The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  144 • FANTASTIC ADVENTURES

  FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. U.S. pulp magazine launched as a companion to Amazing Stories in 1939, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, who was succeeded in 1950 by Howard Browne. Unlike Astounding’s companion Unknown, which was founded a few months afterward, it was initially a science fiction magazine, but it soon began to experiment with Unknown-style humorous fantasies by Nelson S. Bond, Robert Bloch, and William P. McGivern, as well as pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories. When Unknown was sacrificed to wartime economies, FA featured more work of that kind, although sf continued to take priority; it published pastiches of Thorne Smith by Bloch and Charles F. Myers and adventure fantasies by “Geoff St. Reynard”

  (Robert W. Krepps), as well as later works by Unknown regulars L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, and L. Ron Hubbard.

  When Fantastic Adventures folded in 1953 it had already been replaced by the digest Fantastic, launched in 1952, whose early issues featured “slick” fantasy of the varieties favored by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. When Paul Fairman succeeded Browne as editor in 1955, however, it became a clone of Amazing until it was taken over in 1958 by Cele Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s Fantastic Stories of the Imagination played a key role in laying the groundwork for genre fantasy; she provided a home for Fritz Leiber’s sword and sorcery series and featured work in the same subgenre by John Jakes and Roger Zelazny.

  Leiber and Zelazny were also given a much freer rein to improvise

  avant-garde work, as were other new recruits like Ursula Le Guin and Thomas M. Disch. The title was sold in 1965, mostly using reprints until Ted White took over the editorship from 1968 until 1979 and again made its pages available for experiments in sword and sorcery (including Robert E. Howard pastiches by Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter), although he still mingled such work with sf. FA was merged with Amazing in 1980, but the title was resurrected in 2002 by Edward J. McFadden.

  FANTASTIQUE. A French word frequently used as a generic description in place of the Anglo-American horror, although the range of texts so differentiated is significantly different. The import of Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; tr. 1973 as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre) is confused by translation, because there is no real equivalent in English parlance for the fine distinctions Todorov draws between fantastique (tr. as “fantastic”), inconnu

  FAR-FUTURISTIC FANTASY • 145

  (tr. as “uncanny”), and merveilleux (tr. as “marvelous”). For Todorov, the essence of fantastique is the hesitation between psychological and supernatural interpretations of exotic phenomena, and a character’s subsequent indecision as to whether he or the world has suffered a breakdown.

  It is arguable that some such indecision is essential to the differentiation of the sensation of horror from that of terror, but if so it also has considerable relevance to the fantasy genre, because horror is not the only conceivable psychological reaction to that kind of hesitation. In the tradition of fantasy fiction that extends from the sophisticated fairy romances of 18th-century France through the works of Lewis Carroll and F. Anstey to the comedies of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, the characters react with amusement rather than horror to confrontation with the inexplicable, and their behavioral response is pragmatic rather than paranoid. Such pragmatic reactions—easily granted to imaginatively adaptable children like Alice—are the basis of the chimerical effect whose narrative energy much fantasy exploits.

  FANTASYLAND. Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996) is a satirical tourist guide to the kind of stereotyped secondary world employed by modern genre fantasy. The term was also adopted (independently) by John Clute as a description of the stereotyped “basic venue” of commodified/epic fantasy. It is a direct descendant of the similarly generalized backcloth employed in literary fairy tales, whose evocation is signified by the phrase “once upon a time.” The device is useful because the set of expectations it places in the reader’s mind—usually enabled in genre fantasy, as Jones and Clute both point out, by the inclusion of a prefatory map—provides a useful background against which the idiosyncratic variations of particular secondary worlds show up as variations. In the absence of some such set of preliminary assumptions, the writer’s world-building labor would be much more onerous.

  FAR-FUTURISTIC FANTASY. A subgenre spanning fantasy and sf (refer to HDSFL), including a great many hybrid texts based on the premise that magical entities and forces hypothetically removed from the Earth’s past by a thinning process will enjoy a spectacular resurgence in the senile world’s “second childhood,” perhaps as a residue of no-longer-understood technologies that have outlasted their makers.

