The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  ARTHURIAN FANTASY • 25

  chetype of the philosopher wizard who exercises power from behind the throne. The notion that Arthur’s death was not final and that he is eternally ready to return in some national hour of need offers abundant scope for the subgenre’s extrapolation into contemporary fantasy. Such allegorical works as Coningsby Dawson’s The Road to Avalon (1911) anticipated the elaborate exploration begun in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone.

  The disenchantment reflected in White’s The Ill-Made Knight is evident in many other works shadowed by one or other of the world wars.

  A significant dialogue was established in the 20th century between such de-romanticized historical fantasies as John Cowper Powys’s Porius, Edward Frankland’s The Bear of Britain (1944), Edison Marshall’s The Pagan King (1959), Henry Treece’s Legions of the Eagle (1954), and Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Coming of the King (1968) and defiantly Romantic texts like C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and Dorothy James Roberts’s Kinsmen of the Grail (1963). That conflict was productively mined by American fantasies like Robert Nathan’s The Fair, Sanders Anne Laubenthal’s Excalibur (1973), Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, and Parke Godwin’s trilogy comprising Firelord (1980), Beloved Exile (1984), and The Last Rainbow (1985), as well as by sophisticated British children’s fantasies by Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner, William Mayne, and Kevin Crossley-Holland.

  The combative attitude of the defenders of Romance was feminized when Arthurian fantasy was adapted into commodified fantasy by such writers as Vera Chapman and Marion Zimmer Bradley, establishing an even greater contrast with the rugged masculinity of the de-romanticized tradition carried forward by such works as Jack Whyte’s Camulod

  Chronicles (launched 1992), Dafydd ab Hugh’s Arthur War Lord (1994), and Bernard Cornwell’s Arthurian trilogy (1995–97). Masculine romanticization was conscientiously reenhanced by Stephen Lawhead and A.

  A. Attanasio but treated lightheartedly by Gerald Morris. Feminized Arthurian fantasies tend to foreground Guinevere rather than Arthur—

  as in Sharan Newman’s trilogy comprising Guinevere (1981), The Chessboard Queen (1983), and Guinevere Evermore (1985); Rosalind Miles’s Guinevere: Queen of the Summer Country (1999); and Nancy McKenzie’s trilogy comprising The Child Queen (1994), The High Queen (1995), and Queen of Camelot (2002)—and to establish Morgan le Fay as a counterpart to Merlin.

  The nationalistic aspects of Arthurian fantasy remain central to the works of Peter Vansittart, Patrick McCormack’s Albion series, begun

  26 • ASH, SARAH

  with The Last Companion (1997) and The White Phantom (2000), and to Michael Morpurgo’s sequence begun with Arthur, High King of Britain (1994), which moved on from straightforward recycling to contemporary fantasy in The Sleeping Sword (2002). Twain’s use of Camelot as a yardstick for American culture, incorporated into actual political rhetoric in the 1960s, is extrapolated in such fantasies as Peter David’s Knight Life, in which Arthur is re-enthroned in the White House. The subgenre was adapted to the concerns of postcolonial analysis in Elizabeth E. Wein’s trilogy comprising The Winter Prince (1993), A Coalition of Lions (2003), and The Sunbird (2004), which export its materials to Africa.

  Showcase anthologies of Arthurian fantasy include Arthurian Literature by Women (1999), ed. Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack; several edited by Mike Ashley , Parke Godwin’s Invitation to Camelot, Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg’s Camelot Fantastic

  (1998), Greenberg’s Merlin (1999), James Lowder’s The Doom of Camelot (2000) and Legends of the Pendragon (2002), Jennifer Roberson’s Out of Avalon, and Sophie Masson’s The Road to Camelot.

  Guides to the mythos include Phyllis Ann Karr’s The Arthurian Companion.

  ASH, SARAH (1950– ). British writer. Moths to a Flame (1995) is a decadent fantasy set in a “Gothic-Byzantine” court. Songspinners (1996) features magical music that is both a gift and a curse. The Lost Child (1998) is a secondary world murder mystery. The Tears of Arta-mon series, comprising Lord of Snow and Shadows (2003) and Prisoner of Ironsea Tower (2004; aka Prisoner of the Iron Tower), tracks an unfortunate inheritance that involves possession by a “dragon-daemon.”

