The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  Lovecraftian fantasy is an astonishingly prolific subgenre; his fantasy is most conspicuously influential in the works of Brian Lumley and Darrell Schweitzer. Lovecraft features as a character in Richard Lupoff’s Lovecraft’s Book (1985) and in David Barbour and Richard Raleigh’s Shadows Bend (2000), in which he and Robert E. Howard are en route to a meeting with Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraftian fiction

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  has been subject to the same chimerical trends as other subgenres, producing such exotic confrontations as P. H. Cannon’s H. P. Lovecraft/

  P. G. Wodehouse cross Scream for Jeeves (1994); Shadows over Baker Street (2003), ed. Michael Reaves and John Pelan, starring Sherlock Holmes; Nick Mamatas’s Move Under Ground (2004), featuring beat writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs; and Thomas Wheeler’s

  The Arcanum (2004), featuring Arthur Conan Doyle.

  LOW FANTASY. The logical concomitant of high fantasy, defined by Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer as the set of stories featuring “nonrational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur.” The consequence of this disjunction is usually

  humorous or horrific, as opposed to the enchantment of high fantasy.

  Low fantasy corresponds roughly to Farah Mendlesohn’s category of intrusive fantasy, although it presumably takes aboard some of the portal fantasies for which the Zahorski/Boyer schema makes no comfortable accommodation.

  LUCIAN. Greek satirist, often called Lucian of Samosata, active in the second century A.D. He wrote numerous tongue-in-cheek dialogues involving gods, ghosts, and courtesans, and a sequence of anecdotal tall stories describing the philosophical explorations of Menippus, whose quest for enlightenment takes him as far afield as the underworld, Olympus, and the Moon. Lucian’s True History also uses the Moon as a destination for the ultimate traveler’s tale. He wrote an earlier version of the story used by Apuleius as the basis for The Golden Ass but may have recycled it himself.

  LUCKETT, DAVE (1951– ). Australian writer of humorous fantasies for children. The Adventures of Addam (1995) and The Best Batsman in the World (1996) are archetypal wish-fulfillment fantasies; The Last Eleven (1997) is also a sports fantasy. The Wizard and Me (1996) is a contemporary fantasy. In the Tenebran trilogy, comprising A Dark Winter (1998), A Dark Journey (1999), and A Dark Victory (1999), the Order lands must be defended against the armies of Dark. In the series comprising Rhianna and the Wild Magic (2000; aka The Girl, the Dragon, and the Wild Magic), Rhianna and the Dogs of Iron (2002; aka The Girl, the Apprentice and the Dogs of Iron), and Rhianna and the Castle of Avalon (2002; aka The Girl, the Queen, and the Castle), wild magic continually gets loose, upsetting a carefully ordered secondary world. The

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  Truth about Magic (2004), in which a wizard from the Department of Wishes arrives in the village of Widdershins, launched a new series.

  LUMLEY, BRIAN (1937– ). British writer best known for horror fiction (refer to HDHL), much of it in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. He also extrapolated the background of Lovecraft’s hallucinatory fantasy The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in a series of sword and sorcery stories comprising Hero of Dreams (1986), Ship of Dreams (1986), Mad Moon of Dreams (1987), Elysia: the Coming of Cthulhu (1989), and the items collected in Iced on Aran and Other Dreamquests (1990). Three volumes of Tales from the Primal Land—

  The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land (1984), Never a Backward Glance (1991, aka Tarra Khash: Hrossak! ), and Sorcery in Shad (1993)—pay similar homage to the Hyperborean fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. A trilogy spun off from Lumley’s Necroscope series of horror novels, featuring a secondary world populated by vampires and comprising Blood Brothers (1992), The Last Aerie (1993), and Bloodwars (1994), is also of fantasy relevance, as are the stories in Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! (2003).

  LYNN, ELIZABETH A. (1946– ). U.S. writer also active in sf (refer to HDSFL). The Chronicles of Tornor trilogy, comprising Watchtower (1979), The Dancers of Arun (1979), and The Northern Girl (1980), embodies a discourse on sexual politics. The Silver Horse (1984) is a children’s fantasy. Tales from a Vanished Country (1990) features a higher proportion of fantasy stories than does The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (1981). The series begun with Dragon’s Winter (1998) and Dragon’s Treasure (2003) features a world cursed by magical glaciation.

