comprehensive modern collection is The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories (Anchor, 1974).
Andersen’s tales had an enormous influence on subsequent writers; Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are obvious extrapolations of Andersen originals.
“The Snow Queen” is the most frequently transfigured; notable examples include Kelly Link’s “Travels with the Snow Queen” (1997) and Eileen Kernaghan’s The Snow Queen (2000). Variants of “The Little Mermaid”
range from Wilde’s “The Fisherman and his Soul” to Debbie Viguié’s Midnight Pearls (2003) and variants of “The Nightingale” from Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose” to Kara Dalkey’s Sagamore couplet.
ANDERSON, MARGARET J. (1931– ). Scottish-born U.S. writer, most active as a popularizer of science. Most of her fantasies are timeslip stories; they include To Nowhere and Back (1975); the trilogy comprising In the Keep of Time (1977), In the Circle of Time (1979), and The Mists of Time (1984); and The Druid’s Gift (1989). The Ghost inside the Mon-itor (1990) is an account of a haunted computer.
ANDERSON, POUL (1926–2001). U.S. writer best known for sf (refer to HDSFL). His fantasies are routinely leavened with doses of rational analysis that obtain hybrid or chimerical effects, sometimes lightheartedly—as in Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953; exp. book 1961) and the couplet comprising Operation Chaos (1971) and Operation Luna (1999)—but sometimes with a bittersweet regret for the inevitability of thinning, as in the elegiac mosaic The Merman’s Children (1979).
The Broken Sword (1954; rev. 1971) is a dark/heroic fantasy wherein recovery of a traditional image of Nordic elves is similar in intent to the simultaneous efforts of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
The Viking romances Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1973), The Demon of Scattery (1979 with Mildred Downey Broxon), and War of the Gods (1997) also reflect Anderson’s interest in his Scandinavian ancestry; the historical fantasy Mother of Kings (2001) is a more earnest exploration of his cultural roots. A Midsummer Tempest (1974) is a Shakespearean fantasy set in an alternative history. His shorter fantasies are collected in Fantasy (1981) and The Armies of Elfland (1992).
ANGELIC FANTASY • 11
In collaboration with his wife, Karen (1932– ), Anderson wrote the elaborate historical fantasy series The King of Ys, comprising Roma Mater (1986), Gallicenae (1987), Dahut (1988), and The Dog and the Wolf (1988); their other collaborations are collected in The Unicorn Trade (1984).
ANDOM, R. (1869–1920). Pseudonym of British writer Alfred Walter Barrett, who wrote a great deal of humorous fiction, much of it for boys’ papers, including several Ansteyan fantasies. The title story of The Strange Adventure of Roger Wilkins and Other Stories (1985), The Identity Exchange (1902; aka The Marvellous Adventures of Me), and the second of the two novellas making up The Magic Bowl and The Blue-Stone Ring (1909) all recycle the central motif of Vice Versa. In The Enchanted Ship (1908), a pirate ship is plagued by ghosts.
ANGELIC FANTASY. In Judaic, Christian, and Islamic scripture, angels are divine messengers. According to various apocryphal texts, some were expelled from heaven after a rebellion led by Lucifer, thus becoming “fallen angels.” Some Christian sects assert that every human is attended by a “guardian angel.”
All of these ideas are very abundantly reflected in literature. John Milton’s rebuttal in Paradise Lost of Vondel’s account of the war in heaven established a significant taproot text, to which such revisionist accounts as Jonathan Daniels’s Clash of Angels (1930), John Cowper Powys’s Lucifer, Edward Pearson’s Chamiel (1973), Stefan Heym’s The Wandering Jew (1981; tr. 1983), Steven Brust’s To Reign in Hell (1984), and Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass are overt ripostes. Notable accounts of fallen angels on earth include Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels, Helen Beauclerk’s The Love of the Foolish Angel, Garry Kilworth’s Angel, Nancy Springer’s Metal Angel, Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven (1996), Nancy Collins’s Angels on Fire (1998), L. A. Marzulli’s Nephilim (1999), and Peter Lord-Wolff’s The Silence in Heaven (2000). The notion that fallen (and sometimes unfallen) angels inter-bred with humankind, producing “nephilim” offspring, is explored by Storm Constantine and Thomas E. Sniegoski’s series begun with The Fallen (2003). Ambiguous angels of other kinds are featured in Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck (1998) and Cameron Rogers’s The Music of Razors (2001).
