The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  CINEMA. Although horror (refer to HDHL) and sf (refer to HDSFL) were soon established as recognizable cinematic genres, “fantasy” was rarely identified as such until very recently; the only significant attempt to construct a coherent history of cinematic fantasy is the annotated chronology contained in David Pringle’s Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1998). Almost all the early items listed are adaptations of books or theater plays, the latter serving as a stern reminder of the limitations of early movie special effects.

  Cinematic ventures into such subgenres as surreal fantasy ( The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Un Chien Andalou, and René Clair’s early films), Arabian fantasy (the 1924 and 1940 versions of The Thief of Bagdad), and afterlife fantasy ( The Green Pastures, 1936) had little obvious impact on the development of literary fantasy, but cinematic manifestations of angelic fantasy in the wake of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) had a much greater impact and helped to encourage the remarkable subsequent growth of that subgenre. Hollywood fantasy of the

  1940s was dominated by sentimental fantasies; another movie of the

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  period exerting an influence that eventually proved extensive was the Thorne Smith–based I Married a Witch (1942).

  Fantasy set in secondary worlds poses a considerable challenge to scenarists, and the 1939 version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz was a lonely landmark for most of the 20th century; most early adaptations of secondary world fantasies were animated, the potential of that medium being demonstrated by such Walt Disney classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Even intrusive fantasies posed considerable challenges to the artistry of the stop-motion effects employed in such movies as King Kong (1933) and the classical fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s. Although few animated films retained the production values of the early Disney classics, the opportunities and restraints of animation soon spawned a curious kind of stereotyped secondary world with its own conventions and physical laws: a distinctive fantasy milieu that quickly spilled over into comics and impinged tan-gentially on literary fantasy, most obviously in blatantly chimerical works such as Gary K. Wolf’s Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981) and Greg Snow’s Surface Tension (1991, aka That’s All, Folks! ).

  The rapid development of computer-assisted special effects in the

  1990s altered the spectrum of opportunity out of all recognition, at a time when the huge commercial successes of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books justified the huge budgets required to made full use of such techniques. When those projects reached the screen in the early 21st century, the case for recognizing fantasy as a cinema genre was securely made; the probability that the negotiation of film rights would henceforth be a major force in the book marketplace had been demonstrated by the boosting of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl to best-seller status, allegedly on the basis of the optimistic promise that its film version would be “Die Hard with fairies.”

  CLARKE, LINDSAY (1939– ). British writer. The Chymical Wedding (1989) employs a timeslip to set up an unusually elaborate and earnest alchemical fantasy. Alice’s Masque (1994) similarly recycles materials drawn from Frazerian/scholarly fantasy in a contemporary context.

  Parzival and the Stone from Heaven: A Grail Romance Retold for Our Time (2001) recycles Wolfram von Eschenbach’s version of Chrétien’s story. The War at Troy (2004) recycles Homer. Clarke also produced a guide to Essential Celtic Mythology (1997).

  CLARKE, SUSANNAH (1961– ). British writer. The mannered historical fantasy “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” (1996) introduced the magi-

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  cians Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange as the first and second “phenomena of the age”; their quest to restore the glories of English magic to an alternative 19th century, only slightly less subject to thinning than our own, is described in much greater detail in the massive

  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004).

  CLASSICAL FANTASY. Fantasy based in Greek and Roman mythology.

  The earliest surviving Greek literature, including Homer’s epics and Hesiod’s Theogony (c725 BC), already treat the gods as fantastic allegorical figures rather than objects of religious faith, and the adventures of legendary heroes as fanciful stories. There is a clear evolution of scepticism and a calculated reformulation of mythical material in surviving Greek drama; the fifth-century tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles recycle a good deal of material set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, thus providing a series of sequels to the Homeric epics; the slightly later comedies of Aristophanes, especially The Clouds (423 BC), The Birds (414 BC), and The Frogs (405 BC), adopted a far less reverent view of the gods. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC) imported Roman imperial values into the form of Homeric epic, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c10 AD) intensified the process of literary transfiguration. Apuleius’s Golden Ass (early second century) might have established a tradition of fantasy prose fiction had the evolutionary process not been interrupted by the creeping decadence that led to Christianization, collapse, and a centuries-long Dark Age.

