Not all writers of modern fantasy, of course, wanted to dispense with such conventional rewards, but even those who did not tended to exaggerate them. Tolkien was prepared to dabble in weddings and inheritances, and even with climactic returns home, but they seemed trivial by comparison with the opportunity to redeem whole worlds within texts from evil.
His apology for fairy tales makes this potential aspect a key element of their utility, in the notion that consolatory “eucatastrophes” are imperative if they are to provide the reward that justifies their existence. It is for this reason that Tolkien considered immersive fantasy potentially far more valuable to readers than intrusive fantasies or portal fantasies—and the eventual success of The Lord of the Rings lent a great deal of weight to his argument. The more expansive a eucatastrophe is, the more intense a reader’s experience might become; that is why some critics have been eager to move beyond Tolkien’s notion of “enchantment” to some more
grandiose notion, like Arthur Machen’s “ecstasy.”
In claiming that existing fairy tales routinely led to “eucatastrophes,”
Tolkien was overstating his case somewhat. The endings of many actual folktales were so bleak and cruel that Perrault and other adaptors for children felt obliged to censor them; pioneering synthesists like Hans Christian Andersen often attached endings that were rather harrowing. Many traditional immersive fantasies dealing with extraordinary rewards take the form of cautionary tales, warning their characters—and hence their
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readers—that there is no use dreaming that their more ambitious wishes might be granted, because something would inevitably go wrong.
The reason for this occasional cautiousness is easy enough to understand; the reader, unlike the character, has to return to the primary world, closing the book-as-portal when the magical string of words reaches its final period. Even so, it is not obvious that secondary worlds need to be as disappointing as the actual one in order to provide rewarding experiences, and it is obviously not the case that readers prefer to visit innately disappointing secondary worlds because the real one continually lets them down. The most popular tales are, indeed, the ones in which clones of Cinderella marry Prince Charming, poor boys run away with geese that lay golden eggs, and ugly ducklings turn out to be swans. In spite of his over-statement, Tolkien was broadly correct: there is a great deal of consolation to be obtained even from temporary escapes to worlds where rewards impossible of achievement in the actual world are generously on offer.
Tolkien was correct too in his attempt to emphasize—by coining the word “eucatastrophe”—that there is something to be gained from imaginative participation in rewards that go far beyond the simple desire of the individual for the heritable and marriable materials of personal happiness.
In immersive fantasy, the characters with whom the reader identifies may achieve much more; that is why so many of them are heroes and so much immersive fantasy takes the form of heroic fantasy. There is a sense in which Tolkien-clone fantasy is heroic fantasy, but one of the problems afflicting the construction of a historical dictionary of fantasy literature is that the phrase was already in use as a label for a rather different kind of fantasy, already established in the commercial marketplace of the 1970s as a fugitive but manifest presence.
This other kind of “heroic fantasy” was more familiarly known as
“sword and sorcery” fiction. As with Tolkienesque “epic fantasy,” sword and sorcery had one principal model, in the story series by Robert E.
Howard featuring Conan. Howard had pioneered a new frontier in ac-
tion/adventure fiction by borrowing imaginary prehistoric civilizations from the scholarly fantasies of theosophy and centralizing a new kind of Noble Savage as protagonist. Sword-and-sorcery fiction was reliant on a mythical past in exactly the same way that fairy tales were—Howard called his once-upon-a-time the “Hyborian Age”—but it was a more brutal and cynical once-upon-a-time that bore a closer resemblance to the once-upon-a-time of the western genre than that of Middle-earth. Sword and sorcery’s elder races were more loathsome than Tolkien’s aristocratic
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elves, its dragons more monstrous, its wizards less academically inclined, and—most importantly—its swords more akin to gunslingers’ revolvers than to emblems of chivalric knighthood. Sword-and-sorcery fiction was heroic, but it had a notion of heroism that was more physical than that en-shrined in epic fantasy. It was partly to distinguish Tolkien-cloned fantasy from sword-and-sorcery fiction that some of the other labels routinely applied to it were cloned, including “high fantasy” and “quest fantasy.”
It is certainly arguable that the description of sword-and-sorcery fiction as “heroic fantasy” is mistaken; if one accepts Joseph Campbell’s description of the “monomyth” that defines the quintessence heroism, Conan and his clones do not seem to fit. Their ambitions are usually selfish and modest, in consequence of which their achievements are rarely as prodigious as those of the messianic heroes of epic fantasy. Nevertheless, they fall into the same spectrum, and they function as ideological counterweights to the temptations of casual excess that afflict every deus ex machina or holy grail that beckons to the world savers of epic fantasy. One of the virtues of the diversity of modern fantasy is that it forbids writers to take the nature or the goals of heroism too much for granted.