  ASHLEY, MIKE (1948– ). British scholar, whose guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) tracks the evolution of fantasy in popular magazines. His most substantial contribution to the genre is a series of anthologies of original Arthurian fantasies comprising The Pendragon Chronicles (1990), The Camelot Chronicles (1992), The Merlin Chronicles (1995), The Chronicles of the Holy Grail (1996; aka Quest for the Holy Grail), and The Chronicles of the Round Table (1997; aka Tales of the Round Table). The Mammoth Book of Arthurian Legends (1998) also includes some original items. His other anthologies include Jewels of Wonder (1981), The Giant Book of Myths and Legends (1995)—which recycles 51 items— Classical Stories:

  ASTROLOGICAL FANTASY • 27

  Heroic Tales from Ancient Greece and Rome (1996; aka Heroic Adventures Stories From the Golden Age of Greece and Rome), Fantasy Stories (1996; aka The Random House Book of Fantasy Stories), The Mammoth Book of Fairy Tales (1997), The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (1998), and The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy (2001). He is the biographer of Algernon Blackwood.

  ASPRIN, ROBERT LYNN (1946– ). U.S. writer. His principal contribution to the genre is a series of humorous/Arabian fantasies comprising Another Fine Myth . . . . (1978), Myth Conceptions (1980), Myth Directions (1982), Hit or Myth (1983), Myth-ing Persons (1984), Little Myth Marker (1985), M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link (1986), Myth-Nomers and Im-perfec-tions (1987), M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action (1990), and Sweet Myth-tery of Life (1994). He returned to the milieu in Myth-ion Improbable (2001), Something M.Y.T.H. Inc. (2002), Myth Alliances (2003, with Jody Lynn Nye). Myth-Told Tales (2003, with Nye) collects associated short stories. The best-selling 12-volume shared world series Thieves’ World (launched 1979), coedited with Lynn Abbey, established the pattern for such marketing endeavours and helped popularize modern picaresque fantasy. License Invoked (2001, with Nye) and E. Godz (2003, with Esther Friesner) are further humorous fantasies.

  ASTROLOGICAL FANTASY. Astrology is a pseudoscience based on the premise that the apparent movement of the planets through the con-stellations in the plane of the ecliptic influences events on Earth, permitting the personality and destiny of an individual to be investigated by means of a natal horoscope. Such beliefs were widespread in the ancient world and became briefly fashionable again during the Renaissance, but the 20th century became astrology’s heyday; modern practitioners thrive by virtue of columns in magazines and newspapers and recorded telephone messages. In spite of this immense popularity, astrological fantasy is a relatively insignificant subgenre of modern fantasy, because it does not lend itself readily to narrative use.

  Like alchemists, astrologers feature as minor characters in many historical fantasies, usually represented as charlatans; John Galt’s “The Black Ferry” (c1820) and Washington Irving’s “Legend of the Arabian Astrologer” (1832) are exceptions. The Elizabethan magician John Dee, widely featured in historical alchemical fantasies, was also an astrologer, and his activities in that line are featured in such novels as Frances Sherwood’s The Book of Splendor (2002).

  28 • ATLANTEAN FANTASY

  Rudyard Kipling’s “Children of the Zodiac” (1891), A. M.

  Williamson’s Children of the Zodiac (1929), and Louis de Wohl’s Strange Daughter (1945) toy with astrology in contemporary settings, as do Alan Griffiths’s The Passionate Astrologer, Edward Hyams’s The Astrologer (1950), and John Cameron’s The Astrologer (1972), all of which examine by reductio ad absurdum what would result were the science exact. Earnest treatment of the thesis, as in Denny DeMartino’s series begun with The Astrologer: Heart of Stone (2001) and Michaela Roessner’s series begun with The Stars Dispose, inevitably involves the construction of elaborate alternative histories. All treatises on astrology are scholarly fantasies, but Arachne Rising (1977) by “James Vogh
” (John Sladek) is noteworthy as a hoax, which examines the properties of the long-lost 13th sign of the zodiac.

  ATLANTEAN FANTASY. Atlantis—an island continent in the Atlantic allegedly sunk circa 9000 BC—was invented by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias to add dramatic zest to his model of an ideal society. The device played a major role in launching the great tradition of scholarly fantasy; although Plato’s contemporaries and disciples treated the story as fiction, many later writers took it seriously as reportage of fact-based folklore.

  Scholarly fantasists from the Renaissance onward suggested many different locations for the “actual” Atlantis, which began to feature regularly in such 19th-century fantasies as Maurus Jokai’s “The City of the Beast”

  (1856; tr. 1904) and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). The popularity of the motif was boosted by Ignatius Donnelly’s best-selling scholarly fantasy Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882), which suggested that Atlantis was the ultimate source of modern civilization and that its demise offered an invaluable lesson to contemporary hubris. Donnelly’s Atlantis was further transfigured in Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), which made it a central element of theosophical fantasy; many subsequent occult fantasists, including Dion Fortune, similarly adapted it to their own purposes.