  Clark Ashton Smith’s tales of Zothique provided a cardinal example,

  146 • FARJEON, ELEANOR

  perfectly adapted to the extremism of his stylistic decadence, although an earlier precedent had been set by William Hope Hodgson in The Night Land. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth updated the milieu. Other significant contributors to the subgenre within the fantasy genre include Michael Shea; Oliver Johnson, in the Lightbringer trilogy, comprising The Forging of the Shadows (1996), The Nations of the Night (1998), and The Last Star at Dawn (1999); and Christopher Rowley’s trilogy set after the apparent extinction of Man the Cruel, comprising The Ancient Enemy (2000), The Shast War (2001), and Doom’s Break (2002).

  FARJEON, ELEANOR (1881–1965). British writer from a literary family who began writing for the family magazine, then called Farjeon’s Fortnightly, while it was edited by her brother Herbert in 1899–1901.

  Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908) is solidly in the tradition of decadent/Arcadian fantasy. The Soul of Kol Nikon (1914) is a bleak account of a changeling’s futile attempt to acquire a soul, its desperation leading to a typical postwar plea for re-enchantment in Gypsy and Ginger (1920). The ornately stylized Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1921) features a kind of English nature-spirit akin to Shakespeare’s Puck, part satyr as well as part fairy; the tales the spirit tells were not intended for children but were widely interpreted as such. The character reappeared in Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field (1937), which was in fact aimed at the children’s market, as were the similar compendia Faithful Jenny Dove and Other Tales (1925), Kaleidoscope (1928), The Old Nurse’s Stocking-Basket (1931), and Jim at the Corner (1934).

  The Fair of St. James (1932) and Humming Bird (1936) retained a conscientiously adult and rather gnomic sophistication. The erotic fantasy Ariadne and the Bull (1945) transfigures various classical materials. Farjeon’s full-length children’s fantasies The Silver Curlew (1953) and The Glass Slipper (1955) both originated as plays, the latter written in collaboration with Herbert in 1946.

  FARMER, PENELOPE (1939– ). British writer, mostly for children.

  The fantasy series comprising The Summer Birds (1962) begins with a carefully moderated transfiguration of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; its sequels are the dream fantasy Emma in Winter (1966) and the timeslip fantasy Charlotte Sometimes (1966). The Magic Stone (1964) is a magically complicated family drama. A Castle of Bone (1972) features a cupboard that can turn back time and functions as a portal to a personalized secondary world. William and Mary (1974) features a

  FAUSTIAN FANTASY • 147

  portal that can grant access to pictures and poems. Year King (1977) carries forward themes trailed by James Frazer in A Castle of Bone.

  Eve: Her Story (1985) is a feminized/Edenic fantasy for adults.

  Glasshouses (1988) is an occult fantasy. Thicker than Water (1989) is a ghost story.

  FAUSTIAN FANTASY. Stories in which humans make pacts with the Devil. The earliest to be recorded is a medieval cautionary tale about a bishop named Theophilus, but the subgenre is named for a scholar at the university of Heidelberg in the early 16th century who was said to have traded his soul for earthly knowledge. The printed version of the legend by Johann Spies appeared in 1587 and was promptly borr
owed by

  Christopher Marlowe for The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c1592; pub. 1604). By then, the notion of diabolical pacts had been adopted by theologians into the slanders used to justify the persecution of heretics; witches were assumed to have made such pacts. Although the subgenre extends into horror fiction, many Faustian fantasies are much lighter in tone, often focusing on the exact wording of the contract defining the pact in order to set up ingenious narrative twists when settlement falls due. The most famous transfigurations of Faust’s story is J. W.

  Goethe’s, the basis of several operas; modern ones include Thomas Mann’s metaphorical Doctor Faustus (1947; tr. 1948), Robert Nye’s Faust (1980), and Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust.

  Many 19th-century Faustian fantasies portray the Devil and his

  agents as sly, urbane con men who achieve their victories by subtle trickery, as in Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814; tr. 1824; aka The Shadowless Man), Eden Phillpotts’s A Deal with the Devil, and Austin Fryers’s The Devil and the Inventor (1900). The tables are often turned, though, as in James Dalton’s The Gentleman in Black or Walter Herries Pollock’s “An Episode in the Life of Mr Latimer” (1883).