  When the Renaissance of classical learning and literature began in Europe, rival traditions of chivalric romance and Christian fantasy were already in place, but the symbolism of the Graeco-Roman pantheon and its associated imagery invaded those traditions as well as reestablishing a distinct lexicon of images and ideas for future ventures in literary fantasy. Classical imagery remained immensely powerful in poetry, enjoy-ing a new phase of popularity in the 19th century in landmark works by Percy Shelley, John Keats, Algernon Swinburne, and many others. Its association with esoteric learning recommended it for use in sophisticated satires by such writers as Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Garnett and anti-intellectual comedies by such writers as John Kendrick Bangs.

  The renewed fashionability of Pan as an allegorical figure and the constant appeal of Aphrodite helped maintain the genre into the 20th century, although the nostalgia routinely attached to its imagery called forth numerous plaintive allegories of thinning, including Garnett’s “The Twilight of the Gods,” Cloudesley Brereton’s The Last Days of Olympus (1889), and Marjorie Bowen’s The Haunted Vintage (1922).

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  Classical fantasy’s subsidiary categories include the core materials of Arcadian fantasy, Odyssean fantasy, Orphean fantasy, and Promethean fantasy. Writers who have made considerable use of the subgenre include Eden Phillpotts and John Erskine; individual examples fill a wide spectrum, extending from such reverent examples as C.

  C. Martindale’s collection The Goddess of Ghosts (1915), George Baker’s Fidus Achates (1944) and Cry Hylas on the Hills (1945), Ivor Bannet’s The Arrows of the Sun (1949), Maurice Druon’s The Memoirs of Zeus (1963; tr. 1964), and Frederick Raphael’s The Hidden I: A Myth Retold (1990) to such irreverent ones as Alan Sims’s Phoinix (1928), Thorne Smith’s The Night Life of the Gods (1931), A. C. Malcolm’s O

  Men of Athens (1947), and Susan Alice Kerby’s Mr Kronion (1949). The basic materials do not lend themselves readily to feminization, although Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand, which foregrounds the Trojan seeress Cassandra, and Leslie What’s Olympic Games (2004) are heroic efforts, but the hero myths are popular objects of desupernaturalizing deflation in such works as Henry Treece’s Jason (1961), Electra (1963), and Oedipus (1964), and Ernst Schnabel’s The Voyage Home (1958) and Story for Icarus (1958; tr. 1961).

  The Trojan War remains the subgenre’s most popular motif, widely

  featured in such works as Adèle Geras’s Troy (2000). Caroline B.

  Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday (2002) and On the Seas to Troy (2004), Judith Hand’s The Amazon and the Warrior (2004), Lindsay Clarke’s The War at Troy, Clemence McLaren’s Inside the Walls of Troy (1996) and Waiting for Odysseus (2004), and Sara Douglass’s Troy Game series. Another motif that has a good deal of contemporary appeal is the minotaur of the Minoan labyrinth, featured in Peter Huby’s Pasiphae (2000), Alan Gibbons’s Shadow of the Minotaur (2000),
Steven Sher-rill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break (2000), John Herman’s Labyrinth (2001), and Patrice Kindl’s Lost in the Labyrinth (2002). See also EROTIC FANTASY.

  COBLEY, MICHAEL (1959– ). British writer. The epic trilogy launched with ShadowKings (2001) and ShadowGod (2003) feature a fallen empire in which the forces of Earthmother and Fathertree have been defeated, the Rootpower magic is gone, and order can only be restored by an enterprising warlord. His short fiction is sampled in Iron Mosaic (2004).

  COCKAYNE, STEVE (?– ). British writer whose experience with the BBC and as a lecturer in media production is clearly evident in the Leg-

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  ends of the Land series launched by Wanderers and Islanders (2002); one of its intertwined stories features Leonardo Pegasus’ Multiple Empathy Machine, a kind of universal viewer. Such machines multiply, increasing their transformative and disruptive influence massively in The Iron Chain (2003) and The Seagull Drovers (2004).

