In the chimerical Apprentice Adept series, comprising Split Infinity (1980), Blue Adept (1981), Juxtaposition (1982), Out of Phaze (1987), Robot Adept (1988), Unicorn Point (1989), and Phaze Doubt (1990), magic and science are required to maintain a careful balance. The more earnest Incarnations of Immortality series comprises On a Pale Horse (1983), Bearing an Hourglass (1984), With a Tangled Skein (1985), Wielding a Red Sword (1986), Being a Green Mother (1987), For Love of Evil (1988), and And Eternity (1990). The Geodyssey series, which uses serial reincarnation to track the prehistory of humankind, comprises Isle of Woman (1993), Shame of Man (1994), Hope of Earth (1997), and Muse of Art (1999).
Hasan (1977) is an Arabian fantasy. Shade of the Tree (1986) is a dark fantasy. Tatham Mound (1991) is a historical novel with some marginal fantasy content. The Willing Spirit (1996) is a humorous fantasy.
Anthony’s collaborative work includes a stereotyped heroic fantasy
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series written with Robert E. Margroff, comprising Dragon’s Gold (1987), Serpent’s Silver (1988), Chimaera’s Copper (1990), Orc’s Opal (1991), and Mouvar’s Magic (1992). Through the Ice (1989 with Robert Kornwise) is a posthumous completion of a novel by a teenager. If I Pay Thee Not in Gold (1993, with Mercedes Lackey) features a magically sustained matriarchy. Quest for the Fallen Star (1998, with James Richey and Alan Riggs) is a quest fantasy. Dream a Little Dream (1999) is a hallucinatory fantasy based on dream-journals written by Julie Brady. The Secret of Spring (2000, with Jo Anne Tauesch) is a humorous chimerical fantasy. In The Gutbucket Quest (2000, with Ron Leming), the blues feature as magical music.
APOCALYPTIC FANTASY. Apocalyptic literature was produced in considerable abundance between 200 BC and 200 AD, when Jews and
Christians responded to political persecution by envisaging a cata-clysmic divine intervention in earthly affairs that would put an end to history and settle outstanding moral accounts. The example accepted into the New Testament as the Revelation of St. John the Divine became enormously influential as a taproot text, dominating the imagery of a subgenre that has broadened its scope to encompass any abrupt “end of the world [as we know it].”
Favorite motifs from Revelation include the mysterious Beast whose number is 666; the four horsemen who spread Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death; and the field of Armageddon, on which the kings of the earth are drawn to battle. The four horsemen have become part of the standard apparatus of humorous fantasy, lavishly employed by Terry Pratchett, who produced a comprehensive comic fantasy version of Revelation in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens. The sounding of trumpets following the removal of the seventh seal of the book binding the world together also became a familiar comedy motif, as featured in H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Last Trump” and Lord Berners’s Count Omega. More earnest transfigurations of Revelation include Sydney Watson’s trilogy begun with “Scarlet and Purple” (1913) and Joseph B. Burroughs’s Titan, Son of Saturn (1921).
The modern subgenre belongs as much to sf (refer to HDSFL) as to fantasy, continuing a syncretic tradition that began with such hybrid works as Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man (1805: tr. 2003); further examples include R. H. Benson’s The Lord of the World (1906), Robert Nichols’s “Golgotha & Co.” (1923), John Cowper Powys’s Up and Out, Bernard MacLaren’s Day of Misjudgment (1956), and James Blish’s The Devil’s Day (1968–72).
APPLEGATE, K. A. • 19
Apocalyptic fantasy enjoyed a spectacular renaissance as the end of the second millennium approached, a flourishing represented in such pious religious/horror stories (refer to HDHL) as Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s best-selling Left Behind series (1995–2003) and Michael D. O’Brien’s Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (1996); such satires as Andrei Codrescu’s Messiah (1999), Melvin Jules Bukiet’s Signs and Wonders (1999), and Lyda Morehouse’s Apocalypse Array (2004); and such melodramas as Mark Chadbourn’s Age of Misrule sequence and the climactic volume of Charles E. Grant’s Millennium Quartet, Riders in the Sky (1999). The fashionability of the theme continued into the 21st century in such works as Marcos Donnelly’s Prophets for the End of Time.