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  MABINOGION. A term coined by Lady Charlotte Guest as a title for her collection of translations taken from the 14th-century White Book of Rhydderch and the 15th-century Red Book of Hergest, issued in 1838–49

  ( mabinogi means “tales”). Some are adapted from French romances, and others include Arthurian references that probably arrived by the same Anglo-Norman route; some folklorists insist that the French material must have been derived from hypothetical Celtic sources, but the

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  fact that literary products original to Chrétien de Troyes are included make that unlikely. The four “branches” of Welsh mythology that open the collection are a fragmentary record of Welsh legend and myth; they underlie a good deal of Celtic fantasy, being straightforwardly recycled by such writers as Kenneth Morris and Evangeline Walton, and echoing in such contemporary fantasies as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider.

  MACAVOY, R. A. (1949– ). U.S. writer. Tea with the Black Dragon (1983) is a contemporary fantasy featuring an unusual dragon; Twist-ing the Rope (1986) is a sequel. The trilogy comprising Damiano (1983), Damiano’s Lute (1984), and Raphael (1984), set in an alternative Renaissance Italy, features a team of adventurers composed of a witch, an angel, and a gifted dog. The Book of Kells (1985) is a Celtic/

  timeslip fantasy. The Grey Horse (1987) is a historical fantasy set in 19th-century Ireland. The trilogy comprising Lens of the World (1990), King of the Dead (1991), and The Winter of the Wolf (1993; aka The Belly of the Wolf) tells a life story set in a secondary world devoid of commodified fantasy’s stereotypical trappings.

  MacDONALD, GEORGE (1824–1905). Scottish writer whose brief experience as a clergyman precipitated a crisis of faith that affected all of his literary work. His first art fairy tale, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), marks a significant explicit transformation of visionary fantasy into portal fantasy; its hero, Anodos (“upward path”), enjoys an educative progress akin to but very different from that of John Bunyan’s pilgrim. The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called the Second Sight (1864) is a psychological fantasy tending toward horror.

  Although the stories inserted into the text of the novel Adela Cathcart (1864) were extracted and supplemented for marketing as children’s fantasies as Dealings with the Fairies (1867), the allegorical elements of such stories as “The Golden Key” and “The Shadows” are highly sophisticated—more so than the similar elements in Hans Christian Andersen’s most ambitious works. “The Light Princess,” on the other hand, is a humorous fantasy with a straightforward moral. At the Back of the North Wind (1871) is an archetypally Victorian children’s story in which a poor boy’s release from wretchedness through fantasy can only be a prelude to death. The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is a more up-beat melodrama with heroic fantasy elements; its sequel The Princess

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  and Curdie (1883) is considerably darker in its narrative development.

  In parallel with these novels MacDonald continued to add short stories and novellas to a repertoire whose elements were recombined in numerous selections; Works of Fancy and Imagination (10 vols., 1871) was comprehensive at the time, gathering in such notable allegorical pieces as “The Carasoyn”; a more focused sampler is The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (5 vols., 1904).

  The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875; aka The Lost Princess) is a substantial art fairy tale. The historical novel Thomas Wingfold, C
urate (1876) includes interpolated “Passages from the Autobiography of the Wandering Jew.” The title story of The Gifts of the Child Christ (1882) is a notable Christian fantasy, and “The History of Photogen and Nyc-teris” (aka “The Day Boy and the Night Girl”) is another allegory. MacDonald returned wholeheartedly to allegorical portal fantasy for adults in Lilith (1895), whose Edenic fantasy elements are carefully confused with other materials; its symbolism remains stubbornly obscure, and the story’s conclusion is more abandonment than completion, but it seemed a highly significant exemplar to the Inklings. Lin Carter reprinted a good deal of MacDonald’s work in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series—including the three-novella collection Evenor (1972)—thus establishing him as a key ancestor of genre fantasy.

  George MacDonald’s son Greville MacDonald (1856–1944) wrote

  the Cornish fairy story Billy Barnicoat (1925) and a Christian fantasy recycling the legend of St. George, The Wonderful Goatskin (1944).