12 • ANGELIC FANTASY
Angelic messengers and guardians are notably featured in the works of Marie Corelli, Guy Thorne’s The Angel (1908), Frank Baker’s Sweet Chariot, Inez and Her Angel (1954) by Georgina Sime and Frank Nicholson, Vassilis Vassilikos’s “The Angel” (1961; tr. 1964), Robert Nathan’s Heaven and Hell and the Megas Factor, James Morrow’s Towing Jehovah, Frederick Buechner’s On the Road with the Archangel (1997), A. Manette Ansay’s River Angel (1998), Elizabeth Brownrigg’s Falling to Earth (1998), Cecelia Holland’s The Angel and the Sword (2000), and Stephanie Bedwell-Grime’s Guardian Angel (2003). Angelic fantasies giving priority to the Judaic tradition include Ben Hecht’s “Remember Thy Creator” and Bernard Malamud’s “Angel Levine” (1955).
Sceptical fantasies representing angels as agents of divine tyranny include Marcus Donnelly’s Prophets for the End of Time, and Jeffrey Thomas’s Letters from Hades (2003). Various other sceptical analyses of the notion are featured in H. G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit, David Almond’s Skellig, and The Man on the Ceiling (2000) by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, but modern belief in the reality of angels and their continued involvement in human affairs remains very strong, especially in the United States, assisting a recent flood of credulous Christian fantasies; this phenomenon sharpens the piquancy of such sceptical satires as David Sosnowski’s Rapture (1996), Lyda Morehouse’s chimerical trilogy comprising Archangel Protocol (2001), Fallen Host (2002), and Messiah Node (2003), and Robert Deveraux’s A Flight of Storks and Angels (2004).
Artists have routinely assumed that angelic messengers would need
wings to travel between heaven and earth; angelic wings are often featured as symbolic badges of virtue, in such works as Barry Pain’s Going Home, Mervyn Peake’s Mr Pye, and Nancy Willard’s Sister Water, which overlap with secular fantasies of flight. In a rare instance of fantasy literature borrowing inspiration from the cinema, the notion that dead people might serve an apprenticeship to earn angelic status—popularized in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—frequently crops up in modern angelic fantasy, as in Donna Jo Napoli’s Angelwings series and Annie Dalton’s Angels Unlimited series. As with fairies, representations of angels in art provided a convenient vehicle for eroticiza-tion in Victorian times—an inspiration carried flamboyantly forward by Jacqueline Carey. Peter Crowther’s Heaven Sent (1995) is a notable showcase anthology.
ANIMAL FANTASY • 13
ANIMAL FANTASY A story with characters that include sentient animals credited with the ability to communicate with others of their own
species, and sometimes members of other species, but usually not with humans. Fantasies featuring human/animal communication—from
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven through the principal works of Hugh Lofting, Shirley Rousseau Murphy, and Mary Brown to M. Coleman Easton’s Masters of Glass (1985) and The Fisherman’s Curse (1987), Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (1999) and Donald Harington’s With (2004)—
may also be subsumed under the heading, as may theriomorphic fantasies, but they are essentially separate categories, with only slight overlaps. Accounts of entirely hypothetical species, like Tove Jansson’s moomintrolls and Elisabeth Beresford’s wombles also belong to a different category, although they sometimes mimic key features of animal fantasy, as in Robin Wayne Bailey’s accounts of the dragonkin. Didactic works that credit sentience to animals whose exploits are otherwise naturalistic—for example, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927)—are also marginal.
Animal fantasy is rooted in allegorical and satirical beast fables, which range from those cr
edited to Aesop and Pilpay through such medieval tales as the 12th-century Roman de Renart, featuring Reynard the Fox, and Wu Ch’eng-en’s 16th-century Journey to the West (aka Monkey) to Joel Chandler Harris’s 19th-century tales of Brer Rabbit; the purer literary extensions of the tradition include Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Manfred Kyber’s works collected in Among Animals (1912–26; tr. 1967), John Lambourne’s The Kingdom That Was (1931), the principal works of Walter Wangerin and Richard Bach, and Philip J. Davis’s Thomas Gray, Philosopher Cat (1988).
Some of these works became significantly influential in their own
right, especially The Wind in the Willows, which echoes in a good deal of subsequent British fantasy, including the works of Beatrix Potter, and such successors as Alison Uttley and such exercises in calculated quaintness as Beverley Nichols’s series begun with The Tree That Sat Down (1945). The nearest American equivalent is found in the works of George Selden, author of A Cricket in Times Square (1961). Grahame’s eccentric juxtapositions of species are further represented in fantasies featuring odd couples, including Algernon Blackwood’s Dudley and Gilderoy, Don Marquis’s tales of archy and mehitabel (1927), and E. B.