The secondary worlds of commodified fantasy are often threatened with apocalyptic termination, but the formulaic plots of commodified versions usually require that the apocalypses be aborted in the nick of time. Thrillers employing the apocalypse as the ultimate instrument of melodramatic inflation are compelled to do likewise, as in George R.
R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag. Some secondary world fantasies, however, such as R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy, begun with The Darkness That Comes Before (2003), gain valuable narrative energy from such apocalyptic threats. Ancient apocalypses are sometimes featured in historical fantasies, as in Pauline J. Alama’s The Eye of Night (2002).
APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME (1880–1918). Pseudonym of Italian-
born French poet Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky, the great pioneer of surrealism. His fiction includes the title novella (1904) of L’Enchanteur pourrissant (1909), featuring an attempt to resurrect Merlin, the items translated in The Heresiarch and Co. and The Wandering Jew and Other Stories (1910; tr. 1965), and The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories (tr.
1985).
APPLEGATE, K. A. (1956– ). U.S. writer best known for the Animorphs series of educational animal fantasies, launched in 1996, which runs to more than 60 volumes. Her other fantasy project, the Everworld series, is an Odyssean fantasy in which a group of children are displaced into a parallel universe where they encounter the apparatus of fairy tales, classical mythology, Atlantean fantasy, and various other motifs; it comprises Search for Senna (1999), Land of Loss (1999), Enter the Enchanted (1999), Realm of the Reaper (1999), Discover the Destroyer (1999), Fear the Fantastic (2000), Gateway to the Gods (2000), Brave
20 • APULEIUS
the Betrayal (2000), Inside the Illusion (2000), Understanding the Unknown (2000), Mystify the Magician (2001), and Entertain the End (2001).
APULEIUS. Carthaginian writer, sometimes called Lucius Apuleius, who flourished in the second century A.D. Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass—based on the slightly earlier Lucius; or The Ass by the Greek satirist Lucian—is a bawdy, picaresque fantasy that might qualify as the first fantasy novel. Similarly, the interpolated tale of Cupid and Psyche might be regarded as the first art fairy tale; it was frequently recycled, most notably in Molière’s Psiché (1671), Thomas Shadwell’s Psyche (1675), Louis Couperus’ Psyche (1898), and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. The Golden Ass survived the Dark Ages in spite of its flamboyant licentiousness, with the assistance of blatantly hypocritical attempts to construe it as a Christian allegory.
ARABIAN FANTASY. A subcategory of Oriental fantasy founded in Antoine Galland’s version of The Arabian Nights; the motif most widely deployed in fantasy literature is the djinn, although magic carpets are also commonplace and the framing device of Scheherazade’s life-saving efforts as a storyteller has generated its own mini-genre. The erotic content of Galland’s tales, bowdlerized in some translations and exaggerated in others, recommended them for use in the kind of sophisticated fantasy that became commonplace in subsequent French fiction; notable examples include Anthony Hamilton’s The Four Facardins, Augustin-Paradis de Moncrif’s The Adventures of Zeloide and Amanzarifdine (1715; tr. 1929), Jacques-Rochette de la Morlière’s Angola: An Eastern Tale (1746; tr. 1751), Voltaire’s Zadig, Stanislaus-Jean de Boufflers’s “The Dervish” (1810; tr. 1926) and two novellas by Gérard de Nerval. English pastiches include Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), William Beckford’s Vathek, G. P. R. James’s The String of Pearls (1832), George Meredith’s The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), H. N.
Crellin’s Tales of the Caliph (1887), and F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled.
The fashionability of Arabian fantasy waned in the 19th century, but the subgenre survived into the 20th in such examples as Frank Heller’s The Thousand and Second Night (1924 in Swedish; tr. 1926), Noel Lan-gley’s The Tale of the Land of
Green Ginger (1937; aka The Land of Green Ginger), and Arthur Lee Gould’s An Airplane in the Arabian Nights (1947) before its absorption into commodified fantasy in the
ARCADIAN FANTASY • 21
wake of Piers Anthony’s Hasan. Notable examples include Graham Diamond’s Marrakesh (1981) and Marrakesh Nights (1984), M. Coleman Easton’s Iskiir (1986), Seamus Cullen’s A Noose of Light and The Sultan’s Turret (both 1986), Lillian Stewart Carl’s Wings of Power (1989), and works by Chaz Brenchley, Esther Friesner, Richard Matheson, and Ray Bradbury. Works by Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, and Anna Kashina’s The Princess of Dhagabad (2000) assisted in its reintroduction into the field of literary fiction. A notable showcase is the anthology couplet Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights, ed. Susan Schwartz.