  COE, DAVID B. (1963– ). U.S. writer. In the Lon-Tobyn Chronicle, comprising Children of Amarid (1997), The Outlanders (1998), and Eagle-Sage (2000), the mages who preserve order in Arcadian Tobyn-Ser abandon their responsibility in the face of rivalry from the hi-tech city of Lon-Ser. The Winds of the Forelands series, launched by Rules of Ascension (2002) and Seeds of Betrayal (2003), focuses on the work of unconventional wizards with similar sceptical intensity.

  COLE, ADRIAN (1949– ). British writer whose works are mostly hybrids of fantasy and sf or fantasy and horror. The trilogy comprising A Plague of Nightmares (1975), Lord of the Nightmares (1976), and Bane of Nightmares (1976), and the series comprising A Place Among the Fallen (1986), Throne of Fools (1987), The King of Light and Shadows (1988), and The Gods in Anger (1988) are dark fantasies framed as planetary romances. Blood Red Angel (1993) is a far-futuristic fantasy. Storm over Atlantis (2001) is a historical fantasy set in Egypt. His short fiction is sampled in Oblivion Hand (2001).

  COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR (1772–1834). British writer. With

  William Wordsworth, he produced Lyrical Ballads (1798; 2nd ed.

  1800; 3rd ed. 1802), whose preface—in its ultimate version—was a

  crucial document in the history of English romanticism. While Wordsworth’s verse dealt with everyday topics, Coleridge proposed to employ “persons and characters supernatural,” as in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The visionary fantasy “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” about a female vampire, were not included because they were incomplete, but Coleridge eventually published them, only slightly augmented, in Christabel and Other Poems (1816). His essays on aesthetic theory in Biographia Literaria (1817) and Aids to Reflection (1825) elaborated notions from German idealist philosophy to provide foundations on which many subsequent theorists of the fantastic were to build, including the notion that reading fantasy involves a “willing suspension of disbelief” that carries no risk of confusion on the reader’s part as to the limits of actual possibility. Coleridge’s daughter Sara (1802–52) was also a writer, her major work being an allegorical/fairy

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  romance with elements of heroic fantasy, Phantasmion, Prince of Palmland (1837).

  COLFER, EOIN (1965– ). Irish writer, mostly for children. In The Wish List (2000), a dead teenager is given a chance at redemption. The series of blithely chimerical thrillers begun with Artemis Fowl (2001) and continued in The Arctic Incident (2002) and The Eternity Code (2003)—

  The Seventh Dwarf (2004) is a prequel novella—imagines that the world of Faerie has made technological progress at a faster rate than our own; the eponymous teenage supervillain is enthusiastic to possess himself of its secrets, but his plans are continually thwarted by a female member of its elite corps of agents, LEPrecon. The Supernaturalist (2004) is a futuristic fantasy featuring supernatural parasites.

  COLLIER, JOHN (1901–1980). British-born writer based in the United States after 1945, best known for witty and highly polished short stories, many of which are urbane contes cruels slyly subverting the stereotypes of sentimental fantasy and wish-fulfillment fantasy. Most of the stories in The Devil and All (1934) are infernal comedies. Presenting Moonshine (1941)—which overlaps considerably with The Touch of Nutmeg and More Unlikely Stories (1943)—reprints several items from the earlier collection, alongside such classic fabulations as Green Thoughts (1932) and “Evening Primrose.” Much of this material was rewritten when it was further recycled in Fancies and Goodnights (1951), many of whose new items were separately reprinted as Pictures in the Fire (1958); The John Collier Reader (1972) is a definitive omnibus. Collier’s early novel His Monkey Wife; or, Married to a Chimp (1930) is a satire mocking the poses and mores of the Bloomsbury

  Group.