White’s Charlotte’s Web.
14 • ANSTEY, F.
Although animal fantasy was perennially popular in children’s fiction, especially for younger readers, the subgenre was dramatically repopularized by the success of Richard Adams’s rabbit fantasy Watership Down, an example followed by such writers as William Horwood (featuring moles), Garry Kilworth (wolves, foxes, and weasels), Brian Jacques and Robin Jarvis (mice), and William Kotzwinkle and David Henry Wilson (rats). Adams’s quest template was adapted to commodified fantasy by Niel Hancock’s Circle of Light sequence, Greyfax Grimwald, Faragon Fairingay, Calix Stay, and Squaring the Circle (all 1977). Other notable examples of post-Adamsian animal fantasy include Robert Westall’s The Cats of Seroster (1984) and Urn Burial (1987), Meredith Hooper’s The Journal of Watkin Stench (1988; rats), Stephen Moore’s Tooth and Claw (1998; cats), Donald Harington’s The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989), Tad Williams’s Tailchaser’s Song, Michael H. Payne’s The Blood Jaguar (1998), David Clement-Davies’s Fore Bringer (1999; deer), Michael Hoeye’s Time Stops for No Mouse (2000), Cherith Baldry’s Eaglesmount trilogy, Livi Michael’s Frank and the Black Hamster of Narkiz (2002), Dale C. Willard’s The Linnet’s Tale (2002), S. F. Said’s Varjak Paw (2003; cats), Melissa Haber’s The Heroic Adventures of Hercules Amsterdam (2003; mice), and Carter Crocker’s The Tale of the Swamp Rat (2003).
ANSTEY, F. (1856–1934). Pseudonym of British writer Thomas Anstey Guthrie, who popularized a new subgenre of humorous/intrusive fantasy with a sequence of novels begun with the classic identity exchange story Vice Versa; or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882). The teasing erotic fantasy The Tinted Venus (1885) extrapolates an anecdote from Richard Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, using a misplaced engagement ring to bring a classical figure, the goddess of love, into the unsuitable moral environment of Victorian England. A Fallen Idol (1886) imports a sinister Jain idol with similar but darker effect. In Tourmalin’s Time Cheques (1885; aka The Time Bargain), a young man who banks the time spent on a long sea voyage finds himself in paradoxical difficulties when he begins cashing the cheques. In The Brass Bottle, an exceedingly grateful djinn causes severe embarrassment to his releaser.
Anstey reversed his formula in Only Toys (1903) and In Brief Authority (1915), the latter taking a Victorian matron and her family into the Brothers Grimm’s Märchenland. His shorter fantasies are collected, with other material, in The Black Poodle and Other Tales (1884), The Talking Horse (1891), Paleface and Redskin (1898), Salted Almonds
ANTHOLOGY • 15
(1906), Percy and Others (1915), and The Last Load (1925). The works reprinted in the omnibus Humour and Fantasy (1931) became the definitive models of “Ansteyan fantasy,” although most of the notable examples thereof had already appeared, including “Sir Jocelyn’s Cap” by Walter Besant and Walter Herries Pollock, various works by R. Andom and Richard Marsh, and The Rejuvenation of Miss Sema-phore (1900) by “Hal Godfrey” (C. O’Conor Eccles). The formula lost its bite once Victorian moralism had weakened, although various works by W. A. Darlington, Kennedy Bruce’s The Fakir’s Curse (1931), Lad-broke Black’s The Gorgon’s Head (1932), Josephine Leslie’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1945 as by R. A. Dick), and Ernest Elmore’s The Lump-ton Gobbelings (1954) maintained the tradition until the eve of the permissive 1960s.
ANTHOLOGY. Many early collections of myths and legends are, in essence, anthologies, and such widely sourced collections as
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c1387) and Straparola’s Nights (1550–53) played a key role in converting the substance of folktales into literature, as did collections of ballads. Classic collections of folktales assembled by such writers as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm helped to normalize the practices of literary recycling and transfiguration. When books began to be compiled with contents that were credited to an assortment of authors judiciously sampled by an editor—at the end of the 18th century—the format was frequently used as a showcase for fantastic materials, as in the volume of Tales of the East (1812) compiled for Walter Scott by his assistant Henry Weber, who also assembled Popular Romances (1812), an anthology of fantastic voyages modeled on Charles Garnier’s 36-volume collection of Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions, et romans cabalistiques (1787–89).
Other significant 19th-century samplers included Thomas Carlyle’s
German Romances (4 vols., 1827), poetry anthologies like A. E.