Arabian fantasy originating in the Middle East is rare in translation; notable exceptions include Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days (1979; tr. 1995), Bahiyyih Nakhjavani’s The Saddlebag (2000), and Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2003; co-credited to translator Tom McDonough).
ARCADIAN FANTASY. A subgenre consisting of fantasies based on the hypothesis that there was once a pastoral “Golden Age” of social har-mony and languid ease. Its core is a subcategory of classical fantasy relating to the myth of Arcadia, which was elevated by the Roman poet Virgil to archetypal status as a pastoral paradise; the notion was essentially nostalgic even then. The paradigm example of Roman Arcadian fantasy is Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (5th century); the subgenre reappeared in the Renaissance in such works as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Nymph of Fiesole (Italy, c1350; tr. 1959), Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (Italy, 1504), Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana (Spain, 1559), Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumously published Arcadia (England, 1590) and Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (France 1607–27).
Arcadian fantasy is complementary to Utopian fantasy, contesting the notion that civilization, technological development, and political reor-ganization can provide a route to ideal human existence. It was unfash-ionable during the era of romanticism, because its harmonious imagery of benign nature seemed too tame to the followers of that movement, the German origins of which had a more sinister and menacing notion of wilderness; in the post-Romantic 19th century, however, there was a dramatic revival of interest in the god of Arcadia, Pan, an ambivalent figure who could be invested with menace as well as nostalgia. Ford Madox Ford’s The Young Lovell (1913) features a rare Arcadian timeslip. There was also a conspicuous Arcadian spirit in pre-Raphaelism, as exemplified by the works of William Morris, and the literature of the
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Celtic revival, although even its fervent participants could not imagine ancient Ireland, Scotland, or Wales as lands overflowing with natural bounty.
There are significant elements of Arcadian fantasy in the work of
many 20th-century writers, notably W. H. Hudson, Eleanor Farjeon, E. R. Eddison, Eden Phillpotts, and Thomas Burnett Swann; its perennial nostalgic appeal was reinforced in the latter part of the century by ecological anxieties and the growth of ecological mysticism (refer to HDSFL). Ecological fantasies often focus intently on forests, which are essentially hospitable in Arcadian fantasy, as in Nancy Kress’s The Golden Grove (1984), David B. Coe’s Tobyn-Ser series, Richard Grant’s Rumours of Spring, Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet (1997), Mindy L. Klasky’s Season of Sacrifice (2002), and Susan Britton’s The Treekeepers (2003).
ARDEN, TOM (1961– ). Pseudonym of Australian writer David Rain, resident in Britain since 1990. The Orokon series is a chimerical amalgam of dark and humorous fantasy set in a secondary world resembling an alternative 18th century; it comprises The Harlequin’s Dance (1997), The King and Queen of Swords (1998), Sultan of the Moon and Stars (1999), Sisterhood of the Blue Storm (2000), and Em-press of the Endless Dream (2001). The range of its mythical and folkloristic sources expands in the final volume to take in literary reflections like the legendary lamasery of Found Horizon and echoes of Mervyn Peake. Shadow Black (2002) is a similarly inclined Gothic/Satire.
ARIOSTO, LODOVICO (1474–1533). Italian poet whose crucial contribution to the development of prose romance, Orlando Furioso (1516; exp. 1532), picked up the thread of Matteo Boiardo’s incomplete Orlando Innamorato (1487). Such celebrated passages as Astolpho’s hippogriff-flight to the moon, in search of Orlando’s lost wits, exemplify an inventive exhilaration that became central to the appeal of modern fantasy fiction. The author and his creation are deftly transformed in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s alternative history novel Ariosto.
ARMSTRONG, ANTHONY (1897–1976). British writer best known as a humorist, in which vein he produced two volumes of parodic fairy tales, The Prince Who Hiccupped and Other Tales (1932) and The Pack of Pieces (1942; aka The Naughty Princess). His longer works include two karmic romances, Lure of the Past (1920) and The Love of Prince
ART FAIRY TALE • 23
Raameses (1921), the Atlantean fantasy The Wine of Death (1925), and the doppelgänger story The Strange Case of Mr Pelham (1957).