  MACHEN, ARTHUR (1863–1947). Welsh writer briefly associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn by virtue of his friendship with A. E.

  Waite, with whom he wrote the exceedingly esoteric The House of the Hidden Light (1904 in a 3-copy edition; 2003). The reprint was issued by the specialist Tartarus Press; its many volumes of Machen’s works include the sampler Ritual and Other Stories (1992), containing numerous fantasies from 1889–91, and Ornaments in Jade (1997), restoring a text first issued in 1936 but containing similar lapidary items written in the early 1890s, by which time Machen had already published a Celtic parody of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888). His own theory of fantasy literature—which makes much of an

  “ecstasy” that is a more exaggerated version of Tolkien’s enchantment—was set out in Hieroglyphics (1902).

  Machen’s most successful contributions to the English Decadent

  movement were the novellas The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light

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  (1894) and the mosaic The Three Impostors; or, the Transmutations (1895). Because “The Great God Pan” (1890) is a graphic horror story, Machen’s primary reputation has always been in that field (refer to HDHL), but most of these items are equally significant as fantasy, especially the aborted novel “The White People” (1899), which describes subtle and sinister intrusions from a distinctively Celtic dimension of Faerie, whose effects are seen in several other works reprinted with it in the early sampler The House of Souls (1906) and the title stories of The Shining Pyramid (1924; the 1923 U.S. collection of the same title is a sampler) and The Children of the Pool and Other Stories (1936).

  He was already working in the 1890s on two quasi-autobiographical

  psychological fantasies belatedly published as The Hill of Dreams (1907) and The Secret Glory (1922), both of which celebrate the escapist power of the imagination with a then-unparalleled intensity; spinoff from the later grail romance included The Great Return (1915) and

  “The Secret of the Sangraal” (1925).

  Machen continued to produce fantasies during World War I, when

  such seeming indulgence became rare; he precipitated an accidental cause célèbre when “The Bowmen” (1914) was willfully misinterpreted as a record of actual apparitions observed during the retreat from Mons, giving rise to the legend of “the Angels of Mons.” He tried unavailingly to set the record straight in The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915), but his example inspired a minor subgenre, whose other examples include the stories collected in Charles L. Warr’s The Unseen Host (1916) and some of the material in E. B. Osborn’s The Maid with Wings (1917). His most notable postwar fantasy was the alchemical fantasy The Green Round (1933); his later short fiction was collected in The Cosy Room and Other Stories (1936).

  MacLEOD, FIONA (1855–1905). Pseudonym of Scottish writer William Sharp, whose work under his own byline included the Christian fantasy title piece of The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (1895). He maintained the existence of his alter ego fervently from 1893 to1896, in which years “she” produced numerous novels, stories, poems, and essays, becoming a leading contributor to the Celtic revival by inventing folklore on a scale not seen since the days of James Macpherson’s Ossian, in the stories collected in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales (1894) and The Washer at the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities (1896). The allegorical novels Pharais (1894) and The Mountain Lovers (1895) prepared the way for the wholeheartedly fantastic Green Fire (1896), a

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  bizarre metaphysical fantasy with a strong element of Arcadian fantasy that was further developed in the mystical pieces assembled in The Dominion of Dreams (1899) and Where the Forest Murmurs (1906). The short stories were re-sorted into a three-volume set of Spiritual Tales, Barbaric Tales, and Tragic Romances in 1895, and a seven-volume Complete Works was issued posthumously in 1910–12.

  MAETERLINCK, MAURICE (1862–1949). Belgian dramatist who

  made a crucial contribution to the Decadent movement. His earliest fantasies were the Poesque, “Onirologie” (1889), and the play Princess Maleine (1889; tr. 1894), the first of many symbolist dramas describing the gradual unfolding of a tragic scheme at the behest

  of malign fate; three shorter items in this vein were advertised as

  “plays for marionettes,” but not because they were intended for puppet shows.