  Twentieth-century examples were forced by the pressure of melo-

  dramatic inflation to become increasingly ingenious, no matter which side they took; notable examples include Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch

  Soames” (in Seven Men, 1919), Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Sylvis Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, T. F.

  Powys’s “The Two Thieves,” Mervyn Wall’s Fursey stories, Bertrand Russell’s “Satan in the Suburbs” (1953), Patrick Ravignant’s An Edge of Darkness (1963; tr. from French 1965), Jorge de Sena’s The Wondrous Physician (1966; tr. from Portuguese 1986), Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, Josephine Leslie’s The Devil and Mrs Devine (1975),

  148 • FEIST, RAYMOND E.

  William Hjortsberg’s Fallen Angel (1978), John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick (1984), Paula Volksky’s The White Tribunal, Kim Wilkins’s The Infernal (1999), and Andy Duncan’s “Beluthahatchie” (1997).

  Deals with the Devil (1958), ed. Basil Davenport, is a showcase anthology.

  FEIST, RAYMOND E. (1945– ). U.S. writer whose early novels drew on his experience designing fantasy role-playing games. The plot of the epic Magician (1982; rev. 1992) is as carefully orchestrated as any games master’s design, but the series extrapolated from it adopted a spirit more closely akin to swashbuckling Ruritanian romance. The role played by magic became increasing peripheral and arbitrary as the couplet comprising Silverthorn (1985) and A Darkness at Sethanon (1986) gave way to the couplet comprising Prince of the Blood (1989) and The King’s Buccaneer (1989), and to the series comprising Shadow of a Dark Queen (1994), Rise of a Merchant Prince (1995), Rage of a Demon King (1997), and Shards of a Broken Crown (1998). A linked series written in collaboration with Janny Wurts comprises Daughter of the Empire (1987), Servant of the Empire (1989), and Mistress of the Empire (1989). The game-based Krondor series comprising The Betrayal (1998), The Assassins (2000), and Tear of the Gods (2000) returned to basics, as did the Legends of the Riftwar shared world series, comprising Honoured Enemy (2001, with William R. Forschen), Murder in LaMut (2002, with Josel Rosenberg), and Jimmy the Hand (2003, with Steve Stirling). Faerie Tale (1988) is a dark fantasy juxtaposing Faerie with contemporary America. The Conclave of Shadows trilogy, comprising Talon of the Silver Hawk (2002), King of Foxes (2003), and Exile’s Return (2004), developed a new milieu.

  FEMINIZED FANTASY. Sarah Lefanu’s study of feminist sf In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988; aka Feminism and Science Fiction) draws a careful distinction between feminist and “feminized” fiction.

  While the former examines sexual-political power structures and their underlying logic with conscientious scepticism, the latter extols the virtues of femininity, valuing empathy more highly than technical competence, patient diplomacy more highly than aggressive violence, and intuition (especially when magically aided) more highly than rationality.

  Although it is reasonably appropriate to subsume sf of both kinds under the “feminist” heading, there is a far better case for subsuming fantasy that modifies traditional sex roles under the other label. There is a good

  FERAL CHILDREN • 149

  deal of bone fide feminist fantasy—a great many fairy tales have been rewritten with exactly this ideological purpose in mind, as illustrated by Angela Carter and Jack Zipes—but it is far outweighed by feminized fantasy.

  To some extent, the generic difference of balance is a logical corollary of the recycling process that generates so much fantasy fiction, which finds it much easier to change the viewpoint of the relevant taproot texts than alter their content. It is a relatively straightforward task to retell Arthurian legends from a female viewpoint that gives more moral credit to Morgan le Fay and Guinevere than male versions routinely do, but providing a feminist revision would subject the conventions of chivalric romance to a massive overhaul. Future and extraterrestrial settings, by contrast, have no such burden of expectation attached to them. Even in hypothetical alternative historical settings, like those employed in sword and sorcery fiction, amazon swordswomen can hardly avoid being rare exceptions to the rule, while female aristocrats championing the ideals of femininity—especially their magical extensions—blend in with no trouble at all. Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose feminized Arthurian fantasy Mists of Avalon became one of the 20th-century’s best-selling books, put the main emphasis of her series of Sword and Sorceress anthologies where it seemed to belong, not on the swordplay but on the specifically feminine varieties of magic advertised by Jules Michelet’s classic scholarly fantasy La sorcière, especially that of healers.