ARMSTRONG, KELLEY (1968– ). Canadian writer. Her fantasies are set in an alternative history in which most species of “supernaturals”
exist covertly. Bitten (2001) features the world’s only female werewolf.
The heroine of Stolen (2002) is thrown into a secret prison with a mixed population of inmates. Dime Store Magic (2004) and Industrial Magic (2004) examine the commerce of the altered world, the latter introducing a supernatural mafia.
ARNOLD, EDWIN LESTER (1857–1935). British writer. He was the son of the poet Sir Edwin Arnold, whose verse epic The Light of Asia (1879) dramatized the life of Buddha and who bequeathed to his son a strong interest in the ideas of reincarnation and karma. With H. Rider Haggard, Arnold Lester pioneered the subgenre of karmic romance.
The hero of The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1891) recalls his “awakenings” in different eras of British history, continually meeting versions of his female ideal. “Rutherford the Twice-Born”
(1892) makes more explicit use of the notion of karma. In Lepidus the Centurion: A Roman of To-day (1901), a young Victorian and a resurrected Roman turn out to be fragmentary aspects of a single soul. Lieut.
Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905; aka Gulliver of Mars) took Hag-gardesque adventure fiction to Mars, pioneering the subgenre of planetary romance.
ART FAIRY TALE. A translation of the German term kunstmärchen, applied by members of the German Romantic movement to stories that transfigured or mimicked folktales but aspired to the “higher” artistic goals of stylistic elegance and philosophical or allegorical purpose. The term was derived by analogy with a distinction drawn by the Brothers Grimm between naturpoesie (nature poetry) and kunstpoesie (art poetry), the former being allegedly generated by a quasi-organic process by the volk—the entire people—rather than by distinct individuals. Although the Grimms thought “natural” folk tales innately superior to kunstmärchen, their fellow Romantics did not.
Cardinal examples of art fairy tales include J. W. Goethe’s Märchen, Johann Ludwig Tieck’s “The Elves,” and the Baron de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine. French examples were produced by Charles Nodier and many Decadent writers, notably Catulle Mendès’s Luscignole (1892; tr. 1928). George MacDonald’s allegories, John Ruskin’s
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moralistic The King of the Golden River (1850), and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are among the most notable early English examples. Twentieth-century art fairy tales were produced in some profusion by Herman Hesse, Michel Tournier, and Angela Carter.
ARTHURIAN FANTASY. The legend of King Arthur, seeded by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s scholarly fantasy Historia Regum Britanniae [ The History of the Kings of Britain] (1136), became enormously important in French romance as “the Matter of Britain” following its translation and elaboration in the Roman de Brut (1155). Further key elaborations were added by Chrétien de Troyes, who popularized the story of Lancelot and left the allegorical/grail romance Le Conte de graal (
c1180) so tantalizingly unfinished that many others—including Wolfram von Eschenbach in Germany—took it upon themselves to do so.
The love story of Tristan and Iseult was also gathered into the corpus, although it remained marginal.
Arthurian romance was reclaimed by native British writers in such
texts as the obscurely allegorical Gawain and the Green Knight (c1370).
It became a key element of the Welsh legendry assembled in the source texts of Mabinogion before being summarized and elaborated in Le Morte d’Arthur (published 1485 by William Caxton), which was credited to “Sir Thomas Malory,” although its originator remains stubbornly mysterious. Malory’s became the definitive version of Arthurian legend and one of the most important taproot texts of English literature.
Arthurian fantasy was repopularized in 19th-century Britain, its legendary base fetishized by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Thomas
Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829) led the way for Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1832) and Idylls of the King (1859), William Morris’s The Defence of Guinevere (1858), and Algernon Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse (1882). The legends also became a central pillar of the culture developed in late-19th-century children’s literature, notable versions being issued by Andrew Lang in Britain and Howard Pyle in the United States, where Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court had already demonstrated the subgenre’s potential as a comparative exemplar.
Arthurian fantasy is the primary modern refuge of the relics of chivalric romance, robustly sustained in that role by such motifs as the Round Table (and the ruination of its principles by Lancelot’s adultery with Guinevere) and the grail quest. Arthur’s magical mentor Merlin became the ar-
The A to Z of Fantasy Literature Page 11