  Maeterlinck’s most important fantasy plays include the mock-chivalric romances translated as Pelleas and Melisanda (1892; tr. 1894) and Aglavaine and Selysette (1896; tr. 1897) and several fairy tale romances: The Seven Princesses (1891; tr. 1894); Sister Beatrice and Ardiane & Barbe Bleue (1901); Joyzelle (1903); the famous allegory The Blue Bird (1909), which is by far his most optimistic work; and its sequel The Be-trothal (1918). The Blue Bird’s translator, Alexander Texeira de Mattos, did a prose version of the sequel as Tyltyl (1920; aka The Bluebird Chooses in the United States). The Miracle of Saint Anthony (1918) and The Power of the Dead (1923) are Christian fantasies.

  Maeterlinck’s contemplative fatalism is abundantly expressed in

  many essays, some of which qualify as scholarly fantasies; they include studies of the existential plight of bees and ants, accounts of paranormal phenomena, and attempts to extrapolate metaphysical systems from astronomical discoveries. A 23-volume set of his works was issued in the United States in 1915–21.

  MAGAZINES. Fantasy has always been marginal in the fiction marketplace, subject to such editorial prejudice that would-be pioneers like John Sterling and Edward Bulwer-Lytton had to become editors themselves to make homes for their work. Charles Dickens as editor maintained the space for Christmas fantasies opened up by the author’s own early Christmas books, and A. E. Waite had to use the absurd medium of Horlick’s Magazine to continue his championship of Decadent fantasy in 1904, when the Yellow Book and The Savoy had

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  vanished. The British magazine that contributed most to the development of fantasy literature was, however, Punch, whose employees included (at different times) Douglas Jerrold, F. Anstey, and A. A.

  Milne.

  Some of the most important foundation stones of commodified fantasy were laid in the U.S. pulp magazines, where Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt became influential exemplars; the contribution made by Frank Munsey’s pulps was so significant that two magazines, Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939–51) and Fantastic Novels (1940–51), were founded to reprint material therefrom, although both went on to reprint a wider range of material. The subgenre of sword and sorcery, a significant product of “the unique magazine” Weird Tales, was taken up by some fantasy magazines founded as companions to sf magazines (refer to HDSFL), including Unknown and Fantastic Adventures’ successor Fantastic. Imagination’s companion Imaginative Tales (founded 1954) initially specialized in humorous fantasy in the tradition of Thorne Smith, although it soon abandoned the strategy.

  The association between sf and fantasy was important because the sf magazines provided their readers w
ith a primary education in the then-arcane art of reading immersive fantasies that dispensed with the in-troductory apparatus of portal fantasies (which Burroughs, Merritt, and their imitators had had to retain). The intimacy of the continued association between sf and sword and sorcery fiction in the marketplace—

  which is not reflected in the history of intrusive fantasies in spite of the key examples published in Unknown—reflects the fact that they require similar reading skills, of a kind that remained esoteric until the 1960s.

  While sf’s “idea as hero” stories adapted quite well to the more restrictive format of the “digest” magazines that replaced the pulps, and while various kinds of whimsical fantasy clung to a subsidiary niche in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, sword and sorcery stories and quest fantasies required more space for expansion. The British magazine Science-Fantasy provided a venue for Michael Moorcock’s early experiments in that subgenre, as well as a refuge for Thomas Burnett Swann’s classical fantasies. It was not until paperback books replaced magazines as the chief medium of popular fiction, however, that the various forms of commodified fantasy found the abundant narrative space they required. At that point, the eventual economic victory of genre fantasy over sf may have become inevitable, although it was not widely anticipated. Realms of Fantasy could never hope to be as crucial

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  to its genre’s development as the sf magazines had been to theirs, although it now seems as likely a candidate as any to be the last surviving fiction magazine in the commercial arena.

  MAGIC. The definitive element of a fantasy story, according to Lin Carter, is that it assumes and displays the workability of magic. A magical event is one that occurs outside the normal working of cause and effect, by virtue either of the intervention of some supernatural agency or the accomplishment of some kind of formulaic spell. The term is routinely extended to embrace techniques of divination, which threaten to undermine the pattern of cause and effect by facilitating avoidance of its impending effects. The idea is closely related to that of superstition, which describes rules of procedure intended to secure good luck and avoid bad luck (whose supernatural extrapolations include curses); such rules are the psychological spinoff of a built-in tendency to search for patterns in experience, which inevitably takes aboard imaginary as well as real examples; it is conceivable that all magical ideas may be explicable in these terms.