. Rowling’s descriptions of Hogwarts Academy.
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WOLFE, GENE (1931– ). U.S. writer best known for hybrid and chimerical works on the borders of sf (refer to HDSFL), although he has also written earnest Christian fantasies like “The Detective of Dreams” (1980), in the spirit of G. K. Chesterton. Peace (1975) is an intricate posthumous fantasy. The Devil in a Forest (1976) is a desupernaturalized historical fantasy. Free Live Free (1984) is an Odyssean fantasy. The couplet comprising Soldier in the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989) is a classical fantasy involving an amnesiac curse. There Are Doors (1988) is an elaborate portal fantasy. Castle-view (1990) is a contemporary fantasy with Arthurian elements.
Wolfe began an extensive series of sophisticated far-futuristic fantasies with the Book of the New Sun, comprising The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1982), and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983), subsequently adding several short stories, mock-explanatory essays, and a sequel, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), before extrapolating its themes in two further multivolume novels, one comprising Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994), and Exodus from the Long Sun (1996) and the other On Blue’s Waters (1999), In Green’s Jungles (2000), and Return to the Whorl (2001).
Brief fantasies spun off from the series include The Boy Who Hooked the Sun (1985) and Empires of Foliage and Flower (1987).
The couplet comprising The Knight and The Wizard (both 2004), both set in Mythgarthr, aspires to definitive status as a generic heroic fantasy with picaresque and allegorical elements; its Nordic elements predominate but are carefully hybridized, with Anglo-Norman elements as the roots of the English language. Wolfe’s short fantasies are mingled with other materials in many of his short story collections, including Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days (1981), Storeys from the Old Hotel (1988), Endangered Species (1989), Young Wolfe (1993), Strange Travelers (2000), and Innocents Aboard (2004).
WOOD, BRIDGET (1947– ). British writer in various genres. The Minstrel’s Lute (1987) and Satanic Lute (1987) are dark fantasies. The trilogy comprising Wolfking (1991), The Lost Prince (1992), and Rebel Angel (1993) is a timeslip fantasy with elements of Celtic fantasy.
Sorceress (1994), set in a similar milieu, describes the thinning of Irish paganism in the face of Christian invasion. Her subsequent dark fantasies were bylined “Frances Gordon”; they include The Devil’s Piper (1995), The Burning Altar (1996), the Rumpelstiltskin transfiguration
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Changeling (1998), the Sleeping Beauty transfiguration Thorn: An Immortal Tale (1997), and the Little Red Riding Hood transfiguration Wildwood (1999).
WOODING, CHRIS (1977– ). British writer in various genres. Broken Sky (9 vols., 1999–2000) is a manga-inspired “fighting fantasy” series.
Catchman (1999) is a dark fantasy. The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (2001) is a baroque alternative history story. Poison (2003) is a striking Orphean fantasy featuring “phaeries” and a spider queen. The Braided Path trilogy begun with The Weavers of Saramyr (2003) and The Skein of Lament (2004)—with Ascendancy Veil to come—has a quasi-Oriental setting and tracks the progress of an “aberrant” child raised as heir to an empire in spite of stern opposition.
WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION. An annual convention formed in
calculated opposition to the World Science Fiction Convention. The WFC maintains a greater focus on literary materials than does its rival and usually attracts a higher proportion of professional attendees, thus making it a useful venue for business dealings. It instituted the multi-category World Fantasy Awards in 1975, decided by a jury (by contrast with the sf Hugo Award’s popular vote), although convention members can vote items onto the short lists.
WREDE, PATRICIA C. (1953– ). U.S. writer for children and adults.
The series comprising Shadow Magic (1982), Daughter of Witches (1983), The Harp of Imach Thyssel (1985), Caught in Crystal (1987), and The Raven Ring (1994) is set in a secondary world where the am-icable relations between humans, Shee (fairies), and the Wyrd (forest folk) are periodically threatened by the evil Shadow Born. The Seven Towers (1984) makes much of the mystical associations of the number seven. Talking to Dragons (1985; rev. 1993) is an extravagant quest fantasy featuring an Enchanted Forest, whose nature and history are elaborated in Dealing with Dragons (1990, aka Dragonsbane), Searching for Dragons (1991, aka Dragon Search), and Calling on Dragons (1993).