  Donnelly’s ideas were dramatized in André Laurie’s The Crystal City under the Sea (1895; tr. 1896)—which suggested that a remnant might survive, protected by a glass dome—and C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s pseudohistorical fantasy The Lost Continent (1900). Other literary produce of the boom included Frances Layland Barrett’s “The Princess Vita”

  (1900), which makes Atlantis the origin of merfolk, D. Metchim-Bridgman’s Atlantis: The Book of Angels (1900), and Pierre Benoît’s Atlantida (1919; tr. 1920; aka The Queen of Atlantis).

  AUSTER, PAUL • 29

  Most early 20th-century Atlantean fantasy was couched as occult

  fantasy—including such esoterica as John Cowper Powys’s Atlantis—

  or marginal sf, although its fantasy deployments were tracked by Lin Carter’s anthology The Magic of Atlantis. It was quickly reclaimed by commodified fantasy, significant exemplars having been set by Jane Gaskell and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Notable modern examples include Jan Siegel’s Prospero’s Children, Clive Cussler’s Atlantis Found (2000), and Kara Dalkey’s Water series.

  ATTANASIO, A. A. (1951– ). U.S. writer whose early work was mostly hybrid/science fantasy (refer to HDSFL). Wyvern (1988) is a historical fantasy featuring a feral child. Hunting the Ghost Dancer (1991) is a prehistoric fantasy. The Arthurian fantasy Kingdom of the Grail (1992) prepared the ground for the series comprising The Dragon and the Unicorn (1994), Arthor (1995; aka The Eagle and the Sword), The Wolf and the Crown (1998; aka The Perilous Order), and The Serpent and the Grail (1999). The Moon’s Wife (1993) is a hallucinatory fantasy. The series comprising The Dark Shore (1996), The Shadow Eater (1997), and Octoberland (1998) is ornately chimerical.

  AULNOY, MADAME D’ (c1650–1705). The signature used by French writer Marie-Cathérine Jumel, Comtesse d’Aulnoy, who became the

  hostess of a fashionable Paris salon in 1685; the custom developed there of improvising satirical versions of folktales—often drawn from

  Basile’s Pentamerone—in order to comment slyly on events at Louis XIV’s court, thus instituting the modern tradition of the fairy tales/

  transfiguration. “L’île de la félicité was incorporated into L’Histoire d’Hippolyte, comte de Douglas (1690) before her complete works were assembled in two four-volume collections, Les contes des fées

  (1696–98) and Contes nouveaux ou les fés à la mode (1698); a sampler of translations was issued as Tales of the Fairys (1699). The most famous include “The Blue Bird,” “The Yellow Dwarf,” and “The White

  Cat.” Madame d’Aulnoy’s contes are more substantial than Perrault’s, and their didacticism is more sophisticated, but because they were not aimed at children they were not as frequently reprinted.

  AUSTER, PAUL (1947– ). U.S. writer of literary fiction whose novels usually have fantastic elements, frequently involving shifting identities. Fabulation is marginal to the trilogy of postmodern/detective stories, comprising City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986) and to Moon Palace (1989), but Mr Vertigo (1994)

  30 • AUSTIN, WILLIAM

  is a wholehearted allegory of flight, and Timbuktu (1999) is an animal fantasy with suggestions of reincarnation. The Book of Illusions (2002) features a silent movie director who has difficulty contriving a permanent death. Oracle Night (2003) is a series of nested texts, the in-nermost of which tells the story of a clairvoyant soldier.

  AUSTIN, WILLIAM (1788–1841). U.S. writer who followed examples set by Washington Irving in producing an Americanized version of the tale of the Flying Dutchman, recast as an Odyssean fantasy. “Peter Rugg—the Missing Man” (1824; exp. 1827) is cursed to wander the

  roads of New England for more than 50 years, missing the American

  Revolution.

  AUSTRALIAN FANTASY. Australia was once a useful site for lost world stories and utopias, generating a local tradition the most notable fantasy examples of which are Robert H. Potter’s religious fantasy The Germ Growers (1892) and G. Firth Scott’s theosophical fantasy The Last Lemurian (1898). Little notable fantasy, however, was produced there in the first half of the 20th century. Although Australian sf made steady ground thereafter, fantasy was mainly restricted to the work of children’s writers like Patricia Wrightson. The turn of the century, however, produced a remarkable flowering of fantasy literature by Australian authors, where Keith Taylor and Sara Douglass led, Sophie Masson, Garth Nix, Tom Arden, Trudi Canavan, K. J. Bishop, Louise Cusack, Celia Dart-Thornton, Jennifer Fallon, Kate Forsythe, Ian Irvine, Josephine Pennicott, and Tansy Rayner Roberts rapidly followed, assisted by immigrants like Paul Brandon.