In fact, the diversity of modern secondary worlds, by comparison with the narrow horizons of any particular once-upon-a-time, is bound to call everything into question. Although it is perfectly possible to write immersive fantasies in which the characters’ rewards are perfectly ordinary or conventionally stereotyped—and the multiple cloning of Middle-earth immediately brought conventions into being that reduced the vast ambitions of its eucatastrophe to mere cliché—their situation within a genre can hardly help creating pressure to explore the possibility of finding alternative rewards or raising the possibility of finding alternative routes to the familiar ones. The formation of a new “fantasy” genre out of disparate materials—even materials whose fundamental assumptions about the
mythical past were as broadly similar as those of epic fantasy and sword and sorcery—inevitably created a tension that immediately began to modify the processes of imitation and recycling. As more materials were gathered into the new genre, especially the varieties of “contemporary fantasy”
that sought to renew and revitalize the intrusive-fantasy format, as well as various kinds of didactic portal fantasy, the tensions between the newly defined genre’s various components were considerably complicated.
For this reason, the tendency of commodified fantasy toward formularization was always problematic; there were simply too many formulas available. As Michael Swanwick observed in a perceptive analysis of the
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workings of fantasy tradition, the genre looks more like an archipelago than a continent—but every island in the archipelago exercises a modify-ing influence on the others, so that every recycling of an influential model tends to be at least slightly shifted by the example of at least one other. In more adventurous examples, writers deliberately set out to mix different formulas together, rejoicing in the new syntheses that emerge from the un-likeliest combinations. One of the most striking attributes of the emergent genre of commodified fantasy has been its hospitability to chimerical combinations.
Interestingly, this is not a tendency that is confined within the genre. It was natural enough, given the stark contrast between their tacit worldviews on the one hand and the close alliance between their narrative forms on the other, that chimerical combinations of fantasy and sf should appear at a very early stage in their history, and that one of the few specialist fantasy magazines of the pulp era, Unknown, should be largely devoted to the exploration of the possibilities inherent in such chimerization. What is slightly more surprising, however, is that the establishment of a commercial fantasy genre should have
given such swift and spectacular birth to crossovers with other popular genres. There had always been hybrid crossovers between fantasy and detective fiction, in the subgenre of “occult detective stories,” and there had always been a considerable enclave of love stories within fantasy, especially in the subgenre of “timeslip romances,” but the revitalization and recomplication of the various subgenres of fantasy detective story and “paranormal romance” in the last decade has been remarkable. Whereas the long-established crossovers were hybrid subgenres rather than chimerical ones, the proliferation of new kinds of crossover has relied much more heavily on exaggerating the contrasts between the elements fed into the mix rather than smoothing them.
These phenomena, together with a dramatic recent increase in the use of fantastic materials in literary fiction, emphasize the fact that the history of fantasy literature should not be viewed in isolation, as if it were something self-enclosed. Because all literature is fantasy of a sort, trends within generic fantasy can easily overflow into other genres. The energy and vitality of commodified fantasy is clearly demonstrable in the way in which it has helped to refresh other commodified genres whose formulas had become a trifle stale; the utility of the skills involved in reading sophisticated immersive fantasy is clearly demonstrable in the manner in which literary fiction has become much more flexible in its use of fantasy tropes.
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We have also been able to observe in recent years that the establishment of a fantasy genre, however carefully commodified its central examples may be, is bound to create a sceptical interrogation of the nature and functions of fantasy itself—to encourage the growth of fantasies about fantasy: self-conscious exercises in fabulation and metafiction. Such endeavors may appear to be exercises in sophistication, likely to be confined to the more esoteric realms of literary fiction, but that has never been the case.
Children’s fantasy has always accommodated fantasies about fantasy quite readily, and as soon as fantasy became a commercial genre it made the same ready accommodation.
The most conspicuous examples of fantasies about fantasy are humorous, but even the humorous examples routinely serve as contes
philosophiques, and the most serious examples aspire to sentimental as well as philosophical depth. There is, in fact, a sense in which the high status of all the finest works of modern fantasy literature is dependent on their commentary on the politics of fantasy, no matter what other aesthetic merits they may have in addition to their metafictional implications. This is where their own realism becomes manifest, and important. Secondary worlds may function in several kinds of interesting and realistically significant ways, related to the real one logically, satirically, or allegorically, but the function they can fulfill most intricately, most cleverly, and most artistically is that of questioning and reevaluating their own conventional forms.
There are several reasons why a reader might benefit from cultivating the skills required to read immersive fantasy, only three of which are outlined in Tolkien’s celebration of recovery, escape, and consolation. None are to be despised, even if they extend no farther than ritual uses of commodified fantasy—the core works of commodified fantasy are not all badly written, and painters long ago proved that there is an art in imitation as well as invention—but it is arguable that their greatest possible reward is the ability to construe fantasies about fantasies, to participate fully in the joys of fabulation.
This is a useful kind of mental flexibility, valuable not only in the everyday routines of psychological fantasization but also in reminding us that the summary past of history is really no more than another once-upon-a-time. It might be the most accurate estimate we can presently contrive of what really did happen (although one is perfectly free to doubt that), but even if so, it is certainly not a record of the best of all possible worlds. The opportunity to explore others in the imagination can
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only increase the possibility that we might find better ways to exist as individuals in the actual world, and perhaps the possibility that we might find better ways collectively to change the actual world in ways that will improve it.