  COLUM, PADRAIC (1881–1972). Irish writer. Most of his fantasies were written for children. The King of Ireland’s Son (1916) was followed by a conventional recycling of The Adventurous of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy (1918), but his work became more became more adventurous in the short items collected in The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said (1918) and the Cinderella transfiguration The Girl Who Sat by the Ashes (1919). The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter (1920) is a spirited account of a quest to locate Merlin. The Children of Odin (1920) and The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before

  Achilles (1921) returned to straightforward recycling, but The Children Who Followed the Piper (1922) casts the Greek god Hermes as a Pied

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  Piper figure and tracks the fates of children seduced by his music. At the Gateways of the Day (1924), The Bright Islands (1925), and Legends of Hawaii (1937) are compendia of Hawaiian folklore written to commission. The Island of the Mighty (1924) recycled tales from the Mabinogion. Orpheus: Myth of the World (1930) returned to classical material before The Frenzied Prince (1943) brought Colum back to Irish mythology. He also edited A Treasury of Irish Folklore (1954). A few fantasies are included in his Selected Short Stories (1985), but most of his fantasies for adults were plays, including The Miracle of the Corn (1908) and The Desert (1912; aka Mogu the Wanderer).

  COMICS. The early comic strips of the 1890s were almost exclusively devoted to slapstick humor, which began to take on fantasy elements in some strips of the 1900s, most importantly, the long-running and widely imitated series of dream fantasies that eventually became known as Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–27), created by Winsor McCay; his young hero rides off by night on the horse Somnus to the kingdom of Morpheus, where he enjoys fabulous adventures as the playmate of the king’s daughter. Fairy tale characters, including pixies, elves, and giants, soon became standard features of comic strips designed for children.

  Comic strips also became a natural medium for animal fantasies, after the fashion of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1916–44) and British strips like the ever-popular Tiger Tim—who eventually hosted his own weekly—the Daily Mail’s Teddy Tail (1915–40 and 1946–60), and the Daily Mirror’s Pip Squeak and Wilfred (1919–40 and 1947–55). The most successful character of this kind was Rupert Bear, whose career began in 1920. American talking-animal strips eventually came to be dominated by characters created by Walt Disney, their popularity guaranteed by their starring roles in animated movies—Mickey Mouse made his debut in that medium in 1930—although non-Disney characters like Felix the Cat (launched 1943) maintained a long resistance.

  The U.S. comic books spun off from the pulp magazines in the late

  1930s strongly favored sf motifs (refer to HDSFL), although many superheroes were manifestly hybrid characters—notably Captain Marvel (launched 1940), who owed his origins to the magic word “Shazam,”

  passed on by an aged wizard, and Wonder Woman (launched 1941), whose powers were carefully preserved from ancient times in the amazon enclave of Paradise Island. Prince Valiant (launched 1937) was an exceptional excursion into Arthurian fantasy. The comic books soon

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  diversified into horror fiction, successfully
enough to cause a moral panic, and it was not until they adopted the restrictive Comics Code in 1955 that the satirical fantasy of Mad Magazine became the medium’s cutting edge. When the superhero comics began a new phase of evolution in the 1960s, fantasy elements continued to play a minor role, informing such characters as Marvel Comics’ leftover Nordic god Thor and Doctor Strange, rebranded in 1963 as a “Master of the Mystic Arts.”

  As genre fantasy became more popular, Robert E. Howard became an important influence in the comic book medium; sword and sorcery heroes like Howard’s Conan and Michael Moorcock’s Elric were en-thusiastically co-opted into the medium. As the circulation war between D.C. Comics and Marvel heated up, borrowings from fantasy

  increased, encouraged by competition from such newcomers to the

  field as ElfQuest (launched 1978 by Wendy and Richard Pini). Many old characters were comprehensively revamped in frameworks that

  borrowed extensively from fantasy fiction, the most spectacular example being the reformulation of the Sandman in 1989 by Neil

  Gaiman, giving rise to one of the most successful series of graphic novels. Although fantasy narratives are much more comfortably accommodated in graphic novels, shorter strips and individual cartoons remain useful as a medium of grotesque caricature, which is a standard instrument of political satire, and often extends into the realms of the surreal.

  COMMODIFIED FANTASY. A term used by Ursula Le Guin in the foreword of Tales of Earthsea to describe stereotypical and imitative genre fantasy devoid of intellectual and moral complexity. Le Guin uses the term pejoratively, but it is by no means the case that all commodified fantasy is badly written, and its stereotyping performs a useful function in providing the genre with an anchorage and a steady sales base. Literary experimentation in fantasy is to some extent para-sitic—and not only in commercial terms—at the expense of the wide