Waite’s Elfin Music, numerous anthologies of fairy tales, including Andrew Lang’s classic series, and a series of U.S. anthologies edited by Thomas H. Mosher, The Bibelot (20 vols., 1895–1914), which reprinted a good deal of fantasy by William Morris, Fiona MacLeod, Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and others.
Anthologies of ghost and horror stories became very popular in the early part of the 20th century, but fantasy anthologies were usually marketed as children’s literature. The anthology translated as The Book of Fantasy (1940; tr. 1976), ed. Jorge Luis Borges, Silvino Ocampo, and
16 • ANTHOLOGY
Adolfo Bioy Casares, broke that mold, probably helping to inspire
Pause to Wonder (1944) and Strange to Tell (1946), ed. Marjorie Fischer and Rolfe Humphries, two significant showcases displaying the full range of fantastic fiction to English readers. A further set of three was assembled by Kay Dick (two of them bylined Jeremy Scott) in 1946–50, while Donald A. Wollheim began issuing a series of Avon Fantasy Readers in 1949. The literary end of the spectrum, including early examples of surrealism and magic realism, was showcased in A Night with Jupiter and Other Fantastic Stories (1947), ed. Charles Henri Ford.
The 1960s paperback boom created market space for L. Sprague de Camp’s subgenre-defining Swords and Sorcery and its sequels, which soon spawned numerous imitations, clearing the way for Lin Carter to begin his crucial genre-defining exploits in such texts as The Young Magicians and Dragons, Elves and Heroes. Showcase anthologies compiled by other interested editors supplemented and amended Carter’s, the most notable being Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski’s The Fantastic Imagination, Terri Windling’s Elsewhere couplet, Terry Carr’s A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (1981), Maxim Jakubowski’s Lands of Never (1983) and Beyond Lands of Never (1984), David Hartwell’s Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (1988) and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder (1989), and Martin H. Greenberg’s Tolkien memorial After the King (1992).
The commercial genre’s domination by long novels and novel series
ensured, however, that there would be a significant role still to be played by showcases of shorter works. The international dimensions of the genre are extravagantly displayed by Alberto Manguel in Black Water (1983) and Black Water 2 (1990; aka White Fire), by Franz Rottensteiner in The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination (1984), and numerous Dedalus samplers
. The literary pretensions of the genre are also exhibited by such anthologies as Tom Shippey’s Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994) and The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1995), ed. A. Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones.
The remarkable eclecticism of Windling’s fantasy section of the Year’s Best series she edited with Ellen Datlow, until she was replaced by Kelly Link and Glenn Grant, continues to exemplify the full range of the genre. Other significant showcase anthologies include the 1996 Fantasy volume of the Bending the Landscape series, ed. Nicola Griffiths and Stephen Pagel, Robert Silverberg’s Legends couplet, and Al Sar-rantonio’s Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy (2004).
ANTHONY, PIERS • 17
ANTHONY, MARK (1966– ). U.S. writer. The Last Rune series, comprising Beyond the Pale (1998), The Keep of Fire (1999), The Dark Remains (2001), Blood of Mystery (2002), The Gates of Winter (2003), and The First Stone (2004), is a sophisticated portal fantasy that juxtaposes the city of Denver with the secondary world of Eldh, providing opportunities for far-ranging adventures—the fourth volume timeslips to the Wild West—and the examination of various philosophical and political issues, including problems of prophecy.
ANTHONY, PIERS (1934– ). U.S. writer. His early work was mostly sf or ambiguous/science fantasy (refer to HDSFL). The humorous fantasy A Spell for Chameleon (1977) launched the best-selling Xanth series, continued in The Source of Magic (1979), Castle Roogna (1979), Centaur Aisle (1981), Ogre, Ogre (1982), Night Mare (1982), Dragon on a Pedestal (1983), Crewel Lye (1985), Golem in the Gears (1986), Vale of the Vole (1987), Heaven Cent (1988), Man from Mundania (1989), Isle of View (1990), Question Quest (1991), The Color of Her Panties (1992), Demons Don’t Dream (1993), Harpy Thyme (1993), Geis of the Gargoyle (1994), Roc and a Hard Place (1995), Yon Ill Wind (1996), Faun and Games (1997), Zombie Lover (1998), Xone of Contention (1999), The Dastard (2000), Fell Swoop (2001), Up in a Heaval (2002), and Cube Route (2003), which mixes wordplay (literalizing metaphors on a wholesale basis) with mildly sentimental, heroic quests in an unusually turbulent melting pot.
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 10