  Fantasy elements also became more obvious in the work of literary fabulists like Peter Carey, author of Illywhacker (1985) and My Life as a Fake (2003).

  Other notable fantasy writers born or based in Australia include Mrs.

  Campbell Praed, Vernon Knowles, P. L. Travers, and Dave Luckett; Gillian Rubenstein, author of Foxspell (1996), The Fairy’s Wings (1998), and a number of Oriental fantasies bylined “Lian Hearn”;

  “Kate Jacoby” (Tracy Oliphant), author of the Elita series launched with Exile’s Return (1998); Marele Day, author of Lambs of God (1998); and Marianne Curley, author of the Guardians of Time trilogy, launched with The Named (2002). Writers born or based in New Zealand include Hugh Cook, Cherry Wilder, Juliet Marillier, Margaret Mahy, and Sherryl Jordan. As in Canada, it may be that the sensation Australians have of

  BABBITT, NATALIE • 31

  being on the margins of English-language culture encourages an interest in exotic literary materials, although the fact that domestic publication began to flourish just as the fantasy genre was becoming commodified was undoubtedly a factor, as was the establishment of a domestic short-story market in the magazine Aurealis. A notable showcase anthology of Australian fantasy is Michael Barry’s Elsewhere: An Anthology of Incredible Places (2003).

  AWARDS. The principal annual awards for works in the fantasy genre are the Mythopoeic Awards, established by the Mythopoeic Society in 1971; the World Fantasy Awards, established by the World Fantasy Convention in 1975; and the William L. Crawford Award for best first novel in the field, established by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 1985. The Locus Awards also include a “Best Fantasy Novel” category. A Gandalf Award for lifetime contributions to fantasy by a particular writer, created by Lin Carter within the framework of sf’s Hugo Awards (for which works of fantasy are also eligible), was given from 1973 to 1980, and a similar Balrog Award from 1979 to 1985. The British Fantasy Awards, established by the British Fantasy Society in 1971, are more frequently given to horror fiction than fantasy (for which reason the BFA for best novel is the Aug
ust Derleth Award). A Calvino Prize for New Writing in Speculative/Fabulist Fiction was established in 1999 by the Vermont Summer Writers’ Conference.

  AYMÉ, MARCEL (1902–1967). French writer whose novels of provin-cial life often included elements of Rabelaisian fantasy. Those translated as The Green Mare (1933; tr. 1938) and The Fable and the Flesh (1943; tr. 1949) involve apparitions based in folklore. His fairy tales, translated in The Wonderful Farm (1939; tr. 1951) and Return to the Wonderful Farm (1954; tr. 1954; aka The Magic Pictures: More about the Wonderful Farm) are slyly sophisticated. The short fiction in the samplers Across Paris and Other Stories (1950; aka The Walker through Walls) and The Proverb and Other Stories (1961) includes numerous fantasies.

  – B –

  BABBITT, NATALIE (1932– ). U.S. writer and illustrator. The offbeat quest fantasy The Search for Delicious (1969) and Kneeknock Rise

  32 • BACH, RICHARD

  (1970) are modeled on didactic fairy tales. The Devil’s Storybook (1974) and The Devil’s Other Storybook (1978) are humorous accounts of diabolical ineptitude. The sceptically meditative Tuck Everlasting (1975) examines the prospect of immortality. Eyes of the Amaryllis (1977) is a love story with fantastic elements.

  BACH, RICHARD (1936– ). U.S. writer whose motivational animal fantasy Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) was a best-seller. The collection A Gift of Wings (1974) contains some less didactically inclined works, but sentimentality and preachiness were further amalgamated in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), There’s No Such Place as Far Away (1979), and One (1988). The Ferret Chronicles, comprising Rescue Ferrets at Sea (2002), Air Ferrets Aloft (2002), Writer Ferrets Chasing the Muse (2002), Rancher Ferrets on the Range (2003), and The Last War: Detective Ferrets and the Case of the Golden Deed (2003) are more relaxed.

  BAILEY, ROBIN WAYNE (1952– ). U.S. writer. The trilogy comprising Frost (1983), Skull Gate (1985), and Bloodsongs (1986) follows the exploits of a warrior witch; the omnibus Night’s Angel (2002) adds a new story. Night Watch (1990) is a fantastic mystery. The trilogy comprising Brothers of the Dragon (1992), Straight on til Mourning (1993; aka Flames of the Dragon), and Triumph of the Dragon (1995; aka The Palace of Souls) is a portal fantasy with displaced heroes who turn the tide of a war against the forces of darkness. Shadowdance (1996) is a dark fantasy. Swords against the Shadowland (1998) features further adventures of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The trilogy begun with Dragonkin (2003) and Talisman (2004) employs dragons in an otherwise conventional animal fantasy.