  Feminized fantasy is perfectly hospitable to the serious consideration of sexual stereotyping, as in the work of P. C. Hodgell, Rachel Ingalls, Nancy Springer, Tamora Pierce, Nancy Kress’s The Prince of Morning Bells (1981), Lynn Flewelling’s series begun with The Bone Doll’s Twin (2001), and Sarah Micklem’s Firethorn (2004). A more assertive kind of feminism is, however, evident in the works of Phyllis Ann Karr, Elizabeth Lynn, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Kate Muir’s Suf-fragette City (1999), and Cass Dalglish’s Nin (2000).

  FERAL CHILDREN. Thought experiments investigating what might become of a child denied normal processes of education and “civilization”

  are common in fantasy, often featuring lost infants suckled and reared by animals; notable examples include Ronald Ross’s The Child of Ocean (1889), Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales of Tarzan, Nicholas Luard’s Kala (1990), and Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels (1994). A showcase anthology is Mother

  150 • FÉVAL, PAUL

  Was a Lovely Beast (1974), edited by Philip José Farmer, whose own attempts to “update” the myth of Tarzan rarely question the racist assumptions assailed in Neville Farki’s The Death of Tarzana Clayton (1985).

  FÉVAL, PAUL (1816–1887). French writer. Many of his early works were based on Breton folklore, but the fantasies among them mostly remained unreprinted. The serial novels he began to write in 1843 made a crucial contribution to the literary development of secret histories, many of those featuring complex criminal conspiracies ultimately being bound together into a more or less coherent sequence spanning the centuries. His reluctance to produce wholehearted fantasies caused such novels as The Vampire Countess (1856; tr. 2003) to become bizarrely contorted as they struggled to retain their ambiguity—an absurdity acknowledged and extrapolated in the Gallandesque and con-

  scientiously metafictional Knightshade (1860; tr. 2001), The Wandering Jew’s Daughter (1864; tr. 2004), and the flamboyant Vampire City (1875; tr. 1999), whose protagonist is the English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.

  FFORDE, JASPER (1961– ). British writer. The Eyre Affair (2001) is a chimerical account of an alternative history in which the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years when supervillain Ac
heron Hades kidnaps Jane Eyre as Surrealists and Modernists brawl in the street. In the sequels Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of Lost Plots (2003), and Something Rotten (2004), the humor grows broader but remains conscientiously literary.

  FINNEY, CHARLES G. (1905–1984). U.S. writer. His most notable work is the phantasmagoric erotic fantasy The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), about a traveling show with exhibits that transform the life of a small town in Arizona where the inhabitants are unready for re-enchantment on such a generous scale; its method is echoed in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Fair to Middling (1959), and Tom Reamy’s Blind Voices (1978). In Finney’s Oriental fantasy The Unholy City (1937), a resident of the same small town visits the surreal civilization of Heilar-Wey; the novella The Magician out of Manchuria (1968) is similar in spirit. The Ghosts of Manacle (1964) includes a few fantasy stories.

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  FINNEY, JACK (1911–1995). U.S. writer in various genres (refer to HDSFL and HDHL). The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968) and Marion’s Wall (1973) are comedies in the vein of Thorne Smith, but the latter has an elegiac element that transforms it into a sentimental fantasy more akin to his escapist/timeslip fantasy Time and Again (1970), whose belated sequel was From Time to Time (1995). The short fiction collected in The Third Level (1957; aka The Clock of Time) and I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963) includes numerous lighthearted fantasies; those involving timeslips are reassembled in About Time (1986).

  FISHER, CATHERINE (?– ). British writer of dark-edged children’s fiction, often set in her native Wales and drawing upon Celtic materials.

  The Conjuror’s Game (1990) features a sinister healer. Fintan’s Tower (1991) is a quest fantasy. The Candle Man (1994) features an attempt to lift a curse. The Snow-Walker trilogy, comprising The Snow-Walker’s Son (1994), The Empty Hand (1995), and The Soul Thieves (1996), is a picaresque fantasy set in an icy secondary world. Belin’s Hill (1997) is a thriller in which bad dreams intensify in the wake of an accident.