THE SCOPE OF THE DICTIONARY
Because fantasy literature, as defined here, is as old as writing, this guide to its contents has to be very selective, especially in terms of the authors annotated. Authors have been selected for individual attention according to the historical significance, rather than the number, of their contributions to the genre. The lists of titles credited to individual authors are often selective, on the same basis; for instance, the importance of fantasy within children’s literature necessitates the listing of a great deal of fiction marketed for older children, but stories for younger children are usually left unlisted.
Biographical information has been kept to a minimum. Authors who are also annotated in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature are cross-referenced thereto by the indicator (refer to HDSFL), and those to be annotated in John Clute’s forthcoming Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature are cross-referenced thereto by the indicator (refer to HDHL).
The great majority of the terms defined herein have been included because of the frequency of their use or their particular significance within the discourse of contemporary fantasy criticism, but because that criticism is still too thin on the ground for any substantial consensus to have arisen regarding the most useful category distinctions, considerable improvisation has been necessary. Although new emphasis has been lent to such relatively transparent and commonplace terms as “recycling” and
“transfiguration,” the invention of new jargon has been minimized. Some of the more esoteric terms introduced in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia have either been omitted or restricted to brief definitions, in the interests of maintaining as much clarity as the complexity of the phenomena will allow.
In order to list as many relevant titles as possible, descriptions of all but the most important have been restricted to succinct categorization, and the bibliographical information relating to them has usually been limited to the dates of original publication, variant titles, and indications of significant expansion or revision.
The Dictionary
– A –
ABBEY, LYNN (1948– ). U.S. writer best known for her coeditorship with Robert Lynn Asprin of the Thieves’ World shared world project (1979–89), which stimulated the production of picaresque/commodified fantasy. Her early novels featured goddess-worshipping witches battling patriarchal black magic in quasi-medieval settings.
Examples include the couplets comprising Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) and The Black Flame (1980), Unicorn and Dragon (1987) and Conquest (1988; aka The Green Man), and The Wooden Sword (1991) and Beneath the Web (1994). Siege of Shadows (1996) and Jerlayne (1999) are quest fantasies; the heroine of the latter leaves Faerie in order to find out why her family are misfits. The Orion’s Children series, which began with Out of Time (2000), Behind Time (2001), and Taking Time (2004), is a lively contemporary fantasy featuring a librarian who develops extraordinary powers.
ACKROYD, PETER (1949– ). British writer of literary fiction whose preoccupation with secret histories of London is reflected in characters obsessed or haunted by their past equivalents, as in the Dickensian fantasy The Great Fire of London (1982) and the occult fantasies Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993) (refer to HDHL). First Light (1989) and English Music (1993) employ similar transhistorical links and narrative movements. Milton in America (1996) is an alternative history in which the poet funds a utopian community. In the satire The Plato Papers (1999), the great philosopher comments on “the Mouldwarp era” (1500–2300 A.D.) from the viewpoint of 3700 A.D., blithely misinterpreting its hap-hazard relics.
1
2 • ADAMS, RICHARD
ADAMS, RICHARD (1920– ). British writer whose animal fantasy Watership Down (1972)—a heartfelt ecological morality play modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid—revived the subgenre when it becam
e a best seller. The Plague Dogs (1977) and the satirical Traveller (1988) stretched the subgenre’s conventions, but Tales from Watership Down (1996) reverted to safer ground. Shardik (1974) and Maia (1984) are dark/historical fantasies with elements of political fantasy. The Girl in a Swing (1980) is a sentimental/ghost story. The Legend of Te Tuna (1986) and the tales in The Iron Wolf and Other Stories (1980) are recycled folktales.
ADELER, MAX (1841–1915). Pseudonym of U.S. writer Charles Heber Clark, whose collections of humorous stories include several hallucinatory fantasies, notably “Mr Skinner’s Night in the Underworld” in Random Shots (1878), the Arthurian fantasy “Professor Baffin’s Island” (1880; aka “The Fortunate Island”) in An Old Fogey and Other Stories (1881; aka The Fortunate Island and Other Stories), and the two novellas making up Transformations, Containing Mrs Shelmire’s Djinn and A Desperate Adventure (1883). “Professor Baffin’s Island” anticipates Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, and Transformations anticipates the work of F. Anstey.
AFTERLIFE FANTASY. The subgenre of fantasy featuring secondary worlds in which humans are reincarnated after death. Its cardinal examples are the Infernos—and occasional Paradisos and Purgatorios—of Dante’s fantasy, including the spinoff subgenre of infernal comedy.
Various other traditional images—whose variety is mocked in such
comedies as Andrew Lang’s “In the Wrong Paradise”—are also featured, but modern afterlife fantasy tends to be much more inventive and adventurous in designing scenarios in which the moral accounts left in conspicuous debit by life on earth might be ingeniously balanced. Afterlife fantasy overlaps posthumous fantasy, which situates its lives after death within the primary world. Earnest religious fantasies featuring afterlives include a large subset of credulous spiritualist fantasies, but satire predominates in literary fiction.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 8