Sorcery and Cecelia; or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot (1988) and The Grand Tour (2004), with Caroline Stevermer) are set in Regency London. Snow White and Rose Red (1989) transfigures the well-known fairy tale. The couplet comprising Mairleon the Magician (1991) and Magician’s Ward (1997) are mysteries set in an alternative Regency England. Wrede’s short fiction is sampled in Book of Enchantments (1996).
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WRIGHTSON, PATRICIA (1921– ). Australian writer of children’s fiction. She drew on aboriginal folklore in several fantasies describing consequences of the thinning of a native magical reality under the pressure of colonial settlement, including The Crooked Snake (1955), An Older Kind of Magic (1972), The Nargun and the Stars (1973), A Little Fear (1983), the stories in The Old, Old Ngarang (1989), and—most graphically—the Wirrun trilogy, comprising The Ice Is Coming (1977), The Dark Bright Water (1978), and Behind the Wind (1981, aka Journey behind the Wind). Moon-Dark (1987) is a political fantasy with elements of animal fantasy. Balyet (1989) is a ghost story.
WURTS, JANNY (1953– ). U.S. writer and artist. While midway through the hybrid science-fantasy series comprising Sorcerer’s Legacy (1982), Stormwarden (1984), Keeper of the Keys (1988), and Shadowfane (1988), she teamed up with Raymond Feist to produce Daughter of the Empire (1987)—which was eventually expanded into a trilogy by Servant of the Empire (1990) and Mistress of the Empire (1992)—set in one of the secondary worlds Feist had introduced in Magician.
The Mistress of White Storm (1992), which tracks the making of a legendary fortress builder, was followed
by the The Curse of the Mistwraith (1993), whose sequels— The Ships of Merior (1994) and Warhost of Vastmark (1995)—were combined into a single volume under the former title in the United States; the series, which tracks the fortunes of two half-brothers victimized by a curse, was continued in Fugitive Prince (1997), Grand Conspiracy (1999), Peril’s Gate (2001), and Stormed Fortress (2004). To Ride Hell’s Chasm (2002) is an epic fantasy featuring a high-spirited princess. Wurts’ short fiction is sampled in That Way Lies Camelot (1994).
WYLIE, JONATHAN. Pseudonym of husband-and-wife team Mark
(1952– ) and Julia (1955– ) Smith. Their stereotyped accounts of plucky young protagonists operating in secondary worlds include three trilogies, one comprising The First Named (1987), The Centre of the Circle (1987), and The Mage-Born Child (1988); the second Dreams of Stone, The Lightless Kingdom, and The Age of Chaos (all 1989); and the third Dark Fire (1993), Echoes of Flame (1994), and The Last Augury (1994). Their subsequent work became more various, the couplet Dream Weaver (1991) and Shadow-Maze (1992) being followed by the portal fantasy Other Lands (1995) and the dark fantasy Across the Flame (1996). The contemporary fantasy Magister (1997) is set in a world where magic is a performance art.
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The couple adopted a new pseudonym, “Julia Gray,” for the dragon fantasies Ice Mage (1998) and Fire Music (1999), Isle of the Dead (2000), and the Guardian Cycle, comprising Dark Moon (2000), The Jasper Forest (2001), The Crystal Desert (2001), The Red Glacier (2002), and Alyssa’s Ring (2002), in which a prophesied heir turns out to be twins, one of whom is disfigured but either of whom might be the true Guardian.
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YARBRO, CHELSEA QUINN (1942– ). U.S. writer. Her early work was mostly sf (refer to HDSFL). Her detective fiction sometimes has occult elements reminiscent of the “nonfictional” spiritualist fantasies Messages from Michael (1979), More Messages from Michael (1986), Michael for the Millennium (1995), and Michael’s People (1998). Ariosto (1980) is an alternative world fantasy in which Lodovico Ariosto is an adventurer in a world of strangeness that inspires him to put even more imaginative effort into his epic. The historical fantasy To the High Redoubt (1985), the humorous fantasy A Baroque Fable (1986), and the children’s fantasy Monet’s Ghost (1997)—in which a girl who can project herself into paintings is trapped in a Monet—offer further testimony to her remarkable versatility.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 67